Global warming is a Procrustean bed: everything fits the theory, and anything that doesn’t will either be stretched till it fits or chopped till it fits.

It’s pseudoscience. It’s not falsifiable. That is, it flunks Sir Karl Popper’s “line of demarcation” between science and pseudoscience. It’s not refutable. Everything is shown to be explained by the theory. According to Popper, however,

Every “good” scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better. A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.

The reason I bring this up is today’s article in Reuters. Global warming will cause “monster hurricanes,” the eco-spooks all tell us. We’re warned of a future of Katrinas everywhere. Gore’s movie poster showed a hurricane spinning out of a smokestack. Examples abound.

Now it seems less intense hurricanse will be caused by global warming. The bases are covered. Just as with the forecast “European Ice Age” and extreme cold this spring — all “extremes” are because of global warming, extremes of cold included as well as extreme storms of all kinds. And now, less intense storms will be because of global warming too. So last year’s comic screwup of a dire hurricane forecast is explained, and it’s presumably still our fault for buying incandescent lightbulbs and putting our groceries in plastic bags and whatnot.

MIAMI (Reuters) – Global warming could increase a climate phenomenon known as wind shear that inhibits Atlantic hurricanes, a potentially positive result of climate change, according to new research released on Tuesday.

The study, to be published on Wednesday in Geophysical Research Letters, found that climate model simulations show a “robust increase” in wind shear in the tropical Atlantic during the 21st century from global warming.

Wind shear, a difference in wind speed or direction at different altitudes, tends to tear apart tropical cyclones, preventing nascent ones from growing and already-formed hurricanes from becoming the monster storms that cause the most damage. …