By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Professor Shaun Lovejoy, as he continues the active marketing of his latest paper purporting to prove that “the world desperately needs to drop the skepticism and change course – humanity’s future depends on it”, writes in a hilarious op-ed at livescience.com:
“The majordomo of this deniers’ hub [Watts Up With That] is the notorious Viscount Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, who – within hours [fast on his feet, that Viscount is: strong in him the Force must be] – had declared to the faithful that the paper was no less than a ‘mephitically ectoplasmic emanation from the Forces of Darkness’ and that ‘it is time to be angry at the gruesome failure of peer review’.”
The Professor describes this as “venom”. No, sir, it is eloquence in the service of truth. Perhaps he would prefer a scatological rather than an eschatological metaphor. Happy to oblige. The scientific merit of his paper is aptly described by the third, eighteenth, first, and sixteenth letters of the alphabet, taken sequentially. Or, if he prefers it up him palindromically, the sixteenth, fifteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth.
Let me put on my major-domo’s tails, white starched wing-collar, maniple, and white gloves, polish up the nearest silver salver, and, Jeeves-like, shimmer in to address some the fashionable pseudo-physics in Professor Lovejoy’s latest Technicolor yawn.
After deploying the hate-screech word “deniers”, he wheels out Svante Arrhenius, who, “toiling for a year, predicted that doubling CO2 levels would increase global temperatures by 5-6 Cº, which turns out to be close to modern estimates”.
The Professor is perhaps unaware (for he does not seem to be aware of all that much in the realm of physics) that Arrhenius is known to have made errors in his line-by-line calculation of the warming effect of CO2 (actually performed at intervals over the long Arctic winter, not over a whole year). He had, for instance, relied on defective lunar spectral data.
Furthermore, Arrhenius – a chemist and not a physicist – had not at that time come across the fundamental equation of radiative transfer, which would greatly have simplified his calculations and made them more accurate.
However, in 1906, in Vol. 1, No. 2 of the Journal of the Royal Nobel Institute, he recanted and divided his earlier climate-sensitivity estimate by three:
“Likewise, I calculate that a halving or doubling of the CO2 concentration would be equivalent to changes of temperature of –1.5 Cº or +1.6 Cº respectively.”
So few of the F. of D. are aware of Arrhenius’ recantation that I am happy to provide a facsimile (Fig. 1) of the quotation from his 1906 paper, published in German (which perhaps explains why the largely English-speaking F. of D. are unaware of it).
Figure 1. Detail in facsimile from Arrhenius, S., 1906, Die vermutliche Ursache der Klimaschwankungen (“The possible cause for climate variability”). Meddelanden från K. Vetenskapsakademiens Nobelinstitut 1: 2, 1ff.
It is also important to note that Arrhenius confined his analysis to radiative transports only. He did not take account of all the numerous non-radiative transports – afternoon convection in the tropics, baroclinic eddies in the extratropics, evaporation everywhere, etc. – that militate homeostatically against any sufficiently small perturbation of the natural climate (such as doubling the tiny concentration of CO2 in the air).
Nor did Arrhenius take account of the biggest unknown in the climate – the behavior of clouds. All other things being equal, returning plant food to the atmosphere from which it came will cause some warming. But we do not know that all other things are equal.
Professor Lovejoy is also incorrect to say that Arrhenius’ original estimate of climate sensitivity was “close to modern estimates”. IPeCaC clings to a sensitivity interval of 1.5-4.5 Cº, entirely below Arrhenius’ original estimate and almost entirely above his revised estimate.
Many “modern estimates” point to a climate sensitivity well below IPeCaC’s interval. We may even see less than 1 Cº of global warming per CO2 doubling (Monckton of Brenchley, 2008, 2010; Douglass & Christy, 2009; Paltridge, 2009; Lindzen and Choi, 2009, 2011; Spencer and Braswell, 2010, 2011; Loehle & Scafetta, 2011, etc.).
Next, the Professor says that in the scientific method “no theory ever can be proven beyond ‘reasonable doubt’”. It would be more correct to say that some hypotheses (though few in physics and very few in climate physics) can be demonstrated definitively.
