Christmas Lectures?

It is something of a tradition to interpose overindulgence with a little intellectual challenge in the form of Christmas lectures, so I thought I would drop a pebble in. Brian Cox is the scientist de jour and I intend to use some of his words to ask a question.

Prof Cox is a clever and amiable man and I like him. In his 'Why does e=mc2?' book (with Jeff Forshaw), that I am currently reading he says that all science rests on observation. He points out that, no matter how passionately you believe something, if you cannot prove it by experiment, then it has no scientific value. In fact he quotes Richard Feynman on the subject; 'no matter how beautiful your theory, no matter how clever you are or what your name is, if it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong'.

Now, whilst Prof Cox is happy to unequivocally state such things in support of the material in his book, he forgets it when something with which he ideologically agrees comes along. Global warming for instance. Global Warming we have been assured is real and is caused by Man and is due to our output of Carbon (by which these clever scientific types mean Carbon Dioxide). This has been researched and having found that the temperature rose some 400 years before there was a rise in CO2, the scientists decided to wheel out Al Gore to lie for them, fronting a film with the word 'truth' in it, to dispel any thoughts that it might be contrary.

Then, when the never ending warming predicted by the ever increasing CO2 levels ceased in 1998, the scientists thought it too insignificant a detail to mention. As all their dire warnings and predictions are actually based on computer models that they themselves devised and nothing else (again, something they don't seem to make too clear), an experiment was conducted. Past weather and atmospheric conditions were fed into the models to see if they accurately predicted what we know actually happened.

They didn't. Which isn't that surprising when you consider the software was written to support a premise, not  to assess data in an unbiased way. Every objective observation tells us that the hysteria about AGW is just that, hysteria. It isn't scientific and it is far from settled. Yet for Professor Brian Cox and many like him, scientific tenets are sometimes not that important. Why?