The strongest correlate of opinion on climate change is partisan affiliation. Two-thirds of Republicans (67%) say either that the Earth is getting warmer mostly because of natural changes in the atmosphere (43%) or that there is no solid evidence the Earth is getting warmer (24%). By contrast, most Democrats (64%) say the Earth is getting warmer mostly because of human activity. … The divide is even larger when party and ideology are both taken into consideration. Just 21% of conservative Republicans say the Earth is warming due to human activity, compared with nearly three-quarters (74%) of liberal Democrats. — Pew Research Center

In other words, most of the general public appears to believe that the existence of abrupt climate change A large-scale change in the climate system that takes place over a few decades or less, persists (or is anticipated to persist) for at least a few decades, and causes substantial disruptions in human and natural systems. (formerly known as anthropogenic ‘Human-caused’ global warming) is a question of politics rather than science. They’re not looking at evidence published in peer-reviewed science journals before adopting a position. Instead, they seem to decide that their political party’s position on climate change is “X,” so they believe “X.” Finally, this explains why some people who watch a documentary that exaggerates the science end up imitating that smug politician’s You have to realize that I view ‘politician’ as a VERY dirty word in order to get the full effect of this sentence. alarmism. I run into hordes of them on campus, and I always rebuff their attempts to guilt me out of driving by saying “Why worry about the Earth when we’ve got 7 planets R.I.P. Pluto, 1930-2006 to spare?!”

Keep in mind that I’m only saying the existence of abrupt climate change is a purely scientific question. I realize that our response to climate change is a legitimate political question. But let’s set that question aside to contemplate the existence of abrupt climate change. Instead of lining up behind politicians, let’s take the road less traveled by examining some evidence given to us by modern science.

To begin with, it’s indisputable that the Earth’s climate has varied wildly in the past. Vostok ice core data confirm that for nearly half a million years, the climate has changed cyclically. In all that time, the maximum CO₂ concentration never went above 300 ppm parts per million . It’s hit higher levels 15 million years ago, but usually Heinrich and Dansgaard-Oeschger events (among other examples of natural abrupt climate change) show that the natural climate is only fairly stable in the long run. These events show that the climate can quickly move from one stable “attractor” to another. I should stress, however, that results like Meehl 2004 show that today’s changes aren’t natural. in gradual ways. Plus, the Earth was essentially a different planet back then, with a different biosphere basking under the light of a very slightly The Sun was only barely fainter tens of millions of years ago, but high CO2 concentrations hundreds of millions of years ago or more were partially compensated for by the lower solar luminosity. Also, the continents shift on these timescales which affects the climate too. dimmer Sun so comparisons across that much time are tricky at best.

Natural variations are evident in the data, of course. The most prominent cycles over geological time are governed by (among other effects) Milankovitch cycles which are caused by periodic variations in the Earth’s orbit.

Bizarrely, the CO₂ concentration is at 380 ppm parts per million today. That’s ~26% higher than it’s been in the last half million years. Notice that the current CO₂ concentration is off the scale of the Vostok data graph. If this is due to natural variability alone, it’s quite a coincidence that it’s happening right after we started burning enough oil to fuel ~800 million cars, and burning coal by the ton to supply ~50% of our electricity.

Furthermore, it seems like the CO₂ at Vostok typically increased centuries after the temperature started to increase. (Ice core data are difficult to analyze in this manner, though.) At least, that’s the way it used to work. Right now, the CO₂ concentration is at an unprecedented level but the temperature is barely above normal. Again, this implies that we’re not experiencing natural climate variability because what’s happening today doesn’t match the behavior of the ancient climate.

According to physics that was firmly established decades before I was born, CO₂ warms the planet by absorbing infrared radiation from the ground better than it absorbs visible radiation from the Sun. So this rapidly increasing CO₂ should cause a rapid temperature increase:

The above graphs are quite busy, so here’s an overview of each one:

1. The top graph shows temperatures over the last 300 years, as recorded by instruments. Notice that several independent instruments are telling us that the temperature has increased dramatically in recent decades.
2. The middle graph shows temperatures over the last 1000 years as reconstructed from various proxies such as ice cores, tree rings, boreholes, glacier retreat, etc. The different curves are based on different data and algorithms, and were derived by scientists from all over the world. Note that all of them show an abrupt temperature increase in the last few decades. More details can be found in pages 465-474 of chapter 6 here, especially Table 6.1 on page 469.
3. The bottom graph shows a “most likely” temperature reconstruction over the last 1000 years. This estimate uses all the previous curves, weighted according to their statistical uncertainties. The shading represents the combined uncertainty; darker areas are more confidently known.

Perhaps this is a coincidence? All the evidence up to this point just shows that CO₂ and temperatures have both risen in an apparently artificial manner in the last few decades. But Meehl 2004 tested whether or not recent temperature observations could be explained by natural variations alone:

The black curve represents observations. The blue curve represents the result of a computer simulation that accounts for natural variations like volcanic eruptions and changes in the brightness of the Sun. The shaded blue area represents the uncertainty of that simulation. The red curve includes all the natural variations in the blue curve, but adds human emissions like CO₂, sulfates and aerosols. Notice that after ~1970 the observed temperatures aren’t consistent with natural variations, but they are within the error bars of the prediction made by accounting for human emissions.

The Earth is so massive and ancient that we tend to instinctively believe ‘Don’t treat C02 as a pollutant’ in the Christian Science Monitor by Mark W. Hendrickson on June 23, 2009 wrongly says “And how do you propose to regulate Earth’s temperature when as much as three-quarters of the variability is due to variations in solar activity, with the remaining one-quarter due to changes in Earth’s orbit, axis, and albedo (reflectivity)? This truly is ‘mission impossible.’ Mankind can no more regulate Earth’s temperature than it can the tides. … 1. Human activity accounts for less than 4 percent of global CO2 emissions. 2. CO2 itself accounts for only 10 or 20 percent of the greenhouse effect. This discloses the capricious nature of the EPA’s decision to classify CO2 as a pollutant, for if CO2 is a pollutant because it is a greenhouse gas, then the most common greenhouse gas of all – water vapor, which accounts for more than three-quarters of the atmosphere’s greenhouse effect – should be regulated, too. The EPA isn’t going after water vapor, of course, because then everyone would realize how absurd climate-control regulation really is.” that humans aren’t powerful enough to affect the climate on this scale. For example, those awe-inspiring volcanic eruptions simply must dwarf anything we do, right? Surprisingly, humans emit ~100x more CO₂ than volcanoes.

Even still, the Earth is a stable system, right? Will our changes to the atmosphere just provoke a natural response that cancels them out, preventing us from significantly altering the climate? Well… maybe. The natural climate certainly did appear fairly Heinrich and Dansgaard-Oeschger events (among other examples of natural abrupt climate change) show that the natural climate is only fairly stable in the long run. These events show that the climate can quickly move from one stable “attractor” to another. I should stress, however, that results like Meehl 2004 show that today’s changes aren’t natural. stable in our absence. However, a number of positive feedback effects present the disturbing possibility that the climate is only metastable:

• Melting snow/ice uncovers dark ocean water in the Arctic and dark dirt in the Antarctic. In each case, the albedo of the snow is higher, which means more heat is absorbed after the ice starts to melt, which speeds up the remaining melting…
• Warmer oceans will evaporate more water vapor into the atmosphere, which is a more effective greenhouse gas than CO₂.
• Warmer deep ocean temperatures may destabilize methane hydrate deposits, releasing another more potent greenhouse gas.
• Melting permafrost releases CO₂ and methane.
• Melting glaciers help to lubricate the slide of the glacier into the ocean, speeding up the loss of glaciers once the process starts.
• Higher temperatures increase the risk of forest fires, which release the CO₂ stored in the wood.
• The dust caused by vegetation loss due to shifting precipitation patterns, fires and even other pollutants darkens snow, causing it to melt earlier.

There are also negative feedback effects, such as the fact that trees grow faster in higher CO₂ and thus store more CO₂ in their wood. [Update Thanks to Dr. Geoffrey A. Landis for his additions and corrections to this section and the faint young Sun caveat, as well as the abcnews link in the 'ice age in the 1970s' section. by Dr. Landis: Also, the Stefan-Boltzmann equation says that hotter objects radiate more, and higher temperatures = more evaporation = more clouds = higher albedo.] But I worry that the abrupt spike in CO₂ levels might cause positive feedback effects to dominate– at least temporarily. In other words, it seems likely that a little bit of warming will lead to more warming.

Bottom line: As far as I can tell there’s a mountain of scientific evidence showing that abrupt climate change A large-scale change in the climate system that takes place over a few decades or less, persists (or is anticipated to persist) for at least a few decades, and causes substantial disruptions in human and natural systems. is a matter of serious concern.

On a completely different note, as an ordinary American I think we should do something about this matter. We’re still the most technologically advanced nation in the world, with one of the largest, best educated workforces in history. Our economy is very capitalistic, which makes us highly adaptable compared to more socialist countries that are mired in bureaucracy. If any country can solve this problem, it’s us.

The legislation currently in the Senate needs to be passed. This bill has already been weakened in the House and it’s only the first step, but it’s the least we can do to convince the world that the United States is ready to lead once again.

I’ve been discussing abrupt climate change A large-scale change in the climate system that takes place over a few decades or less, persists (or is anticipated to persist) for at least a few decades, and causes substantial disruptions in human and natural systems. on the internet for several years, mostly at Slashdot under the pseudonym khayman80. The interesting bits of these conversations have been copied here, but please note that my statements have been edited Each comment is linked back to the original location in the Slashdot archives so you can compare the current version to the original. Those links look like: [Dumb Scientist] or [Jane Q. Public] and expanded since I first wrote them. Here’s an index with links to each conversation:

1. People wonder why “climate change” replaced “global warming.”

2. rrvau asks if scientists predicted an ice age in the 1970s.

3. People inquire about the scale and impact of human CO₂ emissions.

4. An Onerous Coward asks about nuclear and solar power.

5. Stormcrow309 asks about potential flaws in the Vostok ice core analysis.

6. m4cph1sto doubts that temperatures are increasing.

7. Jane Q. Public asks if sunspot activity causes global warming, among many other topics:

   1. The importance of peer review.
   2. “Cosmic rays are responsible for global warming.”
   3. “Water vapor is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO₂.”
   4. The accuracy of the “hockeystick” graph.
   5. What does the IPCC say about hurricanes?
   6. “CO₂ increases after temperature, so it doesn’t warm the planet.”
   7. “CO₂ is already saturated, so adding more CO₂ isn’t going to warm the planet any more.”
   8. “It’s not that simple.”
   9. We agree that the media over-hypes disaster scenarios.
   10. The Salem Hypothesis and the application of a modified version to this debate.
   11. “The troposphere isn’t warming enough, which disproves global warming.”
   12. Jane says her comments have been taken out of context and deliberately portrayed in a negative light. So please compare her statements to the originals at Slashdot, which can be accessed through links that look like [Jane Q. Public]
   13. “The stratosphere isn’t cooling, so greenhouse warming models are fundamentally flawed.” Now including bonus troposphere content.

8. Kyle asks about the political and economic implications of climate change. Also, he asks if temperatures are only appearing to increase due to urban expansion.

9. Jim P.E. asks if the President is receiving sound advice.

10. Bopeth asks about our population growth, and economic issues associated with climate change.

11. Anonymous says that my “comments exhibit the most profound and disturbing kind of scientific elitism,” along with:

    1. “How do you wager on whether climate change is anthropogenic or not?”
    2. I criticize peer review.
    3. “What I want to see next is the contrary case from a well-versed expert who has reached conclusions that conflict with yours.”
    4. Why shouldn’t we look to politicians for scientific answers?
    5. “What, exactly, would you like to see from the general public in terms of reasoning about this subject?”
    6. Marbs asks “What opinion do you currently hold that contradicts the mainstream scientific community?”
    7. Why do high tides happen on opposite sides of the Earth at the same time?
    8. “… we can’t do ‘parallel earth’ experiments to test various parameters … and nobody has a track record of ‘getting it right’ long term because there hasn’t been a long term yet.”
    9. Marbs asks about the graph on Steven Fielding’s website and the “due diligence report.”

12. gkai asks about clouds, the Earth’s albedo and model validations.

People wonder why “climate change” replaced “global warming.”

[Dumb Scientist]

When did “Global Warming” become politically incorrect and “Climate Change” became politically correct? [dwiget001]

When they realized they might be wrong. [girlintraining]

I’ve noticed that shift in wording too. I think it was intended to address some misconceptions the general public has regarding “abrupt climate change A large-scale change in the climate system that takes place over a few decades or less, persists (or is anticipated to persist) for at least a few decades, and causes substantial disruptions in human and natural systems. ” (the officially accepted title).

Most people don’t seem to understand the difference between “local weather” and “global climate.” Local weather is a phenomenon that changes very quickly– sometimes in a matter of minutes. For example, “will it rain tomorrow in Denver?” Local weather is very hard to predict because that requires solving vector-valued numerical models of the motion … and many other properties like pressure, temperature, phase changes, wind speed, humidity, ground water, electric charge, pollution density, tidal forcing, turbulence caused by ground structures, albedo of ground structures, the exact position of the Sun in the sky at each moment, etc. of the atmosphere on a very high-resolution grid. The global climate Hereafter referred to simply as ‘climate.’ ignores these fast variations by averaging the weather over a long period of time (years, at least) and a large area (the entire globe in this case.) Ironically, the climate is actually easier to predict because it just requires Obviously this is a ridiculous oversimplification, but the point is that weather modeling (emphasizing conservation of momentum) brings modern supercomputers to their knees, whereas climate models (emphasizing conservation of energy) aren’t nearly as demanding. Weather models can be described as “initial value” problems which lose “skill” as time goes on, whereas climate models are “boundary value” problems that don’t suffer from the same forecasting limitations. summing energy input and subtracting energy output.

A good analogy is that it’s easy to predict the pressure in a tire based on the amount of air you put in it, but nearly impossible to predict the exact path of all the air molecules bouncing around inside the tire. Predicting the climate is like predicting the tire’s pressure, while predicting tomorrow’s local weather is more like predicting the path of a single air molecule. Our inability to model weather says very little about our ability to model the climate, and local weather will always vary randomly. Scientists want to emphasize the word “climate” to stress that cold temperatures on [random day] in [Random Town] don’t disprove abrupt climate change.

Update: NOAA has a much better analogy: One way to distinguish between weather and climate is that the climate of your hometown will determine how many sweaters you have in your closet. The weather will determine whether you should be wearing a sweater right now.

Also, the term “global warming” is oversimplified. A more accurate description is that our addition of greenhouse gases has reduced the rate at which thermal energy leaves the planet. As a result, the average energy in the atmosphere and ocean is increasing, which allows this system to “explore more of its phase space.” More energy means more chances of extreme weather– even weather that involves colder temperatures! (Again, note that weather is local and temporary.)

The word “abrupt” was added to emphasize that what we’re experiencing is too fast to be a natural process. The ice core from Vostok shows that CO₂ hasn’t risen above 300 ppm parts per million in the last half million years. It has varied in the past, but usually Heinrich and Dansgaard-Oeschger events (among other examples of natural abrupt climate change) show that the natural climate is only fairly stable in the long run. These events show that the climate can quickly move from one stable “attractor” to another. I should stress, however, that results like Meehl 2004 show that today’s changes aren’t natural. over a timespan measured in millennia. Atmospheric CO₂ is at 380 ppm parts per million now, and this dramatic rise occurred in the span of several decades. As a result, temperatures are rising faster each decade. Changes this rapid haven’t occurred in the hundreds of thousands of years over which we have records. Keep in mind that scientists are primarily concerned about the unprecedented rate of the current changes in our climate.

rrvau asks if scientists predicted an ice age in the 1970s.

[Dumb Scientist]

Paraphrased: “Didn’t scientists predict an ice age in the 1970s?” [rrvau]

In a word: no. That myth can be traced back to sensationalist articles in media like Newsweek. Genuinely peer-reviewed scientific articles were far more responsible, which is one reason why I highly recommend learning science from them rather than the general media.

… I still think that it is the ultimate arrogance that humans think they can alter the planets evolution. Think of continental drift and the accompanying earthquakes, volcanic activity etc. and you’ll understand how insignificant humans are. [rrvau]

Continental drift and earthquakes are completely irrelevant to the climate on the kind of timescale we care about. As for volcanic activity, eruptions only put about a hundredth of the CO₂ into the atmosphere that humans do. Massive eruptions in the geologically distant past (such as the Siberian traps which are a suspected cause of the Permian extinction) have likely put more CO₂ into the atmosphere, but none of the eruptions in the last 500,000 years pushed the CO₂ level above 300 ppm parts per million .

People inquire about the scale and impact of human CO₂ emissions.

[Dumb Scientist]

Global warming is a consequence of climate change. Global cooling is a consequence of climate change. [smoker2]

I think the term global dimming more accurately describes a separate problem that is sometimes referred to as global cooling. Aerosols decrease the size of cloud droplets, thus increasing the albedo of the clouds. This reflects more sunlight back into space. Its effects have been seen in long term trends of sunlight brightness, and in long term evaporation rate measurements. Surprisingly, evaporation depends on the rate at which photons hit the water’s surface more than Roderick, et. al. 2007– that’s the link in this sentence– also shows that wind speed is a strong factor. typical changes in temperature or humidity, so it serves as an independent check of the phenomenon.

Update: Consider this table of radiative forcings. Forcings that warm the planet are colored red, while forcings that cool the planet are blue. Each forcing has an error bar associated with it, and a “Level of Scientific Understanding” (LOSU) on the right hand side.

Global dimming isn’t a threat anymore because regulations were effective at curbing emissions of these aerosols. Plus, aerosols don’t stay in the atmosphere for very long, so once we stopped spewing them into the atmosphere the problem went away. CO₂, however, stays in the atmosphere for ~100 years, so our children and grandchildren will have to deal with it. Unfortunately, aerosols used to counter the effects of greenhouse gases like CO₂. (No, we can’t just start emitting aerosols again and hope they cancel each other out!)

… I am not a denier, but I am not about to be told we must halt climate change. This is a phenomenon that is as old as the earth, and to think we can just stop it when we want to is ludicrous. If you want to limit our impact on that change, fair enough. But don’t tell me it has to stop, because you make yourselves look like idiots. The climate has changed in cycles … if you take those same records which are used to promote the current scare tactics, you would see that after it (CO₂) goes up, it goes down – way way down. It is cyclic. So even if we completely stop producing CO₂ now, the cycle will continue. … So go ahead and do your worst. The only way to stop climate change is to kill the planet.

I think we’re talking about different things. You’re talking about natural variability, and I’m talking about human-caused climate change. Scientists are aware that both phenomena exist, and we can see that our CO₂ emissions have recently pushed the climate beyond the range of natural variations.

[Dumb Scientist]

The fact is, automobiles account for (at most) 2 percent of CO₂ emissions. … We need to convert our major power generation systems to something more reasonable like wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and (yes) NUCLEAR. [Someone]

Huh? All the data I’ve seen places the “transportation sector” near the top of the list. Here’s a quote: “The transportation sector is the second largest source of CO₂ emissions in the U.S. Almost all of the energy consumed in the transportation sector is petroleum based, including gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. Automobiles and light-duty trucks account for almost two-thirds of emissions from the transportation sector and emissions have steadily grown since 1990.”

That said, I do agree that nuclear power is our best course of action.

An Onerous Coward asks about nuclear and solar power.

[An Onerous Coward]
While I’d replace all coal with nuclear in a heartbeat given the chance, I don’t think nuclear power is viable. To me, it seems too expensive, too politically infeasible, too centralized, and too prone to terrorism. Concentrating solar looks very viable at the moment, and I think geothermal could become a major player before 2020 with the right incentives.

But I think energy efficiency is the untapped gold mine. I’ve seen quotes for nuclear running about $6000-$11000 per installed kW of capacity. By my rough calculations, for $3500 you could buy enough CFL bulbs up front* to eliminate the need for that kW of capacity for 30 years.** Even better, CFLs eliminate that demand precisely when the energy is needed. Any generation-based solution has to predict demand and compensate.

* If you assume that the cost of bulbs will go down over time, or that you could invest the money for the bulbs you don’t need immediately, or that another high-efficiency lighting technology will beat CFLs in the future, the strategy works even better.

** $3/bulb, bulbs last an average of 5 years, running for 3 hours a day on average, 17w CFL vs. 60w incandescent.

[Dumb Scientist]
Nuclear power is expensive, but it’s the only option available right now that we know works on an industrial scale. Update: My dad just told me about an interesting proposal for small, self-contained, tamper-proof nuclear generators which wouldn’t be as centralized or expensive as our sadly obsolete nuclear plants.

Concentrated solar is certainly the most promising renewable, but it requires massive battery banks, or expensive water pumping schemes to provide a base load at night. That said, I like it a lot more than photovoltaics. Geothermal only works in certain places, and corrosion makes them very expensive to maintain. In either case, we’d need a superconducting power grid to avoid losses from moving energy from the deserts (solar) or hotspots (geothermal). All these goals are noble, but we need power now to replace coal and oil.

Incidentally, tide power and osmotic power are also good long term goals.

And you’re right- efficiency is absolutely necessary. But the newer technology has to be better in every way, otherwise people won’t switch. My mom doesn’t use CFLs because she can’t stand the quality of the light (yes, some are better than others, but still no cigar) and the fact that they don’t reach full brightness immediately. I have them nearly everywhere, but my reading light is still an incandescent because the CFLs that can be dimmed are expensive and don’t look as nice.

[Dumb Scientist]

My understanding of CSP was that, to increase its baseload ability, you just made it bigger (especially the molten salt tank). I don’t remember the source, but I remember someone was quoted as saying that you can store energy as heat 20x cheaper than you could store it in a battery. As the reservoir gets bigger, it loses heat more slowly. Build it big enough, and you can keep it warm all night, even as you’re drawing power from it. [An Onerous Coward]

Yeah, you might be right about that. I think I remember seeing similar studies, and probably spoke too soon. I’ve yet to be convinced that this is a sure bet, but I’m delighted that Obama is putting more research money into these areas.

You also have the option of burning something to keep the fluid warm, for cloudy days or to provide more baseload.

The only thing we can afford to burn in the long run is hydrogen, which requires energy to produce.

Update: No, actually that’s wrong. You were right about concentrated solar allowing for a burner backup. Biofuels won’t cause any net CO₂ increase because their combustion only releases the CO₂ they’ve recently absorbed to grow. I’m not a big fan of generation 1 biofuels, because they tend to provide an incentive for farmers to grow crops that humans can’t eat. But generation 2 biofuels use the discarded husks of human-edible plants and might be industrially feasible some day. Genetically engineered bacteria also look like they could produce biofuels given enough time. Also, artificial leaves look promising; they might eventually split water into hydrogen and oxygen far more cleanly than any method available now.

