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Is all science required to be "provable" now, then? Most science doesn't really work on proof, unfortunately; it's levels of certainty, not stamping something
by jtheory 13y ago
Is all science required to be "provable" now, then? Most science doesn't really work on proof, unfortunately; it's levels of certainty, not stamping something "proven" and being done with it. It's building models of reality and testing their accuracy as far as possible.
Public policy decisions cannot be based on "proof". There is never going to be proof positive of what the climate will do in the next 100 years until we arrive at 2113, and even then there will be aspects of the picture that will be unclear; not everything is easily measurable, and not everything you might like to know will be measured.
Actual science covers more ground than schoolwork where you have one variable and everything else is controlled. Climate change is a global-scale issues with innumerable variables that can not be controlled.
That's not the same as saying we can know nothing about it, or that we must make no decisions about what we can figure out with some reasonable level of certainty.
> Who decided exactly what inputs are needed for calculations and which should be left out? Who decided their relative weightings? Who decided the exact nature of the interactions inside the models?
Are you saying that because you don't know how to do this stuff, no one can make predictions with a reasonable margin of error?
- SeanDav 13y ago>> Is all science required to be "provable" now, then? This is the whole basis of Science. It is required to be provable, or it is just someone's opinion, and my opinion might be different to yours. Perhaps you should research the Spanish Inquisition and the many atrocities committed by various religions for further insight into why this matters. EDIT: Strictly speaking Science must be falsifiable
- jhaywood 13y agoScience is never required to be "provable". Scientific theories should be "falsifiable". Those are not the same thing.
- JackFr 13y agoThat is the difficulty. When your conclusions are based on models which seem to be infinitely malleable or at least have many "estimated" parameters, the models become unfalsifiable. If you've got a conclusion which is invariant under all possible evidence, it stops being science.
- jhaywood 13y agoThe same criticisms are leveled at the standard model of physics. You're right that it's hard for a theory to be falsified if it can be molded to fit any data. But it still does need to be consistent with past measurements and future measurements and what we know of the physical principles that drive the climate. It also isn't that difficult to demonstrate the underlying principles that are in action. The greenhouse gas effect is fairly easy to measure experimentally (it was first experimentally measured in 1859). Modelling the climate accurately is a very hard problem but we don't have an untouched completely controllable alternate climate on which to perform experiments. It's still better than throwing up our hands and declaring understanding impossible.
- jtheory 13y agoClimate change models must predict future climate-related stats to be falsifiable, and those that don't make accurate predictions must be rejected; that's science. The future continues to arrive, so climate change models continue to be falsified (or not). It's certainly difficult to do; that is not the same as saying they are producing no valid & valuable information.
- xemoka 13y agoTrue scientific research is not meant to 'prove' a hypothesis, but disprove the null hypothesis 'that there is no relationship between two measured phenomena'. It is next to impossible to 'prove' a hypothesis under all conditions and circumstances. This isn't a mathematical proof.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]