Putting Sir Isaac Newton on the right path
Short story by Christopher Bowring
When lay global warming skeptics point out to alarmists that the recent seventeen year period of steady global temperatures invalidates their climate models which predicted runaway global warming, there is often a standard response.
‘How can you, global warming (or climate change) denier, who have no experience of climatology, dare to argue with me, a renowned expert in my field of science?’ Let us return to the England of the seventeenth century to see what is wrong with this rebuttal.
I am in Grantham in Lincolnshire. It is a sunny day. A respectable looking man in a wig is sitting under an apple tree. It is Sir Isaac Newton. I greet him. He smiles back, but looks agitated. ‘What is wrong?’ I ask. ‘I have made a wonderful discovery,’ he replies. ‘I call is my Law of Gravitation’. ‘What does it say?’ I enquire.
‘It says that any two bodies in the universe repel each other with a force proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their distance apart’. ‘Really?’ I respond. ‘But that is nonsense!’ ‘Nonsense?’ explodes the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. ‘Nonsense? How can you, a nobody, a nonentity, dare to question the mind of the greatest living scientist in the world?’
‘Sir, I refute your law quite simply’. And with that I take an apple from the tree and drop it on Sir Isaac’s head.
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Argument from authority is the first line of defence for these people.
We need to draw more attention to the asymmetry between Proposing a theory and Refuting one.
To propose a theory about climate you need to cobble together a vast number of different disciplines and produce a consistent result.
To destroy such a theory you can be as ignorant as you like about most of the theory but simple be able to produce a single flaw.
This is something that does not get emphasised enough.
The climate scientists are a particularly smug and narcissistic lot….characteristics seemingly confined to that ‘discipline’. Characteristics strange as they are distasteful, give the GIGO that they espouse.
refute ?? how does dropping an apple on his head do it ?
That phrase really irks me. There is no “global temperature”, and there certainly aren’t multiple “global temperatures”. Yet we’re always presented with a single, meaningless metric. Why can’t we get away from this??
Precisely. A swift unscientific common-sense solution is often the best way.
“This sir, is how much CO2 we make, which isn’t a lot.”
“What only that much in all that sky up there, blimey”.
At the point where the models are all with 95% confidence wrong, it is not clear at all that it should be called a science.
It is a failed attempt to figure out climate behavior.
I have an acquaintance that beliefs that planet is warming at the rate preached by the most extreme of green dogmas. Every summer he drags himself around, convinced in his heart that it is hotter than ever before. Years back, I tried to tell him that it doesn’t work that way and he barked back his learned nonsense. Since then, I just let him suffer in peace. And suffer he does.
So why did Newton look agitated? Perhaps deep down he knew he had got a sign wrong?
So why are not global warmists agitated instead of agitators? They can see they have got a sign wrong surely? It is cooling.
I suppose there is some data they can’t change and so they must try to change peoples perceptions of that data to maintain their belief system and thereby income streams.
Otherwise I am struggling to see how the circus is still on the road divorced from reality and now divorcing from political “reality”. The whole business is very sad.
@gopal panicker November 29, 2013 at 10:45 pm: “refute ?? how does dropping an apple on his head do it ?”
Re-read that part about “repel”. As eco-geek noted, there was a little sign problem.
Peer review would be a lot more interesting if it generally involved projectiles.
The words “straw man” come to mind as Newton never held such a supposition.
Forget imagining catching him making a completely ridiculous mistake. Instead imagine trying to persuade him that his real theories were incomplete; that the speed of light is constant in every inertial frame or that clocks run slower in a gravitational field.
The reason the AGW people are so hard to argue with is that what they believe ISN’T a mistake. It is indeed quite plausible that changing the composition of the atmosphere might change its radiative properties and lead to warming. There is an aspect of truth to this, just as there is truth in Newtonian mechanics. It is not an error. It is a plausible initial conclusion.
