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Monday, January 6, 2014

Science Is Not Your Enemy An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians by Steven Pinker


The great thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment were scientists. Not only did many of them contribute to mathematics, physics, and physiology, but all of them were avid theorists in the sciences of human nature. They were cognitive neuroscientists, who tried to explain thought and emotion in terms of physical mechanisms of the nervous system. They were evolutionary psychologists, who speculated on life in a state of nature and on animal instincts that are “infused into our bosoms.” And they were social psychologists, who wrote of the moral sentiments that draw us together, the selfish passions that inflame us, and the foibles of shortsightedness that frustrate our best-laid plans.
 
These thinkers—Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Leibniz, Kant, Smith—are all the more remarkable for having crafted their ideas in the absence of formal theory and empirical data.
The mathematical theories of information, computation, and games had yet to be invented. The words “neuron,” “hormone,” and “gene” meant nothing to them. When reading these thinkers, I often long to travel back in time and offer them some bit of twenty-first-century freshman science that would fill a gap in their arguments or guide them around a stumbling block. What would these Fausts have given for such knowledge? What could they have done with it?
 
We don’t have to fantasize about this scenario, because we are living it. We have the works of the great thinkers and their heirs, and we have scientific knowledge they could not have dreamed of. This is an extraordinary time for the understanding of the human condition. Intellectual problems from antiquity are being illuminated by insights from the sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution.
Powerful tools have been developed to explore them, from genetically engineered neurons that can be controlled with pinpoints of light to the mining of “big data” as a means of understanding how ideas propagate.
 
One would think that writers in the humanities would be delighted and energized by the efflorescence of new ideas from the sciences. But one would be wrong. Though everyone endorses science when it can cure disease, monitor the environment, or bash political opponents, the intrusion of science into the territories of the humanities has been deeply resented. Just as reviled is the application of scientific reasoning to religion; many writers without a trace of a belief in God maintain that there is something unseemly about scientists weighing in on the biggest questions. In the major journals of opinion, scientific carpetbaggers are regularly accused of determinism, reductionism, essentialism, positivism, and worst of all, something called “scientism.” The past couple years have seen four denunciations of scientism in this magazine alone, together with attacks in Bookforum, The Claremont Review of Books, The Huffington Post, The Nation, National Review OnlineThe New Atlantis, The New York Times, and Standpoint.
 
The eclectic politics of these publications reflects the bipartisan nature of the resentment. This passage, from a 2011 review in The Nation of three books by Sam Harris by the historian Jackson Lears, makes the standard case for the prosecution by the left:
Positivist assumptions provided the epistemological foundations for Social Darwinism and pop-evolutionary notions of progress, as well as for scientific racism and imperialism. These tendencies coalesced in eugenics, the doctrine that human well-being could be improved and eventually perfected through the selective breeding of the "fit" and the sterilization or elimination of the "unfit." ... Every schoolkid knows about what happened next: the catastrophic twentieth century. Two world wars, the systematic slaughter of innocents on an unprecedented scale, the proliferation of unimaginable destructive weapons, brushfire wars on the periphery of empire—all these events involved, in various degrees, the application of sceintific research to advanced technology. 
The case from the right, captured in this 2007 speech from Leon Kass, George W. Bush’s bioethics adviser, is just as measured:
Scientific ideas and discoveries about living nature and man, perfectly welcome and harmless in themselves, are being enlisted to do battle against our traditional religious and moral teachings, and even our self-understanding as creatures with freedom and dignity. A quasi-religious faith has sprung up among us—let me call it "soul-less scientism"—which believes that our new biology, eliminating all mystery, can give a complete account of human life, giving purely scientific explanations of human thought, love, creativity, moral judgment, and even why we believe in God. ... Make no mistake. The stakes in this contest are high: at issue are the moral and spiritual health of our nation, the continued vitality of science, and our own self-understanding as human beings and as children of the West. 
These are zealous prosecutors indeed. But their cases are weak. The mindset of science cannot be blamed for genocide and war and does not threaten the moral and spiritual health of our nation. It is, rather, indispensable in all areas of human concern, including politics, the arts, and the search for meaning, purpose, and morality.
 
