Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="roadrunner2012" data-source="post: 1281306" data-attributes="member: 40736">Krauthammer had a point? I will say at least he is somewhat clever in his put downs, if disingenuous, but what was his point and how did he prove it? His a very intelligent person, no doubt, and I would expect better of him.This post, from someone more intelligent and better spoken than I am, sums it up nicely. I'm guessing you glossed over it the first time I posted it.<a href="http://science.time.com/2014/02/23/krauthammer-climate-change-caveman/" target="_blank">http://science.time.com/2014/02/23/krauthammer-climate-change-caveman/</a>Fair use excepts for the inherently lazy:Only Krauthammer knows what he meant when he wrote that. Does he genuinely believe that Obama—who, whatever else you might say about him, is no ninny—was really claiming that climate science, for all its complexity, is fixed and complete and a closed book? Or might the President more plausibly have meant that in a political atmosphere in which members of the opposing party continue to call climate change “phony science,” “the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” it might be time to say out loud that no it isn’t, that global warming is confoundingly, worrisomely, dangerously real, even if there are uncountable unanswered questions about it. The rest of Krauthammer’s piece was the usual dreary exercise in scientific hole-poking: What about the much-discussed 15-year ‘pause’ in warming? What about the backing and forthing on whether climate change is contributing to the frequency and severity of hurricanes? Answer that!  To which, yet again, I say, read the studies. The answers are there, the complexity is there and the frustrating ambiguities are there too—all spelled out, all acknowledged. But none of that changes this simple truth: the debate is settled, human-influenced climate change is a fact, and so—for those willing to entertain complexity, to crack a sweat to understand something worth understanding—is the scientific method.</blockquote>

Verification