Sunday
Oct092011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Goldacre on science
Oct 9, 2011 Climate: other FOI I enjoyed this talk by Ben Goldacre about his work on exposing bad conduct by big pharma scientists.
I was particularly taken by his opening gambit, namely that science rejects argument from authority. Too right. However, I couldn't help but be reminded of Simon Singh's contribution to the Spectator debate, which was essentially argument from authority from beginning to end. Perhaps Dr Goldacre should give his friend Dr Singh a lesson in basic scientific philosophy.
There is also a good section on data availability, another area on which the official sceptics might like to spread their criticisms around a little bit more widely.
Reader Comments (53)
Heh, I love ironies and you've given me a big one with the call to a cite to a peer reviewed article. You've got to get curious in order to predict.
The isotope record is ambiguous and there were some volcanoes during the cooling, but it is a BIG clue that the sunspots were different at the same time that the earth cooled. And why the hemispheric assymetry?
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The flaw in his argument that heat of compression "causes the global temperature to be higher" is that this would require the atmosphere to go from a less compressed to a more compressed state.
Oct 10, 2011 at 10:49 PM | Richard Betts
Richard, I may be wrong but wasn't that the point he was making, namely that the atmosphere does go from a less compressed to a more compressed state as you get nearer the surface, and that the mathmatically calculate warming caused by this compression is approximate to the accepted background "greenhouse effect" of 33 degrees, and that this amount of extra heat will occur regardless of the relative composition of the atmosphere. As I say I may have misinterpreted but that my read on it.
all the best Steve
John in France: Thanks for the kind words. For all it's highly publicized failure and criticisms, the drug approval process does a fairly good job of maintaining scientific integrity in a big-money, politicized environment. Their process makes the IPCC look like a joke.