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I'm not convinced that the rigour you suggest is all that common within academia (certainly not in my experience), but scientific research is more rigorous. Sad fact is that research outside of universities tends to be more effective and tends to have more freedom.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ganpati's Goonerz--AFC's Aboriginal Fertility Cult
I've seen some appalling miscarriages in research in recent years, particularly around gender, where you simply cannot challenge the new normal.....
Just have to follow the money, as ever was.Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter
Indirectly, yes. The public pressure feeds into institutional reputation, which equals money.Quote:
Originally Posted by redgunamo
A very small group of online warriors can now dictate what gutless universities do and don't say. And it always comes down to research ethics.
There's this bit on the NASA website where you get a map of the world for every month of every year going back God alone knows how long. And each pixel on the map is coloured in various shades of red and blue. The darker the blue, the colder than average that area of the world was that month. The brighter the red, the hotter.Quote:
Originally Posted by PSRB
So for example in June 1976 {or whenever that v. hot summer here was} you can see the UK is bright red. But the rest of the world has far more blue than red so the planet was colder than average that month despite our heatwave.
But if you look at every month over the past several years, you'll see that most of the world is red, more and more of it is getting red, and it's getting brighter red, with less and less and lighter blue.
In the way that the UK in June '76 was a global outlier that month, you can see that recently, the planet is getting warmer and warmer.
These are simple facts. And the consensus of the academics is that this warming is due to our emissions.
I also think you need to stop being so worried about who is paying for what. Yes of course there are cases of people paying for research in any field in the hope of getting the answer they want.
But most academics do it properly simply because they want to further human knowledge {and show how clever they are in the process.}
No-one's paying NASA to fiddle the figures on that climate map, especially when all the data is in the public domain and everyone can make their own maps.
Just like no-one paid my MA tutor {and his two colleagues} to write their book on the BEF on the western front in WW1 and they weren't massaging the casualty figures etc in the attempt to prove a certain point.
{Though famously that has happened before with Passchendaele, for example. In 1948 James Edmonds totally over-estimated German casualties to make Haig and the BEF look better. And in 1958 Leon Wolff totally overestimated British casualties to make Haig look worse. In both cases all the other historians went through their use of the statistical data and picked holes in them, pointing out the errors. Eg, in one case they included the numbers who were sent to casualty stations with minor injuries and then back to the front, but they didn't do that for the other army. And so while we still can't say for sure what the numbers are, there is an academic consensus for the ranges of the casualty figures for both sides. It may have taken 80 years of debate, but we've got there in the end.}
This Nasa bit has got an animation of 1884 till today:
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs...re/?intent=121
And here's the bit where you can get the map month by month. You can also set the period you want for the average the change that month was based on. {Here the default is the average temp between 1951 and 1980, but as I say, you can change it.}
So nothing about 1800. This is just looking at how the planets been warming recently, though the animation on the page above shows the changes since 1884. Have a look, it only takes a few seconds to play. In the one below you have to set the range for the average, and choose the month and year you want to look at {eg May 2025} or for the average over a few years {eg compare April 2021-21 with the average for April 1960-80.}
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/
It's the greenhouse effect. You only need a few mm of glass even though the garden is huge, especially the area above it going up to the sky. It really is as simple as that.Quote:
Originally Posted by IUFG
Firstly, the Michal Mann hockey stick hasn't been debunked:Quote:
Originally Posted by PSRB
https://www.reuters.com/article/fact...idUSL1N2S112H/
"It is false to say, however, that the graph is misleading or fabricates the impact of man-made climate change."
Secondly, this is from the wiki page. {And NB, the original paper was 1998. In the next 15 years academics debated various aspects of it, things like the tree data didn't go back beyond 1400AD and then what was used as other proxies for climate data before that in the follow ups.} Then:
"Marcott et al. 2013 used seafloor and lake bed sediment proxies, which were completely independent of those used in earlier studies, to reconstruct global temperatures over the past 11,300 years, covering the entire Holocene, and showing over the last 1,000 years confirmation of the original MBH99 hockey stick graph. Temperatures had slowly risen from the last ice age to reach a level which lasted from 10,000 to 5,000 years ago, then in line with Milankovitch cycles had begun a slow decline, interrupted by a small rise during the Medieval Warm Period, to the Little Ice Age. That decline had then been interrupted by a uniquely rapid rise in the 20th century to temperatures which were already the warmest for at least 4,000 years, within the range of uncertainties of the highest temperatures in the whole period, and on current estimates were likely to exceed those temperatures by 2100."
So these internet videos debunking it are absolute *******s spread by climate deniers who don't follow the science.
For the climate experts it's like me trying to debate something I understand to some degree, such as Haig's generalship on the Western Front in WW1, with someone whose entire understanding comes from Blackadder IV and reading a couple of Wilfred Owen poems - perhaps also having watched Oh, What a Lovely War and having heard the expression 'Lions led by Donkeys' but never having actually studied it at all.
Or trying to discuss Palestine with people who've only ever heard of the Balfour Declaration of 1917*, but have never heard of the Ottoman empire {and their decision to allow Jewish immigration in 1880} or the 1920 Tr of Sevres and League of Nations mandate, Kemal Attaturk and the new 1923 Tr of Sevres, GB banning further Jewish immigration before WW2 in an attempt to keep an Arab majority state, GB saying they wanted to keep an Arab majority in 1945 and abstaining on the UN vote for partition, us not recognising Israel until 1950 etc etc etc.
