Global Warming...???

I just found yet another site linking to sceptics commenting on the climate debate. Very interesting; yet another case of, "You pays your money and you takes your choice".

Which caused me to smile to myself - for many years I have been convinced that Science is as much a matter of faith as Religion. It's all very well for someone to say, "The numbers PROVE theories about gravity/virus replication/etc." I have to have faith that the numbers prove it. I suppose the scientists' answer would be, "Ah - but theology can never be KNOWN - whereas if you were a good enough mathematician, you would understand the figures PROVE these things."

However - I'm not. The fact that the figures work if you are good enough at Maths is something I've always had to take on faith.

I suppose I was an iconoclast from an early age, what with a mother who steadfastly refused to believe in gravity. ("So why do things fall down when you drop them?" Mum: "Because they're heavy." "WHY are they heavy?" Mum: "Because they weigh a lot") It was perhaps this background that led me to be uneasy at school when, as in variably happened, the Science teachers would review our carefully-planned experiments and instruct us to put in the results we ought to have got. Nobody will ever convince me that this doesn't happen on a larger scale, especially when grants and funding are involved. You can call it a lack of trust in the scientific community, a lack of faith, if you like...

I am no longer a Christian. There came a point where my observations led me to believe that, like my schoolteachers, the results were being fixed. I still have a spirituality, though, and some of that has come from learning about science - the way we are all interconnected, the wonderful way we seem to bring about change by observing the world at sub-atomic levels, research into memory... all of which, of course, I have to take on faith.

Now - this might not have mattered very much, One woman's view of the world is perhaps not that significant. But the current crisis for Science surely has to be that the Global Warming issue is NOT about Progress versus Ignorance, it is about two sets of people with diametrically opposed views, ALL of whom can 'prove' they are right. Mathematically. Which to choose? How does the average person know which to believe?

The Global Warming bandwagon is a heavy and expensive one. It is now beyond thinking that it should be shown to be based on incorrect science. This, of course, doesn't mean that Global Warming is not happening, even though it seems more and more counter-intuitive.

I have to hold my hand up here as someone who never quite believed in the 'New Ice Age', which some of my readers may be too young to remember. Over thirty years ago, we were terrified on a regular basis by warnings of the New Ice Age. Funnily enough, I don't remember there ever being an announcement that this wasn't going to happen after all; I think the scientific community just cast the belief aside, and - like an embarrassed teenager being reminded they used to believe in Santa Claus - never really talked about it again.

Well - I have the luxury apparently not afforded to scientists of being able to say that I simply don't know what the truth is. It's a shame they have painted themselves into the corner of Infallibility - it would be so much easier all round if they were able to utter those humble words, "We don't know."

Faith and Science are not that far apart...