I’m not sure there’d be a point to building that kind of backup into the concentrated solar plant, though. The ability to use the molten salt loop with an oil burner might not be worth the added design complexity, materials and labor. Wouldn’t that be exactly like Well, except for the fact that the soot from this burning would likely fall onto the mirrors. building an ordinary oil-powered backup generator, which we already have in abundance? One potential benefit is that we could decommission the old generators and recycle their parts, but that’s probably more trouble than it’s worth right now.

Transmission losses, while not negligible, seem manageable. I’ve seen figures of about 2-3% to move electricity 600mi using HVDC. I mean, it’s on Wikipedia, so it must be right.

Yes, HVDC looks promising, but some population centers are farther away than that from a good spot for solar or geothermic (not all northern countries are as fortunate as Iceland). In the long run this isn’t a serious problem because we’ll eventually build a superconducting grid, but until then it’s a nuisance.

The big problem I see with the “we need power now” argument is that we could probably install several gigawatts of CSP and wind before we could even get the nuclear reactor through the permitting process.

If it works, that’s great. The problem is that no country has ever successfully powered their civilization in that manner, so it’s a bit of a gamble. France gets 80% of their power from nuclear, so we know it works. I’m also inclined to say that the delay in getting new nuclear plants online is more of a problem with lenders being extremely cautious about nuclear energy because of public disapproval, so the permitting process is much more ridiculous than it should be. Nuclear power isn’t nearly as dangerous as it’s commonly made out to be, and we need enrichment for medical isotopes anyway so terrorism will always be a problem.

I think concentrated solar is great, and might be our best bet in the long run. I just don’t want these unproven technologies to be our only bet. It’d be nice to see our civilization put no more than, say, 30% of our power generation into one particular technology so that the loss of any one mode of power generation isn’t catastrophic.

Update: I’m going to write a separate article about nuclear power whenever school gets less crazy, but for now I’ll quote another couple of paragraphs from the same recent survey:

… About half (51%) of Americans favor building more nuclear power plants to generate electricity, while 42% oppose this. … More college graduates (59%) favor building nuclear power plants than do those with a high school education or less (46%). … Seven-in-ten scientists favor building more nuclear power plants to generate electricity, while 27% are opposed. Among scientists, majorities in every specialty favor building more nuclear power plants, but support is particularly widespread among physicists and astronomers (88% favor). … — Pew Research Center

In other words, statistically speaking, the more someone knows about physics, the more they favor nuclear power. I’m just sayin…

Stormcrow309 asks about potential flaws in the Vostok ice core analysis.

[Dumb Scientist]

… What are the problems with the Vostok data? … [Stormcrow309]

Diffusion of isotopes over time leads to large horizontal error bars (i.e. it’s uncertain when particular temperature/CO₂ measurements occurred, especially relative to each other). Accumulation rate uncertainty makes these horizontal uncertainties larger at deeper depths (older ages). But vertical uncertainty is smaller (i.e. the absolute maximum of CO₂ is less uncertain). Furthermore, the correlation of those values to the global paleoclimate is still a matter of debate, but ice cores from other locations and other independent proxies yield similar reconstructions.

[Stormcrow309]
… Petit et al. (1999) takes no effort to describe the methodologies used in handling ice cores, which raises questions on the process used. The line “Ice cores give access to palaeoclimate series that includes local temperature and precipitation rate, moisture source conditions, wind strength and aerosol fluxes of marine, volcanic, terrestrial, cosmogenic and anthropogenic origin” is not attributed, which leads it reading as opinion or possible plagerism (Petit et al., 1999, p. 429). Since it is the bases of the work’s analysis, it would make sense to give that sentence more concrete foothold in established theory. There is no discussion on this approach’s appropriateness or flaws. There is a good discussion on the research team’s reason for limiting the data set but not the impact of that limitation. There is no review of further research questions. It reads as a set of scientists too worried about analysis and not with synthesis. The work is biased to its approach and thusly flawed in its presentation.

[Dumb Scientist]

… Petit et al. (1999) takes no effort to describe the methodologies used in handling ice cores, which raises questions on the process used. [Stormcrow309]

That’s because they didn’t handle the ice core at all. They simply applied a newer computational algorithm to the data collected from the ice core by other scientists years before they published. In fact, the second to last sentence in the paper says “We thank C. Genthon and J. Jouzel for performing the CO₂ spectral analysis…” Their papers are, of course, listed at the end with all the other references.

Just in case you don’t have free access to Nature articles, I’ve found a source (see section II) that provides a rough overview of the way the ice core was handled. It was sliced into 1.5m sections, put into a clean stainless steel tube in Grenoble, France and melted so that various types of spectroscopic and chemical analysis could be performed. Update: Eric Steig points out that handling methods were studied decades ago, so they’re careful to keep the temperature of the ice cores below -10°C.

But it needs to be stressed that a deep understanding of this process is only available from the original peer-reviewed articles. I only linked that website for the benefit of people who don’t have free access to journals through their universities.

The line “Ice cores give access to palaeoclimate series that includes local temperature and precipitation rate, moisture source conditions, wind strength and aerosol fluxes of marine, volcanic, terrestrial, cosmogenic and anthropogenic origin” is not attributed, which leads it reading as opinion or possible plagerism (Petit et al., 1999, p. 429). Since it is the bases of the work’s analysis, it would make sense to give that sentence more concrete foothold in established theory.

It might be a good idea to read at least the next few sentences before making accusations of plagiarism. When you do, notice that the sentence you quoted is the “topic sentence” of the paragraph. Other sentences in that paragraph serve to expand on individual points in the topic sentence, and they’re all referenced. In fact, there are no less than 14 references you can read (they’re all listed at the end of the article) to catch up on the science contained in that sentence.

There is no discussion on this approach’s appropriateness or flaws.

Really? How about…

1. Page 431, paragraph 2, sentence 4. “This approach underestimated deltaTs by a factor of ~2 in Greenland (ref 22) and, possibly, by up to 50% in Antarctica (ref 23).”
2. Page 431, paragraph 3. The entire paragraph is devoted to understanding shortcomings in the deuterium-temperature connection.
3. Page 431, paragraph 4, sentence 3. “… the Vostok record may differ from coastal (ref 28) sites in E. Antarctica and perhaps from West Antarctica as well.”
4. Page 434, paragraph 6, sentence 4: “However, considering the large gas-age/ice-age uncertainty (1000 years, or even more if we consider the accumulation-rate uncertainty), we feel that it is premature to infer the sign of the phase relationship between CO₂ and temperature at the start of the terminations.”

There is a good discussion on the research team’s reason for limiting the data set but not the impact of that limitation.

Limiting the data set in what sense? If you’re referring to the fact that they stopped drilling to avoid contaminating Lake Vostok, the impact of that limitation is that the time series stops roughly 500,000 years ago rather than extending slightly farther back in time. If you’re talking about some other data set limitation, you’ll need to be a little more specific so I know precisely what you mean.

There is no review of further research questions.

Really? how about…

1. Page 433, paragraph 4, sentence 3: “We suggest that there also may be some link between the Vostok dust record and deep ocean circulation through the extension of sea ice in the South Atlantic Ocean, itself thought to be coeval with a reduced deep ocean circulation34.”
2. Page 435, paragraph 1, sentence 1: “We speculate that the same is true for terminations II, III and IV.”
3. Page 435, paragraph 1, sentence 6: “We speculate that variability in phasing from one termination to the next reflects differences in insolation curves (ref 41) or patterns of abyssal circulation during glacial maximum.”

[Dumb Scientist]

Are you talking about: J R Petit, J Jouzel, D Raynaud, N I Barkov, et al. (1999). Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica. Nature, 399(6735), 429-436. Retrieved April 7, 2009, from ProQuest Medical Library database. (Document ID: 42351682)? Because the phrase is not in there. The paper reads like the researchers were involved in the drilling. [Stormcrow309]

Yeah, that’s the paper I originally linked, but you’re right– the phrase isn’t there. I was at work (with access to the journals) when I wrote that, and had 4-5 of the older Vostok papers open at once. That particular phrase is probably in one of those papers, but I don’t have journal access at home (and my cache is empty) so I can’t verify that right now. The phrase you’re looking for in the paper I did link is below the references, in the Acknowledgements section: “We thank the drillers from the St. Petersburg Mining Institute; the Russian, French and US participants for field work and ice sampling…”

Sorry about the confusion; I was juggling too many papers to keep them all straight on my desktop. But you can also verify that J. Jouzel is referenced many times, with reference 6 being published in 1987 (several years after the section from 950-2083m was extracted in 1982-83), and 12,13 published in 1993 and 1996. C. Genthon is reference 14, published in 1987.

I must humbly disagree that the paper “read like the researchers were involved in the drilling.” They’ve certainly tried to describe the drilling process in a brief manner for the benefit of the reader, but acknowledged the hard work of their fellow scientists, thanked them for their contributions, and provided citations to their original work in extracting and sampling the ice core. It all seems perfectly civilized.

They limited the ice core due to volcanic activity without discussing the impact. None of my editors would allow me to get away with that.

That limitation has exactly the same impact as stopping the drilling above Lake Vostok. It merely truncates the time series, preventing the reconstruction of data earlier than 423,000 years ago. You’re probably thinking about studies which fail to sample the population in a uniform or unbiased manner, and thus alter the resulting statistics because they’re using a skewed sample. This is a serious problem in many sociological studies, but it’s not a relevant concern here. An ice core taken from a shallower hole (like the 3310m core in the paper) has precisely one impact: it provides data back to 423,000 years before the present instead of even further back in time.

Update: The Vostok ice core data have now been confirmed by the EPICA ice core data. Not only does it agree with the Vostok data, EPICA extends the time series back to 650,000 years before the present.

In addition, the flaws I listed have been addressed, and the historical maximum was defended– this is the reference he mentions. Also, here’s a good list of Vostok references and the actual data.

m4cph1sto doubts that temperatures are increasing.

[Dumb Scientist]

I’m a scientist too, and I judge theories based on merit, not popular opinion. [m4cph1sto]

(Ed. note: In a much later post, he elaborates on a similar claim by explaining that he’s an engineer. See the Salem Hypothesis, or my discussion of its application to this debate.)

As a rule, scientific theories are not accepted by the scientific community until they have done two things: (1) explained known observations in a more simple or fundamental way than alternative theories, and (2) made a prediction about something that is currently unknown and that other theories don’t predict, which is then confirmed by observation.

Global Warming theory has met neither of those requirements. The main statement of Global Warming is something like this: “small changes in the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere cause large changes in global temperature”. Despite this theory, there is absolutely no evidence that a change in CO₂ has ever caused the temperature to change, over the entire billions-years history of the planet. So GW theory doesn’t explain past observations.

Abrupt climate change A large-scale change in the climate system that takes place over a few decades or less, persists (or is anticipated to persist) for at least a few decades, and causes substantial disruptions in human and natural systems. is the direct result of an unprecedented excavation of fossil fuels, and the combustion of said fuels which releases CO₂ into the atmosphere that’s been trapped for millions of years. It’s not supposed to explain past observations.

It doesn’t explain current observations either: CO₂ concentration has steadily increased over the past 100 years, while temperatures have gone up, then down, then up again, then down again (as they are currently). There is no dramatic warming trend as predicted by GW theory.

I’ve never met a scientist who made a claim like the one you’re attributing to me. Most scientists recognize that long term trends are only discernable in the data after accounting for annual variations, multi-year variations, etc. Once those fluctuations are removed by a 5 year averaging procedure, a disturbing upward trend is apparent.

Finally, GW has not made any unique predictions that have later been confirmed as true. It predicted more and bigger hurricanes; that hasn’t happened. It predicted significant temperature increases; that hasn’t happened. In fact, the theory seems totally based on computer models that have failed to make a single correct prediction about the climate ever since I first started following the issue, in 1998.

To summarize, GW theory does not meet the standards of scientific acceptance, not by a long shot.

First, the temperature is increasing. Second, the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report made a very limited claim regarding hurricanes: “It is more likely than not (>50%) that there has been some human contribution to the increases in hurricane intensity.”

Third, Meehl 2004 showed convincing proof that natural forcing can’t account for recent global temperature trends, but including anthropogenic forcing provides a good match for the data.

[Dumb Scientist]

Look at the data again. There is most assuredly a dramatic warming trend, despite the slight decrease in global mean temperature over the past few years. Run a regression on the data, it’s quite clear. [Red Flayer]

You mean this data? … Or this one? [m4cph1sto]

Interestingly, I posted another reply to your parent comment that also included those links. Except, I linked to the main page. I was referring to the figures above the one you directly linked to. Figures A2 and A show the Global Annual Mean Surface Air Temperature Change, measured using two different data sets. Uncertainty is indicated by the green bars. Notice the trend in both figures.

Instead, look at the temperature trends I linked to above, based only on direct measurements made in the United States since 1880, or “mean global temperature” using modern measurement techniques (since 1996). These datasets are, IMO, the only ones we can believe with any confidence. Is there a dramatic warming trend? The answer is as likely no as yes, or a resounding “we don’t know”.

The graph you’re talking about from 1880 onwards is from this paper, where they specifically state that the warming in the U.S. is known to be smaller than the rest of the world. The reasons for this are not (to my knowledge) completely understood. But the rest of the world have had temperature sensors too, we’ve had satellites up for decades, and we can use proxies to confirm that global temperatures are increasing at an unprecedented rate. Update: More recent studies confirm that the U.S. temperature increase matches those in the rest of the world.

In my opinion, any evidence based on “global temperature” that includes data from more than just recent years should be viewed with scepticism, because our worldwide measurement and calculation techniques have changed dramatically, which likely skews the results in one direction or another. NASA presents data on mean global temperature extending from today back to 1880 as a single line graph with no error bars, which is ridiculous.

Figure A is based on this article, which describes adjusting for inhomogeneities in station records and station history adjustments. Sensibly integrating differing data sets is an irritating task, and it’s an ongoing process. But it doesn’t seem to be a problem climate scientists are ignoring– the techniques for dealing with non-uniform noise characteristics and biases in different data sets are well known.

Furthermore, we don’t just have to rely on mechanical recording devices. Tree rings, coral growth rates, borehole measurements and ice core proxies can be used to independently verify the temperature record. They agree to within the limits of experimental and algorithmic uncertainty.

My point is that arriving at a “mean global temperature” is a very difficult calculation to make.

I wholeheartedly agree. I think scientists should be careful to state the estimated uncertainty in all their statements, and abrupt climate change is no exception. It’s just that the error bars are now small enough to rule out the hypotheses “climate change isn’t happening” and “climate change is largely natural.”

Update: After further thought, I think m4cph1sto was referring to a recent argument circulating around “skeptic” sites claiming that the average temperature has been decreasing since 1998. I’ll let Rei handle this one:

FYI: 1998 was one of the strongest El Nino events in modern history. El Nino raises the atmosphere’s temperature by slowing the upwelling of deep, cold water in the eastern pacific. La Nina cools it by just the opposite. It doesn’t change the long-term picture, of course; the rate at which water cycles in the ocean has no bearing on how much total heat input there is into the system; ocean waters aren’t magically decoupled from the rest of our atmosphere. It’s just a source of white noise on top of the blatantly obvious signal. [Rei]

Another Update: This subject came up again here.

Jane Q. Public asks if sunspot activity causes global warming, among many other topics.

[Jane Q. Public]
…one theory is that lack of sunspots causes Earth to warm up. (There is a very strong negative correlation between sunspot activity and temperature on Earth.)

Maybe now we’ll find out who’s right.

[DarkHelmet]

No it doesn’t [youtube.com].

[Jane Q. Public]
I was wrong about the correlation being negative, but I was not wrong about the correlation. But one thing pointed out in your video, that solar activity has not corresponded to temperature in just the last few years, is totally meaningless. Long-term trends are the only ones that matter. And as for long-term predictions, nothing comes close to beating the analysis of sunspots. The science is good. Very good.

I’ll see your YouTube video, and raise you one:
video [youtube.com]
video [youtube.com]

And a whole bunch of articles:
article [typepad.com]
article [wordpress.com]
article [bbc.co.uk]
article [examiner.com]
article [mlive.com]
article [wordpress.com]

[Repossessed]
Do you have any citable sources? Those are blog postings and new sites (which is even worse than a blog).

[Jane Q. Public]
Sources were referenced in both the videos and the articles. I would think that a few minutes with Google should lead you to them.

[Repossessed]
Wikipedia is not a citable source, nor does it have the details necessary for me to do a peer review.

None of your links have any actual data to them, they do not have citations which include the data. They do not include the equations used to come to the conclusions either. Without those, there is no way to determine if the theory has merit.

[Jane Q. Public]
I see. So a presentation by a University professor about his research project is not self-citing?

Are you completely inept at Google? You can’t find his name or the research he was demonstrating?

Look, bud. This is not a peer-reviewed journal itself. If you can’t find the data from the information given (I did), then just blow it off and say you don’t believe it. I don’t care one way or another. But I am not going to spend a half hour looking it up again just for you.

[Repossessed]
I have no interest in believing thing or not believing them, I have an interest in knowing if they are true.

[Jane Q. Public]
Look, guy. I literally just spent 10 seconds on Google and found plenty of information about David Archibald, including a new paper he published just this month.

Do you own damned homework, and stop demanding to be spoon-fed by others. I won’t respond to you again.

[Repossessed]
And yet you are incapable of providing me with that information.

[Jane Q. Public]
NO, just unwilling, you lazy ass. When I was young (NOT that damned long ago), finding information like this meant spending a day at the library finding out what books contained the information, then arranging for inter-library loans, and waiting a week to a month or even longer for the books to even get there.

I am not Al Gore, to pretend that I “invented the internet”. But I have spent a good part of my life helping to build the infrastructure that brings this information to your fingertips. And if you are too goddamned lazy to lift those fingertips to even bother to look something the fuck up, when you so easily can, then I am NOT going to help you!

Is there anything unclear about that???

[Dumb Scientist]
You’re suggesting that other people should embark on a wild goose chase to try to find respectable references behind the pseudoscientific sites that you clearly believe are more rigorous than Nature and Science? Curiously, you haven’t even responded to the reasonable and insightful comments by Geoffrey Landis in this very page. I guess it really is true that “You can’t reason someone out of a position that she didn’t reason herself into in the first place.”

Incidentally, I know this won’t sway you, but I study the climate in my day job and all your posts prove is that you’ve never taken graduate-level classes in this area. Every serious climatologist that I’ve met at the conferences agrees with the mountain of evidence showing that sunspots aren’t strongly correlated with climate. Again, see Geoffrey’s posts.

(Ed note: At this point, Jane responds to Geoffrey with a truly epic post that I later responded to.)

[Jane Q. Public]
No, I was suggesting that ONE particular person was being a lazy ass, and trying to put demands on me as a result. As I have mentioned, one of his questions could have easily been answered had he bothered to spend literally 10 seconds on Google.

Further, I had in fact answered one of Geoffrey’s posts, and I have just answered another one, at length, with a reply that indirectly references about 150 or more peer-reviewed scientific papers. That will have to be good enough, because I am tired of catering to lazy asses who believe what they are told on the 11 o’clock news, and who can’t be bothered to do any real research or even lookups on their own.

[Dumb Scientist]
Or maybe scientists aren’t the brainwashed idiots you clearly think we are? We’re aware that the Sun exists, and that it impacts the climate. But the overwhelming evidence is that sunspots have a negligible impact on the climate.

People are asking you for serious, peer-reviewed references not because scientists are idiots who “believe what they are told on the 11 o’clock news, and who can’t be bothered to do any real research or even lookups on their own” but because we’ve spent our lives studying these issues and what you’re saying contradicts all the evidence we’ve seen.

Further, I had in fact answered one of Geoffrey’s posts, and I have just answered another one, at length, with a reply that indirectly references about 150 or more peer-reviewed scientific papers. [Jane Q. Public]

Here’s proof that the Moon doesn’t cause the tides, that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, and that the Earth doesn’t move. The website has more than 150 peer-reviewed references, I’m sure!

Not convinced? Why not? Do you see any difference between the post you wrote in response to Geoffrey Landis and the fixedearth.com website? Because I don’t. That’s why we’re asking you to provide us with a direct link to an actual peer-reviewed article supporting your claim that sunspots are responsible for global warming. It’s all too common for pseudoscientists to quote legitimate articles to support their outlandish claims, and then ignore the scientists’ complaints.

[Dumb Scientist]

Apparently you think *I* am an idiot. Try reading the goddamned thread. … If you really don’t want to be perceived as a “brainwashed idiot”, maybe you could bother to figure out what the argument is about before you put in your irrelevant 2 cents. … As for the rest, you are one of those lazy asses I mentioned. … But you are too damned lazy to look any of them up? … And yes, that to me means “brainwashed idiot”. … get off your lazy ass and LOOK IT UP YOURSELF!!! … since you insist on being spoon-fed … There are many more, very easily found, but I am not going to do your homework for you. Now go away. You disgust me. [Jane Q. Public]

There’s really no need to be so uncivilized. I’m just saying that all your posts on this subject clearly imply that scientists are either so stupid that they overlook trivially obvious “problems” with their own research, or that they’re willing members in a global conspiracy. Based on your (mistaken) assumption that I haven’t read this thread, I don’t have to guess which of these alternatives you’ve chosen in my case. Pity. I bet conspirators get jetpacks!

And I most certainly do not think you’re an idiot. At worst, I think you’re making mistakes while talking about a highly advanced subject that lies far outside of your own professional experience. Everyone does that. It’d be a different story if I were saying that you were pathetically wrong about your own life’s work… the subject that you’ve studied since childhood with the passionate intensity of a monk. I’d never insult you like that; at most I’d simply ask polite questions to try to understand your subject of expertise better.

First, the Petition Project is a legitimate collection of scientists.

I asked for peer-reviewed references, not a list of people with PhDs. There’s a difference. A list of PhDs is an appeal to authority. A peer-reviewed article is evidence of a very specific claim, along with equations and links to data that I could use to verify the claim. It’s given weight by the confrontational nature of the review process in addition to the fact that everyone involved has a PhD in that specific field. Like other people who take your position, you appear to think that science is democratic– that scientific decisions are made by comparing the number of people on each side. It’s not. It’s about evidence.

So, since you insist on being spoon-fed, here is one: Solar Cycles and Predicted Climate Response, which appeared in Energy & Environment (an appropriately peer-reviwed journal) in 2006. You asked for one, you got it.

