Climate Science and Special Relativity

Scientists are very naive. National – or even tribal- leaders always use whatever advantages they can find for their own benefit. Science is no different than proclamations from a Delphic Oracle from the perspective of National Grand Strategy of every country and culture. And if a discovery can be used as a weapon against adversaries, so much the better. “Benefiting Mankind” is a ridiculous soundbite. The objective is much narrower. Grow up.

Truthseeker says:
March 1, 2012 at 6:38 pm
We only need people to use their brain when they read stuff. That is a problem given that children are not taught to think for themselves and that has been true for a while.
There emerges in present times the collapse of what Ayn Rand termed ‘psychoepistemology’. That is, one’s own self-view as regards one’s ability to think. Many laypeople defer to authority with the assertion: “how could I ever understand something so complicated?” That is the result of accepting one’s own self view as being somehow incapable of doing so. Independent thought presupposes that one is indeed capable of it…or more-so in possession of the self-confident attitude that anything is possible. The modern bell-curve teaching culture basically destroys that faculty. Hence the near-idiocy of ‘teaching’ climate change in schools…especially to young students in lower grades, whose formative years are wasted–ruined–by meme-recitals.

Great post! I think the difference between CAGW climate scientists and other physicists is that most physicists are NOT trying to destroy jobs and the economy while simultaneously attempting to get governments to impose onerous taxes and regulations to control a harmless gas.

Einstein did not fail, nor nearly fail, his courses. That is a myth. He got top grades. A school he attended changed its grading scheme after left. The order of a numerical grading scale of 1 to 5 best to worst was reversed.

