Tuesday, 21 October 2008 by bbbeard.

The worlds in question being politics, economics, and science: Bjørn Lomborg’s think tank is busy setting global priorities.

CVM examined the partisan correlates of scientific skepticism in his post “The Politics of Science“. He wrote

Obviously Republicans are much more likely to question the scientific consensus about global warming and its causes than are Democrats…. My guess is that Republicans have a sense that academics, including scientists, are generally Democratic and have liberal leanings. This is actually correct.

Bjørn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, is something of a bête noire in environmental extremist circles, so despite the occasional Congressional hearing you won’t likely see many Democrat congressmen listening. But because his worldview is rational and economic, he has been embraced by partisans on the right. I suppose this is one of the ironies of our time, since Lomborg is unabashedly leftist in orientation, supporting “a strong welfare state”, “strong redistribution from taxes” and so forth. In the ReasonOnline interview, he says

I’m trying to recapture much of what the left stood for-when we believed in progress, when we believed that scientific understanding could lead us ahead and not just rely on tradition. I think that’s the original sort of background for the left. Unfortunately, I find that a fair amount of the left has turned towards a romanticized view of the world.

But the mere fact that Lomborg has been unwilling to endorse the hysteria about global warming means that conservatives give his views a fair hearing. I wonder how CVM might explain this phenomenon in terms of the “left=smart=AGW-is-gospel” theory.

I should explain that I have long held an “economic view” of the environment. That is, a clean environment is not a political right like freedom of speech, but rather an economic good that is procured in greater extent as affluence increases. (This makes it a “normal good” in the jargon of economists.) I should also explain that I have long held the view that “conservation is conservative” – that is, “Waste not, want not” is a Puritan credo that political conservatives embrace and is entirely consistent with stewardship of resources. These statements strike me as obvious and unexceptional beliefs, but I have noticed that some folks on the left have more absolutist, not to mention megalomaniacal, beliefs about the environment.

Lomborg’s main contribution, I think, has been to focus attention where it belongs, which is: what is the best way to expend limited resources to ameliorate global problems? This is an economic question, which naturally infuriates those who take a quasi-religious view of environmental issues.

Lomborg is director of Denmark’s national Environmental Assessment Institute. In 2004, and again in 2008, the EAI convened meetings of prominent economists dubbed the “Copenhagen Consensus Conference” (not to be confused with the Copenhagen interpretation). The question the cognoscenti ponder is how best to allocate a hypothetical multi-billion-dollar budget to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems.

In 2004, the CCC put the mitigation of AIDS and malaria high on its priority list. The Bush administration had already begun a massive increase in AIDS funding to the third world, but it is rumored that the CCC report was influential in getting the administration to push for malaria funding as well. These recommendations are reflected in Bush administration priorities. (However, politics being what it is, NPR has criticized the initiative.) The fact that  CCC economists, among others, estimate that Al-Gore-style carbon-reduction projects, and in particular the Kyoto Protocol, have poor benefit-cost ratios, may also help explain why CO2 mitigation is not a higher priority with the current administration.

In an ideal world, I suppose, there would be some political benefit to making such important life-saving investments as malaria and AIDS mitigation. But unfortunately, we live in a world where the political class is obsessed with tanning beds and plumbing licensure requirements. The Left (even leftist scientists, apparently) is also obsessed with the idea that Bush is the Worst President Ever™, and saving African kids doesn’t fit their narrative.

So I despair that politics will ever allow us to set priorities rationally. And this despair is of a piece with my belief that there is little value in mixing politics and science.

One of the conclusions the CCC appears to have reached this year is that supplying micronutrient supplements to children in the developing world is probably one of the best investments that can be made. I can map out contradictory scenarios about the political battle over such funding. The more likely one, I think, is that the Democrats will see little advantage to helping reduce Third World disease, and will once again engage in class warfare, portraying any such initiative as corporate welfare for Big Pharma. But I could be wrong.

