By: Henry Lyatsky, P.Geoph.,P.Geol., Lyatsky Geoscience Research & Consulting Ltd.
Published: CSEG - Recorder (page 26)
"…There are known knowns; there
are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things
we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones
we don’t know we don’t know.” – DONALD RUMSFELD
The
planet Earth is cooling. The interglacial climate
period that has kept us warm for
the last several
thousand years, allowing civilization to rise and flourish, is over. Earth
is about to return to the deep-freeze conditions of the last ice age that ended
some 12,000 years
ago, when all of Canada and much of Europe were covered by the sort of thick
continental glaciers that today blanket
remote Greenland and
Antarctica.
This scientific “truth” was drilled into me, a
young geology undergrad in Calgary, by
esteemed professors in basic courses at the beginning of the 1980s.
In the 1970s the media were abuzz with
global-cooling scares. Cooling was supposedly a scientific fact.
Thankfully, the old fears of an impending new ice age have so far
proved unfounded. But now, global warming has replaced the global-cooling craze.
This article is not, by any means, a final
word. I am neither a climatolo- gist nor a logician. My purpose is to encourage
the readers to explore scientific logic, to always be skeptical, to question
the methods and the motives, and to always be ready to wonder and be surprised.
Empiricism
Natural science is
empirical. Empiricism says knowledge is derived from what we can sense or
observe. Knowledge is gained by passive observation of natural occurrences or
by active, preferably controlled, experiments.
Epistemology is the study of human knowledge.
It deals with how we know things.
Much philosophical ink has been
spilled on these subjects over the past several millennia. Too much of that ink flowed uselessly, or
it is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Only a few key points are
summarized below.
Karl Popper (1950, 1968) was probably the past
century’s foremost empirical philosopher. He taught that a legitimate
scientific hypoth- esis must be
falsifiable, i.e., capable of being
disproved by subsequent observations or experiments. If a “theory rules out
certain possible occurrences, … it will be falsified if these possible
occurrences do in fact occur”.
An abstract hypothesis that is not capable of
being falsified is not science at all. It is metaphysics – something worthless
to science, even damaging, which scientists should avoid like the plague. If
one discards falsifiability, then any arbitrary fantasy, postulation or
assumption can call itself science. When empirical logical rigor dies, science
dies.
In Popper’s scheme, where abstract hypotheses
are constantly modified, discarded and created anew to account for accumulating
facts, science should advance more or less smoothly. In the actual
progress of science, however, there are fits and starts. Some new discoveries
are more consequential than others. Besides, as Kuhn (1962) noted, scientists
need some common intellectual framework in which to interpret data and communicate with one another. These tentative
abstract frameworks, or “paradigms”, can exist for a period of time, as
pressure builds up from the growing volume of contrary facts. When the pressure
gets too much, a shift occurs to a new paradigm, and the cycle of new discovery
and testable conceptualization starts again.
A fact is
something we observe. Our observations are necessarily limited and subjective,
but this is not an argument to abandon empiricism. A lack of empiricism leads to relativism and arbitrary postulations. On the contrary, the
imperfection of observation is an argument to maximize the gathering of facts and tighten the empirical rigor.
Do observed facts represent “reality”? What is a
phenomenon? These questions are at least as old as Ancient Greece, going back
to Plato’s cave and Heraclitus’ note that “everything changes and nothing
remains still” (see also Russell, 1961).
All these
caveats complicate empirical thinking, but we have no alterna-
tive. Empiricism is the only way to keep ourselves disciplined and grounded in
“reality”, whatever that is, as we expand our knowledge and avoid
pitfalls.
Deduction and induction
Inductive reasoning works from the particular to the
general, as it looks for a falsifiable scheme that explains all available
relevant facts. This is the empirical way to develop testable hypotheses.
Deduction works the other way, from the general to the specific,
by applying firm rules of logic to reach a conclusion. Deduction can be used to
test hypotheses by making falsifiable predictions. In Popper’s words, a
fundamental question in empirical science is “how do we test scientific
statements by their deductive
consequences?”
