2012-11-27

Science Is Never Settled

Which is why I find it bizarre, if not outrageous, that people speak as if global warming is a settled dispute.

Forcing public policy to react - perhaps over react - to this is foolish. People who claim certainty on anything always scare the crap out of me. After all, we can't quantify what makes them think this way. So they can manage to convince voters to follow them and never really have to face the music if they're wrong.

How can anyone really, really, really be sure the earth will continue on this path and whether at its most profound level we have the ability to even change anything?

Heck, what are the probabilities we can achieve anything with what we're proposing?

As I've mentioned in the past, man can be supremely arrogant. Nature, yet, always manages to humble us.

It's presumed and believed that science purpose is to seek truth.

No it's not. Philosophy makes that part of their business but not science.

Science is only interested in experimenting; testing. Testing exhaustively. A scientists takes failure, I reckon, better than the average person. Since failure can't really kill you, it makes you stronger

You ain't ever gonna convince me global warming has been "scientifically proven."

That's just bull shit.

We always hope science can "prove" the other guy wrong. But to do that is to not understand science. I'm no scientist but even I grasp all it does is build on past ideas and figures. One simple lineage historians are fond of using is the Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Einstein lineage to describe the evolution of science with the Ancient Greeks as the base. Each built on one another. No one was "proven" wrong. They may as well be one person.

Same with philosophy. The Enlightenment didn't "prove" religion to be "wrong." It just taught us a different way to interpret, digest and think about it. They built on Humanist thinkers to state their case.

So. For this climate change "debate." Find another way to sell it if you want public policy to follow.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Mysterious and anonymous comments as well as those laced with cyanide and ad hominen attacks will be deleted. Thank you for your attention, chumps.