Not science Archive

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30 actual experts respond to the WSJ’s 16 “dentists playing at cardiology”

By
Ben Nolan
– February 2, 2012

It’s delish! Teaser:

Research shows that more than 97% of scientists actively publishing in the field agree that climate change is real and human caused. It would be an act of recklessness for any political leader to disregard the weight of evidence and ignore the enormous risks that climate change clearly poses. In addition, there is very clear evidence that investing in the transition to a low-carbon economy will not only allow the world to avoid the worst risks of climate change, but could also drive decades of economic growth. Just what the doctor ordered.

And here’s what a list of credible experts looks like:

Kevin Trenberth, Sc.D., Distinguished Senior Scientist, Climate Analysis Section National Center for Atmospheric Research, La Jolla, Calif.

Kevin Trenberth, Sc.D, Distinguished Senior Scientist, Climate Analysis Section, National Center for Atmospheric Research

Richard Somerville, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego

Katharine Hayhoe, Ph.D., Director, Climate Science Center, Texas Tech University

Rasmus Benestad, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, The Norwegian Meteorological Institute

Gerald Meehl, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, Climate and Global Dynamics Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research

Michael Oppenheimer, Ph.D., Professor of Geosciences; Director, Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy, Princeton University

Peter Gleick, Ph.D., co-founder and president, Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security

Michael C. MacCracken, Ph.D., Chief Scientist, Climate Institute, Washington

Michael Mann, Ph.D., Director, Earth System Science Center, Pennsylvania State University

Steven Running, Ph.D., Professor, Director, Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group, University of Montana

Robert Corell, Ph.D., Chair, Arctic Climate Impact Assessment; Principal, Global Environment Technology Foundation

Dennis Ojima, Ph.D., Professor, Senior Research Scientist, and Head of the Dept. of Interior’s Climate Science Center at Colorado State University

Josh Willis, Ph.D., Climate Scientist, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Matthew England, Ph.D., Professor, Joint Director of the Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Australia

Ken Caldeira, Ph.D., Atmospheric Scientist, Dept. of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution

Warren Washington, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, National Center for Atmospheric Research

Terry L. Root, Ph.D., Senior Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University

David Karoly, Ph.D., ARC Federation Fellow and Professor, University of Melbourne, Australia

Jeffrey Kiehl, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, Climate and Global Dynamics Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research

Donald Wuebbles, Ph.D., Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Illinois

Camille Parmesan, Ph.D., Professor of Biology, University of Texas; Professor of Global Change Biology, Marine Institute, University of Plymouth, UK

Simon Donner, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Canada

Barrett N. Rock, Ph.D., Professor, Complex Systems Research Center and Department of Natural Resources, University of New Hampshire

David Griggs, Ph.D., Professor and Director, Monash Sustainability Institute, Monash University, Australia

Roger N. Jones, Ph.D., Professor, Professorial Research Fellow, Centre for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University, Australia

William L. Chameides, Ph.D., Dean and Professor, School of the Environment, Duke University

Gary Yohe, Ph.D., Professor, Economics and Environmental Studies, Wesleyan University, CT

Robert Watson, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Chair of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia

Steven Sherwood, Ph.D., Director, Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Chris Rapley, Ph.D., Professor of Climate Science, University College London, UK

Joan Kleypas, Ph.D., Scientist, Climate and Global Dynamics Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research

James J. McCarthy, Ph.D., Professor of Biological Oceanography, Harvard University

Stefan Rahmstorf, Ph.D., Professor of Physics of the Oceans, Potsdam University, Germany

Julia Cole, Ph.D., Professor, Geosciences and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Arizona

William H. Schlesinger, Ph.D., President, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies

Jonathan Overpeck, Ph.D., Professor of Geosciences and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Arizona

Eric Rignot, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Professor of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine

Wolfgang Cramer, Professor of Global Ecology, Mediterranean Institute for Biodiversity and Ecology, CNRS, Aix-en-Provence, France

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Grist’s on the WSJ Anti-Climate Change BS case…

By
Ben Nolan
– February 1, 2012

Link. Highlight for me:

Another claim in the article is that “a recent study by William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls … ” Well, let’s ask Nordhaus what he thinks of that. In Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth blog he stridently disagrees with that statement:

The piece completely misrepresented my work. My work has long taken the view that policies to slow global warming would have net economic benefits, in the trillion of dollars of present value. This is true going back to work in the early 1990s (MIT Press, Yale Press, Science, PNAS, among others) … I can only assume they [are] either completely ignorant of the economics on the issue or are willfully misstating my findings.