The term “scientism” is anything but clear, more of a boo-word than a label for any coherent doctrine. Sometimes it is equated with lunatic positions, such as that “science is all that matters” or that “scientists should be entrusted to solve all problems.” Sometimes it is clarified with adjectives like “simplistic,” “naïve,” and “vulgar.” The definitional vacuum allows me to replicate gay activists’ flaunting of “queer” and appropriate the pejorative for a position I am prepared to defend.
 
Scientism, in this good sense, is not the belief that members of the occupational guild called “science” are particularly wise or noble. On the contrary, the defining practices of science, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, are explicitly designed to circumvent the errors and sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable. Scientism does not mean that all current scientific hypotheses are true; most new ones are not, since the cycle of conjecture and refutation is the lifeblood of science. It is not an imperialistic drive to occupy the humanities; the promise of science is to enrich and diversify the intellectual tools of humanistic scholarship, not to obliterate them. And it is not the dogma that physical stuff is the only thing that exists. Scientists themselves are immersed in the ethereal medium of information, including the truths of mathematics, the logic of their theories, and the values that guide their enterprise. In this conception, science is of a piece with philosophy, reason, and Enlightenment humanism. It is distinguished by an explicit commitment to two ideals, and it is these that scientism seeks to export to the rest of intellectual life.

The Linder Gallery, c.1622-1629, Cordover Collection, LLC
 
The first is that the world is intelligible. The phenomena we experience may be explained by principles that are more general than the phenomena themselves. These principles may in turn be explained by more fundamental principles, and so on. In making sense of our world, there should be few occasions in which we are forced to concede “It just is” or “It’s magic” or “Because I said so.”
The commitment to intelligibility is not a matter of brute faith, but gradually validates itself as more and more of the world becomes explicable in scientific terms. The processes of life, for example, used to be attributed to a mysterious élan vital; now we know they are powered by chemical and physical reactions among complex molecules.
 
Demonizers of scientism often confuse intelligibility with a sin called reductionism. But to explain a complex happening in terms of deeper principles is not to discard its richness. No sane thinker would try to explain World War I in the language of physics, chemistry, and biology as opposed to the more perspicuous language of the perceptions and goals of leaders in 1914 Europe. At the same time, a curious person can legitimately ask why human minds are apt to have such perceptions and goals, including the tribalism, overconfidence, and sense of honor that fell into a deadly combination at that historical moment.
Many of our cultural institutions cultivate a philistine indifference to science.
 
The second ideal is that the acquisition of knowledge is hard. The world does not go out of its way to reveal its workings, and even if it did, our minds are prone to illusions, fallacies, and super- stitions. Most of the traditional causes of belief—faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, conventional wisdom, the invigorating glow of subjective certainty—are generators of error and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge. To understand the world, we must cultivate work-arounds for our cognitive limitations, including skepticism, open debate, formal precision, and empirical tests, often requiring feats of ingenuity. Any movement that calls itself “scientific” but fails to nurture opportunities for the falsification of its own beliefs (most obviously when it murders or imprisons the people who disagree with it) is not a scientific movement.
 
In which ways, then, does science illuminate human affairs? Let me start with the most ambitious: the deepest questions about who we are, where we came from, and how we define the meaning and purpose of our lives. This is the traditional territory of religion, and its defenders tend to be the most excitable critics of scientism. They are apt to endorse the partition plan proposed by Stephen Jay
Gould in his worst book, Rocks of Ages, according to which the proper concerns of science and religion belong to “non-overlapping magisteria.” Science gets the empirical universe; religion gets the questions of moral meaning and value.
 
Unfortunately, this entente unravels as soon as you begin to examine it. The moral worldview of any scientifically literate person—one who is not blinkered by fundamentalism—requires a radical break from religious conceptions of meaning and value.
 
To begin with, the findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the origins of life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken. We know, but our ancestors did not, that humans belong to a single species of African primate that developed agriculture, government, and writing late in its history. We know that our species is a tiny twig of a genealogical tree that embraces all living things and that emerged from prebiotic chemicals almost four billion years ago. We know that we live on a planet that revolves around one of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, which is one of a hundred billion galaxies in a 13.8-billion-year-old universe, possibly one of a vast number of universes. We know that our intuitions about space, time, matter, and causation are incommensurable with the nature of reality on scales that are very large and very small. We know that the laws governing the physical world (including accidents, disease, and other misfortunes) have no goals that pertain to human well-being.
There is no such thing as fate, providence, karma, spells, curses, augury, divine retribution, or answered prayers—though the discrepancy between the laws of probability and the workings of cognition may explain why people believe there are. And we know that we did not always know these things, that the beloved convictions of every time and culture may be decisively falsified, doubtless including some we hold today.
 