For the general public that does not have an objective scientific bend, how do you tell virtual reality from the real thing?
That’s a serious problem, actually. Hell, I have an objective scientific bend and I have plenty of trouble with it.
Ultimately, the stock answer is: We should believe the most what we can doubt the least, when we try to doubt very hard, using a mix of experience and consistent reason based on a network of experience-supported best (so far) beliefs.
That’s not very hopeful, but it is accurate. We believe Classical Non-Relativistic Mechanics after Newton invents it, not because it is true but because it works fairly consistently to describe Kepler’s purely observational laws, and (as it is tested) works damn well to describe a lot of quotidian experience as well on a scale less grand than planetary orbits. We encounter trouble with classical mechanics a few hundred years later when it fails to consistently describe blackbody radiation, the photoelectric effect (the one thing Einstein actually got the Nobel Prize for), the spectra of atoms, given Maxwell’s enormously successful addition to the equations of electricity and magnetism and the realization that light is an electromagnetic wave.
Planck, Lorentz, Einstein, Bohr, de Broglie, Schrodinger, Heisenberg and many others successively invent modifications that make space-time far more complex and interesting on the one hand — relativity theory — and mechanics itself far, far more complex than Newton could ever have dreamed. The changes were motivated, not by trying to be cool or win prizes, but by failures of the classical Euclidean theory to explain the data! Basically, Classical flat-space mechanics was doomed the day Maxwell first wrote out the correct-er equations of electrodynamics for the first time. We suddenly had the most amazing unified field theory, one that checked out empirically to phenomenal accuracy, and yet when we applied to cases where it almost had to work certain of its predictions failed spectacularly.
In fact, if Maxwell’s Equations and Newton’s Law were both true, the Universe itself should have existed for something far, far less than a second before collapsing in a massive heat death as stable atoms based on any sort of orbital model were impossible. Also, if Maxwell’s equations and flat spacetime with time an independent variable was correct, the laws of nature would not have had the invariance with respect to reference frame that Newtonian physics had up to that time enjoyed. In particular, moving a charged particle into a different inertial reference frame caused magnetic fields to appear, making it clear that the electric and magnetic fields were not actually vector forms! The entire geometry and tensor nature of space and time in Newtonian physics was all wrong.
This process continues today. Astronomer’s observe the rotational properties of distant galaxies to very high precision using the red shift and blue shift of the stars as they orbit the galactic center. The results don’t seem to agree with Newton’s Law of Gravitation (or for that matter, with Einstein’s equivalent theory of general relativity that views gravitation as curvature of spacetime. Careful studies of neutrinos lead to anomalies, places where theory isn’t consistent with observation. Precise measurements of the rates at which the Universe is expanding at very large length scales (and hence very long times ago, in succession as one looks farther away and back in time at distant galaxies) don’t quite add up to what the simplest theories predict and we expect. Quantum theory and general relativity are fundamentally inconsistent, but nobody knows quite how to make a theory that is “both” in the appropriate limits.
People then try to come up with bigger better theories, ones that explain everything that is well-explained with the old theories but that embrace the new observations and explain them as well. Ideally, the new theories predict new phenomena entirely and a careful search reveals it there where the theory predicts. And all along there are experiments — some of them fabulous and amazing — discovering high temperature superconductors, inventing lasers and masers, determining the properties of neutrinos (so elusive they are almost impossible to measure at all, yet a rather huge fraction of what is going on in the Universe). Some experiments yield results that are verified; others yield results — such as the several times that magnetic monopoles have been “observed” in experiments — that have not been reproducible and are probably spurious and incorrect. Neutrinos that might — even now — have gone faster than light, but again — probably not. A Higgs particle that seems to appear for a moment as a promising bump in an experimental curve and then fades away again, too elusive to be pinned down — so far. Dark matter and dark energy that might explain some of the unusual cosmological observations but a) are only one of several competing explanations; and b) that have yet to be directly observed. The “dark” bit basically means that they don’t interact at all with the electromagnetic field, making them nearly impossible to see — so far.
Physicists therefore usually know better than to believe the very stuff that they peddle. When I teach students introductory physics, I tell them up front — “Everything I’m going to teach you over the next two semesters is basically wrong — but it works, and works amazingly well, right up to where it doesn’t work and we have to find a better, broader explanation.” I also tell them not to believe anything I tell them because I’m telling them, and I’m the professor and therefore I know and its up to them to parrot me and believe it or else. I tell them quite the opposite. Believe me because what I teach you makes sense (is consistent), corresponds at least roughly with your own everyday experience, and because when you check it in the labs and by doing computations that can be compared to e.g. planetary observations, they seem to work. And believe me only with a grain of salt then — because further experiments and observations will eventually prove it all wrong.
That isn’t to say that we don’t believe some things very strongly. I’m a pretty firm believer in gravity, for example. Sure, it isn’t exactly right, or consistent with quantum theory at the smallest and perhaps largest of scales, but it works so very, very well in between and it is almost certainly at least approximately true, true enough in the right milieu. I’m very fond of Maxwell’s Equations and both classical and, in context, quantum theory, as they lead to this amazing description of things like atoms and molecules that is consistent and that works — up to a point — to describe nearly everything we see every day. And so on.
But if somebody were to argue that gravitation isn’t really a perfect force, and deviations at very long length scales are responsible for the observed anomalies in galactic rotation, I’d certainly listen. If the new theory still predicts the old results, explains the anomaly, I’d judge it to be quite possibly true. If it predicted something new and startling, something that was then observed (variations in near-Earth gravitation in the vicinity of Uranium mines, anomalies in the orbits of planets near black holes, unique dynamics in the galactic cores) then I might even promote it to more probably true than Newton’s Law of Gravitation, no matter how successful, simple, and appealing it is. In the end, it isn’t esthetics, it isn’t theoretic consistency, it isn’t empirical support, it is a sort of a blend of all three, something that relies heavily on common sense and human judgement and not so much on a formal rule that tells us truth.
