This Is Science?

ScienceDaily published a credulous report yesterday that proclaimed the “troubling hypothesis” that variations in solar radiation (such as the sunspot cycle) affected Earth's weather had been “laid to rest”. Well, that's an article bound to catch my attention, as I've been quite intrigued by the correlations found between the sunspot cycle and historical temperature records here on Earth.

So what is this research that has laid that troubling hypothesis to rest?

A computer model.

I'm not making that up.

That's what passes for research today, apparently. Nobody went out and did anything messy or dirty like, say, measuring temperatures or solar radiation. Nobody showed that the historical correlations were artifacts caused by some other mechanism. No, nothing like that.

Instead, some geek of a climatologist made up a new computer model and proclaimed the case proven!

Hell, I could do that!

Sheesh...

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words...

Perfect.

Trouble is, his little game is fooling an interesting percentage of the electorate.

It will be interesting – and instructive – to see what happens in the 2010 interim elections...