In other words, the worldview that guides the moral and spiritual values of an educated person today is the worldview given to us by science. Though the scientific facts do not by themselves dictate values, they certainly hem in the possibilities. By stripping ecclesiastical authority of its credibility on factual matters, they cast doubt on its claims to certitude in matters of morality. The scientific refutation of the theory of vengeful gods and occult forces undermines practices such as human sacrifice, witch hunts, faith healing, trial by ordeal, and the persecution of heretics. The facts of science, by exposing the absence of purpose in the laws governing the universe, force us to take responsibility for the welfare of ourselves, our species, and our planet. For the same reason, they undercut any moral or political system based on mystical forces, quests, destinies, dialectics, struggles, or messianic ages. And in combination with a few unexceptionable convictions— that all of us value our own welfare and that we are social beings who impinge on each other and can negotiate codes of conduct—the scientific facts militate toward a defensible morality, namely adhering to principles that maximize the flourishing of humans and other sentient beings. This humanism, which is inextricable from a scientific understanding of the world, is becoming the de facto morality of modern democracies, international organizations, and liberalizing religions, and its unfulfilled promises define the moral imperatives we face today.
 
Moreover, science has contributed—directly and enormously—to the fulfillment of these values. If one were to list the proudest accomplishments of our species (setting aside the removal of obstacles we set in our own path, such as the abolition of slavery and the defeat of fascism), many would be gifts bestowed by science.
 
The most obvious is the exhilarating achievement of scientific knowledge itself. We can say much about the history of the universe, the forces that make it tick, the stuff we’re made of, the origin of living things, and the machinery of life, including our own mental life. Better still, this understanding consists not in a mere listing of facts, but in deep and elegant principles, like the insight that life depends on a molecule that carries information, directs metabolism, and replicates itself.
 
Science has also provided the world with images of sublime beauty: stroboscopically frozen motion, exotic organisms, distant galaxies and outer planets, fluorescing neural circuitry, and a luminous planet Earth rising above the moon’s horizon into the blackness of space. Like great works of art, these are not just pretty pictures but prods to contemplation, which deepen our understanding of what it means to be human and of our place in nature.
 
And contrary to the widespread canard that technology has created a dystopia of deprivation and violence, every global measure of human flourishing is on the rise. The numbers show that after millennia of near-universal poverty, a steadily growing proportion of humanity is surviving the first year of life, going to school, voting in democracies, living in peace, communicating on cell phones, enjoying small luxuries, and surviving to old age. The Green Revolution in agronomy alone saved a billion people from starvation. And if you want examples of true moral greatness, go to Wikipedia and look up the entries for “smallpox” and “rinderpest” (cattle plague). The definitions are in the past tense, indicating that human ingenuity has eradicated two of the cruelest causes of suffering in the history of our kind. 
 
Though science is beneficially embedded in our material, moral, and intellectual lives, many of our cultural institutions, including the liberal arts programs of many universities, cultivate a philistine indifference to science that shades into contempt. Students can graduate from elite colleges with a trifling exposure to science. They are commonly misinformed that scientists no longer care about truth but merely chase the fashions of shifting paradigms. A demonization campaign anachronistically impugns science for crimes that are as old as civilization, including racism, slavery, conquest, and genocide.
 
Just as common, and as historically illiterate, is the blaming of science for political movements with a pseudoscientific patina, particularly Social Darwinism and eugenics. Social Darwinism was the misnamed laissez-faire philosophy of Herbert Spencer. It was inspired not by Darwin’s theory of natural selection, but by Spencer’s Victorian-era conception of a mysterious natural force for progress, which was best left unimpeded. Today the term is often used to smear any application of evolution to the understanding of human beings. Eugenics was the campaign, popular among leftists and progressives in the early decades of the twentieth century, for the ultimate form of social progress, improving the genetic stock of humanity. Today the term is commonly used to assail behavioral genetics, the study of the genetic contributions to individual differences.
 