An interesting aspect of the CCC report is their treatment of terrorism, which they considered in a separate category from “Conflicts“. [Small-world note: Daniel Arce, co-author of the CCC challenge paper on terrorism, was my next-door neighbor from 2002-2007 – indeed, his son and mine were in the same Boy Scout Troop.] The authors acknowledge that terrorism is distinct from the other CCC challenges, in large part because the cost-benefit ratios are “adverse”, in the sense that terrorist attacks to date have taken relatively few lives, and suppression or opposition measures are extremely expensive. But one has to wonder whether any economic analysis is worth a bucket of warm spit when it aims to address an existential threat like the one posed by the followers of Hitler, Marx, or Sayyid Qutb. Consider what the world would look like had Franklin Roosevelt decided the invasion of Europe or Japan was too costly, and that surrender to Hitler and Tojo had a better benefit-cost ratio. Of course, Al Gore thinks the internal combustion engine is an existential threat, too, so the debate continues.

UPDATE: As usual, ahead of the curve. Sir Bob Geldof is lavishing praise on the Bush administration for its aid to Africa:

“It’s no small legacy,” he added, and Bush has “set the bar quite high” for Barack Obama or John McCain.

Instapundit commented:

The press will tell the story eventually. But not until after the election.

UPDATE2:

While we’re on the subject of partisanship and science, I thought I’d point out Bill Maher’s peculiar feelings about vaccines. Larry King interviewed him back in 2005 and explored his worldview, which resulted in this exchange:

KING: You wouldn’t say the Salk vaccine was a bad idea.

MAHER: That’s somewhat of a different case, yes.

KING: Polio was eliminated.

MAHER: Yes but, you know, there are many books out that will — that will — and I’m not well enough versed on it to talk about it that will indicate that there are other reasons why it was. And a lot of diseases that have been they say, whoa, this was eliminated because of a vaccine, they find out well no actually the country got toilets and that’s what happened.

You can also read his opinion that flu vaccines are just another way for Big Pharma to con us out of our paychecks. So it seems like Bill Maher doesn’t think vaccines had much to do with eliminating polio.  Funny, I thought he was a liberal.

Posted in Politics & Society, Science | Print | 1 Comment »

Thursday, 25 September 2008 by bbbeard.

Enough politics. Some NASA guys have found some peculiar, really large regions in the early universe that appear to be receding. The hook is that whatever is pulling on them appears to be farther away than the edge of the observable universe. Dr. Alexander Kashlinsky has dubbed this phenomenon ‘dark flow’, heedless of political correctness in our current season of electoral insanity.

I may be getting ahead of things, but it seems to me that Alan Guth must find this good news. If confirmed, this discovery is another nail in the coffin of old-Big-Bang (i.e. non-inflationary) cosmology.  The only way something beyond the backward light-cone could exist is if the universe had some period of superluminal expansion.

I might as well use this post to address a recent query from CVM regarding the musings of Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at MIT. Dr. Tegmark is a proponent of the idea of parallel universes. I read his article in SciAm back in 2003. I have to say (1) I’m probably not competent to peer-review his technical papers, but (2) I was not impressed by the argument of an infinite universe filled with Hubble volumes, each with the same finite state space. The discovery of dark flow illustrates this problem — our Hubble volume is not closed. In technical terms, this means that there is no infrared limit to the energy a particle can have.  It has also never been obvious to me — perhaps I was asleep in 8.321 — that a finite-dimensional state space even necessarily implies a finite number of possible states. Without a finite state count, the parallel universe idea (at least in the simple “Level I” formulation that Tegmark posits) falls apart. These objections are simple enough that it seems that Tegmark would have confronted them.

Tegmark is actually a prolific and accomplished cosmologist. It is an irony of our celebrity culture that his fame is due to musings of only marginal interest to actual scientists. It’s as though Stephen Hawking were known mainly for the wheelchair… oh, wait….

Posted in Science | Print | 1 Comment »

Wednesday, 24 September 2008 by aurora_guy.

