Science: Heretics as Heroes & Why Peer Review is F*cked Up

The list of scientific heretics who were persecuted for their radical ideas but eventually proved right keeps getting longer. Last month, Daniel Shechtman won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of quasicrystals, having spent much of his career being told he was wrong.

"I was thrown out of my research group. They said I brought shame on them with what I was saying," he recalled, adding that the doyen of chemistry, the late Linus Pauling, had denounced the theory with the words: "There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists."

The Australian medical scientist Barry Marshall, who hypothesized that a bacterial infection causes stomach ulcers, received similar treatment and was taken seriously only when he deliberately infected himself, then cured himself with antibiotics in 1984. Eventually, he too won the Nobel Prize.

Drs. Shechtman and Marshall are on a distinguished list. Galileo, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein all had to run the gauntlet of conventional wisdom in the scientific establishment. For a profession whose very product is new knowledge, science seems strangely resistant to novelty. _MattRidley in GWPF

There are good reasons why politically powerful scientists tend to disparage the ideas promoted by the up and coming heretics: The heretics are rocking the boat! Institutions evolve flows of money, power, and influence over time. Just like political dictators, those scientists who occupy the upper echelon positions of power will constantly survey the lower reaches, looking for possible threats to their influence.

One of the most useful methods that has evolved to keep the upstart revolutionaries in their places, is the peer-review process in scientific publishing. Judith Curry has collected a number of ways in which peer review keeps the uppity heretics in their place:

...peer review as practiced in the 21st century biomedical research poisons science. It is conservative, cumbersome, capricious and intrusive. It slows down the communication of new ideas and discoveries, while failing to accomplish most of what it purports to do. And, worst of all, the mythical veneer of peer review has created the perception that a handful of journals stand as gatekeepers of success in science, ceding undue power to them, and thereby stifling innovation in scientific communication.

...1) The process takes a really long time....

...2) The system is not very good at what it purports to do....

...Reviewers are biased by personal motives...

... _Much more at_JudithCurry_via_GWPF

Professor Curry goes on to compare various open access processes for publication and review, with the traditional peer-review process as it is practised by Science, Nature, PNAS, and the other guardians of the orthodoxy.

Modern science is badly inbred and constipated in areas of funding, review, publishing, tenure, and scientific organisations and conferences. Being an intelligent and scrupulous heretic in today's world is a lesson in institutional corruption in high places.

But that is no reason to give up or sell out. In the world of "new media," there are growing numbers of ways to get one's information out to those who really matter, in the long run. Explore your options and take your best shot.

H/T GWPF

Things Only a Skeptical Brain Can Know

The human brain is expensive to maintain, and over time forced the complete reshaping of a woman's pelvis due to its large size at birth. The adult brain is approximately 3 pounds of fatty tissue that consumes 50% of the carbohydrates you ingest every day. If something happens to your brain -- such as head trauma, degenerative disease, or stroke -- your brain can change in ways that make you a different person.

Biomedical science is devising ways to work around brain damage and to mitigate the effects of brain diseases. It is a short step from correcting brain damage to augmenting the power of normal brains. Do human scientists, psychologists, and philosophers understand the nature of human consciousness well enough to know how best to augment the human brain? There are many ways we might approach the problem.

One problem of human consciousness is how slow it is. It takes anywhere from 0.25 to 0.50 seconds for the conscious mind to acknowledge what the unconscious mind already "knows." Accelerating the mind's conscious awareness would bring many positive rewards in high-risk, real time dynamic situations.

Another problem with the human brain: only a few people are intelligent enough to understand the technology and science that advanced human societies depend upon. Most people are far too stupid to acquire the concepts, and to work their way through the chains of logic to reach the "heights of understanding." Making humans "smarter" and more competently capable of complex thought patterns would be a great help in many ways.

But perhaps the greatest problem with human minds is the laziness and lack of curiosity and skepticism when faced with the ideas and theories that they are taught. Children believe what they are told by their parents and teachers, until some of them reach a rebellious stage where they disbelieve what they are told. But that "rebellion" is just as reflexive as the earlier blind trust. In universities, late adolescents revel in their freedom from their early childhood shackles of mind and body, and become easy marks for their professors. Blind reaction in one direction leads to blind trust in another.

It is easier to believe (or reflexively doubt) than to reason out a problem for oneself. An adult brain is barely matured at age 25 or 30 before it begins to slow down. If it has not acquired healthy habits of skepticism, curiosity, and independent thought by that time, it will be almost impossible to learn them.

Popular delusions that should be doubted by healthy skeptical minds, include the impending shortage of crucial materials, and the impending destruction of the Earth by anthropogenic climate catastrophe.

But those are easy delusions to dispel, for the healthy skeptical mind. There are many other, more difficult popular delusions that may take more thought because they lie closer to the center of one's self-concept and identity. If one learns healthy curiosity and skepticism, all paths lead to the center of one's own ego.

