Prevailing theories have been proven wrong before
It is said that Galileo’s middle finger is displayed in Florence, Italy, thus in death “giving the finger” to those who put him under house arrest for daring to claim the Earth was not the centre of the universe. That the sun orbited the Earth was the scientific consensus of the time, backed by Biblical texts.
The penalty for Galileo’s effrontery in saying otherwise was not only prison and then house arrest. He was also forbidden to claim the obvious as fact. He could claim it only as theory.
Time has proved the 16th century scientific-religious consensus spectacularly wrong. Galileo was right. Reason triumphed over superstition.
Meanwhile, in the 21st century, we are asked to wait another 100 years before the truth or fallacy of the prevailing climate theory is proven true or false. Meanwhile, as the Pope once demanded, mouths and minds must be securely shut.
The parallels between what Galileo endured, and what opponents of the climate change gospel have to put up with, are obvious to those of a rational mind.
Alarmist theories
They are branded “deniers”, instead of honest sceptics of an all-encompassing theory. Some lose their jobs or their working conditions are made intolerable. They have not been put in jail – yet.
To those climatologists who soldier on, testing theories on the edge of acceptance by the prevailing climate priesthood, feel compelled to insert caveats in their findings, grovelling to escape establishment censure.
An example of this is evident in a recent media release by Boston University on the results of climate research that suggests the world might be already benefiting from a rise in carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.
The researchers coming to this conclusion were not sceptics who doubted the alarmist theories of global warming caused by industry. On the contrary, they supported the thesis (and probably still do). Nor were they a single pair hoping to extract more research money by coming to correct conclusions. They undertook this research in an attempt to find out if the claims by climate sceptics that higher CO2 levels were beneficial to the planet.
Embarrassingly, they found the sceptic claim was correct by using 33 years of satellite data.
Reading the Boston University media release, their attempts to avoid being cast into utter darkness, like Galileo, are quite clear. They acknowledge every confirmation that more CO2 greatly enhanced plant growth as shown by satellite images, by quickly adding a rider that, of course global warming and increased CO2 is nevertheless, overall, bad.
“We were able to tie the greening largely to the fertilising effect of rising atmospheric CO2 concentration by tasking several computer models to mimic plant growth observed in the satellite data,” the professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University said, swiftly adding: “(CO2) is the chief culprit of climate change.”
Another of the 34 researchers said: “The greening over the past 33 years reported in this study is equivalent to adding a green continent about two-times (sic) the size of mainland USA (18 million square kilometres).”
CO2 fertilisation
A French researcher added that: “Other studies have reported an increasing carbon sink on land since the 1980s, which is entirely consistent with the idea of a greening Earth.”
That is exactly what sceptics have claimed for years.
This had to be followed by a grovelling before the climate change establishment, so he is immediately quoted as saying: “The beneficial aspect of CO2 fertilisation in promoting plant growth has been used by contrarians… to argue against cuts in carbon emissions to mitigate climate change. CO2 fertilisation is only one, albeit a predominant, reason why the Earth is greening. The study also identified climate change, nitrogen fertilisation and land management as other important reasons.”
Not out of the green woods yet, and digging the hole deeper is this: “While the detection of greening is based on measurements, the attribution to various drivers is based on models, and these models have known deficiencies. Future works will undoubtedly question and refine our results,” an Australian team member said.
Well yes indeed, predictions based on computer predictions of the future climate are fallible. The climate sceptics have been saying so for years.
As for more research questioning and refining the results, it will be really embarrassing when the critics turn out to be climate alarmists and the refiners of these arguments are all climate sceptics.
Galileo’s middle finger may be beginning to twitch.
Read more at: iol.co.za
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