WHAT WOULD AN APOLLO ASTRONAUT KNOW ANYWAY ? There are few people on Earth as carefully vetted, as rigorously trained, and as highly respected as America’s Apollo astronauts. They bet their lives on quality data, its objective interpretation, and the competence, dedication, accountability & integrity of professionals to advance science and knowledge on behalf of all mankind. Heres Apollo VII Astronaut Walt Cunninghams take on the alarmist global warming hypotheses ................... I come from a background where responsible science and technology are the difference between life and death. We didn’t expect our scientists and engineers to know everything, or that their hypotheses would always be right. Hypotheses are ideas to be challenged, and to ultimately be proven or disproven by empirical evidence. Those of us who challenge alarmist claims of accepted theory and consensus are referred to as skeptics, as if that’s a bad thing. Responsible scientists are supposed to be skeptical. In the days of Apollo, astronauts, engineers, flight controllers and managers were skeptical of anything that might impact landing a man on the Moon. That attitude led to success in one of the biggest challenges in history. In the last twenty years, I have watched the high standards of science being violated by a few influential climate scientists, including some at NASA, while special interest opportunists have abused our public trust.” The biggest problems I see with the sorry state of climate science, as the public comes to know it through the media, are the alarmist claims, unsupported by data and history, being presented as facts. When these claims cannot be validated by empirical data, they attempt to justify them by equally dishonest claims of proof by consensus . “Models are not data… I’m here to encourage everyone to look at the data themselves, not just buy what they’re told. I find that my standards for science are more important to me than anything else, and I hate to see them being depreciated by the alarmists’ claims today. Politics and the media and what have you have allowed us now to be facing one of the biggest scientific hoaxes in history. That’s what’s being pushed on us.” These alarmist claims create unwarranted fear in order to promote their political and profiteering agendas, while establishing regulatory policies that kill business and grow government–all at a terrific cost to taxpayers and energy consumers. Understanding global climate and what, if anything, humans can do to affect it are scientific questions that can be answered only by honest science and scientific data. Yet, global warming alarmists invariably try to make their case through rhetoric, dogma, opinion, and emotion. They like to cite their climate models, and the public buys it. Shouldn’t we be emphasizing that models are not data, and that climate models have never successfully predicted anything? Models are built upon assumptions (opinions), and if the bases for the assumptions are wrong, the results can never accurately predict future behavior. Anytime the evidence is debatable, we should push for open and honest public debate in an effort to get to the “truth.” Unfortunately, believers in human caused global warming avoid debate like the plague. The conflict over AGW has deteriorated into a religious war; a war between true believers in a human-caused global warming problem and nonbelievers. True believers are beyond being interested in evidence; it is impossible to reason a person out of positions they have not been reasoned into. forbes/sites/larrybell/2013/08/06/a-conversation-with-apollo-astronaut-walter-cunningham-about-a-vital-need-to-restore-climate-science-integrity/
Posted on: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 12:27:31 +0000
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