A budding geophys must recognize that there are two types of science in this world. The main one is 'Story Telling', or Philisophical Science (PS). It is mainly making observations, and then extrapolating, based on your limited knowledge. We all love ps because it is non-threatening, and makes good television. Artistotle was the king of this, he would say "Look, a feather drops slower than a rock, therefore all lighter objects fall slower than heavy ones."
The thing about PS is that 'conflict of interest' is built-in and not obvious. If you can make up stories, then you are going to do whatever the audience wants, so you can make money. And you must always make it sound plausible, like selling vag eggs. "Chickens are healthy!"
Our great leap forward in society was when we threw all this out. But now, it's just a Western Imperalism thing. Let's all go back to PS, and a gentler time. The problem is that PS always led to disaster, and it's no different now.
A geophys throws all this out, and goes with Scientific Method, or SM. The physics of SM is that it belongs in the future, rather than the hindsight of PS. SM casts a hypothesis that must be proven in the future with new observations or experiments. The hypothesis lives or dies (very cruel). PS always adjusts the story when new observations come in. For example I was reading that the flat zone in global temps before 2016 was being explained away.
They use the 2016 El Nino to show that all the heat came back, and ignored the drop afterwards. Wasn't that a good story? Let's give them more grants.
-- to be continued.
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