Where does that leave one in the Great Climate Debate? Well, it damn well should leave you skeptical as all hell. I believe in the theory of relativity. Let me explain that — I really, really believe in the theory of relativity. I believe because it works; it explains all sorts of experimental stuff. I can run down a list of experimental observations that are explained by relativity that could scarcely be explained by anything else — factors of two in spin-orbit coupling constants, the tensor forms and invariants of electromagnetism, the observation of -mesons produced from cosmic ray collisions in the upper atmosphere far down near the surface of the Earth where they have no business being found given a lifetime of microseconds — and observation I personally have made — and of course all the particle accelerators in the known Universe would fail miserably in their engineering if relativity weren’t at least approximately correct. Once you believe in relativity (because it works) it makes some very profound statements about causality, time ordering, and so on — things that might well make all the physics I think that I know inconsistent if it were found to be untrue.
Yet I was — and continue to be — at least willing to entertain the possibility that I might have to chuck the whole damn thing, wrong from top to bottom — all because a silly neutrino in Europe seems to be moving faster than it should ever be aver to move. Violations of causality, messages from the future, who knows what carnage such an observation (verified) might wreak! I’m properly skeptical because what we have observed — so far — works so very consistently, and the result itself seems to be solidly excluded by supernova data already in hand, but you know, my beliefs don’t dictate reality — it is rather the other way around.
The sad thing about the Great Climate Debate is that so far, there hasn’t really been a debate. The result is presented, but no one ever takes questions from the podium and is capable of defending their answers against a knowledgeable and skeptical questioner.
I can do that for all of my beliefs in physics — or at least, most of them — explain particular experiments that seem to verify my beliefs (as I do above). I’m quite capable of demonstrating their consistency both theoretically (with other physical laws and beliefs) and with experiment. I’m up front about where those beliefs fail, where they break down, where we do not know how things really work. Good science admits its limits, and never claims to be “settled” even as it does lead to defensible practice and engineering where it seems to work — for now.
Good science accepts limits on experimental precision. Hell, in physics we have to accept a completely non-classical limitation on experimental precision, one so profound that it sounds like a violation of simple logic to the uninitiated when they first try to understand it. But quite aside from Heisenberg, all experimental apparatus and all measurements are of limited precision, and the most honest answer for many things we might try to measure is “damfino” (damned if I know).
The Great Climate Debate, however, is predicated from the beginning on one things. We know what the global average temperature has been like for the past N years, where N is nearly anything you like. A century. A thousand years. A hundred thousand years. A hundred million years. Four billion years.
We don’t, of course. Not even close. Thermometers have only been around in even moderately reliable form for a bit over 300 years — 250 would be a fairer number — and records of global temperatures measured with even the first, highly inaccurate devices are sparse indeed until maybe 200 years ago. Most of the records from over sixty or seventy years ago are accurate to no more than a degree or two F (a degree C), and some of them are far less accurate than that. As Anthony has explicitly demonstrated, one can confound even a digital electronic automatic recording weather station thermometer capable of at least 0.01 degree resolution by the simple act of setting it up in a stupid place, such as the southwest side of a house right above a concrete driveway where the afternoon sun turns its location into a large reflector over. Or in the case of early sea temperatures, by virtue of measuring pails of water pulled up from over the side with crude instruments in a driving wind cooling the still wet bulb pulled out of the pail.
In truth, we have moderately accurate thermal records that aren’t really global, but are at least sample a lot of the globe’s surface exclusive of the bulk of the ocean for less than one century. We have accurate records — really accurate records — of the Earth’s surface temperatures on a truly global basis for less than forty years. We have accurate records that include for the first time a glimpse of the thermal profile, in depth, of the ocean, that is less than a decade old and counting, and is (as Willis is pointing out) still highly uncertain no matter what silly precision is being claimed by the early analysts of the data. Even the satellite data — precise as it is, global as it is — is far from free from controversy, as the instrumentation itself in the several satellites that are making the measurements do not agree on the measured temperatures terribly precisely.
In the end, nobody really knows the global average temperature of the Earth’s surface in 2011 within less than around 1K. If anybody claims to, they are full of shit. Perhaps — and a big perhaps it is — they know it more precisely than this relative to a scheme that is used to compute it from global data that is at least consistent and not crazy — but it isn’t even clear that we can define the global average temperature in a way that really makes sense and that different instruments will measure the same way. It is also absolutely incredibly unlikely that our current measurements would in any meaningful way correspond to what the instrumentation of the 18th and 19th century measured and that is turned into global average temperatures, not within more than a degree or two.
This complicates things, given that a degree or two (K) appears to be very close to the natural range of variation of the global average temperature when one does one’s best to compute it from proxy records. Things get more complicated still when all of the best proxy reconstructions in the world get turned over and turned out in favor of “tree ring reconstructions” based upon — if not biased by — a few species of tree from a tiny handful of sites around the world.
The argument there is that tree rings are accurate thermometers. Of course they aren’t — even people in the business have confessed (in climategate letters, IIRC) that if they go into their own back yards and cut down trees and try to reconstruct the temperature of their own back yard based on the rings, it doesn’t work. Trees grow one year because your dog fertilizes them, fail to grow another not because it is cold but because it is dry, grow poorly in a perfect year because a fungus attacks the leaves. If one actually plots tree ring thicknesses over hundreds of years, although there is a very weak signal that might be thermal in nature, there is a hell of a lot of noise — and many, many parts of the world simply don’t have trees that survived to be sampled. Such as the 70% of the Earth’s surface that is covered by the ocean…
