Climate change and the misunderstanding of science

A whole set of emails was hacked from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia a few weeks ago. The emails reveal, depending on who you listen to, not much or the final nail in the coffin of the man made global warming theory.
I have not read the emails nor do I intend to, they have been digested many times over all around the blogosphere.

The whole gist of the emails seem to be that the scientist have sexed up data and modified models to fit their purpose. This has obviously been a PR disaster, but I have to ask myself why?. Surely without reading what was on the minds of both senders and receivers at the time it is impossible to know what they actually meant and the science has not really changed since the revelation. As important as the CRU might be it is not the only institution that researches climate change. We have to look at the skeptics for an explanation.

The simplest is that the skeptics are trying to sow doubt among the lay people, never mind that scientist are almost in agreement about man made global warming, anything that isn't whiter than white will gets picked up and run ad infinitum and will be repeated over and over again whether debunked. Ben Goldacre's excellent article makes this very good point. Thus prepare yourself to discuss the extreme importance of these hacked emails over and over for years to come.

I have rambled on for more than I wanted to. The main point of this blog however, is that critics of man made global warming fail to understand that the science will never be settled, it does not matter whether all scientist think that it is true, this is how science works, after all there are only two types of scientific theories:

• Theories proven to be false
  
• Theories yet to be proven false
  

Everybody is aware of gravity, what most people are not aware of is that gravity is only a theory. It is empirically impossible to test all possible scenarios, therefore a theory can at best be described as not yet proven false only logic and mathematics can be truly accepted to have been proven true. It might be that the current theory of gravity is "true", but we'll only be able to say that it has not yet been proven false.

So back to man made global warming, it will never be proven to be true. There, I have said it. Now go a pollute as much as you want safe in the knowledge that nobody will ever be able to prove that you were in any way responsible. Happy now?