Several years ago I attended a gathering of satellite industry professionals hosted by MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates in Richmond, BC.  In his opening remarks, company co-founder Dr. John MacDonald wanted us to understand the ramifications of what he termed the “data-information gap”which be believed limited the commercial viability of satellite remote sensing.  He asserted that satellite systems were “technology-pushed” rather than “user-pulled.”  He meant that new spaceborne systems had evolved primarily as a result of the interest in technology development rather than any sufficient demand from an end-user market.

Building, launching, and operating spacecraft is extraordinarily expensive.  (For example, the new GEOEYE spacecraft reportedly cost over $500 million to get up.)  Despite analysts’ long-held predictions of a burgeoning market for space-based imagery and other data sets, at the time of the gathering in Richmond, commercial ventures like Space Imaging had been struggling to make ends meet.  The missing end-users, in Dr. MacDonald’s view, were largely decision-makers; i.e., executives and senior authorities, not scientists or GIS specialists.  They had the necessary influence to make capital available for commercial space ventures of this sort.  Existing satellite systems could produce terabytes of data each day, yet there were few, if any, tools to turn this data into information useful to decision-makers.  This was the root of Dr. MacDonald’s data-information gap.  Until the gap was narrowed considerably, commercial remote sensing from space would remain economically unviable.

The gap may indeed be narrowing.  These are exciting times in the business.  Secret government agencies are no longer the sole keepers of the domain. God bless Google Earth.  If any one development of late has brought satellite remote sensing to the common person’s desktop, this has.  I even know a fur trapper using satellite weather and photos to plan his adventures in the Alaskan bush.  News organizations have been using satellite imagery regularly for several years.  Humanitarian and emergency management organizations have become much more sophisticated consumers for planning and responses.  Firefighters use products from NOAA, NASA, and USGS satellites to coordinate their efforts.  Epidemiologists can predict disease outbreaks and spread with satellite-derived products.  Community planners and developers frequently support their zoning work and business decisions using photos from space.   Satellite remote sensing is even a way for ordinary citizens to keep governments honest.  UCLA researchers recently published an interesting analysis using Air Force weather satellite data to conclude the troop surge in Iraq may not have contributed as much to the decrease in violence in Baghdad as ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods had done.

The gap is narrowing, but it’s far from gone.  Many advancements are in the pipeline, and the evolution is bound to be quite dramatic.  As an analog, consider the Global Positioning System.  Not so long ago it was confined to military and government use, and now GPS technology is nearly ubiquitous.  Chances are good that you even carry it around every day with a cellular phone in your pocket.

We are all part of the revolution.  (Isn’t it cool to be a revolutionary?)  I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings!

Posted in Science | Print | 3 Comments »

Wednesday, 27 August 2008 by bbbeard.

I read with fascination AmSci’s book review of “Falling for Science: Objects in Mind” by Sherry Turkle. Dr. Turkle is a professor of sociology at MIT, and though I’ve never met her, it sounds like we would have a lot to talk about. She is most famous for her books on the interactions of people and cyberspace. This latest book is a collection of essays and insights from former students and current professional scientists. They were all asked the same question, “Was there an object you met during childhood or adolescence that had an influence on your path into science?”

My immediate reaction was that the question as posed is a trifle silly (who “meets” objects?) and possibly tendentious, inasmuch as the book review starts with the binary stereotype that “Some people are oriented primarily toward other people, others toward things,” the latter folks being inclined toward science. But as I read on, I appreciated the depth of this insight: that many of us are captivated by the beauty and functionality of objects in our lives. And, like Lorenz’s butterfly, these objects lead us in directions we might not have predicted.

And it put me in mind of Jubal Early, the villain from the ‘philosophical’ Firefly episode, “Objects in Space“. If you haven’t seen the episode, order the DVD. One theme of the episode is the meaning which we humans imbue to physical objects, and how that meaning inheres to the observer, not the object. Joss Whedon has remarked the episode was inspired by Sartre’s Nausea.

Anyway, Proustishly, I recall the many “objects” that I appreciated in my childhood, objects which collectively contributed to the trajectory of my life.

