I think the honest answer is that we don’t know. In fact most of the reconstruction of the early universe prior to the transition from plasma to atoms at T=300,000 years is not based on direct observation, but on inference from terrestrial accelerator experiments. And those only take us back to about the time quarks and leptons condensed.

There are some sound reasons to believe in inflationary cosmology, which addresses the time before the appearance of quarks & leptons — specifically that it seems to provide a unified solution to the horizon and flatness problems, and also predicts the anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background radiation correctly.

There is a version of inflationary cosmology called the self-reproducing inflationary universe. In this model, the universe is a hugely complex fractalish structure of which our observable universe is but one branch. Inflationary events pinch off baby universes all the time, which are mostly hidden from view because of the highly curved space that connects them to their parent universes. What this would mean is that the universe is eternal, that “our” big bang was just another bubble in an infinite sea of baby universes, each growing and accelerating. Philosophically I like this model, but it is not clear what one can do to verify it scientifically. So, we don’t know.

I watch way too much TV, and I randomly saw a new sitcom called The Big Bang a few weeks ago. Bunch of geeky guys with way too many intellectual references for this to last very long, but I would think all of the Keystone Cops might want to check it out.

But the real point was that I searched on Big Bang on my Tivo and have seen a lot of great shows on History, SciFi, etc. I’m ok with the Big Bang, but what was before the Big Bang?

This line of argument is illogical, not to mention tendentious, and so transparently so that I conclude you must be toying with me again!

For one thing, it would seem that an equally valid premise would be “Democrats are more likely than Republicans to believe in AGW for ideological reasons.”

And of course, you assume here as part of your premises the conclusions you want to reach, that AGW is the scientific consensus, that the scientific consensus is necessarily correct, and even your opinion that Democrats are better than Republicans at setting ideology aside when science is at stake. These are examples of what logicians call “Begging the Question,” or “Circulus in Probando.”

But I think the more significant material fallacy here is called “the Fallacy of False Cause”. You ignore the phenomenon I alluded to above, which is that skepticism about central planning and skepticism about unproven science arguably have a common basis that is not ideological and partisan, but rather dispositional and personal.

It is also a fallacy to assert that the correlation of Republicanism|Democratism with ideological blindness implies completeness (”the only reason a Republican|Democrat opposes|supports AGW is ideology”). I confess I’m not sure if this is “the Fallacy of Division” or “the Fallacy of Equivocation” or something else, because your actual argument here is cloudy.

In any case, the argument, “Ah, I see you are ideologically skeptical about big government. Therefore your opinions about global warming are unscientific,” is unsound.

Now, it may be that non-scientist Republicans follow the party line on AGW, just as non-scientist Democrats follow their party line. But I am, ahem, a scientist, certainly more scientist than partisan these days, and am therefore owed the presumption that my skepticism on scientific matters is rational. If you need proof, burdensome or not, I invite you to visit CompuServe’s SCIMATH forum and read some of the many discussions I have joined regarding AGW over the years.

http://community.compuserve.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?redirCnt=2&webtag=ws-sciencemath

You will find that, despite what you may have read in the New York Times, AGW (at least in the extreme Al Gore / James Burke sense) does not have the epistemological status of “theory”. Nor does it enjoy universal support, which is why it is a perennial topic among the regulars at SCIMATH, unlike, say, creationism.

To me, the most important thing to remember regarding these politically charged scientific issues is: the method. [Aside: check out my post on the End of Science.] Are we allowing the scientific method to proceed?

My complaint about the creationists has always been that they are trying to circumvent the scientific method by legislating their “Truth” into science textbooks. It is not the facts or observations set forth on one side or the other that interest me in this case. Darwinism could go on the ash-heap tomorrow and I would be happy, provided the progress was provided by scientists pursuing the science, and not legislators pursuing votes.

Similarly, the contrarian in me gets annoyed by scientific gatekeepers who presume to label dissenting views on controversial topics with big red warning labels.

I certainly know of dissenters against the conventional wisdom in my corner of quantum field theory. Consider some of the papers of Adrian Patrascioiu,

http://eprintweb.org/S/authors/hep-lat/pa/Patrascioiu

Adrian does not believe chiral perturbation theory is mathematically well-founded. This is a minority view, because the certain “consensus” among theoretical physics is that chiral perturbation theory is really shiny and works great. But it would be tacky and insane to put big red warning stickers on his papers.

