John's Blog: January 2007

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Human-Caused Climate Change - Is the Debate Over?

Tuesday, January 09, 2007
We've been hearing a lot about in the last year from the left that "The debate is over. Climate change is happening, and it is being caused by humans." Predictably, there is much hue and cry from skeptics that this is simply self-fulfilling prophecy that attempts to stop further questioning.(Click title to read more...)

I think we shouldn't get sidetracked into a discussion whether the debate is over or not. It's a very subjective statement. Obviously, "the debate is over" does not mean that everyone agrees. Some people fervently deny that the earth is more than 6000 years old, and we are either misinterpreting the dinosaur evidence, or maybe they lived at the same time is early humans. Does that mean that the scientific debate about the various ages of the earth (Jurassic, etc.) is not yet over? What about people who doubt that the earth is round? That the earth revolves around the sun? That apartheid was bad? (Yes, getting away from science now.) That the holocaust happened? Are those debates still "open"?

So, "the debate is over" does not mean that there are no more dissenters at all. Should we then define it as saying that some threshold percentage of believers has been reached, maybe a majority? But on a scientific question, that quickly morphs into a debate about whose opinion matters. A researcher whose educational background is not actually science but happens to be working on the issue anyway? Those people exist. Someone whose educational background is scientific, but in another area of science? They exist too. Does it matter who is paying them? In some cases, undoubtedly. We could come up with any percentage depending on whose opinion we count as mattering.

I think it's really a political question. In fact, I'm not a rhetorician, but I'd wager this is a standard rhetorical device, to just proclaim that everyone agrees with you. It may be true that in different countries, one side or the other has captured the majority of public opinion, or even scientific opinion, and maybe one opinion does prevail in the majority of countries. So maybe you could say that "the debate is over" in certain countries. The reality for the United States, for better or worse, is that the debate is still not over, at least in a political sense. I think those who want it to be "more over", from one point of the view or the other, would better spend their time continuing to convince than to argue about whether it's over or not.

A few thoughts on scientific certainty: Science consists of facts and theories. Facts are merely the observed phenomena, theories are the potential explanations. Theories are strengthened or weakened depending on how well they agree with the facts, as shown by experimentation over time, but theories never, ever turn into fact. Gravitation is still just a theory. Newtonian physics was a fairly well-accepted theory until Einstein. Theories are always being modified or even replaced. When it comes down to it, all theories are just stories we've made up to explain the facts, and science is merely the methodology to compare the validity of competing theories.

Some people seem to unrealistically expect a theory to be "correct" in a way that can be proven beyond the shadow of a doubt. I think that's a fundamental misunderstanding of science. Almost every theory now in existance has some facts which are not explained by the theory, and those that don't, no doubt someday will. The existance of facts that don't fit the theory of course means that the theory needs at least some refinement. It may or may not mean that the theory is flat-out wrong. Yet that's the conclusion that some, armed with conflicting facts, want to jump to.

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