“To one studying the history of science, it even seems that the more certain are the proponents of a theory, the more likely they are to be wrong …” [James Lawrence Powell, Grand Canyon, Solving Earth’s Grandest Puzzle]
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." ;Richard Feynman, Nobel Laureate in Physics; [The Physics Teacher, volume 7, issue 6 (1969)]
I am not making a general criticism of Science in general, nor of Climate Science. I am simply pointing out that Science is based on skepticism and that all knowledge is provisional and subject to change.
The phrase "Settled Science" has been bandied about over the past few years in relation to Climatology and "Anthropogenic Global Warming". This paper examines the notion of "Settled Science" and shows it to be illusory.
Several examples will demonstrate the absurdity of calling anything "Settled Science". In most of these there was far more than a 97% consensus: The belief in these facts of “Settled Science” were usually unanimous.
Isaac Newton created a magnificent theory of Celestial Mechanics that, for the first time, explained why the Solar System has the shape and the motion that it has. He published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687. This book is widely acclaimed at the most important scientific book ever published. It became the foundation of Classical Mechanics, which was extended to nearly every possible natural phenomenon. As mathematical techniques developed, the final triumph of Newtonian Celestial Mechanics was achieved by Pierre Simon de Laplace who wrote a five-volume masterpiece, Celestial Mechanics (completed 1825). Laplace showed in detailed calculations that Newtonian Physics agreed with astronomical observations to better than one part per hundred thousand. Observations and calculations were further refined later in the 1800s resulting in success after success. Not only did Newtonian Celestial Mechanics explain the motions of all the known planets, but predicted the existence and orbit of a previously undiscovered planet, Neptune, along with the orbits of comets, asteroids, etc. The success rate of Newton's Mechanics, as augmented by the calculations of Laplace and others was nearly perfect. By the end of the 1800s, Newtonian Celestial Mechanics was able to predict observations to better than one part per million.
One of the axioms of Newtonian Celestial Mechanics is that gravity is a force that exists between any two masses and propagates at infinite speed, that is instantaneously. This instantaneous propagation bothered quite a few physicists, including Newton himself. Nonetheless, invariable agreement with observations and predictions to better than one part per million is a tough argument to counter. The matter was "Settled Science" for more than 200 years without a single significant discrepancy between theory and observation. In the middle of the 1800s, one tiny deviation between prediction and observation was discovered: the perihelion precession of the planet Mercury. It was so tiny that it bothered nobody. It was explained away by the existence of another new planet, Vulcan, within the orbit of Mercury. Unlike Neptune, Vulcan was not found where it was expected to be, in fact, it was not found at all. The matter was still so small, and the success of Newtonian Celestial Mechanics was so overwhelming, that the issue was largely ignored. It was thought that some observational error was responsible, although such an error could not be found.
Attempts to fix Newtonian Celestial Mechanics by assigning a finite propagation speed to gravity failed utterly. Any finite speed of gravitational propagation would cause the planets to spiral outward from the Sun and the entire Solar System would disintegrate.
Then, in 1905, a Swiss patent clerk named Albert Einstein blasted Newtonian Mechanics out of the water. He showed, among other things, that no force could propagate faster than the speed of light.
This problem vexed Physics until 1915, when Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity. Einstein showed that, despite the finite speed of gravity (which was the same as the speed of light), velocity dependent forces cause each object to be attracted to other objects not where those objects were, but where those objects would have been if they had continued at uniform velocity in a straight line and if the speed of gravity were infinite. Furthermore, General Relativity explained the perihelion shift of Mercury and predicted that light would be bent when passing around a massive object such as the Sun. This phenomenon could be observed during a solar eclipse, so an expedition was mounted to carry telescopes to the predicted location of an eclipse and observations were made that again confirmed Einstein's prediction.
The entire point here is that Newtonian Mechanics, the most respected theory in all of Physics and Astronomy, which had been supported by millions of observations over some 200 years, proved to be incorrect, and not in a minor way either, but in a fundamental way. One of its foundational assumptions, infinite speed of gravity, was simply false, and the seeming agreement with experiment was due to a mathematical coincidence involving the inverse square law of Gravity. Exactly the same phenomenon happens in Electromagnetism, again due to an inverse square law.