My apologies. I wasn’t nearly specific enough in my original request. Scientific journals are rather specialized, and we’re discussing a very specialized hard science topic. It wouldn’t be appropriate to reference an article from a social science journal (which is what Energy & Environment is). The reason is that the referees need to be experts in their field in order to properly vet the paper. Journals I’d suggest reading are Science, Nature, Journal of Geophysical Research, Geophysical Research Letters, Physical Review, Physical Review Letters, Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, Journal of Climate, Environmental Research Letters, Climatic Change, Eos, etc.

I’m sorry for not making that caveat more explicit, but I figured it was an assumption that all scientists would make…

But I’ll make it up to you. Here’s an article by Friis-Christensen and K. Lassen, published in Science in 1991. This would have been a legitimate example of a peer-reviewed journal article supporting your claim.

Of course, it’s incorrect. You can find out how– if you’re interested– by following its citations in google scholar to the present. For nonscientists, read the summary here. The moral of this story is that data smoothing is difficult to do in an objective manner, which is something all computational scientists screw up on occasion. Please don’t mistake this comment as criticism of Friis-Christensen or K. Lassen– I’ve certainly made far bigger mistakes in my own research. The ability to admit a mistake and move on is the mark of a true scientist.

[Dumb Scientist]

Like other people who take your position, you appear to think that science is democratic… [Dumb Scientist]

THAT is complete bullshit. That is the exactly the point that I made in a preceding post… and you claim to have read this thread??? Go back and read it again. You are in error. [Jane Q. Public]

When asked for a peer-reviewed article, you presented a list of scientists. It doesn’t really matter what you’ve written in any other post– this kind of category error gives the appearance that you think science is democratic because that’s the only scenario in which this wouldn’t be a category error.

… Note that peer review is a necessary but not sufficient condition for establishing a valid scientific claim. Not all peer-reviewed papers are accurate, as I’ve shown. But if you want respect from scientists, you have to first rise above this reliance on pseudo-scientific websites that display approximately the same level of rigor and oversight as this site.

And perhaps that particular article WAS wrong. But I have cited — and pointed you to — much more recent research that contradicts that. [Jane Q. Public]

More recent != This is C++ for “is not equal to.” more credible. If they were both articles in Science, yes, all other things being equal, the more recent article would have more weight (unless it was so new that other scientists hadn’t yet had time to respond to it.) In fact, that article you’re leaning on quotes Friis-Christensen and K. Lassen (1991) several times, without seeming to understand that the reason their conclusions aren’t valid has little to do with the data they used; the real problem is the way they smoothed the data. My other post quotes legitimate, peer-reviewed articles showing this warming is due mainly to anthropogenic CO₂.

Journals I’d suggest reading are Science, Nature, Journal of Geophysical Research, Geophysical Research Letters, Physical Review… [Dumb Scientist]

Aha. Exactly those journals that have been experiencing famous failures of the peer-review system in recent years? Of course. Sir, that was only one paper out of a great many. I repeat: why do you want me to do your homework for you? You refuse to look these things up for yourself… [Jane Q. Public]

… I can’t help but point out that you’ve casually dismissed every top-tier hard-science journal, in favor of a social science journal. With all due respect, Science, Nature and all the other journals I mentioned are where science actually happens. The claim that sunspot cycle length correlates well with Earth’s average temperature was made in the mainstream journals in 1991. But it was quickly shown to be a spurious connection based on data smoothing parameters. The fact that Energy & Environment didn’t catch this when the argument was made again 15 years later just shows that they’re not experts in the field. As I’ve said, there’s no shame in that. I’m not an expert in all subjects in the universe, so I don’t fault their lack of highly specialized knowledge in this particular subject any more than my lack of knowledge about synchronized swimming is a black mark on my career as a climate scientist. I’m sure their journal is excellent at analyzing the social science issues associated with energy use, and those issues are important too.

[Jane Q. Public]
As I stated before, I only found that paper after you asked me to find one, and I was not particularly careful in choosing it; you had asked for a peer-reviewed paper, and I just grabbed the first one that was visible. And indeed, some of its claims do appear to be refuted, particularly in a paper by P. Damon, published in Eos in 2004. However, though you apparently knew this (as, I could guess, did Mr. Landis), neither of you bothered to cite any kind of actual data in an attempt to refute the one paper I provided, per your request.

After you mentioned the data smoothing issue, it took me about 2 minutes to find Damon’s paper. If I had been aware of it in advance, I would of course not have offered that paper. But if you really wanted to make a point — and practice what you preach — you should have cited your sources. Instead, you left me to look it up… which makes you are guilty of exactly the same faux pas of which you accuse me. In point of fact, Damon’s paper itself states, “The graphs [from Friis-Christensen and Lassen] are still widely referred to in the literature,and their misleading character has not yet been generally recognized.” Without citing sources, then, how did you expect me to know? …

[Dumb Scientist]
Thanks for the link. You’re right, it is a good paper. I’m sorry that I missed it.

(Ed note: This post was written in response to Jane’s huge post which she wrote in response to Geoffrey Landis.)

[Dumb Scientist]
Mon Dieu! Quantity != This is C++ for “is not equal to.” quality. You’d get a lot more respect if you’d simply link to one or two legitimate, peer-reviewed articles instead of dozens of pseudoscientific websites. I don’t have time to relieve you of all your misconceptions, but here are the most glaring errors:

If you had done your homework (or even watched the YouTube videos I posted above), … On the contrary, if you had watched those YouTube videos I linked to… [Jane Q. Public]

We’re scientists, not preteens looking for cat videos. Link to peer-reviewed articles or expect to be ignored.

Anthropogenic CO₂ is the cause of a small, but measurable, increase in average global temperature. This temperature increase is a detectable deviation away from the statistical variations due to natural causes, and is now quite well understood. [Geoffrey Landis]

That is the most ridiculous thing I have heard to date. It is NOT known, precisely because it has been impossible to statistically separate it from other influencing factors. (Including sunspots!) While many scientists believe that it probably has some effect, nobody has yet managed to measure it with any real statistical significance. Where did you get this idea, anyway? Do you have any sources that purport to have this measurement? The fact is that such a beast does not exist! [Jane Q. Public]

Geoffrey’s statement is most certainly not ridiculous. I suggest looking at the IPCC 4th report. Download chapter 3, open the PDF to page 15 (which is labeled 249) and look at figure 3.6. These data show a global temperature increase of 0.65 °C plus or minus 0.2 °C over the period from 1901 to 2005. The report notes that this rate is higher than at any other point since the 11th century. Meehl 2004 shows that this warming can’t be explained by natural forcings alone, but including anthropogenic CO₂ emissions matches the observations very well. And, yes, those “natural forcings” include variations in solar output, which can be measured by satellites so there’s no need to search for weak correlations in sunspot data.

Furthermore, as I’ve repeatedly argued, Vostok shows that the current CO₂ level is higher than it’s been in half a million years. If you don’t think that CO₂ can warm the planet, I suggest you remember your sophomore-level physics classes and examine the spectrum of the Sun. Then open a textbook and examine the absorption spectrum of CO₂. Notice that the peak of the Sun’s radiation goes through? Now open your thermodynamics textbook and calculate the blackbody radiation of a planet at 286K. Notice that the CO₂ absorbs more of this radiation.

That’s why scientists say that CO₂ is warming the planet. It’s not exactly cutting-edge science.

Most of the science that is used to support the greenhouse warming model come from the IPCC Assessment reports, and much of that “science” has been shown to be flawed, not to mention that the reports themselves are heavily politicized, and their conclusions do not match the actual science that they reference. [Jane Q. Public]

That’s exactly backwards. The IPCC reports are simply compilations of pre-existing, peer-reviewed science. I’ve read their reports and talked with scientists whose work is referenced in the IPCC reports. No scientist I’ve met (in public or private) thinks your conspiracy theory is valid. In fact, I’ve personally confirmed the mass loss in Greenland’s glaciers with my own research. I’ve seen climate change happening with my own data and my own personal algorithms. Does that mean I’m part of the conspiracy too?

Below I link to a letter from Chris Landsea, who is the one who actually did the research on whether hurricanes and typhoons would increase in number or severity due to global warming. His conclusion was that they would not. BUT… the IPCC didn’t let that stop them.

Yes, science is sometimes contentious (which seems to contradict your opinion that scientists are either brainwashed into accepting global warming, or engaged in a massive conspiracy.) Also, the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report made a very limited claim regarding hurricanes: “It is more likely than not (>50%) that there has been some human contribution to the increases in hurricane intensity.”

The giant red “hockey stick” graph from Al Gore’s movie? (The researches who published that paper have publicly admitted that it was based on faulty procedures and have officially withdrawn it.)

I’m not sure what you’re referring to here, but I see no reason to doubt the overall accuracy of that graph.

[Dumb Scientist]

Therefore, the statement in AR4 that “It is more likely than not (>50%) that there has been some human contribution to the increases in hurricane intensity.” is likely an exaggeration, not supported by the actual research. [Jane Q. Public]

According to the IPCC guidance note on uncertainty, that’s basically the weakest statement they could make without being utterly silent. (See table 4.) Months ago, I said that hurricane intensity couldn’t be linked to climate change, and I later corrected another poster who was under the impression that the available data contained a clear correlation between hurricanes and climate change.

If the IPCC report had used any other qualifier from table 4, you might have a more convincing point. Furthermore, another paper in Science says “Results show that the increasing trend in number of category 4 and 5 hurricanes for the period 1970-2004 is directly linked to the trend in SST [sea surface temperature].” Dr. Landsea is a legitimate scientist, but he’s not the only one studying hurricanes, and I fail to see how his claims automatically rule out those of other scientists– especially when they’re making such a weak claim given the observed trends.

And, yes, those “natural forcings” include variations in solar output, which can be measured by satellites at L1 so there’s no need to search for weak correlations in sunspot data. [Dumb Scientist]

Please be specific. “Solar output” can mean many things. [Jane Q. Public]

I was quoting Meehl 2004 in that sentence, which itself quotes Meehl 2003 to show that variations in solar luminosity affect the climate. Of course, Meehl 2004 shows that this effect isn’t responsible for the warming in the latter half of the century, which is shown to be due to anthropogenic CO₂ emissions.

And by the way, I would like to point out a mistake you have made more than once: there is in fact a clear and valid correlation between sunspot cycles and Earth surface temperature, from the distant past up to at least the mid-20th century. [Jane Q. Public]

Further, while it was implied by Mr. Landis, neither of you bothered to acknowledge that there is in fact a strong correlation, at least up to the mid-20th century. Instead, you gave me the impression that you were disputing any correlation at all, which I knew to be incorrect. [Jane Q. Public]

First of all, Dr. Landis and I were careful to hedge our claims. Here are all the statements I’ve made (unless I’ve missed one?) regarding the correlation between sunspot cycle length and the climate:

• Every serious climatologist that I’ve met at the conferences agrees with the mountain of evidence that show sunspots aren’t strongly correlated with climate. [emphasis added]
• … the overwhelming evidence is that sunspots have a negligible impact on climate. [emphasis added]
• The claim that sunspot cycle length correlates well with Earth’s average temperature was made in the mainstream journals in 1991. [emphasis added]
• … so there’s no need to search for weak correlations in sunspot data. [emphasis added]

Which of these statements gave you the impression that I was “disputing any correlation at all”?

Based on your response to Abcd1234 (who carefully said that the correlation hasn’t been true for the last 50 years), I’d assumed you were talking about the last 50 years. In fact, that’s why I stopped lurking. Did I misunderstand your post?

Secondly, you’ve been emphatically denying that the correlation you’re proposing is between luminosity and climate. But that’s precisely what Meehl 2003,2004 and most other peer-reviewed papers show. A correlation between luminosity variations and Earth’s climate isn’t in dispute. What those papers emphatically don’t show is that variations in luminosity are responsible for recent warming, or that variations in sunspot cycle length have a significant effect on the climate.

Update: A good reference regarding solar variability is section 2.7.1 on pages 188-193 of chapter 2 in the 4th IPCC report.

Previously, you cited luminosity data when I had clearly stated that the correlation was with period length, not luminosity.

That’s because other correlations have been disproven by later research, as you now seem to agree. I was just trying to steer you back towards the only correlation that’s well-established in the peer-reviewed literature.

Another problem with your claim is that some kind of mechanism other than variations in luminosity would be needed to support your hypothesis. For example, in this post you claim “The sunspot activity tends to blow away the solar winds, allowing more radiation to get through to Earth’s surface.”

This is indeed a claim made in a real journal. But it’s far more controversial than you’re implying. The maximum impact of this mechanism has been estimated to be responsible for no more than 23% of the 11-year cyclical variation of cloud cover. Furthermore, there’s no long term trend in Svensmark’s data, which would be necessary to explain the long term warming trend that’s been observed. For more information, see chapter 7.10 of this textbook.

Furthermore, as I’ve repeatedly argued, Vostok shows that the current CO₂ level is higher than it’s been in half a million years. [Dumb Scientist]

Once again: correlation alone does not imply causation. You have to show cause, not just correlation. Otherwise you have demonstrated nothing. [Jane Q. Public]

Strong correlation plus a demonstrated causal mechanism does imply causation, though. Many nonscientists seem to get stuck on the fact that the causal mechanism between CO₂ and temperature works both ways. In the paleoclimate record, temperature swings induced by (among other things) Milankovitch cycles are amplified by CO₂. An astonishing number of “skeptics” appear to think the ~800 year phase lag between CO₂ and temperature proves that CO₂ can’t drive temperatures. This sort of bizarre statement seldom (if ever) shows up in peer-reviewed journals, though, because it’s simply not true.

The real point of these ice core analyses is that the natural climate experiences a temperature rise centuries before CO₂ rises. That’s not happening now, because the CO₂ in the air isn’t part of a natural feedback cycle. Instead, we dug it out of the ground in unprecedented amounts and pumped it straight into the atmosphere. Thus we’re not looking at natural climate change, it’s anthropogenic abrupt climate change A large-scale change in the climate system that takes place over a few decades or less, persists (or is anticipated to persist) for at least a few decades, and causes substantial disruptions in human and natural systems. .

Also, the natural climate exhibits feedback effects wherein higher temperatures release CO₂ from natural reservoirs such as the ocean and permafrost. This feedback CO₂ is completely different from the anthropogenic CO₂ that’s already pushed the concentration 26% above its natural peak, which means that the climate is likely to get even warmer due to natural feedback effects when that natural CO₂ is released.

In short, the phase lag has persisted for at least 650,000 years, but it isn’t happening today because we’re not experiencing natural climate change any more.

Then open a textbook and examine the absorption spectrum of CO₂. [Dumb Scientist]

I suggest that YOU look at the absorption spectrum of a cloud. See how they compare… it is not as simple as all that. [Jane Q. Public]

I first encountered the absorption spectrum of water in my first thermodynamics class, ~10 years ago when I was a sophomore physics undergrad. My professor, Dr. Glenn Agnolet, was an especially good lecturer, and pointed out that it’s not a coincidence that humans consider 400nm-700nm to be “visible light.” That’s because there’s a very narrow range of low absorption surrounding those values. It’s also not a coincidence that bees and small birds can see UV while we can’t, because our large watery eyes filter it out, but a smaller eye filters less UV so they evolved receptors for it.

Amusingly, this spectrum even has military significance in that the only frequency ranges useful for talking to submerged submarines have wavelengths longer than a kilometer. Not only does the transmitter have to be kilometers across and placed on a site with very low ground conductivity so it’s located in Wisconsin, the low frequency also results in very slow data transfer rates. That’s why subs receive messages in shorthand even to this day. Water’s absorption spectrum has fascinated me ever since.

But presumably you were implying that the existence of a stronger greenhouse gas like H₂O (which in our atmosphere accounts for roughly 3x the warming of CO₂) means that CO₂ is irrelevant. However, the lifetime of CO₂ in the atmosphere is much longer than water vapor, because oceans cover 71% of the Earth’s surface and therefore H₂O reaches equilibrium in a matter of days. In other words, if we pumped gigatons of water vapor into the atmosphere, it would be back in the oceans within a few weeks. On the other hand, CO₂ stays in the atmosphere for many decades, which is why it’s so dangerous. Water vapor concentration is also low in the stratosphere, so CO₂ is more important there.

I am not citing some “conspiracy theory”, though I will admit that it may seem that way. [Jane Q. Public]

Yes, it definitely does. Ironically, the very next statements in your post tend to reinforce my earlier conclusion.

Most of the science that is used to support the greenhouse warming model come from the IPCC Assessment reports, and much of that “science” has been shown to be flawed, not to mention that the reports themselves are heavily politicized, and their conclusions do not match the actual science that they reference. [Jane Q. Public]

No scientist I’ve met (in public or private) thinks your conspiracy theory is valid. In fact, I’ve personally confirmed the mass loss in Greenland’s glaciers with my own research. I’ve seen climate change happening with my own data and my own personal algorithms. Does that mean I’m part of the conspiracy too? [Dumb Scientist]

But aside from that, your “own research”, even if it does indeed show mass loss in Greenland’s glaciers, does not make your point at all… unless it demonstrates that the mass loss was caused by raised CO₂ levels. Remember: nobody here is disputing that the globe is warming! The debate is about the cause! [Jane Q. Public]

Note that I wasn’t attempting to use my research to support any particular cause of climate change. That statement was aimed squarely at your conspiracy theory. You might be able to convince nonscientists that there’s a massive conspiracy (intentional or not) among scientists, and any reference I produce to show that ~84% of scientists oppose your position would probably just solidify your belief in an evil conspiracy. My anecdote was only intended to show you that I’ve personally verified glacier melt through its effect on time-variable gravity above the glaciers in Greenland and Alaska. Because of this first-hand experience, I’m very skeptical that there’s any large-scale incompetence or data manipulation in the scientific community.

I’m also a little confused. You say “nobody here is disputing that the globe is warming!” but at the end of the very same post you present the Wegman Report in an attempt to discredit Figure 5(b) here which shows that the Earth is warming. Doesn’t that mean you are “disputing that the globe is warming”?

Obviously, this is not a peer-reviewed paper… but it IS a clear damning statement by one of the official reviewers, and I don’t see how you can ignore that. Nor is he the only one. Now, please don’t chide me about that last one… it is not a peer-reviewed paper either but it IS an official statement by the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, and cites over 400 renowned scientists around the world who disagree with the IPCC conclusions. … Now, remember… that was yet another official reviewer of the IPCC reports.

First of all, I’m allergic to politicians so I’m only going to comment on the genuinely peer-reviewed articles you’ve referenced. Secondly, your focus on reviewers seems to assume that I’m worshipping my fellow scientists as high priests. I’m not. I respect peer review precisely because it’s very confrontational, even downright nasty at times. I respect the process of peer review, not necessarily the people involved. Because 16% of scientists disagree with abrupt climate change A large-scale change in the climate system that takes place over a few decades or less, persists (or is anticipated to persist) for at least a few decades, and causes substantial disruptions in human and natural systems. (which seems to confirm my personal assessment based on what I saw at the Fall 2008 AGU conference), I’m not surprised that some people with PhDs (even people holding respectable positions) voice those views in public. If those reviewers ever publish their research in a respectable peer-reviewed journal, I’ll read their articles. This is because I have a limited lifespan– if I were immortal I’d have time to read every last skeptic argument in existence. But I’ve only got a precious few decades of life left, so I don’t waste my time on “science” that hasn’t satisfied the minimum acceptable standard for evidence: peer review.

I’m not sure what you’re referring to here, but I see no reason to doubt the overall accuracy of that graph. [Dumb Scientist]

I am referring here to the particular graph that appeared in Gore’s movie, nothing else. [Jane Q. Public]

I’ve never seen the movie. This is partially because of my fetish for learning science from physics classes at accredited universities, textbooks and peer-reviewed articles rather than YouTube videos and documentaries. But it’s mainly because the thought of that smug, pompous politician accepting a Nobel prize for exaggerating the science makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon just to get the image out of my head.

So I’m going to assume that by “hockey stick,” you were referring to Figure 5(b) here.

McIntyre and McKitrick, in about 5 reviewed papers in 2003 and 2005 … thoroughly debunked the statistical methods used to produce this graph. … Further, a review committee, consisting of Edward J. Wegman (Center for Computational Statistics, George Mason University), David W. Scott (Noah Harding Professor of Statistics, Rice University), and Yasmin H. Said (The Johns Hopkins University) recently reviewed and confirmed these findings.

The Wegman report wasn’t peer-reviewed, but it did contain genuinely useful criticisms of Mann’s methodology. However, followup journal articles such as Rutherford 2005 used completely different analysis methods and arrived at the same result. Also, Wahl and Ammann 2007 independently confirmed that conclusion. If you’d like, you can download their code here to confirm for yourself that the PCA centering issues raised by MM03 and MM05 don’t noticeably impact the results. I’m not disputing that better inter-disciplinary communication leads to better science. I’m just disputing the claim that these errors had any significant impact on the graph itself.

Furthermore, even if Mann et. al. really did make some kind of fatal error in their calculations, that has practically no impact on the current scientific understanding of “recent” temperature reconstructions. Here’s a compilation of time series produced by a dozen independent studies, using different algorithms, different statistical methods and different data. They vary significantly, but the abrupt temperature increase appears in all of them.

[Dumb Scientist]

My apologies, but this is the last comment I can write. I’m struggling under the weight of academic deadlines, and I don’t want to fail out of school because of my Slashdot addiction…

Meehl does not actually show that CO₂ causes warming, he relies on the research of others to do so. In fact, while this may be a slight exaggeration, about all Meehl did here was to integrate the work of a number of other authors. [Jane Q. Public]

At least you’re aware of the exaggeration, if not the magnitude or (more importantly) the fact that this criticism could be applied to any research that expands on previous results… which includes nearly every paper in the history of science.

(Ed. note: Slashdot adds notes like [iop.org] to all links, which I’ve restored here to demonstrate how the original posts looked.)

This is indeed a claim [ameyamhatre.com] made in a real journal. But it’s far more controversial than you’re implying. The maximum impact of this mechanism has been estimated [iop.org] to be responsible for no more than 23% of the 11-year cyclical variation of cloud cover. [Dumb Scientist]

“This is indeed a claim made in a real journal. But it’s far more controversial than you’re implying. The maximum impact of this mechanism has been estimated to be responsible for no more than 23% of the 11-year cyclical variation of cloud cover.”

Estimated by whom? I have already shown you at least one peer-reviewed paper (although you objected to the journal’s lack of reputation for “hard science”) in which the estimation was far over what you state here. (Which, I admit, appears to be validly refuted for a specific period of time.) But if you are going to make an argument, as you seem to be doing here, then refute my source with one of your own, otherwise you are wasting my time. [Jane Q. Public]

That estimate was by T. Sloan and A.W. Wolfendale in the article I originally linked… that’s the link which was originally followed by “[iop.org]” before you quoted it. Also, the paper you previously found contains similar criticisms of Svensmark 1998 on its second page.

