Re: Climatology: a wonderful science

On May 11, 10:19 am, flipper <flip...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sun, 10 May 2009 16:35:44 -0700 (PDT), bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
On May 10, 1:45 am, John Larkin
<jjlar...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, 9 May 2009 05:27:33 -0700 (PDT), bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
A unproven hypotheses go, anthropogenic global warming is about as
close to proven as a scientific hypothesis can get;

Err, can anybody translate that for me?

No scientific hypothesis can ever be "proven"

Quite right. And I'm tired of hearing AGW proponents claim theirs has.

- even the most
successful and widely accepted are only provisionally accepted until
someone manages to falsify them.

Newton's Theory of Gravity had a fairly long run, but eventually
Einstein nailed down its short-comings.

The missing salient point from that dissertation is that none of them
were "provisionally accepted" till they had made definitive, testable
predictions that were experimentally validated.

Darwin's Theory of Evolution doesn't make the kind of predictions that
you seem to be asking for, but is still widely accepted.

Anthropogenic Global Warming explains the warming of the earth over
the past century or so in terms of the increasing level of the the
"greenhouse gas" CO2 in the atmosphere.

No, it proposes to explain but, so far, it hasn't managed to make any
definitive, testable, falsifiable predictions that were subsequently
validated. Instead, they seem to always fall short for some reason.

You would consider the theory valdidate by a detailed prediction of
the climate over the next hundred years? Got any more irrational
expectations? Eternal Life? Lie detectors that work? A working brain?

Back in the real world, anthropogenic global warming fits the data
we've got as well as can be expected. It does a whole better than any
of the competitive hypotheses, and has the distinct advantage of
making scientific sense.

It may not provide the kind of predictions that you'd like to see, but
if we were to hang around until we had a theory that could make you
happy, we'd still be procrastinating when the clathrate gun went off
and provoked ennough global warming to wipe us out and every other
animal bigger or slower breeding than a rabbit.

If you want to falsify it you have to prove that the earth hasn't
warmed up during this period, that CO2 levels haven't risen, or that
CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas.

Nonsense. Don't have to 'prove' any such thing.

Sadly, you do, if you want to be taken seriously.

At the moment you are merely whining for a more precise prediction
than our technology can offer, like any two-year-old who wants the
world to conform to his wishes.

The grown-ups have more urgent problems to attend to.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
.

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