[jholman]

If by "the left" and "the right", you're thinking of US political definitions, please name a couple of politicized scientific disputes where the right-wing side of a scientific argument has merit.

I can think of one family of scientific subjects where the "progressive" side is almost as unscientific as the "conservative" side, and a particular case[0] where the "progressive" agenda was loudly denying the scientific state of the art.

But I cannot think of any cases where the "conservative" side had actively better scientific grounding. But that, of course, is probably due to my bias, my thought bubble, etc. So please, if you can rise to the standard you're setting, I'd like to learn about it. (If nothing else, almost all of my friends and family are left of me, and it's nice to be able to reality-check them, when social mores permit.)

[0] I'd provide my example, but I'm sufficiently afraid of progressive culture to not want to discuss the particular case under my own name. But I checked WP on the subject, and while it's not incredibly detailed either way, I don't think it supports the progressive side of the case w.r.t. the science. (In my assessment, the alleged progressives were wrong about the science in this particular case, although they may have been right about everything else, I dunno.)

[wrycoder]

There is the left narrative, and then there is everyone else.

The classic example is CAGW. If I know a person's position on that, I find I can predict their position on most any other contentious issue.

The average people on the street have plenty of received opinions that they are happy to share, but know little about the actual science relevant to them.

But, we were discussing Wikipedia science articles. The issue with Wikipedia is what is permitted to be said on some science pages, and what is quickly reverted.

Everyone is political. Good scientists (and good encyclopedists) ought to try hard to suppress that.

[revolvingocelot]

>The classic example is CAGW. If I know a person's position on that, I find I can predict their position on most any other contentious issue.

In case anyone was curious, it seems to stand for "catastrophic anthropogenic global warming" [0] (or Citizens Against Government Waste, which seems an equally stark signifier of the invoker's political position -- who better to exemplify "waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government" than, uh, Bernie Sanders?!).

"CAGW", for "catastrophic anthropogenic global warming", is a snarl word (or snarl acronym) that global warming denialists use for the established science of climate change. A Google Scholar search indicates that the term is never used in the scientific literature on climate[104][105] except in reference to denialist tactics.[106]

[0] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Global_warming#CAGW

[wrycoder]

Ok, I can guess your positions on the issues now ;)

It’s not a “snarl” word. It’s an acronym which is used because the whole fully qualified set of words is too long.

All four words are necessary to state what’s being discussed. Anything less is trying to deflect the debate.

Working backwards, Warming: it’s a rare scientist that thinks the world isn’t warming. We are still coming out of the last ice age. Fifteen thousand years ago, there was ice a mile thick where I’m sitting. We are also coming out of the Little Ice Age. A couple of centuries ago, you could walk from Manhattan to Staten Island on the ice in the winter.

Global: local climate change happens all the time. No one disputes that. The discussion is about global climate change.

Anthropogenic: significantly caused by humans, specifically by emitting excessive CO2. This is theoretical, because by itself, CO2 can’t account for the projected warming. There must be a feedback to the real greenhouse gas, water vapor.

Catastrophic: The amount of warming is going to alter the global climate to the point that the Earth’s ecology and human civilization will be seriously affected.

The last two points are in scientific dispute. The computer models, which have many knobs, predict a bad outcome.

Historic satellite measurements of the global tropospheric temperature show that nothing unusual is happening. The increase is 0.14 C per decade.

https://www.drroyspencer.com/2022/01/uah-global-temperature-...

It appears to me that the CAGW hypothesis is disproved.

Global climate change is a topic for some very interesting science. The solar system's position in the galaxy, for example. Or, the effect of the sun on the intensity of galactic cosmic rays.

The climate models can't address even recent pre-industrial global changes.

[revolvingocelot]

A "snarl word" is a neologism for the age-old practice of the creation of derogatory labels by people who are trying to dismiss things without the listener realizing they don't have good cause.

>The last two points are in scientific dispute

I don't think that's true. I think that a casual google will show that climatology is actually in overwhelming agreement that human activities are driving climate change, and here's one I did earlier [0]. To the reader: this is a testable hypothesis!

>It appears to me that the CAGW hypothesis is disproved

Argument by personal incredulity isn't always a fallacy. Sometimes, smart people are intuitive and well-informed enough to jump directly to conclusions without needing to cover the intervening intellectual distance. Maybe this is happening here, and I'm just not an exceptional person, but if I were you I'd consider wondering why the likes of Dr Roy Spencer and I couldn't turn our ability to outthink entire scientific disciplines to a more profitable end.

The issue is that stupidly oversimplified models from 40+ years ago have been borne out, sourced from both capitalist and Soviet science [1][3]. By all means, there are many, many inputs into the grand planetary system, but the inconvenient truth, if you will, is that atmospheric CO2 increases seem to track with temperature increases, in both modeling and the historical record. I think, by "many knobs", that you're trying to suggest there are many variables that can be tweaked -- nope! It's actually very straightforward. Are there complex, "more realistic" climate models that produce unorthodox results when their knobs are twiddled? Probably! But for every one of those you fixate on, remember that there is one big, simple one that continues to track with the thing we're trying to measure: observable reality. Bald-faced denial of observable reality is a pretty good signifier that some aspect of science has been politicized, whether in a Wikipedia article or in a congressional hearing.

You've made a lot of claims, but haven't really backed any of them up, or even explained them; "CAGW" is pretty clearly a snarl word.

[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966

[1] https://eos.org/features/a-50-year-old-global-warming-foreca...

[2] https://xkcd.com/1732/ <- "This is just a temperature chart!" That's right, but its sources, which track the CO2 rise, aren't

[3] https://www.climatefiles.com/exxonmobil/1982-memo-to-exxon-m...

[AnthonyMouse]

A relevant example of this is COVID. It became politicized, with [some of] the left taking the "we must vaccinate all infants and become hermits indefinitely or everyone will die" position and [some of] the right taking the "vaccines are harmful and useless and the virus is just a cold" position.

Neither of these positions is The Truth, as usual, but the result is that some of the things the right has been saying have been accurate but previously disparaged. For example, the difference between dying of COVID and dying with COVID, or accurately pointing out that the large majority of fatalities have been people with comorbidities.

[smt88]

> A relevant example of this is COVID

This is literally an irrelevant example because it's not related to Wikipedia. New, evolving science (especially as it intersects with many governments' policies) is always going to be wrong to some degree.

[AnthonyMouse]

> This is literally an irrelevant example because it's not related to Wikipedia.

rel·e·vant /ˈreləvənt/

closely connected or appropriate to what is being done or considered.

appropriate to the current time, period, or circumstances; of contemporary interest.

> New, evolving science (especially as it intersects with many governments' policies) is always going to be wrong to some degree.

Now this is an irrelevant criticism. Nobody asked for an example that isn't in dispute.

New, evolving science is the thing you would expect there to be the most political disputes over because the uncertainty causes people to believe whatever most benefits their coalition.

[nicky0]

Doesn't Wikipedia have articles about Covid?

[smt88]

Yes but it doesn't say anything about vaccinating infants or any of the other strawman nonsense that the person I replied to was saying.