I have spent my life hiking through and puzzling over the amazingly varied mountain terrains of the Western USA and Canada, especially the Sierra Nevada, Cascades, and Rocky Mountains. Established theories I grew up with but was never satisfied with on the formation of the Rockies are challenged in this wonderful lecture, a classic paradigm shift, and relevant for METAR as we often contemplate paradigm shifts within investor comprehension of markets and of market comprehensions of new tech.
Now I need to go back and reread John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World series. Rising From the Plains and Assembling California are the two titles most closely related to the topic. I’ll probably just start over with In Suspect Terrain and follow McPhee across the US on I-80. I am sure that some of it is not current on geology, but the great writing will make up for it.
If you like McPhee (he is wonderful), then you will like this very bright, plainspoken, somewhat lame, teacher of Geology 101 from Central Washington College who sees what doesn’t fit current theory and takes you on quite an amazing ride.
I picked the most obvious lecture, but the others in his series are also superb and upset what people thought was settled science.
Nick Zenter is great. I’ve watched a number of his videos. He was born to each. He just exudes nerd energy.
Re: John McPhee has been on my list forever. People from all different backgrounds keep recommending him and I keep not getting to it. I’ll have to change that.
I don’t know anyone involved withy science who thinks it’s “settled.” That’s the beauty of science, it keeps learning.
As for the video, meh. He has a theory, not yet widely accepted, but he bashes the fact that there were other theories in the past. Well, dude, that’s how science works. Not really necessary to complain about the theories you learned when growing up.
Of course we do. We also have “gravity affirmers”, relativity “affirmers”, Quantum Mechanics well you get the idea here. The problem isn’t that a lot of scientists (and people) affirm that climate change is human caused and problematic. It’s that the people opposed to this really don’t have any solid evidence to back their claims. To me this is the same as the tobacco industry decades ago trying to convince us the science behind the cancer was flawed. It wasn’t.
Relativity is strange, mostly in the way that time is not constant for all clocks. But until we get an actual better theory, we affirm it. Quantum Mechanics is stranger still, with the uncertainty principle and all that comes from that. Even Einstein hated it. But until we get a better theory, the reality is strange.
I’m still waiting for anything credible that says human activity isn’t harming the climate in ways that are going to be bad for our future. I haven’t see it yet.
Science nerd joke alert:
An electron is driving a car, speeding, and a cop pulls him over.
Cop: “Do you realize you were going 88mph?”
Electron: “Great! Now I’m lost!”
I am puzzled Captain. Why do you keep crying about this? If people study the facts and take a different position than you do and argue their side of the facts. Why can’t you just realize that not everyone is going to agree with you? Instead, you start calling them names because you can’t get them to take your side? Then, when people start calling you names back, well you start crying about that.
While I won’t dispute your arguments even if I disagree, I just want the answer to one question. “Is climate science settled?” A yes or no answer will suffice.
Let’s get more detailed and specific for the Captain, because this seems to be a problem for him. Nothing in science is “settled”. As the joke “the history of physics in 60 seconds” goes:
First Aristotle said a lot of things that were wrong. But Newton came along and straightened him out. Then Einstein messed up things all over again. But now, with the exception of heavy things, light things, hot things, cold things, large things, small things, turbulence, and the concept of time, we have it all figured out again.
If we went around saying that Relativity is not “settled science and could be wrong” we would not have functioning GPS systems, which rely on the fact that time flows differently for GPS satellites than it does for GPS receivers on the surface. If we went around saying Quantum Mechanics is not “settled science and could be wrong” we would not have transistors and all that comes from that. And if scientists themselves thought QM was settle we would have never built the Large Hadron Collider.
Human caused climate change is as “settled” as it will get. And what it says is “we need to change what we are doing, quickly, because we are going someplace very bad”. And until the deniers give us solid reasons to re-think that we need to ignore those people as crack pots no different than flat Earthers.
I will say it isn’t settled Captain, Now tell me what do you think the chances are that humans caused climate change? 90 percent human caused or 10 percent human caused? I want to see on a scale what you think the chances are?
