Guest essay by Dr. Vincent Gray, Wellington, NZ
For over 30 years the world has been saturated with the environmental fallacy.
It has taken over the media; newspapers, radio, TV; the education system;, the schools, the universities.
It has led to a retreat from experimental and theoretical science.
My professional career began during the war when science made a substantial contribution to its outcome. We had vigorous scientific discussions both in public and in the media. We published them in the journals. We enjoyed prestige, attractive salaries and public confidence.
It declined immediately the war ended. R V Jones, in his “Most Secret War” recounts that as soon as the war ended the military were no longer interested in measures to improve conditions of survival of pilots.
I endured a steady decline of science. In industrial research the role of the scientist was to justify the decisions of the sales department, and now it is increasingly to justify the policies of the Government even in the universities.
We have benefited from technical progress, based on scientific discoveries of the past. Chemistry, X-Ray diffraction have enabled molecules to be visualized. Combined with the genetic code it has led to modern medicine and our longer lives. Computers and solid state physics have changed our communications completely. The environmentalists accept these grudgingly, but they reject nuclear power, chemical pesticides, genetically engineered crops, and even (current National Geographic article) nitrogen based fertilizers. They have rubbished Darwin’s theories of evolution and replaced them by The Environment and Sustainability
There have not been any truly revolutionary scientific discoveries for 50 years
Scientists now live on short term contracts, interspersed with press announcements which either scare the public or claims to have made world shattering discoveries, all in the aid of receiving the next grant.
The climate models that have been foisted on the public would have been rejected by all the journals I knew in 1940. They can only gain credence in an atmosphere where science education has been replaced by dogmatic endorsements of the pioneers, and, increasingly, of the charlatans who have taken science over.
I have recently been revising my old NZClimate Truth Newsletters where I said it all years ago. There are no new publications worth answering. The latest IPCC Report merely repeats previous shibboleths.
They have confessed that they are frauds in the Climategate letters, and even, as I point out, in such items as Jim Hansen’s item on “The Elusive Surface Temperature”.
But, who cares? They still routinely promote the views of environmental activists on every excuse, Prince Charles and Al Gore keep up their worrying.
So, at last, to get to the point of this Newsletter, are we returning slowly to reality?
There are currently a number of indications that the worm is beginning to turn.
Fracking
This is a method developed in 1947 for improving oil production which has been the deliverer of the United States economy where they now export oil, instead of importing. It has had the effect of making coal so cheap that it has boosted cosl-fired powers stations and made up the energy shortfall in Japan that followed their unwise abandonment of nuclear energy. European environmentalists and anti-nuclear Japanese must now face the fact that gas prices in the USA are now $3.32 per million BTU in USA, $11.77 in Europe and $I6.66 in Japan
The New Zealand Government seems at last to be encouraging oil exploration. Discouraging damaging protest and even approving the ming of gold in its traditional region, Waihi.
Temperature
I have spent much effort pointing out that you cannot measure the average temperature of the earth’s surface and that the “Mean Global Surface Temperature Anomaly Record” is a very poor substitute. It is not a temperature record at all, but consists of a series of multiple averages each of which is based on a different mixture of measurements from unrepresentative weather stations. It is also, like all of the ”data” favoured by the IPCC, subtly biased to enable it to support the greenhouse theory. What is amazing is that they did not do a better job, and that the world could be made to cringe at the thought of an increased temperature of less than one degree in 100 years.
Yet it has now got stuck. It has stayed much the same for 17 years and Dr Pachauri is so worried that he thinks it might last another 15 years before his desired warming actually happens.
Apart from the infected Met Services, like the UK where they still keep predicting forthcoming warm winters and our own service which failed to predict the drought. Most ordinary meteorologists carry on with genuine science which does not depend on greenhouse gas concentrations
Windmills
The companies are going bust and the US is trying protectionism for its own dying manufacturers
Brian Leyland at
http://nzclimatescience.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogsection&id=5&Itemid=31
shows that windmills actually increase emissions of carbon dioxide because they have ti be backed up witgh inefficient powere stations that can be frequently turned on and off
Emissions
Only 15% of greenhouse gas emissions currently come from countries that signed the Kyoto Treaty. The New Zealand Minister, Tim Groser, recommends it should be ditched at
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10851772
Carbon Price is “Inching close to zero”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/feb/07/european-carbon-price-zero
Sir Peter Gluckman
The Government’s Chief scientific advisor has announced new funding for the National Science Challenges at
It is more interesting in what it does not say that in what it says.
§ Aging well – harnessing science to sustain health and wellbeing into the later years of life
§ A better start – improving the potential of young New Zealanders to have a healthy and successful life
§ Healthier lives – research to reduce the burden of major New Zealand health problems
§ High value nutrition – developing high value foods with validated health benefits
§ New Zealand’s biological heritage – protecting and managing our biodiversity, improving our biosecurity, and enhancing our resilience to harmful organisms
It is all very laudable, but there is no mention of any new ideas that might push any of these objects further.
For the first time there is no mention of the environment, global warming, climate change endangered species, or sustainability. It is actually getting real, at last.
Conclusion
These are, as yet, only straws in the wind. There is still much to do before science and common sense can once again prevail.
Very well said. What “climate science” has done to real science and to valid environmental concerns should make all scientific and worthwhile environmental organizations cringe.
Marxists have done their work very well, as Hayek predicted they would.
Nail on the head, just a slight slip: endangered species are covered (under biodiversity, indeed another unfounded hype). I agree that things are slowly turning, also here in Europe. The economic reality will do the shake up. It is a pity that a justified increased environmental consciousness has been so dramatically overplayed that this may fire back. Wich would be a pity but understandable.
