Last night in the SOTU address, Obama made this pronouncement about climate change:
But the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact.
To that, I say this:
There’s never been any assertion that climate didn’t change, the idea that somehow this is something new to the 21st century is absurd. For example, this graph illustrates just that fact:
Click image for a full sized print (3000 pixels wide, suitable for printing) or choose the PDF below. Note the blip in the top line at the far right, that’s our climate change today. Source: Andy May
Younger_Dryas_to_Present_Time_Line (PDF)
And, as science itself has demonstrated through history, it is never settled, it is always searching for new information, retesting, and sometimes discarding old ideas based on new knowledge.
Saying “the science is settled” is as ridiculous as this famous quote attributed to Lord Kelvin who reportedly said in 1900*
“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement”.
* This quote is reputed to be Kelvin’s remark made in an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1900). Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thomson,_1st_Baron_Kelvin#Pronouncements_later_proven_to_be_false
Equally preposterous (now) is this statement from Kelvin:
In 1898, Kelvin predicted that only 400 years of oxygen supply remained on the planet, due to the rate of burning combustibles.[62][63] In his calculation, Kelvin assumed that photosynthesis was the only source of free oxygen; he did not know all of the components of the oxygen cycle. He could not even have known all of the sources of photosynthesis: for example the cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus—which accounts for more than half of marine photosynthesis—was not discovered until 1986.
Kelvin’s pronouncement, which he believed to be true at the time based on the facts he had at hand, were later disproved by new science and obviously discarded. But, imagine if there were a panic movement then to conserve oxygen, with “oxygen taxes” applied, massive government funded research implemented, and reams of NGO’s feeding on the frenzy demanding a host of new laws and changes in human behavior to avert the crisis.
They’d look pretty stupid to us in the context of science knowledge today, wouldn’t they?
Kelvin also computed that earth was only some tens of millions of years old, based upon the rate at which iron loses heat. Then Rutherford discovered the energy source of radioactive decay, which still heats the planet’s interior.
I attended a computer science lecture in 1975 that proved, based on fundamental physical limitations, that computers would never get significantly faster than they were at that time.
At least Lord Kelvins hypotheses were falsifiable and he did use the numbers he had to hand. Compare this to the wishful, doom-laden and unfalsifiable prophecies of the true believer.
Some will not leave a dead horse (climate change) alone. Then fire up the coal plants on the east coast and warm it up from all the cold they are experiencing.
milodonharlani says:
January 29, 2014 at 9:08 am
“Then Rutherford discovered the energy source of radioactive decay, which still heats the planet’s interior.”
Don’t mention that, we don’t what Greenpeace picketing the Earth and calling for its closure!
Many people I speak to interpret the phrase “Climate change is a fact.” to mean “We must all work together to protect the planet.” The word “fact” is no longer associated with “objective reality” but rather with subjective concepts such as “policy.”
Kelvin was a hidebound conservative who hated to be challenged and was prone to making pronounce,nets based on his own biases. I loved his quote that biology was a non-quantifiable science and that biologists and ecologists’ knowledge was paltry because they could not (then) make precise measurements of the knd he did. Personally, I think he was no better in his way and day than our modern climate science elite; i.e., a charlatan who traded on his name.
The worst part is it makes you question how much any leader understands about anything they pronounce upon…
Is there no limit to the corrosive effects of the the AGW belief-system?
And the hypocrite goes right along with his own DENIER meme – the one that DENIES such things as the 33,000 dead from hypothermia in the UK last year, courtesy of the carbon tax.
Shouldn’t it be legally actionable for him to attempt to link skeptics to Holocaust deniers? Isn’t he rather sitting in a glass house throwing stones?
Whereas, we CAN PROVE that policies to control CO2 KILL PEOPLE.
If you like your climate, you may keep your climate.
Consider the speaker.
Two of the alarmists favorite strawmen,
1. Climate change is real.
All skeptics believe the climate changes.
2. Global warming is real.
All skeptics believe there has been a global temperature increase of a fraction of a degree since the end of the little ice age.
Obama is a desperate man. His economic “reforms” are in ruins, his popularity is in tatters, his trillion dollar stimulus sunk without trace, nobody wants his poorly implemented health reforms.
When people look back at his presidency, what will be his legacy? Sure he was the first black president of America, but will anyone be able to point to anything useful he did?
Obama doesn’t want to be remembered as a black guy, he wants to be remembered as someone who achieved something. Climate was going to be his big thing – and we’ve taken it all away from him.
The sad thing, if Obama wasn’t so arrogant and ignorant, he would realise there is a way he could create a memorable political achievement – he could be the President who reversed America’s disastrous climate policies, who persuaded the Senate to support Congress, to free the American economy from the green shackles of zombie climate science.
But no – I don’t think that is going to happen.
Kelvin also calculated Earth’s surface was last molten 20 million years ago.
