The Interaction of Ideologies: A Bemused Response to “Cheese”

Is this how we should view expert scientists?    Image Credit: morgueFile.com/Grafixar

This post is a reply to the comments of my friend, whom I will call “Cheese” because of his own preferences. Cheese and I have disagreed off-and-on on a number of issues, and in several different forums. You can find his latest reactions to my train of thought in his post Lacking All Conviction: exploring the stigma of centrism.

Hello, Cheese! Before I get into the meat of our conversation, allow me to comment for a moment on the title of your post. After reading through your essay, it occurred to me what you meant by “lacking all conviction” was actually keeping an open mind on contentious, controversial subjects such as Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), sometimes referred to in a more than dishonest way as climate change. How is that dishonest? I will comment on that later. What bemuses me more than a little is the part of your title that announces you are “exploring the stigma of centrism”. That centrism in any given controversy is something stigmatized is not a reaction found among many I have met. Indeed, the middle ground between the extremes is in my experience usually praised as a position that risks the least and which allows political compromise. On reflection I concluded a centrist position, in which you accept no one side over another, is indeed the one of least conviction (other than a position of extreme skepticism). I wonder then if what you mean by your title is that in order to keep an open mind as a true agnostic, you must accept the stigma from contending sides of not holding any conviction.

As one grows older and eventually evolves into old age, a person finds it progressively harder to hold that centrist position of least conviction. If a person is not totally brain dead, he or she begins at a young age to connect the dots between bits of observed and perceived reality to construct the patterns that become that person’s ideology. As they grow older, people will jettison those parts of their ideology that are easily and convincingly rebutted by other observed facts, or become inconsistent with other deeply held beliefs. The older they become, people who are intellectually honest and actively study the world around them will grow progressively more certain about many things, as interlocking and consistent patterns of observed reality reinforce each other.

Sometimes people are led astray by deeply held beliefs that are actually false; sometimes such deeply held beliefs can anchor one with actual reality. How can someone evaluate the degree of truth or falseness in any particular belief? I can only suggest the perspective of a physicist: the degree of self-consistency of a set ideas, not just between themselves but also with all one observes in life, is the only guarantee we will ever have in our mortal existence of truth.

Changing my focus to your actual essay, I must applaud you for the first sentence of your second paragraph: “I disagree with the statement that minority position is irrelevant in science.” Indeed, if a majority position were dispositive of the truth, almost no one today would ever have heard about Galileo Galilei! The only arbiter any of us, especially those of us who fancy ourselves intellectuals, can have of what is true and what is not is the consistency of our ideas with what we observe. This last thought all by itself should make anyone dubious that “the science is settled” on any particular controversy.

The most “settled” science that I know is electromagnetic field theory as summarized in Maxwell’s equations. These are four coupled partial differential equations determining the behavior of electric and magnetic fields. They were a big hint to Albert Einstein, pointing him toward special relativity. Yet, who knows? It is conceivable (although not likely), some physicist in the future might discover magnetic monopoles, in which case Maxwell’s equations would have to be modified with a magnetic monopole term as a source of a static magnetic field. Even if they are totally correct as we know them now, Richard Feynman, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, and Julian Schwinger were able to wring extra meaning out of them by a process called second quantization. In this process the classically continuous electromagnetic field is broken up into particles called photons, which are absolutely necessary for explaining phenomena like the photoelectric effect. This little piece of history should convince anyone that however settled a piece of science is, it is always possible for nature to surprise us.

Being a centrist in any controversy implies that one considers aspects of some, most, or all sides of a controversy to be correct, and from our experience this is often the case. However, no scientist can ever afford to take such a position a priori. All sides might offer postulates to test, but a true scientist can never worry about how many there are with whom he agrees or disagrees. Science is not the result of a democratic election, but the tyrant of reality.

Nor can the scientist ever accept a position purely on the strength of authority. As Galileo learned to his cost, authorities can sometimes be terribly wrong! You state, “the wisdom of people who know vastly more than oneself is dismissed at great peril”, which is certainly true as far as the statement goes. Yet the wisdom of your sentence is also accepted with great peril without a considerable amount of some kind of verification. If you simply accept the wisdom of the high priests guarding the gates of knowledge, you might eventually find yourself a human sacrifice.

Since our discussions on these subjects began in response to my posts on global warming, let us discuss your topic of interest in risk management of the possible problem of AGW. The very first thing that should be said is that the globally averaged temperature changes per year are so very tiny that in measuring them the signal can very easily be lost in the noise. To demonstrate this I will reproduce a plot of one of the five major globally averaged temperature data sets. The one I have chosen to use is the data set maintained by the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). As you probably know, the scientists and managers of the NCDC are famous (or infamous, depending on your attitude) believers in AGW, so it is very pleasing to me to use their data in this context. Two of the other data sets would give a very similar picture, and the two satellite generated data sets do not go back that far in time. If you examine the plot below you should notice several things.

