Guest post by Steven Goddard
There is no question that some of the greatest minds have been scientists. Da Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Edison, Einstein, Fermi, Feynman are a few names that come to mind.
But how about the consensus? One of the most famous cases of consensus science gone ridiculous involved the theory of Continental Drift. In 1912, a German scientist named Alfred Wegener introduced the theory that the continents were not stationary, but rather moved.
Any child can see that the continents fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, yet the scientific community took over 50 years to stop ridiculing Wegener and accept his theory.
“Utter, damned rot!” said the president of the prestigious American Philosophical Society.
“If we are to believe in Wegener’s hypothesis we must forget everything which has been learned in the past 70 years and start all over again.” Geologist R. Thomas Chamberlain
“further discussion of it merely incumbers the literature and befogs the mind of fellow students.” Geologist Barry Willis
Sound familiar?
http://travel.state.gov/images/maps/brazil.gif
http://www.globalkids.info/v3/content/africa.jpg
Several earlier scientists had also observed the obvious – from Wikipedia :
Abraham Ortelius (1597), Francis Bacon (1625), Benjamin Franklin, Antonio Snider-Pellegrini (1858), and others had noted earlier that the shapes of continents on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean (most notably, Africa and South America) seem to fit together. W. J. Kious described Ortelius’ thoughts in this way:[1]
Abraham Ortelius in his work Thesaurus Geographicus … suggested that the Americas were “torn away from Europe and Africa … by earthquakes and floods” and went on to say: “The vestiges of the rupture reveal themselves, if someone brings forward a map of the world and considers carefully the coasts of the three [continents].
Not only do the continents fit together, but Wegener observed that their geology matched.
http://www.scientus.org/Wegener-DuToit.jpeg
And the fossils match.
. 
http://www.scientus.org/Pellegrini-Wegener-1.gif
We see a parallel to global warming. The earth is not warming out of control. Sea level is not rising out of control. The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are not collapsing. The IPCC documents have been shown to be littered with junk science and fraud. The hockey team has been shown to be misusing their positions. Yet the consensus hangs on to the ridiculous, for the same reasons they did from 1912 to 1960. No one wants to “forget what they learned and start over again.”
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Being smart has nothing to do with academic prowess. Scientists are almost universally stupid when it comes to the realities, skills, pitfalls and social graces of the wider World as their focus is on a rather restricted World where 2+2 always equals 4.
John, you said:
In logic as in law, one cannot prove a negative
Can you prove this negative statement logically?
Or to put it in less of a smart-aleck way: if one can’t prove a negative, doesn’t it become impossible to prove a positive? After all, for every proposition there exists some other proposition of which it’s a denial. “All bachelors are single” is logically equal to “no bachelor is married.”
Those sentences are, perhaps, artificial; how about “the current warming is due to human activity” and “the current warming isn’t a result of any other, natural variation”? They’re effectively synonymous claims, aren’t they? But if the proponent phrases it the first way, they have to prove a positive; the second way, they have to prove a negative—i.e. to rule out all possible natural explanations.
It was an excellent post though.
Responding to comment “Dodgy Geezer (00:42:48) : ”
Dodgy,
Yes, your point is excellent. From the dates below it does look like Bacon was a transition guy from religious orthodoxy of the late Dark Ages toward the next periods that forwarded toward scientific method.
He appears to me to be pivotal figure in transition from Dark Ages forward.
Roger Bacon, 1214 to1292
Dark Ages, ~5th Century (~400s AD) to ~ late 11th Century ( ~late 1200s)
John
I got Dark Ages info from :
From http://www.history.com/
The Dark Ages, otherwise known as the Early Middle Ages, was a period in European history from the collapse of Roman political control in the West—traditionally set in the 5th century—to about the late 11th century. It should be emphasized, however, that the fixing of dates for the beginning and end of the Dark Ages is arbitrary; at neither time was there any sharp break in the cultural development of the continent.
This calls to mind a quote from Robert Heinlein “The way of staying young is having the ability to unlearn old truths”. Maybe they just don’t know how to do that.
Mooloo (20:21:05) You are wrong. We do not have to prove them wrong, They have to prove they are right.
Does that meant that because Plate Tectonics is the current scientific consensus, it must be wrong, and the Expanding Earth theories should be taken seriously?
