Category Archives: Science

Send in the clouds

Posted on by davald

Climate change skeptics proffer counter-theories they believe debunk the grand theory of global warming. Yet each attempt is ultimately foiled, usually upon revelation that mistakes were made. But the last bastion of counter-argument focuses on clouds, with at least one scientific heavyweight averring that they will save the day and the planet.

The New York Times presents us with a comprehensive look at the players and the issues in this final frontier. The Times:

[The skeptics'] theory exploits the greatest remaining mystery in climate science, the difficulty that researchers have had in predicting how clouds will change. The scientific majority believes that clouds will most likely have a neutral effect or will even amplify the warming, perhaps strongly, but the lack of unambiguous proof has left room for dissent.

Chief among the dissenters from the majority opinion that climate change is real and mostly human-caused is MIT’s Richard Lindzen. Because of his credentials, he’s become the champion of the skeptics, including members of Congress and the British Parliament. The Times:

At gatherings of climate change skeptics on both sides of the Atlantic, Dr. Lindzen has been treated as a star. During a debate in Australia over carbon taxes, his work was cited repeatedly. When he appears at conferences of the Heartland Institute, the primary American organization pushing climate change skepticism, he is greeted by thunderous applause.

Under investigation are two major types of cloud formations: those that allow for excess heat to escape (lower altitude) and those that prevent heat escaping (higher altitude). The Times:

On balance, in today’s climate, clouds cool the earth. Dense, low-lying clouds are responsible for most of that effect, because they reflect considerable sunlight back to space. Many high, thin clouds have the opposite influence, allowing incoming sunshine to pass through but effectively trapping heat that is trying to escape.

Lindzen’s views have been widely criticized, especially among the vast majority of scientists who hold that the climate is warming because of continuing greenhouse gas emissions. Many scientists issue alarming predictions, advocating for immediate action. James Hansen, the godfather of climate change theory, calls for the shutting down of coal plants, the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions. He and others believe that Congress and international bodies should impose a carbon tax, preferably, or cap-and-trade, if that’s the only viable political option. Doing nothing in the face of business as usual guarantees rising sea levels, widespread drought, species destruction, food scarcity, and wild, robust weather events causing billions of dollars of damage and deaths to thousands. Lindzen gives aid and comfort to the do-nothings, further imperiling the planet. The Times:

Ultimately, as the climate continues warming and more data accumulate, it will become obvious how clouds are reacting. But that could take decades, scientists say, and if the answer turns out to be that catastrophe looms, it would most likely be too late. By then, they say, the atmosphere would contain so much carbon dioxide as to make a substantial warming inevitable, and the gas would not return to a normal level for thousands of years.

Trees

Posted on by davald

Yesterday was Arbor Day. This op-ed in today’s New York Times tells us “Why Trees Matter.” They’re kind of miraculous, when you consider their benefits.

This is what I see out my window as I write.

There are lots of trees, although the photo is a bit dark. It gets cloudy up here in the Pacific Northwest. Despite living in “downtown,” I’m surrounded by trees.

The op-ed writer suggests that we should be concerned about the dramatic loss of trees across the planet.

We have underestimated the importance of trees. They are not merely pleasant sources of shade but a potentially major answer to some of our most pressing environmental problems. We take them for granted, but they are a near miracle. In a bit of natural alchemy called photosynthesis, for example, trees turn one of the seemingly most insubstantial things of all — sunlight — into food for insects, wildlife and people, and use it to create shade, beauty and wood for fuel, furniture and homes.

The inhabitants of Easter Island cut down all their trees, which were crucial to human survival. The people died. Imagine being the last person cutting down the last tree on the island. Hey. You needed it for firewood.

Global warming skeptics

Posted on by davald

William Nordhaus, a Yale economics professor, wrote a piece for the New York Review of Books wherein he pronounced global warming skeptics “wrong.” What prompted Nordhaus was an op-ed that appeared in the Wall Street Journal, which gainsaid the scientific consensus. I offered my two cents here.

