I Don't Believe In Global Warming

On the day I planned to write the title post in my little series, fate has delivered me the most marvelous gift, courtesy of that hotbed of anti-Americanism, The World Bank (.pdf):

Uncertainties remain in projecting the extent of both climate change and its impacts. We take a risk-based approach in which risk is defined as impact multiplied by probability: an event with low probability can still pose a high risk if it implies serious consequences.  No nation will be immune to the impacts of climate change. However, the distribution of impacts is likely to be inherently unequal and tilted against many of the world’s poorest regions, which have the least economic, institutional, scientific, and technical capacity to cope and adapt.

--snip--

A world in which warming reaches 4°C above preindustrial levels (hereafter referred to as a 4°C world), would be one of unprecedented heat waves, severe drought, and major floods in many regions, with serious impacts on human systems, ecosystems, and associated services. Warming of 4°C can still be avoided: numerous studies show that there are technically and economically feasible emissions pathways to hold warming likely below 2°C. Thus the level of impacts that developing countries and the rest of the world experience will be a result of government, private sector, and civil society decisions and choices, including, unfortunately, inaction.

The report itself isn't terribly long, at less than 100 pages of text.

Now, I am quite sure there are some folks out there who wonder why I'm entitling this post and series "I Don't Believe In Global Warming" if I quote a report on global warming.

The answer is simple: That global warming is happening, and happening because of human activity, is not subject to "belief", however that particular word is understood.  I do not "subscribe" to the "belief" that the earth is getting warmer.  It is getting warmer.  I do not "believe" that human action, specifically the burning of billions of tons of fossil fuels, has ejected more and more CO2 to the atmosphere.  I can see for myself:

 Whether it's evolution or climate science or particle physics or heat exchange in chemistry, I neither believe nor disbelieve in any of these things.  Precisely because, however one defines the word "belief", or describe the human activity of "believing", to say one "believes" in any particular scientific theory already demonstrates an ignorance about what science is and how it works.

To those who might insist I've never ever said anything about science before, just check it out for yourself. I have defined, repeated that definition, given examples, talked about what isn't science - many, many times over the six years I've been writing here.  If you missed it, or don't know how easy it is to find out what I've talked about numerous times, at the very least I've provided a handy link here for you to check it out for yourself.

I don't believe in global warming for the same reason I don't believe World War II ended on May 8, 1945.  I don't believe my daughter was born on June 7, 2001.  I don't believe that elementary particles behave both as particles and as wave functions.  I don't believe any of these things because "belief", however one chooses to define that word, just doesn't enter in to it.  At all.  Ever.

I don't believe in global warming because I accept the scientific evidence.  That isn't a matter either of belief or common sense.  It is, rather, a matter of knowing how science works.  Those people who insist otherwise demonstrate by that very insistence they have no idea what they're talking about.

For far too long, time and energy has been wasted trying to tell people who are either too ignorant to know better, or know perfectly well what they're doing and don't care, how wrong they are.  It is far better to continue to discuss these topics without reference to creationists, global warming deniers, and any other person or group who is little more than contemporary alchemists and astrologers.  Call them out for who and what they are, then just carry on, letting them have their hissy fits and tantrums while folks who understand, at the very least, what a strange, complicated world we live in and, for all its flaws, the only way to make sense of that world is scientific understanding.

Yawn: My Response To Creationists

I've been putting off writing about the phony "evolution versus creationism" debate in this little series mostly because wading in to the cesspool of creationism makes me feel stupid.  I suppose I could link to the "Institute for Creation Science" or the Creationism museum in Kentucky, which is supposed to have a display of primitive human beings living cheek by jowl with dinosaurs (who, apparently, didn't get Noah's memo to show up at the ark?).

Instead I decided to link to this guy.  In a post entitled "Science Already Recognizes Intelligent Design" we read:

It has for a long, long time.  As Greg Koukl notes, consider archaeology, forensics and the search for extra terrestrial intelligence. All infer, with good reason, that you can detect whether something happened without being caused by another agent or whether there was an intelligent being behind the creation of something.