On the other hand, I do find the science of climate change quite fascinating, because of its ties to two of my specialties, computational physics and statistical analysis. And the political science is at least mildly entertaining. Does Nancy Pelosi gain votes by claiming she is saving the planet?

Finally, to return the volley, I have to observe that the natural stance of the scientist is to be skeptical. So I consider that skepticism of AGW by a scientist requires no justification, ideology or no. However, the God that didn’t bark is the non-skeptical scientist. What could possibly explain a non-skeptical scientist, indeed one who desires to shut down dissenting views? Could it be… IDEOLOGY?

“Not that there’s anything wrong with that!”….

As usual BBB is trenchant in his analysis, and is so often the case we find ourselves in violent agreement. Republicans indeed (I speak here in the generalities that decide elections) are more likely than Democrats to be skeptical of the scientific consensus about AGW because of “the ideological motivation for opposition to global warming”. Evangelicals, not being as committed to the ideology in question (that of limited government) are correspondingly less likely to question that particular consensus. This argument essentially accepts that the majority of Republicans reject scientific consensus on AGW for ideological, not scientific, reasons. However, the evangelicals are committed to an ideology of fundamentalist acceptance of the literal truth of Biblical narratives, so are far more likely (to use a wry understatemtent) to reject the scientific consensus concerning natural selection. This raises the contentious question of whether Republicans or Democrats are more likely to decide questions of policy on the basis of ideology or science, and I would claim the Republicans are clearly the worse in this comparison. The point I have been trying to make in this entire series of exchanges is that when one rejects scientific consensus in a such a way that the rejection happens to align with one’s idelogy, the burden of proof is on that individual to demonstrate that the reason is scientific, not ideological. Republicans who reject AGW and natural selection fail that test, as do Democrats to reject free trade.

I myself, of course, pass the test with flying colors, but then, I’m not really ideological, merely a philosopher.

Well, I think the political phenomenon is relatively transparent in the case of AGW (and hence not that interesting), and like all political judgments about scientific issues, hooks into ideology.

On the liberal side is a justification for massive government control, indeed global control, of all facets of the economy. Global warming was a godsend (pardon the religious imagery) to Marxists and like-minded advocates of central planning. The hypothesis became prominent shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and has been growing in popularity among the left just as the failures of communism became part of the conventional wisdom.

I can hardly think of a better exemplar of this phenomenon than the 1989 fictional documentary “After the Warming” by “Connections” mastermind James Burke. Amazingly, the video is available for download on Google video. Try

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6514270139930450081

or search Google video for “After the Warming”. You can see info on the “documentary” at IMDB:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0334827/

where it has earned a 9.4/10 rating from devoted fans.

Burke is, first of all, an advocate of the hypothesis of man-made climate change. But more to the point, he is an advocate of universal socialism. The documentary makes the case that the threat and urgency of global warming forces us to adopt a (benevolent) universal government, which he dubs the Planetary Management Authority, or PMA. The PMA is by all appearances a totalitarian oligarchy, but in the manner of utopians from time immemorial, Burke thinks this is a good thing.

And this is the template for politicians — from Al Gore to John McCain — who believe that central planning is a good thing.

The converse of this is that ideologues opposed to central planning, which is to say, the Friedman-Hayek school of thought, find it advantageous to undermine the hypothesis of global warming.

Curiously, you mention evangelicals in this connection. As you are no doubt aware, for the last generation the GOP has survived through a triumvirate of evangelicals, libertarians, and fiscal conservatives. The latter two groups are the conservatives with whom I most closely identify, obviously (though as a conservative Buddhist, I sometimes refer to myself as a member of the “religious right”.)

Now, the curious thing about evangelicals in this regard is that, not being uniformly opposed to government mandates, they find that the ideological motivation for opposition to global warming is correspondingly dilute. Try Googling “global warming evangelicals” to see a number of examples of evangelicals coming down on the “stewardship” side of the global warming debate.

Just to pick a random link from the first Google page:

http://www.creationcare.org/resources/climate/

There are many such sites and news stories about evangelicals splitting from the GOP line on AGW.

I guess a lot of them must be Ph.D.’s, to be so invested in the “scientific consensus.”

BBB

I couldn't have put it better. Likewise, I would point out that it is silly to take the position "it is silly to disbelieve in AGW just because disbelief is the official position of the Republican Party." Yet this seems to be exactly your offering on AGW.