Update: Other relevant papers include Kristjansson 2002 and Laut 2003, followed by Svensmark’s response and Laut’s rebuttal. More recently, Erlykin et al suggest that the apparent correlation is due to direct solar activity, while Pierce and Adams state: “In our simulations, changes in CCN [cloud condensation nuclei concentrations] from changes in cosmic rays during a solar cycle are two orders of magnitude too small to account for the observed changes in cloud properties; consequently, we conclude that the hypothesized effect is too small to play a significant role in current climate change.”

But there are a lot of complex interactions going on here, including the fact that reflection by CO₂ tends to be logarithmic… requiring a doubling of CO₂ concentration to equal an incremental increase in reflection. … Books could be written about it and probably will be. [Jane Q. Public]

Yes, of course. The fact that CO₂ absorption depends logarithmically on concentration has been known since 1900 when Angstrom and Koch Ångström, Knut (1900). ‘Über die Bedeutung des Wasserdampfes und der Kohlensaüres bei der Absorption der Erdatmosphäre.’ Annalen der Physik 4(3): 720-32. published online 308(12): 720-32 (2006) [doi: 10.1002/andp.19003081208] first measured it in a tube filled with CO₂. The absorption dropped by less than 1% when Koch lowered the pressure by 33%, which convinced an entire generation of climatologists that CO₂ wasn’t dangerous because it was already “saturated.” In other words, they believed that adding more CO₂ wouldn’t warm the planet because it was already absorbing almost all it could.

But this research is 109 years old. Books have already been written about it. As early as 1931, Hulburt Hulburt, E.O. (1931). ‘The Temperature of the Lower Atmosphere of the Earth.’ Physical Review 38: 1876-90. used the brand-new theory of quantum mechanics to study absorption in more detail. He concluded that doubling the CO₂ concentration would warm the Earth by 4°C. This is still the conventional method of expressing “climate sensitivity” with respect to CO₂. (Although it’s important to note that this convention ignores slow feedback effects which may sum to produce a temporary(?) net positive feedback effect, given the unnaturally abrupt nature of the forcing.) His prediction is still within the error bars of modern estimates which assign a maximum likelihood value of 2.9°C, with a 95% confidence that it’s less than 4.9°C but greater than 1.7°C. Sadly, his breakthrough wasn’t recognized at the time.

In the 1950s, the Cold War prompted U.S. scientists to study the atmosphere for military purposes. They mounted spectrometers on planes and sent them high into the atmosphere, where the absorption spectrum changed Kaplan, Lewis D. (1952). ‘On the Pressure Dependence of Radiative Heat Transfer in the Atmosphere.’ J. Meteorology 9: 1-12. . At standard pressure, CO₂ absorbs radiation in broad “peaks” in frequency space because of pressure broadening but the lower pressure at altitude narrows these peaks. Thus, CO₂ acts as a less effective greenhouse gas at higher altitudes.

Subsequent studies confirmed and expanded on these results. The short version is that the atmosphere needs to be modeled as a series of layers, where the pressure in each layer causes CO₂ to absorb differing amounts of radiation at different wavelengths. Each layer insulates all the layers below it, and the outer layer of the atmosphere isn’t saturated until it reaches a higher concentration than would be required to saturate at standard pressure. Furthermore, water vapor concentration falls off rapidly with altitude while CO₂ concentration doesn’t, so water vapor doesn’t play a role in the outer layer of the atmosphere.

If you’re wondering why these references aren’t linked, it’s because this debate is ancient and certainly not news to any climatologist who’s less than 50 years behind the cutting edge. Many of these articles’ abstracts aren’t even available online, so you’ll have to search your local university library to find them. You may find this overview (complete with references) helpful in your search, but nonscientists may prefer this less technical version.

Of course, it’s possible that you weren’t “trying to make any earth-shattering observations there,” and were just waxing eloquent about the beauty of science. If that’s true then I apologize for wasting your time, and we agree that science is really frakking cool. This response would then be aimed solely at pseudoscientists like Joanne Nova who claim that “CO₂ is already absorbing almost all it can!”

So, I was not trying to make any earth-shattering observations there, just: it’s not so simple.

Virtually no subject in modern physics is simple enough to be described completely in a single Slashdot post, a single textbook, a single semester, or even a single college degree. For example, high school students learn that gravity is described by F=m*g, where “g” is a constant 9.8 m/s². This is oversimplified because “g” decreases with altitude. Undergrads learn that gravity is described by F=G*m₁*m₂/r². This is oversimplified because it can’t account for the precession of Mercury’s orbit or the orbital decay of binary pulsars due to energy loss from gravitational waves. Graduate students learn that gravity is one of several physical manifestations of the curvature of spacetime due to the stress-energy tensor. This is also an oversimplification because it can’t be quantized and produces unphysical predictions at black hole singularities.

In this sense, abrupt climate change A large-scale change in the climate system that takes place over a few decades or less, persists (or is anticipated to persist) for at least a few decades, and causes substantial disruptions in human and natural systems. is no different from general relativity. It’s a hideously complicated subject that requires at least a graduate education in physics to struggle through the many layers of simplification in order to reach the frontiers of knowledge. When talking with the public, physicists need to make simplifications, or the explanations would take years. Be wary of assuming that these simplifications are anything but pedagogical tools.

We already know of the penchant that the media has for sensationalism. Have you not heard the news reports that “sea levels are expected to rise as much as 10 meters in our lifetime”?? I have. Yet even the IPCC says nothing of the sort. … Which made it prime fodder for Mr. Gore’s movie. Which caught the attention of the public. Which caused alarmism out of proportion to the actual problem.

I completely agree with every statement you’ve made here. My advisor is a world-renowned expert [*] in geophysics And a really nice guy! :) Hi! I’m working, I promise! who recently said “I don’t think climate change is going to kill anyone.” (Provided we take decisive action I agree, but worry that the effects will act as a catalyst to worsen existing political conflicts.) That’s why I’ve insisted on restricting this conversation to peer-reviewed papers. The mainstream media is biased towards sensationalism, and the internet is a tarpit of misinformation.

[*] I’m sorry that I can’t provide more details with which to judge this claim, but my career is just starting so I don’t want to commit professional suicide by making my views on, say, gay marriage or gun rights Pro-2nd amendment article coming soon, to be linked in permanent version of this article. available to potential employers. I’ll say this, though: I suspect that the last woman I dated (a fellow geophysicist) was with me at least partly because I promised to introduce her to him. This suspicion is based on her reaction when she found out who my advisor was, which wasn’t unusual Sadly, I only mean that the initial jaw-drop isn’t unusual… at all.

If you had been paying attention, you might have understood that the Wegman, et al. report was “peer review”

Articles published in scientific journals are peer-reviewed. Again, peer review isn’t about worshipping scientists, so it’s not just about the qualifications of the reviewer. It’s about a process. Scientific articles are subjected to a process called peer review, which means the author gets viciously attacked by people who (sometimes) think he’s an moronic asshole. This process is the bedrock of modern science because it results in articles that are better for it after surviving the inferno. But the nasty emails sent by the reviewers to the author haven’t been through peer review themselves. And that’s basically what the Wegman report is, except they “reviewed” it among themselves. It makes some good points, but draws a completely exaggerated conclusion which hopefully wouldn’t have made it through a proper peer review.

… even if Mann et. al. really did make some kind of fatal error in their calculations, that has practically no impact on the current scientific understanding of “recent” temperature reconstructions. [Dumb Scientist]

Possibly. But it means you have to find other research to make your point. [Jane Q. Public]

Each time series in the graph I previously linked is referenced in chapter 6 here. Turn to page 469 and examine Table 6.1 (later, if you get bored, consider checking out column 2 of page 466 which reviews the claims of MM03 and MM05.) Every time series is referenced well enough to be found on google scholar– for example here’s one of them. As you’ve seen from the graph, they all support the abrupt temperature increase in Mann’s graph. (I freely admit that all these authors could be drooling morons, sheeple incapable of independent thought, or evil conspirators… any of these scenarios or a linear combination of them would completely discredit my position.)

You might be able to convince nonscientists that there’s a massive conspiracy (intentional or not) [emphasis added] among scientists, and ironically any reference I produce to show that ~84% of scientists oppose your position would probably just solidify your belief in an evil conspiracy. [Dumb Scientist]

… they essentially all complain about the same problem: the fact that those involved in the IPCC reporting and review process who disagreed with a preconceived conclusion were blatantly ignored. … IPCC reports are politicized and unreliable. … the IPCC has had a chronic problem with bias and failure of peer review. … Well, not exactly. It’s because until that point, I was not aware that other possible correlations were ever even taken seriously. … That is almost correct, if you are looking at it in a sort of sideways-logic kind of way. … If these statements, by the both of you, do not imply that there is no correlation, I will eat my hat. But of course some of the very literature you rely on contradicts that. … I could not possibly accept the results of this survey as anything but an exercise in data manipulation — intentional or otherwise. … I cannot accept those reported results as anything. As reported, they are meaningless. The word “valid” is not on the horizon. … Oh, come on. Are you being deliberately obtuse? Or did you just not bother to read the papers? … The fact is that the Mann, et al. graph was out of proportion, and tended to exaggerate the appearance of the recent warming. Which you would know, if you actually read the papers. But I suspect that you were just baiting me. … so far you have not managed to validly refute even one point I have made. … it was more like destroying his methodology, not just criticizing it. … What a COSMIC coincidence. The same three people who did the original paper! And they reached a similar conclusion??? How outrageously surprising! Seriously, how can you be surprised? And the fact that they used a different methodology does not impress me in the least. Wegner, et al. strongly implied that while those people might otherwise be competent researchers, they do not know their statistical asses from a hole in the ground … Further, a textbook is anything but a peer-reviewed paper. Would you like me to do a brief review of how many of my high-school and university textbooks contained errors that seem laughable now? Get real. By the time half of them get to publication, they have significant errors. … If you will not accept Energy and Environment as a source because it may not be “sufficiently hard-science” for your taste, then I am sure as hell not going to accept your textbook. [emphasis added] … This was not apparent to me at first, but as it turns out, Meehl’s climate model has relied upon the data generated in the 1998 Mann study. So, at least until some adjustments are made, I have no choice but to consider the Meehl model to have also been successfully refuted. … When a climate model relies upon past temperature variations that are shown to be inaccurate, to say that the whole model becomes questionable is an understatement. … (Ed. note: here I’m referring to your statements in general.) That sounds like a “conspiracy theory” to you? [Jane Q. Public]

In a word: yes. I’ve encountered the same attitude here and in my discussions with creationists and people who dispute the Big Bang. In each case, they insist that peer review is broken. Sometimes they merely say this is because of widespread incompetence or “groupthink,” but it’s also common to see them accuse scientists of active conspiracy. They perform “research” by browsing pseudoscience websites rather than pursuing a graduate education in the field they’re obviously interested in. With all due respect to the parties involved, I think they’re making errors that could be avoided by opening graduate-level textbooks (which have little in common with high school or lower-level undergraduate texts) and solving the problems inside.

Curiously, they’re often computer scientists or engineers. I suspect this is because natural sciences like physics, chemistry and biology appear similar to computer science and engineering. We all use math (in fact, electrical engineers use way more math than biologists) and the first year of college classes are quite similar. Our fields are highly complex and probably equally mysterious to the general public, so we become used to being “the person with the answers.”

However, engineers and computer scientists are, fundamentally, “builders.” Engineers figure out how to use materials like metals and plastic to build amazing technological marvels that enrich our lives. Computer scientists build shining edifices out of pure logic which have bound the human race together and (IMHO) will play a central role in giving our descendants “technology indistinguishable from magic.” In each case, notice that the emphasis lies on creating something that didn’t exist before. They develop preconceptions of the form their algorithm or building will take, then beat raw materials into a shape that conforms to their original vision.

Scientists, on the other hand, are more like detectives. They observe the natural world and try as hard as they possibly can to avoid letting their preconceptions contaminate the results of their experiments. Scientists are supposed to avoid creating something that didn’t exist before!

This isn’t to say engineers don’t have to think critically; for example, they have to recognize why the Tacoma Narrows bridge was badly designed and foresee similar mistakes. But they’re working within known natural laws, and it seems to me that the challenge of deducing those laws without prejudice is completely different. I’m starting to think that computer scientists and engineers are prone to assuming that their skills transfer to the natural sciences better than they actually do, which could explain why rational thought occasionally mutates into rationalizing.

Please don’t misunderstand me: I’m not insulting computer scientists or engineers; I’m definitely not saying a significant percentage of them are pseudoscientists. I spent several years as an aerospace engineering major, my dad is a mechanical engineer, and many of my family and friends are in these fields. My physics degrees certainly don’t mean I can design a skyscraper or write a new programming language. I’m just speculating as to why some of them tend to be over-represented in the ranks of pseudoscientists.

[Dumb Scientist]

… The proponents of “man-made global warming” have seized upon the CO₂-based warming model as their poster child. Unfortunately for them in the long run, that model has some serious problems. For example, in order for the CO₂-based warming model to work, the upper atmosphere must be warming in proportion to the surface. However, it simply is not. Weather balloon and satellite data just do not find the upper-atmosphere warming that would have to be there if the CO₂ warming model were true. You can look that up for yourself. Use actual data, dude, not what you find on the 10:00 news. But enough of the basic background. … [Jane Q. Public, Oct 24, 2007]

… the CO₂-based warming theory REQUIRES the upper atmosphere to be warming at a rate proportional to the low-altitude temperature… and it simply has not been. Actual satellite and weather balloon temperature data do not support the CO₂ warming theory at all. … ALL greenhouse gas “global warming” theories require the upper atmosphere to warm proportionally to the surface temperature. That is directly involved in the whole mechanism that is supposed to be CAUSING the warming from such gases! Whether CO₂ were the “sole” greenhouse gas involved is irrelevant! They all require that the upper atmosphere be warming to a degree that it just has not been. Actual satellite and weather balloon temperature data DIRECTLY CONTRADICT the greenhouse warming theories. And if something that MUST be happening in order for those theories to be true is not happening (and it isn’t), then those theories are fundamentally flawed. [Jane Q. Public, June 22, 2008]

… Once again: the greenhouse gas models, specifically, require that the upper atmosphere be warming to a degree that has SIMPLY NOT BEEN HAPPENING according to the actual temperature data. If you disbelieve that, then try googling NOAA along with a few choice key words and do your own homework for a change. [Jane Q. Public, June 25, 2008]

… And contrary to popular belief, the troposphere has not been warming to the degree it would have to, were the greenhouse models of warming correct. But they are not. They have some very serious flaws. …[Jane Q. Public, July 9, 2009]

I presume you’ve been referring to an algebra error in assimilations of satellite temperature measurements of the troposphere.

1. This error was corrected in 2005.
2. The troposphere is actually the lowest portion of the Earth’s atmosphere. The upper atmosphere is divided into the stratosphere and the mesosphere.
3. Greenhouse warming models predict cooling and contraction of the stratosphere.

Kyle asks about the political and economic implications of climate change.

[Kyle]
Interesting. For the record, what’s your view on all this climate change stuff? Personally, regardless of how the data is broken down, I think it’s crazy to build US legislation to tax all of our energy production based on the notion we can control the earth’s climate.

[Dumb Scientist]

(Ed. note: I’ve removed many points from my emails to Kyle because they’ve already appeared above.)

The scientific case is quite clear: humans have dug up gigatons of CO₂ and pumped it into the atmosphere. This has raised our average temperatures and will continue to do so unless we stop it.

Of course, science doesn’t imply any particular political response. But fighting climate change is almost exactly the same thing as “energy independence” which we desperately need anyway, if only to stop throwing money at so many corrupt governments for their oil. The only difference is that we need to stop burning coal, which is something we have in abundance here in the U.S. All I can say is that this might be bad in the short term, but absolutely necessary in the long term. It’s not clear to me that these taxes would slow the economy down over the medium to long term. The U.S. is still the world’s leader in science and technology, so we’re most likely to be the ones to invent and sell the new cleaner energy tech which would actually make Americans richer in the end…

To replace coal, I liked McCain’s plan to build 45 new nuclear power stations. (Oh, how I wish Obama would listen to him on that particular subject!) Not the crazy new fusion plants (which don’t exist yet and may never exist), just better versions of the fission nuclear plants we already know work because they supply 80% of France’s electricity.

[Dumb Scientist]

I have no problem with using technology to develop cleaner energy sources. I do find fault in the idea of punitive tax policy that punishes consumers for being good capitalists – buying the energy that is the most efficient to produce. [Kyle]

But that’s the way regulation has worked for decades. For example, companies can’t simply dump toxic chemicals into the water (even though that’s cheaper than responsible disposal) because they’d get fined by the EPA. That’s basically the only reason our rivers aren’t even more polluted than they already are. Without a clear disincentive to pollute, companies will choose the most “efficient” means of creating their product, regardless of how much pollution they create in the process.

The only difference here is that the effects of CO₂ pollution are more subtle than, say, dumping acid into a river. But it’s even more dangerous in the long run because CO₂ causes a global problem rather than a local one.

The thing that kills me about the proposed plan is the idea of creating carbon credits, essentially fake money to be bought and sold, and forcing US energy companies to pay new taxes on all the carbon they produce.

Actually, cap and trade strikes me as a very capitalist way of addressing the problem. This is just the latest example of regulation to compensate for what economists call a “negative externality.”

Negative externalities represent rare failures of capitalism; they’re situations in which economic transactions can hurt people who aren’t directly involved. Again, the best example is that of a chemical plant dumping waste into a river. The people downstream will be affected regardless of whether they buy that company’s products. That’s why regulation exists: to protect people from situations where it’s cheaper to ruin the environment than to act responsibly.

This new kind of regulation will have the effect of making dirty technology expensive which will then prompt companies to invest in cleaner technologies for the most capitalist reason imaginable: to make a profit. I hope that the environmentalists will eventually relent and let us build nuclear power plants, because they’re the cleanest form of energy we have that can power our civilization. But I seriously doubt they’re rational enough to see that their fears of radiation are due more to Hollywood than actual physics…

America has always had an advantage in the global economy by having the best infrastructure and cheap energy. I can’t believe that any other countries are going to levy similar requirements on their businesses.

That’s a very serious problem indeed. If other countries don’t clean up too, production will simply shift to countries with lax regulation. One goal of the climate legislation that’s about to hit the Senate is to set an example; to show the world that the United States is ready to lead once again. With a firm domestic commitment to fighting climate change, Obama will have a more credible case to present at the Copenhagen Conference this December.

On a side note, have you ever checked out surfacestations.org? They make a pretty compelling case that the US temperature record over the last several decades is showing artificially high readings.

He’s saying that the surface temperature record is contaminated by the “urban heat island” effect– that temperatures are only rising around cities because of economic growth. One example he shows is that exhaust vents have been placed closer and closer to the sensors over the years.

This is a superficially compelling argument, but it’s also one that scientists have considered and rejected. One test is that the urban heat island effect should be less pronounced on windy days than calm days. That’s because if this warming is just caused by local exhaust vents, wind should carry that heat away whereas calm weather won’t. This doesn’t happen: calm and windy days have the same warming trend. This conclusion is from an article published in Nature by Dr. Parker in 2004; here’s a BBC article quoting it. Other studies have confirmed this result using different methods and data in 2003, 2006, and 2008.

NOAA recently published an answer to that specific website. They took the 70 stations that surfacestations.org designated “best” or “good” and created a time series based on them. Then they used all 1218 stations to create another time series. Both of those time series are plotted on page 3. They’re practically identical.

Also, scientists don’t blindly trust these sensors. Land temperature measurements are independently confirmed by sea surface temperatures, satellite data and proxies such as ice cores, boreholes, coral growth, tree rings, stalactites, fossil beds, ocean sediments and glacial deposits.

Update: Another paper casts doubt on the claims of surfacestations.org.

[Dumb Scientist]

I will say this: The EPA at its core is a political organization. EPA policies have quickly reversed under each new administration and I think this is an area where unfortunately the politics are very intertwined with the science. [Kyle]

Perhaps. But all I’m saying is this: we can agree that some types of pollution are bad, right? Sure, extremists like Earth First and Greenpeace give the whole notion a bad name, but I don’t think any of us want acid rain or smog. CO₂ is just a more subtle problem which is more difficult to explain to the public, but ultimately poses a bigger threat to humanity.

That, and they even admit that these policies will cause an immediate and substantial rise in US energy prices, which trickle down to every segment of the economy. I think the plan is guaranteed to do very tangible economic harm to people all over the US in the near term, and that left alone…

That’s probably true. It wouldn’t be much different than the harm that most other countries have experienced already, though. For quite a while, Europeans have been paying more than twice as much as we do for gasoline. As a result, their cars are smaller, their cities are much better for walking and biking, and their subway systems are better.

Would it hurt U.S. citizens? Probably a little. But it’s a much better idea to experience a little bit of pain now rather than a lot later. Frankly, we’re already far behind the Europeans in this regard. They’re not going to be hit nearly as hard as us when the shit really hits the fan because they’ve already been adapting to the post-oil era.

… companies will eventually develop cleaner technologies without having to be forced to by the government, because consumers want alternatives, and that to me is what it’s all about.

The keyword here is “eventually.” I doubt it would be soon enough, because every ton of CO₂ emitted into the atmosphere worsens the problem, and we still get half of our electricity from coal which needs to be changed to nuclear yesterday.

Liquid oceans had already formed 4 billion years ago, so Earth’s temperature must have been above the freezing point of water. A faint young Sun presents a paradox: how could a 25% dimmer Sun warm the Earth enough to develop liquid oceans?

First, note that the relationship between solar brightness and Earth’s temperature isn’t simple. A 25% fainter Sun only cools Earth by ~7% because Earth’s surface temperature is a balance between energy input in the form of sunlight and energy output from the Earth in the form of blackbody radiation. Further complications include feedback mechanisms such as greenhouse gas effects and changes in Earth’s albedo. Having said that, a 7% cooler Earth is enough to make the tropics as cold as the present-day Arctic which makes the evidence for a liquid ocean difficult to reconcile with the standard solar model.

I first heard about this paradox last December at an AGU talk given by Dr. Goldblatt. He pointed out that the early CO₂ partial pressure was ~25 times its current value (anyone have references for this?), but even this increase isn’t sufficient to guarantee the formation of liquid oceans. However, the total pressure of the atmosphere 4 billion years ago is unknown, so Dr. Goldblatt performed simulations with varying amounts of nitrogen.

Nitrogen isn’t a greenhouse gas, but its presence in the atmosphere causes CO₂ to act as a more effective greenhouse gas via pressure broadening. Dr. Goldblatt found that if the early atmosphere contained roughly twice as much nitrogen as it does today, this would raise the Earth’s surface temperature above the freezing point of water.