Kapow!

Also links to another debunking by Joe Romm. Highlight:

Guys, if you’re going to push disinformation, you have to do better than this:

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now.  This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t”….

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.

Well, as the chart above shows, the last 10 years were easily the hottest on record.  As the Union of Concerned Scientists debunking notes, “2011 was the 35th year in a row in which global temperatures were above the historical average and 2010 and 2005 were the warmest years on record.”  Doh!

And apparently these guys missed the news that last year’s Koch-Funded and Skeptic-Led Study Finds Recent Warming “On the High End” and Speeding Up.  The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST) concluded:

… we find that the global land mean temperature has increased by 0.911 ± 0.042 C since the 1950s….  our analysis suggests a degree of global land-surface warming during the anthropogenic era that is consistent with prior work (e.g. NOAA) but on the high end of the existing range of reconstruction.

Double Doh!

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SHOCKING NEWS: Both global warming denialists and the WSJ’s editorial page are dishonest, pt.3 / Nir Shaviv Edition

By
Ben Nolan
– January 31, 2012

Nir Shaviv was actually born after WWII (a first on this list), and has a decidedly non-white-man-sounding name, though I think Jews are considered white now, right?  Right. He’s a white man. It doesn’t really matter.

Anyhoo, Shaviv seems to actually have some climate-science cred, via astrophysics. In 2003 he published a theory accounting for global temperature variance having something to do with our solar system’s passage through the Milky Way’s galactic arms. Thing is, in the paper making this case, his object of study isn’t the current drivers of climate change, but the drivers of climate change over the past 500 million years. And while he finds that, over that period, “at least 66% of the variance in the paleotemperature trend could be attributed to CRF variations likely due to solar system passages through the spiral arms of the galaxy,” that doesn’t imply that 66%+ of every variability is attributable to a cause. Basic statistics. And he acknowledges as much:

 As a final qualification, we emphasize that our conclusion about the dominance of the CRF over climate variability is valid only on multimillion year time scales. At shorter time scales, other climatic factors may play an important role.

Even its relatively benign claim was seen as problematic by…

  • STEFAN RAHMSTORF, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany;
  • DAVID ARCHER, University of Chicago, Ill.;
  • DENTON S. EBEL, American Museum of Natural History, N.Y.;
  • OTTO EUGSTER, University of Bern, Switzerland;
  • JEAN JOUZEL, Institut Pierre Simon Laplace/LSCE, Saclay, France;
  • DOUGLAS MARAUN,Potsdam University, Germany;
  • URS NEU, Swiss Academy of Sciences,Bern;
  • GAVIN A.SCHMIDT,NASA GISS and Center for Climate Systems Research,Columbia University,N.Y.;
  • JEFF SEVERINGHAUS, Scripps Institution of Oceanography,San Diego,Calif.;
  • ANDREW J.WEAVER,University of Victoria, B.C.,Canada; and
  • JIM ZACHOS, University of California, Santa Cruz

…who published a review in Eos that concluded,

Two main conclusions result from our analysis of Shaviv and Veizer [2003].The first is that the correlation of CRF and climate over the past 520 m.y. appears to not hold up under scrutiny. Even if we accept the questionable assumption that meteorite clusters give information on CRF variations, we find that the evidence for  a link between CRF and climate amounts to little more than a similarity in the average periods of the CRF variations and a heavily smoothed temperature reconstruction. Phase agreement is poor.The authors applied several adjustments to the data to artificially enhanc the correlation.We thus find that the existence of a correlation has not been convincingly demonstrated.

Our second conclusion is independent of the first.Whether there is a link of CRF and temperature or not, the authors’ estimate of the effect of a CO2 doubling on climate is highly questionable. It is based on a simple and incomplete regression analysis that implicitly assumes that climate variations on time scales of millions of years, for different configurations of continents and ocean currents,for much higher CO2 levels than at present, and with unaccounted causes and contributing factors,can give direct quantitative information about the effect of rapid CO2 doubling from pre-industrial climate.The complexity and non-linearity of the climate system does not allow such a simple statistical derivation of climate sensitivity without a physical understanding of the key processes and feedbacks.We thus conclude that Shaviv and Veizer [2003] provide no cause for revising current estimates of climate sensitivity to CO2.

