Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

When Jane Science met Joe Politics, guess which one got corrupted?

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At Townhall, Jonah Goldberg analyzes the recent “Cooling on Global Warming”:

Why has climate change lost its oomph? Plumer lays out some of the reasons, though he minimizes the damage greens have inflicted on their own credibility thanks to the 2009 Climategate email scandal and wildly overstated predictions. For instance, the United Nations predicted there would be 50 million “climate refugees” by 2010. Notably, the islands of the Caribbean would see massive population losses as denizens fled for their lives. Never happened. (Meanwhile, the UN Environment Program has removed the map of predicted devastation from its website.)

Note: Climate change is not, in principle, UD’s “thang” exactly – after all, in a designed universe, humans could indeed futz up the climate – but the key question is, have we? In the long history of Earth and its life forms, do we make that much difference in a few decades? What the fanatical Climategate scientists did was subvert a complex and difficult discussion of the issues around that question into broomstickery, and they too are now, it seems, feeling the fallout. Lesson for all.

Comments
Gil, @1: This has always been an issue with me; I can take a system which has been designed, which we know exactly how it should behave, and spend days debugging it to find that 1 bit somewhere was "out of whack", and until found, the system ran upside down and backwards from expectations; much later, other issues are found and the system now runs with the expected timing; and on and on (there's always 1 more bug); but these guys can make a computer "climate model" that reliably and accurately predicts the behavior of the entire planet, 100's of years into the future, without who knows how many variables accounted for, or understood ??es58
April 28, 2011
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I don't agree , AT ALL, with this Jonah Goldberg person but indeed while creationism is not directly related to the global warming claim it does point out a point we suspected. The same crowd, with the same quality and quantity of evidence, and same upper middle class motivations for a cleaner place, once again leads and is led down the garden path. The same crowd as knows evolution is proven. I never thought it possible puffs of smoke from man could make a dent in such a powerful planet. If global warming is a dud it will reflect greatly in the public mind on other issues like origin ideas. Suddenly the public might give a big ear to organized creationism(s) criticisms. Then it would really get warm around here.Robert Byers
April 28, 2011
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Yes the media are still going on and on about climate change (yawn...).NZer
April 27, 2011
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Correction: R$D should have been R&D. No, I don't make really big bucks writing computer models. The dollar sign in LS-DYNA, my preferred FEA modeling software, is the comment character I type on a regular basis, which instructs the solver to ignore a line of text as a comment, and not attempt to interpret or compile it.GilDodgen
April 27, 2011
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I downloaded the climategate .zip file and looked at its contents. The source code that graphs the now-infamous hockey stick was kludged. It includes an array of hard-coded coefficients which guarantees, even if random data are entered, that the hockey stick graph will be produced. The entire global-warming thing is scientific toast. The computer models of the 1990s that predicted global-warming catastrophe were instrumental in promoting GW hysteria. The predictions of these models have all been demonstrated to be wrong, because the models were based on incorrect assumptions, motivated by an ideological pre-commitment, just like Darwinism. These computer models have now been empirically falsified. That's how science works. I program finite-element-analysis computer models in aerospace R$D for a living, and I am constantly aware that my models must be empirically verified, because I want to get things right. No such standard exists for those in the pseudosciences of Darwinism and Global Warming Hysteria. Note the change in terminology: It was once global warming. (Oops, the climate has not warmed for 15 years, in direct contradiction to the predictions of the computer models, and it's now cooling.) So, let's call it "climate change." (Oops, the climate is always changing, so that tactic makes us look like fools for stating the obvious.) So now we have "global climate disruption." How convenient -- a theory that explains everything and nothing at the same time, just like Darwinism. Because I'm an engineer who deals with reality, I have a nose for this kind of quackery. I can smell it from a mile away.GilDodgen
April 27, 2011
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