Is global warming a myth?

That was the theme of an essay competition run here in 2009.

This was the winning entry.

We used the prize money to buy beer.

Random Jottings from Somewhere Else

The creek of reason

Was only ever a narrow ribbon of hope in the desert

But now it is a chain of stagnant waterholes

Full of shopping trolleys and broken bottles…

I am here in another inland city with a minor university, a minor university that has decided not to offer a chemistry degree anymore and so has handed over the chemistry it is contractually obligated to teach its third year students to our minor university: specifically, to me. I am here to supervise four going-on-five days of experimental work, where from 8:30 to 5:30 with a break for lunch they will grind away doing experiments. These experiments involve the exercise of real, unglamourous, skills- distillation, recrystallisation, not poisoning oneself or settling oneself on fire. The lab we are in is splendid. Such a high ceiling. Taps everywhere. It has the look and the smell of the organic chemistry labs of my own undergraduate days, but it is much too big for us. There is plenty of equipment, plenty of apparatus, plenty of room to rattle around in. All my life this sector of science, my sector of science, has, in this country at least been shrinking.

I never liked the term ‘central science’, but it is. It is the real key to solving our problems in health, our problems with the environment, in developing new materials that will allow Moore’s Law to keep rolling along, that will allow us to upload sentient lobsters to the Interweb.

Of course, these things are still rolling along, I tell myself. Science is not really a dried-up creek, it is still an unstoppable tsunami. Only not here. Or, not much.

Sometimes I google something to find out more about it and find something I have written about it, almost immediately.

Sometimes what I have written is embarrassingly wrong.

Watched the documentary about murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya on SBS the other night. I was impressed by how flash Moscow looked, how much stuff there was on the shelves of the market where her beautiful daughter Vera was shopping, how nice the buses seemed compared to the buses in Sydney. So while at the same time as I fully agreed with the central message about the abominable behavior of the Russian regime, I felt a utilitarian countercurrent of admiration, an involuntary hunch that maybe Putin is not just some grubby authoritarian, but Russia’s Lee Kuan Yew. I still remember those initial few hours of euphoria in Singapore “I have seen the future, and it works”.

As we enter the age of stupid…

My aversion to many-universes models was excessive and irrational. After thinking the matter over carefully, I no longer think there are any logical or moral objections to a many-universes model. I will continue to reject these models on two bases, but I will seek to moderate my language and will not automatically reject them. These two bases are:

(1) Parsimony. We can explain things adequately without them.

(2) Utility. They do not shed any useful light on the most interesting and crucial aspects of quantum mechanics, and hence are not very exciting.

I will now outline my initial objections to many-worlds models, and the answers to those objections I have come up with on further reflection.

The first objection is the aesthetic-moral one made so effectively by Larry Niven in the story ‘All the Myriad Ways’. This story made a strong impression on me, and I now realise with a shock that it alone probably qualifies Niven, after all, to hold down the letter ‘N’ in my list of influential authors.

[I need to find the story again to find the quote I want to put here, so in the meantime you can link to this discussion about the Buffyverse.]

But, in agreeing with this objection, I am not thinking quantitatively. And I am not thinking correctly about *how* microscopic splits of universes lead to macroscopic variations.

It is not equally likely that I will keep driving merrily along the road, and that I will veer suddenly to the left and run over a nun. The bundle of lives that it is ‘me’, if it has a 1 in 10 trillion chance of veering aside and hitting the nun, has been shaped by the choices it has made to be ‘better’ than some other bundle of lives that has a 1 in 10 million chance of veering aside and hitting the nun. Furthermore, I do not know that a choice I can think about is actually possible: perhaps my freedom is more restricted than I believe, and I actually have no finite probability of veering aside and running over the nun.

Perhaps this is best expressed in terms of another one of those Socratic dialogue thingies.

Assertion: It seems that the possible number of universes is infinite, such that any imaginable universe is not only an image of truth, but a fraction of truth. Therefore the many-universes model is immoral and aesthetically repellent.

Response: However, the evidence suggests strongly that our universe has not existed forever, which means it had a beginning. This beginning surely imposes some set of initial conditions on the bundle of possible universes, which implies that the number of multiple universes is not infinite.

Assertion: Although the possible number of universes may be finite, it seems that we cannot quantify, to any extent whatsoever, the probability of one universe existing rather than another. Therefore the many-universes model is still immoral, yadda yadda.

Response: However, statistical thermodynamics provides a very good model for how we could do this. Imagine, if you will, a simple universe of a large number of red balls that can be placed at any of a large number of energy levels separated by a finite amount of energy. Let us imagine that this universe has a certain total energy, that it begins at some point in time with the balls assigned to some unique configuration of energy levels, and that balls are free to move from one energy level to another- not completely freely, but with a high probability to adjacent levels and a decreasing probability to more distant levels.

This is a reasonable model for a classical universe. We can’t know exactly what the configuration of balls is, but whenever any change happens in this universe, we can say it is in the direction of the configuration of balls that can be made in more different ways. This is just a statistical law, which arises from having lots of balls, but it is so solid that it is the basis for the second law of thermodynamics, and hence for everything.

Figure 1. Two sets of red ball universes with total energy 42. There is only one way of arranging the balls that gives rise to the universe on the left. There are many ways of arranging the balls that give rise to the set of universes on the right.

Is there anything to stop us from saying that the physical meaning of probability is that everything happens, and every time a ball moves from one place to another the universe splits?

No, there is nothing to stop us, we can certainly say this. This might be a useful way to look at things in a classical universe. It gives a very straightforward physical interpretation of probability. There are no real aesthetico-moral objections, since the choices (or deterministic non-choices) we make are the same ones we would make in the classical universe, according to the laws (or guidelines) or thermodynamics. We just interpret them as probabilities rather than unique events. I think, given how very large large numbers are, if we say that every particle in the universe can choose (or be impelled) to change state once a chronon, our macroscopic choices (or non choices) take place at such a high level of emergent phenomena that most of the unnerving possibilities that make us turn away from the many-universes model, like Larry Niven, with fear and loathing, are in any meaningful sense of the word, impossible.

Assertion: Okay, okay, maybe you’re right. But what about the two-slit experiment?

Response: The two-slit experiment?

Assertion: Let me explain. Actually, you can probably get a much better idea if you go out and get hold of a copy of Feynman’s ‘Lectures in Physics’. It is in Volume III.

If you have two slits in an electron-proof thingy such that a single beam of electrons can go through both of them at once, then ping onto an electron detector, you can get two different outcomes, depending on whether you put something at the slits to detect whether the electrons go through them or not.

Figure 2. Things that can happen in the two-slit experiment with a beam of particles.

You get this result- electrons acting like particles would act if you detect them, and like waves if you don’t detect them- even if you shoot them through one at a time, so you can detect each electron striking the other side individually, ping, ping, ping.

The two-slit experiment is relevant because it seems to imply communication between bundles of universes. An electron chooses to go through one slit or another: the universe splits. But the overall features of the observed universe depend on the choices of many electrons. How can this make sense, in a many universe model? How can the many-universes model cast any light on this? Should we not see, in a universe of red balls, the particle-like distribution of particles in all cases.

Response: Yes, this is one of the more wacky things about quantum mechanics. Actually, I fail to see how the many-universes model can cast any light upon it. Perhaps Marco (pbuh) can explain.

However, the two-slit experiment can still make sense in a many-universes model. It does *not* imply communication between universes, because wave-particle duality can mean something like the De Broglie pilot wave model, which is perfectly consistent with electrons going through independently to create an interference pattern. This does not rely on any spooky ‘now I’m a wave, now I’m a particle, ooga-booga’ weirdness, which Dr Clam has decided he finds more irritating than the many-universes model.

Assertion: What about the different behaviour of fermions and bosons? A few chapters later on in Feynman’s ‘Lectures on Physics’, there is this really nifty discussion of scattering. Particles that are different from each other scatter in one way, which is the same sort of way, more or less, as macroscopic lumps of matter. Particles that are identical scatter in one of two completely different ways, depending on whether they have integer spin (bosons) or half integer spin (fermions).

Feynman writes somewhere that he tried to put together an explanation for this difference between fermions and bosons into an undergraduate lecture, but found he couldn’t do it, which he says means that we don’t really understand it. Whatever it is, doesn’t it just knock the stuffing out of the many universes theory? Here we have macroscopic consequences arising from probabilities that don’t seem to behave anything like probabilities behave in your universe full of balls. And that’s the wacky way all probabilities behave in quantum mechanics. Sure, you can save your many-universes theory by adding lots of wacky ad hoc rules about how ‘balls’ of different kinds should behave, but what good is that? It hardly makes it a useful predictive theory, huh, huh?

