[Iowa_Flames_Fan]

Originally Posted by Bingo

Your analogy works well if you set the clock back to the mid 50's. At that point smoking was thought be be harmful but it was far from proven, and there certainly wasn't a consensus.

Today we have that.

Tomorrow we may have that for global warming, but today we don't. Or ... time might show that there was a bit of a panic applied to the science and it was a cyclical phenomenon with man playing a microscopic part.

You may well be right. The nature of science is that it adjusts its theories so that they match the available data. I'm no expert on climate change, but the little research I've done has revealed something pretty damning about many of these dissenting voices who are going against the mainstream of climate science--that mainstream that believes, as the National Academy of Sciences and other research institutions, that

Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise.

http://www.pewclimate.org/global-war...basic_science/

Undoubtedly there are some who disagree. One notable figure in that debate is Tim Ball, who was a professor of climatology 10 years ago, but left the academy to work as a hired gun for a right-wing think-tank. In and of itself, that's not very interesting--it happens on both sides of the political spectrum all the time, especially when professors have difficulty getting any funding for their research, and their academic careers begin to fizzle as a result.

Here's the interesting part. 10 years ago, Dr. Ball was trying to convince everyone that global warming is a "myth." Now, even he admits it's happening, but has changed his story to "not catastrophic" and "not "anthropogenic (man-made)." Why the change of heart? What will be the most convenient viewpoint when the available evidence changes again?

But Ball isn't seriously trying to discredit the legions of climate scientists who disagree with him. If he were, he would do actual research of his own, instead of attacking research that others are doing. What he's trying to do is make it seem like there's more doubt in the scientific community than there actually is. This is a tactic that has worked very well on issues like intelligent design--because the mealy-mouthed media refuses to distinguish between scientific findings in refereed journals and articles posted on the web by think tanks.