WHY IT DOESN’T MATTER ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING

Picking 1970 as a starting point was for a long time a common warmist (a believer in global warming , a scientist in this case) “cherry-pick”, because that was essentially at the bottom of the 1940-1975 cooling off period.  By starting the period under consideration as a low point, everything is higher afterward, which makes it look perhaps worse than it really is.  Of course it did get warmer, after the bottom of the cooling period.  They used to throw in “since 1970″ as being when all kinds of warming happened.  Duh.  Good thing, too!

Same thing about 1800, when they use that year (the BEST study did, and they were wrong to do that), because that was the end of the LIA when the world was going to warm up.  And it is a good thing it did warm up!

We are “only” 210 or so years after the end of the LIA.  To put that into paleoclimate perspective, the Younger-Dryas (Y-D) stadial began about 12,900 years ago.  A stadial was/is a cool period, essentially was an ice age.  The Y-D was the last real ice age.  Its onset was VERY abrupt.  It began over a period of about 0-200 years.  No one knows yet how short a time it took.  Greenland’s temperatures dropped by about 12 FULL degrees C, mostly right at the beginning.  The Earth entered a new ice age, which it was not to come out of for 1200 years.

What we all think of as a stable temperature for X many thousands or millions of years simply didn’t happen.  It is in our imaginations.  Since the beginning of the Younger-Dryas the Earth has been in the Holocene, most of it much a much warmer period., certainly no ice age.  Much of the era time was the Holocene Climatic Optimum (HCO), from 9,000 BP to 5,000 BP. 

ABBREVIATED EVOLUTION

The late archeologist Steve J Gould well into his career came up with a twist on evolution that was termed “punctuated evolution”  (PE).  PE was the first real acknowledgement that uniformitarianism was not the only principle at work in the earth sciences and biology.  There was just so much evidence that something other than slow, incremental mutations and slow, incremental erosion, that sooner or later someone was going to have to bring in the sudden bursts and extinctions into the mix.  Gould was the guy who did it, and I give him credit for doing it.

But, like all changes that come from within, PE was only a half step, a conservative step, one that had to be limited in its scope in order to be at all acceptable in his field.  Evolution itself came from without.  Alfred Wallace was not an academic, and if he hadn’t written Charles Darwin about his ideas about natural selection, Darwin might never have gotten around to publishing his ideas.  Literally.  Darwin knew it was too big a sea change and was trepidatious about putting his ideas out there.  Without Wallace’s full conclusions about natural selection, one has to wonder what timid half step Darwin might have taken, if and when he would have gotten around to publishing anything.

But evolution or punctuated evolution, there is still a lot more evidence out there that something happened along the way that interrupted, not only natural selection, but the flow of human history.  It may not even be a coincidence that the very demarcation between history and pre-history is laid out at the same time as the extinction of the mammoths and other megafauna in North America and the extinction of full-sized mammoths everywhere. But whatever it was, it was more extreme – in the time of man – than what is covered by Gould’s modification to Darwin’s theory.  Mankind’s development did not stop with the advent of homo sapiens sapiens. at the individual level.  Once sapiens began collecting in units larger than matings, his real devlopment took off.

So, more than punctuated evolution, as regards the development of h. sapiens sapiens. , there was the development of homo civilus.  And it didn’t happen only once, unless I miss my mark.

LYING TO WIN – THE FIVE QUESTIONS OF SOCIOPHYSICS SCIENTIST SERGE GALAM

Over at Dr Curry’s Climate, Etc. there is an post about Is It Necessary to Lie to Win a Controversial Public Debate?, with Dr Curry’s comments on an article by Sociophysics scientist Serge Galam.

I was actually rather impressed by the five questions Galam asks.

I’ll get right to them. . .

Complex Systems ~10, Western Science 0

Hamilton at WUWT commented:

It really does get up my nose that the media and governments think the people can only cope with a simple cause and effect situation – one factor causing one effect. So, more CO2 = hotter and less CO2 = colder has become a simple mantra which all can understand; it fits well with this patronizing view of general intelligence. Daniel’s piece on cloud seeding, suggesting that both atmospheric chemistry and cosmic rays are influential is probably closer to the truth. But of course there are now two influences which may well work in tandem. Far too difficult for the simple masses to cope with so let’s just stick with CO2 – it’s also got a better tax raising potential too.

