I just find it so funny that the people in this thread criticizing the majority's consensus in the global warming debate act as if they are so enlightened and as if there data is somehow less impeachable.
This is not how the scientific community works:
Majority consensus potentially has some problems
Opponents make alternate claims that have not been subject to mass peer review
Thus, opponents claims are correct.
It is those within the scientific community who challenge the majority consensus who should be viewed most skeptically, particularly when it is a recent challenge that has not been subjected to peer review. That is how the scientific community deals with new hypotheses. The previous majority consensus OFTEN CHANGES AND ADAPTS IN LIGHT OF NEW DATA but is nevertheless CORRECT. This happens over 90-95% of the time. For every new hypothesis that takes hold and is worth anything, there are hundreds of others that quickly disintegrate.
How many times do you think the "law of gravity" or the "theory of evolution" have been revised? Hundreds if not thousands of times. But have they ever been proved wrong? No, they have not.
The opponents of the majority consensus on climate change see something that challenges that majority consensus and latch onto it for dear life claiming that they are the enlightened ones when really they are just jumping on the next bandwagon. Its kind of like a self-fulfilling hypothesis. They believe it because they want to.
Mafoo, for instance, says he has never believed in human-caused global warming BUT NOW when some data finally comes out that could support it, he acts as if he has been correct all along. That's like a creationist who doesn't believe in evolution who latches onto intelligent design for dear life as soon as it gets a tiny bit of support in the scientific community. Its like people who don't like paying high taxes latching onto supply-side economics even if the underlying principles behind supply-side economics are questionable, and remain so. It verges on intellectual dishonesty.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