Response: Again, this example is one of the more spectacularly weird things about quantum mechanics. And maybe shoehorning it into a many-universes model would just be papering-over a dodgy theory. But maybe it could actually shed some light on the problem. For instance, our model of the universe of balls sort of implies that we can tell the balls apart: but if the balls are indistinguishable, then there is only one way to get to this configuration, just like there is only one way to get to this configuration, and they are equally ‘probable’. Or am I dreaming?

Figure 3. Two sets of red ball universes with total energy 42. If all the balls are indistinguishable, isn’t it true that there is only one way of arranging the balls that gives rise to the universe on the right, just like the universe on the left?

White King: Tell him he’s dreaming.

9.10.8

I have been spending my time here in this inland city, doing wet chemistry during the day- which I am not so good at, I would not be the one doing this in a more knowledgeable time- and at night I come back and watch the Sky business news- because I have a very low resistance to television- and read ‘Accelerando’. Only a chapter at a time, because then my brain is too stretched and I have to go and take a nap. I thought tonight that maybe I am wasting my time, messing about with dumb matter, when the real game is elsewhere. But someone has to figure out these things.

I am reminded, in these exciting times, of a story I once read by Leo Szilard, where capitalism is compared to the manic depressive cycles of the insane.

Stross has something that is superficially plausible in ‘Accelerando’, on making command economies as effective as market economies, using expert systems that can evolve optimal allocations of resources without the need for competition in the real world. This sounds good, but what it leaves out is the ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’ principle. We have all these sophisticated computer models for all sorts of things, and so many of them are just rubbish, because they need more and better inputs than we can provide. A pseudo-market in silico cannot function like a real market until we are massively, massively, massively documented in real time.

When that day comes, we will have to get rid of so many of our stupid laws it isn’t funny.

Usury is a sin. Muahahahaha!

The world is flat - with gigantic frigging walls built everywhere.

Like, our dog runs off. He doesn’t go very far, and he hasn’t gotten into a great deal of trouble (yet), but we live in the sort of neighbourhood where one day, someone will shoot him. We went to a good deal of trouble putting up one of those electronic dog fences, which worked real well for a while. However, he is a dem clever dog, and when the battery in his zappy collar was low he worked it out, and just barreled out through it from then onwards. We thought we would get a more uber zappy collar, and the ones available locally were real expensive, but there were much cheaper ones on the net from overseas- like half the price- so we ordered one of them. Customs stopped it. It is apparently legal to sell them in Australia, but not to import them. This seems a bizarrely nit-picky instance of restraint of trade. We googled importing them, and all we could find was stuff about their use as sex toys. Oops.

Like, I get all these emails from Indian undergraduate project students looking for a place to come and do a three month or so final year project. Unfortunately, I always have to write back and tell them what I have found out after making inquiries, that there is a 0.0001% chance of their getting a visa to come and do this.

Like, our university demands one particular English test. It is the TOEFL instead of the IELTS, or vice versa. I can’t quite remember. I ended up waiting nine months for a student from the Middle East I had offered a scholarship- who had perfectly decent English skills- to get in to do the proper test at the heavily oversubscribed testing centre in his country, and what with one thing or another, I had to hand the scholarship money back before he could take it.

They are absolutely batshit insane – to quote Lexifab, in another context – about occupational health and safety at the place I am visiting. A fellow came around this morning to move my pushbike – because he got an email from someone else in the Geschutzapparat, telling him to come around and move my pushbike – because it was a safety hazard, leaning up against a wall inside the lab in a way that impinged too much on a thoroughfare that none of us actually fared through during the course of a day.

It is the only place I have ever been where prescription glasses do not count as safety glasses in the teaching lab. I have just ignored this directive.

10.10.8

You should try and complete this statement my son made to me the other day: ‘My mind gets confused when I…’

I am about 43% of the way through Accelerando. My brain is feeling stretched, as it is meant to. At the same time, I am living through what seems to be an exciting economic phase transition.

It is probably right and good that the tertiary sector as presently constituted should begin to wither away. It is configured for the old age of stupid, not the coming age of stupid. We need to educate a leaven of people who actually know things to get us through the coming age of stupid, using the tools of this/that age.

A symptom of the new age of stupid is the idea that simulated ‘experiments’ can replace experiments. We need to find a way to escape from the tyranny of safe.

I predict that in another month, after the ‘worse than expected’ RMP growth numbers come out (worse than expected by who?) everyone will be looking critically for the first time at all the RMP economic data we’ve seen for the past decade and telling us that it is dodgy as. Roll on Economics 2.0!

‘…think about knight’s moves in four-dimensional chess.’

11.10.8

Finished Accelerando. Once the pace accelerates past what the characters can cope with so their story is left behind, it is relatively easy for a simple human like me to keep up.

For what its worth, I don’t think it is possible- within the universe- for there to be a conscious entity which stands in relation to a human being as a human being stands to a tapeworm. This analogy crops up a number of times in Accelerando.

Datum: The complexity of possible problems scales in a dizzying way. For example: Two body problem, easy. Three body problem, impossible. (NB: Number of bodies in the universe, 10¹⁸⁰ ono. )

Datum: There is a limit to how fast information can pass from one place to another. It isn’t all that fast, compared to speeds we can imagine.

Datum: There is a limit to how much stuff can be packed into a particular volume. It isn’t all that much, compared to smallnesses we can imagine.

I think if you put these three things together, it will work out the horizon of possibly tractable problems in our universe will turn out to be not all that far removed from the horizon of problems solvable by human intelligence in our universe.

I believe there could certainly be conscious entities which stand in relation to a human being as a human civilization of several quadrillion humans stand to a human being. But I don’t think that degree of ability to hold information, to come up with new ideas, to link existing ideas, would be qualitatively different from human intelligence, to the same extent that we are different from tapeworms.

One Universe is Enough for Anyone

Firstly, I expect you have noticed that P. J. O'Rourke has cancer.

Androoo must bear the weighty responsibility of putting me on to P. J. O'Rourke in the first place. This had the effect, eventually, of kicking me some distance along - though not all the way down - the continuum between traditional Catholic economic 'progressivism' and more libertarian economic principles.

The interesting thing for me is that P. J. Rourke states pretty much the same theodicy that I have used for a long time, though with fewer long words and funnier jokes, presumably because he doesn't have a doctorate but is famous for being a funny person:


I consider evolution to be more than a scientific theory. I think it's a call to God. God created a free universe. He could have created any kind of universe he wanted. But a universe without freedom would have been static and meaningless -- the taxpayer-funded-art-in-public-places universe.

Rather, God created a universe full of cosmic whatchmajiggers and subatomic whosits free to interact. And interact they did, becoming matter and organic matter and organic matter that replicated itself and life. And that life was completely free, as amoral as my cancer cells.

Life forms could exercise freedom to an idiotic extent, growing uncontrolled, thoughtless and greedy to the point that they killed the source of their own fool existence. But, with the help of death, matter began to learn right from wrong -- how to save itself and its ilk, how to nurture, how to love (or, anyway, how to build a Facebook page) and how to know God and his rules.


Which is basically what I have thought for the last twenty years. But I have never seen anyone else write it down.

Actually, this first bit about P. J. O'Rourke is not at all pertinent to my main points. Which I will get on to later tonight, or possibly tomorrow. Watch this space!

Adaptive? Aye!

In Chapter Five of 'The God Delusion' Richard considers the origin of religion, and briefly considers the possibility that it might be adaptive before moving on to his own theory. Richard is dismissive of group selection theories, as I said before. In fact, for reasons that I don’t quite understand, the idea of group selection in general seems to be anathematised by the evolutionary biology community. Perhaps this is a reaction against the pernicious ideas of the 19th and 20th centuries that saw human history in terms of the struggle between different races

Richard takes only one possible example of group selection for religion, a tribe with a ‘God of battles’ that impels it to war against other tribes and squish them like bugs. He outlines how this could happen, then says:

‘Those of us who belittle group selection admit that in principle it can happen.
The question is whether it amounts to a significant force in evolution. When it
is pitted against selection at lower levels - as when group selection is
advanced as an explanation for individual self-sacrifice- lower-level selection
is likely to be stronger. In our hypothetical tribe, imagine a single
self-interested warrior in an army dominated by aspiring martyrs eager to die
for the tribe and earn a heavenly reward. He will be only slightly less likely
to end up on the winning side as a result of hanging back in the battle to save
his own skin. The martyrdom of his comrades will benefit him more than it
benefits each one of them on average, because they wull be dead. He is more
likely to reproduce than theyt are, and his genes for refusing to be marrtyred
are more likely to be reproduced into the next generation. Hence tendencies
towards martyrdom will decline in future generations.'

