January 8, 2006
AND BY A VOTE OF TEN TO TWO WITH THREE ABSTENTIONS, DARWIN WAS RIGHT
Ice cores show warming 'natural' (Brendan O'Keefe, The Australian, January 7th, 2006)
Hundreds of thousands of years worth of climate records in ice cores show there is nothing unusual in a global warming trend over the past 25 years.Marine geophysicist Bob Carter, a professor at Queensland's James Cook University and leading climate change sceptic, said the effects of human activity would barely register in the long-term history of climate change.
He told The Weekend Australian that ice cores from Antarctica "tell us clearly that in the context of the meteorological records of 100 years, it is not unusual to have a period of warming like the one we are in at the moment".
Dr Carter disputed the theory that human activity was making a current - natural - warm period hotter: "Atmospheric CO2 is not a primary forcing agent for temperature change." He argues that "any cumulative human signal is so far undetectable at a global level and, if present, is buried deeply in the noise of natural variation" [...]
But other leading scientists, who blame human activity for climate change, say the "denialists" are a one-to-99 minority.
Will Steffen, director of the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at the Australian National University, said: "There is no debate. The debate is over." The evidence that human activity had increased emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, adding to natural warming, was "overwhelming", he said.
For scientist and University of Adelaide academic Tim Flannery there was also no argument: humans had turned up the heating and only humans could keep a lid on it. The argument that human activity did not contribute to global warming was "not a credible hypothesis to build policy on", he said.
The authority of the scientific community, according to scientists themselves, is supposed to rest on whether their myriad theories are testable and validated objectively by those tests. The reason we all accept that bacteria causes pneumonia is not that the vast majority of a privileged medical profession so believes in theory, but that the theory is generally born out almost every time we fill a prescription. Yet as scientific inquiry becomes more conjectural, abstract and inaccessible to the layman, we are asked more and more to accept that scientific truths are validated by the mere existence of a consensus of scientists, or, as in the case of Intelligent Design, by court decisions by solitary lay judges on whose theory is more persuasive.
Global warming and darwinism are both excellent examples of this essentially authoritarian mindset. It may be reasonable scientifically to suspect human activity can affect our climate, but to assert that “the debate is over” before there is even one conclusive example of a reversal in direct response to corrective action is politics, not science. Likewise with darwinism, the oft-heard claims that the vast majority of biologists accept it and that no one has come up with a better natural theory are simply arguments from authority that cover the lack of an unambiguous ability to test it. Belief in human-induced global warming and darwinism are not prima facie unreasonable, but belief that they have been “proven” scientifically and are now beyond debate are. Fortunately for us, few of the truly great scientific heros of the past succumbed to such pomposity .
When we descend to details, we can prove that no one species has changed (i.e. we cannot prove that a single species has changed): nor can we prove that the supposed changes are beneficial, which is the groundwork of the theory. Nor can we explain why some species have changed and others have not. --(Letter to G. Bentham May 22, 1863)
Mr Darwin:
Did you foresee that those problems would be resolved in the future, not by finding the evidence that would prove those things, but by expanding and amending your theory so that it now by definition encompasses everything that ever happened?
Posted by: Peter B at January 8, 2006 9:50 AMBack to global warning, which I am presently enjoying, can anyone tell me what the weather will be like next week? For sure?
Posted by: Genecis at January 8, 2006 10:01 AMYes, Genecis, they can tell you with absolute certainty, provided you remember that all science is self-correcting.
Posted by: Peter B at January 8, 2006 10:12 AMPlease, don't blame me for the fanaticism of my followers.
Posted by: Charles Darwin at January 8, 2006 10:16 AMIntellectuals always want to be priests. They want the rest of us to support them while they tell us what to do.
Posted by: Brandon at January 8, 2006 12:59 PMAnyone who says, "the debate is over" is not a scientist. From his title alone, this guy Steffen is just another bureaucrat who's interested in defending his turf and in increasing his budget and the little empire he runs.
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at January 8, 2006 2:44 PMRather than debating Darwinism, we'd do much better for our children by explaining that the keywords in science are accuracy and utility, not "truth" and "correctness".
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at January 8, 2006 3:00 PMAOG:
Fair enough, although accuracy could keep us going here for a few hundred threads. But let's park darwinism for a while and focus on global warming. What do you make of the frantic doomsday warnings of even the most respectable, established scientists? More and more they are talking as if the Black Death was approaching at fifty miles a day and we are all still ignoring hygiene and buying icons. Seriously, do you think we are in the grip of a kind of collective madness or are we missing something here?
Posted by: Peter B at January 8, 2006 8:23 PMPeter, I'll take "collective madness" for $100.
But I could spin that as a side result of the Darwinism debate, where the two sides argue whether Darwinism is "true" or "false", when I don't think either term can be applied. And because that's the big, visible, scientific theory, the true/false dichotomy is projected on to other theories, such as anthropogenic global warming. That, too, ends being treated as true/false, particularly by its proponents. But as even OJ pointed out in an earlier thread, scientific theories are never true or false, but instead are more or less accurate and more or less useful. The emphasis on true/false obscures that and makes it easier for charlatans in white coats to take advantage of weakly supported theories.
P.S. On the other hand, I am sorely tempted to blame government funding for this effect. Just as state support for a Church leads to ossification and political correctness, government funding of science will promote the same sort of petty and progressively minded types to positions of respect and leadership.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at January 8, 2006 10:18 PMOh, this is rich.
I seem to remember an article quoting an Italian female(????) who was salivating at the prospect of the ice cores proving to America/Bush that there's global warming and we need to get on board Kyoto.
Posted by: Sandy P at January 9, 2006 12:06 AMAOG:
This is out of my league, but I also wonder whether a lot of this just isn't being driven by exploding computer capacity. We keep hearing about fantastically complex "models", and I imagine some scientist trying to make a name for himself saying :"Geez, look at all this computing power. Let's see how much data I can stuff into it and where it leads me."
Of course there are no follow-up grants if it doesn't lead anywhere, are there?
Posted by: Peter B at January 9, 2006 5:53 AMAOG:
You hit a lot of nails right on the head.
Peter:
In pointing out that argument from authority afflicts rational inquiry, so do you.
In (very limited) defense of those advocating anthropogenic global warming, the precautionary principle is not completely unjustified.
If the consequences of a warmer global climate are sufficiently bad, and If there is a chance that human activity contributes to that climate change, then, given that the future isn't knowable, it may well be prudent to limit anthropogenic forcing.
But, even given the first antecedent, most global warming advocates have replaced everything "If there is a chance that" with "because."
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at January 9, 2006 8:16 AM