Saturday, October 04, 2008

Dogma or science?

What distinguishes science from religion as an ideology is the adherence of science to the standard of empirical evidence to validate its key constructs and contentions.

Here is the latest summation of satellite temperature data from 1979 to the present. What the data show is significant cooling, so much so that all the previous warming of the past 100 years has been supplanted. Moreover:

  • Since there was global cooling from ~1940 to ~1979, this means there has been no net warming since ~1940, in spite of an ~800% increase in human emissions of carbon dioxide. This indicates that the recent warming trend was natural, and CO2 is an insignificant driver of global warming.
Those who claim that climate change is a fact, a scientific certainty, a facing yet another crisis in their adherence to green, ideological dogma, rather than the principles of scientific enquiry.

Incidentally, NASA just published a report indicating that the past year has seen the fewest sunpots and low solar wind activity. Perhaps this is a stronger, alternative scientific explanation for climate change as a pre-dominantly natural phenomenon.