Guest essay by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Politicians pay for science, but scientists should not be politicians. Consensus is a political concept. Unwisely deployed, it can be damagingly anti-scientific. A reply to Naomi Oreskes (Nature, 4 September 2013).
Subject terms: Philosophy of science, consensus, climate change
The celebrated mathematician, astronomer and philosopher of science Abu Ali Ibn al-Haytham, or Alhazen, is justly celebrated as the founder of the scientific method. His image appears on Iraqi banknotes and on the postage stamps of half a dozen nations of the ummah wahida.
Al-Haytham on a 10,000-dinar Iraqi banknote. Image source: banknotes.com.
Al-Haytham, unlike Naomi Oreskes,[1] did not consider that consensus had any role in science. He wrote that “the seeker after truth” does not put his trust in any mere consensus, however venerable: instead, he submits what he has learned from it to reason and demonstration. Science is not a fashion statement, a political party or a belief system.
The objective of science, as of religion, is truth. Religion attains to the truth by accepting the Words of Messiahs or of Prophets and pondering these things in its heart[2]. Science attains to the truth by accepting no word as revealed and no hypothesis as tenable until it has been subjected to falsification by observation, measurement and the application of previously-established theory to the results.
The Royal Society’s dog-Latin motto, Nullius in verba, roughly translates as “We take no one’s word for it”. The Society says, “It is an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment.”[3] No room for consensus there.
The Royal Society’s achievement of arms and dog-Latin motto. Image source: The Royal Society
T.H. Huxley, FRS, who defeated Bishop Wilberforce in the debate over evolution at the Oxford Museum of Natural History in 1860, put it this way: “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.”[4] Richard Feynman agreed: “Science,” he said, “is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”[5]
Karl Popper[6] formalized the scientific method as an iterative algorithm starting with a general problem. To address it, a scientist proposes a falsifiable hypothesis. During the error-elimination phase that follows, others demonstrate it, disprove it or, more often do neither, whereupon it gains some credibility not because a consensus of experts endorses it but because it has survived falsification. Head-counts, however expert the heads, play no part in science.
Left to right: T.H. Huxley (cartoon by Spy), Karl Popper (ivanjeronimo.com.br), and Richard Feynman (swfan444.deviantart.com).
The post-modernist notion that science proceeds by the barnacle-like accretion of expert consensus on the hulk of a hypothesis is a conflation of two of the dozen sophistical fallacies excoriated by Aristotle[7] 2350 years ago as the commonest in human discourse. The medieval schoolmen later labelled them the fallacies of argument ad populum (consensus) and ad verecundiam (appeal to reputation).
Science has become a monopsony. Only one paying customer – the State – calls the tune, and expects its suppliers to sing from the same hymn-sheet. Governments, by definition and temperament interventionist, are disinclined to pay for inconvenient truths. They want results justifying further intervention, so they buy consensus.
The Hamelin problem is compounded by a little-regarded consequence of nearly all academics’ dependency upon the public treasury. Those whom the State feeds and houses will tend to support the interventionist faction, and may thus give a spurious legitimacy to a political consensus by parading it as scientific when it is not.
Too often what is really a political consensus will be loosely defined with care, allowing its adherents to pretend that widespread scientific endorsement of an uncontentious version implies support for a stronger but unsupported version.
Consider climate change. The uncontentious version of the climate consensus is that greenhouse gases cause warming. Oft-replicated experiment establishes that the quantum resonance that interaction with near-infrared radiation induces in a greenhouse-gas molecule, such as carbon dioxide, emits heat directly, as though a tiny radiator had been turned on. Thus, adding greenhouse gases to the air will cause some warming. Where – as here – the experimental result is undisputed because it is indisputable, there is no need to plead consensus.
The standard version of climate consensus, however, is stronger. It is that at least half the global warming since 1950 was anthropogenic.[8],[9] Supporters of the uncontentions version need not necessarily support this stronger version.
Though IPCC (2013) has arbitrarily elevated its level of confidence in the stronger version of consensus from 90% to 95%, Cook et al. (2013),[10] analyzing the abstracts of 11,944 papers on global climate change published between 1991 and 2012, marked only 64 abstracts as having explicitly endorsed it. Further examination[11] shows just 43 abstracts, or 0.3% of the sample, endorsing it.
No survey has tested endorsement of the still stronger catastrophist version that unless most CO2 emissions stop by 2050 there is a 10% probability[12],[13] that the world will end by 2100. The number of scientists endorsing this version of consensus may well be vanishingly different from zero.
The two key questions in the climate debate are how much warming we shall cause and whether mitigating it today would cost less than adapting to its net-adverse consequences the day after tomorrow. There is no consensus answer to the first. The consensus answer to the second may surprise.
Answering the “how-much-warming” question is difficult. Models overemphasize radiative transports, undervalue non-radiative transports such as evaporation and tropical afternoon convection, and largely neglect the powerfully homoeostatic effect of the great heat-sinks – ocean and space – that bound the atmosphere.
Absolute global temperatures have varied by only ±1% in 420,000 years[14]. Will thermometers be able to detect the consequences of our altering 1/3000 of the atmospheric mix by 2100?
