By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
In the closing minutes of the final plenary of the U.N.’s Doha climate summit, when no one else had anything further to add, I spent a few seconds telling the delegates something that the bad scientists and the malicious media have done their level best to conceal. There has been no global warming for 16 years.
In the real world, this surely welcome news would have been greeted with cheers of relief and delight. Since the beginning of 1997, despite the wailing and gnashing of dentures among the classe politique, despite the regulations, the taxations, the carbon trades, the windmills, the interminable, earnestly flatulent U.N. conferences, the CO2 concentration that they had declared to be Public Enemy No. 1 has not stabilized. It has grown by one-twelfth.
Yet this startling growth has not produced so much as a twentieth of a Celsius degree of global warming. Any warming below the measurement uncertainty of 0.05 Cº in the global-temperature datasets is statistically indistinguishable from zero.
The much-vaunted “consensus” of the much-touted “ensembles” of the much-heralded “models” has been proven wrong. The much-feted “modelers” had written in 2008 that their much-cited “simulations” ruled out, to 95% confidence, intervals of 15 years or more without global warming. To them, 16 years without warming were as near impossible as makes no difference.
Yet those impossible years happened. However, you would never have known that surely not uninteresting piece of good news from reading the newspapers or watching ABC, BBC, CBC, NBC, et hoc genus omne. The media are not in the business of giving the facts or telling the truth any more.
Precisely because journalists no longer bother to provide the inconvenient truth to their audiences, and because they are no longer willing even to provide the people with the straightforward facts without which democracy itself cannot function, the depressingly ill-informed and scientifically-illiterate delegates in Doha can be forgiven for not having known that global warming stopped a long while back.
That is why they should have been excited and delighted when they heard the news – nearly all of them for the very first time.
But this was the alternative reality that is the corrupt, self-serving U.N. Howls, hoots and hollers of dismay and fury greeted my short, polite announcement. This absurdly inappropriate reaction raises a fascinating question.
How are we to dig a rat-hole wide enough to allow the useful idiots and true-believers to escape as each passing year makes it more and more obvious that their fatuous credo has all the plausibility of the now somewhat discredited notion that the world was to be snuffed out at this year’s winter solstice?
Every student of the arts of diplomacy in the civil-service and staff colleges of the U.K. hears much about the rat-hole problem. How does one let the other side off some hook on which they have imprudently impaled themselves, while minimizing their loss of face?
A cornered rat will fight savagely, even against overwhelming odds, because it has no alternative. Give the rat a way out and it will instinctively take it.
The first step in digging a diplomatic rat-hole is to show that one understands how one’s opponents came to make their mistake. One might make a point of agreeing with their premise – in the present instance, the long-proven fact that adding a greenhouse gas to an atmosphere such as ours can be expected, ceteris paribus, to cause some warming.
Then one tries to find justifications for their standpoint. There are five good reasons why the global warming that they – and we – might have expected has not occurred for 16 years: natural variability in general; the appreciable decline in solar activity since the Grand Maximum that peaked in 1960; the current 30-year cooling phase of the ocean oscillations, which began late in 2001 with the transition from the warming phase that had begun in 1976; the recent double-dip la Niña; and the frequency with which supra-decadal periods without warming have occurred in the instrumental record since 1850.
The next trick is to help them, sympathetically, to focus the blame for their error on as few of their number as possible. Here, the target is obvious. The models are to blame for the mess the true-believers are in.
We must help them to understand why the models got it so very wrong. This will not be easy, because nearly all of our opponents have no science or math at all.
We can start our deconstruction of the models by pointing out that – given the five good reasons why global warming might not occur for 15 years or more at a time – the modelers’ ruling out periods of 15 years or more without warming shows they have given insufficient weight to the influence of natural variability. We can poke gentle fun at their description of CO2 as “ the tuning-knob of the climate”, and help them to put things into perspective by reminding them that Man has so far altered only 1/10,000 of the atmosphere, and may alter 1/3000 of it by 2100.
We cannot altogether avoid the math. But we can put it all in plain English, and we can use logic, which is more accessible to the layman than climatological physics. Here goes.
The fundamental equation of climate sensitivity says temperature change is the product of a forcing and a climate-sensitivity parameter.
The modellers’ definition of forcing is illogical; their assumptions about the value of the climate-sensitivity parameter are not Popper-falsifiable; and their claims of reliability for their long-term predictions are empirically disproven and theoretically insupportable. Let us explain.
The IPCC defines a forcing as the net down-minus-up flux of radiation at the tropopause, holding surface temperature fixed. Yet forcings change that temperature. A proposition and its converse cannot simultaneously be true. That is the fundamental postulate of logic, and the models’ definition of forcing manifestly offends against it.
No surprise, then, that since 1995 the IPCC has had to cut its estimate of the CO2 forcing by 15%. The “consensus” disagrees with itself. Note in passing that the CO2 forcing function is logarithmic: each further molecule causes less warming than those before it. Diminishing returns apply.
We can remind our opponents that direct warming is little more than 1 Cº per doubling of CO2 concentration, well within natural variability. It is not a crisis. We can explain that the modelers have imaginatively introduced amplifying or “positive” temperature feedbacks, which, they hope, will triple the direct warming from CO2.
Yet this dubious hypothesis, not being Popper-falsifiable, is not logic and, therefore, not science. If a hypothesis cannot be checked by any empirical or theoretical method, it is not – stricto sensu – a hypothesis at all. It is of no interest to science.
Not one of the imagined feedbacks is empirically measurable or theoretically determinable to a sufficient precision by any method. As an expert reviewer for the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, I have described its strongly net-positive feedback interval as guesswork – and that, in logic and therefore in science, is exactly what it is.
There is a powerful theoretical reason for suspecting that the modellers’ guess that feedbacks triple direct warming is erroneous. The climatic closed-loop feedback gain implicit in the IPCC’s climate-sensitivity estimate of 3.3[2.0, 4.5] Cº per CO2 doubling falls on the interval 0.62[0.42, 0.74], though you will find no mention of the crucial concept of loop gain either in the IPCC’s documents or – as far as I can discover – in any of the few papers that discuss the mathematics of temperature feedbacks in the climate object.
Process engineers building electronic circuits, who invented feedback mathematics, tell us any loop gain much above zero is too near the singularity – at a loop gain of 1 – in the feedback-amplification equation. At a gain as high as is implicit in the models’ climate-sensitivity estimates, the geological record would show violent oscillations between extremes of warming and cooling.
Yet for 64 million years the Earth’s surface temperature has fluctuated by only 3%, or 8 Cº, either side of the long-run mean. These fluctuations can give us an ice-planet at one moment and a hothouse Earth the next, but they are altogether too small to be consistent with a feedback loop gain anywhere near as close to the singularity as official estimates imply, for homeostatic conditions prevail.
The atmosphere’s lower bound, the ocean, is a vast heat-sink 1100 times denser than the air. Since 3000 bathythermographs were deployed in 2006 no significant ocean warming has been found.
The upper bound of the atmosphere is outer space, to which any excess heat radiates harmlessly away.
Homeostasis, then, is what we should expect, and it is what we get. Accordingly, the climatic loop gain – far from being as impossibly high as the IPCC’s central estimate of 0.62 – cannot much exceed zero, so the warming at CO2 doubling will scarcely exceed 1 Cº.
