<p>aegrisomnia, you’ve fallen into the trap discussed by DocT above: the difference between being scientifically “incontrovertible” and being incontrovertible for practical purposes. Aside from the previous examples of spherical shape of the earth and the ellipse of its orbit, as DocT (correctly) pointed out above, in practical terms Newtonian physics is “incontrovertible” in terms of making decisions in the everyday world, even though it is not only “controvertible”, it’s been scientifically disproved as a statement of absolute scientific precision. </p>
<p>While AGW is not incontrovertible in the scientific sense that doesn’t mean that it’s not incontrovertible in the same sense that Newtonian physics is.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t call using the standard definition of words “falling into a trap”. Incontovertible means “cannot be shown to be wrong”. Perhaps scientists should use precise language, as in “there is strong evidence for AGW” or “AGW has not been shown to be an invalid theory”. Saying that it is a fact or certain, even for all practical purposes, is unscientific and therefore it doesn’t seem surprising to me that scientists with this official position would draw criticism. Criticism is deserved, just like you’d criticize a priest for swearing in a situation where 99 percent of the population would swear as well. Principles are a good, not a silly or dangerous, thing to have… especially since scientists are people, hence fallible, and using two different standards when discussing a topic may lead to trouble. We all think car salesmen are crooks when they harp on the positives to the customer and complain about the negatives elsewhere; so scientists get a free ride when it comes to convincing lay men as opposed to convincing the scientifically literate? Sounds more like politics to me.</p>
<p>In the context of a non-scientific discussion about what is common sense, no. I would, however, seriously doubt the credentials of any scientist who claims that it is impossible to disprove that the world isn’t a flat disk on the back of a turtle. I can think of several ways to disprove that hypothesis; but to seriously practice science, you need to understand that causality and continuity of objective reality are assumptions, not facts, about how the world works, and just maybe there is a turtle that nobody’s found yet.</p>
<p>a-
Given the subtlety of that sort of thinking (esp to us lay-peeps, even well-educated ones LOL, out here), what do you propose to be a good way for an issue like Climate Change or Global Warming, which has geo-political and global economic implications, to be handled in the public domain, then?</p>
<p>Is it remotely accurate and effective to say, well, “whether or not we are on top of a tortoise really does not matter for our purposes?” If so, who gets to determine that?</p>
<p>It just seems so scary that we have reached this point in unknowability, ease of misunderstanding AND manipulation… Is it even a realistic goal to try to educate the masses about all this in school???</p>
<p>As an aside, some of the greatest thinkers about genetics use a lot of common sensical thinking to challenge their assumptions about the relationships between things. It is a useful approach for re-starting, to get beyond, to move on, to un-kink some of the knots. It tries to undo erroneous assumptions. There is also the hard work of looking very very carefully at all the evidence, looking for patterns. In combination, we might arrive “somewhere” at some conclusion, but we are led to new questions, always.</p>
<p>I’m willing to limit myself to the “special case” where causality and continuity of objective reality are assumed as facts: i.e., the “real world.” :)</p>
<p>I find it interesting that regular scientists who work in the area of climate science are “damned if they do, damned if they don’t.” Musicprnt made the following apt observation:
Of course, “they” didn’t calculate the propaganda impact of the name; when they observed that the globe was getting warmer they referred to that phenomenon as “global warming.” When they felt that the science has been proven sufficiently to make them confident that the theory was incontrovertible in the normal (if not absolute) sense, they said that, too. </p>
<p>On the one hand, they’re accused of being not sufficiently politically savvy to weigh the effect of the terminology they use on the “idiot mill” and on the other, that they haven’t adhered to strict scientific precision enough to satisfy purists.</p>
<p>I honestly don’t think there’s any way they could have expressed either matter that would not have subjected them to criticism from one faction or another.</p>
<p>Okay, dstark, I’ve perused the “sell out or senile” piece and all I can say is that it’s sadly lacking in facts. Long in moaning about what a bad person Giaver is, but no real justification other than that “LudwigVanQuixote” doesn’t care for Giaver offering an opinion on an obsession near and dear to Ludwig’s heart.</p>
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<p>I’d quote more but this seems tedious enough to establish my point, being that it takes an especially myopic kind of hypocrite to argue that a dollar - in whatever manner the transaction might have occurred - from those who see AGW as today’s “tulip bulb” craze can wash away the subsidizing of entire careers by the taxpayer.</p>