M. Simon
That’s an interesting paper (by Miskolczi). Did you read the paper? Or just the article by the Portland journalist?
The article cites Miskolczi: “During the 61-year period, in correspondence with the rise in CO2 concentration, the global average absolute humidity diminished about 1 per cent.”
And she also says:
“..In the 5 years since he first published his results, not one peer review has come back disproving his theory, or his Constant. To date, not one scientist has come forward to disprove Miskolczi’s theory that the Earth’s climate is at equilibrium..”
And yet, is that true? No.
Many papers have been published which show that relative humidity has been constant, ie absolute humidity changes with temperature.
This is a key question in atmospheric physics – and has been for a few decades. Whether or not it is conclusively answered who could say. And yet the journalist says “not one paper..”
A Matter of Humidity, Dessler, Science Vol 323, 2009.
One paper is sufficient to prove the journalist wrong.
To be a skeptic means to ask questions..
Be prepared to ask questions at Science of Doom
John F. Hultquist (23:12:11) :
It is up to the AGW crowd to show a force and a mechanism that supports their theory.
Until they do it is right for all the rest to remain skeptical.
Small correction. it is our right for all to remain skeptical.
The point with AGW crowd is that there is a trend to take that right away, they don’t call us deniers for nothing.
George Turner (21:59:27) :
-This was from the article CO2 – An Insignificant Trace Gas? Part Six – Visualization.
George – I don’t know. The paper doesn’t say. Why is it critical?
Average is average and not just in science. What about painting, music, architecture or even cooking? True geniuses are exceptionally rare. Let’s say it was decided we need more poets or music composers. No amount of education would do that. The spark has to be there to start with. The average bureaucrat scientist doesn’t have the fine-grained discrimination of the greats.
Many of those names you mention are not scientist in the way we think of them these days. Feynman, certainly, he’s my hero. Eistein, patent clerk, the others mostly philosophers. The premise is right and of course in the world of physics where nearly everything is not visible to the naked eye, it is models that rule, mathematical models. The difference in climate ‘science’ (I find that hard to say, climate and science together) is the way in which they test the models. Eistein’s work is still be empirically tested today and much of quantum mechanics as well. Parts of the maths models that work empirically are used without real concern the rest await to be fully proven.
Climate modelling is completely different. If the model doesn’t follow reality then tweak the variables or say that the reality is wrong.
janama (22:02:09) :
so will Neal Adams finally be recognised for his expanding planet theory?
Re the expanding earth concept, there was a Symposium at the University of Tasmania a copule of years ago to honor the work of Prof S Warren Carey and his disciples, including my former highly respected boss, John Elliston.
Carey lamented that some aspects of proof would rely on satellite and moon-earth measurements yet to be done and that he would no longer be here when the results came in.
I have a CD of the Symposium if you are genuinely interested. It is another story of a theory that the old school would like to forget. Yet, it might be right. One of its rationales was to do away with the need to subduct plate edges. It asks a number of questions that classical geologist simply cannot answer – and they are valid and pertinent.
For anyone who has worked in science, the reason is clear: science is like a Royal Court. It is not done to challenge your superiors who are, by implication, your betters.
The reality in my generation was this: science was suitable for practically gifted folks who benefitted from a lot of academic instruction.
It was a disaster for really bright kids who needed TECHNICAL INSTRUCTION and mentoring, but could read up most things alone and actually could think critically early on.
When you get a lot of folks who were good experimenters but whose critical faculties weren’t Mensa-like, you produce a community which is happiest in quiet experimentation mode and doesn’t enjoy radical upstarts challenging them.
It’s why, often, the great ones start out at less prestigious places, because there, they get less interference from on high whilst they are establishing their career.
Scientists are full of self-interest like anyone else.
And if senior folks can blackball your next promotion, grant or publication submission, you’d better learn fast to play the game.
There were good reasons to reject Wegener’s work. How could any one accept tidal forces making continents plough through the oceans? There were two things missing from Wegener’s work: measures of relative continental motion and a plausible mechanism. Having to deal with creationists and a few crackpots over this same issue I’m very disappointed to see this in this blog. This is a very bad post.