It is also worth explaining to our opponents the fundamental reason why models cannot do what the modelers claim for them. The overriding difficulty in attempting to model the climate is that it behaves as a chaotic object. We can never know the values of its millions of defining parameters at any chosen moment to a sufficient precision to permit reliable projection of the bifurcations, or Sandy-like departures from an apparently steady state, that are inherent in all objects that behave chaotically. Therefore, reliable, very-long-term prediction of future climate states is known a priori to be unavailable by any method.
The modelers have tried to overcome this constraint by saying that the models are all we have, so we must make the best of them. But it is self-evidently illogical to use models when reliable, very-long-term weather forecasting is not available by any method.
This fundamental limitation on the reliability of long-term predictions by the models – known as the Lorenz constraint, after the father of computerized or “numerical” weather forecasting, whose 1963 paper Deterministic Non-Periodic Flow founded chaos theory by examining the behavior of a five-variable mini-model of the climate constructed as a heuristic – tells us something more, and very important, about the climate.
Bifurcations (or, in our opponents’ intellectual baby-talk, “tipping-points”) in the evolution of the climate object over time are not a whit more likely to occur in a rapidly-warming climate than in a climate which – like our own – is not warming at all.
Sandy and Bopha, and the hot summer in the U.S., could not have been caused by global warming, for the blindingly obvious reason that for 16 years there has not been any.
However, there are many variables in the climate object other than CO2 concentration and surface temperature. Even the tiniest perturbation in any one of these millions of parameters is enough, in an object that behaves chaotically, to induce a bifurcation.
Nothing in the mathematics of chaos leads one to conclude that “tipping-points” are any more likely to occur in response to a large change in the value of one of the parameters (such as surface temperature) that describe an object than in response to an infinitesimal change.
The clincher, in most diplomatic discussions, is money. Once we have led our opponents to understand that there is simply no reason to place any credence whatsoever in the exaggerations that are now painfully self-evident in the models, we can turn their attention to climate economics.
Pretend, ad argumentum, that the IPCC’s central estimate of 2.8 Cº warming by 2100 is true, and that Stern was right to say that the GDP cost of failing to prevent 3 Cº warming this century will be around 1.5% of GDP. Then, at the minimum 5% market inter-temporal discount rate, the cost of trying to abate this decade’s predicted warming of 0.15 Cº by topical, typical CO2-mitigation measures as cost-ineffective as, say, Australia’s carbon tax would be 48 times greater than the cost of later adaptation. At a zero discount rate, the cost of action will exceed the cost arising from inaction 36 times over.
How so? Australia emits just 1.2% of Man’s CO2, of which Ms. Gillard aims to cut 5% this decade. So Australia’s scheme, even if it worked, would cutting just 0.06% of global emissions by 2020. In turn, that would cut CO2 concentration from a predicted 410 μatm to 409.988 μatm. It is this infinitesimal change in CO2 concentration, characteristic of all measures intended – however piously – to mitigate future warming that is the chief reason why there is no economic case for spending any money at all on mitigation today.
The tiny drop in CO2 concentration would cut predicted temperature by 0.00006 Cº. This pathetic result would be achieved at a cost of $130 billion, which works out at $2 quadrillion/Cº. Abating the 0.15 Cº warming predicted for this decade would thus cost $317 trillion, or $45,000/head worldwide, or 59% of global GDP.
Mitigation measures inexpensive enough to be affordable will be ineffective: measures expensive enough to be effective will be unaffordable. Since the premium exceeds the cost of the risk, don’t insure. That is a precautionary principle worthy of the name.
When the child born in Bethlehem ~2012 years ago grew up, He told His audience the parable of the prodigal son, who had squandered his inheritance but was nevertheless welcomed by his father with a fatted calf when he returned and said he was sorry.
However vicious and cruel the true-believers in the global-warming fantasy have been to those few of us who have dared publicly to question their credo that has now been so thoroughly discredited by events, we should make sure that the rat-hole we dig for their escape from their lavish folly is as commodious as possible.
If all else fails, we can pray for them as He prayed looking down from the Cross on the world He had created.
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
k. i’ll keep aristotle’s pit bull in the corner for now.
maybe it would be a good topic more suitable for your own site?
timor domini principia sapientiae puts me off my lunch.
= = = = = =
rgbatduke,
Your comment was comprehensive . . . thanks.
I see you appreciate well that the issues of philosophy in Western Civilization do fundamentally bear on the science of physics. I do. The philosophy that supports science is very interesting.
I think much of Blandshard’s book will be familiar to you.
I think Kant is the main source of the philosophic tradition that became the ‘Analytical’ philosophic revolution starting in the late 19th century and which then strongly influenced LP and Popper. Yes, Popper and LP share some of epistemological and metaphysical conceptions and overall logic endemic to the ‘Analytical’ philosophic revolution.
I will highlight my criticism of Popper on this thread . . . . but I am much slower that you are . . . . how did you do that comment of yours so fast? Must be your book preparation has the info right on the top of your mind.
I look forward to your book! I will look up MacKay’s book which you recommended.
Regarding focusing on the discussion of religion as a subject of critical dialog, it is quite interesting . . . but I have found that Paul of Tarsus had identified the essence of religious basis; he inherently held that you first must make an act of pure unquestioning belief without the need for logical support or proof; he implied that nothing else is relevant to the religious view. When I have held extensive discussions it always has come down to what Paul observed about the religious situation.
My wife is from a family with a many century Buddhist heritage from China. She would agree with you that Buddhism is not a religion in the sense that Hindu, Islam, Jewish, Christian and most known religions are.
John
Hi Chiefio.
“Similarly, the “tooth chatter” of a bunny has a specific meaning, a definition.”
‘specific meaning’ is not the definition of definition. I already made that explicit.
for the purpose of this discussion i have defined ‘word’ as a ‘symbol with a definition’.
i also drew your attention to the fact that acoustical properties are not part of the definition. (as is self evident that we are typing)
i’ll be around when you finish your exuberant pursuit of that straw man, ok? But i’m not going to tire myself following you.
To persist in the refusal to draw the distinction between semiotics and language serves no logical purpose and i’m sure you ‘feel’ it, whether you possess the self discipline to do better or not.
it is, of course, an abuse of language to debase definitions or to attribute linguistic properties to a cock’s comb, mandrill’s ass or a dog’s smile. the very idea that tooth chattering is a part of speech and therefore an element of any linguistic structure is absurd. Let’s hope you won’t be granting linguistic powers to the mimosa just to be contrary.
To restrict the meanders, allow me to define ‘definition’ for you:
Definition: the set of distinguishing characteristics of an entity.
One other item – you said:
“That you are deaf to the intelligences all around you is a pity. They can communicate with you, but only if you learn to listen, and sometimes to listen visually (SIC)…”
you can improve your technique of personal attack by using conditionals and interrogatives.
for example, rephrasing ‘That you are deaf to…”, to “IF you are deaf to” rescues your falsehood from utter inanity and makes it a defensible, if not sublime truth.
(Your stab in the dark was fail. In fact, you would be amazed to see my work – but you have not earned and deserve to be deprived of the pleasure.)
Abuse of language such as you have demonstrated, after semantic analysis, carries about as much meaning as a dog’s growl. Granted that it has meaning, please tell me what part of speech that growl is? Is it a noun? Is it a verb? Please feel free to use language if you find further growling to be inadequate. In order to have an actual conversation, I’ll have to insist on it.
