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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as a lay sceptic, in chilly Queensland, wearing a sweater, i’ve learned to take into account the ifs, buts & maybes:
30 Nov: Sydney Morning Herald: Peter Hannam: Summer warmth ahead to cap Sydney’s hottest year
Sydney can expect a warmer than average summer, making it likely the city will also record its hottest ever year, the Bureau of Meteorology predicts. With a top of 30 degrees forecast for Thursday, the harbour city will be certain to notch up another month of above-average maximums, even though November has had closer to normal temperatures than the July-October stretch of warmth.
Barring a cool end to the year, 2013 is likely to be Sydney’s warmest in 154 years of record, said Aaron Coutts-Smith, head of the bureau’s climate monitoring for NSW. ”We’re miles ahead of the previous [record],” said Dr Coutts-Smith, with the 2004 and 2005 years at present tied for the record with a daily average maximum of about 23.4 degrees…
Current models show the odds are in favour of a warmer and drier summer than average for most of NSW, including the Sydney area…
The city is expecting showers on Friday and possibly Saturday, topping up the 190 millimetres already recorded for the month – the wettest November since 1984…
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/summer-warmth-ahead-to-cap-sydneys-hottest-year-20131127-2y9kh.html
“pat says:
November 30, 2013 at 5:29 am”
Cold here in Sydney, too. And forecasts are generated by? Computer models! HA!
cynical_scientist says:
November 29, 2013 at 11:16 pm
The words “straw man” come to mind as Newton never held such a supposition.
“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.”
Might Cause? Really?
No it has to be be shown conclusively the changes in the composition earth atmosphere leads to warming.
And then you have to beat thermodynamics….
Might cause leads to failure in the engineering world
lemiere jacques says:
November 30, 2013 at 1:16 am
so it is said one must trust simulation because they can hindcast some patterns of the past climate….
=================
A parrot can hindcast – repeat what it has learned. this doesn’t mean it has any skill predicting the future. the problem is that modellers use the same data to train the models that they use to validate the models. this tells us nothing about the skill of the models.
if you want to actually validate a climate model, train it using the temperature data from 1850-1950, then ask it to predict temperatures from 1950-2013 and see how well it does. what you will find is what we are seeing now.
When the models were trained using data from 1850-2000, they were unable to predict temperatures from 2000-2013. yes, they could predict temperatures from 1850-2000, because these were the training set, the models memorized these and parroted them back. But just like a parrot the models were unable to predict the future for 2000 onwards.
What the models were able to predict from 2000 onwards was what the climate modellers believed. the modellers believed that temps would continue to rise as CO2 was continuing to rise, and this is what the models delivered; what the modellers believed the future would look like.
Can someone please explain to this Box of Rocks how a CO2 molecule can generate heat?
I know that CO2 can release energy when it cools or absorb energy as it warms.
There is also this idea that it can emit photons under certain circumstances…
But hey does it have a secret stash or is there a Keynesian multiplier for CO2 to generate or convert matter and energy????
Jan Jacobs says:
November 30, 2013 at 2:46 am
95% certainty, means nothing at all.
================
it means that if you repeat the identical experiment 20 times, 19 times the result will be negative and 1 time it will be positive, on average. If you then publish the 1 in 20 and fail to publish the 19 in 20, you have on your hands an exciting new discovery in science. that no one will be able to replicate. but since peer reviews does not involve replication, this will not prove a barrier to publication of utter nonsense as scientific fact.
the problem is that “modern” science ignores the scientific principle. the method that allowed us to separate superstition from reality is being largely ignored by scientists. instead they are selectively publishing positive results because this attracts grant money. Imagine you get $5 million in grant money to study XYZ. You then report back that yes, we spend $5 million and found that XYZ doesn’t happen. Can we now have another $5 million?
Now imagine instead that you report back that XYZ does happen (as we have seen, 1 in 20 times) and you want $5 million more for continued studies of this very promising and unexpected result. Which report will get you the money and which will report will get your the boot?
So, with car payment and mortgage payments and bills mounting up, a wife to keep and children to feed, which report are you going to deliver?
