David Scheidt wrote:
On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 1:36 AM, Onno Meyer <[email protected]> wrote:
Climate Science is a lot like Tobacco Science:
1) They describe complex systems with thousands of causes and
thousands of effects.
2) The exact cause-and-effect mechanisms are not always known,
and there are random factors, too. ("Uncle Ed smoked a pack
every day, and he lived to the ripe old age of 99." -- many
others didn't.)
That's what the climate change deniers want you to think. It's not true.
No, there are plenty of weather effects we don't understand all that
well. Those weather effects are often irrelevant to the issue of climate
change, but that doesn't make his statement incorrect. Even ignoring
denialist camps, there's considerable variation in predictions of
long-term climate change, mostly based on uncertainties about the
behavior of various feedback loops.
\Any reasonable expert would claim a high likelihood that both
cimate change and cancer from smoking are real, not certainty.
No. It's quite reasonable to make the claim that climate change is certain,
that it's caused by man burning fossil fuels, and it's happening now.
Actually, I'd call them comparable; there is no reasonable case for
either theory being incorrect. The statistical case for cancer from
smoking is overwhelming (I'm not sure of the size of available sample
sets, but it's a ridiculous number of standard deviations away from an
expected random distribution).
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