Uncontroversially, direct radiative warming at CO2 doubling will be the product of the instantaneous or Planck parameter[15] 0.31 K W–1 m2 and the CO2 radiative forcing[16] 5.35 ln 2: i.e., ~1.2 K. Models near-triple this value by temperature feedback amplification. Yet no feedback can be measured directly or determined theoretically. Feedbacks may even be net-negative.[17],[18]
Another uncertainty is introduced by the amplification equation in the models, which was designed for electronic circuits, where it has a physical meaning. In the climate, as the singularity at a loop gain of 1 approaches, it has none. In a circuit, feedbacks driving voltage to the positive rail flick it to the negative rail as the loop gain exceeds 1. In the climate there is no such physical mechanism.
The chaoticity of the climate object is an additional, insuperable uncertainty.[19],[20] The IPCC admits this: “In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system and, therefore, that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”[21]
The atmosphere, like any object that behaves chaotically, is highly sensitive to initial conditions. The available data will always be inadequate to allow reliable prediction – especially by probability distribution in model ensembles – of the chaos-driven bifurcations that make climate climate.
Given these real uncertainties, the IPCC’s claim of 95% consensus as to the relative contributions of Man and Nature to the 0.7 K global warming since 1950 is surely hubris. Nemesis is already at hand. Empirically, the models are not doing well. The first IPCC Assessment Report predicted global warming at 0.2-0.5 Cº/decade by now. Yet the observed trend on the HadCRUt4 data[22] since 1990, at little more than 0.1 Cº/decade, is below the IPCC’s least estimate.
Taking the mean of all five global-temperature datasets, there has been no global warming for almost 13 years, even though CO2 concentration increases should have caused at least 0.2 Cº warming since December 2000.
Given the Earth’s failure to warm as predicted, and the absence of support for the IPCC’s version of the climate consensus, its 95% confidence in the anthropogenic fraction of the 0.7 Cº warming since 1950 seems aprioristic.
No global warming for 12 years 8 months. Data sources: GISS, HadCRUt4, NCDC, RSS and UAH.
So to the economic question. Posit ad argumentum that the IPCC’s central estimate of 2.8 Cº warming from 2000-2100 is true, and that Stern[23] was right to say the cost of failing to prevent 2-3 Cº warming this century is ~1.5% of GDP. Then, even at a zero inter-temporal discount rate, the cost of abating this decade’s predicted warming of 0.17 Cº[24] by CO2-mitigation schemes whose unit mitigation cost is equivalent to that of, say, Australia’s carbon tax will be 50 times the cost of later adaptation.
How so? Australia emits just 1.2%[25],[26] of global anthropogenic CO2. No more than 5% of Australia’s emissions can now be cut this decade, so no more than 0.06% of global emissions will be abated by 2020. Then CO2 concentration will fall from the now-predicted 410 μatm[27] to 409.988 μatm. In turn, predicted temperature will fall, but only by 0.00005 Cº, or 1/1000 of the minimum detectable global temperature change. This is mainstream, consensus IPCC climatology.
The cost of this minuscule abatement over ten years will be $162 billion[28], equivalent to $3.2 quadrillion/Cº. Abating just the worldwide mean warming of 0.17 Cº predicted for this decade would cost $540 trillion, or $77,000/head worldwide, or 80% of ten years’ global GDP[29]. No surprise, then, that in the economic literature the near-unanimous consensus is that mitigation will cost more than adaptation[30],[31]. The premium vastly exceeds the cost of the risk insured. The cost of immediate mitigation typically exceeds by 1-2 orders of magnitude that of eventual adaptation.[32]
Accordingly, Oreskes’ statement that “Political leaders who deny the human role in climate change should be compared with the hierarchy of the Catholic church, who dismissed Galileo’s arguments for heliocentrism for fear of their social implications” is not only scientifically inappropriate but historically inapt: for no political leaders “deny the human role in climate change”, though some may legitimately doubt its magnitude or significance; and none impose any such opinion upon their citizens.
It is the true-believers in the New Religion of Thermageddon who have demanded that their opponents be put on trial for “treason” (Robert Kennedy), and for “high crimes against humanity” (James Hansen, NASA)[33]. The penalties for treason and for crimes against humanity are not the house arrest to which Galilei was sentenced, but death. Insistence upon consensus has often bred the most brutal kind of intolerance.
Galileo Galilei. Image source: content.answcdn.com.
The true lesson of l’affaire Galilei, then, is that the governing class, then the high priests of Rome, now the acquiescent archdruids of academe and their paymaster the State, should not intolerantly abuse their power, then of theology, now of monopsony reinforcing peer-pressure rebranded as consensus, by interfering in scientists’ freedom to be what al-Haytham had beautifully called them: seekers after truth.
References
[1] Oreskes, N, 2013, Nature 501, 27–29 (05 September 2013), doi:10.1038/501027a.
[2] Luke II, 19: King James Bible.
[3] http://royalsociety.org/about-us/history/
[4] Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95), Aphorisms and Reflections, selected by Henrietta A. Huxley, Macmillan, London, 1907.
[5] Feynman, R., What is Science?, 15th annual mtg. National Science Teachers’ Assn., New York (1966), in The Physics Teacher 7:6 (1969).
[6] Popper, K., Logik der Forschung, (Julius Springer Verlag, Vienna, 1935).
[7] Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 52 pp. (2012).
[8] IPCC, 2001. Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis: Contribution of Working Group I to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Houghton, J.T., Y. Ding, D.J. Griggs, M. Noguer, P.J. van der Linden, X. Dai, K. Maskell and C.A. Johnson (eds.)], (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
[9] IPCC, 2007. Climate Change 2007: the Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007 [Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K.B. Avery, M. Tignor and H.L. Miller (eds.)], (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
[10] J. Cook, D. Nuccitelli, S.A. Green, M. Richardson, B. Winkler, R. Painting, R. Way, P. Jacobs, and A. Skuce, Environ. Res. Lett. 9 (2013), doi:0.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024.
