Misunderstanding Climate Change? - Quareness Series 98th "Lecture".
Although the bard hisself William Shakespeare is said to have used around 24,000 words in his plays and poems and indeed introduced about 1,700 new words into the language, it's estimated that your average English speaker today has a vocabulary of 9,000 words and uses some 100 of those repeatedly. There are over 170,000 words listed in the Oxford English Dictionary which, however, does not cover many areas (e.g. academic and scientific jargon). As some other bright spark said..."This suggests that there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the OED, or words not yet added to the published dictionary, of which perhaps 20 percent are no longer in current use. If distinct senses were counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million.”
In academia many of the words deployed tend to be jargon. Generally the first thing a student learns in the first-year course of any subject is the "language" of the discipline. Some of this is done because the area of study requires unique words, but often a different meaning to a common word is used and creates confusion. A good example of such appeared early in the anthropogenic (human caused) global warming (AGW) debate when those scientists who challenged the theory using the scientific method were labelled sceptics. But of course all true scientists are necessarily sceptics (i.e. their approach is to try to disprove theories) and it's rather unfortunate that the label has taken on other connotations in a culture of increasing cynicism and nihilism. In its original pure meaning scepticism is just thoughtful inquiry within an understanding that we can never know the absolute truth with certainty - a fundamental tenet of scientific methodology?
This illiteracy is quite a noticeable and apparently growing problem in our age of (mis)information, bringing to mind Bertrand Russel's observation that “the whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” Take for example the common misunderstanding of the "greenhouse effect theory" which could even result in a colder world. The general public associate the word greenhouse with higher temperatures leading them to conclude that the theory concept must automatically infer warming. And maybe this is why the terminology was chosen for a political agenda of persuasion in favour of blaming anthropogenic warming? This suspicion arises from a similar prior misdirection of using the catchphrase "holes in the ozone" in order to create a "suitable" mental image. In fact there are no such holes (only an area of thinning) but the phrase implies something is leaking or broken. It is striking how many people hold intractable views on global warming apparently without even a basic understanding...but maybe this is partly due to the deliberate use of words to mislead? It leaves us with a serious dilemma..how to engage in logical discussion about illogical things.
More often than not, if we have a debate today between two scientists most of the public cannot understand it because they don’t know the jargon and have different meanings for some of the words. And if the debate is between a scientist and an environmentalist, or even an ordinary citizen, it quickly tends to devolve into an emotional and fact-free argument.
Finland is understood to have the highest level of science skills among nations today but even there it's only 18% (which means 82% lack these skills) and the average for many other countries is just 10%. It seems a reasonable assumption then that around 90% of the general public are incapable of understanding any of the Science Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), even if they were inclined to try. Despite this, however, many are imbued with the absolutism, perfection, and immutability of numbers which evolved from a movement back during the 1920s called logical positivism defined as…characterised by the view that scientific knowledge is the only kind of factual knowledge and that all traditional metaphysical doctrine must be rejected as meaningless. By way of contrast the Anglo-American mathematician/philosopher Afdred North Whitehead (1861-1947) pointed out that "there is no more common error than to assume that because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain."
Unfortunately so many people seem to have become so imbued with this logical positivism that they can’t believe there are different types of numbers and data (e.g. continuous and discrete) and in many statistical applications the difference is critical to the validity of results. Indeed most of us don’t even know there are imaginary numbers used in some parts of mathematics.
A little historical background may be relevant here. The modern study of climate (i.e. the average of the weather) started in the early 1900s in response to pilots seeking forecasts during World War 1. Meteorology was (still is) restricted to study of the physics of the atmosphere. Weather stations were sited mostly at airports and this only began to change in 1948 with the setting up of a meteorology department and Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This led to a reconstructing of monthly atmospheric circulations over the North Atlantic and Europe back to the 1750s and a first realisation of the connections between sea-surface temperature and the atmospheric circulation, which is still today the subject of ongoing efforts to understand seemingly using computer techniques in a somewhat uncritical way. And this is hardly surprising given the problems inherent in researching a generalist subject in which there are so many sub-disciplines.
Perhaps it's only a few disciplines (e.g. systems analysis) which may grasp the fundamental problem at the heart of the AGW issue - the difference between generalisation and specialisation e.g. for every area of the subject there is a different specialist, each using different jargon. Most of those labelled climate scientists (even with their mathematical and physics qualifications?) do not appear to understand this core problem, despite what they may think themselves...the inevitable extension of logical positivism? This may be partly why there is a Glossary with every IPCC Report and Summary leaving most of the general public no better informed?
