It appears, then, that the Eatanswill people, like the people of many other small towns,
considered themselves of the utmost and most mighty importance, and that every man in Eatanswill,
conscious of the weight that attached to his example, felt himself bound to unite, heart and soul,
with one of the two great parties that divided the town—the Blues and the Buffs.
Now the Blues lost no opportunity of opposing the Buffs, and the Buffs lost no opportunity of opposing the Blues;
and the consequence was, that whenever the Buffs and Blues met together at public meeting, town-hall, fair, or market,
disputes and high words arose between them.
Disclaimer
This is going to be a chaotic outpouring of some of my thoughts on tomorrow's referendum.
It isn't going to change anyone's mind - it probably won't even be read - it's simply me getting somethings out of my system.
How I'm Voting
I will be voting for the UK to remain in the EU.
There was never any real doubt in my mind on this and nothing in the so called debate of the last few months has given me any reason to change my mind.
The fact is that I have always considered myself to be a European. I'm proud to be English, but proud that England is part of the United Kingdom,
and proud that the UK is part of the European Union.
I feel that unity is better than division, and fear that leaving the EU will be very divisive and only lead to more division.
None of this means that I think everything England, the United Kingdom, or the European Union does is for the best,
just that it's better to be part of something bigger than yourself.
But whilst I hope that we will remain in the EU, I fear that whichever side wins, the loser will be democracy, the UK and the EU.
About the Referendum
This referendum is and has always been a bad idea.
There are times when a referendum makes sense.
If a party wants to take an action, such as leaving the EU, that will have profound effects on the country it's fair that it should ask the people for a mandate
via a referendum..
But this is not such a referendum. No mainstream party wants to leave the EU.
David Cameron doesn't want to leave the EU -
the only reason for the referendum was as a sop to elements of his party that were threatened by UKIP.
So we have the Prime Minister, a year after winning an election, asking the country if he should do something he doesn't want to do, and has no need to do.
It's difficult to have a referendum on our future as a nation without it becoming very divisive and bitter.
It's like a civil war - you are not fighting an enemy, you are fighting your own country.
It's brother against brother, fathers killing sons, sons killing fathers.
The problem is whatever the outcome the wounds will still be there, and worse may follow.
To go or not to go, that is not the question
With these dissensions it is almost superfluous to say that everything in Eatanswill was made a party question. If the Buffs proposed to new skylight the market-place, the Blues got up public meetings, and denounced the proceeding; if the Blues proposed the erection of an additional pump in the High Street, the Buffs rose as one man and stood aghast at the enormity. There were Blue shops and Buff shops, Blue inns and Buff inns—there was a Blue aisle and a Buff aisle in the very church itself.
One of the problems with this vote is that the question being asked is very simplistic, just the two options Remain a member of the European Union or Leave the European Union,
but the actual question is much more nuanced than that.
I think it was the leave supporters who were very insistent that the question should be very simple, but the result is that no-one knows what a leave vote actually means.
What type of brexit will we get?
A vote for Remain at least is straightforward - nothing changes,
(except for all the bitterness, recriminations).
But a vote to leave could mean anything, and anyone voting to leave won't get to make the decision of which sort of exit will be negotiated.
There are two questions regarding a leave vote:
The first is how much do we actually leave. A vote for leave won't suddenly mean we are no longer a member of the EU,
there will have to be years of negotiation before it's settled,
and whoever is doing the negotiating will get to choose from arrange of options, going from complete isolation, to remaining in the EU for trade purposes,
but giving up any ability to control the EU.
The second problem is what we will do with all this new found freedom once we leave.
We currently have both the extreme right and left wings of the political spectrum both thinking leave will be a good thing.
They cannot both be correct.
To some the EU is literally a communist state, to others it's full of capitalist parasites, forcing privitisation and destroying workers rights.
Piers Corbyn (of termite fame) wants a Lexit, a left wing exit.
But that won't be an option on the ballot, the only option is leave or remain,
and you can bet that a vote for leave will be interpreted by Johnson, Gove or Farage as a Rexit.
If Leave win I suspect there will be a lot of disappointed leavers at the end.
The Standard of Debate
Of course it was essentially and indispensably necessary that each of these powerful parties should have its chosen organ and representative: and, accordingly, there were two newspapers in the town—the Eatanswill Gazette and the Eatanswill Independent; the former advocating Blue principles, and the latter conducted on grounds decidedly Buff. Fine newspapers they were. Such leading articles, and such spirited attacks!—'Our worthless contemporary, the Gazette'—'That disgraceful and dastardly journal, the Independent'—'That false and scurrilous print, the Independent'—'That vile and slanderous calumniator, the Gazette;' these, and other spirit-stirring denunciations, were strewn plentifully over the columns of each, in every number, and excited feelings of the most intense delight and indignation in the bosoms of the townspeople.
Look Who Want Out
To bring this blog back to science;
if I was in any way tempted to vote Leave, the fact that just about everyone of the most idiotic climate skeptics also want to leave,
would surely be enough to put a reasonable doubt in my mind.
When the likes of Piers Corbyn, Christopher Monckton, Steve Goddard, Anthony Watts, Jo Nova, James Delingpole are all cheering on an exit, one has to assume they see some benefit to their cause.
That said, I suspect the reason has less to do with any possible change in UK energy policy,
and more to do with the correlation between Euro and Global Warming conspiracies.
It may or may not be a coincidence, but so much of the debate seems to echo the climate change arguments.
There's the constant repeating of statistics that have been debunked (the 350 million a week we will be supposedly saving for example).
There's the experts know nothing type of arguments.
There's the dismissal of any argument that goes against you as scaremongering, or the result of EU bribery.
The Gazette warned the electors of Eatanswill that the eyes not only of England, but of the whole civilised world, were upon them; and the Independent imperatively demanded to know, whether the constituency of Eatanswill were the grand fellows they had always taken them for, or base and servile tools, undeserving alike of the name of Englishmen and the blessings of freedom. Never had such a commotion agitated the town before.
The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel
Finally, what really concerns me about the referendum, and especially the Brexit side, is the attempts to define the debate in terms of Britishness,
and argue this as a choice between being pro-British and anti-Europe, or pro-Europe and anti-British.
As I said at the start, I consider myself to be both pro-British and pro-European.
If we remain there will still be a United Kingdom, if we leave it could well mean the end of the UK, as Scotland at least, and possibly the other non-English
sections of the kingdom will be pressing for their own independence votes.
My big fear from all this is that with so much at stake, and the constant mantra of brexit of take back control,
that aftermath will be filled with accusations that the other side were unpatriotic, sold out our country's future, and was even an act of treason.
Things could get nasty in the days after the referendum, and possibly for a lot longer.
Several months after Christopher Monckton of Brenchley last had a post on WUWT
concerning the 18 years of pause, he's returned with a new post - Introducing the global warming speedometer.
