IS GRAVITY LEFT-WING??
A PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTION: 7th JULY 2010 BACK
TO WEATHER-BLOG MENU IN THE FOURTH CENTURY BC....... About
2350 years ago, Aristotle noted that "there is no effect or motion
without a cause". The cause of the downward motion of heavy bodies,
such as the element earth (remember, back then, the elements comprised
earth, air, fire and water), was related to their dense nature, which
caused them to move downward. In his system, heavy bodies were not
attracted to the earth by an external force but because of an inner
gravitas or heaviness. Thus
does science work. Theories are proposed and they then stand or fall
under the weight of subsequent observations and research. A theory that
was merely a seed in the 4th Century BC, gravity is one of those that
has stood the test of time well, undergoing a modification here, a
modification there and making it through to the present day as a good
explanation as to why jumping off a sheer cliff is not such a good idea. IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY..... Let's
go back in time again, this time to the 19th Century. To Victorian
natural historian and alpinist John Tyndall, the evidence,
controversial at the time but now mainstream, that many thousands of
years ago much of northern Europe had been covered by ice-caps and
glaciers was clear. The problem was as follows: how could the climate
change in such a drastic manner in order to permit such a
development? Like
gravity, the
theory of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions leading to a rising
temperature
came from a string of observations, investigations, discoveries and
calculations. Like gravity, it is a developing theory with respect to
minor details. Like gravity it is, as a fundamental concept, accepted
by the vast majority of scientists who work in that particular area -
climatology - in a similar way that plate tectonics is accepted
by most geologists but might not necessarily be fully understood by,
for example, a neurologist. So,
then: why is the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) left-wing
whilst the theory of gravity is, apparently, not? A DAFT QUESTION? It sounds like a daft
question but in fact it is relevant - given that one of the various
accusations frequently thrown at climate scientists is that they are
conspirators in some grand plan to create a socialist World Government.
Now, forgive me if I
have got something wrong, but history has shown that stability - in
terms of society, economics and state - tends to favour non-extremist
governments and far-left or far-right regimes have typically led to
chaos and misery, often involving war somewhere along the line. Why
would climate scientists wish to create something like that? The answer is, of
course, that they don't: climate scientists are as diverse a bunch of
folks as any other profession from doctors to accountants. Fill a pub
with them and get them engaged on various topics and you'll get plenty
of good arguments going. Pretty much the only thing you'll get good
agreement on are the scientific principles first established over 100
years ago by the likes of Fourier and Tyndall! SCIENCE GETS OUTED Yesterday
- July 7th 2010 - the final report into the so-called "climategate"
affair was released. Here are the key findings:
In
short, this simply means that they got the science right (1 and 2) but
went about doing so in a way that to outsiders might seem a bit
secretive or even aloof. So let's briefly look back at what led to the
need to undertake these reviews. The
sciences have for a very long time progressed via a system in which
discoveries and theories are written up and published in specialist
journals following review by fellow specialists ("peers"). This is not
a perfect system but it can be imagined as a crude "bullshit filter"
that weeds out sloppy or repetitive material that makes no actual
contribution to the knowledge-base. It can be controversial especially
when there is a sense of competition or rivalry between various
research teams and from time to time almighty rows can break out.
Normally, all of this goes on out of the public arena. Up until
recently, I've been aware of it through my work in mineralogy. Believe
you me, there can be controversy even in that area of science! Now,
or rather since over 1000 emails were obtained and posted around the
internet in November 2009, the general public is aware of it too.
Science, that normally did its work largely behind closed doors, has
been outed. Is this a bad thing?
Although
the journals are and always will be the core area in which science is
progressed, we need to develop better public communication strategies
across the board rather than rely on the media to do this job for us.
It is vital that the public understand as clearly as possible where the
certainties and uncertainties lie - in climatology and elsewhere.
Scientific discoveries and theories often have direct effects on our
lives. They have made flight, personal computers and vaccination
against dreadful diseases possible, among many things. In this
particular case, they are warning us that our current levels of fossil
fuel use are unsustainable because they are destabilising the climate.
As a geologist, I can also add that they are unsustainable because oil,
gas and coal are all finite resources and if we start to run out of
them (beginning soon in the case of regular oil) before anything else
is in place as a replacement then economic collapse on an unprecedented
scale can be expected. Writing
in 1995, the scientist Carl Sagan said:
"We’ve arranged a civilization in which
most
crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have
also arranged things so that almost no one understands science
and technology. This is a prescription for disaster."
The
BBC has a particularly strange policy when reporting climate science.
In no other branch of the Earth Sciences that I can think of is so much
airspace given to political opponents. In the case of evolution, they
do not include Creationist points of view in every story. Yet in the
case of climate, they frequently include comments from what are no more
than political think-tanks such as ex-Chancellor Nigel Lawson's Global
Warming Policy Foundation. And so more scare stories such as AGW being
a left-wing conspiracy to tax us all more gain public traction.
Opponents
to
the AGW theory like to look back over the past few million years and
remind us that the climate is always changing. Yes - it is. However, in
each of the drastic changes in the geological past, there wasn't a
civilisation in the way. The development of modern civilisation has
been favoured by a relatively stable climate these past few millennia.
My advice is that it would be good to keep it that way.
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