For instance, it is possible to demonstrate the Theorem of Pythagoras. My own simple proof by inclusion is at Fig. 2.
Figure 2. Demonstration of Pythagoras’ Theorem by inclusion. The boundary contains either the square on the hypotenuse (red) and two congruent right triangles or the squares on the other two sides (blue, green) and two more congruent right triangles. Subtract on each view the two right triangles. Then the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. Q.E.D.
Professor Lovejoy sets out his stall thus:
“Climate skeptics have ruthlessly exploited this alleged weakness, stating that the models are wrong, and that the warming is natural. Fortunately, scientists have a fundamental methodological asymmetry to use against these skeptics: a single decisive experiment effectively can disprove a scientific hypothesis. That’s what I claim to have done. Examining the theory that global warming is only natural, I showed — without any use of GCMs — that the probability that warming is simply a giant natural fluctuation is so small as to be negligible. He compounds this point later by saying “skeptics dismiss the models”.
Well, are the models right? A single experiment demonstrates that, on the central question how much global warming should have occurred since 1990, the modelers’ hypothesis that the trend in global temperature would fall on their predicted interval (the orange region in Fig. 3) has been demonstrated to be false. Skeptics doubt the models not least because the modelers’ confidently-made predictions have been demonstrated, time and again, to be wild exaggerations.
Figure 3. Near-term projections of global warming (IPCC, 1990: orange region), compared with observed outturn taken as the mean of the RSS and UAH monthly global mean surface temperature anomalies, 1990-2014.
Professor Lovejoy says that his “CO2 proxy … predicts with 95 percent certainty that a doubling of CO2 levels in the atmosphere will lead to a warming of 1.9 to 4.2 Cº”. He prays in aid Fig. 4.
Figure 4. “This figure visually shows the strong linear relation between the radiative forcing and the global temperature response since 1880 … showing the 5-year running average of global temperature (red) as a function of the CO2 forcing surrogate from 1880 to 2004. The linearity is impressive; the deviations from linearity are due to natural variability. The slope of the regression line is 2.33±0.22 degrees Celsius per CO2 doubling (it is for the unlagged forcing/response relation).”
I do not pretend to understand this graph. For a start, it seems to show (albeit in exasperatingly non-standard units) that just about half the CO2 forcing since 1750 occurred before 1960, when CO2 concentration last stood at 316 ppmv. However, the official story-line (in standard units) is that the CO2 forcing from 1750 to 1958 was 0.7 W m–2, whereas that from 1958 to 2014 was greater by four-fifths, at 1.2 W m–2. Makes a bit of a mess of the claimed “linearity”, that.
Secondly, the linear trend on the global temperature anomalies since 1880 is 0.87 Cº, (Fig. 5), in response to 1.9 W m–2 of CO2 forcing. A doubling of CO2 concentration would give 3.7 W m–2 of CO2 forcing, according to the current official method.
Therefore, if there were a linear relation between CO2 forcing and temperature change (which there is not), and if all of the warming since 1750 were anthropogenic (which it was not), and if there were no major natural influences on temperature over the period (which there were) the warming in response to a CO2 doubling would be just 1.7 Cº, not the 2.33 Cº suggested in Professor Lovejoy’s caption.
Figure 5. The least-squares linear-regression trend on the mean of the HadCRUT4, GISS, and NCDC monthly mean global surface temperature anomalies from 1880-2014 is 0.87 Cº. The linearity is not particularly remarkable: the correlation coefficient is only 0.69. The oscillations of global temperature following the 60-year period of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation can be clearly seen.
There is demonstrably no linear relationship between the CO2 forcing, which increases monotonically, and global temperature change, which is stochastic. Global temperature change is more closely related to changes in the great ocean oscillations in the short term (Fig. 6), in total sunlight hours at the surface in the medium term (Fig. 7), and in total solar irradiance in the long term (Fig. 8).
Figure 6. The remarkable non-linearity of global temperature change since 1890, showing the two periods of global warming that coincided remarkably with the two positive phases of the naturally-occurring Pacific Decadal Oscillation over the period.
