Study finds no grounds for climate sceptics’ concerns

After quite a lot of bitter debate, the Labor Govt. here has introduced a carbon tax. This is due largely to the Greens holding the balance of power. They’ll never forget Lake Pedder in Tasmania.
Having visited the wilderness there I realise how very precious and vulnerable nature is, and just how destructive humans are. It’s going to take a big shift in consciousness.

Absolutely, evolution is false. God gave us scripture to tell us the precise mechanism for the creation of the earth. God gave us other evidence - the one we call “science” - to confuse us. “Science” is a test of our faith. Our Good God wants us to trust Scripture and to distrust our senses; God wants us to trust in Him above all things and to know that nothing we perceive around us can be trusted. That goes for climate change.

“A lot of scientists take evolution for a fact and make everything that is found fit the theory.”

Nice caricature. It would work for anyone who wants to has no idea of scientific method, like most fundamentalists (who generally also have no idea of what the Bible REALLY is, only what their ‘faith-theory’ has told them it is).

Scientists do NOT treat evolution as a fact. They treat it as a theory, which is a working model supported by available evidence. They then apply the time-honoured method of falsificationism, which means trying to prove it wrong (on the basis that you can ‘prove’ something right a million times, then prove it wrong once, and the once wins) by finding how evidence does or does not fit. Where evidence does not fit, the theory must be changed to fit the evidence, NOT the other way round. The result is a continuously evolving and developing theory. In principle, the point comes where sufficient evidence has been found, the theory has been exhaustively tested, and can be treated as a scientific law. In practice, evolution is an experiment which can never be completed because of the time-scale, so it will always remain a theory. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, because it is much more than a hypothesis and is supported by the greatest weight of evidence.

As far as climate change is concerned, the real question is not whether or not the earth is warming, but whether this is a dangerous trend or a normal oscillation, and how far it is anthropogenic. So far, the evidence is that we are affecting the climate, and increasingly putting our planet at risk. The fact that we are all fallen sinners, and therefore basically selfish, means that we are unlikely to change our ways sufficiently to redeem the situation. Our corporate greed will be our judgment.

Tony: nice.

Nope. The Theory of Evolution. The Law of Gravity. I suspect the only reason there isn’t an analogous controversy is that the Bible talks about creation (but never explains how), but doesn’t talk about gravity. Unless someone wants to argue that the apple that fell on Newton’s head was the same kind as the one Eve allegedly ate… (Which, of course, wasn’t an apple.)

BTW, Newton’s law of gravity is called a “law” because it explains and predicts the movement of matter mathematically, i.e., gravity follows the inverse square law (it decreases by the square of the distance from an object). However, where gravity is very strong (for example, near stars, and particularly near black holes), Newton’s law needs to be supplemented by Einstein’s theory of general relativity (e.g., to calculate the orbit of Mercury, the planet closest to the sun).

One can thus see that even the laws of physics are not (if you like) set in stone, and may be tweaked, or even displaced, by better formulations with more explanatory and predictive power. They are prescriptive only as they are descriptive.

As for evolution, in one sense it is a fact, i.e., it is empirically observable — palaentologically, taxonomically, and genetically — as observable as the fact that objects fall. It is the mechanism of evolution, and the most adequate model to describe it, that is arguable. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is by no means the final word on the subject, and there are ongoing disputes (some extremely acrimonious) among Darwinians themselves, but on the whole it does the scientific heavy-lifting. Only ideologues, like creationists, can deny it altogether, while proponents of ID, although they distance themselves from the scientific and hermeneutical ignorance of creationists, do lousy science and dire natural theology.

“If it were just a theory, it wouldn’t make people desperate to get other people to disbelieve in it.”

That’s because they don’t understand it - they don’t understand how science works, they don’t understand how the Bible works, and they generally don’t really understand how faith works. If they did, they’d realise it really isn’t an issue.

Absolutely, Tony.

That being said, the big question is what do we do about it. Is it enough of a problem to seriously mess with economies in order to cut CO2? You can be cool with the science and disagree with what it means.

I’m not sure why we have to “seriously mess with economics” in order to move forward on this.

Where I live at the moment is one of the most depressed areas of the US. We also have a big industrial base with lots of plant going idle. In the last year, the production of wind turbines in this area has doubled, creating hundreds of jobs and - apparently - increasing the number of wind turbines produced in the US by 75%.

There is also a house in downtown Cleveland (which gets winters of 0 degrees F and summers of 90 degrees F) that has been built with a super-efficient heating system and an energy recovery cooling system: http://tinyurl.com/smthme It’s on sale for an asking price of $329,000 (about £204,000).

There are a lot of technologies that we can be developing right now that will add jobs. We don’t have to force people to change overnight at great personal and employment expense in a recession. But we can look forward to what human beings will have to do by necessity anyway.

The whole nay-saying position seems to be a case of bad black-and-white thinking along the lines of “I can’t afford to buy a new $50,000 electric car today and get rid of my eight-year-old petrol car because I’m unemployed. So my solution will be to stick my fingers in my ears and hum a ditty and then declare that climate change isn’t happening and work to make sure change doesn’t happen.”