The skeptics have focused on the apparent absence of warming over the last several years. Nordhaus includes this chart in his initial essay.

We’ll note that since roughly 1920 temperatures have risen, modulating during WWII, then resuming a steady climb to the beginning of the last decade, when temperatures appeared stable. Nordhaus, correctly I believe, judges a decade’s worth of data misleading. After all, one could take any ten-year span along the above curve and find that temperatures have stabilized or even fallen. What’s important is the long-term trend.

I’ve constructed a chart based on data obtained here.

Again, we could take any 10-year chunk along the curve to “show” that temperatures had cooled. What counts is the trend, which I’ve depicted as a dashed red line.

Consider this chart, which shows temperature anomalies from 1750 to about 2005. The base years are 1951-1980. A temperature change outside the base would be an anomaly. (source)

What strikes me about this chart is the absence of negative anomalies since roughly 1980. From that year forward all anomalies have been positive.

The climate scientists (their day jobs) at realclimate.org recently looked at a 1981 paper by James Hansen et al., published in Science, one of the top two peer-reviewed scientific journals. The scientists draw attention to the prediction of increased warming, despite the fact that temperatures had declined during the period of their research. (At the time, at least one weekly magazine had a cover article on the coming ice age.)

As it happens, actual temperatures were 30 percent higher than Hansen et al. had predicted. Nevertheless, the authors were confident that they had the science correct, which allowed them to make their prediction.

I especially like this concluding paragraph from realclimate:

To conclude, a projection from 1981 for rising temperatures in a major science journal, at a time that the temperature rise was not yet obvious in the observations, has been found to agree well with the observations since then, underestimating the observed trend by about 30%, and easily beating naive predictions of no-change or a linear continuation of trends. It is also a nice example of a statement based on theory that could be falsified and up to now has withstood the test. The “global warming hypothesis” has been developed according to the principles of sound science.

Back to the skeptics. In their reply to Nordhaus’s original essay, they write:

Professor Nordhaus presents two graphs from the IPCC 2007 report that purport to show that without anthropogenic emissions, models successfully simulate the global mean temperature until about 1970 but cannot do so thereafter. This is the basis for the IPCC’s claim that it is likely that most of the warming over the past fifty years is due to man’s emissions. Such a procedure absolutely requires that the model include correctly all other sources of variability. However, the failure of the models to predict the hiatus in warming over the past fifteen years is acknowledged to indicate that this condition has not been met. Furthermore there is the embarrassing fact that the models do not reproduce the 1910–1940 warming, which is nearly identical to the 1970–2000 warming but occurred before man’s emissions became large enough to be considered important.

I would reply by asking the skeptics to explain global warming over the long term. Why have temperatures risen? Natural cycles? Shifting of the earth’s axis? Sun spots? The real climate scientists have factored in a host of such input variables, none of which explain the warming.

It really is physics. Carbon dioxide provides a “blanket” of warmth, without which earth would be a ball of ice. But what happens if we keep adding more blankets? We would expect further warming.

The scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—some 1,000 or so—acknowledge that the climate is complicated. So much so that their initial reports were heavily qualified. Over time, however, as more data have been accumulated and models further refined, the scientists have become bolder in their predictions. Their latest summary (pdf) said that global warming was “unequivocal.”

Realclimate.org says this about using arbitrary time slices to prove or disprove global warming:

Short term (15 years or less) trends in global temperature are not usefully predictable as a function of current forcings. This means you can’t use such short periods to ‘prove’ that global warming has or hasn’t stopped, or that we are really cooling despite this being the warmest decade in centuries.

So there.

Profound ignorance

Posted on by davald

Chris Mooney hypothesized that Republicans are “at war with science,” and wrote a book about it. A new study (pdf) (by a scientist, of course) confirms his hypothesis. Conservatives distrust science, and the more education they have, the greater their distrust.