Richard undercuts his own argument when he decries (in Chapter 7) the appalling behaviour of the Israelites as they entered the land of Canaan, described with approval in the Old Testament:

The book of Numbers tells how God incited Moses to attack the Midianites. His
army made short work of slaying all the men, and they burned all the Midianite
cities, but they didn’t kill the women and children. This merciful restraint by
his soldiers infuriated Moses, and he gave orders that all the boy children
should be killed, and all the women who were not virgins.

Where are the Midianites today? Where are the Amalekites? Where are the Jebusites? The Israelites are still there. In these sort of ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ examples, it is not what happens to the winners that is most important, but what happens to the losers. They don’t pass on their genes at all.

But ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ is, as Richard knows, a classic misrepresentation of what evolution is all about, and the ‘God of battles’ has precious little to do with the adaptive significance of religion. Evolution is all about outbreeding the competition. Remember those Israelites that are still there? There are more religious Jews today as a proportion of the Western Jewish population than there were fifty years ago. Not because they have conquered the secular Jews, but because they have consistently had more children.

You can snicker all you like at my tribe for spending all its time building grandiose religious monuments and making yak butter to burn in our temples, but if we have 2.2 children survive to adulthood on average and your more gainfully employed tribe only have 1.9, in a few hundred years you will be history and we will still be around. At the end of 2005 I read a letter to the editor in the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald making the ridiculous suggestion that certain religions were bad from an evolutionary point of view because they encouraged people to have more offspring than the environment could support. This is the opposite of the truth. As long as there is a decent chance that some of your offspring can leave your overpopulated homeland to spread their genes and memes elsewhere, this is an excellent strategy.

At the business end of evolution- outbreeding the competition- religion is becoming more adaptive, not less, with the spread of contraception.

A more specific example of the adaptive significance of religion can be seen in the response of Sub-Saharan Africa to the AIDS pandemic. I sarted collecting data on this part of the world from the CIA world factbook about a decade ago, on the theory that people to some extent practice what they preach and that the spread of AIDS should favour monotheist religions that place a premium on fidelity in marriage, specifically Islam. Though a lot of the data on religious affiliation in Africa seem to be extremely rubbery and numbers are doubtless manipulated for political reasons, the overall proportion of Muslims has risen from 32.9 to 34.1% in Sub Saharan Africa as a whole in the years 1989-2005. In Kenya, for instance, the proportion of Muslims rose from 6% to 10% in that time, and much larger gains are claimed for Sierra Leone (30% to 45%), Togo (10% to 20%), the Ivory Coast (25% to 35-40%) and Burkina Faso (25% to 50%!). Those countries where the proportion of Muslims has apparently declined are only a few where a large hand-waving estimate has evidently been exchanged for a more precise one: significantly Malawi (20% to 12.8%) and Ghana (30% to 15.6%). More importantly, since all those numbers may have been influenced by all sorts of other factors, is that most individual non-Muslim countries have seen a much sharper decline in population growth rate than most individual Muslim ones. Anyway, will process all that data properly later and get it up here... For the moment, I think it is safe to argue that historically venereal diseases have been a very effective way of removing large numbers of people from the gene pool, and that religion is one effective way of combatting this problem.

Trying to stay away from big red buttons

This is just to expand my comment on Marco’s blog to make it, with any luck, a bit more obvious what I was trying to point out in my ham-fisted way.

Let us consider a series of questions, corresponding to different degree of ‘skepticism’ between ‘contrarian’ and ‘fanatic’. As you answer ‘yes’ to each question, you move closer to the position of the High Priesthood. It is their goal to sweep you onward from the question to which all sensible people would answer ‘yes’ to the question to which no sensible person would answer ‘yes’ on a wave of emotion, without stopping to think.

Q.1: Is the average surface temperature of the world increasing?
Those who would answer ‘no’ to this question might rightly be called ‘contrarians’ in a pejorative sense.

Q.2: Is this rise in temperature caused by human activity?
Those who would answer ‘no’ to this question are what you or I or Joe Q. Public would reasonably call ‘Greenhouse skeptics’. They are almost certainly wrong.

Q3: Is this rise in temperature a bad thing?
I don’t think anyone has seriously attempted to address this question. The answer ‘no’ is assumed by the High Priesthod and attempts to introduce the question are ridiculed on RealClimate. Most industrialised nations spend more energy on heating than cooling; most of the world has greater death rates in winter than summer; longer growing seasons and ice-free waters are clear bonuses for regions far from the tropics. Closer to the equator, common sense, extrapolation from ice age pollen data, and what tenuous experimental evidence exists suggests that the mid-latitude desert belts will shift towards Los Angeles, Santiago, Cape Town, Madrid, and Melbourne- which are well-off enough to cope with a bit of desertification- and away from Ciudad Obregon, Asuncion, Lusaka, N’djamena, and Tennant Creek- where more arable land would be welcome.

Q4: Should we try and stop this rise in temperature?
Or, would it make more sense to adapt to it? A degree of adaptation will be absolutely inevitable in any case, as we have absolutely no means whatsoever of stabilising the temperature at the status quo short of a nuclear winter. We could do our best to predict what climate would be like in the extreme scenario where the carbon dioxide bands are completely saturated, and plan for that. I have previously argued this at some length and pointed out that regions that are particularly vulnerable to climate change are regions that are particularly vulnerable to unchanged climate, anyway. Let’s get people off those marginal rangelands and marshy coasts: they are not good places to live.

Q5: Should we marginalise technical solutions to stopping this rise in temperature?
There seems to be a kneejerk response by the High Priesthood and their followers to sneer at technical solutions. You can see the lips curling when you read what they write. Whatever tinkering around the edges might be achievable by technical advance X, Y, or Z, we have a moral duty to change our lifestyles and adopt proscriptive social-engineering solutions. Even that guy I heard from the Wentworth Group, which is supposed to be a group of scientists, when he came to speak to a graduating class of scientists at Devil Bunny City University, only talked about political, social-engineering, Neo-Stalinist solutions.

Something something Dostoevsky something something

Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination.
- Max Planck

I've never been able to find this quote in the original German (thus ensuring, I suppose, that by tomorrow morning I shall have a comment from someone who has managed to find it) but in English, I can endorse it unreservedly because of those three words 'at our disposal'. Doubtless there are more true statements than those that can be found by experiment, or that can ever be verified, but the means by which we apprehend them are definitely not 'at our disposal'.

I will now attempt to construct an elaborate metaphor.

The universe which we experience, let us call the Ocean.

Let us give ourselves an instrument for sampling the universe which is at our disposal, which will give reproducible results, with which we can experiment: this is the Cup of Reason.

Let us give ourselves another instrument for sampling the universe which is not at our disposal, which will give irreproducible results: this is the Net of Poetry and Imagination.

We can dip the cup in many times, and we can learn much about the wetness of the ocean, and the saltness of the ocean, and as we focus our energies more and more on understanding what we find in the cup we will uncover splendid chemical equilibria, and wondrous plankton, and all manner of marvels, and we will understand the ocean, this little cylinder of water circumscribed by reason.

We can dip the net in many times, and many times we will find nothing, but sometimes we might pull out a Crimson Gugfish, and we can show it to our friends and say: 'Look at this image of truth I have imagined' and they will say, if they are sensible and wise and know well the use of reason: 'That thing will not fit in a little cylinder of water'. And we will go away abashed.

Why Water Doesn't Matter. Much.

Okay, there is obviously more to the Greenhouse Effect than a lame correlation between carbon dioxide concentration and temperature rise. I have only just figured out exactly how it all works, and maybe it is written up somewhere on RealClimate for noobs like me, but I couldn’t find it, so here it is.

Let us begin with the Sun. It is more or less a black body heated to a high temperature, and sends all kinds of electromagnetic radiation out in all directions, some of which impacts the Earth, as shown in Figure 1.

The difference between the upper dotted line (sunlight at the top of the atmosphere) and the lower solid line (sunlight at the bottom of the atmosphere) is the first lot of energy we need to worry about. Part of it looks like it is scattered back into space (the general fact that the solid line is lower than the dotted line) and part of it goes into increasing the kinetic energy of various molecules floating around in the air (those are all the little dimples in the solid line). These molecules (mostly water) can then knock into other molecules and increase the general kinetic energy- that is, the temperature- of the air. The more scatterers there are in the air- dust, soot, water droplets, etc.- the more energy will be scattered away, and the more water vapour (mostly) there is, the more the atmosphere will be heated directly. But on average, the solid line should not change much over time.

Now, what happens to the solid line when it reaches the earth’s surface? Either it will be reflected, and zip back off into space, or it will be adsorbed. This will be very variable indeed, and will depend on where the clouds are (they count as surface), and where the snow is, etc. Nobody is at all sure how this balance between reflection and adsorption will respond to an increase in global temperature, but the famous precautionary principle suggests that it is likely to stay about the same.