Delving a little deeper below the surface we might find, for example, that "greenhouse’ gases also cause cooling by increasing the efficiency of convection cooling...the greenhouse gas absorbs radiation and then via collision transfers that energy to non greenhouse gases before it emits a photon. It's estimated that roughly 80% of the cooling in the lower atmosphere is due to convection cooling. Higher in the atmosphere there are greater and greater amounts of free ions and free electrons which radiate due to motion. At high elevations the atmosphere is rather more like a plasma and this explains why the greenhouse mechanism saturates. In support of this is the fact that there are periods of millions of years in the paleo record when atmospheric CO2 was high and the planet was cold and periods when atmospheric CO2 was low and the planet was warm.
As regards the "polluting" by humanity I wonder when we'll be humble enough to admit the very small scale of such in the grand scheme of things. Measured against super volcanoes, rifting earthquakes, collisions of large bodies, plate tectonics ripping continents apart and buckling the crust up into high mountain ranges, and 100,000 year continental glaciations interrupted by 10-30,000 year warm periods, our human impact seems pretty puny. We don’t command enough energetic might to match even a measureable fraction of that wielded by these natural disruptions. We seem capable of only temporal and largely localised harm to the planet that its processes can easily heal. Dare I say it might also be quite humbling (and even sobering) for more of us to realise that whilst our Earth varies in distance from our sun by nearly 4% in one orbit, there's no signal of that at all in global temperature records.
It may be a truism that any theory about our world is indeterminate i.e. we cannot know when we are correct, only when we are wrong. Our science really amounts to a collection of functionally effective theories and all such theories of whatever hue tend towards persistence, perhaps in part because consistent behaviour in a social sense may be essential for widespread social cohesion. It may not be necessary for us to believe but it could well be socially important for us to behave as if we do. Even rational materialism (beloved of many scientists) is an article of faith whose truth content is indeterminate. Indeed the very existence of an objective world in the sense that we understand it has been challenged time and again from Plato, through Kant and Schopenhauer and on up to the quantum physicists of today. It is functionally effective to regard "our world" as existing thereby allowing us to do science, but we can have no real "proof" that it exists in the way we think it does.
In the circumstances some of us may get to wonder if truth matters at all, given that it seems to be so widely regarded (at least partly) as a social construct. Whether we have hidden subconscious barriers to having the world conform to our wishes or whether there is in fact an orderly Universe out there somewhere with a will of its own that simply refuses to listen to our beliefs and demands, is in fact functionally equivalent. Whether we define the region of natural law as being inside or outside of us may be irrelevant in that what is functionally important is that there is such a region i.e. there are things we are constrained by other than our own imagination and desires.
A theory is only a theory, it is not truth. All honest attempts to represent truth as an expression of natural law beyond man's ability to change are necessarily temporary and always subject to refutation through science. The important/practical/useful thing, however, is that they have the quality of functional effectiveness...same as those metaphysical conjectures which may be irrefutable not because they are true, but because they cannot be shown to be false.
If it's indeed true that so few people (10%) are capable of a basic understanding of the science taught by rational materialists, it's quite probable that only a tiny percentage may be capable of understanding and accepting that science itself is not "the truth" either i.e. it's merely functionally effective. The temptation then is one of easy misrepresentation and simplification of scientific ideas (in what is really the field of philosophy) in order to construct a narrative that is emotionally appealing to large numbers of people - a "hearts and minds" power game.
Central to this notion of functional effectiveness is the "reality" that society appears to need consensus and cohesion irrespective of whether it's right or wrong e.g. it doesn’t matter on which side of the road one drives, but it does matter that all who use the road drive on the same side. Nevertheless the truth does matter in the sense that consensus ideologies that are potentially damaging to society (and maybe its very survival) need to be challenged. Even if its impact/intent is to preserve the elites by befuddling the masses, political correctness and telling people how they ought to behave may be tolerable up to a point. However, it may now be rapidly reaching such a degree that its lack of functional effectiveness is becoming apparent. Today it's increasingly looking like we have a primal conflict between (a) those who consider that a consensus based on a profound belief that the good of the people is best served by a competent world wide elite who impose a consensus view of reality upon all, for the good of all, irrespective of its arbitrary alleged truth content, and (b) those who maintain that the consensus view is so radically wrong and dysfunctional that it threatens humanity's vital interest more than destroying the consensus does. In practical terms the former approach runs the risk of ineffectiveness given that any centralised entity micromanaging decisions that reflect down into the details of the system is inevitably hopelessly slow to respond to change or hopelessly unstable due to long delays between "front line" activities and responses emanating from the central authorities. The latter more "conservative" approach also carries risk in that civilisations and cultures have died because their existing ideologies ossified...the world changed and they could not.
The truly progressive way may be to seek to establish why we are where we are and distinguishing between what may be true and what is functionally effective (including what is possibly true but unhelpful, as well as what is unprovable but helpful) in order that we may collectively begin to define a new consensus more suited for the situations we find ourselves in? For this to happen, we may have to change the agenda.