But the complication isn’t done yet — the twentieth century perhaps was a period of global warming — at least the period from roughly 1975 to the present where we have reasonably accurate records appears to have warmed a bit — but there were lots of things that made the 20th century, especially the latter half, unique. Two world wars, the invention and widespread use and testing of nuclear bombs that scattered radioactive aerosols throughout the stratosphere, unprecedented deforestation and last but far from least a stretch where the sun appeared to be far more active than it had been at any point in the direct observational record, and (via various radiometric proxies) quite possibly for over 10,000 years. It isn’t clear what normal conditions are for the climate — something that historically appears to be nearly perpetually in a state of at least slow change, warming gradually or cooling gradually, punctuated with periods where the heating or cooling is more abrupt (to the extent the various proxy reconstructions can be trusted as representative of truly global temperature averages) — but it is very clear indeed that the latter 19th through the 20th centuries were far from normal by the standards of the previous ten or twenty centuries.
Yet on top of all of this confounding phenomena — with inaccurate and imprecise thermal records in the era of measurements, far less accurate extrapolations of the measurement era using proxies, with at most 30-40 years of actually accurate and somewhat reproducible global thermal measurements, most of it drawn from the period of a Grand Solar Maximum — climatologists have claimed to find a clear signal of anthropogenic global warming caused strictly by human-produced carbon dioxide. They are — it is claimed — certain that no other phenomena could be the proximate cause of the warming. They are certain when they predict that this warming will continue until a global catastrophe occurs that will kill billions of people unless we act in certain ways now to prevent it.
I’m not certain relativity is correct, but they are certain that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is a true hypothesis with precise predictions and conclusions. I have learned to doubt numerical simulations that I myself have written that are doing simple, easily understandable things that directly capture certain parts of physics. They are doing far, far more complex numerical simulations — the correct theoretical answer, recall, is a solution to a set of coupled non-Markovian Navier-Stokes equation with a variable external driver and still unknown feedbacks in a chaotic regime with known important variability on multiple decadal or longer timescales — and yet they are certain that their results are correct, given the thirty plus years of accurate global thermal data (plus all of the longer timescale reconstructions or estimates they can produce from the common pool of old data, with all of its uncertainties).
Look, here’s how you can tell — to get back to your question. You compare the predictions of their “catastrophic” theory five, ten, twenty years back to the actual data. If there is good agreement, it is at least possible that they are correct. The greater the deviation between observed reality and their predictions, the more likely it is that their result is at least incorrect if not actual bullshit. That’s all. Accurately predicting the future isn’t proof that they are right, but failing to predict it is pretty strong evidence that they are wrong.
Such a comparison fails. It actually fails way back in the twentieth century, where it fails to predict or explain the cooling from 1945 to roughly 1965-1970. It fails to predict the little ice age. It fails to predict the medieval climate optimum, or the other periods in the last 10,000 years where the proxy record seems to indicate that the world was as warm or warmer than it is today. But even ignoring that — which we can, because those proxy reconstructions are just as doubtful in their own way as the tree-ring reconstructions, with or without a side-serving of confirmation bias to go with your fries — even ignoring that, it fails to explain the 33 or so years of the satellite record, the only arguably reliable measure of actual global temperatures humans have ever made. For the last third of that period, there has been no statistically significant increase in temperature, and it may even be that the temperature has decreased a bit from a 1998 peak. January of 2012 was nearly 0.1C below the 33 year baseline.
This behavior is explainable and understandable, but not in terms of their models, which predicted that the temperature would be considerably warmer, on average, than it appears to be, back when they were predicting the future we are now living. This is evidence that those models are probably wrong, that some of the variables that they have ignored in their theories are important, that some of the equations they have used have incorrect parameters, incorrect feedbacks. How wrong remains to be seen — if global temperatures actually decline for a few years (and stretch out the period with no increase still further in the process) — it could be that their entire model is fundamentally wrong, badly wrong. Or it could be that their models are partially right but had some of the parameters or physics wrong. Or it could even be that the models are completely correct, but neglected confounding things are temporarily masking the ongoing warming that will soon come roaring back with a catastrophic vengeance.
The latter is the story that is being widely told, to keep people from losing faith in a theory that isn’t working — so far — the way that it should. And I have only one objection to that. Keep your hands off of my money while the theory is still unproven and not in terribly good agreement with reality!
Well, I have other objections as well — open up the debate, acknowledge the uncertainties, welcome contradictory theories, stop believing in a set of theoretical results as if climate science is some sort of religion… but we can start with shit-canning the IPCC and the entire complex arrangement of “remedies” to a problem that may well be completely ignorable and utterly destined to take care of itself long before it ever becomes a real problem.
No matter what, we will be producing far less CO_2 in 30 years than we are today. Sheer economics and the advance of physics and technology and engineering will make fossil-fuel burning electrical generators as obsolete as steam trains. Long before we reach any sort of catastrophe — assuming that CAGW is correct — the supposed proximate cause of the catastrophe will be reversing itself without anyone doing anything special to bring it about but make sensible economic choices.
In the meantime, it would be so lovely if we could lose one single phrase in the “debate”. The CAGW theory is not “settled science”. I’m not even sure there is any such thing.
rgb