After his talk was finished, I asked: “You said that evidence constrains the early CO₂ concentration, but is there any experimental evidence which constrains the early nitrogen pressure?” He replied that there wasn’t, and then someone else in the crowd said that ongoing research is attempting to constrain the nitrogen budget through “raindrops.”

I’d like to find out what he was talking about. Do we have fossilized raindrop patterns in ancient rocks? If so, how do they tell us anything about the early nitrogen pressure?

I’ve tried to seek out differing opinions on this issue, to see if it’s possible to oppose gay marriage for thoughtful reasons. Here’s what I found:

Gay people already have the right to get married; they don’t need special rights!

How is this argument any different from saying that paraplegics already have the right to use the stairs, so they don’t need wheelchair ramps?

Activist judges are pushing gay marriage on us!

Activist judges are probably judges who make decisions you don’t like. There are many flaws in our current model of government, but this isn’t one of them. Constitutional republics such as our own differ from pure democracies by setting limits on the will of the majority. For instance, the Bill of Rights restricts the majority of voters from removing a group’s right to free speech or right to bear arms. This issue isn’t fundamentally different.

Marriage has been defined as man-and-woman for thousands of years!

At different points in history, marriage has been defined as an arrangement where a man bought his wife with a dowry and subsequently owned her, beat her, and held the unilateral right to add more wives later. Deuteronomy says that a virgin rape victim should be forced to marry her rapist (her father gets fifty shekels of silver, so it’s fair). Women are still forced into arranged marriages, occasionally before puberty. Either way, by definition a wife couldn’t be raped by her husband. Divorce used to be impossible, especially the variety initiated by the wife. Marriage has been denied to couples of particular races, castes, or interracial couples.

During the hotly debated reforms that incrementally abolished these prejudices, the opponents of expanding individual rights made similar arguments. They didn’t seem to realize that the nature of marriage has been changing for centuries. More fundamentally, they made the mistake of equating “the way things have been done in the past” with “the way things should be done.”

Gay couples can’t conceive children!

Neither can straight couples containing a man who’s had an effective vasectomy, a woman with a successful hysterectomy or a post-menopausal woman. In fact, lesbian couples are probably more fertile than some of these straight couples because they have access to the same in vitro fertilization procedures available to straight couples. But what’s the point of this kind of comparison?

Next we’ll have to let people marry horses!

Are the people who make this argument really serious? I’ve never once met a person making plans to marry an animal. However, I’ve met quite a few gay people who wanted to be able to get married.

Furthermore, a marriage is a type of contract. Signing any contract requires sapience and full awareness of the responsibilities involved. That rules out child marriage (depending on each culture’s reasonable definition of adulthood) and horse marriage (unequivocally).

These bizarre claims tend to distract attention from the real issue, which is that married couples receive over 1,000 tangible benefits. For instance, married couples are allowed to:

• Visit their spouse in the hospital, and make medical decisions if necessary.
• Simplify their taxes and finances in a well-rehearsed manner.
• Get property and inheritance rights, even without a will.
• Get discounted “family” rates for many types of insurance.
• Receive Medicare, Social Security and veteran’s benefits for a spouse.
• Adopt children.
• Take bereavement and funeral leave.
• Transfer property tax-free between spouses (including on death).
• Enter a prenuptial agreement and change surname upon marriage using standardized forms.
• Obtain domestic violence protection orders.
• Visit their spouse in jail.
• Etc.

The only “slippery slope” argument of this variety that’s worth mentioning is the polygamy issue. Polygamists modify the usual marriage contract by allowing for more than two partners. This modification remains a valid contract between adults, so it’s not a strawman argument. The distribution of benefits to each spouse would, however, require careful thought. For example, a default polygamous contract where one partner has a high-paying job would likely need to specify that each of the other spouses would divide up the benefits that would usually go to a single person. Otherwise polygamists would be prohibitively expensive to hire, among other disconcerting effects. But this doesn’t seem like a particularly difficult accounting problem.

Gay marriage is bad for children!

There are two versions of this argument. One asserts that homosexuals are morally equivalent to child molesters, which doesn’t deserve a serious response.

The second asserts that both male and female role models are important in a child’s emotional development. Quite frankly, this is the only argument I’ve seen that makes the slightest bit of sense, even if it only applies to couples who intend to conceive or adopt children. Furthermore, I’m very skeptical of the claim that the lack of a strong role model for one gender is worse than (or even comparable to) being one of the half million children stuck in foster care right now.

Disturbingly, this rationale seems to suggest that children should be taken from single parents who aren’t actively searching for an opposite-sex partner. I’ve also never seen any discussion of how this problem could be mitigated by ensuring regular interaction with an opposite sex role model– can anyone provide links here?

Gay marriage would cheapen traditional marriage!

Only if your sole reason for getting married was to taunt gay couples. If you got married for some other reason, like mutual love and commitment, then how do other marriages affect your bond?

The Family Research Council points to statistics on gay relationships to show that they’re shorter, more promiscuous and more violent than heterosexual relationships. Questions of skewed sampling jumped to mind, so I searched for the first reference they cited to support their claim that “Lesbians, for example, suffer a much higher level of violence than do married women.” (Incidentally, cohabitating lesbians should be compared to heterosexual cohabitating unmarried women otherwise two variables are changed at once.) Imagine my surprise when I found the paper and read the following paragraph:

Women living with female intimate partners experience less intimate partner violence than women living with male intimate partners. Slightly more than 11 percent of the women who had lived with a woman as part of a couple reported being raped, physically assaulted, and/or stalked by a female cohabitant, but 30.4 percent of the women who had married or lived with a man as part of a couple reported such violence by a husband or male cohabitant. These findings suggest that lesbian couples experience less intimate partner violence than do heterosexual couples; however, more research is needed to support or refute this conclusion.

That’s right, one of the references actually contradicted the claim it was used to support. The second reference didn’t discuss lesbian couples at all, unless I missed something while reading it.

Even if this kind of statistical difference really existed, it’d likely be due to the social marginalization experienced by gay couples. In other words, perhaps marriage really is a stabilizing influence, and gay couples are worse off because they’re not as well integrated into society. Marriage would be strengthened, not cheapened, by extending its rights to other couples.

Homosexuality is a choice!

Homosexuality is a fascinating topic in evolutionary biology/psychology, but we don’t yet have a complete scientific description of this facet of human nature. Experiments have suggested that homosexuality is caused by some combination of genetic and prenatal factors, though.

Even without science, the claim that “homosexuality is a choice” confuses me. I say this because– speaking as a heterosexual– I’m having trouble remembering when I chose to be attracted to women. They just began to appear… fascinating… when I was a young boy. I don’t remember having a choice about it. What about you? When did you choose your sexual orientation?

I’m not sure how a gay marriage opponent would react to that question. Perhaps he’d say “May 7, 1985: I decided to be straight so I wouldn’t go to Hell.” Or perhaps he’d say that heterosexuality is the normal orientation, so everyone is really heterosexual. Homosexuals, on the other hand, are choosing to fake a sexual urge that they don’t really feel. This makes even less sense to me, because I don’t think I’d be able to fake an attraction to other men. My sense of duty to science stops here, unfortunately, so I can’t falsify this hypothesis.

But– more importantly– why would anyone want to engage in such a masochistic charade? Gay people face rampant– sometimes violent– discrimination. They’re drastically outnumbered by straight people, so their dating options are reduced by a factor of ~20.

Homosexuality is condemned by (INSERT DEITY HERE)!

I think this is the only genuine argument against gay marriage. Some people try hard to phrase their opposition in secular terms, but they consistently fail to demonstrate that gay marriage does any harm except to religious beliefs.

It’s true that Allah, Yahweh and Hindu gods are commonly believed to disapprove of homosexuality. For brevity’s sake, I’ll focus on Yahweh’s position:

This verse is an unambiguous condemnation of homosexual behavior. Confusingly, though, this verse is an unambiguous condemnation of lobsters:

Some theologians account for this cognitive dissonance by labeling the homosexuality law “moral” and permanent. But the lobster law is “ceremonial” and later repealed by Mark 7:19, even if Matthew 5:17-19 complicates the matter. The method of determining whether a given verse is “moral” or “ceremonial” appears to depend greatly on the tastes of the person interpreting the verse.

People who quote an ancient book to support their prejudices are able to do so because it’s possible to support just about any position by selectively quoting a sufficiently large and complicated book.

Furthermore, politics is so inherently confrontational (and historically quite deadly) that it’s a really bad idea to combine it with another inherently confrontational (and also deadly) subject: religion. In other words, government should be secular^[1] in the sense that political arguments should be made without reference to religion simply in the interest of getting things done without interruption by constant shouting matches.

It might be hard for an American Christian Fundamentalist to understand why our society shouldn’t enforce his particular denomination’s set of holy laws. Appeals to individual rights aren’t likely to persuade him, because those concepts aren’t enshrined in the Bible. But consider this: if America can enforce religious laws on your behalf today, what happens if (or when) America no longer has a Christian majority? It seems like organizing the government in a religiously neutral manner is– in the long run– the only way to guarantee that Christians aren’t persecuted in the future.

The fact that we’re even having this debate is symptomatic of a deeper problem, though. Political debates shouldn’t ever involve religion, but the debate over gay marriage seethes with religious themes. Maybe it’s best to decouple religion from government in matters relating to marriage. Every government document that currently refers to marriage should be changed to refer to a “civil union” that doesn’t discriminate on any basis such as race, religion or sexuality.

Marriage should be a purely religious ceremony, defined and implemented by churches however they see fit. You wouldn’t seek the government’s approval to baptize your child, would you? What about the notion of filling out a government form to get permission to hold a Bar Mitzvah or Confirmation? If it’s a bad idea to allow the government to regulate those sacraments, it’s probably also a bad idea to allow the government to regulate marriage.

Footnotes

1. Many people seem to equate the term “secular government” with “atheistic government” by arguing that the removal of religious language from political debate is tantamount to state-mandated atheism. I disagree, because there seem to be three basic ways that governments can deal with religion:

   A completely religious government is best exemplified by Iran, Afghanistan under the Taliban, and Spain during the Inquisition. Each day the government reaffirms its mission to enforce the rules of the national deity, and punish non-believers or believers in a different deity. Oh, and if they get a chance, maybe they’ll get around to making sure the trains run on time.

   A completely atheistic government is best exemplified by the communist Soviet Union, North Korea, and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Each day the government reaffirms its mission to eradicate all religions, and punish believers. Oh, and if they get a chance, maybe they’ll get around to making sure the trains run on time.

   A completely secular government, on the other hand, has never existed. Each day, such a government ignores inflammatory rhetoric and strives to protect the individual rights of all people– believers and non-believers alike. Making sure the trains run on time is essentially their only concern, along with other theologically neutral responsibilities.↩ back

The central problem is that scientific theories have to make unique, falsifiable predictions. For example, Newton’s theory of motion predicted the locations of the planets with only a single “adjustable” parameter. The Big Bang and evolution are more malleable than Newton’s theory of motion because of the myriad unknown parameters on which they depend.

Tim Thompson calls Big Bang cosmology a metatheory, which has the same relationship to theory as metaphysics does to physics. In other words, metatheories are generic frameworks that contain many different scientific theories. The Big Bang metatheory can (loosely) be defined as “the universe is expanding, so it was smaller, denser and hotter in the past.” Many theories have been proposed and abandoned within this framework. For example, early models couldn’t account for the horizon problem so they were modified by inflation (which would’ve been abandoned if WMAP hadn’t found anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation at the 10^-5 level.) Furthermore, WMAP’s discovery of dark energy has ruled out many specific Big Bang theories.

A metatheory has to be specific enough that it can be falsified entirely, though, otherwise it’s not scientific. The Big Bang metatheory could be proven wrong by observations of galaxies that substantially deviate from Hubble’s law. A helium-4 abundance much less than 25% couldn’t be consistent with the Big Bang metatheory, etc.

I think it’s also true to call evolution a metatheory which says something like “all life on earth is descended from a common ancestor(s); observed variations between different species are due to mutations and natural selection.” Darwin’s early model within the metatheory of evolution was extremely simplistic. He didn’t rule out Lamarckian inheritance, so in the strictest sense his theory was falsified in the 1940s by the modern evolutionary synthesis with Mendelian genetics. In the 1970s, punctuated equilibrium revised the existing view that speciation rates were largely determined by mutation rates (and therefore constant in time) by proposing that selection pressures due to migration events or environmental changes also play a significant role. Dawkins’ continuously variable speedism seems like the most accurate viewpoint to me regarding this debate. Evolution can also be falsified entirely, as I’ve noted.

Similarly, germ theory probably qualifies as a metatheory: “microorganisms are the cause of many diseases.” This metatheory has a rich history, introduced ~1000 BCE in ancient Hindu texts, debated by famous Persian scientists ~1000 CE, and more recently demonstrated by Louis Pasteur in the 1860s.

Modern medicine couldn’t exist without this metatheory, but the earliest germ theories probably asserted that all diseases were caused by microorganisms. That’s patently false: some cancers and genetic ailments aren’t contagious at all because their origins are completely different. Not to mention the fact that viruses (arguably) don’t qualify as living organisms. But discrediting the germ metatheory would require showing that microorganisms aren’t responsible for diseases such as cholera that are commonly attributed to them. For instance, these vectors could be an innocent by-product of miasms. (Let me stress that there is no evidence at present to support such a notion.)

Written by Marble on March 25, 2009 at 9:28 PM

I have an interest in AI, physics, astronomy, and am very keen to work out the reality of the spirituality portrayed by Christianity and its roots.

I’ve generally avoided entering heated discussions about evolution because I feel they create a lot of hot air and not much progress. I also think (controversially perhaps) that the inability to question the ‘accepted opinion’ is a very human foible – not limited to people of religion, nor excluding those of higher intellect. I like William Beaty’s page of maverick scientists and thought it interesting you quoted Carl Sagan

… oh wow – just discovered your theological journey article searching for your Carl Sagan quote… [ed note: the quote is here but that theology article led to a side conversation]

Written by Dumb Scientist on March 26, 2009 at 2:37 AM

I like William Beaty’s page of maverick scientists …

Interesting page. Scientists sometimes say that the only way for a new theory to be accepted is for the old scientists to die. I’d like to think that’s a pessimistic viewpoint, though.

Written by Marble on March 26, 2009 at 6:12 AM

Here’s just one place where I think it’s happening today (astronomy). I came across the electric universe theory a few years ago and was majorly impressed. Prior to that I just accepted that the moon’s craters were impacts, that comets were dirty snowballs of melting ice, that the Sun was powered by fusion – but I couldn’t quite comprehend how we got a flat galaxy, flat solar system and flat rings around Saturn via gravity… so I googled for an explanation a few years back and didn’t find anything that really explained it, a year later the question burned again – and that’s when I found that site and one or two others. I was blown away. There were explaining so much more and poking significant holes in the current understanding of astronomy. (I’ll come back to this.)

Actually – around the same time and unrelated to the electric universe – this image / series of images really nailed home to me that I no longer believed the astronomers really knew what they were talking about…

What’s fascinating about this is that the star is believed to be too far away for ‘expanding shell’ to be anything other than a brief flash of light traveling through concentric shells of dust – because if it was dust moving that distance over that period of time would be moving around the speed of light…. i.e. – they say, it can’t be what clearly appears to be an expanding shell of dust due to its high velocity so it must be a light echo.

Now on the original NASA description (which I read some years ago – which now seems to be replaced with the above ones) was a prediction based on the nature of a light echo (which I found no fault with) – it was that the ’shell’ would appear to contract inward as the light bouncing off the back of the shell finally made it to Earth. Funnily enough – it ain’t happening, and I never expected it to. And it appears NASA have retracted that prediction. So I’ll contend that with mon 838 what you’re seeing actually is what you’re getting. An expanding single shell of dust. And I suspect the dust’s velocity / expansion is slowing, rather than having a constant expansion rate at the speed of light as the light fades. I just tonight discovered the Groucho Marx quote – “Who you gonna believe? Me? Or your lying eyes?” ;)

So basically I believe that it’s the light from the star illuminating the singular dust shell – and it’ll continue to fade as the dust disperses – but that will (continue) to have a different visual affect to that of a true light echo. But the ramifications of that are huge! Either our distance measurements are off (it’s apparently a bit dodgy anyway once parallax runs out), and/or our understanding of the speed of light is in question (I suppose dark matter will bound to the rescue there).

The thing that impresses me the most about the electric universe is that its explanation of a number of plainly visible astronomical phenomena can be physically demonstrated: crater creation (from here), Equatorial Ridges and Saturn’s Rings

I drilled through that site & more like it over a couple of months, and while there are some aspects I’m not sure about / disagree with – I’ve got no doubt that they’ve fired the first shots in the oncoming astronomical revolution ;) My unfinished comment about Carl Sagan was that he is naturally dismissive & derisive of the electrical universe… But there is so much evidence there – plain as day evidence – that it warrants a much deeper look. So the revolution isn’t starting from the top / the high priests of science ;) I think the evidence is so plain though – that it wont take the older generation to drop off…surely… ;)

BTW – here’s a link for an electromagnetically shrunken coin.

Written by Dumb Scientist on March 26, 2009 at 7:35 AM

Here’s just one place where I think it’s happening today (astronomy). I came across the electric universe theory a few years ago and was majorly impressed.

I’ve seen it too, but wasn’t very impressed. I tend to agree with the wikipedia page’s “comparison to mainstream cosmology.” The main problem is that plasma cosmology introduces lots of new assumptions, and can’t account for nearly as many phenomena as mainstream cosmology. For example…

Prior to that I just accepted that the moon’s craters were impacts,

We’ve seen meteorites causing craters. It’s an established fact. I’m thinking of the craters that have formed on Earth during recorded history, as well as craters that have formed on the moon and been seen by our telescopes (it looks like a single bright flash, not a lightning-like spark), and events such as Shoemaker-Levy 9 which show that comets do strike planets.

Yes, the electric universe page shows pictures of scorch marks that look like craters, but they simply assert that the solar system was more “electrically active” in the past. This might happen on Io (because its proximity to Jupiter opens up a giant EM flux tube) but in any other case I think it’s a solution in search of a problem.

that comets were dirty snowballs of melting ice,

Which has been confirmed by spectroscopic analysis. We can point spectrometers at comets and analyze the spectral fingerprints of the comets, verifying that they’re made of water ice.

that the Sun was powered by fusion

Solar physics is probably one of the most impressively accurate theories ever developed. It accounts for not only the behavior of the Sun, but also explains the light spectra of much larger and much smaller stars, as well as explaining the way stars die.

Here’s an example: as the “electric universe” says, scientists used to be confused by the fact that we could only see 1/3 of the neutrinos expected from the Sun. The particle physicists measuring the neutrino flux kept saying the problem was due to solar physicists- that they’d just gotten their models of the solar interior wrong. The solar physicists stuck by their answer, and eventually we discovered that neutrinos have mass (which surprised the particle physicists) and as a result they “oscillate” between three flavors of neutrinos. Since the particle physicists were only looking for one flavor, they missed the other two.

Solar physics essentially rewrote particle physics, which really impresses me.

– but I couldn’t quite comprehend how we got a flat galaxy, flat solar system and flat rings around Saturn via gravity…

The galaxy is believed to have condensed from a much larger cloud of primordial hydrogen and helium (there’s some evidence that supermassive black holes played a large role in this process). Because the proto-galaxy condensed from something much larger, its moment of inertia reduced dramatically, rather like an ice-skater drawing her arms in to spin faster. This caused the rotation rate of the galaxy to increase around whatever axis the angular momentum pointed originally, which is completely random for each galaxy.

This doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be any spherical-like orbits, just that there are more objects orbiting in the disk that’s perpendicular to the axis of rotation than in any other plane. Here’s the punchline: over billions of years, the objects that aren’t orbiting in the galaxy’s disk have close encounters with the more numerous objects in the disk, and are either flung out of the galaxy or put into more normal orbits. The same process accounts for the fact that all planets in the Solar System orbit in a common plane. (Incidentally, elliptical galaxies look different because they’ve collided with other galaxies “recently,” disrupting the natural flat spiral shape.)

Actually – around the same time and unrelated to the electric universe – this image / series of images really nailed home to me that I no longer believed the astronomers really knew what they were talking about…

What’s fascinating about this is that the star is believed to be too far away for ‘expanding shell’ to be anything other than a brief flash of light traveling through concentric shells of dust – because if it was dust moving that distance over that period of time would be moving around the speed of light…. i.e. – they say, it can’t be what clearly appears to be an expanding shell of dust due to its high velocity so it must be a light echo.

The stars “clearly” rotate around the Earth once every 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4 seconds. Anyone who attempts to explain that away as the “rotating Earth” is just trying to get you to disbelieve your lying eyes. If you think that’s silly, keep in mind that some people literally believe it to be true.

Now on the original NASA description (which I read some years ago – which now seems to be replaced with the above ones) was a prediction based on the nature of a light echo (which I found no fault with) – it was that the ’shell’ would appear to contract inward as the light bouncing off the back of the shell finally made it to Earth. Funnily enough – it ain’t happening, and I never expected it to. And it appears NASA have retracted that prediction.

I’m not privy to these details. I’m also not convinced that there really isn’t any evidence of reflections from the back of the nebula. If you’re really curious, google the principle investigator and ask him if he’d help you understand it. Most scientists like to talk about their work with the general public as long as people ask polite questions in a non-confrontational manner.

But for the sake of argument, let’s say NASA predicted that the reflections from the back would make the nebula appear to shrink and then retracted those predictions because it didn’t happen. I’d like to know the diameter of the nebula, which converted into light travel time would tell us how long we’d have to wait. I’d also like to know the light spectrum, the dust density and the dust size distribution. This would allow me to calculate the scatter of the light, perhaps using Mie theory.

I suspect what’s happening here is that the light isn’t as strongly scattered backwards as it is in the forward direction. So the echo from the front part of the nebula is brighter than the reflection of the back part of the nebula because the light from the back part of the nebula has to be reflected nearly 180 degrees. I can’t be sure without devoting a lot of time to this problem that I don’t have, though.

Also, scattered light from the back of the nebula would be scattered again on its way to us as it passes through the front part of the nebula, so that complicates the interpretation somewhat.

So I’ll contend that with mon 838 what you’re seeing actually is what you’re getting. An expanding single shell of dust. And I suspect the dust’s velocity / expansion is slowing , rather than having a constant expansion rate at the speed of light as the light fades. I just tonight discovered the Groucho Marx quote – “Who you gonna believe? Me? Or your lying eyes?” ;)

So basically I believe that it’s the light from the star illuminating the singular dust shell – and it’ll continue to fade as the dust disperses – but that will (continue) to have a different visual affect to that of a true light echo. But the ramifications of that are huge! Either our distance measurements are off (it’s apparently a bit dodgy anyway once parallax runs out), and/or our understanding of the speed of light is in question (I suppose dark matter will bound to the rescue there).