Figure 7. The remarkable non-linearity of global temperature change in the South China Sea, 1880 to 2008, tracking a remarkable non-linearity in the number of sunshine hours in Japan. Not all pyrometer records show this correspondence: but the Japanese record is the longest we have, and one of the most meticulously kept.
Figure 8. The remarkable non-linearity of the sunspot record, 1600-2003, from Hathaway et al., (2004). Inset: The remarkable non-linearity of global temperature trend, 1659-2010. The first and most rapid of the three periods (red) of global warming since 1659 (1694-1733) occurred as solar activity began to recover at the end of the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715). The other two periods (1925-1946 and 1977-2000) occurred at the solar Grand Maximum (1925-1995).
Next, Professor Lovejoy makes the startling assertion that the probability that what he calls “rare, extreme fluctuations” in global temperature such as those of the 20th century were natural is 1:1000 to 1:10,ooo.
This is where his omission of any reference to the Central England Temperature Record, or to the Utrecht or Prague temperature records, or to the historical circumstances (the freezing of the Thames, of the Dutch canals, of the Hudson in New York), is so reprehensible.
The rapid warming at the transition from the Maunder Minimum to a more normal climate occurred well before the industrial revolution began. It was not our fault.
Or Professor Lovejoy could have gone back to 1421, at the time when global temperature began to tip downward into the Little Ice Age. An interesting letter in the Vatican archive from the Papal Legate in Greenland to the Secretariat of State reported that the Legate regretted that he could not take up his appointment because “the ice is come in from the north”. Suddenly, ships could not reach Greenland.
By now, anyone who has studied the climate ought to have realized that what Professor Lovejoy calls “rare, extreme fluctuations” are neither rare nor extreme. They are the norm, not the exception.
Moreover, the entire interval of global temperature change since 1750, from the depth of the Maunder minimum to the acme during the Great El Niño of 1988 represents a movement of just 0.9% in absolute mean global surface temperature. By contrast, the change between midday and midnight at one location can be as much as 20% of absolute mean temperature. And the interval between the hottest and coldest places on Earth represents close to half of absolute mean temperature.
Next, the Professor says: “But what about Medieval warming with vineyards in Britain, or the so-called Little Ice Age with skating on the Thames? In the historical past, the temperature has changed considerably. Surely, the industrial-epoch warming is just another large-amplitude natural event?”
He answers his question in the negative, saying large-scale changes can only occur over periods much longer than a century. He would have gotten a nasty surprise if he had been around at the end of the Younger Dryas cooling event 11,400 years ago. At that time, according to the ice cores, the temperature in Antarctica rose by 5 Cº in just three years. As Professor Ian Plimer puts it, “Now, that’s climate change!”
Next, Professor Lovejoy writes: “My result focuses on the probability of centennial-scale temperature changes. It does not exclude large changes, if they occur slowly enough. So if you must, let the peons roast and the Thames freeze solid, the result stands.” No, it doesn’t. Just look at the warming of 1694-1733: 1.7 Cº in just 40 years, a rate equivalent to 4.33 Cº/century.
The Q&A that Professor Lovejoy has issued to prop up his paper says that he regards any change of more than 0.25 Cº over 125 years as exceptional, and likely to occur only 10% of the time. No, it isn’t. As I pointed out in a previous posting, more than a third of all 125-year periods predating the onset of anthropogenic influence on climate in 1950 show warming or cooling of more than 0.25 Cº.
Figure 9. Left: The misleading propaganda claim made by “Skeptical” “Science” that 97% of scientists agree we are the cause of global warming. Right: The true position exposed by Legates et al. (2013): 99.5% of 11,944 climate-science papers did not say we are the cause. They did not even say we are the primary cause.
Next, Professor Lovejoy says IPeCaC has “strengthened its earlier 2007 qualification of ‘likely’ to ‘extremely likely’ that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.” Yes, it has, but it has done so not only on no evidence but in the teeth of the evidence.
As Legates et al. (2013) demonstrated, 99.5% of 11,944 scientific papers on climate published between 1991 and 2011 did not say that most of the global warming since 1950 was caused by us (Figure 9).