Skeptics do not believe or disbelieve, at least not without enormous mental effort to exclude other possibilities. Only a fool will "believe" what he cannot know. An honest religion will admit as much. Honest believers admit their own foolishness. Dishonest believers go on jihad and attempt to beat non-believers into submission, or otherwise eradicate all disbelief.

What can a skeptical brain know? Knowledge is multi-leveled, and of variable quality and robustness. A true skeptic understands more about knowledge than a believer, since a believer is unwilling to undergo the process of testing, falsifying, proving a hypothesis. But that is only a starting point.

Intelligence and wisdom (the appropriate use of knowledge) are two different things.  When intelligent people devote themselves to the polemical defense of an unsupported hypothesis (a belief from faith), the arguments they frame may be complex and superficially convincing.  But how deeply are they capable of building their support?  That is the question.  How long does it take them to get to the issue of falsifiability?  Or do they avoid falsifiable arguments altogether?

To a true believer, his religion is unfalsifiable.  It is circular, tautological, based upon the simplest of "knowledge", and essentially unshakable.  This is true whether the religion is spiritual, political, economic, or "scientific."   A true believer will run away from questions of data, and data reliability.  A skeptic lives in the land of data and data testing.

Skepticism is based upon the (sometimes compulsive) need to break through from one level of knowledge (or ignorance) to a higher level of knowledge (or level of lesser ignorance).  In the world of the honestly curious, the burden of proof is always on the "believer" in the battle between skepticism and belief.  Anyone who adopts a different assumption for reasons other than playing the devil's advocate, is either ignorant, mindless, or unscrupulous.   The skeptic knows this, which explains a great deal of the skeptical stamina in the face of holy inquisitions and the burning of the heretics.

Addendum:  This alarming (alarmist) analysis of the near future of the US contains a great deal of information in the form of graphs, links, multiple personal analyses, etc.  (via The Survivalist Blog)   If you have some time to test your skeptical powers, look for problems with the author's data, arguments, conclusions, and recommendations.  As it deals with "the coming food crisis" it should be a problem that persons of most political and religious beliefs can grapple with -- without creating cognitive dissonance or a crisis of conscience.

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Why CAGW Heretics are Better Informed than the Orthodox Climate Change True Believers

Orthodox believers need only profess their belief, and express astonishment that anyone in their right minds would doubt the orthodoxy. It requires very little cognitive ability. There are no risks and substantial benefits to orthodox belief.

Heretics have to be better informed than the orthodox. There are substantial costs associated with heresy, and most heretics will not step out of the mainstream lightly. Most heretics stepped away from the comforting fellowship of true believers out of a strong sense of logic and evidence. In fact, most heretics were compelled to doubt by their own cognitive integrity.

The recent divergence of satellite and ground station temperatures away from CO2 levels, as illustrated by the image above, has happened fairly recently--within the past ten years at most.
The divergence of temperatures away from IPCC projections as illustrated in the image directly above, is even more recent--over the past eight years at most.

An even more recent divergence from expected trends--the recent cessation of warming of upper ocean levels--is only four years old.

These changes are recent trends, and well within the range of short-term climate/weather variability. But they do raise the question: "what evidence is required to falsify IPCC models and projections?" It is a question worth considering, given that a hypothesis such as CAGW can only be science if it is falsifiable.

Returning to recent climate/weather trends, beyond the ENSO and PDO weather patterns, what might be responsible for the downturn in global satellite, ground, and sea temperature readings?

1. The sun heats the earth, repository of most of the CO2 on the planet.

2. Some stored CO2 comes out by a process known as outgassing ( from the soil ) and the champagne effect ( from the oceans ).

3. Sloppy "scientists" see the warming, and the CO2, but overlook the changes in the sun, don't see the fine differences in timing... and proceed to blame the increasing temperature on CO2 and mankind as the culprit in a classic knee-jerk reaction.
__Source__via__Greenwatch

Well, the numbered list above is a summary that follows a longer argument, but it may actually be an accurate summing up of much of the current confusion in climate science, typified by the confused ramblings of James Hansen, Michael Mann, Gavin Schmidt, et al.

The fact remains, in order to be a heretic--whether in religion, climate orthodoxy, political correctness etc--one must know more about the underlying ideas involved, than must a true believer, who must only profess belief. To a believer, insistence on evidence and consistency is often considered a sign of a lack of faith. In many belief orthodoxies, such lack of faith could easily mean the loss of funding, employment, or even loss of one's life.

Heresy is a risk. Be sure you are ready to take the risk before you take the plunge.

Climate Basics: Earth's Heat Content

Intelligent people understand that they can trust neither politicians, nor the media. What some of them have not yet learned, is that they cannot blindly trust anyone, regardless of academic or scientific credentials.

Consider the science behind climate change. A scientific theory must contain falsifiable hypotheses. The key to understanding and testing current orthodox theories of anthropogenic global warming, is to identify the falsifiable hypotheses and to attempt to falsify them.