Patrick, it isn’t meaningless – although I’ll agree that some of it is fabricated (extrapolated). It is still meaningful. Without it we wouldn’t know whether, over time, the global temperature is rising or falling. Other metrics are not useful. When it starts falling (when we are about to plunge into the next Ice Age) then we had better know about it so that we can prepare. Sorry, but I think it’s frankly ridiculous to say it’s meaningless. All we can do is prepare for whatever the Earth throws at us based on what we record and see. Gathering global temperatures and collating them into an average serves a purpose. The alternative is watching glaciers melt and/or noticing increased forest fires – all to try and inform you about what the Earth is doing – temperature wise. Frankly, I’d rather collect temps and average them out, wouldn’t you? The alternative is a caveman approach. We’re all well aware that some of the records are fabricated and adjusted, but it’s still better than watching to see if a Pyracantha berries early, or if a Fuschia flowers late.
Box of Rocks — For a question like that you should really let your fingers do the walking on the web. There are scores of articles to explain it, like this one. The “heat” from CO2 is (ultimately) from the sun, not from the CO2 itself.
Short answer – The sun heats things up. These things emit infrared radiation. Greenhouse gases (including CO2) absorb infrared radiation. Absorbing this radiation heats them up; they then heat up the atmosphere. (Oxygen and nitrogen don’t absorb infrared radiation, so if there were no greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, this infrared radiation would make it into space without heating up anything.)
David L. says:
November 30, 2013 at 1:58 am
so why did the world believe Aristotle for do long?
=============
because sometimes lighter objects do fall slower than heavier objects, but heavier objects almost never fall slower than lighter objects. this was taken as proof that Aristotle was right.
This is how superstition and false beliefs comes into existence, when we accept positive examples as proof that something is true. This is largely the driving force behind AGW. Positive examples are taken as proof of AGW, while negative examples are ignored.
However, as with Aristotle, it is the negative results that are important. The small, light objects that on occasion do fall faster than large heavy objects are what proves Aristotle wrong. It is these negative results that do not get published that prevent us from discovering the truth.
for example, a lead pellet weighs less than a large block of Styrofoam. Yet the lead pellet falls faster than the block of foam. By the scientific method, this single example proves Aristotle wrong. However, by “modern” science, the hundreds of examples of heavier objects falling faster than lighter object “outweighs” the evidence of this single exception, making Aristotle correct.
cynical_scientist says:
November 29, 2013 at 11:16 pm
An old saying about a nail and the head of a hammer comes to mind. Nicely done.
Yup. Nice and easy does it. Why is it that so many people in the MSM are frightened to even ask simple questions? Perhaps a lack of confidence that comes from not having a basic science education.
Rather than arguing AGW with your neighbor that believes in warming, argue Aristotle first. Establish in their mind why positive examples are not proof, but negative examples are. Do this for something simple and non controversial, like falling objects.
Only after they agree on the principle of scientific discovery, then apply this to their argument that such and such storm proves AGW is real. Explain that a storm does not prove AGW any more than a heavy object falling faster than a light object proves Aristotle.
Then apply the flat-line in temperatures to rising CO2 levels, to demonstrate to them that just like Aristotle, the lack of warming is proof that AGW is wrong. That in the case of falling objects, as single example that does not fit is all it took to prove Aristotle wrong. In the case of AGW, no matter how many positive examples are found, it only takes one negative example to prove AGW wrong.
This is what separates superstition from science. Superstition relies of positive examples to establish belief. Science relies on negative examples to establish truth. No matter how many positive results are published in leaned journals it doesn’t prove anything. However, a single negative result can prove a whole body of scientific theory and teaching, going back almost 2000 years to be wrong.
Poppycock. Newton was 100 percent correct, and dropping the apple on his head actually proves it.
The only time relativistic effects take hold is at massive planetary scales and where gravity difference is relatively significant, for instance the difference between Earth orbit and surface level.
There is also speeds approaching the speed of light where time dilation takes hold.
For all Earthly interactions of matter (hadron configurations perceivable by the human eye) Newton’s laws are correct, which is why when someone makes the correct claim that the top 15 floors of the north tower on 911 cannot ACCELERATE at 64% freefall through resistance greater than it’s static weight without extra energy in the form of explosives removing the resistance, the anti-conspiracy morons cannot counter with “Well Newton’s laws are wrong according to relativity”
Newton’s third law also states that 2 colliding objects exert equal force against each other which means that for every floor destroyed in the resisting section a floor must be destroyed in the falling section, meaning that after 15 floors there cannot be any piledriver destroying the building.
I’m surprised you would post Mr Bowring’s erroneous example.
Whatever happened to the boy who told the Emperor he had no clothes? Did his mom take him home and beat him to within inches of his life or did they make him the new Emperor? Not that we’re hedging our bets or anything.