It isn’t just the general populace.  I’ve been underwhelmed by the inability of scientists to handle more than one variable.  That is what reductionism is all about from what I know:  Break everything into the simplest components and then analyze all of those, and Viola! you’ve got a whole scientific reality.

But the whole system breaks down when they can’t handle more than a simple cause-and-effect situation, like you say.  But these are scientists, not just Joe Main Street.  They can handle compound, to some extent, just by separating out all the pieces.  But dealing with complexity is another story.  Then it is just handled by creating reductionist models and letting the code do all the hard work.  But they don’t seem to understand that it is still not a system – just a bunch of pieces – pieces that will act differently in tandem than they will by themselves.  (Ask any pharmacist about that some time.)

I would imagine the next really big thing in science will be when someone comes up with math that will deal with complexity and do it well.  I don’t think Chaos Theory or Catastrophe Theory are it, because we’d have seen an explosion in understanding by now.

It is all over my head, so I don’t know the answers, either.  But reductionism never made sense for trying to understand complex systems.  I don’t think we’ve gotten to first base yet.  And climate is perhaps the canary in the mineshaft about that.  Research on understanding the beginnings of life have been spinning their wheels for 60 years.  (Freeman Dyson – a climate skeptic – was a young man palling around with Albert Einstein at Princeton when a solution to that seemed right around the corner; that was the early 1950s.  Dyson is now the old man of science, with the accent on old.)  Hot fusion is the same story.  And don’t even ask about Quantum Theory; Physics has gone basically nowhere since that dead end took over, looking at smaller and smaller pieces, thinking if we find enough of them it will explain reality.

Really complex phenomena just seem to be over our heads so far.  We go into them assuming simplistic things, and go off in reductionist directions, thinking it will eventually turn the tide, and then full careers (or two consecutive) go by and nothing is accomplished.

It doesn’t help that the reductionists dominate in so many sciences.  It produces a lot of general use products for the consumer marketplace, so it has its place.  But for understanding some of the bigger issues, it is failing in the marketplace of knowledge.  Hopefully there is a Newton out there somewhere to take the first step toward really tackling complex systems.

So far the score is Complex Systems ~10, Western Science 0 (…I don’t know about Eastern Science).

Dawdlers and Barriers

http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/to-know-but-not-understand-david-weinberger-on-science-and-big-data/250820/

The above is an article recommended at Judith Curry’s Climate, Etc site and WUWT.

I don’t expect you to have the time to read this article about scientific knowledge having created so much data that we may never be able to catch up and understand any of it.

But one passage made me want to share it.  Here is the passage:

We therefore stared at tables of numbers until their simple patterns became obvious to us. Johannes Kepler examined the star charts carefully constructed by his boss, Tycho Brahe, until he realized in 1605 that if the planets orbit the Sun in ellipses rather than perfect circles, it all makes simple sense. Three hundred fifty years later, James Watson and Francis Crick stared at x-rays of DNA until they realized that if the molecule were a double helix, the data about the distances among its atoms made simple sense. With these discoveries, the data went from being confoundingly random to revealing an order that we understand: Oh, the orbits are elliptical! Oh, the molecule is a double helix!

With the new database-based science, there is often no moment when the complex becomes simple enough for us to understand it. The model does not reduce to an equation that lets us then throw away the model. You have to run the simulation to see what emerges. For example, a computer model of the movement of people within a confined space who are fleeing from a threat–they are in a panic–shows that putting a column about one meter in front of an exit door, slightly to either side, actually increases the flow of people out the door. Why? There may be a theory or it may simply be an emergent property. We can climb the ladder of complexity from party games to humans with the single intent of getting outside of a burning building, to phenomena with many more people with much more diverse and changing motivations, such as markets. We can model these and perhaps know how they work without understanding them. They are so complex that only our artificial brains can manage the amount of data and the number of interactions involved. [emphasis added]

The bold passage immediately took my brain to traffic.

“Traffic?” You are probably asking, right?

In occasional discussions about driving and traffic (a big deal in the Chicago area, I assure you) I have probably heard twenty or thirty people rag on about when there is a barrier in one lane ahead, and “everyone” is getting in the non-barriered lane, forming one long line of courteous people, but then there is one discourteous “bastard” who drives up the almost totally open OTHER lane.  These people get really LIVID about that guy “cheating” by not getting in line like everybody else.  There is more to it even than, “Who does he think he is, anyway?”

