How much global warming fell in _your_ backyard?
I am becoming increasingly convinced that we still haven't gotten science education right in our primary and secondary schools, and the latest defenses of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) just add to that conviction. If you haven't seen it, the claim basically is that AGW explains why it is so cold recently (yes, that's right - it's cold because the planet is warming). Warming, you see, has increased water vapor in the atmosphere, leading to more snow in Siberia which then reflects the sun and causes cooling.
Now, this may well be happening; however, what it describes is essentially a damping mechanism, suggesting that the earth is inhibited from overheating. But the real problem is that AGW never predicted it, and therefore citing it does not support AGW at all.
Here is the key: science is all about making falsifiable predictions. A useful theory is one that makes predictions that you can test. If it repeatedly shows that it can predict things accurately, we can start to rely on it. Newton's theory of gravitation is useful because it has been shown repeatedly to predict accurately the motion of objects from pebbles to planets. There are a few cases, such as the precession of the orbit of Mercury, which had been seen in the 19th century not to follow the theory, leading to the need to develop General Relativity, which does predict those cases accurately.
The problem with AGW is that it has not been shown to predict anything accurately. That does not demonstrate that human activity has no impact on climate, only that the claim remains unproven and essentially useless. That some scientists have developed models which claim massive worldwide floods should not be stampeding us to destroy our economy which hysterical energy policies, since there is no reason to believe that those models are accurate at all.
If we taught science properly - as a process of learning about the world rather than a collection of facts and computations - I'd hope that most people would have seen through the AGW nonsense long ago.
Now, this may well be happening; however, what it describes is essentially a damping mechanism, suggesting that the earth is inhibited from overheating. But the real problem is that AGW never predicted it, and therefore citing it does not support AGW at all.
Here is the key: science is all about making falsifiable predictions. A useful theory is one that makes predictions that you can test. If it repeatedly shows that it can predict things accurately, we can start to rely on it. Newton's theory of gravitation is useful because it has been shown repeatedly to predict accurately the motion of objects from pebbles to planets. There are a few cases, such as the precession of the orbit of Mercury, which had been seen in the 19th century not to follow the theory, leading to the need to develop General Relativity, which does predict those cases accurately.
The problem with AGW is that it has not been shown to predict anything accurately. That does not demonstrate that human activity has no impact on climate, only that the claim remains unproven and essentially useless. That some scientists have developed models which claim massive worldwide floods should not be stampeding us to destroy our economy which hysterical energy policies, since there is no reason to believe that those models are accurate at all.
If we taught science properly - as a process of learning about the world rather than a collection of facts and computations - I'd hope that most people would have seen through the AGW nonsense long ago.