Besides, since Professor Lovejoy’s paper plays with statistics a great deal, he should know that no recognizable statistical process performed on any actual dataset (unless science now recognizes a show of hands among scientifically-illiterate, rent-seeking representatives of governments) generated IPeCaC’s “95-99% confidence” value.
Next, the Professor asserts that “skeptics … insist that warming results from natural variability”. No, we don’t. We assert that in the present state of knowledge it is impossible adequately to distinguish between natural variability and anthropogenic influence.
The Professor digs his hole ever deeper: “The new GCM-free approach rejects natural variability, leaving the last vestige of skepticism in tatters.” Here is an honest version of that sentence: “I reject natural variability aprioristically, so I bished and bashed the numbers till they fitted my preconception, leaving the last vestige of my scientific credibility in tatters.”
Yet he rants blithely on to the effect that the Canadian government has “axed climate research” (hurrah!); that it gave him no funding for his research (so he got more than he deserved); that it has “shamelessly promoted the dirtiest fuels” (but CO2 is not dirty, it is the stuff of life); that it has “reneged on its international climate obligations” (no, it took lawful and timeous advantage of the opt-out clause in the Kyoto Protocol and, therefore, has no “international climate obligations”); that “two decades of international discussion have failed to prevent emissions from growing” (along with crop yields and net primary productivity of trees and plants, thanks to CO2 fertilization); and, finally, that “the world needs to drop the skepticism and change course – humanity’s future depends on it” (but, as T.H. Huxley said, to the scientist “skepticism is the highest of duties, blind faith the one unpardonable sin”, and whenever someone says humanity’s future depends on something he means his income depends on it).
Sure, but you could find it as easily as I. As I subsequently noted, this is a dodge. Petit doesn’t say we’re 5000 years overdue. Chris asserted that without a shred of evidence:
Kilometrodonharlani is incorrect to state, on no evidence, that “most recent interlgacials have lasted longer than the current ~11,400 years”. According to the ice-core record (Petit et al., 1999), each of the past four interglacials showed temperatures at least as warm as the present for about half the length of the current warm period. We are indeed overdue for another Ice Age, though we cannot stay when or even whether it will occur because we do not know exactly what triggers Ice Ages. However, according to the ice-core records the transition is more likely than not to be abrupt. At present we are entirely unprepared, which seems imprudent.
Mr Lee continues to maintain that mathematics “is not a topic subject to the scientific method”. By me and others he was given examples of mathematical hypotheses that were, until they were demonstrated, subject to the scientific method, and were demonstrated thanks to its process. However, the more evidence he is given the more he rails against it.
In mathematics, we usually call a hypothesis that is not yet either proven or disproven a “conjecture”. The strong variant of the Goldbach conjecture, for instance, is that every composite is the mean of two primes (you will not find it more concisely encapsulated anywhere). I suspect that, like the long-outstanding Fermat conjecture eventually demonstrated by Wiles, Goldbach will eventually be demonstrated by mathematical induction.
Be that as it may, Mr Lee says, “To be subject to the scientific method, the inquiry must be based on empirical and measurable evidence and theories must be falsified when contradicted by experiment. To the contrary, in mathematics, there are no experiments and no realities to falsify theories. Mathematical theories are created from logic and axioms and, as Einstein observed, are certain enough to not refer to reality. In fact the theories refer to models of reality when used for scientific analysis, not reality. … No mathematician looks to the telescope or the microscope to obtain observations to falsify his mathematics.”
This confused and ill-expressed passage contains several errors. One error is that mathematical conjectures arise solely from the fundamental postulates (which previous generations of mathematicians used to call “axioms”). Conjectures may in fact arise either inductively or deductively; and, these days, not all mathematics appeals back to the fundamental postulates; nor, since Gödel, is it as “certain” as Mr Lee says Einstein held it to be.
But Mr Lee’s central error lies in the assumption that the method of testing a hypothesis (or, in mathematics, a conjecture) must be experimental and founded in measurement. Not so: it may be empirical but not necessarily experimental in the material sense, and it may also be purely theoretical. Read Popper. The scientific method is not circumscribed by the arbitrary limitations Mr Lee imagines. Read al-Haytham. Its purpose is to search for the truth.
