We will probably never know. Does it matter? I introduced an Asimov essay early on in the topic, and not a single person responded to it, much less showed any possibility they understood any of it. Certainly only a very few write as if it has meaning, not that it matters in any case.
It’s the source of the great sentiment, “John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”
Was he right about that? Such a question is only answered by an individual, by your own mind. Nobody can tell you that’s true, and force you to believe it. You have to realize for yourself the meaning of it, there is no scientific experiment, no cite, no evidence to point to, no double blind study or consensus science. And if somebody disagrees with that, there is no way to convince them otherwise. Asimov goes on to say a lot more, like
Which was one of the points I thought important in a science discussion, about something as contentious as global warming. When Asimov writes
he is speaking to a critic of science and our current understanding. It’s an answer to the idiot view that because we don’t know everything perfectly, we don’t know anything. This idiot belief shows up in climate science, and definitely rears it’s idiot head when it comes to recent temperature data.
This essay is from The Skeptical Inquirer, Fall 1989, Vol. 14, No. 1, Pp. 35-44
While he is speaking about the old “flat earth” belief system, and the ancients and such, it’s also pretty valid for measuring global temperatures, and how our view of the earth has changed. For example, the jet streams. As with most everything that comes up, it was mentioned and a source provided long ago in the thread.
There is this idiot belief that the “jet stream” is a single entity, a “thing”, and that it has some sort of stable structure, and exists for some reason, by itself. This is possibly due to the idiocy spewed forth by talking heads on the weather channel, where they describe it as “the jet stream”, and attribute qualities to it as if it controls the weather somehow.
The link still provides the easy ability to see for yourself that this is just not true. Here’s a winter view of the jet streams.
Here’s a summer time view. If you look at those and compare them and think, “There isn’t much of a jet stream in summer”, then you now know more than most people in the world do. The jet streams are caused by large differences in air temperature, where warm tropical air meets cold polar air. It’s why the south pole always has strong jet streams, even in the austral summer. It never warms up over Antarctica, even though the summer sun there is much stronger that in the north pole summer. This is because of the ice there. Lots and lots of ice.
Moving on, if you watched the video when I first linked to it, and thought “Wait a minute, that makes it sound like cold years in the arctic would have mild winters, while the years with extreme cold are from it being warmer up near the poles”, which is stupid and nobody would ever say that. Right?
Ah, that’s enough of that.