The movie “Contact” was a shining example of the self-parody of materialists.  While mocking those who believe in Intelligent Design, their litmus test for extraterrestrial life was whether patterns they viewed had evidence of design.

Forensics is all about looking for evidence of design. And archaeology correctly infers design.

Earlier today, a friend of mine posted a link to a "Surrealist Letter To The Rectors of European Universities".   In comments, someone wrote the following: "How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?  Answer: Fish!"  That makes far more sense than the preceding, while standing as a model of logic compared to what follows.

We agree there is a gap in understanding some things about the universe. The Darwinists plug it with the “naturalism of the gaps.”  They don’t know what caused it, but it definitely wasn’t an intelligent designer. They have no argument other than blind faith.  We don’t have the same gap.  We logically infer from the evidence that some things — such as life and the indescribable complexity and design of the universe — had to have come from a powerful designer.  Even atheists like Richard Dawkins concede that the universe appears to be designed.

There are some folks who take the time to deconstruct nonsense like this.  I refuse, preferring to treat people who write this way much the same way one professor invited to "debate" the issue responded to his interlocutors.

Academic debate on controversial topics is fine, but those topics
need to have a basis in reality. I would not invite a creationist
to a debate on campus for the same reason that I would not invite
an alchemist, a flat-earther, an astrologer, a psychic, or a
Holocaust revisionist. These ideas have no scientific support, and
that is why they have all been discarded by credible scholars.
Creationism is in the same category.

Instead of spending time on public debates, why aren’t members of
your institute publishing their ideas in prominent peer-reviewed
journals such as Science, Nature, or the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences? If you want to be taken seriously by
scientists and scholars, this is where you need to publish.
Academic publishing is an intellectual free market, where ideas
that have credible empirical support are carefully and thoroughly
explored. Nothing could possibly be more exciting and electrifying
to biology than scientific disproof of evolutionary theory or
scientific proof of the existence of a god. That would be Nobel
Prize winning work, and it would be eagerly published by any of the
prominent mainstream journals.

“Conspiracy” is the predictable response by Ben Stein and the
frustrated creationists. But conspiracy theories are a joke,
because science places a high premium on intellectual honesty and
on new empirical studies that overturn previously established
principles. Creationism doesn’t live up to these standards, so its
proponents are relegated to the sidelines, publishing in books,
blogs, websites, and obscure journals that don’t maintain
scientific standards.

Now, the person to whom I linked will probably cry "Foul!" because he writes about Intelligent Design, rather than creationism.  To which I will only copy and paste what Federal District Court Judge John Jones wrote in his opinion tossing out the Dover Area, PA School Board's requirement to teach Intelligent Design alongside evolution:

The overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory. 

You can call it "creationism" or "creation science" or "Intelligent Design", but it all comes down to the same thing: demonstrating not only a magisterial ignorance both of the creation stories in Genesis as well as the traditional Doctrine of Creation alongside an almost comical ignorance about what science is and how it works.  There is no need to "respond" or "rebut" what are not "arguments".  The constant demand from creationists for attention should be met with silence broken only occasionally by the laughter from those who understand that every time a creationist writes something, they again demonstrate exactly why they aren't taken seriously.

I will stipulate, however, that the very notion that scientists "believe" something demonstrates how little allegedly faithful Christians think of their own faith, willing as they seem to be to strip the word belief of any real meaning this way.

Reality? I Can Take It Or Leave It

As I've said many times, a guiding light of mine is the simple proposition that words mean things.  Tossing verbiage around without thought or care, then taking that same word-tossing to the next level and insisting that, Humpty Dumpty like, we can just make words mean whatever we wish, well, that's enough to make me wonder about sanity.