Undeterred, Shaviv has taken to the Internet, self-publishing a number of anti-anthropogenic polemics on his website (e.g.).

In the example, he argues that while there is, in fact, an impressive correlation between CO2 levels and global temperatures over not only the last 400 thousand years, but over the last century, the causality is ambiguous.  Anyway, blah blah, “we don’t fully understand the aerosol effect on cloud formation!” QUESTIONS QUESTIONS QUESTIONS and then he points out that there’s ALSO been a correlation between the last century’s increase in temperatures and an increase in solar activity, to which he elsewhere attributes something like half of the century’s warming.

He’s been in a fight over this with Michael Lockwood (meteorology prof at the University of Reading) and Claus Froehlich (of the World Radiation Centre in Switzerland) who argue that solar outputs since the 80s have actually been at historic lows, while the warming effect has continued. Here’s the actual paper.  And here’s a 2010 inter-disciplinary lit. review (well cited) substantiating the conclusion that solar variation falls short of accounting for recent temperature changes.

Shaviv responded to Lockwood and Froehlich’s findings in a memo published by a self-described “conservative” science blog called “Reference Frame,” but no where else that I can find.

As for ulterior motives, he apparently wrote to SourceWatch “if you’re looking for dark secrets about my funding…you’ll find none,” and it doesn’t appear that they have.

Conclusion: This guy’s got more cred than anyone yet, but his respected work doesn’t appear hugely relevant to the current climate situation, and his work that does relate to it seems not particularly respected in the scientific community, which begs the question — is this really the best they can do?

PS – I’ve asked r/AskScience if they can comment on his credibility within the scientific community on this subject. Will update if/when I get any good responses.

Updated: From “FormerlyTurnipHunter,” who is an expert in “Quantum Information/Quantum Computing/Quantum Optics”:

Not every skeptic or denialist is an outright crackpot. Some scientists do really think they found a different mechanism to explain global warming and they should be taken seriously.

However, these skeptics’ theories usually don’t hold up to even the most cursory scrutiny. This is also the case for Shaviv’s theory on cosmic rays. He is not the only one propagating cosmic rays as the main cause for warming btw., there’s also Svensmark.

Their physics is not completely wrong, their [sic] is definitely a link between cosmic rays and cloud cover, which in turn influences the climate. The problem however is that the cosmic ray theory can’t explain the warming over the last three decades, in which solar activity was decreasing.

So why would these scientists still hold on to their theories despite a lack of evidence? I don’t know, but I’m a scientist myself and I know how hard it is to let go of your ideas sometimes. Especially when there’s a big enough lobby happy to believe you and give you money to talk about this research of yours.

According to desmogblog, a great resource on climate denialism, Shaviv at least doesn’t deny anthropogenic warming completely, he just places our contribution at roughly 1/3 (its more like 3/4).

So instead of a paid denier like many others I would say he’s simply a mediocre scientist who won’t let go of a disproven theory.

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SHOCKING NEWS: Both global warming denialists and the WSJ’s editorial page are dishonest, pt.2

By
Trevor Macomber
– January 30, 2012

Continued from last week’s post (even though I’m not as good at this as Ben is):

With a PhD in solid state physics and a distinguished career in electrical engineering, Michael Kelly (professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.) actually seems like a pretty smart dude with little in the way of outside dirt on his hands. That said, his own bio also indicates zilch in the way of a climate science background. (It goes without saying that people specialize in things for a reason, right? Because it’s impossible to be an expert at everything, even for people who are very smart overall, as Mr. Kelly appears to be? And yeah: he’s an old white dude.)

William Kininmonth (former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology) is another card-carrying member of Old White Guys Anonymous — and also a card-carrying member of The Lavoisier Group, which helped launch his book, Climate Change: a Natural Hazard, and is presided over by former mining magnate and current nuclear energy investor, Hugh Morgan. Also:

According to a search of 22,000 academic journals, Kininmonth has not published any research in a peer-reviewed journal on the subject of climate change.

Richard Lindzen (professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT) has an impressive one-line CV (that of the previous parenthetical) and an equally impressive multi-line one. However, as Ross Gelbspan at Harper’s pointed out many moons ago,

Lindzen, for his part, charges oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services; his 1991 trip to testify before a Senate committee was paid for by Western Fuels, and a speech he wrote, entitled “Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus,” was underwritten by OPEC.

Any guesses as to his relative age and skin color?

