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A challenge to climate sceptics

By Steven Meyer - posted Tuesday, 15 November 2011


In the third century BC the scientific consensus among the Greeks was that the Earth was stationary at the centre of the universe. The sun, moon, planets and stars, so it was thought, all revolved about the Earth. Well that was plainly wrong. But let's see what the scientists of that era got right.

They knew the Earth was spherical. The idea that educated people in Columbus' time, 1,700 years later, thought the Earth was flat, is a myth. Third century BC scientists also knew that the sun was not a fiery little ball in the sky. Mathematicians such as Aristarchus of Samos had calculated that it had to be at least six million kilometres distant and at least seven times the size of the Earth.

Our ancestors were not nearly as stupid or ignorant as we sometimes like to think. Aristarchus suggested a heliocentric model of the universe. He proposed that instead of the sun orbiting the Earth it was the Earth that orbited the sun. Day and night was caused by the Earth rotating on its axis.

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The third century scientific consensus was having none of that. Was it because they were stupid? Hardly. Given what was known at the time there were excellent scientific reasons for rejecting the heliocentric hypothesis.

Archimedes of Syracuse, one of the most brilliant scientists of antiquity, led the case for the prosecution. He pointed out that if the Earth truly moved we would see the fixed stars move relative to each other, a phenomenon known as parallax. Yet no such relative motion had ever been observed. There was no detectable seasonal variation in the shapes of the constellations as the Earth moved from one side of the sun to the other.

Proponents of the heliocentric theory had no answer to these and many other objections. The scientific consensus was right in rejecting the heliocentric hypothesis at the time.

The scientific consensus may be wrong; but it is rarely irrationally so. There were good scientific reasons for accepting the phlogiston theory of heat in the seventeenth century and rejecting the theory of continental drift when Alfred Wegener first proposed it in 1912.

Before I leave this topic I want to make one last point. Even when the scientific consensus turns out to be wrong it is rarely an amateur outsider who comes up with the correct answer. The scientists who ultimately put the heliocentric theory on a firm footing, Copernicus, Kepler, Tycho Brahe and, of course, Galileo, were all respected professionals.

The lone amateur maverick who overturns the fuddy duddy scientific establishment is a bit of a myth. I am not saying it never happens. Occasionally an exceptionally gifted amateur who has devoted long hours to a problem may come up with an answer that overturns the accepted scientific paradigm. But I can't think of one instance of this happening in the past century.

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The closest I suppose is Albert Einstein. Having failed to secure an academic post, he was working at the Swiss Patent Office when he published his three famous papers in 1905. But he was hardly an outsider. He had many connections in the scientific community whom he was able to use as a sounding board for his ideas. Einstein was more an amateur patent examiner than an amateur scientist.

Note also that Einstein submitted his theories to peer review. They were instantly recognised as an important contribution to physics and published in Annalen der Physik, arguably the most prestigious physics journal of the time. He did not simply publish a few pamphlets, the 1905 equivalent of posting on a website.

Be aware that if you are an amateur outsider challenging the scientific consensus then statistically the odds are heavily against your being vindicated; even more so if you do not submit your theories to peer review. That does not mean I can be absolutely certain that you're wrong. But if I were a bookie I would be giving odds of 100 to 1 against you being right.

OK, with that out of the way, supposing I said let's debate the science of quantum electrodynamics (QED). What would readers think?

Many readers would probably think I was some kind of a braggart who was trying to impress them with my intellectual brilliance. Others might think I was a raving lunatic. Few readers, if any, would agree that holding a debate on the science of QED on an online forum was a sensible idea.

I also venture to say that most readers would admit freely that they were not in a position to debate the science of QED. And yet many of those same readers have firmly held views on anthropogenic global warming (AGW). They are prepared to dismiss AGW as being without foundation.

It happens I did study QED as part of my post graduate degree in theoretical physics back in the 1960s. I love QED. It is so wonderfully counter-intuitive. What path does the electron take in going from A to B? It "sniffs out" every conceivable path.

I do not know enough to offer any new insights on QED and I never did. But I am still able to give a coherent explanation on what it's about and, for example, explain the physical significance of the Feynman path integrals.

Now I am going to let you into a secret. AGW is several orders of magnitude more complicated that QED. Comparing AGW to QED is like comparing the fighting of a real war to a game of checkers.

Here's why.

QED deals with systems that are simple compared to the Earth's climate. They are also well defined; we know all the important parameters and how the interact.

Everything you need to know about QED is contained in a compact set of mathematical concepts. It's not simple mathematics. You won’t learn it at high school. But a good under-graduate course in mathematics should put you in a position to tackle the mathematical aspects of QED.

