The Black Magic of Computer Simulations

"Official" Science Soils Its Underwear


The following appeared as a Guest Post on Kiwiblog

A Guest Post by Bryan Leland:

The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition have discovered that the Royal Society of New Zealand cannot support its contention that man-made global warming is real and dangerous.

Various exchanges between NZCSC and RSNZ revealed that the Society: has forgotten its roots; makes statements that it cannot support with evidence; is quite happy for its officers and members of the Society to make public statements that are against its own Code of Ethics; agrees that climate science is contentious but will not support open debate on it; wants to change its Code of Ethics to put cultural beliefs on equal footing with scientific evidence.

It all started with a statement by the Chief Executive (CE) and two reports that made it clear that RSNZ supported the belief that that man-made global warming was real and dangerous and urgent action was essential. The NZCSC asked RSNZ to provide convincing evidence based on observational data that supported this belief. The Royal Society were unable to do so and passed the query on to Prof James Renwick who has close links with the IPCC. He too was unable to provide the requested evidence. It seems that the evidence does not exist.

P Contamination Is No Problem, Don't You Know

She'll Be Right, Mate

Sir Peter Gluckman is a professor of pediatrics.  He currently serves as the "Science Advisor" to the Prime Minister.  This position gives him the license to pontificate on all manner of issues, pronouncing on the good the bad and the ugly according to one of our most prestigious deities, Science.  Most of his prognostications have absolutely nothing to do with pediatrics.  

We got a pretty strong impression of Gluckman's ability as a climate scientist when he pronounced that global warming was real--a real threat to New Zealand no less.  No rigorous, hard-bitten determination to falsify evidence and data, before pronouncing a hypothesis robust.  He was just reading the prognoses of climate speculators.  He was comforted, apparently, to be told that all climate scientists have proven beyond any reasonable doubt that the world is warming and this represents a major threat to human civilization.  Pediatricians know such things, don't you know.

But now Professor Gluckman is cleverly parlaying his expertise in pediatrics into scientific expertise on the poisonous effects of methamphetamine.

Ouch!

Climate Alchemy Exposed and Exploded

We confess that we have had enjoyed "a laughing into the cornflakes" experience this morning.  Climate "science" is casting a debilitating pall over the profession.  If economics deserves the appellation "the dismal science", climate science  deserves the appellation "scientific alchemy".  The longer climate alchemists continue to push their ideological barrow up the hill, the more discredit they bring to genuine science.

The event that caught our attention was an article published in The Guardian--a long time drum beater for the cause of fighting the noble fight against global warming.  Granted there are no surprises there.  The fight against global warming has always appealed to those who devotedly worship the State and actively advocate for its relentless expansion.  It's a cause big enough to justify universal organised human action, which in implies (at last) the UN will become the global uber-State.

The editors at The Guardian must hate having to publish articles with headlines like:

Southern Ocean showing 'remarkable' revival in carbon absorption ability

Unexpected findings show oceans’ potential to absorb CO2 fluctuates more over time than previously thought, researchers say

For those who do not worship at the feet of the State, such headlines are a frisson to the soul, and a belly laugh to the diaphragm.

Isaac Newton Left Shaking His Head

Latter Day Step Children

One of the negative conditions under which modern scientists labour is "groupthink".  To be fair, it has always been the case that consensus science, which is sometimes referred to as the ruling paradigm, substantially controls the contemporary settled scientific views of the day.  [See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962,1970)].

However, the power and control of the ruling consensus varies over time.  There is evidence that at present the power of groupthink in science is waxing, rather than waning.  On the other hand, it is precisely when the reigning paradigm begins to crack and falter that the establishment's opposition to challenges becomes both frenetic and febrile. And it certainly has at the moment. So, it is possible the frenetic character of attacks upon the non-consensus view betray the insecurity of the establishment.

We have just had a small indication of this in New Zealand.  NIWA--a government run and funded science agency--representing "official science"-- announced that it will no longer fund its employees' membership subs to an independent association of scientists called The New Zealand Association of Scientists. (NZAS)

NIWA is refusing to pay membership fees for its staff to belong to the Association of Scientists, saying the group actively lobbies against science and the integrity of scientists.  The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research notified its staff of the policy change this month. [Radio NZ]

Re-read the quoted paragraph.

Scepticism on the Rise

The "Science" Behind Climate Science

We were entertained recently on the way to the office hearing a caller address one of the local radio talk-back hosts.  Adopting the tone of a pedant, she informed the host that she had been listening to the global warming denialist propaganda which had been airing on the show.  She introduced herself as a university student who had been busy studying the science of global warming for several years.  She had called up to put the facts and to straighten out the Neanderthal host.