The first object that sprang to mind was a perfboard “computer” kit, comprising a backboard, six perfboard disks, and a bunch of wires, screws, jumpers, and lights. It came with an instruction manual with dozens of “programs”, which one implemented by installing wires connecting the screws installed on the backboard, and labeling the various positions of the disks, which acted as multipole switches. It had limited capability, of course, the equivalent of about two or three bytes (!) of RAM, but was capable of some non-obvious computation. I suppose on one level its attraction was how it made accessible the mysterious world of computing, but on another level, it struck at that boundary between comprehensible and incomprehensible.

Another favorite was a tiny microscope that my father brought me from one of his many trips to the Orient. It came with a dozen or so slides of prepared, stained specimens. I spent countless hours fiddling with it, marveling at the intricacy of nature and the length scales beneath the visible, and trying in vain to find household items that would yield to its power. (In hindsight, some stain would have helped greatly.) Ultimately, of course, we used very nice microscopes in high school biology class, and the toy microscope yielded to entropy.

I was also the proud owner of a Tasco 60mm refractor with azimuthal mounting, which offered tantalizing details from the night sky. I spent many cold hours scanning my favorite constellations, star-hopping – and dreaming of having a larger scope. At one point I bought a 6″ refractor lens grinding kit from Edmunds, the idea being that grinding your own lens was so much cheaper than having a professional do it. I spent many hours pushing the lens back and forth over the grinding glass, but lens grinding is slow work. I gave up after a while and decided it would be quicker to go to college, get a job, and pay a professional to do it after all. So now I have a 10 inch Dobsonian sitting in my garage, where it serves as my wife’s favorite parking target.

I have to mention an “object” that was a profound talisman for me, the book “Calculus: One and Several Variables” by Saturnino Salas and Einar Hill. The first edition was a big red cloth-bound book which I found absolutely delightful, both from a tactile and an intellectual standpoint. I’m pretty sure I read it from cover to cover. I loved the beautifully hand-drawn figures, the cozy typeface, and especially the intuitive but rigorous presentation. For awhile I carried this book everywhere, and it is the text from which I learned calculus. I have noticed that subsequent editions have completely lost the magic, going to the soulless modern format: computer-generated plots, gray sidebars, and Times New Roman.

I could go on… the assorted bits of schwag from the Star Trek Fan Club, the Radio Shack Science Project Kits that came packaged in a neat red and clear plastic perfboard box, my first electric guitar, the Morse code set I had in elementary school, the hefty steel-ringed glass lens I still use as a paperweight…. These all provided little impulses on the trajectory I have followed.

So, as Jubal Early said, “Well… here I am.”

Posted in Politics & Society, Science | Print | 4 Comments »

Thursday, 7 August 2008 by bbbeard.

There is new research into the Milgram hypothesis (”six degrees of separation”), which was last discussed in Compuserve SCIMATH about two years ago. This time, some folks at Microsoft investigated the connectivity of the Microsoft Messenger network. They looked at 30 billion records of messages sent among 180 million users and came up with an average (not median!) link length of 6.6. From the WaPo article:

“To me, it was pretty shocking. What we’re seeing suggests there may be a social connectivity constant for humanity,” said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who conducted the study with colleague Jure Leskovec. “People have had this suspicion that we are really close. But we are showing on a very large scale that this idea goes beyond folklore.”

Funny, this triggered a memory. From the BBC news story on Judith Kleinfeld:

Judith Kleinfeld, a professor psychology at Alaska Fairbanks University, went back to Milgram’s original research notes and found something surprising.

It turned out, she told us, that 95% of the letters sent out had failed to reach the target.

Not only did they fail to get there in six steps, they failed to get there at all.

Milgram was a giant figure in his world of research, but here was evidence that the claim he was famously associated with was not supported by his experiments.

“I was shocked. I was horrified,” she said.

Wow. Two shocked researchers. But then I recalled the other thing Milgram was famous for.

In Milgram’s first set of experiments, 65 percent (26 of 40) of experiment participants administered the experiment’s final 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment, some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating in the experiment. No participant steadfastly refused to administer shocks before the 300-volt level.