Now compare this to climate.

  • Climate systems are several orders of magnitude more complex than the systems that physicists consider when they study QED.
  • We do not know all the parameters. Most likely we do not yet know all the important ones.
  • We cannot quantify the interactions of even the known parameters with precision.
  • There is no compact set of equations that enable you to predict with precision the way climate will behave as parameters are changed. Climate science will never achieve the predictive precision of QED.

If you are prepared to admit that you cannot debate QED maybe you should ask yourself whether you are truly in a position to offer opinions on a scientific topic that is immensely more complex such as AGW.

There are admittedly a number of factors that muddy the waters when it comes to climate.

  • Climategate demonstrated that a number of scientists were behaving badly. That, by itself, is not surprising. It has happened throughout history and will happen again. In that respect scientists are no different to any other group – e.g. Wall Street Bankers. What is shocking is that, like Wall Street Bankers, the misbehaving scientists were not sacked. Phil Jones should not have been allowed to remain on as head of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia
  • Some climate scientists appear to have an exaggerated notion of their ability to forecast the future.
  • Some of the policy responses to AGW are nothing short of lunatic. The only thing that I can think of that would be worse than the Gillard Government's go-it-alone carbon tax would be to emulate Europe's carbon trading scheme.
  • People most of us would prefer not to be associated with have taken on climate change as a political cause. I really do not like the thought of being on the same side as that recycled Stalinist and anti-Semite, Lee Rhiannon, in any debate.

However most climate scientists are not charlatans. Nor are they Stalinists. They are hard working researchers who are doing their best to understand the likely consequences of adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. It is a fiendishly difficult task.

I have admitted freely that some climate scientists have behaved badly and that, for reasons I cannot understand, they keep their posts. But the same is true on the other side. I'll confine myself to one example, Professor Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology at the University of Adelaide.

I used to respect Professor Plimer so I was anxious to read his book, Heaven and Earth - Global Warming: The Missing Science (2009).

What a load of codswallop! There is no other way to describe it. For example, Plimer claims that volcanoes emit more CO2 than human activity. This is news to the United States Geological Survey (USGS) that keeps track of volcanic emissions across the globe. According to their figures volcanic emissions amount to less than 1 per cent of human emissions. Attempts to get Plimer to explain the differences between his numbers and USGS have been to no avail.

Plimer claims that temperatures during the so-called Mediaeval Warm Period (MWP) were higher than today. There were no thermometers around during the MWP. We do not have an accurate temperature record. Temperatures have to be inferred from proxy sources such as tree ring widths. To say that the error bands are large is an understatement.

However the best evidence we have suggests that temperatures today are considerably higher than those prevailing during the MWP. In fact the whole idea of a Mediaeval Warm Period may be something of a myth. Many scientists have pointed these and other errors of fact out to Plimer. His book has been through multiple printings. He has never issued a correction.

Here is what one pundit writing in The Australian, hardly a hotbed of Marxists, had to say about Plimer:

Plimer claims that scientists such as himself, who do not agree with the consensus, are labelled deniers, "yet their scientific doubts are not addressed". Nothing could be further from the truth. All of Plimer's arguments have been addressed ad nauseam by patient climate scientists on websites or in the literature.

So a professor at a leading Australian university continues to disseminate information knowing it to be false. Should he be sacked? What is the scientific consensus with regard to global warming?

Most actual climate scientists are of course of the opinion that continuing to add CO2 to the atmosphere could have severe negative consequences for humanity. Not all of them are of that opinion. But the vast majority are. What about scientists from other disciplines?

Only elite scientists, those with a solid record of achievement, are elected to the Royal Society and the (U.S.) National Academy of Sciences. There are some dissenters but, overwhelmingly, members of these two elite scientific bodies agree that it is dangerous to continue pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. The governing bodies of both organisations have called upon governments to take steps to curb CO2 emissions. So the consensus view among climate scientists and among the world's elite scientists generally is that adding CO2 to the atmosphere poses grave dangers.

You are free to dissent from their opinion. That is your right. But here is the challenge.

Bearing in mind that, historically, amateur dissenters from the scientific consensus have been wrong much more often than they've been right and that amateurs who fail to submit their work to peer review are almost never correct when they try to overturn the prevailing paradigm, give me RATIONAL reasons for believing that you are right and most of the world's best scientists are wrong about a SCIENTIFIC issue.

Bring it on!

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Article edited by Jo Coghlan.
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About the Author

Steven Meyer graduated as a physicist from the University of Cape Town and has spent most of his life in banking, insurance and utilities, with two stints into academe.

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