Posted on 07/26/2013 12:24:09 AM PDT by neverdem
Remember when scientists and other truth-seekers used to get all riled up about the way the Catholic Church treated Galileo? The outcry was not over the fact that Galileo was a "peer-reviewed" researcher, and therefore beyond question. Quite the contrary: the argument was that, from the point of view of the quest for truth, no one, including the representatives of official orthodoxy and authority, ought to be regarded as beyond question. In the Michael Mann lawsuit against Mark Steyn and National Review, it is the "award-winning researcher" who is joining the fight for Church orthodoxy, while the defendants are the persecuted Galileos.
Mann, of course, is the creator of the famous "hockey stick graph" that has been employed doggedly throughout the doctrinaire climate science community and the mainstream media as proof that the Earth has shown a marked and unprecedented increase in global mean temperature during the brief period of industrial society's extreme CO2 production, which increase is consequently cited as proof that man's industrial activity is causing the temperature rise. Let us leave aside the climate religion's little logical problem, namely the contradiction between (a) its complete dependence on the premise that rising CO2 levels can and do have an immediate and substantial effect on global temperature, and (b) its attempts to dismiss the significance of the fact that global temperature has not increased significantly since 1995 while CO2 emissions have continued to rise, on the grounds that this is supposedly too short a period to prove anything.
The concern in this context is not so much the truth or falsity of the global warming theory, but the implications of this lawsuit, and its social importance, should Mann actually win.
Steyn, along with many researchers on whom he has leaned in developing his critique, have questioned both the methods...
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
The EPA effectively argued that they didn’t have to properly evaluate the claims since it was “peer-reviewed” by major journals...whose peer review primarily consisted of checking for grammatical errors and assessing how interesting the claims would be if true.
” ... And we dont lose an atom or a molecule. How can that be???”
It can’t be.
Thousands of tons (circa 1970 estimate: 10,000 tons) arrive every day, mostly micrometeoroids drawn by our planet’s gravitational field.
Now and then, a bigger object - say, as big as a small grain of sand - arrives and vaporizes, leaving a painfully brilliant track across the night sky (if it chances to enter the atmosphere on our planet’s night half). Sometimes, we see it, but it lasts only a second or so. Lighter elements join the other gases in the atmosphere; heavier ones get down to the surface. Eventually.
Every once in a great while, a much larger object arrives. Lucky for us, the intervals between such are very, very long.
Things are pretty busy at the molecular level too.
Our planet is constantly blasted by the radiation from our sun. Visible light is only the tiniest fraction of the electromagnetic energy that hits. A deluge of particles hits as well; their great velocity breaks molecules into atoms, knocking apart the hydrogen and oxygen of water, splitting the paired nitrogen and oxygen atoms that form most of our air, breaking the carbon away from the two oxygen atoms that formed carbon dioxide. Freshly loosed atoms can be bounced away with such high velocity that they never return. The rest mix into the atmosphere, or fall still lower.
Fortunately (for us and the other living things, mostly on or near the surface), our planet’s core spins, creating a magnetic field that deflects most of those speedy particles, and the deep blanket of the atmosphere absorbs most of the radiation, or reflects it elsewhere.
Goodly amounts of air and water still exist here on earth, held (mostly) by gravity, boosting surface air pressure to a level that lets us continue breathing. So the loss of millions upon millions of individual molecules isn’t too serious.
All this goes on all day, every day. So do many other things. Lucky for us, we don’t have to pay any of it much attention.
Hope it stays that way.
Mann also concedes he is a public figure, so he will have to prove actual malice by Steyn, which IMHO makes his case very, very difficult to win.
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