[ RadSafe ] RE: The hot and cold of history & journalistic credibility

[Gary Damschen]

If the science behind anthropomorphic contributions to Global Warming is so
settled, then could someone explain what seems to be a growing number of
articles similar to this one?

 

http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/global-warming020507.htm

 

I also wonder why we are continuing to insist on taking drastic action to
forestall the doom and gloom scenarios predicted by computer models when the
models' predictions about the effects of warming apparently do not even come
close to approximating the effects contemporaneously recorded during earlier
known warming periods. Isn't this a bit like the old jokes/stories about
people getting million dollar phone bills and being told they had to pay,
even though they couldn't possibly have run up such a large bill by
themselves, "because the computer said so?" Since when does science discount
the observation of physical phenomena in favor of computer models when
checking hypotheses? It seems like almost anyone could postulate a
hypothesis, develop a computer simulation based on the hypothesis, then show
the results of the simulation as "proof" that the hypothesis is correct.

 

As far as the "scientific consensus" argument goes, the above article's
author makes an excellent point about the "Global Cooling" consensus in the
70's and 80's. Other great consensus views include the invalidity of plate
techtonics, the flatness of the Earth, the rotation of the Sun around the
Earth, the immutability of the atom, and the ferocity and magnitude of the
2006 hurricane season predicted by.the computer models. If we had followed
the urgent advice during the cooling scare to melt/nuke the ice caps to
prevent a new Ice Age, where would we be now? The alarmists of that day
decried the immorality of inaction to halt the cooling much as the current
alarmists decry inaction to halt the warming. Perhaps we need to do real
observational science and work on refining our models so that they
reasonably approximate observed physical phenomena before we insist on
potentially ruinous actions that may well be counterproductive based on
predictions from those models. I mean, really, isn't this somewhat akin to
demanding immediate action to counter the "radiological threat" posed by the
increase of background counts from 40cpm to 60cpm over 2 seconds and
extrapolating that rise for the next 5 minutes? If the average background
over 30 minutes is 50cpm, might this be within the normal variance? Is it so
impossible that we might be seeing natural fluctuations? As with radiation,
I wonder if there is not a large difference between "detectable" and
"hazardous" in climatology.

 

My $0.02,

Gary Damschen