Comment 110478

By mikeonthemountain (registered) | Posted March 24, 2015 at 16:12:59 in reply to Comment 110470

Fascinating that you bring that up! If you read the hypothesis, it's actually a decent early guess. You could replace the word phlogiston with "carbon dioxide" and it is an incomplete but approximate description. Trying to figure out what phlogiston was, led to uncovering of more and more of the periodic table; speaking of alchemy in general.

We've progressed from phlogiston theory, to understanding oxidation, to understanding carbon dioxide, to understanding greenhouse effect, to experimentally verifying it in labs and on earth and on other planets, to quantifying historical norms in our current agriculturally friendly epoch, to using quantum mechanics to create computers that can process gargantuan amounts of computations and make some (admittedly non-linear) extrapolations, with multiple models checking for conflicts wherever possible.

Current climate science is as far removed from phlogiston, as our trip to the moon is from early naive attempts to cross the Atlantic - far from complete, but starting to establish some rigor and predictability against real world experiments and observation that tell us what we need to know.

Comment edited by mikeonthemountain on 2015-03-24 16:16:50

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