Since the time of the double slit experiment by Thomas Young, it was universally accepted that light was a wave. Light was diffracted by gratings and other irregularities. Only waves can be diffracted. The notion that light was a particle died in 1801 and Young killed it. For over 100 years, the wave nature of light was accepted by 100% of all scientists. Whoopsie. Light is a particle and a wave. This was demonstrated in 1905 by Albert Einstein and has been giving people headaches ever since. Similarly, it had been shown in 1897 that electric charge was carried by a particle named "electron" by J J Thomson. There was no question about the particulate nature of the electron. Whoopsie again. It turns out that the electron is also both a particle and a wave. In fact, it turns out that all sub-atomic particles are waves.
This was one of the several Earth-shaking identifications of seemingly different entities that turned out to be the same things merely viewed from different perspectives. For centuries, it was "Settled Science" that these word pairs described distinct and very different objects. Each of these distinctions was accepted by 100% of scientists:
star, sun -- Giordano Bruno hypothesized that they were identical, a discovery for which he was burned at the stake.
world, planet -- Nicolaus Copernicus showed that the Earth was just another planet, orbiting the Sun [actually the common center of mass of the Solar System]. For millennia, there was a near 100% consensus that the Sun, Moon, & planets orbited the Earth.
time, space -- Einstein, 1905
mass, energy -- Einstein, 1905
particle, wave -- Einstein, 1905
acceleration, gravity -- Einstein, 1915
To the utter amazement of the scientific community and the entire World, both words of each of these word pairs mean exactly the same thing. It is equally astonishing that the last four of these were discovered by one person: Albert Einstein.
It was "Settled Science" that the "inert gasses", helium, neon, argon, krypton, & xenon did not form any chemical compounds whatsoever. This is because they all have completely filled outer electron shells and therefore are not prone to either lose or gain electrons. Whoopsie. In the last few decades, it has been discovered that all of the "noble gasses" form compounds.
Stability of the Chemical Elements was "Settled Science" for nearly a century. Since Lavoisier and the other early true chemists, it was known that elements could not be transmuted from one to another and that the hope of the alchemists was futile. The elements were absolutely fixed and immutable. ALL chemists agreed on this point unanimously. Whoopsie, Becquerel discovered radioactivity and the immutability of elements, the "Settled Science" of most of the 19th century Chemistry, sank like a lead brick.
It was "Settled Science" that acquired characteristics cannot be inherited. The great evolutionist and taxonomist Jean Baptiste Lamarck believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. This was shown to be false within a century when Darwinism and Mendelism became established. Researches by many biologists showed that Lamarck was wrong on this issue. By the 1940s, the "fact" that acquired characteristics could not be inherited was a piece of "Settled Science" acknowledged by ALL biologists. Whoopsie! In 1942, Conrad H. Waddington discovered epigenetics and showed that, in some cases, acquired characteristics can be inherited.
The "central dogma of molecular biology" is a phrase by Francis Crick, who proposed the double helix structure of DNA. It means that information passes from DNA to mRNA to proteins, but neither mRNA, nor proteins can pass the information back to DNA. Crick first wrote it in 1958 and repeated it in 1970. It was "Settled Science". Then reverse transcriptase was discovered, which is an enzyme used to generate complementary DNA from RNA. So at least one reverse link exists. But the matter is far from over. Recently, James A. Shapiro in his book Evolution: A View from the 21st Century has published evidence that proteins edit nuclear DNA directly.
Furthermore, there was the "one gene, one protein" hypothesis, which was universally believed for a couple of decades and considered to be "Settled Science". Further research demonstrated that there were no more than 25,000 genes in the human genome, but at least 100,000 different proteins produced under direction of the genome. Simple arithmetic shows that a single protein specifying gene must produce more than one protein. Whoopsie! This was shown to be the result of differential mRNA "editing" which occurs within the nuclear envelope before the edited mRNA enters the general cytoplasm. In a given organism, different cell types have distinct editing enzymes in the nuclear envelope, converting mRNA into different versions, permitting a single piece of DNA to direct the synthesis of distinct but related proteins.
Slowing of the expansion of the Universe was "Settled Science". Gravity was known to be always attractive. Therefore, once the expansion of the Universe was discovered, it became clear that gravity must be slowing the expansion of the universe for the same reason that a rock thrown vertically into the air slows down. A major stated goal of the Hubble Telescope project was to determine the "deceleration parameter", the rate that expansion was slowing. Everybody in Science was unanimous on this. Whoopsie. In 1998, it was discovered that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating.