I can testify that this recrimination is not a relic of the 1990s science wars. When Harvard reformed its general education requirement in 2006 to 2007, the preliminary task force report introduced the teaching of science without any mention of its place in human knowledge: “Science and technology directly affect our students in many ways, both positive and negative: they have led to life-saving medicines, the internet, more efficient energy storage, and digital entertainment; they also have shepherded nuclear weapons, biological warfare agents, electronic eavesdropping, and damage to the environment.” This strange equivocation between the utilitarian and the nefarious was not applied to other disciplines. (Just imagine motivating the study of classical music by noting that it both generates economic activity and inspired the Nazis.) And there was no acknowledgment that we might have good reasons to prefer science and know-how over ignorance and superstition.
 
At a 2011 conference, another colleague summed up what she thought was the mixed legacy of science: the eradication of smallpox on the one hand; the Tuskegee syphilis study on the other. (In that study, another bloody shirt in the standard narrative about the evils of science, public-health researchers beginning in 1932 tracked the progression of untreated, latent syphilis in a sample of impoverished African Americans.) The comparison is obtuse. It assumes that the study was the unavoidable dark side of scientific progress as opposed to a universally deplored breach, and it compares a one-time failure to prevent harm to a few dozen people with the prevention of hundreds of millions of deaths per century, in perpetuity.
 
A major goad for the recent denunciations of scientism has been the application of neuroscience, evolution, and genetics to human affairs. Certainly many of these applications are glib or wrong, and they are fair game for criticism: scanning the brains of voters as they look at politicians’ faces, attributing war to a gene for aggression, explaining religion as an evolutionary adaptation to bond the group. Yet it’s not unheard of for intellectuals who are innocent of science to advance ideas that are glib or wrong, and no one is calling for humanities scholars to go back to their carrels and stay out of discussions of things that matter. It is a mistake to use a few wrongheaded examples as an excuse to quarantine the sciences of human nature from our attempt to understand the human condition.
To simplify is not to be simplistic. 
 
Take our understanding of politics. “What is government itself,” asked James Madison, “but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” The new sciences of the mind are reexamining the connections between politics and human nature, which were avidly discussed in Madison’s time but submerged during a long interlude in which humans were assumed to be blank slates or rational actors. Humans, we are increasingly appreciating, are moralistic actors, guided by norms and taboos about authority, tribe, and purity, and driven by conflicting inclinations toward revenge and reconciliation. These impulses ordinarily operate beneath our conscious awareness, but in some circumstances they can be turned around by reason and debate. We are starting to grasp why these moralistic impulses evolved; how they are implemented in the brain; how they differ among individuals, cultures, and sub- cultures; and which conditions turn them on and off.
 
The application of science to politics not only enriches our stock of ideas, but also offers the means to ascertain which of them are likely to be correct. Political debates have traditionally been deliberated through case studies, rhetoric, and what software engineers call HiPPO (highest-paid person’s opinion). Not surprisingly, the controversies have careened without resolution. Do democracies fight each other? What about trading partners? Do neighboring ethnic groups inevitably play out ancient hatreds in bloody conflict? Do peacekeeping forces really keep the peace? Do terrorist organizations get what they want? How about Gandhian nonviolent movements? Are post-conflict reconciliation rituals effective at preventing the renewal of conflict?
 
History nerds can adduce examples that support either answer, but that does not mean the questions are irresolvable. Political events are buffeted by many forces, so it’s possible that a given force is potent in general but submerged in a particular instance. With the advent of data science—the analysis of large, open-access data sets of numbers or text—signals can be extracted from the noise and debates in history and political science resolved more objectively. As best we can tell at present, the answers to the questions listed above are (on average, and all things being equal) no, no, no, yes, no, yes, and yes.
 
The humanities are the domain in which the intrusion of science has produced the strongest recoil. Yet it is just that domain that would seem to be most in need of an infusion of new ideas. By most accounts, the humanities are in trouble. University programs are downsizing, the next generation of scholars is un- or underemployed, morale is sinking, students are staying away in droves. No thinking person should be indifferent to our society’s disinvestment from the humanities, which are indispensable to a civilized democracy.
 
Diagnoses of the malaise of the humanities rightly point to anti-intellectual trends in our culture and to the commercialization of our universities. But an honest appraisal would have to acknowledge that some of the damage is self-inflicted. The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness. And they have failed to define a progressive agenda. Several university presidents and provosts have lamented to me that when a scientist comes into their office, it’s to announce some exciting new research opportunity and demand the resources to pursue it. When a humanities scholar drops by, it’s to plead for respect for the way things have always been done.
 
