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Even a Scientist Can Be Wrong
I recently heard of a statement made by Neil deGrasse Tyson that I thought must have been a misquote. I looked into it and, sure enough, that wise man who’s quoted on tee shirts and coffee mugs said, “The good thing about science is that it’s true, whether or not you believe in it.”
Whoa. The list of superseded scientific pronouncements is a long one, but I seem to recall a couple of real bloopers from his own field of expertise. It was once thought – as late as the early 20th century – that our own galaxy was the extent of the universe. Lo and behold, it is now accepted that there may be 100 billion galaxies comprising the universe – and counting. Now that’s a major whiff.
Not to mention the fact that luminaries such as Einstein, Shapley, Hoyle, and Gold believed that the universe was static, that is until Hubble peered through the Mt. Wilson telescope and verified the findings of that crazy Catholic priest George Lemaitre who had been trying to tell them the universe was expanding, and had been since the explosion of the primal atom (I won’t say creation).
Stay tuned for more alterations in “settled science.” It’s the nature of things.
Published in General
How does Prof Spencer explain away the fact that before the year 1500 there was an extended period of time when carbon dioxide levels were almost as high or higher than they are now? Did the world end twelve years into that heavy duty carbon dioxide cycle? Or what?
I blame all those pre-Columbian SUVs.
@caroljoy — “This man would be screaming about the necessity of nuke power, and since all his teenager and older children were very environmentally concerned hippies, they would pester the father about “So where is the nuke waste going to go?” … he got red in the face and screamed: ‘Don’t worry about where we will put it – there are millions of acres of Indian reservation land and no one there to patrol most of the roads in and out at night. No problem just dumping it there.’”
This sounds like a conservative father pulling the chain of his progressive children, assuming such a conversation happened at all. It is double hearsay, after all.
In reality, the issue of where to put nuclear waste has been a fierce political battle for half a century. At great expense a suitable repository was built at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, but so far it has succumbed to pandering politicians. The idea that nuclear waste might instead be midnight dumped on Indian reservations is pretty comical. You can’t hide it: it’s radioactive. Which also means it could be used to make dirty bombs, so the Feds monitor it carefully. Fortunately it doesn’t take up much space, so it’s being stored on the grounds of the nuclear power plants that generated it.
@caroljoy — “Bill Gates … arranged with various agencies and officials for the Chinese to come down the St Lawrence Seaway and pump thousands of millions of gallons of pristine Great Lakes water into their super barges and then head on back to China.”
Are you sure you didn’t confuse the Chinese with the aliens from the TV series, V?
The Chinese sailing supertankers full of water halfway around the world? They have plenty of their own water: they control the Himalayas. And since when is Great Lakes water “pristine”?
But I am not going to say any more about this until I see some kind of a source.
That would be a reward for criticizing him …
This seems to be a garbled reference to the Medieval Warm Period, ca. 900-1300 A.D., when Scandinavian colonists herded cows in Greenland. Warmer temperatures, at least in northern Europe and the north Atlantic, apparently due to a low level of volcanic air pollution, not CO2.
To find CO2 levels as high as today’s, you have to go back a few million years.
Go back a few tens or hundreds of millions of years, and you find hyperverdant ecosystems with both temperatures and CO2 levels much higher than ours.
You’re able to state this supposed irrefutable “fact” that to experience such high levels of CO2 we’d have to go back hundreds of millions of years is because the references to the carbon dioxide surge of a time period right before the 15th century have been scrubbed. I did find a scientist I used to talk to a bit so I emailed him today, as he has the data on the time frame I am referring to.
I believe the CO2 spike I am thinking of was after the Medieval Warm Period.
Right now, the situation with the search engines is payments made by this force and that force to keep the “Official Story” pegged to the first 154 pages of the search engine’s results. So type in “stolen election” + “Trump had his election stolen” you’ll see 489 pages of results letting the searcher know that Trump did not even have a single vote stolen.
That is how every single topic of any controversy stands right now.
I searched “stolen election 2020” on DuckDuckGo and Bing. DuckDuckGo had a “news” stripe of mostly negative stories, but the rest of the first page was “pro-stolen” stories. On Microsoft’s Bing the first window leaned a little more negative but you couldn’t miss the stories that support the stolen election narrative.
Moral: STOP USING GOOGLE.
I think you misunderstood what I wrote about CO2 levels in the past.