Here is another pair of settled scientific matters that were not quite so "settled" as scientists thought. They were first promulgated by two of the scientific giants of the 19th century who happened to be good friends, Darwin & Lyell.
Charles Lyell built his theory of the Earth on the ideas of uniformitarianism and gradualism. Prior to Lyell, geologists spoke of strange and repeated catastrophes as the explanation for the geological record. Lyell said, "Nonsense," all forces that shaped the Earth were prosaic and common and are still going on today. This was called "uniformitarianism", the idea that processes were uniform across time and space. He also believed that all change was gradual ("gradualism"), keeping in mind that there were brief violent changes such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. All such events were believed to be local in scope and the notion of global catastrophes was quietly buried. Nearly all geologists believed firmly in gradualism right up until the 1980s, when Walter Alvarez and his colleagues destroyed gradualism (Whoopsie) with their emphasis on mass extinctions such as the end cretaceous event perpetrated by a colossal asteroid strike. The bulk of the geological community was so committed to gradualism that Alvarez et all were subjected to a great deal of derision. Now mass extinctions are one of the central features of Earth Sciences.
Charles Darwin built his Theory of Evolution on the notion of gradual change, bit by bit, as life adapted over time. Darwin rejected the "saltation" theories of many others to explain the apparent gaps in the fossil records, and instead blamed the gaps on the incompleteness of the record. According to Darwin, species change gradually with time, introducing the same gradualism into Evolution that Lyell introduced into Geology. The vast majority of evolutionary biologists agreed with Darwin. Whoopsie. Darwin was wrong. Eldridge & Gould showed that Evolution was very uneven in time. There were long periods when a group of animals changed little if at all, interrupted by brief (in the geological sense) episodes of rapid evolution. They called their theory "punctuated equilibrium" and produced a wealth of data to support their point of view.
It was "Settled Science" that the rigidity of the Earth's crust made it impossible for continents to move around. Continental Drift was tossed into the dustbin of history. Even the great Harold Jeffreys was convinced that there was no possible means for continents to move. This was nearly unanimously believed. Whoopsie. Plate Tectonics burst on the scene and became one of the central tenets of Geology.
Not quite so recently, but just as firmly believed to be "Settled Science" was Lord Kelvin's declaration that the Sun (and hence the Earth) was no more than 20 million years old. This time scale gave Charles Darwin fits because it was insufficient to permit observed Biological Evolution to occur. Remember, Lord Kelvin (after whom the Kelvin temperature scale was named) was one of the greatest physicists of all time. He was a founder of Thermodynamics and many other areas of Science. His word carried the highest authority in the scientific world. Nearly all physicists of the era agreed with him based upon his brilliant and incisive papers on the subject. His calculations, based on known Physics of gasses, were correct. But his conclusion was wrong. He did not know about nuclear reactions, which had not yet been discovered.
Then there was the matter of what caused ulcers. It was "Settled Science" for decades that most ulcers were caused by excess acidity in the stomach. All treatments of ulcers were based upon this incontrovertible fact. Whoopsie, wrong. Most ulcers were found to be caused by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori. The linkage to acid was real, but only because this bacterium is acidophilic. But the bacterium and not acidity was the cause.
Then there were these big misses by great minds:
“There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will,” Albert Einstein told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on December 29, 1934 [In 1938, only 4 years later, nuclear fission was discovered.]
In 1895 Lord Kelvin stated that “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible”. In 1903, the Wright Brothers proved him wrong.
British Astronomer Royal in January 1956, Richard van der Riet Woolley said, ''Space travel is utter bilge.'' In 1957, the first artificial satellite was launched by the USSR. In 1959, Luna 2 impacted upon the Moon.
Now, when one looks at the predictions of "Global Warming", one does not get predictions that are very accurate at all. In fact, all of the most prestigious models disagree with one another by wide margins. To which I ask the question: How can a theory that does not agree with observations to any reasonable degree of accuracy be considered "Settled Science"?
Unlike astronomical observations, temperature measurements are not accurate to even parts per thousand, let alone parts per million. In fact, the claimed deviations are close to the noise levels.
I do NOT mean to disparage Climate Science and the hypothesis of Anthropogenic Global Warming (or Climate Change) There is much data and reasoning to support this position. I merely point out that the matter is not "Settled Science" because there is no such thing.
