Green Science Online Blog

Climate Science NOT Settled

Even though the mainstream media downplayed its importance, the release of thousands of digital documents from the Hadley Climate Research Unit in England last November showed that even those scientists most committed to the concept of human-caused global warming are not in lock-step agreement.

And it also gave lay-people a good glimpse of the “under-belly” of science–that scientists are just as human and just as prone to pride, petty arguments and a vengeful spirit as anyone else.

When digging for truth, it’s rarely easy to say that the science is “settled.”  There are so many pieces of the universe that are far from being competely understood by scientists, how earth’s climate works being one of them.

That fact that the planets and Sun revolve around the earth was “settled” for millenia, though there were “skeptics” all along.  Newtonian Mechanical theory explained a lot, but it turned out to be only a special case of the more universal theory of Quantum Mechanics, which itself  had to be revised several times during the last century.

Saying that “the science is settled” on the theory that human-caused global warming is dooming our planet is about as crazy as saying that the science is settled on the causes of and cures for cancer.

One of the most shocking facts from the exposed emails is the way these pillars of the scientific community decided that if they couldn’t control the peer review process at a scientific journal, they would conspire to shut it down.

And to say that the scientists who wrote those embarrassing emails should be respected for their “peer reviewed” research and their status as IPCC big-shots, while other scientists, who stayed away from the political game, are not “qualified,” is whitewash.  Or greenwash.

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This past year, my middle-schoolers were treated to a free showing of Al Gore’s fright film about the projected impact of human CO2 emissions on global warming. They did not get to see a similar treatment of legitimate opposing scientific views.

When I studied science, “back in the day,” the concepts of peer review and the scientific uncertainty principle were fundamental.

For over 200 years, scientific uncertainty was defined to mean that, although very few things can be proven with 100 percent certainty, a scientific concept can be considered truth as long as it is 95 percent certain, and had been reviewed and confirmed by a scientist’s peers.

But something changed in the scientific community at the end of the 20th century. In an article aptly titled “The Uses of Scientific Uncertainty,” published in Rachel’s Environmental & Health Weekly on July 1, 1999, Peter Montague revealed a “revolution” that dropped the time-honored uncertainty principle.

He traced the beginning of this revolution back to 1992, when the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, meeting in Rio, declared that “lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective [my emphasis] measures to prevent environmental degradation.”

The environmental community’s disdain for scientific truth and peer review has far surpassed the Rio declaration, as we saw in the recent United Nations conference in Bali. Credentialed scientists who dispute the data massaging and computer models used to predict an imminent catastrophe, were not allowed to voice their skepticism or to present their own findings at the official forum.

In the 15 years since the Rio declaration, we see that the concept of “cost-effective” measures no longer applies to the still-disputed global warming crisis. Instead, we are all expected to ante-up exorbitant taxes to “pay” for our carbon dioxide “pollution,” and the world’s economy be damned.

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