Incidentally, all engineers should avoid medicine. The science on which it is based is even fuzzier than climate. ☺

Dec 4, 2015 at 2:51 PM | Unregistered CommenterEntropic man

I met a very pleasant and intelligent Engineer while doing a post-doctoral course in Cardiology. She was more clued up than most of the class, some of whom were practicing Physicians.

Incidentally, all engineers should avoid medicine. The science on which it is based is even fuzzier than climate. ☺

Dec 4, 2015 at 2:51 PM Entropic man

EM - you are off your rocker.

Martin A

I kid you not.

It is very difficult to demonstrate that any medical procedure is effective to even 95% confidence.

EM - you just make stuff up.

"It is very difficult to demonstrate that any medical procedure is effective to even 95% confidence" (even if it were true) is not at all the same thing as "The science on which medicine is based is even fuzzier than climate".

Martin A, perhaps Entropic Man is trying to say that if more Engineering-class minds applied themselves to medicine, then it would actually improve medicine.

We already know that Climate Science often fails established benchmarks, and they clearly just wish to compete with the Medical Profession[*] for the moniker of "The only profession with a 100.00% failure rate".

[*]Physicians do at least have a "Professional" ethos and a governing body which will occasionally strike-off gross incompetents, charlatans, and mass murderers.

Engineering has pushed the frontiers of medicine. Xrays, scanner, radiation theropy. Surgical robots, the list is endless.

RR

I agree with you. Bye Bye.

Micky H Corbett

"you need to know what the steady state is. "

Probably not current conditions.

The default state for Earth over the last two million years has been global temperatures around 9C, ice sheets as far south as London and sea levels 120 metres below the present state.

The default state over the previous 50 million years before the Arctic Ocean formed and the Panama Strait closed was 17-19C with sea levels 30 metres above current levels.

The current interglacial is a short term transient intermediate state at 14C and icurrent sea levels. It is certainly atypical. Over the last 50 million years Earth has probably spent less than 1% of its time in interglacials.. It would not be too surprising if this transient state was .more prone to excursions on the decadal or century scale, but evidence is currently lacking.

Anyone supporting an unstable cycle hypothesis as a cause for the 1C warming since 1880 would need to show that such hysteresis(?) Is possible, demonstrate a mechanism and provide an an energy budget if they hoped to change the current AGW paradigm..

If the paradigm shift to plate tectonics is any guide, they would also need to wait for the current generation of climate science professors to die off. Younger geologists accepted the change easily, but some of their older colleagues never accepted the change.☺

Michael hart, Ross Lea

The problem with biological and medical research is not the poor quality of the researchers. It is the difficulty of separating the signal you wish to study from the incredible and irreducible amount of background noise.

How would an engineering approach help?

It's an attitude of mind, EM. People have debated raising the statistical bar for publishing results in the Bio-medical literature (and other fields). And the debate will continue. Coming from a Chemistry background, I was shocked when I first observed commonly accepted error bars/uncertainties in Immunology experiments.

Off course, that was before I had to do them myself, by which time I had become more understanding!
A lot still depends on the motivation of the researcher to repeat the experiment. If they know that it won't get published otherwise, then they'll make the effort. Unless they don't think their results are truly trustworthy, meaningful or reproducible.

michael hart - note what EM actually said:

"... medicine. The science on which it is based is even fuzzier than climate..."

Ludicrous. As somebody said, when climate science advances to the point where it knows about climate even one tenth of what is known by medical science about its subject, climate science will deserve credibility.

Then he changed his story:

"It is very difficult to demonstrate that any medical procedure is effective to even 95% confidence"

But still bollocks.

There are innumerable medical procedures diagnostic therapeutic and surgical whose effectiveness is known with virtual certainty.

The second statement is a red herring anyway. Even if "It is very difficult to demonstrate that any medical procedure is effective to even 95% confidence" were true, "the science on which (medicine) is based is even fuzzier than climate.." remains completely false.

Another example of something wafting into EM's mind and at that instant crystallising and becoming, for him, reality.

I assume he comes up with inanities like that on the basis that forty years of pontificating in front of classes of thirteen year olds conditioned him to believe that they are in fact pearls of wisdom.

Michal hart

"was shocked when I first observed commonly accepted error bars/uncertainties in Immunology experiments.

Off course, that was before I had to do them myself, by which time I had become more understanding!"

You know the problem! Can you suggest ways of conveying the dificuties involved to your engineering colleagues?

It is not just, or even, reluctance to replicate. A clinical trial may have enough resources to follow a thousand patients; to get decent error bars might take a sample size of 1 million. Noone is willing to put in the enormous funding needed to produce outcomes of engineering quality.

This can happn to you too. I have heard engineers talk of their project being Proxmired. This is what happens when the outcome is compromised by inadquate resources.

The classic example is the space shuttle. NASA was tasked to produce a reliable space transportation system. Senator Proxmire repeatedly cut their budget. The final product crashed twice in 135 flights and was abandoned as too dangerous to use.

Martin A

Now you are pontificating outside your field.Did you ever work in Biology or medicine? I have done both.

As a biologist, EM has decided to classify engineering by his observed behaviour of one or two be met once.

Like any sort of generalisation where it comes to people, it lends itself to the bigoted mind.

EM, your idiocratic spew in hiding the failures of climate science by lying about medicine is low life even for you.

Martin A,breath of fresh air

"BOFA And not far behind is the unique belief EM has that you need an alternative theory before the previous one is declared failed."

To quote Aristotle "Nature abhors a vacuum.".

Most scientists in a field accept a paradigm, a world view based on theory and the available evidence. When new evidence forces a new paradigm it replaces the old one.

An old theory is normally declared failed, as you put it, because a more successful theory has replaced it, one which better explains the evidence.

I cannot think of a single example in which an old theory has been discarded without a replacement in place.

Martin A

I did six months as a blood transfusion/haematology technician and a year's biomedical science poatgrad after I left teaching.,

EM,
I was a phlebotomist and a respiratory therapist, and served on the code blue team at a major hospital in my youthful years, so can say with authority at least equal to yours that you are full of it.
Old theories, in honest science, have their weaknesses openly discussed. That is notably absent from the world of climate science.

Hunter.

You know better than that

You know that donated blood is separated into its components and repackaged as cell concentrates and serum.

You know that it is screened for the main blood transmitted infections.

You know that both the patient's pre-transfusion sample (which you probably took) and the red cell concentrate are checked for correct ABO and rhesus group and that the recipient's serum is mixed with cells from the concentrate to check for agglutination or haemolytic reactions.

You know the results are crosschecked by another technician.

You know the procedures by which the safety of the transfusion is checked in the ward before transfusion and you know the post-transfusion checks.

You know that despite the BCSH guidelines blood transfusion is regarded as a dangerous procedure, to be used only when necessary.

You know that despite these precautions patients continue to die from mismatched transfusions, from unexpected immune reactions and from infections.

Yet you support Martin A's rosy view of medicine.

I cannot think of a single example in which an old theory has been discarded without a replacement in place.

Dec 5, 2015 at 7:08 PM | Unregistered CommenterEntropic man

Martin A spoke of validity, but you transposed it to utility.

Many religious philosophies are not valid (to my way of thinking at least) and often contradict each other, but have not been discarded by their adherents. Catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory is certainly not about to be discarded by those who earn a good living from it, whether they see anything to replace it or not.