Neverending Audit

You’re being dogmatic
My duty is to struggle with you
To cultivate modesty
A simple and unpretentious language

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[A] black swan is enough to sink any and all hypotheses.

The existence of a black swan only disproves the claim that all swans are always white. This falsification is not out of logical necessity: we must take into account background knowledge. The instance of a black swan works as a refutation only if we know what whiteness is, that blackness is not whiteness, that there can’t be white and black swans, that we should not decide to revise our ontology of swans instead, etc.

Tim Curtin should be able to tell how a statement about local temperatures can refute a statement about global temperatures. Unless we adopt some kind of statistical self-similarity between the local and the global, I fail to see how the reasoning works exactly. On the face of it, showing that such and such regions is not warming does not refute the claim that the sum of the regions warm.

The best way to disprove the claim that the global temperatures do not warm would be to prove that they indeed do not warm. For now, the induction that Tim Curtin provides is too weak and appears as a mere rhetorical device.

That this rhetorical device proceeds by induction is intriguing, considering the falsificationist setting in which Tim Curtin sets up his refutation. For Popper’s insistence on refutation is motivated by his conception of science as a system to make empirical deductions. Popper was not very fond of inductions.

Source: Judith Curry on anthropogenic versus natural causes of global warming « My view on climate change