Well, you lost me with the statement “having a theory” is not the same as doing science.
No Chief, I lost you a long time before that. Or rather, you lost yourself. A theory is the start of the process. The theory needs to be predictive to be of any value or have any claim to being “science” rather than, how did you put it?, a “notion.” The data that you mention is indeed important, but it has to come after the theory, and needs to be predicted by the theory or else you don’t have a scientific theory, you have a bunch of post-hoc rationalization. Curve fitting. Correlation but who knows if there’s any causation. The kind of “statistics” that gave rise to the saying about “lies, damn lies and statistics.” That’s why Anthropology is treated as a second-class science, there are few opportunities to test predictive values.
In particular, if two Anthroplogists have competing theories about something, there’s no way to devise a test to determine which theory better models reality. Both theories have been built by making assumptions about the existing data, and no new data can be expected (well, not until after Obama gets done with the economy anway – we’ll be lucky to have a hunter-gatherer society by the time we’re rid of him and his buddies).
But Climatology doesn’t have that problem. You can create predictive tests, gather the data, and validate the theory. You can, but you don’t. Instead, you present and ever-changing set of postulates, postulates that always change to account for new data but always end up predicting the same thing. You started with your conclusion and worked backwards from there. Every time new data comes in that upsets your applecart, you start over from your conclusion and work backwards to build a model that incorporates the new data, but that’s bass-ackwards fella. The data is supposed to lead to the conclusion, not the other way around.
Let us know if you ever start doing things the right way. That’s when we’ll take you seriously as a scientist. Until then, you’re a crank.
