In Science, Competence Can Overcome Bias

I have submitted the following comment to Dr. Judith Curry's Climate Etc. blog site, where she has posted on "The Bias of Science":

The issue is competence. With competence, bias can be quickly overcome; without it, bias inevitably becomes hardened, unquestioned dogma. When I compared the temperatures in the atmospheres of Venus and Earth, I very simply--and as it turned out, naively-- used the Stefan-Boltzmann equation as applied beyond the atmosphere, without consideration of the difference in albedo for the two planet-plus-atmosphere systems. I did not consciously assume the planet-plus-atmosphere system was a blackbody, however (I just used the easiest model that occurred to me, to investigate the expected temperature ratio--the simple approach I learned from my earliest physics education, starting in high school and continuing throughout college), and when I discovered, quite directly by my simple approach, that the actual Venus/Earth temperature ratio was a constant that in fact depended only upon the ratio of the two planets' distances from the Sun--thus definitively disproving the "greenhouse effect" hypothesis, of increasing global mean temperature with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, as well as disproving the need for any correction due to the large difference in albedo--I was able to immediately interpret this, with correct physical intuition, as being necessarily due to both atmospheres directly absorbing, and being fundamentally warmed only by, the same physical fraction of the incident solar power. In a March 2012 update to my original "Venus: No Greenhouse Effect" post, I provided the proper Stefan-Boltzmann equations for the temperature in each troposphere, assuming both tropospheres are warmed by the same fraction of incident solar power, and showed that their temperature ratio at any given pressure is indeed independent of the fraction of solar power absorbed, and is just dependent upon the ratio of their solar distances. This of course confirms my original, insightful interpretation of my Venus/Earth comparison.

So my basic scientific competence and physical insight overcame the naivety (a form of bias, one might say) of my overly-simple approach; I in fact made the correct physical interpretation, and I have correctly stood by it ever after (see here for example). Not so for all of those (including Judith Curry), who have dismissed my findings when informed of them, generally with the flat--and in fact wrong--statement that my comparison was worthless because I had not "corrected for the difference in albedo" in the two planets, and also no doubt because no one was willing to seriously consider that these two atmospheres were both warmed by direct absorption of incident solar power, rather than from the surface (which was and continues to be the consensus belief--that is, the consensus bias). As a competent physicist, I knew, and know, my original interpretation was correct, and I maintained that any competent physicist must come to the same conclusion as I did, from the observed constant Venus/Earth temperature ratio, but it has done no good, from November 2010 to now. Even after posting those equations that starkly PROVE my original interpretation was good, there has been no sign of any growing acceptance, on either side of the climate debate, of my Venus/Earth comparison as a definitive correction to the patently incorrect consensus beliefs of climate scientists.

So the basic INcompetence of all of the defenders of the climate consensus has so far kept them from overcoming their bias against my definitive disproof of the "greenhouse effect", which continues to be promulgated to the public, falsely and incompetently, as unarguable fact.

Incompetent Comments on UAH GMST Data

I do not take the fevered climate debate seriously anymore, since my definitive Venus/Earth temperatures comparison has not brought everyone to their senses, that the consensus is entirely incompetent in promulgating the carbon dioxide "greenhouse effect". But I still sometimes comment here and there. I just submitted the following comment to Dr. Roy Spencer's site, where he has posted the April 2012 update of UAH (University of Alabama at Huntsville) satellite data on global mean surface temperature anomaly:

The remarks here--especially the ones deducing continued global warming from obviously stalled data--indict the commenters as incompetent. Dr. Spencer, you do a disservice to any lay readers who stop by here and take these comments as serious scientific appraisal, by allowing these comments to go unanswered by you.

I wrote over a year ago that the global mean surface temp (GMST) would, according to the multidecadal ocean-oscillations theory, vary by a few tenths of a degree around an average +0.10°C for the next 5 years or more--and the average of your table here, from the beginning of 2011 to now, is +0.125. The only recent difference in the data is the magnitude of the swing, between successive maxima and minima--in years past, it was only .2 to .3°C, while in your table here, encompassing the last 3 such swings, it is more like .4 to .5°C, with an average of .426°C. So it's somewhat looser data recently, but it is not warming at all (and, as I have also written for over a year, the temperature is about where it was in 1991, over 20 years ago now).

There is no competent climate debate, because there are no competent climate scientists. It is all political maneuvering, lay readers, and you shouldn't take anyone's--any "expert"'s--word on anything in the "debate".