Me?  I grew up in an area where people didn’t all get at the back of one line, they formed two roughly equal-length lines, and merged when they got up to the front of each line, up at the barrier.

Which way is best?  I don’t know.

Who is right and who is wrong?  I don’t know.

But let’s discuss it a bit…

The Monkey Trial, Global Warming version…

[Plaintiff]: SOME OF THE PEOPLE OF THE WORLD

[Defendant]: HUMAN INDUSTRIAL ACTIVITY

[Charge]:  ATTEMPTED MURDER OF THE PLANET EARTH

Someone today made the claim I’ve heard from time to time that the climate skeptics, of whom I am one, shouldn’t be allowed to get away with picking holes in someone else’s hypothesis without having some hypothesis of their/our own to replace it.  Now while on the surface that may sound reasonable, let us look at it another way – by looking at what would happen in our court system if that was the case.

What an interesting court system that would be, that in order to find someone Not Guilty, the defense in a criminal trial was required to prove that someone else – someone specific – perpetrated the crime instead.  Of course, we would never consider such a thing, in this our enlightened age.  A criminal charge is either found sufficient or insufficient to convict the defendant, solely on the merits of the case against him.  Not on his ability to put the blame on someone else.

Though it is the defendant whose liberty is at stake, when a trial is held, it is the prosecution’s case that is really being judged. Many a case never  even goes to court, even when the prosecutor is certain that his suspect has perpetrated the crime, because the prosecutors recognize that they do not have sufficient evidence to convict. After all, in our system, if a defendant is found not guilty once, he may never be tried for that crime again.  Double jeopardy.  The prosecution gets only one shot, once it goes into the criminal courts.  So, rather than fail to convict, the prosecutor holds back, presumably hoping that more evidence will show up that will allow a successful conviction later on.

Did 9/11 Kill America? Or was it on its way to the morgue already?

I heard a truism decades ago that went something like this:

In fighting against any anything, we always lose, because we inevitably take on the qualities of “our enemy”, the very ones we are fighting against.  In so doing, the “enemy” ends up winning.”  Even  with World War II and Hitler, if you look at what America became – torturers, invaders of defenseless countries, world dominators, totalitarians to some extent – we lost that war.

Every time I stand in a TSA line at an airport, I can’t shake the notion of what it was like to pass through a Nazi checkpoint in 1941.

This is the way the moderately conservative German newspaper, der Spiegel, sees 9/11, on this the eve of its 10th anniversary Bush’s Tragic Legacy – How 9/11 Triggered America’s Decline:

The smoke was still rising from the rubble of the World Trade Center when Richard Armitage, at the time the US deputy secretary of state, spoke in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. “History begins today,” he said.

In the coming decade, Armitage would turn out to be right — except the politician could not have foreseen how tragic the history would be following the epochal event. It is the history of the decline of the USA as a superpower.

Immediately before the attacks, this country was in full bloom — like Rome at its peak, as TV host Joe Scarborough recalls today.

The Republican President George W. Bush had inherited a fat budget surplus from the Democrat Bill Clinton. In Kosovo, the US, which Madeleine Albright dubbed “the indispensable nation,” had just shown the Europeans how it could resolve conflicts, even in their own backyard…

It was NOT all hunky-dory, though.  Enron, along with their fellow criminals at Arthur J Andserson, was on the front pages, as were the collapse of other mega-empires, such as WorldCom.  Carnivorous capitalism was taking a severe bruising in the press.  The pedophile priests and the Catholic Church were very happy to have something push them off the front pages.

After watching several hours on that day ten years ago, I went to give blood.  I wasn’t there five minutes when the guy behind me raised his voice and declared that, “We are so damned lucky that it was George W Bush who is President!“  Hackles up, my immediate reaction was to say, “You stupid idiot, if Bush wasn’t the President this never would have happened!“  Instead, in the interests of peace among grieving Americans, I bit my lip.  Now I know that I should have spoken my peace and then gone to stand way in the back of the line – just to get away from such willful stupidity. In the days to follow, comedians and professors lost their jobs, as America went insane with forced compliance of any and all things Bush.