"Fact" in this case meaning something you believe with a religious fervor, despite the contrary evidence.
Oh, that's rich. It's precisely a lack of religious fervor that allowed me to become a skeptic when I was once upon a time an ardent "believer." As I became better versed with the actual science of it all I came to see the various logical flaws and the substantial inconclusiveness of the evidence. It is precisely the reason my top target for criticism is when people "believe" because it's "science."
If it's a fact, show us the evidence. You need to understand that we in the reason-based community aren't like you, and we won't accept faith-based claims.
So that's why you merely accept the claims of man-made global warming, and don't even bother to appraise the quality of the evidence for yourself.
That's a creative way to backpedal. Faced with the evidence that your claim that climate science predicted cooling was false, you respond by denying climate science existed. You certainly thought it existed when you incorrectly claimed it was predicting cooling. Climate science only seemed to vanish when you found it said the opposite of what you claimed.
If you had bothered to read
your own damn link you would see that I was merely agreeing with a point that its authors made. It is true that climate science as we know it today did not exist in the 70s. The study of earth's climate was done by individuals spread across multiple disciplines with an assortment of interests that were tangentially related to climate sciences. The "climate science community" if you will, was a decentralized group of scientists who were trying to study the Earth's climate for different reasons, in pursuit of separate primary interests. Climate science as an independent field came to exist as a merging of these separate interests into a common subject of interest. If you knew anything about climate science, you would already know this. But since you're an ignorant fool, you're learning something new and reacting violently to something that might challenge your dogmatic faith.
The "consensus" of the community at the time was that we were on the path toward an impending glacial period. It was, in fact, the only substantial theory that carried any degree of cohesive agreement. Truth is, there were few people at the time who were interested to bother with trying to extrapolate such long term, far reaching conclusions. Of course, the theory was substantially flawed. It was too quick a rush to judgement, based on far too small a sampling. Everyone knew that the planet seemed to have been on a cooling trend for a few decades, and the newest research and theories about solar and orbital cycles' effects on climate seemed to further indicate that we were heading in that direction. What was getting people worked up was that the trend seemed to be moving
quite fast. Since nobody had seen
any trend before (seeing as nobody had been doing much study on the matter), panic and arrogance got the best of them. The trend was undeniable. The causal link between cycles and climate was at least extremely difficult to dismiss. Three parts correlation, one part causation, balance with panic and serve over ice, and presto! The global cooling cocktail was a hearty flavor of the week.
Enter the politics....
It was an advisory council to LBJ who were charged with the task of coming up with a way to sell anti-pollution policy to the American public. They latched on to recent research that was suggesting that atmospheric levels of CO2 were on the rise. This rise was attributed to the consumption of fossil fuels for energy. This was pretty good evidence that human activity was having a significant impact on the environment. But what was missing was how this could be converted into a
need for policy. What was the impact on American lives? There was the potential health side effects pollution. (You really should read your own link; it lays out how the committee first wanted to make a public health case about pollutants.) But instead they came up with
a newly hatched hypothesis about CO2 levels becoming a direct factor for massive climate change.
This is important for you to understand:
The idea that the planet was warming and that CO2 was to blame was born inside a politician's round table chamber.
Now, I know what you're going to say....you're going to accuse me of weaving a conspiracy theory. But that's not at all what I'm doing. There's no conspiracy about it. There's no malicious plot afoot. The problem is a simple matter of bias and conflicting interests, as well as well intended but misguided flaws in reasoning. Once the political hypothesis of global warming was hatched government action and money was poured into studying the idea further. This, on its surface would sound all well and good, right? There was a big problem, however, because the same arrogance, rush to judgement, and over emphasis of geologically insignificant time scales took hold and led to an equally flawed conclusion; that the world was rushing head first into dramatic and catastrophic warming. The first attempts to study man-made global warming were inherently flawed
because they were attempts to study man-made global warming when they should have been attempts to study the climate and verify whether climate change was occurring at all, and what the causal agents actually were. The government funded studies
to measure global warming but not to
verify global warming.
This is how climate science, as we know it today, was born as in independent field of study. As people attempted to join the field, they were essentially required to sign onto the belief of man-made global warming as a result of CO2. There was no consideration for testing the hypothesis, it was merely assumed. It wasn't long before it became educational material. The scientists who were being paid with government grants to
study global warming "verified" that it was real, and next thing you knew was that budding scientists could not emerge without first accepting the hypothesis as scripture. Again, while you're probably going to accuse me of making a conspiracy theory I want to point out that
there's no conspiracy here, just a series of well intended but misguided events that have led to erroneous conclusions.
And that's a paranoid conspiracy theory.
And that's why you're not taken seriously. Your science and logic stinks, and all you have is conspiracy theories.
There is alot of evidence and research emerging that challenges the underlying assumptions of AGW theory. But you consistently reject it as being paid propaganda from oil companies. And you want to talk to me about alleged conspiracy theories?
