If you've misspent your youth conducting experiments, taking graduate courses in physics and chemistry, and know something about thermodynamics, molecular spectroscopy, fluid mechanics, modeling data and publishing scientific papers, the current debate over anthropogenic global warming can make you hurl.
While not faulting journalists and politicians for their stupendous ignorance when discussing most scientific subjects, I do condemn their utter lack of coherence concerning basic scientific definitions, processes, and principles.
Specifically, the chattering classes have no appreciation of the following truisms: settled science comes only in the form of physical laws while the causes behind specific phenomena are sometimes never definitively settled. And the more complex the system being observed, the longer it takes to reach a consensus about the causal mechanisms.
Even Al Gore can probably remember being introduced to Newton's 3rd Law of Motion in high school, F=ma. This is usually our first introduction to settled science. That's why it's called a law of physics. It didn't matter that Einstein generalized its form in the theory of relativity or that in the 1920's it had it be replaced with a new mechanics valid at the atomic scale. At velocities small compared to the speed of light and for macroscopic objects, F=ma is settled science.
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