Hmm, I’m beginning to see a pattern. Perhaps the Milgram hypothesis is part of a diabolically Byzantine scheme to see how far science journalists can be pushed into torturing innocent researchers.

But seriously. To my mind there is nothing ideological about the Milgram hypothesis, although I know several folks who have gotten quite exercised in their interpretation of the meaning of the six degrees of separation. The hypothesis seems to me to be a more-or-less obvious property of percolating networks, essentially a consequence of the logarithmic nature of shortest-path length.

To bring you up to date, here is what I wrote about six-degrees in 2006:

It seems to me that one first has to proffer a specific meaning for “link between two people”. Let us suppose for the sake of argument that we settle on something like “a link is said to exist between two people if neither would be surprised to receive a communication from the other”. I suppose the sociologists or psychologists could spend a lot of time arguing about more precise meanings for “link” — but I conjecture that, except for pathological meanings of “link”, the connectedness of humanity as defined by the Milgram hypothesis and the discussion below would not vary very much.

Okay, so once we agree on what we mean by “link”, I suggest that the six in “six degrees of separation” is a median number, not a maximum. By that I mean: pick two living persons. Determine their Milgram number, that is, the minimum number of links traversed to connect them. Add that number to a list. Continue with a different pairs until all O(36E18) pairs have been examined. Order the list and find the median Milgram number. Then the Milgram hypothesis corresponds to the median Milgram number being six.

Note this allows the possibility that some persons (or small groups) could be entirely isolated from the rest of humanity. Simply enter their Milgram numbers as infinity. If the number of these “hermits” is not overwhelming, their existence won’t shift the median. For example, if there were 10,000 hermits, then there would be roughly six billion times ten thousand (6E13) pairs that give infinite entries in the list, and these comprise less than the last 0.0002% of the list. Also, there could *conceivably* be a number of people who are really hard to get to, but who have Milgram numbers less than infinity. It seems to me that having a Milgram number of, say, 100, requires that one or both ends of the chain connecting a pair of people is populated by folks who are linked to *exactly* two people — neither of whom know each other! (Hypothetically, the very ends of the chain could know just one other person). Once you connect to “normal” people who know dozens or hundreds of other people, the jig is up and the logarithmic nature of Milgram connectivity takes over.

Your mileage may vary. It seems to me that the important observation is that the Milgram number is small, something smaller in fact than the common log of the number of nodes in the network. FWIW it seems to me that people’s intuitive rebellion against the Milgram hypothesis has nothing to do with the number actually being 6. I don’t think that a person uncomfortable with 6 would be comfortable with 7. I can’t imagine what a person who thinks the Milgram number should be 100 or 1000, or greater, is thinking .

Posted in Politics & Society, Science | Print | 4 Comments »

Wednesday, 6 August 2008 by bbbeard.

SpaceX loses yet another launch vehicle.

For those of you not familiar with SpaceX, it is at the forefront of the NewSpace movement, whose advocates believe it is imperative to harness the power of private enterprise to make mankind a spacefaring species. Its colorful and brilliant founder, Elon Musk, is one of those Internet Billionaires that populate the new technology landscape these days. SpaceX has developed a new commercial launch vehicle, the Falcon I.

Unfortunately, the first two “demo” flights failed to reach orbit. This third flight was intended as a “production” flight and carried actual “paying” payloads.

I have mixed emotions about this failure. On the one hand, I agree with the motivation of the NewSpace advocates. I would like to see us become a spacefaring species. I reckon it’s the only way my great-great-grandson will get to fly one of these.

But I have spent the last twelve months helping design NASA’s new launch vehicle, the Ares I. This rocket science stuff isn’t as easy as it sounds. Staging is risky. Propellant slosh can bring you down to earth. In a sense, it’s good to know that the problems I’m working on are not simple.

Posted in Space, Science | Print | 1 Comment »

Friday, 1 August 2008 by bbbeard.

And maybe this time, there is a valid point to be made.

