Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Consider the following descriptions of three scientific theories. Which is the odd one out?
1. The buildup of anthropogenic carbon dioxide may lead to dangerous climate change, not because CO2 is a particularly powerful greenhouse gas, but because the slight warming caused by excess CO2 will cause sea water to evaporate, filling the atmosphere with water vapour. Water vapour is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. The evaporation of water vapour will trigger a chain reaction, a runaway greenhouse effect, in which global warming caused by the evaporation of ever increasing amounts of sea water forces yet more sea water to evaporate. In Dr. James Hansen’s words, “The oceans will begin to boil”.
2. We have already been visited by aliens, who most likely continue to monitor us. The alternative is to believe the preposterous proposition that we are the only intelligent life inhabiting any of the planets circling our galaxy’s 100 billion stars. The reason this must be true – all we have to do is look in the mirror. In a few decades, or at most a few centuries, humans will have the technology to build nanotech space probes the size of a grain of sand or smaller. Probes which can visit other stars, and transmit information back to us. Such probes are already on the drawing board.
See: http://www.space.com/612-nanotechnology-scientists-pin-big-hopes-small-scale.html
Since the probes we shall build will be incredibly small, it will be possible to launch them at near light speed, for trivial economic cost. Scientists have even discovered ways such probes could be steered and decelerated as they approach their destination, using the Galactic magnetic field. If just one group of intelligent aliens in our galaxy of 100 billion stars reached our level of technology, at least half a million years ago, and made the decision to send out such space probes, then there has already been enough time for their high speed probes to reach our star system, and report back what they found.
3. Human lives are in danger right now, from asteroids and comets flying through space. As the shock advent of the Chelyabinsk meteor demonstrated, Earth can be struck unexpectedly at any time by meteors and other space bodies, many of which have the potential to cause widespread devastation. The Chelyabinsk meteor detonated with a force of 500 kilotons of TNT – it is only due to good fortune that the explosion, which caused some buildings to collapse and widespread damage and injuries from breaking glass, did not cause serious loss of life.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor
So which theory is the odd one out?
The answer is theory three of course. Unlike the other two theories, theory three is supported by observational evidence. The other two theories, however compelling they seem, are just speculation.
| Story Title | Separating fact from fantasy |
| One line summary of story |
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The two first would be considered fringe hypotheses.
The third suggestion has the makings of an actual theory until proven invalid.
Skience on April 10, 2014 2:20am:
…”We may dislike the situation. But we are not in a position to demand. …”
———
As a PhD in the hard sciences, having been once an academic and a peer reviewer as well as peer reviewed, I agree with most of what you write. Academics is a closed, self serving community.
But I think society at large is in a position to demand, because society pays for their research through tax dollars. That is the great misdirection of academics: Academics have it both ways, they dip into the public coffer and claim a cloistered existence answerable only to the inner circle.
So the pressure needs to be placed on the government by the people and for the people to cut funding for those things the people do not see worthy, and they have every right to do so. Then let the academics try and fund their cloistered research by peer review alone.
Academics only need to answer to us if we are paying them. Otherwise you are right, they can have their science anyway they like it.
skience
… As outsiders we cannot realistically demand this group match our standards. …
No, but we can hope to expose the fragility of theories which are not well supported by evidence to public ridicule. I have no problem with people indulging in speculation – what I object to is when such speculation is mislabeled as settled science.
Kano says:
April 10, 2014 at 2:05 am
“I explain the water vapor theory being nonsense, by showing what happen during the 1998 El Nino, the temperature shot up, so did water vapor, but came down just as fast, when the El Nino was finished, if water vapor was self perpetuating or exponential there would have been no cooling after”
If the theory of catastrophic positive water vapor feedback were right, we would expect it to happen in places that are already very humid and hot – Singapore for instance.
Before Global warming of say 2.0 deg C turns the icy planes of Germany into something less icy, the hot humid climate of Singapore right at the equator should long have turned into a little Venus climate.