I have considered New Zealand to be the “thin edge of the wedge” on “environmental issues”, followed by Australia on “political issues”, and then visa versa. In the end the void is great enough to split a Kaori (NZ) tree. Neither are great performers IMO.
It is interesting that you date this decline from just post WW11. I would have thought it more observable from the late 60’s or early 70’s. It is possible that these are both correct, in that what you perceived in the 40’s had been translated into academia and other structural functions to the degree that it became increasingly dominant from the later time, where previously it might have been sporadic or particular in nature.
It must also be the case that in any transition, there are a number of participants who reflect a previous culture, and until they are rendered effectively uninfluential, a mix of influence survives, which personally I see as having survived to a diminishing degree until the end of the 1980’s.
Although I don’t doubt for a minute your basic proposition, it is also possible that what you perceived after the war had been present prior to it, and that your awareness was to some degree based on a reversion and your increasing maturity and experience.
As to the present and future, plainly AGW along with a whole host of other manifestations of this, not just in science, are all teetering and will collapse in the near future under the weight of their inherent inadequacy. Reality can only be abused for so long.
What happens after that is problematic. How is the mind of a 20 yo constituted after, to a large degree, never having been exposed to anything as uncompromising as a hard fact? If everything has been provisional for them, depending on convenience and based on an edifice of defiance of reality, what can be built from this?
My own experience in science from the ’70s onward is in agreement with Dr. Gray’s experience. Scientists are people who are expected to curry favor with MBAs and lawyers. Getting money is the goal, not the means.
“Fracking
This is a method developed in 1947 for improving oil production which has been the deliverer of the United States economy where they now export oil, instead of importing.”
I think he means to say natural gas here not oil. I surely wish the US was a net exporter of oil.
“There have not been any truly revolutionary scientific discoveries for 50 years”…
I’ve been saying this for years… And people think I’m crazy…
Humm Man out of Earth orbit? the fastest Jet…on and on…
The one exception is the electronic tech, being the only place some great stuff is coming from..
The paragraph on the temperature record is just perfect..
We still import a whole lot of oil. We export gas, though….
Reed Coray says:
May 10, 2013 at 9:10 am
Very well said. What “climate science” has done to real science and to valid environmental concerns should make all scientific and worthwhile environmental organizations cringe.
The most important point the author makes is not about “climate” science, but instead about science in general. By the end of the ’60s there was a very strong trend to require company researchers to provide support to marketing. There is no appreciation of fact or truth in marketing and the pervasive demand for “support” from scientists tends to drive out original and critical thinkers from all fields that simply demand “support.” This is not limited to corporations and instead is endemic in any system dominated by political behaviour. In such a climate of thought, ad hominem becomes in the bminds of many synonymous with critical thought. Various other institutions including the current patent and copyright systems tend to lend support to this pathetic pattern, encouraging “inventors” to patent or copyright outright trivial, self-evident drivel as original contributions. Focusing on the problems of any single science encourages the reader to ignore a far greater, systemic problem with science in general.
“bminds” -> minds
@upcountrywater says:
May 10, 2013 at 10:03 am
“There have not been any truly revolutionary scientific discoveries for 50 years”…
I’ve been saying this for years… And people think I’m crazy…
——————————————————————————————————
Yes. Pretty well everything that has developed has its base decades ago, and anything that has made progress into significance or public usage has just been evolutionary or developmental.
You quote electronic technology as an exception. That has been following along Moores Law in a dutiful fashion for decades. An iPhone might be Wow! Amazing! as a consumer item, but it is otherwise trivial.
Sensation ahead of substance. Novelty ahead of real discovery.
Thanks Dr. Gary
Larry Bell documents more “inconvenient truth”: Global Warming Alarm: Continued Cooling May Jeopardize Climate Science And Green Energy Funding! He quotes Paul Elrich (2010 Nature) observing (how a barrage of challenges countering the notion of a looming global warming catastrophe):
If WUWT is truly the most visited climate website, then we know the times, they are a changin’.
Truth may be obscured for awhile (to us, 50 years is a long time, but it really is, in view of eternity, only a blink), but it will, in the end, prevail.
While the seemingly rock hard state of the minds of “dah yute” of today may be dismaying, there is, even now, a remnant. Not all the young minds of the world have been brainwashed. There are THOUSANDS of eager, intelligent, accurately educated, girls and boys (and 20-somethings, too) ready to fight the ongoing battle for truth.
The signs of science’s rebirth may appear tentative to us, a crocus or two here, some tiny buds there, but the power of those small green shoots pushing up through the earth into the light is mighty and irresistible. A cold snap or two may slow them down, but NOTHING will stop spring from bursting forth in all its glory. And it is well on its way. Take heart! The long, cold, winter is over. Spring has begun!
When money realizes, as it clearly has, that CO2 conjecture is a bad investment, you can know that the CO2 scam is over. It’s only a matter of time. I know, I know, time is what some now have very little of and you wanted so very much to see another science summer. Moses wanted very badly to go into Canaan with his people, but God only allowed him to see the promised land from a distance before God took him home. But, the Israelites did make it. And that was all that really mattered.
THANK YOU, Dr. Gray. Thank you for all your persevering, heroically valiant, efforts in the battle for truth.
Forever grateful,
Janice
The problem for too many scientists today, especially climate scientists’, is grant addiction.
In ‘climate science’, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that grants are rarely available unless the conclusion of the research, for which you are seeking funds, is clearly stated first.