Your explanation opens up a giant can of worms. We have an enormous amount of evidence that the galaxy is ~100,000 LY across, that Andromeda is ~2,000,000 LY away, and that lightspeed is 299,792,458 m/s. You’re trying to solve a really tiny mystery, but in the process you’re going to have to explain a lot of astronomical observations.

I don’t have time to fully describe the last century of astronomy, but I’ll note that our distance measurements are based on (in order of increasing distance) parallax, Cepheid variables, type 1A supernova, and redshift measurements. This is a good overview.

It’s true that we’re constantly recalibrating these “standard candles” and that all science is subject to change from new information. The problem is that our observations place rigorously defined error bars on those distances. I wouldn’t be surprised if these measurements are off by 10-20% because the error bars really are that big.

But if this echo is anything but light, you’re talking about a HUGE change in these distance measurements, or the speed of light. This kind of change would require you to explain all the measurements made by telescopes all over the world for the last century. I hope you like tilting against windmills…

Also, dark matter wouldn’t have anything to do with this. Dark matter was originally an hypothesis that explained the anomalous velocity rotation curves within galaxies and the unusually high orbital velocities of entire galaxies in superclusters. But it’s been experimentally verified by the Bullet cluster. In addition, the WMAP results are inexplicable without a certain amount of non-baryonic dark matter and something bizarre called dark energy.

Dark matter/energy are ridiculously complicated topics, but they’re not simply “fudge factors” that scientists throw at phenomena they don’t understand.

Equatorial Ridges

Interesting coincidence: I recently met a scientist– Emily Dahlberg– at last December’s AGU Fall Meeting who was studying the Iapetus ridge. She presented three theories and cast serious doubt on all of them. We really don’t know why the ridge exists, but I read that page and don’t see how plasma cosmology has a better explanation for all the various mysteries of the ridge.

Saturn’s Rings

As far as I can tell, the Cassini probe has been discovering new rings and gaps in the ring system, and they don’t seem to be having trouble describing them with standard gravitational physics. It’s weird physics- moons can actually push rings away with their gravity (counterintuitive, has to do with rotating coordinate systems), but it’s all comprehensible with enough math.

BTW – here’s a link for an electromagnetically shrunken coin.

Yes, electromagnetism is a very powerful force. It’s 10³⁶ times more powerful than gravity, in fact. So I can understand its appeal in terms of explaining the universe. Maybe we’ve even underestimated the importance of interstellar plasma interactions. Who knows?

It’s true that both gravity and electromagnetism have infinite range and can cross empty space (the electric universe site claims that scientists don’t acknowledge that electromagnetic forces can cross empty space, but I have yet to meet a physicist who’s that ignorant). The sweeping claims made by plasma cosmology are ignored by mainstream physicists because electric charges come in two types which tend to attract each other and cancel out. Gravitational mass only comes in positive quantities, so it never cancels out.

As a result, the universe’s large scale structure is dominated by gravitational interactions. Galaxies form because of gravity, and random collisions between objects form the flat disk shape. Stars collapse because of gravity until they become hot enough to fuse hydrogen, then remain stabilized by gravity until it ultimately ends when nuclear fuel runs out, etc.

Written by Marble on March 26, 2009 at 10:22 AM

Yeah – I’ll admit I’ve never bothered with trying to distinguish between the electric universe & the plasma cosmology – I figured they were largely on the same track.

Wikiquote – Most astrophysicists accept dark matter as a real phenomenon and a vital ingredient in structure formation, which cannot be explained by appeal to electromagnetic processes

Obviously most astrophysics agreeing, a fact does not make – and a citation is required for ‘cannot be explained’.

See this link for an electrical simulation of spiral galaxy formation. Of course I haven’t deconstructed his mathematical model or attempted to reproduce it in my microwave – so I’m going to have to take it on face value.

But if this echo is anything but light, you’re talking about a HUGE change in these distance measurements, or the speed of light. This kind of change would require you to explain all the measurements made by telescopes all over the world for the last century. I hope you like tilting against windmills…

If the speed of light dramatically changes outside our solar system… then why wouldn’t our observations still be consistent with what we have – how would we know / not know if light travels much faster or slower between the stars & systems? And how many light years across are those huge galaxies – yet we seem to see both arms practically identical (well my very basic observation – I don’t know if there’s any research to indicate that the stars on the far side of the galaxies are ‘younger’ or if the arms are skewed to allow for the distant light taking longer to reach us etc).

Solar physics is probably one of the most impressively accurate theories ever developed. It accounts for not only the behavior of the Sun, but also explains the light spectra of much larger and much smaller stars, as well as explaining the way stars die.

I’m not sure it’s that good. And I don’t think history bears out your assertion. Solar physics is probably one of the most impressively modified theories that changes on a regular basis. The Sun only became a fusion powered entity when we discovered fusion for instance. And I believe stars have only recently been shown to consist mostly hydrogen & helium (apart from the core in older/larger stars), and that the spectrometer readings of elements present are due to the extreme heat effectively bouncing electrons through the orbital shells of the hydrogen. (If I’m correctly recalling the 2006 astronomy 162 podcast of lectures I’ve listened to recently.) Stars are changing brightness, size, colour too rapidly for the current theory. The corona is too hot. When was dark matter & energy ‘discovered’? Weren’t the insides of the galaxies meant to spin faster? This is largely how astonomy works these days – either ignore the evidence that doesn’t fit the model, or change the model to refit the evidence – the latter of which is fine – but if the model’s not making predictions… I think your model is kinda worthless – falsifiability or something isn’t it?.. ;P

We’ve seen meteorites causing craters. It’s an established fact. I’m thinking of the craters that have formed on Earth during recorded history, as well as craters that have formed on the moon and been seen by our telescopes (it looks like a single bright flash, not a lightning-like spark), and events such as Shoemaker-Levy 9 which show that comets do strike planets.

Yes, the electric universe page shows pictures of scorch marks that look like craters, but they simply assert that the solar system was more “electrically active” in the past. I can maybe see this being true on Io (because its proximity to Jupiter opens up a giant EM flux tube) but in any other case I think it’s a solution in search of a problem.

I’m not disputing that physical impacts occur – but perhaps you can point me to some images or descriptions of craters caused by such impacts? Why are the impact craters (say on the moon for arguments sake), pretty much perfectly circular? Unless some sort of atomic type explosion is invoked upon impact – I can’t see how the pretty much all the impacts on the moon would be perpendicular to the moon’s surface, considering that the moon has such a weak gravity well, because I figure a lot of those large craters caused by large / fast moving meteorites that should really spread themselves along the moon’s surface in the direction the meteorite was travelling. And then you have to explain the flat bottoms and ridge walls – which the electrical machining can clearly demonstrate (and the little peak in the middle occasionally – which probably rules out an explosion BTW).

Which has been confirmed by spectroscopic analysis. We can point spectrometers at comets and analyze the spectral fingerprints of the comets, verifying that they’re made of water ice.

You’re studying for a PhD right – I’ll forgive you for not being up on it all ;)

Here’s an example: as the “electric universe” says, scientists used to be confused by the fact that we could only see 1/3 of the neutrinos expected from the Sun.

So if we can’t get comet dust right… how much more so exotic particles – don’t we only detect 1 a day or something – as a flash of light in a large water container miles underground? (I’m just filling in space here cause I’m having trouble finding the EU’s rebuttal.)

And I’m not saying the Sun doesn’t have fusion reactions – it’s just that they’re not the main power source. If the fusion reaction in the center was the source of heat then why is the corona (the outer most atmosphere) orders of magnitude hotter than the Sun’s surface (photosphere). How does the heat get to the corona and stay there without moving back? They’re speculating of course – but as far as I’m aware – there’s no demonstrable mechanism. But an arc discharge where the energy is coming from the outside I perceive as a less problematic explanation. Combine that with a radial field flattening the solar system due to the incoming energy feeding the Sun – then it does tie in nicely – even if I don’t know what I’m talking about ;)

As far as I can tell, the Cassini probe as been discovering new rings and gaps in the ring system, and they don’t seem to be having trouble describing them with standard gravitational physics. It’s weird physics- moons can actually push rings away with their gravity (counterintuitive, has to do with rotating coordinate systems), but it’s all comprehensible with enough math.

I’ll take the simpler model – which is electrical repulsion. Tends to push things like that. And you have those IO plumes remember…so there’s no doubt there’s significant electrical charge available. What’s more is that the ring reforms too. Gravity just doesn’t do that – I don’t care how much math you throw at it ;) And that wouldn’t be similar math to the one that has the bug-hole paradox in it? Or the barn-pole one? I’m sorry but paradoxes particularly like those tell me there’s something wrong somewhere… (in the model – not reality … *plugs ears so doesn’t have to enter philosphical debates on reality*).

Your explanation opens up a giant can of worms.

But if you don’t ask the questions, people generally don’t start to think of the answers… and they just keep accepting the high priests (peer reviewed) version of reality ;)

Sometimes the devil is in the details.

Your explanation opens up a giant can of worms.

Revolutions are messy affairs….

It’s true that both gravity and electromagnetism have infinite range and can cross empty space (the electric universe site claims that scientists don’t acknowledge that electromagnetism can cross empty space, but I have yet to meet a physicist who’s that ignorant). But the sweeping claims made by plasma cosmology are ignored by mainstream physicists because electric charges come in two types, and they tend to attract each other and cancel out. Gravitational mass only comes in positive quantities, so it never cancels out.

Apparently plasma effects scale really well (electric machining micro craters to craters on the moon – I know at this point you may not accept that – or planetary Lichtenberg figures perhaps but I’m dying here due to lack of sleep…). And plasma doesn’t just ‘cancel out’ charges – see the Birkeland currents / plasma sheaths for starters. Of course you could ask what powers the super galactic currents – but well – apart from super cluster currents etc – I suppose we could equally ask what kicked off the big bang.

Here’s the 3 legs of the stool that I think make it very difficult to upturn the current theories

You need billions of years for:

1. Evolution
2. Gravitationally based solar system stability
3. Geological weathering through water & wind

That ties biology, geology & astrophysics. The weight against saying such & such an event happened in a much shorter time frame in one field is caused by the other two. However, in my opinion (iamadumbnonscientist) all 3 fields could be reduced to a shorter timespan through the electric universe concepts & creation/ID. Of course I may have to create an anti gravity drive, disprove the constancy of light and build an AI to argue on my behalf before anyone will listen to me….but even then I’m not so sure ;)

Written by Dumb Scientist on March 26, 2009 at 9:53 PM

If the speed of light dramatically changes outside our solar system… then why wouldn’t our observations still be consistent with what we have – how would we know / not know if light travels much faster or slower between the stars & systems?

First, the problem of varying physical “constants” has been examined in detail here (see section 3). There’s weak evidence that some physical constants were different in the past, but young Earth creationism requires a much larger change than the evidence supports. In this context “much larger” means millions of times too large.

Second, if the speed of light is different outside of our solar system, there must be a boundary layer (abrupt or gradual) between the region in our solar system with a low speed of light and the outside universe where the speed of light is higher. In either case, this is the definition of a lens. You’re basically saying we live in a glass marble (or glass ellipsoid, or glass ballerina figurine). Look at a glass marble in the Sun sometime- the boundary layer between air and glass bends light and focuses it. This interface bends the light because the speed of light is 33% slower in glass than in air.

Even if the boundary layer is gradual, that’s the same as the case of the Earth’s atmosphere: light travels around 0.03% slower in air than vacuum, and this change occurs gradually as the air gets thicker towards the ground. This allows people standing on top of a mountain to see over their geometrically defined horizon because the light bends down towards them. It’s also part of the reason the moon turns red during lunar eclipses (the moon is in the Earth’s shadow, but it’s being lit up by the refracted light of all the sunrises and sunsets in the world).

If light really is faster outside our solar system, that boundary layer would have experimentally measurable consequences:

• The sky would look weird– some regions would be totally dark, and the “fixed” stars would shift in queasy patterns as the Earth revolved around the Sun.
• Depending on the geometry of the boundary layer, at least one focal point would exist where electromagnetic radiation across the frequency spectrum are concentrated. All those frequencies would have to be focused to the same point because our local measurements reveal all EM radiation to travel at the same speed in our vacuum, and remote measurements of extra-galactic events reveal the same thing to within the limits of experimental uncertainty. This means that the boundary layer you’re proposing can’t have any chromatic aberration. So the solar system would have “death zones” that would be subjected to extreme radiation whenever a “local” supernova exploded… and I haven’t seen evidence for anything like this.
• An abrupt boundary layer would result in total internal reflection. If the boundary layer is spherical, sufficiently large and centered on the Sun, the Sun’s light wouldn’t be totally reflected, but depending on the boundary’s size the light reflected from Jupiter and Saturn (along with their radio emissions) would bounce around the solar system.

Transmission coefficients are also dependent on the relative speeds of light in both regions, and generally not the same for different frequencies. The boundary would have to be almost perfectly clear across all observed frequencies to account for its invisibility, which means it has to have some kind of idealized anti-reflective coating.

And how many light years across are those huge galaxies – yet we seem to see both arms practically identical (well my very basic observation – I don’t know if there’s any research to indicate that the stars on the far side of the galaxies are ‘younger’ or if the arms are skewed to allow for the distant light taking longer to reach us etc).

Cool! Some new evidence indicates that the Milky Way is about twice as big as I thought it was. The Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) “networked” many telescopes together to form a telescope with unprecedented angular resolution, and imaged star-producing clusters on the opposite side of the galaxy in radio waves twice- once in January and once in June to obtain parallax measurements. Also, their density vs. distance measurements suggest that the Milky Way has 4 arms, not 2 as previously believed.

I guess that some medium-distance standard candles need to be revised again, by a factor of at most 2. That’s a larger error than I would’ve expected off the top of my head (note that I’m a physicist, not an astronomer). Anyway, I found that just now and thought it was both informative and relevant.

To answer your question, pretty much all galaxies are about the same size as ours or slightly smaller. It used to be odd that Andromeda seemed so much larger than our galaxy, but the VLBA showed that this was because, paradoxically, it’s harder to study our own galaxy than it is to study galaxies millions of light years away. And in Andromeda’s case, the disk is nearly edge-on, so the near stars appear 200,000 years younger than the farther ones. But since most stars live for billions of years this isn’t noticeable. Stars the size of our Sun live for 5-10 billion years, smaller stars like red dwarfs last tens of billions of years and larger stars can shine so brightly that they exhaust their fuel in mere millions of years. So the 200,000 years it takes for light to cross the galaxy is a small percentage of the lifetimes of all but the largest stars, which are being born all the time so they don’t have a uniform age anyway.

The Sun only became a fusion powered entity when we discovered fusion for instance.

So… you’re saying it’s surprising we didn’t realize that the Sun was fusion powered before fusion was discovered in the 1930s? (I consider Bethe’s and Chandrasekhar’s works in 1939 to mark the dawn of modern solar physics.)

And I believe stars have only recently been shown to consist mostly hydrogen & helium (apart from the core in older/larger stars)

That depends on your definition of “recently.” Helium and hydrogen were found to dominate the Sun’s spectrum in 1868. So it wasn’t surprising when fusion-based stellar models developed in the 1930s didn’t allow for large percentages of other elements. Otherwise fusion would be harder to start, causing the minimum size of a viable star to be higher than we’ve observed.

… and that the spectrometer readings of elements present are due to the extreme heat effectively bouncing electrons through the orbital shells of the hydrogen.

I don’t understand this point. What elements are you talking about? I’d be interested to see if there’s some way for spectroscopic “fingerprints” to be mistaken for something else (which is what I think you’re saying) but the predicted signatures have extremely narrow peaks in the frequency domain, and thermal motion usually just results in Doppler broadening…

(If I’m correctly recalling the 2006 astronomy 162 podcast of lectures I’ve listened to recently.) Stars are changing brightness, size, colour too rapidly for the current theory.

I think it’s likely that steady-state predictions are simpler than predictions of the transition states. In other words, it’s easy to predict the temperature and neutrino flux from fusion in a stable star, but transitions and oscillations are harder to describe. At least, that’s been my experience in a different field of physics…

When was dark matter & energy ‘discovered’?

1933 – Zwicky studies the Coma cluster of galaxies and is surprised to find that these galaxies are orbiting each other much faster than he predicted based on their visible mass. He proposes that each galaxy actually contains much more mass than is visible.

1959 – Measurements of galactic rotational velocities conflict with expected velocities based on the amount of matter observed to be present. The dark matter concept proposed by Zwicky is found to solve this problem too.

1970s – Big Bang nucleosynthesis has trouble reconciling observations of high deuterium density with the expansion rate of the universe. Non-baryonic dark matter solves this problem as well.

At this point, dark matter was simply an hypothesis. MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) was another hypothesis with equal weight. But then in 2006 measurements of the Bullet Cluster supported the dark matter hypothesis over the MOND hypothesis.

Simultaneously, WMAP (2001-present) measured the microwave background radiation and independently confirmed the existence of dark matter. It also revealed an even larger amount of “dark energy” which confirmed the 1998 discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. I can’t claim to understand any of the debate after that point, though: it’s over my head.

Weren’t the insides of the galaxies meant to spin faster?

Yes, but it’s a little complicated. Kepler’s laws say inner planets orbit faster than outer planets, but in a very specific manner: “the square of the orbital period of the planet is directly proportional to the cube of the radius of the orbit.

That wasn’t what scientists were expecting when they looked at galaxies, though. Their models accounted for the fact that galaxies are densely filled with stars rather than dominated by a single point mass like our solar system. Thus, stars at the edges should be a little faster than the Keplerian estimate. The problem was that the actual observations revealed a velocity curve (i.e. orbital velocity of stars versus their distance from the center of the galaxy) that was way too flat. In other words, stars at the edge were traveling much too fast.

But then someone noticed that if you hypothesized the existence of a (nearly) uniform “halo” of matter around the galaxy, the problem went away (I had to do this homework problem in my cosmology class). This hypothesis of a non-interacting dark matter halo wasn’t distinguishable from MOND until several years ago, though.

This is largely how astonomy works these days – either ignore the evidence that doesn’t fit the model, or change the model to refit the evidence – the latter of which is fine – but if the model’s not making predictions… I think your model is kinda worthless – falsifiability or something isn’t it?.. ;P

I’ve never seen astronomers ignore evidence- not the astronomers whose papers I read or my astronomer friends. Perhaps my experiences are less representative of the astronomy community than yours are, though. Can’t say for sure.

I agree that models which don’t make falsifiable predictions are worthless. I’ve just never seen that happen in peer reviewed journals. Theories are modified by new evidence all the time, but those modifications make predictions of their own. An excellent example is that the dark matter hypothesis drastically modified our understanding of galactic structure and evolution. It used to be indistinguishable from MOND until someone realized that dark matter’s signature weak interactions imply that it would behave differently in a collision between galaxies. The ionized gas that makes up the bulk of the visible mass of the galaxies would collide and slow down, while the dark matter of each galaxy would fly right through the other galaxy and keep going. It’s possible to view the total amount of matter in this case because matter (dark or ordinary) acts as a gravitational lens- it bends light from even more distant galaxies.

By carefully examining the extent of this lensing, a map of the total amount of matter was revealed. It wasn’t in the same place as the light from the ionized gas. In fact, the mass is centered along several lobes outside each galaxy along the direction of their motion, which is exactly what the dark matter hypothesis predicted decades earlier.

I’m not disputing that physical impacts occur – but perhaps you can point me to some images or descriptions of craters caused by such impacts?

• NASA routinely observes craters being formed on the moon. It’s a serious problem for the (possibly) upcoming moon base, so they’re trying hard to characterize the impact frequencies and size distributions to keep the colonists safe. Here’s the best video I’ve found that shows an impact.
• The largest impact in recorded history was the Tunguska event in Russia in 1908. Recently, researchers have claimed that the impact crater is hidden under a lake. I think this is the lake in question, and they’re planning to take core samples to confirm this (by searching for the expected ejecta at the right depth).
• In 1947, a meteorite hit Russia and left several craters, the largest of which was 26m across and 6m deep.
• In 2007, a meteorite hit Peru, and left a roughly circular crater 13m across and 4.5m deep.

Also, over a thousand meteorites have been recovered after eyewitnesses followed the fireball to the rock. These meteorites show a significantly different chemical makeup than earthly rocks, and the resulting ejecta is spread over a wide area. Thus a chemical fingerprint of a foreign object is recorded. The best known example is Barringer Meteor crater. In 1960, Shoemaker showed that it was caused by a high velocity impact with an iron-nickel asteroid.

Any alternative explanation would have to explain why this ejecta looks so different than the rest of the Earth, and why it looks so similar to meteorites.

Why are the impact craters (say on the moon for arguments sake), pretty much perfectly circular? Unless some sort of atomic type explosion is invoked upon impact -

That’s actually a pretty good description of what happens. The kinetic energy of a multi-kiloton rock moving at an orbital velocity is so large that the resulting explosion is sometimes more powerful than even the Tsar Bomba (without the radioactivity).

I can’t see how the pretty much all the impacts on the moon would be perpendicular to the moon’s surface, considering that the moon has such a weak gravity well, because I figure a lot of those large craters caused by large / fast moving meteorites that should really spread themselves along the moon’s surface in the direction the meteorite was traveling.

They’re not all perpendicular, it’s just that the resulting explosion is relatively spherical regardless of the incoming direction of the meteorite.

And then you have to explain the flat bottoms and ridge walls – which the electrical machining can clearly demonstrate (and the little peak in the middle occasionally – which probably rules out an explosion BTW).

Craters with flat bottoms are larger, commonly known as impact basins due to their size. The larger size results in greater melting of the rocks, which makes the craters flatter. Here’s a good site.

All these features have been studied and reproduced both in the lab and in simulations. In the 1960s scientists literally shot big guns at cement and observed craters that matched observations. In 1981 the central peaks were examined in more detail, and explained by the interaction of two shock waves. More recent research is being performed by scientists like Dan Durda: KC-135 microgravity experiments in regolith properties and cratering mechanics, Mark Cintala, Josh Colwell, and Daniel D. Durda. (From here.)

Which has been confirmed by spectroscopic analysis. We can point spectrometers at comets and analyze the spectral fingerprints of the comets, verifying that they’re made of water ice.

You’re studying for a PhD right – I’ll forgive you for not being up on it all ;)

That’s fascinating– I didn’t catch that discovery. The percentage of water in comets may be lower than I thought before, making the separation between comets and asteroids fuzzier. Interesting. I’d imagine that there are still reasons for comets to be different than asteroids in more circular orbits because comets are continually re-heated when they pass by the Sun, and cross many planets’ orbits during their circuits through the inner solar system so they probably accrete more dust.