I would say the political aspect of this science (climate modeling), though amusing qua political science, has very little light to shed on the validity of the actual science. Politicians will do what politicians will do. Ignore them.

Leaving you in a logical cleft-stick from which there is but one way out....

>>The fact that Republicans are more likely to reject scientific consensus regarding fact (on some issues) than are Democrats….<<

I notice you didn’t comment on the Democrat obscurantism on gender differences. But no matter. My point is made.

I dispute that the hypothesis that humans are responsible for warming of global climate has reached the epistemic status of “fact”. That the science is not settled should make this frontier of interest to all scientists, as should the implications of the hypothesis itself.

I’ve been following the evolution of this hypothesis for some time now. It is remarkable how little has migrated into the realm of fact. I have to say I have been disappointed time and time again, when each new headline announced some buttress for AGW, how shoddy the science has been.

I would say it is a fact that atmospheric CO2 concentrations have risen in the decades we have been measuring it. I would say it is a fact that that increase is due to fossil fuel consumption — although this requires some faith in the application of isotopic analysis (a faith I share). I would say it’s pretty well established what those concentrations imply for radiative transport, at least on a lab scale.

But at the other end of the chain of inference, I would point out that there are apparently still no global circulation models which retrodict the last 100 years of climate measurements and which meet a statistically valid goodness-of-fit test. Given that the finest-grid models have a resolution of only about a degree of latitude/longitude, and perhaps 20 levels of atmosphere, this is not surprising. But it raises the question of the timetable for model validation.

And in fact this is the rub. I know a great deal about physics. And I know a great deal about numerical modeling. And I am a naturally skeptical cuss. These character flaws (both skepticism and “numericism”) are correlated with a tendency to affiliate with conservatives, and also to reject “consensus” (which is, after all, different from “tradition”). So I think you are barking up a blind alley, so to speak, to take correlation for causation in this case.

BBB

Thus “believing in AGW because it is the official position of the Democratic Party” is not only silly, to state that it is silly is silly, a straw man of the first magnitude. Who would ever promote such a position? On the contrary, since scientific consensus favors AGW (I’m not saying I personally accept it), the fact that Republicans are much more likely to reject this consensus (and also the theory of evolution, and also stem cell research) than are Democracts suggests that Republicans are making decisions about fact for ideological, rather than for scientific, reasons. If you want to know who is more “anti-science”, find out who accepts Darwin’s theory of evolution (as I recall, 9 out of 10 Republicans running for president did not). For Detailed Balance, I would also argue that Democratic rejection of free trade is similarly misguided.

One example is the consideration of gender differences. The scientific “consensus” (if such a thing can ever relevantly be said to exist) is, I think, that the existence of the Y chromosome in an individual’s genetic makeup can have significant effects on that individual’s propensities and capabilities. But for ideological reasons, this assertion is anathema to Democrats yet welcomed by Republicans.

Another example is space exploration. Space buffs for the most part have welcomed the Bush administration’s Vision for Space Exploration, and its commitment to a new generation of manned space exploration. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, has announced that he plans to cancel the Constellation program in toto to fund national early childhood education. Which of them is “anti-science”? How long have we heard one party complaining that space exploration drains funds from domestic programs? Which party do you suppose that is?

Another example is nuclear and particle physics. For longer than I have been alive, the GOP has supported a vigorous program of research into fundamental physics. The late Senator Jesse Helms was an avid proponent of the Supercollider. Yet, the SSC was cancelled in 1993 by a Democrat Congress and Administration. Who was “anti-science”, Jesse Helms or Tom Foley?

A glaring example is the “dismal science”, economics, for which Democrats in general maintain utter disdain and steadfast ignorance. More on this in a future post, perhaps.

So what does all this mean? I think in every one of these cases, including AGW and creationism, one can explain the partisan clustering on one side or the other of each scientific issue by examining the ideological interests of each side. Jesse Helms perhaps supported the SSC for jingoistic and national defense reasons, while Foley and George Mitchell, being socialist internationalists, were opposed (I exaggerate for humorous effect).

But this brings to mind the adage, “Does the waving of the grass make the wind blow?” To me it means that judging scientific theories by their partisan support is not likely to lead to reliable insights. That is to say, believing in AGW because it’s the official position of the Democrat Party is silly.

Among the pearls of wisdom dispensed by Alice Cooper is the maxim, “Anyone who gets their political views from a rock star is a moron.” I would say the Cooper principle applies to science and politicians.

BBB