I think what the climate models intentionally lack is the concept of thunderstorms.
skience says:
April 10, 2014 at 2:31 am
“Indeed, there may be many within climate science who are cautious in what they say and who would be skeptic scientists.”
Only that they do it secretly while publicly they go along with the UN’s globalist control schemes. “I have only followed orders”; an excuse that is in practice not nearly as good as it sounds.
DirkH
I think what the climate models intentionally lack is the concept of thunderstorms.
Willis said something similar on several occasions 🙂 – http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/07/emergent-climate-phenomena/
Well Done Eric,
I do think that is a good article.
However some comments below.
Clearly the CATASTROPHIC Green House Gas Theory lacks observational evidence. But what about the GHGE theory itself? Could it be that so called Green House Gases actually help COOL the Earth? IS there any observational evidence for that? Well yes there is.
http://www.principia-scientific.org/greenhouse-effect-does-water-vapor-increase-or-decrease-the-lapse-rate.html.
So,actually the Inverse of Theory 1 has observational evidence.
Theory 3. Meteorites could destroy the Earth, has some backing but the recent example did not actually kill anyone!
Dr. James Hansen went off the rails and against the consensus. They used to try to frighten us with the runaway greenhouse effect until they realised it was failing.
Eric Worrall says:
April 10, 2014 at 3:43 am
“DirkH
I think what the climate models intentionally lack is the concept of thunderstorms.
Willis said something similar on several occasions 🙂 – http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/07/emergent-climate-phenomena/
”
Very good link in this context! Yes, they cannot simulate exactly that kind of emergence due to their fixed coarse grid size.
In the comedy ‘The Missionary’ Michael Palin plays the naïve Reverend Fortescue. Charging him with his mission to save Fallen Women, his bishop tells him: ‘Find out why they do what they do. And stop them doing it’.
Whilst the last example quoted is good on the ‘what’ and the ‘stopping’, it’s weak on the ‘why’. Thus it is the least interesting theory, for its independent variable is largely missing.
New knowledge is interesting entirely because it speculates previously unknown connections between the past and the future. So the first examples are/may be wrong, yet interesting. Note that it is the failure of Hansen to deal with the falsifications of his theory which has led to new and more complete speculating, here on WUWT as much as anywhere else. The second example is in its way even more fruitful than Hansen, because it feeds into current debates about probability theory.
Error is not a crime; it is a spur to new knowledge. But warmists speak like the bishop when they try to ‘Stop sceptics doing it’.
‘
After reading the comments so far, I can see a case made for number 1 being the odd man out as well. #2 is pure speculation, but there is no evidence against it. #3 is, as stated, an observed phenomenon. #1 however has evidence against it.
Positive feedback does not necessarily mean that something will continue to increase exponentially. It depends on the loop gain. Many positive feedback loops are convergent. That is the feedback amplifies the input signal, but to a controlled extent. In the context of the climate system, positive feedback may amplify the heating effect of CO2 without leading to runaway global warming.
For example, let’s say that an increase in CO2 leads to a warming of 1 degree C. That warming produces a rise in water vapour and more CO2 (released from the warming oceans) such that the temperature rises a further half degree in response. That half degree rise in turn causes a further rise of one quarter of a degree, which causes another rise of one eighth of a degree and so on. This is a positive feedback series but it is also ‘convergent’. It does not increase to infinity no matter how long it goes on for. It converges to a value of 2 degrees C.
With no feedbacks the effect of doubling CO2 is calculated to produce a rise of about 1.1 degree C. The IPCC previously said that positive feedbacks would amplify this to 3.5 deg.C (or more). However, many recent studies have come in with much lower estimates of climate sensitivity. Consequently, the latest IPPC report now says
“He strongly believes a run away green house effect has made Venus inhospitable. ”
I don’t know if Dr Hansen does believe this, but many of my acquaintances on the AGW do. They constantly cite this as an example of what we face. I find the idea ludicrous. The only thing Venus and earth have in common is relatively close size. Venus has no magnetic field to shield it, it has never had oceans, it has no large satellite, the composition of its atmosphere is not only far denser, but also very dissimilar to earth’s, and finally Venus receives a good deal more solar radiation than earth. More than likely it’s atmosphere is not the result of ‘runaway’ greenhouse effect because that implies that it’s atmosphere was different than it is today and we have no evidence to support that assumption.
