Codger on Politics

Tuesday, July 08, 2014

Science isn't ruled by a Majority

Science isn't ruled by a Majority

http://thefederalist.com/2014/07/07/the-mean-girls-of-global-warming/

""Someone sent me a clip from John Oliver—a nebbishy British version of Jon Stewart—arguing that global warming skeptics don't deserve a hearing because 97% of scientists supposedly back the claims of catastrophic man-made global warming.""

""But the biggest problem with this statistic is that it just doesn't matter. Before Copernicus and Galileo, there was a pretty strong consensus among scientific authorities that the Earth was at the center of the solar system. Up to the 1950s, the theory of plate tectonics, which is now the foundation of geology, was still widely considered a crackpot notion championed by a few lonely dissenters. The history of science is a long history of the consensus being proven wrong.""

""the idea that "just by watching a video like this and hearing an entire audience derisive[ly] ridicule climate-denialism," skeptics will be induced to go along with the consensus. ""

The idea of global warming is too complicated to have such a consensus. Most will acknowledge that the earth has warmed in the recent past. It is not as clear as to why. It has not warmed recently. It may not be a bad thing.

To have it be a bad thing, you need to believe he climate is unstable such that a small temperature rise will trigger the release of gasses which will trigger more increases causing disastrous results. Also you must believe the climate as been correctly modeled so the predictions the model makes are likely true.

Also you must disbelieve that some, due to funding pressures have tailored the data to produce the desired result. You must disbelieve all of the other possible sources of temperature rise including variation in the sun's output. You must ignore the lack of temperature rise in the last 15 years.

I find it all unlikely.

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