For example, an abstract hypothesis may deductively
predict that the rocks in a particular locality should be Silurian limestone.
If Jurassic sandstone is found instead, the hypothesis is falsified. If
Silurian limestone does indeed crop out, the hypothesis is by no means proved
correct: it has only passed one particular test and awaits many others.
Two major pitfalls can trip up the unwary and the
lazy.
• Canonizing a tentative hypothesis, model or paradigm and
treating it as received truth
•
Applying
concept-driven deduction where fact-driven induction is required, which leads
to false determinism
This is where today’s climate science often goes wrong.
In geoscience and climatology alike, hypotheses are too often canonized
unskeptically. The meticulous collection of facts is lazily disregarded in
favor of grand but premature or idle theorizing and fancy-looking modeling.
Arbitrary hypotheses are sometimes even used to insist without evidence on what
the facts not are but what they should be.
Abstract modeling
“All models are wrong but some are useful” – George Box
A model is an abstraction, a conceptual representation of
some phenomenon. It is neither a truth nor an empirical fact. A model is
something we formulate. In natural sciences, it is a mentally contrived system,
typically composed of linked elements, designed to represent some aspects of an
empirically sensed reality.
Parameters are factors used to relate variables to their
functions, so parameters can define how the function changes in response to the
variables.
If enough of a system’s elements
and links are known, the variables can be defined or at least constrained.
This is the main purpose of scientific modeling. It can be done if a system is
sufficiently well determined; i.e., the
loose variables do not overwhelm what is known.
If
the unconstrained variables are too many
and the knowns
too few, the system is underdetermined and
it defies unique
solution.
An abstract model is only as good as its known
parameters, acknowl- edged variables, and assumptions. What do we assume about
the system’s elements? And about ways in which they are linked? Dealing with a
complex phenomenon such as climate, with its multitude of unknown factors,
influences and links, one must be extremely cautious.
It is commonly lack of knowledge that makes things
deceptively appear simpler than they are. Climate is extremely complex,
with a multitude of interconnected influences and feedbacks.
A conceptual model with too few
interlinked elements reduces uncertainty and it may even enable a unique solution, but it may be too coarse to be useful.
Simple models might
have their uses,
however, at the appropriate levels of the phenomenological hierarchy. For example, for all we know, all atoms of the same isotope
are the same. For some purposes, their behavior can thus be modeled with some simplicity. Yet, atomic physics and molecular chemistry do not define the variety of geologic features
in the rocks: every basin
and every mineral
deposit is different from any other.
At these, higher levels of the phenomenological
hierarchy, many small events – such as the Brownian motion of molecules, for example – average
each other out and become irrelevant, while new complexity emerges.
The
ever-more-rapid advances in computing power
enable extremely elaborate and
complex models. Unfortunately, modelers sometimes
forget the phenomenon they are trying to represent and instead fall in
love with the computer-gener-ated
abstractions. In the absence of sufficient factual (i.e. observational)
constraints, model complexity must never become a self-purpose.
Mathematics is abstract. What is three? A number is an abstract means to count observed
occurrences, but it is not these occurrences themselves (as in “three
fingers”). Complex mathematics, by itself, does not make a model true. It is
a means to an end, not an end in itself. Without adequate factual
constraints or realistic parameterization, too much math simply piles
one abstraction on top of another.
As with any abstract scientific scheme or hypothesis, be
it quantitative or qualitative, a model is empirically tested by its
falsifiability. Do the observed facts accord with the model’s predictions?
The manner in which the term “model” is commonly misused
in tectonics is highly misleading. In this misusage, what is called a model is
merely a genetic tectonic scenario intended to account for some rock
configuration. Strictly speaking, these are not formal models, just loose and often speculative hypotheses or even fantasies. If
they are not falsifi- able, they should not be
proposed.
In
climatology, unknown variables are legion. It is a common mistake to take a climate
model too seriously, even more so to canonize
it. An arbitrarily chosen model becomes a false and
misleading paradigm, leading scientists
astray or diverting
them to spend
their time fighting to debunk it.