Hansen’s problem is that he doesn’t knw the Earth’s climatic history. The conditions about which he warns have occurred before and there was no “runaway” warming, which is prima facia evidence that Hansen doesn’t understand the Earth’s climate and how it works. His theory is thus overly simplistic.
None of the three scenarios listed reaches the level of a scientific theory. At best they are hypothesis with some supporting evidence, except for hypothesis 2 for which there is a total lack of evidence, but absence of evidence is not of course evidence of absence.
The danger from asteroid impacts is in fact quite closely constrained by observation. Major events are much less frequent than the timescale of the development of human civilisation.
A runaway greenhouse effect is theoretically possible on the Earth but would take particular circumstances and is again constrained to time scales far longer than the existence of humans, never mind civilisation. However the observational evidence it is possible is obvious from the state of Venus.
The whole article of this post is undermined by the apparent indifference to the definitions of scientific theory, hypothesis and speculation.
skience
I asked as a start that the professional working in this area they expect to see [from] any of their undergraduate students handing in an essay . Which although a low standard is one many of these ‘professionals’ working in climate ‘science’ cannot or do not reach.
Try some of the ‘tricks’ the team gets up to at most universities on most courses and all you end up with is a need to rewrite your work at the least. While it some cases you be off the course altogether. PHD can also be consider to mean piled higher and deeper , never more so than climate ‘science ‘
@-dccowboy
Venus has no magnetic field to shield it, it has never had oceans, it has no large satellite, the composition of its atmosphere is not only far denser, but also very dissimilar to earth’s, and finally Venus receives a good deal more solar radiation than earth.
How do you know Venus never had oceans?
The surface of Venus actually receives LESS solar radiation than the Earth because the high cloud layer has a much greater albedo than the Earth. Although the time in the past when Venus became a runaway greenhouse was when the sun was much cooler. As the sun increases in output we get closer tot he Earth receiving the same sort of energy as Venus did in the Early stages of the solar system.
@- Col Mosby
Hansen’s problem is that he doesn’t knw the Earth’s climatic history. The conditions about which he warns have occurred before and there was no “runaway” warming, which is prima facia evidence that Hansen doesn’t understand the Earth’s climate and how it works.
The conditions that are similar in the Earth’s past occurred when the solar output was much {30%} lower than at present. Perhaps Hansen knows more about the Earth’s climate history than you think?
Hansen is wrong because the planet Venus has only trace amounts of water and is 96.5% CO2 with a surface pressure equivalent to 1km deep in one of Earth’s oceans. This is why Venus has such a strong greenhouse effect! As other people have said in their posts, the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere has been many times higher in the past than now, without causing a runaway greenhouse effect
David L. says: But I think society at large is in a position to demand, because society pays for their research through tax dollars. That is the great misdirection of academics: Academics have it both ways, they dip into the public coffer and claim a cloistered existence answerable only to the inner circle.
There are many people in academia who aspire to the standard of skeptic science. But unfortunately, there are many, and by the way so most institutions failed to take action after climategate it is a majority, who are willing to accept the status quo and accept work as “science” which does not meet the higher standards we skeptics would like.
The problem at the moment is that whenever we criticise “science” it is taken as a criticism of both the good and the less good. We need a way to distinguish between the two.
But most importantly we need to be able to articulate what we want in a positive way instead of constantly being portrayed as attacking all “science”. Creating a positive vision of what we want may in itself cause academia to re-evaluate its standards and “pull its socks up”. But I doubt it as many academics who don’t meet the skeptic standard have been allowed to call themselves scientists, and I can’t see them willingly changing the standards of science in a way which would necessarily exclude them.