This is much shorter then his previous reports, and fails to mention the Great Pause at all, instead concentrating on a new graph, which he describes as
A single devastating graph shows official climate predictions were wild
Actually, it isn't really new - just a straightened up version of the dial graphs he featured in his previous posts.
Those graphs showed the warming rates of various data sets, but now he's dropped all data except the two satellite sets that show the least warming.
I'm not keen on the style of graph; it's rather distracting and presenting the data on a circular dial makes no sense,
except to make it look like a speedometer.
But, in any event, a speedometer is a lousy metaphor for changing temperatures.
A car's speedometer shows the instantaneous speed of a car,
but that isn't a useful concept for temperature records, that change greatly from month to month.
So the speedometer in Monckton's graph is showing a rate of change averaged over a longer period.
But then you have to decide what length of time you are taking for the average.
For Monckton's graph he's chosen to start in 2001.
Odd, as last time he was insisting the Great Pause starting date was calculated, and not plucked arbitrarily from the ether, which he implied was the defining point of the end-point fallacy.
Now he seems to plucking the start date out of the ether.
Monckton's Omissions
Here's my own version of the details of Monckton's speedometer, flattened out to make it easier to read.
It's trying to show the disparity between IPCC projections compared with real observations.
That is the two satellite sets showing temperatures in the lower troposphere - RSS 3.3, ignoring the newer RSS 4.0 and older UAH 5.6,
both of which shows considerably more warming.
He shows the warming rate over a 15 year and 4 month period, and claims
Fifteen years is long enough to verify the predictions from IPCC’s first three Assessment Reports against
real-world temperature change measured by the most sophisticated method available – satellites.
But he's wrong as can easily be seen by looking at the confidence intervals for these 15 years
using this handy tool.
RSS 3.3 shows only 0.36 °C / Century warming, but with a 2σ confidence interval of ± 2.26 °C / Century.
We cannot say with any degree of confidence that the real rate of warming isn't in the IPCC's 2001 predictions, or even their 1990 predictions.
Here's the previous graph showing the rates of warming since 2001 for more data sets with their 2σ confidence intervals marked.
The Missing Heat
The IPCC figures Monckton uses are projections for the period 1990 to 2025,
but Monckton compares this with the 15 years from 2001 to present.
He's implying that this slower rate will continue until 2025, which is dubious given the uncertainty in the trend,
but he's also effectively tracing that lower rate back to 1990, and in so doing effectively hides much of the warming that has already occurred during the first decade of the IPCC's projection.
This graph illustrates the problem.
It shows Monckton's preferred satellite data from 1990, the start of the forecast period.
The green line shows Monckton's trend starting in 2001, the blue line shows the trend from 1990.
The trend of speed since 1990 is 0.98 °C / Century, twice the speed Monckton uses, and very close to the lowest IPCC projection. (If you include May's figures the rate is now 1.19 °C / Century, within the lower bound.)
But the IPCC were not making a claim about the rate of change but the total change over a 35 year period.
Monckton uses projections from the first three IPCC reports (1990, 1995 and 2001).
The 1990 report was based on simpler models and later reports have shown less warming,
so I'll stick with the 2001 projections.
The values Monckton uses come from page 8 of the IPCC 2001 Synthesis Report:
For the periods 1990 to
2025 and 1990 to 2050, the projected increases are 0.4 to 1.1°C and 0.8 to 2.6°C, respectively.
Monckton translates this as:
IPCC (2001), on page 8, predicted that in the 36 years 1990-2025 the world would warm by 0.75 [0.4, 1.1] C°,
equivalent to 2.1 [1.1, 3.1] C°/century.
This predicted interval is 4.5 [2.3, 6.6] times observed warming since January 2001.
Aside from thinking that 1990 - 2025 is a 36 year period, when it's 35, he makes a couple of dubious changes.
He says that the IPCC predicted the world would warm by 0.75 °C by 2025, when they only give a range of values.
He's taken the mid point of the range as the expected amount of warming.
But this assumes the projected range is symmetrical, which is unlikely if you look at the 1990 reports estimates.
Then he converts the projected warming into a rate of warming.
The IPCC only say that 2025 is expected to be 0.4 to 1.1 °C warmer than 1990.
This should be measured using an average of annual temperatures centered on those two dates - I'll use 20 year averages as this is the method specified in later reports.
So the true measure will be to take the average temperature between 2016 - 2035 inclusive,
and see if they are between 0.4 and 1.1 °C above the average temperatures for 1981 - 2000.
We won't know for certain if this projection is correct until 2035, but how far off are they at the moment?
Here is a graph showing the running 20 year averages for Monckton's preferred temperature set,
relative to the 1990 average.
This goes up to 2005, the year centered on the 20 years from 1996 to 2015.
The average in 2005 is 0.207 °C warmer than it was in 1990. That's more than halfway to the lower bound of the IPCC's projection, even though we are less than halfway through the projection period.
Translating this into Monckton's speed, we have a rate of warming since 1990 of 1.38 °C / Century, well within the IPCC's projections.
Using the Hadley Centre's surface data, which is what the IPCC are referring to,
the rate of warming since 1990 is 1.80 °C / Century - exactly in line with the IPCC's 1995 projection, and well within the 2001 projections.
The following graph shows the rolling 20 year averages, both for Monckton's satellite averages, and for HadCRUT4,
along with a representation of the range of projections from the IPCC 2001 report.
None of this guarantees that the IPCC projections will be met.
If temperatures continue to rise in line with Monckton's speedometer, the 2025 figure would be 0.31 °C above the 1990 value.
A bit short of the IPCC's lower bound of 0.4 °C, but much higher than Monckton is implying
Most of the global temperature sets have been published up to April 2015 and they all continue to show the globe is very warm.
GISS in particular has had 7 months of record breaking anomalies, with every month since October 2015 being more than a degree above the base line average (1951 - 1980).
Of course, this spike in temperatures is generated by the current El Niño conditions, and temperatures will fall back later in the year.
This leaves a question as to whether 2016 will be another record breaking year, in some or all data sets.
Personally I don't care too much for emphasizing annual records, as it's a distraction from the long term trends -
a single record warm year does not prove the trend is upwards, and a lack of records over a certain period does not mean warming has stopped.
Nevertheless, records are fun and if 2016 is a record it will be remarkable given that it will be the 3rd record year in a row for land based observations.
For the satellites the question is whether 2016 will finally break the long standing record set in 1998.
It's something of a risky move predicting a record, given how the doubters will use anything you say in evidence against you -
If you predict a record that doesn't happen it will be prove that all your forecasts are wrong,
in it does happen it will be evidence that the figures are fraudulent.
So I was intrigued by a couple of tweets Gavin Schmidt made over the last couple of months,
saying that it was more than 99% certain that 2016 would be a record at least as far as GISS goes.
Aside from the wisdom of making himself such a hostage to fortune,
I was also suspicious of the idea that 3 or 4 months in you could be so confident.
So I've been looking at the statistics myself.
