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Category Archives: Science And Society
CAGW
Why the science is not “settled”:
The sad thing about the Great Climate Debate is that so far, there hasn’t really been a debate. The result is presented, but no one ever takes questions from the podium and is capable of defending their answers against a knowledgeable and skeptical questioner.
I can do that for all of my beliefs in physics — or at least, most of them — explain particular experiments that seem to verify my beliefs (as I do above). I’m quite capable of demonstrating their consistency both theoretically (with other physical laws and beliefs) and with experiment. I’m up front about where those beliefs fail, where they break down, where we do not know how things really work. Good science admits its limits, and never claims to be “settled” even as it does lead to defensible practice and engineering where it seems to work — for now.
Good science accepts limits on experimental precision. Hell, in physics we have to accept a completely non-classical limitation on experimental precision, one so profound that it sounds like a violation of simple logic to the uninitiated when they first try to understand it. But quite aside from Heisenberg, all experimental apparatus and all measurements are of limited precision, and the most honest answer for many things we might try to measure is “damfino” (damned if I know).
The Great Climate Debate, however, is predicated from the beginning on one things. We know what the global average temperature has been like for the past N years, where N is nearly anything you like. A century. A thousand years. A hundred thousand years. A hundred million years. Four billion years.
We don’t, of course. Not even close. Thermometers have only been around in even moderately reliable form for a bit over 300 years — 250 would be a fairer number — and records of global temperatures measured with even the first, highly inaccurate devices are sparse indeed until maybe 200 years ago. Most of the records from over sixty or seventy years ago are accurate to no more than a degree or two F (a degree C), and some of them are far less accurate than that. As Anthony has explicitly demonstrated, one can confound even a digital electronic automatic recording weather station thermometer capable of at least 0.01 degree resolution by the simple act of setting it up in a stupid place, such as the southwest side of a house right above a concrete driveway where the afternoon sun turns its location into a large reflector oven. Or in the case of early sea temperatures, by virtue of measuring pails of water pulled up from over the side with crude instruments in a driving wind cooling the still wet bulb pulled out of the pail.
Hubris.
[Late-morning update]
The Virginia Supreme Court says that the University of Virginia is not a “person,” and therefore doesn’t have to respond to a FOIA.
Huh?
So that means that UVA is immune from FOIAs in general? That it can’t enter into contracts? I think this will be appealed, all the way to SCOTUS, and they’ll lose.
But it raises the question: just what is it they’re hiding that they would fight this so tenaciously? And how is such a lack of transparency “scientific”?
The First Americans
Were they European-Americans, rather than Siberian-Americans?
[Update a few minutes later, after reading the whole thing.]
Heh. “Iberia, not Siberia.” And not “Clovis first.”
Global Warming
…causes amnesia. Is there anything it can’t do?
[Update a few minutes later]
The unbearable Gleickness of being: a ClimateFake update.
[Update a while later]
Heh — from the link:
Second, it is beyond irony and parody to take in again the fixation with Heartland’s tiny $4.4 million budget last year next to the recent news that the Climate Works Foundation, one of the major climate campaign organizations, just got another $100 million fillip from the Hewlett Foundation. This brings the grand total of Hewlett grants to Climate Works to nearly $600 million. I believe this one grant history to just one organization rivals the total combined assets of all the main conservative foundations. And these folks get their knickers in a twist about Heartland and the Koch brothers? The paranoid climateers make the cliché Victorian woman standing on a chair afraid of a mouse look like a Spartan warrior by comparison. I repeat: what a bunch of losers.
Let’s hope they’re losers. So far the losers have been taxpayers and consumers.
[Update early evening]
A huge link roundup of breaking posts: the Gleick tragedy.
[Bumped]
Eco-Destruction
…and the nature of fakery. Just what is it these people are at war with, really?
The Climate Skeptics
Why they (that is to say, we) are winning.
[Update a while later]
Peter Gleick and America’s [other] dumbest criminals.
Catastrophic Global Warming
…is it like the Millennium Bug?
As he says, it’s pseudoscience in the service of politics. Of course, the nice thing about the Millennium Bug was that we knew to the second when it would occur.
Second Breakfast
…and second sleep? This is fascinating.
I often do wake up in the middle of the night and have trouble getting back to sleep. I generally do after an hour or two, but it means I don’t get enough sleep the second time, because I have to get up for work. Who knew that this was natural? The problem is that you really have to get to bed early in order to do it, because it means you need ten consecutive hours to get your sleep instead of eight. I found this interesting, too, and completely unsurprising:
…the majority of doctors still fail to acknowledge that a consolidated eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.
“Over 30% of the medical problems that doctors are faced with stem directly or indirectly from sleep. But sleep has been ignored in medical training and there are very few centres where sleep is studied,” he says.
So doctors are as ignorant about the science of sleep as they are about nutrition.
The President’s Energy Speech
The five biggest whoppers. And those are just the biggest ones.
[Update a couple minutes later]
“We’re focused on production.”
Fact: While production is up under Obama, this has nothing to do with his policies, but is the result of permits and private industry efforts that began long before Obama occupied the White House.
Obama has chosen almost always to limit production. He canceled leases on federal lands in Utah, suspended them in Montana, delayed them in Colorado and Utah, and canceled lease sales off the Virginia coast.
His administration also has been slow-walking permits in the Gulf of Mexico, approving far fewer while stretching out review times, according to the Greater New Orleans Gulf Permit Index. The Energy Dept. says Gulf oil output will be down 17% by the end of 2013, compared with the start of 2011. Swift Energy President Bruce Vincent is right to say Obama has “done nothing but restrict access and delay permitting.”
And this is worthy of comment:
Obama said in his speech that Americans aren’t stupid. He’s right about that, which is why most are giving his energy policy a thumbs down.
Actually, it’s not clear that he’s right about that. The fact that he was elected president would seem to be evidence against the proposition.
[Update a few minutes later]
Rising gas prices: all part of Obama’s plan? All you had to do was to listen to what he was saying in the 2008 campaign.
While this position may be slightly unfair to the President (Mr. Chu was not yet in the Administration at the time he made the remarks, so any link between it and administration policy is tenuous), the quote devastatingly reveals just how tone-deaf and myopic white-collar, progressive intellectualism can be. The delusion that jacking up energy prices is part of a “good government” agenda is one of the pieces of insanity that keeps the blue intelligentsia from consolidating its position as a natural governing class.
More surprising here is that Politico is jumping on the bandwagon—although it notes that Chu’s remarks have been detrimental to Obama, the piece laments that the goal of raising gas prices doesn’t get the sympathetic attention it obviously deserves, given the support of numerous “experts.” With thinking like this dominating media and intellectual circles, it’s little wonder that the mainstream media is perceived as elitist and out of touch.
I disagree that the link between Chu’s remark and policy is “tenuous” at all. He was appointed precisely because he believes such nonsense. And in this case at least, the perception is the reality.