And if not should it not become a religion rather than a scientific hypothesis? The signs are already there. Scientists are openly mocked and vilified if they challenge the science behind the theory. Global warming denial is now being treated by some zealots with the hatred and contempt shown (and rightly shown) to Holocaust denial. Those who have doubts about the theory are regarded as heretics.
I’m not a scientist and have the good sense to realize that I am not qualified to make any judgment at all on global warming. But I do know this. If scientists cannot critically examine established orthodoxies without fear of destroying their careers then we’re all in trouble.
The point here is that if Greenhouse Gases continue to increase and then we observed global cooling then this can be falsifiable.
The problem has been that the contrarians have failed to come with good natural explanations and models to explain what has been found after more than 100 years of investigation, experiments and attempts at falsifying this.
What history shows is that the ones that are claiming to be the modern day “Galileos” are more than 50 years late, the current scientific consensus was reached thanks to those Galileos like Calendar and Plass that had to convince all those scientific groups and academics that Humans are causing a lot of the current warming.
Of course global warming is falsifiable. If the average temperature of the Earth is not increasing then we can say global warming is not occurring. Since it is, we can say global warming is occurring (yes, I am being a smart-ass, I know what you meant).
3 things about your OP:
I think this exact same debate has occurred before.
If you really do not know anything about the field, how do you know scientists are being persecuted for having doubts? I mean you must have some pretty strong familiarity with the field to know global warming is religious dogma among these scientists and the heretics are being persecuted.
Why don’t you trust massive numbers of scientists who practice their profession in climatology? Where have you previously experienced massive numbers of scientists deliberately ignoring good data that refutes such a big theory?
More examples of items that support the theory (and there are several lines of research that show this) that can be debunked, and there had been many attempts in the past, are these basic 10 “fingerprints” that can be also falsifiable just by looking for evidence that they are not happening or that they have better explanations than the increase of human made global warming gases.
Your thread title asks whether or not global warming is a falsifiable theory. I’ll leave to others to answer that.
However, the balance of OP isn’t actually about this question at all: instead it concerns whether one can form a view on global warming based on certain signs. Essentially you seem to be positing that there are signs that global warming must be more a religion than a scientific theory, namely that (you say) those who express a contrary view are treated poorly.
In reality, in the free society in which we luckily live, scientists who have spoken against global warming have suffered no great disadvantage. But even so…
An astronomer who seriously posits that the moon is made of green cheese rather than rock and dust would have their career destroyed. This doesn’t mean the orthodox theory concerning the composition of the moon is a religion, or that the astronomer is being oppressed. The astronomer would just be flat out wrong.
A medical expert who published papers encouraging smoking because (he said) it made you healthier would be mocked and vilified and treated as a heretic. And rightly so since he would not just be wrong but dangerously so.
In the end, sometimes one can’t just form views based on “the signs”. One can’t just engage in a meta-analysis and come to a conclusion about a debate based just on the style of the debaters. In the end, one can’t assume that mockery and vilification and career destruction is necessarily a result of one being treated unfairly. It may just be that what one is doing invites it.
And speaking of scientists being vilified, is the OP really unaware of the vilification that many scientists like Mann had to go though?
Thanks to the fake climate gate conspiracy several climate scientists have been receiving death threats and even people like former Attorney General Cuccinelli use their power in their attempt to silence the scientists that agree and find evidence that is driving the current consensus.
In the meantime the very few scientists that are against the consensus are failing to have their theories pan out, Like Lindsen with his Iris effect or they only show that real religion, ideology and real zealot views are driving their efforts like Spencer.
Scientists, and others, are always welcome to “critically examine established orthodoxies”. That’s not what gets people mocked. However, if you wish to overturn an established scientific viewpoint, it’s not enough to just go “yeah, but what if it ain’t?” If you want people to take you seriously, you need evidence. And the stronger the theory you’re arguing against, the stronger your evidence needs to be. Remember - your alternative hypothesis not only needs to account for the contrary evidence you’re promoting, but also all the other evidence that’s already out there. The new theory has to be better than the old one.
This is where all of these contrarian ideas fall apart, whether it’s denying global warming, evolution, vaccination, or the luminiferous aether. The evidence just isn’t there. And if you’re going to keep yammering on about how we should still pay attention to an idea that contradicts evidence we DO have, and isn’t supported by anything but wishful thinking (and, to be fair, perhaps a few cherry-picked data points), then you deserve to be mocked and ignored. That IS the proper scientific response.
