I just want to take a sec and give mad props to the word "risible" in general. It is a word we Americans use far too infrequently yet one of the coolest words in the English language.
But on the topic of Wegner, might I jump in here as a "recovering geologist" and throw in my two cents to say that if Wegner's hypothesis had been immediately accepted wouldn't it have been strange?
Yes, new concepts always require a fight--including the new concept that AGW might be nutso. I have studied anthropology quite extensively. I love this passage because it tells how suicidally stupid societies can be. And everytime I think of AGW I think of pigs and fish.
"Remember that Tasmania used to be joined to the southern Australian mainland at Pleistocene times of low sea level, until the land bridge was severed by rising sea level 12,000 years ago. People walked out to Tasmania tens of thousands of years ago, when it was still part of Australia. Once that land bridge was severed, though, there was absolutely no further contact of Tasmanians with mainland Australians or with any other people until the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman arrived in 1642, because both Tasmanians and mainland Australians lacked watercraft capable of crossing those 130-mile straits between Tasmania and Australia. Tasmanian history is thus a study of human isolation unprecedented except in science fictionnamely, complete isolation from all other humans for 12,000 years."
"If all those technologies that I mentioned, absent from Tasmania but present on the opposite Australian mainland, were invented by Australians within the last 12,000 years, we can surely conclude that the Tasmanians did not invent them independently. Astonishingly, the archaeological record demonstrates something further:
Tasmanians actually abandoned some technologies that they brought with them from Australia and that persisted on the Australian mainland. For example, bone tools and the practice of fishing were both present in Tasmania at the time that the land bridge was severed, and both disappeared from Tasmania around 1500 B.C. That represents the loss of valuable technologies: fish could have been smoked to provide a winter food supply, and bone needles could have bene used to sew warm clothes. What sense can we make of these cultural losses?"
"The only interpretation that makes sense to me goes as follows.
All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use. For example, there are several instances of people on Pacific islands suddenly deciding to taboo and kill off all of their pigs, even though pigs are their only big edible land mammal! Eventually, those Pacific islanders realize that pigs are useful after all, and they import a new breeding stock from another island." Jared Diamond, "The Evolution of Guns and Germs," in Evolution: Society, Science and the Universe, ed by A. C. Fabian, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 60
of course the Tasmanians couldnt import technology because they lost their ability to build boats.
The above is what I think of when I think of the modern society trying to kill off its energy supply because of an irrational fear of CO2. Energy was the thing that eventually killed off slavery and brought our standard of living to the level it is at. And the AGW crowd wants us to do away with it--they do this by fighting against any new energy supplies.
Obviously any new hypothesis, especially one as dramatic as "Continental Drift" would require extraordinary proof. So the fact that Wegner was or wasn't immediately greeted as a victor early on would seem not to matter one way or another.
The weakness of Wegener's mechanism for drift was his problem. But that problem didn't erase the geological observational data of former land connections. This is like your statistics of play models that don't match reality. They don't erase the data that 1. NOAA adds 1/3 of a degree TREND merely by their 'correction' factors and 2. that air conditioners and other heat sources are all next to far too many thermometers.
And that's what we've all been going on about here, isn't it? That concensuses don't matter in the face of the science, but just because a concensus exists doesn't mean that it is necessarily suspect.
No, it doesn't mean it is necessarily suspect. But it doesn't mean that it is automatically exempt from criticism and doubt--ONLY RELIGIONS AND POLICTICAL PARTIES demand no doubt.
For instance there is now a general "concensus" around Plate Tectonics, does that mean we should automatically assume it is amazingly suspect?
If there were data against it then it would be right to do the scientific thing and examine it again. I know of no data against it.
(*and I actually had a teacher in undergrad who expressed skepticism about some factors of plate tectonics but I never heard specifically what his issues were.)
The only thing I know of is that the observed motion in the mantle doesn't fit the Bernard Convection cell geometry. So, like Wegener, our mechanism for drift may need some correction. But it is really hard to deny the fit of geologic layers across continents now separated by thousands of miles.
It wasn't until, what, 20 some odd years after his death that paleomagnetic surveys started providing additional lines of evidence and finally ultimately a mechanistic understanding later on.
It was more like 30 years.
In a sense, the current AGW hypothesis not only contains a mechanism but has models which appear to support the mechanistic explanation.
I have told you that I am involved in model making for oil field reservoirs. I used to be in charge of it for Kerr-McGee but now that I have retired I merely do it. But a model can look really grand but because the knowledge of the details are too poorly known, the field behaves totally differently than the model predicts. It is this weakness in the model's that is most problematic. We can't test any of the current models for 50 years. We don't know if any of them are right.
I also remember looking at Jody Dillow's vapor canopy model which had been written by John Baumgardner. Looking over the code I found that this one dimensional model of radiative heat flow in the atmosphere sent heat 'north' and thus during every iteration of the program it leaked energy out of the system which was never accounted for again. The model predicted that Henry Morris' vapor canopy would have a cool earth. All the radiative physics was right but that one leak off of energy gave the answer Jody and John wanted. It was a very nice model but totally crap.
Now, global climate models can't handle clouds. The grid size of current GCM's is about 50 km x 50 km. Clouds happen on 5x5 or 10x10 grid size levels. That GCMs can't handle clouds correctly means you can't trust the models implicitly. They might be right but they might be very very wrong.
) and other issues. It is so that like can be compared with like.
