Right, just his opinion, until you get quotes from the scientists who he is referring to you are just blowing smoke. The proper position is that it is very likely that most of the scientists are correct. The longer it goes with no deniers making a dent where it counts just adds to the certainty.
Sorry, Charlie, but Wegener, while admired for having a good idea – just as Ptolemy the Great is admired today for having a good idea – did not come up with the Tectonic Plate theory. He claimed that the continents drifted over the sea floors, and this was proven incorrect. Wegener was wrong. It took a significant change away from his theory for the workings of the plates to win scientific approval.
BTW the explanation I rely on is here, from Realclimate, that is made and managed by real climate scientists:
So Gore is going for the popular view of things when they are 90% or more likely to be or to take place. Incidentally the quotes you got were from the days even people like me told Gore to stop with that, the quotes found are from 2006 and 2007, seems that he is taking the advice now and this is another example of timeline trouble. Most of the recent denialist tripe only quotes from the same.
It has to be noticed that FX is doing the cowardly thing by ignoring the cite from The Union of Concerned Scientists with the links to the investigations and reviews made that exonereted the scientists, FX is regurgitating already debunked baloney.
Gosh Mr Science, who should I believe? Internet crank that never uses sources? Or rude asshole with a pretentious user name who always uses sources for every last goddamn thing?
I think it is the internet crank that is more accurate. **Trinopus **is right, instead of continental drift we have plate tectonics and Arthur Holmes elaborated on one of the ideas of Wegener and his mechanism was the one used for the modern theory.
“New theories donot always arrive with all the t’s crossed and i’s dotted. Wegener did not have an explanation for how continental drift could have occurred. He proposed two different mechanisms for this drift, one based on the centrifugal force caused by the rotation of the earth and a ‘tidal argument’ based on the tidal attraction of the sun and the moon. These explanations could easily be proven inadequate and opened Wegener to ridicule because they were orders of magnitude too weak. Wegener really did not believe that he had the explanation for the mechanism, but that this should not stop discussion of a hypothesis. The scientists of the time disagreed. After Alfred Wegener died, the Continental Drift Theory was quietly swept under the rug. With the Continental Drift Theory out of the way, the existing theories of continent formation were able to survive, with little challenge until the 1960’s.”
Anyway, for anyone rational out there who is still interested, Wegener was not a “crackpot.” He was a serious observer, who had a good idea. The idea was wrong, for being incomplete. He never came up with the actual solution. That honor falls to someone else, a bit later.
I get a laugh out of reading pre-sixties science articles that talk about mountain building and other events that they know happened, but there is no accepted theory or mechanism to explain how it happens.
" He never came up with the actual solution. That honor falls to someone else, a bit later" could be the tagline for so many scientists.