Illogic of the
“official” global-warming dogma
Science has been “settled” before, and not just for
global cooling. In the 1890s, for
example, some very prominent physicists thought that nothing much fundamentally
new remained to be discovered in their science: classical mechanics and
electromagnetics covered the main bases, and future research would be a matter
of elaboration. However, in 1895 Wilhelm
Röntgen discovered X-rays,
and in 1905 came Einstein.
Science is never settled. There is no last word. A good
scientist is always a skeptic, never a denier. Personally, I am agnostic about
anthropo- genic global warming. I simply don’t know. Given the current state of
knowledge, nobody knows – and I am happy to admit it. Clearly, though, the
“official” global-warming dogma is
bogus.
In contrast to the current debates about climate change,
the science was much more compelling in identifying the causes of the
depletion of the atmosphere’s ozone
layer, which vitally protects us from harmful extraterrestrial radiation. A
particular type of man-made
molecule was found to be at fault,
with a particular sort of chemical reaction.
The
scientific case was empirically clear
and relatively simple,
and the consensus was genuine. The international Montreal
Protocol in 1987 rightly mandated a world-wide phase-out of the culprit chemicals. Climate has been changing the entire time there’s
been planet Earth, getting colder and warmer
by turns. Identification of
glacial deposits and facies in ancient sedimentary
rocks makes this clear, as do studies of paleo-faunas
and paleo-floras. Glacial deposits and landforms are spectacular around
Calgary, and the magnificent moraines in Wisconsin are the reason that state’s name is attached
to the last period of major glaciation.
What drove past climate changes?
Perhaps fluctuations of solar output,
or natural changes in the composition and particle load of the
atmosphere, or variations in the Earth’s
orbit. It has all been going on forever.
A famous Swedish
scientist, Svante Arrhenius, in 1896 took a stab at explaining the ice ages in
the geologic past. Based on the contempo-rary knowledge of chemistry
and physics, he suggested that
an increase of atmospheric CO2 should lead to an increase in the world’s
tempera- ture. Since human
industrial activity
produces CO2 and
other gases that supposedly warm the planet through a
“greenhouse effect”, modern anti-capitalism activists
conclude that the most advanced industrial countries are the culprits
behind the man-made
global warming. Arrhenius’ scientific idea is a supposition
that should be falsifiable, or testable based on observed facts. A tendency or
a theoretical potenti- ality may well deserve serious consideration – but they
are not facts. So far, the factual record is mixed. Perhaps it will take a lot
longer before we reliably know what is actually happening with the climate.
Predictions such as Arrhenius’ are hypotheses.
Only observations are facts. Climate models predicting global temperatures a
century ahead are too dependent on assumptions to be reliable. They might as
well be 10,000-year predictions.
One only needs to follow the news to know the official
global-warming dogma stands falsified. No global warming has been
measured for the last two decades.
The infamous “hockey-stick graph” in the 1990s predicted that we are about to imminently
enter a new period of rapidly accelerated global warming.
So far at least, nothing
like this has occurred.
But a canonized model must be upheld. We are
now told that the “missing” heat is hiding in the world’s oceans, soon to come
out with a vengeance. Maybe it is, but in the absence of hard evidence this is
not science but merely Popper’s metaphysics.
The Arctic and Antarctic ice was supposed to
melt away fast. The anomaly of the 2015-2016 strong El Niño aside, the recent
years saw a growth of polar ice, preceded by a reduction since the 1990s. And
the Arctic and Antarctic ice does not shrink and grow in tandem. Are the
re-grown ice caps here to stay? Will they keep growing? Will they shrink again? It is much too soon to tell. At any rate, our modern factual
knowledge of the climate is too limited
to permit long-term predictions.
Leonardo DiCaprio, a Hollywood actor, was
ridiculed when he proclaimed southern Alberta’s ageless chinook winds to be
evidence of global warming. Less farcically, America’s venerable space agency, NASA, is often accused of fudging the data to
make the recent decades’ global warming look bigger than it was. This was
allegedly done by artificially depressing the graphed temperature values from
earlier in the 20th century,
so any later increases would
look steeper. Many academics
defend NASA (they would, wouldn’t they?) but in the absence of open scientific
transparency, how does one judge
A false claim by the alarmists is that 97% of climate
scientists believe global warming
to be man-made and urgent.
