Sceptical voices, part one

Musings about the importance of challenging accepted wisdoms

Life is full of traps.  In that sense our lives are little different to our ancient days of cavemen.  But the traps are very different.  They have changed from pits embedded with sharp sticks, covered with vegetation, to an avalanche of information, news and media output from which determining truth is challenging.  The modern equivalent of the ancient pit trap.

My sense is that one way we embrace what we perceive as truthful is through pattern matching, a powerful aspect of the human brain.  By pattern matching, I mean the tendency to place greater emphasis on information that matches our view of the world, that accords with our core beliefs, than that which doesn’t.

Thus if one is a liberal with leanings towards social engineering as a means of improving society then news and information that supports that philosophy will be accepted as validation of that view.  Then again, if one is strong on the need for the individual to be independent and responsible for their own lives then the validation of that philosophy will be supported by a completely different stream of information.

A prologue to what follows.

Regular readers of Learning from Dogs will be clear that my view is that mankind is responsible for a range of issues that, if not resolved, will threaten the very ecology of Planet Earth that allows mankind to survive.  My dear Californian friend of over 40 years, Dan, thinks otherwise.  Let me add, Dan is not a mental slouch.

I wanted to share some articles that Dan recently sent me, not to prove who is right or wrong, but to underline the critical importance of never ceasing to question the truth of everything that is fundamental to our knowledge of the world, in the broadest sense, upon which we live.

Dan sent me a link to this item,

New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxidetrap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

Study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA’s Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models.

 “The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show,” Spencer said in a July 26 University of Alabama press release. “There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.”

In addition to finding that far less heat is being trapped than alarmist computer models have predicted, the NASA satellite data show the atmosphere begins shedding heat into space long before United Nations computer models predicted.

The new findings are extremely important and should dramatically alter the global warming debate.

This is not the full article, which may be read here.

I was interested in what had been published by Yahoo News and sought to verify it directly on NASA’s web site.  I was unable to do so, and replied with links to two findings by NASA that man, indeed, was affecting global climate.  One of those NASA links was here,

A new NASA-led study shows that human-caused climate change has impacted a wide range of Earth’s natural systems, from permafrost thawing to plants blooming earlier across Europe to lakes declining in productivity in Africa.

Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Science in New York and scientists at 10 other institutions have linked physical and biological impacts since 1970 with rises in temperatures during that period. The study, published May 15 in the journal Nature, concludes that human-caused warming is resulting in a broad range of impacts across the globe.

adding my own view that “There isn’t a serious scientist in the world who has published a peer-reviewed paper that disagrees with the core notion that man has affected the planet. ”

Dan responded thus,

Paul – This will be a good one.

The point I always try to make is that good science is always subject to change as new evidence is discovered. I believe that science is by nature, controversial; plus ça change and all that….

To state as a “Hard-Core Ideological Truth” that Anthropogenic Global Warming (now known as more PC “Climate Change”) is a fact is self-serving.  To deny the disputative work of many highly regarded scientists and climatologists who challenge this construct, can only result in a politically charged and alarmist position serving, in the end, special-interests.

Being skeptical is a healthy process. This process should be followed in the “Climate Change” debate. Especially in the face of today’s political reality and the funding that special interest groups need to survive. Regarding the proclamations of “Man-Induced Global Warming/Climate Change Proponents” that Man is and will be single-handedly responsible for the global flooding of most of the world’s coastal cities, is arrogant, absurd and unprovable.

Moreover, to ask world governments to take billions and billions of dollars out of their economies to fund nutty programs like “Cap and Trade” in order to ostensibly “contradict” something that has been happening on its own for millions of years, is pretty much over the top.

For the last 2 million years, Earth cycles in and out of ice ages.  It happens whether the planet supports 20 million people or 20 million dinosaurs. Glaciers grow and recede. Polar ice increases and decreases. The planet shifts its axis a few degrees and it gets cold.  It shifts back, it gets hotter. Ocean currents change based on God’s unpredictable timetable causing local droughts and floods. A few volcanoes erupt and we get instant cloud cover drifting over the planet changing climatology drastically. The Sun, its relative position to Earth and its sunspot cycles adds a little flavor. How about putting the Earth’s wobble in the mix?  Or, for that matter, without the Moon we would have no seasons?