James McGrath (professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University) is — as you’ve probably guessed by now — a middle-aged Asian female. HA! That’s just a little climate change denial humor for you. He’s actually very old and very white. He’s also a member of the Plastics Hall of Fame (what is plastic made from again?) with literally nothing in the way of climate science background or related fields in his loooong career.

Rodney Nichols (former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences) is another not-climate-scientist whose “commercial consulting has included the central research laboratory of GTE and Shell Technology Ventures.” And old, white, etc. (Why do we keep harping on oldness and whiteness here? I dunno. Ben started it, now I’m continuing it. I think we just find it interesting that it’s always old white guys who say nothing is wrong with how things are.)

Burt Rutan (aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne) made some awesome rocketships. How does that extrapolate to climate change expertise again?

Harrison H. Schmitt (Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator) is head of New Mexico’s Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department whose “first order of business [was to review] regulations on oil companies put in place by [Gov. Martinez's (R)] predecessor, former Gov. Bill Richardson (D).”

He also believes — in a completely logical and non-conspiracy-theorist sort of way — that

the whole trend [of anthropogenic climate change] really began with the fall of the Soviet Union. Because the great champion of the opponents of liberty, namely communism, had to find some other place to go and they basically went into the environmental movement. [cite]

Three more to go. (Goddamn jobs.)

***

(One day later)

Nir Shaviv (professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem) is — drumroll please — a young white dude this time! But while he adds his name to the above list, he has also admitted:

According to the common perception, the temperature over the 20th century has been warming, and it is mostly anthropogenic in origin, with greenhouse gases (GHGs) being the dominant driver. Others, usually called “skeptics”, challenge this view and instead claim that the temperature variations are all part of natural variability. As I try to demonstrate below, the truth is probably somewhere in between, with natural causes probably being more important over the past century, whereas anthropogeniccauses will probably be more dominant over the next century. Following empirical evidence I describe below, about 2/3′s (give or take a third or so) of the warming should be attributed to increased solar activity and the remaining to anthropogenic causes.

Shaviv also stresses

that there are a dozen good reasons why we should strive to burn less fossil fuels.

The two primary reasons why fossil fuels are bad are of course pollution and depletion, while minor reasons include for example the fact that many fossil fuel reserves are controlled by unpleasant governments.

Clearly, not you average “Drill, baby, drill!” reflexively conservative wingnut. (Check out Ben’s Nir Shaviv-centric piece for more info.)

Henk Tennekes (former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service) gets us back on track in the old guy department. And returning to the previously cited DeSmogBlog, he also has “not published any original research in a peer-reviewed journal since 1990.” Moreover (if the Wikipedia citation of a Dutch-language article is to be believed), he “objected to the increase of computing power for medium-range weather forecasting…by referring to biblical texts.”

Finally, the ancient Antonio Zichichi (president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva) is a supremely accomplished nuclear physicist…with, again, no background in climate science or related research. (That said, and for what it’s worth, Nobel Prize laureate Hans Bethe has called Zichichi an “ottimo organizzatore, mediocre fisico” (excellent organizer, mediocre physicist).

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SHOCKING NEWS: Both global warming denialists and the WSJ’s editorial page are dishonest, pt.1

By
Ben Nolan
– January 27, 2012

Just joking. That’s not shocking at all.

Spotted by Trevor (link is to the WSJ’s notoriously propagandistic FAIR editorial page):

No Need to Panic About Global Warming

There’s no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize’ the world’s economy.

Editor’s Note: The following has been signed by the 16 scientists listed at the end of the article:

A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about “global warming.” Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.

The “large and growing” claim is conveniently left unsubstantiated. Instead we get a series of anecdotes, long-since-refuted claims, and faux paranoia. Read it for yourself, if you must, but what’s interesting to me is the list of 16 “Scientists” allowing their names to be used to legitimate this propaganda:

Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.

I’m at work right now, and don’t have time to go through all of them (hence the “pt. 1″ above), but I got a start:

Claude Allegre (former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris) has been caught both misrepresenting and making up data and has, from what I can tell, lost all credibility as a scientist within the scientific community. He’s also a very old white man.