To be awarded a research grant, the conclusions have to be scary, albeit peppered with the cop out wording of: “may”, “could”, “the models show….”
And that’s how you get a grant, but I sense grants are beginning to decline in number and amount – something which is long overdue.
If you look into industrial sales pitches you will discover “hockey sticks” To wit: If you buy xyz your yield of produce, ect will rise exponentially All Mickey Mann did was use this technique to promote global warming.
Sadly we are being pushed by people who believe that the cause (ideology) is more important that facts. The objective of those people is to force all others to bow down to their dogma that must never be questioned. I can only hope that in the end, science returns to testing, verifying, and still keeping an open mind to the possibility that the result may not be correct. Doubt in science is really a good thing because it causes us to be open to the possibility of another discovery.
True, true, Mr. Stendera (thanks for kind remarks on M. Mann thread — just read them). Can’t you just see Michael Mann at the county fair pushing his Super-Dooper Does-it-All STICK! (comes in wood or fiberglass). LOL, your fertilizer metaphor is MUCH better, Mr. S..
Bob Diaz, did you eat more hamburgers??? It’s a lot warmer here in the Pacific Northwest this week!!! Maybe you should cut back… LOL
Well said Dr Gray, to me it seems human nature is the one constant through out.
We are lazy and remain complacent until the crisis effects us personally.
So even scientific awakenings are cyclic.
As you and others have pointed out, the damage to scientists, conservationists and policy advisors will be deep and far reaching.
The real scientists have my deepest sympathy, it would seem the lesson here is bureaucracy is the natural enemy of discovery, wonder and individual brilliance(critical thinking?).
Climatology TM is to me the ultimate expression of group think.
While we are reviewing, past critiques of this CAGW nonsense, does any one have access to John Daley’s direct criticism of the team ? I was immensely cheered by his statements to the team, wrt their incompetence, but if I saved it, it is on a now expired laptop
Correct, we are currently in a dip in the rate of fundamental advances.
But these are not uncommon.
The question ought to be what we can do to kick-start a new wave of creativity?
-Common sense says that the internet should allow better cross-fertilisation of ideas.
-There are more of us than ever to come up with inspiration.
-We are all in such desperate straits that we must come up with something… hang on.
No we’re not. Necessity is the mother of invention and most of the brightest and best of us are given tenure at universities. What would those people need to do in order to be secure?
A: Not rock the boat, then they can’t be sacked; fear authority.
B: Promote their field so as they don’t fall back relative to other fields (the performing arts has an academy so we must. And outsiders don’t understand our field so they need the academy to tell them who is good. And so we can’t disagree with the heads of the academy if we want to get on in the academy. So Yesterday’s ideas are not to be offended against).
C: Raise the profile of their field to ensure the funding keeps flowing. The bigger the issue the better. Saving the nation; good. Saving the world; better! Cost-effectively realising this is a phantom menace and that the clones are a waste of resources…
Not a good strategy if you want to be secure.
My prediction: Science and common sense never prevail. Itll just be a different irrational fixation instead of CO2. Has there ever been a time in any culture in recorded history when affairs were governed by science and commonsense without over-riding obsessional fixations with something more important than lived reality?
The fall-off of major scientific discoveries since 1970 parallels what happened in the Soviet Union, which incidentally partly explains why the West won the Cold War – the Soviets falling behind technologically – and, I believe, is due to the same cause: the leftist politicization of science in general, with its hostility towards dissenting views and its disregard of the principle of skepticism.
Janice Moore – I share your hopes for a recovery, but not so much your optimism – this diease has become so very deeply rooted worldwide and in every dimension of society, that it will take herculean efforts to eradicate it.
I attach two emails I sent to Dr. William Happer apropos his latest Wall Street Journal op-ed, which refer to the problem ar hand.
Dear Will:
Saw your latest op-ed, and Peter Glieck’s meshuga response to it. Great job of showing him and his fellow alarmies for the fools and dunces and hypocrites and liars and sycophants and parasites that they are.
There is no question that added CO2 has only benefits and no harmful effects. Greenhouse operators (i.e., the real “greenhouse effect”) have always understood this – I remember hearing of this on a fifth-grade school field trip where my class visited a greenhouse. You don’t have to be a physicist or any kind of scientist to be able to understand that – just have an open mind.
Unfortunately, we have a long ways to go to get this rubbish out of the body politic’s system. Obama and company and his Ministry of Propaganda (the media) will cling to AGW no matter how much evidence is presented to refute it, because it is the reason for their assault on civil liberties and their pretext to tax and regulate everything to death. They’re already saying the last 17 years’ cooling isn’t enough to disprove global warming, and of course they ignore the pattern over the longer period (80 years of net cooling since the peak temps of the 1930s, not to mention over 3,800 years since the beginning of the hittite-Minoan-Mycenean warm period).
By the way – I assume you’ve heard about the two profs at San Jose State who burned a copy of Steve Goreham’s Book, The Mad Mad Mad World of Climatism? Can you imagine that – a university, supposedly a place of open dialogue and examination of all aspects of problems and issues, engaging in book burning? Hitler and Goebbels live on campus! I should think that SJSU’s reputation will be forever besmirched by this incident.
Best regards,
Chad Wozniak
Dear Will:
Thank you for your kind response to my message. And thank you for keeping up the good fight.