The difference between liberals and conservatives on this point is large and getting larger, as the following chart from the study shows. You’ll notice that both liberals and conservatives started out in the same place back in 1974, which also coincides with the beginning of the Great Divergence.

Mother Jones‘ Kevin Drum includes an excerpt from the report:

Conservatives with high school degrees, bachelor’s degrees, and graduate degrees all experienced greater distrust in science over time….In addition…conservatives with college degrees decline more quickly than those with only a high school degree[]. These results are quite profound, because they imply that conservative discontent with science was not attributable to the uneducated but to rising distrust among educated conservatives.

My first reaction was to question the definition of educated. It seems to me that one characteristic of a formally educated person is both knowledge of and appreciation for science in the broadest sense. That would include familiarity with such topics as Newton’s Laws of Motion, gravity, Einstein’s theories of relativity, evolution, and, more recently, global warming.

Now it may be the case that conservatives with college degrees are indeed familiar with these concepts. Rather, they don’t trust their underlying science or those who study them. And the more conservatives may learn, the more they distrust. From the study:

Two interesting patterns from these supplementary analyses are worth mentioning. First, the public defines “what science is” in three distinct ways: (1) as an abstract method (e.g., replication, empirical, or unbiased); (2) as a cultural location (e.g., takes place in a university or is practiced by highly credentialed individuals); and (3) as one form of knowledge among other types such as commonsense and religious tradition. Interestingly, conservatives were far more likely to define science as knowledge that should conform to common sense and religious tradition. Relating to the second pattern, when examining a series of public attitudes toward science, conservatives’ unfavorable attitudes are most acute in relation to government funding of science and the use of scientific knowledge to influence social policy. Conservatives thus appear especially averse to regulatory science, defined here as the mutual dependence of organized science and government policy [my emphasis].

I’ll offer my speculative two cents.

It’s been suggested that conservatism is a reaction to both liberalism and modernism. Liberals, as a rule, are far more likely to “trust” science; and it’s true that most academic faculty are liberals. Does the latter mean that colleges select for liberalism? Or is it the case that liberalism and intellectualism, including scientific inquiry, go together? Regardless, and I think it’s more about the correlation rather than the doubtful selectiveness, conservatives don’t like liberals. Insofar as most scientists are liberals, conservatives distrust science.

If the conservatives should gain further electoral victories in November, the nation will step closer to the following outcomes:

  • abolishment of EPA and NASA (a bunch of go-gooder scientists)
  • cuts in government funding of research (why help out liberals?)
  • repeal of environmental regulations, including EPA’s recent carbon restrictions
  • prayer and creation “science” in public education
  • a new law equating abortion with murder, with all the attendant effects
  • federal subsidies to private Christian schools (no money for Muslims)
  • repeal of Obamacare, if the Supreme Court doesn’t beat them to it
  • carbon dioxide will be declared a “good” gas, not to be curtailed

There would be lots of other crap, too. Be my guest in adding to the list.

Error bars and majority rules

Posted on by davald

While an overwhelming number of scientists, and nearly all climate scientists, concluded some time ago that excessive carbon emissions are heating up the planet and that human activity is largely responsible for the increase, a handful of scientists, including a very small minority of those working on climate science, continue to deny what most consider the obvious. The Wall Street Journal serves as the outliers’ venue of choice, since the paper’s editors, certainly, side with the skeptics and deniers.

In its January 27, 2012, edition the paper published a letter signed by 16 scientists, only two or three of which conducted research on the science of global warming. Their essay received the title “No Need to Panic About Global Warming: There’s no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize’ the world’s economy.”

Their argument rested on a simple, but terribly flawed interpretation of the data. The scientists wrote:

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

More than twice as many scientists responded with a rebuttal, which, of course, did not dampen the ardor of the deniers, who issued a reply of their own. It seems that neither “side” was persuaded by the other.

