If you've read the beginning days of this weblog (which today celebrates two weeks of actual existence), you might recall that I am trying to test three hypotheses. The third is that we are disproving (or falsifying) incorrect assumptions, hypotheses and opinions at a rate that effectively doubles human knowledge (knowing something is not true is really, really important). This is just as important in global warming as with anything else.
Critics of global warming have for years pointed to the fact that satellite observations, taken from a single dataset, showed slight cooling in the tropical troposphere since 1979. Since this conflicted with what climate models predict, this was a serious problem for those attempting to warn the public about global warming.
So they went and got more data, which is what you're supposed to do. This 2005 news release from the Lawrence Livermore Lab (close to where I grew up), shows that further research found better data that agrees with modern climate models.
As there is still considerable controversy about global warming, there's a whole lot more falsifying and disproving that needs to be done, probably on both sides of the fence. If you think about it, the beneficiaries of this disproof of the previous data are the critics of global warming as well as those who strongly believe, as critics now actually have to examine their assumptions, look for more or better data, or find explanations for what this research showed.
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