This proved to be so interesting, that I think I might try to do a month by month summary.
Simple Correlation
The first question is how much correlation has there been in the past between the first 4 months of the year and the final Annual temperature.
The correlation is remarkably good, and looks pretty linear.
I was surprised at how strong the correlation was, but on reflection there are a couple of reasons why this shouldn't be so surprising.
First, by April a third of the year has already been locked-in.
More importantly as temperatures have warmed in general it's natural that this will increase both the annual average and the starting average.
Using this line to predict 2016, we get a forecast of 1.08 ° C, with a 95% prediction interval of 0.94 - 1.23.
This compares with the current record set all the way back in 2015 of 0.87 ° C.
From this I estimate the probability of 2016 setting a record in GISTEMP
at 99.8%.
This graph puts the forecast in the context of previous annual temperatures.
The vertical line represents the 95% prediction interval.
Is this a reasonable prediction?
I'd be extremely cautious about reading to much into this simple analysis.
For one thing, extrapolating from a trend is dangerous when you move outside the range from which the trend was calculated.
In this case the average for Jan-Apr is far warmer than anything seen before, so it's impossible to know if the trend would continue linearly.
The red dot in the next graph shows where our prediction sits on the line.
In addition any probability is only the probability of a record assuming the assumptions of the model are correct.
There will always be a lot of factors that such a simple model does not take into account, and given the probability is so high,
there's a reasonable chance that any additional factors will reduce that probability.
One thing in particular is that this model does not take into account the fact that this is an El Niño year,
and that it is almost certain that temperatures will drop during the rest of the year.
Though looking at the last big El Niño year, 1998, that ended up very close to the predicted value.
I want to look at more complicated forecast models in a later post.
All of the above has been with regard to the GISS temperature set, but we can use the same method to look at other sets.
For NOAA the probability of a record is slightly less, partly because 2015 was somewhat warmer, 0.9 ° C,
and partly because the start to 2016 hasn't been quite as warm in NOAA as in GISS.
The prediction for NOAA using this method is 1.01 ° C, with a probability of 97.9% of beating the 2015 record.
For HadCRUT4 the probability of a record year is only 91.7%.
For the satellite data the current record goes back to 1998, and the two versions of data sets used which show the smallest amount of warming, RSS 3.3 and UAH beta 6, show the most uncertainty.
RSS 3.3 is projected to beat 1998 by 0.13 ° C, with a 95.5% of a record.
UAH beta 6 is projected to beat 1998 by 0.08 ° C, with a 87.0% chance of a record.
By contrast UAH v5.6 has a 99.9% chance of being a record, and RSS TTT 4.0 has a 99.7% chance.
It's curious that for UAH the newer, but still unpublished, version is the data set with the greatest chance of not being a record, but the older official version has the most chance of any set of beating the record.
Here's what the UAH beta 6 forecast looks like in context.
This table summarizes the probabilities and margins for all data sets.
I'm showing the expected value as a margin over the previous record, rather than as an anomaly to avoid confusion between the different bases used for each set.
Set
Probability
Margin
GISTEMP
0.998
0.22
HadCRUT4
0.917
0.12
NOAA
0.979
0.15
RSS 3.3
0.955
0.13
RSS 4.0 (TTT)
0.997
0.25
UAH 5.6
0.999
0.26
UAH Beta 6
0.870
0.08
Changes over time
Here's a graph that shows how the probabilities have changed since the January figures.
and here's a graph showing projected difference between 2016 and the previous record in degrees C.
Conclusion
I think it's very likely that most and probably all data sets will show 2016 as being the warmest year on record.
But I would be pretty skeptical about the very high probabilities obtained by this simple method.
All of the above statistics should be considered just for fun and I take no responsibility for any losses occurred by anyone taking bets.
My main interest in all this is to see how the forecasts, using this simple method, change over the year.
Update
This post was updated on to include HadCRUT4 figures for April.
In a previous post I was talking about Piers Corbyn and his strange obsession with termites.
The claim was that termites emit ten times the CO2 as humans, and I pointed out that
the only source he quoted for that extraordinary claim was a list of fun facts on a website for a termite detector company, and he ignored contradictory facts from that very source.
But that left the question as to whether there was any truth in the claim, and if there isn't where did the claim originate.
Zombie Termites
Piers is not the first to have made the claim.
In fact the claim has been around for at least 25 years,
and has all the hallmarks of a zombie statistic - one that is repeated so often it can never be killed.
It's a suspiciously round number - ten times anything has a certain shock value that 9 times or 11 times doesn't.
Then there's the lack of clarity, ten times human output from what year, and do we mean all human activity, or just from fossil fuels.
And I can find no instance of someone given precise figures and sources both for termite and human emissions -
nobody says According to this research termites emit X amount of CO2. According to this research humans emit Y amount of CO2. Note that X is 10 times Y..
The question of the time frame for the claim is important as human emissions have increased over the last few decades, as this graph demonstrates.
Emissions have doubled since , so if termites had been emitting 10 times as much back then, they'd only be emitting 5 times as much now.
Looking for a Source
Alan Caruba
The earliest online example of the claim I could find was from , in an article by Alan Caruba,
with the equivocal title Global warming: Lies, lies, damnable lies!.
Carbon Dioxide is a natural, abundant chemical that is essential to the growth of all plants
and trees. You and every other member of the planet's six billion human population emits CO2
every time they exhale.
Termites produce ten times the amount of CO2 than all the fossil
fuels burned in a year worldwide.
The technology of energy production, transportation,
etc.,
has been calculated to be only 0.04 per cent. The UN Kyoto Climate Control Treaty is
intended to control that! Do you think 0.04 per cent has any effect? The notion of calling
CO2 a "pollutant" is ludicrous. Worse, it is a criminal fraud.
As is often the case it's thrown in amidst a number of irrelevant claims, and provides no source.
He makes an even odder claim that energy production and transportation are 0.04%, without saying what they are 0.04% of.
Edmund Contoski
A slightly later, and much quoted, version comes from Edmund Contoski in -
Not only is carbon dioxide's total greenhouse effect puny, mankind's contribution to it is
minuscule. The overwhelming majority (97%) of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere comes
from nature, not from man. Volcanoes, swamps, rice paddies, fallen leaves, and even insects
and bacteria produce carbon dioxide, as well as methane.
According to the journal Science (Nov. 5, 1982)
, termites alone emit ten times more carbon dioxide than all the factories and automobiles
in the world.
Natural wetlands emit more greenhouse gases than all human activities combined. (If
greenhouse warming is such a problem, why are we trying to save all the wetlands?)
Geothermal activity in Yellowstone National Park emits ten times the carbon dioxide of a
midsized coal-burning power plant, and volcanoes emit hundreds of times more. In fact, our
atmosphere's composition is primarily the result of volcanic activity. There are about 100
active volcanoes today, mostly in remote locations, and we're living in a period of
relatively low volcanic activity. There have been times when volcanic activity was ten times
greater than in modern times. But by far the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions is
the equatorial Pacific Ocean. It produces 72% of the earth's emissions of carbon dioxide,
and the rest of the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and the other oceans also
contribute.