Atmospheric Warming and the Tropospheric Temperature Lapse Rate

I have posted the following at the Tallbloke site, where the tropospheric temperature gradient is being discussed: The fact that the Venus/Earth temperature ratio, at points of equal pressure over the range of Earth tropospheric pressures (excepting only at points inside the Venus cloud layer), is a constant that is precisely and entirely due only to the ratio of the two planets' distances from the Sun, IS the definitive empirical evidence--of two detailed atmospheres, and thus the largest, and clearest, experimental test--revealing the fundamental physical mechanism of warming of planetary atmospheres by direct absorption of radiative (infrared) energy from the Sun. My Venus/Earth comparison establishes: 1) The tropospheres of both Venus and Earth must directly absorb, and be fundamentally warmed only by, the same physical fraction of the incident solar energy, whose intensity varies with solar distance r as one over r-squared (in which case, as I have shown at the above link, the temperature ratio is necessarily what it is observed to be); 2) The tropospheres, especially Earth's, are not fundamentally warmed from the surface at all, as most scientists currently believe, as any such warming would cause the Venus/Earth temperature ratio to be other than what it is, due only to the solar distances of the two planets; 3) The Standard Atmosphere properly represents the stable equilibrium state of Earth's troposphere, while Venus's atmosphere is always in its equilibrium state (this means the Earth is not subject to "runaway" global warming OR cooling--meaning no "ice ages" due only to undirected physical processes, and no need for auxiliarly theories, like the physically suspect Milankovitch correlation-model theory, to "explain" them); 4) There is no "greenhouse effect", of increased global mean surface temperature, with an atmospheric increase in carbon dioxide or any other so-called "greenhouse gas"; 5) There is no albedo effect, either from the planetary surface or from cloud tops, upon the equilibrium atmospheric temperature, since the great differences in these variables for Venus and Earth have no effect upon the Venus/Earth temperature ratio (and this is also the obvious physical consequence of atmospheric warming solely by direct absorption of solar IR); and 6) the proper handling of the Stefan-Boltzmann formula in analyzing the problem of atmospheric warming (it applies only in the case of warming only by incident radiation, assumes that all absorbed radiation is transformed into heat energy, and it cannot be applied anywhere within a system in which other forms of heat transfer--conduction and convection--are occurring). My Venus/Earth comparison also shows that the temperature lapse rate structure of the troposphere predominates over all other atmospheric conditions, including night and day, that it fundamentally and strictly governs atmospheric temperatures, and that the lapse rate structure does NOT depend upon gross vertical convection, especially from the surface, since each layer of the atmosphere is directly warmed by the Sun. The term "adiabatic lapse rate" should be replaced by "hydrostatic lapse rate" (as I have consistently emphasized) to be consistent with the fundamental physics--of real gases in a gravitational field--behind it.

Quantifying Ignorance

Judith Curry's Climate etc. site has a post on "Ignorance: The Engine of Science", discussing the latest junk-food science book recommended by Curry, to which I respond here, with what I have learned, in my lifetime of experience, to be trustworthy information on this subject:

According to Firestein [the author of the book, and a ranking academic, of course]:
"Working scientists don’t get bogged down in the factual swamp because they don’t care all that much for facts."
------Nonsense, he should say they don't care much for what others TELL them are facts (if they are good scientists); they know they have to verify the facts for themselves if they want to KNOW the facts.

"Being a scientist requires having faith in uncertainty,"
------No it doesn't, not at all; it requires having faith that you CAN LEARN and UNDERSTAND any and all processes in the physical universe. Being a scientist requires QUANTIFYING uncertainty, as probability of occurrence, and the general failure to do that (to be ABLE to do that, while staying within the bounds of current, central theories that are so uncertain, i.e. improbable, that they are, or should be, patently false) is the very foundation of the current crisis of incompetence in science. Uncertainty is not your friend; it is the acid that will eat away all of your pretended, false "knowledge".

"Science, then, is not like the onion in the often used analogy of stripping away layer after layer to get at some core, central, fundamental truth. Rather it’s like the magic well: no matter how many buckets of water you remove, there’s always another one to be had."
------Sure, along with a proliferation of hypotheses that allow you to ignore that there IS a central, fundamental truth in every investigation. There is in the end NO MAGIC whatsoever (so get that out of your head once and for all, whether you want to be a scientist or not).

"So I tried to imagine what it was that was exciting in the lab that wasn’t exciting in the course."
-------The excitement--no, the transcendant experience, beyond mere excitement--is in finding the answer yourself, instead of being stuffed with other peoples' "answers", which are increasingly NOT real answers, in science today, but only covered-up ignorance.