J. Scott Armstrong (cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting) is a Wharton School marketing prof with no apparent credentials in climate science whatsoever. His beef with climate science seems to be that it doesn’t rely on the particular body of marketing forecasting research literature that his been where he’s made his biggest contributions as an academic. He published an attack on the scientific-ness of climate-change-related forecasting methods used by climate science in something called “Marketing Papers (2008),” which I can’t seem to track down, and was shot down, claim by claim, by actual climate scientists in a paper published by Interfaces (“a bimonthly peer-reviewed scientific journal about operations research that was established by The Institute of Management Sciences, now part of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences“). The paper concludes:

Creating doubt about well-supported scientific results to influence policy actions is a well-documented phenomenon in health-related research (Michaels 2008). Whatever the goals of AGS [the paper's shortform for Armstrong and his two non-climate-scientist co-authors], their audit of the USGS reports similarly serves to create doubt—in this case, about global warming and its effects on polar bears. AGS continue previous efforts to create doubt about global warming and its probable consequences (Lee 2003). The two USGS reports that AGS audited clearly defined the scientific approaches, the threats, and the scientific uncertainties regarding the likely future status of polar bears. In this rejoinder, we have shown AGS to be scientifically wrong or misleading on every major point in their attempt to establish doubt about those reports.

Scientific discussion is necessary to advance knowledge and inform public-policy decisions. Expressions of ideology masked as scientific discussion, however, do neither.

Jan Breslow (head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University) is a medical doctor who’s done genetics research, but has no apparent expertise or training in climate science. Count one more really old white man (that’s three now).

Roger Cohen (fellow, American Physical Society) is a recent retiree of the ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company, which clearly suggests impartiality on this issue. (He’s also old, male, and white.)

Edward David (member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences) is even fucking older (can’t say whether or not he’s particularly whiter or more manly). “In 1977, he became President of Research and Engineering for Exxon Corporation, serving until 1985.”

William Happer (professor of physics, Princeton) I’ve written about before. To review:

The author of the article is one William Happer who appears to be the “Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University.” Specifically (from wiki), “William Happer is a physicist who has specialised in the study of optics and spectroscopy.” RELEVANT. The Princeton part is impressive.

I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. Think that’s impressive? It’s nothing. Between oil money and every credentialed climate “skeptic” on this planet, there’s only one. Let’s find Happer’s! *double-yoo double-yoo double-yoo dot gee oh oh…* you know the rest….

Link:

Happer has been on the board of the George C. Marshall Institute since at least 2002, and is currently its director.  The institute receives a sizable portion of its funding from ExxonMobil.  Out of an operating budget of about $800,000, an average of $91,428 per year from 2001-07 comes directly from ExxonMobil.  They also receive $250,000 per year from the Scaife oil fortune, and we see almost half of the Institute is funded by oil money.

DING DING DONG.

I’d rather go play basketball than spend the next half-hour pointing out the holes in his seeping shit bag of an article. (If you really want me to, I’ll do it, but please don’t ask me to unless you really really want me to.)

Before signing off though, Happer made his biggest splash as a anthropogenic climate change “skeptic” (not that it really matters whether or not we’re causing it if it’s happening,which it fucking is) pushing a petition that the American Physical Society (APS) soften its stated affirmative position on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Here’s how that worked out:

Despite seven months of intense effort to recruit physicists to sign a politically motivated petition disputing anthropogenic climate change, a mere, 0.45% of theAmerican Physical Society‘s 47,000 members signed on.

It’s a humiliating defeat for the climate change Deniers who make such false claims as ”many scientists dispute’ and ‘there is no consensus. The Petition drive was announced in the prestigous journal Nature, APS publications, numerous popularand electronic media, as well as heavily promoted by the petition organizers. Despite all of that effort and publicity, a mere 0.45% was all that they could manage.

Consider that the success rate for Nigerian email scams is estimated to be0.1% to 0.2%, ie roughly speaking about the same.

It’s a good post. With charts!

aps2

You should read it.

Five down, eleven to go. I need to get back to work, but I will get back to this.

***

UPDATE BY TREVOR: Here’s Part 2.

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Michio Kaku is a fundamentalist

By
Ben Nolan
– January 26, 2012

Dude’s getting a lot of Reddit love for this video:

He’s a well-credentialed physicist, which apparently means that what he has to say about the nature and future of civilization has some degree of validity. People assume so, anyway, but they shouldn’t. Couple reasons, starting with the most superficial:

He seems to think Star Trek is a fully realized and unproblematic vision of a possible human future (bear with me); a supposedly possible future he’s innovatively called “2,” presumably because numbers are impressive. Problem 1 (I can use numbers too!): The Star Trek universe is not a fully realized and unproblematic vision of a possible human future, nor is it intended to be.

