RespectTradition
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Let's Prize Climate Skepticism | Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar | Cato Institute: Commentary
excerpts
Very good read. It doesn't try to defend climate change, nor does it condemn it. It simply talks about how science is supposed to work and how a great many people in the Extreme Environmental crowd wants to act like people who question climate change are anti-science. This is sad, since, as the article reminds us, real science is skeptical and is about questioning.
excerpts
The latest Nobel Prize for chemistry has confirmed what science students are taught early on: that all scientific theories are intrinsically uncertain; that science progresses through skepticism and attacks on existing theories, and that successful attacks are sometimes rewarded with Nobel Prizes. It follows that skepticism about global warming, far from being antiscience, is in keeping with the standard scientific approach and could one day fetch a skeptic a Nobel Prize
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When Schechtman first announced his discovery, his superiors were scornful, telling him he should review his basic chemistry textbooks. When he persisted, he was asked to leave his research group. His first paper on the topic was rejected by the Journal of Applied Physics. But Schechtman persevered, and he proved that what 99.9 percent of scientists believed was wrong.
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Science proves nothing beyond all doubt. Rather, it progresses by knocking down existing theories in favor of better ones, which in turn are subject to fresh attacks. Skepticism is at the very heart of the scientific method. The scientific approach is at odds not with climate-change skeptics, but with those who claim global warming is completely proven, contestable only by madmen and blackguards paid by oil companies.
Very good read. It doesn't try to defend climate change, nor does it condemn it. It simply talks about how science is supposed to work and how a great many people in the Extreme Environmental crowd wants to act like people who question climate change are anti-science. This is sad, since, as the article reminds us, real science is skeptical and is about questioning.