The adsorbed energy heats the Earth’s surface. But because the whole thing has to balance to keep the Earth’s temperature the same, it has to go somewhere: and where it goes is the energy radiated by a black body heated to a not-terribly-high temperature, as shown in Figure 2.



The heavy green line is the theoretical curve for a black body at 255 K, and the narrower green line is observational data from an area of the Pacific ocean at about 290 K. Now you can see the bending signal of carbon dioxide! This is the rational basis for being fretty about carbon dioxide. If the dip caused by carbon dioxide gets bigger, the total area of the curve has to increase to balance the average energy coming in with the energy being radiated out. Let’s say the dip increases to where it takes up an extra 10% of the total area under the curve: the surface temperature then has to increase by a factor of approximately the fourth root of 1.1, an increase of about 6 K. 10% is of course a ruinously gloom and doom eyeballing estimate by me that probably requires a quintupling of carbon dioxide concentration, so people are worried about an increase rather less than that.
This is why I was (probably) wrong about water vapour: Water vapour, though in one way of looking at things is responsible for 90% of global warming, in another way is irrelevant, since this emission is happening in a 'window' where water hardly absorbs at all.

Note that this 6 K with a vast increase of carbon dioxide is an increase in average surface temperature; not air temperature, which will be bouncing around all the time in response to the energy actually absorbed by the atmosphere directly, and the balance between reflected and absorbed radiation. I think this is the basis for the quarrel between the RealClimate guys, who think average air temperature is a good global warming way to measure nevertheless, and Roger Pielske Jr., who favours something to do with the heat content of the oceans as a better way to see how this balance between heat adsorbed and heat radiated is working out in practice.

The Madness of King James

I was a bit peeved, finding out that ‘contrarian’ is a term of abuse on RealClimate. I assumed it meant ‘someone with a bias towards the position which is roundly abused by the majority’, but it seems they mean by it ‘someone who disregards all the evidence out of contrariness.’

Nature is doing the experiment for us, so there is no need for me to dispute with the RealClimate people. And no appropriate dangling threads to grab hold of at the moment, either. But all these things keep going around and around in my head and keeping me awake, and I am hoping they will go away if I write them down, so you will have to bear with me. Or go somewhere else, until the next post. That would also be fine. I am afraid all my links are recorded at work, where I have been collecting them in epsiodes of slackness, so I can’t put them in now.

I contend that:

* People who post comments on RealClimate erring on the ‘we’ll all be rooned’ side are not slapped down, unlike those who post comments erring on the ‘she’ll be right’ side.

* People who argue on RealClimate about the difference between 0.08 and 0.11 degrees as if it means something, and attribute deviations in multi-decadal averages of that magnitude to specific reafforestation events, are not doing anything worthwhile. They are finding patterns in noise, just like any good animist tribesman. We can only make very broad, careful statements with data as noisy as we have.

* If my y = mx + c correlation, where y = deltaT and c = [CO2], curves up at the end, it must mean that something other than CO2 is primarily responsible for the last fifteen years. This might be falling aerosols, or the delayed effect of rising CFCs, or something else, but we can be certain that the real ‘m’ for forcing due to carbon dioxide is not as great as the ‘m’ we might extrapolate from looking at the last fifteen years alone.

* The forcings used by Hansen et al. in 1988, an apparently seminal paper to which I was directed by Eli Rabett, are just that same y = mx + c that a dumb ox like myself could have come up with.

* I have learned what I ought to have realised from Beer’s Law, that y = mx + c ought to be y = m log(x) + c. NB: This means that any correlation curve ought to be curving down, not up.

* None of the specific predictions of the Hansen et al. model seem to have come to pass: China, Central Asia, the margins of the Arctic and Antarctic ice shelves, and shallow seas like the Caribbean, don’t seem to have experienced more intense warming than other parts of the world over the past eighteen years.

* The argument that anthropic influences on water vapour can be ignored because water vapour has a short residence time in the atmosphere does not hold, er, water. Ozone has a short residence time, too. It is the steady state concentration, averaged over space and time, that is important, and I cannot imagine how this could not have been affected by human activities. I feel that anthropogenic water vapour will be far more significant than a 30% loading on the [CO2] forcing, and it will be much more complicated to work out.

* The arguments about the ocean heating up and outgassing carbon dioxide, and the ocean becoming acidic, ignore the fact that the ocean is a very thin warm bit on top of a very thick cold bit. It is the mixing of these bits that is important. I found some US Geological Survey data of ships sailing here, there, and everywhere and measuring the carbon dioxide concentration in the water. There was a very broad range in carbon dioxide concentrations. The concentration in the water was often higher than atmospheric concentration. There wasn’t any trend to less carbon dioxide in warmer water. Why is this? Well,

* When I was last in Devil Bunny City I went to a talk by a physical chemist from New Zealand who talked about how mass and heat transport are coupled: you can’t calculate the flux of carbon dioxide from water to atmosphere and vice versa just by looking at the concentrations, you need to know the relative temperatures too. I worked out his equations in Excel, and a gas will move against a pressure gradient if it is moving with a temperature gradient: i.e., if the air is hotter than the water, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the water will be higher than in the air. He wrote two papers on this in 1991-1992 in the climate scientists’ journal of record, Geophysical Research Letters. They have each been cited exactly four (4!) times. I found a paper from 2003 by a collection of climate scientist chaps from Princeton and other places, who estimated carbon uptake in various places and come to the conclusion: ‘there is more carbon dioxide uptake at low latitudes, and less at high latitudes, than the models predict.’ Well, this is because the physics in those models is wrong.

Now, I might be in error. I may not have read enough and may be overlooking lots of things. But everything I have found has reinforced my belief that it is very wrong to make drastic and expensive changes in policy on the basis of projections of existing climate change models. The models do not contain all of the relevant physics. The models do not have proven predictive value. Extrapolations of the models to the future, to give ‘we’ll all be rooned’ gleefully and credulously reported by the popular science media, is irresponsible evangelism, not science.

Here's another quote from Diarmaid MacCulloch's book about the Reformation, page 571:

Personally leading an investigation to discover the causes of the storms, James
uncovered a story of a gathering at North Berwick parish kirk the previous
Hallowe'en (31 October 1589) over which Devil himself had presided, with the
agenda of plotting the King's destruction, principally through manipulation of
the weather. The details were abundant, or at least became so after the suspects
had been subjected to prolonged torture.

Two Short Plays, or One Short One and One Infinitely Long One

#1:

The doorbell rings.

Salesman: Hi, I’m selling house insurance.

Householder: That’s great! How much?

Salesman: Well, its kind of a sliding scale. The more you pay, the more protection you get.

Householder: Okay, so what would it cost to ensure I could replace my house and contents?

Salesman: It’s hard to tell. You probably can’t protect your *whole* house, however much you pay. But the more you pay, the more likely you’ll be able to replace at least part of it.

Householder: Well, that doesn’t sound like a *very* good deal. But I don’t want to leave my house uninsured. What sort of protection can I get for $20 a week?

Salesman: Well, it's kind of hard to tell. I could make some kind of estimate.

Householder: Please do.

Salesman: Well, I have to be frank, probably we couldn’t pay anything at all on a cockamamie policy like that, but its possible we might be able to replace your garage if it fell down. Possibly.

Householder: What about, say, $40 a week?

Salesman: Er. Might still be nothing. But there’s almost certainly a better chance we could replace your garage.

Householder: $60?

Salesman: I’d have to say, same again. Maybe nothing, possibly your garage.

Householder: Okay, so let’s say I want to make certain that at least my garage is covered. Hoe much will that cost me a week?

Salesman: You want to be *absolutely* sure your garage is covered?

Household: Yep.

Salesman: Absolutely?

Householder: Yep.

Salesman: (fiddles with calculator) I make that $1836.41.


#2:

A: This is my cake.

B: No, it’s my cake.

(they fight)

A: I’ve got an idea, let’s split it 50:50

B: No, it’s mine.

(they fight)

C: What’s going on here?

B: We’re fighting over this cake. It’s mine, but A said we should split it 50:50.

A: That’s right.

C: Well, there’s no need to be unreasonable. Why don’t you compromise? B, you take three-quarters of the cake, and A, you take one-quarter.

A: No, that’s a dumb idea.

B: No, it’s my cake.

C: Suit yourselves. (leaves)

(they fight)

A: Okay, you can have three-quarters of the cake.

B: No, it’s mine.

(they fight)

D: What’s going on here?

B: We’re fighting over this cake. It’s mine, but A said we should split it 75:25.

A: That’s right.

D: Well, there’s no need to be unreasonable. Why don’t you compromise? B, you take seven-eights of the cake, and A, you take one-eighth.

A: No, that’s a dumb idea.

B: No, it’s my cake.

D: Suit yourselves. (leaves)

A: Okay, you can have seven-eighths of the cake.

B: No, it’s mine.