This is from a very long article which throws claim after claim at the reader. It starts by claiming all the warming of the 20th century was wiped out in - an utterly ludicrous claim.
He also claims that 72% of all emissions come from the Pacific ocean, a claim both wrong and incompatible with termites producing 40% of all emissions.
But his claim about termites is weaker than others, he only says termites emit ten times all the factories and automobiles in the world, not all emissions from fossil fuel.
This article seems to be the only paper ever cited as evidence that termites produce 10 times as much CO2 as humans.
But there are a couple of problems using it as evidence:
It doesn't support the claim.
It's probably wrong.
The full article is behind a pay wall, but the abstract states:
Termites may emit large quantities of methane, carbon dioxide, and molecular
hydrogen into the atmosphere. Global annual emissions calculated from
laboratory measurements could reach 1.5 x 1014 grams of methane and
5 x 1016 grams of carbon dioxide.
As much as 2 x 1014 grams of molecular hydrogen may also be produced. Field
measurements of methane emissions from two termite nests in Guatemala corroborated the
laboratory results. The largest emissions should occur in tropical areas disturbed by human
activities.
The figure of 5 x
1016 grams of carbon dioxide is 50 Gt of
CO2.
This is less than twice current human emissions from fossil fuel, and around 2.5 times as much as human emissions in 1982 when the article was published;
nothing like 10 times human emissions.
It's accuracy was called into question as soon as it was published, even by the authors.
The Sydney Morning Herald quoted the authors as
saying, ... actual gas production may vary from their estimates by a factor of two.
and quotes Dr Pearman of CSIRO saying that as far as methane output was concerned
... the first impression was that the production rate on a global scale was
about 10 times less than that reported in Science.
A couple of years after it's initial publication, Science published this letter from N. M. Collins and T. G. Wood, saying
We do not question their laboratory experiments, but we are critical of
their extrapolations of gas emissions (calculated from food consumption) to a
global scale.
Our appraisal of the available data indicates that
gas
emissions by termites was overestimated by at least one order of
magnitude.
Since 1982 there have been other papers giving much lower estimates for termite emissions -
agreeing with the claim that Zimmerman et al were out by a factor of 10.
Then in , we have research from M. G. Sanderson which gave termites a global CO2 emission rate of just
3.5 Gt per year (± 0.7 Gt per year).
A global database describing the geographical distribution of the biomass of termites and their
emissions of methane and carbon dioxide has been constructed. Termite biomasses were assigned to
various ecosystems using published measurements and a recent high-resolution (10' × 10')
database of vegetation categories. The assigned biomasses were then combined with literature
measurements of fluxes of methane and carbon dioxide from termites and extrapolated to give
global emission estimates for each gas.
The global emissions of methane and carbon dioxide are 19.7 ± 1.5 and 3500 ± 700 Mt
yr-1, respectively (1 Mt = 1012 g)
. These emissions contribute approximately 4% and 2%, respectively, to the total global fluxes
of these gases.
That puts termite emissions at not much more than a tenth of all human emissions.
Incidentally, the figure of 2% of global fluxes is misleading as they are comparing termite emissions against net land emissions.
Compared with total global emissions their figure is more like 0.5% for termites, compared with around 4% for humans.
Here's a graph comparing the different estimates for annual termite emissions along with that claimed by Corbyn.
The dotted line shows 29 Gt, which is the value given for all human emissions in the IPCC's 4th report.
Dixy Lee Ray
So where did this myth originate?
I don't know for certain, but the earliest record I could find is in a book called Trashing
the Planet by
Dixy Lee Ray.
Published in this book, subtitled How Science Can Help Us Deal With Acid Rain, Depletion of
the Ozone, and Nuclear Waste (among Other Things) is something of a blueprint for arguments made
against environmental concerns, including global warming.
The quote in question says:
The largest source of greenhouse gas may well be termites, whose digestive activities are
responsible for about 50 billion tons of CO2 and methane annually.
This is 10 times more than the present world production of CO2 from burning
fossil fuel.
It's a garbled claim as it mixes CO2 and methane, but the figure of 50 billion tons (50 Gt) suggests it comes from the Zimmerman paper.
Given that this book was written only 8 years after the Science paper, and given that this
passage was mentioned in several book reviews on publication, I
think it's quite possible that Dixy Lee Ray is the originator of this zombie statistic.
Incidentally, Trashing the Planet, to give it its full title, was
responsible, for more than the myth about termites.
See The
Volcano Gambit for another misunderstanding starting with an article in
Science.
As to why Dixy Lee Ray made the mistake in the first place, I don't know.
But I do have a very tentative theory - I wonder if it might have come from a confusion of different units used in measuring carbon.
Carbon emissions can be described either as the mass of carbon-dioxide (CO2), or as the mass of
carbon (C).
This can be a big source of confusion, as Joe Romm explains.
For this and the previous article I've tried to be consistent and convert all measurements into gigatons of CO2.
But many sources measure emissions in mass of carbon - it's a simple
process to convert the mass of carbon to the equivalent mass of carbon-dioxide, simply multiply by 3.67.
Now, if you look at estimates for human emissions at the start of the 80s, this would have been
around 5 Gt of Carbon.
If you were not paying sufficient attention you could easily think the figure quoted in the
Science paper (50 Gt of CO2) was ten times that of human emissions (5 Gt of C).
The real issue with the termite myth is not how it started, but how it has been perpetuated by people
endlessly repeating other's mistakes.
They
Do not check the original source
Do not check the figures
Do not consider if human emissions have changed
Do not ask if there are any estimates that contradict their claims
Do not ask how termite emissions could be changing
Whatever else the people repeating this claim are, they are not skeptics.
For those unfamiliar with Piers Corbyn, he is a weather forecaster from England.
He runs a company called WeatherAction,
which sells long-range forecasts for various regions of the world.
To quote the Weatheraction web site:
The forecasts are based on predictable aspects of solar particle and magnetic activity and sun-earth connections and their modulation by lunar effects.
The unique method developed by Piers Corbyn - WeatherAction founder, astrophysicist, theoretical physicist and weather & climate physicist & forecaster - is kown [sic] as The Solar-Lunar-Action-Technique (SLAT) of Long-Range forecasting.
I've been fascinated by Corbyn ever since reading Boris Johnson's 2010 article in the Daily
Telegraph
The
man who repeatedly beats the Met Office at its own game.
(Johnson's written at several more articles for the Telegraph about Corbyn since then.)
The 2010 article is about Corbyn's success at predicting December 2010 would be very cold, and contains gushing remarks such as
Allow me to introduce readers to Piers Corbyn, meteorologist and brother of my old chum, bearded
leftie MP Jeremy.
Piers Corbyn works in an undistinguished office in Borough High Street.
