Frankly, I don’t care. I was joking. I kid my family. Dantes is basically right. One crucial difference is that an MD applies existing knowledge and can prescribe medication. A PhD advances knowledge by producing original research that must be deemed valuable by a committee of experts. Of course you can be both. It usually takes longer to receive a PhD than an MD.
Hoping to get back to the central discussion of this thread. There was some discussion about cycles that might be interesting to explore, but if you’re like me, most of this stuff we’re trying to decipher off of internet summaries. Not sure anybody here is really diving into the expert literature. One thing I’ve found profitable, but totally time consuming is to google some of the experts in the field, examine their CVs, and click on anything that is published but not behind a pay wall. When you do that, you can discover some serious science.
What may be unclear is that I am not a climate alarmist. Kind of for two reasons. First, i don’t trust predictions. They are always wrong. Predictions are tough, especially about the future! Second, no matter how severe the climate crisis might become, what matters is the total carbon dioxide emitted, not a reduction in the rate of emissions. Given the political “climate” and whether or not a build-out in renewable energies can economically replace fossil fuels in a timely way, my conclusion is that all of the fossil fuels that can be burned will be burned. So then the question becomes how much fossil fuel is out there, and when the energy gained from extraction will equal the energy of combustion. At the point, it is game over.
Of course. It is not an “academic” doctorate. It is a doctor of medicine. Those are two different things. I cannot graduate from a four year university with an MD.
This is literally an ignorant statement. There are no licensed physicians in this country, board certified or not, who are permitted to use the designation of “M.D.” with only a bachelor’s degree. The AMA makes sure of that.