"Global Warming" requires an ongoing accumulation of heat. This heat accumulation should be reflected in temperature measurements -- allowing for normal climate and weather cycles. The best measurement of Earth's heat content is ocean temperature measurements, rather than the ground surface station measurements that currently feed data into GCMs.

The simplest form of "fact-checking" of IPCC GCM climate projections, is to see if Earth's heat content is growing.

...global warming requires a more-or-less monotonic increase in the accumulation of heat (in Joules) within the climate system. The use of a global average surface temperature, regardless if it is increasing or decreasing is an inadequate and inaccurate metric of global warming as the heat is not only a function of temperature but also mass over which the heat change occurs! This is why the ocean is the dominate reservoir of heat content change.

With respect to the change in upper ocean heat content, as reported on a Climate Science weblog on February 15 2008, the paper

Willis, J. K., D. P. Chambers and R. Steven Nerem, 2008: Assessing the Globally Averaged Sea Level Budget on Seasonal and Interannual Time Scales. Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans (in press),

reports on no upper (700m) ocean warming since 2004.

Thus while we cannot state that the recent widely distributed cold waves or overall cooling of the troposphere are evidence of the end of global warming over decadal and longer time scales, we can state that global warming has not occurred in the last 4 years. This is a major issue for both climate science and for policymakers, as only those who blindly (or deliberately) ignore the scientific evidence can still accept the 2007 IPCC conclusions as settled science.___ClimateScience

The question is, how long will the heat content of Earth's climate system be allowed to diverge from orthodox climate models, before the climate orthodoxy begins to modify its approach to GCM's and climate projection?

The current climate orthodoxy is based upon a set of assumptions--incorporated into its models--that must eventually be pared down enough to a form which can be falsified. We are not at that point as of yet. Currently, the orthodoxy has taken care to obscure and complicate its theories so as to present a front to the world which is indistinguishable from an unfalsifiable belief system, a religion.

But if catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) orthodoxy is to be taught in university science departments, rather than in cloistered seminaries and monasteries, curious students, post-grads, and junior professors will attempt to formulate the issues in terms of science--falsifiable hypotheses. As these un-initiated supplicants produce a body of work based upon pre-orthodox mindsets, it should be possible to tease out a set of hypotheses which are falsifiable.

More time. More data. Cleaner theories. More honest science. The orthodoxy can consider itself under siege.

Cuba is not a Place for Good Socialists

Neil Clark went to Havana looking for the socialist paradise he had always heard it would be. By the time he left, he was happy just to get out alive!

All the people whose views we respect had said that the Caribbean island was a progressive model whose policies on education and healthcare ought to be copied throughout the world. We went there last April desperately wanting to like the place — after all, if George W. Bush and other right-wing nasties hated Cuba so much, then the country must be on the right tracks.

But we returned home terribly disillusioned. Neither of us had been to a country which was so utterly decrepit.

...The average wage in Cuba is a pitiful $17 a month. The monthly ration which includes 283g of fish, 226g of chicken, ten eggs and 1.8kg of potatoes is barely enough for a fortnight, meaning most Cubans need to work the black market to stay alive. Things that we in Britain take totally for granted — such as toilet paper, toothpaste and pens — are luxury goods in Cuba. I’ll never forget the look of joy from an old lady when I handed her a couple of old marker pens and a coloured pencil.

For Fidel’s chums, life is somewhat easier. Despite its calls for further belt-tightening, the Cuban government last year ordered Series 1, 3 and 5 BMWs for all its ambassadors and a Series 5 model for Raúl Castro, who had taken charge of the country after his brother’s hospitalisation.

The heartbreaking consequences of Cuba’s currency apartheid were bought home to my wife and I on a Saturday afternoon visit to Havana’s Coppelia ‘Ice Cream’ park. To the right of the park gates was a long queue of Cubans who had only Cuban pesos. They have to wait on average two hours every weekend to get their weekly scoop of ice cream. On the left, there was walk-in access to tourists and the lucky locals who had convertible pesos. Fifty years on, the Cuban revolution has turned full circle in a truly Orwellian fashion. Once again the locals find themselves excluded from the best beaches in their country, as they were under Batista. And prostitution, so rife in pre-revolutionary days, is back — the jineteras being the only group of Cubans allowed to enter the new purpose-built resorts.

...The totalitarian nature of Castro’s Cuba is no right-wing myth, but a reality....After the stress of our final day in Cuba, my wife and I were hugely relieved to leave the country. And when we were safely airborne, we both reflected that if any country was in need of a revolution, it was Fidel Castro’s Cuba. ___Source

Go ahead and read the full story of Neil Clark's visit to Havana. Also consider Czech super-model Helena Houdova, who had to hide her digital memory card in her bra, to get visual evidence of Cuba's collapse out of the country. And think about the people who continue to repeat the lies about Castro's "revolution paradise", and consider what these dishonest rumour-bearers are really up to. And while you are thinking about that, think about the same brainless ideologues who mecca'd to Sandinista Nicaragua, and who continue to pilgrimage to Chavez' Venezuela.

