Will the Debate on Global Warming Ever be Over?

Now it's interesting that so many blogs (e.g., Liberal Values) and news reports (e.g., The BBC News) have the unmistakable slant that any question about the relationship between global warming and the sun is a now closed -- the debate is over.

This reflects a profound misunderstanding about how "science" works -- worse, there is the belief that certain theories are "established" and "closed" and any further uncertainty and questions are just masked conspiracy.

The ongoing "Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets" (CLOUD) experiment at CERN seeks to address the weakness in earlier studies that have investigated the relationship between climate and cosmic rays. As this article in Nature states:

. . . for a connection between cosmic rays and climate to be interesting, it does not have to account for the already well-explained climate history of the past 100 years. Even a small effect, to which Earth is only sensitive under some conditions, would be an exciting find. The CLOUD experiment does not have to overturn the consensus of the world's climatologists to be a success; it just has to throw a little light on some physics. "In a nutshell," says Kirkby, "we want to go after the microphysics between a cosmic ray and a cloud droplet or ice particle. How significant are they in the atmosphere, or in certain parts of the atmosphere?"

. . . how significant are they in the atmosphere, or in certain parts of the atmosphere?

These sound like important questions for which there are yet no answers.

Yet to listen to certain bloggers, e.g., "Liberal Values, you'd think that this type of investigation is waste of time, CERN's resources, and precious public research tax dollars.

Even the very term "debunking" (which means 'to expose the sham or falseness of') is about as inappropriate and amateurish as one can get when describing the natural adversarial process between scientists: experiments either succeed or fail to support existing hypotheses. Later or different experimental procedures and data can lead scientists to draw different conclusions. When this happens, it is NOT because the earlier experiments were a "sham" or "deliberately false."

It's completely fine not to have a clue about how science works -- there's many things about which I have little knowlege. However, this type of self-published reasoning and terminology demonstrates one thing and one thing only: not only does "Liberal Values and like bloggers have not a clue about how science works -- they don't seem to even have a clue that they don't have a clue. And that's bad . . .

If these are "Liberal Values," the hell with those values.

Disclosure about how well I'm trying to manipulate you: the headline of this post ('Will the Debate on Global Warming Ever be Over? ') has an Emotional Marketing Value Score of 22.22%. Not bad, & it's designed to appeal to both your intellectual and empathetic spheres with equal but somewhat muted ferocity.