science

A long article has been released with many quotes from the core group of global warming alarmist 'scientists'. Why do I quote that word? - because so far none of them have told us, the intelligent public, a full, proper, scientifically argued case giving evidence of four things:

1. dangerous,
2. human-emitted,
3. carbon-dioxide-caused,
4. global warming is taking place.

In other words, there are four propositions that must all be substantiated with credible evidence before a scientific theory exists that there is anything to fear from carbon dioxide. My take on the status of these four is: (1) is certainly false, (2) uncertain, (3) most likely largely false, and (4) most likely true, but not as large as it has been represented. But this post is not about the correctness of the theory, but the more basic question whether it is a scientific theory at all.

I think most people know of the concept that scientific theories must be falsifiable. There are a lot of subtleties around that idea that need not concern us now, but we can use it as a rough test for good science. Remember, good science doesn't have to be correct - a theory proposed, tested properly, and rejected for making incorrect predictions is still an exercise in good science, even if it failed to come up with an advance. And contrariwise, a wild guess shoved down people's throats by force without any attempt to test against reality is bad science, even if by some chance the guess happened to be correct.

So we see that the question of whether this is good science is not the same as the question whether it is correct (although the two are obviously related).

So how does the CAGW theory stack up?

Steve McIntyre, one of the two researchers who exposed the faulty statistics behind the infamous "hockey stick" temperature curve which attempted to write the medieval warm period and the little ice age from the pages of history, has been recognised by New Statesman as one of the top 50 "People Who Matter 2010".

Congratulations Steve. Those who, like me, came late to the global warming question, owe a great debt to you and Ross McKitrick for your tireless work in the face of astonishing and tenacious obstructionism in getting the raw data needed to do a detailed analysis. Steve runs his own blog on climate science at http://climateaudit.org.

But we can't have an honour going with grace and good humour to someone who opposes the consensus, can we? New Statesman just had to find a way to spoil it somehow. Here's their "acknowledgement" of Steve's invaluable work:

"Nature", which imagines itself to be the international weekly journal of science, published an absurd piece trying to make out that the bullies in the global warming scare movement are in fact a naive group of timid waifs being rolled over by a powerful movement that dominates the media. Try telling that to David Bellamy, one of the best and most popular media biologists, banned from TV for his disbelief in anthropogenic global warming!

There's a really good deconstruction of Nature's cowardly piece over here on Talking About the Weather, but a few additional remarks are in order. To give you the flavour of the thing, here's a sample of the Nature article:

In a previous post on peacelegacy.org,I used the example of a chappie called Fred to show you why the absence of an atmospheric hotspot is, all by itself, a complete disproof of the hypothesis of dangerous anthropogenic global warming (AGW). For those who came in late, the entire basis for the AGW claim is that certain unverified, and now falsified, computer models predict a lot of warming over the coming 100 years. It is shocking, but true, that there is no actual evidence whatsoever for this idea; it is computer models alone, and those models are basically no more than coded guesswork. And what do these models predict?

They predict that the world is heated by the appearance of a 'hotspot' in the atmosphere above the equator.

Model predicts air above the tropics heats up. from the NIPCC Report p. 107
But the reality is that this hotspot has failed to develop:

I see they're going to fire up the Large Hadron Collider at half power. For those who haven't been following this story, your life is being put at risk.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a project by The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN. Back in 1964, a physicist called Peter Higgs found an elegant mathematical theory by which he explained one of the great puzzles of particle physics, why mass exists.

There is some background to this question. The twentieth century produced two great theories of physics: relativity and quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics explained many curious puzzles in the subatomic realm, for example, why atoms don't collapse. Atoms have a field of electrons orbiting the nucleus; according to classical mechanics, any accelerating charged particle (like an electron orbiting an atom) should radiate energy. This means the electron should spiral into the nucleus and the atom should collapse. Obviously they don't because we are still here, made of functioning atoms! Another example is the radiation from black bodies. Only quantum theory can explain why the spectrum is what it is.

It is no exaggeration to say that the modern world only exists because of quantum mechanics: every piece of electronics that exists only works because of quantum mechanics, and a great deal of it was only discovered because we understood the theory behind it all. It is the most successful scientific theory ever. It has passed every experimental test ever thrown at it. But it doesn't explain gravity.

This is a reasonably short work, very different from Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth. Although Paltridge is an atmospheric physicist and erstwhile Chief Research Scientist with Australia's CSIRO, he has put together an accessible summary of some of the damning evidence against the global warming alarmism.

Over on the newsgroups, folk are discussing a rather sad article from ScienceDaily, called "Apparent Problem With Global Warming Climate Models Resolved".

Apparently the folk at ScienceDaily, as well as a large fraction of the general public, need some basic lessons in how real science, the science that increases our understanding and helps us make sense of the world, works. Here's a textbook example of how not to do it: