Jeff Fink wrote: >I last posted on the global warming subject several months ago with a >question that was not adequately answered by the global warming believers. >So, here it is again. > > >Why were the climate experts of the late seventies warning us of a coming >ice age while we were in the early stages of global warming? Were they that >stupid, or was it that an ice age didn’t fit the agenda of the world’s >powerful elite? If the experts were that stupid in the relatively recent >past, can we realistically believe today’s experts have it right now?
I know little about global warming, but I think I know the answer to that, based on the history of other research. My hypothesis: In the late 1970s, researchers did not have as much data as they have now, and they did not have as many tools, such as satellites or the array of temperature probes the Japanese use to establish ocean temperature, or the supercomputer now used to model the data. (Supercomputers from that era were about as good as today's desktop computers.) They depended more on theory and guesswork, and less on observation and experimental data. So they were wrong. Along exactly the same lines -- to repeat the example I posted earlier -- most biologists interested in genetics prior to 1952 were working on the assumption that the genetic code must be expressed in proteins. They thought the code must be very complicated, and they assumed that only a complicated and huge molecule could contain it. They were not good at information theory. Watson heard their theories and could not make head or tail of them because they were so complicated, so he ignored them. It turned out the theories were not only complicated, they were nonsense. These people were not "experts" at all. Or, you might say, they were experts in a nonexistent subject. I expect that most present-day cold fusion theories are also nonsense, and it likely that the "atmospheric experts" of the 1970s were also "experts" in imaginary ideas that had no application to the real world. Some of them may have learned more, and they may have becomes today's real experts, but they were able to do that because the taxpayers gave them megabucks to buy loads of tools and rockets and other gadgets that allowed real observations and real experiments, which led to real science. All real science is grounded in experiments and observation. There is one other reason so obvious it hardly needs mentioning. There is no question the world is heating up. Whether CO2 is the cause, or the only cause, is perhaps less clear, but the heating trend is beyond debate. You do not need to be an expert to see the glaciers are receding everywhere on earth, and record temperatures are being recorded in most countries. So the weather itself is giving us undeniable data, and we now know what the theory must model to be right. In the 1970s the trend was less clear. - Jed