Those ways do deserve respect, and there can be no replacement for the varieties of close reading, thick description, and deep immersion that erudite scholars can apply to individual works. But must these be the only paths to understanding? A consilience with science offers the humanities countless possibilities for innovation in understanding. Art, culture, and society are products of human brains.
They originate in our faculties of perception, thought, and emotion, and they cumulate and spread through the epidemiological dynamics by which one person affects others. Shouldn’t we be curious to understand these connections? Both sides would win. The humanities would enjoy more of the explanatory depth of the sciences, to say nothing of the kind of a progressive agenda that appeals to deans and donors. The sciences could challenge their theories with the natural experiments and ecologically valid phenomena that have been so richly characterized by humanists.
 
In some disciplines, this consilience is a fait accompli. Archeology has grown from a branch of art history to a high-tech science. Linguistics and the philosophy of mind shade into cognitive science and neuroscience.
 
Similar opportunities are there for the exploring. The visual arts could avail themselves of the explosion of knowledge in vision science, including the perception of color, shape, texture, and lighting, and the evolutionary aesthetics of faces and landscapes. Music scholars have much to discuss with the scientists who study the perception of speech and the brain’s analysis of the auditory world.
 
As for literary scholarship, where to begin? John Dryden wrote that a work of fiction is “a just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind.” Linguistics can illuminate the resources of grammar and discourse that allow authors to manipulate a reader’s imaginary experience. Cognitive psychology can provide insight about readers’ ability to reconcile their own consciousness with those of the author and characters. Behavioral genetics can update folk theories of parental influence with discoveries about the effects of genes, peers, and chance, which have profound implications for the interpretation of biography and memoir—an endeavor that also has much to learn from the cognitive psychology of memory and the social psychology of self-presentation. Evolutionary psychologists can distinguish the obsessions that are universal from those that are exaggerated by a particular culture and can lay out the inherent conflicts and confluences of interest within families, couples, friendships, and rivalries that are the drivers of plot.
And as with politics, the advent of data science applied to books, periodicals, correspondence, and musical scores holds the promise for an expansive new “digital humanities.” The possibilities for theory and discovery are limited only by the imagination and include the origin and spread of ideas, networks of intellectual and artistic influence, the persistence of historical memory, the waxing and waning of themes in literature, and patterns of unofficial censorship and taboo.
 
Nonetheless, many humanities scholars have reacted to these opportunities like the protagonist of the grammar-book example of the volitional future tense: “I will drown; no one shall save me.” Noting that these analyses flatten the richness of individual works, they reach for the usual adjectives: simplistic, reductionist, naïve, vulgar, and of course, scientistic.
 
The complaint about simplification is misbegotten. To explain something is to subsume it under more general principles, which always entails a degree of simplification. Yet to simplify is not to be simplistic. An appreciation of the particulars of a work can co-exist with explanations at many other levels, from the personality of an author to the cultural milieu, the faculties of human nature, and the laws governing social beings. The rejection of a search for general trends and principles calls to mind Jorge Luis Borges’s fictitious empire in which “the Cartographers Guild drew a map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it. The following Generations ... saw the vast Map to be Useless and permitted it to decay and fray under the Sun and winters.”
And the critics should be careful with the adjectives. If anything is naïve and simplistic, it is the conviction that the legacy silos of academia should be fortified and that we should be forever content with current ways of making sense of the world. Surely our conceptions of politics, culture, and morality have much to learn from our best understanding of the physical universe and of our makeup as a species.

Gaseous planet with same mass as Earth is discovered by scientists

KOI-314c, 200 light years away, is 60% larger than Earth, with a thick gaseous atmosphere, orbiting a red dwarf star
Gaseous planet discovered
 
Artist's impression from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics of KOI-314c in orbit around its star Photograph: C. Pulliam & D. Aguilar (CfA)/PA

Earth's gassy 'twin' has been discovered in another solar system 200 light years away.
The planet, known as KOI-314c, weighs the same as Earth but is 60% larger, leading scientists to suspect it has a thick gaseous atmosphere.

It orbits a dim red dwarf star at such a close distance that temperatures on its surface could be as high as 104C – too hot for most forms of life on Earth.

