Time to end the debate

I see in the news this morning that earlier this month the BBC aired "The Great Global Warming Swindle" - a number of scientists (and others) claiming that global warming is not caused by people (the CO2/temperature relationship is, in fact, a cause and effect, but the temperature causes the warming, not the other way around).

So, in this corner we have a politician claiming that he has proof that the human race is going to destroy the planet it occupies, and in the other, we have a journalist claiming that he has proof that the politician is wrong. Wow, there's a tough call. All we need is a lawyer and we'll have all three classes of people you should never trust.

Who do I believe? Oddly enough, niether of them. I don't believe anyone has PROVED anything yet.

To me (granted, I'm an engineer, not a scientist), the essence of scientific 'proof' is the single-variable experiment. You take a system and do exactly the same things to it twice except for a single factor that you change. Performed carefully and/or with sufficient repetition, you gain knowledge of what effect that factor has on the system. Generally you call the system you ran without that factor the "control."

So there's a huge problem with anyone who claims to have proved any cause/effect relationship (or lack thereof in many cases) with regard to the Earth.

We have no control for our experiment.

I think it is high time we conducted a proper experiment for global warming. Let's go find some planets that are very like Earth. After all, there are a few hundred billion stars in this galaxy alone, and all we need is a few dozen that are like our sun and have earth-like planets. We settle on, say, half a dozen of these planets and produce a varied level of CO2 emissions on each one, carefully leaving a few unpopulated as controls.

In a hundred years or so, we can look at the temperature changes on the various planets, and we can begin our analysis.

If you think this is far-fetched, try taking a sober look at what the alarmists want to do to our economy, or the idea to launch hundreds of thousands of rockets to put a distributed umbrella between us and the sun.

Remember that while the experts still disagree on whether we are able to destroy our ecology, we are quite able to destroy our economy.