He has no telescope or supercomputer.
Armed only with a laptop, huge quantities of publicly available data and a first-class degree in
astrophysics, he gets it right again and again.
and
He seems to get it right about 85 per cent of the time and serious business people - notably in
farming - are starting to invest in his forecasts.
In the eyes of many punters, he puts the taxpayer-funded Met Office to shame. How on earth does
he do it? He studies the Sun.
The bearded leftie brother is now leader of the Labour party, which has put rather more
focus on Pier's own believes, for good or bad.
Johnson's claim regarding Corbyn's 85% success rate is presented with no evidence.
It's a figure often quoted by his supporters, but I've seen no statistical evidence to back that claim.
To me, and many others, it seems Weatheraction's claims of success are more to do with confirmation bias than objective evidence -
5 years on, December 2010 is still held as evidence for his uncanny ability to forecast the weather,
but the failure to predict the rest of that winter are quickly forgotten.
Piers the Climate Scientist
I want to look at Weatheraction's results in later articles,
but here I'm more interested in his claims about climate science.
His Weatheraction site makes his views on global warming and the role of CO2 plain -
he spends more time talking about it on that site than he does about the weather.
His views are summed up thus:
WeatherAction is involved in the Global Warming/Climate Change debate where we point out that the world is now cooling not warming and there is no observational evidence in the thousands and millions of years of data that changes in CO2 have any observable effect on weather or climate in the real world.
His work on the subject consists of badly
written and intemperate rants, with a fair amount of conspiracy theories thrown in.
He claims that CO2 based climate change is a hoax perpetuated by Big Oil to drive up fuel prices -
which is a change from the more usual claims that it is a hoax perpetuated by communists to destroy oil companies.
To get some idea of his style here's some brief extracts from a recent post on the Weatheraction site:
Happy(?!) Lenin's Birthday & World Earth Day
The dates are the same because Green campaigners & Eco-socialists (whatever that means) wanted to drag former communist supporters into their scheme of increased taxation and bigger national and world government in name of 'saving the planet'.
In actual fact their de-industrialization and asset-stripping privatisation policies to be applied to the UK, USA and most western countries (but not Germany) and fraudulent manipulation of (weather) data conducted through the United Nations Climate Committee (IPCC) and the European Union diktats such as the EUETS (Emission Trading Scheme) are the OPPOSITE to Lenin's promotion of heavy industry and professed intended application of real objective science for the good of mankind.
...
In the UK it is likley that Whitehall and most Tory MPs know the CO2 story is a pack of lies but promote it as an important ideological component of their green-tax, high energy charges, pro-nuclear, living-standards-lowering, asset-stripping - de-industrialization agenda. The LibDems, Greens (especially) and Labour (with the exception of those that actually know something about science such as Graham Stringer MP) largely believe in the delusion, although they cannot put an argument for it and painfully find themsleves watching the destruction of the steel and other heavy industries and whole communities (of their, not Tory, voters) thanks largely to anti-CO2 and related EU policies of their own making - and go into denial, trying to blame China rather than themselves. They will only give-up the CO2 story when they decide to defend the interests of their UK voters.
It's difficult to believe anyone takes him seriously, but he seems to attract a large range of admirers especially amongst fringe politicians across the political spectrum - Boris Johnson, George Galloway and Roger Helmer MEP for example.
Piers on Termites
Piers Corbyn is frequently introduced as a scientist - often as a real scientist.
I suspect people use the word real to indicate that he says what they want to believe.
It's difficult to see much science in any of his rants,
and he rarely backs up any claim with a source.
One of Pier's obsessions is termites. He mentions them at every opportunity, claiming that they
produce ten times as much CO2 as all human activities,
and joking about the need to declare war on them.
His fury at the scientific consensus that humans are destroying the planet is palpable.
If it's true that carbon dioxide is a problem, then the powers-that-be ought to attack the
main producers of carbon dioxide. Termites produce ten times more CO2 than mankind, so we
should have a war on termites. But we haven't seen any of that, he concludes. There's
no war on termites.
In his review of the IPCC
we have this marvelous non sequitur.
THEIR CLAIM that alleged CO2 warming due to a small rise in the atmospheric concentration
(0.04%) of the trace gas, CO2, is
somehow hidden in the deep ocean is scientific nonsense beyond reason, fact or observation.
The non-observed warming of the
atmosphere cannot realistically get to the deep sea let alone make a sensible difference to
the massive oceans (71% of Earth's surface).
Termites alone produce 10 times the CO2 of all Man's activity. Will Obama start A WAR
ON ANTS?
Their dire warning of world warming while it gets colder and their call
for more switching to gas from coal - which is a bright Green Light to
Russian militarism and gas-blackmail of the Eu; rest on two premises:-
1. That in the present real world increases in the trace gas CO2 (0.04%
of air) cause warming and climate change.
2. That even if this were true Man's only 4% contribution of total CO2/
greenhouse gases dominates and nature's 96% conspires that all other
CO2 etc from
termites (10x that of Man)
, volcanoes, rotting plants,
cow-fart etc stay constant as a whole, leaving Man's 4% in charge.
and in numerous other places.
The Trouble with Termites
The first problem is he doesn't explain how termites emitting a lot of CO2 would negate human activity.
Nature puts a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, but also takes a huge
amount out of the atmosphere each year.
As long as the amount in is the same as the amount out, the amount in the atmosphere
remains constant.
What's changed is that humans are now adding additional carbon into the atmosphere,
and as a result less CO2 is leaving the atmosphere than entering it, so the amount is
increasing.
Termite CO2 emissions are part of the natural CO2 cycle.
As long as termite numbers are not changing the amount of CO2 they put into
the atmosphere will have no effect on the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
(And if termite numbers are increasing it would probably be due to human activity.)
So what source does Corbyn quote for this claim?
In almost all cases he never quotes a source - he simply asserts it's a FACT.
The one exception I could find was in this slide show,
where on the first page he claims ANTS produce TEN times as much CO2 as ALL man's output!
Aside from him mixing up termites and ants, you can just about see on the bottom right of the page
a link to a source.
But if you were expecting Corbyn to link to an actual scientific report, you would be
disappointed.
The link is to a list of Termite and Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Facts on a web site for a
company who make termite detectors.
The site no longer has that list, but it is archived here,
It's basically just a list of fun facts regarding termites.
Sure enough the fact Corbyn is using as a source for his quote is there:
Scientists have calculated that termites alone produce ten times as much carbon dioxide as all the fossil fuels burned in the whole world in a year.
Actually that's not quite what Corbyn claims, he says it's ten times all human output, not just that from fossil fuels.
But more problematically, Piers appears to have missed, or chosen to ignore, other facts in the list that
contradict
the ten times figure (my emphasis):
It is thought "There are 2,600 different species of termites, and it is estimated
that there are at least a million billion individual termites on Earth, that they emit
two
and four percent of the global carbon dioxide and methane budget
, respectively-both
mediated directly or indirectly by their microbes.
