Re: THE SKY IS FALLING! THE SKY IS FALLING!

James Schrumpf <jaspammenotschrumpf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:Xns9B77D3110418Ajaschrumpfusenetstic@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

Quiet, "Will Vaughan" <wsvon@xxxxxxxxxxx> -- I'm transmitting rage.

James Schrumpf wrote:
Quiet, Professor <theodoreward@xxxxxxxxx> -- I'm transmitting rage.
*snip*


Yes I mentioned there are a lot of smart people on both sides,
though the majority seem to be on one side. Again, I'm not saying
its set in stone as I can't judge not being a climate scientist or
whoever studies this crap. I am simply saying if there are two sets
of smart people arguing over this it is retarded for people who are
in no position to judge to summarily say one side or the other is
correct. And that being the case if you have to choose a side you
should choose the side that allows life on earth to continue over
the side that allows you to keep driving SUVs.


Except that on one side you have people who are ignoring the actual
science that's going on right now and clinging to the AGW belief.

Science isn't determined by how many people are on one side or
another, but by what the evidence says.

Galileo was right when most of the rest of the world was wrong.

Continental drift was proposed by Ortelius in 1596, fully developed
by Wegener in 1912, and not agreed upon until the late 1960s.

Bretz proposed the origin of the scoured badlands in Montana to be
the result of a catastrophic flood from glacial lake Missoula, and
the argument went on for over forty years before the geologic
community accepted the evidence in the 1970s.

What the AGW people have done is taken a set of measurements and some
dubious climate models and run wild with them. They are ignoring
more recent measurements that don't agree with their models, and
their models can't account for observations they should have
predicted if they were accurate.

The problem with your last sentence is that it's not as simple as
"quit driving SUVs"; it's more like "prevent the developing nations
from developing and destroy the existing economies of the developed
nations."

Answers to complex problems are never simple, and climate is one of
the most complex things on Earth. If someone claims to have a simple
answer to "global warming" or "climate change," they're selling
something.

Exactly - and the examples you cite do show that science is a
self-regulating institution. But the ones you cite are exceptions -
for the most part, ideas by small groups only gain when they are
scientifically plausible - and this is not the norm in science. This
is explored in detail in Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions." Just because its not the norm doesn't mean it can't
be true, but the odds are very much against it.

However, the AGW deniers don't have science on their side. Sure
there is some evidence that points against AGW - but the most of
the evidence - and the most convincing scientific evidence - is on
the side of AGW. As a result, most climate scientists beileve it
as a likely theory. The AGW deniers need to read Carl Sagan's
Demon-Haunted World to get a perspective on what it really means
to have a scientific debate and not an all out war on prevailing
scientific ideas based on limited and faulty evidence.

Plus, Professor's idea is crystalized by Hitchen's - from
Sahil Kapur's article:

"Christopher Hitchens, a genuine skeptic, accepts that even if
the science of human-caused global warming is uncertain, "we
should act as if it is" certain, because "we don't have another planet
on which to run the experiment." Hitchens argues that if humans
turned out not to be contributing to global warming, we would merely
have made a "mistake in analysis, which we could correct from, "
whereas if the doubters were wrong, inaction "would lead to disaster."
This illustrates the difference between honest skepticism and
zealotry."

Full article here:

http://tinyurl.com/58ennm












Funny you would bring up Sagan's "Demon-Haunted World", my favorite of
his books. In that book he strongly emphasizes Karl Popper's idea of
disproving a hypothesis, i.e, for a hypothesis to be scientific it must
be disprovable; there must be some observation or experiment that would
prove the idea to be wrong.

Popper is the "anti-Kuhn". According to Kuhn, results which don't
support a hypothesis aren't considered to be refuting it, but a a
result of a researcher's mistake. That is, until the "mistakes" add up
to the point where the "revolution" occurs, after which a new paradigm
results that incorporates the "old" results with the "anomolous"
results.

Kuhn also argues that rival paradigms were "incommensurable", i.e.,
that one paradigm can't be interpreted through the framework of the
rival. This approach was criticized by Stone and others for seeming to
entail that theory choice was irrational, and that it was impossible to
judge one theory better than another by rational means.

The problem with this philosophy of science is that the "evidence" of
AGW is mostly the results of climate models that do a notoriously bad
job of predicting the past climate. When one is looking at predictions
that are poorly correlated with facts, it's hard to blame a
"researcher's mistake" for the facts.

I prefer Popper's approach of falsifiablility, and AGW admits to no
such possibility: melting glaciers? AGW. Growing glaciers? AGW.
Sudden hot weather? AGW. Unseasonably cold weather?
Never-before-seen snowfall? AGW.


Actually, there is a testable hypothesis for the theories underlying all of
the climate models used by the IPCC. As stated and shown grapically in the
latest IPCC report, if the models are correct, there should be a
"fingerprint" of increased warming in the troposphere above the tropics
relative to the rest of the atmosphere. Happily, NOAA has baloon and
satellite data dating back to the '50s that includes global tropospheric
temperatures. There was no fingerprint. The climate models failed their
only testable hypothesis.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24036736-7583,00.html

Doug

--
"It's called thinking for yourself. I'd look into the idea if I
were you. You seem to have the idea that disagreeing with the
smrat people counts as thinking for yourself." rich hammet

.

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