{"id":6991,"date":"2021-01-03T23:42:53","date_gmt":"2021-01-03T23:42:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newmatilda.com\/?p=139676"},"modified":"2021-01-03T23:42:53","modified_gmt":"2021-01-03T23:42:53","slug":"the-rbg-affect-where-the-rubber-meats-the-road-on-science-global-warming-and-the-convenience-of-hypocrisy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/01\/03\/the-rbg-affect-where-the-rubber-meats-the-road-on-science-global-warming-and-the-convenience-of-hypocrisy\/","title":{"rendered":"The RBG Affect: Where the Rubber \u2018Meats\u2019 The Road On Science, Global Warming And The Convenience Of Hypocrisy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
DON’T MISS ANYTHING! ONE CLICK TO GET NEW MATILDA DELIVERED DIRECT TO YOUR INBOX, FREE!<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n US Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsberg knew a lot about activism and the fight for women\u2019s rights. And like the current battle to arrest global warming, RBG also knew a bit about people ignoring the bleedingly obvious when it suited. Geoff Russell explains.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Physical scientists often repeat experiments. It\u2019s mostly a\nrite of passage for young scientists to get more precise answers to old\nquestions than their elders. Mathematicians similarly delight in new proofs to\nold theorems. In 1928, Elisha Loomis published a book of 365 proofs of\nPythagoras\u2019s Theorem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A person who says \u201cLet\u2019s not reinvent the wheel\u201d has probably\nnever built anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The process is loosely called \u201creplication\u201d<\/em>. If two\ngroups can\u2019t perform the same experiment and get the same result, then there is\na problem. Identifying the problem is a terrific way of learning stuff. There\nis no substitute for sleepless nights thinking about why something doesn\u2019t\nwork.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A huge landmark study in 2015 pointed to what some have called a replication crisis in psychological science<\/a>. A consortium of researchers tried and mostly failed to replicate 100 pieces of psychological research. Others have pointed to similar problems in medicine<\/a>. Watch that space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And in climate\nscience?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Happily there isn\u2019t any replication crisis in climate\nscience. Probably because it\u2019s really just very complex physics; and physicists\nhave been repeating, checking and scrutinising each others\u2019 work for over 100 years.\nIn 1887, the first ever Michelson-Morley experiment was performed\u2026 by Michelson\nand Morley\u2026 who else? The experiment is all about relativity and the speed of\nlight; the details don\u2019t matter. But the work has been repeated at least 30 times\nsince, with increasing accuracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Remember the famous climate science hockey stick<\/em>\ngraph? This was a graph in the 2001 IPCC report on the global climate showing\nthat current temperatures were dramatically higher than anything for 1,000 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Climate change deniers criticised the methodology, so teams\nof scientists from all over the planet repeated the work; again and again and\nagain. By the time of the 2007 IPCC report, some 12 teams had replicated and\nconfirmed the results. This isn\u2019t quite like the Michelson-Morley experiment,\nthere is a much wider intrinsic range of reasonable results that count as\nconfirmation, but the original work stood up well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If different methods get the same result, then you can be\nfar more confident of it. You can still find climate change deniers saying the\nhockey stick has been discredited; because they, like Donald Trump, simply make\nstuff up. They lie. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Michael Mann, one of the original hockey stick study\nauthors, wrote a book about the saga in 2012; \u201cThe Hockey\nStick and the Climate Wars\u201d<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here\u2019s a recent version of the hockey stick graph:<\/p>\n\n\n\n