Commentary #6: Global Warming

[Mark Rippetoe]

The reference says 20x more. Am I reading wrong?

__________________________________________________ __

The World's Deadliest Animal is On The Move

Mosquitos are apparently the world's deadliest animals. But read the copy:

It's the mosquito - and, increasingly, it's on the move.

These global shifts, which will only accelerate as the planet warms, have sparked concern that the diseases mosquitoes carry will exact an even higher toll in the months and years to come.

In June alone, five cases of locally transmitted malaria were discovered in Texas and Florida: the first cases acquired in the United States in two decades. These cases, experts say, are unlikely to have a connection to warming temperatures - conditions in Florida and Texas are already suitable for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. But as urban heat islands expand and temperatures rise, mosquito-borne diseases are expected to travel outside of their typical regions.

"Climate change allows the creeping edge of mosquito ranges to expand," said Sadie Ryan, a professor of medical geography at the University of Florida.

Even though they just said theses cases are unlikely to have a connection to warming temperatures.

Earlier this year, Georgetown University researchers published a paper in Biology Letters demonstrating that malaria mosquitoes' ranges have already shifted in Africa over the past century, farther from the equator and into higher altitudes.

Malaria cases worldwide declined steadily for nearly two decades. But that progress stalled as cases have flatlined and even ticked up in some countries in the past few years. Cases increased to an estimated 247 million in 2021 from a recent low of 231 million in 2018, according to data from the World Health Organization.

Cases increased 7%. Might that have something to do with changing eradication efforts? Maybe? Possibly??

[Gilead]

Might that have something to do with changing eradication efforts? Maybe? Possibly??

Or maybe it has something to do with Billy boys latest initiatives.

Are genetically-modified mosquitoes from a Bill Gates-backed program causing a U.S. malaria outbreak?

Bill Gates Announces $168 Million to Develop Next-Generation Malaria Vaccine | Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

[Mark Rippetoe]

Could be. Gates is a scary human being.

[mkm5]

Could be. Gates is a scary human being.

Human being is a bit generous don't you think Coach? Steaming pile of shit might fit better.

[IlPrincipeBrutto]

A man once went to the doctor, complaining about stomach burns.
“It’s due to low iron levels in your body – the doctor told him – Eat a rusty nail at lunch and come back in two weeks.”

The man did as told, and two weeks later he was back.

“So, how’s it going?”
“Very bad doctor – he said – my burns are still there, now I also abdomen spasms and passing stools is a pain in the arse.”

“I see – said the doctor with a knowledgeable look – but without my cure, you would have been worse. Add a rusty nail at breakfast, see you in a month”


The story is (hopefully) apocryphal, but raises an interesting question: how would you prove the doctor wrong? Even better: is it actually possible to prove him wrong?

This type of questions can be used to define what falls within the realm of science. The current paradigm of What Is Science was formalized by Sir Karl Popper about a century ago. Basically (and imprecisely), a scientific theory must be open to falsification. Stated differently, a theory is scientific if there is an experiment that could prove it wrong; the essential part is the existence of the experiment, not its result.

Let’s try to illustrate the concept with an example.
Newtonian mechanics says that speeds are additive. If you are on a train doing 50mph and throw balls at 50mph in the direction of travel, someone watching from the station platform will see the balls going at 100mph. The theory also says that this is true at any speed.
There is an easy way to check the theory; build ever faster trains and throw ever faster balls and see what happens. In 1887 Michelson and Morley did exactly this; their ‘train’ was the Earth itself, and their ‘balls’ two rays of light; the results did not agree with theory. Thus, Newtonian mechanics was proved to work well with low speeds, but not with relativistic ones (where special relativity takes over).

Now let’s go back to our doctor; how could we test his statement?
We could give a nail to a thousand people, and if they all report pain we could conclude that giving nails is harmful. But each human is unique, and the doctor could state that his particular patient has a body that actually works differently, so the result derived form the thousand other patients doesn't apply.

To disprove this, we would then have to study the physiology of every part of the body of that specific patient, and show that it works in the same way as similar parts of the other thousand individuals we tested. But the doctor could point out that a human body is not a machine, and his global behavior is not simply the sum of the behaviors of each single part.
So we would have to repeat the investigation above for each combination of two parts, because their interactions might be different; and then then three-parts combinations, and so on and so forth. And all this on a single patient, whose body changes in time, and therefore does not constitute a valid basis for repeated experiments. It's worse than a hopeless task.