One of the biggest problems we face is that many big corporations have bought into the AGW myth, because they expect to profit from various aspects of it. People like George Soros and Michael Bloomberg expect to make money on otherwise uneconomic “renewable” energy sources, like wind, when Obama succeeds, at their behest, in jacking up the price of fossil fuel energy to the point where these wasteful schemes can compete. Big Oil, far from financing skeptics, is actually in the thick of this, and one may recall that Enron was the first to tout cap-and-trade. It’s crony capitalism at its worst.
The other huge problem is the extent to which this mythology has already penetrated the K-12 educational system, as well as the universities. Elementary school teachers are being instructed, under the new official educational standards, to tell their pupils that they will die from global warming if something isn’t done about it, and to punish any pupil that denies this (which to my thinking is nothing short of child abuse). Kids are going to have an awful lot to unlearn at some point – not only the falsity of AGW, but the habit being inculcated in them of not questioning anything they are told.
It’s really sad that the people who will be hurt the most by the AGW alarmist agenda are the poor people who are the biggest supporters of the officialdom pushing that agenda. Obama speaks glibly of saving the world for our grandchildren, but there are a lot of grandchildren right now, here, today being raised by grandparents on low incomes, who stand to be very badly hurt if Obama’s energy agenda is carried out. The wealthy left-wingers who support this agenda might not feel it if gasoline goes to $10 a gallon or electricity to 40 cents a kWh, but poor and middle-class people sure will.
Here in California we have a particular example of an abusive regulatory agency: CARB (California Air Resources Board). CARB has proposed new regulations for diesel engines that will require trucking companies, farmers and other users of trucks to refit their existing equipment at huge expense – enough to drive a good many out of business altogether, and of course cost their employees their jobs. The “science” behind these new regulations was found to have been “researched” by a charlatan, an impostor without credentials, and after review by experts was found to be completely false and unfounded, and to have no beneficial effect on emissions – but CARB is going ahead with the regulations based on it anyway.
I was particularly offended when Obama traveled to Ghana and told people there not to develop their fossil fuel resources and instead rely on thei “bounteous resources of wind, sun and biomass.” Well, the vast majority of Ghanaians do rely on biomass – they burn shit (sorry to be so direct, but “dung” just doesn’t quite get the point across) to cook their food. Shit is biomass, right? And then they die by the thousands from the diseases and parasites they catch from doing that. I’ve been to Ghana and have seen how everybody there (except the tiny socialist-kleptocrat elite) lives, and if that is the vision Obama has for our country’s future, the kind of world he wants to leave to our grandchildren, we are in serious trouble
We have quite a row to hoe here, and it’s probably going to require a deep-down change of leadership in the country before these problems can be fixed – and considerable restructuring to take down rogue regulatory agencies like CARB, the EPA and the Department of Labor.
My apologies for being so prolix – it just seems there is always something to talk about on this subject.
Best regards,
Chad Wozniak
Dr. Gray, you are the only person besides my buddy George I have heard that says, “…you cannot measure the average temperature of the earth’s surface… .” I have tried myself to explain this to others and their eyes glaze over. Either they do not understand or they think I’m a nutjob, because the concept that we can measure a single world temperature (by our current methods) is always assumed to be correct. And try to explain how thermometer readings that are plus or minus 0.5 or even 1.0 degree yields “average” world temperatures good to one hundredth of a degree that can then become the latest new high temperature record. Thanks for the essay.
Chad Wozniak says at May 10, 2013 at 12:57 pm
I fear that we would disagree vehemently over political philosophy (I am a Labour party supporter, British Socialist!)
But I fear even more that we would agree practically over many policies.
My concern over AGW is that it involves altering scientific methodology in order to preserve one’s own position.
This has led to a deadening of debate. Knowledge has been unchallenged and so enabled to become faith.
Faith is a basis of life; faith is an experience that you frame your life and your decisions (and your views) through.
Science is a means of evaluating doubt.
Both faith and science are of value but they are not the same.
To return to the beginning, I think you are also confounding faith (your basis for life) with science (your assurance of avoiding error).
But I hope we can still respect each other despite being on opposite sides politically.
Dear Dr Gray,
i think you have made some very salient and profound points. I have recently read “Brighter Than a Thousand Suns” by Robert Jung. The insight and substaniated thinking by Bohr, Heisenberg Schrodinger, et alia at Guttenburg in the 1920’s and Rutherford, Dirac, Thompson at Cambridgeand Fermi independnetly in Italy in the 1930’si s absoloutley outstanding.
The young questioning minds not blinded by dogma or pre-conceived ntoions. They must still exist. Why is it they they are not allowed to blossom and advance science whether is be in physics, biology or chemistry ?
As you rightly point put, why no new ideas in 50 years? Is it our education systems?
I may be upsetting people – but the rate of inventions ground to a halt as Universities started employing accountants. The departments that just existed before and did research usually without a lot of complicated/expensive apparatus were now having to fill in activity sheets and account for their time ‘not teaching’. Research departments had to ‘make money’ – i.e. research grants and funded research. The only way to make money is to have a ‘customer’ – customers by definition do not know (or want to know) the latest blue sky research – they want a marketable product. So research becomes implementation research and incremental advancement. Attempts to spend time on blue sky good ideas is stifled at the next year end when the department head is questioned about unfunded hours worked. Accountants have no sense of scientific excitement about research or new ideas – just look at the ($35,000) loss column for the department and suggest that the department head be re-employed preferably not at this university. The closest to leading edge research that a university can get nowadays is if NASA or similar agency like the Department of Energy wants to do leading edge research and provides a research grant for some kind of teaming arrangement. This is how UEA got the Hadley Centre and their reason for being terrified of upsetting the funding stream. Funding trumps science every single hour of every day.
