Yep, nothing like a knee jerk liberal with pre-determined conclusions offering some fair and balanced opinions.
I think the defining issue of liberalism in our time is global warming. This is an issue which I had no interest in until after Al Gore won the nobel prize. I then decided to look into it and immediately found many credible skeptical scientists. Not that we haven’t seen a warming trend but that this trend is driven by human produced CO2 and can therefore be controlled by human actions.
Testing a scientific hypothesis should be a rigorous attempt to disprove it, not to accumulate evidence to support it. A theory is strengthened by not being able to prove it false and when it survives all attempts to prove it wrong it is then considered valid, but not necessarily proven . This is why things such as gravity are still called theories.
The theory that Carbon Dioxide is a green house gas and absorbs heat can be tested in the laboratory and since it has not been proven false this theory can be accepted as valid. The theory that increases in of CO2 in the atmosphere are directly responsible for increases in global temperatures can also be tested. Again, we can only prove that it is false. Parallel trends in CO2 and temperatures even if observed consistent over long periods of time cannot prove the theory but an observed decrease in temperatures at the same time that CO2 levels continued to increase would disprove the theory. These observations have already been made and so it can be said that the theory that global temperatures are a direct result of CO2 levels can be said to be proven false.
This does not disprove the theory that human emitted CO2 contributes to global temperatures but it does disprove the theory that global temperatures are a direct result of CO2 emissions and it can be concluded that other factors simply play a stronger role. We may wish to reduce our CO2 emissions for the role that they do play but we would not expect to be able to control global temperatures based on this alone. In a practical sense the costs involved could be prohibitive and destructive to modern society and the benefits not even noticeable.
Oh yeah... a whole notch.
ReplyDeleteYup.
Yep, nothing like a knee jerk liberal with pre-determined conclusions offering some fair and balanced opinions.
ReplyDeleteI think the defining issue of liberalism in our time is global warming. This is an issue which I had no interest in until after Al Gore won the nobel prize. I then decided to look into it and immediately found many credible skeptical scientists. Not that we haven’t seen a warming trend but that this trend is driven by human produced CO2 and can therefore be controlled by human actions.
Testing a scientific hypothesis should be a rigorous attempt to disprove it, not to accumulate evidence to support it. A theory is strengthened by not being able to prove it false and when it survives all attempts to prove it wrong it is then considered valid, but not necessarily proven . This is why things such as gravity are still called theories.
The theory that Carbon Dioxide is a green house gas and absorbs heat can be tested in the laboratory and since it has not been proven false this theory can be accepted as valid. The theory that increases in of CO2 in the atmosphere are directly responsible for increases in global temperatures can also be tested. Again, we can only prove that it is false. Parallel trends in CO2 and temperatures even if observed consistent over long periods of time cannot prove the theory but an observed decrease in temperatures at the same time that CO2 levels continued to increase would disprove the theory. These observations have already been made and so it can be said that the theory that global temperatures are a direct result of CO2 levels can be said to be proven false.
This does not disprove the theory that human emitted CO2 contributes to global temperatures but it does disprove the theory that global temperatures are a direct result of CO2 emissions and it can be concluded that other factors simply play a stronger role. We may wish to reduce our CO2 emissions for the role that they do play but we would not expect to be able to control global temperatures based on this alone. In a practical sense the costs involved could be prohibitive and destructive to modern society and the benefits not even noticeable.