And, as I have already pointed out, mathematicians did indeed look to the telescope to seek empirical evidence confirming an important aspect of Einstein’s theory of special relativity. Indeed, according to Italy’s most eminent scientist, Prof. Antonino Zichichi, Galilei first posited – or at least prefigured – the theory of special relativity: and it was Galilei who invented the telescope.
Mr Lee accuses me of telling him he knows nothing about mathematics and science. No: I said he displayed an inadequate knowledge both of the history of science and of the scientific method. And so he does.
What, then, are the essential elements of the scientific method? First, there must be a general problem in need of a solution. Next, there must be a hypothesis to address that general problem, and the hypothesis must preferably be expressed in mathematical terms to ensure clarity and precision. Then the hypothesis should really be reviewed and published, though Einstein’s relativity theory was not reviewed before it was published and does contain one or two errors of notation.
Then other scientists must subject the hypothesis to scrutiny, using what al-Haytham called their “hard-won knowledge”. This is what Popper calls the “error-elimination” phase. Then one of three outcomes arises. Rarely, the hypothesis is definitively demonstrated, whereupon (in mathematics) a conjecture becomes a theorem. More commonly, the hypothesis is definitively refuted during the “error-elimination” phase. Once a hypothesis has either been demonstrated or refuted, the scientific method has done its work.
However, the commonest outcome is that the hypothesis or conjecture is neither demonstrated nor refuted, in which event it gains a measure of credibility in that it has withstood the error-elimination phase, and the general problem is accordingly modified, whereupon the algorithm iterates and the scientific method continues to operate to refine the hypothesis until it is eventually either demonstrated or refuted.
In this iterative process, there is no restriction at all on the methods that may be used in seeking either to demonstrate or to refute a hypothesis or conjecture. The truth may be sought by whatever methods are available, without limitation. To use the Goldbach conjecture as an example, the conjecture that every composite c is the mean of two primes has been tested empirically to very high values of c without any counter-example having been found. The conjecture has of course gained credibility as a result of its having survived this empirical falsification.
However, by definition no problem in mathematics or in physics that applies to the natural or to the real numbers up to and including infinity, or to objects whether corporeal or not that are counted or measured by what I shall call the “full set” N or R to contrast it with Ø, the “empty set” (the Fermat and Goldbach conjectures are typical examples of such problems in mathematics), can be definitively decided by empirical methods. In such instances it is absolutely necessary to resort to theory, and the scientific method – in physics as in mathematics – is perforce open to this approach.
Professor Lovejoy’s characterization of the scientific method in the article that gave rise to the head posting was, therefore, inadequate, as is that of Mr Lee, who presumes to lecture me in unpleasant tones on the distinction between mathematics and the other sciences – a distinction of which his own grasp turns out to be more than somewhat deficient.
Militantharlani continues wilfully to misunderstand my earlier comments, so I shall give this tedious troll the traditional attorney’s response: Asked and answered.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
April 24, 2014 at 10:45 am
None of your comments answer the simple question, upon what do you base your unsupported assertion that the end of the Holocene is overdue by 5000 years?
I don’t know if it will end in 50, 500, 5000 or 50,000 years, but based upon prior interglacials & current orbital mechanics, what makes you so sure the end is overdue by 5000 years? Why is that question so hard for you to answer? Ignoring it isn’t an answer.
I was not debating interglacial terms or time frames., I asked, could you show me where he spoke rudely to you? (Before you addressed him in the manner I quoted)
David A says:
April 24, 2014 at 11:23 am
I did. “Kilometrodonharlani is incorrect to state, on no evidence,” et seq is it.
As I said, I might have upped the ante after this unresponsive dust off, being already angry over Chris’ unrepentant slur against the US in general & my dad’s aircrew comrades in particular for allegedly committing an atrocities at Hiroshima & Nagasaki, without mentioning Bomber Commands’ firestorms or genuine atrocities by Japanese forces, let alone the fact of ending the war, saving on the order of a million lives on both sides, quite possibly to include my dad’s. So excuse me if I took it a little personally.