Integral to the deniers’ case is a chart they created, which, they believe, reveals the fatal defect in the majority’s two-fold contention.  I reproduce it here.

A real-life climate scientist, Barry Bickmore, offered a quick rejoinder to the deniers. He suggested two main points: the above chart ignored the error bars (degrees of uncertainty) of the IPCC projections; and the recent “cooling” can easily be explained by confounding factors, among these La Niñas and volcanic eruptions. Bickmore:

But let’s look at the graph. They have a temperature plot, which wiggles all over the place, and then they have 4 straight lines that are supposed to represent the model predictions. The line for the IPCC First Assessment Report is clearly way off, but back in 1990 the climate models didn’t include important things like ocean circulation, so that’s hardly surprising. The lines for the next 3 IPCC reports are very similar to one another, though. What the authors don’t tell you is that the lines they plot are really just the average long-term slopes of a bunch of different models. The individual models actually predict that the temperature will go up and down for a few years at a time, but the long-term slope (30 years or more) will be about what those straight lines say. Given that these lines are supposed to be average, long-term slopes, take a look at the temperature data and try to estimate whether the overall slope of the data is similar to the slopes of those three lines (from the 1995, 2001, and 2007 IPCC reports). If you were to calculate the slope of the data WITH error bars, the model predictions would very likely be in that range.

Here’s Bickmore’s chart showing actual temperature readings and the IPCC projections with their original error bars.

We can appreciate that the further out the projections (forecast) the greater the uncertainty. However, measurements do show a leveling over the past few years, which the deniers are quick to emphasize.

But suppose one removes the confounding factors, which are surely temporary in their effects. RealClimate.org shows us the result.

The trend is clear. Up, up, and away.

There is a significant danger in ignoring the temporary effects. They mask the underlying warming trend. The carbon is still emitted. The physics still apply. Once the effects cease global warming continues apace. Indeed, as this RealClimate post reports, ocean heat content is rising and arctic sea ice is decreasing, both expected consequences of increased carbon emissions.

The deniers hold that the recent departure from the warming trend line “falsifies” the models used by climate scientists. The quote from Bickmore above addresses that claim.

Moreover, they assert that just because most of the world’s scientists concur with the conclusions of the IPCC, science is not a democracy in which majority rules. It’s possible that the consensus is wrong.

That’s all true, and it’s also what science is about. Theories are provisional. The geocentric model gave way to the heliocentric model. Newton’s laws of motion were superseded by relativity and quantum mechanics.

Science is really quite conservative in its method: observation, hypothesis, further observation, refinement of the hypothesis, data analysis, more refinement. Then repeat, repeat, and repeat again and again. Only after years’ worth of this methodology does a hypothesis rise to the level of theory. Yet, even at this point, it’s just a theory, subject to replacement by another theory, one that more fully explains what we see, hear, touch, and smell.

If you followed the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), itself a collection of several hundred scientists, you understand how initially tentative were the panel’s reports. With each iteration, however, came greater certainty. Why is that? Because the research continues, with much more data gathering and analysis, along with model refinement.

The deniers, on the other hand, hasten to condemn the models, without pausing to ask if there are confounding variables. Suppose there were no shifts in ocean currents. Suppose there were no La Niñas. Suppose there were no volcanic eruptions, and so on. Has the physics changed? Do atmospheric carbon dioxide molecules no longer trap heat?

A theory of climate change, long in its emergence, cannot be easily replaced by another theory in light of temporary effects. Actually, the deniers don’t suggest an alternative explanation. For them it’s just a matter of “falsifying” the consensus model(s), while impugning the motives of the scientists, such as the deniers did in their first piece:

Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet.

Barry Bickmore had this to say about the Wall Street Journal and its role in keeping climate change science “controversial” and “unsettled.”

The level of deception by the WSJ authors and others like them is absolutely astonishing to me.

Indeed.

Science as politics—or religion?