These are the type of true believers who will happily make 90% of Earth's human population disappear, if that is what the gods of global warming and peak oil demand. It is an unhappy group of pilgrims, acolytes, disciples, and zombies. Their beliefs far outweigh anything that can be shown to their lying eyes.

The Sun is Dimming--Meteoroligical Scientists are Being Forced to Fight for Funding to Monitor the Harbingers of a New (little) Ice Age

The sun is in a "funk"--unsure of what to do, when to kick into its new cycle: Solar Cycle 24.

The last such solar funk corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. While there were competing causes for the climatic shift—including the Black Death’s depopulation of tree-cutting Europeans and, more substantially, increased volcanic activity spewing ash into the atmosphere—the sun’s lethargy likely had something to do with it.

...The planet’s climate is a messy picture, with all sorts of influences and feedback cycles that need to be taken into account. In order to build more accurate computer models, scientists need to understand both anthropogenic factors and the link between the sun and our planet, Tapping says. To help get at the sun’s influence, he and other researchers connect Earth’s temperature with historic sunspot records of sky watchers from Europe and China, as well as with carbon-14 isotopes­—residue from cosmic rays delivered by the sun’s magnetic field—found in tree rings. To understand our role in climate change,” he says, “we need to understand the natural process.”....“Things [new solar research telescopes] are all on hold due to the consequences of the huge science funding cuts in the U.S. and the U.K.,” Tapping says. “This is impacting other partner countries because of the possible need to cover financial holes. Nobody is clear yet as to how this will unfold so they are hanging onto their wallets, for the moment.”

PopMech

At least one veteran meteorologist is predicting the start of a global cooling, based upon satellite measured temperature trends combined with recent global weather patterns. The reluctance of the Sun to go ahead and do its job is simply an additional reason to be concerned.

Update:

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada's Carleton University, says that "CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short time scales."

Rather, he says, "I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet."

Patterson, sharing Tapping's concern, says: "Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth."

"Solar activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely will again," Patterson says. "If we were to have even a medium-sized solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than 'global warming' would have had."___IBD

Global cooling is a potentially civilisation-stopping development--depending upon how far it goes. It could be a genuine catastrophe--in contrast to current overfunded CO2 hysteria. Scientific funding agencies have become steeped in a neo-Lysenkoism of climate, that is quickly taking on fascist overtones in terms of lack of tolerance of debate and dissent.

Westerners are being failed by their governments and scientific foundations. It is within the ability of many of the world's "concerned billionaires" to make up governmental deficits in funding for the vital heresies. Unfortunately, men such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, George Soros, etc. cannot be bothered with such things.

Burn the Heretics!

To burn or not to burn. That is the question before the orthodoxy. Take Alex Cockburn. A prominent leftist intellectual, enemy of corporations and right-wing ideologues everywhere. But Cockburn has committed an unpardonable sin--he wants a real climate debate.

While the world’s climate is on a warming trend, there is zero evidence that the rise in CO2 levels has anthropogenic origins. For daring to say this I have been treated as if I have committed intellectual blasphemy.

In magazine articles and essays I have described in fairly considerable detail, with input from the scientist Martin Hertzberg, that you can account for the current warming by a number of well-known factors....There have been similar warming cycles in the past, such as the medieval warming period, when the warming levels were considerably higher than they are now.

Yet from left to right, the warming that is occurring today is taken as being man-made, and many have made it into the central plank of their political campaigns. For reasons I find very hard to fathom, the environmental left movement has bought very heavily into the fantasy about anthropogenic global warming and the fantasy that humans can prevent or turn back the warming cycle...This turn to climate catastrophism is tied into the decline of the left, and the decline of the left’s optimistic vision of altering the economic nature of things through a political programme. The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice. ____Spiked

Of course, Cockburn understands the left better than anyone outside the movement possibly could. He lives, eats, breathes, and drinks leftist thought. Unfortunately, it is not only the left that has fallen for the politically driven cant of catastrophe.

For his sins of revealing the obvious, Cockburn is condemned to the stake by his erstwhile friends and colleagues. Ironic, that one who has devoted his life to a more rational left should be one of the first to be reviled by the irrationalist turnings of the new left.

But that is how the new orthodoxy works. Burn the heretics! Then hang them. Then off with their heads! You know how it goes . . .



H/T Lubos

Global Warming Denialists: The New Evil Empire?

Global warming deniers must be crazy to say the things they say--unless--unless they are being paid a lot of money to contradict the "scientific consensus." Right? So who are all of these big money interests who pay the deniers the big money, and why would they do it?

