This is hilarious. “Unusually heavy snow and ice last year forced Dupre and Larsen to call off a similar mission, but they now plan to launch Project Thin Ice 2006.” I’m pretty skeptical about global warming in general, so I’ve never really understood how colder temparatures are explained as due to global warming (The Day After Tomorrow, for instance) as it’s simultaneously used to explain warmer weather patterns (which would make sense, hence the name).
Being a scientist I understand that realistic climate models are complex (often chaotic) and can produce some counterintuitive results (the Butterfly Effect, for instance) becuase the system they’re modeling has the same behavior in real life. However, it simply never makes sense, scientific or otherwise, to use the same model to explain contradicting behaviors (we have a technical name for a model that does that: a “failure”). Thus for organized environmentalism “Global Warming” is infinitely flexible because when it comes down to it, it meshes perfectly with their belief system. This is a perfect example of an unfalsifiable premise being passed off as science in the interest of advancing a social/political agenda. That’s kind of ironic, since these are some of the same activists (along with their allies) who have been so vocally accusing the ID movement of doing just that.
That’s great! An expedition to investigate the shrinking ice called off because there was too much of it. I saw this article too, and thought it seemed a little ironic, but not being a scientist I wasn’t able to express my thoughts nearly so well.
Good post, Stephen.