Climate change can hardly be called a science by the way. To be a science you need to make falsifiable claims. Without the ability to experiment, all you are doing is fitting some gigantic models to some historical data, and we all know how bad this can go.
So, astronomy is not a science? Because we can't do experiments on stars and galaxies.
Astronomy is not only a science, it's the science that kicked off the scientific revolution in the 1600s.
You don't need to be able to experiment to do science, you just need to be able to observe. Theories are tested against future observations. "Natural experiments" where something new happens are useful for this. An example in climate science was what happened after the Mt. Pinatubo eruption.
> Climate change can hardly be called a science by the way. To be a science you need to make falsifiable claims.
It certainly does.
- The increase in global average temperatures is correlated to water vapor
- The increase in global average temperatures is correlated to methane
- The increase in global average temperatures is correlated to CO2
Another example:
- "there has been an increase in global average temperature"
These are all falsifiable assertions and have been given due attention. I would be really skeptical of a perspective that claims climate change makes no falsifiable claims.
> Without the ability to experiment, all you are doing is fitting some gigantic models to some historical data, and we all know how bad this can go.
Fitting a gigantic model to historical data is a form of experimentation. A hypothesis is in some ways the act of creating a model to fit data and then to use that model as a tool for predictions. Fitting a gigantic model to historical data and seeing how it goes is exactly an experiment!
