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.”
The real story here is about the sociological environment of scientific communities.
Even if scientists where infinity intelligent, they’d still be herd animals like the rest of us. If the herd is going in one direction, it is a rare individual that will choose to go the other way. This theoretical herd of infinitely intelligent scientists will apply their intelligence to mock them.
To my mind, the best scientists are borderline autistic (a la big bang’s Sheldon). These people can abandon their own ideas with no thought to social consequences.
And herein lies the problem with the “save the world” sciences (sociology, environmental science, climate science, etc). They inadvertently select for people who want to save the world: people who are both highly socially aware, and who are pre-disposed to believe that we are causing problems.
I refuse to believe in continental drift.
I`m convinced that way back when the solar system was forming and proto planet Theia hit the earth, it wasn`t in fact a planet but but a huge ball of seltzer.
Over time the `outfizzing` of Theia has resulted in the earth expanding.
Hmm…who could i sell this to?
Reply to ASK-AN-EARTH-SCIENTIST
Subject: Snow in Hawaii
I would like to know if it can snow in Hawaii??
The answer is “yes”. It snows here every year, but only at the very summits of our 3 tallest volcanoes (Mauna Loa, Mauna Kea and Haleakala). The snow level almost never gets below 9000 feet in Hawaii during the winter, but since these mountains are taller than 13,000 feet, 13,000 feet, and 10,000 feet, respectively, they get dusted with snow a few times a year. It rarely stays on the ground for more than a few days though.
Although the rest of the island chain enjoys warm tropical weather the entire year-round, there have been “freak” cold storms a few times this century that have brought local snow storms down to as low as 3000 to 4000 feet. This snow has melted very quickly, however.
Ken Rubin, Assistant Professor
Department of Geology and Geophysics
University of Hawaii, Honolulu HI 96822
Guys – Florida is hardly covered with snow! (Nor Georgia.)
But, if you just count the prescence of snow, then ALL 50 STATES HAVE SNOW RIGHT NOW!
(Feb. 13, 2010)
As a kid, I stuck a map of the World on the ceiling over my bed, so every morning and night I’d spend some time staring at it through the dim light and could not help noticing how South America and Africa seemed to fit together. So, when Tuvo Wilson came to my university on his speaking tour reviving Continental Drift, I had no problem accepting the hypothesis as reasonable – and that is all that it had become at the time. The dominant hypothesis (consensus is too strong a word) to explain transcontinental distributions of fossil and living organisms involved fanciful ‘land bridges’ and the like – really, just as crazy an idea as moving continents, but essentially untestable, because a land bridge could always be invoked (sort of like AGW and CO2).
Lots of biogeographers had their careers invested in land bridges and lots of other scientists with no real knowledge were happy to slag the ridiculous idea of moving continents. The real difference between AGW and Continental Drift is that the facts were allowed to triumph because billions of dollars had not been spent to buy opponents, media, and politicians. I’m not sure that facts matter much for AGW or that the ‘skeptics’ have much hope. Even many skeptics seem to accept the unproven assumption that the World has warmed significantly over the last hundred years and every damned politician-scientist that I’ve seen more or less apologising for Climategate-IPCC repeats ‘the science is proven’ lie ad nauseum – and without challenge.
Lee Moore (07:14:49) :
At present, the Arthur Holmes approach is the only scientific one for global warming too. There are some interesting conjectures, but there is just insufficient evidence to how much of a problem global warming might turn out to be.
You mean the science isn’t settled? 🙂
There is evidence that falsifies the AGW hypothesis.
AGW tries to explain warming in the last half of the 20th century as primarily due to increases in CO2. The only true support for AGW are computer models that assume as a postulate that as CO2 causes surface temperatures to increase, specific humidity in the radiative zone must also increase. It is this positive feedback of increased humidity in the radiative zone that reduces OLR (Outgoing Long wave Radiation) resulting in global warming. If the specific humidity does not increase in the radiative zone then there is nothing stopping the OLR from radiating out into space. Note that the transport of latent heat by evaporation to the top of the convection zone means that increases in specific humidity in the convection zone are not a significant factor.
Peer reviewed papers such as Paltridge’s “Trends in middle- and upper-level tropospheric humidity from NCEP reanalysis data” and Solomon’s “Contributions of Stratospheric Water Vapor to Decadal Changes in the Rate of Global Warming” show that specific humidity in the radiative zone has gone down as CO2 has gone up; a negative feedback in contradiction to the assumptions built into all of the IPCC climate models.
A key requirement of AGW has been contradicted by the data.
Mike Ramsey
Mooloo (20:21:05) [first comment on the thread]:
Spoken like a scientist wanting to protect his bailiwick from close scrutiny (contain the damage).
Laboratory science is in good shape — that’s the source of Man’s technological wonders — ideas can be experimentally tested with results either validating or falsifying the proposed physical relationship at issue.
Field sciences, often times, have wondered off course because it’s hard to devise experiments that can test (falsify) the ideas in these various disciplines.
The other commenters are right: It’s the AGW proponents that must demonstrate their hypothesis has validity, not the other way around.
