From a post in the news section, might interest you, dunno...

US physics professor: 'Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life'

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/james ... long-life/

He's saying what I've long suspected, but what's your take on it?

I don't think the climate change thing has much to do with astrophysics, does it?

+1

I started, but have not finished a Physics degree via the OU and found it to be really good

There is a good choice of specialists subjects so you can do what interest you. The mistake I made is that I did not do enough maths at the start and would strongly recommend that you look at doing a few of the mid level maths courses early on to allow you to tackle the higher level physics courses later (for e.g. The quantum mechanics course states that you must be comfortable with calculus and there is no way I could say I am comfortable with that!)

That s the main reason why I have not picked up the course again – I know that in order to progress I will have to spend at least 1 year doing maths – its something I will have to bite the bullet at tough if I want to complete the course

I'm not sure that's terribly relevant. His letter doesn't cover any scientific argument (although states he disagrees with a lot), simply the way that the APS went about its business.

To be fair, if you read the back story, he's not actually complaining about the validity or not of the notion of climate change. He's arguing the purely metaphysical point that (apparently) debate about said is simply not being allowed. The base position of the scientist is scepticism, not credulity and the application of the hypothesis - test - replicate methodolgy. Any scientist who tells you anything more complicated than Newton's laws has been 'proved beyond doubt', you should treat with serious caution.

My comment was merely pointing out this thread is mainly about "Quantum, Theoretical, Astrophysics, etc...". Climate science seemed out of place to my mind.

Of course, the "etc" could cover a multitude of science disciplines...

I was taking the thread as a general discussion on all types and disciplines of physics, and as somewhat pointed out, the use of the word 'incontrovertible' will/should cause debate

Ern's post would seem to fit in perfectly.

Given that we're only currently capable of viewing 5% of what makes up the universe (as we apparently understand it), and we can't make up our minds about that 5%, anyone who tells you they understand physics is a liar, or at least 95% wrong...

And even Newtons Laws only work up to a point. Anything like a black hole is beyond Newtonian physics.

I do believe that global warming is man made, but the exact causes are not precise. There does need to be more debate on the causes as it would give clues as to the greatest solutions and things to watch out for. The problem is that government funded science is usually easier to obtain if you include the current craze into the title. They might include "Global warming and its links to the extinction of frogs" just to get funds.