Greenhouse gases are mostly water vapor. After that, CO2 and methane. All together, very small components of the Earth’s atmosphere.  That should tell us something.

If you go to NASA scientist, Dr. Spencer’s website – http://www.drroyspencer.com -, you may find some interesting data from his studies that suggest that man-made caused CO2 entering the atmosphere is not all that important.  At the very least, this is a controversial subject that should be treated that way and not as fact.  And please, don’t tax me more to pay for unsubstantiated programs to make it snow more in the Arctic.  What if it snows too much or get’s too cold and Hudson and the Thames freeze again.  Rather be warm than cold.

And by “peel-back-the-onion”, I mean that any ardent, independent researcher should publish both sides of the story as a matter of course.  Especially in regards to global warming.

For what it is worth, I personally believe that the “Anthropogenic Global Warming Crisis” is an attempt by “Political Man” to assign full blame to the “Global Industrial Sector” for increased CO2 emissions which, in turn, will rapidly create an atmospheric, hydrospheric and lithospheric catastrophe beyond anything Man has every seen (Love that one!).  Once that blame can become an incontrovertible truth and that Man is proven Responsible, then the Industrial Enterprises of the Advanced Nations (they have all the money, or they used to) will pay billions to Create Government Managed Programs to Decrease CO2 Emissions and Prevent this World-Ending Catastrophe from ever taking place. Wow.

Instead, what we should really be focused on is something a little more banal like Jobs, freeing up Global Enterprises from regulations and taxes, adjusting our Social Entitlement Programs to fit revenues and paying back Debt.  That’s the Red Meat of this era, in my humble opinion.

Paul, I gotta say, this is fun!  See more below…..

Dan then included more background articles that will be the subject of Sceptical Voices, Part Two.  Hope you can stay with it.

9 thoughts on “Sceptical voices, part one”

  1. Dear Paul:
    What’s wisdom? Truth achieved to the best. Yes, truth.

    OK, brandishing “TRUTH” contradicts Popper, Karl, and other fanatics of relativism, and multiculturalism. I am in the process of writing an ambitious essay on this, but it’s slow going (as I transform Popper in mental dog chow, among other sins caused by my predatory nature…)
    The weasel expression “climate change” is a lie, and should not be used by the philosophically correct. In truth, the heating process is undeniable in the polar regions; plus 4 to 5 degrees Celsius (forget about American Middle Age units!)

    The correct expression is greenhouse gas poisoning.

    So what to say to Dan’s rape of common sense with trivial pseudo science? Like most of the rest of the USA, he is self serving: the USA has the world’s most inefficient economy. So, no wonder they want to keep on keeping on. Drive those big cars, live in these big inefficient houses, far in the suburbs, etc.

    The truth is simple: records show CO2 equivalent greenhouse gases were not above 300ppm for at least 20 million years. Now we are at 450 ppm, and rising by 4ppm a year. While the seas are now keeping pace, rising perhaps at 5mm a year. .

    Yes, 450ppm, not 387ppm. 387 that’s the CO2 last year. Just the CO2. 450 is with all the other greenhouse poisons counted. Antarctic’s icecap is unstable at 425ppm. Ah, and half the CO2 is swallowed (for now!) by the oceans. Wait for the ineluctable burp.

    In my theory of truth, it’s important to label some people and conclusions as idiotic. And in my theory of justice, it’s important to label some people and conclusions as criminal. This is common sense, and this is why society s organized that way for justice. It remains for society to organize itself that way for intelligence, and its enemy, idiocy.

    How long do we need to get tired, reasoning with idiotic and criminal Nazis? At some point, it’s enough. Label mental waste as dangerous rubbish, and dispose of it. In this, I am following, and generalizing, the concept of hate speech.
    http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

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    1. Dear Paul
      I of course did not want to assimilate Dan to a Nazi, although re-reading what I wrote, I thought it sounded that way a bit too much. However, my point about truth is that one should not be afraid of name calling… or its obverse, outright appreciation. Calling it as one thinks it is, is just the ultimate abstraction, and abstraction is how thinking works.
      http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

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      1. Patrice, I’m hoping to speak with Dan today and have my fingers crossed that he will engage, part of the point of me publishing the item. Wondered how you responded to part two of the essay? P.