The roots of this claim vary, but reportedly, they tend to involve exaggerating the strength of stated
convictions and the extent of reported individuals’ alarm. The poll sample
is sometimes small.
Ask if there is global warming
and if any of it is man-made, and most
reasonable people’s answers (my own included) would be at least non-negative.
However, that is no evidence of a consensus for urgency.
On the other extreme,
to deny man-made drivers of climate change completely, as some activists do, is as problematic as it is to postulate them without question. These
activists deserve
full credit for standing
up to the warmist dogma, but their own absolutism itself should invite skepticism. A scientist is not a scientist if he is not a healthy skeptic.
What is going on with the climate? The point is, we don’t
know.
Don’t thank your prof
How many of us had a college course in
scientific logic? In all my programs, I never did. And if you are not taught,
how would you know?
Perhaps the professors themselves don’t know logic enough to teach.
Or they don’t care, or couldn’t be bothered. Nor is history of ideas taught much. Ignorance, unless it is checked,
propagates generation to generation.
Much of this has to do with the much-bemoaned
(e.g., Bloom, 1987) loss since the 1960s of the classical education. As access
to college education has expanded in the past decades, the quality has
declined.
“More means worse”, as the writer Kingsley
Amis used to say. That’s why a B.Sc. degree is no longer quite enough to ensure
a strong career, and an M.Sc. could be advisable to improve one’s competitive
advantage.
Removal of logical rigor leads to relativism.
Everything is deemed subjective (Bloom, 1987;
Hughes, 1993). Truth is relative: each person has his own, to be upheld
without question in the interest of diversity
and tolerance. One idea or theory or value system or even behavior is as
good as any other – and who do you think you are to judge?
Apart from the obvious (un)ethical
repercussions in the social sphere, such lazy and deconstructive thinking
destroys empiricism, and with it the integrity of science.
Thought control
“Does Big Brother exist?”
“Of course he exists. The Party exists.
Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.”
“Does he exist
in the same
way as I exist?”
“You do not exist.”
– GEORGE ORWELL (“Nineteen Eighty-Four”)
In 1633, the great Galileo
famously saved himself from the Inquisition by formally
recanting his scientific views. He got away with merely
house arrest.
The modern system of administering the academia took its essential
form in the 1940s. Some of the inspiration is commonly attributed to Vannevar Bush, a prominent American inventor, weapons designer, entrepreneur and public administrator. The intent was to give scholars
freedom to work and create.
The academia is officially independent, to
shield it from the whims
of fluctuating public
passions and political pressures. Outsiders have limited scope
to interfere.
Tenured professors are essentially safe from layoffs. The
academics decide for themselves who will be hired into their midst as new
faculty. They review each other’s funding applications and publication drafts,
and build up each other’s citation counts by mutually quoting each other’s work
in their own papers.
In such an opaque and self-enclosed system, all members
of the academic cartel have a common
interest to maximize “funding” (i.e. their intake of taxpayers’ money) while
avoiding external scrutiny. To gain
career advancement, each cartel member
vitally depends on every other for favorable reviews and citations.
In a tightly closed shop, this is a recipe for
self-organizing conformism. The academia’s incestuous self-rule (“academic
independence”) is organized around mutual peer review of each other’s
work. Collective self-accountability, however, is no accountability at all. We
have heard plenty about all this after Climategate.
In such a closed system, open debate, which is the
lifeblood of scientific advance, is choked off. Healthy skeptics of the
official climate-change dogma are sometimes dismissed pejoratively as
“deniers”, which poisonously and falsely hints at an analogy with the denial of
the Holocaust.
Insistence on mutual peer review often leads to
censorship or self-censorship. Inconvenient dissenters are easy to squeeze out, by killing their grant applications and publication drafts. Evil be to him who evil thinks.
If something undesirable does make it into print, it can
simply go un-quoted and ignored.