Posted on by davald

If, as Jonathan Haidt says, politics is religion, then could science be politics? If so, then science is religion.

Confused. So am I, and I’m writing this stuff.

During my recent exposure to “the conservative mind,” it occurred to me that I should from time to time dip my intellectual toe into darker waters. And who better represents the conservative viewpoint than the National Review? After all, its founder, William F. Buckley, is credited with making conservatism creditable among, well, fellow conservatives.

I just now clicked on its website. Among the tabs signifying different sections of the online magazine is “Planet Gore.” I knew where I’d be going with that title.

Sure enough, the entries are devoted to mocking global warming, for the most part, and relying on selective reports, otherwise—all with the intention of gainsaying the science of climate change and its many practitioners.

But why should science be religious or political? Yes, it’s true that liberals accept climate science in far greater numbers than conservatives, and it’s also true that scientists tend to be politically liberal rather than conservative. Does it follow, then, that science is liberal?

Scientists themselves would argue that the scientific method, or methods, is conservative in execution. It rarely leaps, while adhering to well-established hypotheses and theories; it moves slowly, demanding considerable proof to knock off an incumbent “truth.”

If you have read, say, RealClimate.org, you gain an appreciation for the complexities of science, the massive amount of accumulated data, the testing of hypotheses, the surmises, and the disagreements. And woe unto any scientist who gets it wrong; the response is fast and furious, though rarely mean.

Here’s one entry under “Planet Gore.” It’s about the melting of the polar ice caps. The caption contains “Not So Settled Science” and a quote from a researcher, described as “the kicker”:

“Even with an eight-year estimate, it’s not clear how far into the future you can project,” he says. “A lot of people want to predict into the end of the century, but I think it’s too dangerous to do that … We don’t have enough info to know what’ll happen. There’s some ebb and flow to these things.”

This is followed by “Someone tell Al Gore please.”

However, if you click to the linked report (US News) you get this:

Nearly 230 billion tons of ice is melting into the ocean from glaciers, ice caps, and mountaintops annually—which is actually less than previous estimates, according to new research by scientists at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

If the amount of ice lost between 2003 and 2010 covered the United States, the whole country would be under one-and-a-half feet of water, or it’d fill Lake Erie eight times, researchers say. Ocean levels worldwide are rising about six hundredths of an inch per year, according to researcher John Wahr.

What do we find about this at RealClimate.org?

The graph covers thirty years of data, and the trend is clearly downward, meaning more ice is melting over time. Suppose we project outwards. Now what?

These charts are based on data; they’re not articles of faith.

If you Google “John Wahr polar ice melting” you get a slew of blogposts, most of which are at least skeptical of climate change if not deniers. At the top of the search list is a link to Reuters. Here is how that international news agency started its report on Wahr’s study:

John Wahr of the University of Colorado in Boulder and colleagues, in a study published on Thursday, found that thinning glaciers and icecaps were pushing up sea levels by 1.5 millimeters (0.06 inches) a year, in line with a 1.2 to 1.8 mm range from other studies, some of which forecast sea levels could rise as much as 2 meters (2.2 yards) by 2100.

If you fancy yourself rational, you’re not likely to build right next to the water these days.

Analog or digital?

Posted on by davald

While growing up, an inevitable question loomed, aided and abetted by teachers and parents: What do you want to be?  Unlike Jimmy Stewart’s character in A Wonderful Life, who desired to “build things,” the issue before me was one of title or profession and not doing. Perhaps it was as a high school sophomore that I reached my decision. I would become a scientist. That seemed a sufficient title—very general, nothing specific. So I chose German as my foreign language, influenced, no doubt, by Einstein’s visage on magazine covers and the ex-Nazi Werner von Braun on Walt Disney’s television program. I did not become a scientist, of course, despite having taken four years of ein, zwei, drei…However, I did go on to use physics and math in one of my previous lives as a forensic consultant.