Chris’ own lack of combat experience contrasts starkly with his dad & grandfather, & ill suits him to pass judgement on American actions which ended the most horrific conflict in history. I’m reminded of a British Foreign Service officer’s assessment of Ambassador Joe Kennedy, “I thought my daffodils were yellow until I met Kennedy.”
His lordship has not really answered the main point pressed by Mr Mosher and Mr Lee. Mathematics is not an empirical science. Special relativity is physics, not mathematics. Physical theories may be refuted by empirical observations whereas mathematical theorems may not. The Pythagorean theorem applies in Euclid, but not in an alternative geometry. To cap it all, if we turn Euclid into a physical theory by predicting: measure any actual triangle and you will find the square of hypotenuse length equals the sum of the squares of the other sides, it is false. Actual physical space, according to Einstein, is non-Euclidean. So Pythagoras is a bit off, because of the curvature of space.
This does not affect the main thrust of his lordship’s argument, which strikes me as basically correct. But it is presumably admissible to draw attention to minor slips in passing. The subjective intentions of Messrs Mosher and Lee are irrelevant.
.
Talking of proving a particular hypothesis, here is an ancient Greek coin from 440 BC that includes the proof that:
(a + b)2 = a2 + b2 + 2ab
http://www.acsearch.info/ext_image.html?id=582831
Nice coin. Nice proof.
Ralph
Lord Monckton has entered a deliberately obtuse phase in argument in defusing to recognize the differences that make Mathematics not subject to observation or experiment as are sciences like physics. I doubt his misunderstanding can be overcome by what I write so I suggest he might read http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/philosop/method.htm . That article is written at the level of college undergraduate. In part it says:
“Students and laypersons seldom grasp the difference between mathematics and physics. Since math is the preferred modeling analogy for physics, any physics textbook is richly embellished with equations and mathematical reasoning. Yet to understand physics we must realize that math is not a science, and science is not merely mathematics.
In the early history of science, mathematics was considered a “science of measurement”, and was supported because of its practical applications in land measurement, commerce, navigation, etc. But those who did math discovered that mathematics was a branch of logic, and certain important results (such as the Pythagorean theorem of right triangles) could be arrived at by purely logical means without recourse to experiment. ”
I hope that explanation is sufficient for LM.
LM seems to want to transcribe my word so that he can argue against straw-men of his making. So, when he claims “But Mr Lee’s central error lies in the assumption that the method of testing a hypothesis (or, in mathematics, a conjecture) must be experimental and founded in measurement,” he must know I wrote no such thing. In fact Einstein said that a hundred experiments wouldn’t prove him right, one could prove him wrong. What I did write is that science is falsifiable through experiment and observation and math is not.
LM has also spoken falsely in saying “Mr Lee accuses me of telling him he knows nothing about mathematics and science.” What I did write is available above and everyone should be able to judge LM’s truthfulness for himself.
All in all LM understanding of math and science seems poor in interchange here.
refusing not defusing — typo above
milodonharlani says:
April 24, 2014 at 11:33 am
Thank you sir. I accepted LM answer with regard to what he meant concerning the atrocities of war as reasonable and worthy of respectful conversation. ( My personal view is that the atomic drop likely saved lives, but was a very difficult decision and I am glad I did not have to make it. Even if I had made that decision, I would feel that I was committing an atrocity, and have deep regret concerning all the innocent lives lost
David A says:
April 24, 2014 at 12:22 pm
You are welcome. I should have put quotation marks around my citation of Chris’ response to my first comment.
The decision wasn’t hard for Truman, given that cities around the world had already been burned to the ground with their civilian citizens in them. The only difference was a single bomb could now do damage comparable to many blast & incendiary devices. Truman had estimates of a million US casualties (not fatalities) alone, without counting Japanese military & civilian losses & allied military. Not to mention the American prisoners sure to die. He made the right choice. War is atrocious. Ending the worst one of all by making it too horrible to continue it was a good thing.
Much discussion here on the bell curve or the normal distribution. In my experience, much natural phenomena have a log-normal distribution which has a much greater probability of higher values occurring naturally. Normal distributions are nice, but not natural.
