Can You Be a 'Scientist' but Reject the Scientific Method?

As reported in Politico on January 27, climate activists at the American Meteorological Society’s annual meeting in January in Phoenix, Arizona admitted they are failing to persuade the American people of the threat of global warming.

Leading climate scientists and meteorologists are banking on a new strategy for talking about climate change: Take the politics out of it.

That means avoiding the phrase “climate change,” so loaded with partisan connotations as it is. Stop talking about who or what is most responsible. And focus instead on what is happening and how unusual it is -- and what it is costing communities.

Educating the public and policymakers about climate change at a time when elected leaders are doubling down on denying that it is happening at all or that humans are responsible for it demands a new lexicon, conference attendees told me

Activists pushing climate change socialism are frustrated by their inability to persuade rational people of their irrational arguments.  There is absolutely zero evidence of man-made global warming -- none whatsoever.

At heart:  can you be a scientist while rejecting the scientific method?  Moshe Pritsker, a former post-doctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School and CEO of JoVE, told Live Science. "The reproducibility of published experiments is the foundation of science. No reproducibility -- no science."  [Editor's note: Dr. Pritsker, who was not interviewed for this article, personally supports the global warming hypothesis; his remarks are directed to the scientific method and are not criticism of the global warming theory.] Just because one can buy a lab coat for $46.39, that doesn't make them a scientist.

Today "science" has degenerated into "thought experiments."  That is, "imagineering" has replaced empirical experimentation.  We have returned to the superstition of the Dark Ages.  It was once believed that mice and rats spontaneously arose from dirty rags and debris, because dirty rags were observed coincidentally in the same places.  A long time passed before anyone tested the idea with hard experimentation to see if it was actually true.

Let's try this:  today's news reports a 26% decrease in shark bites last year.  Does a reduction in shark bites cause global warming?  Or does global warming cause fewer shark bites?  That's the level of absurdity we have reached.  

The modern world was built upon the "Scientific Method" popularized by and attributed to Sir Francis Bacon. The "Scientific Method" is variously presented as 6 - 8 steps. Here is an excerpt:

Step 1. Make observations. Observations must be based on specific events that have already happened and can be verified by others as true or false.

Step 2. Form a hypothesis. A hypothesis must be testable and "falsifiable."  There must be a way to show the hypothesis is true or false.  A hypothesis is usually stated in the negative because this assists in testing.  For example, if the observed data would exist even without human activity, then humans are not causing climate change.

Step 3. Design an experiment. How can we test with hard experimentation if our hypothesis is true or false?

Step 4Perform an experiment. The experiment must be conducted by neutral, unbiased researchers under carefully-controlled conditions, capable of proving the hypothesis true or false, without other influences.

Step 5. Analyze results and draw a conclusion.  Do results agree with the prediction of the hypothesis or disagree, to a meaningful extent?

Step 6. Repeat the Experiment. No experimental result can be science if it is not repeated by other, independent, unrelated, teams of neutral, unbiased researchers in different locations under different condition.

An outstanding "teachable moment" (lost on the pseudo-scientists) was the discovery of "cold fusion" by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann. At the University of Utah, experiments proved that their device worked. This would provide limitless clean energy.  But no one could reproduce their experimental results.  One successful experiment is not science until the experiment has been repeated many times.

Experiments can be influenced by unknown factors, such as the experiment at MIT that kept acting strange until the students realized that other researchers were operating a giant electromagnet in the floor just above their ceiling.  Nothing is 'science' until it has been repeated in different locations.

Step 7. Report your results.  Disseminating results, including the raw data, allows other researchers to verify the results.

Step 8. Develop new hypotheses.   The process repeats, to learn new things.

Testing a hypothesis by hard, unbiased experimentation is the dividing line between superstition and the modern world.  We still have the engineering skills to manufacture electronic gadgets.  But humanity has returned to pre-modern superstition

We should not be surprised that the emotionalism of postwar generations, moral relativism, and a rejection of the very concept of objective truth infects every institution populated by human beings.

So has there ever been a single experiment ever proving or even related to the proposition that humans are causing global warming?  No, not a single one.  Never.

But, the true believers will protest, carbon dioxide traps heat.  Uh...  Everything absorbs heat.  Nitrogen absorbs heat.  Dirt absorbs heat.

But there's a problem:  Hot air rises.  If gases absorb heat, they expand, and then they go up.  When carbon dioxide absorbs heat, it does not remain at the Earth's surface.  It rises. 

So is CO2 a conveyer belt?  Does CO2 absorb heat at the surface, rise upward to the thin upper atmosphere, and then release that heat into outer space?  Does CO2 actually act like an air conditioner, cooling the planet?

Nobody knows.  It's never been tested.  How CO2 behaves in a container in the laboratory is not relevant to how free-floating CO2 behaves in the open atmosphere in a planet-wide climate system.

In fact, what was the Earth's temperature yesterday?  I don't mean the weather report where you live.  I mean "the" one and only temperature of the entire planet?  Nobody knows.  To measure "the" temperature of the entire globe, we would have to have weather stations measuring every square mile of the planet.  Okay, let's be generous and say one station per every ten square miles.  Then this data would have to be averaged together, assuming absolute perfect reliability. 

Well, if the temperature is increasing in one place, isn't that good enough?  No.  The problem with air masses is that air moves.  Air does not stay in one place.  Hot air travels.  Cold air travels.  Prevailing wind currents change.  So a temperature in one location cannot be extrapolated to the entire planet.

Worse, temperature measurement only began around 1880.  There was no means of quantifying heat until the 17th century and the temperature scale for standardized measurement was not invented until 1850.  But scientific measurements require instruments that are standardized and calibrated with reliably-consistent manufacture.

Temperature records did not start ntil the turn of the century.  Even then, only a few major cities in Europe and on the U.S. Eastern seaboard were measured.

The average person doesn't believe that humans are or are capable of changing the Earth's climate.  People have lost trust in "experts" across the board.  These experts no longer deserve to be placed up on a pedestal.