Since we agree to disagree on this Subject, I offer a OXYMORON: ACADEMIC INTEGRITY?
Dedicated to the University of Pennsylvania for the whitewash of DR
Micharl Mann.
Enjoyed the comments on this post.
Guenter Hess (23:39:45) :
I disagree with the article.
If you want to have a scientific process that maintains high quality standards
than you have to accept that there is a high barrier, until the scientific community accepts a new theory. ….
There is no shortcut.
Unfortunately, with regard to AGW there was a shortcut. It was politicized, and became a bandwagon, which all manner of politicians, NGOs, scalliwags, and carpetbaggers of all types happily clambered aboard. Many scientists, much to their discredit simply went along, often because that was where the funding was, because of peer pressure, and because their jobs were at stake if they didn’t. The damage done to science has yet to be tallied, but no doubt it will be enormous.
Are Scientists Always Smart?
Clearly not as any scientist that has won an ig nobel can testify.
http://improbable.com/ig/
OK, not completely fair. Some winners were just misunderstood. But not all of them!
Mike Ramsey
As a confirmed skeptic, I must, alas, side with mooloo. “proof” is required neither to confirm an hypothesis, nor to discredit it. “proof” is required only to change someone’s mind in regard to the hypothesis. For those who believe global warming to be human caused, proof they are wrong is required, regardless of how weak the evidence that brought them to their original conclusion.
One thing is for sure.
Sometimes its difficult to say this is “voodoo-science” and
this is not.
Look at the miskolczi discussion here;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/26/debate-thread-miskolczi-semi-transparent-atmosphere-model/
Unfortunately the thread ends abrubtly at precisely the same moment as Miskolczi enters the debate himself.
I have’nt kept my knowledge on radiation up to shape, so I cannot say whether he is right or not. Kirchoffs law, or not
Kirchoffs law…..
Should’nt this man be allowed to have a seminar where other physisists could challenge his theory right on, and a paper resulting from that? Put some money on that, IPCC!
Discussions in writing is like having an email-war that never ends….
If he is right, it would be fantastic. If he is mistaken at some point of his reasoning, it could be clarified.
Please listen to this on the BBC (13/02/2010) http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8513000/8513893.stm – Here we have “Prof Jones” stating that his data was “not well organised” – strikes me as a the start of getting around to admitting that the “data was manipulated (sorry – normalised)”
Geoff Sherrington (02:04:26) :
“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.”
Geoff, you are confusing me. How can one do away with the need to subduct plate edges? It is not a matter of need; it is an observed phenomenon. Many studies have been carried out on the seismicity of plate boundaries resulting in a three-dimensional structural models of the subducting plates. Subducting plates are just facts.
Cold fusion is real. It has been replicated and published in thousands of papers. See:
http://lenr-canr.org/
“yet the scientific community took over 50 years to stop ridiculing Wegener and accept his theory”
This is a very kind rendition of the remark most likely written by a geologist. In fact proof of the shifting of continents intruded itself on the science in the form of the discovery in the 1950s of the transform faults along the Mid-Atlantic ridge where the separation of the Americas from Europe and Africa took place and the ridge, of course, also faithfully parallels the relevant coasts. The scientific community had behaved so abominably toward Wegener (W died long before he was vindicated) that the ugly term “plate tectonics” (more appropriately a dental mechanics term) was adopted for the phenomenon and Wegener’s term was left buried with him, with no acknowledgement. I was a student during the 50’s and 60’s and, in the early years, like the AGW stuff, it was worth your career to espouse such a heretical theory. Actually, South African geologists had accepted it decades before European and North American scientists. I apologize for not having links – one of the advantages of being old is you know history from living through it.
Lee Moore (07:14:49)
“Thus it was by no means unscientific to be sceptical about continental drift until the 1960s.”
But it did betray a poverty of imagination, courage and vision.
Craig Loehle (06:13:44) :
“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”
Hear hear! (British tribal dialect for “strongly agree”).
Gary Pearse (10:00:20) :
I had a HS science teacher-she just died recently,bless her, who was fond of saying:Wegner is right!-this was heresy for any one to say in the 60’s!
She educated a whole generation of people in the facts of Wegner’s theory.
by the time I got to University, the edifice was cracking.Oh, one of the Geology
profs. was an early student of hers…
The same thing is happening to AGW…
Chris Schoneveld (09:33:38) wrote: “Subducting plates are just facts.”
Mid-ocean spreading ridges have been observed & measured. The total length of these “spreading ridges” is about 40,000 miles.
There has been a failure to observed & measure an equal length of “suducting plates” (or an equal distribution around the world).
And the evidence for “subducting plates” in many instances is ambiguous.
Geology is a field science where a priori assumptions have played a significant role in the development of its theories.
But once consensus grabs ahold of any field science, it’s hard to dislodge the consensus even in the face of significant contradicting evidence.
Climate science tends to be a consensus science discipline, thus, opinion, as opposed to empirical evidence often has more weight in the deliberations of its members.