(they fight)

E: What’s going on here?

B: We’re fighting over this cake. It’s mine, but A says he should have an eighth.

A: That’s right.

E: Well, there’s no need to be unreasonable. Why don’t you compromise?

etc.

Coupla graphs

Here is the scary CO₂ graph; red points are the famous Mauna Loa data, blue points are from the number 1 ice-core study turned up by Google (http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/lawdome.html)


Here is the HadCRUT3 global temperature dataset for the same period at annual resolution; the solid black line is the best estimate value, the red band gives the 95% uncertainty range caused by station, sampling, and measurement errors, the green band adds the 95% uncertainty range due to limited coverage, and the blue band the 95% bias range due to bias errors.
Bias errors are urbanisation (the 'heat island' effect) and changes in thermometer exposure protocols over time. They have taken an urbanisation bias value of 0.055 C per century for their land values, which seems to be a consensus value. Some researchers they cite (i.e., not fruit loops) claim this may be as high as 0.3 C per century, but this figure incorporates both land and sea data so is not likely to be out by as much as that.


Here is my quick and dirty correlation of the two graphs above, with one data point every five years:

My naive extrapolation of graph (1) and graph (2) suggests that the mean global temperature ought to be bopping up and down one side or another of 0.0-0.2 degrees above today's mean c. 2030.

Global Warming, My Shiny Metal Arse

This increasing multipartisan consensus that Global Warming is occurring and is a Bad Thing is pushing me more and more into the 'Greenhouse Skeptic' camp.

I predict that the average temperatures in the place where I live now and the average temperature in the place where you live now, gentle reader, for the years 2026-2030, will be lower than for the years 2001-2005.
I'm happy to wager $1000 (in CPI-adjusted 2006 Australian dollars) on this prediction to the first three gentle readers who respond, even if they live in Southern Siberia.

I further predict that the net change in sea-level around the Pacific Ocean, once all local sinkings and risings of the crust are accounted for, will be not demonstrably different from zero over the years 2001-2030.

I predict finally that the relative magnitude of the costs incurred in avoiding global warming and the costs that can be with a reasonable degree of certainty be attributed to global warming will bear an eerie similarity to the 'Y2K' situation.

This Glass is Half Full, v1.2

I note with some glee that Marco has abandoned to me the position ‘we should do nothing about anthropogenic global warning’. His discussion over in anotherblog appears to be quibbling about the best way to do something about anthropogenic global warning. [I accidentally deleted this when trying to fix a typographical error, along with Marco's comment that he still does really think we should do nothing about global warming, he just believes there can be collateral benefits to carbon trading. So consider me gleeful instead that I have not lost my only fellow traveller!]
I admit that I have wavered somewhat over the past year, but now feel that I can assert this position with confidence. Anthropogenic global warming is a fact, but we should do nothing about it.

Item 1: Climate doesn’t kill people, Weather kills people. If the climate is likely to change to give a 25% increase in the amount of economic and human damage from weather, should we make heroic efforts to avoid this change, enormous in absolute terms? Or should we direct our efforts to protecting people and property from weather in general? Any change in climate leading to more severe storms/droughts in a particular area will be a trend laid over a pattern of variations in weather already containing many episodes of these events. If an area experiences too many droughts to be used for agriculture without subsidies from outside, it should be abandoned. If the economic productivity of a storm-affected area in good years is not enough to offest the cost of reconstructing it after bad years, it should be abandoned. Admittedly there is the possibility that Atlantic hurricanes could become regular events in the north-east and south-west Atlantic, for example, but I assert that the primary economic damage of a strong global warming event will be restricted to areas that are marginal for human use and should never have been used in the way we are using them. Nobody in their right mind ought to live in a dead-flat swamp where six-metre storm surges can occur, like the Ganges Delta or the Gulf Coast of the United States. These areas are likely to suffer recurring natural disasters and struggle to remain viable with or without global warming. Rather than do anything to slow global warming, we should abandon these areas.
Cost neutral suggestions: I recommend vegetarianism, as a way to remove the economic incentive to occupy marginal grazing lands susceptible to drought, and thalassophobia- the vast evil blue thing wants to kill us- to remove people from these dangerous places.

Item 2: Everything adapts. So a hundred years may well see a significant change in climate. In a hundred years, a farming district may cycle through three or four cash crops. In a hundred years, people can abandon one region en masse and settle another one. In a hundred years, animals and plants can also move from one place to another. Shifts in habitat are already occurring and being noted as responses to global warming. Usually these are reported with concerned tut-tutting: they need not be. Life is flexible.
Global warming cannot be uniformly bad for all environments and all species. It will be bad for some species and good for others. A naive Clammish view would say that it would favour warmer environments- which tend to support a larger number of species than cold ones. Invariably, we are likely to hear sad tales about species that are losers and find species that are winners demonised as pests. This will be irrational. Species come and species go, just like individuals. The primary difference is that unlike species, individuals can suffer or be happy: individuals are of more importance. However, I do like having lots of species around. However, preventing global warming is a very round-about and inefficient way of protecting endangered species. The evacuation of areas that are marginal for human habitation (Item 1) will present a fine opportunity to establish large reserves.
Cost neutral suggestions: I recommend open borders, to allow people to adapt optimally to new condtions, and an end to subsidies to poor uses of agricultural land, ditto.

Item 3: Lomborg is probably wrong about the main impact of global warming being on the Third World. It now appears likely that the world will not heat up uniformly, but heating will be much more marked near the poles than near the equator. A modest increase in tropical temperatures over a hundred years is unlikely to produce any impact on the Third World that could be disentangled from the pre-existing background of weather, disease, and poor governance. These are the problems that we should be tackling. Warming of the temperate/subarctic northern hemisphere, on the other hand, will have significant beneficial economic effects: reduced winter mortality, reduced energy use for heating, extended growing seasons, more available arable land, new sea routes, etc.

Item 4: We should worry about the catastrophes. Lomborg mentions in his reply to Scientific American that he did not attempt to cost certain catastrophic events, since the models suggested they had a very small likelihood of occurring. These catastrophic events play a large role in global warming consciousness-raising, however.
(a) We have no idea what degree of global warming might be necessary to kick off these events.
(b) We have no way of ensuring that, even if we emit no carbon dioxide, these events will not occur sometime in the future due to natural warming.
Therefore, instead of going to heroic efforts to aim at some target (a) which may be made redundant by (b), we should think seriously about how we can adapt to, mitigate, or reverse these possible catastrophic events.
Self-serving suggestion: We should give lots of money to scientists and engineers.

Item 5: On reflection, Item 5 is sillier than the rest, and has been omitted.

Addenda: This dodgy analysis has left out a few things we are likely to lose to global warming, but I think it will be much cheaper to save them in an ad hoc fashion. These are edifices of significant cultural value in places marginal to human habitation, and species inhabiting environments likely to vanish entirely. Polar bears presumably survived the last warm interglacial period in some refugia. We ought to locate one and ensure that a population of them remains there.

Bananas!

$2.50 a kilo! At the little shop in the village! Someone brought them up from the coast.

Here is Scientific American's really lame attack on Lomborg, entirely embedded in the best poliblog fashion within Lomborg's reply.

Bjorn Again

I haven’t yet read more than a tiny fraction of the Anti-Lomborg webpages I’ve come across, and can’t contemplate the process of wading in against them. I find it astonishing that he can have aroused such vitriol. It is also hard to believe that many of the critics have even read the book, the straw man they attack has so little resemblance to the book I have been reading. The Skeptical Inquirer’s review is a particularly feeble hatchet job that cherry-picks a few examples of logical fallacies- which could be found in practically every popular science book ever written- and never mentions the central thesis of the book. Other critics accuse Bjorn of naively assuming that the market and business as usual will take care of everything, while he actually argues strongly for government action in the form of debt for rainforest swaps, research into renewable energy, multinational mangement of oceanic resources, etc.

I think Bjorn is trying to say something very simple that ought to be utterly uncontroversial:
Since we do not have infinite resources, we need to set priorities. If we do not do this explicitly, we will end up with a set of priorities based on media sound-bites that will be grossly inefficient. We need to set our prioirities rationally, in the light of a proper study of the possible costs of our problems and the possible costs of fixing our problems.

It is legitimate to argue about the best way of doing these cost benefit-analyses, and it is both legitimate and easy to poke holes in Bjorn’s specific analyses. He is just one person, analysing data that is in the public domain, and I am sure he would agree that every calculation he makes is provisional and subject to large errors. The point of the book seems to me that simply that such analyses should be made and should form the basis for environmental policy.

