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Pseudoscience Test vs. Global Warming
Is everything a pseudoscience?
Based on the list below, can Global Warming be considered a pseudoscience?
- Falsifiable – it’s a theory so large that designing an experiment to test it is nearly impossible.
- The plural of anecdote is not data. We all have memories of how the climate (weather) used to be — snowy Halloweens of the ’70s, brown Christmases of the ’80s, etc. But is it anthropomorphous or just the dynamic systems of the earth adjusting?
- Data Cherry Picking – Yes.
- Technobabble – Yes.
- Plausible Mechanism – So much of the relationship between the atmosphere and the ocean is unknown that we can’t model a system we have little to no understanding of.
- Unchanging – Yes. Global warming causes every single extreme weather event – except in areas where it doesn’t. Flood? Drought?
- Exaggerated Claims – The world will end in 12 years! No wonder Greta is not in school – If I were convinced that the world was going to end I would not want to spend my days in a classroom. I regret how little convincing it took for me to leave school when I should’ve been there. Hopefully someday, Greta also comes to regret how little time she’s spending in school.
- Certainty – Nobody is more certain of any fact than when they’re wrong.
- Logical Fallacies – Post hoc ergo propter hoc, “After this, therefore because of this.” The earth’s atmosphere is literally a global system – it’s impossible to observe all possible inputs into the atmosphere that could be causing larger reactions across the system. Without the certainty of what we’re observing, how can we be certain of the theory to explain the observation?
- Peer Review – Global warming peer reviewers are a small community reviewing each other’s works. A few dozen people determine what is the acceptable science and what is not. Not just with global warming but many other scientific disciplines as well. As much as half of the scientific papers published are deeply flawed, wrong, or outright fraudulent. Academic science has become a battleground of ideological careerists in pursuit of their own agendas outside of scientific fields.
- Conspiracy to suppress? It’s not a crazed theory if it’s demonstrably true. The media has its own agenda and acceptable narrative — anything that challenges that agenda or questions the narrative is suppressed. Look at Covid and how the media acted like a flock of starlings; as the narrative changed they all instantly moved with the new story in tightly choreographed flights of fantasy. This is not a conspiracy, this is observable fact.
Is there any scientific or technical discussion taking place in the media that is not overrun with pseudoscience or outright falsehoods? Put your favorite scientific political debate to the test.
Published in Domestic Policy
Amen
Global Warming is falsifiable. It is not prove-able or testable, but can be falsified. For example, the theory predicts that temperatures over the poles will rise twice as fast as over the equator. That has not happened. All the quantitative predictions have failed. It is pseudo-science, because the climate is too complicated for simple calculations.
Anecdotes.
It’s actually “Post hoc, ergo Propter hoc.” Which means “After this, therefore Because of this.”
That list should mention the historical raw temperature data that can’t be found and is only available in “corrected” or “homogenized” form. Hiding the facts and inventing others is a strong indication of dishonesty, which is somewhat beyond “pseudo”.
Thanks. I updated the spelling.
I need a vaccination from spell checker dependency. The anecdote has gotten me before.
You corrected the spelling, but Post hoc, ergo Propter hoc is still “AFTER this,” not “BEFORE this.” (“Post” means after/later.)
12. Critics are silenced, even threatened with the loss of their jobs and professional credentials.
Others, like Judy Curry, are hounded out of the profession for doing actual good science. She was the chair of the department of earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She resigned due to harassment by her peers, with the statement: “Independence of mind and climatology have become incompatible…Climatology has become a political party with totalitarian tendencies. If you don’t support the UN consensus on human-caused global warming, if you express the slightest skepticism, you are a ‘climate-change denier,’ a stooge of Donald Trump, a quasi fascist who must be banned from the scientific community.” (City Journal Winter 2019, article by Guy Sorman entitled “Climate Science’s Myth-Buster)
I’ll second Stad’s comment #7: the suppression of dissenting views is profoundly anti-scientific.
The plural of “data” is not “data”. Oh wait, it is.
And the plural of anecdotes is anecdotes.
The plural of datum, is data.
And a Donut without a hole is a Danish
The plural of Data is Lore. And/or Lal…