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To: gore3000
If it was correct there would be tremendous amounts of evidence for it and such a claim would have been made decades ago.

It was.

From the Scientific American article you dismissed out of hand apparently without reading:

"Hints of a harsh past on the earth began cropping up in the early 1960s, but we and our colleagues have found new evidence in the past eight years that has helped us weave a more explicit tale..."

[...] "The search for the surprisingly strong evidence for these climatic events has taken us around the world."

[...] After hundreds of millions of years of burial, these now exposed rocks tell the story that scientists first began to piece together 35 years ago.

[...] "In 1964 W. Brian Harland of the University of Cambridge pointed out that glacial deposits dot Neoproterozoic rock outcrops across virtually every continent."

[...] "Realizing that the glaciers must have covered the tropics, Harland became the first geologist to suggest that the earth had experienced a great Neoproterozoic ice age [see 'The Great Infra-Cambrian Glaciation,' by W. B. Harland and M.J.S. Rudwick; Scientific American, August 1964]."

[...] "The first of these objections began to fade in the late 1970s with the discovery of remarkable communities of organisms living in places once thought too harsh to harbor life."

[...] "In the 1960s Martin J. S. Rudwick, working with Brian Harland, proposed that the climate recovery following a huge Neoproterozoic glaciation paved the way for the explosive radiation of multicellular animal life soon thereafter."

So... When you say, "If it was correct there would be tremendous amounts of evidence for it and such a claim would have been made decades ago", what can we deduce from the fact that such a claim *was* indeed made "decades ago"?

The fact that you haven't heard of something is not sufficient grounds for you to declare that it didn't happen. You would benefit from researching things instead of posting your assumptions as fact. In this case, you needn't have gone any farther than material that was already provided on this very thread. Reading it instead of dismissing it unread would have been useful and educational.

Science is much more than just a process. It is the vast amount of accumulated evidence and discoveries and verified theories which have been gathered for hundreds of years. Attempting to discuss science -- or worse, attempting to refute it -- without being familiar with at least a substantial grasp of that body of knowledge is a recipe for failure.

There is no evidence for these claims that is why they use 'computer models'.

They have massive evidence for those claims, which is *why* they use computer models to handle the amount of information.

You can model whatever you like on a computer and make it come out any way you wish.

Not if you do it honestly and carefully, you can't. Are you accusing them of being dishonest?

Sometimes I think that more lies are told with spreadsheets than with tongues.

Hmm, I guess you are.

If you distrust computer models so much, what alternative method would you propose for determining the results of the complex interactions-over-time of large systems?

185 posted on 10/30/2003 9:27:53 PM PST by Ichneumon
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To: Ichneumon
From the Scientific American article you dismissed out of hand apparently without reading:

I read that garbage and my objection to it has not been refuted - life could not exist in the oceans for hundreds of millions of years if they were covered with ice. The article is therefore nonsense.

As to models, they cannot prove what we do not know because they cannot be tested and cannot take account of influencess which are unknown. Models are only useful as shortcuts for what we already know. Even then they need to be tested in real life.

211 posted on 10/31/2003 4:52:22 AM PST by gore3000 ("To say dogs, mice, and humans are all products of slime plus time is a mystery religion.")
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