E.M.Smith says:
December 28, 2012 at 4:57 pm
Werner Brozek:
Note that Donald said “Smoothed”…
Thank you! I believe you mentioned this earlier in the thread so I was able to figure out what happened in the latest entry and comment on it.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/28/dana-nuccitellis-holiday-trick-for-sobering-up-quick-put-a-little-less-rum-in-your-egg-nog/
This is where an 11 year average was used.
Chiefio – i forgot to add this to my reply:
http://xkcd.com/169/
@RGBatDuke:
Oddly, I came to the conclusion that all ‘truth’ was probabilistic on my own, but not so formally. I have an abstract ‘truth strength’ assigned to most things I “believe”. A weighting. That, BTW, is why I’m willing to accept contradictory things as ‘both possible’ (just not always at the same time…) and find religion acceptable.
Basically, I don’t need to choose the “optimal” or “best”; I just need to see the probability map and realize that the strongest path is probably the more correct one, but maybe not 😉 And that often the apparent contradiction that says one ought to be ‘tossed out’ is just a reflection of my limits / error. Rather like that “Genesis and the Big Bang” book where if you calibrate a ‘day’ from the start of relativistic time, rather than our ‘already expanded’ end; the Genesis account matches our “Science Narrative”… THEY are not in conflict so much as MY broken understanding of ‘a day’… not including Einstein in the time axis…
So while I can’t even prove for certain that I exist, I can except that it is THE most likely path, and mostly apply that one when thinking about things. Yet I also know I might just be an imagination of some other dimensional construct… a fantasy of God, if you will. Similarly, while I’m fairly sure some old White Hair Guy didn’t speak the world into existence and doesn’t spend his time counting all the hairs on my head, it’s not impossible. (Oddly, I think that “most probable” is that an advanced race visited here long ago, and tried to teach us some things. We have a badly understood record of that in our ‘ancient great books’ and monuments. We called them Gods and Angels. I hope they visit again, preferably soon. Yes “Ancient Aliens”…) I have no problem, though, if it turns out that whatever God is, they don’t want to be seen as an “Ancient Alien”… or with the explanation that some old King in Mesopotamia slipped a ‘priest’ some gold to write up a good bit of fiction to flim-flam the rubes. All are possible until shown not… just very unlikely for some…
So given that the books were written by people, even if divinely inspired, I accept that they may have some bits confused. (And that it’s the Popes and Bishops and Cardinals and all who have it wrong in saying it is all literally true…)
@Gnomish:
You like absolutes and syllogisms and demand compliance. I look for truth. You want a world bounded by rules, of your making. I look for wisdom. You can play your word games, as you like, I have no need for your cartoons, verbal or otherwise.
You can insist on whatever you like, and enjoy the silence of one voice…
I would suggest that you look at the history of folks using exactly the arguments you have used, to forbid the use and teaching of non-verbal (i.e. sign language) modes to the deaf. It’s a “hot button” issue in the community; and with good cause. They were accused of exactly the same kind of lack of thinking and lack of intelligence that you wish to apply to other species, and in the same modes. We have an existence proof of the bankruptcy of that reasoning.
NO natural language requires a definition (though they can help). I’d even go so far as to say no natural language HAS full definition. ( I’ve used many fully defined languages, from symbolic logic to a variety of computer languages with defined constructive grammars). They have dramatic contrasts with natural languages largely based on the LACK of restrictive definition in natural languages. By design, natural languages are extensible and improvisational, and not constrained by formal definitions. That lets us say new things that have never been said nor thought before. Fully defined languages are dead and sterile in comparison.
Coco did that kind of language invention / extension when she asked for a specific piece of fruit from the ‘cold-box’. She created a new word, one never before defined to her, and used it in a grammatically correct way to get what she wanted. One not in ASL that she was being taught. Yet also one that was understood to her ASL speaking trainers. Not defined. Not in a dictionary. Yet it worked.
Coco speaks. She does so with “gestures” and facial expressions. Just like deaf humans.
When you denigrate gestures and expressions (and even the sporadic ‘grunts’ that some deaf folks use) you denigrate all language, and all intelligences.
From a Buddhist mantra: “Sentient beings in the universe are numberless. I vow to protect them.” Even if they say “I am happy, thank you.” with a tooth chatter and say “I’m watchfully grazing” with a “rupt rupt rupt”, and even if they say “BIRD! Run for cover!” with a raising of pitch and volume on that sound and lengthening of the vowel. People are only ‘special’ in their conceit and denigration of other living things.
Oh, and bunnies don’t “grunt”. That’s something people do…
Observing your limitations is not personal attack, btw, so I have no need to ‘improve it’. The improving runs the other way…
@Werner Brozek:
You are most welcome. It’s a common error and common trick to use a moving average so as to hide inflection points and shorten the period of ‘trend’. A 10 period moving average on ten periods of data is a single point. No trend. On a 20 period data set, it turns the last 10 periods into one point. Now your max period of trend is the first 10 +1 data points… Some folks know that and work around it. Some know it and use it ‘for effect’ (i.e. as a trick). Most folks don’t realize it.
My general rule of thumb is that “Averages are used to hide things.” Sometimes that is a desirable thing. (Like hiding the day to day variation in prices of a stock in a moving average) It can let you see an inner property a bit better by hiding a distraction. Much of the time the hiding is not desirable…. like using a 200 day moving average of stock prices to tell you when they have started going down. It tells you about 200 days too late that the inflection already happened… (Yet it is widely used… go figure…)
So anyone talking about a ‘short trend’ in an ‘average’ or ‘smoothed’ temperature series needs a very close inspection for ‘truthyness’ 😉
You are right that furred and feathered friends communicate by non English verbal sounds and may mimic human behaviour to communicate.They communicate by sound,behaviour, display and even pheromones.As such their communication includes language.I am touched by your interest in communicating with the deaf.
BTW I am sure you exist, even if I am not able to prove this fact.
Years ago I asked my father this question ‘How can I be sure that I exist”
He was sitting next to me and pinched me hard on the arm and asked me if I felt it.I did. Since then I have not been troubled by this question.
Chiefio… your ontological improvisations are silly.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
If you don’t think words have definitions, how can you expect anybody to credit your utterances with any more meaning than an animal grunt? Was that a loaded question?
For the third and last time: your obsession with deafness has no relevance to the nature of language. Is an idea too complex for you it it isn’t translated into bunny talk? I can’t be bothered, you know. Your ontological improv is not funneh.
Are you unclear that the word ‘denigrate’ does not have the same definition as the word ‘define’ or are you suggesting that comprehension devalues a concept?
Did you imagine that “conceit and denigration” of human beings made you a special bunny?
I understand both what you say and the motive for saying it. It is not pursuit of truth.
There is a word for it but there’s no way to translate it into Furry for you.
Thank you but you have something wrong. The Known negative feedbacks in the climate result in the direct impact of CO2 being reduced by about 80% ( EG Direct radiation of surface heat through the Atmospheric IR hole, and heat of evaporation/convective cooling etc) So after this negative feedback is applied the resulting magnification of 3 requires a positive feedback magnification of approximately 15 or a loop gain of about 0.95 – not 0.62 at all. This is not just improbable, it’s impossible.
One must also consider the feedback function. For example T/Co2 and T/H2O are logarithmic so the feedback function is a logarithm. This implies that the loop gain must be higher – Much higher, when CO2 is low and thus weather is much more unstable at low CO2 concentration.
