Neanderpundit

So I write to GeoMan, this being the gist of my missive:

You have made a great point of explaining the scientific
process, and yet you accept the shibboleth of global warming as
dogma, when it clearly is not.
Less than five hundred years of temperature measurement exist. Less
than a hundred of that with any real level of calibration of the
instrumentation. All of that measurement has taken place on or near
land, with no data for the oceans, which cover a pretty large portion
of the planet. No knowledge of the temperature variation can be given
before that, except as reasonably educated wild ass guesses based on
any number of factors. We don’t know if the earth is warming or
cooling beyond the last hundred or so years, and what is more
important, we have NO idea if warming trends regularly cycle over the
course of thosands of years and by how much. All that exist are
guesses. Basing a theory of global warming on guesses is the worst
kind of junk science. Pity, your site seemed to show such promise.

The response?

All good points, but consider this: we are returning massive amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels. Will this have an impact? I say yes. What do you think?

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Now, a while back I made the claim that I would post a picture of myself wearing lederhosen if the Sox won.

Well, forst of all, all the sox fans in the universe should be thanking me,because I made it possible for the laws of perversity of the universe to be broken, just this once.

On the other hand, I have never been able to find a pair that cost less than a grand, that I could wrap around my enormous ass..

Until now.

Y’all want to see Og in Lederhosen, get together and buy them for me. Here they are.

I’ll even wear them to a blogmeet– hell, they’d be PERFECT at Klas. What say ye? do you want your retinas to be permanently scarred? hell, if enough people get together and buy them, I’ll wear them AND NOTHING ELSE to the next blogmeet.

Mike Strickler, a geologist living somewhere near Selma, Oregon. The website is kind of nice, in a high-school-student kind of way, and it’s very informative about a lot of things.

What I enjoyed was his description of the “scientific method“. It’s pretty simply explained so just about anyone can understand. And it’s right, too; he follows the train of stages- idea, hypothesis, theory, law, dogma, stagnation. About stagnation he says this:

“This is the death of scientific thought, and should have no place in YOUR thoughts. Question all scientific laws, especially the ones that are the most firmly steeped in dogma.”

All pretty straightforward, yes? but then in another section of the website he whips this out:

“Sorry if this sounds negative, but this is an emotional issue, and one which needs to be addressed IMMEDIATELY. If humans as a species (and the developed nations in particular) fail to make the hard decisions now, we are in for real problems in the future. What can we do? STOP DRIVING NOW. Raise the price of gasoline to $10.00 per gallon and maybe your grandchildren will have a chance.”

Not only has he come to his conclusion about ‘global warming’ through a total disregard ofthe scientific method, he has jumped straight from “idea” to “stagnation” and doesn’t even bother to question the idea that global warming exists, he takes it as dogma and assumes “we’re all gonna die” as the Acidic one would have said.

Now, I had an email exchange with him, and he was nice, so don’t go pissing in his cornflakes- yet. More on the email exchange tomorrow.