Post
Topic
Board Politics & Society
Re: Reddit’s science forum banned climate deniers.
by
AnonyMint
on 22/03/2014, 17:20:08 UTC
Spendulus, I think you're mistaking what the word falsify means with regard to the demarcation problem of science.

If you bothered to look it up, you'd see I'm stating that AGW claims are nothing more than psuedoscience and they need to make falsifiable statements in order for us to demarcate their claims as real science or cargo cult science. That's what falsify AGW means. It doesn't mean "disprove it" it means "make a statement that you can soundly claim with NEVER happen to support your theory".

Here's one from evolution: "We will never find modern day rabbit fossils embedded in pre-Cambrian rock."

AGW alarmists have yet to come up with one single falsifiable statement regarding man's impact on carbon. I don't doubt there is science to be had here, but it is not in making alarmist calls surrounding claims of few or several degrees temperature differences over periods of time. Instead, science is making bold claims, like "If X then Y" or "If X then not Z". Alarmists are unable to make such claims, so the only thing the rest of the scientific world can do is scratch their heads and shrug because there's not a damn thing to test or verify. This is the crux of the issue. You can't refute something that's not making scientific claims, which is why AGW alarmism has perpetuated itself for so damn long. Sure, they have a consensus in their little journals, but FFS the Vatican has a consensus on the virgin Mary! That a few individuals who choose to take the title "climatologist" decide to also be alarmist doesn't tell us anything. There weren't even degree programs for climatology as a standalone degree till 2001. It seems the required credentials for being a climatologist is that you have a degree in one of the following: physics, meteorology, biology, zoology, botany, paleontology, geology, entomology, microbiology, oceanography, astronomy, math, computer science, or statistics....

...

Hence my argument that we should falsify AGW claims, in other words, MAKE THEM TESTABLE. Someone needs to make a claim that can be falsified according to Karl Popper's demarcation solution. Then we can test and/or observe.

If there's anything I've learned from this thread, it's that none of you know about the demarcation problem of science, and really have no business debating this from either angle. Falsification is what separates science from pseudoscience, and pseudoscience is rampant in this thread.

Bravo, but I said that last year (and 22 days before you did) in this thread:

What I am saying to you is that these are not science precisely because they can't be falsified.

It is no different in that respect than religion. Is denying religion because it can't be falsified irrational? That is why we call it faith and not science. Please learn the distinction.

It is modeling masturbation.

"If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts." - Albert Einstein.

Meaning we can make models that say exactly the opposite by making different assumptions. That is why it isn't science. Science is something real that can be tested and falsified. How can we falsify that soot from some place is causing ice to increase or decrease some place else? It is only a model and can never be tested. Statistical correlation does not warrant cause and effect. That is a basic tenet of statistical theory.





Hence my argument that we should falsify AGW claims, in other words, MAKE THEM TESTABLE. Someone needs to make a claim that can be falsified according to Karl Popper's demarcation solution. Then we can test and/or observe.
Well, they make falsifyable claims all the time.
"Burning of fossile fuel  --> more CO2 in the air"
"More CO2 --> more heat absorption"
"Higher temperatures --> increased melting of ice"
"Higher temperatures --> more water evaporation"
and so on

But none of those can falsify AGW. We can falsify some of those claims (ice in a laboratory for example but not cumulative polar ice because we can't isolate other variables), but we can't falsify the following:

  • Those claimed effects are occurring, e.g. the warmists utterly failed on their temperature predictions.
  • Those claimed effects are done exclusively by man, i.e. anthropogenic or the 'A' in 'AGW'.
  • Those claimed effects even if done exclusively by man are causing global climate variation.

There is a discussion upthread between Spendulus and myself wherein it is explained why we can't falsify AGW, because we don't have a closed system to experiment with (we can't isolate all the variables). It is downthread from the above quoted posts. Perhaps someone else can find it and re-quote it in this context. I am out of free time to read further downthread from there.