One must also consider energy saturation. 85% of the energy available for interception has been intercepted and given conservation of energy no warming can occur beyond that. I believe there is a missapplication of the logarithmic relation here. I do not believe that CO2 will continue to follow a logarithmic function unless pressure is unconstrained – that is CO2 is added to the bulk of the atmosphere – IE if we constrain atmospheric pressure to 1 ATM or less then CO2 warming must saturate, the function in real life will not remain logarithmic – question is when? (Remembering here that each CO2 molecule produced by fossil fuels requires more than one O2 molecule to be removed from the atmosphere – taking acount of water produced in the reaction) – The Nett density of the atmosphere reduces with each quantum of fossil fuel burned all other things remaining equal.
The IPCC suggestion of 3.3 deg C per doubling implies that if we replaced our atmosphere with CO2 it would be over 100 deg C warmer and there would be no liquid water on earth rather than as the greenhouse effect so far shows a maximum of about 15/85 x 33 or 5.3 degrees increase based on extrapolating the point of energy saturation and ascribing all previous warming to CO2. 100 deg C is fanciful stuff.
The supposed history of the earth suggests the early earth atmosphere was mostly CO2 – It must then have been 100C hotter, how then pray-tell did we end up with 1.5 billion square km of water in our oceans? Surely 98% CO2 was past some tipping point or other ?
bobl:
The IPCC suggestion of 3.3 deg C per doubling has the additional shortcoming of being non-falsifibable. This conclusion folloows from the non-observability of the equilibrium temperature. The lower values of the equilibrium climate sensitivity (TECS) that have been suggested by people who include Lord Monckton have the same shortcoming. In view of the non-falsifiability, TECS is not a scientifically viable concept.
“Phil” says the model simulations that led their creators in 2008 to write that 15 years or more without warming would indicate a discrepancy between the models’ predictions and observed reality were adjusted to remove the effects of the El Nino Southern Oscillation. So they were: but the paper also points out that removing ENSO increases the discrepancy between predictions and observed reality.
He also quibbles about Newton’s birthday. However, by the Calendar Reform Act of 1751 (not 1750, since he is being picky about dates), 11 days were taken out of the calendar to conform with reforms that Catholic Europe had adopted a couple of centuries previously. Therefore Newton was not born on Christmas Day (though, at the time, his parents thought he was).
And he quibbles about what happened at Goose Green. My account comes directly from the 2IC in question.
Other commenters continue to whinge about my including a couple of sentences about the Christmas spirit at the end of the head posting. Yet there is no incompatibility between religious belief and science, which is why many eminent scientists (including Newton) were also Christians.
So, get over it! A roarin’ Hogmanay to one and all.
Monckton of Brenchley:
If you were to assist those of us who are in the scientific community by ceasing the practice of referencing the product of the IPCC climate models as “predictions” and to replace this term by “projections,” this would be of great benefit to the cause of bringing the scientific method to IPCC climatology. Conflation of the term “prediction” with the term “projection” is at the heart of an application of the equivocation fallacy by IPCC climatologists. As I point out in the peer reviewed article at http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/15/the-principles-of-reasoning-part-iii-logic-and-climatology/ , repeated applications of this fallacy play a major role in the argument that is made by IPCC climatologists against continuing CO2 emissions. When well-meaning people such as yourself use terms ambiguously this practice assists the pseudo-scientists of the IPCC in their pseudo-scientific mission.
OH, and it’s “E.M” not “E.E.” ( e.e. was the poet… 😉
E. E. “Doc” Smith was a science fiction author who wrote Universe-spanning space opera back in the 30’s through maybe the 50s or early 60s (can’t recall the exact dates, but his earliest pulp fiction stories are no longer in copyright). The two most famous series where the Skylark of Space series, and the Lensman series. His heroes all looked like J. “Bob” Dobbs — craggy and masculine with a pipe jammed between their teeth. His books featured a lot of nudity a la ER Burroughs (Martians in scanty “trappings”) with scantier trappings but of course, no sex. A lot of smoldering passion, though. His books were (and are!) great fun to read, but suffer from a tragic flaw at this point in time — the physics in them, Ph.D. or not, is unbelievably bad. It’s not just the lack of relativistic correctness or any attempt to respect the laws of thermodynamics, it is phrases like “the acceleration of many times the speed of light” that are ill-dimensioned that set one’s teeth on edge.
Still, worth a read. The Skylark series as originally published in Amazing Stories is IIRC available via Project Gutenberg, but the Lensman series is still in copyright. I don’t know how easy any of the books are to find in print — they do sometimes run them off again (as they still sell) but I haven’t seen one in a store for a decade or so at this point.
Just FYI.
rgb
Regarding focusing on the discussion of religion as a subject of critical dialog, it is quite interesting . . . but I have found that Paul of Tarsus had identified the essence of religious basis; he inherently held that you first must make an act of pure unquestioning belief without the need for logical support or proof; he implied that nothing else is relevant to the religious view. When I have held extensive discussions it always has come down to what Paul observed about the religious situation.
IIRC Paul went further and in one of his trips to Greece he grew so frustrated trying to convert people with a philosophical tradition of actual critical thought that he effectively cursed knowledge and learning as obstacles to that pure statement of faith. Sadly, although I know the NT pretty well at this point, I can’t recall the letter/chapter and am too lazy to go look it up (again).
But I agree — that is always the end point of a discussion with a religious person. As a reasoned conclusion religious belief is difficult to support. Impossible to support, if one goes to the extreme of Humian skepticism and demand infinite proof for an infinite claim lest one be fooled by sufficiently advanced space alien technology or the like (Clarke’s Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, or its converse, any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced:-).
Also, even in the brutally honest analysis category, the “best thing to believe” might well depend on the person. As far as I can tell, many people need to believe in God and perfect justice and a pleasant afterlife or even in hell and an unpleasant afterlife. It gives their life an illusion of “higher purpose” that allows them to cope with the fact that it has no higher purpose that they can actually discern in reality, or allows them to cope with the suffering in their lives by consoling themselves with the illusion that they will have a second life in which they will not suffer. It forms a functional “secondary superego” that — sometimes — allows them to kick alcoholism or drug dependence or a tendency to be violent and thus escape a living hell in this one life. And as has been hypothesized and I believe verified to some extent by experiment, we seem to have evolved with a susceptibility towards religious belief — there are receptors in our brains that are stimulated in a self-sustaining pleasure loop by “religious experiences” (or rather, the loop is the religious experience). This is not implausible as we are social animals and religion forms (and has formed over at least recorded history) a key component of the social glue for nearly any human society. Genetic/memetic co-evolution seems not unreasonable.
This does not make any religion “right”, but it may explain why some people make the unreasoned leap and others don’t (typically settling on a religion consistent with their local culture, of course). Life sucks — not all the time for most of us, but some of the time for all of us and all of the time for some of us and then you die. As the Buddha observed, suffering exists and is indeed a universal experience of all beings with a brain capable of experiencing. It isn’t fair. Life is not just. I’m relatively wealthy and comfortable by accident of birth, and in a heartbeat another accident could take it all away. In India, in Africa, in countries all over the world, there are children dying at this moment of starvation, disease, acts of war (often religious war), accident, all of it plain bad luck. Suffering.
We don’t need to look to an afterlife for hell — hell is with us everywhere we look, every day, in this one life. And no, there isn’t a shred of evidence that a second life or afterlife is going to make it all better, balance out the scales, ransom the suffering with some sort of reward, punish those fortunate enough not to suffer as much or who by their actions caused some of the suffering to add still more senseless suffering to an already intolerable total.