The only way to test the doctor's prescription would be to have an *identical* twin of the patient, and have them live the *same identical life* except one takes the rusty nail at lunch, and the other doesn't. Here, "identical" means totally identical, from mental synapses to the physiological values of each single cell; otherwise, you are not testing the cure on the same individual, and the result of the experiment will not be valid.
We must accept that we cannot test the doctor's statement.

But why are Sir Isaac's musings on falling apples testable, while the doctor's rusty diet is not?

Because the doctor made a statement about a historical process, in this case the life of the patient, a process which evolves in time and never reappears identical. There can’t be any counter-experiment to the doctors’ prescription, because there can’t be another patient identical to the one he gave nails to.

This doesn't mean historical processes cannot be subject to scientific investigation at all. Nobody can reproduce the Big Bang (assuming it took place), and therefore it's impossible to test statements like "If the inflation part of the Bing Bang had lasted ten nanoseconds more, the universe would now look like X"; but you can make hypotheses about parts of the historical process that is the Universe itself, like "there are black holes", and test them.

What you can't do is test any hypothesis that involves an alternative development of the historic process you are dealing with; you would need a parallel, identical historic process to do that, and by definition you don't have it.

There is something else of importance to note. Testing a hypothesis about a repeatable phenomenon (throwing balls on a train) helps predicting the result of future experiments done in similar circumstances. Does the same hold for hypotheses about historic processes? I wish I had a convincing answer, but I don't. What I can speculate is that the value of testing an hypothesis relative to a historic process seems to depend on how many other *similar* historic processes are available.

Example time: Each individual is unique, but all digestive systems work in pretty much the same way. If you give a rusty nail for lunch to a thousand people, the results could be turned into a useful guideline, although it would still not be a physical law.

Now let's take this statement: "If we limit CO2 levels to X, global climate will evolve according to trajectory Y until 2080". This is certainly a testable statement; you 'just' have to limit CO2 levels (we'll ignore the implementation details) and measure global climate. Then in 2080 you tot up the score and declare the statement 'true' or 'false'.
Trouble is, there is only this Earth. Imagine that to limit CO2 you had to inflict untold suffering on people, and then in 2080 your model turns out to be wrong; what do you do? Would you take the risk? How could you even compute what the risk is? In terms of reliable predictions, is this much different from someone telling you "Put 1000 bucks on a Dow Jones index fund and you will be rich in 2060"?

So, Global Warming thinking seems able to only make two kind of statements:
- untestable statements about alternative development of an historical process ("without the increase in CO2, the world would be cooler now")
- one-off statements about the future ("if we limit CO2 below a certain threshold, something X will happen") whose truth or not will only be known in a distant future.

Neither type of statement enables us to understand and make predictions *today* on how the world functions; and that, after all, is the main purpose of scientific investigation.

Let me rephrase all this in another, grossly stated way: If it's too hot, it's GW. If it's too cold, it's GW. If it rains too much, it's GW again, and likewise if instead it doesn't rain at all. At a higher level, if the Earth warms, it's GW, but even if the warming pauses, it's still GW. If GW hasn't fully happened yet, it will happen, give it enough time (remember those partially unrealized, catastrophic predictions of the past?). How can you prove GW wrong then? And if you can't prove it wrong, is GW science at all?

This question has received some interesting answers (we are almost done, I promise). In "The Climate Change Debate - An Epistemic and Ethical Enquiry", philosophy professors David Coady and Richard Corry ask the same question. In Chapter Five they conclude that, according to Popper's definition, GW theory is not science.

But, in a truly startling flourish, they take this conclusion to mean that Popper's definition is not applicable to modern, complex, interlinked scientific disciplines like Climate Studies, and therefore is not the appropriate metric to judge if GW theory is scientific or not.

Yes, that's what they do: "According to Popper, GW is not science; and this means that Popper is inadequate".

Their reason to do so is that Popper's criteria ensure scientific inquiry does not accept falsehoods, but in doing so it might force you to reject true, but untestable ideas. And, in their opinion, given the stakes being played with GW, finding true but untestable ideas is more important than make sure you reject false ones.