The Science magazine reports that termites annually generate
more than twice
as much carbon dioxide as mankind does burning fossil fuels
.
One termite species annually emits 600,000 metric tons of formic acid into the
atmosphere, an amount equal to the combined contributions of automobiles, refuse
combustion and vegetation.
So Piers, who claims to be a scientist makes repeated claims that he only backs up with a single
dubious source, and that source contradicts his claims.
As to whether there is any truth behind the termite claim - the short answer is probably not, but I'll leave that for a future post.
As I mentioned in a previous post, Christopher Monckton seems to have contradictory views on when something demonstrates the endpoint fallacy or not.
But his Great Pause posts are not by any means the most egregious example of this confusion.
Here is a video of a presentation he gave at Saint Paul, Minnesota.
You can watch the whole thing and find many examples of contradictions and nonsense, but the bit I'm interested in starts at around 43:40 and lasts a little under 5 minutes.
During those 5 minutes Monckton both condemns one graph as bogus whilst claiming an almost identical graph is genuine.
43:40
Here is the latest lie - in the 2007 report - the iconic lie there.
They're attempting to show that global warming is accelerating.
Implication that our CO2 emissions are accelerating and this is causing a more rapid rate of warming.
This is a statistical lie known as the start point or endpoint fallacy. Where you take a
jiggly up and downy dataset like temperature, where you don't know which way it's going to
go next, a stochastic dataset. If you choose your start point and your endpoints carefully
enough you can make it look as though any trend you want is happening. Here they've tried to
show a rising trend.
I'm now going to take the same data, but I'm going to take the more recent end of it, between 1993 at the present,
and I'm going to choose my own start points.
Look at this.
Top left 1993 to the present, top right 1997 to the present, bottom left 2001 to the present, bottom right 2005 to the present.
We're heading for a new ice age!
In case this isn't clear enough, Monckton now asks his audience:
Now here is a question for you - to see if you've been concentrating as alertly as I'd hoped.
Which of those two graphs is nearer to the truth?
Hands up for the UN's graph. None I think.
Hands up for my graph. A few.
Hands up for neither. Much more.
And those who said neither are correct.
Because remember I started out by saying this is a bogus statistical technique.
Every time you use it, it produces results which could only be right purely by accident.
It is invalid whether you do it to try and show a falling temperature or you do it to try to
show a rising temperature,
and I merely gave you that example to show how easy it is to bend the data in the way the UN has
done.
And it is a disgrace that a public authority in receipt of tax-payers money from around the world should dare to produce a graph like that one that we've just seen.
That should never have been done.
It is a clear continuing instance of deliberate bad faith.
There cannot be any doubt about what Monckton is saying at this point.
All the graphs he showed are only to illustrate how bogus the technique is.
That's taken us to 46:00.
Now skip forward a couple of minutes.
47:45
So we go on then to a lie which was told by the Director General of the National Climatic Data Center, Tom Karl,
when he and I testified along side each other in front of the Energy and Commerce Committee of Congress earlier this year.
I produced this graph ...
This graph shows exactly the same period as the bottom left one in his set of bogus graphs.
It isn't exactly the same as the one he showed to the Committee, that was this:
In either case the graph shows almost the same time frame as the bottom left one he's already claimed produces results which could only be right purely by accident.
So is he admitting to presenting a bogus graph to the Energy and Commerce Committee of Congress,
or is was he trying to make the same point to them, that a graph like this only shows a result that is a pure accident?
He goes on ...
... what I'm saying here is that there has been global cooling for the
last 8 or 9 years, statistically significant, and rapid cooling.
How many of you have seen that reported in any major news medium recently?
We are now up to 48:30, less than 5 minutes since he first described the IPCC graph as a lie.
He's admitted to showing a graph to a Committee of Congress that covers the same period as one he claims demonstrates the endpoint fallacy,
but is also claiming to his audience that it demonstrates rapid and statistically significant cooling.
You can see the whole hearing here.
Monckton's testimony start's at 1:21:30 - though the video doesn't capture the slide in question.
Again he says that the graph shows seven years of cooling, with no suggestion that it is based on a statistical lie.
There's a lot more that could be said about Monckton's recollection of this hearing, but that's moving outside the scope of this post,
which was merely to draw attention to Christopher Monckton's inconsistent notion of what makes for a bogus statistical technique.
And as theories go this was all very fine and pleasant until Veet Voojagig
suddenly claimed to have found this planet,
and to have worked there for a while driving a limousine for a family of cheap green
retractables, whereupon he was taken away,
locked up, wrote a book, and was finally sent into tax exile, which is the usual fate reserved
for those who are determined to make a fool of themselves in public.
Introduction
Among the inspirations for Conventional Signs are some of Martin Gardner's essays
on skepticism, in
particular those found in his book Science: Good. Bad, and Bogus.
The earliest essay in that collection, written in 1951, called The Hermit Scientist
describes a number of individuals who have come up with theories that challenged established
ideas, and for good reason were not accepted by scientists.
The second person to be mentioned in that essay is Dr Immanuel Velikovsky (the first is L Ron
Hubbard).
Gardner sums up Velikovsky's book Worlds in Collision thus:
A few months before Hubbard's revelation, the Macmillan Company published Dr. Immanuel
Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision.
The book throws together a jumbled mass of data to support the preposterous theory that a giant
comet once erupted from the planet Jupiter,
passed close to the earth on two occasions, then settled down as Venus.
The first visit to the earth of this erratic comet was precisely at the moment Moses stretched
out his hand and caused the Red Sea to divide.
The manna which fell from the skies shortly thereafter was a precipitate, fortunately edible, of
suspended elements in the celestial visitor's tail.
Later the comet's return coincided with Joshua's successful attempt to make the sun and moon
stand still.
The miracles of both Moses and Joshua were the result, Velikovksy informs us, of a temporary
cessation of the earth's spin.
Gardner's description is only really the tip of the iceberg
- Worlds in Collision also suggests that flies might have traveled on Venus to
reach Earth, Mars was also knocked out of it's orbit and came into close contact with Earth,
causing yet more biblical catastrophes,
and he hints that if any of this is inconsistent with Newtonian mechanics, then Newton is wrong
and the planets are governed by some mysterious form of electro-magnatism that allows of the
events he describes to just happen.
WiC also makes it clear that this is only the start and there are more revelations
to be published in future books.
These would included ideas such as Saturn exploding and drenching the earth, and ancient
astronauts visiting the early earth.
Although Velikovsky's work is a tissue of absurdities, and has been recognized as such by every
geologist and astronomer in the country, it is astonishing how many who reviewed the book were
caught off guard by the author's persuasive rhetoric.
John J. O'Neill, science editor of the "New York Herald Tribune," described the book as "a
magnificent piece of scholarly historical research."
Horace Kallen, editor of the "Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences," wrote, "The vigor of the
scientific imagination, the boldness of construction and the range of inquiry and information
fill me with admiration."