This is a stark existential landscape. The mind recoils, and invents something, anything to redeem it. Such as a redeemer. This allows people to overcome the fear and cope, to get out of bed one more day and go to their job as a Wal Mart greeter, or return to the garbage heaps of Delhi and scavenge whatever one can find that has enough value to hold onto life for another day and hope for better fortune tomorrow, or deal with the cancer eating at their guts that dictates that no matter what they would like, they have begun a spiral of misery that will terminate in a cessation of experience in a few short months.
This, I believe, is why theodicy has the problem backwards. We know perfectly well that an all-loving, all-powerful God, a God of compassion, would not create a Universe filled with suffering and random and capricious acts of violence. Yet we live in a Universe filled with suffering and random and capricious acts of violence, and can hardly avoid the evidence that this is the case as we suffer many of those random and capricious accidents, we cope with the fact that we aren’t Bill Gates and can’t by a yacht on a whim (and Bill gates copes with the fact that he is Bill Gates — do not imagine that wealth buys freedom from suffering), as we get horribly sick and recover, or do not, or lose our jobs, or have a car crash that kills one of our children, or…
…live life with some joy, much ennui, and some suffering, in every possible mixture.
This does not appear to be just. Of course, it actually is. It is perfectly just, if and only if it is totally impersonal, where it is literally blind chance or fate that decides, where your life history is decided for all practical purposes by rolls of invisible dice that occurred long before you were born (and which may be continuing, although a proper statement of physical theory including quantum mechanics does not allow for dice). But just or not — nobody can blame the dice for being random, and nobody had a choice about being in the game — people solve the problem of evil by inventing a just God.
Cognitive dissonance at its finest! We can now invert the argument! Life sucks, God loves us, therefore there must be something to redeem life, an afterlife. In the afterlife all of the obvious injustices, insults, and pain we suffer all of the time from our egocentric points of view as living sentient beings will be perfectly balanced by an infinite experience of life that is perfect, suffering free, where they can always have a yacht if they want it, where the bread always lands butter side up, where they experience the neurotransmitter-induced ecstasy of the religious drug-loop nonstop, a perpetual speedball high in the presence of God, where they are actually happy and bad things never happen.
Except to those people that were mean to them. All too often (since the hell meme was invented) we have been able to add to this already pleasant dream the dream of bad people getting their comeuppance. Being human, it isn’t enough for us even in our fantasies that our own hurts simply cease in the cessation of true death, we must have them improbably transformed to joy, and add to that joy the savage pleasure of imagining Big Jimmy who always stole our lunch money from us being caned in the Principle’s Office for eternity.
Theodicy has it completely backwards. If there were no suffering, nobody would bother inventing something invisible and posthumous to balance it out. The existence of God would be an abstract metaphysical question, unlikely on the face of it but open for discussion.
Buddha invented, or tried to invent, the perfect antidote to this sort of irrational belief. First of all, get over it. Suffering is here, it is real, and it is not redeemable. Even an eternity of imagined pleasure doesn’t truly eliminate the reality of the moments of pain, especially as we are experiencing them, any more than the memory of past pleasures does. Our experience is immediate — we are stuck on the moving cusp of Now, and are cursed and blessed with sentience that permits us to all-too-well extrapolate from our past sufferings to future ones and rob even our moments of pleasure of some of their savor. Also, if we are born again, we are born to suffering. “Heaven” is impossible — even the Gods, if the Gods exist, so powerful that any wish is instantly granted, must endure suffering and wonder why. If every wish is instantly granted, how long before one has no wishes? How long before all effort ceases? What we would claim to be heaven, instant gratification for eternity, is actually a horrible trap:
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Prose/lulea.php
(a short story that is also a Moral Tale, derived from Frank L. Baum’s Queen Zixi of Ix, available for free via Gutenberg IIRC, in case one wishes to read the “prequel”, but the short story stands alone, I think).
This is why Buddha advised his followers to not argue about God. God isn’t important — if God exists God has to deal with suffering too, and the only way to do so is to live with compassion. In truth this does not eliminate suffering. If you hit the Buddha on the head, he or she will suffer the pain. It does, however, establish the moral basis of a society that actively tries to minimize it, and thereby perhaps reduces suffering compared to one where people act in selfish and cruel ways.
Buddha was not any more a god than you or I — he made no claims of deity (rather the opposite). He did not found a religion. He invented a practical moral philosophy — not a “perfect” one by any means, and not a perfectly consistent one either as even his teachings are distorted by mistaken (or at least, unprovable and empirically unlikely) metaphysical assumptions.
That is the heart of Buddhism, reduced to two statements. Suffering exists, and we should probably collectively choose to act accepting this as true and living our life to minimize that suffering for the whole society in which we live as best we can. Belief in God(s), rituals associated with that belief, claims made by the purveyors and scriptures of the religions and so on are unimportant and can themselves be morally judged on the basis of suffering and rejected where they do not taste sweet. What matters is doing your best to avoid the obsessive attachments that lead to suffering in one’s self, and avoiding actions likely to lead to the suffering of self or others. Oh, and here are a few mental disciplines that might help you cope with some of the angst of human existence — live in the now, centered, so you do not relive past suffering or live in fear of future suffering. Learn to meditate to break the horrible loopback cycle of anxiety that our minds are prone to. Be excellent to each other (to quote George Carlin in Bill and Ted). So very simple.
It won’t work, of course, not perfectly. If you break your leg, you will suffer if you are the Buddha himself reborn. If your dog dies, you will suffer. If you walk through the poorer streets of Poona, or Mumbai, or Cairo, or New York, you will suffer. If you are trapped in war-torn Syria and endure watching your family torn apart by a bomb — “good” bomb or “bad” one as it might be labelled according to your “side” in the conflict — you will suffer. Your suffering cannot be redeemed as it is real and immediate — but it can be endured.
rgb
– – – – – – –
rgtatduke,
As a young person growing up near a small town in the USA, I was continuously wondering about what appeared to me to be the complete irrelevance of the sea of profound belief in the supernatural and in superstitions; belief in the supernatural and superstitions being what I find is the essence of religions. I realized that those beliefs were so embedded into history and current social institutions that one had to study subjects like Christianity in order to understand even the context of logic and science within our society and history.
Paul Johnson’s book ‘The History of Christianity’ was very helpful to me in that regard. He is quite critical and objective even though a devout Christian. To understand our society and history, similar critic and/or comparative histories of other religions are helpful for those finding irrelevant all supernatural and superstitious beliefs. Also, I found all of Joseph Campbell’s works on mythology and religion to be quite helpful in understanding the phenomena of belief in the supernatural and the superstitious.
NOTE WRT BUDDISM – Evidence that Buddhism is not a religion in the normal sense is also to be found in the number of people holding Buddhist values who also, at the same time, belong to religions like Christianity, Judism, etc.
John
Viscount Monckton of Brenchley:
I have returned to Falmouth for some hours because I was unable to obtain a locum for duties I am tasked to perform tomorrow morning. Having completed my travel home I visited WUWT to see what has been happening, and I found your excellent article which is both timely and needed.
I hope you are returning to good health so you can enjoy Hogmanay having missed the Christmas festivities.
I write to make two comments: one pertaining to your excellent article and the other on an unfortunate development which has happened in the resulting thread. Unfortunately, I will be returning to another activity which isolates me from communication immediately after my duties in the morning and, therefore, after this evening I will not be able to reply to any responses to this post for about a week.
