7 (or more) reasons to be (scientifically) skeptical of Anthropogenic Global Warming
Monday, December 7th, 2009Bore Patch blog has an excellent post up: Should You Be a Global Warming Skeptic?. He details the problems with the AGW theory, much of it known even before the revelations of the “Climategate” leak.
Read the whole thing, really, but I especially want to point out this paragraph, which is a pointed response to any argument that “the science is settled”:
I thought there was a consensus that Global Warming is occurring? The “science is settled”, isn’t it?
Actually, there’s never been a consensus. We’ll come back to this later, but the most interesting thing about this argument is that it’s not a scientific argument. Science simply doesn’t care about consensus, it cares about data and reproduceability of results. If your data is solid, and other people can get the same results, it simply doesn’t matter if you run with the crowd or not.
Simply put, if science depended on consensus, we would never get anywhere — as any fundamentally new theory pretty much depends on throwing an old theory out. Reputable scientists in modern times never argue that something is “settled”. I mean gravity isn’t “settled” science for Chrissakes — do you really think that the climate is settled science, when we can’t even predict next week’s weather?
If you’re hearing “the science is settled”, what you’re hearing is politics, not science. It’s smoke and mirrors. It a different way of saying “We have a vested interest in people believing us, so everyone who doesn’t agree with us should just shut their mouths.” Specifically, it’s an Appeal to Popularity fallacy — an attempt to shame critics into silence — and it is shameful coming from people who claim to be scientists. Don’t let them get away with it.