Firestein knows squat about real science. Why do you keep looking outside of yourself, when the answer you NEED is within?

On the Failure of Post-Normal Science

The Climate Etc. site has an article on the "Republican brain" (apparently a recent but fast-growing field of science), to which I respond here:

The larger problem is, when nobody has all the answers even to the most basic questions, instead of admitting they don't know, the self-styled institutional "experts" dig in and defend their "expertness", and fight, rather than disdaining such adolescent and misdirected behavior in favor of finding the objective truth--in fact, "objective" is the key word.

None of the opinions Judith Curry has sought out and brought forward here are worth any of my time, none at all. They are all subjective, not objective. And I am not talking about their political opinions--much less their opinions on one political group over another--which by definition are irrelevant to science. I am talking about their presumptions about "settled/good" science. None of them know what they are talking about. They just don't know what they are talking about.

Let's cut through all the BS, all the vain arguments--we live in a time of crisis in science, because the reigning scientific paradigm, or philosophy, (undirected evolution) has failed, becoming a millstone dragging down the mind rather than a light to the truth, and those who mentally depend upon that paradigm, as a religious belief, do not yet know that their "knowledge" is obsolete, just so much roadkill on the journey to more real knowledge. There are as yet no coherent societal constructs, no easy public narratives--in short, no enlightened public opinion (a.k.a. "post-normal science")--to replace the already-failed belief, in essentially meaningless development (the literal meaning of "undirected evolution") of all the miracles of natural process, of natural mechanism, we observe in the world and the universe beyond. There are only other religions, which the "scientific believers" prefer to war with, rather than see that their own position has become just another benighted religion. Darwin was a religious-minded, amateur scientist, an incompetent fool, whose fundamental misapprehension, concerning design of the natural world, has spawned a world of scientific fools--and their time is now passing, along with that misapprehension. Will that passing consume another century, of increasingly misdirected science?

Judith Curry's blog (and every other blog, filled with earnest argument and unending discussion) is just a continuing therapy session for those who cannot or will not learn. Judith Curry, like every other academic or institutional scientific authority, does not know where to turn. And that is telling, because she "knows", as a scientist, that only objective observation, interpretation and verification are needed--not reliance upon unquestioned dogma, even if that dogma is "scientific" (i.e., "settled science"). All of the people whose opinions she solicits believe unquestioningly in evolution theory. But that theory is fundamentally false, mistaking designed mechanisms for products of undirected, natural laws. Even the discovery and elucidation of the amazing mechanism that is the DNA molecule, has not broken through the false belief, to a realization of underlying, deliberate design of all the life on Earth.

And more specifically, in the climate debates, if the climate system is not designed, then it must be subject to "runaway", chaotic behavior, QED--for (and here is the fundamental truth, believe it or not) there is no coherent physical mechanism, indeed no physical coherence, without deliberate design. Scientists study design every day, throughout their lives, yet shackle themselves to the lie that everything is the result of random physical processes--and no more. The dissociation with reality is so great today, that many entertain pseudoscientific discussions of, say, the "Republican brain", in the vain hope of surcease from their inner struggle to deny the obvious design in the natural world, with concocted outer struggles against phantoms of their imagination. Such discussions are, in my opinion, insane, inherently damaging to true, verifiable reason.

The Enchantment of "Settled Science"

I received a comment (from Julian Braggins), asking why a simple demonstration disproving the consensus greenhouse effect was not perfomed long ago, by a student if not an "expert". My response grew too long to fit in a comment, and it is important enough to warrant its own posting here:

Good Morning, Julian,

We are in a time of scientific (and political) madness, when the supposedly authoritative "scientific consensus" has failed, because generations of scientists have been miseducated, but few can believe it, or acknowledge it. The next century will be filled with books on "why didn't they see that...?"

