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The attempt to conflate the two is not surprising but of course is specious.... TTOE is a full Scientific Theory that meets all the criteria thereof.... AGW is at best a hypothesis that meets exactly none.

I must take issue with both these claims, dear freedom2003.

First, AGW (anthropogenic global warming) doesn't even qualify as an intelligent hypothesis. Anyone who is even vaguely familiar with the history of climate change on this planet would likely find such a proposal risible. For it simply doesn't square with the evidentiary record, available to any intelligent generalist who cares to follow the problem.

Just ask any AGW proponent to see the evidence backing up his proposal, and he will give you the results of his own purpose-built, mathematically-based climatological model as just the evidence you seek. Try that global warming alarmist/troll Michael Mann (of UPenn and "hockey stick" fame) on that question and see where it would get you. (It would probably be a lawsuit....)

Are we to believe that the legitimacy of science depends on such tactics? Does Michael Mann really expect us to believe that his consecrated model is a complete description of climate change in the natural world, that is to say in Reality? Which is to say that Reality can actually be reduced to the size of a conception of a human brain — i.e., as something further translatable into a purpose-built mathematical model.

If that is so, then all I can say is Mann's model does not address the Mediaeval Warm Period (roughly dated 800–1400 A.D.), back when Greenland was actually green. (Evidently the folks on Greenland back then were engaged in small-scale agriculture, herding and vinocultural activities. Also they were Christians, as church ruins there attest.)

I find it noteworthy that toward the end of this global warming period, Europe was horrifically savaged by the Black Plague. Estimated loss of life: 13 million souls.

Anyhoot, fairly quickly thereafter, severe cold set in globally, and persisted for centuries. In the American experience, one thinks of the first year of the Pilgrim's landing at Provincetown, MA (1620), and the enormous toll in lives it took (over a third of the population in that bitter winter). Or of the horrific experience of Valley Forge, in that terrible winter of profound misery and discontent....

But then, things started warming up again from there. A family reminiscence here that seems on-point: When my Dad was a boy, he attended boarding school at a private academy located on an island in Boston Harbor. He would tell us of how the harbor would freeze in the winter, so much so that they could bring in horse-teams to drag in fully-loaded coal barges over the ice. THAT sort of thing hasn't happened in my lifetime!

I recall that, back in the 1970s, the stories that Time and Newsweek were running were all about immanent global cooling, presaging the imminent return to the next Ice Age….

It’s to laugh.

Anyhoot, the Mediaeval Warm Period does not comport with Mann’s hockey stick. Moreover, the ideology behind global warming theory — that man is the sole culprit, thus his Industrial Revolution is entirely to blame for the catastrophe that Mann’s model purports to predict — is totally silly. Back in the Mediaeval Warm Period, there was zero industrial activity whatsoever going on involving large-scale use of hydrocarbon fuels. Beyond cooking and warming fires, there was near-zero release of hydrocarbons by man-made means into the natural environment. (And you can’t blame everything on cow flatulence.)

Finally, what really puts me off is the global-warming-alarmists’ claim that carbon dioxide emissions kill the biosphere because they introduce inadvertent, devastating effects on global climate. At least that seems to be implicit in their main argument.

Yet it seems to me that the natural world quite handily deals with the well-being of the total Biota: We humans discern that the Biota consists of two fundamental realms, the biological and the botanical. Botanical entities’ respiration consists of inhaling carbon dioxide — without which photosynthesis would be impossible [and thus no food for humans] — and exhaling oxygen.

And it’s a really good thing that the plant world does this: because human respiration consists of inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide.

What an amazing complementarity in living and breathing Nature!

All Thanks and Praise be unto the Lord!!!

Michael Mann: Does your “model” take such considerations into effect?

Or are these considerations negligible, because they do not presuppose or fit your model?

Dear freedom2003, I was about to get into my Second point, re: whether or not Darwin’s theory qualifies as accepted science. Then I realized how long I’ve gone on already.

Time for a break. But I’ll be back.

Thank for agreeing with me that AGW theory is total tripe.

PART TWO OF MY LAST: RE THAT CREEP DARWIN

To continue RE: My quibble with your Second point, freedumb2003, that Darwin’s theory is accepted science — so accepted, in fact, that it cannot be questioned by any sensible person now living.

But if that is the case, then it seems to me we have entirely left the precinct of science, and are venturing into wholly ideological territory, a territory unhinged, untroubled by, any connection with the actually Reality in which you and I and everybody else actually lives.

For openers, science itself is an intergenerational, communal and social effort that has a noble mission and tradition to maintain. Science can’t tell us everything we’d like to know, but we have confidence that, in what they do tell us, that is reliable.

To evaluate this issue, it seems best to mention at the outset the gist of two different points of view of what constitutes Reality, and what constitutes Science. Historically, culturally in the West, the latter has ever been thought of as the devoted student and explicator of the former. That is to say, science per se is not the principle creative activity in Nature. The purview of science is a very restricted one, based as it is on the method that distinguishes it as a valid intellectual activity: That is, a method based on direct observation (as technologically made more keen over time), and on successful and replicable experiments designed to “falsify” (or by default, “justify”) whatever outcome the experiment is seeking to achieve.

But what science never does, nor can do, is to PROVE anything. “Proof” is a term that belongs to mathematics alone. Science is about making descriptions of Nature, to as high a probabilistic determination as possible. Which ALWAYS falls short of 100% accuracy.

