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.
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Should add that I start with Copernicus & Vesalius, since they first broke with veneration for the authority of the Ancients (eg, Aristotle, Ptolemy & Galen) & Church doctrine based upon interpretation of the Bible, Scholastic tradition & those same Ancients. The initial step in developing the modern scientific method was to place observation ahead of received authority. Copernicus did however continue Aristotle’s perfectly circular orbits, which made predictions based upon his simpler heliocentric system less accurate than Ptolemy’s more complicated geocentric model.
Today we’re back to venerating the authority of self-appointed or Team-anointed state-sanctioned experts, adepts of the new religion.
Thanks again, Christopher, Lord Monckton.
I will be watching for the presentation of your bathtub model for the Earth’s climate.
I wish you the best, even though I think a generally simple view of this most complex system as an input-output black box is bound to either fail in making useful short-range predictions or explain the inner workings of the chaotic system. In this bathtub there are things moving in the water, emergent phenomena locally changing its viscosity and forming vortices, dead pools and circulation cells.
Monckton of Brenchley, September 8, 2013 @ur momisugly 9:40 pm.
Your ad hominems and personal assumptions do not enhance your pretenses to be an authority. They only detract from your credibility.
I did not muse about the Big Bang. I gave it as a candidate answer for you to use in my challenge to provide the initial conditions for chaotic climate. You have not responded. I’ll give you a better hint: let the time be at the formation of the oceans. Now what are the initial conditions?
Students (pl: he who knows not and knows that he knows not; distinct from a fool: he who knows not and knows not that he knows not) need to grasp the difference between the real world and models of it. All scientific knowledge, as distinct from data, is contained in its models of the real world. The two notions are distinct.
I agree with you that a mathematician is free to fix his own t0, but that choice applies to his current model, also freely chosen regardless of whether it fits the real world. Perhaps the lesson here is that objects in science are just those that can be observed and measured, i.e., data. Show us the equations you observed, show us the initial conditions, and I’ll show you the underlying model.
You refer to IPCC TAR for using chaos without actually citing it. Here is what it says:
“The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long term prediction of future exact climate states is not possible.” TAR, Technical Summary, G.2 Climate Processes and Modelling, p. 78.
“A complex, non-linear system may display what is technically called chaotic behaviour. This means that the behaviour of the system is critically dependent on very small changes of the initial conditions.” TAR, §1.2.2, Natural Variability of Climate, p. 91.
Of course, the climate is neither nonlinear nor chaotic. These are strictly mathematical concepts, and the real world has no observable mathematics. A simple change of coordinate systems can convert the model of a real world system between linear and nonlinear. The unfortunate choice of uncorrelated data can change the model of a real world system from predictable to chaotic. Nonlinear and chaotic have no known definitions outside of the mathematics. IPCC was wrong, but this particular error is greatly toned down in AR4. And for the latter, it was more careful and it stepped up the rigor at bit:
“A parallel evolution toward increased complexity and resolution has occurred in the domain of numerical weather prediction, and has resulted in a large and verifiable improvement in operational weather forecast quality. This example alone shows that present models are more realistic than were those of a decade ago. There is also, however, a continuing awareness that models do not provide a perfect simulation of reality, because resolving all important spatial or time scales remains far beyond current capabilities, and also because the behaviour of such a complex nonlinear system may in general be chaotic.
“It has been known since the work of Lorenz (1963) that even simple models may display intricate behaviour because of their nonlinearities. The inherent nonlinear behaviour of the climate system appears in climate simulations at all time scales (Ghil, 1989). In fact, the study of nonlinear dynamical systems has become important for a wide range of scientific disciplines, and the corresponding mathematical developments are essential to interdisciplinary studies. Simple models of ocean-atmosphere interactions, climate-biosphere interactions or climate-economy interactions may exhibit a similar behaviour, characterised by partial unpredictability, bifurcations and transition to chaos. AR4, ¶1.5.1 Model Evolution and Model Hierarchies, p. 113.
