Global Warming and Falsifiability Redux

More than three years ago I noted an article in one of the London papers about the harsh winter in England and how environmentalists claimed that the cold and snow somehow was evidence of global warming:

... scientific fact has to be "falsifiable," i.e., there has to be some evidence that, if true, would make the theory false. If all evidence can be incorporated in the theory -- much like everything can be described as "God's will," or by the phrase "God works in mysterious ways," or "God can do anything" -- then you are not talking about science, but religion. If warmth is evidence of global warming, and cold is evidence of global warming -- or, in England, if no snow = global warming and snow = global warming --then global warming is not science anymore, it's a faith system. And, like any faith system, its arguments of late have often boiled down to demanding that heretics be silenced.

This came to mind over the past few days as we watched while environmentalists traveling to Antarctica to view the melting polar ice instead were trapped by expanding ice and had to be rescued:

In an event chock-full of bitterly cold irony, perhaps even Al Gore has noticed that multiple icebreakers couldn't free a boat stuck in Antarctic ice that global warming was supposed to have melted. 

Few of the media reports on the plight of the Russian-flagged research vessel MV Akademik Schokalskiy have noted the irony of a ship full of climate scientists getting stuck in an Antarctic ice sheet so thick that early attempts at breaking through the ice to free them were failures. 

"We're stuck in our own experiment," the Australasian Antarctic Expedition said in a statement. "We came to Antarctica to study how one of the biggest icebergs in the world has altered the system by trapping ice. We ... are now ourselves trapped by ice surrounding our ship." 

In a statement only climate-change die-hards could make, the group said, "Sea ice is disappearing due to climate change, but here ice is building up."

I think that "global warming," like "Obamacare," is fast becoming the punch line for a joke that everyone is in on.   These people just aren't serious, and no one should take them seriously anymore.   We will look back on this as a form of mass hysteria no different from millenialist fears of the end of the world.