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  3. I guess, in the end, all the name-calling, politicization and hysteria aside, what we should be doing is examining the facts. If we agree that Science by definition is mutable by new experiments/discoveries (and I’m not a scientist although I do hold a couple of degrees and have spent nearly 30 years in the high-tech private sector running businesses in 18 countries) than we simply have two sides trying to prove they are right. (witness the latest Einsteinian controversy created by a faster-than-light experiment at the CERN Accelerator), -http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903703604576588422968704078.html?mod=googlenews_wsj –

    Commom sense or maybe Good Sense plus hundreds of informed “opinions” and “studies” demonstrates that anthropogenic global warming is, at the very least, questionable and problematic. I have dozens of science articles published by credible scientists that can dispute fact-for-fact that long-term, planet-wide Climate Change has very little to do with Man’s industrial might.

    I do not deny that the planet warms and cools and has done so since the beginning of Earth. It has been warming for quite a while. However, there is new, emerging evidence that the warming is beginning to cool – as I pointed out in an article that Paul published. And, as recently as the 70’s there were many, many scientists who claimed that Earth was now cooling and that within a relatively short period of time, a new Ice Age would envelop us. This time around, it is man-caused global warming or as I have mentioned, more politically correct, “Climate Change”. An amorphous and safer hypothetical construct than global warming.

    Why is it so important that Man is single-handedly causing climate change? I can think of only two reasons: 1.) If Man is causing this, then Man can reverse this (He is all powerful!) and, 2.) to do so will require hundreds of billions of dollars re-directed from the private-sector economies of the world to go to war against global warming, i.e., climate change. Money and power, in a very big way.

    What I’m saying here is don’t take my hard earned rubles and don’t take my company’s competitive profits and force us to invest in something that is very uncertain, long-term and so amorphous that no one really knows how to begin. In my humble opinion, the potential for human, bureaucratic waste, mis-management and error far out-weighs any clearly targeted benefit.

    Let’s say that a Global Warming Fund Program does happen. Several thousand individuals in the more developed nations (where all the money is produced), mostly from a very politicized and organized public-sector movement, will “redistribute” revenues through interesting government programs like “Cap-and-Trade”. A completely new, fresh and powerful global bureaucracy will emerge that will make decisions more closely controlling free-market capitalism than ever before. Political decisions will be made in the “public-interest” that will “liberate” vast profits from the private-sector to the public-sector in order to support hundreds of new regulatory and entitlement programs. Wow. Fresh tax revenues made in the name of “saving the planet” from ourselves. How about a new Trade Exchange to oversee Cap-and-Trade transactions. A handful of powerfully connected people will become billionaires. And, powerful. Beautiful.

    If Nature, Science or maybe God, is responsible for “climate change”, how will it be possible to modify human behavior in order to save the planet? How will new multi-government revenues by generated to fight “The End of the World”? Without Man as the culprit, no redistribution of capital can be justified, can it? What are Man’s priorities? Where should we spend our tax revenues? Shouldn’t jobs, debt and poverty be higher priorities than a possible change in sea levels sometime in the next few hundred years? Oh, you say, just a few decades….. Well, at least one has past and my Costa Mesa house hasn’t flooded yet.

    Here’s an excerpt from 2006 discussing UN priorities vis a vis global warming. Comments go back 10 years when many “experts” were convinced that Oceans would rise in 10-20 years. Read below and check out where diplomat administrators prefer a $50B investment should be made:

    /////
    How to save the world
    Bolton v Gore

    Jun 22nd 2006 | WASHINGTON, DC
    From The Economist print edition
    A question of priorities: hunger and disease or climate change?

    TWO years ago, a Danish environmentalist called Bjorn Lomborg had an idea. We all want to make the world a better place but, given finite resources, we should look for the most cost-effective ways of doing so. He persuaded a bunch of economists, including three Nobel laureates, to draw up a list of priorities. They found that efforts to fight malnutrition and disease would save many lives at modest expense, whereas fighting global warming would cost a colossal amount and yield distant and uncertain rewards.

