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Old 03-17-2015, 08:02 PM   #64
Happy Monkey
I think this line's mostly filler.
 
Join Date: Jan 2003
Location: DC
Posts: 13,575
Quote:
HM, assuming this was any other topic, would you be convinced? I am not convinced.
Most other scientific topics don't have major industries trying to sow doubt in them, so it wouldn't come up. But yeah, if every major medical group said vaccines were safe and effective, and even ones funded and populated by anti-vaxxers said "well, maybe", I'd find that pretty convincing.

Actually, a better example might be smoking and lung cancer. When even the studies funded by the tobacco companies had to stop denying the connection, that was an overwhelming consensus.

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The IPCC did. In 2013 their predictions section contains this item:
The global surface temperature increase by the end of the 21st century is likely to exceed 1.5 °C relative to the 1850 to 1900 period
You know why they walked back. Let's not say the word.
They raised, but softened the lower prediction, and removed the upper limit. On the whole, that's a bit of a "walk back", but not much. I don't consider it a weakness of science, though, when predictions change in the course of a decade, and the softening of the language probably results in a bigger consensus.

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But in some sense of all this, fuck the IPCC. It's a group of people, chosen in a political manner, by a political organization, and working by committee. They are building political consensus, not scientific consensus.
As with evolution and vaccines, politics is where most of the debate (as opposed to research) on the issue is taking place. What you say may be true of the IPCC, but all they did was codify what they thought the consensus was, ask actual scientific organizations if they concurred, and present the results to governments. The second part of that is relevant to the discussion.
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