KOI-314C is only 30% more dense than water. This suggests that the world is enveloped by a blanket of hydrogen and helium hundreds of miles thick.

Scientists believe it may have started life as a mini-Neptune before some of its atmospheric gases were blasted away by intense radiation from the parent star.

Lead astronomer Dr David Kipping, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in the US, said: "This planet might have the same mass as Earth, but it is certainly not Earth-like.

"It proves that there is no clear dividing line between rocky worlds like Earth and fluffier planets like water worlds or gas giants."

The findings were presented at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington DC.

To weigh KOI-314c, the scientists used a new technique called transit timing variations (TTV), which only works when more than one planet orbits a star.

The two planets tug on each other, slightly altering the time they take to cross or "transit" the star's face. Analysing the way the planetary wobbles affect light coming from the star makes it possible to calculate their mass.

KOI-314c's companion world is similar to it in size but weighs four times more than Earth.

The new discovery was made by chance as scientists scoured data from the Kepler space telescope looking for evidence of moons rather than planets.

"When we noticed this planet showed transit timing variations, the signature was clearly due to the other planet in the system and not a moon," said Kipping.

"At first we were disappointed it wasn't a moon, but then we soon realised it was an extraordinary measurement."

What energy problem? Doom-and-gloom activists have missed the real solution: tech innovation.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
andrew saeger for the boston globe
 

Doom-and-gloom activists have missed the real solution: tech innovation

By John E. Sununu

Whoever coined the phrase “everyone loves a good mystery” was wrong. What people really love is a good mystery story, with an exciting plot and — more important — a tidy resolution where everything becomes clear. It’s a formula that Edgar Allan Poe invented, Arthur Conan Doyle perfected, and Agatha Christie employed to make millions. By comparison, a mystery without resolution can be frustrating. And a mystery whose conclusion contradicts the spirit of the narrative can be downright annoying.
 
That’s the problem with the tale of electricity in the United States. Consumption is falling, no one saw this coming, and it contradicts the gloom-and-doom narrative that so many environmental activists use to raise money. As a result, it’s barely getting any attention. When the Associated Press published a year-end story on the dramatic trend, it appeared in this newspaper on page B6.
 
Yet the facts are striking. Since 2007, total electricity consumption in the United States has fallen by over 100,000 megawatt hours. Consumption on a per-person basis is down even more dramatically, reaching levels not seen since 2001. In an age of ubiquitous handheld devices and laptops, that appears counterintuitive. Surprisingly, those devices are helping to fuel the decline.
 
Laptops use less electricity than desktops; tablets use less than laptops; smartphones use less than tablets. As smaller devices displace their clunkier brethren, we use less power even as we spend more time online. Often unwittingly, consumers are applying enormous pressure for greater efficiency: As they demand longer and longer battery life, manufacturers must find ever-more clever ways to minimize power consumption. According to the Electric Power Research Institute, today’s iPad consumes less than 5 percent of the electricity used by a desktop computer.
In other parts of the home, traditional electricity hogs like televisions have turned over a new leaf. Today’s flat-screen models use 80 percent less energy than the monster cathode-ray sets from my childhood. That’s primarily the work of the humble light emitting diodes — low-power units that are fast becoming the light source of choice for everything from stadium jumbotrons to car headlights.
 
It’s noteworthy that the lion’s share of this transformation has occurred without government intervention. Computers, TVs, and industrial lighting are generally free from regulation. Consumers have been helped by energy-efficiency labels on appliances, but as electricity prices continue to rise, companies see this less as a federal imperative than as a competitive necessity.
 
Nor has the government been especially adept at noticing, let alone understanding, the trend. After years of erroneously forecasting usage growth, the Energy Department has at last projected a drop in household electricity consumption for 2014. The agency still maintains, however, that total consumption will increase once industrial and commercial uses are included. We’ll see. It’s difficult to argue that three years of declines were simply an anomaly when Canada and the United Kingdom have seen the same pattern.
 
The laws of supply and demand remain as powerful as ever. Ultimately, lower demand should help counter electricity rates that are skyrocketing because of high-priced renewable energy projects. Like the shale gas revolution rocking US energy markets, it’s a technological phenomenon that’s good for consumers, good for industry, and good for the environment.
 
