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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The real parallel with the historical controversy over continental drift is not with AGW; the claim that the scientific community holds a consensus on AGW is merely their own propaganda. There is no such consensus, and there never has been. The real parallel with Wegner’s case for continental drift is the case that Svensmark, Shaviv, Soon, and others in the solar and astrophysical fields are making for the role that solar-modulated high-energy cosmic ray flux plays in earth’s cloud cover and hence climate. Like Wegner, who as a meteorologist was an outsider to the field of geology, they come from outside of the mainstream of climate science–and have gotten a similar reception. Like Wegner, they are now being ignored, dismissed, ridiculed, and suppressed–in this case, not just by the AGW crowd, which brooks no competition, but by much of the rest of the scientific community which has been distracted by the activisism of the AGW advocates. My own judgment is that the evidence they have produced so far is just as compelling for their case as Wegner’s was for his in his day.
It could take a while. Max Planck is reputed to have said “Science advances one funeral at a time” …
“Does that meant that because Plate Tectonics is the current scientific consensus, it must be wrong”
No, but imagine someone on an internet message board tried to argue that Plate Tectonics is wrong. There would be no need to simply scream “Consensus!” at him and rest your case. Instead, you could point out that the continents fit together pretty well and that the geological and fossil elements of the continents seem to match up pretty well too. Indeed, it’s possible to summarize the best evidence for continental drift in just a few sentences.
In other words, “consensus” is what people rely on when they don’t actually have good arguments on the merits.
As far as scientists being smart goes, I think most of them would do pretty well on IQ tests. But are they really trained to be skeptical as so many claim? I don’t think so. I think they are trained to be (and selected to be) conformists. Perhaps nobody sits them down and explicitly says so, but they must learn pretty quickly that to get ahead, they need to please their advisors; their dissertation committees; hiring committees; tenure committees; grant committees; and so on. And the easiest way to do this is by conforming yourself to the popular views.
I was nearly failed in my Geology course because, as an engineering student, I could not accept that mountains were formed by SHRINKAGE of the earth’s surface due to cooling (tension) . It seemed to me that only compression could have formed mountains.
I was told accept that mountains were formed by shrinkage or I might fail the course. I passed the course (and hence got the engineering degree I wanted) but writing what I knew to be untrue bugged me.
I think similar pressure is applied today to students to accept AGW theory. Fortunately the leaked CRU e-mails have emboldened some to stand up for what they secretly knew.
The “back radiation” that IR budgets, GCMs, and AGW is so dependent upon, it should be viewed as relative to what abosrbs it (positive, negative, or the same),
rather than merely added up.
In this simple respect AGW models, proponets, and believers are,
creationists.
“energy creationists”
Even (most “mainstream”) sceptics are not “energy realists”,
in this most basic of respects.
Stupid, misconcieved, blinded by their own lack of knowledge and / or understanding (and no doubt vested interest pension funds as well…) of the basics seems applicable to the vast majority of “consensus” and “sceptic” climate scientists alike.
John Whitman (01:17:05) :
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.
But don’t, please, just stick to Europe. When we were in the Dark Ages the Arab civilisation was way ahead (by the time of the Abbasids). Most of the enlightenment’s favourite Greek texts came to us via Arabic translations. Non-muslims also enjoyed more freedom than non-christians in Europe. They were pretty good at maths then, as were the Hindus.
Maybe the back radiation addition misconception would be better phrased as,
“heat creationists”
or,
“IR creationists”
or,
“thermal creationists”,
but creationists they are all the same.
John Blake – your last paragraph was brilliant.
With your permission. I would like to quote it.
Jack Linard
@John Whitman
“…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….”
Bacon was a staggering guy, to me the most amazing mind that we know in history. There is actually very little known about him, just fragments, which makes him even more tantalising.
People often confuse him with Francis Bacon, who lived around 1600, but in fact he lived in the 1200s, as far back from Francis Bacon as Francis Bacon is from us.
In those days the concept of dispassionate scientific knowledge had not been invented. Knowledge was what was revealed to you by authority – the most important source being, of course, the Bible. Roger Bacon single-handedly invented the concept of academic research knowledge, developed by a string of universities, and tested by experiment. For this he was locked up in the March of Ancona for 13 years.
If you read the few translations of the bits of work that exist you will be amazed. At one point he, to quote Blish:
“…begins to talk about the continuum of action, an Aristotelian commonplace in his own time, but withing a few sentences he has invented – purely for the sake of the argument – the lumeniferous ether which so embroiled the physics of the nineteenth century, and only a moment late throws the notion out in favour of the Einsteinian metrical frame, having skipped completely over Galilean relativity and the inertial frames of Newton….”
No wonder he was locked up. Serves him right for being 700 years ahead of his time….
Science created a barrier that anyone outside cannot possibly have any chance of crossing. Arrogance that no matter what you say will be wrong until proven right.
How can you prove anything when automatically it is incorrect before even being seen.
Debating right and blaming wrong here still misses the point!
Understanding the mechanics of how this planet works in conjuction with the atmosphere has not been studied.
So observational science must do.
Mechanics is how the planet works but science crapped out on a single gas.
Stumpy – hydraulics is not science – it’s engineering. Leave it to those who do, not to those who think about postulating what might happen under certain (possibly global warming influenced) scenarios
The Power of an ATOM is not what you observe on the outside But, the mechanics of how it works on the inside!