I don't know how widespread or accepted their ideas are; to me, the fact that one has to discard something as fundamental as Popper's ideas in order to preserve the GW framework is quite extraordinary. As the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; I honestly don't know if such evidence is there.

(I would recommend the book to any GW skeptic; it forces you to argument skepticism in a rigorous way)

This concludes what I wanted to say. Thanks so much for reading.
Hope this has been useful for some and apologies for taking so long.


IPB
(3/3)

[IlPrincipeBrutto]

I'll just leave this quote here:

"The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people. Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience. In turn, the pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other unrelated ills. It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, government agencies, and environmentalists. In my opinion, there is no real climate crisis. There is, however, a very real problem with providing a decent standard of living to the world’s large population and an associated energy crisis. The latter is being unnecessarily exacerbated by what, in my opinion, is incorrect climate science.”

(Dr. John F. Clauser,)


Source: https://co2coalition.org/publication...-of-directors/


Dr. Clauser won the Nobel Prize for Physics for his experiments on quantum entanglement (the apparent ability of particles like photons to interact over enormous distances).
The page reported above says he was quite critical of the attribution for the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics for work on the development of weather models; the same page says he himself has developed an alternative model, which attributes a bigger, self-regulating role to clouds.

I am not gong to even attempt to evaluate the merit of Dr. Clauser's criticism; I just note that his statement seems to have received very little attention.

IPB

[Mark Rippetoe]

I just note that his statement seems to have received very little attention.

Of course it has. But from now on I will refer to AGW as a pseudoscience, like astrology or homeopathy. I encourage you all to do the same. From Wikipedia: Pseudoscience - Wikipedia

Pseudoscience is differentiated from science because – although it usually claims to be science – pseudoscience does not adhere to scientific standards, such as the scientific method, falsifiability of claims, and Mertonian norms.

Scientific method
Main article: Scientific method

The scientific method is a continuous cycle of observation, questioning, hypothesis, experimentation, analysis and conclusion.
A number of basic principles are accepted by scientists as standards for determining whether a body of knowledge, method, or practice is scientific. Experimental results should be reproducible and verified by other researchers.[24] These principles are intended to ensure experiments can be reproduced measurably given the same conditions, allowing further investigation to determine whether a hypothesis or theory related to given phenomena is valid and reliable. Standards require the scientific method to be applied throughout, and bias to be controlled for or eliminated through randomization, fair sampling procedures, blinding of studies, and other methods. All gathered data, including the experimental or environmental conditions, are expected to be documented for scrutiny and made available for peer review, allowing further experiments or studies to be conducted to confirm or falsify results. Statistical quantification of significance, confidence, and error[25] are also important tools for the scientific method.

Falsifiability
Main article: Falsifiability
During the mid-20th century, the philosopher Karl Popper emphasized the criterion of falsifiability to distinguish science from nonscience.[26] Statements, hypotheses, or theories have falsifiability or refutability if there is the inherent possibility that they can be proven false, that is, if it is possible to conceive of an observation or an argument that negates them. Popper used astrology and psychoanalysis as examples of pseudoscience and Einstein's theory of relativity as an example of science. He subdivided nonscience into philosophical, mathematical, mythological, religious and metaphysical formulations on one hand, and pseudoscientific formulations on the other.[27]

Another example which shows the distinct need for a claim to be falsifiable was stated in Carl Sagan's publication The Demon-Haunted World when he discusses an invisible dragon that he has in his garage. The point is made that there is no physical test to refute the claim of the presence of this dragon. Whatever test one thinks can be devised, there is a reason why it does not apply to the invisible dragon, so one can never prove that the initial claim is wrong. Sagan concludes; "Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all?". He states that "your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true",[28] once again explaining that even if such a claim were true, it would be outside the realm of scientific inquiry.