The idea that there is a “denial industry” doesn’t hold up to logic. Here’s how policies that adhere to conventional theories about global warming benefit most vested interests:

* Insurance companies get to charge higher premiums
* Fossil fuel companies get to keep prices (and profits) high
* Politicians get to enact new taxes
* Public sector entities get new taxes to fund their pensions
* Environmental organizations get more funds
* Left wing activists get a new basis to attack private ownership
* Labor unions get more jobs, especially in the public sector
* Lawyers get a new basis to file lawsuits
* Wall street gets to trade emissions credits
* Climate researchers get more grant requests funded
* United Nations bureaucrats get a guaranteed revenue stream

With pretty much everyone winning in this scenario, apart from billions of ordinary consumers, millions of small businesses, and the economic aspirations of emerging nations - where is the denial industry? With virtually all powerful vested interests winning under the alarm scenario - it’s no wonder we aren’t seeing meaningful debate on this topic.

EcoWorld

Al Gore is not the only opportunist who stands to make billions on the great "Kyoto and Sons Global Warming Crusade Bandwagon." Oil companies, insurance companies, trial lawyers, government bureaucrats, any academic or industry researcher who can tie their grant proposal to "global warming"--all the usual suspects stand to gain from the "Son of Kyoto" accords.

So if you somehow believe you are "speaking truth to power" by railing against the "Global Warming Denialists," you are actually serving as a shill for powerful interests yourself. Consensus science is for morons who do not understand science. What passes for consensus science in climate studies is actually "consensus politics." If you fell for it, don't feel too badly. The news and entertainment media trumpets the political consensus 24 hours a day.
People who oppose the claim that "the debate is over," are not denialists at all. They are heretics. They think the great CAGW bandwagon is suffering a severe case of "premature evangelisation." Current mainstream thinking on "global warming" and "climate change" is incredibly simplistic. Why? Because most people do not understand Popper's concept of falsifiability--which underlies science.

Without the benefit of informed, experienced, and creative minds, the mass of humans in the developed world accepts what the media tells them as fact. They have no basis whatsoever to contest the popular "consensus" views promulgated by the mainstream. That is a pity. But not a great pity.

Delusions have a way of sorting themselves out as more data accumulates. The theory that anthropogenic CO2 is forcing massive, catastrophic climate change is one of those delusions that requires sorting by data. That will not be done by the mass media, or by consumers of mass, mainstream media. It will be done by the heretics and infidels of the scientific world. The same type of scientist who has always done most of the work in science.




Image source Mensa Barbie

The Great Climate Research Funding War

Poor climate orthodoxy. The alarmist orthodoxy outspends the open minded skeptics by thousands to one, and the orthodox true believers--even with the help of 99% of the media--still cannot get the respect they feel they deserve. The debate will simply not close--unless the orthodoxy begins burning the heretics at the stake!

Pobrecitos! Poor babies. Just as in the failing and corrupt government school system, corrupt adherence to a bad hypothesis leads to failure in the end--regardless of the amount of money spent, and whatever "consensus" it can create temporarily.

Via Icecap

Burning the Heretics

The climate orthodoxy's crusade against the heretics hijacked Newsweek recently. Pity the poor "deniers" when mighty Newsweek attacks! Or not.

At the Live Earth concert in New Jersey last month, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. denounced climate-change skeptics as "corporate toadies" for "villainous" enemies of America and the human race. "This is treason," he shouted, "and we need to start treating them now as traitors."

Some environmentalists and commentators have suggested that global-warming "denial" be made a crime, much as Holocaust denial is in some countries. Others have proposed that climate-change dissidents be prosecuted in Nuremberg-style trials. The Weather Channel's Heidi Cullen has suggested that television meteorologists be stripped of their American Meteorological Society certification if they dare to question predictions of catastrophic global warming.

A few weeks ago, the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Marlo Lewis published an article opposing mandatory limits on carbon-dioxide emissions, arguing that Congress should not impose caps until the technology exists to produce energy that doesn't depend on carbon dioxide. In response to Lewis's reasonable piece, the president of the American Council on Renewable Energy, Michael Eckhart, issued a threat:

..."Take this warning from me, Marlo. It is my intention to destroy your career as a liar. If you produce one more editorial against climate change, I will launch a campaign against your professional integrity. I will call you a liar and charlatan to the Harvard community of which you and I are members. I will call you out as a man who has been bought by Corporate America."

Source

What kind of limp-wristed threat is that? What kind of a moron takes himself so seriously that he would even talk like that? Utter fool.

This is the zealotry and intolerance of the auto-da-fé. The last place it belongs is in public-policy debate. The interesting and complicated phenomenon of climate change is still being figured out, and as much as those determined to turn it into a crusade of good vs. evil may insist otherwise, the issue of global warming isn't a closed book. Smearing those who buck the "scientific consensus" as traitors, toadies, or enemies of humankind may be emotionally satisfying and even professionally lucrative. It is also indefensible, hyperbolic bullying. That the bullies are sure they are doing the right thing is not a point in their defense.