The Myth of Settled Science
The Myth of Settled Science
The Myth of Settled Science
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“To one studying the history of science, it even seems that the more certain are the proponents of a theory, the more likely they are to be wrong …” [James Lawrence Powell, Grand Canyon, Solving Earth’s Grandest Puzzle]
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." ;Richard Feynman, Nobel Laureate in Physics; [The Physics Teacher, volume 7, issue 6 (1969)]
I am not making a general criticism of Science in general, nor of Climate Science. I am simply pointing out that Science is based on skepticism and that all knowledge is provisional and subject to change.
The phrase "Settled Science" has been bandied about over the past few years in relation to Climatology and "Anthropogenic Global Warming". This paper examines the notion of "Settled Science" and shows it to be illusory.
Several examples will demonstrate the absurdity of calling anything "Settled Science". In most of these there was far more than a 97% consensus: The belief in these facts of “Settled Science” were usually unanimous.
Isaac Newton created a magnificent theory of Celestial Mechanics that, for the first time, explained why the Solar System has the shape and the motion that it has. He published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687. This book is widely acclaimed at the most important scientific book ever published. It became the foundation of Classical Mechanics, which was extended to nearly every possible natural phenomenon. As mathematical techniques developed, the final triumph of Newtonian Celestial Mechanics was achieved by Pierre Simon de Laplace who wrote a five-volume masterpiece, Celestial Mechanics (completed 1825). Laplace showed in detailed calculations that Newtonian Physics agreed with astronomical observations to better than one part per hundred thousand. Observations and calculations were further refined later in the 1800s resulting in success after success. Not only did Newtonian Celestial Mechanics explain the motions of all the known planets, but predicted the existence and orbit of a previously undiscovered planet, Neptune, along with the orbits of comets, asteroids, etc. The success rate of Newton's Mechanics, as augmented by the calculations of Laplace and others was nearly perfect. By the end of the 1800s, Newtonian Celestial Mechanics was able to predict observations to better than one part per million.
One of the axioms of Newtonian Celestial Mechanics is that gravity is a force that exists between any two masses and propagates at infinite speed, that is instantaneously. This instantaneous propagation bothered quite a few physicists, including Newton himself. Nonetheless, invariable agreement with observations and predictions to better than one part per million is a tough argument to counter. The matter was "Settled Science" for more than 200 years without a single significant discrepancy between theory and observation. In the middle of the 1800s, one tiny deviation between prediction and observation was discovered: the perihelion precession of the planet Mercury. It was so tiny that it bothered nobody. It was explained away by the existence of another new planet, Vulcan, within the orbit of Mercury. Unlike Neptune, Vulcan was not found where it was expected to be, in fact, it was not found at all. The matter was still so small, and the success of Newtonian Celestial Mechanics was so overwhelming, that the issue was largely ignored. It was thought that some observational error was responsible, although such an error could not be found.
Attempts to fix Newtonian Celestial Mechanics by assigning a finite propagation speed to gravity failed utterly. Any finite speed of gravitational propagation would cause the planets to spiral outward from the Sun and the entire Solar System would disintegrate.
Then, in 1905, a Swiss patent clerk named Albert Einstein blasted Newtonian Mechanics out of the water. He showed, among other things, that no force could propagate faster than the speed of light.
This problem vexed Physics until 1915, when Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity. Einstein showed that, despite the finite speed of gravity (which was the same as the speed of light), velocity dependent forces cause each object to be attracted to other objects not where those objects were, but where those objects would have been if they had continued at uniform velocity in a straight line and if the speed of gravity were infinite. Furthermore, General Relativity explained the perihelion shift of Mercury and predicted that light would be bent when passing around a massive object such as the Sun. This phenomenon could be observed during a solar eclipse, so an expedition was mounted to carry telescopes to the predicted location of an eclipse and observations were made that again confirmed Einstein's prediction.
The entire point here is that Newtonian Mechanics, the most respected theory in all of Physics and Astronomy, which had been supported by millions of observations over some 200 years, proved to be incorrect, and not in a minor way either, but in a fundamental way. One of its foundational assumptions, infinite speed of gravity, was simply false, and the seeming agreement with experiment was due to a mathematical coincidence involving the inverse square law of Gravity. Exactly the same phenomenon happens in Electromagnetism, again due to an inverse square law.