Really? Care to provide any examples where the reason for this vilification wasn’t abject stupidity? Or straight-up fraud? Or how this is worse than the vilification that faces people like James Hansen, Michael Mann, or Phil Jones? Because those guys get treated like Communist Hitler for nothing more than their stance based on overwhelming evidence. The flak even the most dishonest climate deniers get is nothing by comparison.
It’s often like how alt-med advocates complain about being treated like evil people. To that hypothetical alt-med advocate:
You’re wrong, hurting people, and often blatantly dishonest if not straight-up fraudulent
The reason you get flak is not because you advocate for alternative medicine but because you’re wrong and/or dishonest and won’t correct your errors
The vilification coming from your side is far, far nastier, and is not based on any actual justification!
This has literally never happened. There is not a single scientist whose career was destroyed for questioning AGW. You get the occasional scientist who commits academic fraud like Wegman, or put out a paper that’s straight-up awful like Willie Soon or Steve McIntyre, or for not being a scientist and lying through his teeth constantly like Christopher Monckton (WHO STILL GETS SPEAKING GIGS FOR SOME REASON!), but simply for questioning the evidence? Give me one example. One.
Of course global warming is falsifiable - in 500 years we’ll have the evidence to know exactly what happened to the earth.
The two more important questions are:
Is global warming provable within the timeframe of demands for transferring significant wealth to stopping it, and
Is the effect of short-term CO2 release as predictable as the climate scientists say?
These are not easy questions to answer, for one simple reason: The earth’s climate represents a complex adaptive system, and such systems are inherently difficult to predict, much less understand.
Gavin Schmidt may say that a lower 20 year mean from 2050 to 2070 than from 1950 to 1970 would falsify global warming, but he adds a bunch of caveats about volcanic eruptions, comets, etc. But in a complex system, you can always find something to blame so I have no doubt that should we see such a lower mean, climate scientists will just go on a hunt for the ‘missing warming’ - and probably manage to come up with an explanation.
Because climate is a complex adaptive system, how it responds to CO2 today may not be the same as how it responded yesterday. That’s one of the reasons why the various climate models can be tuned to predict past climate, but tend to be much less precise when extrapolated into the future. As you go further into the future and iterations of feedback loops work their way through the system predictability gets harder and harder.
Nevertheless, climate change is real, and even if man had no part in it, it’s something that bears study and a certain amount of effort in risk mitigation. It’s incontrovertible that the Earth’s temperature has been rising in the past century, and it’s almost certain that man is playing a part in that. The real questions revolve around the accuracy of future predictions and how much we should invest to try to stop or mitigate it.
Hang on, you go too far. The problem with the climate science debate is that it keeps devolving into a binary choice: Either you believe in ‘global warming’, or you’re a ‘denier’. But climate science is a huge field, and not all of the conclusions are of equal weight.
There comes a point in science where the a new theory is supported by enough evidence that is granted the null hypothesis. If you want to argue that relativity is wrong, the burden of proof is on you to provide evidence that that is the case, because the theory of relativity has amassed enough empirical evidence to grant it the status of being the null hypothesis. But there was a time when that was reversed, where the burden of proof was on Einstein and other researchers to gather enough evidence to grant Relativity the status of established science.
‘Global warming’ isn’t a single theory. It’s a description of very complex interplays of many different physical effects interacting within a complex system. Some of them are very well established and have earned the right to be granted the null hypothesis, and some are highly speculative. For example, and in my opinion, global warming theory still relies far too much on highly complex, tuned computer models for its predictions.
There is no doubt in my mind that the burden of proof has shifted to skeptics when it comes to the basic fact of global warming: We’re pumping a lot of CO2 into the air, and because CO2 is a greenhouse gas it is causing a certain amount of warming. If you want to deny this, the burden of proof is on you.
However, the political argument around global warming involves a lot more than the basic science. It also includes:
Prediction of positive or negative feedback effects over a long time period
Prediction of CO2 output in the future
Prediction of social trends that impact the cost of global warming
Prediction of economic growth over the long term
Feasibility of and cost of CO2 reduction methods
Cost/Benefit analysis of mitigation vs avoidance
Assumptions/value judgments regarding the net present value of future warming
Technological predictions of future energy sources
None of these are established science, and some of the more radical conclusions of the catastrophic global warming scenarios are highly speculative. And yet, in the political debate questioning any of it will get you labeled a ‘denier’.
Another thing that is currently a hot issue but is not established science: The current cost of global warming. I see an effort to present estimates of the cost of global warming in terms of current extreme weather events and such as ‘settled science’, but I do not believe that is the case at all.
