Two views on climate change
Paul Rako is the Technical Editor of EDN Magazine (Electronic Design News -- one of the leading industry monthly magazines)
In today's post, he
comments on an editorial in a competing magazine and proceeds to tear it apart:
Politics, faith, and the engineer
Our esteemed competitor EETimes has an editorial about intelligent design and global warming. Kenton Williston points out that Darwin and the theory of evolution is settled science and so is global warming theory. By this he must mean anthropogenic global warming (AGW) because he says we have to do something and do it good and hard or disaster awaits. He points out that some engineers have the temerity to doubt AGW and he condescendingly feels sorry for them, since they are obviously being as unscientific as the people that peddle creationism and intelligent design.
Before I add my two cents, I would like to point out a little foible in his strawman. Now, I am a Darwin guy 100%, but lets� face it, if you push and push and push on science you go to physics and then past relativity and quantum mechanics to get to--- superstring theory. Nice theory, actually it is hypothesis. A lot of nice math. A lot of idea people. But there can be no possible testing of the hypothesis and therefore no science. Sorry, it bothers me too, but since we can�t test superstring theory it is indistinguishable from the religions that say God snapped her fingers 10,000 years ago and everything came into being just as it is today.
Funny thing is that, faced with the same facts as Kenton Williston, I draw the exact opposite conclusion. In fact AGW is far more a religious movement that a scientific one. Now please, before you greenies start foaming at the mouth and bite out chunks of the carpet, I am not saying climate theory is religious, or disputing the fact that the world certainly seems to be warming. There are tons of good science going on that examines the relationships of CO2, water vapor, cosmic rays, volcanic activity, asteroid impact and sunspot activity on global climate. But there are two religious wings. One is the global warming skeptics that think that absolutely nothing is going on and that we should not even care about these issues. The other religious wing is the global warming alarmists, who make a very tortured leaps of faith to come to the conclusion that not only should we do something, we should do just what they want us to do and do it right away.
Paul then proceeds to carefully examine what is being said by the AGWers and then to dismantle each point one by one, all the while providing links to the original source materials.
A good read...
Posted by DaveH at July 23, 2008 9:03 PM