I agree that a ‘rat hole’ escape is needed for AGW-advocates. Your post pertains to scientists – mostly academics – who have been promoting the AGW-scare, but they are merely purchased tools of politicians. It is the politicians who need to be given a ‘rat hole’. Indeed, the bureaucracies that operate the scare will continue to be established until the politicians withdraw from the scare.
When the politicians withdraw from the scare they will then stop funding the so-called scientists whom they are likely to blame for the scare. You suggest blaming the climate models, but people built the models, and only people can serve as scape goats.
This threatens the reputation of all science.
Importantly, politicians lose face – and, therefore, votes – if they reverse course, especially if they say they are abandoning a policy because it was wrong. They will not want to be seen to withdraw from the AGW-scare, and they will need to blame others for their mistaken AGW-policies of the past.
A decade ago Fred Singer organised a public meeting at an IPCC Meeting where he, Gerd Rainer-Weber and I were speakers. I said then,
I still see no reason to change that view.
So, in my opinion we need to give the politicians a way to stop active promotion of the scare while seeming to continue to support the scare as they let it fade away. And we need protect the reputation of science from the damage of the pseudoscience which the politicians have purchased from the climastrologists.
In August 2009 I foresaw the political demise that would occur at Copenhagen the following December. And I suggested a ‘rat hole’ for the politicians that was posted on WUWT at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/17/stopping-climate-change/
In that article I suggested research funding should be switched from climate modelling to research of geoengineering options that would only be implemented in the unlikely (I think impossible) elevation of global temperature by 2 K (which the climastrologists had said was the limit which should not be passed).
In that article I said
Unfortunately, as the following thread clearly demonstrates, few understood the ploy. People seemed to think I was advocating the geoengineering and seemed oblivious to the obvious impossibility of any country implementing such a scheme because that could be seen as an act of war (altering climate in one place also alters it elsewhere).
I still think the idea has merit because I have not found another ‘rat hole’ to offer the politicians.
That brings me to the unfortunate development which has happened in this thread.
Robert Brown (who signs himself as rgb) makes some good posts on WUWT. He has often made some very, very good posts which are among the very best ever seen on this blog. He provides an example of such an important post at December 26, 2012 at 9:44 am.
However, and unfortunately, some of rgb’s posts display two flaws. And on this thread he has displayed both. This distracts from the exceptional quality of much that he posts on WUWT and can induce unfortunate responses as has happened in this thread.
Firstly, rgb is prone to not admit an inadvertent error (and we all make them). This can result in unfortunate resentment over trivial side-issues, and an example of such resentment was expressed by Julian Flood at December 26, 2012 at 6:21 am. The overlooking of minor mistakes (usually overstatement of certainty) seems to be from the common assumption of academics that they are the fount of unassailable knowledge. Indeed, he stated this in his post at December 26, 2012 at 10:24 pm where he wrote
Actually, he rarely ‘polices’ anything but often provides interesting and insightful opinions based on epistemology. Others do much more ‘policing’ of “physics” and “statistical validity”, notably D Boehm, David M Hoffer, and – to a lesser extent – Willis Eschenbach.
Secondly, and very unfortunately, rgb takes any opportunity to ‘sell’ his religion. This can be disruptive of threads. And, as do most atheists, he fails to recognise that his religion is as faith-based as any other: agnosticism rejects faith but belief that no deity exists (i.e.atheism) is a religious faith of identical kind to belief in the existence of one or more deities (i.e. theism).
Also, rgb seems to think all religions except his own are akin to superstition, and this demonstrates his profound ignorance of religion (a coherent belief system logically constructed from tenets) and superstition (an incoherent mixture of beliefs deriving from fears). Hence, he denigrates all religions except his own.
There are reasons for posters on WUWT to mention their religion and their politics when that indicates the ‘world view’ of the poster. David M Hoffer expressed this in his post at December 26, 2012 at 3:25 pm where he states that it can be important to explain that the science is independent of such ‘world views’. But, as he also stated in that post, the diversity of ‘world views’ is a strength of WUWT. Hence, your article published on Christmas Day appropriately concluded saying
Those concluding statements were an explanation of the ‘world view’ which governs your suggestion that “we should make sure that the rat-hole we dig for their escape from their lavish folly is as commodious as possible”. They were not an invitation to discuss Christianity, atheism or any other religion in this thread except to mention that some other religions would not agree with your charitable assertion of what “we should” do.
There are blogs for discussion of religious ideas, but rgb and some others fail to recognise that WUWT is not one of them.
Again, thankyou for your excellent article and I hope it can lead to a useful cooperation between you and Robert Brown: you are both fine gentlemen.
Richard
The IPCC suggestion of 3.3 deg C per doubling has the additional shortcoming of being non-falsifibable. This conclusion folloows from the non-observability of the equilibrium temperature. The lower values of the equilibrium climate sensitivity (TECS) that have been suggested by people who include Lord Monckton have the same shortcoming. In view of the non-falsifiability, TECS is not a scientifically viable concept.
. As few as a hundred completely random sites would start yielding a halfway decent estimate of the instantaneous average temperature at points (say) 1 meter above the local ground level from a properly designed measurement station. By halfway decent I don’t mean accurate — I mean statistically well-founded — the average would start to satisfy the Central Limit Theorem, permitting us to make a quantitative estimate of the probable location of the actual average compared to the sample average.
This is not true, on many levels. First of all, one can measure temperature. Measuring an “average instantaneous temperature” for the planet is thereby entirely possible. In fact, I can do so by using a single thermometer. The problem isn’t making measurements and forming an instantaneous average, it is correctly and honestly estimating the probable error given a particular pattern of measurements. Using a single thermometer in my own back yard might yield and instantaneous estimate of the mean temperature of the planet, but my back yard isn’t a random site (it is selected on the basis of where people live, in turn where people feel comfortable, which lops of some 80% of the Earth’s surface from consideration, biased sample for sure). One might expect errors as large as the measurement itself, certainly of that order.
We’d do better using a (good) random number generator and dropping thermometers at randomly selected points on the surface of the Earth. This is actually a lot more difficult as it sounds because of the spherical polar coordinate Jacobean, but there are a few ways of generating unbiased random points in
Of course one would do better statistically with far more randomly selected sites. The actual number required to get an accurate estimate within a reasonably small probable error depends on the distribution of temperatures itself — places like Antarctica or the Sahara with relatively little surface area but extreme temperatures have to be independently adequately sampled. It is difficult for me to seat of the pants estimate how many sites would be required to obtain 0.1 C error bars (let’s choose a standard deviation of the data as an error bar, since I invoked the CLT above and the two go hand in hand) but if I did it anyway I’d take the max/min variation of some 100K, pretend that this is the variance (probably not, but it is an estimate of the variance, likely proportional to the variance), require 1/1000 of this as the SD, and hence would guestimate N = 10^6 as being a good number of samples to get there. One might make it with 10^5, as max-min overestimates the variance by at least a factor of 2 but probably less than 10, but I like to wear a belt and suspenders when dealing with a troublesome pair of pants and besides, the data itself will tell you when you have enough.
So let’s say order of a hundred thousand randomly sampled sites, properly measured, will yield an instantaneous average temperature that is likely to be accurate to within a tenth of a degree kelvin. Might make it with 30,000. Probably won’t make it with 10,000. And the sites must be randomly selected or else you are simply introducing a complex anthropic bias into the measurement process and your measurement and result is crap in an unknown way! Randomly selected from the entire sphere, too — no fair leaving out the oceans or places in the remote reaches of Tibet or Mongolia just because they are hard to reach! “Hard to reach” is a bias!