The first two sentences refer to numerical weather prediction as an example of the subject of climate, which begins at “There is also”. The last sentence of ¶1 is ambiguous, correct if “such” refers to the model and not to the real world. The next paragraph outlining the study of chaotic systems is much better, but requires recognition that the insertion of “nonlinear” in “the study of nonlinear dynamical systems” shifts the meaning from including the real world back to just models, and that the word “inherent” is wrong. IPCC seems to be converging, so one can hope that it might get the matter right in AR5.
You say Mr. Glassman seems to imagine that cloud cover is constant. It’s not my imagination that it is constant in the GCMs, as I actually said, and that that treatment removes its dominating feedback power. You missed the point entirely. Cloud cover decreases with increasing TSI and increases with increasing surface temperature. That means cloud cover is not constant, and that is a dual feedback. That determination is made contradicting your ad hoc rule, To determine a feedback is to establish a quantitative value for it.
You say, 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 course, quite another matter.
If you actually found a passage in some climatology text supporting your position, I challenge you to quote it, along with the reference. Then I will show you where you and the text both went wrong, as done above with the IPCC on climate chaos. You close with a comically self-contradictory conclusion: climate is “governed by equations” which are inadequate. I suppose that the existence of those natural equations is matter of faith.
You say, 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. Perhaps precision is unattainable in the climate because you can not imagine, much less observe, what those initial conditions might be, or to what they might apply. What precision might you expect for the time of formation of the oceans? You will find with practice that “very great precision” is required in the use of language.
RoHa says:
September 8, 2013 at 6:26 pm
@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.”
Any time you want, put Ghazali’s writings specific to causality next to Hume’s writings. You will find that Hume’s explication is light years ahead of his time and depends on no one. Hume was a true genius.
“but without Ghazali’s contention that God causes all events, and establishes the regular correlations.”
This is just mind boggling. Do you really mean to suggest that the postulate of God is a small matter that separates the two thinkers. Hume’s great achievement was to remove God and all God-like causes from science. Ghazali remained dependent on God for his account of knowledge. Do you not understand that Hume was the first to show that metaphysics can be removed from science but that Ghazali had no clue that the task was even important?
RoHa says:
September 8, 2013 at 5:39 pm
@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.’
Then you will really enjoy reading “Two New World Systems” shown up-screen from here. You will agree that Galileo invented scientific method.
“what made modern science possible, Newton’s calculus.”
“Or Leibniz’s.”
Leibniz did not apply his calculus to the physics or astronomy of the day. Newton explained that given a mountain high enough and a cannon of the correct dimensions he could launch a cannon ball into orbit – Sputnik is born! Newton synthesized the physics of the heavens, Kepler, and earthly physics, Galileo.
Theo Goodwin says:
September 9, 2013 at 8:27 pm
Galileo certainly made important contributions to the development of the scientific method, but as I commented earlier, IMO its rebirth in the early modern period owes to Copernicus in the physical sciences & Vesalius in life science. Galileo was a convinced Copernican even before his telescopic observations, & may have been encouraged to reject Aristotle’s physics by Copernicus’ rejection of ancient Greek astronomy (except for the few ancient heliocentrists, consider impious even by their fellow pagans).
Mr. Glassman, who puzzlingly accuses me of ad hominem remarks, continues to exhibit more than a little confusion about elementary mathematical and physical concepts. Let me do my best to clarify matters.
He begins by reasserting that he considered the Big Bang a credible set of initial conditions for studying the evolution of the climate. His musings on this subject are, alas, at odds with more than a century of understanding in physics. For the physical laws we observe today did not apply at the moment of the Big Bang. They only came into existence a minuscule fraction of a moment after the Big Bang itself. For this reason, inter alia, we cannot prove that there is or is not a God; and, in the other direction, we cannot discern anything at all useful about the evolution of the climate from studying the Big Bang, which occurred 13.82 billion years ago.
He goes on to propose the formation of the oceans as the appropriate starting moment t0 at which to measure the initial conditions in the climate. However, that too is not close enough to today’s conditions to give us useful guidance. Indeed, our data are manifestly inadequate to obtain a set of initial conditions of anything like sufficient resolution that far back in time. As I have tried to explain to him, a chaotic object such as the climate is subject to bifurcations (what used to be called phase transitions) that arise deterministically but indeterminably with minuscule variations in the initial conditions. For that reason, the choice of t0 for studying the evolution of the climate object should be as close as possible to the present, for that is when we have the least inadequate data.