Since the time of the double slit experiment by Thomas Young, it was universally accepted that light was a wave. Light was diffracted by gratings and other irregularities. Only waves can be diffracted. The notion that light was a particle died in 1801 and Young killed it. For over 100 years, the wave nature of light was accepted by 100% of all scientists. Whoopsie. Light is a particle and a wave. This was demonstrated in 1905 by Albert Einstein and has been giving people headaches ever since. Similarly, it had been shown in 1897 that electric charge was carried by a particle named "electron" by J J Thomson. There was no question about the particulate nature of the electron. Whoopsie again. It turns out that the electron is also both a particle and a wave. In fact, it turns out that all sub-atomic particles are waves.
This was one of the several Earth-shaking identifications of seemingly different entities that turned out to be the same things merely viewed from different perspectives. For centuries, it was "Settled Science" that these word pairs described distinct and very different objects. Each of these distinctions was accepted by 100% of scientists:
star, sun -- Giordano Bruno hypothesized that they were identical, a discovery for which he was burned at the stake.
world, planet -- Nicolaus Copernicus showed that the Earth was just another planet, orbiting the Sun [actually the common center of mass of the Solar System]. For millennia, there was a near 100% consensus that the Sun, Moon, & planets orbited the Earth.
time, space -- Einstein, 1905
mass, energy -- Einstein, 1905
particle, wave -- Einstein, 1905
acceleration, gravity -- Einstein, 1915
To the utter amazement of the scientific community and the entire World, both words of each of these word pairs mean exactly the same thing. It is equally astonishing that the last four of these were discovered by one person: Albert Einstein.
It was "Settled Science" that the "inert gasses", helium, neon, argon, krypton, & xenon did not form any chemical compounds whatsoever. This is because they all have completely filled outer electron shells and therefore are not prone to either lose or gain electrons. Whoopsie. In the last few decades, it has been discovered that all of the "noble gasses" form compounds.
Stability of the Chemical Elements was "Settled Science" for nearly a century. Since Lavoisier and the other early true chemists, it was known that elements could not be transmuted from one to another and that the hope of the alchemists was futile. The elements were absolutely fixed and immutable. ALL chemists agreed on this point unanimously. Whoopsie, Becquerel discovered radioactivity and the immutability of elements, the "Settled Science" of most of the 19th century Chemistry, sank like a lead brick.
It was "Settled Science" that acquired characteristics cannot be inherited. The great evolutionist and taxonomist Jean Baptiste Lamarck believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. This was shown to be false within a century when Darwinism and Mendelism became established. Researches by many biologists showed that Lamarck was wrong on this issue. By the 1940s, the "fact" that acquired characteristics could not be inherited was a piece of "Settled Science" acknowledged by ALL biologists. Whoopsie! In 1942, Conrad H. Waddington discovered epigenetics and showed that, in some cases, acquired characteristics can be inherited.
The "central dogma of molecular biology" is a phrase by Francis Crick, who proposed the double helix structure of DNA. It means that information passes from DNA to mRNA to proteins, but neither mRNA, nor proteins can pass the information back to DNA. Crick first wrote it in 1958 and repeated it in 1970. It was "Settled Science". Then reverse transcriptase was discovered, which is an enzyme used to generate complementary DNA from RNA. So at least one reverse link exists. But the matter is far from over. Recently, James A. Shapiro in his book Evolution: A View from the 21st Century has published evidence that proteins edit nuclear DNA directly.
Furthermore, there was the "one gene, one protein" hypothesis, which was universally believed for a couple of decades and considered to be "Settled Science". Further research demonstrated that there were no more than 25,000 genes in the human genome, but at least 100,000 different proteins produced under direction of the genome. Simple arithmetic shows that a single protein specifying gene must produce more than one protein. Whoopsie! This was shown to be the result of differential mRNA "editing" which occurs within the nuclear envelope before the edited mRNA enters the general cytoplasm. In a given organism, different cell types have distinct editing enzymes in the nuclear envelope, converting mRNA into different versions, permitting a single piece of DNA to direct the synthesis of distinct but related proteins.
Slowing of the expansion of the Universe was "Settled Science". Gravity was known to be always attractive. Therefore, once the expansion of the Universe was discovered, it became clear that gravity must be slowing the expansion of the universe for the same reason that a rock thrown vertically into the air slows down. A major stated goal of the Hubble Telescope project was to determine the "deceleration parameter", the rate that expansion was slowing. Everybody in Science was unanimous on this. Whoopsie. In 1998, it was discovered that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating.
