Science is a human invention of the early 17th century. At that time it was known as "natural philosophy" and in a nutshell it strives to understand the natural world by studying the natural world, leaving out divine intercession, revealed truth or any religious input. It deals strictly with the natural world as revealed by observing and experimenting on nature.
As more expeirments are done and more observations made (on and of the n atural world) understanding changes and explanations are adopted that more closely explain the experimental and observational data.
The press often writs that "scientists believe that ...." and this is wrong - what they should write is "consistent with the most recent data, scientists say..."
There is a huge difference between a belief system and empirical knowledge of the natural world.
People often make fun of science because results and conclusions change as more data is collected and things consistent with the data of 20 years ago are now known to be wrong. But falsification is an absolute necessity of something "scientific" - one has to be able to falsify a theory or it isn't part of science. You cannot disprove the existence of god but it is conceivable to disprove the theory of evolution - just collect enough data that contradict the model. In fact, it is absolutely essential that the theory of evolution is falsifiable
Every aspect of science is, in principle, falsifiable. We just recently read that there was a possibility that neutrinos were measures as traveling faster than the speed of light. That would have falsified a prediction based on Einstein's equations, hence falsifying the equation. Every practicing scientist deals with falsifiability on an almost daily basis.
Religious beliefs are in another realm entirely and are not subject to the same rules of logic and religion is a totally separate discipline.
Exactly!
So I would suggest that nca225 read Gnomon's post several times until he really understands it.
Man made global warming is currently a hypothesis subscribed to by some number of people. That includes some scientists and a whole lot of others for whom belief in it has become a religion.
As well, there are a significant number of others, scientists and non scientist, for whom the evidence put forth to date is inconclusive. Inconclusive about whether it is man made and inconclusive about whether it is even a long (in geological terms) term trend.