Fair enough. All I’m trying to say is that if you want to argue against currently accepted science, it needs to be done with data and rational arguments, not just yelling “what if everyone’s wrong?! Why won’t anyone listen to me?!” which seems to be the level the OP is on.
Suppose you found out that I was planning to go to a busy playground take a spin around on the mary-go-round blindfolded and start firing off an AK47 randomly. It would be impossible for you to predict where the bullets would hit, or even if anyone would be hurt. However I can say with confidence that it would be worth your time and effort to stop me from going through with this.
Modern science has always exalted the “rogue” scientist who can challenge established orthodoxies with a strong theory. Einstein is the patron saint of these rogues and Darwin is one of his disciples. The difference is that Einstein and Darwin challenged orthodoxies with sound science.
At this point my opinion is that AGW is in roughly the same space as evolution. Evolution is highly complex and scientists have taken many wrong turns along the way but it is the consensus theory for explaining how life has arrived at its current state. There is a large contingent of people who, for reasons largely outside of science, cannot bring themselves to believe it. This includes a non-trivial number of scientists. They attack evolution by pointing out the missing data or trumping up unknowns to make it seem that evolution is in doubt. Like AGW evolution is very hard to prove with experimentation.
Lastly, I won’t believe that any scientist’s career has been ruined by doubting AGW without proof.
It really depends on the cost of stopping you doesn’t it?
What if the only way to top you from shooting your AK-47 is to blow up the merry go round with a rocket launcher?
If you want to triple the cost of electricity in America by mandating that we only use renewable energy, the cure may be worse than the disease. If you want everyone to use halogen or LED lightbulbs and inflate their car tires, the cost is significantly lower and might make more sense.
That’s a ridiculous analogy. A better one would be, “I have built a very complex model that suggests that sometime in the future it’s more likely that people will shoot AK’s randomly. This will not happen for a few decades, and so far I don’t have any empirical data to prove my model is correct because there is too much variance in the random shooting data. Nonetheless, I demand that we embark on an immediate program to remove every AK from the world. This will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, but trust me - it’s worth it.”
And to carry the analogy further, you might say “This is beyond debate, because the vast consensus of scientists agrees that shooting an AK at people is dangerous.” Then if I question your complex model of future predictions, you can respond “Denier! I told you the science is settled!” Despite the fact that what is ‘settled’ is not your model, but the basic science you used to start construction of the model.
Well yes, because given our understanding of the model, if CO2 continued to rise and solar output remained the same, it would be extremely bizarre for warming to stop or reverse without some external effect. I mean, the fact that you seem to indicate that these reasonable caveats are evidence that we’re forming the evidence around a conclusion, rather than the other way around, is fairly absurd. Obviously, all of our predictions of massive warming go out the window if Yellowstone erupts, causing a massive increase in reflective aerosols. This is not some excuse, this is examining the evidence available with the models we have. Similarly, the reason for the “missing” warming in the last decade can be explained through numerous natural systems we know about - without the warming effects of CO2, we’d be a hell of a lot colder! None of this is ad hoc, none of this is looking for excuses. If you look at the big picture, at how our models work, it makes sense.
It also matters if the plan is even feasible. For instance, if the plan is “We’re going to get everyone to bring their AK’s in.”, I might reasonably ask “But aren’t the people who are likely to go on a shooting spree going to ignore your request? Won’t we just be spending a lot of money on a program that can’t possibly work?”
If the response to that is, 'DENIER!", then we have a communications problem.
And this is exactly the problem with current plans to curb global warming. A fundamental objection to the current plans to add carbon taxes to curb CO2 emissions is that China, Russia and India are not playing along. And so long as they don’t, any attempt to reduce CO2 emissions here will simply divert CO2 emissions to other countries. Policies that drive up the cost of energy may simply push industry out of the west and into the countries where energy is cheap. That may actually make the problem worse if it drives a factory into a country with less energy efficiency and lower pollution controls.
If the carbon taxes drive down consumption of fungible energy sources like oil, that will simply depress the world price and stimulate more consumption elsewhere.
The net result may be very little CO2 reduction, but a large wealth transfer from the west to some of the world’s worst actors. In fact, if we voluntarily start driving up our own energy prices, it gives the countries that don’t follow suit a comparative advantage and lowers their incentive to reduce CO2 as well. We’re creating incentives for other countries to emit more CO2.
This is a very difficult problem, and I haven’t heard a good answer to it yet. Instead I hear lots of shouting down of ‘deniers’ and a government that plans to plow ahead with serious carbon reduction programs without considering whether or not they are affordable or will be effective.