I am nevertheless curious about our universe, from its beginning to its end and in between. For superficial edification I subscribe to the journal Science and Scientific American magazine. If you promise not to salivate, I bring you the Feb. 2012 cover of the latter:

The cover article follows theoretical physicist Craig Hogan, who’s trying to determine if the universe is digital rather than analog.

He begins by explaining how the two most successful theories of the 20th century—quantum mechanics and general relativity—cannot possibly be reconciled. At the smallest scales, both break down into gibberish. Yet this same scale seems to be special for another reason: it happens to be intimately connected to the science of information—the 0’s and 1’s of the universe.

The British scientists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley sought to prove or disprove the existence of an ether, which my dictionary defines as: ”…a very rarefied and highly elastic substance formerly believed to permeate all space, including the interstices between the particles of matter, and to be the medium whose vibrations constituted light and other electromagnetic radiation.” The two researchers demonstrated in their famous 1887 experiment that there was no ether.

Prof. Hogan, per force, lacks the $5 billion that built the Hadron Collider to determine, among other things, whether or not the “god particle” exists. So he’s fashioned an inexpensive, rather makeshift contraption, which he calls “his Holometer,” near Fermilab Particle Astrophysics Center outside Chicago (he’s its director). Like Michelson and Morley, Hogan is also using an interferometer. (graphic of the M & M interferometer below from Wikipedia)

What about “the smallest scales” to which the article refers above? These are Planck lengths. If you must know, a Planck length is equal to 1.616199(97)×10−35 meters, the smallest measure in the universe, save for my bank account. We’ll get to this in a brief moment.

Einstein’s theories of relativity implied the existence of black holes, those strange entities Stephen Hawking has written about. Hawking originally opined that information is lost once matter enters a black hole. Not so, countered Leonard Susskind, among others. Which is it? Susskind offered a compelling proof that the information exists in two-dimensional holographic form at the event horizon rimming the black hole—the holographic principle.

Ultimately the reason why physicists are so excited about the holographic principle, the reason they spent decades developing it—other than convincing Hawking that he was mistaken, of course—is because it articulates a deep connection between information, matter and gravity. In the end, the holographic principle could reveal how to reconcile the two tremendously successful yet mutually incompatible pillars of 20th-century physics: quantum mechanics and general relativity. “The holographic principle is a signpost to quantum gravity,” [UC Berkeley physicist Raphael] Bousso says, an observation that points the way toward a theory that will supersede our current understanding of the world. “We might need more signposts.”

Hogan believes that if the universe is indeed digital, space itself would be quantum, emerging from “the discrete, quantized bits at the Planck scale.” These quantized bits do not sit still; they vibrate and fluctuate according to the laws of quantum mechanics. At Planck scale, it is thought, these bits are foam-like. Hogan’s strategy  ”for getting down to the Plank length is to measure the accumulated errors that accrue when dealing with any jittery quantum system.”

Michelson and Morley, using their interferometer, hoped to capture very subtle changes in light beams bouncing off mirrors. If one beam ended its path a bit faster or slower than the other, then an ether exists. They found no such change. Light’s speed appeared to be constant, which Einstein later proved with his theories of relativity.

Hogan constructed a “holometer” that resembles M & M’s experimental apparatus.

A laser hits a beam splitter that separates the light into two. These beams travel down the two 40-meter-long arms of an L-shaped interferometer, bounce off mirrors at each end, then return to the beam splitter and recombine. Yet instead of measuring the motion of the earth through the ether, Hogan is measuring any change in the length of the paths as a result of the beam splitter being jostled around on the fabric of space. If at the Planck scale, spacetime thrashes around like a roiling sea, the beam splitter is the dinghy pitching through the froth. In the time it takes the laser beams to travel out and back through the Holometer, the beam splitter will have jiggled just enough Planck lengths for its motion to be detected.

