I suspect there's a rich irony in the way "scientific method" is thrown around in the political debate these days. The left is denouncing intelligent design as nothing but fundamentalist wishful thinking, while the right is lambasting global warming as bad science. As if both issues are fully resolved one way or another.
What has struck me more than once - and especially in Wikipedia - is that those who advocate a scientific point of view actually have a very superficial understanding of what science is and does.
These examples are illustrative. The "theory" of evolution is an attempt to explain facts that can be observed in the real world. It has not yet been disproven, and all available evidence supports it. As a result, it remains the best explanation for certain natural phenomena. This isn't to say it's the final explanation, nor the only one. But if you're going to postulate another explanation, it must either do better than evolution as a whole or add to it by explaining something evolution doesn't.
Intelligent design fails on both these counts and does therefore not deserve anything approaching equal footing.
But this doesn't mean that the questions are unreasonable or unscientific. It is perfectly fair to ask whether we can observe things that can't be explained with evolution and can be better explained by intelligent design. But note that those are two questions. Merely finding weaknesses in the theory of evolution does not strengthen the case for intelligent design. It simply means that evolution as a model is incomplete, a premise few evolutionary scientists would dispute. It is much tougher to find support for the second part, namely that intelligent design is the superior explanation for certain things. Irreducable complexity is an intelligent point, but it still seems kind of futile, because everything related to life seems hopelessly complex until people have taken a closer look at it. I think the intelligent design folks are asking useful questions, but I'm inclined to believe they'll do rather more to prove than to disprove the evolutionary model before they're done.
Global warming runs into a "show me" argument. The scientific consensus - and it really is a consensus - has expressed two convictions: one is that the temperature on Earth's surface is increasing, and the other is that human activity is a major contributor to that increase. There are two important corollaries: one is that climate change has unpredictable consequences; the other is that human activity must change to mitigate this uncertainty.
The two assertions are based on a preponderance of the evidence. Data convinces the scientists that climate changes are a result of trends not random fluctuations or natural cycles. Statistical models are helpful here: if you know probabilities of certain events, you can test to see how likely it is that a certain series of events can be explained by one thing or another. In other words, it is much harder to write off 20 successively warmer winters as a fluke than three successively warmer winters. To simplify things a bit.
But there is quite a bit of uncertainty, actually a lot. We can't quanitfy the effects of different kinds of human activity on the climate, and we certainly don't know the effects it may have in the long run, or how much we can actually change things.
But there's again the fact that global warming remains the best model, the best explanation for what we're seeing, and that new data supports it more. In that sense, it's like evolution. It may not be perfect, it may not explain everything, but it explains more than anything else.
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