One then needs to go beyond this initial conclusion and look at questions of magnitide and other factors. It is no use getting your knickers in a knot over an effect which is insignificantly small or which is obliviated by other much larger influences and controlling factors on the state of the climate. And if you are willing to take that deeper look you will find (with a sigh of relief) that this is indeed the case.
The problem with the alarmists is that they are unwilling to take that next step. They are so mesmerised by the frightening (wonderful?) possibilities of their initial conclusion that they are are unable to move beyond it. What they believe is actually a piece of the truth. But it is only a piece. Unfortunately they are completely fixated on this piece. They are unable or unwilling to go beyond it and look at the larger picture. Persuading them of their mistake is not a simple matter of demonstrating some gross error.
I propose a theory that says we don’t control the climate; IT controls US…;)
@Jeff Alberts “That phrase really irks me. There is no “global temperature”, and there certainly aren’t multiple “global temperatures”. Yet we’re always presented with a single, meaningless metric. Why can’t we get away from this??”
Precisely – !!! And it doesn’t take a scientist to figure that out – just good old common sense.
The science is settled. It’s wrong, but that is not the point. It is settled and now we are only allowed to dispute the politics. The solution to the settled science is communism. That is wrong, but that is not the point either. The solution is to take any one who disagrees and put them to work in the fields, (Pol Pot and Mao) or to kill them off in a frozen wasteland somewhere (Stalin) . The tools to put in place are a compliant Press and media, (Kim Jong Il, Obama, Hedegaard, Camerloon) and an army of indoctrinated sheep to break windows and daub slogans and terrorize the non-compliant ( Agenda 21 via Greenpeace, FOe, WWF)
Watch your backs. We may think history cannot repeat itself again, but show me an era where it did not…..
Ivor Ward
Jeff Alberts says: “…There is no “global temperature”, and there certainly aren’t multiple “global temperatures”. Yet we’re always presented with a single, meaningless metric. Why can’t we get away from this??”
Because AGW zealots like to pretend there is such a thing. If there were, we’d have no means of measuring it, lacking a place to put a global-scale thermometer. I’ve thought of such a place, but Al Gore doesn’t return my Tweets.
@Jeff Alberts & 4TimesAYear
I agree there are no “global temperatures”. There at least difficulties in measuring a global temperature and I don’t know whether a global temperatur makes sense, but in my opinion there IS a global temperature. What is Your argument?
Another classic example posits a post-1905 visitor to the famed Max Planck in December 1900. “Give me a sphere of gray metal the size of a tennis ball,” says the visitor. “When I cut the sphere into two halves and slam them forcefully together, the result will be a crater two miles wide and one thousand feet deep, that will smoke-and-steam for years.”
“Impossible!” replies der grosse Herr Professor Planck. “We may not know much, but settled thermodynamic principles do specify that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Your tennis-ball cannot possibly liberate sufficient energy for this effect.”
The problem here is that Prof. Planck’s 19th Century view assumes that “energy” is chemical: Even granted his discovery of quantized photoelectric processes that very month, no classical (Newtonian) effect could generate a “tennis-ball” outcome. But prior to Special Relativity, neither Planck nor anyone else can know that “energy” is in fact not chemical but nuclear, proportional to mass times a gigantic conversion factor = 186,282^2, the universally constant rate-of-propagation of electromagnetic radiation (“light”) in vacuo.
“Science” is a Philosophy of the natural world; an empirical, objective, above all rational Method; and in Practice a “social enterprise” subjecting all positive, null, and negative experimental outcomes to strict replication of results. “Nullius in verba” as Galileo put it, or as Feynman admonished: Nature cares nothing for what you may believe, nor for any “mere opinion” you may hold.
Conjecture a contingent, material, rational projection (no inverse causation, miracles, perpetual motion, need apply); formulate a testable hypothesis; conduct rigorous experiments designed specifically not to prove but to invalidate your premises; finally, submit detailed, explicit results for replication by knowledgeable experts (“peers”). Only so is any Theory provisionally verified, ever pending one single contrary result.