She proposed that the host did not understand science and the vast array of facts and research which lay behind the theory of global warming.  Nor did the host grant that there was an overwhelming consensus in the scientific community that the theory was fact, not speculation.  Ninety-seven percent of scientists affirmed the veracity of global warming, she declared.  Before she could proceed further, the host interrupted her and asked, could she tell him and the listeners where that figure of an overwhelming, 97 percent consensus had come from.  She began to umm and arrr.  Then she doubled down to insist that it was doubtless true.  When asked why, she said that she had heard it referred to many times.

Here lies a problem, oft encountered.

Letter From the UK (About Invincible Ignorance)

‘We’ll All Be Dead Before Climate Change Orgs Admit They’re Wrong’ Says MP

by Oliver Lane
BreitbartLondon

Member of Parliament David Davies has warned of the stubborn nature of organisations like Britain’s Royal Society – the oldest grouping of eminent scientists in the world – who have admitted that they will not accept any other thinking on global warming for at least “fifty years”, even if the data shows otherwise.

Attending a speech on climate change in the House of Lords, the Welsh Tory MP spoke about on his surreal experience meeting two men from the Royal Society whom he said had been sent to persuade him and fellow climate realists Peter Lilley MP and John Redwood MP to embrace the idea of man-made climate change. He said that representatives from the Society – often lauded as the most eminent grouping of scientists, founded in the 1600s – told him that they would not change their mind for at least fifty years, regardless of the evidence.

Justification of Knowledge and Truth (Part II)

A Bold Plan for Perpetual Ignorance

How do we know that what we know is actually true?  Wittgenstein and the post-modernists argued that we never will know absolute truth; all we can have is perspectives (including this one).  This has not sat well with traditional philosophers, but it has certainly had a field day in the world of academia.  We now have endless lists of perspectives as subjects for study: queer literature, minority art, feminist politics, proletarian ethics, trans-gender discourse, and so on, ad nauseam.  The end result is lots and lots of insignificant jobs for post-modern academics.  Lots of heat, but not much light.

We have argued that rationalism--one of the traditional justifications of knowledge--elides into tautologies and irrationalism.  The second major tendency to justify knowledge as being true-truth is empiricism.  This is probably the tendency which is most popular today--largely, due to the widespread belief that science (which employs the "empirical" method) delivers the truth.  As Frame explains:

Letter From America (About "Same-old, Same-old . . . ")

Faux-Science  Fascistas

Over the years, we have published a plethora of articles on the subject of Global Warming being a faux-science.  But, the claims to be the only true and genuine science of climate continue to be made.  So we will continue to publish pieces that tear that canard into pieces.

To that end, here is an excellent piece from Patterico:

Is Study of So-Called Climate Change Even “Science”?

Burn the heretic:

In early May, Lennart Bengtsson, a Swedish climate scientist and meteorologist, joined the advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a group that questions the reliability of climate change and the costs of policies taken to address it. While Bengtsson maintains he’d always been a skeptic as any scientist ought to be, the foundation and climate-change skeptics proudly announced it as a defection from the scientific consensus.

Just a week later, he says he’s been forced to resign from the group.

Not So Definitive After All

Problems with scientific research

How science goes wrong

Scientific research has changed the world. Now it needs to change itself

The Economist

Oct 19th 2013

A SIMPLE idea underpins science: “trust, but verify”. Results should always be subject to challenge from experiment. That simple but powerful idea has generated a vast body of knowledge. Since its birth in the 17th century, modern science has changed the world beyond recognition, and overwhelmingly for the better.
But success can breed complacency. Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying—to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity.

Global Warming Games

More Time Please

There is a very fine line these days between science and propaganda.  Old school science--that is, science in the good old days--was largely populated by a bunch of ruthless sceptics who believed very little, challenged everything, and wanted experimental proof.

This is not to say that every scientist believed he had to "go back to the beginning" and re-work every experiment to prove for himself the laws of motion or the veracity reflected in the periodic table of the elements.  As Michael Polanyi has argued, all scientists operate within a tradition of knowledge passed on from practitioners to neophytes that represented what he called tacit knowledge.  But, let a few experiments throw up results that are not expected, and old school scientists would get a rush of blood to the head.  The labs would be booked out for months, arguments would rage, and debates would go long into the night.

These days much of this rigour has disappeared--particularly in those "disciplines" where proof or disproof cannot be offered via experimental tests.

The Ugly Scientist

Fraud and Deception

Science trades under the mantle of objective, tested, authenticated conclusions.  It turns out, however, that in all  scientific endeavour there is a strong dose of interpretation and subjectivity.  This is not just the case for science; it is true of all human actions.