"The greatest dangers to liberty," Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, "lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

Source

On Society's Need for Heretics

In a world where much of society--and even much of science--is increasingly giving in to groupthink, it is refreshing to see a distinguished scientist who recognises the vital role of heretics in both science and society.

As a scientist I do not have much faith in predictions. Science is organized unpredictability. The best scientists like to arrange things in an experiment to be as unpredictable as possible, and then they do the experiment to see what will happen. You might say that if something is predictable then it is not science. When I make predictions, I am not speaking as a scientist. I am speaking as a story-teller, and my predictions are science-fiction rather than science. The predictions of science-fiction writers are notoriously inaccurate. Their purpose is to imagine what might happen rather than to describe what will happen. I will be telling stories that challenge the prevailing dogmas of today. The prevailing dogmas may be right, but they still need to be challenged. I am proud to be a heretic. The world always needs heretics to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies.

...Everyone agrees that the climate is changing, but there are violently diverging opinions about the causes of change, about the consequences of change, and about possible remedies. I am promoting a heretical opinion, the first of three heresies that I will discuss in this piece.

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

...To stop the carbon in the atmosphere from increasing, we only need to grow the biomass in the soil by a hundredth of an inch per year. Good topsoil contains about ten percent biomass, [Schlesinger, 1977], so a hundredth of an inch of biomass growth means about a tenth of an inch of topsoil. Changes in farming practices such as no-till farming, avoiding the use of the plow, cause biomass to grow at least as fast as this. If we plant crops without plowing the soil, more of the biomass goes into roots which stay in the soil, and less returns to the atmosphere. If we use genetic engineering to put more biomass into roots, we can probably achieve much more rapid growth of topsoil. I conclude from this calculation that the problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a problem of land management, not a problem of meteorology. No computer model of atmosphere and ocean can hope to predict the way we shall manage our land.

...

Edge.org Freeman Dyson

Go to edge.org and read the full article, a refreshingly intelligent look at the world, in comparison to what is typically available in the media.

Al Fin blog has devoted a great deal of time to the conformity--the groupthink--that pervades academia, the media, and society at large. I use terms such as "academic lobotomy", "psychological neoteny", and "malignant narcissism" to describe how a generally healthy society might allow itself to sink into brain killing conformity.

The good news is the people such as Freeman Dyson are alive and communicating their ideas. The bad news is that academia and the media are doing their utmost to reduce the number of intelligent and heretical replacements that western society needs.

Most people will never reach the next level. The wisdom, intelligence, and originality--the overall comptence needed--is not being shaped by a vacuous and incompetent pseudo-intelligentsia, that has taken over the intellectual landscape. Young people of promise are being wasted by in large number by a system that does not want heretics and challengers.

Grand Old Man of the Left Rails Against "Global Warming" Religion

Most of the driving force behind the CAGW bandwagon and crusade has come from the left. Leftist environmentalist movements particularly, but the anti-globalist left and the anti-American left have also leaped on board the bandwagon with enthusiasm. So how do you explain Alexander Cockburn, one of the more prolific and literate leftists of them all, condemning CAGW as a capitalist-inspired fiction of destruction?

The marquee slogan in the new cold war on global warming is that the scientific consensus is virtually unanimous. This is utterly false. The overwhelming majority of climate computer modelers, the beneficiaries of the $2 billion-a-year global warming grant industry, certainly believe in it but not necessarily most real climate scientists-people qualified in atmospheric physics, climatology and meteorology.

...The first global warming modelers simply threw up their hands at the complexity of the water problem and essentially left out the atmospheric water cycle. Over time a few features of the cycle were patched into the models, all based on unproven guesses at the effect of increased ocean evaporation on clouds, the effect of clouds on reflecting the sun's energy and the effect of cloud warming on rainfall and snow. All of these "band aid" equations are hopelessly inadequate to repair the computer models' inability to describe the water cycle's role in temperature.

Besides the inability to deal with water, the other huge embarrassment facing the modelers is the well-researched and well-established fact published in many papers that temperature changes first and CO2 levels change 600 to 1,000 years later....

Much more at the Source

Readers of Al Fin will find nothing new in Cockburn's arguments. The most interesting thing is the person making the argument. How will the true believers of CAGW confront this heretic of the left? Will they accuse him of being in the pay of coal interests? Or will they simply ignore him?

Because the one thing they cannot afford to do is to engage him on the face of his arguments. Because based upon rational argument the CAGW true believers cannot win. They can only have faith in the righteousness of their cause.

Global Warming as Religion

This is not the only blog to draw a comparison between the nature of belief in global warming, and belief in religion. The excellent website + blog Numberwatch has recently developed the analogy quite well:

Religions vary in their treatment of unbelievers, which ranges from disregard to slaughter. The new religion relies at present on verbal assault and character assassination, though there are those who would go further. They call the infidels “deniers” – a cheap and quite despicable verbal reference to the Holocaust. There is a sustained campaign to deny the deniers any sort of public platform for their views.