Wired Magazine’s cover story last month parleyed the “Petabyte Age” into an argument that the scientific method itself is undergoing a revolution. The thrust of the argument is that extreme computation and extreme data have changed the nature of investigation, driving scientists to abandon their paradigm. Chris Anderson writes:

Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation, that no conclusions should be drawn simply on the basis of correlation between X and Y (it could just be a coincidence). Instead, you must understand the underlying mechanisms that connect the two. Once you have a model, you can connect the data sets with confidence. Data without a model is just noise.

But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete.

As a computational physicist, I have some sympathy with this argument. In my doctoral thesis I argued that computation is a “third discipline”. neither experimental nor theoretical, and with a quality and rigor — and limitations — all its own. Indeed, one of my proudest accomplishments from that era was a paper that reconciled moderate-temperature experimental data with the predictions of low-temperature chiral perturbation theory. The zone connecting these two disparate regimes was largely inaccessible to experimenters and theoreticians alike, but clever algorithmists like my collaborators could accomplish this reconciliation.

But Wired is talking about a different phenomenon. In essence they are lining up to escort the theoreticians and experimentalists off the stage. In my heart I cannot endorse this trend as a good thing. Personally, I would be lost without the framework of theory to explain observations of computational or experimental origin. “No theory should be believed until it has been confirmed by experiment” is the creed of the experimentalists — and conversely, “No experiment should be believed until it is confirmed by theory”. An example of the latter is Rutherford’s classic scattering experiment with alpha particles and gold foil. Without a fit to his theoretical calculation of scattering cross section, his experiment would have been a mild curiosity. But because it conclusively showed the concentration of atomic mass in the nucleus, it revolutionized our view of matter.

Conversely, I see in some of my colleagues that a sincere and debilitating ignorance of theory is costly and dangerous. A recent example is the hunting for resonant instability phenomena in fluids (e.g. Faraday waves) using computational fluid dynamics. Without theory to guide the search, extreme computation is extremely wasteful, since there are sizable regions of the spectrum (especially at low frequencies) without resonances, and a random search is unlikely to turn up these instabilities. An unguided search that is less than exhaustive is more likely than not to guide one to the wrong conclusion.

But at the same time, the time’s they are a-changin’. A whole new generation of investigators is coming of age with Google, and supercomputers on the desktop. So am I headed for the Recycle Bin of history — just as my forebears, who finally had to admit that real calculation could be accomplished without the aid of a tab sheet, and that real documents could be prepared without a pencil and yellow pad?

Posted in Science | Print | 2 Comments »

Sunday, 27 July 2008 by CVM.

I am somewhat bemused by the alignment of political affiliation with opinion about global warming, an ostensibly scientific question. Obviously Republicans are much more likely to question the scientific consensus about global warming and its causes than are Democrats. Why is that? (I should think that drumming up the occasional dissenter on global warming is hardly more convincing than drumming up the occasional Duesberg on AIDS). Of course Republicans are much more likely to question the scientific consensus on evolution than are Democrats, and that is clearly because Republicans are (much) more likely to be fundamental Christians. Unlike the typical blogger (the Detailed Balancer excluded, of course) or talk radio host, respectable folks do not indulge in ad hominem arguments, so just because Republicans are more likely to believe in evolution (which, let us grant, is a benighted position) does not mean Republicans are wrong, nor Democrats right, about everything, or even about global warming. Still, why the remarkable alignment?

My guess is that Republicans have a sense that academics, including scientists, are generally Democratic and have liberal leanings. This is actually correct. There is an interesting positive correlation between education and affiliation with the Democratic party, a correlation that holds even in the sciences, so it is not because of brain-washing by the post-modern lit-crit crowd. Still, this can hardly lead one to assume that all scientific (educated, Left/East Coast pointy-heady professor elite) consensus is driven by a liberal agenda. For example, there is a scientific consensus about dietary trans fat that has led California and New York City to ban trans fats in restaurants (in both cases, the ban was spearheaded by [moderate] Republicans). This is an area I know something about, and I am highly skeptical about the consensus, don’t even get me started about the laws (I’m against them). Why aren’t the Republicans pro-trans and the Democrats anti-? On the other hand, the scientific consensus on aging research has been challenged by many crackpots, including Aubrey de Grey, and (having some expertise in this area as well) I have had no compunction in deflating these anti-establishment positions. Why don’t the Republicans rail against the liberal gerontologists?