This is why I firmly believe we need to establish a new concept of skeptic science – which is science where assertions are only made which can be substantiated by the evidence.
son of mulder says:
April 10, 2014 at 2:13 am
“The aliens are already here. They arrived in their ships the size of a grain of sand and the only reason we haven’t seen them is because they are hiding in the oceans.”
I can’t say for sure if the aliens are here or not. What I do know though is that there is definitely intelligent alien life on other planets. How do I know? Because they have not tried to contact us.
Anyone remember Carl Sagan speculating that the burning oil wells were going to affect the climate? We all understand that when you dream up an alarming scenario you can get people to listen to you. Climate alarm has been going on for a long time. You might say it started with the story of Noah.
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1991-01-23/news/1991023131_1_kuwait-saddam-hussein-sagan
The slight warming caused by excess CO2 will cause sea water to evaporate, filling the atmosphere with water vapour. Water vapour is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. The evaporation of water vapour will trigger a chain reaction, a runaway greenhouse effect, in which global warming caused by the evaporation of ever increasing amounts of sea water forces yet more sea water to evaporate. In Dr. James Hansen’s words, “The oceans will begin to boil”.
He went on to say that’s basically what happened to Venus.
Regarding increased evaporation of water during a warm-up, he ignored:
1. The effect of clouds that primarily reflect solar radiation and only secondarily retain heat.
2. Evaporation that transports heat out of the climate system by releasing latent heat high up in the atmosphere.
Regarding the fact that the atmosphere on Venus is 95% CO2 and it’s hot enough on the surface to melt lead, Mars also has an atmosphere that’s 95% CO2 and it’s so cold there it snows dry ice. But they tell us that CO2 at 0.04% here on Earth is the driver of temperature.
The slight warming caused by excess CO2 will cause sea water to evaporate, filling the atmosphere with water vapour. Water vapour is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. The evaporation of water vapour will trigger a chain reaction, a runaway greenhouse effect, in which global warming caused by the evaporation of ever increasing amounts of sea water forces yet more sea water to evaporate. In Dr. James Hansen’s words, “The oceans will begin to boil”.
He went on to say that’s basically what happened to Venus.
Regarding increased evaporation of water during a warm-up, he ignored:
1. The effect of clouds that primarily reflect solar radiation and only secondarily retain heat.
2. Evaporation that transports heat out of the climate system by releasing latent heat high up in the atmosphere.
Regarding the fact that the atmosphere on Venus is 95% CO2 and it’s hot enough on the surface to melt lead, Mars also has an atmosphere that’s 95% CO2 and it’s so cold there it snows dry ice. But they tell us that CO2 at 0.04% here on Earth is the driver of temperature.
jauntycyclist says: “In the old days christians used to burn people to purify them and ‘to save their souls’ thus reasoned they were doing them a favour.”
This is not phrased correctly. It should be, “In the old days, there was once a historical episode where some locals mis-used the mantel of Christianity to gain power over others, committing un-Christian acts such as burning certain dis-liked members of society with the excuse that the souls of the burned were being ‘saved.’ ”
In this day and time, among educated people, Marxist-fueled demonization of Christians is no longer acceptable behavior.
re: The C of E’s climate advocacy:
The Church of England is dying – they know it, everyone knows it. Like all dying organizations, they are flopping around, desperately trying to find something politically popular to latch onto in the hope that those who have already rejected them may come back to the fold. It’s rather like a jilted lover thinking that a new tube of lipstick is all she needs to get her old boyfriend back – it never works.
And of course it has never occurred to the CofE to go back to the actual core of what was once their faith – that’s so old fashioned! And so they race and race and race after whatever their pollsters and political inclinations tell them might be trendy, never comprehending that today’s trend is always tomorrow’s bad joke.
And thus do great institutions with longstanding traditions die.
(and please don’t misinterpret my meaning, the “climate change” advocacy isn’t a cause of this, it’s just one more small symptom of the internal cancer that has now spread throughout the entire body of that church, and will kill it soon)