Larry Woiwode illustrates the principle:

No fact exists without an interpretation of it, as a philosopher by the name of Cornelius Van Til once said.  What he meant is if I say, "The Civil War", anybody who hears those words is stormed by sets of facts, some merely by naming it as I have.  If you view it as a war of northern aggression, you have facts to support that.  If another sees it as a conflict that installed commercial manufacture over agrarian interests, facts might well support that view.  If I say its genesis was slavery, I might well be closer to the truth, but I would have to summon my series of facts to support that. . . .

Take a step farther back.  If you believe trees are a result of random happenstance or believe they were ordained to look as they do, part of a design fulfilled, then your view of the tree and facts about it will differ, according to your ideology.  [Larry Woiwode, Words for  Readers and Writers (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2013), p. 33f.]

Modern science is presently dominated by a perverse ideology: scientism--which holds that the only reality, the only thing which exists, is matter.   It denies the subjective, ideological construction of all scientific endeavour.  It claims pure, brute objectivity. 

As a result, it perversely drives science into being a more ideologically bound and subjectively dominated enterprise.

Taking Refuge in Vain Inanities

Over-Egging "Consensus Science"

It is often argued that the general consensus of scientists and the peer review process ensure the integrity of all scientific results and conclusions, and guard against faulty reasoning, over-extrapolation, poor methodology, and similar. . . . But . . . the way scientific research is actually undertaken reveals a very different story. 

Firstly, consensus should never be used to determine truth since this would be committing the logical fallacy of argumentum ad numerum.  Moreover, consensus  also seems to be applied rather inconsistently.  For example, many Christians accept the scientific consensus that the universe is 8-15 billion years old, yet those same Christians are usually vehemently opposed to the consensus that all life came about by naturalistic evolution. 

Secondly, history shows that the consensus has often been wrong--indeed, hopelessly wrong.

Exposing Pre-Commitments

A Moment of Rare Honesty

Every so often an Unbeliever comes along who shows he is aware of his assumptions and pre-commitments.  It does not happen very often.  The cry of our age is, "Just the facts, ma'am."  We just focus upon facts and follow wherever they take us.  The problem with this is that our presuppositions have already determined what will be accepted as fact, and what will be discarded.

For example, the Christian is predisposed to accept the existence of the God revealed in the Scriptures.  Therefore, His revelation of Himself is factual, objectively and eternally so.  It is true truth.  The Unbeliever is predisposed to deny the existence of God.  Therefore, he regards the Bible as anti-factual or non-factual or mythical.  The Unbeliever's presuppositions have already determined not only what the facts will be but also how and where they will be discovered or learnt. So Unbelief is plagued by two self-deceits.  The first is that it believes it has no fundamental suppositions or presuppositions.  The second is that it believes Unbelief is objective: it follows the facts wherever the facts lead.

Foundering Rocks, Part III

 Lip Service in the Academy

In the scientific community the vast majority of scientists accept evolutionism on the basis of authority.  "I believe evolutionism to be true because everyone else does" is the actual epistemic state of play of this bizarre theory.  After all, evolution calls for billions of years in order to work its "magic".  In terms of the theory, no-one is able to be around that long.  Proving the theory to be true by means of scientific experimentation is impossible from the get-go.

It has been intriguing to watch experimental physicists strive mightily, expending great effort and expense to prove their theories about the state and nature of the atom and the existence, behaviour, and function of sub-atomic particles.  The Hadron Collider is just one example, albeit the largest, of experimental equipment built to confirm or deny the kaleidoscope of theories about how atoms are and work.  But when it comes to evolutionism, nada.  There ain't no Darwinian Collider.

The Overreach of Stupid Science, Part V

The Eclipse of Ethics

[Part V of  The Folly of Scientism by  Austin L. Hughes

Originally published in The New Atlantis ]

Perhaps no area of philosophy has seen a greater effort at appropriation by advocates of scientism than ethics. Many of them tend toward a position of moral relativism. According to this position, science deals with the objective and the factual, whereas statements of ethics merely represent people’s subjective feelings; there can be no universal right or wrong. Not surprisingly, there are philosophers who have codified this opinion. The positivist tradition made much of a “fact-value distinction,” in which science was said to deal with facts, leaving fields like ethics (and aesthetics) to deal with the more nebulous and utterly disparate world of values. In his influential book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), the philosopher J. L. Mackie went even further, arguing that ethics is fundamentally based on a false theory about reality.

Evolutionary biology has often been seen as highly relevant to ethics, beginning in the nineteenth century. Social Darwinism — at least as it came to be explained and understood by later generations — was an ideology that justified laissez-faire capitalism with reference to the natural “struggle for existence.” In the writings of authors such as Herbert Spencer, the accumulation of wealth with little regard for those less fortunate was justified as “nature’s way.” Of course, the “struggle” involved in natural selection is not a struggle to accumulate a stock portfolio but a struggle to reproduce — and ironically, Social Darwinism arose at the very time that the affluent classes of Western nations were beginning to limit their reproduction (the so-called “demographic transition”) with the result that the economic struggle and the Darwinian struggle were at cross-purposes.

