Story submitted by Eric Worrall
How do we prove climate alarmists are wrong? Let us count the ways
If the temperature goes up, this is just what the models predicted – watch out because …
…soon it will get a lot worse. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_climate_change
If the temperature goes down, the deep ocean is swallowing the heat – even though the heat can’t be measured, we know it must be there, because that is what the climate models tell us. Global warming prevails! http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pacific-ocean-and-climate-change-pause/
If the global temperature crashes, its because global warming induced melting of arctic ice shut down the ocean currents. http://science1.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/05mar_arctic/
If the snow disappears, this is just as models predicted – snowfall is a thing of the past. http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html
If there is an unusually heavy snowfall, this is just as models predicted – global warming is increasing the moisture content of the atmosphere, which results in increased snow cover. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/10/2010-snowmageddon-explained-sans-global-warmingclimate-change/
If there is a drought, that is because of global warming. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/21/causes-of-midwest-drought-2012_n_1690717.html
Except of course, when global warming causes heavy rainfall. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/13/global-warming-the-incompetent-politicians-excuse/
No matter what the observation, no matter how the world changes, we can never falsify alarmist climate theories. Any possible change, any possible observation, can always be explained by anthropogenic global warming.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/03/22/occams-razor-and-climate-change/
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@richard Wright
I never wrote the quotes now being attributed to me. My speculation is that poor formatting of text by milodonharlani has created this confusion.
@milodonharlani
“A recent one of the many tests of the hypothesis…”
What you are describing is not experimental science. It’s not even, strictly speaking, a ‘test’ in any experimental sense of the word. What you’re describing are scientific observations, e.g., discoveries.
It should be notes I’m not arguing against the possibility of scientific knowledge. I’m pointing out that the endlessly asserted claim that the only true science is experimental science, is a breathtakingly dumb thing to claim. As a criticism of climate models, it’s also a breathtakingly dumb criticism to make (especially when there are so many good and obvious ones, one could make instead).
Models can be proven wrong. I would say if you can’t predict an El Nino 6 months in the future then you can’t predict global climate for the next 20 years in the future.
Richard Wright says:
August 15, 2014 at 3:52 pm
No, that is not what would happen. If the rocks were reliably dated to the Precambrian & the fossils clearly in the rocks, then evolution would be falsified. There is no possible way to presume an alternate line when evolution predicts nothing even remotely like a rabbit in the Precambrian.
At least a dozen predictions made by ID Creationism have easily been shown false. For instance, ID predicts that a bacterial flagellum (among the many that have evolved independently) is “irreducibly complex”, yet its evolutionary pathway has now been mapped. ID is like CACA because its practitioners behave opposite to the scientific method. When confronted with a problem, they throw up their hands & ask, “What else could it be (but a Designer or man-made CO2)?”, rather than trying to find out what else could explain observations.
Just as Creationists predicted that paleontologists would never find a proto-mammal with both the reptilian & mammalian jaw joints, ID advocates keep suffering failure after failure, while the fact & theory of evolution are repeatedly confirmed by new discoveries, not that further confirmation of the reality of both be needed.
The mechanism of micoevolution is exactly the same as macroevolution. Mutations are often harmful or neutral, but they are so common that some cannot help but be helpful in changed or unchanged environments. As I mentioned, the evolution of a bacterium from eating sugars to eating nylon resulted from a single point mutation, replicable in the lab. Death is not the governor. Before the development of nylon, this mutation would have led to the death of the bacteria suffering it. But after nylon, the same mutation opened up a whole new realm for microbes to exploit. Many such examples of minor mutations causing significant developments exist in nature & the lab.
Your statement that “Innumerable small probabilities multiplied together yield an impossibility” shows that you don’t understand molecular biology or genetics. You really ought to study biology before presuming to comment on it.
It is not reading assumptions into the evidence to note the similarities & differences in genomes & chromosomes of more closely & distantly related organisms. Sometimes surprises arise that lead to different conclusions about relatedness. But if you have a better explanation than evolution for, for instance, the telomeres in the middle of human chromosome #2 than that it arose from fusion of two standard ape chromosomes, which is why we have only 23 pairs instead of 24, then please by all means propose it. (As you may know, all members of the Hominidae except modern humans, Neanderthals & Denisovans have 24 pairs of chromosomes.)
Furthermore, this gross chromosomal mutation is associated with our bipedalism, since the fusion arguably affected the function of Hox B genes found on our chromosome two, which specifically control the way the pelvis, lower spine & genitalia develop. Humans have five lumbar vertebrae but chimps three, so it’s a highly plausible hypothesis that the fusion was one of the changes that led to walking upright.
