The Myth of ‘Settled Science’

National Review ^ | 2/21/14 | Charles Krauthammer

[SoFloFreeper]

I repeat: I’m not a global-warming believer. I’m not a global-warming denier. I’ve long believed that it cannot be good for humanity to be spewing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I also believe that those scientists who pretend to know exactly what this will cause in 20, 30, or 50 years are white-coated propagandists.

“The debate is settled,” asserted propagandist-in-chief Barack Obama in his latest State of the Union address. “Climate change is a fact.” Really? There is nothing more anti-scientific than the very idea that science is settled, static, impervious to challenge. Take a non-climate example. It was long assumed that mammograms help reduce breast cancer deaths. This fact was so settled that Obamacare requires every insurance plan to offer mammograms (for free, no less).

Now we learn from a massive randomized study — 90,000 women followed for 25 years — that mammograms may have no effect on breast-cancer deaths. Indeed, one out of five of those diagnosed by mammogram receives unnecessary radiation, chemo, or surgery.

So much for settledness. And climate is less well understood than breast cancer. If climate science is settled, why do its predictions keep changing? And how is it that the great physicist Freeman Dyson, who did some climate research in the late 1970s, thinks today’s climate-change Cassandras are hopelessly mistaken?

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

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[GOPJ]

Last Friday, Obama ostentatiously visited drought-stricken California. Surprise! He blamed climate change. Here even the New York Times gagged, pointing out that far from being supported by the evidence, “the most recent computer projections suggest that as the world warms, California should get wetter, not drier, in the winter.”

OMG - when the New York Times starts balking at liberal bullsh*t you know pigs are flying ....

[GOPJ]

There is no such thing as settled science. The computers generate predictions from theories. The report of every result from a computer simulation should begin with Theoretically, if we assume ....

Ding, ding, ding ... we have a thread winnah!

[metmom]

ping

[Mike Darancette]

The climate consensus reminds me of the bad old day commercial that stated, “nine out of ten doctors who smoke prefer Camels” which was later changed to “nine out of ten doctors interviewed who smoke prefer Camels”. Can’t use 100% (unbelievable) or 50% (even money) so 90% or above sounds serious and when connected with persons of authority, wow! So many logical fallacies and so little time.

[betty boop]

"Settled science" is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron.

So I guess that would make the disciples of Anthropogenic Global Warming a bunch of morons.

But there is a vast pile of money to be made from getting this screwy theory adopted as the central truth of climate change.

Thanks so much for the ping, dear metmom!

[Alamo-Girl]

"Settled science" is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron.

Precisely so, dearest sister in Christ!

[palmer]

The atmosphere contains 720 GT of CO2. The oceans contain 37,400 GT of suspended carbon, land biomass has 2000-3000 GT.

And humans contribute only 6 GT.

To the atmosphere every year.

[palmer]

The way I look at it is if you are going to get cancer and die, you will get cancer and die regardless of screening. If you are going to get cancer and not die (which happens far more often), then you will get cancer and if you are screened, they will do all sorts of unnecessary treatments. If you are not screened it won’t be much different. The non-lethal types of cancer rarely progress into the lethal kinds. There are some exceptions, but not that many.

[palmer]

Well that really is technobabble. Nothing causes warming on earth except the sun and very minor amount from geothermal energy. CO2 in some cases reduces radiational cooling (longwave) but its effect is very minor compared to water vapor. Think about cold desert nights compared to warm humid Miami nights. Is CO2 important in reducing that cooling? Not really.

[MediaMole]

Every time I hear someone say, “the science is settled,” I hear it in Latin being said by the Pope to Galileo.

This “settled science” is based on proprietary computer models designed to create the desired result. The observed, real world results have not matched the computer models, so they need to go back to the drawing board and see where their models are wrong.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

I good analogy are three big men laying pipe, plus a small boy. The first big man uses a backhoe to dig a deep trench. Then a second man puts in the pipe, and the third man uses a bulldozer to put the dirt back in the trench.

When the first man is digging up dirt, the small boy adds his little beach bucket of dirt to the pile. It amounts to 1/120th of the amount of dirt in the pile.

So between the dirt dug up, and the dirt replaced, this little added bit is well within the margin of error. Hardly noticeable.

Which is a good analogy to human CO2 production. And even the more scientific of the AGW advocates admit it. By ourselves, humans cannot do anything that can affect this scale.

The way they try to overcome this is to say both that planetary climate systems are so delicately balanced that even the tiny human contribution can throw it out of equilibrium, so that much greater *natural* CO2 producing systems will start producing more CO2, far beyond what we do; and/or the CO2 fixing systems are “maxed out”, and cannot absorb even a tiny bit more CO2 than normal.

That is, our tiny ‘lever’ of CO2 with force a much greater ‘lever’ of natural CO2 production, that will cause runaway natural CO2 production. While at the same time, the CO2 absorbing system will not be able to absorb any more CO2.

Which is nothing short of magical, religious reasoning.

“I cannot destroy the enemy nation by myself, but my gods will obey me, and they are powerful enough to destroy the enemy nation. Once I set them loose, they will do it all themselves.”

This is the Man Made Global Warming argument in a nutshell. People like Al Gore who think they are powerful enough to control the weather. What a Nimrod.

[Cooter]

[palmer]

That is, our tiny `lever' of CO2 with force a much greater `lever' of natural CO2 production, that will cause runaway natural CO2 production. While at the same time, the CO2 absorbing system will not be able to absorb any more CO2.

That is not what anybody says. The atmospheric CO2 is clearly building up due to human activity, your own numbers show that (man's annual emissions are 6 into a total of 720). Some of the extra CO2 in the atmosphere is being absorbed by the ocean each year.

The only remaining question is how much amplification there is over the warming from CO2. Like I said, CO2 is not being amplfied, warming is (allegedly) amplified by increases in water vapor.

The problem with that theory is that water vapor (or the evenness of it) is determined by weather. So amplification may not even be possible at all. Water vapor (or evennness of water vapor) will simply fluctuate and provide us with the long term swings in temperature. Fundamentally the weather will be driven by solar spectrum changes and long term ocean cycles. The idea that a small amount of warming (only global, negligible in any one location) is going to change the weather is kind of ludicrous.

[dennisw]

It was never about “settled” science; but rather settled politics to stampede the sheep into wasting trillions of dollars while the left congratulated themselves on their caring and sensitivity.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/23/study-volcanoes-contribute-to-recent-warming-hiatus/#more-103722

[miserare]

BINGO!

[tpanther]

perfect BB !!!