He complains that I refer to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report without citing it. However, it is self-evident from the citation that I had represented its meaning correctly and sufficiently. He then disagrees with the IPCC, saying that the climate is neither non-linear nor chaotic. There are numerous self-evident non-linearities throughout the climate object, but – as I have said before – it is difficult to explain concepts in mathematics to a non-mathematician. But let us try. A non-linear function is one whose graph is not a straight line. Gravity, to take one fundamental influence on the climate, varies as the square of the distance between two astronomical bodies. It is a non-linear function of distance. The radiative forcing from a proportionate change in CO2 concentration is a logarithmic function of the proportionate change. Again, the function is non-linear. And so on, and so on. To pretend that the climate is linear is to err fundamentally.
Non-linear functions may be ordered or, under certain conditions or across certain intervals,, chaotic. For practical purposes, it matters not whether Lorenz (1963) was correct to characterize the climate object as what is now called chaotic (he himself did not use the term in that great paper). The difficulty that the models have in attempting to predict the climate is that, whether or not the climate object is chaotic, it behaves – in our limited observational capacity – as though it were chaotic.
Mr. Glassman then demonstrates just how much of a non-mathematician he is by saying that “the real world has no observable mathematics”. Of course it does. Refer to any elementary textbook of physics, or watch a thermometer or barometer or hygrometer or radiometer. If an object can be measured, it has observable mathematics. He muses that “a simple change of co-ordinate systems can convert the model of a real-world system between linear and non-linear”. But that statement manifestly contradicts his immediately preceding statement that “the real world has no observable mathematics”. Converting some non-linearity in the observable climate object to linearity – a process well understood by mathematicians, and known as linearization – is of course a mathematical process.
Next, he asserts, meaninglessly, that “The unfortunate choice of uncorrelated data can change the model of a real-world system from predictable to chaotic”. To study the real world, we measure it as best we can and use the resultant data. Whether or not the data we obtain are correlatively or even causatively linked, those are the data we have. And it is not the model of the climate object that behaves chaotically: it is the climate object itself that does so. The ambition of climate modeling, though it is largely futile over the long timescales the IPCC plays with, is to attempt the opposite of what Mr. Glassman, in this immensely confused sentence appears to be suggesting: it is to model the climate so that what appears chaotic and deterministic becomes sufficiently ordered to be determinable.
Mr. Glassman compounds his nonsense by saying, “Non-linear and chaotic have no known difference outside … mathematics.” Of course they do. The word “chaos”, for instance, was used in ordinary speech long before it was adopted for use in mathematics.
Next, he says that “the insertion of ‘non-linear’ in ‘the study of non-linear dynamical systems’ shifts the meaning from including the real world back to just models.” Codswallop. The CO2 radiative forcing, for instance, is a non-linear function of the proportionate change in concentration whether we choose to model it or not.
Mr. Glassman goes on to say that cloud cover is constant in the climate models. As I had previously explained, it is not constant in the real world. Nor is it constant in the models.
Vexatiously, he next refuses to acknowledge the meaning of the word “determine” in mathematics, saying that my definition of it is an “ad hoc rule”. The word literally means “define the limits”, and it is in this sense that it is used in mathematics. Thus, to determine climate sensitivity to a CO2 doubling is to establish a value, or an interval of values with upper and lower bounds, for the amount of warming a doubling of CO2 concentration may be expected to cause. To assert that a particular temperature feedback exists, as Mr. Glassman does, is – whether he likes it or not – not the same thing in mathematics as to determine it. Therefore, as I had correctly stated in the head posting, it is not possible to determine any temperature feedback, so that the IPCC’s imagined near-tripling of the direct warming to be expected in response to a CO2 doubling to allow for temperature feedbacks is mere guesswork, and uneducated guesswork at that.