Will Nitschke says:
August 15, 2014 at 3:59 pm
By poor formatting do you mean pasting your name & date of comment at the head of my reply to it. IMO that’s pretty standard.
Will Nitschke says:
August 15, 2014 at 4:03 pm
Apparently you don’t understand what an experiment is. It’s a test of an hypothesis. Predicting where to find fossils & then finding them there is a test of an hypothesis. The standard, textbook definition of an experiment is “an orderly procedure carried out with the goal of verifying, refuting, or establishing the validity of a hypothesis”.
Thus all the examples I gave of successful tests of predictions were experiments. You don’t get to invent your own definition of what counts as an experiment.
@milodonharlani
“By poor formatting do you mean pasting your name & date of comment at the head of my reply to it. IMO that’s pretty standard.”
Not when any reasonable person would read your post as quoting me, when in fact you’re writing your own comments. Anyway, I’ve pointed out the mistake, so let’s move on.
“Apparently you don’t understand what an experiment is. It’s a test of an hypothesis. Predicting where to find fossils & then finding them there is a test of an hypothesis. The standard, textbook definition of an experiment is “an orderly procedure carried out with the goal of verifying, refuting, or establishing the validity of a hypothesis”.”
An experiment is not a merely ‘a test of a hypothesis’. An experiment must have an experimental design. One of the reasons why it has a design is so that you can run the experiment again to confirm the result. This is called replication. Nothing you are describing has any of these essential properties.
Will Nitschke says:
August 15, 2014 at 4:46 pm
You mention only one essential property, which all of my examples have in spades, ie repeatability.
Of course the results of the experiment of looking for fishapods in Late Devonian rocks from then equatorial coastal shallows are repeatable. Eminently so. Tiktaalik was found as a result of repeating prior results.
Wherever they look for the CMB, astronomers repeat the results of Penzias & Wilson, although lately with more detail they’ve found interesting irregularities in it.
Professor Ryan
Can you explain exactly what observational techniques were used to determine the energy imbalance observed from your statement?
Will nitschke says
Can you explain exactly what mechanism causes the oceans to warm from GHG when at the same time the atmosphere is not?
milodonharlani says:
August 15, 2014 at 4:55 pm
Will Nitschke says:
August 15, 2014 at 4:46 pm
—————————–
I’m reminded of a party when I was a doctoral student in the history of science at Oxford. Another American, an economics grad student (& Yale Snow Prize winner), who liked to quiz me, asked what makes science science. The first thing I said, even before “predictions which can be shown false”, was “results are repeatable”.
prjindigo said: “An incomplete model is not a model, it is a painting.”
Any model is always incomplete. If it was not so, the model would be ‘real life’.
It’s a bit like finding some old bones and then constructing a crude approximation of how the creature may have looked.
A Dali painting of the same is most likely more accurate 😉
—
And to be on topic: nice laundry list of excuses, reminds me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFvujknrBuE
@milodonharlani
“You mention only one essential property, which all of my examples have in spades, ie repeatability…”
An experimental test without the ability to replicate the result is not considered an experimental test. But there are other kinds of tests which remain scientific. So the point you’re making is the same point I’m making. Thank you for making it.
@Bob Boder
“Can you explain exactly what mechanism causes the oceans to warm from GHG when at the same time the atmosphere is not?”
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2014/08/how-deep-ocean-warming-can-bypass-the-surface/
Will Nitschke says:
August 15, 2014 at 6:02 pm
What you incorrectly consider an experimental test doesn’t matter.
What actually constitutes an experimental test does, as do the examples I cited. I’ve shown that the tests of hypotheses which I mentioned in response to your request are indeed experiments with repeatable results, meeting every requirement.
Nitschke says
Roy’s post that you linked explain how potentially deep oceans can warm without surface warming from GHG. Even he states that this only a possibility. This doesn’t explain how the oceans could warm from GHG without atmospheric warming.
Try again
For an example of a scientist whose opinion does matter:
http://tiktaalik.uchicago.edu/searching4Tik.html
The search for Tiktaalik put our scientific theory to the test
Scientific theories are powerful because they allow us to make predictions about our world. We look at all the evidence we have gathered to date and predict what we might find if we do certain experiments. If the results of these experiments confirm our predictions, we know we have a solid theory. If not, we revise our theory and keep asking questions. That’s what science is all about.
How did we know where to look for Tiktaalik?
As paleontologists, we can’t go to a lab and use beakers and test tubes to gather evidence to test our theories. Instead, we look at the fossil evidence that exists today to make predictions about what we might find in the field tomorrow. Lucky for us, there is a bounty of evidence scattered all over the world, and more turns up every day. To find a transitional fossil between land animals and fish, we start by looking at the very first tetrapods to show up in the fossil record. Then, we look for fish which had a similar pattern of bones in their fins as the tetrapods had in their limbs.
