PAtownhall.com
Pennsylvania's Marketplace of Ideas
Pennsylvania's Marketplace of Ideas
PAtownhall.com
Pennsylvania's Marketplace of Ideas
Pennsylvania's Marketplace of Ideas
by Peg Luksik
In our post-Christian era, Science has become the guiding light for our public policy-makers. The scientific method of inquiry and analysis is based on provable facts, is backed by unbiased research, and is therefore much more in tune with our enlightened societies than religious superstition.
It sounds quite wonderful – as long as no one looks too deeply at the claims of provable facts and unbiased research. If one does, some troubling discrepancies between the rhetoric and the reality begin to surface.
For example, we are told that global warming is a crisis which man has caused through excessive creation of greenhouse gas emissions, specifically carbon dioxide emissions. Or we WERE told that global warming was the crisis, now the name of the crisis is slowly morphing from "global warming" to "climate change" – but man is still the culprit.
In the movie, An Inconvenient Truth, there is a scene in which Al Gore presents two graphs to a studio audience. The first represents temperature change, and the second represents carbon dioxide emissions. He overlays the graphs, showing a correlation between the two. He tells the audience that the relationship is "complicated", but does not explain the complications.
It could be because those unexplained complications present a problem for the theory of man-made global warming/climate change.
In actuality, increased carbon dioxide emissions have lagged behind increases in global temperatures by about 800 years. So, since global temperature change comes BEFORE a change in greenhouse gas emission levels, some scientists believe that increases in global temperatures cause increases in carbon dioxide emissions.
They base their reasoning on the fact that the greatest source of carbon dioxide emissions is the oceans. When the global temperature rises, the oceans also get warmer, and vice versa. Water, however, heats and cools more slowly than air. So it takes much longer for the oceans to react to temperature change than for the atmosphere. It's like a delayed effect – a global scale example of what everyone experiences when visiting the beach. The water is warmest when the day is almost done and the air is already cooler.
The fact of the time lag is provable. The effect of this fact on the theory of man-made global warming/climate change is devastating. It turns the popular theory upside down. An event cannot cause something that precedes it. It would be like claiming that a devastated coastal village caused the tidal wave that hit it. Blaming the village would be ludicrous. But that is exactly what the advocates of man-made global warming/climate change are doing – they are blaming the effect (increased greenhouse gas emissions) for the cause (increased temperatures).
If science were truly based on provable facts and unbiased research, we should be seeing a frank and open discussion of these two opposing positions. We aren't. Instead one position is protected more assiduously than any golden idol, while the proponents of the other are denigrated and penalized. The global warming/climate change leaders fully expect the national and international communities to accept their word and radically change public policy because they "know" that they are right.
It sounds like they are asking us to take a leap of faith.
Science didn't remove religion from the public marketplace, it became religion, with scientists and their policy-makers as the new gods. Unfortunately, they brought all their human failings with them to their elevated position. And in the resulting lack of real scientific inquiry and dialogue, everybody loses.