Apostates are universally even more reviled than infidels. They have turned their backs on the true faith, whichever that might happen to be. Partial apostates, or heretics, are even more loathed and through the ages have been subjected to the most appalling punishments and deaths. In the case of the “sceptical environmentalist”, Bjorn Lomborg, he is of the faith. In fact he is a serial believer; accepting, for example, that eating celery causes two percent of all cancers and, of course, that global warming is man made, but he rejects the sacrificing of humanity to the belief. This is unacceptable! What are a few million deaths from dirty water, mosquito bites and other hazards so long as people can be made to conform? So far he has only been assaulted with insults and custard pies. Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace, broke with the movement over its growing anti-human, anti-scientific tendencies and drift into extremism. The last straw for him was the campaign against chlorine, not only an essential component of human life but also the basis of one of the most dramatically life-saving hygienic interventions. He has, consequently, been subjected to a prolonged campaign of vilification, described as an eco-Judas, turncoat and traitor. Every minor commentator or blogger who manifests disbelief can expect to be the target of abuse from self-appointed protectors of the creed.

....Freedom of speech and publication is at the very heart of science. Even the most foolish of hypotheses is allowed to be offered for examination. In much of religion the opposite is true; challenging the established dogma is heresy, for which the punishment has ranged from ostracism to horrific torture and death. One of the greatest ironies produced by the successful policy of entryism by the eco-theologians is that it is none other than the Royal Society that has been orchestrating the attempt to censor any deviation from establishment beliefs. Authoritarian politicians, such as Congressman Brad Miller, would give such suppression the force of law.

It is a curious repetition of history that those who advance the hypothesis that the sun is the controlling element in changes of climate are vilified, just as Galileo was, for supporting the Copernican heliocentric description of the solar system. Yet the sun is clearly the driver for climate – if it stopped shining, the earth’s temperature would drop to near absolute zero. In the establishment dogma the sun is barely mentioned, while the puny efforts of mankind are gratuitously magnified out of proportion. In a scientific approach to climate, a full understanding of the behaviour of that solitary driver would be the first prerequisite, but this is waived in the interests of piety; so leading solar researchers have been deprived of funding.

....Contradictions and irrationality also abound in the modern theocratic world. The EU, for example, gratuitously destroys a tiny industry making traditional barometers, on the grounds of an irrational fear of mercury, then imposes the use of fluorescent light bulbs that distribute that same dreaded substance in huge quantities across the continent, all on the basis of the threat of global warming.

People who have never heard of Wien or Planck confidently assert that it is “obvious” that man-made CO2 will cause runaway warming of the planet, when it is not at all obvious to many who are familiar with the works of those gentlemen. It is obvious in the sense that it is obvious that believers will have everlasting life or that a senseless act of self-immolation will earn the eternal attentions of 72 virgins in Paradise. The capacity to believe six impossible things before breakfast has been restored from fantasy to accepted normality.

By all means, visit the Source for more.


The logical response to a question for which you do not know the answer is: "I don't know." But in religion and global warming, the government school educated, the psychologically neotenous, the academically lobotomised--all of these are willing to go far out on a limb, far beyond what they can demonstrate to be true, in declaring the strength of their belief, of their certainty!

This is why government should have absolutely nothing to do with promoting religion, and that includes the religion of global warming. If you believe in an absurd religion, keep it to yourself! Otherwise you may become like those absurd primitive fanatics who go around slicing people's heads off, and stoning women to death. Is that what you want? We hope not.

Say your prayers as you like, but stay out of our way. Otherwise, we cannot be held to account for the consequences. Religions must know their place.

Global Warming Heretics--The Death Penalty?

Being a global warming (CAGW) heretic can be risky.

Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, has received five deaths threats by email since raising concerns about the degree to which man was affecting climate change.

One of the emails warned that, if he continued to speak out, he would not live to see further global warming.

...Richard Lindzen, the professor of Atmospheric Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology - who also appeared on the documentary - recently claimed: "Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves labelled as industry stooges.

...Dr Myles Allen, from Oxford University, agreed. He said: "The Green movement has hijacked the issue of climate change. It is ludicrous to suggest the only way to deal with the problem is to start micro managing everyone, which is what environmentalists seem to want to do."

Nigel Calder, a former editor of New Scientist, said: "Governments are trying to achieve unanimity by stifling any scientist who disagrees. Einstein could not have got funding under the present system."

Source

And while Hollywood fantasy hounds worship at the feet of Al Gore and his apocalyptic visions, real scientists are becoming increasingly uneasy with Gore's lack of truthfulness:

... part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.

“I don’t want to pick on Al Gore,” Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. “But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data.”

....Dr. Hansen said, the former vice president’s work may hold “imperfections” and “technical flaws.” He pointed to hurricanes, an icon for Mr. Gore, who highlights the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and cites research suggesting that global warming will cause both storm frequency and deadliness to rise. Yet this past Atlantic season produced fewer hurricanes than forecasters predicted (five versus nine), and none that hit the United States.