[11] Legates, D.R., W.W.-H. Soon, W.M. Briggs, and C.W. Monckton of Brenchley, Sci. Educ. 22 (2013), doi: 10.1007/s11191-013-9647-9.
[12] Stern, N., The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review. Cambridge University Press (2006).
[13] Dietz, S., C. Hope, N. Stern, and D. Zenghelis, World Economics 8:1, 121-168 (2007).
[14] Petit, J.R., Jouzel, J., Raynaud, D., Barkov, N.I., Barnola, J.-M., Basile, I., Bender, M., Chappellaz, J., Davis, M., Delaygue, G., Delmotte, M., Kotlyakov, V.M., Legrand, M., Lipenkov, V.Y., Lorius, C., Pepin, L., Ritz, C., Saltzman, E., and Stievenard, M., Nature 399: 429-436 (1999).
[15] IPCC (2007), p. 631 fn., where the value is given as a reciprocal in W m–2 K–1.
[16] Myhre et al., GRL 25:14, 2715–2718 (1998), doi:10.1029/98GL01908.
[17] Lindzen, R.S., and Y.-S. Choi, Asia-Pacific J. Atmos. Sci., 47:4, 377-390 (2011), doi:10.1007/s13143-011-0023-x.
[18] Spencer, R.W., and W.D. Braswell, Remote Sensing 3, 1603-1613 (2011), doi:10.3390/rs3081603.
[19] Lorenz, E.N., J. Atmos. Sci. 20, 130-141 (1963).
[20] Giorgi, F., 2005, Climatic Change 73, 239-265 (2005), doi: 10.1007/s10584-005-6857-4.
[21] IPCC (2001, §14.2.2.2).
[22] C.P. Morice, J.J. Kennedy, N.A. Rayner, and P.D. Jones, JGR 117:D8 (2012), doi: 10.1029/2011JD017187.
[23] Stern (2006 op. cit.), ix.
[24] Derived from IPCC (2007 op. cit.), 803, Table 10.26.
[25] Boden and Marland, Global CO2 Emissions from Fossil-Fuel Burning, Cement Manufacture, and Gas Flaring, 1751-2007, Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Center, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA (2010a). [26] Boden et al., Ranking of the world's countries by 2007 total CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel burning, cement production, and gas flaring, Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Center, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA (2010b).
[27] Derived from IPCC (2007 op. cit.), p. 803, Table 10.26.
[28] Derived from Wong, P., Portfolio Budget Statements 2010-11: Budget-Related Paper No. 1.4. Climate Change and Energy Efficiency Portfolio, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra, Australia (2010).
[29] World Bank, Gross Domestic Product 2009, in World Development Indicators 2009. http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DATASTATISTICS/Resources/GDP.pdf.
[30] Tol, R., J. Econ. Perspectives 23:2, 29-51 (2009a).
[31] Tol, R., An analysis of mitigation as a response to climate change, Copenhagen Consensus Center, Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark (2009b).
[32] Monckton of Brenchley, C, 2013, Is CO2 mitigation cost-effective? In Proceedings of the 45th Annual International Seminar on Nuclear War and Planetary Emergencies, World Federation of Scientists [A. Zichichi and R. Ragaini, eds.], World Scientific, London, 167-185 (2013), ISBN 978 981 4531 77 1.
[33] Happer, W., Letter to the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming (2010 June 22): http://republicans.globalwarming.sensenbrenner. house.gov/Media/file/PDFs/Hearings/052010Science_Political_Arena/Response_Happer.pdf.
Nice essay, thank you Christopher (remember Tom Lehrer & The Elements in Melbourne?).
Regarding references to Australia, one of the famous appeals against authority was from Professor S Warren Carey rejecting a nomination to be a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. Carey expanded Wegener’s continental drift theory (but to my knowledge, never – or perhaps with great reluctance – accepted the concept of plate subduction).
http://science.org.au/fellows/memoirs/carey.html#9 see under Relationship with the Academy…
(Prof Carey was an old and dear friend who would have had low tolerance for consensus science).
…………………………..
Also re Australia, yesterday saw a Federal Election in which the Conservatives (the Coalition, or the Liberal & National Parties) changed Government & gained a large majority over what in USA would be called ‘Liberals’. The losing party received the lowest primary vote in its 100+ year history. One of the winning central policies was to repeal the legislation that created a ‘carbon tax’. The incoming Prime Minister said that this would be completed within 3 years.
Another election result was the loss of seats by the Green party. Public sentiment in Australia is now firmly against strong responses to ‘climate change’ and under the new PM, it is expected to become even less liked.
………………………….
Today, there is a lot of correspondence and commentary about the new Government’s carbon tax policy. There are many appeals to authority and many references to settles science. I am ashamed that these people lack understanding of how science progresses, by experiment and data. They include a Nobel Laureate.
Ref 33 should read
http://republicans.globalwarming.sensenbrenner.house.gov/Media/file/PDFs/Hearings/052010Science_Political_Arena/Response_Happer.pdf
Last video I posted obviously can’t be linked back so here is another attempt:
Evan Camp: A true breath of fresh air: teaching students about controversial science: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf6Ofw-Ckb8
I am very grateful to the numerous commenters here who have carried on the discussion about whether consensus has any role in attaining to the truth in science. The feelings of justifiable outrage that run right through this thread were perhaps best conveyed by the commenter who said it was no longer possible to find books for children that celebrated the contributions of individual scientists. Even children’s books have been tampered with to glorify drab collectivitism at the expense of the sparkle that is individual achievement in science.