In the Star Trek universe, it’s given that we’ve transcended the will to power as a species, which is attributed to a combination of a memory of the trauma of brutal eugenics wars (see that episode where Q puts humanity on trial) and a wonder and humility rooted in first contact with an alien species (see “First Contact” — the second of the Star Trek movies starring the TNG gang). …Really, Kaku? You REALLY think that’d work? How long was it after the horrors of WWII that the Cold War picked up?

And even in Trek, you needed to actually have first contact with a technologically superior alien species. It was a necessary condition. What’s dude’s plan if that deus (alienus?) ex machina doesn’t end up materialising? (Side note: I grew up loving TNG (=”The Next Generation,” or “The one with Patrick Stewart”). It was my favorite show from age, like, 6 to 12. I still nostalgically enjoy the company of those characters, and I’m sure the show defined my moral intuition to a far greater extent than I could even really say.)

The point, tho, is it’s not a very credible vision of the future of humanity. But, as I said above, it was never supposed to be. The point of Trek was to be a soap box for Gene Roddenberry to declare on contemporary problems (like racism, greed, torture, technology, etc.) abstracted from the reality of our world (in which they exist) and from an angle of absolute humanistic moral authority.

If Roddenberry was genuinely interested in laying out a full vision for how society might work, he wouldn’t have just given it to us that money has been abolished — he would have gone into far greater historical detail as to what that process looked like, and how whatever resources are still scarce are managed and distributed. The answer is quite clearly implied: a strong, central bureaucratic authoritarian body. This is clear, for example, in how prime assignments on prime starships, like the Enterprise, which were certainly scarce, were distributed. They distributed on the basis of a highly formalized system of academic testing designed to reduce you to a comparable commodity manageable by the centralized bureaucracy. Assignments come from a “Starfleet Command” whose internal dynamics and politics are only vaguely gestured towards. We’ve seen this political-economic form before. How the Federation has managed to overcome the ultimately socially dominating dynamics that we saw emerge in almost every society that adopted that model is never specified. Presumably it has something to do with the elimination of the scarcity of life essentials — food, shelter, etc.

Problem 2: It seems to me that all of the most important indicators are telling us we’re heading into a period of increased, not reduced, scarcity:

The marginal gains in food production from technological advancements in food production are diminishing just as demand is increasing at a far greater rate than just the increase in our population (thanks to ethanol and the increased demand for more resource intensive food products by the growing middle classes in countries like China, India, and Brazil), and soon we’re going to to run into a serious water shortage thanks to our widespread over-taxing of depleting aquifers (all this is summarize here).

Energy innovation will have to make incredibly dramatic and sudden leaps forward if it’s going to pick up the slack in a post-peak-oil world (I’m more optimistic here than I am about food, but not by much. Thorium is pretty exciting, but there are plenty of very good reasons to be skeptical that it’ll ever get the kind of government support it needs to get fully off the ground (various lobbies for one, and for two, its unweaponizability in a global context of scarcity in which, any realpolitician worth their salt will tell you, it’s going to be all the more important to make sure you’re the one holding the biggest club — remember, we haven’t kicked the whole will-to-power thing yet and really shouldn’t rest on assuming we’ll be able to in time, even if we can imagine we might do it eventually.)

And then there’s population growth and climate change which, according to the IEA’s latest projection, will likely bring civilization-ending temperatures before the century is out. An important point to be made about climate change is that, as a species and scientifically speaking, we know exactly what we need to do to pull ourselves back from the brink. We just can’t make ourselves do it. Why? Because our social/political/economic system is a machine run out of control.

The problem this poses isn’t a scientific one, it’s, d’uh, a sociological/political/economic one, and there was no substantial engagement with it, as such, in Kaku’s little talk whatsoever.

I pointed this out on Reddit (+5 upvotes, -4 downvotes), and got the following reply:

Pretty sure he is in a much better position to predict the future of civilization than the average sociologist. (+5 upvotes, 0 downvotes)

Okay.

But back to Kaku: All Kaku gives us, socio-politically, is a vague gesture at “fundamentalism.” But fundamentalism isn’t the problem. Fundamentalism is a symptom. It’s an irrationalist response to the less and less avoidable rational conclusion that there’s no metaphysical grounding for a universal system of values around which we can all eventually unite; the conclusion that the universe itself isn’t rich with external-to-us sources of existential meaning, which brings me to another thing the Star Trek universe allowed its characters to take for granted that we simply can’t: Almost all of the episodes derived their interest through their engagement with fundamentally humanistic (not scientific) problems — an encounter with a new and mysterious source of consciousness or system of values that’s at odds with some until-then unproblematized aspect of the system structuring the humans’ interpretations of themselves and the universe.

