I'm comparing the hysterical reactions surrounding the two subjects. IMO, anytime you get a hysterical knee-jerk reaction to something, especially something that there just isn't enough scientific evidence for (such as human caused global climate change or 2012, which also claims to have scientific reasoning behind it) that tells me that reason has flown out the window.
This is where you are wrong, Tara. There is scientific reasoning and and scientific research behind the warnings about climate change. That means that scientists look at such things as mean annual temperature of the Earth, the measurable emission of various greenhouse gases and pollutants made by human activity, the activity of the Sun, the climate variations in the Earth's past etcetera etcetera. The scientists gather as much data about the present and the past as they can, and from them, they try to predict the future. It is very complicated to predict the future climate, because there are so many factors that are incompletely known, which is why scientists disagree about climate change. However, the majority of the scientists believe that human activity is affecting the climate, and they have used science - that is, actual measurements of factors like temperature and greenhouse gas emission, plus mathematical models - to arrive at their conclusion.
A prophecy by Nostradamus is not built on science. Nostradamus made no measurements of anything that he could observe in the world around him. He didn't use a thermometer to measure the temperature. He had no way of measuring the level of pollutants in the air. He had no way of knowing about the climate in all the rest of the world, since parts of the world were unknown to Europeans in his time, the sixteenth century.
What Nostradamus did to make his prophecies was, if I have understood things correctly, study the Bible as well as read occult literature of his time. That is not science. If, for example, you claim that you can learn about the future from reading the Bible, particularly if you claim that you can learn that some momentous event is going to happen in the year 2012, then you must carefully explain what passages there are in the Bible that contain this information. I have read the Bible, and I'm quite sure that the Bible doesn't discuss the year 2012. If you want to claim that such passages exist, then you must clearly identify them and explain how you can know that they refer to the year 2012. If you can't do that, then you can't claim that the Bible predicts the end of the world in 2012, and then you can't use the Bible to claim that you know that the world will come to an end in a specific year.
Nostradamus is known for couching his prophecies in very vague and ambiguous words. Because of that, no one has managed to use Nostradamus to accurately predict an actual major event in the world. After a major event has happened, people have scoured Nostradamus' writings for anything that can be construed as a prediction of these things. Because Nostradamus was so good at speaking in riddles, it has often been possible to find a passage that seems to predict an actual event after it has happened. However, if the actual event had unfolded differently, it would have been possible to use the same passage by Nostradamus to predict that alternative event. To put it differently, Nostradamus is useless for actual predictions of the future, and he is only good for confirming what you already know.
The crucial thing to remember is that
Nostradmus' prophecies are not science, because he didn't use scientific methods to arrive at them. Because what makes science into science is not the answers you get, but the methods you use. Science requires that you use observations, measurements and mathematical models, and that you can clearly explain how your observations, measurements and calculations led to the results you arrived at. You must be able to explain it so clearly that other people can make similar observations, measurements and calculations to see if they will get the same results that you got.
That is science.
If you claim that you have received special, privileged information from God or from ghosts or spirits, or that you have been lifted above the time stream by emissaries of God and have seen things that no other person will ever be privy to, then whatever information you claim to possess is not science, because no scientific methods were used to arrive at it. It is, of course, possible that the information that you claim to possess will turn out to be correct after all. If you were right about one thing but wrong about many others, then your correct prediction was probably just a lucky guess. If, however, you make a number of detailed and clear predictions about the the relatively near future based on the information that you received straight from God and they all turn out exactly as you said they would, then you are either part of the biggest scam ever or you have just given the world proof that God exists and that you are his spokesperson.
But since no one has ever managed to interpret Nostradamus' prophecies correctly before the actual events happened, it is clear that they don't contain actual information but just suggestive wording that can be interpreted the way you want to after the events have happened.
So, Tara, the prophecies by Nostradamus are not science, but the predictions about climate change, which are based on observations and measurements of actual events and mathematical calculations using the results of those measurements and observations,
are science. That's an absolutely crucial difference.
Ann