The academia has its failings in geoscience too. Along
the Pacific coast of British Columbia and northern Washington state, a number
of published studies (e.g., Acharya, 1992; McCrumb et al., 1989; Lyatsky,
1996) suggest that the oceanic Juan de Fuca plate
offshore seems to be deforming internally and no longer subducting.
Empirically, the Cascadia subduction zones lacks some of
the main features from which subduction zones are normally identified. There is
no bathymetric trench(!), the supposed arc volcanism is weak and scattered,
earthquake seismicity does not suggest an east-west lithospheric stress, and regional
patterns of ongoing
coastal subsidence and uplift do not fit a simple pattern
expected of subduction.
The conventionally assumed scheme with ongoing,
rigid-plate West Coast subduction is
obviously falsified. This suggests that the earthquake risk in the Vancouver-Seattle area, while clearly
very substan- tial, might be
exaggerated. No active subduction should mean no impending mega-thrust
quake.
The scientific work discussing these complications has
been published in major peer-reviewed scientific journals and high-end book
lines.
However, one finds few
if any references to these studies
in the literature on the West Coast tectonics – not even to rebut!
Each particular academic failing may
have its own specific, even innocent, causes
and explanations, and
cheap individual finger-pointing is usually
not warranted. The
overall pattern, though,
is clear: scientific work that does not fit the
“party line” of the moment can have a hard time getting published or cited.
If maximizing funding and promoting the academic cartel’s
agendas is a priority, voters and
legislators can be scared into opening
their wallets by scientific prophesies of impending doom. Very troubling are some famous and controversial words from
the late, prominent climate scientist, Stephen Schneider:
“On the one
hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the
scientific method, in effect promising to tell the
truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but – which means
that we must
include all doubts,
the caveats, the
ifs, and the buts.
On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And
like most people
we’d like to see the
world a better
place, which in this context
translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change.
To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the
public’s imagination. That, of course,
entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have
to offer up scary
scenarios,
make simplified, dramatic
statements, and make little
mention of any
doubts we might have. This
‘double ethical bind’ we frequently
find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has
to decide what
the right balance
is between being effective and being honest.
I hope that means being
both.”
Nonsense. There is no “one hand, other hand” in science.
A true scholar does not get to have it both ways. Socrates drank hemlock –
rendering himself permanently ineffective – to maintain his intellectual integrity.
Climategate was not a fluke. The self-serving modern
academia can no longer be regarded as a credible source of climate science. In
today’s “post-truth” intellectual and political environment, where mere
shrill- ness on all sides too often
drowns out thought and replaces intellectual rigor, openness is needed more
than ever. If sunlight is the best of disinfectants, it is time to throw the
windows wide open.
Some political agendas
It is not just in the Leap Manifesto. Lomborg (2001) called it “the
Litany”.
The modern, populous, industrial civilization, it is
sometimes said in various words, is an unsustainable parasite load on the
planet, and to stop it strong government action is only righteous.
Democracy and freedom, say some people on both the far
left and the far right, are a Western capitalist sham. Citizens are mere
automatons and puppets, as a cabal of big corporations and banks controls the
media and brainwashes common people into more consumption than virtue and
environmental responsibility would
require.
The planet, we are told, is facing a man-made
environmental catastrophe, which will soon wipe out countless species and make
our current way of life impossible. What sort of
catastrophe, exactly, is not important: before global warming, for example,
there were the Club of Rome’s neo-Malthusian, now empirically discredited
“limits to growth”.
The urgency of the supposed impending catastrophe makes
it impera- tive for the government to take things firmly in hand, redirect or curtail the industrial and business activity,
impose punitive taxation, and reduce our living standards and rates of consumption.
Individual free choice would be severely restricted. Some virtuous form of
communalism would be imposed instead. The age of capitalism, free trade and
“neo-liberalism” would be brought to an
end.
Because opposition to this radical agenda
objectively contributes to imminent planetary destruction, we are told, such
opposition must not be allowed to stand in the way of vital progress. There is
no time to waste! Global-warming skeptics, we have been told even by some very
prominent public figures, belong in jail, or at the very least such skepti-
cism should be made as socially unacceptable as overt racism.