We need not go so far back in history to find this effect. The doctor that hypothesized that Helicobacter pylori caused stomach ulcers was raked over the coals and ridiculed for a number of years until they figured out he was right. The true method of science is to take what is considered the consensus and to find places where it fails. These failures allow us to learn more by being able to modify our understanding to better predict the future. That is why the second any politician says that they are a believer in “intelligent design” or creationism, they get scratched off my list of people I might vote for. Neither of those predict the future. They only lamely explain why we are where we are.
another classic example of the “settled science” proving to be wrong is the Nobel Prize won by West Australian biologist, Barry Marshall. He proved that the scientific consensus on the cause of ulcers was wrong – and got a more deserved Nobel than Barack and Al for his efforts
Tom P (03:28:27) :
You’re back again with your usual crap. Arhennius did indeed say that CO² molecules could be heated by incoming IR radiation. What he never got right was how a more energetic CO² molecule would affect the rest of the atmosphere.
Mooloo
“If you want to prove AGW is wrong, then you need to prove AGW is wrong. Nothing else will do.”
This is the thinking from the witch hunts. People knew implicitly that certain individuals were witches. Bad things that happened were mysteriously caused by their secret evil arts.
The key point is that the onus was on them to prove that they were not witches. The obligation on disproof, not proof. The argument of evil influence through magic was impossible to disprove in fact.
Not only AGW but much environmental activism uses “science” with the logic of the witch-hunt for justification. CO2 emissions? Nuclear power? Genetic modification? Nano-technology? etc… The “precautionary principle” says that once we have a superstitious fear of something, then the accusation of harmful effect needs to be disproved. And the hypothesised effects are carefully designed to be suitably nebulous, uncertain and shrouded in statistically near-impossible analysis that such disproof of harm is near impossible.
Witches were burned, drowned etc on the “precautionary principle”.
Jaye (23:23:38) :
As Feynman said.
guess —– construct theory —— test theory with experiment. If experiment proves theory wrong go back to guess.
Climate science. Guess —-Contruct theory — make model to fit theory eureka —– theory was correct.
Filipe,
Newton couldn’t explain the mechanism of gravity. Did that make him wrong? An intelligent critic of Wegener would have said “clearly the continents have moved and we need to determine how.”
Feynman said “Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.”
david wawn (05:38:07)
David it’s worth explaining what Barry had to do to get the conscensus broken. He was a wonderful Aussie and a great scientist.
Derek
Ranting against “creationists” does not establish validity to any supposed “consensus” on abiogenesis. Recommend you explore Uncommon Descent, and books by Michael Behe etc. No one has yet come up with an quantifiable theory of abiogenesis to replace Louis Pasteur’s Law of Biogenesis Omne vivum ex ovo, Latin for “all life from eggs” i.e., “life comes from life”. Accounting for the recursive irreducible complexity of the simplest self reproducing cell remains a challenge in the Origin Of Life.
jlc (05:17:35) :
Hydraulics is science (physics). Newton came up with some of the theories we still use to this day when he was but a young schoolboy playing in the stream at the bottom of his garden. That sir is science, I can assure you.
The application of the principles in engineering.
I will answer the question posed by the title. I earned a PhD in Physical Chemistry at an Ivy League university. I’ve worked in the sciences my entire career (over 25 years). I can emphatically say that scientists aren’t always “smart”. I can also say that there are few truely “Smart” scientists, especially of the caliber of Newton, Einstein, Feynman, etc. Actually, I’ve known quite a few “dumb” scientists and wondered how they graduated from any college with a degree. One major problem with typical scientists is that they want to boil everything down to a single factor. The world is multivariate. Science does not really teach multivariate analysis…rather it focuses research on very pointed, specific, and univariate research. Global Warming is a classic example: the entire worlds temperature can be linked to CO2 levels. Really? No need to worry about earth’s tilt relative to the sun, sunspots, solar flux, particulate matter in the air, moisture in the air, sea temperature, ocean currents, ocean level, amount of vegetation on the land, etc. The only factor that seems to be the center of attention is CO2 for these GW scientists. And tree ring proxy data? This suffers from the same problem….tree ring width from 1000 years ago can directly and exactly illustrate temperature at that time without knowing a myriad of others factors that were occuring 1000 years ago? It’s the oversimplification of the world that tends to make scientists not too “smart” and makes them highly prone to errors and poor predictions.
Ideally, science requires an independent mind. Institutionally, this is beat out of one. First, one must spend years and years in school pleasing teachers. Then, one must get grants and get published, in both of which endeavors non-conformity to the paradigms of the time are punished. Finally, one must get tenure, which can be denied for any reason, including incollegiality (not getting along with your fellow department members). It is amazing anything original can be produced at all after such mental homogenizing.
Filipe
Newton devised the mathematical model (guess) than fitted with what he saw. That model was then tested by physical experimentation and found to fit the model so scientists ran with the model until it was proven inadequate. Then we moved on to Einstein, Hook, etc but not in that order. The Newton model has been seriously remodeled but it still fits for everyday applications. As scientists say “within the limit it works, at the limit we need something else”. That is not the premise under which climate science has been operating. I find it almost impossible to put science along side the word climate.