The Corean Chronicles
Everyone's an Expert
Now... we all have opinions, particularly in areas such as politics, music, theatre, art, the weather, as to what we like... and that's fine. What's not so fine is the ever-growing assumption that all opinions are of equal value, or that "likes" equate to validity or correctness. All opinions are not of equal value, and whether one likes something or believes it to be so does not translate automatically into excellence or validity. Add to that the assumption, particularly by "educated" individuals, that one's opinions and beliefs outside one's field or fields of expertise are equally valid or superior to the professionals in another field, and a society risks sewing the seeds of its own collapse, particularly in cases involving elected officials, such as Congress, who too often defer to popular opinion or their own unfounded biases.
And yet, no one seems to see it. The doctor who can see so clearly how the "everyone is wonderful" philosophy undermines medical excellence cheerfully and vociferously disputes years of research by thousands of climate scientists because he cannot believe what they report, yet he'd be outraged if those climate experts disputed key aspects of his medical practice. The engineer who understands the importance of accuracy and perfection in structure would be furious if a group of professional musicians pointed out non-existent weaknesses in his engineering, but sees nothing wrong with making blatant and incorrect assessments about professional musicians and singers. And of course, all the readers who make the thousands and thousands of misguided and incorrect statements about books -- largely because they don't like what the author did, rather than because the book was technically bad [not that there aren't many, many, technically bad books, but those aren't generally the ones these "reader reviewers" pan] -- would be outraged if people made the same petty comments about their work.
The problem is that, in a society that has become almost totally consumer-oriented, such opinions guide politics and public policy. Education is no longer based on what works, but upon making students and parents feel good and upon the widely held opinion that "anyone can be anything he or she wants to be" [which is almost never true, rhetoric to the contrary]. Government has become more and more widely based on the opinion that someone else should pay for the programs, despite years of recommendations by economists and other professionals that a nation cannot continue to expand government programs without increasing taxation or cutting other programs. Even within fields such as the investment banking and securities business, executives with no expertise in complex financial systems, such as derivatives, thought they were experts and made decisions based on the popularity of short-term profits... leading to the resulting disaster.
Entertainment has become based more and more on strict popularity -- what the majority wants -- and factors such as the skill or performers, the excellence of scripts or music, have almost entirely vanished, although everyone cites excellence as the basis for their views, and that "excellence" is based on what they like, usually superficial appearance and/or crudity, and seldom are such likes based on an in-depth and studied expertise in the field. The same is true in athletics. Never in our history have there ever been so many Monday morning quarterbacks, and almost none of them have any experience on the professional level in the sports they criticize.
Everyone's an expert, and fewer and fewer Americans are listening to those who truly are the experts -- and yet they wonder why the problems are multiplying?
I do not spuriously dispute the claims of climatologists. I read the lengthy final draft report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (a title that already indicates the group's bias) and found that there were serious errors, misrepresentations, and outright lies throughout the report. A handful of brave climatologists also have disputed the report. In fact, the primary editor of the report resigned from the IPCC before it was made public because he disagreed with the heavy emphasis on unsupported claims of global warming and the use of poor models to predict future ice cap melting.
The historic record shows a well-documented warming period that lasted from approximately 800-1200 AD and a less well-documented period around 4000 years ago. In the more recent warming period, temperatures were substantially warmer than today, England was growing grapes, the southern two-thirds of Greenland was mostly ice- and glacier-free, Europe and Russia had record crop yields, etc. Despite such warming, the polar ice caps remained intact and coastal cities did not flood. The warming was not anthropogenic, because the relatively small non-industrial population could not have generated much CO2. And, if they did, how did warming reverse a few hundred years later? Perhaps mechanism other than CO2 are more relevant to warming.
Here's just one of the flaws in the CO2-will-cook-the-planet theory. Assume CO2 is causing warming. Air, seas, and surface get warmer, evaporation increases, cloud formation increases, planetary albedo increases, less light reaches lower atmosphere and surface, planet cools. Climatologists at MIT believe that if CO2 raised temperatures as much as some climatologists claim, the final result will be a cooler planet, not a warmer one. Here's a quote: "The effect of clouds on this heat budget is immense. The major radiatively active components of the atmosphere are water vapor and so-called layer clouds. The latter contribute to cooling by reflecting sunlight that otherwise would be absorbed by the surface, and contribute to heating by absorbing and re-emitting infrared radiation (essentially the greenhouse mechanism).