Ted Thackrey, editor of the "New York Compass," suggested that Velikovsky's discoveries "may
well rank him in contemporary and future history with Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Darwin, Einstein.
. . ."
And the book received enthusiastic endorsement by those two eminent scientists, Clifton Fadiman
and Fulton Oursler.
Gardener was wrong in one important respect - his 1951 essay concludes:
Thus it is that probably no scientist of importance will present the bewildered public with
detailed proofs that the earth did not twice stop whirling in Old Testament times ...
The current flurry of discussion about Velikovsky and Hubbard will soon subside, and their books
will begin to gather dust on library shelves.
Neither Velikovsky nor Hubbard disappeared.
Velikovsky became increasing popular especially in the early 70s, when it was claimed that many
of his predictions were being confirmed by space exploration.
Also, there were detailed debunkings of his work by popular scientists, most noticeably
Carl Sagan.
His chapter in Brocca's Brain is a very detailed debunking of the astronomical
problems in WiC,
though it seems like quite a large sledgehammer to crack a very nutty nut.
But Velikiovsky ideas did die out after the 70s,
and tempting as it might be to draw comparisons between current nonsense, such as Global Warming
Doubters, and Velikovsky, I don't think it would be remotely fair.
But it turns out, thanks to Watts Up With That, I don't need to draw the comparison,
they've done it themselves.
WUWT in Chaos
Chaos - G.F.Watts
There have so far been three articles posted on Watts Up With That within a 10 day
period, mentioning Velikovsky.
Sensational Scientific Speculation
The first was called The Complicity of Journals and Magazines in Pushing Flawed IPCC Climate
Science, archived here.
In this essay, Ball says that science journals are too commercial and publish pseudo-science and
sensational articles in order to boost flagging sales.
But then complains that Macmillan dropped publication of the entirely scientific and
unsensational Worlds in Collision
... they [Macmillan] were the publishers involved with
the Velikovsky travesty, one of the most egregious examples of the conflicts that occur
between publishers and a search for the truth.
He then goes on to say that Carl Sagan an early promoter of human CO2 caused global
warming, felt so threatened by Velikovsky
that he published a book on the subject.
Ball concludes that He (presumably Sagan) is not to be believed on anything.
This post produced a lot of reaction. Those hostile to the views of WUWT couldn't believe their
luck.
Gavin Schmidt tweeted:
Today is obviously something
special: Tim Ball & Anthony Watts come out in support of Velikovsky https://t.co/r62KGYTGEZ
In the comments section of WUWT there was both delight from supporters of Velikovsky and dismay
from the more level headed doubters.
This lead to Ball posting this comment:
Wrong! I am not pushing Velikovsky.
Why don't you read carefully without automatically and almost immediately putting on your
blinders?
I was using Velikovsky to illustrate how mainstream academia reacts when somebody dares to
suggest anything other than what they push.
Step outside their prevailing wisdom and they disclose their tunnel vision and prejudices
quickly and nastily.
Harlow Shapley's despicable behavior in the matter was exposed by the letter he wrote to
Macmillan threatening wto get all academics to withdraw their textbooks.
The letter was obtained and revealed by the Harvard Hasty Pudding Club.
It's curious that he only mentions Harlow Shapely at this point, but Carl Sagan in the article.
Shapely in the 50s organized the boycott of Macmillan that resulted in them dropping the book.
Sagan in the 70s was highly critical of this action.
In this Ball again complains that he was falsely accused of pushing
Velikovsky, but spends most of the post seeming to do just that.
The part where he says he isn't pushing Velikovsky starts:
The reaction to my recent reference to Immanuel Velikovsky was knee-jerk, ill-informed, and a
classic example of scientific elitism.
I suspect that like so many such reactions they are by people who read or know little about the
events and issues involved.
I also suspect because it occurs all the time, that definitive opinions are based on a minor
matter unrelated to the whole story.
As G. K. Chesterton explained,
The thing which the world suffers just now more than from any other evil is not the
assertion of falsehood,
but the endless repetition of half-truths.
I was falsely accused, along with Anthony Watts, of pushing Velikovsky.
Ironically the unsourced quote from Chesterton is itself a half-truth.
Chesterton said it was England that was suffering, not the world.
It was a world in which painters were trying to be novelists, and novelists trying to be
historians, and musicians doing the work of schoolmasters, and sculptors doing the work of
curates.
That is a view which has some truth in it, both as a description of the actual state of
things and as involving an interesting and suggestive philosophy of the arts.
But a good deal of harm may be done by ceaselessly repeating to ourselves even a true and
fascinating fashionable theory,
and a great deal of good by endeavouring to realize the real truth about an older one.
The thing from which England suffers just now more than from any other evil is not the
assertion of falsehoods, but the endless and irrepressible repetition of half-truths.
There is another side to every historic situation, and that often a startling one;
and the other side of the Victorian view of art, now so out of mode, is too little
considered.
The salient and essential characteristic of Watts and men of his school was that they
regarded life as a whole.
They had in their heads, as it were, a synthetic philosophy which put everything into a
certain relation with God and the wheel of things.
Ostensibly the point of this post is to claim that a scientific elite tries to suppress
theories that threaten the
orthodox believe.
I don't agree with this, and his article is confused and contradictory, but the main issue is he
continues to use Velikovsky as an example of the
heretic being suppressed by the elite, and in so doing gives the impression that Velikovsky was
right, or at least plausible.
Anthony Watts added a disclaimer to this article insisting he's never ... never supported
Velikovsky's ideas ... in Worlds in Collision,
but he does ... support discussing them in the context of learning ....
Rightly Labeled Ridiculous
Three days later there was a joint post from Watts and Ball, called A response to being
Mann-handled, archived here, and is described
as a Full Disclosure – by Tim Ball and Anthony Watts.
This tries to set the record straight, insisting that neither Watts nor Ball
agree with Velikovsky.
But it distracts from this by going for a full out attack on Michael E
Mann, permanent bogyman for the WUWT.
Mann's crime in all this was to post a tweet saying that Ball and Watts subscribed to
Velikovsky.
Mann's accusation is completely false and indicates he either failed to read the article or if
he did, failed to understand its purpose.
The objective of the original article and follow up was to show how self-appointed elitists
hinder the advance of science.
A majority who made written comments about the article understood and agreed with the premise.
Even this full disclosure finds it difficult to say straight out that Velikovsky was wrong
Again, for the record, neither of us support Velikovsky's views on
planetary motion
.
Some
of them are rightly labeled as ridiculous.
However, to claim that we do, simply because the articles used him as an example of how some
in
science turn spiteful when confronted with ideas they see as threatening,
is wrong, and the elitist premise is well illustrated by the ugly behavior of Dr. Mann and
others.
But in the same article they say:
We pointed out that he worked with Einstein, who knew his claims and encouraged him.
We also pointed out that some who initially attacked his work, like Professor Hess, later
conceded that
many of his predictions were confirmed
.
