How the profiteers who market Thermageddon offend against the principles of formal logic
Guest post by Monckton of Brenchley
LOGIC is the heartbeat of all true learning – the soul of the Classics, the Sciences and Religion. Once everyone studied the Classics, to know that in logic there is a difference between true and false; the Sciences, to discern where it lies; and Religion, to appreciate why it matters. Today, few study all three empires of the mind. Fewer study the ordered beauty of the logic at their heart.
Is Private Fraser’s proposition that “We’re a’ doomed!” logical? I say No. G.K. Chesterton once wrote: “When men have ceased to believe in Christianity, it is not that they will believe in nothing. They will believe in anything.” The belief that Thermageddon will arise from our altering 1/3000th of the atmosphere in a century is in-your-face illogical, rooted in a dozen fallacies marked out by Aristotle as the commonest in human discourse.
“Consensus” is the New Religion’s central fallacy. Arguing blindly from consensus is the head-count fallacy, the argumentum ad populum. Al-Haytham, founder of the scientific method, wrote: “The seeker after truth does not put his faith in any mere consensus. Instead, he checks.”
Two surveys have purported to show 97% of climate scientists supporting the supposed “consensus”. In both, 97% agreed little more than that the world has warmed since 1950. So what? One involved just 79 scientists, hardly a scientific sample size. Neither was selected to eliminate bias. Neither asked whether manmade global warming was at all likely to prove catastrophic – a question expecting the answer “No.”
Claiming that the “consensus” is one of revered experts is the argumentum ad verecundiam, the fallacy of appeal to authority. T.H. Huxley said in 1860, “The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties: blind faith the one unpardonable sin.”
Believers talk of a “consensus of evidence”. Yet evidence cannot hold opinions. Besides, there has been no global warming for 18 years; sea level has risen for eight years at just 1.3 in/century; notwithstanding Sandy, hurricane activity is at its least in the 33-year satellite record; ocean heat content is rising four and a half times more slowly than predicted; global sea-ice extent has changed little; Himalayan glaciers have not lost ice; and the U.N.’s 2005 prediction of 50 million “climate refugees” by 2010 was absurd. The evidence does not support catastrophism.
Believers say: “Only if we include a strong warming effect from CO2 can we explain the past 60 years’ warming. We know of no other reason.” This is the argumentum ad ignorantiam, the fundamental fallacy of argument from ignorance. Besides, natural variability is reason enough.
They say: “Global warming is accelerating, so we are to blame.” Even if warming were accelerating, this non sequitur is an instance of the argumentum ad causam falsam, the fallacy of arguing from a false cause. They go on to say: “CO2 concentration has risen; warming has occurred; the former caused the latter.” This is the post hoc ergo propter hoc sub-species of the same fallacy.
They say: “What about the cuddly polar bears?” This is the argumentum ad misericordiam, the fallacy of needless pity. There are five times as many polar bears as there were in the 1940s – hardly, as you may think, the profile of a species at imminent threat of extinction. No need to pity the bears, and they are not cuddly.
They say: “We tell the models there will be strong CO2- driven warming. And, yes, the models predict it.” This is the fallacy of arguing in circles, the argumentum ad petitionem principii, where the premise is the conclusion.
They say: “Global warming caused extra-tropical storm Sandy.” This inappropriate argument from the general to the particular is the argumentum a dicto simpliciter ad dictum secundum quid, the fallacy of accident. Individual extreme events cannot be ascribed to global warming.
They say: “Melting Arctic sea ice is a symptom of global warming.” This unsound argument from the particular to the general is the argumentum a dicto secundum quid ad dictum simpliciter, the fallacy of converse accident. Arctic sea ice is melting, but the Antarctic has cooled for 30 years and the sea ice there is growing, so the decline in Arctic sea ice does not indicate a global problem.
They say: “Monckton says he’s a member of the House of Lords, but the Clerk says he isn’t, so he’s not credible.” This is the argumentum ad hominem, a shoddy sub- species of ignoratio elenchi, the fundamental red-herring fallacy of ignorance of how a true argument is conducted.
They say: “We don’t care what the truth is. We want more power, tax and regulation. Global warming is our pretext. If you disagree, we will haul you before the International Climate Court.” This is the nastiest of all logical fallacies: the argumentum ad baculum, the argument of force.
These numerous in-your-face illogicalities provoke four questions: Has the Earth warmed as predicted? If not, why not? What if I am wrong? And what if I am right?
Q1. Has the Earth warmed as predicted? In 1990 the IPCC predicted that the world would now be warming at 0.3 Cº/decade, and that by now more than 0.6 Cº warming would have occurred. The outturn was less than half that: just 0.14 Cº/decade and 0.3 Cº in all.
In 2008 leading modellers wrote:
“The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 years or more, suggesting that an absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the observed warming rate.”
Yet the linear trend on the Hadley/CRU monthly global temperature anomalies for the 18 years 1995-2012 shows no statistically-significant warming, even though the partial pressure of CO2 rose by about a tenth in that time.
The modellers’ own explicit criterion proves their scary predictions exaggerated. Their vaunted “consensus” was wrong. Global warming that was predicted for tomorrow but has not occurred for 18 years until today cannot have caused Sandy or Bopha yesterday, now, can it?