Given a soundly defined instantaneous average temperature, accurate to within 0.1 kelvin, from 100,000 or so sites, defining any of a number of coarse grained interval averaged temperatures is straightforward. A straightforward average over the previous 24 hours is one good one to generate, for example. Not (max – min)/2 — we don’t know a priori that instantaneous temperatures is uniformly or symmetrically distributed across the median or centroid — a true time average obtained by (say) sampling every minute, adding the previously defined instantaneous mean temperatures up, and dividing by 1440. For longer times, one could could generate an averaging kernel — personally I wouldn’t recommend the Heaviside function usually used, but any sort of gaussian or logistic kernel could weight “now” (say, the daily average) most heavily and average in temperatures from before and after that time with a smooth cutoff.
Again, the difficulty isn’t making the measurements and defining a process that leads to a well-defined average — it is computing a meaningful probable error. But this too can be done.
Finally, given any of these temperature series — and personally, I’d strongly recommend using the instantaneous local data sampled every minute before constructing any of these averages, one can do an analysis that gives a completely empirical estimate of the feedbacks on the basis of the analysis of the noise via the fluctuation-dissipation theorem.
The issue isn’t, therefore, whether or not one can measure a meaningful instantaneous mean global temperature to within some precision, or take the time series of both that value and/or the actual global data and analyze it further to obtain meaningful measurement-based estimates of dynamical parameters, it is that this has not been done! At least, not as far as I know. It would cost a lot of money, for one thing — imagine planting 70,000 ARGO buoys at fixed, completely randomly selected locations around the world’s oceans (only worse, as one has to sample the air one meter above the sea surface every minute so the buoys would have to be anchored and have a “permanent” above-the-sea presence at each point, in addition to a diving unit that sampled at depth if you wanted that data too). Imagine the difficulties locating stations in Antarctica or Tibet or in My Back Yard in the event that the dice so dictate. Even permitting a site to be moved by (say) up to a kilometer or two for “convenience” (which sadly will introduce a bias not unlike the one Anthony has documented associated with “convenient” locations for weather stations already) would leave you having to rent locations from arbitrary people in arbitrary cultures with arbitrary political systems. A tough (and expensive) problem.
Alternatively, one can make do — at lower precision — with satellite measurements. Still expensive, but it avoids rental and politics. It also doesn’t return true “surface temperature” measurements, or particularly accurate measurements per site, but it does give you a very large number of points and a fairly uniform/unbiased coverage.
So Terry, it isn’t can’t. It is won’t, can’t afford to, or haven’t (yet). It can be done but hasn’t. So the quantity itself is a perfectly valid scientific quantity, and it is reasonable to explore possible futures based on different values, and one can even contemplate making estimations of its value based on data, as long as one recognizes how terrible that data is, on its very best day.
In figure 1.4 of AR5 (discussed on other threads) the IPCC presents a cartoon graph with a measured temperature “error” estimated at roughly 0.1 kelvin. I doubt it. Perhaps for RSS (alone), but even there, I doubt it. The further back one goes, the larger this error estimate gets, until it properly should be order of a full degree K on up to several degrees K for geological data.
Everybody in climate science is pretending to a knowledge that is much greater than what we probably have, given the best of intentions and a couple hundred years of thermometric data from an enormously biased sampling of the Earth’s surface. Only for the last 33 years do we have anything like an unbiased global estimate of temperature, and it seriously bothers me that it is never given with probable error bars, only with whatever variance is visible in the “perfectly precise” e.g. RSS or UAH LTT. Even for these series, it makes determining (or estimating) what is statistical error in the measurement relative to variation in the quantity being measured almost impossible. The former can be done only with a complicated and directed meta-analysis because it is mixed with the natural variation, making signal and noise and error unresolvable.
Most of what is wrong with climate science could probably be fixed — by turning all the data over to somebody like the CDC, who employs professional statisticians who actually understand things like double blind results, Bayes theorem and the necessity for samples to be random and iid in order for them to yield a meaningful quantity and a meaningful standard error estimate from some statistical analysis of the data. In the meantime, bias (and not just confirmation bias or thumbs deliberately on scales — plenty of the bias is purely anthropic sampling bias like the difficult-to-determine UHI error that could be trivially eliminated by using random site selection instead of using the series we’ve got from thermometers placed near places that people live, or can easily get to).
Will it be fixed? Perhaps in a few decades. Satellite data is already fixing it, or limiting it, in some sense. At some point it is probable that people will invest what it costs to do this right — even a few thousand (say, 10,000) truly randomly selected sites (7000 in the oceans, 3000 on land, give or take) would work wonders by, among other things, providing a truly unbiased sanity check on the claims for “corrrections” of the biased surface data from biased sites that comes from a biased sampling procedure. It also might give us a simple, scalable path to more accurate measurements, as we can just add a few more sites every year at moderate cost until we make the mean instantaneous temperature measurement as accurate as we like.
rgb
rgbatduke:
You seem to have misread me. I do not dispute one’s ability to observe a temperature or to average temperatures observed at varying locations or times. I do dispute one’s ability to observe an equilibrium temperature. If you believe an equilibrium surface air temperature has been observed, please share with me a citation to this result.
NOTE WRT BUDDISM – Evidence that Buddhism is not a religion in the normal sense is also to be found in the number of people holding Buddhist values who also, at the same time, belong to religions like Christianity, Judism, etc.
Of the nominally Christian variants, the Society of Friends stands out as being nearly perfectly compatible with anything in the entire spectrum of belief while being totally respectful, indeed a near perfect rediscovery, of Buddha’s general philosophy. Absolute equality, rejection of scriptural dogma in a theory of “continuous personal revelation” compatible with the idea of incremental and systematic improvement of scientific knowledge, simple tenets. There are atheist Quakers, Buddhist quakers, and one good thing about Quakers is that you can be an atheist and for the most part be perfectly welcome. Your path is your path, and God speaks — or does not speak — to you, no fault no problem either way. But you’ll be happier if you avoid harming your neighbors and live in good fellowship with them.
As a number of people have pointed out, if you strip away the superstition, the myths, the legends, the absurd and prolix rules and rituals and the special interests of the priesthood, all religions end up being practically the same. The heart of all religion is (pick your favorite variant of the) Golden Rule. Personally I prefer the negative variant — Do not do unto your neighbor what you do not want your neighbor to do unto you. The positive variant leaves too much room for people to proselytize and threaten or impose religious tyranny, as they can argue that if they were lost sheep damned to hell they’d want somebody to threaten to burn them at the stake or convert — for your own good of course. But it is difficult to argue with being left pretty much alone as long as your actions do not directly harm others. And the best of all is a middle path — leaving people alone to make their own choices while still helping them out in a compassionate way.
One very interesting book that I can commend to those of you on spiritual journeys with the notion of God is this:
http://www.stillnessspeaks.com/sitehtml/unknown/impersonallife.pdf
This text is clearly of Christian origin, but the description of God it presents is pure Vedantic Hinduism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta
or pure monist pandeism, and the associated claim that the purpose of life and religious contemplation and study is to realize the union, nay, the essential identity, between Atman and Brahman, or Self and God. This is to be heavily contrasted with the strictly dualist interpretations of Christianity that of course “won” the war fought in Nicaea, in part because they were a more convenient state religion for a slaveholding global empire.