Recent observational studies show that these effects almost balance, but that the cooling effect is somewhat more important." (http://web.mit.edu/cgcs/www/clouds.html)
That doesn't look like universal agreement among climatologists that anthropogenic CO2 release will cook us.
Mr. Modesett repeatedly makes fallacious arguments from authority. Not all authorities are right. I'll give two examples from medicine: in the 1990s many physicians believed that children who lived near high-voltage power lines were far more likely to get leukemia. This was based on multiple epidemiologic studies. I was among the physicians who vehemently disagreed with the epidemiologic "authorities." We were proven right: the studies were flawed both methodologically and statistically. Another medical example was the two Australian doctors who believed that gastric ulcers were caused by bacteria. The world's gastroenterologists all said they were crazy. It took twenty years, but they were proven right. Thousands of "authorities" were wrong. The same will be said of today's climatologists who claim we're experiencing runaway anthropogenic global-warming.
: 4:35 PMI've spent some twenty plus years studying and dealing with environmental issues, and one thing is very clear. Theoretical studies and calculations have a great potentional to be wrong. That's why I tend to look at such long term factors as the drastic reduction in ocean ice, the melting of the vast majority of glaciers [yes, there are a few that aren't], the continuing and increasing rate of ice-sheet meltwater, the temperature increased forest die-backs, and the comparison of ice-core records to historical trends over the past 100,000 plus years. Those aren't subject to nearly the same degree of data-manipulation on either side.
And... precision does help, even in spelling names.
"Drastic reduction in ocean ice". The Arctic, yes, has shrunk some (though it's recovered quite a bit in the last couple of years), but the Antarctic is a different story. It's actually been growing about 1% per decade during the time we have satellite records.
"the comparison of ice-core records to historical trends over the past 100,000 plus years."
You mean the ones that indicate that CO2 is a lagging indicator? Which, of course, makes perfect sense because as temperatures increase the CO2 that's dissolved in the oceans will be released.
Look, there's no question that on a 50-year scale things are currently warming, just as there's no question that the last decade or so we've been on a short-term cooling trend after the greatly anomalous 1998. There's also no question that over timeframes of millions of years that the planet has been much warmer than present, as well as much colder, and CO2 concentrations have been much higher, as well as much lower. The planetary environment is a remarkably resilient system, full of feedbacks that keep it more or less in balance.
For a variety of reasons, our best bet is normally to trust the institutional authorities on the matter, unless we believe they have a bias that would cause them to lie or at least be misled on the issue. The scientific and technological institutions, after all, have a proven record of improving their explanations and their technologies over time, even if it's sometimes in a two-steps-forward, one-step-back fashion. Hence, the layman would do well to bet on their conclusions, even if he can't trust them absolutely.
But when it comes to questions about, for instance, the value of art, we may have legitimate cause to distrust the institutional authorities: we say that they have an academic bias, and that their tastes naturally run toward the scholarly. Moreover, in comparison to the scientific community, literary academics don't have a proven record of improving much of anything. The simple fact is that most literature professors would dismiss Mr. Modesitt's novels with the same contempt that he probably reserves for Harlequin romances. Given this, his invocation of authority in the arts is somewhat confusing.
However, there is such a thing as cross-training, and there are people who have become very good in more than one field. And there's the occasional amateur who gains competence without gaining credentials or fame for that competence.
For example, you've written about starships, but it's possible that I know celestial mechanics better than you do. If the two of us were to find ourselves adrift in space, in the same spaceship, with nobody else on board, you might be well-advised to let me drive.
http://jenab6.livejournal.com/12053.html
What credentials do I have? None. Except I took some astronomy courses in college a long time ago. I just got addicted to the math pertaining to orbits, and I kept poking around with it until I'd taught myself how to do a thing or two.
Credentials are a suggestion of competence, but they are not proof. Performance is proof.
Furthermore, competence does not necessarily equal worth. There is also the matter of intentions, of loyalty, of a congruence of interests, between the worker (or the official) and the people whom the worker (or the official) is ostensibly serving. It's entirely possible that the worker (or the official) has another agenda, or that there exists a third party (or a special interest) whom the worker (or the official) is covertly and corruptly serving.
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