Quote:
Originally Posted by Millstone
Man-made climate change has been proven?
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I didn't say it was proven, I said it is supported by overwhelming empirical evidence (in peer reviewed studies, to boot).
As crhayes points out, scientific theories aren't "proven", in the sense that showing you a million white sheep doesn't prove that all sheep are white. A theory is scientific if it makes
testable predictions and is hence
falsifiable; that is, if there is a logical possibility of proving it false. Therefore you could disprove my claim that all sheep are white by producing a black sheep.
(This, incidentally, is why creationism and "intelligent design" are not scientific theories. Since they make no testable predictions, they cannot be falsified.)
The evidence for anthropocentric climate change is very wide and deep, coming from a multitude of studies in a variety of disciplines, from geology to meteorology to biology to oceanography. The case against it is sporadic, mostly non-rigorous, and originates mainly from funders and researchers with conflicts of interest, i.e. who benefit materially from delaying policy efforts to address climate change.
Since the theory is a complex model of prediction in a complex, dynamic system with emergent characteristics, it is technically impossible to make an exact prediction of what will happen. Instead, climate modeling seeks to take into account as many variables as possible so models can sketch out statistical probabilities.
Changes to the climate system are not linear but chaotic, lurching suddenly and disruptively from one dynamic to another. This has already happened and has been observed and measured in detail.
If anything, climate models to date have tended to under-estimate both the speed and disruptiveness of actual changes to the climate system. Scientists are regularly discovering new feedback mechanisms - many of them positive feedback loops that actually accelerate warming, like the melting of the Siberian permafrost - and adjusting their models to take these into consideration.
Of course, none of this will make any difference to you. If you have refused until now to undertake an honest review of the scientific literature on climate change, nothing I write on some forum is going to change your mind.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Millstone
lol, hippies
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Because nothing says "hippie" like tens of thousands of people with PhDs in science, tenured professorships in research institutions and publication in peer reviewed scientific journals. lol.