Partly in response to this contradiction, the eugenics movement arose, with its battle cry, “The unfit are reproducing like rabbits; we must do something to stop them!”

The Overreach of Stupid Science, Part IV

The Eclipse of Epistemology

[Part IV of  The Folly of Scientism by  Austin L. Hughes

Originally published in The New Atlantis ]

Hawking and Mlodinow, in the chapter of their book called “The Theory of Everything,” quote Albert Einstein: “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” In response, Hawking and Mlodinow offer this crashing banality: “The universe is comprehensible because it is governed by scientific laws; that is to say, its behavior can be modeled.” Later, the authors invite us to give ourselves a collective pat on the back: “The fact that we human beings — who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature — have been able to come this close to an understanding of the laws governing us and our universe is a great triumph.”

Great triumph or no, none of this addresses Einstein’s paradox, because no explanation is offered as to why our universe is “governed by scientific laws.”  Moreover, even if we can be confident that our universe has unchanging physical laws — which many of the new speculative cosmologies call into question — how is it that we “mere collections of particles” are able to discern those laws? How can we be confident that we will continue to discern them better, until we understand them fully?

A common response to these questions invokes what has become the catch-all explanatory tool of advocates of scientism: evolution.

The Overreach of Stupid Science, Part III

The Eclipse of Metaphysics

[Part III of  The Folly of Scientism by  Austin L. Hughes

Originally published in The New Atlantis ]

There are at least three areas of inquiry traditionally in the purview of philosophy that now are often claimed to be best — or only — studied scientifically: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Let us discuss each in turn.

Physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow open their 2010 book The Grand Design by asking:

What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator? ... Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

Though physicists might once have been dismissive of metaphysics as mere speculation, they would also have characterized such questions as inherently speculative and so beyond their own realm of expertise. The claims of Hawking and Mlodinow, and many other writers, thus represent a striking departure from the traditional view.

The Overreach of Stupid Science, Part II

The Abdication of the Philosophers

[Part II of  The Folly of Scientism by  Austin L. Hughes

Originally published in The New Atlantis ]

 
If philosophy is regarded as a legitimate and necessary discipline, then one might think that a certain degree of philosophical training would be very useful to a scientist. Scientists ought to be able to recognize how often philosophical issues arise in their work — that is, issues that cannot be resolved by arguments that make recourse solely to inference and empirical observation. In most cases, these issues arise because practising scientists, like all people, are prone to philosophical errors.

To take an obvious example, scientists can be prone to errors of elementary logic, and these can often go undetected by the peer review process and have a major impact on the literature — for instance, confusing correlation and causation, or confusing implication with a biconditional. Philosophy can provide a way of understanding and correcting such errors. It addresses a largely distinct set of questions that natural science alone cannot answer, but that must be answered for natural science to be properly conducted.

These questions include how we define and understand science itself.

Secular Theology

The Religious Foundation of Modern Science

It was from the intellectual ferment brought about by the merging of Greek philosophy and Judeo-Islamic-Christian thought that modern science emerged with its unidirection linear time (rather than cyclic), its insistence of nature's rationality, and its emphasis on mathematical principles.  All the early scientists such as Newton were religious in one way or another. . . . In the ensuing 300 years, the theological dimension of science has faded.  People take for granted that the physical world is both ordered and intelligible. 

The underlying order in nature--the laws of physics--is simply accepted as given, as brute fact.  Nobody asks where the laws come from--at least they don't in polite company.  However, even the most atheistic science accepts as an act of faith (i.e. an assumption) the existence of a law-like order in nature that is at least in part comprehensible to us.  So science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview.  [Paul Davies, "Design in Physics and Cosmology," in God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science, ed. Neil A. Manson (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 148.]

Kuhn's Revolution

Fifty Years On

Several decades ago during post-grad studies we were introduced to Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  Kuhn was working as an academic physicist and was asked to teach a course on science for humanities students.  Very cleverly, Kuhn decided to teach the course looking at the history of science--that is, science from a humanities perspective.

His research led him to the discoveries he summarises in The Structure.  He demonstrated that in the history of science, knowledge has been communal, not objective.  It is socially conditioned.  These ideas are now accepted by all but the most purblind.  Kuhn, of course, was not researching and writing in a vacuum.  Wittgenstein had already laid the philosophical foundations for this thesis.  Michael Polanyi had already articulated the idea that all scientific knowledge was personal knowledge.  Kuhn was building upon these notions.

Fifty years have not passed since The Structure first appeared.  John Naughton, writing in the Observer, chronicles the origins and influence of the work that reverberates to this day.