Originally Posted by
N2264J
When dealing with systems as huge as the global climate, you're working primarily with probabilities. You can't duplicate this stuff in a wind tunnel.
Look, we've been through all of this before. In the 50s, peer reviewed science started to link cigarette smoking with lung cancer. The tobacco industry hired medical doctors, celebraties and quack scientists to publically characterize those papers and studies as "junk science."
That worked for a while but today you'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't think cigarette smoking causes lung cancer.
We have to get this right because the consequences are global, not just some individual smokers dying of cancer.
Actually you can't PROVE that smoking cigarettes CAUSES cancer, you can only say it will increase your RISK of cancer, because otherwise there would be a direct correlation from smoking to lung cancer... (I know, yell at me all you want, but try to argue with the late 90's person who has smoked and eaten red meat all their life, and don't have cancer yet... And then you can tell it to the people who have never smoked a day in their life, and get diagnosed with lung cancer...)
As to that 2nd example, that plays into the fact that "science" has to be able to be proven correct as well as proven incorrect. You cannot PROVE that not smoking cigarettes will prevent you from getting lung cancer...
That's essentially the point the people who don't believe in global warming (myself included) are trying to make... You can trot all the celebrities out who believe it, but that doesn't PROVE anything, it just scares the uninformed...