Science is never settled

Whilst the best science is open ended, there always exists an element that wants to stifle debate and edit away new knowledge that might threaten existing theories, practices and attitudes. It is much easier to suppress new evidence than to rewrite the textbooks, and rocking the establishment-boat can endanger careers.

Climate change controversy is not new. After two years of research, international scientists decided in April 1981 what life was going to be like in the year 2000. Because of changing climate, polar caps would melt and coastal towns like London, New York and Auckland would have to be evacuated.

They added that by 2000 the world would have doubled its population, half the world’s natural woods would have gone (yearly the size of California), and nearly two million species of birds, insects and animals will have disappeared. With oil wells drying up and people not affording to pay high costs of oil, they would turn to burning wood.

Apparently the smoke from this would so pollute the air that rain would fall as ‘sour rain’ rendering 20% of the land unusable, a desert-like polluted place of waste. The best agricultural lands would be used for streets and airports, and would become asphalt jungles. NZ would be growing more cereal crops, more goats for milk and meat, and our chief export was predicted to become rabbit meat.

Our own economists and scientists, back in 1981 said that all citizens of NZ including children would in two decades be required to carry passports. By 2000 it would be impossible to rob a bank and fences would be unheard of. Asthma and cancer would be cured. Cars and trucks would be relics of a bygone age, no highways and no fumes, because we would all be travelling on “nuclear trams”.

Also, we would be just recovering from a nuclear war.

Such was the thinking in the 1980s and we can now reflect how wrong they were, but perhaps we have forgotten how quickly opinions and science does change. Thankfully science history is studded with reversals.

If it wasn’t for better telescopes that revealed Martian ‘canals’ are an optical illusion caused by streaks of dust blown across the Martian surface by heavy winds, would we still be thinking the canals are a sophisticated irrigation system developed by an unknown intelligent species?

If Europe had listened to climate scientists would the channel tunnel between France and England have been built? In 1973 the proposal was under heavy fire from meteorologists who feared air-flows between the two sides of the channel would create an 'atmospheric syphon’ that would change Europe's weather and disturb crops such that they would only grow hundreds of kilometres away, with grapes refusing to ripen in Touraine and beets no longer flourishing in Piccardy.

In the 1970s cooling brought fears af an impending Ice Age, interrupted in the summer of 1975 by a heat wave that gripped most of Europe. Panicking scientists blamed the new Ice-Age for the heat, as all were so in consensus that the ‘mini-ice age’ was descending over the Northern Hemisphere, therefore the heat wave had to be one of the side-effects.

But by November 1976 the heat had become a far off memory, and with the onset of even cooler weather scientists predicted a 20-Year shiver now lay ahead.

By 1981 royal astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle was publicly warning about the headlong cooling rush, declaring “The Earth could easily slip into an ice age in 10 years, with glaciers spreading over Britain, most of North America and northern Europe”.

But then in May of 1989 two Canadian scientists, W. Richard Peltier and Mark Tushingham reported that sea-levels were ‘rising steadily’, that there was “strong new evidence” of the world’s oceans slowly but steadily rising, a finding they said meant the globe was warming up.

Ex-Vice President Al Gore predicted in 2009 that in 10 years time, global sealevels will have risen by 67 meters. Inconvenient truthfully, NIWA in their 1998 Lyttelton study had arrived at a rise of just 1mm per year, or less than half an inch in 10 years, which meant that international sea-level science now varied by 670,000%.

Science is never settled. If it was there could be no room for further discovery and so we should be suspicious of all such claims. There are some reports that US Commissioner of Patents Charles H. Duell closed the US patent office in 1899 because, apparently he had decided everything that could be invented had been invented.

In January 2001, Ivan Baldry and Karl Glazebrook, of John Hopkin's University in Maryland, found that if the universe was viewed from a great distance it would appear turquoise. They determined the colour by combining light from over 200,000 galaxies. Later they said it was beige and they apologised for having to do their calculations again because their original work used the wrong shade of white.

How lucky for the fashion industry this had stayed unsettled. What on earth would we wear to match a turquoise universe?

Ken Ring of [www.predictweather.com|www.predictweather.com] is a long range forecaster for Australia's Channel Seven.