For several years now, reading various places around the Internet, the phrase "reality-based community" has been bandied about, not only as a counter to Karl Rove's "We're an Empire, we create our own reality," nonsense.  The meaning of the phrase has expanded to include the claim that science deals with "reality" and religion, well, to quote a commenter at the science blog Pharyngula, "begins with bullshit."

"Reality" is a word I detest.  Like "morality", and "truth", and "belief", and "nature", the word has become unhinged from any reference point.  Does it mean our common, everyday experience of the flow of space-time?  Does it refer to the mathematical equations that demonstrate how matter and energy are, at a basic level, interchangeable?  Does it refer to the flow of human events that we, being human, privilege over many other events?  One could go on asking questions of this sort, and I confess they all sound a bit pedantic, but the point, I hope, is clear.  That which we call "reality", at least in our mundane sense, is by and large a facade, a construct of our human sense organs coping with a variety of inputs and attempting to make sense of those inputs in a way that maximizes our survival advantage.  Were to have, say, the olfactory abilities of some dogs or carrion-eaters, say, the world would be "real" in a fundamentally different way than it currently is to us.  If we had the ability some snakes do, to "see" heat emissions, our "reality" would be a very different thing indeed.

With the help of several different branches of science, we have come to learn over the past century or so that what we call "reality" or "the physical universe" is not at all what or how it appears.  Indeed, "physical" is hardly what I'd call any particular object that has mass, considering even the most dense elements and objects are still, by and large, empty space.  In the early decades of the 20th century, physicist Niels Bohr (who counts Olivia Newton-John among his grandchildren) developed a model of the atom, what was once considered the most basic unit of physical matter, that looked quite a bit like a solar system.  Around the central nucleus, which consists of neutrons and protons (positively charged particles) there swirl various layers of electrons (negatively charged particles; and please note, "positive" and "negative" are conventional designations rather than describing anything inherent in the particles themselves).

The problem with the model was, no one had ever seen an electron.  By the time the First World War was over, there had been enough experiments working on the mass of atomic nuclei and their constituent parts to get a rough approximation of the masses of both protons and neutron.  In theory, the neutron was a particle with no charge that was, in fact, a proton and an electron fused together.  Except, the difference in mass between the proton and neutron was almost statistically negligible.

Furthermore, while it was easy enough to follow the effects of what were supposed to be electrons, it became increasingly apparent the particles themselves were probably beyond anyone's capability of "discovering" in a conventional sense.

In the 1920's, Werner Heisenberg went a bit further.  Studying elementary particles - the stuff that was discovered to make up protons and neutrons and electrons - Heisenberg made the claim that, for all intents and purposes, such things didn't actually exist.  The equations made clear they should exist.  The experiments constructed to demonstrate the correctness of the equations were then and continue to be consistent within striking orders of magnitude.  Yet, no one has ever, nor probably will ever, see a boson or a meson or, God help us all, a graviton.  First of all, one of the consequences of General Relativity is that energized particles behave both as objects containing mass and also as energy waves.  There are packets of light energy called photons, yet light also behaves much the same way waves do - with amplitude and frequency.  Heisenberg stipulated, further, that while it was well enough to give the equations their due, since they were confirmed by experiments, it was probably better to let the paradox rest and act as, for the sake of any particular experimental procedure, these particles exist.  It is a position that is known as "operationalism": we cannot know whether or not there "really" are "things" out there we call elementary particles, since the only confirmation we have of their existence are particular scientific tests that in themselves only demonstrate that certain events happen, rather than there are any such "things" in and for themselves.

Erwin Schrodinger, in a famous complaint aimed at Heisenberg, said that operationalism, combined with Heisenberg's more well-known position that we cannot know both the position and momentum of an elementary particle, led to the paradox of the cat in the box.  The cat was both alive and dead, Schrodinger said, under Heisenberg's working theories.  To which Heisenberg replied, "True enough.  Until we open the box to find out whether or not the cat is dead."  Without observation, the propositions, "The cat in the box is dead," and, "The cat in the box is alive," have an equal chance of being accurate.