Here is another pair of settled scientific matters that were not quite so "settled" as scientists thought. They were first promulgated by two of the scientific giants of the 19th century who happened to be good friends, Darwin & Lyell.
Charles Lyell built his theory of the Earth on the ideas of uniformitarianism and gradualism. Prior to Lyell, geologists spoke of strange and repeated catastrophes as the explanation for the geological record. Lyell said, "Nonsense," all forces that shaped the Earth were prosaic and common and are still going on today. This was called "uniformitarianism", the idea that processes were uniform across time and space. He also believed that all change was gradual ("gradualism"), keeping in mind that there were brief violent changes such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. All such events were believed to be local in scope and the notion of global catastrophes was quietly buried. Nearly all geologists believed firmly in gradualism right up until the 1980s, when Walter Alvarez and his colleagues destroyed gradualism (Whoopsie) with their emphasis on mass extinctions such as the end cretaceous event perpetrated by a colossal asteroid strike. The bulk of the geological community was so committed to gradualism that Alvarez et all were subjected to a great deal of derision. Now mass extinctions are one of the central features of Earth Sciences.
Charles Darwin built his Theory of Evolution on the notion of gradual change, bit by bit, as life adapted over time. Darwin rejected the "saltation" theories of many others to explain the apparent gaps in the fossil records, and instead blamed the gaps on the incompleteness of the record. According to Darwin, species change gradually with time, introducing the same gradualism into Evolution that Lyell introduced into Geology. The vast majority of evolutionary biologists agreed with Darwin. Whoopsie. Darwin was wrong. Eldridge & Gould showed that Evolution was very uneven in time. There were long periods when a group of animals changed little if at all, interrupted by brief (in the geological sense) episodes of rapid evolution. They called their theory "punctuated equilibrium" and produced a wealth of data to support their point of view.
It was "Settled Science" that the rigidity of the Earth's crust made it impossible for continents to move around. Continental Drift was tossed into the dustbin of history. Even the great Harold Jeffreys was convinced that there was no possible means for continents to move. This was nearly unanimously believed. Whoopsie. Plate Tectonics burst on the scene and became one of the central tenets of Geology.
Not quite so recently, but just as firmly believed to be "Settled Science" was Lord Kelvin's declaration that the Sun (and hence the Earth) was no more than 20 million years old. This time scale gave Charles Darwin fits because it was insufficient to permit observed Biological Evolution to occur. Remember, Lord Kelvin (after whom the Kelvin temperature scale was named) was one of the greatest physicists of all time. He was a founder of Thermodynamics and many other areas of Science. His word carried the highest authority in the scientific world. Nearly all physicists of the era agreed with him based upon his brilliant and incisive papers on the subject. His calculations, based on known Physics of gasses, were correct. But his conclusion was wrong. He did not know about nuclear reactions, which had not yet been discovered.
Then there was the matter of what caused ulcers. It was "Settled Science" for decades that most ulcers were caused by excess acidity in the stomach. All treatments of ulcers were based upon this incontrovertible fact. Whoopsie, wrong. Most ulcers were found to be caused by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori. The linkage to acid was real, but only because this bacterium is acidophilic. But the bacterium and not acidity was the cause.
Then there were these big misses by great minds:
“There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will,” Albert Einstein told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on December 29, 1934 [In 1938, only 4 years later, nuclear fission was discovered.]
In 1895 Lord Kelvin stated that “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible”. In 1903, the Wright Brothers proved him wrong.
British Astronomer Royal in January 1956, Richard van der Riet Woolley said, ''Space travel is utter bilge.'' In 1957, the first artificial satellite was launched by the USSR. In 1959, Luna 2 impacted upon the Moon.
Now, when one looks at the predictions of "Global Warming", one does not get predictions that are very accurate at all. In fact, all of the most prestigious models disagree with one another by wide margins. To which I ask the question: How can a theory that does not agree with observations to any reasonable degree of accuracy be considered "Settled Science"?
Unlike astronomical observations, temperature measurements are not accurate to even parts per thousand, let alone parts per million. In fact, the claimed deviations are close to the noise levels.
I do NOT mean to disparage Climate Science and the hypothesis of Anthropogenic Global Warming (or Climate Change) There is much data and reasoning to support this position. I merely point out that the matter is not "Settled Science" because there is no such thing.