Robert Brown says:
March 1, 2012 at 8:29 pm
Outstanding post, Sir.

In America, students think for themselves.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08BAfKCfu74&w=420&h=315%5D

Your facts about Einstein are on the nose. He taught himself mathematics in his spare time and mastered calculus by 15. The only reason he avoided high school was because he viewed rote learning as a poor teaching method. Because of this, his non-science marks were not good enough to get into polytechnic, but his maths and physics grades were exceptional despite his poor attendance record. He then changed schools and attained the required grades to gain entry. Once he had graduated with a teaching diploma, he struggled to get work not because he was a failure, but because teaching jobs were in short supply – so he took a temporary job at the patent office. I love the spirit of the post, but check your facts, dude.

Robert Brown says:
March 1, 2012 at 8:29 pm
=========
Someone had to say it.
Now it needs to “go viral”.
Wow.

Robert Brown says:
March 1, 2012 at 8:29 pm

RGB: Very nice essay – thank-you very much! I hope many CAGW convinced readers see the overall tenuous foundation on which such conclusions rest. Much rancor, debate, and animosity is to be expected with much skeptical contention. It is how science works out the details, after all.
What forced myself into engagement, were the many calls for action, based on mostly conjecture and first reports. This is how society makes it’s biggest blunders. Going off at “half cock” is descriptive. The science must be nailed solid and models validated before ANY actions, beyond prudent disaster preparedness, can be contemplated. We just don’t know which way to jump, or whether any jumping is even required. Action without reason is panic. Panic destroys opportunity for rightful action.
To my horror, there are many, that for ideological reasons, want and desire… exactly that. GK

Reminiscent of a supposed conversation at the air ministry WW2.
“I just turned away some bod called Frank Whittle who has made a gas turbine engine in his garden shed. It only had 1000 pounds of thrust”.
Reply, “The super-charged, Rolls Royce Merlin engine in the Spitfire has 800 pounds of thrust”.

Attention.
This is a legal notice from the US Department of Political Correctness.
Dear Sir or Madam. It has come to our attention that you have been continuously using the term “climate scientist” in various contexts. We hereby inform you that by recent findings this term is considered derogatory and insinuating various illegal behaviors, and is therefore not recommended to be used in public debate.
We hereby ask you to:
1) Stop using the offensive term, using politically correct replacements like “alternative scientist” whenever appropriate.
2) Issue appropriate corrections and retractions of previously published materials which contain the offensive term(s).
3) Notify the US Dept on PC as soon as possible that you have read and understood the above letter and have agreed to follow the suggested guidelines from that moment on.

Wow! Thanks Dr. Brown, that was marvelous. Would it be possible to get a copy of that in pdf format?
Only by cut and paste, unfortunately. I’m writing directly into the “Leave a Reply” box, which has no real facility for previewing or editing or saving or retrieving the source text — except by mouse.
Not a completely terrible interface, but I do so miss not having an “edit” button on the articles and replies I write, when I discover errors…
rgb

Mariss said @ March 1, 2012 at 10:21 pm

Beautifully written article. Eisenstein failed at school, failed in his personal life and he was even unable to get a teaching job. He could only find work as a menial Swiss patent office clerk. Not something to build your career as a theoretical physicist.
….
Today we are overrun with scientists like they were rats…

I’d say we were overrun by people spouting bullshit. But then I’ve actually read several biographies of Einstein; my favourite’s Abraham Pais’ Subtle is the Lord.

Frizzy said @ March 1, 2012 at 10:52 pm

Wow! Thanks Dr. Brown, that was marvelous. Would it be possible to get a copy of that in pdf format?

I can but agree 🙂
One tiny quibble: the use of verify (prove to be true) rather than corroborate (strengthen). The former creates the certitude that leads to dogma.

Robert Brown: An intelligent and intelligible comment. Thank you.

As others have said, the declaration “the science is settled” gave away that this was a smoke screen, an overconfidence, a lie, if you will.
I asked someone who was saying, “big oil is funding shill scientists”, OK, what if one day the IPCC turns round and says that CO2 isn’t a problem after all? “Then I’ll know big oil got to them too.” It is completely circular.
Having said that I don’t think we can ignore the desires and views of climate change activists. We know that if AGW theory didn’t exist, they would still be pushing for something. We need to understand what it is that they really value and want. For example, maybe they want “justice” for the world — but HOW they envision justice working is something about their own interpretations, how they think, how they categorise things.
A lot of negativity gets projected onto big industry and capitalism (and it is debatable whether we even have capitalism, but nonetheless, somehow the world’s injustices are down to big money and greed, in their view.)
It is a cultural movement. Debating the science is secondary, because if and when the AGW model dies, these people will still want something. Some get called watermelons and maybe that’s the majority, but I think many are actually really interested in a “just world” but trouble is, the world is very complex.
That was a point that Michael Crichton made: environmentalists have very little appreciation of complexity. He compared the map of molecular paths in a single cell, to the Club Of Rome type of world systems map, and you can see, the Club of Rome was obviously not remotely having any chance of being right.
We can’t change what people value — if someone feels in their heart that they really want to see a just world, there is nothing you can do to change that — that is their prerogative, that is what they value most, that is how they see life. But the issue of complexity, this is something we all need to keep looking at. Environmentalists often try to invoke complexity by means of “the interconnectedness of all things” like, my car exhaust is drowning a small island. But that isn’t complex thinking, that’s magical thinking.
Real complexity is being able to see the actual network of relationships and their magnitudes and the cycles and the feedbacks.
There was a popular feminist who wrote that thin women, models in Western fashion magazines were just as bad as female mutilation practices in Africa, because if you make the judgment that Africa is worse, then that appeals to Western racist imperialism. So in order not to be a Western sexist male imperialist, you had to single out the Western fashion magazines, not the African tribal customs. This kind of “interconnected” thinking is a sort of typical thing in the humanities and is part and parcel of the sorts of arguments that people use when thinking about world justice. This is why you won’t get a straight answer to, “what about China’s emissions dwarfing ours?” because they see it as you trying to deny your own greed, for Western imperialist reasons.
Many people might say, well that’s just BS, but remember this is something that’s been prevalent in our culture for going on 30 years. People think this way. So I think we really have to look at complexity and raising the bar on complexity. Help people move from magical thinking to highly complex thinking.
If you can help someone see, actually see for themselves, greater complexity, then once they see it, there’s really no going back for them.