    That conclusion upset a lot of environmentalists. This week, another man who upsets a lot of people embraced it. John Bolton, America’s ambassador to the United Nations, said that Mr Lomborg’s “Copenhagen Consensus” (see articles) provided a useful way for the world body to get its priorities straight. Too often at the UN, said Mr Bolton, “everything is a priority”. The secretary-general is charged with carrying out 9,000 mandates, he said, and when you have 9,000 priorities you have none.

    So, over the weekend, Mr Bolton sat down with UN diplomats from seven other countries, including China and India but no Europeans, to rank 40 ways of tackling ten global crises. The problems addressed were climate change, communicable diseases, war, education, financial instability, governance, malnutrition, migration, clean water and trade barriers.

    Given a notional $50 billion, how would the ambassadors spend it to make the world a better place? Their conclusions were strikingly similar to the Copenhagen Consensus. After hearing presentations from experts on each problem, they drew up a list of priorities. The top four were basic health care, better water and sanitation, more schools and better nutrition for children. Averting climate change came last.

    The ambassadors thought it wiser to spend money on things they knew would work. Promoting breast-feeding, for example, costs very little and is proven to save lives. It also helps infants grow up stronger and more intelligent, which means they will earn more as adults. Vitamin A supplements cost as little as $1, save lives and stop people from going blind. And so on.

    For climate change, the trouble is that though few dispute that it is occurring, no one knows how severe it will be or what damage it will cause. And the proposed solutions are staggeringly expensive. Mr Lomborg reckons that the benefits of implementing the Kyoto protocol would probably outweigh the costs, but not until 2100. This calculation will not please Al Gore. Nipped at the post by George Bush in 2000, Mr Gore calls global warming an “onrushing catastrophe” and argues vigorously that curbing it is the most urgent moral challenge facing mankind.

    Mr Lomborg demurs. “We need to realise that there are many inconvenient truths,” he says. But whether he and Mr Bolton can persuade the UN of this remains to be seen. Mark Malloch Brown, the UN’s deputy secretary-general, said on June 6th that: “there is currently a perception among many otherwise quite moderate countries that anything the US supports must have a secret agenda…and therefore, put crudely, should be opposed without any real discussion of whether [it makes] sense or not.”
    //////

    When public people in-charge have the authority to make multi-billion dollar priority decisions, you can see where the money would go.

    Finally, let’s check out other aspects of Nature. Take a look at volcanoes. See what happened a few months ago when Iceland erupted. More economic disruption in a few days than 10 years of Man-caused global warming hysteria. Why aren’t citizens of Naples Bay worried about Vesuvius? For sure, sometime in the future, Mt. Rainier is going to blow its top. I don’t see the unwashed masses retreating from Seattle. The line of underwater volcanoes along the Pacific Rim of Fire would change the world literally overnight. Should we be redistributing personal wealth to combat these “certainties? Why don’t we have a national earthquake fund for the day California secedes from the Union? Surely, Man can prevent volcanic eruptions and earthquakes!

    And the Oceans of the World? Why isn’t there a global movement to manage the health of our Seas? This, at least, would be feasible and immediately benefit mankind. I actually donate money to this cause.

    In the end, if one would like to voluntarily “invest” in global warming prevention projects, I encourage it. But, if you want me and my family to pay more taxes to sovereign governments for the purpose of employing tens of thousands of multifarious, intervening aparatchiks to guarantee we won’t have any more ice ages, I’ll try to vote that down every time.

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    1. Dan, thank you so much for your thoughts. I think they deserve a Post in their own right, and may just publish that during the week. Once again, many, many thanks, Paul

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  4. My personal conclusion as follows: Right or wrong (NASA findings, scientific findings, political opinion), the truth is hitting us between the eyes – CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING. So where do we go from here if not working together as a human race to make the necessary changes to save our planet Earth – our home!

    Yes, I agree, and do believe that Earth has its CYCLES; but again, to the degree of what we are now experiencing. Do we need to advance this “cycle” with pollution of every description; and to what major damage to the Earth’s “natural cycles.” Yes, most definitely, let’s not try to make a connection; let’s not try to be proactive in saving our planet. Ah, the doubting Thomas’. Yes, question all we want, yes, there are other important issues to resolve in the world, but WHAT IF “Climate Change/Global Warming“ is for real, what then?

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