Andres Valencia asks why I say there is no physical mechanism whereby the feedback loop gain (which, in the climate, is the product of the sum of all unamplified feedbacks expressed in Watts per square meter and the Planck or instantaneous climate-sensitivity parameter (0.31 Kelvin per Watt per square meter) cannot cause very rapid amplification of global warming when it is a little below unity and then, a moment later when it is a little above unity, cause very rapid diminution of global warming.
In an electronic circuit, an over-unity loop gain flicks the current from the positive-voltage to the negative-voltage rail. In circuits, therefore, the Bode feedback-amplification equation has a meaning in phsyical reality. It describes what happens even if the loop gain exceeds unity. The singularity in the equation maps to a singularity in the performance of the operational amplifier.
In the climate, no such mechanism is possible. As the water vapor builds up in the atmosphere with warming (if it does as the Clausius-Clapeyron relation suggests), then the water vapor feedback – and hence the loop gain) continues to grow. It could, in theory, grow to greater than unity, where the feedback sum exceeds 3.2 Watts per square meter per Kelvin. But once the feedback sum is that great, the feedbacks that were in net terms causing warming before cannot suddenly cause cooling, let alone the very substantial cooling that the equation would lead us to expect. In short, the Bode equation is the wrong equation.
I pointed this out, with a diagram showing the singularity in the equation, when I was giving a talk attended by several IPCC lead authors in Tasmania during my speaking tour of Australia and New Zealand earlier this year. One of the lead authors was astonished. “Have you published this?” he asked. “It changes everything.” No, I said: I’m still working on it.
However, Dick Lindzen, when I presented the same point at the World Federation of Scientists’ annual seminars on planetary emergencies in Erice, Sicily, a couple of weeks ago, said the equation would work quite well in the climate up to a loop gain of about 0.8. That would cover the IPCC’s implicit interval of loop gains, which is [0.42, 0.74]. However, I am not sure that deploying the equation up to a rather arbitrary limit is the best way to model the influence of feedbacks on climate sensitivity.
I have asked one of the nuclear scientists at the conference to see if he can introduce a damping term into the feedback-amplification equation to prevent the loop gain from getting anywhere near unity. The homeostasis in the climate is formidable – just how formidable I shall discuss in a moment – so it is not inappropriate to reflect this in a damping term.
Mr. Valencia asks, “Do we not have evidence of climate oscillations between ice ages and temperate climates?”. It cannot be said often enough that, in the physical sciences, quantitative questions should be expressed quantitatively, not qualitatively. For in the past 420,000 years, the oscillations between the glacial and interglacial phases of the climate have altered absolute global temperature by plus or minus 1%. That is all. So very small a variability, so very great a homeostasis, suggests either that feedbacks in the climate are somewhat net-negative, as Dick Lindzen has found them to be (in which case they reduce warming to a small degree) or that, at worst, they are barely net-positive. However, if feedbacks are indeed on the interval [-0.5, +0.1], as Dick thinks they are, then their influence will simply be swamped by non-radiative transports and by the temperature-homeostasis of the climate.
Where does the homeostasis come from? From the fact that the atmosphere is bounded by two heat-sinks, the ocean and outer space. It is really, really hard to alter global mean surface temperature over the long term, and our altering the composition of the atmosphere by 1 part in 3000 over the next 100 years will scarcely be able to alter it.
Naomi Oreskes, “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change”, Science, 4/12/03, whatever her beliefs about the role of consensus in climate, in no way measured it. That is so notwithstanding the applause from the insecure climatologists and academics with failed models. She managed to transmute journal bias into proof of a consensus.
Joining the fray to endorse science by ballot, Scripps Institution in a current article laid out the support for her presumably peer-reviewed paper:
“QUESTION: Scientists disagree. We don’t know the science well enough yet, so why should we do anything?
“ANSWER: Actually, there is strong scientific consensus on the reality of human-caused climate change. See the consensus/position statements of: – National Academy of Sciences – Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – American Geophysical Union (AGU) – American Meteorological Society (AMS) – American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Oreskes (Science, 2004) analyzed all abstracts in refereed scientific publications from 1993-2003 with the keywords “global climate change” (928 papers). None disagreed with the consensus position that human activities are causing the current warming.” Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Birch Aquarium, Climate Change FAQ, http://aquarium.ucsd.edu/climate/Climate_Change_FAQ/ .
Naomi Oreskes said, “Remarkable, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.” This is remarkable only if one starts à priori with the belief not just in a consensus, but with very large majorities. A truly remarkable consensus might be, say, 99%, in which case by her analysis she might have found about ten non-conforming papers, or how about 99.9% and one. She found none.
She started with 928 abstracts from refereed scientific journals published between 1993 and 2003 and containing the key phrase “climate change”, or some say, “global climate change”. Among these, she found that 75%, or 696, articles discussed what she considered the Consensus proposition: global warming is occurring because of manmade greenhouse gas. Of those 696, 100% agreed!
But she did not begin to survey a representative group of scientists who had an opinion on global climate change. She has no information from those who disagree with the AGW conjecture. Among them would be those who could not be bothered trying to publish against the tide in the closed community, and those who tried but were rejected.