Mea Culpa
should be Gottingen, not Guttenberg
On reflection , and some wine, the problem lies with what Universities have become. No longer the province of the the most intelligent (and before the critcism of elitism, I can run 100 m but not as fast as Usain Bolt, why is enhnaced physical ability applauded, but enhanced intelligence decried?) Universities now provide qualifcations on the basis of regurgitated informtion, not to question established ideas.To put it bluntly, most universites are now profit making meat processing plants to provide economic units to provide higher tax revenues.
I believe there have been at least two brilliant inventions of the last 50 years.
The first may be just outside the 50 years in that it was first reported in Applied Physics Letters on 1 December 1962. This was the first visible spectrum (red) light emitting diode. They, and their many descendants, are now in almost every electronic device and have spun-off an extraordinary range of applications.
The second invention falls well within the last 50 years since it was developed in 1973. This is the Global Positioning System (‘clocks in space’) which has, since it became operational in 1994, also spun-off an incredible range of applications.
Both ideas have had a revolutionary impact on modern life.
Dr Gray, I think you will find Peter Gluckman has snuck one science challenge in the list called:
“The Deep South: research to understand the role of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean in
determining our future environment”
Page 30 of this document spells it out, lots of AGW waffle:
http://www.pmcsa.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/Report-of-National-Science-Challenges.pdf
I read something on http://www.stuff.co.nz also but can’t seem to find it now. He’s still holding on, you can be assured. I think from memory only 4 mill over 10 years specifically assigned for then deep south challenge. That is a pittance which is good to see not much emphasis being put on it.
Some won’t find this relevant, some may even mistakenly find this racist. That’s you prerogative. I’ll also mention the topics are in no way interrelated from to the best of my knowledge. I just think it shows the man’s character. Peter Gluckman is the NZ spokesman for B’nai Brith. They are Israeli expansionist organisation that make no apology for settlements and land grabs, lets just call them what they are “Zionists”. Basically Gluckman thinks of himself as one of the anointed ones in more ways than you could ever imagine .Put it this way, they don’t believe in two states or peace. It’s my way or the highway. They seem to want the land of Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Iraqi also according to the original planned maps from the international Zionist federation in the late 1800’s, oh and Ben Gurion said it also many times.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%27nai_B%27rith
This is what they claim:
“B’nai B’rith International (English pronunciation: /bəˌneɪ ˈbrɪθ/; Hebrew: בני ברית, “Sons of the Covenant”),[1] the oldest Jewish service organization in the world, is committed to the security and continuity of the Jewish people and the State of Israel and combating antisemitism and bigotry. Its mission is to unite persons of the Jewish faith and to enhance Jewish identity through strengthening Jewish family life; broad-based services for the benefit of senior citizens; and advocacy and action on behalf of Jews throughout the world.”
So you will see it says “sons of the covenant”, they are all male and are similar to the Anglo-freemasonic orders. So you can see Gluckman lives in a misogynistic fantasy world of initiations and fairy tales. Where in reality they do things like attack film festivals, they want to shut down the Palestinian voice or any opposition. Sound familiar? http://electronicintifada.net/content/bnai-brith-attacks-canada-palestine-film-festivalagain/5758
Peter Gluckman also attends IPS conferences with the likes of Mr. Elliott Abrams from the CFR and PNAC Neocon/Iraqi war planner. The one who mentioned the “New Pearl Harbour” to be taken advantage of. People of that ilk. They try to shape the way the world sees Israeli foreign policy, a little bit like how he’s trying to shape the NZ climate policy.
http://www.herzliyaconference.org/eng/?CategoryID=486
http://www.herzliyaconference.org/eng/?CategoryID=425
I have not seen so much good sense in one article for a very, very long time. Congratulations!
Billy Liar says:
May 10, 2013 at 2:36 pm
I believe there have been at least two brilliant inventions of the last 50 years.
The first may be just outside the 50 years in that it was first reported in Applied Physics Letters on 1 December 1962. This was the first visible spectrum (red) light emitting diode. They, and their many descendants, are now in almost every electronic device and have spun-off an extraordinary range of applications.
The second invention falls well within the last 50 years since it was developed in 1973. This is the Global Positioning System (‘clocks in space’) which has, since it became operational in 1994, also spun-off an incredible range of applications.
Both ideas have had a revolutionary impact on modern life.
LEDs or electroluminescence was discovered in 1907 and implementation extended over the decades with “the first practical visible-spectrum (red) LED was developed in 1962”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode
To be picky – the only thing that is ‘novel’ about GPS is that it is satellite based, Otherwise it is ‘just another’ Distance Measuring Equipment (DME) system. It is another implementation of an old idea. In the same way that satellite phones like Iridium have merely moved the base stations onto a satellite so they orbit past the phone rather than the phone passing the base stations. However, both have found widespread spin off’s. Similarly, LORAN and eLORAN are just other implementations of wartime GEE.
It is extremely difficult to find new ‘inventions’. Many of the ‘new’ patents are taking old inventions that were feasible but not practical and using advances in technology to implement them. This is extremely important work and there have been huge advances but it is not the original idea.
The only one area I can think of is nano technology and buckminster fullerine type materials the work in that area was not even feasible until the 90’s
I might be accused of a big case of nostalgia…but…
The end of true applied research for me came when Bell Telephone Laboratories was divided up among the “Baby Bells” and became Bellcore for them and Bell Labs for ATT at divestiture.
