This Slashdot story mentions that climate scientists are responding to Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth by pointing out that there is actually NO conclusive scientific evidence for global warming. What caught my eye is that the Slashdot crowd has tagged the story with “FUD” and “flamebait”.
In other words, on a scientific issue the Slashdot audience, which is normally considered to be comprised largely of technically knowledgeable and literate people, are giving more credibility to the beliefs of politicians than to actual scientific evidence from climate scientists. This is a clear demonstration of how the global warming scare-mongering is dogma, not science.
Much of the political backing of the global warming hypothesis is based on so-called “Consensus Science“, the idea that if a bunch of respected scientists (many of whom are qualified only in urelated fields) argue that a hypothesis is true, the lack of actual scienitific evidence is irrelevant. As Emeritus Professor Garth Paltridge, former Chief Research Scientist of the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research, wrote in the essay Climate Models and Consensus Science,
We have to get away from simply running models and comparing their final output in some sort of search for a consensus on the results. Consensus is not science. Consensus tends to the politically correct. Consensus is not the sort of thing on which sensible people put their money.
There may be global warming, and it’s well worth investing in scientific study. But we shouldn’t make radical changes to society and industry without understanding what we are doing, and whether the changes could actually cause worse problems than we are trying to solve.
Global Warming: Science vs. Politics
This Slashdot story mentions that climate scientists are responding to Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth by pointing out that there is actually NO conclusive scientific evidence for global warming. What caught my eye is that the Slashdot crowd has tagged the story with “FUD” and “flamebait”.
In other words, on a scientific issue the Slashdot audience, which is normally considered to be comprised largely of technically knowledgeable and literate people, are giving more credibility to the beliefs of politicians than to actual scientific evidence from climate scientists. This is a clear demonstration of how the global warming scare-mongering is dogma, not science.
Much of the political backing of the global warming hypothesis is based on so-called “Consensus Science“, the idea that if a bunch of respected scientists (many of whom are qualified only in urelated fields) argue that a hypothesis is true, the lack of actual scienitific evidence is irrelevant. As Emeritus Professor Garth Paltridge, former Chief Research Scientist of the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research, wrote in the essay Climate Models and Consensus Science,
There may be global warming, and it’s well worth investing in scientific study. But we shouldn’t make radical changes to society and industry without understanding what we are doing, and whether the changes could actually cause worse problems than we are trying to solve.