Saturday, February 20, 2010

A Choice of Viewpoints

Here are two clips that give you a taste of two sides of the "global warming" debate.

First, Obama explains that you can't believe your "lying eyes" since any negative fact is just a fact while all those positive facts are not just facts but confirmations of a theory:



And here's a CBS News report questioning whether the emperor has any clothes along with the closing scene with a requisite confirmation that the "science is settled" and all the necessary facts are in and the time to question is well past:



My own viewpoint is that the truth is being trampled upon and you can't have science if you don't have openness, honesty, and debate. Here's a bit from a BBC news report that reflects my viewpoint:
Leading scientists say that the recent controversies surrounding climate research have damaged the image of science as a whole.

President of the US National Academy of Sciences, Ralph Cicerone, said scandals including the "climategate" e-mail row had eroded public trust in scientists.

His comment came at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Diego.

Dr Cicerone joined other renowned scientists on a panel at the event.

'Distrust has spread'

He said that the controversial e-mail exchanges about climate change data had caused people to suspect that scientists "oppressed free speech".

His fellow panel members, including Lord Martin Rees, president of the UK's Royal Society, agreed that scientists needed to be more open about their findings.

"There is some evidence that the distrust has spread," Dr Cicerone told BBC News. "There is a feeling that scientists are suppressing dissent, stifling their competitors through conspiracies."

Recent polls, including one carried out by the BBC, have suggested that climate scepticism is on the rise.

Dr Cicerone linked this shift in public feeling to the hacked e-mails and to recently publicised mistakes made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in one of its key reports.

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