Once again, the appeal to authority. Notice how Dessler averts his eyes from the fact, the uncontravertable fact, that many on the list of 400 are experts on climatology, several have served as IPCC expert reviewers, and several state for the record that they used to believe the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, but recent data has made them skeptical.
But if he noticed that, he might make him have to admit that the science behind global warming, oh excuse me, climate change, is very far from settled. Furthermore, it seems to be moving farther away from "settled" rather than closer. Several of the skeptics, old and new, mentioned that they talked to many colleagues who agreed with them in private but were afraid to risk grants by going public with their doubts.
And before he gratuitously insults Freeman Dyson again, he might find someone who knows as much about computer models as Dyson does, to attempt to answer Dyson's charges about the unverifiability of models with large numbers of arbitrary parameters.
This is hardly the first time in scientific progress that scientists have made a real breakthrough, then gone overboard with the implications. In the late nineteenth century, how many hoped and believed that every illness would be explained by bacterial infection? Surely it was only a matter of time before all the bacteria were identified. But alas, it turned out that the theory, though a magnificent advance in medicine, was not sufficient to explain cancer or even the common cold. |