I think critics are also wrong to snarl at Bjorn’s relentless optimisim. I remember years ago, pre-Lomborg, reading a book by David Suzuki called ‘The Japan We Never Knew’. In it he recounts with apparent approval a scene in a Japanese classroom where an environmentally aware teacher is asking students if they think various facets of the environment will be better or worse when they grow up, and they all agree that things will be worse. I wanted to shake David Suzuki. Hang on, those are all things that I know have gotten better in the past few decades! If this teacher is any good, she should be convincing students that they can make a difference. She should be telling them about the successes of the environmental movement and the way people have managed to change things for the better, not inoculating her students with despair for the future. If you are Dictator of Eastasia and your environmental advisors keep telling you your environmental problems will cost more resources to solve than you have, wouldn’t you just say ‘the hell with it’, spend your resources however you feel like it, and hope your environmental advisors have got it wrong? I know I would. Before we can solve our problems, we need to believe our problems are soluble.

The Lesson of September 12th

I realise why I have been so quiet lately. I am clearly going through a meek and non-confrontational phase. The prospect of unpacking my thoughts on climate change makes me feel all twitchy.

So I should start in a roundabout way by saying that I have finished Jared Diamond’s ‘Collapse’. Like ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’, you all ought to read it, so I won’t say too much about it here until the rest of you catch up. It is a lot like Dr. Seuss’s ‘The Lorax’ but with real examples. The Lorax always made me really sad, but I have grown used to reading really sad things so that the sadness has siuffused my being, so I can’t say I became any more depressed through reading it. The irreversibility of deforestation in some environments struck me- on Iceland, Easter Island, and Northern Arizona. Some environments are robust enough that the forests come back in a few generations and seethe over the ruins of lost civilisations, and some just aren’t. I went out immediately and went for a walk around my own piece of land, once open forest, cleared ninety years ago and not grazed or (except for a few feeble attempts at firebreaks) mown for the past 18 months since we’ve had it. There are several large established native trees, but there were absolutely no new ones coming up anywhere. Maybe all of our native trees are the sort that need fire to germinate? We have cool, wet summers and long winters, so I would expect the unmodified landscape to have been more of a mosaic of pro-fire and anti-fire trees, like in northwestern Tasmania. If they are all ‘pro-fire’ trees, I assume it is a product of aboriginal land management practices and the ‘anti-fire’ trees are lurking in the gorges thirty km to the east. I might be wrong since my botanical ignorance is near total. It could just be that it will take a long time for the soil to recover from all those decades of being walked on by sheepses. Along one side there is a line of old pine trees planted as a windbreak, and under these a few new little pine trees were coming up, but nowhere near as many were springing up under the same kind of trees on along the road. Where we have transplanted these to outline the windbreak of the future along another side fence, they are doing very nicely. It sunk in that the lovely view outside is one of those irreversibly-changed environments: if humans left tomorrow, whatever final forest cover does manage to colonise it would be dominated by introduced trees and would have a depleted flora and fauna compared to neighbouring areas of uncleared bush for thousands of year.

Jared Diamond never says much about the subtitle of his book: ‘How societies choose to fail or survive’. Or, I guess he does, but he never addresses the more interesting quiestion, ‘Why societies choose to fail or survive.’ He says that the response of societies to changes is sometimes good and sometimes bad, and in the case of the Pacific islands fits this to a deterministic model: things tended to reach a stable and not completely disasterous equilibrium on tiny islands where everyone’s actions obviously affected everyone else, and on large flattish ones where a single government could be established. But on ones geographically condemned to be divided between numerous groups, Tribe A had no incentive to conserve resources if it meant that they would be snaffled by the evil Tribe B: it was better to get in and snaffle them first. You will read this yourselves, of course.
I think the why to failure is simply putting personal, short-term interests ahead of long-term interests. Often, what is globally good will be locally bad, and vice versa.
Two examples from a society that is supposedly concerned about achieving a sustainable use of energy:
The Victorian (non) wind farm. Canned because of the orange-bellied parrot. Is it a good thing for the parrot? Probably. Is it remotely credible that a network of wind and solar energy remotely capable of meeting our energy needs could be established without impacting negatively on a lot of endangered species? I don’t think so.
The evils of smoke. The council in the big city (population 16,000) is banning wood heaters because it is in a valley and fills with smoke every winter. This will be nice for the local asthmatics, but it also means that houses currently heated with non-fossil carbon will be shifted to fossil carbon.
Here’s another example, which I don’t get at all, about another scare resource. Devil Bunny City was under the despotic rule of a supposedly ‘green’ premier. It lets all its stormwater and almost all of its wastewater run off into the ocean. Instead of attempting to convince us of the merits of recycling, he decided to build a desalination plant which makes no environmental or economic sense. On second thought, I have no idea what this is an example of, since it seems both locally and globally insane.

The evils of smoke brings me to the important lesson of September 12th. What happens if you ground all the planes for a few days and reduce the amount of particulates in the upper atmosphere? The temperature shoots up a couple of degrees. What would happen if we instantly stopped using fossil fuels (say, if it is discovered an over-zealous Pentagon once added a few zeroes to a proposal and there are enough submarine-sized nuclear reactors in a cavern in Texas for every small town in the world to have one)? If we cut our emissions to zero, the temperature will spike up everywhere by some unspecified amount. And it is the speed of climate change that is a bad thing: life can cope with very big changes if they aren’t too quick. Carbon sequestration technologies are absolutely essential if we want to reduce the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, because natural processes are too slow. When these are cost-effective to implement they will be impemented. I don’t know what the ideological conservationist position is on carbon sequestration and I suspect it will make me twitchy to find out. My worry is that the orthodox wisdom conflates a whole bunch of questions into one:

Is global warming occurring?
Is it caused primarily by humans?
Should we try to stop it, or just mitigate its effects?
If we should try to stop it, what are the best ways?
How do we get societies to adopt these best ways?

It seems to me that the ideological conservationist leaps directly from the beginning of this to the end without thinking too much about the middle. I am not so sure as I was a year ago that we should do nothing to try and stop global warming: I think we should probably spend a reasonable amount of money on investigating biological and technological methods of carbon sequestration. I think Kyoto-type agrreements are a very bad idea. The transition to a post-fossil fuel economy will happen anyway, driven by economics. We won’t even have to stop driving our cars, because once our power generation is nuclear we will have immense reservs of natural gas to reform into clean-burning motor fuel at no more than two or three times its current cost in real terms. (By ‘we’ I mean Russia and the Greater Iranian Islamic Republic).

I haven’t read the Sceptical Environmentalist, but I think the Copenhagen Consensus project is a good idea. We need to prioritise things. It is silly to go around saying everything is equally important and we need to everything now, because we either end up paralysed and do nothing, or make a choice on where to devote our energies on sentimental reasons and become tireless advocates for baby Harp Seals.

In which Dr Clam says nothing of particular use to anyone

Q: What do they have in common, this New Scientist article about gebits that was the inspiration for my incomplete Al-Jamila story, and these articles of Robin Holliday’s about alien intelligences, brain function, and the origin of religion?

A: They are not science.

There is something that an old, wise scientist friend of mine says often, which every real scientist knows:

‘Just because the model fits the data, it doesn’t mean the model is true.’

Any theoretician worth their salt can make half a dozen models that fit the data before lunchtime. Then, you go out and do the experiments. It is not enough to say, ‘this is the simplest model, so it must be true.’ First of all, the simplest explanation is likely to be one we haven’t thought of yet. Secondly, Ockham’s razor is a rule of thumb, not a rule of nature. Remember Einstein’s dictum: ‘An explanation should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.’

That is why we practicing scientists don’t have a great deal of patience with gebits.

Ecrasez l'infame!

I have slightly misread Prof. Holliday- his goal is not the advancement of science, but the downfall of religion, which he sees as the fountainhead of countless evils. Thus I stand somewhat in the same relation to him as a representative of 'Catholics for Choice' would stand to me, and he is probably right that there is not much point in us talking.

I fear he will be greatly disappointed should religion ever be effaced from the Earth. My observations lead me to predict that such a void will not be occupied by humanist scientific rationalism, but by New Age hokum, aimless hedonism, and endless re-runs of 'Survivor: Dinosaur Planet'.

I will accede to Prof Holliday's wish to have the last word:


#7: At least we can agree about what Max Planck said. There is only one method of obtaining new information and that is by the scientific method, which a large number of people certainly do not realise.
However, in terms of social evolution, we have to add technology to science.

