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Old 12-31-2010, 12:30 AM   #328 (permalink)
NeilBlanchard
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What motivates the deniers, I wonder? It is certainly easier to convince yourself that you are not doing anything wrong...

A lot of science that we now know is true, was at first resisted: Copernicus and Darwin and Einstein come to mind. Do you trust that we know the structure of the atom, or the speed of light, or evolution, or that the planets orbit the sun, or what causes gravity? Do you *really* know that these are all true, and can we prove beyond all doubt that they are true?

We trust science because it is the best explanation, and it fits the data the best.

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You are confusing weather with climate. Weather changes all the time; no duh. Climate generally does not change -- but it is changing now.

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I think it's great that we all have our opinions about science. If you want to jump in on the importance of the Higgs boson, or the tube worms that eat scorching hot chemicals around volcanic vents, or on life on Mars, or on Pluto not being a planet anymore, or on spectroscopy and lasers, or on organic chemistry synthesizing a glaucoma drug from Calabar beans, or how supernovas create all elements heavier than iron (all the gold in existence came from supernovas!), or about dark matter, or how evolution has changed birds who eat from bird feeders, or how to cure cancer, or discuss an ancestor of birds that had four wings, or reconstruct the the temperature of ancient oceans based on the fossil record, or why the megafauna died out except for musk oxen (which are not as closely related to bovines as they are to goats), or why so many bats are dieing of "white nose disease", or why we are seeing bee colony collapse, or just how do they use lithography to make CPU chips, or on earthquake detection, or on the life cycle of the soil, or about horseshoe crab's copper-based blood (which has benefited ALL of us reading this, believe it or not!), or any other of a myriad of subjects that I find fascinating -- then the more opinions, the merrier.

But, if you think you can prove that any of these scientists are faking it, or that they can't possibly know what they are doing, or that you or Glen Beck or Michell Bachmann or Megyn Kelly or James Inhofe -- can any more tell Percy Julian (the genius organic chemist) that he was barking up the wrong tree, or that Pluto should still be considered a planet, or that dark matter really doesn't exist -- any more than you or they can say that the science that shows that anthropogenic global climate change isn't real -- then you need to think again.

As Richard Alley said in the video of his Congressional testimony (paraphrasing):

"If this was all a video game -- sure, I would push the button to see how it would turn out! But -- it's not a video game."
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Last edited by NeilBlanchard; 12-31-2010 at 02:06 AM..