This weekend Paul Hudson received some attention for getting a little known fact into the BBC. A fact all of us who are skeptical about Global Warming noticed awhile ago. The Earth, you see, hasn’t warmed in 11 years. Since 1998 the rise that so worried environmentalists, has stopped. What has risen is public awareness of Global Warming. This awareness has exploded leaving governments around the world embracing or being pressured to embrace radical regulations to curb this now non-existent warming trend.
Let me start by admitting back in my crazy liberal days of college I was someone who accepted the Global Warming agenda. Like your average holier than though liberal, I couldn’t have cared less about my own carbon footprint and happily used my computer, drove my car everywhere I went, and even on occasion littered. Yet I “worried” about warming and spoke ill of anyone who questioned the claim.
A few things happened to turn me into a skeptic. The first was seeing the global temperature stop rising as predicted. The second was reading several speeches by author Michael Crichton. Crichton pointed out that much of the science seen on TV and pushed by the likes of Carl Sagan, had been taken over by marketing, propaganda, questionable mathematics and not verified through experimentation. The third was noticing how everything I had heard in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth seemed to NOT be happening.
Those three things made me start questioning what was going on. As more television stations and companies started going “Green” and celebrities started pushing a radical agenda, I pushed back. My overall movement toward conservatism started encompassing a much larger skepticism of the information bombarding me from every media outlet I turned to.
The more I started asking questions, the easier it became to dismiss Global Warming. I found that at the root of so many arguments was junk science. I am at heart a scientist. I wanted to be a physicist growing up and I keep the scientific method as the central reasoning tool of my existence. The more I paid attention to those calling themselves representatives of the scientific method, the less I could find that method at the root of their hysteria. Worse, these same people vilify anyone who questions their logic as anti-science, anti-intellectual, and uncaring about humankind and the environment.
I love reading about the great minds who started scientific revolutions and the historic times in which they lived. Every one of those great minds, were skeptics. They were people who held the counter opinion when the evidence destroying long held beliefs could no longer be ignored. So when I hear terms like “consensus” thrown about by those pushing Global Warming, I cringe.
If Copernicus or Einstein had simply accepted consensus thought, we might still believe the Earth is the center of the universe and the nature of space and time could still be locked inside the atom and deep away from us in space. When the facts break down in terms of Global Warming I so often hear Al Gore and others say, “every credible scientist agrees that…” Not only is this almost never true, it is not an argument in a scientific world.
Consensus alone is never a reason to accept any truth in science. Consensus can only come after experimentation is conducted and then criticized and conducted again and again. Then, the very moment a new experiment or set of data runs counter to consensus, it too must be tested and criticized until it can either build a new consensus or be disproven. We know, for example, that two objects falling, regardless of weight, do so at the same speed. If for some ungodly reason that was disproven, had astronauts gone to the moon and found something different let’s say, than that deeply held fact would need to be called into question.
Arguments for the outcomes of Global Warming are almost always based on junk science. Usually these predictions start with information that is true, like global temperatures were going through a period of rise. The fact(s) tough are exploited to form conclusions that are not informed by the scientific method. When Al Gore stands before an audience and predicts, as he did in his movie, that hurricanes will increase during the early 2000′s because of Global Warming and then opposite happens, something is wrong. That something is not science, but the exploitation of data for a political agenda.
Al Gore and other environmental “advocates” do this kind of junk science exceedingly well. They take the basic premise, the Earth is warmer now than in the past and add the theory that man is the cause of this warming. Then they make a series of predictions based on what is happening on the planet at the current moment, like a year or two with an increase of hurricanes. They take news headlines and then make bold predictions about how much worse things will get without political action. There is no experimentation or data to support their predictions, just theories presented as fact with a few bits of data sprinkled in to make the theories sound credible. Al Gore and many of these “advocates” are not scientists, they are salesman.
Hurricanes have not increased each year, the temperature has not increased each year, we are not seeing the signs predicted by those pushing this global warming agenda, polar bear populations have increased and no decreasedand so on. Global Warming, as told to us by politicians and interpreted to us through marketing campaigns, probably does not exist. The nightmare scenarios that it would cost nations trillions of dollars to prevent, are as bogus as claims that bottles of snake oil would cure human health ailments.
So is the lack of their evidence and the wild predictions they present evidence that all of climate science is bunk? No, of course not.
The truth is, climate science is a new field of study and scientists are collecting growing amounts of data. The raw data does show that our planet is warmer overall than it has been in awhile. While this annual warming trend has stopped, that does not mean it will not start again and it is hard to ignore that our planet is still warmer today than it was decades ago. There are natural questions we should be asking. Why is this? Should we be concerned about it? Are humans solely to blame? Is this new period of cooling going to continue?
The very foundation of science is the statement, “I don’t know.” Our ancestors would ask a question like, “Why does the sun move through the sky?” They would respond with, “I don’t know, let’s find out.”
What has happened is the misuse of scientific data. Global Warming and the environmental movement is being built around marketing and politics rather than evidence and experimentation. While at the core there may be sufficient data showing interesting changes in our global climate, the reckless use by politicians, celebrities and snake oil salesman like Al Gore is reckless junk now hurtling at our economy and society with the force of a chemical rocket.
Science is experimentation and it is honest collection of data both good and bad. What has happened is the Global Warming marketing campaign and the political strong arming has vilified anyone who disagrees with the “consensus” leaving Global Warming to be taken as fact regardless of the validity of the science behind it. Look below at a video of someone who dares question Al Gore.
We must ask the basic questions that people like Al Gore are unwilling to answer. We must take the data we see and process it with logic, common sense and through the most important filter of all, the scientific method. Theories must be proven, not with the clipping of headlines and a marketing narrative, but with facts, figures and experimentation. All of which must be repeated, over and over again and checked for flaws in methodology.
Most important, when anyone ever claims a consensus as proof of something like Global Warming and it comes with no further fact or evidence, that argument must be shot down and the person spreading that line reminded of Copernicus and Galileo not to mention Fulton and the Wright brothers. Without evidence, fact and experimentation, they are just selling snake oil.
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