And even when it did focus on science, the process of scientific research was never represented realistically. Huge and dramatic problems were soft-balled to be dramatically batted out of the park in some grand deus ex machina brought to us by, more often than not, Gene Roddenberry’s Mary Sue — the transcendently genius but also handsome, unpresupposing and relatable young acting-ensign, Wesley Crusher. And the solving of these problems never only resulted in a publication and researchers light-years away labouring to come up with ways to make practical use of the discovery. Wesley’s solutions always had immediate, dramatic impacts on his life and the lives of the crew.

Sorry, but that’s just not how science works. The process of science, truth be told, is almost always pretty fucking ponderous and dull. Full of null findings (not many of those in Star Trek either).

But back to fundamentalism: Fundamentalism is a symptom of an exploitative global political-economic system that structures civilization through subordination of all qualitative values to a fundamental quantitative value (read: capital). The very same system that’s made it possible for elites around the globe to buy mass-manufactured, pseudo-luxury products like Chanel bags which — no, Kaku — are not in themselves any kind of cultural advancement over the luxury handbags of previous decades (or centuries) any more so than the global ubiquity of manufactured pop bullshit like Akon and Transformers — when I was backpacking I heard Akon fucking everywhere, and saw Transformers in a packed theatre in Seoul — represents a cultural advance from the Beatles or the Godfather or Shakespeare or Aeschylus (blockbuster artists of times past). They’re signs of the emergence of a vapid global monoculture.

And the steamrolling of the English language over something like 100 languages per year in its march to global linguistic hegemony (another encouraging sign, by Kaku)? If you know another language, you know to what degree it can let us access meanings or perspectives on things impossible or tremendously awkward in English. It really is a fucking tragedy, all the ways of seeing the universe that we’re destroying forever. Werner Herzog speaks to this here (most relevant bit begins at about 5:20):

To reiterate the point I made above, fundamentalism is a response to what Nietzsche called the death of god — the move into an era where authentic belief in metaphysical authority is constantly undermined by the very way that society demands that we function within it — the greatest values devalue themselves. This is a reality many many many scientists have responded to with their own kind of denial-driven fundamentalist belief, except theirs is in Science itself (I also like science, but I understand that it’s limited — and rational existential meaning-making lies beyond them). This church-of-Science fundamentalism is made tenable for its adherents by their self-isolation in academic worlds far removed from the reality of the larger social system and a concerted group effort at mutual idealization. Anyway, blah blah blah. Believe that he’s not full of bullshit on this topic if you want to. For now, you’ll probably be happier for it.

And the idea that it’ll all be great once we can just “Play around with” the earth? Kaku, what–the–fuck is our game gonna be? Dodgeball? Does he seriously imagine GLaDOS happy?

We’re at a point, right now, where there’s a major crisis of value — where we really have to work (whether we do so consciously or unconsciously) at not being nihilists — the recourse of many, as mentioned, being denial through fundamentalism.

What games do nihilists play? None. Because there’s no point. Inert, they’re carried by the current, biggass waterfall (read catastrophic food and energy crises and warming-caused mass extinction) on the horizon or no.

What games do fundamentalists (irrationalists) play? SCARY ONES.

Michio Kaku is a fundamentalist. The end.

/drunken doom-prophetic rant

Update: A Redditor has kindly pointed out that Kaku didn’t invent the “1, 2, 3″ typology of civilizations. Wiki:

The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring an advanced civilization’s level of technological advancement. The scale is only theoretical and in terms of an actual civilization highly speculative; however, it puts energy consumption of an entire civilization in a cosmic perspective. It was first proposed in 1964 by the SovietRussianastronomerNikolai Kardashev. The scale has three designated categories called Type I, II, and III. These are based on the amount of usable energy a civilization has at its disposal, and the degree of space colonization. In general terms, a Type I civilization has achieved mastery of the resources of its home planet, Type II of its solar system, and Type III of its galaxy.[1]

Interesting, but how exactly Kaku makes the jump between the consolidation of our exploitation of all of the potential energy resources on the planet to the idea that we’ve achieved some kind of utopia, I have no idea. Presumably he’s conjecturing that if we’ve lasted long enough for technology to advance that far, we must’ve figured out how to get along. Maybe. And maybe if Aristotle had imagined a future society that had progressed to the point where it was able to harness the atom, he’d've made the same assumption. I doubt it though. Aristotle was many things, but incautiously naive wasn’t one of them.