Her analysis is also biased toward journal policy because she examined only abstracts and not the full articles. Criticism won’t surface in the abstract. Even in the main body, authors are obliged to understate any exceptions to the dogma, couching them as contingents or making them topics for further study. What Oreskes has established with good evidence is that peer-review journals do not publish papers smacking of heresy.
None of the peers and scientific societies who passed her article seems to have noticed that her data don’t support her conclusions one iota. The paper, the peers, and the professional societies exemplify not science but erroneous statistical interpretation, likely due to the fact that her results were too good not to be true.
The results prove not Oreskes’ conclusion about the existence of a consensus, but instead, with a high probability, that refereed journals in her survey have, for whatever reasons, published no papers disputing the anthropogenic climate change conjecture.
The lesson is that for two decades, submitting any paper at all critical of AGW to one of her refereed journals has been a major waste of time.
Pat Frank says:
September 7, 2013 at 12:27 pm
That is quite an inspired post. I did not know that you were interested in the history and philosophy of science. Kudos to you.
Karl Popper formalized the scientific method as an iterative algorithm starting with a general problem.
What Karl R. Popper actually “start[ed] with”, at one point in his discourse, was a universal generalization (UG), e.g. “All Crows Are Black” [KRP (1934/1959) 266], which he thought typified all scientific propositions. Therefore since UGs require infinite regression, or philosophical induction, to prove, he invented the notion that scientific models must have a falsification clause. None does. Instead, his UG example is a definition in science, and quite alien to scientific propositions. But Popper had another simple way of fixing that problem: “definitions do not matter.” KRP (1966), 24 of 31. Without definitions, Modern Science does not exist.
Karl R. Popper deserves the title of founder of Post Modern Science. PMS has five tenets explicit in his writings. They are (1) falsifiability [KRP (1934/1959) 267; (1963) 7], (2) peer-review publication [KRP (1945) II-213, 225-6; (1966) 1-2 of 31], (3) single error rate decision making [KRP (1934/1959) 256], (4) consensus [KRP (1945) II-205], and (5) political correctness [KRP (1945) II-220]. These are listed here in order as adopted and adapted for scientific evidence in federal court by the US Supreme Court in Daubert v. Merrell Dow. Not one of them – not falsification, not peer review, not publication, and not consensus – has any validity in Modern Science, as founded by Sir Francis Bacon in 1620, and as practiced exclusively, secretly, and successfully in industry.
Note the absence in PMS tenets of causation and prediction, the foundational pair of attributes of Modern Science. Popper intentionally removed Cause & Effect from his model of science, and with that sterilization of science, he also threw out prediction and validation. Scientific models are valid only to the extent that experiment validates their nontrivial predictions. Those predictions require not physically impossible philosophical or mathematical induction, but scientific induction based on Cause & Effect.
The well known climatologists seem unaware of the fact that they are practicing PMS. It is thanks to PMS that we even have such a load of KRP as AGW.
Yet no feedback can be measured directly or determined theoretically.
To the contrary, cloud cover provides not only a pair of feedbacks, but because they gate the Sun, the most powerful feedbacks in all climate, and feedbacks not represented in the GCMs. Cloud cover through the burn-off effect amplifies solar variations. It is a fast, positive feedback to TSI. Cloud cover is also a slow, negative feedback to global surface temperature form any cause through added moisture according to the Clausius-Clapeyron effect.
Science imposes no requirement on models to have any fidelity to real world processes other than to provide testable predictions. But because IPCC and GCMs have failed, most importantly in experimental climate sensitivity being less 1ºC where the IPCC minimum was 1.5ºC, and nominal was 3ºC for its catastrophic predictions, the models are wide open to scientific criticism. A little fidelity to dominant real world physics could fix the models, but surely destroy what’s left of AGW and a bunch of reputations in the process.
@ur momisugly R. de Haan
Well, until this morning about all I knew of the “Electric Universe” was the name. I watched the two video’s you provided, another series on YouTube, and read several websites. First off, I’d have to say how disappointing it is to hear of the same kind of gatekeeping within a field as inconsequential policy wise as cosmology that we’ve seen in climatology. Other than that I really didn’t see anything that seriously challenges the current view of the universe. The first video devotes a large portion of its time on NGC – 7603 and one of the talking heads says (paraphrasing) that there’s a non-cosmological red shift component. Ok, so what? The big bang theory isn’t dependent upon every red shift being 100% due to expansion. The YouTube video I watched says at least three times that “only electric currents create magnetic fields”. Uh, there are these little things on my refrigerator that might disagree. And don’t even get me started on “Gravity is an infinitely weak force” and the image of dragons cross-culturally as evidence of an electrically dominated universe.
All in all, not impressive, if they’d back their scope down a notch or two (hundred) they might be able to explain some structures in the universe with their hypothesis, but trying to make it explain Everything is a couple hundred bridges too far IMO.
The chaoticity of the climate object is an additional, insuperable uncertainty. The IPCC admits this: “In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system and, therefore, that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. [¶] The atmosphere, like any object that behaves chaotically, is highly sensitive to initial conditions.
IPCC’s simulation may be nonlinear and chaotic, but climate is neither. Like the rest of the real world, it has no parameters, no inputs, no equations, no values, no coordinate systems. These are all manmade. In thermodynamic systems especially, model properties depend upon the scale – micro, meso, macro – elected by the modeler.
The atmosphere, like the rest of physical world in the climate system, has no initial conditions. On the other hand, though, the models must. And the properties are quite different between IPCC’s Radiative Forcing model and a heat flow model.