@Jeff Alberts
>>……There is no “global temperature”, and there certainly aren’t multiple “global temperatures”. Yet we’re always presented with a single, meaningless metric.<>That’s the reason why we consider, instead, the temperature “anomaly.”<>Jean Meeus, you CAN average out global temperature.<<
Yes, indeed. You can average anything, but does that statistic actually have any meaning? Once again, it goes back to sampling. I can argue with how you sampled data for any kind of average you want to take. This is part of the reason why the AGW proponents have been reduced to absurdly proposing that the excess heat they expect is "hiding" somewhere in the ocean, i.e. the heat is still there; they just can't sample it.
The above did not format properly when posted, so I’m going to do these one at a time.
@Jeff Alberts
>>……There is no “global temperature”, and there certainly aren’t multiple “global temperatures”. Yet we’re always presented with a single, meaningless metric.<<
Amen, brother. This is a theoretical construct upon which additional theoretical constructs (models) have been built at considerable cost, and all of it has been much ado about nothing.
@Jean Meeus
>>That’s the reason why we consider, instead, the temperature “anomaly.”<<
Using temperature "anomalies" does not solve the problem, as you must always posit some sort of global temperature to which you can compare these variations and then say, "See. It's getting hotter." All problems with the attempt to prove that it is getting hotter (or colder) derive from sampling errors, as shown by Alan Watts among others. These sampling errors in turn derive from the fact that "global temperature" is a meaningless theoretical construct that leads you into additional logical errors.
@Big Jim Cooley
>>Jean Meeus, you CAN average out global temperature.<<
Yes, indeed. You can average anything, but does that statistic actually have any meaning? Once again, it goes back to sampling. I can argue with how you sampled data for any kind of average you want to take. This is part of the reason why the AGW proponents have been reduced to absurdly proposing that the excess heat they expect is "hiding" somewhere in the ocean, i.e. the heat is still there; they just can't sample it.
ferdberple on November 30, 2013 at 6:05 am
David L. says:
November 30, 2013 at 1:58 am
so why did the world believe Aristotle for do long?
=============
because sometimes lighter objects do fall slower than heavier objects, but heavier objects almost never fall slower than lighter objects. this was taken as proof that Aristotle was right.
–///////////——-
Good point! And it took man going to the moon to finally show even a feather will fall as fast as a hammer in a vacuum; but you have to believe man went to the moon and it wasn’t staged in Hollywood! 🙂 /sarc
cynical_scientist says:
November 29, 2013 at 11:16 pm
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. … They are unable or unwilling (emphasis added) to go beyond it and look at the larger picture.
They are more than capable of looking at the larger picture. Their problem is that they are, as you also suggest, unwilling to move beyond their initial view. And that is because their true goal is politically driven, the accumulation of the vast powers and monies that they and their allies envision will be theirs if they can convince the general populace that the world will be doomed if we don’t take the actions they suggest.
Remove all possibility of accumulating those powers and monies and the alarmists would move on to other pursuits. Most of them, by now, have absolutely no interest in the truth, for the truth will ruin their prospects for advancement.
Fortunately, the populace is starting to smell a rat.
Everyone! Averaging is very important and informative. Let me give you a few examples. The average surface temperature of the oceans is 22˚C, the average temperature 2 meters above the surface is 15˚C and the average temperature of the deep ocean depths is 4˚C. Most importantly the average temperature of the entire ocean is 6˚C exactly equal to what the S-B equation says it should be, proving the AGW theory is a hoax.
The lay skeptic can also point out that the money spent by the evil oil companies is far smaller than the money spent by the governments propping up the theory. There are far more paychecks cut by governments/university’s/ngo’s than by carbon-based energy companies.
@Genghis
>>Everyone! Averaging is very important and informative.<<
Yes, indeed. Averages (simple means) can be very important and informative when they are used appropriately. An average temperature of the Earth, however, is a meaningless use of a statistical mean.
How could we disprove that … the gravity ‘constant’ is not constant over distance and instead gradually decreases to zero at some enormous distance, (eg 5000 LY ?), then reverses into growing repulsive force beyond that distance …?
And then, if such could somehow be proven, then what would that do to “dark matter” theory?
The average global temperature, as a concept, is as useful as the average city telephone number.
It can be calculated and the result can be compared with previous calculations. But it doesn’t tell us anything.
And when anomalies are calculated without regard to mass closures of cooler rural stations they merely mislead.