You wrote:

Secondly, if I did believe in a fundamental incompatibility between science and religion, I would keep it to myself. Claiming such a thing cannot do science any good.
There are vastly more people in the world with a religious world view than a scientific world view. In various parts of the world they are voters, legislators, or unelected rulers with power to determine science policy. They will not just go away. A great many of them do not need encouragement to think that science is godless and evil. What good can it do science to confirm them in their prejudices? About 30% of our first year students come from schools affiliated with religious institutions. Do I want to send their parents and teachers the message that science is fundamentally incompatible with their values? How would that help the long-term viability of science in Australia

Here we part company, because I could not disagree with you more. It is religions that are evil, not science. You only have to look around the world to see how much suffering is caused by religion: the ongoing conflict in the middle east. The ingrained hostility betweeen India and Pakistan, which has lead to three wars, and the even greater violence following partition. Years of conflict between catholics and protestants in Northern Ireland. And now the religious right in America, with its associated militarism. Almost all religions sanction war, and the killing of human beings. I have not the slightest respect for politicians and other members
of the establishment who regularly attend church and believe in the efficacy
of prayer.

Quite apart from all that, I think it is simply feeble to just follow a majority view. Would you believe that one should not have opposed the killing of supposed witches, because in the past the majority of people believed in their activities? Many people believe in astrology, would you therefore go along with that belief as well? Fortunately, human history is full of examples of a minority view triumphing over a mistaken majority. The abolition of slavery in the west is a very good example, or the abolition of child labour. With regard to the students you mention, it is not your job to send their parents any message about religion, but if students
enquire about religion and science, then I think they should be invited to participate in informed discussion.

I suggest we end our dialogue as it leads nowhere.

Regards, Robin Holliday

I told you that story so I could tell you this one...

Hey, did anyone hear about that wave of terrorist attacks disrupting the elections in Iraq? Me neither. It is a good day for us unreconstructed Neoconservative nation-building fanatics...

Anyway, I only put up that post about Prof Holliday’s article so I could put this one up:

#1: Greetings Alex,

As you might possibly have expected, I wanted to make a few comments on Robin Holliday's article:

There is absolutely no place for a "vital force" or any non-material entity either in the egg, the sperm, the fertilised egg, the embryo, the child or the adult. Thus, there is no non-material soul, nor an afterlife.

Prof. Holliday is contrasting his professional understanding of biological processes with a very crude understanding of what a non-material soul might be. The Prophets did not have the same range of metaphors available that we do, and living today they probably would use different words. 'Consciousness' is not material in the sense that you can distill it out of something, yet it exists- it is apparently an emergent property, something arising from the interaction between material objects. Breath and Fire and the other historical analogies for consciousness validly refer to processes, not to static objects. An omniscient God existing outside of space-time would necessarily know all the details of the dynamic process of consciousness and be able to recreate it (upload it, in the language of Damien Broderick) to whatever 'hardware' it wanted to outside of space-time.
Thus the conclusion, there is no non-material soul, nor an afterlife, does not logically follow from Prof. Hollidays premises.

The next fundamental difference between science and religion is the issue of free will. In fact, most individuals believe in free will because it is a matter of common experience that they feel free to make their own decisions. For the religious, free will is God's gift to man. However, once it is accepted that we are complex organisms composed only of molecules, the completely new light is thrown on the supposed existence of free will. In making a simple choice, for example, between moving one's right or left arm, we feel completely free, but the fact remains that a signal is transmitted to the muscles that comes from the brain. The brain is not capable of spontaneously creating energy, because if it did it would contravene the law of conservation of energy, so the signal must come from somewhere else. Because we are conscious of feeling free, the signal must come from another part of the brain which is part of our unconscious brain function. Thus, there are forces at work of which we are not aware. These forces are determinants of our behaviour, and free will is no more than an illusion. Of course, some decision making is complex and may depend on knowledge, experience and external factors of which we are well aware, but this does not affect the basic conclusion that we do not have free will.

This argument betrays an ignorance of history. It is wrong to say that 'religion' supports free will and 'science' supports determinism: there are many atheistic scientists who believe in free will, often basing their arguments on woolly interpretations of quantum mechanics, and the argument between free will and determinism has been a constant feature *within* the main currents of religious thought for thousands of years. e.g.,: In their emphasis on the supremacy of God over all things, they [The Ahl al-Hadith] insisted that it was He alone who created human acts, even a persons evil acts. ... The Mutazilis, in their attempt to rationalise their faith, asserted the freedom of the human will which would be rewarded necessarily by Gods justice. The Hadith folk felt that this was to insult Gods power ... by ascribing to human beings alone their evil deeds, as if human creatures could create, like God, deeds or anything else.
(A 9th century controversy in the Islamic world, recounted by Marshall G. S. Hodgson in The Venture of Islam. In a more recent example, the Reformation in the Christian world was basically just a big argument about free will and determinism.)

The argument can be turned on its head, and I have argued elsewhere that a creator could easily include wheels or propellers in animal design. Yet no wheels or propellers exist in the animal kingdom. The Darwinian explanation for this is perfect: it is impossible to evolve a wheel by stages, because only a whole wheel has function.

I am sure that if a wheel was discovered in a living organism tomorrow Prof. Holliday would not accept it as a disproof of evolution- it certainly wouldnt be! So he shouldnt argue that the absence of wheels is proof. Wheels and propellors are forbidden by the physical difficulty of providing rotating structures with nutrients in organisms with the kind of biology that has evolved on Earth, not because they are non-functional in intermediate stages: otherwise, something like a wheel could equally well evolve with a non-locomotory function, being swapped over to a locomotory function later (viz., some of the models for the evolution of wings).

Experimental science has established itself as rational and reproducible, and there is no place for the contravention of natural laws, such as miracles, superstition and the occult. Finally, it is often pointed out that religious scientists exist. It seems that these are individuals who can in some way compartmentalise contradictory viewpoints, but this is an ability that I for one find extremely hard to understand.

Science is for examining the reproducible elements of the universe. It has been so good at explaining the observable features of the universe by considering only those elements that it is easy to assume that only those elements exist. That may well be true. But the existence of irreproducible, miraculous elements is not *disproved* by science. This phenomenon is not a miracle is an assumption you have to make *before* you can study a phenomenon by scientific methods. Saying that everything can be explained by science is not a scientific statement: it is a statement of faith. I think that everything within what we call the universe will end up being explicable by science, but I am fully aware that is just a leap of faith on my part.

Finally, I find *Prof. Hollidays* ability to compartmentalise contradictory viewpoints impressive. Surely he must act, in his day-to-day life, as though he has free will and is making real choices to pursue one line of research or buy one brand of soap powder over another? I couldnt do this. If I am to act as though I have free will, I need to hold to some philosophy that allows me to have free will!

Cheers,

[Dr Clam]

#2: Thanks, [Dr Clam], and yap I was expecting comments from you.

First I'm sorry for being tardy in my reply, I've had to be away from
communications for a few days and just got back and logged in.

I shall pass your comments on to Robin together with your email address so
that he can replay to you directly.
And thanks for taking the time to state your viewpoint.

cheers,
alex

#3: To [Dr Clam]:

Alex Reisner has sent me your letter about my article. I think there
are some severe problems in communication language and logic.

I have read the following several times, without any comprehension:

Prof. Holliday is contrasting his professional understanding of biological
processes with a very crude understanding of what a 'non-material soul'
might be.

This seems to be the same as my saying "There are no fairies at the bottom of
my garden," and getting your response "You have a a very crude understanding of
fairies"

The Roman Catholic catechism includes the following:

Question: What is the soul?
Answer: The soul is a living being without a body, having reason
and free will.

That is very clear isn't it? It is a statement or dogma.

You should understand that I am merely presenting the views of
scientific rationalists, including Francis Crick (commonly regarded
as the greatest scientist of the 2nd half of the 20th century), Richard Dawkins,
and many, many others.

I find it extraordinary that a scientist could write the following:

I am sure that if a wheel was discovered in a living organism tomorrow
Prof. Holliday would not accept it as a disproof of evolution-

Thousands and thousands of animal species have been studied by
biologists over several centuries. As a scientist, what would
you make of someone saying "You might find a stone tomorrow that
does not fall to the ground"?
I do not think you are well versed in scientific methodology

There is a lot I could add about free will, but will not. You seem to adopt the
position of some philosophers who say that if you feel free, you are
free, therefore the issue is not of importance.
I did not mention determinism, which certainly is not a consequence
of a disbelief in free will. Stochastic events and chaos theory explain
that. The attempt by a few to use the uncertaincy principle of quantum
mechanics as a basis for free will does not stand up to any serious
scrutiny. We certainly know enough about neurones to be sure of
that.

Regards, Robin Holliday

#4: Greetings Prof Holliday,

Thanks for writing back to me!

I have read the following several times, without any comprehension: "Prof. Holliday is contrasting his professional understanding of biological
processes with a very crude understanding of what a 'non-material soul'
might be."

It is the lines after that one that probably should be read several times, where I try to explain what I understand by 'non-material soul'.
If you say, 'I dissected Alex and did not find a sense of humour', then I would be right in saying, 'You have a very crude understanding of humour'.