But spectroscopic measurements of comets have been conclusive: comets contain water. Also, Cassini has literally flown through water plumes from Enceladus which is a moon of Saturn that might be a captured comet. Certainly these new observations push down the likely percentage of water, but it has to be higher than zero otherwise other observations wouldn’t make sense.

So if we can’t get comet dust right… how much more so exotic particles – don’t we only detect 1 a day or something – as a flash of light in a large water container miles underground? (I’m just filling in space here cause I’m having trouble finding the EU’s rebuttal.)

We’ll always be getting stuff wrong. That I can promise you. But the people doing the comet research aren’t the same people detecting neutrinos, and they’re using very different physics. I don’t see a connection between the two fields that’s strong enough to make me think that failures in one field imply anything in particular about the conclusions from the other field…

And you’re right– neutrino detection is really difficult. Despite freakishly large detectors, I think your estimate of the flash counts isn’t too far off. That’s why it takes them a long time to build up enough statistics to rule out this-or-that physical theory. But based on their successes in correlating increases in flash count rates to supernovae, I think the detectors work correctly.

And I’m not saying the Sun doesn’t have fusion reactions – it’s just that they’re not the main power source.

Then you’d have to explain the fact that we see just enough neutrinos from the Sun to account for the fusion-based solar models. Remember that solar physicists (usually regarded as lowly experimentalists) went up against the particle physicists (if physicists had superstars, it would be these guys) and they won. Furthermore, after the particle physicists relented, neutrino oscillation was independently confirmed in at least three different ways.

Neutrinos were predicted to exist long before any direct evidence was found. Pauli actually predicted the existence of neutrinos when analyzing beta decay (a type of nuclear reaction) in 1930. Using nothing more than conservation of energy and momentum, Pauli predicted a particle that wasn’t seen until 1956. As far as I know, neutrinos are only created in nuclear reactions. If fusion isn’t powering the Sun, those neutrinos are a big mystery.

If the fusion reaction in the center was the source of heat then why is the corona (the outer most atmosphere) orders of magnitude hotter than the Sun’s surface (photosphere).

It’s interesting that you should bring this up when less than a week ago, a solution to this problem was proposed. Ironically, the explanation could be a type of plasma wave called an Alfven wave, named after Hannes Alfven. Yes, the father of plasma cosmology.

How does the heat get to the corona and stay there without moving back?

I don’t know. I’ve tried to figure out if “the electric Sun” can explain this better, but I don’t understand the idea that the Sun is charged. The solar wind is neutral- you can confirm that by looking at probe measurements of nuclei and electrons, and they’re the same.

Newer, more comprehensive data regarding the solar wind is also available from Ulysses. It confirms that solar wind is electrically neutral, but a charged Sun should only be repelling one type of charge.

The corona’s high temperature has been mysterious for a long time; I just don’t see any advantage to the electric Sun idea.

But an arc discharge where the energy is coming from the outside I perceive as a less problematic explanation. Combine that with a radial field flattening the solar system due to the incoming energy feeding the Sun – then it does tie in nicely – even if I don’t know what I’m talking about ;)

You’re in good company; I don’t understand that paragraph either.

I’ll take the simpler model – which is electrical repulsion. Tends to push things like that. And you have those IO plumes remember…so there’s no doubt there’s significant electrical charge available.

Electrical forces tend to push charged objects. I think you’d have a lot of trouble reproducing Cassini’s optical views of the rings with Cassini’s measurements of the electric field in the Saturnian system. I encourage you to try, but note that Io is a moon of Jupiter, not Saturn.

Also, the simplest model makes the fewest assumptions. The weird gravitational effects I’m describing don’t really make any more assumptions than Newton did when he conceived inverse square gravity. It’s just that in a rotating coordinate system, inverse square gravity has counterintuitive results when multiple objects are placed in “orbital resonances.”

Furthermore, it only makes sense to compare the simplicity of two models if their predictions both match the experimental results. I’ve seen proof that inverse square gravity can account for the gaps in Saturn’s ring system, but I haven’t seen any equivalent proof for an electromagnetic origin. I also still don’t understand where all these charges come from, and why they don’t just become neutral by attracting opposite charges.

What’s more is that the ring reforms too. Gravity just doesn’t do that – I don’t care how much math you throw at it ;)

What, exactly, do you mean by “reforms”? Why, exactly, is gravity unable to do that?

And that wouldn’t be similiar math to the one that has the bug-hole paradox in it? Or the barn-pole one? I’m sorry but paradoxes particularly like those tell me there’s something wrong somewhere… (in the model – not reality … *plugs ears so doesn’t have to enter philosphical debates on reality*).

First, you’re describing special relativity, not math itself. Second, the math involved in special relativity is almost entirely unrelated to the math used to describe the orbital resonances that connect Saturnian moons with gaps in the ring system.

Third, the barn-pole paradox isn’t really a paradox. It’s an “apparent” paradox, which means it violates common sense but isn’t internally inconsistent (which is how I’d define the term “paradox” in the context you’re using the word).

Special relativity is one of the most beautiful (IMHO) theories in physics. It’s completely at odds with common sense, and those quirks are given names like “twin paradox” and “barn-pole paradox” but the theory has stood the test of time for over a century. It’s also one of the few “advanced” topics that can be approached without much mathematics. I’ve tried to provide an introduction in this article.

The gist of the barn-pole paradox is that relativity of simultaneity causes the person holding the pole to measure the front and the back doors to open and close at different times, while the person standing still in the barn measures them opening and closing simultaneously. It’s bizarre, even infuriatingly nonsensical. But it’s got experimentally testable consequences: GPS devices wouldn’t work correctly if special relativity was wrong, because they need to take time dilation of the satellite network into account to calculate the position of the GPS receiver in your car. (A separate correction accounts for general relativistic effects.)

A good example of a genuine paradox is the grandfather paradox. This kind of internal inconsistency prompts many physicists to be skeptical of time travel. But it’s nothing like the “apparent” paradoxes in special relativity.

Your explanation opens up a giant can of worms.

But if you don’t ask the questions, people generally don’t start to think of the answers… and they just keep accepting the high priests (peer reviewed) version of reality ;)

I’m not telling you to stop asking questions. I’m just saying that I think your proposal conflicts with nearly every experimental result that I’ve seen.

I’ll try to answer your questions as best I can, but the reality is that I’ve got serious problems with my research and I’m wondering if I’ll be able to graduate after all… I should really be working on my program right now.

Apparently plasma effects scale really well (electric machining micro craters to craters on the moon – I know at this point you may not accept that – or planetary Lichtenberg figures perhaps but I’m dying here due to lack of sleep…). And plasma doesn’t just ‘cancel out’ charges – see the Birkeland currents / plasma sheaths for starters.

Yes, I’m aware that electromagnetic phenomena exist. It’s just that as far as I can tell, the electric universe is saying that electromagnetism is responsible for: the shape of Saturn’s rings, the light from the Sun, the shape of the galaxy, all the craters in existence, etc. I don’t see any reason to think that any of the currently accepted explanations for these phenomena are fundamentally wrong, let alone all of them. Furthermore, in order to fix these “problems,” they’re postulating the existence of huge charges and voltage differences between planets and stars that just don’t make any sense to me.

You need billions of years for:

1. Evolution
2. Gravitationally based solar system stability
3. Geological weathering through water & wind

That ties biology, geology & astrophysics. The weight against saying such & such an event happened in a much shorter time frame in one field is caused by the other two. However, in my opinion (iamadumbnonscientist) all 3 fields could be reduced to a shorter timespan through the electric universe concepts & creation/ID.

At the cost of having to explain (among many other things):

1. Primordial element abundances such as the 25% abundance of helium-4, which is a specific prediction of Big Bang nucleosynthesis.
2. The WMAP cosmic microwave background. Why does its angular power spectrum indicate an age for the universe that’s 13.7 billion years, plus or minus 200 million? Why is it so isotropic (the same in every direction) down to the 10^-5 level?
3. Isochron dating results of old rocks, which depend only on nuclear decay rates being constant in time. Isochron dating isn’t dependent on initial quantities of elements, and the analysis method automatically produces error bars on the obtained age. The oldest rocks we have agree that the Earth is 4.55 billion years old, plus or minus 100 million years or so.

Just to be clear, we can’t be sure that nuclear decay rates are exactly constant. But experiments have placed constraints on the size of any variation in decay rates:

1. Supernovae produce many radioactive elements which slowly decay after the explosion. At first they shine brightly in a spectroscopically unique manner, but over the course of several weeks they fade to half their previous brightness. The amount of time it takes the brightness to fade is a direct measurement of the nuclear decay rate. The best example is supernova 1987A, which lies ~169,000 LY away. That means that when scientists looked at that light in 1987, they were measuring the nuclear decay rate as it was around 169,000 years ago. The results were experimentally indistinguishable from current decay rates, and have been confirmed by similar experiments on SN1991T, which is 60,000,000 light years away.
2. The Oklo natural nuclear reactor left evidence that can be used to determine the fine structure constant and neutron capture rates, both intimately entwined with quantum mechanics’ predictions of nuclear decay rates. This experiment is more ambiguous and as a result the error bars are much larger than the SN1987A constraint, but it’s also consistent with a constant nuclear decay rate. Since the Oklo reactor was active 1.8 billion years ago, the Oklo evidence only supports a change in the fine structure constant of one part in 10 million over that timespan.
3. The increase in nuclear decay rates necessary to increase the “apparent age” of rocks from thousands to billions of years is enormous. This decay rate would make all the mildly radioactive elements in the Earth decay faster, releasing enough heat to melt the crust. It would still be molten to this day unless God made a cosmically sized refrigerator to cool it down fast enough to fit into the creationist timeline.
4. Any change in nuclear decay rates would have to affect all types of nuclear decay identically, otherwise isotopes that decay by different mechanisms (alpha, beta, neutron emission, etc) would’ve decayed at different rates. If these rates changed differently, it would cause isochron dates of the same object but using different isotopes to disagree. To the best of my knowledge, that’s never happened.
5. If nuclear decay rates have changed, then why do ice cores like the one taken at Vostok, Antarctica show agreement between annual layer counts and isochron age? A change in nuclear decay rates wouldn’t affect the annual temperature fluctuations that form the basis of the annual layer counts, so the two different methods of dating the same (~400,000 year old) ice core should be different. They aren’t.

If all these concerns can be adequately explained by a young Earth model, I’d be interested to hear about it.

Written by Marble on March 27, 2009 at 12:05 AM

Ahh… nice. All good stuff.

Ok – for brevity (and the sake of your PhD) I propose to drill down on only two items for now (if you have any time remaining to waste).

1. Crater creation – which is one of the most personally compelling arguments for me and both sides can claim reproducibility to some extent.
2. Speed of light variance outside of the solar system – mainly because this is key to my understanding of some concepts I have under development – so I really want to be convinced that this can be ruled out.

Currently at work – so I’ll digest your replies this evening hopefully. This was just to let you know how I was thinking of proceeding. I had been toying with the idea of getting a physics degree (particularly plasma physics and electromagnetic radiation) – but cost money and I’ve got a family to upkeep.

On the side – You saw the ‘unexpected’ supernova event report on slashdot today? (1st article when I opened it at lunch time funnily enough). Not saying that all theories don’t have to predict everything – but this isn’t by any stretch an isolated incident in astronomy… which is what contributes to my skeptism that it’s hanging together as well as you portray / been portrayed to you.

You’ve also got me wondering if people/scientists are lulled into a false sense of security by error bars too. You were saying previously for distance error was within some x% – but then Andromeda has just turned out to be twice as large (unrelated calculations I realize) – but how big were the error bars on the initial estimate for Andromeda? I’m guessing they weren’t 100%. But I think you’ll obviously agree that ultimately error bars give no guarantee of true error – just of known error within the calculation. So I’m just saying that error bars in themselves give no real assurance of ongoing predictability of the theory. Obviously if all represented data fits within them – fantastic. But you can make a mathematical function for any set of arbitrary data and have very small error retrospectively – but its predictability will be up the creek (over fitted models basically).

Written by Dumb Scientist on March 27, 2009 at 6:45 AM

a) Crater creation – which is one of the most personally compelling arguments for me and both sides can claim reproducibility to some extent.

Frankly, I’m not the right person to ask regarding craters. I was able to find references to this work, but I’ve never studied the equations governing supersonic shock waves. Until I do, I’m completely ignorant of this subject and can’t help you beyond showing you where to continue your research.

b) Speed of light variance outside of the solar system – mainly because this is key to my understanding of some concepts I have under development – so I really want to be convinced that this can be ruled out.

I’m much more familiar with optics and relativity, so discussing this subject will be more productive.

Currently at work – so I’ll digest your replies this evening hopefully. This was just to let you know how I was thinking of proceeding. I had been toying with the idea of getting a physics degree (particularly plasma physics and electromagnetic radiation) – but cost money and I’ve got a family to upkeep.

Considering the questions you’re asking, that would probably be the only way to find rigorous answers. Keep in mind that plasma physics is a highly advanced topic, so you’ll need a 4 year degree in general physics, then at least a year of graduate courses in electrodynamics (Jackson’s textbook is standard, but supplement it with Griffith’s E&M book because it’s simpler and will help provide a grounding in the basics).

Then you’ll get to the plasma physics classes. I don’t want to discourage you, but I feel the need to be honest about the difficulty of the task in front of you.

On the side – You saw the ‘unexpected’ supernova event report on slashdot today? (1st article when I opened it at lunch time funnily enough). Not saying that all theories don’t have to predict everything – but this isn’t by any stretch an isolated incident in astronomy… which is what contributes to my skepticism that it’s hanging together as well as you portray / been portrayed to you.

Yes, we’ll always be surprised by something. Our theories will always have flaws. Once that stops being true, physics will be rather boring.

I think it’s important to gauge how big these flaws are, relative to how many phenomena are satisfactorily explained by the theory in question. Isaac Asimov wrote a great essay on this subject.

You’ve also got me wondering if people/scientists are lulled into a false sense of security by error bars too. You were saying previously for distance error was within some x% – but then Andromeda has just turned out to be twice as large (unrelated calculations I realize)

1. I’m a physicist, not an astronomer.
2. I explicitly made those error bar estimates vague because I was pulling them off the top of my head (I never got proxy servers working, so I need to go into work to access the journals, and a blizzard just hit my town…)
3. The size of our galaxy (not Andromeda) was apparently off by a factor of 2. That’s because we have to peer through the Milky Way’s dusty central bulge to see the other side, and the parallax measurements are very tricky. Other galaxies (such as Andromeda) are much easier to analyze.
4. There’s a big difference between 2 and 1,000,000.

- but how big were the error bars on the initial estimate for Andromeda? I’m guessing they weren’t 100%. But I think you’ll obviously agree that ultimately error bars give no guarantee of true error – just of known error within the calculation. So I’m just saying that error bars in themselves give no real assurance of ongoing predictability of the theory. Obviously if all represented data fits within them – fantastic. But you can make a mathematical function for any set of arbitrary data and have very small error retrospectively – but its predictability will be up the creek (over fitted models basically).

1. It’s true that all error bars assume some underlying model is true. Scientists try to make this underlying model as simple and general as possible. For example, errors are usually assumed to be drawn from a so-called normal distribution (also called a Gaussian distribution).
2. Error bars generally express uncertainty in terms of “sigma” or the standard deviation of those errors. So when a scientist says “plus or minus 10%” she’s probably using a 1-sigma error bar, which means something very specific. It means that given the data and the finite precision of her instruments, there’s a 68% chance that the quantity being measured lies within 10% of the stated value. Of course, that means there’s a 32% chance that the quantity actually lies outside “1 sigma” or “1 standard deviation” error bars.
3. If you look carefully at the normal distribution, you’ll see that the probability of the actual quantity being within 2 standard deviations is 95.45%. Similarly, it’s 99.9999999997440% certain that the actual quantity is within 7 standard deviations.
4. Your million-fold alteration of physics isn’t impossible, just very unlikely. So unlikely, in fact, that I can’t calculate the probability that the actual value of the speed of light (or the age of the universe, or the distance to the stars or galaxies) is outside 1,000,000 standard deviations. This calculation needs to be performed in arbitrary precision arithmetic, because even 64-bit double floats aren’t going to be precise enough to hold such a small number…

Annoyingly, it’s not always easy to predict how long the program will run after each set of modifications. Also, my code occasionally has bugs which make it hang indefinitely. When a program’s expected run time is measured in weeks, it’s reassuring to see regular progress reports. Otherwise I worry that the program has silently crashed.

At first I just slapped a print statement into the outermost for-loop, encased in an if-then statement which only activated once every 1000 loops. The print statement used the time elapsed since the start of the loop and the progress made to estimate the time remaining. It looked a little like this (plus some type casting):

This sufficed until I altered with the settings of the inner loops in a way that increased the run time dramatically. The first notification took hours to appear, which I consider unacceptably slow. Then I tried making the print statement activate every 10 loops to speed up notifications when the run time is very long, but that filled the log file with megabytes of print statements and slowed down the program. It became clear that quick hacks were going to require a lot of ongoing maintenance. I needed a notification system that could automatically adapt to short and long run times.

I call my solution “Automated Notifications”. The latest version is v1.2, which can be downloaded here.

Features:

• The time until the first notification appears can be controlled separately from the other notifications, and it defaults to 10 seconds.
• The amount of time between all subsequent notifications are controlled by a variable which specifies a target interval between notifications. The actual intervals will be within 30% of this target (5 minute default).
• A minimum number (default is 4) of notifications will be printed by notify(). This only activates if the projected run time is less than the chosen interval between notifications.
• The time remaining is printed in a human-readable format using the seconds_to_string() function. Time is reported in years, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds. No more than 2 units will be printed in each statement to reduce clutter (though this value is customizable).
• A print statement reports the time elapsed at the end of the loop, so the estimated time remaining can be judged against how long the loop actually took.
• The outer loop can start at any (positive! — need to fix this!) index, not just 0 as in the example above.
• Most notification options are set above each loop, so multiple loops can be configured differently (see custom_example.cpp).
• It’s probably a good idea to put code into the notification function that saves your data to disk so that if the computer crashes or the power goes out, the application can be restarted from the last notification point. The variable notification.partial_saves_enabled is meant to turn on this unwritten code, but you’ll also need to pass a new argument to the notify() function containing the data you want written to disk.

Requirements:

• Intended for use in C++ programs, tested using the g++ compiler that comes with Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit.
• Your outermost loop must cycle over many indices (dozens or more). The loop can start at any index you want, but it needs to increase by 1 in each loop.
• Requires the iostream, iomanip and vector libraries (available in Ubuntu by default).

The program is split up into 3 files: common_declarations.hpp contains datatype definitions and function declarations, common_functions.cpp has function definitions for notify() and sec2human() while example.cpp is just an example loop which uses Automated Notifications.

This division isn’t necessary, but I’ve found it’s a good way to organize larger software projects. This way, widely used functions that are rarely changed can be declared and defined in the common files and compiled separately from the programs which merely use those functions.

The Makefile included with Automated Notifications compiles in two steps to illustrate this technique. After adding many functions to my version of the common files, the first compilation step takes almost a minute on my computer. This step only occurs when the common files are edited, however, which means it’s rarely needed. The second compilation step, on the other hand, is more frequent and much faster.

By the way, common_declarations.hpp contains the line “using namespace std”. I’ve read that this is bad programming practice, but I haven’t run into any serious consequences yet, and it’s convenient not to have to type “std::” every time I want to use “cout”.

Here’s what example.cpp looks like:

When run, it produces output that looks like this (note that the first line appears within seconds, and the subsequent notifications are 25% apart because the estimated run time of this program is less than the default interval):

I changed the limits of the loops by adding 4 zeros each to i_end and j_end, but the first line still appeared within seconds:

Obviously, I didn’t wait for that one to finish. But the point is that I quickly knew I’d die of old age centuries before it did. Incidentally, I tried adding a few more zeros to j_end and it caused the first notification to take an irritatingly long time to appear. This happens because the outer loop takes a long time to increment just once. I’m not yet sure how I want to address this problem.

Automated Notifications is free software, licensed under the GPLv3 rather than the CC license that the rest of the site uses. If anyone notices any bugs or has any suggestions for how to improve Automated Notifications, please let me know in the comments below. I’m also curious to see how others have solved this problem, regardless of the language it’s written in.

Version History

v1.2 – 2009-03-08 – Simplified default settings to shorten example.cpp, added custom_example.cpp.

v1.1 – 2009-02-27 – Replaced max and min intervals with target_interval.

v1.0 – 2009-02-26 – Original release.

I’ve heard some proposed explanations for this mystery. A woman once told me that she thought motion sickness was a relic of our tree-dwelling ancestors. Young monkeys are probably similar to young humans in the sense that they’re full of energy and devoid of caution. Motion sickness acted as negative reinforcement that discouraged them from swinging through the trees too wildly and losing their grip on the branches.

Another explanation comes from Alastair Reynolds’s novel Redemption Ark. He notes that evolution shaped our genes for many generations before boats and other moving vehicles were invented. Being inside a moving vehicle isn’t a situation evolution ever had to deal with before, so we haven’t been optimized for riding in them. Normally, our sense of balance is maintained by the vestibular system in our inner ears combined with our vision. You can test this by standing on one foot with your eyes open, then close your eyes and find out how much harder it is to keep your balance.

It’s usually impossible for your visual cues to contradict the signals from your inner ears– unless you’re in a moving vehicle. Then the deck of the boat appears stationary to your eyes, but your inner ear insists that it’s moving. It’s not obvious to me why this conflict results in the specific symptoms of motion sickness, though. For instance, why does seasickness manifest as nausea rather than a headache?

Reynolds suggests that motion sickness arose as a defense against hallucinogenic plants. An animal that accidentally eats peyote will experience hallucinations that cause the inner ear to conflict with visual cues just like being inside a moving vehicle. This state of intoxication is potentially deadly to a prey animal who wouldn’t be alert enough to notice a stalking predator. Because the psychoactive chemical is absorbed through the stomach, throwing up is the quickest way to end these hallucinations.

So whenever I get seasick, I’m experiencing the side effects of an evolutionary war between plants and animals. Plants evolved thorns and disorienting chemicals to deter animals from eating them. Animals, in turn, evolved a physiological response to these chemicals which is accidentally triggered by riding on a moving vehicle.

Interesting idea, but how can it be tested? The only falsifications I can think of are that hallucinogenic plants had to have evolved before motion sickness, and species whose ancestors never encountered these plants wouldn’t get seasick. Those seem nearly impossible to verify, but some people seem to be immune to motion sickness, so their genomes could be compared to people like me to identify the genes responsible. I’ve also briefly looked into the role of the area postrema, the region of the brain that controls vomiting. Reynolds suggests this part of the brain can be activated by a conflict between the inner ear and visual cues, but this page notes that it lies outside the blood-brain barrier which suggests that it induces vomiting based on detecting toxins in the blood rather than as the result of sensory conflicts.