Q2: Why was the “consensus” wrong? Why do the models exaggerate? The climate-sensitivity equation says warming is the product of a forcing and a sensitivity parameter. Three problems: the modellers’ definition of forcing is illogical; their assumptions about the sensitivity parameter are not falsifiable; and their claims that their long-term predictions of doom are reliable are not only empirically disproven but theoretically insupportable.
Modellers define forcing as the net down-minus-up flux of radiation at the tropopause, with surface temperature fixed. Yet forcings change surface temperature. So the definition offends against the fundamental postulate of logic that a proposition and its converse cannot coexist. 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.
Direct warming is little more than 1 Cº per CO2 doubling, well within natural variability. It is not a crisis. So the modellers introduce amplifying or “positive” temperature feedbacks, which, they hope, triple the direct warming from CO2. Yet this dubious hypothesis is not Popper- falsifiable, so it is not logic and not science. Not one of the imagined feedbacks is either empirically measurable or theoretically determinable by any reliable method. As an expert reviewer for the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, I have justifiably excoriated its net-positive feedbacks as guesswork – uneducated guesswork at that.
For there is a very powerful theoretical reason why the modellers’ guess that feedbacks triple direct warming is erroneous. The closed-loop feedback gain implicit in the IPCC’s climate-sensitivity interval 3.3[2.0, 4.5] Cº per CO2 doubling falls on the interval 0.62[0.42, 0.74]. However, process engineers building electronic circuits, who invented feedback mathematics, tell us any loop gain much above zero is far too near the singularity – at a loop gain of 1 – in the feedback-amplification function.
At high gain, 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 inconsistent with a loop gain anywhere near as close to the singularity as modellers’ estimates imply.
Surface temperature changes little, for homoeostatic conditions prevail. The atmosphere’s lower bound, the ocean, is a vast heat-sink 1100 times denser than the air: one reason why 3000 bathythermographs deployed in 2006 have detected no significant ocean warming. The atmosphere’s upper bound is outer space, to which any excess heat radiates harmlessly away. Homoeostasis, then, is what we should expect, and it is what we get. Thus the climatic loop gain cannot much exceed zero, so the warming at CO2 doubling will be a harmless 1 Cº.
Yet the overriding difficulty in trying to model the climate is that it behaves as a chaotic object. We can never measure 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 the evolution of all objects that behave chaotically. Therefore, reliable, very-long-term modelling of future climate states is unattainable a priori.
The IPCC tries to overcome this actually insuperable Lorenz constraint on modelling by estimating climate sensitivity via a probability-density function. Yet PDFs require more, not less, information than simple estimates flanked by error-whiskers, and are still less likely to be reliable. The modellers are guessing. Their guesses have been proven wrong. Yet they continue to demand our acquiescence in an imagined (and imaginary) consensus.
Q3: What if I am wrong? If so, we must travel from physics to 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 cost of failing to prevent warming of that order this century will be about 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 typical CO2-mitigation schemes as cost-ineffective as Australia’s carbon tax would be 48 times greater than the cost of later adaptation. At a zero discount rate, the cost of acting now exceeds that of adapting in the future 36 times over.
How so? Australia emits just 1.2% of Man’s CO2, of which Ms. Gillard aims to cut 5% this decade, abating 0.06% of global emissions by 2020. Then CO2 concentration will fall from a predicted 410 μatm to 409.988 μatm. In turn predicted temperature will fall by 0.00006 Cº. But the cost will be $130 billion ($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 thus be ineffective: measures expensive enough to be effective will be unaffordable. Since the premium vastly exceeds the cost of the risk, don’t insure. That is a precautionary principle worthy of the name.
Q4: What if I am right? When I am proven right, the Climate Change Department will be swept away; Britain’s annual deficit will fall by a fifth; the bat-blatting, bird- blending windmills that scar our green and pleasant land will go; the world will refocus on real environmental problems like deforestation on land, overfishing at sea and pollution of the air; the U.N.’s ambition to turn itself into a grim, global dictatorship with overriding powers of taxation and economic and environmental intervention will be thwarted; and the aim of science to supplant true religion as the world’s new, dismal, cheerless credo will be deservedly, decisively, definitively defeated.
Any who say “I believe” are not scientists, for true scientists say “I wonder”. We require – nay, we demand – more awe and greater curiosity from our scientists, and less political “correctness” and co-ordinated credulity.
To the global classe politique, the placemen, bureaucrats, academics, scientists, journalists and enviros who have profiteered at our expense by peddling Thermageddon, I say this. The science is in; the truth is out; Al Gore is through; the game is up; and the scare is over.
To those scientists who aim to end the Age of Reason and Enlightenment, I say this. Logic stands implacable in your path. We will never let you have your new Dark Age.
To men of goodwill, lovers of logic, I say this. It is our faculty of reason, the greatest of the soul’s three powers, that marks us out from the beasts and brings us closest in likeness to our Creator, the Lord of Life and Light. We will never let the light of Reason be snuffed out.
Do not go gentle to that last goodnight – Rage, rage against the dying of the light!
John West:
At January 6, 2013 at 11:49 pm you ask
Probably not, but I am not surprised at what has happened as is shown by my warning about it at January 6, 2013 at 12:19 pm where I said
But my warning “fell on stony ground” so this thread has been destroyed in the same way as the thread of the previous WUWT article by Lord Monckton at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/25/bethlehem-and-the-rat-hole-problem/
Indeed, both threads were most fervently attacked by evangelism of atheism from rgbatduke and John Whitman.