Now, I don’t pretend to understand any of this, nor can I begin to appreciate the implications of an ultimately digital universe, one structured and operated according to 0′s and 1′s. But if the universe is composed of discrete bits, rather than, say, analog vibrating strings, then it is essentially a computer. Computers run programs. The universe, we might think, is running at least one and perhaps an infinite number of programs.

I will not proffer a hypothesis of who or what is the chief programmer or whether he, she, or it (I’m with “it”) is using Java, Perl, or BAL. Yet, if biology, the stuff of life, is fundamentally a complex arrangement of 0′s and 1′s then instead of trying to breed or clone different varieties of species in laboratories, code warriors would ultimately do the work. Since we are biological, humans may be literally programmed or even re-programmed in the future.

Imagine the possibilities. Imagine the horrors.

The fools are gathered

Posted on by davald

RealClimate.org, a website devoted to the science of climate change and run by real climate scientists, provides an invaluable service to the general population. It’s not easy to translate the arcane jargon and complexities of any scientific endeavor into language understandable to the layman. Try as the scientists might, however, the subjects remain inscrutable to the willfully ignorant and those with political agendas.

Whether or not one believes that global warming is real and is principally caused by human activity has become a litmus test for Republican presidential candidates. The correct answer—to appease the modern GOP constituency—is a decided “no.”

True to form, and one billing himself as the conservative alternative to Barack Obama, comes now Rick Santorum to answer the call:

GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum targeted primary rivals Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich on Tuesday for allegedly buying into the “bogus” science of man-made climate change, while proudly declaring that he himself had never believed in the “hoax of global warming.”

It would seem that Santorum’s belief inheres in his literal reading of the Old Testament, specifically the Book of Genesis, wherein, ”We were put on this Earth as creatures of God to have dominion over the Earth,” said Santorum, “to use it wisely and steward it wisely, but for our benefit not for the Earth’s benefit.” Santorum, of course, is a practicing fundamentalist Catholic, notwithstanding the pope’s siding with the scientists on the issue of climate change.

In a post today on RealClimate, guest writer Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education asks “So what’s a teacher to do?”

Imagine you’re a middle-school science teacher, and you get to the section of the course where you’re to talk about climate change. You mention the “C” words, and two students walk out of the class.

Or you mention global warming and a hand shoots up.

“Mrs. Brown! My dad says global warming is a hoax!”

Or you come to school one morning and the principal wants to see you because a parent of one of your students has accused you of political bias because you taught what scientists agree about: that the Earth is getting warmer, and human actions have had an important role in this warming.

Or you pick up the newspaper and see that your state legislature is considering a bill that declares that accepted sciences like global warming (and evolution, of course) are “controversial issues” that require “alternatives” to be taught.

I’m somewhat fascinated about popular reaction to both climate change and evolution. We don’t encounter such widespread denial of other scientific topics, from cosmology to nanotechnology. Why the two?

I suspect the answer has much to do with the implications of global warming and evolution. Of the former, a rational response to the science would compel a sharp reduction of carbon combustion and embrace of those “Democratic” values of environmentalism and “being green.” Moreover, curbing greenhouse gas emissions requires governmental regulation or legislation in the form of either carbon taxes or cap-and-trade programs, since carbon emitters are unlikely to shut down coal plants on their own. Republicans, as a rule, loathe government, even as they benefit from it.

Evolution, which Darwin himself realized, upsets the religious applecart. God is no longer necessary to explain the origin of species. So, better to deny the science than jettison cherished beliefs.

My sympathies lie with the imagined teacher, as they are with Mr. John Scopes. Teaching science (or history or political science) in today’s public schools is risky business. The fools are gathered outside the classroom, armed with pitchforks and clinging to their Bibles. They won’t let science get in their way.

The unnecessary God

Posted on by davald

I watched a debate between Christopher Hitchens, who died recently from esophageal cancer, and Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative writer. The event occurred at Notre Dame university. At issue was whether or not God exists. The official question for debate: Is religion the problem?

