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All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.

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Comments 27901 to 27950:

Tom Curtis at 13:00 PM on 29 August 2015

Here’s what happens when you try to replicate climate contrarian papers

mancan18 @12, your account of the advance of science is too simplistic. It neglects the strong emperical vein in Aristotle's philospophy, which he put into practise especially as regards biology. It also neglects the development of that empericism by Roger Bacon (considered by some the inventor of modern science). It also neglects that the early scientific revolution developed out of medieval scientific enquiries, best illustrated by the fact that Newton's research in fact mirrored that of Roger Bacon.

Worse, you demonstrate an oversimplistic idea of empericism in science. It was the geocentrist Tycho Brahe that was the great observational astronomer, not Copernicus. And his 'refutation' of Copernicism stood at least in part on emperical grounds, notably the absence of stellar paralax (predicted by Copernicus), and initially by a wrong relation with regard to the parallax of Mars. While Copernicus's theory was in some ways emperically superior, was "intrinsically no more accurate than Ptolomy's", and commonly predicted "errors of a day" in the timing of lunar eclipses, not to mention the wrong length of year. (Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution p 288)

Likewise Galileo's theories faced emperical falsification from the start, predicting only one tide per day (for instance).

The fact is the transition from scholasticism to science was a messy affair. We cannot deprive Galileo's contemporarys of the mantle of scientist just because they were geocentrists, or employed some scholastic arguments unless we wish also to exclude Copernicus (who argued for his theory based on the "perfection" of the circle") and Newton (who was also an alchemist).

mancan18 at 09:18 AM on 29 August 2015

Here’s what happens when you try to replicate climate contrarian papers

M Tucker at @5 and Ger@6

I think you will find that at the turn of 16th and 17th century when Galileo lived, that there was little scientific evidence for any theory. Science at that time was more philosophical, based on the thinking of Aristotle. This way of thinking came from the Greeks who preferred to philosophise. They used to just sit around and think about things rather than make actual observations and do experiments to collect data that supported their theories. The prevailing scientific method at the cusp of the 16th and 17th century was to only propose theories that reinforced the Bible. The vast majority of the "scientists" at the time studied in monasteries or were alchemists trying to convert lead into gold. Copernicus was a monk and proposed his heliocentric theory as an alternative to the Ptolemic biblical geocentric theory only as an interesting thought exercise which he saw as a much simpler explanation. He supported his heliocentric ideas with geometry but was too afraid to publish until he was on his death bed. It is no coincident that the spread of the Copernican theory to scientists like Galileo was only possible due to the recent invention of printing. This allowed ideas and findings to be spread more widely. Galileo at least made observations and collected evidence. His work on falling bodies was certainly unique since the prevailing Aristolitean scientific view at the time was that heavier objects fell faster that lighter objects. And we already know that through his observations of Jupiter and the Moon through his recently developed telescope, he gathered evidence of the correctness of the Copernican theory. This correctness was further refined by Kepler, also a deeply religious man, through proposing that the planets moved in elliptical orbits, a position that took him 20 years to come to using the highly accurate data collected by Tycho Brahe, who incidently still believed in a biblical geocentric theory. The whole issue, heliocentric versus geocentric, was finally put beyond all doubt later in the 17th century by Newton, incidentally another deeply religious man, with his Theory of Gravity and the invention of Calculus using the co-ordinate geometry that had recently been proposed by Descarte. Galileo was one of the first scientists who used a modern scientific approach (hypothesise, propose a theory, create experiments, observe, collect data, and test) to justify his ideas. This is quite unlike the many so called "scientists" at the time who were more philosophers who conducted few expirements, collected little supporting data and preferred to use the bible as evidence to justify for their ideas. Galileo was a modern scientific thinker unlike most of his contemporaries. The Galilean story just shows that all scientific ideas are the meticulous work of many scientists pursuing a common truth.

Theories, where the observations and evidence are contry, are thrown out. Theories, where observations and evidence are supporting, are further refined and become increasingly accepted as scientific truth until there is only one scientifically indisputable piece of evidence that can falsify the theory. In climate science, the contrarians have not found a single piece of evidence that disproves the fundamental scientific idea that rising greenhouse gases will warm the planet. Also, they have not proposed a single coherent alternative scientific idea, nor provided a single piece of indisputable evidence that explains why the current warming is happening. All they have provided are some interesting distracting talking points, which, so far, have only served to further reinforce the idea that AGW and CC is actually happening.

Just asking. What are the views of the primary scientists who actually collect the data from the primary sources (i.e those on the ice flows gathering the ice core data, those collecting the glacial retreat data, those gathering the sediment data, those collecting the carbon dioxide data, those actually creating and verifying the climate models etc.)? Are there any contrarians amongst the primary scientists who actually collect the data, or are the contrarians only found amongst the secondary scientists who use the data collected by others, in an effort to debunk the basic AGW and CC proposition?

One Planet Only Forever at 07:09 AM on 29 August 2015

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