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srid  7mo ago (cafeamericainmag.com)   Edited 7mo ago   4095 thread views

The Vacuity of Climate Science

cafeamericainmag.com

There has been a lot of CW discussion on climate change. This is an article written by someone that used to strongly believe in anthropogenic global warming and then looked at all the evidence before arriving at a different conclusion. The articles goes through what they did.

I thought a top-level submission would be more interesting as climate change is such a hot button topic and it would be good to have a top-level spot to discuss it for now. I have informed the author of this submission; they said they will drop by and engage with the comments here!

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Yeah, and Lord Kelvin estimated age of Sun to be about 32 million years (IIRC). Noone claims that scientists are always right.

You're missing the point, perhaps deliberately?

The question centers around why experimentation is important. Anyone can observe something and then make a model up to explain that observation. This does not, and cannot, demonstrate the model is correct. Scientists were wrong about the surface temperature of Venus before it was measured -- yet they made models that perfectly predicted their (incorrect) surface temperature. That their model matched their prediction did not corroborate the model in any way, as is obvious by the fact that it was wrong.

Since then, scientists have measured the temperature of Venus. And now... they have made models to perfectly predict that (correct) surface temperature. Because this time around the temperature is correct, it feels like the model is thus more correct (on this basis) than the previous one. In a sense it is, in that it gives the right temperature. But it is no more (or less) validated by this than the incorrect model! The evidentiary value is exactly the same. You can always make a model fit certain data points, it doesn't mean the model is correct.

Obviously, since we learned about actual Venus temperature any models are expected to predict correct results there.

Doing anything else would be deeply silly.

Specifics how models are build/used/validated are depending on a model. But not rejecting reality and what we learned is hardly indictment of science.

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