IPCC’s admission is a confession that its models are failures, disguised as a lament that it found climate impossible to model. It’s time for IPCC to heed the warning to Guy Callendar, IPCC’s hero of the AGW movement, by Sir George Simpson, Head, Met Office, 1920-1938.
Callendar opened the door to AGW and climate sensitivity, putting it at 2ºC:
“G. S. Callendar (1938) solved a set of equations linking greenhouse gases and climate change. He found that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration resulted in an increase in the mean global temperature of 2°C, with considerably more warming at the poles, and linked increasing fossil fuel combustion with a rise in CO2 and its greenhouse effects: ‘As man is now changing the composition of the atmosphere at a rate which must be very exceptional on the geological time scale, it is natural to seek for the probable effects of such a change. From the best laboratory observations it appears that the principal result of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide… would be a gradual increase in the mean temperature of the colder regions of the Earth.’” AR4, ¶1.4.1 The Earth’s Greenhouse Effect, p. 105.
a message inflamed and made infamous by Roger Revelle:
“Thus human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.” Revelle, R. and H.E. Suess, “Carbon Dioxide Exchange between Atmosphere and Ocean, etc.”, 9/4/1956.
and to which Simpson chided,
“In the first place he [Sir George Simpson] thought it was not sufficiently realised by non-meteorologists who came for the first time to help the Society in its study, that it was impossible to solve the problem of the temperature distribution in the atmosphere by working out the radiation. The atmosphere was not in a state of radiative equilibrium, and it also received heat by transfer from one part to another. In the second place, one had to remember that the temperature distribution in the atmosphere was determined almost entirely by the movement of the air up and down. This forced the atmosphere into a temperature distribution which was quite out of balance with the radiation. One could not, therefore, calculate the effect of changing any one factor in the atmosphere, and he felt that the actual numerical results which Mr. Callendar had obtained could not be used to give a definite indication of the order of magnitude of the effect.” CALLENDAR (1938) Simpson critique.
It’s time for IPCC to scrap its Radiative Forcing paradigm for a heat model, and with it introduce the great processes of time, heat flux, global albedo, solar variability, ocean heat capacity and currents, and for the record, CO2 solubility. When it completes the task, it will find that all it needs to do to predict global climate is to predict the Sun.
Jeff Glassman says:
September 8, 2013 at 9:22 am
“Popper intentionally removed Cause & Effect from his model of science…”
Actually, David Hume did that. He is followed in this by the most important philosophers of science of the twentieth century including Hempel, Scheffler, Quine, Levi, and others. “Removing” cause and effect means simply that there is no unique account of cause and effect in physics; that is, physical theory is never proved and we must always be open to new evidence which can falsify our existing theory.
Your claims come fast and furious with no explanation. To refute them would require doing a post on the basics of scientific method. There isn’t time for that. To cut to the chase, Popper would have endorsed nothing in postmodern science.
Mr. Glassman is incorrect to say that the climate is not chaotic and has no initial conditions. Lorenz (1963) is his best starting-point for reading the extensive literature on chaos and the climate. Revisionism in relation to the meaning of IPCC (2001), para. 14.2.2.2 is not approrpriate. The “system” referred to there is the climate system, which behaves as a chaotic object, deterministic but not determinable because we have insufficient information about the values of the millions of initial conditions at an chosen starting moment.
He is also incorrect to say we can measure feedbacks directly. We can posit them, but we cannot measure them quantitatively, nor can we determine their values by any theoretical method. They are guesswork, and the guesses are wrong.
He is also incorrect to say that the models take no account of cloud feedback. They do, but there are arguments in the literature even about the sign of the feedback, which further demonstrates my point that we cannot determine feedback values either empirically or theoretically.
Theo Goodwin, September 8, 2013 @ur momisugly 10:19 am
You critique what I said offering no contradiction!
I didn’t claim Popper was first. Nor did I claim that any Cause & Effect in science was ever unique. Nor did I claim that science was proved. Nor did I claim that science only looks for evidence which can falsify.
You seem to have accepted the notion of philosophers who, grading their own papers, contend that C&E has been eliminated from science. To the contrary, I urge that it thrives along with everything else in Modern Science. This much I’ll give you: maybe not in Philosophy. Try listing the scientists.
How you can suggest I offered no explanation is a mystery when my posts were amply referenced. I gave you a source for the five tenets of what I call PMS, fully cited to where they were set forth by Popper.
Prof. Stove labeled him with the pejorative a “modern irrationalist” (Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists, December, 1982) and to Martin Gardner he was an eccentric (A Skeptical Look at Karl Popper, August, 2001). In my book, he fits Gardner’s commendable musings on the attributes of cranks, including:
“That there are individuals of debatable status—men whose theories are on the borderline of sanity, men competent in one field and not in others, men competent at one period of life and not at others, and so on—all this ought not to blind us to the obvious fact that there is a type of self-styled scientist who can legitimately be called a crank. It is not the novelty of his views or the neurotic motivations behind his work that provide the grounds for calling him this. The grounds are the technical criteria by which theories are evaluated. If a man persists in advancing views that are contradicted by all available evidence, and which offer no reasonable grounds for serious consideration, he will rightfully be dubbed a crank by his colleagues.” Bold added, Gardner, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, 1952, p. 6 of 204.
We could list the ways Popper was a contrarian to science, but perhaps his nonsensical views I already cited suffice, namely that scientific propositions were Universal Generalizations, and that “definitions do not matter”. I dub him crank.
