By John Christy
The Global Warming Policy Foundation
GWPF Note 17
When I grew up, science was defined as a method of discovering information. You would make a claim or a hypothesis, and then you would test that claim against independent data. If it failed, you rejected your claim and you started over again. In other words your hypothesis was not good information. But nowadays, if someone makes a claim about the climate, and someone like me falsifies it, rather than abandoning the hypothesis, that person tends to just yell louder that their claim is right. They find it difficult to look at what data might say about their beloved hypothesis.
I’m referring to the climate’s response to the emission of extra greenhouse gases as a result of our combustion of fossil fuels. In terms of scale – and this is important – we want to know the impact on the climate of an extra 0.5 units of forcing, amongst all the other forcings, some of which are over 100 units each. So we’re trying to figure out the signal of an extra 0.5 of a unit amidst these large and variable natural flows of energy.
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