In this thread rgbatduke says he is a convert to atheism from Christianity. I wonder if John Whitman is also a convert to atheism from some other religion. Converts to any religion are usually fervent and often extreme in the their views.
In the other destroyed thread I wrote at January 4, 2013 at 1:57 am
WUWT has a policy of restricting discussion of Creationism. In my opinion, the recent destruction of the two threads indicates that WUWT also needs a policy of restricting discussion of atheism.
Richard
Robert Brown: if you go along with the idea that we might be part of a simulation then another question arises: why? Why did the programmer set the simulation running? What was the purpose? ‘To love him and serve him’ as the penny catechism says might not be far from the truth – at least as far as the ‘serve him’ bit goes (and ignoring the gender specific language for a bit as well). Maybe, the simulation is running to solve a problem. Perhaps the programmer wants to find the underlying nature of reality but cannot solve the hardest problem of all: the conundrum at the heart of quantum mechanics, how can a subatomic particle be both a particle and a wave? It needs the properties of both but he or she cannot reconcile the problem revealed by the double slit experiment. So, he sets the simulation running with sufficient boundary conditions to allow one outcome (us) have a chance of solving the problem. The boundary conditions set by the programmer have given us a ‘Goldilocks’ universe which ensures that no matter how daft we are (i.e., regularly kill one another , pump Gigatons of CO2 into our atmosphere) our propensity to reproduce and our planet’s response to GHG’s serve to counteract any adverse effect. It all seems reasonable to me. There is a God and global warming isn’t a problem. But, what happens if we discover the answer? Will our creator’s problem be solved? Will the stars start going out?
But there is one further possibility – maybe the programmer’s stars will start to go out too and so on back up an infinite chain of frustrated computer programmers demonstrating (a) that we have the power to wipe out not just one but all possible universes and (b) to all who care to run such a simulation that reality is impossible – even when simulated.
Just thinking – as they say.
jdseanjd says: January 7, 2013 at 3:50 am
There is also an article on the new american site about the bullying EPA losing a case, in the supreme court, against the sackett family, but I cant put my hand on the reference.
EPA Wetlands Sacketts PLF
http://www.pacificlegal.org/Sackett
rgbatduke says:
January 6, 2013 at 10:40 pm
“Then, something about scientists holding themselves accountable as renters (tenants) of some dwelling?”
The term “rent seekers” is used by economists for one who tries to obtain a cash flow from some economic activity where he produces nothing. It does not apply only to landlords. Brokering “Carbon Credits” is a good example of rent-seeking behavior. Seeking to profit from “Global Warming” is another.
There are some people on here with too much time on their hands. Trying to unscrew the inscrutable, page after page, accomplishes what exactly? “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the eruditist of them all?”
RGB says….”Not fair to cheat and just make intelligence an a priori infinitely improbable characteristic of your infinite eternity and explain the visible Universe however improbable you want to judge it in ignorance, with the an even less probable uncaused cause judged in even greater ignorance as it is out there where it cannot even in principle be observed, slipping the pea neatly under the shell.”
RGB, you consider that the assertion of an infinite energy (omnipotence) beyond time and space casuesless cause to have intelligence to be “infinitely improbable” and you further state that my assertion that the observable universe is improbable by chance, is a judgement of ignorance. Curious that you ignored the logic of my argument entirely. You consider that although science has found that a random manifestation of the first forces could have had billions of possibilities, and that everyone of them, except the one which happened, would have resulted in rapid dissolution and entropy, short circuiting all forms of life and most elements, to be “infinitely improbable”
I explained the illogic of your postion here…”multiverses are just a theory, not an observation as is OUR universe, the only one we have to observe. Furthermore, even if we are one of billions of multiverses, it is pure ASSUMPTION that those universes have created random forces and they just fail, for all we know they all function just as ours does. The KNOWN observations do not fit random happenstance. The argument against the OBSERVATION is based on theory, and purely speculative assumptions about that theory, IE, Theoretically multi verses could be real, theoretically this reality could be random (premise) and they could all fail, therefore our OBSERVATIONS of what appears to be incredibly unlikely intelligent manifestation in this universe, is random chance.(premise matches conclusion) It is a logic fail, .petitio principia. And finally multiverses, brane theory, cyclic big bang, all do nothing to address the already presented cause dilemma, they just regresses it further, what caused that universe, what caused the one before ours, etc.
Actually the pea is a priori slipped under the shell in all arguments, including yours, as you have admitted to certain answers being unknowable. My effort was to articulate the logic of why, via “science” the answer is unknowable, although logically inferred that a cuseless cause is necessary, and logically that causeless cause must have attributes beyond science, which and by definition only see a “quantifiable” part of the whole. I will take a mathmatical appoach in my second appoach in articulating the dilemma of duality, or why science can not explain it self , Science is fit indeed to discover the laws of an already existing and functioning cosmos, but powerless to explain, via it own methods how it, “everything inclusive’ came to be, and logically it must still admit that the mystery exists, and is forever beyond science, or “under the shell” as you say.
Mathmatically there are three fields. Field one is “nothing” a big zero, it has no energy, no attributes, nothing, nada zip. It cannot be the cause of everything inclusive”, everything cannot have come from nothing.
Field two is one through any number. Field two is the domain of science, and can be both an effect and a cause. Two plus two equals four. Four is the effect, two and two are the cause.
