leonine
Posts: 409
Joined: 11/3/2009 From: [email protected] Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: Rule quote:
ORIGINAL: Yachtie Long-term cycles in ocean temperature, she said, suggest the world may be approaching a period similar to that from 1965 to 1975, when there was a clear cooling trend. At the time some scientists forecast an imminent ice age. I remember those forecasts. lol I suspect that climatology is much like the medical industry, the dental industry, the food industry and the clothing industry: some issues become fashionable now and again. Five years hence the same industries may advance the complete opposite fashions: long dresses instead of short dresses, et cetera. You suspect wrong. The difference is that the first is a science, where facts matter, while the others are commercial concerns where what matters is what you can sell the consumers, and facts are whatever the advertising department says they are. Both the ice age theory and AGW were propounded in the '70s, and at the time both of them had the status of crank theories, because they predicted future trends quite different from those predicted by the then orthodox climatological theories. In the next few decades the data consistently didn't fit the predictions made by the ice age theory, so it was consigned to the dustbin of exploded hypotheses. However, the data also consistently didn't fit the orthodox theory that climate was too solid and stable to vary in any significant way over timescales of less than centuries. What the data fitted was the predictions made by AGW, which is why most experts now accept it as the best description we have of reality. (Which is the closest a real scientist will come to saying "the truth.") Forty years on when the theory became a political issue, it looked to people on the outside as if it had appeared out of nowhere as some sort of crazy fashion among the scientists, and the politicians assumed that if they could just tackle it like any other crazy fashion and PR it out of existence. But what they don't understand is that when a paid sceptic jumps up and down and shouts about a bit of data that doesn't fit, the experts aren't impressed because they have already seen decades of data that does fit.
< Message edited by leonine -- 9/8/2013 8:44:15 AM >
_____________________________
Leo9 Gonna pack in my hand, pick up on a piece of land and build myself a cabin in the woods. It's there I'm gonna stay, until there comes a day when this old world starts a-changing for the good. - James Taylor
|