This is an excerpt from an article by Jack Frampton called Science, Religion, Passion, Cohorts, and the Much-Heralded Doom of Planet Earth from the current (#21 June) issue of Winding Road and online auto mag. Tomorrow I’ll publish Part Two. If you would like to read the whole thing all you have to do is “subscribe” by giving them your email address and downloading the 17Meg PDF file.
Scientists are a bunch of people specializing in various kinds of exploration using the scientific method to search for physical truths.
The problem here is that when it comes to the environment, the scientific method cannot be used.
The scientific method says that to declare something ?true,? one must create an experiment that replicates theoretical results, like proving E=mc2 by blowing up two perfectly good Japanese cities. Usually there is a control part of the experiment, which does not include a key ingredient of the theory. In the pharmaceutical business, when a drug is tested on one group of people, a similar group of people (the control group) is given a placebo (a sugar pill) to test the difference between getting the drug and not getting the drug. Or in the previous example, dropping a giant goose down pillow on two other perfectly good Japanese cities.
So to ?prove? the notion that A) the world is warming and B) CO2 is the culprit, one would have to take the Earth with its CO2 levels, create an Earth II with capped CO2 levels, let the two Earths spin in space together for a couple hundred years, and then compare the results.
If Earth II showed no temperature increase, and Earth I did, voil??CO2 would be the culprit. If Earth II showed the same temperature increase as Earth I, it would be back to the drawing board.
To date, we know of no Earth II being built. So the scientific method is off the table.
What is being used in our quest for the truth about Global Warming and CO2? Well, for the most part, computer models. And let us state here as clearly as possible that it may be scientists using computer models, but computer models are not science. They are a technological tool.
And while computer models are important technological tools, they are far from infallible. They require a whole list of assumptions that make them unreliable, especially when applied to something as complex as weather. All you have to do is watch the weather report on TV, and you will witness forecasters using three or four different computer models, each showing a different prediction, and then splitting the difference in their forecast. And this is for what?s going to happen tomorrow.
These same sorts of computer models promised us a disastrous 2006 hurricane season. Didn?t happen.
So for these scientists to use their computer models to tell us what will happen in thirty-five or fifty years is, if not mendacious, highly suspect. Remember, thirty years ago Time Magazine reported that scientists (probably the fathers of the current batch) were predicting a new Ice Age, and we were all going to die.
Once a scientist steps away from the cover of the scientific method and its demonstrable physical facts, he is just as liable to be as full of baloney as the guy who bends pipe down at Muffler King.
I remember Earth 2. If I recall correctly, it was on the air back in 1995 on NBC and only lasted one season. Tim Curry was the bad guy.
“You do the pelvic thrust,
It really drives you in-sa-a-a-a-ane!
Let’s do the time warp again.”