Everything in this field (1 through any number) demands both cause and effect. Everything in this field is relative. It must be able to be measured and quantified. It is subject to time, which runs in one direction, and space.
Classical mechanical theory and quantum physics still require relativity, and to be quantified. A photon is something, and quantifiable. The Higgs field, if found will be quantifiable. The Singularity must be described in other then absolute terms, or suffers being placed under the same shell you place I.D. Every effect is proceeded by a prior cause. There can be no effect without a prior cause. All causes are themselves an effect. Cause and effect is a chain and it, with the arrow of time, moves in one direction. In this sense science is the study of how all things in the cosmos interact, and the laws that govern those interactions. Science is constrained to time and space and relativity. Science cannot contain absolutes. I maintain that science is, in its essence, “cause and effect” as quantified by relative numbers.
Field two is incapable of giving one hypothetical “first cause” no matter how right or wrong, which is not relative and in turn demands another prior cause. And this is the dilemma of field two. It cannot explain itself. It is perfectly suited to examine and explain how it operates. However it cannot logically explain how it came to be, yet it cannot always have been. To state that everything came from nothing (Field one) is not science. To state that “everything” always was, is an assertion of ignorance, not a scientific explanation. Steady state theory, brane theory, cyclic big bang theory, all in essence, state that everything in field two is a complete mystery, and always will be, because everything inclusive, (quantifiable by one through any number) themselves have no cause, having always been.
Any attempt, via field two tools to explain “one“, the “first caused” will invariable lead scientist to infinite energy beyond time and space explanations. When a scientist says something is beyond time and space he is not saying what it is, he is saying what it is not. He is making a confession of the limitation of his tools. A confession of inability, is not an answer. Logically and mathematically Field two cannot explain or deny field three, or itself, it can only explain things within itself, and due to the arrow of time, every number but one. Any adjective used which can be quantified by a number, can in turn be an effect, or resulting sum from a proceeding cause. Marconi stated, “The inability of science to solve life’s mystery is absolute.” Field two cannot explain absolutes.
Science can eventually explain everything in field two, “One through any number” except for “one”, the first caused. “One” is unique in this field, in that it can never be explained without relating to field three. One is the “first caused” anything that is measurable and quantifiable. Field two is the perfect agnostic and logically states, I cannot know. All scientist who hold science as the sole means of knowing anything should logically be agnostic.
Field three is infinity. It is not a number. It cannot be measured. Nothing on its own or combined inclusive ever done in field two can equal field three. One trillion times one trillion, is no closer to measuring field three then one plus one. It is not subject to time or relativity. It is a concept that cannot be denied, yet cannot defined by field two. The human brain, being a field two construct, cannot explain yet cannot deny the existence of field three. Any attempt to imagine the end of space or the beginning of time for instance, is forever met by the inevitable question, “What is beyond that? What came before that? When talking of the expansion of space the human brain says expansion into what?
Field three is undeniable, yet forever immeasurable, and forever beyond the scope of field two, “one through any number“. Science can only deal with things which can be measured. Field three is transcendent, and beyond field two.
Any attempt, via field two tools to explain “one“, the “first caused” will invariable lead scientist to infinite energy beyond time and space explanations.
Given that field two cannot explain itself, the only logical answer to what caused the “first caused” is in field three. Field three is the “first cause:, beyond the laws of “cause and effect” saying to field two, I exist, you cannot deny me, and you cannot measure me, I can cause you, you can never cause me. I can live without you, you cannot live without me, I am transcendent. You can only know me by transcending field two.
The paradox of “cause and effect” demands an eternal and infinite beyond time and space causeless cause. The existence of anything relative, and therefore subject to the law of cause and effect, one photon for example, requires, at the end of the chain of cause and effect, something absolute, something beyond things relative to have always been, something transcendent, or capable of existence beyond the tools of science. The observable universe indicates that intelligence is a part of that infinite energy first cause.
.
God is energy. Einstein seems to have ascribed to the “ether” hypothesis. In any case, there is an order to life, and to the universe, and it follows the laws of physics. The problem is, our understanding of physics is incomplete. The God of Christianity is mostly silliness, based on superstitious fantasies and myths. But, it works for a lot of people.
Hmmmn.
So what exactly defines a “miracle” … That is, at what level of improbability must even the most skeptical of a “scientist” accept that a “miracle” has indeed happened, and therefore, there must be a God/”god”/gods/intelligent designer/unintelligent designer/Gaea/Nature/Evolution/Big Banger arranging all of this stuff we know exists and are surrounded by? As one example:
1. Assume the Milky Way is not rotating.
2. The earth weighs 5.98 x 10^24 kg – essentially all of it heavy metals and atoms greater than the “Big Bang’s H2,He, and Li – but is inside a solar system weighing 1.99 x 10 ^30 kg, so any single atom blowing in from the galaxy only has a 3 in 10^ -6 chance of “landing” somewhere in the original solar system dust cloud and become “earthbound” … Doesn’t matter where the rest of the dust in the universe/galaxy/solar system goes, it didn’t land on earth.
3. The earth has some 1.33 x 10^50 atoms in it, almost none of it hydrogen or helium, so all of its atoms must have come from another star’s supernova dust cloud. (Most isotopes lighter than iron could have come from only one supernova sequence, but most isotopes above Fe-Ni (56 AW) need two or three supernova cycles. Let’s ignore those grandchildren and great-grandchildren isotopes for now.)
