| on Apr 9, 2008, 05:38 PM E.S.T.
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In Stalin's Russia any dissenter from the Party Line was guilty. Innocence had to be proved.
It's a standard tyrant's trick. During the reign of Oliver Cromwell in
England, witchhunters did not have to prove that their victims were
guilty. The accused witches had to prove their innocence.
That's
what Al Gore has done to science: He and his friends have flipped
innocence and guilt from normal science to Stalinist science.
In Al Gore's America, any "global warming denier" is guilty until proven innocent. He or she must have been bought off
by Big Oil. Skeptics, no matter how well-qualified, must prove the
negative about really silly alarmist hogwash. And whenever some
prediction is falsified, the warm mongers have an explanation: it's
just a temporary glitch in the data. Oh, yes, we were wrong about 1998,
but just wait till 2050! The excuses are endless.
Stalin twisted scientific biology over four decades in the Soviet Union. His favorite fake-scientist, Trofim Lysenko,
used all the powers of the police state to enforce his batty belief
that the bleeding disaster of Soviet agriculture could be fixed just by
making plants grow bigger. It's the old idea that giraffes
have long necks because their ancestors stretched their necks out more
and more, to nibble at higher leaves on the trees. It's nonsense, as
horse breeders have known for ages. You can't make a great race horse
just by making their ancestors run fast. You have to do selective
breeding.
But breeding takes time, and Stalin was in a
hurry. So he fell for the Lysenko fraud, and flipped the burden of
proof: Any Soviet biologist who disagreed with Lysenko was
shot. This went on for forty years, and caused endless suffering as one
harvest after the next crashed. People died by the millions, in part
because biological science was fundamentally corrupted.
Putting
the burden of proof on the doubters is a perversion of normal, healthy
science. It's as if Jeremiah Wright demanded that all white folks must
prove to him that they're not blue-eyed devils. If politically correct ideas are true by default, the Al Gores can prove anything.
In normal science the burden of proof is on the proposer. Albert Einstein had to prove
in his historic 1905 paper that there was a fundamental flaw in
classical physics. The distinctive predictions of Relativity Theory
had to be verified for decades afterwards. Some are still being tested
today. His predecessor Max Planck remarked that he encountered so much
skepticism that he had to wait for the older generation of physicists
to die off before his work was accepted. Darwin said the same thing.
A
healthy scientific community is extremely skeptical. It needs to see
more and more evidence, over and over and over again, before it adopts
some wild-eyed new idea. It takes all the time it needs; good science
is very patient. Einstein himself was a complete skeptic about quantum
mechanics, and never accepted it over the last forty years of his life.
He had a perfect right to question it, as long as he had rational
arguments, and he did. (He was wrong on QM, but he was right on
Relativity.)
"Catastrophic global warming," caused by
human beings, is a really wild-eyed idea, given the fact that animals
have survived on earth for half a billion years, with thousands of
massive volcanic explosions, giant meteors hitting the earth, drifting
continents, and great biomass changes that would have perturbed the
climate, if the hypothesis were true. Just imagine the amount of C02
that must have been released with the Cambrian explosion of animal
life. If the earth really saw superfast global ups and downs in
temperature, no animals could have survived those 500 million years.
The Ice Ages drove animals and people south, but they were not
superfast, global events, or you and I would not be here today. Animals
and plants are able adapt to temperature changes. Polar bears grow
layers of fat and long, dense fur. Camels can stay cool in the desert.
In
biology, "catastrophism" has been treated with intense skepticism since
Charles Darwin in the mid-19th century. Except today, when biological catastrophism is the in thing. Why would that be, do you suppose?
How
have Al Gore and the fraudsters pulled it off? It's really simple. They
just flipped the burden of proof and put it on the "deniers" --- the
skeptics, who don't believe the computer models. With the Left in
control of the media, you can do it.
So now it's prove to me you're not a witch! Because there is no
decisive evidence. There are 21 computer models that "prove" global
warming over the next century. By the time 2050 rolls around, most of
the modelers will be dead.
To answer the biggest con
trick in the history of science, you just have to address a single
question to True Believers: What's your evidence for this barmy idea? (Not: Here's my evidence against it. That's not how it works).
And
the answer is: There are no facts robust enough, consistent enough, and
verified enough to support the mass hysteria. The climate system is
hypercomplex, nonlinear and poorly understood. The media spinners are
immensely ignorant about real science, and just care about the next
scare headline. There's a lot of wild speculation and a mob of
self-serving politicians, bureaucrats and media types who stand to gain
a ton of power and money by suckering millions of taxpayers. Al Gore
just started a 300 million dollar PR campaign to convince everybody.
When was the last time you saw 300 million bucks being spent to promote
a scientific hypothesis that was already proven? We're not spending
millions to prove the existence of gravity. The uproar and money
involved in this fraud is in direct proportion to the lack of solid
facts.
The last ten years have seen global cooling, not warming.
Temperatures
over the last hundred years look like the stock market: ups and downs,
a very slow rise of a fraction of a degree until the late 1990s, then a
drop for the last ten years, with so much cooling in the last year as
to cancel out a century of warming. Why? Nobody really knows, but Mr.
Sun is the logical suspect.
Look it up. But don't get
caught in the trap of proving the negative. In normal, healthy science,
the skeptics ask questions. It is the proponents who carry the burden
of proof.
Now can we talk about 9/11? That's
a fact. But Al Gore doesn't think it's a big deal, compared to his
favorite science fiction story. Al Gore just wants power, fame, money,
and the US Presidency. Well, three out of four ain't bad.
Oliver Cromwell and his witchhunters would have understood perfectly. Source
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