This seems to be the same as my saying "There are no fairies at the bottom of
my garden," and getting your response "You have a a very crude understanding of
fairies"

My point is just this, which I will reiterate. In your statement "There is absolutely no place for a "vital force" or any non-material entity either in the egg, the sperm, the fertilised egg, the embryo, the child or the adult. Thus, there is no non-material soul, nor an afterlife," the conclusion does not follow from your premises. I am not seeking to defend the doctrine of the soul outlined in the Roman Catholic Catechism.

You should understand that I am merely presenting the views of
scientific rationalists, including Francis Crick (commonly regarded
as the greatest scientist of the 2nd half of the 20th century), Richard Dawkins,
and many, many others.

You have correctly identified undue respect for authority as my one great weakness, but appealing to authority rather than answering my objections is cheating! :)



I find it extraordinary that a scientist could write the following: "I am sure that if a wheel was discovered in a living organism tomorrow
Prof. Holliday would not accept it as a disproof of evolution"
Thousands and thousands of animal species have been studied by
biologists over several centuries. As a scientist, what would
you make of someone saying
I do not think you are well versed in scientific methodology

Firstly, I didn't say something like, "You might find a stone tomorrow that does not fall to the ground", I said something like: "I am sure that if a stone was found tomorrow that did not fall to the ground you would not accept it as disproof of gravity." Neither would I. It would be some anti-rationalist's trick with magnets, I am sure.

But the two counter-factuals are completely different:

1) The gravitational interaction between pieces of matter is well described by laws that appear to apply always and everywhere in space-time, from extensive observations.

2) We have studied thousands and thousands of animal species, but all of them share a common ancestor and are restricted to a very small part of the universe. The properties of living organisms on Earth are *contingent on historical events* and quite different forms of life could have evolved elsewhere. It is physical limitations, based on the historical development of life on Earth, that prohibit wheels: it is possible to envision different biologies that do not have these physical limitations. It is not the absence of intermediate forms that prohibit wheels, because the intermediate forms could have had some other function and only swapped over to be wheels later.

There is a lot I could add about free will, but will not. You seem to adopt the
position of some philosophers who say that if you feel free, you are
free, therefore the issue is not of importance.
I did not mention determinism, which certainly is not a consequence
of a disbelief in free will. Stochastic events and chaos theory explain
that. The attempt by a few to use the uncertainty principle of quantum
mechanics as a basis for free will does not stand up to any serious
scrutiny. We certainly know enough about neurones to be sure of
that.

I certainly don't want to get into an argument about free will either- I had enough of that as an undergraduate to last me a lifetime! I regret putting in that line at the end about your ability to compartmentalise your ideas, it was a foolish non sequitur. Please accept my apologies.

My point was just that the equation religion=free will is fallacious, as historically most of the opponents of free will have been truly, madly, deeply, religious.

Best regards,

[Dr Clam]

#5: To [Dr Clam],

I do not think our correspondence is leading anywhere. I have
read your two Emails several times but I am unable to extract anything
about your real opinions on the topic of science and religion that I wrote
about.

One thing you seem to invoke is a non-material "consciousness." Now I
am aware that many have referred to and discussed the "problem"
of consciousness. To me the problem is that we simply do not yet understand
brain function, and I would add that many animals appear to have an
awareness of the world around them and therefore consciousness. I cannot
envisage any conceivable reason why consciousness is not part of sensory
perception and brain function. Brains consist largely of neurones, and
neurones are made up of molecules. What else can there be?

I will just add two further comments. You write:

Thus the conclusion, 'there is no non-material soul, nor an afterlife',
does not logically follow from Prof. Holliday's premises.

There are NO premises, but a mass of information from modern
biology.

On free will, you write:

This argument betrays an ignorance of history.

I take exception to this. I have been a student of the philosophy
and history of science and I think what I wrote about free will
has absolutely nothing to do with history. It is about conservation
of energy and neurone function.
I can also add that I am completely unconcerned about the choice
of soap powders. It could be arbitrary, or it could be that my wife or
someone else recommended one. The absence of free will is very
important when it come to judging anti-social behaviour. Most people
believe in retribution, ie punishment, for criminal acts. I do not, because
such acts are not the result of "free will." Deterrence, however, is very
important, in a variety of contexts. This is a hugely important social issue,
and I think most people are very confused about it
If you want to continue this, I suggest you summarise in succinct form
your own views about science, religion, vitalism, consciousness, or
whatever. Then at least I will know where you stand. At present your
real opinions are something of a mystery to me.
I will send you next week a few reprints on matters directly or indirectly
related to all these topics.

Regards, Robin Holliday

#6: Dear Prof Holliday,

You are probably right that this is useless, but I will have one more go and try to answer your questions. I hope I am right in believing that you published your piece on The Funneled Web because you want people to argue with you, and will not be offended by me. I certainly do not wish to cause any offence and am only interested in making my ideas clear. Evidently I have a long way to go!

You wrote an article claiming that there is a fundamental incompatibility between Science and Religion. I do not believe this is true. My first published letter to the editor was to the Catholic Leader when I was 19, telling people that they should not fear evolution, because it was fundamentally compatible with religion. I have continued to argue this with many people in many places over the last few decades, all of them people who fear and distrust science because of the sort of rationalist triumphalism embodied by people like Prof Dawkins.

My understanding of the scientific method is grounded in its practice and in the writings of the 19th century American Pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce: once we know the consequences of a thing, we know all there is that can be known about it. I have a quote on my website by Max Planck that embodies the same principle: Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination. Those are statements I believe. I think they demand a greater degree of humility and agnosticism from practitioners of the historical sciences than we have seen from Prof Dawkins. Experiments cannot tell us whether miracles are possible, whether there is or is not a God or an afterlife, or what if anything exists outside space-time. We are free to chose our own poetry for whatever is not amenable to experiment, and we do not have any scientific grounds for preferring Housman over Manley Hopkins.
I should add that I am not currently a practising Catholic, and I do not believe in any kind of vital spirit. I believe what I attempted to explain in my first message, that the soul as some kind of spirit existing independently from the body is an unnecessary hypothesis. I am a theist in the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic tradition and strive to make my beliefs consistent with our observations of the universe.
I completely agree with you about animals. I do not believe there is anything uniquely important about human beings and have been a vegetarian since 1990 because of my respect for animal consciousness.
I wrote to you because I disagree strongly with the claim of your article. I do not believe there is a fundamental incompatibility between science and religion.

Secondly, if I did believe in a fundamental incompatibility between science and religion, I would keep it to myself. Claiming such a thing cannot do science any good.
There are vastly more people in the world with a religious world view than a scientific world view. In various parts of the world they are voters, legislators, or unelected rulers with power to determine science policy. They will not just go away. A great many of them do not need encouragement to think that science is godless and evil. What good can it do science to confirm them in their prejudices? About 30% of our first year students come from schools affiliated with religious institutions. Do I want to send their parents and teachers the message that science is fundamentally incompatible with their values? How would that help the long-term viability of science in Australia?

Thirdly, if I did believe both in a fundamental incompatibility between science and religion and that it was a good thing to point this out, the three main points I made in my first letter would hold true, and if I was an atheist I would probably still want to make them. There are flaws in your arguments that make them ineffective in demonstrating what you wish to demonstrate.

(1) The findings of modern biology have no bearing on whether there is something that, in its consequences, is indistinguishable from the soul of tradition. A premise is defined as a proposition which an argument is based on or from which a conclusion is drawn. You cannot have any logical argument without premises, and I am as convinced as you are that the facts of biology you cite are sound. But your conclusion does not follow from them. I tried to explain this but have failed completely to make myself understood. It would probably take a whole essay on its own, which I do not want to write, and I am sure you do not want to read!

(2) Your wheel argument is flawed. The lack of wheels is a contingent fact of terrestrial evolution, not a necesary characteristic of life everywhere, and a wheeled organism would not constitute disproof of evolution.

(3) It is wrong to state that belief in free will is a characteristic feature of religion. That is the only point I wanted to make. I have absolutely no interest in arguing about free will as such because I am convinced it is a futile exercise. I am sure you have an excellent understanding of the history and philosophy of science. But you would not say that belief in free will was a characteristic feature of religion if you had made any serious study of the history of religion. I am sure this is a topic that you have little sympathy or patience for, so this is understandable, but the history of religion is inextricably bound up with human history as a whole. The claim that belief in free will is a characteristic of religion in general is an untenable one.

I hope I have cleared up the mystery a little. I do not think my opinions are really of any relevance. I know I have no chance of convincing you that your thesis is wrong, or likely to cause harm to science, but hoped there was some worth in pointing out the flaws in some of your arguments. I would count it a victory if you became a more accomplished polemicist for your cause, because this can only be achieved by understanding your opposition, and the more there is understanding, the more there is hope.

All the best,

[Dr Clam]

I shall consider Prof Holliday's reprints at a later date...