re: #358 Shane

re #356 lostlakehiker;

Agree. It isn’t that it can’t be true or false, its the methods and politics being used to prove its true. It’s not good science. No ends justify any means. I want real science. I want to keep looking. I don’t want dogma. Right now I feel its a lot of dogma and not real science. If you start with CO2 as the culprit and proceed to make models the exclude all other options, CO2 is the answer. What if it is man made and its not CO2 but something else and we could fix that but have focused on CO2?

Whenever a scientific issue becomes a public policy issue, you will have political positions masquerading as science. We see this from the Discovery Institute, and we see it from the Left on global warming. But it is possible to give bad reasons for an ultimately correct claim.
As in: “2+2=4 because 2*2 is 6 and the way to add two numbers is to multiply them and subtract 2.”
Or, “global warming is caused by human use of CO2, because if it isn’t, we cannot make a crusade of global warming and fight the power of Big Oil”.
If it’s not CO2, what would it be? Methane? Reducing our methane production won’t be easy. Rice farming and cattle ranching are big contributors. But Vietnam can’t survive without growing rice, and no one has figured out how to put turkeys out to graze on the grasslands of Texas or Paraguay. It takes a ruminant stomach to digest grass, and methane is a byproduct. So there’s a limit to what we can do to abate methane, if it’s a contributor to the problem. Estimates I’ve seen put it a distant second, though significant, behind CO2.