Physicists have a better understanding of statistics and better data to work with than pyschologists. There is a very clear causal explanation for why greenhouse gases do what they do. With that said, there is not enough discussion about the cost and effectiveness of proposed solutions to global warming - a lot of the "solutions" are more feel-good measures, which are not worth the cost for what they do. Global warming is a global problem - if the US stopped all of its contributions to climate change the earth would keep warming up.
As a physics grad student I have seen plenty of "negative" results published, and the standard of positive results for instance 3 or even 5 sigma is a much tighter standard than p > 0.05. Science is a big field, the problems in one domain do not necessarily translate into all domains. However there are other fundamental problems with physics as a field.
The question in climate change is not direction, but magnitude and variance. While most of physics does use 3-5 sigma tests due to a large number of experiments, climate science can not do the same.
Furthermore, we have significant evidence that climate scientists are motivated to protect their work against critics - just read the climategate emails. That's not how science should be done, and goes well beyond the replicability issues discussed here.
At the risk of further derailing this thread, there was nothing wrong with the content of the climategate emails, other than poor choice of words - a poor choice of words that were all too easy to take out of context.
Really? There is 'literally nothing wrong' with stonewalling FOI requests, stacking peer review to prevent opposing scientists from publishing, or splicing temperature data onto the end of a proxy chart to hide the fact the proxy is diverging?
>There is a very clear causal explanation for why greenhouse gases do what they do
I'm sorry, but it doesn't work that way. We have very clear chemistry/physics on the composition of food, how it is digested, etc. But nutrition science is still an embarrassing shitshow.
We have clear physics on how neurons fire, etc. but neuroscience is still in its infancy and psychology... well, it is psychology.
Earth's climate is a large scale multi-variable control system with thousands of feedback loops. A good understanding of the physics that drive a single forcing doesn't really tell us shit I'm afraid. It is just as open to manipulation as these other fields.
This sentiment is not correct - causal explanations do matter. The statistical evidence for global warming is not particularly strong, as temperature data is very noisy. If we didn't have a causal explanation there would not be a scientific consensus behind climate change. That adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere changes the climate is more like gravity - we have clear physics on why things fall when you drop them, and if we somehow were adding mass to the center of the earth we know what effect this would have.
More generally you are correct, we don't know exactly how much the earth will warm or if there are complicated feedback mechanisms in place that could cause this warming to speed up or reverse course. We can't even reliably say that next year will be hotter than this year (actually it probably will be cooler because this year has been unusually hot).
Indeed, but it is really only the system response we are interested in. As you admit, a clear causal explanation for how a single input forcing is increasing doesn't automatically get us to a position where we can predict the overall system response. Or predict whether a given system response will have some positive or negative second order effect.
We have a clear causal physical explanation that eating fat should make you fatter right? Are you willing to say that? Or would you qualify yourself - 'eating more fat will make you fatter in the absence of negative feedbacks (perhaps the fat reduces your appetite more than carbs or protein?) and assuming that all other inputs (exercise level etc) remain constant'.
Really, all we have is how well a model predicts the future. there's a fairly sucky model from the 80's, [1]. Maybe it's totally wrong. Maybe it's just overfitting. But it's got a good track record, if underpredictive. I'm all for the idea that co2 doesn't effect temperature. I just haven't seen any models that show that. Furthermore, i haven't seen anything with any sort of a track record. I'm pretty sure Hansen's paper is pretty much the root of all modern climate modeling. I'm totally willing to stipulate that the whole field is wildly off track, but there's no evidence of that. The only thing we have is 35 year old models that seem to work.
I mean, more specifically, aether was flat out wrong. it still had predictive power. Someday we'll have something more refined, or perhaps completely refuted.
Derailing the thread further, I don't understand why people say "aether was flat out wrong". Is it because they don't know it was just a name change, and we're now calling it "vacuum"? [1]
My guess is, the pink band is current (er, 2011 versions) of what the global average temperature was. Which makes the 60's even cooler (heh). As with all things, it depends on how you measure.
So anyway, i'd agree the centering of zero sure could change things, but it sure seems like predictive power in the rates of change. Like, temperature isn't stable, it's not going down, it's going up and it looks like it's going up at about that rate.
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but that sort of goes back to the original point, all we really have is models. you held up physics as an example, but if we look at something like the gravitational constant, things are really screwy. As far as i can tell, 3 really first rate teams came up with 3 different answers - not even overlapping in the error bands. big G is obviously helpful, but it must be more complicated than we understand right now.
I dunno. I kind of like the european model for chemical handling. Super toxic chemicals in tiny quantities aren't that big of a deal, maybe 50 people die, so it's not heavily regulated. Mildly toxic chemicals in large quantities, same deal. Maybe 50 people die. Large quantities of toxins are regulated in proportion to the risk. The point is, balancing the risk against the best current understanding really seems like the best that can be done.
Sure, but a pretty high percentage of the US believes anthropogenic climate change is not real. They think it's either a misinterpretation, or an explicit hoax. Most of the Republican party denies climate change, or at least denies that human activity is playing a significant role in it.
We can't have reasonable debates on cost-effectiveness when so many people deny the fact that there is even a problem at all.
This is orthogonal to my point, which is that these incentives are present in all branches of science, and are likely impacting what is published similarly.
I can only speak to particle physics, but the main issue is that we can't study the truly interesting problems. Theories such as string theory are basically beyond the reach of experiments. Our current models work very well to describe the universe, but we haven't made that much serious fundamental progress since the 1970s. It takes decades to find new particles which we know must exist (top quark in 1995, Higgs in 2012). This will probably become even more true after the next few years after the LHC collects data at 13 TeV, although of course I could be wrong and something could be found. To study new physics you have to go up an order of magnitude in energy or luminosity, and this scales worse than linearly with cost, so it isn't feasible. Of course it is possible that new technologies emerge, but this isn't a sure thing.
The other problem with physics is that it is really hard to become a professor, and the field forces 90% of bright, dedicated and talented people to go into industry because there is a lack of jobs in physics. We really need permanent positions at labs outside of academia.
>Physicists have a better understanding of statistics and better data to work with than pyschologists.
They certainly have better data to work with in most cases, but what makes you think that physicists understand statistics better than psychologists? Is this just the physics superiority complex?
No. Physicists just take a lot more math classes (including statistics and data analysis) during their undergrad/graduate studies than biologists or psychologists do.
Physics PhDs will have taken more math courses than Psychology PhDs on average, but I am pretty skeptical that they have taken more statistics courses. I would like to see the evidence for that if you have it.
Sorry, my point was simply that the incentives discussed in the post aren't unique to the field. They play a role in all academic literature, the best way to deal with it is to be consciously aware and take advantage of what the internet has allowed in terms of non-traditional distribution.
As a physics grad student I have seen plenty of "negative" results published, and the standard of positive results for instance 3 or even 5 sigma is a much tighter standard than p > 0.05. Science is a big field, the problems in one domain do not necessarily translate into all domains. However there are other fundamental problems with physics as a field.