Hitchens, as many of you know, was a strident atheist. It was not enough to lack faith in (a) God; one must set about to bash religion itself. He joined three others in this mission: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris.

I won’t go into Hitchens’s reasons for his position. You can watch the debate yourself. Here I wish to discuss three bases for theism proffered by D’Souza. They are:

  1. the mystery of the cell
  2. ex nihilo
  3. anthropic principle

D’Souza asserts that, while scientists can explain how species evolve, they are at a loss to tell us how life itself began. He argues that the simplest cell—necessary, he says, to start us on the evolutionary trail—is hardly simple at all. It contains all the requisite stuff to begin the tree of life. But whence this stuff? D’Souza suggests God, the “intelligent designer.”

Only the Hebrew bible among religious texts, D’Souza says, offers the narrative of the universe emerging from nothing. Guess what?—D’Souza asks. That’s precisely what cosmologists believe today, that before the Big Bang there was no time, no space—in other words, nothing.

Quoting Dawkins, D’Souza then argues that if any single condition for life were off by the slightest degree, humans would not exist. He thus invokes the anthropic principle: that the universe is arranged in goldilocks fashion to enable our existence. That is, the world was made for us.

Essentially, D’Souza is arguing for “the God of the gaps.” Explanatory holes can be filled with a divine creator, God.

This is a strange way to make your argument—from the absence of evidence. Yet, how else can one “prove” that God exists? As far as I know D’Souza has not seen God, talked to him, or sensed his/her/its presence. He cannot describe God or provide us with his/her/its characteristics. (The God of my childhood catechism was defined as “the Supreme Being who made all things.” Where is your evidence, Catholic Church?)

D’Souza is too dismissive of science and how it works. First of all, scientists are much less certain, dogmatic, and doctrinaire than are D’Souza and most other religious adherents. Truth, the scientists understand, is always provisional: a theory may explain events and allow for accurate predictions–until the next theory comes along that improves our understanding. Newtonian physics gave way to Einstein’s relativity; the heliocentric theory trumped the previous geocentric model.

Even if we assume that D’Souza is correct about the state of scientific understanding of the cell, it does not follow that: either science cannot or will not produce an adequate explanation; or that the alleged insufficiency means that God made it. Nor does it necessarily follow that the Big Bang confirms the existence of a supreme being, although I concede that I have difficulty wrapping my brain around everything coming from nothing.

As for the anthropic principle, why can’t D’Souza accept that humans are evolutionary accidents? That is, things could have turned out very differently. There were at least two massive destructions on earth that wiped out a majority of the species. Had a meteor not crashed into the Caribbean near Yucatan some 65 million years ago the dinosaurs might still be around. And if they’re here, we’re not. Again, a very complex chain of events led to the emergence of homo sapiens, including species elimination. But it does not follow that everything that came before human existence was either caused by God or designed with us in mind.

I’m now going to quote from Bertrand Russell, specifically from his essay “Why I An Not a Christian.” This was actually a lecture that he gave in 1927.

You all know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different, we could not manage to live in it [the anthropic principle].

Russell was no friend of religion, and took whatever opportunity available to mock it. So he does in this essay.

[The argument from design] sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits would view that application…You all know Voltaire’s remark, that obviously the nose was designed to be such as to fit spectacles.

Do you think that if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists?

Teleology is the doctrine that says that everything around us, all that there is, has a purpose, which is what Russell was speaking about. Darwin rejected this notion. It is incorrect to say that we have eyes in order to see. Or that giraffes have long necks so that they can reach high leaves. Or that the sun is designed to keep us warm. Rather, and this seems counter-intuitive, our abilities to see, hear, touch, etc. are the result of random mutations in genetic material that allow for adaptation, or species’ survival. On the Origin of the Species upset the theological applecart. Darwin anticipated as much, which is why he delayed its publication.

If nature can be explained by science, who needs God?