Robert B
You have brought together in one essay (or essai) everything that has been written on this site in the past 4 years. Great piece of writing. (quotidien = daily)

Stefan says:
March 2, 2012 at 12:48 am
They are selfish, communists (community-ists) do nothing slobs. They want you to share your goods and shackles with them because they are too [snip . . looks like obnoxious graffito . . kbmod] idle to do it for themselves. They do not like authority. They want to be totally independent, to do what they want when they want and not have to worry about little things like money.

Robert Brown says:
March 1, 2012 at 8:29 pm
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Usually, when I see a posting of this length my eyes glaze over and I quickly scroll on. As I originally did with this.
So thanks to the posters who recommended it strongly enough for me to give it the time it deserved and grateful thanks to Prof Brown for posting it in the first place.
I feel privileged to have read it.

I remember working on the BATSE project on the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory as a programmer in the ’90s. The project was implemented due to the discovery of Gamma ray bursters in the ’70s. The physicists on the project were extremely excited, since something new was going on (including the appearance of faster-than-light speeds). I asked one physicist (Brad Schaeffer at the Goddard Space flight center) what the prevailing theories were. He told me that for every scientist there were at least two theories…
That seems to be the difference between physicists and climatologists – a lot more sceptism (even about their own pet theories).

Thank you OP (original poster) (Mr Cockroft).
Exactly why can post on a worldwide forum, be debated if I’m wrong, smile when I’m Wright (seewhatididthere.dwright) and have a good time, that is the SCIENCE that I grew up loving.
The haters are NOT why I dragged my ass up from the middle nowhere Canada, paid my way into University on $50 000 GC.CA loans to find out that my so called “Professers” are life losers.
15 years later I go toe to toe with these a$$holes and they still crawl back into their cockroach holes.
And I still listen to Eminem, mother^u(kers.
dwright

That pretty much sums up my position. I would describe myself as a professional PhD level scientist who has, over the years, looked on aghast at the way climate science has been done.
Every experiment I do, I assume that my data is flawed, I wield occam’s razor on every experimental result, I retest and repeat until my only option is to believe the data. Then I go away and design another experiment to try and disprove my first. It’s the only way to not cheat yourself, the only way not to waste effort on artifacts or mis-conceptions.
Climate science fails to do this at every turn, the skeptical side of the debate can be as guilty of this as the believer side, however at least the skeptics adopt the right habit of mind. The believer approach to climate science isn’t science, at least not how I was trained to do it!

Very good analysis. We want open minds not closed thinking.

Thanks to Andi Cockroft for producing this guest post. But to Robert Brown, “Wow!!” That was possibly the most lucid and well-argued description of the correct approach to science which I have ever read. It should be compulsory reading for anyone involved in science, whether a student, a researcher, or simply an interested layperson like myself,
…… and for anyone not involved in science such as the politicians who are taking us back to pre-industrial times and the sheeple who passively go along with it.

Nice read. However, Mr Brown’s comment seem to deserve it’s own post. Maybe other physics profs, and students, then dare stand up and go off the reservation against the squashing of supposed dissent that, apparently, higher education are engaged in these days.
From my understanding it used to be: Go out and make a fuzz, to get students interested to join. Now it’s: STFU! So as not to ruin the big green climate gravy train!
Alas, I also now understand what was sorely lacking from the physics course I took, an actual coherent professor. Thank you for that, I thought you guys were mythical legends only. 🙂

“Robert Brown says: It was that little phrase that brought me into this insanity “settled science”. Those two little words uttered by scientist flew in the face of everything I was ever taught.”
Those two little words were a wake up call, they were the wake up call for alot of people. I’ll wager most people who frequent this blog were brought into this insanity for the same reason, those two little words.