Given the indeterminacy of truth (as mentioned above) we get to just fumble about in a picture of our world that somehow works. Our narratives, notions, theories and understandings of what is and what constitutes facts and phenomena are simply ways of looking at stuff that have enabled us to survive thus far. Ultimately what may matter more is not the reality or otherwise of AGW but the survival of ourselves and future generations. And for this to happen, we might need to concentrate more on the eradication of demonstrable falsehoods.
Irrespective of the truth content of views on climate change, we can examine the functional effectiveness of the policies prescribed (proscribed?) in terms of achieving their own stated objectives e.g. whether reducing CO2 emissions does in fact bring about reductions in warming or perhaps even an increase in cooling, or even whether our current relatively expensive renewable energy "solutions" are in fact anyway effective at sufficiently reducing our CO2 emissions...as compared say with nuclear power!
Elitism today built largely upon the robber baron philosophy of "grab and hold" morality of 19th century western imperialism and the like, increasingly appears to have run its course. That it has absorbed and used its greatest enemy (Marxist thought) as just another tool of mass exploitation is a tribute to its cunning in seeking to control everything. Of course the same mentality did likewise with Christianity in times past but despite these significant successes, it does not now seem functionally effective at promoting its own survival.
It needs to be pointed out also that even if AGW were true and attempts to combat it admirable on the basis that they turn out to be functionally effective at reducing atmospheric CO2 levels, the lesser truth could remain that our (dysfunctional?) renewable energy approach does not in the end achieve the aims for which it allegedly exists. Taking cue from the approach of the "globalists" some of the "opposition" might hire new "experts" to tell us that in fact nuclear power will save the planet, not because it needs saving, but that a few terrawatts capacity of cheap long lasting energy is what we're going to need to combat all sorts of eventualities that may or may not happen and that we can do nothing to prevent. Such might not amount to an attempt to change perceptions so much as to bend them to that opposition's purpose. Signs of the emergence of such a "kick-back" against the current "consensus" might include a move away from questionning at a profane level the morality of those who seek virtue in political action to merely pointing out the impossibility of actually achieving their stated political aims, whilst applauding their desire to do so.
Much of our science today seems to have a problem with generally misusing statistics (a necessary discipline because all scientists collect data). In the scientific world it's a given that only data can lead to a rejection of a null hypothesis (a default position that there is no relationship of significance between two measured phenomena) and only data can be legitimately used to project a future scenario. Assuming a scientist has collected enough reliable data, s/he then has to interpret what those data mean. Problems arise when the scientist has a poor understanding for example of exactly what confidence intervals mean.
Despite the IPCC having made numerous statements about the probability of certain events happening, statistics does not give that power. The researcher only has the power to choose the confidence interval and based on that choice this then reflects on whether certain statistics will lead him/her to reject or not reject the null hypothesis. It seems that climate science (as we know it Jim) does not use the null hypothesis scientific method, despite it being generally assumed to be true until evidence indicates otherwise. One cannot use a confidence interval to make deductions on a probability of an event happening. This is because researchers chose the confidence interval based on how many standard deviations they want included in their confidence level, and that level is only relevant to the confidence that the true mean of a population data falls within the range of the confidence interval. It does not mean we can predict an outcome with a probability of that confidence interval. Just because many (including the IPCC and "97% of climate scientists") may think that they have that power of prediction does not make it scientifically accurate.
Another problem is that our climate scientists do not appear to fully understand the meanings of accuracy ( = the error of the fundamental misapplication of the basic science) and precision (= the error bars of accumulated rounding operations) in statistics. The charts of greyed error area in their climate science graphs are rounding and precision errors and not accuracy errors. An accuracy greyed area would be so huge that it would dwarf the chart and displaying only the greyed precision area suggests that the climate scientists don't really understand the difference.
The classifications used in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers were first introduced by Stephen Schneider (an American Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change at Stanford University) who was quoted in the Discover magazine back in 1989 as saying - “On the one hand we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but, which means that we must include all the doubts, caveats, ifs and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists, but human beings as well. And like most people, we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we have to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This double ethical bind which we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”
It would appear that we cannot rely on today's claimed "scientific consensus" (or any other source) to give us the unadulterated true picture of the state of our climate's prospects or truly fit-for-purpose "corrective actions". Like as with the natural curiosity of our small children, I think we may need to constantly question...what...where...why...etc. in order to have any realistic hope of a balanced approach to our problems.
At the end of the day (as they say) our physicists use mathematics (= only an approximation of the real world) as their model and our climatologists use climate computer software (= a worse approximation) as theirs. And in general all of them (and us) need to learn to be humble and say I don't know when this is so. Science may be in danger of losing its way and dooming us to fruitlessly chase our way down rabbit holes. The "antidote" would appear to largely lie with our adhering to the scientific method...if we can't reject the null hypothesis with 5 or 6 sigma tests, then let us admit we don’t know instead of inventing "the science is settled" concepts through mathematical constructs and computer modelling.
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
October, 2018.