[AMF]

Both your's and R13's post revolve around a continuing flaw: you both continue to believe that "a theory can be proven wrong without other theories to take its place."

That is simply not scientific (or helpful) because you have presented no serious disconfirming evidence to support your claim. We haven't mentioned at all, for example, the causal mechanisms that link human activity to global warming. We've just been talking about the state of scientific opinion. And I claim that the overwhelming majority of scientists who study it beleive in anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

What you have mentioned is that there are anomalies in the AGW research program. And I fully agree with that. There are anomalies, sure are, darn right. Lots and lots of them.

For example, last year in my hometown it was colder than the year before.

But, again, I say: "so what"? Scientific progress has nothing to do with the presence or absence of anamolies. Instead, it has everything to do with how well research programs stack up against each other in the face of these anomalies.

So, R13 is correct to state that " If a scientific theory can not explain anomalies that are proven to exist, then that theory must be examined very carefully, to determine whether or not it should be considered a valid theory anymore."

BUT, disproving a theory (or 'research program') doesn't happen until a better theory comes along. No theory is disproven, except maybe in political circles, until a better theory comes along.

An analogy would be me telling a child "the sky is blue becuase of X" and he replies: "No it isn't" And I say "well, then what is the reason?" and he says" I dont' know but I do know it's not becuase of X!"

What good does that do? None whatsoever. The kid could keep on like this ad infinitum, and no progress is made.

Another example: Before newton, people believed in the copernican model, or in ether, or that something else kept the planets in their orbits. When did they get proven wrong? NOT when people pointed out strange anamolies in their preedictions - they'd been doing that for centuries - but until people had something better to replace copernicus with, did he get cast aside. And that happened when Newton came along. Ok, so, then when was newton cast aside? Anamolies in his theories built up for almost two hundreds years, IIRC. But did people say he was wrong? No. They simply said his theory wasn't good enough. He was only cast aside when Einstein came along. And what did Einstein do? He said, yeah, ok, Newton is pretty much right, but let me show you this better theory that explains as much as Newton did, and then a bit more. And then Newton was cast aside. And so then in the inter-war era a bunch of physicists studied anomalies in Einsteins' theory, for decades. But at no point was Einstein cast aside until Quantum mechanics was 'discovered'.

In other words, to simply claim a prevailing/commonly accepted or debated theory is "wrong" without putting forth a counter proposition means one is simply being contrary for the sake of argument. A person who argues for no reason other than to argue has a strange motivation. One that is, perhaps, just knee-jerk dogmatic at its' core.

So, to reliably call into question the AGW research program, you have to present another research program, and it must:

1) Explain as much as AGW does
2) Make predictions that can be tested (ie: are falsifiable)
3) Explain at least some current anomalies in the AGW research program

Do I sound like a stuck record yet?

Now, a few posts back, I made an honest proposal. It was "provide me with a testable supposition that would convince you that you were wrong. What criteria would need to be met for you to change your mind? Tell me that, and then I'll go and test it. And answer me this: if I meet your criteria, then will you change your mind? If I take whatever reasonable test you propose, and meet it, then do you think it possible to change your mind?"

If you are not willing to do that, then that is strong evidence that your beliefs are based solely on dogma, habit, ideology, or self-interest, because it indicates that you are unwilling to change them based on testable criteria (ie: facts).

Now, as to your comment about this Jones fella. No scientist worth his salt would be accepted if his work wasn't reproducible. If he actually did say "We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" then he is not a decent scientist - again, for a scientist to withhold data is just professional suicide. Do you have a reference?

Given the highly politicized nature of the global warming debate, and the proclivity for right-wingers to seize upon a single anomaly and use that to loudly claim that AGW is totally inconcievably mind bogglingly wrong, I suspect that Jones is a bit wary of releasing his data and then having someone make outrageous claims by some non-scientist who take some small portion of the data out of context. I'm sure you know what I mean.

But, more to the point, there you go again: you find a single anomaly, this one person, and based on that single datum claim that the entire body of AGW is therefore disproven.

Where would we be today if that had been done to Newtonian physics or modern chemistry or any other famous research program in the past? I can see it now: "Hey, newton, your theory sounds good, but although you predict 99.99% of the movement out there, you can't predict pluto's orbit, so your theory is obviously TOTALLY WRONG."

Huh? Makes no sense to do that, right? We'd still be in caves if that was the way we "did" science, because every time a new theory came along someone would say "hey, it doesn't prove every single thing, so it's obviously 100% totally completely irrevocably wrong and if our government spends even one penny on this then the terrorists have already won!"

And that is why scientific progress relies upon competing research programs, rather than simply people spending their time looking for anomalies in existing theories.

Again, I eagerly await a better research program than AGW.

Thanks,

AMF

PS: Oh, I totally agree that "Temperature "measurements" before the mid-19th Century are based on "proxies", i.e. indirect temperature measurements such as tree rings, boreholes, isotope ratios, etc. ...Even direct measurements of "average global temperature" (whatever that is) are fraught with uncertainty...etc"...This is all sort of a 'duh' statement to me, and I thought I had addressed this point in my earlier post, so I saw no need to elaborate.

But, in any case, the only thing your statement is doing is saying "Hey, its' hard to measure historical temperatures"

To go from that to "AGW is wrong" is, for the reasons outlined above is erroneous and irrelevant - until it leads to a theory or set of theories that supplant AGW.

And, of course, it will *always* be hard to measure historical temperatures, and we will always have to rely on proxies. But "proxy" does not equal "false". Hell, if we took that attitude, the entire field of astronomy would be thrown out wit the bathwater.

I repeat, again and again, that theories will always have anomalies and some of them are inevitably based on artifacts of the data measurements, such as these. But that is irrelevant to 'disproving' the theory in question.

Again, I eagerly await a better research program than AGW. Until is happens, well, it's all just whistling past the graveyard.

Until you can show me a theory or body of theories that explains global warming better than AGW, then you are simply saying "no, you're wrong" without actually furthering the debate.