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snousleSigh. I just saw this article quoted in a way that basically said "see, scientists have been saying dumb things for more than a hundred years, so don't believe anything they say now".
The gist of the article is that Lord Kelvin had calculated that burning coal would cause all oxygen in the atmosphere to be consumed before long - "Lord Kelvin startled us not long ago by affirming that there was only oxygen in the atmosphere sufficient to last mankind for some 300 years, and that the world was doomed to die of suffocation."
Trouble is, the mass of oxygen in the atmosphere as cited in the article is off by more than a factor of a thousand, and there is no evidence that Lord Kelvin ever claimed that we'd run out. It was entirely a fabrication of reporters at the time. As usual, there was a germ of truth in there - Kelvin did publish a paper with (accurate) caclulations along these lines - but the magazine article got the conclusion exactly backwards.
It took me less than five minutes to cross-check this article and establish that it wasn't a matter of bad science, but rather, bad journalism. Unfortunately, the "scientists are dumb" trope is so compelling that none of the commenters on the blog where this was posted even lifted a finger to question this assumption.
I don't understand why people think it's so clever to be casually dismissive of expertise. There's this fantasy floating around that all emporors are naked, and that one simple, obvious observation can magically overturn a century of accumulated knowledege. It doesn't work that way, and people who believe this are not only making fools of themselves, but denying themselves the opportunity to actually learn something.
The gist of the article is that Lord Kelvin had calculated that burning coal would cause all oxygen in the atmosphere to be consumed before long - "Lord Kelvin startled us not long ago by affirming that there was only oxygen in the atmosphere sufficient to last mankind for some 300 years, and that the world was doomed to die of suffocation."
Trouble is, the mass of oxygen in the atmosphere as cited in the article is off by more than a factor of a thousand, and there is no evidence that Lord Kelvin ever claimed that we'd run out. It was entirely a fabrication of reporters at the time. As usual, there was a germ of truth in there - Kelvin did publish a paper with (accurate) caclulations along these lines - but the magazine article got the conclusion exactly backwards.
It took me less than five minutes to cross-check this article and establish that it wasn't a matter of bad science, but rather, bad journalism. Unfortunately, the "scientists are dumb" trope is so compelling that none of the commenters on the blog where this was posted even lifted a finger to question this assumption.
I don't understand why people think it's so clever to be casually dismissive of expertise. There's this fantasy floating around that all emporors are naked, and that one simple, obvious observation can magically overturn a century of accumulated knowledege. It doesn't work that way, and people who believe this are not only making fools of themselves, but denying themselves the opportunity to actually learn something.