STEP 1: We used the distribution of known fossils to determine where there was a gap in the fossil record
@milodonharlani
“What you incorrectly consider an experimental test doesn’t matter.”
It does matter when it’s the actual definition. One example among countless –
“An experiment is an orderly procedure carried out with the goal of verifying, refuting, or establishing the validity of a hypothesis. Controlled experiments provide insight into cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs when a particular factor is manipulated. Controlled experiments vary greatly in their goal and scale, but always rely on repeatable procedure and logical analysis of the results.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiment
“What actually constitutes an experimental test does, as do the examples I cited. I’ve shown that the tests of hypotheses which I mentioned in response to your request are indeed experiments with repeatable results, meeting every requirement.”
None of your examples are controlled, and none of them are repeatable in a controlled fashion. So you’re just being very very silly now.
@Bob Boder
“Roy’s post that you linked explain how potentially deep oceans can warm without surface warming from GHG. Even he states that this only a possibility. This doesn’t explain how the oceans could warm from GHG without atmospheric warming.”
Actually it does explain it. Read it again. If you don’t understand what you’re reading, I cannot help you with that, as I suspect you don’t like to be contradicted, so now all your responses will be pointlessly adversarial.
Will Nitschke says:
August 15, 2014 at 6:16 pm
Willful ignorance is silly.
The examples I cited fit the definition perfectly. Your understanding of what constitutes the scientific method is faulty.
The quest for Tiktaalik was a controlled, repeatable experiment, meeting every term of the definition. Ditto testing the Big Bang Theory by looking for the predicted CMB (although first found by accident).
@milodonharlani
A final observation. By your definition heat waves, droughts, glacier ice loss, and pretty much every correlation and “consistent with” claim is a scientifically repeatable experimental proof of climate models. Now you’ve painted yourself into a corner you can’t get out of. Of course, you may actually believe all that, but I suspect not. Have a great day, anyway.
Nitschke says
Read it many times before and again it doesn’t as I have ask him myself. He also suggests this as a possible method he is not suggesting this is fact or theory.
I also don’t care if I am contradicted, why would i waist time here if I didn’t want honest debate, i have been wrong many times before in my life and it has not hurt me yet? If you have something to teach me go ahead and teach, I will be happy listen and learn if there is value in what you say.
Will Nitschke says:
August 15, 2014 at 6:33 pm
No, that is far from by my definition. Are you really this obtuse, or simply unwilling to admit you were wrong?
The scientists I cited from the U. of Chicago, Drexel & Harvard disagree with your ill-informed opinion, as do philosophers & historians of science. You’re entitled to your opinion, no matter how insupportable. But be aware that real scientists of great achievement in their fields, conducting actual, controlled, repeatable experiments to test the predictions of their hypotheses, totally disagree with your warped view.
@Bob
“Read it many times before and again it doesn’t as I have ask him myself. He also suggests this as a possible method he is not suggesting this is fact or theory.”
Correct. You asked for a method, I pointed you to a method. If you’re moving the goal post could you at least explain where you’ve moved it to? 😉
Will Nitschke says:
August 15, 2014 at 3:46 pm
“What’s the test for the big bang theory?”
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
Here’s a confirmation of a test of a prediction of the Big Bang Theory:
http://www.universetoday.com/10600/neutrino-evidence-confirms-big-bang-predictions/
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
Will Nitschke says:
August 15, 2014 at 6:33 pm
“@milodonharlani
A final observation. By your definition heat waves, droughts, glacier ice loss, and pretty much every correlation and “consistent with” claim is a scientifically repeatable experimental proof of climate models. Now you’ve painted yourself into a corner you can’t get out of. Of course, you may actually believe all that, but I suspect not. Have a great day, anyway.”
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
Look around, pal, and take a deep breath, but not too deep. You’re the one in the corner with the paint fumes melting your brain. You’ve got it bassackwards.
The whole point about the “climate (anti-)science” Team is that they do not make specific predictions about “heat waves, droughts, glacier ice loss” & then test them by observations. They try to make any & all observations fit their “theory” by hook, crook & GIGO model, plus media, PR and lawsuit. That’s precisely opposite to the procedure of the experimental evolutionary biologists and cosmological astrophysicists.
Sorry, but I hope you just sound dumber than you really are.
I stand educated.
Thank you
Bob Boder says:
August 15, 2014 at 6:55 pm
Wow. That rara avis on this blog, an honest, brave man.
I stand impressed.