Bah, I'm a fail, got the first two wrong (wasn't sure) and had to guess on the true/false one. Need to brush up on my knowledge

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Evil will always triumph over good, because good, is dumb

#1 & #2 wrong, Greenhouse Theory is much older than I ever thought.

#3 I got right, not because I knew it, but the correct answer was the most complete and worked with my minimal understanding of how the atmosphere works.

#4 I got wrong. I had never heard this before, and guessed it was false.

#5 I got right, but I nearly went with the NASA answer.

40% F
See me after class! >:(

P.S. Neat quiz, I'll spread it around, see what kind of responses I get.

I'm glad people found it an entertaining diversion. In the meantime, I tweaked the wording a bit and added some more false answers in order to make guesswork more difficult.

Good little quiz. The only one I was unsure about was, "4. Researchers have conducted experiments to determine that even a one third reduction in the concentration of CO2 would make only 0.4% difference in infrared radiation absorption. Therefore, they concluded that changes in CO2 level would make no significant difference." I got the right answer by process of elimination, but it contained several parts that could've gone either way. Since I'm not a climatologist, I couldn't tell you how much of a difference on climate 0.4% would make, so the conclusion could be a complete lead on.

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"America is, now, the most powerful and economically prosperous nation in the country." - Master of Ossus

The same one Rye was unsure of was the one I got wrong.

I'd like to repost this elsewhere, if I may. It's quite a nice little refresher on the science basics, as well as maybe rooting out the imbeciles who will go for the most obviously incorrect answer out of spite or genuine belief. Besides, a lot of people who have the power to change the game are also fairly smart, but they simply don't want to believe the science, for much the same reason Japanese fishing companies don't want to acknowledge extinction of marine stock, or indeed, Big Oil and the peak oil theory and creationists and the evolutionary theory.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

The one that really got me was #4. After reading the answer, I had a huge "duh" moment. When I was actually taking the quiz for some reason I refused to go for the option that implicated the scientists.

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"Spare me your space age technobabble, Atilla the Hun." -Zap Brannagan

"It means they could've done some freaky human/demon hybrid thing." -Nightstalker, on Nazis

That's true; a 0.4% difference is actually not insignificant. Moreover, there is no reason to restrict projections of CO2 concentration changes to one third. The researchers' conclusions were wrong for more reasons than I explicitly listed. But I felt like a huge long-winded spoiler-block answer would just break up the quiz.

Sure, go ahead. I also added one more question, and a few more false answers to trip up the veteran test-takers.

That's one of the mistakes often made by people who adopt the pro-science view on this. They tend to be loathe to admit that scientists might have made grievous errors. But that's how science always works: people start with something that's pretty damned sketchy, mistakes are made (sometimes really bad ones), but it eventually reaches a point that we can really start working on it and getting it to a point where a lot of the nebulous gaps in the original work are filled in. More and more eyes look over it, more and more potential problems are identified and solved, etc.

One of the biggest mythologies of the global warming denier movement is the belief that all the critics who have sprung up since Al Gore's movie are the first ones to have raised all of these objections. In reality, they were mostly raised decades ago, examined thoroughly, and in many cases, incorporated into the theory. There was already a full century of scientific criticism of the theory before anyone ever saw "An Inconvenient Truth", and these bloggers and political editorialists think they're breaking stories that shatter the scientists' world.

It's a common argument that when a scientist doesn't bend to public criticism (or even from other scientists), he's simply being arrogant. But have them actually change their views upon taking onboard new evidence and viewpoints, and all of a sudden their science is utterly flawed and their position untenable. Just like politicians "flip-flopping", it shows weakness, not an ability to be humbled, address their own mistakes, and correct their views accordingly. No, far better to stick to your guns and go out with a bang until (or even beyond) the time your mistakes are abundantly obvious.

Biblical inerrancy isn't just for the Bible anymore.

Unfortunately, public opinion is so massively incompatible with the scientific method that the two cannot be reconciled. How do you explain the difference between "political flip-flopping" and "improving and revising a theory in light of new data", when you're talking to the common folk?

People, as a general term, are stupid and irrational, and cannot be seriously expected to hold valid or useful opinions on science. In short, if they don't have some postsecondary education in the subject then they should shut the fuck up and let the smart people do the talking. Unfortunately, that won't happen because the common man's ego is much too large to allow that kind of intellectually submissive attitude, even if he doesn't deserve his own opinion of himself.

Like that thread in SLAM, with the placing of climatology alongside such bastions of reasoning like astrology and the old canard of "it's a theory, not fact" rears its ugly head. Again. More than anything, that argument needs to go to hell before anything more complex gets discussed.

And really, I can't fathom why these people don't apply their reasoning (if one can call it that) to any other trade. Plumber says your boiler is not certifiable and dangerous? Find a guy who kow tows your line of thinking. Sure, he may be a pastry chef with fuck all knowledge in plumbing, but if we let plumbers tell us what we do and do not know, isn't that bowing to elitist snobbery? Fuck that, all opinions are sacred. Both sides should have equal validity in their arguments, because ostracising one side from the debate due to lack of evidence or experience is not democractic. Or failing that, find a guy who works in the area of interest and rally behind him, say, on the need to ban MMR jabs. He's a doctor, so he MUST be correct. All those thousands of other GPs and scientists telling him he's full of shit is simply a smear campaign against the truth, not a move to protect the wary public from itself.

I'm surprised people are getting these wrong. I barely missed 5 and 6 because I figured NASA's climatology experiments would have been more convincing than gas experiments to people, and because I figured that pointing out how people are torturing facts was truer than just stating that it didn't cause the ice age's end.

I'd suggest altering 5 and 6 a bit. For 5, the criteria for 'importance' would have been nice to state beforehand, mostly because it makes sense in hindsight but I'm not an engineer and I don't default to that interpretation and I doubt too many other people would as well. Still, I understand the rationale. For 6, I'd remove the 'partially true' aspect of three... but that may be part of the trick. I knew that CO2 effects didn't cause the ice-age melting, but I fixated on the "taking advantage of measurement uncertainty" bit too much.

/1. Guessed 2, and actually had to work out why it made sense when it was revealed to be the answer. Was actually leaning at guessing 6 since it also seemed like one of those things that could have happened.

/2. Guessed 5, based on the year, during the Industrial Revolution.

x3. Chose 1 over 3 based on the word 'trapped'.

x4. I guessed 4. Never heard of such an experiment, and it didn't seem correct anyway.

x5. I chose 6, because that seemed to be how I became aware of it. Then I read the answer and remembered reading that somewhere too.

/6. I chose 1, because I remember reading something to that effect, but part II of the question kind of made it obvious as the CO2 theory is the one in all the news stories.


Darn. I should have studied the links first.

Nice quiz, thank you.

Got (5) wrong, that was a really hard one. The other questions were easier thought.

The problem is that science's predictive power leads to a weird sort of back-prediction: we predict that if you measure something, you will probably get the correct value.

Plus, when we know the true value is high, and you present a question like:

Was X ever measured to be 2, when X really equals 10?
a) Yes
b) No

...most of the time, the answer is going to be "b." The odds of anyone hitting that particular wrong estimate are low, even if the total odds of hitting some wrong estimate are high.