Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
But since then, the science has moved on—just like it did with humours, and
phlogiston, and eugenics, and all those other theories that were fashionable for a period
but which were eventually superseded by what Thomas Kuhn called a 'paradigm shift'
in scientific thinking. This is how true science works and how it always has worked.
A scientific theory, Karl Popper argued, is only useful if it contains the key to its own
destruction. That is, for a proposition to have any real scientific value it must be
'falsifiable'—capableofbeingprovedwrongthroughexperimentandobservation.Justlike
has happened to the once-plausible, but now thoroughly discredited theory of catastrophic
anthropogenic global warming.
You'd think a scientist of the calibre of Sir Paul Nurse—or indeed of Michael Mann,
director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, or Phil Jones,
DirectoroftheClimaticResearchUnitattheUniversityofEastAnglia—wouldbefamiliar
withthiskindofthing.Butapparentlynot.ThankGodforknow-nothingEnglishLiterature
graduates and their pesky insistence on doing a bit of background reading, eh?
