Quote Originally Posted by Thorne View Post
I know I've told this story before, though perhaps not here:

During the Hurricane Katrina disaster, both before and after, reporters for the networks repeatedly asked climate and weather experts whether global warming had caused Katrina to become so strong. All answered with a definitive, "Unlikely" or "Probably not."

Then someone asked the question of a "climate specialist." His response was that it was absolutely certain that global warming had caused Katrina to grow from a category three to a category five! No mention of data which supported his statement, no clarification of just what kind of "specialist" he was, just that statement.

Want to guess which statement received the most coverage for the next week? You guessed it! The climate "specialist" clip was played over and over again, on several different networks. None of the climate experts were ever quoted.
And chances are good the specialty was in political advocacy at that.

On the other hand, if you focus on quality sources like peer-reviewed journals you can see all sorts of evidence that man-made chemicals are altering the Earth's temperature, and you can't see a single good study saying they don't without looking back several years. It's not because politics or other factors drive the agenda, its that those models have been refuted through further study.

We can't model everything that happens in the atmosphere, but that doesn't mean we don't understand enough of the picture to reach a meaningful conclusion. Building a nuke required splitting the atom, but it doesn't require understanding the subsubatomic particles, just the subatomic ones.