The Dark Side of Science And Religion

I have posted the following comment to an American Thinker article on "The Dark Side of Science":

Both science and religion -- as practiced by human beings, who are ignorant of far more than they are knowing -- may be classified as "fake news" (to take advantage of a current idea): Science as practiced is not necessarily good reasoning, and religion as practiced is not necessarily good in spirit (or "spiritual"). Both are, more often than not, not what they are supposed, or meant, to be.

Good reason and spirituality are the objects to be desired; science and religion are at best tools to those ends, and mankind has seen enough value in both to have made them institutions, necessary for civilization -- but also capable of holding mankind back (as religion has repeatedly done throughout history, and science is increasingly doing, for the last century and a half, with the rise, and current general belief, in scientific materialism, most famously represented by Darwinism, or undirected evolution of the world and all of its life).

The key, of course, is learning, and the institutions of both science and religion are -- at least, they are meant to be -- institutions of learning.

We are not here to love one another, for example, because we make ourselves unlovable, in our selfish ignorance; we are here to LEARN to love one another; we can argue over just how great a majority -- if not all -- of us NEVER learn it very well. It helps (immensely) if we are taught the lesson by example from earliest childhood, and consistently until we grow up to reason for ourselves. Religion CAN help provide that, but the chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and if that weakest link is our parents who teach us, or the morally weak (or even false) religion they practice, we grow up mentally deficient, relative to those of us who were taught better.

There is new knowledge that mankind needs to learn, which would correct fundamental ignorance in both science and religion. The "experts" -- so-called -- in both fields don't want to hear of it (nor do their followers, the unquestioning believers in the consensus, in either field). It will replace the currently ruling paradigms in both science and religion.

Here is a gentle example of what the new knowledge can provide:

advice to a truthseeker

My Venus/Earth Comparison Should Not Even Have Been Needed

I received a comment (from one Chris Carter) yesterday (on this post), agreeing with, and emphasizing, my continual refrain with respect to my November 2010 Venus/Earth temperature vs. pressure comparison, that the close (or rather, precise) agreement between the Standard Atmosphere for Earth's atmosphere, and the actual profile of Venus's atmosphere over the same range of tropospheric pressures, cannot legitimately or even competently be laid to "coincidence" (as all of the critics of that comparison essentially do).

I don't want to debate with such critics; I say I am only here to inform, and I only maintain my original analysis is correct, as originally written, and definitive against the consensus "climate science" theories, of radiational forcing of global warming within the atmosphere, due to a "carbon dioxide greenhouse effect". The comparison of Earth and Venus shows there is no such effect in the real atmospheres (and Venus has 2400 times the concentration of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere as does Earth), and the simple physics of the Standard Atmosphere explains why -- because, for atmospheric pressures above approximately 200 mb (as can be observed in all the planetary atmospheres), the atmosphere overall, and thus globally, obeys the hydrostatic condition, and thus behaves like an unmoving ("static"), incompressible medium (to wit, water, hence the "hydro"). That condition enforces an increasing pressure with depth in the atmosphere, and the ideal gas laws in turn mean the temperature must also increase with depth in the troposphere (which, again, exists above 200 mb in all the planetary atmospheres). This explains the simple vertical temperature "lapse rate" structure, defined in the Standard Atmosphere (and based upon many years of temperature measurements throughout the real atmosphere), of -6.5 degrees Celsius per km of altitude above sea level. (The condition is quantified by simple calorimetry, in the equation mcΔT = -mgΔh, or ΔT/Δh = -g/c, where g is the gravitational acceleration and c is the effective specific heat of the air, determined empirically.)

I am only mentioning this yet again, because the very EXISTENCE of the lapse rate structure -- obviously a global constraint upon the temperature in the atmosphere, as any excess heat will only escape "down" that temperature gradient, without affecting the temperature at any point along the way, to outer space -- should have rung a bell in the minds of competent physicists, that there can be no radiative global-warming "greenhouse effect" in the real atmosphere (despite what radiation transfer theorists and laboratory physicists observe in an enclosed tank in a laboratory, for example).

This in fact is why I did the Venus/Earth comparison in the first place, because the subject of the lapse rate structure was brought up in the internet blogs earlier in 2010 (and not by me), and I quickly understood just how powerful a contradiction of the consensus it was, and I couldn't understand why others, of even the most pronounced "skeptical" positions in the climate science debates, weren't treating it as such. I felt a quick comparison of Venus, with its almost pure carbon dioxide atmosphere, with Earth should reveal, clearly and decisively, the truth of the matter. And of course, I found the utterly precise (!) agreement that I, and I thought any competent physicist should have, expected.

So my Venus/Earth comparison wasn't really even needed. Competent scientists should have agreed that, if in fact the Standard Atmosphere model correctly represented the temperature structure of Earth's troposphere (and of course it was developed, between approximately 1850 and 1920 -- the latter date, when the American Standard Atmosphere was first officially adopted -- to do just that), it should also, and just as accurately, represent Venus's atmosphere over the same range of pressures -- modified only by Venus's closer distance from the Sun.