The preceding century was one of discovery, innovation and advancement in telecommunications. The Big Bang theory’s existence came from studies of bird poop in microwave antennae. The transistor came alive after a lab researcher messed up the doping process and decided to test the “ruined” result. In a more “scientific” process, Dr. Nyquist formulated the theory of digital sampling that still works, giving us talking machines that sound human…and the damned Iphone. Let’s not forget the LASER and its development. These examples are just a few of many such discoveries and happy accidents.
Of course that was when telecomm was a stodgy industry where change came slowly and costs were much much too high for the average consumer to hear the marketers talk.
Standards were the big thing – change was something long considered and picked at before seeing the light of day. Then came divestiture – and Ma Bell was never the same.
Many of the same brilliant people still worked at the split organization, but research had to produce something marketable, something whiz bang something to make money with. Not only on the ATT and Western Electric side, but all through technology the question wasn’t; “Gee, how can we use this?” It was; “How much can we sell it for and when will you have it ready?”
Companies developed competing standards and marketed them – most consumers are aware of VHS and BETA – Japanese Victor Corporation and Sony’s head-to-head conflict. However this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Scientists became dependent on sales marketers for funding. I think the slide to feeding from the government trough was easy from there.
“Publish or perish” became “produce or die”.
Thanks for letting me wallow in nostalgia for a bit, I feel much better now, Dave.
Mike (an old telecomm engineer)
Ian W,,,,Its ironic that your novel development is named after the most heinous plagiarist of all time…who even boasted of it. Fullers geodesic dome idea which propelled him to stardom was stolen from a patent application by an Austrian inventor which Fuller read in hi capacity as mail censor. He later defended this by saying that “What is often mistermed as plagiarism is more precisely ‘talent.'”
…its not certain that he had any.
Thanks, Dr. Gray.
I think that when governments grow big enough to control the universities, they start churning out useless “yes-men”, incapable of questioning the status quo, which is how we make science.
This graduates just want to reaffirm the discoveries of their teachers, not to prove them wrong in some way and maybe invent something new. Like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein did. Like we used to do in our jobs.
What was that quote from Planck again? I don’t want to be misunderstood, I wish a long life to Dr. Gray and the gentlemen writing an op in the WSJ recently.
Unfortunately there has been a rise of style overriding substance, of activists putting on the mantle of science as if a costume, all too effectively appealing to authority (for just the formal style of a paper is enough to get many to auto-believe, while computer model monuments to GIGO impress the naive, both taking advantage of a predominance of TL:DR and superficial impressions). Meanwhile, they lack the commitment to honest inquiry and increasing the material capabilities of mankind which gave more true science a justly deserved favorable reputation. On such as nuclear power and radiation, ideologues never managed much infiltration, but they finally did at environmental studies institutions.
For instance, the Doran & Zimmerman paper providing the foundation of the 97% consensus appeal to authority claim is a classic example: actually reading the short paper is enough to see its two questions were essentially if temperatures rose since the Little Ice Age and if humans have a significant (non-zero UHI et cetera) impact on temperature, but about all of countless websites reporting such (aside from skeptic sites) are dishonest enough to portray such as agreement on CAGW, making the paper serve its purpose.
Many who call themselves scientists today do not deserve the term, better called activists; just graduating from college with a degree, like millions of other people, does not intrinsically make someone really a scientist, nor does being paid to advance a cause other than more honest inquiry.
Dr Gray, while I would disagree with you on several points – important scientific advances continue to be made in apolitical areas like nano-tech – I agree that the problem is that the grant system politicizes science. This dates from the 1950/60s when politicians decided that they needed to make academic science more relevant to society, and funding was shifted from direct funding of academics to a system of targeted grants.
We see its worst excesses in climate science where many papers are little more than a pitch for the next round of grants, and full of scientifically unsupported statements that pander to the current groupthink/consensus, call it what you will.
The solution is an at least partial return to a system where some academics get long term funding, which they are free to use researching any subject they feel of interest.
@M Courtney –
Faith is not the basis of my convictions, since I am an atheist. My convictions are based solely and strictly on my own observations and those of others that I find credible and compelling. I am always suspicious of blankjet statements about anything.
I believe that the record of socialism speaks for itself: at best it is stagnation, as in Britain pre-Thatcher, at worst it is Nazism (yes, National SOCIALISM), Communism and now Climatism. No belief system which emphasizes the collective over the individual can ever be truly humane, because it inevitably leads to the disregard of fundamental rights – the rights, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, to “life, liberty and the oursuit of happiness.”
With all due respect, to believe that socialism in any form has a future would seem to me to be much more of an exercise in unempirical faith than conclusions drawn from observation. It is as much an article of faith as AGW, methinks.
I don’t believe I fall into any of the conventional political categories, although I probably come closest to the classical luberal (not today’s reactionary statists) label.
Dr. Grey,
I find it intriguing that you reference Dr. R. V. Jones’ excellent book ‘Most Secret War”. This book lists in its pages all of the problems with “science” that we are heir to. Every one of Lord Monckton’s oft quoted logical fallacies are included, plus such things as political interference, self righteousness and down right pigheadedness.
I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a great read.
Great post.
You made the comment that, “So, at last, to get to the point of this Newsletter, are we returning slowly to reality?”
Maybe in New Zealand, but not here in the US.
I just recently heard an educator of secondary education (high school in the US) justify eliminating dissection (frogs, fetal pigs, and the like) out of public schools because surgeons (paraphrasing here) don’t need to know anatomy anymore given that most operations are performed using tiny incisions and amplified microscopy.”
Seriously, she said said something like that.
