Friday, November 06, 2009

Deluded

I'm not sure why, but Blogger seems to have been playing up for the last couple of days.   It's worst at work, where it just crashes on Mozilla Firefox every time I try to open the posting page, but it's also playing up at home.   And even on my daughter's laptop, which I'm using at the moment, it's a bit iffy.   Seems to be better on Internet Explorer than Firefox, so perhaps the latter has added some component that's upsetting Blogger.   Or else Blogger itself has changed something, since the pages are loading differently to waht they used to.  Whatever the problem, it's a bloomin' nuisance!

What I'd been trying to add on here was a quote from George Monbiot, a stalwart defender of Global Warming.   He was writing in the Guardian, and, in talking about Clive James (who's a disbeliever in the religion of GW) he said:

Had he bothered to take a look at the quality of the evidence on either side of this media debate, and the nature of the opposing armies – climate scientists on one side, rightwing bloggers on the other – he too might have realised that the science is in.  In, at any rate, to the extent that science can ever be, which is to say that the evidence for man-made global warming is as strong as the evidence for Darwinian evolution, or for the link between smoking and lung cancer.

Regrettably George's argument lets him down twice in this short paragraph.   Firstly the two opposing sides aren't scientists versus bloggers, but scientists versus scientists and a great many other intellectually well-endowed people (whom he manages to dismiss completely early in the article).  And secondly, telling us that the evidence for man-made global warming is as strong as the evidence for Darwinian evolution is just like saying that the evidence for dinosaurs having bad breath is as strong as the evidence for knowing the names of the first person on the planet.  

There is no 'evidence', but there is a lot of speculation.   Unfortunately, the Darwinians are so into their own philosophical speculation that they pretend it's actually an argument with some basis in fact.   And equally unfortunately, they've taken to Global Warming like it was latest piece of evidence for everything Darwinian.  

Deluded. 

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