Mertonian norms
Main article: Mertonian norms
During 1942, Robert K. Merton identified a set of five "norms" which characterize real science. If any of the norms were violated, Merton considered the enterprise to be nonscience. These are not broadly accepted by the scientific community. His norms were:

Originality: The tests and research done must present something new to the scientific community.
Detachment: The scientists' reasons for practicing this science must be simply for the expansion of their knowledge. The scientists should not have personal reasons to expect certain results.
Universality: No person should be able to more easily obtain the information of a test than another person. Social class, religion, ethnicity, or any other personal factors should not be factors in someone's ability to receive or perform a type of science.
Skepticism: Scientific facts must not be based on faith. One should always question every case and argument and constantly check for errors or invalid claims.
Public accessibility: Any scientific knowledge one obtains should be made available to everyone. The results of any research should be published and shared with the scientific community.[29]

Refusal to acknowledge problems
In 1978, Paul Thagard proposed that pseudoscience is primarily distinguishable from science when it is less progressive than alternative theories over a long period of time, and its proponents fail to acknowledge or address problems with the theory.[30] In 1983, Mario Bunge suggested the categories of "belief fields" and "research fields" to help distinguish between pseudoscience and science, where the former is primarily personal and subjective and the latter involves a certain systematic method.[31] The 2018 book about scientific skepticism by Steven Novella, et al. The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe lists hostility to criticism as one of the major features of pseudoscience.[32]

And this is even better:

For philosophers Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome R. Ravetz "pseudo-science may be defined as one where the uncertainty of its inputs must be suppressed, lest they render its outputs totally indeterminate". The definition, in the book Uncertainty and Quality in Science for Policy,[38] alludes to the loss of craft skills in handling quantitative information, and to the bad practice of achieving precision in prediction (inference) only at the expenses of ignoring uncertainty in the input which was used to formulate the prediction.

The whole Wikipedia article is a detailed description of AGW, but in the end it is, after all, still Wikipedia:

Philosophers debate the nature of science and the general criteria for drawing the line between scientific theories and pseudoscientific beliefs, but there is widespread agreement "that creationism, astrology, homeopathy, Kirlian photography, dowsing, ufology, ancient astronaut theory, Holocaust denialism, Velikovskian catastrophism, and climate change denialism are pseudosciences."

[Barry Charles]

I'll just leave this quote here:

"The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people. Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience. In turn, the pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other unrelated ills. It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, government agencies, and environmentalists. In my opinion, there is no real climate crisis. There is, however, a very real problem with providing a decent standard of living to the world’s large population and an associated energy crisis. The latter is being unnecessarily exacerbated by what, in my opinion, is incorrect climate science.”

(Dr. John F. Clauser,)


Source: https://co2coalition.org/publication...-of-directors/


Dr. Clauser won the Nobel Prize for Physics for his experiments on quantum entanglement (the apparent ability of particles like photons to interact over enormous distances).
The page reported above says he was quite critical of the attribution for the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics for work on the development of weather models; the same page says he himself has developed an alternative model, which attributes a bigger, self-regulating role to clouds.

I am not gong to even attempt to evaluate the merit of Dr. Clauser's criticism; I just note that his statement seems to have received very little attention.

IPB

Thank you for your well thought out and persuasive posts! This type of critical thinking should be practiced by all of us on every topic.

[mkm5]

I'll just leave this quote here:

"The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people. Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience. In turn, the pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other unrelated ills. It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, government agencies, and environmentalists. In my opinion, there is no real climate crisis. There is, however, a very real problem with providing a decent standard of living to the world’s large population and an associated energy crisis. The latter is being unnecessarily exacerbated by what, in my opinion, is incorrect climate science.”

(Dr. John F. Clauser,)


Source: https://co2coalition.org/publication...-of-directors/


Dr. Clauser won the Nobel Prize for Physics for his experiments on quantum entanglement (the apparent ability of particles like photons to interact over enormous distances).
The page reported above says he was quite critical of the attribution for the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics for work on the development of weather models; the same page says he himself has developed an alternative model, which attributes a bigger, self-regulating role to clouds.

I am not gong to even attempt to evaluate the merit of Dr. Clauser's criticism; I just note that his statement seems to have received very little attention.

IPB

Excellent. Personally, this climate bullshit is on an exponential "coof" level as far as I'm concerned. I'm not sure how much more of the propaganda I can take. It's infiltrated everything that used to be "normal." Cold weather? Climate change. Hot weather? Climate change. It's raining outside? Climate change. "Wildfires?" Climate change. Dog can't take a shit? Climate change.

It's like the Terminator; it won't stop, can't stop until the objective is achieved. Sorry for the comparison, and FAS and FJB.

[IlPrincipeBrutto]

Thank you for your well thought out and persuasive posts! This type of critical thinking should be practiced by all of us on every topic.

You are making me blush.
Thanks.

IPB