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” – Max Planck
“Truth never triumphs — its opponents just die out. Thus, Science advances one funeral at a time” Max Planck
I am imagining an Edwardian Era “Hold Your Breath” Society which would’ve advocated as little breathing as possible in order to conserve oxygen. Blue faces would’ve been very ‘in’ for the progressive, ‘free sex’ crowd back then. Aleister Crowley would’ve lead the way promoting erotic asphyxiation as a method to save the planet.
Eric Worrall says: January 29, 2014 at 9:28 am [ … ] When people look back at his presidency, what will be his legacy? Sure he was the first black president of America, but will anyone be able to point to anything useful he did? Obama doesn’t want to be remembered as a black guy … [ … ]”
That is why we must remember our past as demanded by George Santayana and not indulge The Poverty of Historicism. Have we learned the lesson of progressivism the make-things-better movement – FORWARD willy-nilly – damn the unintended consequences.
Here is something else Kelvin got wrong, but in an amusing sort of way:
“You, in this country, are subjected to the British insularity in weights and measures; you use the foot, inch and yard. I am obliged to use that system, but must apologize to you for doing so, because it is so inconvenient, and I hope Americans will do everything in their power to introduce the French metrical system. … I look upon our English system as a wickedly, brain-destroying system of bondage under which we suffer. The reason why we continue to use it, is the imaginary difficulty of making a change, and nothing else; but I do not think in America that any such difficulty should stand in the way of adopting so splendidly useful a reform.”
” but the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact”
Now we all know that when the alarmist Democrats refer to climate change it is not “natural” climate change that they refer to which is happening all the time . They use climate change to mean global warming caused primarily by man generated greenhouse gases. So is global warming caused primarily by man settled ? We all know that it is not . The last 17 years of no further increases in global temperatures and the alarmists inability to predict this and to explain why it is happening and how long it may last is more evidence of the doubt and flaw still in their science. The 15 years of cold winters and now the coldest winter across US and Canada since the 1970’s just confirms that the debate is not settled at all. There is even more doubt now.
In my opinion ,climate science is being used for political purposes while the public is being misinformed and left unprepared for the real climate that is currently underway and coming in the future. Large areas are running out of fuel [natural gas and propane ] that should have had their stocks raised before the start of the winter given the past 15 years of growing colder winters .But if the officials say that the science is settled and to expect only global warming , who is going to raise the fuel stocks ?
@quelgeek –
AGW belief is only one small corner of an ideology that distorts a person’s view of everything and, worse, prohibits and prevents him from changing his thinking or recognizing reality. It is not there in isolation, apart from the rest of a belief system.
One also must recognize that for the ideologue, there is ONLY the ideology. Concepts such as true, false, fact and illusion are entirely outside its purview and are irrelevant to the thought process (if indeed something so rote and so mechanical can be called “thought”). That is, I believe, why these people are so resistant to changing their attitude even in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. For them, that contrary evidence not only doesn’t, it can’t exist, and more than that, can’t even be conceived of. Sort of like “ungood” in Orwell speak, leaving no room for “bad”.
Fascists – and this is what the Eco Loons are – historically promoted the following; death of ‘deniers’ or dissenters; a rewriting of history and fact; cult membership; denial of rationality and real faith; follow the leader cult mentality; Orwellian newspeak.
Yes OBozo the climate does change, but it has nothing to do with Co2 a trace chemical 95% emitted by Gaia….just a ‘scientific’ pastiche for more gov’t control over the peasantry.
When you push policies (unilaterally) that hurt the standard of living of the poor while you pontificate about the evils of “income inequality,” I guess you have to use imperial statements like “The science is settled!” Woe is he who acts on the whims of his ignorance…
You would think someone who is in charge of the most powerful country in the world would at least have the sense to look out of his window and realise that his “experts” have misinformed him.
In a similar vein, the Daily Telegraph has a report today that fish in the North Sea, are getting smaller due to global warming. I can assure the “scientists” who publish this rubbish that this is not the case, if they wish to prove their point, they can go skinny dipping in the North Sea for a couple of hours! I live 20 miles away from it and believe me it is as cold now as it was thirty years ago!
“Saying “the science is settled” is as ridiculous as this famous quote attributed to Lord Kelvin who reportedly said in 1900*
“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement”.
He appears to have got the century right, though. With apparently little to do in the last half a century, metaphysical dark matter, strings and such have come out of the woodwork, largely as patches on theories that aren’t fully satisfactory – e.g. stronger gravitational force needed to explain motion of outer arms of galaxies (the pioneer anomaly, too?) and “maybe” we found the Higgs boson …
POTUS’ plausible deniability and nothing more.
“All skeptics believe there has been a global temperature increase of a fraction of a degree since the end of the little ice age.”
Absolutely. We do however often disagree on the magnitude of the fraction of a degree, and even if we can get a real and accurate measurement of the global atmospheric temperature at all.