Well we see a similar proces of denial going on in the global warming debate: Wegner was a meteorologist, and an excllent one or Germany would not have named its central meteorological (NOT geological!) institute after him. Geologists of the time denied him a hearing because he was not “one of them”. Climatologists today play the same game: they either have big supercomputers and toe the official IPCC line or else they’re not funded but ridiculed instead. And epistemologists who point out that they follow a belief system rather than refutable sciencific principles are ridiculed because … who’d have guessed … they’re not climatologists. Small wonder they aren’t. Neither am I a theologian.
Anyone for Surge tectonics?
Hi folks,
States of snow!
49 US States have some snow cover, ex. Hawai.
Never registrated bevor.
Look for an article, Anthony!
“If you want to prove AGW is wrong, then you need to prove AGW is wrong. Nothing else will do. ”
Infact that conclusion is wrong. Alarmists have to prove AGW/ACC is happening. They have so argued, so they have to prove it…
Science and politics should never collude, the Nazi experience should make it illegal. Common sense is a quality that eludes most politicians and some scientists, together you have a dangerous mix. Common sense along with truth has been less common of late. Thank you Anthony,give these prevaricating obfuscating pseudo scientists every encouragement to hang themselves on their own petard. Followers will slowly whither,the hard core more vociferous in their screams of flat Earther. Prime minister Brown only today screaming the loudest. Wayne
The late Stephen Jay Gould wrote quite an interesting piece on the continental drift saga.
I read it in one of his books, so it was probably originally printed in “Nature”.
To summarise and paraphrase, during the early stages of the discipline of geology there was a rather fundamental split between catastrophism (the world was shaped by infrequent catastrophic events of unknown cause) and uniformitarianism (the world was shaped by gradual action of known processes).
By the early 20th century, the uniformitarian view had gained ascendency, largely due to fit with observations at various scales.
The ability to fit the continents together as a jigsaw puzzle was seen as an interesting oddity.
Absent a suitable mechanism, continental drift seemed to be harking back to catastrophism. This would be especially so if the lineage could be traced back to earlier catastrophist proposals.
After a viable mechanism with observational backing was proposed, the improved explanatory power of plate tectonics gave it traction. The fact that the proposed mechanism was uniformitarian wouldn’t have hurt, either 🙂
Leaving Gould’s article, the slow acceptance of the “dinosaur killer asteroid” hypothesis also appears to be a catastrophist vs uniformitarian (large-scale vulcanism) argument. The asteroid hypothesis now seems to be the most favoured, but vulcanism still has its adherents. The asteroid impact may have triggered vulcanism, but there is (or was some years back) some doubt as to whether the vulcanism may have preceded the asteroid strike.
Filipe:
“There were two things missing from Wegener’s work: measures of relative continental motion and a plausible mechanism.”
Well, yes, but if there isn’t a concept of moving continents, then it is a bit difficulty to start any hypotheses about how this could work, isn’t it?
Anyway, it was not mentioned in the article that in Europe, Wegener’s hypothesis was considered quite plausible. I have a geological textbook from 1943 where it is described with pictures as the most probable of all the other possibilities.
Are politicians always smart?
Obviously not!
Obama keeps on pushing for solutions to solve a non existing problem, putting us all in “green shackles” and our economy off down the drain:
From Drudge report:
“NYT SATURDAY: White House officials are searching for ways for Obama to ‘use executive powers to advance energy, environmental and other policy priorities’… Developing…”
Steve Goddard (22:46:14)
“Every child also understands that record cold and snow in the deep south is not caused by excess heat.”
And every adult should know that what happens in one region doesn’t reflect what might be happening in the world as a whole.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/02/january-2010-global-tropospheric-temperature-map/
Spencer: “As can be seen, Northern Hemispheric land, on a whole, is not as cold as many of us thought.”
Wegener showed a correlation between the shapes of the continent back in the twenties, but he was hard pressed on the causation. In contrast Arrhenius worked out from first principles a causal relationship between atmospheric CO2 concentrations and global temperature more than one hundred years ago, though a correlation was not observed until much more recently.
Funny how Al Gore uses the same story to make the opposite point, well actually he makes the same point but he views the warmers as the modern version of Alfred Wegener where as sceptics see him as the modern sceptic.
Even Einstein once said that he thought nuclear power was an impossibility!