Thursday, December 29, 2011

Do warmists believe in global warming?

Louis Woodhill says that "Even the Warmists Don't Believe In Global Warming." If they did, they would try to actually reduce CO2 rather than only trying to extort money and "move to a centrally planned world economy managed by experts, 'just in case'?"

I don't have a settled stand on the issue, but the article has a nice discussion of how there is no such thing as settled science.
“Science” consists of nothing but theories that have not yet been disproved by evidence, but which, in principle, could be so disproved. Even Einstein’s theory of relativity, which has been validated by thousands of experiments and measurements over almost a century, was recently called into question by experiments involving neutrinos that appeared to travel faster than light.
If something is “settled”, it is not science. It is religious dogma, and an assault upon freedom of thought and inquiry.
But don’t the climate scientists’ computer models prove that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are causing climate change? No. First, no computer model can ever prove anything (see the definition of “science” given above). Second, we do not have the capability to model a system as complex as the earth.
The most any computer model can be is a useful tool. As it happens, all of the computer models that have been developed over the years by climate change proponents have already been invalidated by events that they did not accurately predict. For example, given the fast rising CO2 concentration in the earth’s atmosphere, global temperatures should have gone up much faster than they have over the past ten years.