DirkH says:
April 23, 2014 at 2:52 pm
SasjaLr says:
April 23, 2014 at 2:38 pm
“Arrhenius was also wrong in other fields of science. As co-founder of the Race Biological Institute in Uppsala, Sweden, he was part of the work* that become the foundation of the German NSDAP’s** race hygiene in the first half of the 1900′s.”
Eugenics was invented by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, and cornerstone of the ideology of the American Progressive Socialists (todays American “liberals”). Hitler admired the USA and FDR for his centrally controlled economy. Section 4 (I think) of Mein Kampf speaks in glowing terms of the USA as the most successful Germanic country in the world. (One of the reasons that Germans are not allowed to read it).
So that’s the more likely route the Nazis got the Eugenics from; emulating America. Whether Arrhenius’ work influenced him is questionable; Eugenics was wildly accepted; John Maynard Keynes, for instance, was president of the Eugenics society for a time. George Bernard Shaw was a member as well.
================================================================
The Fabians were Eugenicists. H.G. Wells thought that useless people should be culled. Note, that the Fabians were second generation socialists; the Labour Party in the UK originated from the Methodism of ordinary working people, and then got annexed by the Fabian intellectuals; rather in the same way that New Labour usurped what went before it. North London is where this cesspit is, and always has been
DirkH says:
April 23, 2014 at 4:28 pm
That being said, if your media is as trustworthy as the German… maybe just conjecture dressed up as fact.
========================================================
The MSM is utterly untrustworthy and as much a part of the problem as the political classes.
Mr Steele says I have not really answered the point that “mathematics is not an empirical science … Physical theories may be refuted by empirical observations, whereas mathematical theorems may not.”
That was not the point at issue. The point at issue was whether the scientific method was applicable to mathematical conjectures as it is to physical hypotheses. By definition, it is applicable to both. Read Popper. Read some of the examples given in this thread.
Nor is it a precise use of language to say that “mathematics is not an empirical science”. In the ancient universities, mathematics is treated as an art, rather than as a science.
And it is, for instance, possible to refute a mathematical conjecture empirically with a single counter-example, so that it is incorrect to say that mathematical conjectures may not be refuted by empirical methods. There are some famous examples of this in the history of mathematics. Read W.W. Rouse Ball.
It is, of course, trivially true to say that mathematical theorems may not be refuted by empirical methods, or indeed by any methods, for they are already definitively proven and, so long as the demonstration was sound, they are by definition irrefutable.
Mr Steele may of course be forgiven for not having read a whole thread in which some 200 contributions have appeared, many of them substantial: but earlier in this thread I pointed out that the Pythagorean theorem applies not only in the Euclidean plane but also in the hyperbolic plane (it is quite easy to demonstrate this on the unit Poincare disk).
I also pointed out that the theorem potentially holds absolutely, under some variant conditions. So Mr Steele is incorrect to say the Pythagorean theorem applies only in the Euclidean plane.
In any event, it was entirely irrelevant to the head posting whether the Pythagorean theorem is applicable to other planes: for my demonstration of the theorem (which I dare not claim is original, for so many proofs are in existence and it is likely that someone else has already found it) was in the Euclidean plane.
Nor is Mr Steele right to introduce a quibble about whether the Euclidean plane exists in the real universe owing to the deformation of space in the presence of matter and, consequently, of gravity. My point was a simple one: that the scientific method applies just as much to any yet-undetermined conjecture in mathematics as it applies to any yet-undetermined hypothesis in physics. Once a conjecture or a hypothesis is determined by demonstration or refutation, the scientific method ceases to apply to it, but until then it applies as a process just as much to mathematics as to the physical sciences.
Mr Steele is also incorrect to say the subjective intentions of trolls are irrelevant. Of course their subjective intentions are irrelevant to any genuine argument they may deploy, for their arguments stand or fall on their merits, such as they may be.
However, as a close observer of this and some other blogs on both sides of the debate, I have often seen willful, systematic, and surprisingly successful attempts by trolls deliberately to sow confusion and despondency, and to sneer at those who disagree with the Party Line, and to denigrate their reputations, and to disrupt what could otherwise be useful conversations on these threads.
