Declension wrote:
ruveyn wrote:
We are being urged by the Luddites and the eco-phreaks and the governments to become poor and humble.
There are "Luddites" on both sides of the fence. Anthropogenic climate change is a strange and abstract thing to believe in, and the evidence for it is indirect and requires mathematical analysis. A certain type of Luddite will reject it simply for that reason.
Unseen causes are difficult to comprehend correctly. For starters one must have a -theory- which is well tested and corroborated.
Unfortunately "climate science" is based on no such theory. Climate is an emergent property of weather which itself is the result of chaotic dynamics, which is notably intractable to mathematical methodology. Hence "climate science" is based more on -models- (the result of fitting curves to data) than it is on solid physics. The problem with -model- is that there are just too many variable parameters at work and one will end up was a hodge podge like Ptolemaic cosmology filled with epicycles and deferents and crystal spheres. That was what astronomy was like before Copernicus and Kepler led to Newtonian gravity based theory of accounting for the motion of celestial bodies.
Weather and climate are currently in a pre-Keplerian, pre-Newtonian state (so to speak).
I think of myself as a rational skeptic rather than a Luddite and I am underwhelmed by the current "scientific" consensus on anthropogenic global warming. Please recall that at one time (and not that long ago) almost ALL physicists believed in aether (it does not exist) and almost NO physicists believed in atoms (they do exist, ask any survivor from Hiroshima).
ruveyn