I am probably not alone in thinking of physics as the preeminent discipline in the natural sciences. Its propositions are rigorous and widely testable. As a discipline, it has shown itself adept in assimilating new evidence. Which is how human knowledge of Reality progresses from Ptolemy to Einstein.

Which means that physical science is ineluctably subject to change, subject to subsequent modification as new evidence comes into play.

David Bohm sums this up quite nicely:

…Newtonian mechanics, thought originally to be of completely universal validity, was eventually found to be valid in a limited domain (velocity small compared with light) and only to a limited degree of approximation. Newtonian mechanics had to give way to the theory of relativity which utilized basic conceptions concerning space and time which were in many ways not consistent with those of Newtonian mechanics. The new theory was, therefore, in certain essential features qualitatively and fundamentally different from the old one. Nevertheless, within the domain of low velocities, the new theory approached the old one as a limited case. In a similar way, classical mechanics eventually gave way to the quantum theory, which is very different in its basic structure, but which still contains classical theory as a limited case, valid approximately in the domain of large quantum numbers. Agreement with experiments in a limited domain and to a limited degree of approximation is evidently no proof, therefore, that the basic concepts of a given theory have a completely universal validity. — Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980, p. 105

How come the biological sciences don’t work this way? NOTHING has changed with Darwin’s theory for the past 160 years. Every new discovery becomes new “proof” that Darwin’s theory is correct. And God help the brave person who suggests otherwise!!!

To those folks looking for “certainty in Nature” I have only one observation: The only certainty in Nature is that Nature is uncertain. BUT — Nature is not random.

On such grounds, I object to the idea that Darwinism is somehow the sine qua non of Biology, let alone a valid scientific theory.

Biology is purportedly the “scientific” study of living beings.

In what follows, I’m taking my page from physics, physics being a relentlessly rigorous scientific discipline that is able to propound its thinking in terms of universal mathematical language. Also it is remarkable for its ability to assimilate new evidence that confounds old theories. If that were not so, then we’d all still be stuck in Ptolemy’s Geocentric Model of the universe, and Einstein would be completely, totally unintelligible to the human species, not to mention Niels Bohr.

I do not notice a similar enthusiasm for embracing change as a matter of scientific principle in devotees of Darwin’s theory.

The reasons I think Darwin’s Evolutionary Theory is NOT a valid scientific theory:

(1) Scientific theories must, in principle, be testable. And not only testable, but replicable by other observers, using the same basic test apparatus as adjusted to local conditions as need be. Somebody please tell me how the central premise of Darwin’s theory — that one species can convert itself, via its progeny, into a kind different than itself — that is, into a “new species — can possibly be true, since no human observer, after all this historical time, has been able to report such a finding? And since no feasible experiment seems forthcoming to test such an hypothesis?

Not all of the Reality we humans live in is directly observable in all its aspects. Yet the answer to some questions that affect us most deeply must be inferred from what can be “seen,” not just by what we feel. We are profoundly affected by the effects of “non-observables” at many levels. Thus frequent “reality checks” seem to be in order. :>)

But in any case, science cannot reach to the problem of non-observables, or justly to have anything to say about them. That doesn’t mean that the problem of non-observables just “goes away,” because Science thinks it’s unprofitable and/or bunk, methodologically speaking, to track them down. Rather, that study legitimately falls to theology and philosophy.

Finally, science cannot define Nature. However, as "formal observer," it can attempt to describe (to the maximum possible accuracy it has at hand) what Nature is — as seen from the standpoint of a particular, given point in time.

There is a "problem" that we humans actually L IVE in — and live OUT of — the very “problem” that science per se CANNOT address, given the self-imposed limit of its method.

Thus in conclusion, my objection to Darwinism is that it never changes. It’s been around since 1859, and there is nothing going on with its “creed” that has been modified by more recent experience of any description whatsoever. If anything, Darwinist theory is being used as a screening tool to prohibit free speech contradicting its (alarmingly partial) account of biological organisms — in the natural sciences, in the academy, in the elite journals, in public opinion.

The thought struck me today that Darwin’s theory is, in itself, a “fossil.” Of course, there’s irony there, in that Darwin himself worried that his theory depended on the by-then-known fossil record of his own day, which was very spotty to say the least. Yet he said that his theory would either rise or fall on the paleontological/fossil record yet to be established over time.

That Darwinism purports to be THE principal science of biology just gives me the fits. The theory says nothing about the origin of life, or its subsequent biological organization necessary to the maintenance of a living state. Darwin does not deal with such problems. All he wants to show you is how one “species” turns into another “species.” [And of course, we can always quibble about the meaning of “species” if we have nothing better to do….]

In conclusion, I just think that Darwin’s Evolution theory is the greatest Myth of our Time. It has absolutely no merit as a scientific theory, because it does not speak the language of science (mathematical formulation); it cannot design an experiment to prove its main holding — that is, to demonstrate it is possible for one species to become another species under laboratory conditions.

Finally, Darwinism proposes an (untested) directive by which further discourse regarding Nature is to prescribe to its theory that evolution is wholly undirected in its operation without deviation; that is, everything in Nature happens by chance.

If one is in the business of rent-seeking from federal taxpayers and/or other third parties, in support of such groundless “research,” I have only one thing to say to you: Please get another living, please get a LIFE. Speaking as a federal taxpayer, I’m sick and tired of paying for this kind of garbage.

In the end, your message is: Winners win; Losers lose. That’s just the way it is…. Whatta concept!!! Thank you Charlie Darwin!

Bye-bye for now, dear freedom2003. We obviously disagree on the Second point. Still, thank you so much for writing!