User talk:Dr. JJ

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I am a professor of earth sciences at a well known (but alas, it has to be secret due to privacy, endowed chair and tenure concerns) university. I have degrees in geology, stable isotope geochemistry, and paleo-climatology, with my graduate degrees from Rice University and M.I.T.

I am a skeptic on AGW, primarily due to the extensive research myself and my associates and students have done over the years on the natural variations in earth's climate and their attribution. My work indicates perhaps 5-10% of the climate changes of the last few hundred years are due to human CO2, the vast majority of the signal is due to solar and water vapor variations, thus swamping the noise produced by human CO2. My opinion is that the science behind this issue has been irreparably damaged by the politics of the issue and very little rational scientific debate is currently happening.

I also have many opinions on various scientific and political issues and topics, however, unlike many on Wikipedia, I will not venture outside my direct education and experience to offer any adds to this media. I feel it intellectually dishonest to wear the cloak of science and the credibility of a scientist to push POVs that you are not fully educated and experienced in with deep, long term knowledge. When scientists venture beyond their education and experience, science slips into "belief" (akin to religion, in trusting and parroting what others you trust or respect say and believe, and thus intellectual lazyness) and "politics" (the realm of influence, plurality, and majorities of opinions), not the scientific method and principles.


Contents

[edit] Message Center

Should want to leave a message, or more likely disagree with everything I say, feel free, since I have a real job I may not get back to you soon.

[edit] 3RR

Hi there. We have a rule against multiple reversions of a page's content, called the Wikipedia:Three revert rule. It says that if a user reverts a page's content more than three times a day, they are to be blocked from editing for a 24 hour period. The goal is to reduce "revert wars" and encourage discussion of article content on talk pages. Your edits on scientific consensus are close to violating this rule. This is just a warning, since you seem new here. --Fastfission 22:41, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Welcome

The following is standard welcoming material, which you may find useful. In particular, I would point out the use of signatures, which can be formed by typing four tildes (~~~~), as a way to identify your statements on talk pages. Dragons flight 23:24, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

Welcome!

Hello, Dr. JJ, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! 

[edit] Scientific consensus

When making controversial changes, you should probably discuss them on the talk page of the article (accessible by clicking the "Discussion" link at the top of the article's page) before making them. In this case, I don't think it is a matter of simple "scientific information"—the claim in question is about whether or not anthropogenic global warming is considered a controversial (in terms of evidence) issue within the scientific community. Surely you can agree that such a statement—one about the status of information within a community—is not a simple scientific fact (unless you consider sociology of science to be the science in question you are talking about). So whatever your opinion on the issue, surely you can see that it is not a case of "simply" updating things; that your view of things may be considered controversial and should be hashed out first.

Usually on controversial pages—anything to do with evolution and global warming falls into this category—substantial content changes are discussed (using the method described above) and a wording everyone can be happy with is eventually decided upon. That being said, edits which look like attempts to push a particular viewpoint without any previous discussion are often quickly reverted on such pages—the reason being that the current content of the page is usually already the result of a lot of push-and-pull and compromise between people with very different takes on the issues, and such pages are often the targets of hit-and-run vandalism attempts. This is not to say that content never changes—indeed, on such pages a well-voiced criticism by someone who understands the subject often leads to substantial changes in the article.

So -- my recommendation is to post your specific objection to the talk page of the scientific consensus article (at Talk:Scientific consensus), doing so in good faith (that is, don't assume that the people who disagree with you do so maliciously or out of stupidity), and see what kind of response you get. In this case, if you think the case of evolution and global warming are too closely lumped in the article—and they do have significant differences in the types of debates they are and the different ways various sides enlist or dispute a standard of "scientific consensus"—please feel free to bring this up and we can talk about it. I do not have strong feelings either way on the anthropogenic global warming issue; my understanding of it is that a number of studies have shown there is almost no dissent over the idea of anthropogenic global warming within the relevant scientific communities, but if you have citations to the contrary I'm always willing to change my view on this type of issue. --Fastfission 23:55, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

As for the "science being settled"—note that according to our article on the phrase the science is settled, this is not something that people who argue for AGW actually claim. What the scientific consensus article is based on, and what my understanding of this is based on, are literature studies, the sorts of things that the aforementioned sociologists of science work on. On this issue, the work by Naomi Oreskes has been the most prominent, esp. Naomi Oreskes, "The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change", Science 306:5702 (3 December 2004): p. 1686; online at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686. --Fastfission 00:00, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

hi -- thanks for your note about the Oreskes issue, and I liked the Norvig link you provided. Of course there is variation depending on how the search is done, but it certainly does appear that Oreskes did a pretty good job -- and Norvig backs it strongly, for what that is worth. It might have been useful to know the difference between "implicitly" and "explicitly" supporting the GW consensus, but many articles which refer only obliquely to the issue -- for example, an article on forest changes in response to global climate change -- may have no reason to make any explicit claim, and so might just implicitly accept the consensus. I have always assumed that Oreskes would have had a great deal of difficulty separating the articles into one pile or another, and that's why she lumped them together. I don't think it's critical, in any case, because the results of the search are useful only as a rule-of-thumb overview of the state of the science, and not as an accurate depiction of what percentage of all scientists support one view or another -- that would be impossible to verify, in any case. I think the sentence about the Oreskes article is fine as it stands. Thanks for the comments, and welcome to wikipedia. bikeable (talk) 00:46, 18 July 2006 (UTC)