8 thoughts on “The American Physical Society”

    1. Not by any means. Some Nobel Prize winning physicists resigned their membership because the AAAS directors went full bore stupid, but many remain as members, and are upset that the AAAS directors went full bore stupid. This sometimes happens in science, as glorified con men and group think convince “sciency” people that we are faced with in impending ice age due to pollution, that Aryans are the superior genetic race, or that by whipping pepper plants we can make angrier, hotter peppers.

      Many physicists have said that by the standards of hard physics, climatology might as well be a bad high school science fair project, with sloppy controls, data handling, analysis, and conclusions. Others note that it operates as a wacko religious cult, which is perfectly accurate. Climate science should be renamed climate Scientology, but Scientologists aren’t as obsessive about pursuing and punishing those who doubt the truth of BS about Xenu, auditing, and all that other BS.

      1. Pretty much. It’s really rather shameful that any scientist buys into the pseudo-science promulgated by the climatology community, more so if they use it as a justification for extremely serious policy/economic changes to the world. As I’ve said before the data is crap the models are crap and even then the crap models don’t even match the crap data. High school science fair project might be too generous an insult for these charlatans. The best money still rests on the hypothesis that climate “models” are mostly just multi-variate regressions with too many free parameters and chosen primarily based on prejudice. It’s sad how little our fundamental understanding of climate has advanced over the past 3 decades despite climatology’s increasingly prominent role in politics.

        The attempts to shut down legitimate criticism by drawing comparisons with holocaust denial are truly shameful and disgusting.

    2. I have to agree. That was pretty dumb even for your typical verbiage.

      Should you ever want to think about this sort of thing rather than play a monkey with keyboard on the internet, I’ll point out the following problems for your consideration: your quote doesn’t match anything in Rand’s summary or the linked articles; it also is a leading question (which is one of the question types which I consider inherently stupid); the views of a small AAAS committee don’t necessarily perfectly reflected the opinions of thousands of AAAS members; and fourth, that the AAAS story showed a legitimate problem which maybe you ought to glance at rather than mash keys.

      Finally, are you for real? If I were a billionaire looking to stretch my dollars, a few shills posting really stupid rebuttals to blogs I want to support would be a really cost effective addition to my toolbox.

  1. By the bye, I knew Steven Koonin (the chair) years ago when I was a student at Cal Tech. Not his student, but some friends of mine were. He was scary smart. Reading some of the transcripts from this committee makes me think he still is.

    With all that, I’m a little surprised at the makeup of the presenters. While Curry, Lindzen, and Christie are all real and respected scientists, I don’t know that I would have made half the presenters from the skeptical side of things. I just don’t think that that is a representative sample. Ignoring all the nonsense about “97%”, which anyone can tell is manifestly wrong by just examining what the sources for it say, I certainly think that a very considerable majority of scientists in the climate field believe in AGW. It sounds like the APS group decided to settle this issue (to their own satisfaction, that is) once and for all: do the skeptics have a good case, or should we go with the expertise of the majority?

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