4. The Crab Nebula became visible in 1054 AD (1000 years ago, near enough) but is 6500 light years away. None of its atoms have gotten here yet.
It is now 11 light years across, so the dust cloud is 5.5 light-years/1000 years or 1500 km/sec. (Assume 5 light-years/1000 year for the dust velocity.)
Astronomers think some 20% of the original star is left, so assume 80% of each supernova got randomly blown into space from each explosion.
Question: If all of the 10^50 heavy atoms on earth were built up in first-generation supernova’s like the Crab Nebula, and then were randomly blown by that exploding supernova across the galaxy into our solar system, how many Crab Nebula’s were required to simultaneously blow up if all of them were in a sphere only only 5 light years away from the solar system? [Obviously, if they were any further away, or if the random supernovas blew up too early to become part of the solar system’s dust cloud, or were traveling too fast to be captured by what would become part of the solar system’s dust cloud, or were thrown out too slow to get here in time, or were formed but were inside another star gravity field and never thrown back into space, even more dust would be lost in space, but let’s keep the problem easy. 8<)
Add in the real world of rotating galaxies and moving "targets" of future dust clouds … If some of the supernova's blew up too early, their gas would "float across" the prototype solar system dust cloud too early to be collected into the "earth". Those coming in too late would "miss" the earth's orbit as well, since the continents have been solid since 4.3 billion years ago. Again, let's keep it easy and assume all of the dust arrived just in time to be "stopped" and collected into a dust cloud that conveniently began rotating at just the right speed to condense into planets at just the right distance from the just right star size at just the right gravity at just the right solar intensity …..
We are told that the universe is expanding, so all that dust formed elsewhere needed to arrive at the solar system before the source supernova’s got too far away. Again, let’s keep it simple, and just assume that all of the supernova’s blew up at a single convenient distance with the same exit velocity from each supernova so all of the scattering dust got here at the same time to be collected into the future solar system so it could begin condensing into our planet.
Question: If the solar system and earth are 4.5 billion years old – and I've got a fossil dated 3.5 billion years ago on my shelf so I know life began at least that early! – how many supernova's had to be created, go through their lifetime, and then blow up per second ( between say 12 billions ago and 6 billion years ago) to make those 10^50 atoms so they could come into the solar system and be grouped by gravity into our planet's orbit in time for the continents to form 4.5 billion years ago?
PS. I'm a nuclear engineer, so the whole building-up-atoms-by-fusion makes sense to me. The carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc burning of each shell in each star makes sense to me. I've designed and handled nuclear weapons, and have counted individual atoms as they decay. The theory is correct – one atom at a time that is. But creating 10^150 atoms (?) by fusion in a random number of supernova's, then randomly blowing them into space until 10^50 of them "just happen" to all collect into the right part of the earth's orbit at exactly the right time and the right velocity so they accumulate together?
At some point in time, no "scientist" can claim "random chance" any more. 8<)
Oh, by the way, the "Book" that we now have – the one written by those ignorant wandering shepherds that couldn't even get through the desert in less than 40 years? It DOES record all that we now know about the Big Bang, formation of the elements as light cooled into matter and was gathered into the solar system and planets, formation of one single continent surrounded by a single sea and its subsequent breakup, evolution of the plants, the greening of the atmosphere and revelation of the stars and moon, evolution beginning in the sea, then moving to land with the dinosaurs, then mammals, then snakes, then man/Man … All in exactly the right sequence of events. Before "scientists" had ever discovered what those shepherds already knew about fusion, quarks, nucleons, or plate tectonics.
Now, I do grant you that the dates are a little off. But heck, what's a shepherd going to use when the zero had not yet been invented, much less decimal places or powers of ten?
richardscourtney says:
January 6, 2013 at 4:00 pm
“It is important that evangelism of atheism or any other religion NOT be permitted to destroy this thread in like manner.”
I can’t let this calumny against non -believers on this site just pass.
Non -belief in something does not equate to having faith in a belief system, no matter how many people of ‘faith’ come on and say it, in an attempt to portray it is just the other side of the coin they are looking at and is therefore a ‘religion in itself.
Given all the possible things that could be stated as a fact in the world I disbelieve far more than I believe in.
I don’t believe in gods, fairies, santa claus, vampires, ghosts and werewolves. I also don’t believe aliens are currently visiting Earth etc etc etc. There are plenty of people out there who do believe in some of these things.
Leaving aside gods what theism are non -believers in these things suffering from? Please name the theism for each of these things.
There are some things I do believe in. Gravity is one. I am certain that when I take my next step I wont suddenly fly off into space. I cannot prove this by establishing the exact nature of gravity at all quantum levels, it is not known to me (or anyone) yet. However, there is enough empirical evidence out there for me to accept its existence and effects.
If, however, you truly believe and have faith in an omnipotent and active god, that is the ONLY thing you can believe in. You must believe that when you take that next step you can indeed go flying into space at gods will.
Unless of course you believe the gods have created a universe with immutable laws and processes that they themselves cannot interfere with and events must proceed in accordance with these laws and that random chance and events will decide the future. Of course if you believe that then you believe what I believe in, that we do indeed live in a godless universe notwithstanding its creation. We are godless because the gods created it as so and we can proceed on evidence and science to try and work out the universal laws and completely discount the supernatural because it does not exist in this universe.