Another part of quantum mechanics that makes a mockery of "reality" is the idea that a quantum event somewhere here on earth has a direct and measurable effect upon a quantum event in a star in the Horsehead Nebula.  Known as quantum entanglement, it is the proposition that, against any classical ideas of what was known as "local reality", action-at-a-distance (which Einstein, whose theories led to this and a host of other issues he didn't like, called "spooky") was a basic part of the physical make-up of the Universe.  For years, the position set out by Einstein and some colleagues that this unacceptable state of affairs showed that quantum mechanics was incomplete held sway.  In 1964, John Stewart Bell proposed that, in fact, what was known as the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky paradox was in error, and, in fact, over the course of a series of trials, there was an increasing probability of determining how two seemingly unrelated quantum events were, in fact, related.

Now, many physicists chuckle when the positions taken here - that there is an inherent nothingness to reality; that there is an inherent unpredictability to reality; that an event at point (a), without either any time lag or physical contact, can influence an event at point (b) - are expanded in various fictional settings.  Most even the most well-versed scientists would insist these phenomena are highly localized and specialized.  Just because we cannot know both the position and momentum of an elementary particle does not mean Schrodinger's cat is both alive and dead until we open the box to investigate, they say.  Schrodinger, it seems, made a category mistake (no pun intended).

To an extent, this is a perfectly sound argument to make.  After all, I wouldn't think of trying to shove my head through a wall, even though I know both the wall and my head are mostly empty space.

Which position, of course, begs many questions, not the least of them being: What is reality?  It might well mean our everyday reality we encounter.  Yet, again and again, it was precisely scientific investigation of that everyday reality that revealed the paradoxes discussed above.  Which leaves me asking, again, what is reality?  Would it be possible to operate as if quantum mechanics governed our macro-world?  Of course, in some ways, it does.  If you're reading this on a computer, you can thank quantum mechanics for that.

Back in the early 1990's, philosopher Jonathan Searle wrote a longish book entitled The Philosophy of Mind. Over and over in that book, Searle repeated that reality is and I quote, "elementary particles in fields of force."  While this might well be a good working definition in some circumstances, the fiction that the word "particle" creates - that there are these "things" out there we call elementary particles, rather than energy traces from collisions that fit with mathematical predictions concerning the behavior of small masses of light elements colliding at near the speed of light - renders this "definition" of "reality" untenable (there are a host of other issues with Searle's book, but this one always nagged at me).  In fact, while we may be able to express, with a certain degree of confidence, through certain mathematical equations, the statistical regularity of certain events (without ever being able to approach precision on all such events; more precision one way leads to less precision the other), this hardly means we understand what the word "reality" means, or to what it refers.

When I read people talking about how they're so scientific and are part of the reality-based community, I figure they flunked Physics 101.  Because if they're relying on science for their understanding of reality, then they have some problems.

Science As A Remarkable Tool With Limits

I've decided to make clear, kind of once and for all, what science is, how it works, why it works so well, and most of all, why people who don't understand science attack it for things it doesn't say or do.  I consider this a public service.  I also think, once and for all time, I can point people HERE and say, "Look, I answered your question!"

When I was in seminary, I took a seminar on science and theology.  The professor, the late great Roy Morrison, and I had a conversation after one class session in which he made the point that many scientists repeat information gained from radioactive dating without considering it is rooted in assumptions that are not falsifiable.  He also said that doesn't mean using radiometric dating isn't wrong-headed.

He was right.

I thought I'd begin this series of posts by talking about the way science operates, including the way it incorporates non-falsifiable assumptions as its starting-points.  Science is a wonderful tool that, over the past several centuries has evolved in to a remarkable way of answering questions about the world in which we live.  While less developed, the social sciences like psychology, sociology, political science, and anthropology, do offer students the opportunity for keener understanding of human life.

