money is to science
as politics is to police work

been a long time…loved that show…only saw about 5 episodes…
have searched all over for it,
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“science is to politics
as money is to police work”

ever wonder how an oil man became president???
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On the contrary, I’m not claiming they’re not there.

They may be there. However, I can’t find them. I’ve looked for them, at least a cursory inspection.

Inhofe clearly stated: “An **abundance** [emphasis mine] of new peer-reviewed studies, analysis, and data error discoveries in the last several months has prompted scientists to declare that fear of catastrophic man-made global warming ‘bites the dust’…”

I not only do not find “an abundance”, I don’t find any. I’m certainly willing to accept that they may exist. However, if you’re going to defend Senator Inhofe’s statement, it would behoove you to provide this magic abundance. Demonstrate this abundance. Give me some references.

See, I’m attacking Inhofe’s claim as lacking in evidence. If you want to challenge my attack, you have to provide evidence. You can’t claim that my attack is invalid because I haven’t done the research, that’s Inhofe’s job (and yours). This is how science works. He’s providing this claim, he needs to back it up. If you’re going to defend him, YOU need to back it up.

> Ah, and then we have this old canard. He’s wrong becuase the evil oil and gas companies are paying him off so they can make money off of us while the world burns.

I did not claim this in any way, and attempting to inject a moral argument here (citing “evil oil and gas companies”) is a blatantly bogus attempt on your part to belittle my stance by implying that my intellectual stance is clouded by a moral judgment on my part.

I do not claim that corporations are “evil”. They are manufactured personalities and artificial constructions. Claiming that corporations are “evil” is like claiming that any other non-sapient construct is “evil”.

I claimed that he was wrong, ***as he provided no evidence for his claim***, and I was unable to corroborate his statement, as ***I was unable to find evidence myself***.

To counter my claim that he is wrong, YOU MUST PROVIDE EVIDENCE.

I posited, additionally, that perhaps the **reason** why I am unable to find evidence is that the evidence does not exist, which necessarily implies that Senator Inhofe is either an idiot, misinformed, or a baldfaced liar in his speech on the senate floor.

A possible justification for *this* statement is the fact that he gets the vast majority of his campaign funds from the oil and gas industries. This doesn’t even imply necessarily that Inhofe is lying or stupid, it simply shows that he has a relationship with industries that have a significant economic interest in continuing business as usual. Since he’s getting a lot of his funds from this industry, it stands to reason that he has a lot of interaction with people from this industry, who may be providing him with unscientific assertions.

You can provide evidence that Inhofe is not lying by either providing citations that back Inhofe’s original claim, or by providing a credible explanation why Inhofe has reason to believe this evidence exists when neither myself (or, apparently you) are unable to find this evidence.

> Forget that it’s the evil oil and gas companies spending millions of dollars on research for alternative fuels and energy.

Yes, millions of dollars spent on research for alternative fuels and energy is certainly a piece of evidence. However, without contextualizing it, it is meaningless. How much money do they spend on research for petrochemical fuels? Do they get a tax break for research into alternative fuels? My impression is that petrochemical companies spend a vanishingly small proportion of their R&D budget on alternative fuel research in comparison to known technologies (feel free to provide evidence to the contrary). According to Chevron’s fact sheet (http://www.chevron.com/documents/pdf/corporatefactsheet.pdf) they’re spending an estimated $20 billion dollars on exploration and capital investments. How does this compare to their alternate energy research? Shell Oil’s corporate public documents don’t even detail how much money they spend on alternate energy research (http://www.shell.com/static/investor-en/downloads/publications/faoi/faoi_2006.pdf)

Interestingly, the Chevron site does not claim that global warming is a hoax or cite or provide any evidence to the contrary, which would seem to be a logical place to find it if it existed anywhere other than in Inhofe’s speech.

My interpretation of your statement here is that oil and gas companies are spending significant resources on alternative fuels and energy is evidence that they’re not “evil”. (If I’m misunderstanding you, please clarify)

Since I don’t claim that they’re evil, I’m not sure what you’re trying to do here other than distract me from your lack of evidence. They’re corporations. They have an obligation to their shareholders to maximize profit and cut expenses.

But more important is your misunderstanding of how science works. You offer quotes from Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein to the effect that the opinions of the majority of scientists prove nothing. And they’re both right — because nothing is ever proven in science. No theory, nothing that you call a fact, has ever been proven. Proof is a mathematical concept, not an empirical one. If you drop an apple from an apple tree a trillion times, and it falls to the earth every single time, that doesn’t prove that apples always fall to the earth from apple trees. It just makes it highly likely.

So tell us, what standards would you apply to evaluating any scientific hypothesis? Suppose, for example, that I asked you to prove that the earth orbits the sun. Could you prove that hypothesis? Could you do so in a manner that is fundamentally different from the methods used by scientists to establish that AGW is real? I think not. But give it a try, and I’ll have fun applying the same arguments to your attempt that you’ve been using against the AGW hypothesis.

They get to pick and choose what we don’t understand well enough to base policy on

For example, if there’s only a 95% chance that the global temperature will rise by 3-5 degrees in the next century, then we need more data. If there’s a 20% chance that Iraq has WMDs, then we need to do something about it immediately.

Someone, please let me know when I’m cynical enough.