"But Balfour. It's all about the Balfour declaration. You must be a Maga-supporting, GB-news watching, Islamophobe for daring to say otherwise."
{*You'll be surprised how many of the halfwits mix it up with the 1927 Balfour Declaration which was simply about the status of the dominions in the British Commonwealth.}
Right. The Americans tightening their belts could prove to be rather revealing; endless free money (may I say "QUANGO"?) to promote whatever cause added a certain piquancy and focus and drive. Exposure of USAID, among others, will change alot of people's thinking. You could buy "ethical" research practises. That's all going to stop for now, so we shall see.Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter
We do need more honest men like GG who are prepared to really get stuck in to the topic and learn, for everybody's good. Young people, I mean; not me, of course :-)
I can't really speak for other subjects but in history, at BA and MA, the rigour was certainly there. {And from my limited memories of the LSE - including this young PhD student who tutored us for one of the 2nd year courses who we used to chat with for an hour afterwards as my mate, him and I also shared a similar sense of humour - there was serious economic rigour in Economics.}Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter
This modern, grievance studies bollox and the woke gender stuff amongst the students is a totally different kettle of fish. It's not fair to write off serious academics in a serious subject like climate science that can involve Oxbridge professors and Nobel prize winners simply because a few former polys are happy to give in to the wishes of a bunch of teenagers too thick to do a proper degree cos they're now businesses and get paid 9k a year for giving these muppets a worthless bit of paper.
{It's like saying Dec didn't mean either of those free-kicks against Real cos when you watched a park game last week, the guy who hit the top corner had totally mi**** a pass to the winger.}
As now a Terf who's been dragged into all this cos a petite feminist mate from the rave scene got punched in the face by a big bloke in a skirt at the Anarchist Bookfair, I've been following all this gender bollox for a decade now and I totally agree with you.
But to suggest that these kids moaning about gender means we can't trust serious science is misguided. If someone from the South African embassy had been due to speak when I was at the LSE, we'd have rioted. But that wouldn't have stopped the serious work of our top academics like Magnad {now Lord} Desai.
You're right that some of the serious research can occur outside uni. When I was chose to do the Indian army on the western front for an MA presentation, two of the best sources were books specifically on the subject written by non-academics - one a barrister and the other a former Gurkha officer, Major Gordon Corrigan, who I got to come and give a lecture and who, when the glw and I spoke with him and the tutor in the bar for a couple of hours afterwards is the most old skool gent I've ever met while also being a total {hippy style} India head.
But the work of the proper academics were vital as well. Ormissi had gone through every single letter the Indian troops wrote. {All non-officers letters were censored, but copies were kept of every single Indian letter to be able to check they weren't going to mutiny.} Now you can only spend the time doing that and then writing it up in academic journals and books if you're a full-time academic. I also found loads of papers on Jstor and I wouldn't be able to research history to the level I did without a Jstor login giving me access to every single academic paper ever published.
And there's no way I could have gone on and done a PhD without the access to the archives that being an academic allows.
So in terms of history, I'd totally dispute that the "sad fact is that research outside of universities tends to be more effective and tends to have more freedom." That's not the case at all.
I was at one of the only 3 unis that offer an MA in WW1 studies. My tutor is one of the country's top experts and he'd published a book on the BEF with his two colleagues published by the OUP that's one of the serious academic textbooks. When writing an essay on the BEF being put under French command at the start of the Spring Offensive in 1918, I took issue with one word when he said that it almost didn't happen. Talking to him after I got the essay back, he said he could now see how that sentence could be slightly misconstrued and would write an extra 3 paragraphs explaining it in greater detail based on what I'd said. And I could only have researched all this with the uni library giving me access to every book and article ever written on the subject {though I only read the Eng Lang ones, though they'd cite French and other academic sources.}
So having studied at post-grad level relatively recently - after all this woke nonsense started - in my case the teenagers banging on about woke stuff had absolutely no bearing on our research. And the same would apply to top level climate science. Climate change is no respecter of gender, race, post-imperialism etc. Yeah, you might get the odd article in the Grauniad saying climate change is gonna hit poor black people in the 3rd world more or whatever, but it has no bearing on the data modelling that's continually being debated and refined.
So don't through the baby out with the bath water. And as I said elsewhere, look at those Nasa maps - the animation and the way you can make a map for any month of any year {or range of years, so the average for April 2021-25 for example} to see whether each bit was hotted or colder {and how much} compared to the average {from a year range you can set yourself eg the average for every April between 1951 and 1980.}
All that data is in the public domain. All of it can be checked, and Nasa aren't doing it for the money and they're not taking into account gender or ethnicity. And you can see the world is getting hotter and hotter.
That's the bottom line.
{What did you study, btw, P?}
Thanks, Red. Much appreciated. {Though having loads of time with no job or kids but having a glw and cat to look after me does allow me to research the stuff that interests me all day.}Quote:
Originally Posted by redgunamo
History. :-)Quote:
Originally Posted by Ganpati's Goonerz--AFC's Aboriginal Fertility Cult
And history is a tricky one. The rigour is there but a fair amount of excellent works of history either come from outside academia or are denounced within it.
And I specifically said that scientific research does carry more rigour. Even within universities.
But often that rigour requires external input-Royal Socities, professional bodies etc etc.
Again, I am not questioning any research. I am merely challenging how universities operate. And don't make the mistake of thinking it is only former polys and the lower end of the sector that are hit with this. It is across the board.
Apart from Oxford and Cambridge, because of the GIGANTIC external funding they receive, mostly from us.