Kent writes:

> "AN INTRODUCTION
>  According to the National Academy of Sciences, the Earth's surface
>  temperature has risen by about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the past century,
>  with accelerated warming during the past two decades. There is new and
>  stronger evidence that most of the warming over the last 50 years is
>  attributable to human activities."
>
>  Now if it accelerated that could be a problem.  Notice we have now shifted
>  from empirical evidence to speculation.

The proper term isn't "speculation." It's "extrapolation," a completely
different process.

Everything about science is designed to *predict* the world around us. In
fact, the quality of those prediction are the sole measure that we have to
gauge our level of understanding.

Every facet of science works in this same manner. Newton determining the path
a baseball will take is no different than NOAA trying to determine the path
that the global climate will follow. If you truly can characterize the intial
conditions accurately, and you have a very good mathematical model of the
physics of the process at hand, prediction is not all that difficult,
especially now that we have mechanical computing devices that no longer
require hand cranks.

Wirt Atmar

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