The debate over climate change is..
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Re:n/t (Score:5, Informative)
No, all of science is debatable. Even Newton and Einstein.
The ones insisting that science is "settled" and undebatable are the same old religious authority figures dressed in new clothes.
Re:n/t (Score:5, Informative)
except its misleading and FUD.
Finding where within error bars. I don't think any actual scientist in the field would call it " substantially."
Really, heartland and it's peoples are know liars. Find better sources.
http://www.skepticalscience.co... [skepticalscience.com]
Re:The true source of global warming? (Score:4, Informative)
The amount of actual heat produced by burning stuff is miniscule compared to the energy added by greenhouse warming, about 0.028 W/m^2 vs. 2.9 W/m^2. It's not worth worrying about at this point.
Re:n/t (Score:5, Informative)
Newton is a good example. We know for a fact that his 'laws' (or more accurately, models) of motion are wrong. We've known that for a very long time (that is why relativity was needed, Newton's model, for example, failed to predict the orbits of the planets accurately).
I think you missed one of the major points of Newton's contributions to the Scientific Revolution. Before Newton (and especially before Descartes and other scientists of his generation), science was concerned with "causes" and "truth" and whether explanations were "right" or "wrong." But Descartes and others tried to move toward mechanical explanations of the universe, which didn't require the same rigid definitions of "cause" in scientific theories like Aristotle's physics did.
Newton's physics required an even stronger break: he asked people to accept his purely mathematical model as a scientific explanation. He postulated unseen "forces" like gravity to make the universe work. These were very weird ideas to scientists of the time, who associated the influence of unseen "forces" acting at a distance with occult traditions -- NOT science.
But Newton changed the entire goal of science. It was NOT to come up with an ultimate explanation or cause for observed effects, but to provide predictive models, regardless of whether those models carry any formal "explanation" for what is observed. The idea of "right" or "wrong" assumes that there's some sort of absolute "truth" which science is uncovering about the universe. But it's not.
Therefore, as you rightly note, we still teach Newton's laws as the first physics most students learn. They are not "wrong" at all, since that concept doesn't apply. They are simply known now to be a mathematical model which is approximate and only works best at certain scales. For other scales (extreme speeds, extreme gravity, etc.), we need to use another model for accuracy. But, as we know, there are plenty of places where Einstein's "laws" seem to lack explanation too -- hence all of the discussion about dark matter and dark energy, which are needed in the models to keep the math working out.
That's part of the problem with those who find concepts like "dark matter" and "dark energy" to be suspicious. People often act like these are somehow flaws or show that our physical laws are "wrong." But right now they are just other mathematical correctives to help create accurate predictions -- that's mostly what science is. It is not concerned with "ultimate causes." However, there does seem to be an emphasis on "elegant theories," so if the math of dark matter and dark energy can be incorporated into some other mathematical model in an "elegant" way, that will probably be seen as "progress."
Newton's laws were never proven "wrong" -- they just lost sufficient predictive power under extreme circumstances.
Re:n/t (Score:4, Informative)
Data and modeling are two different things. The data shows irrefutable evidence of global warming. Modeling is a new-fangled way of trying to put data into a context and then extrapolate into the future. Modeling is improving with every software revision and computer advance, but errors in modeling DO NOT refute the basic data showing global warming. Modeling is only as good as the programer that writes the program. Its results are subject to the context and assumptions of the programer. So, the models are imperfect, and they always will be. Anyone that thinks otherwise is an idiot.