Chris says:
March 1, 2012 at 9:12 pm
Your facts about Einstein are on the nose. He taught himself mathematics in his spare time and mastered calculus by 15. The only reason he avoided high school was because he viewed rote learning as a poor teaching method. Because of this, his non-science marks were not good enough to get into polytechnic, but his maths and physics grades were exceptional despite his poor attendance record. He then changed schools and attained the required grades to gain entry. Once he had graduated with a teaching diploma, he struggled to get work not because he was a failure, but because teaching jobs were in short supply – so he took a temporary job at the patent office. I love the spirit of the post, but check your facts, dude.

I recall a documentary about Einstein that indicated Einstein had some early problems with Special Relativity. He realized this before an experiment could be carried out that would have revealed his mistakes with the math. A series of events, including WWI, prevented the errors from being discovered before Einstein could correct them.
Sorry about the lack of references here.

I enjoyed this article. Well done.

Outstanding comment, Robert Brown!
Anthony, I believe this should be elevated to head post status. I almost didn’t bother to read it. because it looked too long for a comment on a not particularly interesting subject.

Robert Brown says:
March 1, 2012 at 8:29 pm
The Newtonian equations also have a problem when acceleration is large. When this is so, a fourth term, the rate of change of acceleration with time, (called “jerk” by engineers I believe) must be added to the mathematical description. This came to light when the acceleration/deceleration sled experiments were done following WWII in preparation for space flight. I have always felt that this indicated that the Newtonian equations were likely Taylor Series expansions of the “true” relations truncated at the second order term. Since Newton’s formulas work in most non-quantum cases, they have been, and still are, exceedingly useful. As an aside to Mr. Brown’s comment about the utility of Newton’s formulation, one of my instructors said when I was first studying quantum mechanics more than 50 years ago, ” I have been working with this stuff for ten years and I am not sure that I understand it. I do know that when I apply these principles in the laboratory I get the results I expected. Thank you Mr. Brown.

The diffence between reality and virtual reality is summed up nicely in his quote from Douglas Adam’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:”
They…summoned a qualified poet to testify under oath that beauty was truth, truth beauty and hoped thereby to prove that the guilty party in this case was Life itself for failing to be either beautiful or true. The judges concurred, and in a moving speech held that Life itself was in contempt of court, and duly confiscated it from all those there present…

A. Scott says:
March 1, 2012 at 7:29 pm
In my opinion, as I watch them with some regularity, weather models cannot predict with accuracy what the weather will be tomorrow.
They have evolved to where than can provide us a good guess and most will be at least somewhere in the ballpark with accuracy up to 4 to 7 days out. They can sometimes be generally close as much as a couple weeks out.

Basically no better than chance or a guess. I can guess that 3 days from now in the Seattle area it will be overcast, drizzly and in the 40s, and have an excellent chance of being right. But I’m not really predicting anything, I’m just going with the odds.
The models are actually trying to run through scenarios, and most will be horribly wrong. Why they’re still considered is beyond me.

Robert Brown Thank you!
I hope your long reply gets raised to its own post here. There are so many bits in it worthy of comment. No, more, it was like reading poetry at times. I really warm to so much of what you were saying.
Having said which, we have had opportunities here at WUWT to pick up real gold, that have been missed or misunderstood. I’m working on one of them backstage right now, to improve the communication. Stay tuned.

Robert:
I appreciate the relatively measured tone of your post and scientific acumen. However, I’d like to point out how easy it is, even for a rational and learned person such as yourself, to inadvertently bungle language and perpetuate the deplorable level of discourse currently plaguing The Great Climate Debate.
You said:

They are — it is claimed — certain that no other phenomena could be the proximate cause of the warming.

I’m not certain who ‘they’ is meant to be here but let’s assume that the IPCC represents the gravitational center of the establishment’s scientific thought on this matter: From IPCC (2007)*, page 10:

Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.

I’ve bolded two mentions of uncertainty: most (>50%) and very likely (>90% probability; IPCC, page 121.). Now, perhaps you were just speaking in shorthand, but I’ve seen many AGW supporters have their feet held to the fire on this blog, and others, for such mis-statements. I’m sure Anthony and the denizens of WUWT would agree that precise language is important, particularly with respect to quoting The Other Side. Now as with any qualitative estimate of uncertainty, arguments can be made one way or the other regarding accuracy. But they did estimate it to be non-zero (and/or >5%) so characterizing the climate science community at large as ‘certain’ is a misleading generalization.
Also, one could argue that comparing climate science to ‘bench’ science is apples-and-oranges. As you correctly point out, observational data of climate are wrought with uncertainty, and increase at the mind-numbingly slow rate of one data point per year. Other more applied scientific disciplines lend themselves to repetitive experimentation on much shorter time scales, permitting continuous refinements of methodology, exploration of alternate hypotheses, etc.
Again, thanks for your post.
* IPCC, 2007. Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of the Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