Of course, she missed that fact that there might be an advantage to the patient if the surgeon knew where to make the “tiny” incision in the first place, not to mention all the structures he/she might want to avoid (a knowledge of anatomy is helpful in knowing to what said structures are attached and which ones can sacrificed and which are absolutely necessary to sustain life).
Common sense tells you that the earlier you start understanding anatomy, the better, but, since the purpose of the general population understanding science is lost on the average educator, anyway, I’m not going to hold my breath waiting on some intelligent teaching idea to come out of the American educational system.
For 10K years there was a true frontier to be explored and settled. Having completed this process on Earth we were to have continued it on to other worlds. We seem stuck now, unable to truly set forth into the heavens. We’ve already backed off on manned missions even to nearby worlds. We are not doing serious planning for making a jump to new Earths. Unless we find a way to work around the enormous problem of M in E=MC^2, with its insurmountable wall as velocity increases, it appears we must develop great courage for missions lasting multiple generations or manned by a series of clones of the initial crew. But we do not seriously pursue this. We are stuck on this rock and here we shall someday perish as a species. This will not be due to poisons, global warming or any other Man made issues. It will be Nature doing what is already preordained.
“witgh inefficient powere stations that can be frequently turned on and off”
Do you mean:
“with inefficient power stations that can’t be frequently turned on and off”?
I likewise recommend R.V.Jones’ book.
Its been a couple decades or more since I read it. Even so one of the episodes in it which has stuck with me ever since is when British captured a Würzburg radar (in the Bruneval raid). They found the construction tolerances were amazingly precise, much more than was needed, so they speculated it was actually some sort of directed energy weapon. The Brits only ever built their radars just good enough that they’d work, and no more.
After WW2 they asked the radar engineers in postwar Germany ‘why did you make it with such high tolerance’. The answer: ‘we always build stuff that way’.
Seventy years later the Germans are still cleaning out the rest of Europeans at the competition tables because they have this ingrained attitude. You can learn a lot about a people by how they do things, and national habits are very hard to change.
Reblogged this on The GOLDEN RULE and commented:
There is much to learn, or to become satisfied with the support offered, from this post. I find I do not agree with all that Dr Gray says, particularly his enthusiasm for nuclear power, but I do understand his reasons.
What is important are his thoughts on how the “science” applied to AGW is unsupported by valid logical thinking and processes and yet how it manages to still shape the world’s thinking and actions.
Really impressed by his understanding of the impossibility of establishing a meaningful average global temperature, whereby it becomes a joke to make political decisions on such data (my comment).
“Scientists now live on short term contracts, interspersed with press announcements which either scare the public or claims to have made world shattering discoveries, all in the aid of receiving the next grant.”
So simply said, and so very true.
The last truly “new” thing to be invented was the LASER in the mid 1950s. The basis of all computer science was developed long before that. By then we already had the basic knowledge to get to the moon.
[OT — completely]
“… let’s just call them what they are ‘Zionists’.” [Danny on 5/10/13 at 3:40PM]
You say that like you think it’s a bad thing.
God’s Chosen People, Israel, are in their land, THEIR LAND (as delineated in the book of Joshua), given to them by God FOREVER.
GO, ISRAEL!
************************
Hi, Chad W., still allies (and, still praying for you — even if you think my prayers are to Someone who doesn’t exist). He believes in you. [:)]
DesertYote says:
May 10, 2013 at 9:18 am
Marxists have done their work very well, as Hayek predicted they would.
Strange I though man made global warming was invented by the Club of Rome, hardly Marxists!
Carbon fiber aircraft. Bouncing ball and sky crane martian landers. LCD digital television. MRIs
dental implants. These are new.
I’ve taught my 20YO son that CAGW is a hoax.
Dr Grey. I share your optimism about the coming revelation of the truth about CO2 and climate..
Thanks Gaia for not continuing to warm. If she had, we’d all be slaves in the dark very soon.
Although deadly, we lovers of liberty must pray for cold.
Warmth is best though.
“There have not been any truly revolutionary scientific discoveries for 50 years.”
The expansion of the universe is apparently expanding at an accelerating rate. This observation combined with standard theory suggests that baryonic matter constitutes only a very minor part of the total mass-energy of the universe. Revolutionary — I would say.
Part of the problem – beyond the absolute corruption and dishonesty that sometimes seems to run rampant – is that bean counters and other assorted “by-the-numbers” folks have wrested control of science and industry from those who are interested in pushing forward. Now everything is about cutting costs and making numbers look good, never mind that creation always makes the numbers look better. The problem is that creation can’t be readily quantified.
George Saliba mentions about the history of declining science being related to finance running out in the regions where scientific progress was achieved.
“European environmentalists and anti-nuclear Japanese must now face the fact that gas prices in the USA are now $3.32 per million BTU in USA, $11.77 in Europe and $I6.66 in Japan”
Now that begs for the free market to adjust things and make a ton of money doing so. Not being in the business, I googled LNG tankers and found this site: http://shipbuildinghistory.com/today/highvalueships/lngactivefleet.htm
358 existing tankers, 100 under construction. The prices will adjust, obvious other variable if the supply continues to increase, we are all winners.
@Janice Moore –
Yes, I am a nonbeliever in a deity – but it’s because I can’t reconcile the evil I see in the world with the idea of a good God, and I do not want to believe in an evil God – this spiritual basis for not believing is far stronger for me than the science that also implies there is no God.
This said, I will never fault a religious believer who accords me the same right to my beliefs as I accord to him/her. And if someone gets comfort and a sense of security and certainty from their beliefs, who am I to take that from them? I have no desire to impose my belief system on anyone, no need for that sort of control over anyone, and certainly no wish to deprive anyone of the strength and reassurance they gain froim their beoiefs. It is only that to be honest with myself, I have to call ’em as I see ’em.
