Update – 04 August 2006 – GRIM, posting at Blackfive comes up with an interesting essay about the scientific community and various scientists’ persuasions about global warming and climate change.
Beware when the words scientific and consensus are used together.
It’s interesting how Newsweek Magazine, long known in conservative circles to be politically left, seems to have changed it’s mind about long-term climate change. They couldn’t be merely harping about the latest trends in junk science, could they?
Image (Courtesy NASA SOHO): A three-day movie of the Sun reveals why this seething monster is the main source of climate effects on Earth. After watching this for a few moments, the notion that mankind could have a more significant effect than the Sun seems patently ridiculous. Just look at the bubbling cauldron of the photosphere and the massive plasma ejections! Awesome!
Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee writes an interesting editorial about current climate junk science and the political outcroppings in California:
Global warming, whether theory or fact, spawns political heat
Thirty-one years ago, Newsweek magazine published an extensive account of what it described as a growing scientific consensus of global climate change.
“There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production,” Newsweek said, adding, “The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it” and “to scientists these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather.”Global warming? Not quite. The Newsweek article about the emerging scientific consensus was about global cooling and the potential onset of a mini-ice age, akin to the one that chilled the Northern Hemisphere between 1600 and 1900. [See the facts about the Maunder Minimum and mini-ice-age — Ed.]
Now we are told, of course, that there’s a growing scientific consensus about global warming, with hydrocarbon emissions from humankind’s economic activities the chief culprit, although there’s a significant body of contrary opinion.
Whether global warming is a scientific fact or, alternatively, a theory being propagandized for ideological reasons is still an open question. But it clearly is a political fact and in politics, perceptions are always more powerful than reality, whatever it may be.
Walters goes on to write about how all this plays out in California politics.
Now, it’s no surprise to me that the politically-left Newsweek jumped all over the latest junk science in their October 1997 issue devoted to global warming. Shame on them for being junk science mongers.
The words scientific and consensus used together are always a sham. True science requires that proof be demonstrated — quad erat demonstratum — which is never the case with scientific consensus.