Saturday, May 3, 2014

The Growing Religious Self-Righteousness of Science



Steven Goddard has a post, "My 35th Year as a Global Warming True Believer". My response is the following:

"Global warming" hype is just the latest step in a creeping degeneracy of science--particularly in the earth and life sciences--that has been going on since long before I was born. As a physicist, I am astounded by the poor quality of introductory university physics texts being written today, and can only hope undergraduates are encouraged to study earlier, classic texts, from the first half of the 20th century. In fact, I consider it imperative not to embrace any current theory, but to inform myself of the entire field, going as far back as needed to get to the origins of those theories, when everyone still KNEW they were just a certain set of assumptions and makeshift hypotheses.

I know, as no other scientist on Earth does, that the current scientific paradigm, of uniformitarian, undirected "evolution" of all that we observe on Earth, is wrong, and has failed. I watched--and offered my two cents, over and over, in letters to the editor--as the steamroller of Darwinian evolution (theory, NOT fact) has put down all honest criticisms, over my adult lifespan (and of course, long before). More than 30 years ago, I had already concluded that the main failing of today's scientists was their inability to handle basic probabilities, and thus to govern their imaginations, and especially to rigorously match the strength--not to mention the kind--of their proposed causes to the strength--and kind--of the observable effects (0.04% CO2 as the "control knob" of global mean temperature, for example--or, Steven, "salinity differences" driving the Gulf Stream).

"Climate science" today (and every other field of science tied to troubled and failing theory) is just a massive and absurd waste of my time, not to mention the aggregate time being devoted to it by everyone else in the world. That the science community and the world should be so deluded as to take it seriously, much less let it run amuck in the political world, is insane. I dismissed the "greenhouse gas" scientists 20 years ago, when I encountered them in passing at atmospheric science conferences, and I have only had my attention called to the "global warming" world agenda since late 2009, barely two months before the climategate e-mails broke. Within a year, I had identified the most basic errors in the consensus theory, learned of the actual governance of global mean temperature by the hydrostatic vertical temperature lapse rate, and definitively confirmed it and the stable Standard Atmosphere model that assumes and rigorously quantifies it, in my elementary but (amazingly, insanely) seminal Venus/Earth temperatures comparison (which should have been done by competent scientists over 20 years ago, or even as far back as 1979, when the earliest pertinent Venus data was obtained).

I had no reason to be really surprised by the foolishness of the global "global warming" hysteria, however. I've seen the hysteria build, and the dogma ever emotionally and unscientifically defended and reinforced, over my lifetime, in the evolution debates (which from the first to the last, outlawed the very idea of design in or of the natural world), the continuing introduction and too-quick acceptance of poorly-quantified and hypothesis-multiplying theories (like plate tectonics--separate from provable "continental drift" observations--and Milankovitch theory), and the public adulation heaped upon the glory-hounds in science, intent only upon trumpeting the current consensus, men like Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan (and most recently, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye). The vehement, dogmatic rejection of "Intelligent Design" in recent years was but a telling prelude, the previous step in the growing religious self-righteousness of science.

I know that I, and I alone as yet, hold open the door to the next scientific paradigm, and to a once-again truly competent modern theoretical science, with my discovery of the world-encompassing design of those who were remembered among ancient man as the "gods", that, ironically and not at all coincidentally, started all of the misbegotten, religiously-held dogma that besets mankind on Earth. The present difficulties are but the tip-most hair on the tail of the runaway dog of basic scientific misconceptions, diligently nurtured through most of the last two centuries.

2 comments:

  1. Harry ,
    coming from a zero base on the consensus problem I like your style. I am doing my damnedest to get up to speed ,but there are so many opinions and so many denier/alarmist sites competing for attention that the whole thing has become a bunch of attack dogs against trolls on each side .
    I have relied to a huge extent to the comments of :-
    https://globalwarmingdenier.wordpress.com/

    Stefan is a funny and articulate person on the subject . I do not know his background but what he says is very interesting IT MAKES SENSE!
    You say that most of what you say is basic physics , I have very basic physics, is it possible that you might discuss with Stefan a way forward?
    The vast majority of people are operating in a PR delusional world, we need guidance , support , inspiration , these politicians are doing what they always do , surrender to the lowest common denominator and the most votes. Please ,please produce a paper for peer review or obtain publication on a massive scale so that the Alarmists can dispute the science.

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  2. Good Afternoon, Ernest,

    Everything I have put out on the internet is part of my own personal, ongoing experiment, to find a way forward as you say (my personal way forward is to inform the world of new knowledge, unknown to even the supposed experts in every field). Basic physics, I have found, is NOT the way forward at this time, because there is no agreement on what that basic physics is. What I have tried to put out is only the clearest, most definitive (unarguable) facts, that literally SHOW--to any reasonable, competent mind--that the consensus climate science is obviously wrong, and worse, wrong-headed, and even worse, incompetent. Even the clearest facts have made no headway in making the authorities (in both science and politics) change their thinking. Our leaders, and all of our institutions, are not facing reality, and they are refusing to tell us the truth, because they could not stay in power if they did.

    What you are ultimately frustrated with is a false and incompetent leadership, in science and in politics, busily destroying the very things it is supposed to protect and serve. And the ordinary people are too divided in their beliefs to confront that fundamental problem, choosing instead to take sides (sides defined by the incompetent and false leadership) against one another. "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

    Peer review got climate science to its current pass. It is itself one of those false and incompetent leaders, or standards.

    For outside guidance and inspiration, people need competent and honest leaders--first, last and always. But frustration with incompetent or dishonest leaders has, throughout history, driven man to seek inner guidance and inspiration; and there, the never-failing wisdom has always been, "Seek, and you will find." For what it's worth to you, I personally recommend it.

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