Os aderentes à "teoria" do aquecimento global não possuem, até o momento, provas realmente irrefutáveis sobre sua realização. Eles mostram evidências circunstancias que corroboram uma crença no fenômeno, mas tudo feito na base do alarmismo e das falsas suposições.
O historiador britânico restabelece um pouco de lógica ao debate (que na verdade não existe: quem acredita, faz disso um artigo de fé...).
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
It is a pity Karl Popper did not live to see that Global Warming
fitted perfectly into his model of a pseudo-theory.
The Copenhagen Summit was bound to fail if only because
politicians are beginning to realize that ordinary
voters do not believe in man-made Global Warming, as polls
plainly show. They did not believe in Marxist Dialectical
Materialism either, or Freudianism. These three pseudo-sciences
have a lot in common, not least their ability to inspire a
religious kind of belief in highly educated people who lack a
genuine creed.
When I was an undergraduate the philosopher I studied most
carefully was Karl Popper, especially his writings on the
evaluation of evidence and criteria to distinguish a genuine
scientific theory from a false one. He made two key points. First,
a theory must include the falsifiability principle. It must be
susceptible to empirical tests and, if it fails to meet them, be
scrapped. He gave as an example of a genuine theory Einstein’s
General Relativity of 1915. Einstein insisted that it must survive
three practical tests, and if it failed any one of them be dropped
as untrue. In fact it passed triumphantly all three, beginning in
1919, and many other since.
Popper argued that prima facie evidence of a bogus theory
was the practice of altering or enlarging it, by its authors, to
accommodate new evidence since its original formulation. This, he
argued, had happened in the case of Marxism and, still more,
Freudianism. Scientific theories, he argued, must be very precise
and scientific to be of any use. Marxism and Freudianism were just
portmanteau notions into which virtually any kind of phenomena
could be made to fit. Hence Marxism led to political and economic
disaster areas like the Soviet Union, and Freudianism to a
stupendous waste of time and money.
It is a pity Popper did not live to see that Global
Warming fit perfectly into his model of a pseudo-theory. It is
vaguely and imprecisely formulated. It fails the falsifiability
test, because all new evidence is made to fit by enlarging the
theory. When originally formulated in the 1980s, Global Warming
produced by man-made emissions would lead, it was argued, to much
higher temperatures and desiccation. There would be a huge drop in
rainfall and an imperative need to build seawater desalination
plants. I recall an unusually dry summer (1987) in the English Lake
District, normally rainy, was triumphantly presented as “absolute
proof” of the theory. This autumn, the Lake District had an
unusually wet spell, culminating in floods that engulfed the
delightful town of Cockermouth, where Wordsworth was born. This was
pounced upon by Global Warming “experts” as “absolute proof” of
their theory, and paraded as such in Copenhagen.
The fact is that the theory has now been expanded to
include any unusual form of weather, anywhere. Hot summers, warm
winters — global warming. Cold weather at an unusual time of year
— global warming. Drought, storms, floods — global warming. No
snow on the ski slopes, sudden snow, out of season snow, very heavy
snow — global warming. Of course in countries like Japan or the
UK, where unusual, unpredictable, and tiresomely variable weather
is the norm (it was first commented on in the UK by the Venerable
Bede in the eighth century), the public does not swallow global
warming, and polls show majorities of 55 to 60 percent reject
it.
Of course vested interests accept it. It is regarded as a
splendid way of damaging the American economy, by the same kind of
left-wing intellectuals who supported the Club of Rome in the
1960s, which argued that world resources were on the brink of
exhaustion. It is a form of pantheism and a useful emotional outlet
for people who have renounced Judeo-Christianity. If someone is
anti-American, left-liberal, and atheist, it is virtually certain
he (or even she: women are notoriously more skeptical about it than
men are) is a Global Warmer.
THEN AGAIN, GLOBAL WARMING NOW HAS a powerful, worldwide
institutional substructure. If a media outlet has an environment
correspondent, or a university a Department of Climate Studies, or
a government a Ministry of Global Warming, those involved are
certain to be not just believers but fanatical propagandists for
the cause. Their livelihood depends on it. I calculate that the
lobby now includes over 20,000 full-time, well-paid professionals
whose entire life is spent in pushing “proofs.” The existence of
this enormous phalanx of well-placed, articulate enthusiasts has
inevitably led to the capture of powerful institutions — in
Britain, for instance, the Meteorological Office, the Royal
Society, and the BBC, together with many universities and
newspapers. It used to be supposed that scientists, or those
calling themselves such, were incorruptible and guided purely by
genuine convictions based on objective evidence. But scientists
behave just like politicians if the pressure and prizes make it
worth their while to conform.
So vast sums of money will continue to be spent on an
unproven and unprovable theory, predicting a global catastrophe
from the realms of fantasy. The money could be much more profitably
spent on space exploration. This is a genuine science and could
turn out to be useful, even vital. The planet Earth, though not
threatened with destruction by man-made global warming, is by no
means indestructible. There are many unpredictable events within
our solar system, and still more outside it, that could make Earth
uninhabitable by humans. A meteorite of sufficient size could
destroy it entirely. A giant sunspot could produce precisely the
catastrophic climate change the lobby falsely claims is being
created by man’s “emissions.” There are hundreds of fatal
possibilities astrophysicists can imagine, and thousands more, no
doubt, that could occur.
In the long term, it is desirable that the human race,
faced with the prospect of extinction on Earth, should prepare an
escape route for itself to another inhabitable planet. In order to
do this we must explore the universe far more thoroughly and
exhaustively than we have done up till now, and equally important,
develop the concept of mass space travel and colonization schemes.
Mankind has done this before, notably in the 15th century, when the
threat of plague and starvation in Europe led to the successful
crossing of the Atlantic and colonization in the Americas. We need
to repeat the imaginative effort of the late medieval Spanish,
Portuguese, and Genoans in navigation, technology, and courage, but
on an infinitely greater scale. This would be a worthy cause for
the united resources of the human race to combine in furthering —
the colonization of the universe.
It may be a distant goal, but it is a practical one, and
in pursuing it we would do more to unite the human race in
purposeful activity than anything else so far proposed. By
contrast, combating a largely imaginary threat of global warming is
just as costly, as well as scientifically unsound, technologically
impossible, and, not least, divisive.
