Monday, July 14, 2008

The Scientific Underground

It's not hard, in fact, to drive science underground.

Scientists are scientists, for the most part, because they love, you know, science. Not for publicity, not for money, lord knows, and while they might be glory driven, it's not really glory as normal humans understand it. It's nerd glory.

As a result, you can drive science underground without scientists even noticing. (Especially geologists, who are halfway there anyway.) I think this is what happened with various practitioners of the atmospheric and solar scientists. They were off making observations and measuring stuff and crunching numbers, and when they next looked up they saw all this runaway global runaway global warming hysteria (heh).

To a good scientist, non-truth is offensive. But they must be used to it. Pop culture is filled with bad science, and few people care. It's sort of nerdy to care. They're used to being ignored, or greeted with eye rolling, or what have you.

Fortunately, these guys cared and have done something about it, explaining anthropogenic climate change in relatively simple terms.

It's fairly lengthy, and it addresses a lot of the ridiculous premises of AGW.

For myself, I find consistently that man over-imagines his own importance in the universe. In the article, they compare AGW to The Piltdown Man. I compare it to the geocentric universe. We're just sure we're responsible for so much.

And it's largely hubris.

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