Mr. Glassman futilely maintains his assertion that “the climate is not governed by equations”. He asks me to find a passage in some climatology text supporting my contention that it is. It is time he did a little work himself, rather than making stuff up. Let him turn to any textbook of climatological physics. He will find it full of equations. The equations express the physical laws that govern the climate. He states, more than somewhat arrogantly, that if I refer him to any such text he will demonstrate its error, just as he claims to have done with the IPCC’s account of mathematical chaos. Since Mr. Glassman plain has no understanding of what mathematical chaos is, he has of course failed to refute the IPCC’s understanding of it. And, since he has no understanding of the laws of physics that govern the climate and are expressed as equations, he will be in similar difficulty in attempting to maintain that equations (or, more precisely, the physical laws that the equations describe) govern the climate. He may like to start with Roe (2009) on temperature feedbacks and let me know what Roe (a student of the formidable Dick Lindzen) got wrong.
Next, Mr. Glassman says I perpetrate a comic self-contradiction when I say that the equations that govern the climate are inadequate. There is no contradiction at all. We do our best to discern the physical laws, and we express our discernment in equations. Some of the equations that govern the climate are now demonstrated – such as the fundamental equation of radiative transfer, which was first derived empirically by Stefan (the only Slovene after whom an equation has been named) and was later demonstrated theoretically by his Austrian pupil Ludwig Boltzmann. Other equations, such as the climate-sensitivity equation, are not yet demonstrated and are very likely not to be adequate yet, which is why there has been so much less global warming than the models had so confidently but unwisely predicted.
Mr. Glassman goes on to say, “I suppose that the existence of those natural equations is a matter of faith.” No, it is a matter of painstaking observation, followed by painstaking measurement, followed by the painstaking application of pre-existing theory to the results.
He then says, “Precision is unattainable in the climate because you cannot imagine, much less observe, what those initial conditions might be, or to what they might apply.” Look about you, man. Can you not see the world? Can you not photograph it? Can you not understand the elementary concept of taking measurements at a particular moment, which mathematicians call to? We can observe the initial conditions, but we cannot measure them to a sufficient resolution or precision to use them as the basis for modeling the future evolution of an object that behaves chaotically, as the climate does.
He ends with a childish ad-hominem that “you will find with practice that ‘very great precision’ is required in the use of language”. Well, it is he, not I, who has been imprecise, using terms such as “determine” in a non-standard sense without making it explicit that that is what he is doing. One is left wondering whether he is himself confused or is yet another of the new species of troll that has recently become evident, deliberately trying to confuse the argument in the hope of undermining it and thus of defending the now-indefensible climate-extremist position. His own imprecision of language is so great that I cannot tell whether his confusion is inadvertent or deliberate. Perhaps, therefore, he will be kind enough to go away and examine either an elementary textbook of mathematics or his conscience or both before posting anything here again. Attempts to sow deliberate confusion on matters of science and mathematics with the aim of pursuing the poisonous political objective of the climate-extremists are downright evil, which is why I have gone to some lengths here to dispel the confusion that Mr. Glassman has sown.
Theo Goodwin says:
September 9, 2013 at 8:27 pm
I do not mean to reserve all credit for Galileo. If you haven’t read the book I referenced up-screen, please do. You will find it a true joy. Galileo’s thought experiments about physics and astronomy are revelatory. Yes, Galileo seems to have remained a Copernican. Had he not been under severe constraints of “house arrest” he might have become a Keplerian.
Oops! My last post was addressed to:
milodonharlani says:
September 9, 2013 at 8:37 pm
@Theo Goodwin
“Do you really mean to suggest that the postulate of God is a small matter that separates the two thinkers?”
No. Why would you jump to such a conclusion?
I simply pointed out that Ghazali’s ideas on causation were similar to, and may have inspired, Hume. They both denied necessary causality, both agreed that observation only shows the succession of events, and both agreed that it is we make the link as a mental habit.
But Ghazali’s scepticism led him to fideism and mysticism. Hume’s led to scepticism about God.
Some good discussion of the similarities in arguments and ideas here:
http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Medi/MediAdam.htm
http://www.ghazali.org/articles/gz-riker.pdf
http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ma/works/ma-gz-ps.pdf
As far as the influence is concerned, that is less easy to show. We certainly need not assume that Hume shared the 20th century European ignorance of Islamic and medieval philosophy, but to confidently assert direct influence I think we need a little more evidence than the quotation Mashhad Al-Allaf gives us.