The first thing to notice is the actual temperature averages are represented as the red bars of a histogram in the plot, and that their heights relative to the zero line actually represent a temperature anomaly, i.e. the difference from some standard temperature. It does not really matter what the standard temperature is, so long as we all agree to accept it for purposes of data discussion. However, the standard temperature is a value that AGW believers think represents a long-term time average for globally averaged temperature. The only thing wrong with this last statement is that there is no static long-term average, because not only is climate changing, it has always been changing from the beginning of the planet’s history. Many backers of AGW admit this fact, but they say it is always associated with increases in atmospheric CO₂ concentrations. This is absolutely true, but what they do not often recognize is the increases in temperature generally precede the measurable increases in CO₂ by about 800 years. This seems to indicate the increase in temperature might cause the increase in CO₂, not the other way around. When some AGW proponents do recognize this correlation, they will respond by noting that correlation is not the same as proof of causation and invoke some other mechanism for the correlation. What they can never explain however is how such large fluctuations in planetary temperatures and CO₂ concentrations (much larger than our modern changes) could occur without humankind providing the CO₂.

The next aspect of the plot you should notice is the error bars about the measurements. Most of these error bars either overlap or closely approach the zero line, indicating the actual temperature anomaly could have been very close to zero. This demonstrates how small the signal to noise ratio actually is. In fact the signal itself is very tiny, which brings up the subject of the penultimate aspect you should notice, which is the blue interpolating curve. Given its smoothness, the curve is probably a least squares fit of a piecewise cubic spline.  However it was generated, we can use the interpolating curve to get differences in temperature anomalies, and therefore of the actual temperatures themselves, between any two dates. For example, during the very last period of global warming, the temperature anomaly increased from about 0°C in 1970 to about 0.6°C in 2000, or a change in temperature of about 0.02 °C per year.

The final aspect of this plot you should notice before we get to risk analysis is that temperature does not increase monotonically with time, but the change varies from warming to cooling and back again with a half-period of 30 to 40 years for each warming and cooling phase. There is a separate, longer cycle of warming and cooling with a period of about 1500 years, whose last half-period of cooling was the little ice age that started in the 1300s and ended around 1860. Therefore, we should expect slow warming with the warming phase of the 1500 year cycle with the half-periods of 30 to 40 year warming and cooling as fluctuations on top of the longer cycle warming trend.

The most important implication of this discussion is that any feedback mechanisms the atmosphere and the seas provide must be net negative, not positive the way the AGW proponents believe. Otherwise there would not be a cycle of alternating warming and cooling. One very big theoretical problem AGW believers have is the very fact of these alternating cycles. If CO₂ concentration is the dominant forcer of temperature, then how can there be these cycles when CO₂ concentration has been increasing almost linearly with time? The only answer possible is that atmospheric temperature is not nearly as sensitive to CO₂ concentration, as many scientists have believed. I have suggested a physical reason for this insensitivity with the saturation of quantized energy transitions in CO₂ molecules by absorption of infrared photons, and the long lifetimes of these excited states relative to the time it takes a photon to get most of the way to the top of the troposphere. You can read about this mechanism in the posts Basic Physical Processes of Greenhouse Gas Warming and An Infrared Photon’s Life in the Atmosphere. Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, Huntsville has suggested a dominant negative feedback on temperature forcing you can find discussed in the post Clouds and Global Warming. Finally, there is a natural connection between the degree clouds can shade the Earth to provide that negative feedback and solar power output that explains the 30 to 40 year half-cycles. This connection through cosmic rays forming cloud nucleation centers has been both observationally and experimentally verified and can  be read about in the post Solar Power Output and Global Warming.

So what does all this have to do with the risks of ignoring the possibility of AGW? I would suggest the following points are dispositive.

1. The rate of observed warming is very slow. IF the warming were monotonic, it would take approximately a century to warm about 2°C.
2. But the warming is not monotonic. Every 30 to 40 years a period of warming ends to be followed by 30 to 40 years of either gentle cooling, or at worst a “pause” in the warming. This (assuming warming rates do not change much) should increase the time required for a 2°C increase to about two centuries.
3. Any feedbacks provided by the atmosphere and the seas are net negative, so the warming could never become exponential in growth rates.
4. The causes of the long 1500 year cycle and the 30 to 40 year half-cycles are entirely natural and man could not change them even if he wanted. If he mucked around with the atmosphere to artificially increase cloud cover as some have suggested, the situation could be made infinitely worse by inducing a “nuclear winter”.

Given these points, what do you think the risks would be of ignoring AGW?

I will defer the discussion of the risks we would assume if we follow the courses recommended by the AGW believers to a later post.

GO TO HOME

Sharing is caring!