Alternatively you can just believe in an omnipotent god and forget the rest.
Alan
Don’t waste your time Anthony. I mentioned this very same page to her last time but she obviously couldn’t be bothered. I suspect she’s another eco-hypocrite.
I think she’s fishing for visitors to [her] awful website as she keeps linking to it and repeats her same old rubbish. I suggest you BAN her for trying to constantly throw threads off topic.
Indeed, global atmospheric-oceanic circulation patterns constitute a “complex dynamic system,” that is, one with three or more mutually interacting variables. By mathematical and physical necessity (Newton’s “three-body problem”) such systems are chaotic/fractal, non-random but indeterminate, self-similar on every scale– subject to Edward Lorenz’s celebrated “butterfly effect,” a “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” that renders all non-linear projections futile.
That said, geophysics unequivocally demonstrate that in long-term global contexts of (say) minimum 10-million years, solar-driven atmospheric-oceanic conditions reflect the underlying reality not of “climate” but of plate tectonics. In brief, Earth’s current 2.6-million year Pleistocene Era is defined by cyclically recurring Ice Ages averaging c. 102,000 years, interspersed with 12,250-year remissions such as our fading Holocene Interglacial Epoch.
Since post-Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) Boundary eras typically last 12 to 16-million years, it seems that periodic Pleistocene glaciations will persist another 10 to 14-million years, until North and South American continental landmasses drift apart sufficiently to re-open Eastern vs. Western Hemispheric circulation patterns. Astronomical cycles, solar irradiation, accumulating atmospheric trace-gases such as CO2, have precisely zero bearing on Earth’s continental dispositions.
Citing logical fallacies in regard to manifestly non-rational CAGW scenarios, which are in fact propaganda exercises designed explicitly as rent-seeking elitists’ global power-grabs, is a mug’s game. As Planet Earth enters upon a 70-year “dead sun” Maunder Minimum similar to that of 1645 – 1715, likely the precursor to a cyclical resurgence of Ice Time, warmists’ murderous sabotage of global energy economies accords with totalitarian fantasists such as Keith Farnish, Kentti Linkola, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber. Anyone unacquainted with these death-eating Luddite sociopaths has much to learn.
Centers for Disease Control says:
January 6, 2013 at 7:08 pm
Before Marx and Engels, Atheism was called Narcissism. Worship of self. Cain suffered from it, as did Lucifer.
You and I are definitely on a different page regarding definitions CDC. Your statement has no logical basis to it at all; Not ‘believing ” in an imaginary deity as a logical explanation of the existence of all things, makes one a narcissist?
I’m not sure it is a fair debate if you just get to make things up.
The question also arises: Did Cain really exist, or was this some sort of cautionary tale (a fairy story if you will?) passed down over many generations? Or perhaps confused retelling of a more recent event of a dysfunctional family?
We perhaps need not debate who, what, where or the possibility of the existence of the other chap you mention, he is sort of in the same bracket as most of the gods we get told about.
It is the oldest and most basic religion.
No doubt early primates at some stage developed a sense of “self”. Which is by no means, or by any interpretation, narcissism. And given that religion is a structured and ordered system of beliefs, an awareness of self is not in any way, or by any interpretation, a religion.
If you say there is no God, by the rules of logic, you have just declared yourself to be God, able to make such a statement. Sorry, that’s a more implausible tale than the one that declares a Just and Loving God would make His will clearly known to the people He created by way of the written and spoken word.
And I am sorry to say, to me that is just meaningless waffle, which would be much more impressive delivered in sonorous tones, amidst pomp and ceremony in an awe inspiring setting (say, a cathedral, replete with jewel like stained glass filtering the light, and soaring columns reaching to the ceilings far above ….. ).
It reminds me of something:
Sometimes out of morbid fascination, I watch TV evangelists in full flow, as, barely pausing for breath, they expound deep and meaningful “truths”, such as the above. I sometimes, for my amusement, roll the sentences around in my mind and try to elicit what was really said, or if there is any meaning in there. There is not, of course. Their secret, I think, is to be able to keep the flow going, throwing in enough rote learned phrases and elaborating on interpretations of meaning and really just making up the derived “truths” or “lessons” as they go. And it is an impressive and effective talent indeed.
RACookPE1978 says: January 7, 2013 at 7:09 am
“…At some point in time, no “scientist” can claim “random chance” any more. 8<)…."
I’m guessing here, that you are implying “somebody” did it.
If so, he was dang busy at the time – there are estimated to be about 30 billion planetary systems in our galaxy alone.
If things don’t add up to your satisfaction on your time scale, you should perhaps bear in mind the possibility your shepherds may not the only ones to get timings (or even the basic theories) wrong. They didn’t have zero, and who knows what we don’t know?
Thanks, rgbatduke, Monckton & others, for the interesting discussion.
Ignorance is infinite.
@richard Courtney, consider your argument made.
Invokation of any God, is pure trolling.
@Alan Millar, we are all un-believers in one faith or another.
We argue the logical fallacies of the Carbon Dioxide Cult, what I perceive as, abuse of the scientific method.We are interested in negating their attempts to cloak a cause in science as a cover for power over people.
Just because the Carbon Cultists have earned, disrespectful labelling such as I do here, does not mean we will profit from arguing religion.
Back to what we know and can know.
What I am seeking is a picture of the IPCC, cause and case.