Finally, I should say that though I am willing to provisionally accept the scientific consensus about global warming, and therefore I reject the implicit position of the Detailed Balancer (and, I gather, the Republican consensus), my personal position is: bring it on. Global warming is indeed hardly more than an inconvenient truth. Of far greater threat to civilization is the long-overdue ice age. A somewhat secondary threat, but far greater than global warming, is the depletion of fossil fuels. Both threats will be delayed by global warming (the latter because global warming will increase energy available for, .e.g., wind and hydroelectric).

Posted in Politics & Society, Science, General | Print | 13 Comments »

Saturday, 19 July 2008 by bbbeard.

A post by an editor of the American Physical Society has triggered a round of denials and repercussions.

The inflammatory sentences were

There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO₂ emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution. Since the correctness or fallacy of that conclusion has immense implications for public policy and for the future of the biosphere, we thought it appropriate to present a debate within the pages of P&S concerning that conclusion.

This was reported in the Daily Tech, among other sites.

Apparently this was too much for the American Physical Society, which issued a denial of the denial. They cited the APS National Policy statement adopted only last November.

Sorry, no permalink of the denial at the APS site, but here is the statement:

APS Position Remains Unchanged

The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007:

“Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate.”

An article at odds with this statement recently appeared in an online newsletter of the APS Forum on Physics and Society, one of 39 units of APS.  The header of this newsletter carries the statement that “Opinions expressed are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the APS or of the Forum.”  This newsletter is not a journal of the APS and it is not peer reviewed.

In the meantime, the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, author of a global-warming-critical report published on the APS P&S site, notes that his work has been red-tagged. Minus headers, I quote nearly the entirety of his letter to the APS (thank you, Jonah Goldberg):

The editors of Physics and Society, a newsletter of the American
Physical Society, invited me to submit a paper for their July 2008
edition explaining why I considered that the warming that might be
expected from anthropogenic enrichment of the atmosphere with carbon
dioxide might be significantly less than the IPCC imagines.

I very much appreciated this courteous offer, and submitted a paper. The
commissioning editor referred it to his colleague, who subjected it to a
thorough and competent scientific review. I was delighted to accede to
all of the reviewer’s requests for revision (see the attached
reconciliation sheet). Most revisions were intended to clarify for
physicists who were not climatologists the method by which the IPCC
evaluates climate sensitivity - a method which the IPCC does not itself
clearly or fully explain. The paper was duly published, immediately
after a paper by other authors setting out the IPCC’s viewpoint. Some
days later, however, without my knowledge or consent, the following
appeared, in red, above the text of my paper as published on the website
of Physics and Society:

“The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its
conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the
world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society
disagrees with this article’s conclusions.”

This seems discourteous. I had been invited to submit the paper; I had
submitted it; an eminent Professor of Physics had then scientifically
reviewed it in meticulous detail; I had revised it at all points
requested, and in the manner requested; the editors had accepted and
published the reviewed and revised draft (some 3000 words longer than
the original) and I had expended considerable labor, without having been
offered or having requested any honorarium.

The punchline is lovingly crafted and scalding in its implication:

Please either remove the offending red-flag text at once or let me have
the name and qualifications of the member of the Council or advisor to
it who considered my paper before the Council ordered the offending text
to be posted above my paper; a copy of this rapporteur’s findings and
ratio decidendi; the date of the Council meeting at which the findings
were presented; a copy of the minutes of the discussion; and a copy of
the text of the Council’s decision, together with the names of those
present at the meeting. If the Council has not scientifically evaluated
or formally considered my paper, may I ask with what credible scientific
justification, and on whose authority, the offending text asserts primo,
that the paper had not been scientifically reviewed when it had;
secundo, that its conclusions disagree with what is said (on no
evidence) to be the “overwhelming opinion of the world scientific
community”; and, tertio, that “The Council of the American Physical
Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions”? Which of my
conclusions does the Council disagree with, and on what scientific
grounds (if any)?

