Week of 10 August 2009

The interesting thing about AGW is that the left, including leftie scientists, take it as a given, putting it in the same class as, say, evolution. In reality, there's no such certainty.

If you ask biologists about evolution, about 100.0% of real biologists will tell you that evolution is true. It's a done deal. It's supported by overwhelming evidence accumulated over the last 150 years. It's predictive. Darwin, for example, knew little or nothing about genetics and nothing about DNA, but everything about genetics and DNA supports evolution theory. If you ask chemists or physicists or geologists about evolution, about 99.9% of them will tell you that evolution is true. There's simply no doubt about it, and no serious debate. It's as certain as anything in science can be. It's as certain as, say, atomic theory or gravitational theory.

Are some details about evolution still uncertain? Sure, and scientists will continue to attempt to resolve them. But these are nits and have absolutely no effect on the validity of evolution theory in general. That's the real problem that the creationist nutters have. To them, if even one single thing in their bible is falsified, the whole thing is falsified. That's true, of course. But what they don't understand, or refuse to understand, is that science doesn't work that way. A theory is the best available framework to explain observed data. If one thing turns out to be wrong, that doesn't invalidate the theory. It simply means that we need to learn more about that particular aspect of the theory. But creationists don't understand that, so they keep making pathetic attempts to falsify the tiniest parts of evolutionary theory, convinced that if they can do so (they haven't had much success, because about 0.00% of scientists are creationists, and it's very difficult to criticize successfully something about which one knows nothing) they will invalidate evolutionary theory. What they don't understand is that to invalidate evolutionary theory, they'll need to propose a better theory, one that takes into account all of the observed data gained by hundreds of thousands of scientists over the last 150 years in millions of experiments. Good luck with that.

Then ask scientists about AGW. You'll find that about 5 out of 6 agree that AGW is true. To a non-scientist, that may seem to be consensus, but to a scientist it means that AGW has by no means achieved a consensus. In particular, when we have scientists like Freeman Dyson, probably the greatest living scientist, expressing doubts, not to mention many respected climate scientists and even national climate bodies refusing to accept the AGW hypothesis, that means AGW is not yet a theory, but merely a hypothesis that is being challenged and may well fail.