I took the time to find and read quickly through the paper by Klein you cited, and I confess I didn't find it all that simple (compared to the definitive simplicity--if one only takes the time to do it--of looking at the actual atmospheric temperatures of Venus and Earth, and noting that their ratio, at various pressures over the range of Earth tropospheric pressures, is due only to their distances from the Sun), nor does it address the fundamental question of, "how is the atmosphere warmed"? (as the Venus/Earth comparison does). Klein's experiment shows that atmospheric absorption of IR EMITTED BY THE SURFACE does not further warm the atmosphere, but it gives the impression that no IR absorption in the atmosphere can warm the atmosphere, because it doesn't address atmospheric absorption of incident solar IR, which is an absorption of some 20% of the incident solar power. And everyone (including me) has been hesitant to state what seems to be obvious, to me, that it is apparently water vapor that is absorbing solar IR in the troposphere, and fundamentally heating the atmosphere, independently of heating of the surface. Not being a climate scientist or meteorologist, and thoroughly skeptical of every aspect of climate "science" because of the fundamental incompetence I have uncovered in it, I haven't wanted to rule out other modes of IR absorption of incident solar, but water vapor stands out--on Earth and Venus--so far alone. (This would explain why comparing the Earth temperatures with those in other planetary atmospheres does not give the same, definitive results, if other gases than water vapor are at least partially responsible for warming those other atmospheres.) You will note that Klein, for example, discusses water vapor separately and in general terms, AFTER his experiment, and not at all in the context of IR absorption of incident solar by water vapor as a warming mechanism of the atmosphere.

I don't mean to damn Klein's experiment with faint praise (we are all just a varied bunch of students--with the natural world our teacher--trying to solve a "homework problem"), it is just that there is an abundance of evidence, it appears to me, to disprove the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect, and most of it quite simple, at least to a scientist--and the "consensus" scientists, determinedly incompetent before all of it, refuse to see it. It is a matter of breaking the literal enchantment put upon people's minds by the built up "consensus" picture. It is easy to see that enchantment as an essentially religious belief in false dogma, but those enchanted will not listen to that explanation either. One could also liken it to the enchantment of sexual attraction, particularly the "bewitching beauty" power of women over men. I suggest a cartoon might help, of a group of men staring moronically at a beautiful woman--or rather, at her reflection in a mirror--and labelling the men "Climate Scientists", the mirror "greenhouse effect theory", and the reflected image "the consensus"; and off on the side--outside the window perhaps--the reality, that is seen in the mirror of false theory as a beautiful woman, is actually the real world: trees and grass and sky.

Frankly, knowing as I do that the Earth was deliberately re-formed, wholesale, to a great design, I know that all the bewitching beauty of the natural world is the result of prior design, and that is the "bucket of water in the face" that can snap everyone out of their haughty belief in their own knowledge to date.

The Climate Science "Debate": All Should Come Clean

I have submitted the following comment to the Roy Spencer site:

Roy Spencer wrote: "...we have only one subject to study, the Earth. Establishing causation in such a situation is dicey, at best."

Wrong. We have Earth AND Venus, which are easily shown to be warmed alike, despite the great differences in albedo (30% vs. 70%), CO2 atmospheric concentration (.04% vs. 96.5%), and planetary surface (Earth is 70% ocean, Venus all solid crust), because: The ratio of atmospheric temperatures, Venus/Earth, is essentially a constant over the range of Earth tropospheric pressures, and especially so away from the Venus cloud layer, where the constant (1.176) is PRECISELY due to the ratio of the two planets' distances from the Sun. This fact can only be explained by concluding that both atmospheres are warmed by absorption of the SAME fraction of the incident solar irradiation, and not from the planetary surface: I have explicitly given (at the above link) the simple equations for the mean temperatures in the two atmospheres based upon that assumption, and shown that the fraction (f) absorbed by the two atmospheres drops out of the equation for the ratio of the temperatures, so that one can apply the basic Stefan-Boltzmann formula, without any albedo correction, as I did boldly and simply in my original approach. With the temperature ratio due only to solar distances, there is simply no greenhouse effect due to the much larger CO2 in Venus's atmosphere. That is how easy it is to establish (the lack of) causation, of a supposed temperature increase with increasing carbon dioxide (and thus for any "greenhouse gas"). See also "For Climate, All the World's a Stage".

There have been no competent climate scientists since the Venus temperature and pressure data was obtained over 20 years ago, an elementary study of which (like mine) should have quickly killed the "global warming greenhouse effect". The only real atmospheric warming by IR-absorbing gases is the fundamental warming by direct absorption of incident solar radiation. There is no extra warming due to increasing CO2--nor is there extra warming from the surface (surface warmth merely drives the weather/climate).

This is the revolutionary correction to climate science that everyone is steadfastly ignoring. Everyone needs to admit, first to themselves and then immediately to the world, their mistakes, but right now, everyone but me continues to double down on their invalid scientific prejudices. I understand that, but it makes all the debates since my Venus/Earth analysis simply irrational avoidance behavior, entirely unworthy of true, dispassionate science.