Having regard to the circumstances, surely the Council owes me an
apology?

Now, I have occasionally been a member of the APS, but am not currently, since my interests have drifted away from nuclear physics and toward rocket science. I missed the news that the Council had endorsed the IPCC position. My personal opinion is that the case on anthropogenic climate change is not closed, that the much-touted consensus is fragile at best, and that much of the science is hastily publicized and of sub-standard quality. On the other hand, the rise in CO2 concentration is real, it is anthropogenic, and the risks of deliberate ignorance are substantial, even if the optimum course turns out to be patience and research. If you need a label, I am a skeptic, not a denier.

In short, this is not the same situation that we face with creationists and evolution. Monckton’s argument is clearly a scientific one and should not be cast aside in favor of an artificial and ill-conceived political consensus.

(h/t Jon Woolf and Rand Simberg)

Posted in Politics & Society, Science | Print | 1 Comment »

Wednesday, 2 July 2008 by bbbeard.

Yesterday was the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.

It is a hallmark of the culture in which we live that this particular scientific theory so offends the majority.

Darwin’s theory of evolution through variation and natural selection has been controversial among some religious groups since its introduction. To some, it represents a mortal challenge to a literal reading of Genesis — but then, so does the standard cosmology of modern physics, the theory of plate tectonics, and indeed much of the unified structure of modern science. A more serious threat is that, by fully integrating homo sapiens with the rest of the living world, it could be interpreted as undermining any worldview that gives special precedence to humanity.

I am not a subject matter expert when it comes to evolutionary biology. However, I am a scientist. The defective products that emerge from places like the Institute for Creation Research and the Discovery Institute bears so little resemblance to actual science that I find it baffling that any schooled person could be fooled. Conversely, I have read On the Origin of Species and found it awe-inspiring.

But for me, the crux is the method.  The scientific method has proven its effectiveness countless times. It is not a democratic method. It is one where reason and evidence prevail over tradition and faith. Conversely, the legalistic and political strategies pursued by the creationist camp are obscurantist and sterile.

The scientific method is naturalistic. It is inconceivable that a Physical Review Letter will ever conclude “God is Responsible for Superconductivity in Laminar Cuprates”. To creationists, this appears to be a “chink in the armor”, their reasoning being that if science assumes there is no deity, then science’s reasoning about the non-existence of deities is circular. Some scientists try to compromise, and say that the hypothesis of the existence of God is testable. Good luck getting that past peer review. I am perfectly comfortable accepting that science has literally no contribution to the discussion of the supernatural, other than to provide explanations for phenomena that otherwise might tempt us to resort to superstition and religion. If there are supernatural phenomena that require explanation, I’m happy to let the shamans deal with it.

Steven Jay Gould popularized the notion that science and religion are “non-overlapping magisteria“,  a view he dubbed NOMA. I can’t quite purchase this epistemology. Science has inarguably invaded mindspace once occupied by priests and shamans, and seems poised to continue to do so. I think science will continue to generate new knowledge at an exponentially growing rate, but that it will be a long, long time before it can adequately address the questions of human individual and social behavior that are the bastion and bailiwick of religion, tradition, and superstition. We have only recently become equipped to explain the composition and interactions of atomic nuclei. Biology has only in the last generation become organized enough to support mathematical analysis. But even the idea that the practice of medicine should be based on evidence, and not anecdote, does not have universal support. And social sciences are struggling for legitimacy and a place of respect in the scientific community. I doubt this will come in my lifetime.

So, to all the creationists out there, I’m really not interested in your speculations on why God designed the eye so that we become presbyopic, or your criticisms of Darwin’s understanding of the mechanism of heritability. Your sin is the undermining of the method, and until you stop trying to legislate your results and start learning how to do real science, no one is going to take you seriously.

[h/t Rand Simberg]

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