Granted classical assumptions, Max Planck in 1900 would not be so much wrong as necessarily mistaken. Meantime, as geodesics in 4-D Riemannian hyperspace, gravitation’s probabilistic trajectories become factorial: Converting not mass-to-energy but space/time to energy would explode the solar system “like a stick of dynamite in a rotten apple.”
@cynical_scientist
I couldn’t agree more, they have become fixated on the tail of the dog rather than the body.
It all depends on your mindset.
Some, Newton was one, always question and want to know more – he would say, “we have not pushed the boundaries far enough and man must strive to learn more about the Universe” – he would have marvelled at and with Quantum theory.
Then, there is the ‘other lot’, they are one’s who would have us back in the dark ages before the great enlightenment because that suits their purpose.
Only good men reach out to the firmament, the only thing holding us [the human race] back are the naysayers and deniers of: pure science and the glory of mathematics.
We’ve only dipped our toes and the ‘ocean of space’ is vast.
cynical_scientist says:
November 29, 2013 at 11:16 pm
Nice.
Of course there is no “global temperature”. That’s the reason why we consider, instead, the temperature “anomaly”. For example, we can compare the mean temperature of November 2013 AT A GIVEN PLACE to the mean temperature of December of the years 1980-2010 at the same place. And do the same for other places.
@ur momisugly Lew Skannen : correctumundo.
The word that really gets me is ‘pause’. It IS NOT a pause – and even sceptics sometimes use the word! A ‘pause’ is a temporary cessation. It implies that you know the future state of events. If you are banging a hammer on a piece of wood, then you pause, it means you KNOW that you are going to carry on hitting the wood with the hammer. If you have finished hitting the wood then it isn’t a pause – it is stopped. Knowing the future state is clear here. If you cannot know the future state (as is the case with climate science) then it is not a ‘pause’. A ‘pause’ implies that the state that existed before will continue – and that simply isn’t knowable!
It’s possible that I’m wrong here, but I’m worried about people who write that Arrhenius measured heat when light was passed through CO2 gas or air with CO2 in it.
The early experiments by Arrhenius, Tyndall et al used a rock salt crystal to refract the visible and particularly the invisible Infra Red part of the spectrum. They did not rely on heat measurements for their theories. They detected wavelength and hence energy, as at absorption bands, using a bolometer. This could have been a thin walled glass sphere filled with a gas, the sphere expanding when heated and the approximate wavelength of the emission measured from its position relative to the crystal. Think Pink Floyd CD covers.
If you go to Web sites and search derivation of Stefan Boltzmann or derivation of Planck equation, you will find that the much publicised energy dependence on the 4th power of temperature arises from mathematical integration of geometric terms such as those taking you from a plane to a sphere.
There might be later papers in which the actual heat production is measured, but I am not aware of any from my fairly broad reading. So you have to place your trust in a theory of quantum electrodynamics.
That said, I do not argue that passage of IR light though a gas mixture containing CO2 will produce heat. It will. I have melted & cut 1 inch steel plate with IR light from a CO2 laser that has been focussed to a very small diameter. In the atmospheric context, while I agree that heat will be produced, I am uncertain about how long the heat will remain in the natural system. Heat that is fleeting, or heat that induces a cooling feedback will not do the job so often claimed by GHG enthusiasts.
There is still no single, quantitative, replicated paper that links GHG concentration with a temperature change in the atmosphere.
Lloyd Martin Hendaye says:
November 29, 2013 at 11:44 pm
“like a stick of dynamite in a rotten apple.”
Hee hee. Reminds me of the story of the Hollywood director who, on hearing of the first atomic bomb attack on Japan, rushed up to his leading actor and breathlessly blurted “This atomic bomb, man, it’s… it’s.. DYNAMITE!!”
(OK, it’s Saturday night here and by now I’m frivolously amused…)
Jean Meeus, I take your point, but there actually is a ‘global temperature’. It’s an average of all locations, all times of day, and all days of the year. I think it’s 14.5-15 C. The anomaly is a reading above or below a set period of time of temps taken from the 1961-1990 average.