"The arguments about global warming too often sound more like theology than science. Oh, the word “science” gets thrown around a great deal, but it's cited as a sacred authority, not a fallible process that staggers only awkwardly and unevenly toward the truth, with frequent lurches in the wrong direction. I cannot count the number of times someone has told me that they believe in “the science,” as if that were the name of some omniscient god who had delivered us final answers written in stone. For those people, there can be only two categories in the debate: believers and unbelievers. Apostles and heretics.
This is, of course, not how science works, and people who treat it this way are not showing their scientific bona fides; they are violating the very thing in which they profess such deep belief. One does not believe in “science” as an answer; science is a way of asking questions. At any given time, that method produces a lot of ideas, some of which are correct, and many of which are false, in part or in whole."--Megan McArdleMcArdle delivers a well-reasoned argument in her editorial, "Global-Warming Alarmists, You're Doing It Wrong", from which the above quote is taken.
McArdle begins her editorial by discussing how economics tried predictive modeling, only to realize over the years there are too many factors involved in the economy for any kind of economic modeling predictions to be reasonably accurate. By the time you come up with a model that works, one of the variables has changed.
McArdle correctly relates this to climate science, which has even more variables than economics. At least with economics, you don't have to consider solar temperature, CO2 emissions, or cow farts. How about plant absorption of CO2? Have we compared Earth's historical temperature with other planets in our solar system?
Until climate science can accurately account for the 4,385,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pound gorilla in the room (aka "the sun"), it is hard for me to take them seriously.
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