Karl Popper, one of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method in favor of empirical falsification. According to Popper, a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can (and should) be scrutinized with decisive experiments. A theory is genuinely scientific only if it is possible in principle to establish that it is false.
Popper held that genuinely scientific theories are never finally confirmed, because disconfirming observations (observations that are inconsistent with the empirical predictions of the theory) are always possible no matter how many confirming observations have been made. Scientific theories are instead incrementally corroborated through the absence of disconfirming evidence in a number of well-designed experiments. According to Popper, some disciplines that have claimed scientific validity—e.g., astrology, metaphysics, Marxism, and psychoanalysis —are not empirical sciences, because their subject matter cannot be falsified in this manner.
Can The Story of Climate Change ever be proven? Can predictions of future climate changes like the obliquity driven descent into the next glacial period in 5 to 10,000 years be proven? Can we prove the termination of the Pleistocene Ice Age in about 3 million years, driven by increasing temperatures during the planetary system’s out-of-plane galactic orbital oscillation? Will we confirm our entry into the next geological Hot House period as we exit this cold Sagittarius spiral arm and enter the next hot inter-arm region of space in about 125 million years? No way that these can be proven or even falsified. So, must this hypothesis be deemed unscientific? If our only option for testing the thesis is to falsify future climate predictions – then yes, we must discard this hypothesis or call it so much pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo.
Remember the premise of The Story of Climate Change: our climate is cyclic with a period of 675 million years. The pattern and periodicity of climate change means that not only can we predict future climate changes but now we can locate and catalogue past climate changes in the geologic record. The past is the present is the future. To falsify The Story of Climate Change we merely compare paleoclimate proxy data to our model and see if it fits. If the preponderance of scientific evidence leans toward falsification, then perhaps Cosmoclimatology should be delegated to the dustbin of science. Then maybe it was CO2 after all.
regards,
Kirby Schlaht