Which could be read as being a little supportive.
To be fair, it seems obvious that Watts is genuinely
embarrassed that he allowed Ball to use such an example.
He says in the comments section that he was wasn't very familiar with Velikovsky's work when
Ball submitted the article,
and if he had been he would have asked Ball to find a better example.
I'm more curious about what Ball really feels about Velikovsky.
Ball's Opinion of Velikovsky
Ball claims that Velikovsky was merely the example to illustrate the behavior of the scientific
elite, and in no way did this show support for Velikovsky's views.
Leaving aside the premise of the scientific elite, the claim that Ball only regards
Velikovsky as an example of elitist persecution seems dubious to me.
Here are some of my reasons for this doubt:
If you do want to attack the suppression of ideas from a scientific elite,
why use a case like Velikovsky if you think his ideas are ridiculous?
It undermines your case if the work that was not accepted by the scientific elite
is
wrong, and worse if it is as ridiculously wrong as Velikovsky's.
If you are deliberately using Velikovsky to make a point that no matter how wrong
someone
is they should still be given a fair hearing,
why not make that clear from the start?
A simple statement such as I completely disagree with Velikovsky's theories, but I
will defend to my death his right to a serious publisher,
would have avoided any confusion.
Nowhere in either of the first two posts does Ball indicate any thing specifically wrong
with Velikovsky.
The closest he even gets to accepting Velikovsky might have made any mistakes is when he
says Sagan was more wrong on fundamental issues
than Velikovsky.
What he thinks Sagan got more wrong than Velikovsky was CO2 causing global warming.
Throughout the posts, Ball uses phrases that might give the impression he supports
Velikovsky, despite his claims he doesn't. For example,
As a result of Velikovsky's research, done with thoroughness and
precision,
he discovered anomalies that didn't fit the prevailing sequence of events.
Velikovsky's story is fascinating because of his innovative thinking and
accuracy of his predictions.
He quotes Michael Goodspeed:
More than 5 decades after the Velikovsky firestorm, questions first posed by Velikovsky
can no longer be ignored.
At stake here is not just the billions of dollars NASA has wasted chasing chimeras, but
the very integrity of scientific exploration.
Also at stake is the ability of the sciences to attract and inspire new generations.
And nothing is more inspirational than a sense of being on the edge of discovery.
No matter the outcome of this long-standing battle, the time of reckoning is at
hand.
The voice of Velikovsky's ghost WILL be heard.
He objects to Sagan and Gould criticizing Velikovsky's works, yet they are only
confirming what Ball claims to agree with,
that Velikovsky's ideas are ridiculous.
In the comments section Ball never complains about any post supporting Velikovsky, but does
write a long comment in response to others:
Some of the comments show the ignorance of their author.
For example, the claim that V was not a scientist by any measure, contradicts his formal
education and life work.
He worked and communicated extensively with Einstein on matters of science, in
particular electromagnetism.
Einstein had no problems with his credentials or abilities,
and if he is good enough for
Einstein he is good enough for me.
Then there are those who ask what predictions he made that were correct. This only
confirms they never read his work or subsequent discoveries and discussions.
If they did they would find his predictions that flew in the face of the then
scientifically held wisdom.
He compare the history of Velikovsky with those who oppose the theory of CO2 causing global
warming.
For example
The complexity of the corruption by the few scientists who hijacked climate science is
revealed by comparison.
They quickly established their views as the prevailing truth through the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by deliberately misusing climate science,
but also misusing basic science.
They isolated anyone who challenged either part of their false 'offical' science in the same
way Velikovsky was marginalized.
But Ball is accepting the official science was correct in the case of Velikovsky.
Watt about Scientific Elitism
Ignoring Velikovsky, the argument of the second article was that scientific
elitism is damaging to science.
This is an old claim that I find unconvincing.
It's an argument that is used by people who are wrong, are rejected or ignored by people who are
in the best position to know they are wrong.
It's always so much easier to believe that the reason your arguments were rejected is not
because you were wrong,
but because there's a cabal of scientists, who cannot allow your views to be accepted for fear
it would undermine their authority.
It's the appeal to the romance of the heretic over that of a reactionary orthodoxy, which
in science is rarely correct.
As G.K. Chesterton explained -
The word heresy not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being
clear-headed and courageous.
The word orthodoxy not only no longer means being right; it practically means being
wrong.
All this can mean one thing, and one thing only.
It means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right.
For obviously a man ought to confess himself crazy before he confesses himself heretical.
And yes, I am taking Chesterton out of context to emulate Ball, and the use of this quote should
in no way be taken to mean I agree with any of Chesterton's views.
As far as the idea of the scientific heretic, Martin Gardner summed up the problem
When Renaissance science first began to free itself from metaphysical biases, it was the rule
rather than the exception for courageous pioneers to find their work greeted with derision by
their colleagues.
Galileo had to battle not only church authorities but fellow scientists who were more
preoccupied with Aristotle than with an experimental determination of how the world did, in
fact, behave.
As Aristotle's scientific authority declined, however, opposition to new ideas in science became
more confined to areas where science clashed with Christian doctrine.
Since the turn of the century, even this area of conflict has become remarkably small, and
widespread opposition by scientists to a legitimate theory,
based on verifiable evidence and cogent reasoning, is an increasing rarity.
For a contemporary scientist, often the quickest way to fame is to overturn a widely held
theory.
Einstein's work on relativity is an excellent illustration of how easily a revolutionary
hypothesis can meet with almost immediate serious response,
careful testing, and ultimate acceptance.
Of course there are exceptions ... But, if anything, science today leans backward in the
friendly consideration of bizarre hypotheses.
Moreover, Tim Ball's articles, especially the second, seem contradictory and careless.
It would take far too long to go over every problem, in many ways he's a lot like Velikovsky in
that respect.
But a few issues are:
Ball objects to pejorative and subjective adjectives, such as radical and notorious,
but then uses phrases like indoctrinated by formal education and describes scientific
specialization as the bastions of dogmatism and intellectual tunnel vision.
He objects to Velikovsky being described as a catastrophist, but Velikovsky constantly uses
the word catastrophy throughout his work,
and describes his ideas as theory of cosmic catastrophism.
He says Velikovsky was born in the Soviet Union. In fact he was born in 1895, 20 years
before there was a Soviet Union.
He claims the church promoted and protected the Ptolemaic system for 2000 years,
which is at best a wild exaggeration.
The Ptolemaic system hasn't even existed for 2000 years.
He says that Carl Sagan and Stephen J Gould are both part of the scientific elite.
Yet both were popularizers of science, wrote popular books and Gould was frequently attacked
for his unorthodox ideas.
Moreover, both explicitly disagreed with the actions of Harlow Shapely in trying to get
Macmillan to drop WiC.
Sagan was particularly harsh on this action, calling it a disgraceful attempt by some who
called themselves scientists to suppress his writings.
