Alarmist climate science and the principle of exclusion | Watts Up With That?In 1837, Charles Darwin presented a paper to the British Geological Society arguing that coral atolls were formed not on submerged volcanic craters, as argued by pioneering geologist Charles Lyell, but on the subsidence of mountain chains.
The problem, as Darwin saw it, was that corals can not live more than about 30 feet below the surface and therefore they could not have formed of themselves from the ocean floor. They needed a raised platform to build upon.
However, the volcanic crater hypothesis didnt satisfy Darwin; he thought the atoll shape was too regular to have been the craters of old volcanos. There were no atoll formations on land, Darwin reasoned; why would there be such in the ocean? Therefore, Darwin proposed that corals were building upon eroded mountains, an hypothesis that, he wrote happily, solves every difficulty.....
Darwin didnt have any actual physical evidence to support these two hypotheses: he arrived at them deductively, through the principle of exclusion. A deductive conclusion is reached through theoryif X, then logically Y must be soas opposed to induction, which builds a theory out of empirical data. The principle of exclusion works from the premise that there is no other way of accounting for the phenomenon......my error has been a good lesson to me never to trust in science to the principle of exclusion.[2]
While Darwin rejected the principle of exclusion, at least as a primary scientific tool, alarmist climate science has not. Instead, the principle of exclusion is one of the most-cited arguments to support the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis.
For example, in a 2010 interview with the BBC on the Climategate scandal, Climate Research Unit (CRU) head Phil Jones was asked: What factors convince you that recent warming has been largely man-made? Joness reply: The fact that we cant explain the warming from the 1950s by solar and volcanic forcing. In other words, Jones is using the principle of exclusion: while he and his colleagues cant prove that human activities are causing warming, they cant find any other explanation.
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The AGW hypothesis may well prove to be correct. However, the simplest and most logical explanation for climate change, in the past, now, and in the future, is natural variation. If so, then the AGW hypothesis, based on the treacherous principle of exclusion, will go the way of Darwins two hypotheses on the Glen Roy tracks and the creation of coral atolls.
And so, while alarmist climate scientists are quite within their rights to propose the AGW hypothesis, they should also be cautious: AGW is an hypothesis. It has not reached the status of a scientific theory (it has not passed enough scientific tests for that), nor is it a scientific fact, as the public is told. Instead, alarmist climate scientists have thrown the proper scientific caution to the winds to make claims that arent supported by the evidence, and to smear those who point out the possible errors in their hypothesis.
ten years from now Old Rocks will be telling everybody that the scientists never said AGW was going to be catastrophic.....it was only the media getting confused....and here are the links to prove it!
hahahaha