I’ve lost track of the number of times my straight female friends have expressed similar tastes. Why should attractiveness be asymmetrical? Here are my current hypotheses, listed in order of decreasing likelihood:

1. It’s common for two genders of a given species to experience drastically different selection pressures. One gender’s evolution is usually influenced by sexual selection more than the other. For instance, male peacocks have experienced more sexual selection than female peacocks, which has resulted in drab females and beautiful males. The same effect occurs with cardinals. Notice that the males in both species evolved features which are actually counter-productive in terms of camouflage from predators.

   In the case of humans, women seem to be shaped by sexual selection more than men. Women have much less body hair than men, which doesn’t seem to confer any nonsexual advantage. Female humans are also the only mammal to have permanent breasts; all other mammals’ teats swell for nursing but shrink away to practically nothing afterward. These characteristics imply that women really are objectively more beautiful than men in the sense that their evolutionary fitness has been defined more by attractiveness.

2. Our society has been male dominated for most of recorded history. As a result, advertisements for products have been aimed at men because they controlled most of the wealth (and, sadly, still do in many countries). Attractive women help to sell anything from beer to cars. Straight women aren’t the target of these advertisements, but they’re exposed to them regularly because they live in the same world that men do. As a result, even straight women tend to associate beauty with the female body.

3. I think most people would agree that the genitals of either gender aren’t aesthetically appealing. They may elicit sexual arousal, but a woman looks more… elegant(?)… with her legs closed. So it might be more accurate to say that a woman’s less flattering features are simply better hidden.

4. A man’s sex drive seems to be more visual than a woman’s, though it’s hard to be sure because of the current social taboo against female sexuality. If true, this probably means that a woman can detach her visual sense of beauty from her sex drive more easily than a man could. This hypothesis seems to imply that gay men would disagree with the concept of objective female beauty.

5. More women than men could be bisexual, but evidence in this direction is skewed by the greater prejudice against gay men compared to lesbians. Does anyone have more recent, credible sources regarding these issues?

As a heterosexual male, I’m biased towards believing that women are objectively more attractive because of my sexuality. Straight women experience a different bias based on vanity. It’s flattering to believe that one’s gender is more beautiful than the other. Lesbians are biased in both ways. Gay men, on the other hand, could offer the most critical judgment because they’re not biased by sexuality or vanity.

Is the notion of objective female beauty mistaken, have I missed a hypothesis, or do you think I’ve ranked them in the wrong order?

I’ve come to see my beliefs as priceless glass sculptures; I instinctively treasure them but shouldn’t hold them so close that they’ll hurt me if and when they shatter. As a result, I’m suspicious of all my beliefs to varying degrees. I hug beliefs in lower, less doubtful levels closer to my chest, but only after examining them carefully for cracks. Beliefs in higher, more doubtful levels remain at arms’ length in case they shatter.

This strategy helps to avoid pain, but I suspect it also makes me more intellectually… nimble. Less attachment to any particular belief makes it possible for me to change my position with greater ease when new evidence is uncovered. If new evidence is never forthcoming, that’s either because I completely understand the universe (which is a “problem” I’d really like to have) or because I’m ignoring evidence that I simply don’t want to see.

I can’t conclusively tell the difference between those two possibilities, which terrifies me…

Recently, it’s become obvious that I was wrong and she was right. Germs are responsible for disease, but it’s crucial to remember that germs are everywhere. Our immune systems are constantly fighting these microscopic invaders. In fact, we’re probably infected with the common cold to some extent even when we don’t show any symptoms.

During the flu season of 2005, an experiment was performed to test the idea that being cold can make you sick. 90 people kept their feet in a bowl of ice water for 20 minutes, while a control group of 90 people put their feet in an empty bowl for 20 minutes. Over the next 5 days, 29% of the group with chilled feet developed cold symptoms, compared to only 9% of the control group.

Professor Eccles explained this effect by saying that our bodies restrict blood flow to the extremities when we get cold to help conserve body heat for the torso and brain, which really need to be warm. Cutting off the blood flow reduces the supply of white blood cells which are the immune system’s primary weapon against germs.

While his explanation makes sense, there may be a more general effect at work. The human body is a machine that accepts fuel in the form of food, and uses that fuel’s energy to keep us warm and to power our immune systems, muscles and brains. However, in frigid conditions our bodies have probably evolved to say “who cares if I might get sick a week later when I’m going to die of hypothermia in half an hour?”

In other words, the optimal survival strategy during bitterly cold conditions is probably to divert all the energy normally used by the immune system into keeping our bodies warm. Mammals whose bodies didn’t make this sacrifice weren’t as susceptible to disease in the long run, but that didn’t matter because they dropped dead of hypothermia before they could enjoy their good health. So that survival strategy would be eliminated by natural selection.

Anyway, the point is I was wrong, and my mother was right. Sorry, Mom!

This is what you get if you take a photo of the Moon every night for a month, then make a movie out of those pictures. The Moon’s phases aren’t surprising, but the Moon also appears to grow and shrink as it orbits the Earth. This happens because the Moon’s orbit is slightly elliptical; its distance to the Earth varies by about 10%.

Also, the Moon appears to “wobble” from left to right. That’s because the Earth’s gravity pulls harder on the Moon the closer it is to the Earth, so the Moon travels faster in its orbit when it’s closer to the Earth. The Moon’s rotation rate matches its average orbital speed (which is why we only see one face of the Moon), but its orbital speed varies during the orbit while its rotation rate remains fixed, so the Moon appears to wobble from left to right.

2009-08-10 Update: I’ve noticed that many people arrive at this article by googling moon wobbles. All the other sites on the first page claim that “moon wobbles” are responsible for explosions, mass-murder, earthquakes, terrorism, etc. Sadly, I need to emphasize that the wobbling I’m describing can’t possibly result in these kinds of ludicrous effects.

In other words, most people argue to win… and I can’t stand it. Whenever I mention this pet peeve, the response is almost always “Oh, so you argue to lose, huh?”

Not exactly. I see a third alternative, one that seems more productive. I argue to learn.

In fact, I think the best possible outcome of a debate is when my opponent convinces me that he’s right and I’m wrong. That way, I’ve learned something new or improved my worldview by fixing a mistake. It’s just boring to convince someone else that I’m right. What do I gain from a debate that I “win” in that manner? Very little, I think.

That’s the point of this website. I’ve decided that I can no longer develop my ideas in isolation. I’m blind to the flaws in my own ideas because I’m simply too biased towards believing they’re true.

It might seem like I shouldn’t be annoyed with people who argue to win, because they’re doing me a favor by enthusiastically attacking my ideas. While it’s true that I desperately want people to attack my ideas in order to identify flaws in my reasoning, the problem is that people who argue to win generally aren’t very persuasive. They’re certainly motivated to attack my ideas (which I appreciate), but the resulting arguments have always been much less enlightening than conversations with people who disagree with me in a calm, non-confrontational manner.

That’s because you have to understand another person’s position at least a little bit before you criticize it. Otherwise your attacks might not be aimed at their central point, or you may misinterpret their position altogether. Your arguments must also serve as a “bridge” between the other person’s position and your own, to show the other person how to cross the intellectual distance that separates your positions. Finally, you can’t simply grab the first argument that appears to support your position or attack your opponent’s. This happens most often in verbal debates where there isn’t much time for research or introspection between intellectual salvos. But it also occurs in written debates with depressing frequency, and the resulting arguments simply aren’t challenging enough.

For me, debating means to seriously entertain my opponent’s viewpoint, to examine the world through the lens of his assumptions. If I happen to like his viewpoint better than mine (which happens occasionally) I cheerfully say “thank you for correcting me” and drop my old position like the proverbial hot potato. I’m not on anyone’s side but my own, and sometimes I’m not even on my own side…

Then one day, I heard him say: “Brontosaurus never existed.” Someone immediately responded: “That’s ridiculous! Of course Brontosaurus existed. We’ve got its fossils!”

Tom didn’t back down, insisting that there was never any such animal as a Brontosaurus. Then, for the first and only time that day, I spoke up loudly enough for the crowd to hear me: “No, he’s actually right this time. Brontosaurus was an old name given to a particular dinosaur, but they changed the name to something else… umm… it starts with an ‘A’. Allosaurus?”

Another student in the crowd said “I know what you’re talking about, but that’s not the right name. Allosaurus was a carnivore, and he’s talking about a plant eater. I don’t remember the name either, though…”

Several agonizing minutes passed as I searched my memories (it’s like a garbage dump in there) but the name eventually surfaced: “Apatosaurus.” Of course, by that time the conversation had moved on– no one cared anymore.

In retrospect, I feel dirty that I helped legitimize Tom’s anti-science agenda. He obviously didn’t mention this (100 year old!) classification error because he’d developed a sudden interest in taxonomy. But he was right about this one particular fact, no matter how disingenuous he may have been to bring it up in the context of preaching young earth creationism.

Ultimately, though, I’d feel even dirtier if I hadn’t tried (however ineptly) to defend the truth, even if that truth was spoken by a man I despised– a man on a personal mission to destroy science itself.

Given that history, you might be surprised to learn that I’d always found the concept of God confusing. I was 10 years old the first time I recall thinking about this subject. These thoughts usually took place at the top of an oak tree in our front yard. I’d scamper up the branches until I was above the roof of my family’s single story house. I enjoyed the challenge– it was tricky to select branches close enough to grab but strong enough to support my weight.

When I reached the top of the oak tree, I clumsily tried to climb the tree of knowledge. The oak tree allowed me to see farther than I could from the ground, but that wasn’t enough. I wanted to understand– really understand– how the universe worked. My curiosity was already an overwhelming disability.

Learning to climb the tree of knowledge was a lot like learning to climb an oak tree. I had to be sure that the assumptions I chose were simple enough for me to grasp but strong enough to support the weight of my worldview. I’d already taken science classes, and I learned those lessons a little too well. I learned to keep an open mind, to question everything. I learned to check my assumptions to see if I’d mistakenly assumed something that was wrong or (worse) ambiguous. More than anything else, I learned to falsify my ideas by comparing them to experiment.

As you can probably imagine, my childhood was a little socially awkward…

So I liked climbing trees– it was a solitary activity that left me plenty of time to think. My thoughts often turned to God, probably because He confused me so much. I’d been told that He was an overwhelmingly powerful Being, but I’d never personally seen any evidence that He existed. However, all the adults I knew insisted that He was constantly watching us to make sure we were being nice. If we were nice, He’d reward us with eternal bliss after death. Naughty people… well, I didn’t like thinking about that. (I still don’t.)

As a young boy, I felt that this claim had a familiar ring to it. It sounded like another (discredited) claim that adults had been making for as long as I could remember. But the claim of God’s existence was so much vaster in scope! I began to suspect that the adults genuinely believed in God; their belief wasn’t just theater as it’d been with the other claim. Then I noticed something odd. Whenever I asked questions about God, people became visibly uncomfortable in ways they rarely did when I inquired about other subjects. Teachers instantly became less helpful and more combative. They’d say things like “you’ve just got to have faith”^[1] and shoo me away.

That answer didn’t make sense to me at the time, so I decided to ignore the adults. Instead, I tried to test the idea of God for myself using my naive notions of the scientific method. I prayed for God to show me some sign that He existed– to move a cup across a table, among other things. (Nothing miraculous happened.)

This confused me, but one day I found these passages in the Bible:

So my experiment had been flawed; its failure wasn’t proof that God didn’t exist. God simply preferred people to believe in Him based on faith instead of evidence. That’s what people had been saying to me all along: God wasn’t obliged to perform parlor tricks to convince me of His existence!

Slowly, though, I started marveling at how easy it’d be to trick people who didn’t use evidence to reach their conclusions. For instance, could I tell people that I was a “wallet inspector” and claim that they had to have “faith” to see my official badge?

Obviously that’d be ridiculous. Even I could tell that people are usually rational– they clearly used evidence to reach most of their conclusions. This distinction bothered me. Why did people take one approach to the question of God’s existence, but take a fundamentally different approach to any other question?

I never got a clear answer to that query, but everyone agreed that the question of God’s existence was much different than a question like “should I buy this used car?” They agreed that you should use evidence to decide whether you should buy the car, saying that faith only applied to a question like “Does God exist?”

But… shouldn’t you be more careful when dealing with bigger decisions? For instance, deciding what type of candy to buy requires a far shorter investigation than buying a house. You’d pore over many pages of evidence for the house purchase, but buy the candy bar on a whim. It seemed to me that the question of God, being much more important than buying a house, would require the most demanding investigation of my life.

My child’s mind was confused by the fact that most people seemed to disagree with this position. I had to be missing something! My ignorance began to gnaw at me, compelling me to read all the books I could find about religion^[2] in the library. None of the claims in the religious books seemed to be as rigorously justified as the claims made in the science books. I spent a long time in the card catalog trying to find a convincing logical argument to support the existence of God, or a well-documented miracle.

I found many proofs for God’s existence, but all of them seem flawed to me. (That’s probably just because I misunderstood them or completely missed the most solid proof, though…)

I found many accounts of miracles, and whole crowds of intelligent people had been satisfied with the evidence establishing these miracles. Unfortunately, I found that many different religions make such claims, and I couldn’t honestly say that any particular religion’s claims appeared more valid than another’s. (That’s probably just because I missed the most credible miracle, though…)

Looking back, I cringe at how simplistic my reasoning was. I’d ignored a lot of nuances and made countless assumptions that I didn’t recognize at the time.

Several years and many books later, I remember seriously wondering– for the first time– if God even existed at all. At first I instinctively recoiled from that idea. You see, everyone I’d ever met believed in God. I thought that I was the first person in history to doubt the existence of God! Adults would certainly be furious if I told them, and my friends weren’t interested in much more than video games. The few people I did tell instantly (and angrily) shunned me. I was utterly alone. As if that wasn’t enough, I soon realized that I was now damned to eternal hellfire if God really did exist, or doomed to eternal nonexistence after death if He didn’t.

I was 12 years old.

It wasn’t until a year later– when I first got on the internet– that I learned the word “atheist.” It turns out I wasn’t the first person to doubt the existence of God! Just knowing that I wasn’t alone was enormously comforting, but my mortality still weighed heavily on me in a manner that’d probably be unfamiliar to people who believe in Heaven.

Life went on, of course. Catholic schools have religion classes which I continued to attend through high school. I found those classes fascinating and frustrating in equal measure, while my teachers and classmates quickly grew tired of my questions. For example, one day the teacher was discussing “transubstantiation.” She stressed that transubstantiation wasn’t just a spiritual or metaphorical change, but was in fact a tangible change.

Now, I’d grown accustomed to “spiritual” claims, and had decided to ignore them because they weren’t falsifiable. But I’ve always had trouble keeping my mouth shut, especially when it comes to subjects that confuse me. Without thinking, I blurted out: “Have I been sitting in the wrong seat in church? Is this miraculous change tangible– actually visible– from another location?”

Big mistake. She called my parents that evening (concerned with my irrational behavior) and soon became convinced that I was just emotionally reacting to a recent family event. I decided not to challenge that belief because I couldn’t imagine anything positive resulting from such a confrontation. More recently, I’ve adopted that lesson as a general guide to civilized behavior. In real life I rarely– if ever– challenge other peoples’ beliefs because the result is often divisive, frustrating, and futile.

It was around this time that I discovered Ayn Rand. Unlike some other atheist philosophers I’d found, she never made strange claims like “morality is completely relative” or “reality is a collective hallucination.” She presented a rational, objective philosophy that strongly resonated with me. Her writing had me absolutely entranced– I’m not surprised that she built “the unlikeliest cult in history.”

Inspired by her ideas, I constructed a proof at age 18 which attempted to show that God didn’t exist. It worked like this:

Assumption #1: An objective reality exists. In other words, reality is governed by laws of physics (currently known to us only as crude approximations) which are completely immutable. If I didn’t make this assumption, it seemed like I’d have to seriously consider the possibility that objects disappeared whenever I turned my head, then reappeared when I looked at them again.

Assumption #2: God needs to be able to violate those laws of physics in order to be literally omnipotent. I say this because it seems like humans might eventually be able to perform miracles similar to those recorded in the Bible if our descendants ever develop sufficiently advanced technology. But that wouldn’t make them gods (obviously) because they can’t possibly break the actual laws of physics.

Conclusion: The existence of God is incompatible with the assumption of a strictly objective reality. Because I’m unwilling to drop my belief in objective reality, I must conclude that an omnipotent God isn’t possible.

(Note that this argument says nothing about gods who are powerful but not literally omnipotent, like Greek gods.)

Because I believed that this argument ruled out the existence of an omnipotent God, I was a strong atheist regarding the deities of most monotheistic religions. (I remained agnostic with respect to non-omnipotent gods.)

It wasn’t until I was 24 that I realized I’d made a dreadful mistake. Assumption #1 wasn’t indisputably true! I could think of at least two classes of statements that were less doubtful. Also, I hadn’t considered the possibility that people could accept a different version of assumption #1 that removed the conflict between the statements “an omnipotent God exists” and “I believe that objects don’t disappear when I turn my back on them.”

When I realized how arbitrary assumption #1 was, I had no choice but to abandon atheism and identify as a weak agnostic. Also around this time, I started realizing how blind I’d been to flaws in Rand’s philosophy. While I still consider Ayn Rand to be the strongest influence on my philosophical views, I disagree with her on several important issues. I also want nothing to do with Objectivist organizations that promote her philosophy.

So here I am, just as confused at age 28 as I was when I was 10…

Footnotes

1. I define faith as “belief in a proposition that isn’t adequately supported by empirical evidence or logical arguments.” This definition is somewhat subjective; how does one decide the amount of evidence that’s “adequate” to support reasonable belief in a proposition?

   My answer is to say that the amount of evidence required is proportional to how “extraordinary” that proposition is. I determine the “extraordinariness” of a proposition by comparing it to previously established facts. For example, I believe in the existence of Moscow even though I’ve never seen it, but that’s because the existence of cities is an established fact to me. Also, if Moscow didn’t exist, that would require explaining why many newspaper stories feature it. On the other hand, in order to believe in the existence of an alien, I’d have to see it with my own eyes as well as proving to myself that it has no DNA or RNA. This is because I’ve never seen anything like an alien before- the established existence of an alien would be a huge change in my worldview.

   Note that this means the degree of “faith” in a person’s belief in a given proposition is relative to that person’s collection of previously established facts. This is a serious problem, as it only takes one false “fact” to throw a person’s reasoning out of contact with reality altogether, though he will believe himself to be perfectly rational in reference to his collection of “facts.” Because of this, I spend a lot of time trying to identify assumptions in my reasoning and questioning whether they’re actually necessary, or even if they’re just plain wrong.↩ back

2. I define religion as “a system of beliefs that include supernatural elements.” (When I say “supernatural,” I mean “violates the actual laws of physics” rather than merely “violates the crude approximations we currently call the laws of physics.”) This includes nearly all monotheistic and polytheistic belief systems as well as some Eastern philosophies. I’m not certain that it includes Buddhism, though, because I haven’t studied Buddhism in enough detail to conclusively identify its supernatural beliefs.

   Note that I don’t consider faith to be a required element of religion. Some religious people are scrupulously rational, and seem to share my discomfort with the idea of using faith as a means to gain knowledge.↩ back

Level 1 – Least doubtful

In my opinion, Descartes uttered the least doubtful statement ever: “I think, therefore I am.” I’d have no sense of self without making this assumption, so I definitely couldn’t inquire about anything else.

Level 2

Next, I consider some math axioms to be very certain: identity, transitivity, etc. As an example, here’s a typical level 2 statement: “1+1=2″.

I don’t fully understand a lot of math axioms, though, so I relegate them to more doubtful levels. More competent mathematicians will be able to include more math axioms in level 2.

Level 3

My personal choice for a level 3 statement is: “My senses reveal an external reality, governed by objective laws, which exists independently of conscious minds.”

Specifically,

• The colored shapes that I see represent objects with existences of their own, and those objects don’t disappear when I turn my back on them.
• The objects that I can sense are governed by consistent, implacable laws. People can’t, for example, wish for food to appear in front of them because the laws of nature don’t allow it.
• These laws are not relative. Other people inhabit the same reality that I do, though admittedly they may perceive it differently (as in the case of colorblindness).

It’s important to note that I could be plugged into The Matrix or my senses could be faked in some other manner. While I acknowledge this possibility, I can’t see how any productive search for knowledge can take place without assuming that an objective reality exists, and that my senses are mostly accurate.

It was a long time before I realized that the strongest version of this statement (which I no longer endorse) implicitly assumes that omnipotence is impossible. That’s because literal omnipotence requires total control over reality, not just advanced technology that works within the laws of physics to create the illusion of omnipotence.

I believe that many monotheists reject this “strict” statement, and instead make a different assumption at this level. That is, monotheists seem to assume that God exists and has absolute control over a reality that is ultimately not objective, in the sense that mechanistic laws don’t always hold true (otherwise “genuine” miracles would be impossible). Depending on their particular theology, some monotheists seem to agree that reality usually appears to be governed by objective laws, but account for this by saying that God isn’t capricious.

I think this implies that monotheists accept a different version of the objective reality assumption. It’s probably something like “God exists, and when He isn’t performing miracles, He allows reality to appear as though it’s governed by objective laws.” At least, that’s my best guess. Any monotheists want to comment on this point?

Level 4

Various scientific theories go here. Science isn’t supposed to provide truth, it only provides models which predict experiments and observations. The theory with the fewest axioms that most closely matches the evidence wins. (At least until a better theory comes around.)

As a result, scientific statements always have room for doubt.

Level 5

Most knowledge regarding human history belongs here:

• I’m suspicious of historical evidence because many people have had motives to slant the “official” story in their favor.
• Depending on how old the story in question is, there’s also been a lot of time in which to alter the evidence.
• Research shows that humans are prone to developing “false memories.” Since history is often nothing more than recorded memories, I’m skeptical of historical claims even if I completely trust the person making the claim.
• Historians also have to somehow correct for years of detritus laid over the evidence by humans who– even if they’re not malicious– are still less predictable than animals or geological processes.
• Also, history is the study of a subject that’s simply too emotionally charged– all of us have our own cultural reasons for believing in one version rather than another.

That’s not to say that scientists aren’t biased in favor of their own pet hypotheses. It’s just that scientists’ biases seem more geographically random than historians’.

Level 6 – Most doubtful

Any statement which can’t be falsified or checked for internal consistency goes here. These statements might be correct, but there’s currently no way for me to tell!

Most of political theory, psychology and sociology goes here, in my opinion. Along with a lot of philosophy and most religious statements.