It is also worth pointing out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka
or “Vedantic Atheism”, that anticipated and published Hume’s primary conclusions over 2000 years before Hume published them. Buddhism arose out of this same period when the Upanishads were written and Vedic priest-driven Hinduism was subjected to several hundred years of skeptical criticism and transformed from being a top-down religion run by the priests to a religion (or many religions) of personal growth and discovery, religions that ranged from pure Charvaka atheism through Buddhism towards Vedantic Hinduism wherein the notion of the Gods remained, with variations of the Trimurti or Mahavishnu representing Brahman, the ultimate Universal consciousness.
I present this for your information only — not as any sort of endorsement. When I subject the Universe to a rigorous mathematical analysis based on what we know of information theory, information entropy, consciousness, and mechanism, I can see very little hope that the Universe is in any sense alive and self-aware beyond our individual awarenesses (which are indeed a part of the Universe becoming self aware of the rest, however poorly and imperfectly). There is no real evidence that it is — the Universe does not behave like a sentient thing. There is no plausible mechanism for any hypothetical awareness — what we do know of it is that it requires an incredibly complex physical apparatus to exist at all and it goes away or is damaged irreparably by damage to that apparatus (or simple administration of drugs that block the electrophysiological processes of neural activity). Our knowledge may not be perfect, but it isn’t nothing, and nothing in our knowledge suggests the possibility of some sort of world-consciousness.
But still, some sort of extension of this concept is at least not logically or mathematically incompatible with the existence of God — and The Impersonal Life channels the outline of the sort-of Christian spiritual pandeist point of view rather perfectly. And as far as I can see, it is harmless. The organized scriptural religions with their dominating priesthood and dogmatic rules defining things like homosexuality as being “evil” and women as being “unclean” or portraying God as a vengeful demon — including Vedic Hinduism, to some extent — are far from harmless.
rgb
richardscourtney says:
” belief that no deity exists (i.e.atheism) is a religious faith of identical kind to belief in the existence of one or more deities ”
must nullify the null hypothesis, eh mastah richard?
i recognize this as the most favored argument of the creationist.
so did trenbreth.
it doesn’t work when somebody names your game.
agnosticism rejects faith but belief that no deity exists (i.e.atheism) is a religious faith of identical kind to belief in the existence of one or more deities (i.e. theism).
Not at all. Atheism is just what it says it is. The lack of belief in any god or gods. Not the active belief that there are no god or gods. Its simplest expression is: there is no evidence for the existence of a god or gods. No matter how “appealing” an argument for them might be on other grounds, I do not believe much in things for which there is no evidence.
I apply the same criterion to magnetic monopoles. There are lovely arguments for their existence. Seriously, physics itself would be apparently incomplete (as far as we know so far) without them. Yet we fail to find any. Lack of evidence is not positive evidence of lack, but it damn sure is lack of evidence.
This is a common mistake made (or tactic used) by people seeking to defend religious belief — the assertion that atheism is itself a “religious belief”.
It is not, any more than my lack of faith in the existence of a monopole is equivalent to a belief that none exist.
rgb
= = = = = =
richardscourtney,
A couple of comments wrt your comment.
It was I that introduced in this thread the definition of religion as profound belief in the supernatural and in superstitions. It was not rgbatduke. He and I were very civilly discussing that in context of this post on WUWT by Christopher Monckton who introduced us to an excellent scientific discussion and also to some very solemnly explicit religious statements. With Anthony’s and the moderator’s tolerance many commentors took Monckton’s lead in pursuing science topics and religious topics. You imply that is out-of-bounds even when Monckton served it up. If Anthony and the moderators say it is then it is.
The philosophy of science and the history of science is replete with these kind of discussions of what science is and by comparison what religion is. In fact that kind of discussion is very necessary to comprehensively talk about objectivity in knowledge and what reality is. That kind of historically important discussion is taking place here and predominately in a civil manner which is surprising considering that religious beliefs are critically discussed. That said, it is solely at the discretion of our host Anthony.
You might consider that the discussion necessarily turned to Hume, Kant, LP and Popper philosophies. The inclusion of religious versus science discussion forced us to those topics philosophies which are very relevant to the climate science dialog.
John
rgbatduke:
I see that at December 29, 2012 at 11:48 am you quote me in another of your deflections of this thread with yet another of your displays of ignorance concerning religion. Indeed, your posts have encouraged gnomish to display willful stupidity on the subject. I am answering this one point purely to state the degree of your error, and I will not reply to any other posts from you about religion on WUWT.
I wrote
You have replied with this nonsense
Nonsense!
Agnosticism is a rejection of belief concerning a deity or deities.
Atheism is the belief that there is no deity.
Theism is the belief that a deity or deities exist.
If you want to discus theology then I am willing to educate you but not on WUWT.
Richard
RichardSCourtney
I am not so sure that Agnosticism is a rejection of belief in a deity in all cases.The dictionary definition ‘A view that nothing is or can be known of a god or of anything but material phenomena’
only goes so far.When you talk to Agnostics though there is a wide variety of belief that is outside the bounds of dictionary definition.
Asking my agnostic father his belief gives the lie of the land.
Do you believe there is a god? Answer,’ I think there probably is, but I can’t be sure.’
Do you believe in life after death?
Answer ‘I very much doubt it, but will be interested to find out.”
John Whitman:
At December 29, 2012 at 12:20 pm you assert to me
There is NO “versus”. They are different and complimentary but absolutely NOT mutually exclusive.
If you want to promote your religion then do it on an appropriate blog. There are several but WUWT is not one of them.
Richard
John Whitman says:
December 29, 2012 at 12:20 pm
Farmerbraun says :
Amen.
= = = = = = =
richardscourtney,
Someone’s insistence of religion as true makes no obligation on someone who finds religion irrelevant to objective knowledge and reality. Let the religionists prove their claims true scientifically and others can do critical skeptical analysis. I have found in my 62 years that most religious people do understand their beliefs are fundamentally not in need of proof or logic or science to be true to themselves . . . . most are epistemologically honest about that. Most scientists have some religion, anyone can critically evaluate rather easily whether religious belief informs some scientific basis . . . . no problema in practice.
Also, the term atheist and agnostic and many such terms are religious sourced/created terms. I simply refuse to use such rigged terms. They can and should be avoided if we are to be objective about discussion of science, reality and religion.
John
@richard Courtney:
Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities.[1][2] In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities.[3][4][5] Most inclusively, atheism is simply the absence of belief that any deities exist.[4][5][6][7] Atheism is contrasted with theism,[8][9] which in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists.[9][10]
See that ? Absence of belief. Not belief in absence.
Richard wrote: agnosticism rejects faith .
Agnosticism is more passive than active; it simply states “unknown and (apparently) unknowable”.
No rejection is involved; simply observation.
cheer up, poor richard – i have good news for you.
prepare for the revelation!
i think that you shall never see
a supernatural deity
and here’s what makes it so much fun-
you can’t prove there isn’t one!
so when i tell you ‘i made god’
you can’t tell me it’s a fraud.
for it is one of nature’s laws
that every thing requires a cause
so how can there be any doubt
once you reallly think it out –
for god to say ‘let there be light’
had and english teacher, right?
and thence ensues hilarity
for you can’t prove it wasn’t me.
for we all know that divine truth-
is not found in a polling booth…
but now draw near for a vital lesson.
and you shall hear my poor confession-
you can’t make a prince by kissing a frog.
nor trust the bark of a dyslexic dog.