If CO2 is the main driver of climate, per the warmistas, why is it getting colder as CO2 increases?Better yet, how does a singularity grow in mass, since it is of infinite density, infinitely small and time stops in its presence? If not, what happens to the mass falling into a black hole? Theoretically, the event horizon grows. But how can it with time at nearly a standstill even at that location near a black hole? Since gravity supposedly slows time, what do we really see when we observe stars moving in very rapid orbits near the supposed black hole in the center of a galaxy? In my reference frame they are moving. But in theirs, time is much different. How about some answers from any of you relativity people? And this stuff is easy compared to quantum physics and wave functions collapsing due to “observation”, entangled particles instantaneously communicating and quantum jumps of particles. Not much settled science that I can see anywhere I look.

Robert Brown said @ March 2, 2012 at 7:32 am

One tiny quibble: the use of verify (prove to be true) rather than corroborate (strengthen). The former creates the certitude that leads to dogma.

Utterly granted. Sorry.

No need for sorry Robert. It is a pleasure to be able to assist you in your excellent prose. There is but one writer the Git knows of who could write flawlessly from start to finish: Bert Russell. The rest of us need editors. Some of the writers the Git has edited required almost as much effort as the writer expended. Most required less, but it is a certitude that editing your prose would require the least; your intent was utterly clear. You are a master.

Zeke said @ March 2, 2012 at 7:50 am

“Firstly, an amateur working as a clerk is just as able to present the truth as the most gifted professional. The truth is the truth no matter who presents it. The unwillingness of many main-stream “Climate Scientists” to engage with alternate viewpoints sets them apart from “Science”. ”

This claim is easily testable. Would this author care to submit a paper reviewing the work of Dr. Halton Arp which shows quasars of high redshift all over the sky are associated in pairs with active galaxies? The evidence is simple and ubiquitous that redshifted objects are not racing away, but in some cases even have bridges of material attaching them to low redshift active galaxies. It is over. The Big Bang is falsified. And yet, it is assured he will not have a career in any field of astronomy or astrophyics if he does not affirm the Big Bang.

Arp seems to still be working at the Max Planck Institut für Astrophysik.
http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/mpa/institute/members/popups/IMZKgQxLtmNsM.html

Smokey says:
March 2, 2012 at 11:16 am
Jim G,
“Most all of those questions are discussed in Harvard physics professor Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality and The Fabric Of The Cosmos. The first book is the most recent. You can probably find it on Amazon used for a few bucks. Very readable, with almost no math at all [although his extensive footnotes contain the underlying math].”
Thanks, Smokey, but are there any answers? Just kidding, as I know there are not, but it sounds like an interesting read for what “might be” some of the answers..

Fred Singer in his recent post here would have us place Climate Science advocates into three groups; deniers, sceptics and warmistas – but why the need for demarcation?

Why did Dr. Singer choose the pejorative term “denier” when a less inflammatory word could have been used instead? Surely Dr. Singer knows the origin of the term “climate denier” and the implications of that insult.

Ian W says:
March 1, 2012 at 6:33 pm
The answer of course is that climate ‘science’ the way it is practiced is not science. I find it interesting that popular science magazines and the media have no problem reporting the neutrino faster than light story, or pro vs con on string theory, or reversals in medical research yet can only see ‘the one true god CO2′ when it comes to climate ‘science’.
They appear to have no cognitive dissonance in doing so either so they will praise the skepticism of science in one field yet condemn skepticism on climate ‘science’. The logical inference from this support unabated by facts is that they don’t see climate ‘science’ as a science either – it is a tenet, a mark of faith – hence a religion,

I’m not sure religiosity is the most parsimonious explanation. I think they’re displaying fear. Fear that dissent will derail the “necessary” precautionary actions which alone will save us. (Incidentally, fear of having a marvelous gravy train derailed or deprived of fuel, too, of course!) Fear that the science consensus and political will might be compromised.
All in all, a symptom of vulnerability, weakness.

No need for sorry Robert. It is a pleasure to be able to assist you in your excellent prose. There is but one writer the Git knows of who could write flawlessly from start to finish: Bert Russell. The rest of us need editors. Some of the writers the Git has edited required almost as much effort as the writer expended. Most required less, but it is a certitude that editing your prose would require the least; your intent was utterly clear. You are a master.
As a matter of curiosity, did you know Russell? I’m a second-generation disciple — my philosophy instructor was George Roberts at Duke, from whom I took literally half of my major. Russell was a master. In more ways than just his prose. “Problems in Philosophy” is still in my mind one of the most succinct statements of “philosophy” in existence, although Russell missed the importance of Boole. Still, for 1912 it was awesome.
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