This whole brave new world of post-capitalist
environmental justice would presumably be directed by correctly illuminated and
selfless persons with necessary powers
and a grave responsibility to save the planet. These philosopher-kings would
presumably resemble the activists who
propose such solutions.
The superficially seductive idea of a
rationally organized and virtuous society,
run in the name of “the people” but actually from the top down by illuminati, is at least as old as
Plato’s “Republic”. Many liberal scholars, not least
Popper (1950), have denounced such schemes as a
call for tyranny.
Today’s
would-be
philosopher-kings often find it convenient to dress up in pseudo-environmental
green. A former senior UN climate official,
Christiana Figueres, has been pilloried in the media
for stating the following:
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting
ourselves the task
of intentionally, within
a defined period
of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning
for at least 150 years,
since the Industrial Revolution.”
And more.
“This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which
is to intentionally transform the
economic development model for the first time in human history.”
No, this is not at all the
first time in history. The Marxists’ previous attempt to do something of this nature
littered Eurasia with 100 million corpses and failed in squalor.
This comment from Europe’s former climate commissioner,
Connie Hedegaard, received its own share of harsh rebukes.
"Let's say that science, some decades from now, said 'we were wrong, it was not
about climate', would
it not in any case
have been good
to do many of things
you have to do in order to combat climate
change?”
Perhaps so, but this is a debate of an
entirely separate nature, for which dubious science must not be used as a
cover.
With previous
hints of approval
from the Barack
Obama administration, some American
state-level prosecutors have been investigating ways to prosecute oil companies, think
tanks and assorted global-warming “deniers” under
the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, whose initial intent was to stop
organized crime. In the 1970s, would they have prosecuted skeptics of global
cooling?
On the heels of the 20th century, this is
chilling. Remembering the totali- tarian perversions in National Socialist
(Nazi) Germany and Communist Russia and China, the radical socio-economic
schemes advanced by many climate alarmists today are nothing new. Benito
Mussolini, an ex-socialist who implemented one such scheme
almost a century ago, said it memorably:.
“For if the nineteenth century was a century of individualism (Liberalism always signifying individualism) it may be expected
that this will be a century of collectivism, and hence the century of the State.”
Have we not had enough?
REFERENCES
Acharya, H., 1992. Comparison of seismicity parameters in
different subduction zones and its applications for the Cascadia subduction
zone; Journal of Geophysical Research, v. 97, p. 8831-8842.
Bloom, A., 1987. The Closing of the American Mind; Simon and Schuster.
Hughes, R., 1993. Culture of Complaint; Oxford University Press.
Kuhn, T.S., 1962. The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions; University of Chicago
Press. Lomborg, B., 2001. The Skeptical
Environmentalist; Cambridge University Press.
Lyatsky, H.V., 1996. Continental-Crust Structures on the
Continental Margin of Western North America; Springer-Verlag.
McCrumb, D.R., Galster,
R.W., West, D.O., Crosson, R.S.,
Ludwin, R.S., Hancock, W.E., and Mann, L.V., 1989. Tectonics, seismicity and
engineering geology in Washington; in: R.W.
Galster (ed.), Engineering Geology in Washington, v. I; Washington Division of Geology
and Earth Resources, Bulletin
78, p. 97-120.
Popper, K.R., 1950. The Open Society and Its Enemies (2nd
edition); Princeton University Press.
Popper, K.R., 1968.
The Logic of Scientific Discovery (2nd English edition); Routledge. Russell, B., 1961. History
of Western Philosophy (new edition); George
Allen & Unwin.
About the author
Henry Lyatsky is a
Calgary-based consultant who has worked in oil and mineral
exploration around North
America and overseas.
He is the first or sole author of three books (Springer-Verlag) and two
atlases (Alberta Geological Survey) on the regional geology and geophysics of
western Canada.
Read more in the mid-April RECORDER – FOCUS: Greenhouse Gas/Environmental
Geoscience.