I also have evidence that some of this activity is paid-for (no names, no pack-drill), and that a very great deal of money has been devoted to fostering this sort of deliberate disruption. To this extent, the intentions of paid trolls to cause maximum dissension and disruption are, of course, highly relevant.
The simplest way to deal with trolls, whether paid or unpaid, whether active and paid Climate Nazis [(C) Roy Spencer] or mere useful idiots [(C) Vladimir I. Ulyanov], is to answer them firmly, and go on doing so until, one by one, they give up. Just at present I am not in a charitable mood, so the trolls are being dealt with even more firmly than usual.
Mr Lee persists in trying to divert attention from what I said to what he wishes I had said. I had not at any stage said or implied that mathematics and science are the same. I had said, correctly, that the scientific method is applicable to both.
jauntycyclist says:
April 24, 2014 at 12:28 am
at look at climate science
====================
“climate science is manifestly a contradictory term”. Sadly, for science
Meanderonharlani pays not the slightest attention to any answer uncongenial to his world-view, and bangs on again and again about my allegedly improper concern for the victims of the Allied bombing of Hiroshima. His silly accusations are answered in detail upthread.
Hiff: Lord Monckton’s blather and erudition is ambrosia, and I drink it in. For all those that cannot enjoy (or even fathom his intellect); get a life!.
Same here. However, I am already in his choir, so I love it when he is “preaching to the choir”. He is as effective as the “End of Days” guys. However, if passersby are not already in the choir, and they pass by his rants and listen, I fear they’ll decide he’s a crank, and not join the choir. So, …, half of me loves his writing as it is, but half of me wishes he would express more interested in the undecided factions of this debate.
Dr Norman Page: At least Lovejoy seems to acknowledge the truth that the GCM,s are useless for climate forecasting and that other methods are required.
I agree that is an important step forward, and it should not be overlooked.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
April 24, 2014 at 1:04 pm
You answered nothing. My pointing out that interglacials do not average 6400 years has nothing to do with my world view, except that I support valid scientific conclusions even when not supportive of my positions.
It’s a flat out lie that my objection to your false, baseless assertion has anything at all to do with my “worldview”, other than for science. As is your further baseless assertion that you answered my question. Maybe you have convinced yourself that I pointed out your error out of some agenda other than a desire to present the facts, but that is manifestly not the case.
Why can’t you simply state what convinces you that the end of the current interglacial is overdue? Because you are incapable ever of admitting error, as with the trial of Galileo & your atrocious calumny against America.
Try being a man for a change. You can’t practice science without being able to support your view & admit error when you can’t.
Mr Lee says I mischaracterized an upthread argument of his when I wrote, with respect to the scientific method, “But Mr Lee’s central error lies in the assumption that the method of testing a hypothesis (or, in mathematics, a conjecture) must be experimental and founded in measurement.”
What Mr Lee had actually said upthread was: “To be subject to the scientific method, the inquiry must be based on empirical and measurable evidence and theories must be falsified when contradicted by experiment.”
Mr Lee says I “spoke falsely” in having said he had accused me upthread of telling him he knew nothing about mathematics and science.
He had actually said upthread: “LM also arrogantly characterizes my understanding of science and mathematics without any evidence for his assertion.” In context “characterizes” meant “challenges”.
Monckton of Brenchley: If I have been even more liverish than usual in response to the three trolls who have made the mistake of trying to lower the tone this time, it is because my broken foot is painful and I am confined to barracks at a time of year when I should normally be out in my hill-kilt striding through the budding heather, listening to the cry of the whaup and the song of the lark and rejoicing in the azure air of spring on the high tops, gazing half across the world and, at night, all the way across our quiet corner of the glittering universe.
I am sorry to hear that. Get well soon.
I was going to complain (” nit pick”) about your inventive plays on “milodonharlani”, but now that I know it isn’t his real name I enjoy them more.
The sentence does kind of run on, though, like one of those long Homeric sentences where the beginning has an opposite tone to the end.
Keep up the good work. I look forward to your next.