....“Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet,” Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said in a September blog. “Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change.”

In October, Dr. Easterbrook made similar points at the geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed Mr. Gore’s claim that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this” threatened change.

Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century.”

Getting personal, he mocked Mr. Gore’s assertion that scientists agreed on global warming except those industry had corrupted. “I’ve never been paid a nickel by an oil company,” Dr. Easterbrook told the group. “And I’m not a Republican.”

Biologists, too, have gotten into the act. In January, Paul Reiter, an active skeptic of global warming’s effects and director of the insects and infectious diseases unit of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, faulted Mr. Gore for his portrayal of global warming as spreading malaria.

“For 12 years, my colleagues and I have protested against the unsubstantiated claims,” Dr. Reiter wrote in The International Herald Tribune. “We have done the studies and challenged the alarmists, but they continue to ignore the facts.”

Source

Burning the Heretics Part II

"The debate is over, let the trials begin":

With the debate now settled, what are we to do with those scientific heretics (deniers is a much too mild a term for these dangerous individuals) who continue in their error and refuse to accept the teachings of the UN's ecumenical council of scientists. David Roberts has already called for climate change heretics to be put on trial, but he goes too far as he appears to want to punish people for heretical statements they made prior to the issuance of the latest UN writ. After all, as the earlier pronouncements from the UN's ecumenical council were not as definitive as the current one and the debate not yet closed, these unfortunate souls must be given a chance to repent from their errors before they are punished.

Following enlightened historical precedence (see Galileo), I humbly suggest that the UN create an office to be known as the Permanent Tribunal of Universal Inquiry to investigate into the views of scientists on climate change. Those who publicly repent from their errors would be given leniency, but those who maintain their heretical positions should be handed over to civil authorities for proper punishment. In times past the penalty for the crime of heresy was burning at the stake but, regretfully, this would release too many greenhouse gases, so another form of punishment must be found.

Lord Monckton should be one of the first of the heretics to be brought in front of the tribunal of inquiry. I cite his recent critique of the IPCC report only as evidence with which he condemns himself. He has had the audacity to continue to publish his heretical views even after he was duly informed that the debate was officially over. His critique of the IPCC report is comprehensive and it could cause weaker minds to question the infallibility of the IPCC.

....[and there is] Dr. Edward Wegman, professor at the Centre for Computational Statistics at George Mason University and chairman of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics. Dr. Wegman's crime is that he verified the McIntyre and McKitrick critique of Michael Mann's famous "hockey stick" graph, and has also complained that climate change scientists have routinely made basic statistical errors and insists that climate scientists actually consult with professional statisticians when using statistics in their work. I do note that the IPCC, quietly and without comment, has dropped the use of Dr. Mann's graph from its latest report. The IPCC's current global temperature graph, which only starts in 1850, will hopefully stop all the embarrassing distractions on the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.

Then there is Dr. Henrik Svensmark, director of the Centre for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish Space Research Institute. Dr. Svensmark presents an alternate theory on climate change that involves the sun's magnetic field, cosmic rays and cloud formation. Dr. Svensmark has even conducted experimentation to support his theory. As the IPCC report concedes that cloud formation and feedback remains a major source of uncertainty and its discussion of the role of the sun is limited to solar irradiance, it is clear that an alternative theory that attacks the weakest parts of the IPCC dogma must be silenced.

An what are we to do about Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the Russian Academies of Sciences' Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St. Petersburg and head of the International Space Station's Astrometry project? He comes to the puzzling conclusion that the simultaneous global warming on Mars, where there are no man-made (or martian-made) greenhouse gases, shows shows that the sun rather than man's industrial activity, is the main cause of warming on the Earth. The very fact that the IPCC report did not address Mars warming shows how irrelevant this argument is for global warming on the Earth. Another of his heresies is that the IPCC has the cause and effect backwards, that it is the Earth's warming that causing the release of CO2 from the world's oceans, rather than rising CO2 causing the warming. He also points out the surface layers of the world's oceans are actually cooling. Allowing the dissemination of such information will only cause confusion.

Source.

Another interesting skeptical look at the recent IPCC political summary for policy makers comes from the erudite President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus.

Indeed, I never measure the thickness of ice in Antarctica. I really don't know how to do it and don't plan to learn it. However, as a scientifically oriented person, I know how to read science reports about these questions, for example about ice in Antarctica. I don't have to be a climate scientist myself to read them. And inside the papers I have read, the conclusions we may see in the media simply don't appear. But let me promise you something: this topic troubles me which is why I started to write an article about it last Christmas. The article expanded and became a book. In a couple of months, it will be published. One chapter out of seven will organize my opinions about the climate change.

Source.

Whether by burning, banishment, or simply ignoring what they say--it is simply too important an issue to allow the heretics to speak out publicly. The high inquisition of the climate orthodoxy simply cannot allow it.