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For reading

By
Ben Nolan
– December 20, 2011

Wired on how many of the (especially medical) scientific stories coming out of the research community are “shadowed by all sorts of mental shortcuts.” Teaser:

The reliance on correlations has entered an age of diminishing returns. At least two major factors contribute to this trend. First, all of the easy causes have been found, which means that scientists are now forced to search for ever-subtler correlations, mining that mountain of facts for the tiniest of associations. Is that a new cause? Or just a statistical mistake? The line is getting finer; science is getting harder. Second—and this is the biggy—searching for correlations is a terrible way of dealing with the primary subject of much modern research: those complex networks at the center of life. While correlations help us track the relationship between independent measurements, such as the link between smoking and cancer, they are much less effective at making sense of systems in which the variables cannot be isolated. Such situations require that we understand every interaction before we can reliably understand any of them. Given the byzantine nature of biology, this can often be a daunting hurdle, requiring that researchers map not only the complete cholesterol pathway but also the ways in which it is plugged into other pathways. (The neglect of these secondary and even tertiary interactions begins to explain the failure of torcetrapib, which had unintended effects on blood pressure. It also helps explain the success of Lipitor, which seems to have a secondary effect of reducing inflammation.) Unfortunately, we often shrug off this dizzying intricacy, searching instead for the simplest of correlations. It’s the cognitive equivalent of bringing a knife to a gunfight.

0

Provocation: Can what distinguishes human beings from other beings be defined “scientifically”? If so, how?

By
Ben Nolan
– December 16, 2011

I don’t think that it can be, which really pissed off the folks over at r/psychology. One person proposed that human beings could be distinguished via DNA. Problem is that that would mean that a severed hand would be defined as a human being, no? Or a hair on a hairbrush? A foetus? But I’d like to hear some better arguments…

1

Wanna See How Lame Hurricane Irene Was?

By
Tom OHare
– August 29, 2011

Watch this shitty video. Contra Brian Moylan, at Gawker, this video is not the best thing about Hurricane Irene. The best thing about Hurricane Irene was the nice cool breeze it brought in, the quiet hum of trees rustling. Every. Once. In. A. Great. While. Honestly, this was no mighty hurricane. This was the weakest of weak sauce. I mean, I’m sorry that people died, but the fact that they had to stretch the death toll for everything they could to include an old man who died while trying to board his house up (sorry, dude, but it was the combination of strenuous physical activity and your weak heart that killed you, not the hurricane) shows you what kind of storm we were dealing with. Like, right now the front page of the NYTimes has, as its main story, “INLAND FLOODS IN NORTHEAST MAY BE IRENE’S BIGGEST IMPACT,” which links to a story about Vermont, which is probably the first time Vermont has been on the front page of the venerable New York Times since Calvin Coolidge was president. Or there was a Phish reunion tour. Or since Ben&Jerry’s had their IPO. Or something about cheese. There’s always cheese, isn’t there, Vermont?

The biggest impact Irene had, according to the Times, may be inland floods in the northeast, where 72 people live. These people all have guns and merit badges from Cub Scouts; they dwell among a large deer population and have access to picturesque rivers and waterfalls — i.e., fresh water. It’s late August, warm with plentiful sunshine. They’ll be just swell, after a fashion.

Meanwhile in New York, Ground Zero for Irene’s wrath, a few raindrops fall artfully off a tree limb, a sticker flutters on a stop sign against the wind, and some hipsters set the whole thing to suicide music, as evidenced by this horrible video re-cap.

Enjoy!

1

Very Stupid Arguments

By
Tom OHare
– August 12, 2011

Do you want to read 2,000 words from someone at the Witherspoon Institute (never hearda ya!) attempt to connect the proliferation of online pornography with terrorism? Of course you do.

Bonus teaser:

The frequency with which terrorists are found with pornography raises important questions about the possible effects of pornography on our national security.

This just might be the stupidest article on the Internet. No, I did not read the whole thing. If it happens to come to any groundbreaking conclusions, do let me know in the comments.

(via Digby)

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