The mistakes in their case, which appear to be legion.(Far to much certainty from little facts)
The best picture of what we can know about weather, climate and imagined changes, (not much?)
The shape of what we do know ( which appears to be pretty fuzzy about the edges)
From there I will draw my own conclusions, about what politics are necessary .
What we have demonstrated on this post is, free thinking abounds at WUWT and we are troll bait when religion is argued here.
John Whitman says:
January 6, 2013 at 7:46 pm
Bruckner8,
Again, show me your ‘a priori’ justification that I and people like me require belief (aka faith). You are implying that it is a metaphysical requirement of human beings to ‘believe’ or ‘have faith’, qua human beings. Where did you acquire that ‘a priori’ knowledge? Show me the source. Is your source faith or belief? It appears so.
Your self-proclaimed omniscience in that regard is strong evidence that you are profoundly belief or faith based, but that implies nothing about people who are not like you.
Goodnight, cocktail hour is starting soon. Catch tomorrow morning.
John
Sorry John, I never said *humans* require belief; I said atheism and theism require belief. Us humans on the agnostic side have neither belief, because, darnit, we just don’t know, lol. You’re convinced there’s no theism, yet you have no proof. If you have no proof, you’re left with belief.
You KNOW there’s no theism…and yet you accuse me of using a priori knowledge. Good one!
Poor Monckton of Brenchley.
Surely he just wished to make the point that the fervid belief in the CAGW story mimics religious beliefs throughout the ages, with cynical, self-serving high priests bent on riches, power and fame asking for “faith” and “belief”, …. and the unthinking, baying crowds supporting them furiously because they have been “told” and “know the truth”……
And just look where we have taken it ….
“In the beginning, the Earth was without form, and void, and darkness filled the face of the land.” Sounds a little like the heat death of the Universe, no?
My hat off to you, I salute you and bow humbly.
Alan Millar:
At January 6, 2013 at 4:00 pm I wrote
Your post at January 7, 2013 at 7:20 am uses that statement as an excuse to promote atheism. Clearly, some atheists will you any possible excuse to evangelise their religion.
I was arguing that action should be taken to avoid the misuse of WUWT to promote any religion.
Your post has proved my point.
Richard
Wow, I would get back to “Preach not lest…”
But I think there is a religious component to carbon hysteria that harks from a deep human need for shared belief and tradition–a need that is not fulfilled in modern secular society. Carbon theology can be compared to Prohibition, where “Christian” Temperance swept the industrial world and was codified in a U.S. constitutional amandment, later repealed.
We may not have the capacity to completely divorce belief and causes for action. Is science a religion? Perhaps, but it is clear from history that we are better served by reason and careful observation than blind faith.
It seems to me modeling climate change is like kicking a football into the Grand Canyon and trying to model the flight, bounce and the ultimate end of that football’s trip.
There are so many variables starting with the pressure changes of the ball as it falls and at what angle did the ball leave the kicker’s foot. Which rock will it hit next and at what angle?
Climate change has many causes and variables. Some are seen real time and others are delayed.
Can long term climate change be modeled?
Maybe not.
cn
richardscourtney says:
January 7, 2013 at 8:51 am
“Your post at January 7, 2013 at 7:20 am uses that statement as an excuse to promote atheism. Clearly, some atheists will you any possible excuse to evangelise their religion”.
You have just repeated your previous tripe.
I cannot be promoting atheism as I don’t recognise any non belief in a stated fact as a ‘ism’ of any kind.
You have failed to tell me what ‘isms’ are my non -beliefs in fairies and ghosts etc are. Having difficulties?
You have not answered my point, that your only true belief is in an omnipotent god and therefore you cannot truly believe in anything else.
You must believe that your next step could send you flying into space if your god wills it, notwithstanding gravity.
Or that the universe has been created to be immune from the whims and influences of gods and that therefore we both agree we live in a godless universe not withstanding its creation.
Which is it?
Alan
My oft repeated suggestion to my religious friends is this:
If you are arguing about politics, the Federal Reserve Act, the economy, global warming or any other subject, leave religion completely out of it. Once you bring religion onto the table you just lost the argument especially when arguing with progressives.
As you probably know: it is suggested by Silas Beane and others, that over the next 2-3 centuries we may be able to produce a simulation of an entire universe populated with sentient beings like us (or indeed, even better, perhaps more peaceful models).
It is great fun, isn’t it?
But, next 2-3 centuries? On the one hand, there is World of Warcraft now, which is essentially a peaceful model although hard on the NPCs. There is a scary/spooky argument against the theodicy problem — whenever you see bad things happen to people, either they are NPCs (no real souls nobody actually harmed) or they are real players who are being painlessly removed from the game to go play another, starting over on another server as it were (or forced to wait out the end of the game).
In game context, the Universe can appear to be any age you want. Indeed, in game context there could be no other real players, all the other players could be NPCs.
I do take issue with “simulate an entire universe” — information theoretically and computationally so very, very impossible (at least for anything but a very, very small universe), but the beauty of the WoW model is that one doesn’t have to simulate a whole universe in detail, only a coarse grained view that can be zoomed and corrected according to the limited I/O bandwidth of the player. In other words, if one could completely replace my sensory input stream with a computer generated one, within the next decade or two we’ll probably be able to produce a real time simulation of the projection of an alternate reality into a single person’s consciousness. Shades of The Matrix (or Plato’s Cave).