And – this may surprise you – I will never dismiss someone’s prayers, because of the love and affirmation they represent and because the support they give to the person prayed for does have an effect, to strengthen and comfort them. Even for an atheist, there is power in prayer, and I have been heartened by those who prayed for me during a long and nearly fatal illness.
My wife is very religious, and tolerantly so, and I support her churchgoing and her other reloigious activities becasuse, very simply, they are part of the wonderful person she is.
We agree to disagree on religion, with the understanding that no two people think exactly alike because no two people are exactly alike.
And yes, we must all be allies in the good fight against the irrationalism and tyranny of AGW. The diversity of belief amongst us is a strength, not a weakness. The Founding Fathers understood this so well, but of course the zealotry behind AGW precludes that understanding.
The way back to where? The social revolution / anti war campaigns that took place in western universities in the 1960s created a political class thats more interested in pushing out political ideology than working on new discoveries..
50 years is long enough for these graduates to take over all key positions in our society..
Government, schools and the media are packed to the rafters with people who can trace their success directly back to these political hothouses.. To undermine the politics of the University is to undermine your graduate position in society
This is why civilizations fail 100% of the time..
There is no way back..
“James at 48 says:
May 10, 2013 at 6:01 pm
For 10K years there was a true frontier to be explored and settled. Having completed this process on Earth we were to have continued it on to other worlds. We seem stuck now, unable to truly set forth into the heavens. We’ve already backed off on manned missions even to nearby worlds. We are not doing serious planning for making a jump to new Earths. Unless we find a way to work around the enormous problem of M in E=MC^2, with its insurmountable wall as velocity increases, it appears we must develop great courage for missions lasting multiple generations or manned by a series of clones of the initial crew. But we do not seriously pursue this. We are stuck on this rock and here we shall someday perish as a species. This will not be due to poisons, global warming or any other Man made issues. It will be Nature doing what is already preordained.”
Much my thoughts. Im a child of the Space Age. But really the path was chosen by the abandonment of project Orion. Really, the entire failure of Western Civilisation at this challenge hinges on one phone call. George Dyson tells of his fathers anecdote in his book on the project. A call came in from the office that was preparing the nuclear test ban treaty to ask if the team wished to keep open an option for testing nuclear propulsion. No one was around but Freeman Dyson. It was kind of last thing on a lazy Friday scenario. He just thought, heck, and said “no”.
That was the end of real space travel for the West. Dyson admitted this as being the first time in history that a new technology was abandoned for purely political reasons. Without nuclear propulsion everything else was destined to be piddly-squat window dressing. For real space exploitation you need real mass shifting abilty. For that theres only nuclear.
Iwas watching bits of 2001 A Space Odyssey again last night. I finally realise how far fetched it was. Not only because it was set only 30 odd years in the future, but the scale of everything was incredible. The underground shuttle bay at the moon base is immense. It would take a decade to dig that on Earth. They have wooden crates ofgear. How the heck would you have enough spare mass lifting ability to waste on wooden crates using chemical rockets. I know the story envisaged nuclear propulsion, but only the puny kind, not the full-bore fission detonation kind you would need to realise such a vision.
Like you say, the species is absolutely snuffed by this failure.
UNLESS…decades or centuries hence, after all this shite we call our “civilisation” has been flushed down the place its destined to go, some other society picks up where ours left off fifty years ago.
Anyone familiar with my comments will find it no surprise that I no loger give the Brit-proverbial “monkeys” for “our” society or what happens to it.
@Janice Moore.
I was the same until I was 50. From my twenties I actually believed in an evil creator (its not my idea but owes something to Gnosticism).Then something happened. When this thing happens all your perceptions fall into place and you find you were completely wrong. To start with, you need to abandon the primitive equation of God with “a creator” in a linear conception of time, as well as any thought of understanding either time or its experience rationally. To try to refer to science to understand these things is like trying to use science to understand the feelings evoked by a poem. Its a fundamental non-sequitor. The poetic is, moreover, insusceptible to any logic or reason. It is an emergent property. The Divine is the poetry of existence.
Asfor Israel…you have to choose, between a liberal democracy that delivers equal rights for men and women including the 20% of its citizens who are Muslim Arabs represented in their parlliament, …
………………………….or……………………………….
… on the other hand, institutionalmisogynists andracists who by doctrinemaintain a woman is one qurter the vale of a man, mutilte the genitals of female childrenby the millions every year, put “homosexuals” to death whilst (bizarrely) also practising endemic male-on-male (presumeably “heterosexual)” sodomy, hold the fundamental belief that salvation is only possible when every last Jew on the Earth has been slaughtered, produce nothing of value, do nothing of value, wage continual homicidal attacks on every community that doesnt yield to their “superiority”, ….it goes on and on and on and nothing is the least tolerable about it except the music (until you’ve had the translation)..
Given the above, look how many idiots prefer the latter.
…clearly the ” ” on my keyboard is dysfunctional.
The Dark Ages lasted 1000 years. If we get away with only 50 years we are lucky. Which I do not think we are.
It is sad to have to acknowledge the reality of today … that the field of climate science has been badly corrupted by the vast sums of money feeding the dangerous man-made global warming agenda.
The suggestion that a very rare trace gas Co2, and then only 3% of the total Co2 emitted into the atmosphere each year by human activity, is the key driver of global warming and climate change, simply demonstrates an incredible ignorance and delusion of the most extreme kind.