Science works so well because, at its best, it begins with the assumption that everything we know, including all our scientific understanding, is wrong.  It may serve us well so far, or as far as it goes; if some new piece of information arises, however, that isn't accounted for by our prevailing understandings, those understandings themselves have to change to accommodate the newly discovered facts.  In the process, how we understand all sorts of other things also changes.

The way we understand things in science is referred to as "theories".  Scientific theories are provisional statements about how disparate yet related phenomena work themselves out.  Scientific theories, among the many ways human beings have used to understand their world, make two related claims.  First, like many ways of understanding, whether alchemy or magic or even theology, science claims to make predictions about future events based upon the way various theories describe how particular phenomena occur.  Second, and unlike those mentioned and others, science (at its best, anyway) says that if its predictions are not accurate, it will change the theory.  In practice, there are a number of ways theories are not altered or tossed away in the face of contrary evidence.  It usually takes the accumulated weight of contrary evidence to convince most scientists, over a longish period of time, to stop using theories that have been consistently falsified.  Still, the number of scientific theories that have been discarded over the centuries precisely because they were falsified is quite large.  The twentieth century alone has seen several basic theoretical shifts in physics, shifts that have implications for chemistry, biology, and other branches of science as well.

Theories are no less rooted in unfalsifiable assumptions than anything else we humans do.  To return to the example at the beginning of this post, consider the discovery of radioactive decay.  After the discovery of radiation at the end of the 19th century, many prominent physicists worked hard to discover radioactive materials.  In the process of their studies, recognizing that "radiation" means that a given element is releasing elementary particles, it was soon discovered that, for a given mass of a radioactive element, the release of particles that creates the various types of radiation occur at a statistically regular rate.  From this, it became a matter of somewhat complicated mathematics to use the measured radioactive level of a particular mass of a radioactive element and determine not only when it was created, but when it would, at some point, reach then end of its radioactive decay, becoming both inert and transmuted to another element.

We now use this understanding in all sorts of ways.  Because there are traces of radioactive carbon in all carbon-based life, we can use our knowledge of the half-life of radioactive carbon to date everything from fossils to petrified wood.  Radioisotopic labeling is now a pretty common method for studying all sorts of things, both in living and dead organic matter.  The results we receive from all sorts of uses of our understanding of radioactive decay are, and have been, consistent across the board, and are just one reason the guess about the age of the earth - around four and a half billion years, within a range of a few hundred million years one way or another - is not just a guess, but a pretty confident assertion .

There's only one problem with this whole theory.  We have no way of knowing if the rate of radioactive decay, which we humans observe as a statistically regular event, has always been as constant and regular.  There is no way to show, definitively, that it even occurred prior to its discovery.  There may well have been a change in the rate of radioactive decay over the multiple billions of years of the history of the universe.  The problem with these perfectly reasonable alternatives is simple: There is no way to investigate them.  We cannot go back in time, say, to the formation of planet Earth to check the decay rates of the various radioactive elements and see if they differ from current rates.  It may well be the case this happened.  We cannot find out, however, if this is true.

So, scientists make the assumption that decay rates of radioactive elements have been a constant since the beginning of the Universe.  Setting aside protests and working under the assumption that decay rates have been constant has shown the theory to be remarkably fruitful of all sorts of things, many of which couldn't have been imagined when radioactive decay was first discovered and codified.

This somewhat mundane, and I hope easily understood, example of the way untestable assumptions work in science makes clear that science, for all the things it does remarkably well, actually works within its human limits.  Whether it's the study of radioactive decay, or weather phenomena, or the activity of human societies in different times and places, science offers us the remarkable ability to understand all sorts of things; yet it does so always with the understanding that it is doing so with certain things - call them givens, perhaps, or axioms - that are assumed to be true only because they cannot be disproved otherwise.

As we move forward through this series, I hope to demonstrate what a remarkable tool the scientific method has shown itself to be, despite its many limitations.