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David Warren

David Warren

  posted on Sunday, May 04, 2008
Bio/Email | David Warren Archives | Printer-Friendly Version

Scientists try to speak with authority, but real authority resides elsewhere

For at least the next decade, the most august scientific authorities are now saying, global average temperatures will not increase. My first instinct, had I any free money to blow, is to bet that they will rise: less from a betting impulse than from greed, for I’ve noticed that a lot of money has been made betting against the consensus of the authorities in my lifetime, and a lot lost on assuming it was sound.

I might hesitate, however, in this instance, for from the little I know about world climate—enough to dismiss global warming alarmists, but not enough to make my own confident predictions—a cooling trend is more likely than a warming one, in the near future, for two big reasons. First, Earth weather seems to track space weather, and the solar magnetic activity cycle seems to be entering relaxation mode.

Second, we have, as everybody agrees, regardless of their views on greenhouse warming, just passed through a decades-long phase of slightly rising global temperatures, which followed a few decades of slightly falling temperatures. The rise ended about 1998, a record warm year. We’re at the top of the roller coaster now. Experience should tell us: hang on for the plunge.

Another analogy might be to trends in breathing. It would not follow that my reader will never inhale again, from the fact that he is exhaling now.

The news, for what it’s worth, comes from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, in Kiel, Germany, prominently played in the international science journal Nature. The authors of the study applied existing knowledge of oscillations in ocean temperatures, especially in the North Atlantic, to computer models of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that show consistent upward trends. This had not been done before, and when it was, the IPCC’s predicted 0.3°C rise in global atmospheric temperatures over the next decade was cancelled out.

Cautions within cautions: the Leibniz Institute is also dealing in computer models, which, in their nature, cannot even reliably predict the weather in Ottawa next weekend. Close readers of the news would discover that IPCC’s “grand central” model did not even consider such major known climatological factors as Gulf Stream pressures and the El Niño cycle.

In turn, the Leibniz Institute’s modelling necessarily focuses on the North Atlantic, because that’s what we have information on. Vast tracts of the Pacific, Indian and southern oceans have not yet been seeded with networks of instrumental buoys, and most of these read only the surface. For all practical purposes, the influence on climate of seas covering well over half the world’s surface are “mare incognita.”

Conversely, information about human contributions to the world’s climate is only too plentiful, thanks to the global craze for gathering economic statistics. We have every reason to believe it is quite small, yet the mere availability of mountains of data about it confers a systemic bias on any computer modelling, as on any other kind of statistical analysis. You go with the numbers you have, and draw very big conclusions from very narrow assumptions.

This is a routine flaw in all modern scientific thinking, which scientists themselves are loath to consider, just as we all are loath to consider facts of life that must tend to make us very, very humble. To be charitable to the scientists who take the pay of the IPCC—though only for the briefest moment—myopia is a universal human condition. We all imagine that what we know is intrinsically more significant than what we don’t yet know, or even cannot know.

This is why the empirical outlook of science needs balancing against the philosophical outlook, which demands context, and seeks breadth. It is incidentally also why the greater advances in scientific understanding are often made by rank amateurs—people like Einstein working in places like Swiss patent offices, who can see the forest in spite of all the trees.

It is also why such a disproportionate number of the greatest theoretical advances have been made by religious “nutjobs” (in the current parlance)—from the evangelical Newton, to the Catholic fundamentalist Galileo, to monks such as Copernicus, Mendel and Lemaître—people chilled out by disposition, with a grand view of nature and her infinitely distant, but transubstantially present, God. Without such vision, we all tend to become easily panicked data crunchers.

I was struck this week by another science story, also in Nature magazine. The techies at Hewlett-Packard have successfully fabricated “memristors,” a fourth building block for electronic circuits (after capacitors, resistors, and inductors). The achievement promises significant advances in computer memory and processing.

The possibility of memristors was first established by Leon Chua, a professor at Berkeley, in 1971. He said this week, “I’m thrilled because it’s almost like vindication. Something I did is not just in my imagination, it’s fundamental.”

I love the implicit faith and humility in that statement. The man is thrilled because he didn’t really invent anything after all, merely discovered (“dis-covered”) something already there, in nature or “the mind of God.”

And that is where authority comes from. Not from “scientists.”

Nice line, eh

...

David Warren is a columnist for the Ottawa Citizen.  Visit his web site at davidwarrenonline.com.


Posted on 05/04/08 at 07:54 AM
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