And it did, and always will, due SOLELY to the fundamental nature of the hydrostatic condition. It should always be remembered that my comparison was between the Standard Atmosphere, known for decades, even a century, with the Venus profile on a much later, and single day, October 5, 1991 -- showing there can not have been any global warming in Earth's atmosphere since the development of the Standard Atmosphere model, a century and more ago. This negates all the research of all the alarmist "climate scientists" of the last two generations and more (since they turned away from the Standard Atmosphere in order to chase a chimera of unstable atmospheric temperatures) -- lifetimes, and generations, of work, wasted by miseducation and incompetent physics (and the resulting degeneration of modern science itself, as the many "skeptics" of the consensus have by now well shown).

So thanks for reminding me to emphasize this critical point once again, Chris.

Venus, Once More: Is Anybody Out There Seeking the Truth?

Just a sentence or two to add to my 2010 Venus/Earth temperature vs. pressure comparison.

My Venus/Earth comparison, which strongly and I believe definitively disproves the consensus "global warming greenhouse effect" of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, is routinely dismissed, basically on the grounds that its precise agreement, between the unchanging Standard Atmosphere model of Earth's atmosphere and the atmosphere of Venus over the same range of tropospheric pressures as Earth's, is but a "coincidence". This criticism ignores the very great unlikelihood of such a "coincidence", over the full range of tropospheric pressures, and between two such different systems as Earth and Venus (which I have enumerated many times, and won't repeat all of the huge differences again here.)

The last such criticism I received in this line was that the Venus data I used in my comparison, while presented on the internet as representative of Venus's atmosphere, was in fact for latitude 67°N, not a mid-latitude (or putative global mean) 45°N, a full 22 degrees north of mid-latitude, and in fact within the arctic circle, on Earth.

What I waited for others to mention was this: Earth's spin axis is tilted about 23.5 degrees with respect to its orbital axis, which is why it has such a large arctic region (every point above 66.5°N). If Venus were similarly tilted with respect to its orbital axis, criticizing my comparison on this point would be proper. But Venus is NOT so tilted; it is only about 2.7° (usually stated as 177.3°, or "upside down" compared to Earth's spin). So there is no large, not even a substantial, arctic region on Venus at all, that does not receive sunlight for half the (Venus) year. In other words, rather than saying that 67N on Venus is 22° north of 45°, truth-seekers should say 67N is a full 20° south of any supposed arctic region on Venus (which, at 2.7°, would anyway be entirely overwhelmed by the heat surrounding that small area). On Earth, of course, 20° south of the arctic circle is 47°N...mid-latitude. It should be apparent that Venus just has a wider "mid-latitude" range of latitudes than Earth, because it has no arctic region to speak of. And I have yet to see any critic provide detailed temperature vs pressure Venus profile data for a broad range of latitudes on Venus (I have seen temperature vs altitude in the literature, but not versus pressure, for any other latitude than the 67N data I found and used in 2010.)

But there is no sign of real, independent thinking among my critics, most notably among the alarmists and especially among the politicians, who smell money and power in the water, as it were, and don't want it to get away from them. They are basing their new world order upon blatant lies and blatantly incompetent "climate science" -- and in the end, the world will go to ruinous war over this, if they do not cease and desist, any and all "climate policies".

You have all been warned. Stop now.

The Underlying Problem of Our Time (and of All Known History)

I have responded to a comment to an article on the American Thinker site. The comment referred to Nietszche and Hegel, recognized as modern philosophers, and the more ancient Plato, and the following is my response:

Philosophy has not advanced since its "beginnings" in Plato; Aristotle was known in Plato's Academy as a master of Rhetoric (compelling argumentation, or debating points), not Philosophy, and his later fame held back the development of physics (and mathematics) for 2,000 years. Darwin also won the day in his time only on the quantity and determination of his rhetoric, his endless, seemingly plausible debating points, not on his "science".

All of the most famous, or popular, philosophers of recent memory -- or even of the last 2,000 years (and yes, that includes all the religious philosophers, of all of the world's religions) have done little to help mankind know itself.

As I summarizd in my book, "The End of the Mystery":

"Behold the new paradigm: Materialistic reductionism, randomness, and mindless evolution are dead, both as logically prior (“a priori”) assumptions and as historical explanations of our world. As Darwin was wrong in biology, Hegel was wrong in philosophy, and Marx was wrong in economics, politics and sociology**; all of the people, famous or otherwise, who have since been inspired by any of them (even to the point of World War) have been fundamentally misled, and in their turn misleading. “Evolutionary” archaeology and anthropology (which consider that mankind civilized itself, many times and in many places, among different peoples) are wrong.

**Just as Aristotle was wrong in “natural” science, the antecedent to physics, chemistry, etc.. They all believed that the material world is complete in itself, and that various observed divisions of the world are fully explained by their necessary interactions with one another. Thus Darwin set species against species, or species against the environment; Hegel set individuals against the state; and Marx set class against class, or workers against employers. They all overvalued their categories as being the only reality."

But the world, especially all of its academic authorities, a.k.a. "experts", will not abide any talk of that new paradigm. And that is THE underlying problem of this climactic, critical time, with all of its resurgent, divisive dogmas.