There is actually an interesting argument that suggests that this “must” be the case. It is a bullshit argument, of course, but I offer it up in the spirit of amusing bullshit. Assume that any intelligent species that evolves and that fails to kill itself off will eventually obtain energy/resource stasis and very long lifetimes. Assume further that intelligence, curiosity, and evolutionary competitiveness redirected means that they, too, like to game. To avert boredom then, they would inevitably develop better and better games, until the games were indistinguishable from reality (complete sensory replacement) and quite possibly would learn to suppress, replace and release memories of reality for a “saved game” memory for a complete immersion experience.
Game context might well share many features of our apparent reality. An apparently vast and complex Universe but you can’t get out into it because it would take too much CPU and memory and you can only afford the cheap single-planet simulation. Lots of pathos and tragedy and adventure, with NPCs to play Wal Mart greeters. A certain amount of pain and suffering for the main players, but only because if there isn’t any the game gets boring and it is too easy to tell that it is a game, at least for players who have spent a billion years or more gaming.
If this is in our future, of course, the present could just be a nostalgia game! With certain assumptions, one can even make it likely that this is the case — what are the chances of coming in on the original experience instead of the billions and billions more resimulations of the original experience.
A sufficiently accurate simulation, of course, could never, even in principle, be detected! After all, the game console controls your game experience and can even replace your in-game memory on the fly and you’d never notice it because the only way to notice it would be to compare now to your previous memory. In between this keystroke – and this one – I could have popped out of game context, gone to work, taken a vacation with the many tentacled kids, and then restarted the game to seamlessly reenter game context.
This is actually a sufficient disproof of the quantum hidden variable theories, or at least it requires them to be prefaced by “assuming that the Universe and quantum theory in general are what they appear to be” (which sort of begs the question even if you then accept the proof). Any outcome that can be measured in a lab and used to prove is computable, and any computable outcome can be produced by hidden variables. One literally cannot test the proposition if the proposition is true, as any tests that succeed prove it false. To put it another way, a Stern-Gerlach quantum spin separation experiment produces a computable result — the splitting of the downstream beam. Electron interference experiments produce a computable result — a phase-based stochastic interference pattern. Our sensory experience of the computable results could be obtained if there were no actual electrons involved at all, and how could we tell?
All just for fun, of course. One of the infinity of possibilities explored by The Matrix or much earlier by James Gunn’s The Joy Makers (one of the all time great SF story triplets, btw). But clearly not the best thing to believe because whether or not we are in game context, there is no point in believing that we are without evidence.
Note well that this is almost exactly what religions propose. This world isn’t real, it is a “creation” of an intelligent external entity with a different time stream that has perfect control over the game experience. To this entity, we might be nothing but NPCs ourselves — AIs loose in the game context while a much bigger game is being played out on a much bigger arena all for the amusement (sorry, but there it is) of that external entity. We have the World of Warcraft model of infinite serial reincarnation in a single game context as NPCs “die” and are respawned — Buddhism if you like — where all the NPCs are of course ultimately identical to the toplevel controlling program that multitasks them. We have the “forgiving” Christian model where a secondary game server stands by and NPCs are placed there in non-conflicted roles as they are eliminated in the primary context, saved for a new game later or whatever. We have the “punitive” Christian model or Muslim model where there are two secondary servers, a nice one and a “hell” level where one has to battle demonic cows for eternity.
The details of the top level reality, of course, are fuzzy to say the least. How could they not be? They are completely hidden behind the sensorily perfect simulation! Or, the game context could indeed contain “cheat codes” that can be discovered by the players or NPCs — the games we write certainly do — that confer amazing in-game powers to violate game context provided that one does the equivalent of typing in a special string — but usually at some cost. The existence of such codes would be evidence at least of inconsistency in the sensory models and a probable uphill level in reality, but — note well — not even the master server of a set of game contexts could ever be certain that it itself wasn’t just one layer in a higher level simulation.
Godel’s theorem is a powerful, powerful result that prevents that — it could prove its internal consistency only if it were inconsistent, and if it couldn’t prove it, that only allows for the possibility that it is consistent, not the certainty.
My big problem with religions is precisely this. We have the bulk of the human species running around all over the planet behaving as if they are players or non-player characters in a vast, complicated MMORPG. I’m sorry, not one MMORPG, any one of a few dozen, or hundred, or thousand distinct MMORPGs with different presumed rules and game objects. Some devoutly believe in the secondary games where they will be NPCs no more, with or without the hellfire level for the people that they played against or that cheated against their supposed rules. Some equally devoutly believe that the whole point of the game is for your NPC role to end, to wake up and realize that you are in fact the primary real player or the game context itself, or to just simply go away and cease looping into the ongoing game.
I just think it is time for humanity to put away these childish suppositions. If it is a game, it is a damn good one, and fighting over the competing MMORPG hypotheses is pointless and causes all sort of apparent suffering amongst the players. There isn’t the slightest valid reason to believe any of the proposed MMORPG scenarios available in the game context, at least for those of us who test the rules and the proposed cheat codes and find the game rules amazingly consistent (or at least, consistently simulated). NPC or not, the default hypothesis has to be that this reality is real, not a simulation running in some other even more complex reality through which you can be promoted. Indeed, it could be that the point of the game is to eventually figure that out and start living as if the world we see is the only world we get, for a single pass through our player identity real or NPC as it may be.
rgb