The Baloney Detection Kit and Global Warming

In his book The Demon Haunted World, the late Carl Sagan had suggestions for detecting fallacious or fraudulent arguments. He called these suggestions the Baloney Detection Kit. I am going to apply these suggestions to global warming. Here are most of the suggestions:

• Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the facts. Scientists say the earth is getting warmer. That has been the only thing confirmed by all scientists. Everything else has not been totally confirmed. Scientists cannot even predict how hot the earth will be.
• Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view. Here the knowledgeable proponents would be mainly meteorologists and climatologists. I don't see hardly any encouragement for dissenters who believe that man is not the sole cause of global warming. They are ridiculed and say they should lose their AMA accreditations. That is not science. That is a cult.
• Arguments from authority carry little weight (in science there are no "authorities"). In other words, just because you are well known popular climatologists does not mean you are right about global warming. You have to show you are right by the science. And if you are a politician (read Al Gore) or a celebrity you are definitely not an authority on the subject.
• Spin more than one hypothesis - don't simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy. For example, sunspot activity may cause global warming. I know without the sun you have no greenhouse effect which is the mechanism behind global warming. Volcanoes may cause it too. Just don't go blaming mankind right away for all of the causes of global warming.
• Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it's yours. Hypothesis' come and go. If your ego gets involved with the hypothesis then you may disregard or downplay any evidence that can disprove your hypothesis. Also, if a researcher gets a grant from the gov't to do research his/her ego will even be more attached to the hypothesis. That is where politics starts to corrupt the science.
• Quantify, wherever possible. Someone once said mathematics is the language of science. You can make up hypothesis' all you want, but unless you can quantify your hypothesis it is harder to describe and cannot be tested. Linear systems like a ball rolling across a floor is easy to describe in an equation. All you need is the ball's mass and velocity to get its momentum. Also, you can figure out from its trajectory where the ball is going to move next. The ball has only one-degree of movement. For more degrees of movement a system has, the more complicated to describe it mathematically (Lotfi Zadeh's Law of Incompatibility). Eventually, if the system has enough complexity it may appear random, but may not be random at all. Just too complex for anyone to quantify precisely. It's hard to link cause and effect together. That is the nature of nonlinear systems. Weather systems are no different. That is why meteorologists can only tell you there is a 60% chance of rain instead of 0% or 100% chance of rain. To simulate weather on a computer meteorologists use five differential equations called primitive equations. These nonlinear equations describe temperature (which is just the average measure of molecule velocity), wind direction (longitude and latitude), precipitation and pressure thickness. If you input the wrong value in those equations or if the value is imprecise then the computer model can yield incorrect results (garbage in, garbage out--as computer scientists like to say). Even a group of researchers from America and Europe saying better forecasting models are needed to model global warming.
• Ask whether the hypothesis can, at least in principle, be falsified (shown to be false by some unambiguous test). In other words, it is testable? Can others duplicate the experiment and get the same result? The hypothesis about mankind being most responsible for global warming can be falsified. There is global warming on Mars. Mankind does not inhabit Mars. Therefore, if mankind cannot affect global warming on Mars then it must be something else creating it. Like say the sun or some other natural process.