Quote:
Originally Posted by Vector
There is no absolutely certain knowledge of anything, not even mathematical propositions. It may be that two and two do not add up to four. It just seems that way to us because we are all hopelessly insane.
People determined to deny the undeniable may place an impossible burden of proof on those who assert what they wish to deny. Disprove any possible alternative, no matter how speculative, to what you claim is true.
Those of us who claim that global warming is anthropogenic cannot prove, as a matter of absolute certainty, that it is not due to sunspots. No one can prove or disprove anything as a matter of absolute certainty. We cannot prove that global warming is not caused by astrological influences, or by the exercise of psychic powers by malicious extraterrestrials.
The case for anthropogenic global warming is not based on speculation. It is based on established science and solid empirical data. Attributing global warming to sunspots is pure speculation. It is not reasonable to reject solid science based on pure speculation.
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What solid science? Question - what cause the Medieval Warm-up and then caused the Little Ice Age? Answer - we don't know. Did whatever caused them go away? Highly unlikely. So, which way are the underlying non-anthropogenic trends going? Beats me, but if you don't know that, how can you add or subtract their effect from the measurable change over the last century or two? You can't. If we had two or three millennia of date to work with, covering at least some of the smaller cycles, we could.
But we don't have that data! All we have is 50 years of highly detail data, 350 years of less and less detailed data, and extremely limited, second hand data going back a few millennia. And I say for the record, that's not enough to have any sort of solid science out of, in a subject where you can't run a separate experiment on, over and over to get more data...