Regardless that you seem to be channeling Popper to speak for him, he scores five out of five as the godfather of PMS and its conjecture-turned-evil-spawn, AGW. A dangerous crank.
Monckton of Brenchly, September 8, 2013 @ur momisugly 3:12 pm
1. Mr. Glassman is incorrect to say that the climate is not chaotic and has no initial conditions. Please supply any initial condition for the climate as opposed to a model of it. I will give you the Big Bang. Whatever the object being discussed, without an initial condition it cannot fit the definition of chaotic, as, for example, spun by IPCC:
“Chaos: A dynamical system such as the climate system, governed by nonlinear deterministic equations (see Nonlinearity), may exhibit erratic or chaotic behaviour in the sense that very small changes in the initial state of the system in time lead to large and apparently unpredictable changes in its temporal evolution. Such chaotic behaviour may limit the predictability of nonlinear dynamical systems.” AR4, Glossary, p. 942.
Climate neither has initial conditions, nor is it governed by equations, nonlinear, deterministic, or other. Climate is natural, part of the real world, but these parameters and concepts are all manmade. And I can’t imagine a very small change in the Big Bang.
2. I didn’t say as you claim that we could measure feedbacks directly. You said, bold added, “Yet no feedback can be measured directly or determined theoretically.” My example fit the second half of your disjunction to perfection.
3. I did not say what you attribute to me here: He is also incorrect to say that the models take no account of cloud feedback. I did not address the general topic of “cloud feedback” but instead of “cloud cover” and “cloud cover feedback”. Cloud feedback is in the GCMs, but it does not include cloud cover. And while cloud cover is certainly in the GCMs, apparently parameterized, it is nonetheless constant. Consequently, cloud cover feedback is not in the models. To be a feedback, it must be variable, and dependent, directly or indirectly, on TSI and on surface temperature.
“The post-modernist notion that science proceeds by the barnacle-like accretion of expert consensus on the hulk of a hypothesis …”
I have never been able to take post-modernism seriously simply because the very name is absurd. “Modern” means “now-time”. “Post” means “after”. “After-now” is the future. And yet the post-modernists want to say that the present is post-modern. Such an abuse of both logic and the English language strongly suggests that anything else they have to say will be similarly meaningless drivel.
@Theo Goodwin
“To go farther back than Galileo in identifying the creator of scientific method is eccentric.”
I would say that nominating anyone “the creator of scientific method” is eccentric. The creation of scientific method seems to me to be a process of slow development and refinement, and not the product of a single mind.
“what made modern science possible, Newton’s calculus.”
Or Leibniz’s.
@Theo Goodwin
‘“Popper intentionally removed Cause & Effect from his model of science…”
Actually, David Hume did that.’
There is reason to believe that Hume was inspired by Al Ghazali. If not, he independently reproduced Al Ghazali’s ideas, but without Ghazali’s contention that God causes all events, and establishes the regular correlations.
Alhazen was a denier. It is as simple as that.
Thank you very much, Christopher, Lord Monckton,
As you point out, in an electronic circuit we can easily build an oscillator.
The Earth climate seems to me like a well-damped oscillating system, with enough negative feedback loops to keep the global average air temperature stable within a narrow band of temperatures.
Among the mechanisms would be Lindzen’s Infrared Iris, Eschenbach’s Thermostat, and “the fact that the atmosphere is bounded by two heat-sinks, the ocean and outer space.” as you also remark (although this is not a mechanism but a boundary set).
With a small “climate sensitivity”, as shown by many researchers, CO2 would have to be a minor player.
It is very difficult to explain mathematical concepts to non-mathematicians, but I shall again do my best with Mr. Glassman, who has difficulty in understanding the meaning of initial conditions in an object that evolves over time, such as the climate. He muses about the Big Bang as the initial condition for the climate, when it ought to be obviousthat we do not possess adequate information reliably to determine the current state or future evolution of the climate by reference to what happened somewhere in what is now the universe 13.82 billion years ago.
In any object that evolves over time, a mathematician may select any chosen starting moment, conventionally represented by the lower-case “t” with a zero as subscript. It is like taking a photograph of the object at that instant. In order to predict reliably the evolution of the object from t0 over a chosen period, it is necessary to know the initial conditions at t0, and to know all the rules that govern the objects evolution from t0. However, in a chaotic object – and Mr. Glassman’s quotation from the glossary in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report shows quite clearly that the chaoticity of which the IPCC speaks in para. 14.2.2.2 of the Third Assessment Report is in the climate object itself and not merely in the models of it, as he had previously attempted to suggest – the sensitivity to even the most minuscule perturbation in the initial state of the object at any chosen t0 is extreme. Very great precision, therefore, is required in knowing the initial conditions of a chaotic object, and that precision will forever be unattainable in the climate.
And if Mr. Glassman seriously imagines that the climate is not governed by equations, he should attempt to read any standard textbook of climatological physics, though he will need a considerable knowledge of mathematics first. The question whether the climate is adequately represented by the equations as we have them now is, of courrse, quite another matter.
Mr. Glassman then says that in an earlier comment he had given an example estabishing that a feedback had been determined theoretically. Again, it would be helpful if he would familiarize himself with the language of science, which is mathematics. To determine a feedback is to establish a quantitative value for it. Since he stated no value in his earlier comment, he had not determined the feedback in question. I say again, no feedback can yet be determined either empirically or theoretically.
