Forecasting rain - Climate Change: The Facts - page 59

6 Forecasting rain
John Abbot & Jennifer Marohasy
Areasonabletestofthevalueofanyscientifictheoryisitsutility.Forexample,thecalendars
that were developed based on Nicolaus Copernicus' Heliocentric Theory of the Universe
were better calendars than those based on Ptolemy's Handy Tables. The new calendars,
based on the new theoretical approach that suggested the earth moved around the sun
(rather than the sun around the earth), more precisely predicted the position of the sun and
the planets and thus was of more utility for navigation and also weather forecasting. The
adoption of the new theory, however, was resisted because of its political and religious
implications. In contrast, the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) has very little
practical utility, but tremendous political value. It is a theory that accords with the mood
of our time, the zeitgeist, which assumes that man's greed is despoiling the earth and that
political action based on a scientific consensus can save the planet.
This is part of the reason why credible scientific rebuttals fail to achieve its overthrow.
The other reason is that the history of science shows it is competition, not logical argument,
that only ever successfully displaces even a failed paradigm. For example, in a review
of seven high-profile scientific articles and also devastating rebuttals some of which were
also published in the journals Science and Nature , Jeannette Banobi and colleagues showed
that original articles were cited seventeen times more than their rebuttals, and that annual
citations of the original articles were unaffected by the rebuttals. 1 Indeed it is a naïve view
of science that assumes new hypotheses are either accepted or rejected according to the
received evidence. As Thomas Kuhn explains in his 1962 seminal work The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions , it is more usual that an established paradigm will be continually
modified in small ways to incorporate contrary evidence—that is, until a new theory
emerges with the potential to capture the imagination of the discipline, or at least in the first
instance, a critical 10 per cent. 2
The status quo
Prior to the establishment of the current Australian Bureau of Meteorology in 1909,
Australian meteorologists had a keen knowledge of astronomy and considered solar, lunar
and planetary cycles in their weather forecasting. There remained some interest in this
approach, which was termed solar terrestrial physics, at the bureau until the early 1950s.
Since the 1950s the bureau, and other major climate research institutions around the world,
have worked towards a global effort to simulate climate largely independently of
extraterrestrial influences. The primary focus has instead been modeling oceanic and