Interesting article but the science of global warming is a new theory based solely upon the assumption that a small rise of CO2 is amplified by water vapor and positive feedback, that has been built into most climate models. This goes completely away from the classical climatology espoused by such giants as Reid Bryson, Fred Singer, Roger Reville, Claude Allegre and the literally thousands of scientists patiently studying the real world instead of tweaking the models or extrapolating from them as if they were truth. Here a young but emperical science has been hijacked by a type of activist science that believes computer manipulated data and the results of models over what the real world tells us. For example, study of the cooling periods of the past shows that these are times of increased storminess in the Northern Hemisphere but the computer based “climate scientists” have tried to assure the longevity of their theory by asserting the opposite, i.e warming causes increased storms. The AGW theory is akin to the hypothesis that cancers are caused by power lines in spite of the extensive medical literature that describes complex, multifactoral causes.
Tom P,
The Northern Hemisphere has been plenty cold. Due to the negative AO, the cold air is spread out wider and thinner than “average” – so more land area is freezing than “average.” That is why we have seen record or near record snow extent in the Northern Hemisphere for the entire winter.
The “average” temperature is not a particularly meaningful metric right now and is being widely misinterpreted by alarmists. The Canadian Arctic and Greenland just aren’t as quite as cold as they usually are.
No one has to prove AGW wrong. The believers in AGW have to prove it true. This is no mean task. Correlation does not necessarily equal causation. As far as I know, to date there exist absolutely no empirical evidence of man-made global climate change.
I would add this comment. I believe the CFC/ozone hole fraud had the an even more rapid acceptance than the CO2/AGW fraud. It laid the groundwork for the AGW scam.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/the_cfc_ban_global_warmings_pi.html
The resistance to continental drift was in part because the observations supporting it were in isolation. Sceptics were quite correct to demand answers to certain questions, but when the workings of the system as a whole were understood, the sceptics had no choice but to stand down. The climate debate is the opposite, a consensus having been formed around observations in isolation while sceptics continue to investigate the system as a whole and show that the conclusions drawn are less credible the more we know about the system as a whole. In particular, I continue to be amazed at the ease with which the AGW proponents regularly attribute an extra 3.7 w/m2 of energy being retained on earth as if this was a new energy source in addition to the sun itself. CO2 does not, and cannot, generate any additional energy. It can, at best, change the manner in which energy flows between ocean, land and atmosphere layers. In brief, a change in cyclical fluctuations, but not a change in the ultimate equilibrium of the system. I believe the following model is closer to the argument that the AGW proponents are presenting than is the greenhouse model:
Take a tall glass jar with a tight fitting lid. Open it and pour it half full of honey, then close the lid. Mark on the outside of the jar the level of the honey. Now pick the jar up and shake it vigorously. Put it back down and quickly mark the level the honey is now at. If we observe certain factors in isolation, we come up with certain conclusions.
The first conclusion is that the level of honey is now lower, so shaking the jar must have destroyed some of the honey. As we continue to observe however, we note that the level of honey seems to be slowly rising. Where is the honey coming from? Close inspection reveals that there is honey dripping off the inside of the lid as well as sliding down the sides. We can conclude from this that the lid and the glass are creating honey. In fact, we can measure how fast the level of honey is going up, assume that it will continue to do so at the same rate, and calculate how long it will take before the honey fills the jar and forces the lid off or the jar to explode. As further observation reveals that this does not happen, that instead the honey simply levels off at the exact same level as before, we have to ask some new questions. Why did the lid and glass stop making honey? Is it a temporary pause, and all we must do is wait and the making of honey by the lid and glass will resume?
The answer of course is that the lid and glass never did make honey. The observation that they did was made in isolation, the predictions of the jar filling up and exploding based on isolated facts proven wrong simply by waiting for the system as a whole to return to equilibrium. CO2 can no more add energy to the earth system than jar lids can manufacture honey. By no means is the earth system “closed” in the same way that the jar is, but the analogy is apt. You can’t increase the amount of honey in the jar with inserting some from outside the jar. Similarly, you can’t increase the amount of energy retained by the planet (and hence its temperature) except by inserting additional energy into the system. As CO2 only interferes with how energy flows through the various layers, and introduces no new energy itself, we need only wait a sufficient time period for equilibrium to assert itself and show that this.
While the jar of honey only has a limited number of factors governing its system, the planet of course has multiple energy inputs and multiple cycles that govern fluctuations and make this difficult to discern. But continued insistence that CO2 manufactures energy and could lead to a tipping point makes no more sense than concluding that jar lids makes honey and will do so until the jar explodes.
If one changes the question Are Scientists Always Smart? into a statement:Scientists are always smart, this clearly is, to me, a non sequitur since [most] scientists are human and, as such, fallible.
Mooloo (20:21:05) : “Going off on a tangent about how other scientists were wrong in the past is totally and utterly irrelevant.”
Mooloo, he DID make the case, and it wasn’t a tangent.
Fact: plate techtonics had supporting evidence, but was dismissed/attacked by the establishment.
Fact: the AGW establishment has little to no _supporting_ evidence, but it attacks anyone who points that out.
They’re a bit different, but come on… those differences hardly make it an “irrelevant tangent”.