To make matters still worse, Mr. Glassman seems to imagine that cloud cover is constant. One has only to look at the changing pictures of Earth from space to realize that cloud cover is constant neither regionally nor globally. Indeed, Pinker et al. (2005) published data, more recently reanalyzed and largely confirmed by my colleague Dr. Jonathan Boston and published with a paper by me on the subject in the 2010 Annual Proceedings of the World Federation of Scientists, establishing that the radiative forcing from the naturally-occurring reduction in global cloud cover that occurred from 1983-2001 was greater than the entire anthropogenic greenhouse-gas forcing since 1750. It did not persist, of course: the cloud cover returned in late 2001, interestingly in lock-step with the phase-transition from the warming to the cooling phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation; and, since 2001, there has been no global warming at all.
But in a geological time-frame of a few hundreds of thousands of years, the general conditions of the Earth have not been so well regulated and show (Vostok Ice Core) temperature excursions from -8° to +2° C.
“Paleoclimate studies indicate that in the past billion years the Earth’s absolute global mean surface temperature has not varied by more than 3% (~8 K = ~8°C) either side of the 750-million-year mean (291 K = 18°C).” according to Scotese.
(see http://www.scotese.com/earth.htm)
@Zeke says
“I would not say it is entirely correct to say that religion and science both seek for truth, but one uses experimentation and observation to prove or disprove its claims. The reason this is not entirely true is because spiritual traditions must be practiced.”
A hearty thank you for raising this point. A number of contributors have mentioned religion as if the old Catholic church was typical of religious thinking now and there seems to be a general misunderstanding of what faith is. Faith is frequently equated with blind faith which is not normally accepted in science and engineering. It is however perfectly acceptable in religious studies because of the concept of revealed knowledge. There is plenty of revealed science in authentic religious scripture but atheists and agnostics find this terribly inconvenient preferring to cite infamous actions or teachings of the ‘followers’ and by association, besmirch the Revealer’s reputation and by implication, the validity of their Revelation. This has been effectively done during the whole period of the Enlightenment and it drives modern materialism.
A single example will suffice: “Split the atom’s heart and you will find the sun.”
It was reveal many centuries before it was confirmed that atoms had a “heart”.
My point is that religious students are always seeking proofs and validation. It is now more than clear that some involved in climate science are actively discouraging the independent investigation of truth – the foundation stone of discovery, faith and confirmation.
They demand instead a blind faith in the pronouncements of a select few who will make determinations of truth on “our behalf”, an action that vitiates true true science and real religion.
Thanks, milodonharlani.
Probably Copernicus, Vesalius and Bacon where some of the giants on which shoulders Galileo rode on.
Mr. Valencia says the climate seems to be a well-damped oscillating system with many negative feedback-loops keeping the temperature stable. If the climate object is damped so that the feedbacks are net-negative, then global temperature cannot undergo feedback-driven oscillation at all. The very small oscillations in global temperature that are observed, though sufficient to take the Earth in and out of ice ages every 100,000 years or so, are altogether insufficient to allow us to imagine that the feedback loop gain in the climate object falls anywhere near the interval [0.42, 0.74] that is implicit in the IPCC’s climate sensitivity estimates. The oscillations, therefore, are not driven by loop gains intermittently exceeding unity, as they are in an electronic circuit.
Nor is it appropriate to talk of multiple feedback loops. The mathematical representation of feedbacks in the models takes the sum of all feedbacks and represents them in a single feedback loop. I suspect that even this will not do. A more appropriate model would perhaps be the bathtub with the plug out and the taps on. Depending upon the rate of influx of solar radiation and the rate of outflux from the atmosphere into the oceanic and outer-space heat-sinks, the temperature in the atmosphere will change. But, since the rates of influx and outflux do not vary by very much, there is not much change to temperature. Several mathematicians are now working on the bathtub model – which, of course, involves taking the time-integrals of the changes in influx and outflux. They are finding that this model actually works – and indicates that CO2 is at best a bit-part player in the changing climate.
So far, and then only after much tampering with the temperature data to make the warming rate look worse than it really is, the greatest supra-decadal rate of warming that we have observed in the global instrumental record was equivalent to 2 K/century, and that rate persisted for 33 years from 1974 to 2006 inclusive. But that period included within it an entire 26-year warming phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. During the cooling phases, even with CO2 being added to the mix, we do not seem to be getting any warming at all. On average, then, it would be surprising to see global temperature increasing by more than 1 K this century, if that. And that is before we allow for the half-century of global cooling, driven by the now-serious drop in solar activity since 1960.
The more one looks at all this, the more one concludes that Dick Lindzen was right when he concluded that there was not much more probability that the world would be warmer than today by 2050 than that it would be cooler. The remaining question is how quickly the international scientific community will realize that continuing to pretend that CO2 is a major problem is undermining its credibility and thus its justification for future funding of this or any other scientific discipline.
Galileo’s greatest discoveries & insights were made without aid of Bacon’s philosophy, but the two thinkers did correspond on the question of the tides, about which both were wrong, but Bacon less so. Kepler correctly attributed the tides to lunar influences. Still, it’s possible that some of the theoretical discussion in Galileo’s “Two Systems” owes to Bacon’s thought.
I date the birth of modern science from Copernicus, who waited until he was dying to publish “On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres” in 1543. The scientific method was IMO developed between his time & Newton’s “Principia” of 1687, with perhaps some refinement in the 19th century to accommodate some other procedures besides pure induction.