Unfortunately, this news undermines the Malthusian narrative that the only path to salvation involves carbon taxes, renewable energy mandates, and a government that decides what kind of light bulbs you can buy. Environmentalists on the left raise lots of cash off the claim that current energy consumption trends are unsustainable and we’re running out of everything. Lower electricity consumption could really hurt their business model.
 
Innovation has given consumers better, faster, and more nimble electronic products. In a highly competitive marketplace, that same innovation has delivered greater efficiency and productivity as well. As always, activists and government officials would love to claim that their prescription of regulation and intervention is essential to save the world, when in fact their best course of action might be to get out of the way. Why, for example, can’t they make it easier to import cheap surplus hydroelectricity from Canada?
 
That remains a mystery, but perhaps not for long. As the public becomes more aware that the sky isn’t falling, the appetite for exotic solutions and hypothetical energy sources will decline even faster than electricity consumption. That conclusion may not be as entertaining as a Sherlock Holmes story. But, as the detective would appreciate, it is at least built on common sense.
 

Does cloudy super-Earth hold life? Weather may be factor

A cloudy super-Earth is raising questions.

Does cloudy super-Earth hold life? Weather may be factor

Science Recorder | Delila James | Wednesday, January 01, 2014
 
Astronomers are having a tough time figuring out what some super-Earths are made of–thanks to layers of high-altitude clouds blanketing the planets.

The name “super-Earth” is just a bit misleading. In fact, these planets bear little resemblance to planet Earth. The term “super-Earth” only refers to the mass of the planet and doesn’t suggest anything
about its surface characteristics or potential for life.

Super-Earths are exoplanets–planets outside our solar system–that are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. And despite being rather common in our Milky Way, scientists still know very little about them. Super-Earths could be watery worlds or gas balls like Jupiter with atmospheres similar to Earth’s or completely different. Unlocking their mysteries would not only enhance understanding of how planets and solar systems form, but help narrow down the search for intergalactic life forms.

In 2009, astronomers discovered a super-Earth exoplanet, classified as GJ 1214b, that is 2.7 times the size of Earth, a relatively nearby 40 light years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, and races around its red dwarf star once every 38 hours. The problem was, despite being otherwise well-suited for study, scientists remained puzzled because they couldn’t determine its composition.

Now, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is shedding some light (literally) on the mystery by allowing scientists to observe GJ 1214b as it passes in front of, or transits, its host star. This gives them the chance to study the planet as starlight filters through its atmosphere. The researchers look for changes in certain wavelengths of light, which indicate what chemicals are in the atmosphere, and for apparent changes in the planet’s observed size. For example, a watery world would make it look bigger because water vapor is opaque when seen through certain colored filters and blocks starlight.

Completely contrary to the research team’s expectations, even with Hubble’s precision, they observed no apparent change in the size of the planet. According to lead author Laura Kreidberg of the University of Chicago and her colleagues, this could only mean that GJ 1214b was blanketed in a cloud cover composed not of water, but of zinc sulfide or potassium chloride. The team’s paper is published in the journal Nature.

While it’s nice to have the mystery partly solved, the downside is that the planet’s clouds, like those here on Earth, reduce visibility. So, whether GJ 2114b is home to any sort of biological activity is likely to remain a mystery for the time being.

Read more: http://www.sciencerecorder.com/news/does-cloudy-super-earth-hold-life-weather-may-be-factor/#ixzz2pffUQpEA

Mars One moves closer to launching humans to Mars

Are humans headed to Mars?

Mars One moves closer to launching humans to Mars

Science Recorder | Rick Docksai | Tuesday, December 31, 2013
 
As 2013 draws to a close, the founders of Mars One will be making at least one New Year’s resolution: make even more progress toward the goal of flying humans to Mars. It’s been less than eight months since the Dutch nonprofit went public with its plan to send several humans on a one-way voyage to the red planet by 2024, but the venture has made some noteworthy headway in that short time frame.

First, the venture has secured the buy-in of several respected industry partners. Aerospace heavyweight Lockheed Martin has agreed to build a Mars Lander vessel for the future expedition; and satellite firm SSTL has signed on to build a communications satellite that will transmit communications to and from Earth and the Mars base. Lockheed Martin has been involved in nearly every one of NASA’s robotic missions to Mars, and it has a lead role in NASA’s research-and-development of technologies for a human expedition to Mars. The aerospace firm will be designing its Mars One lander based on the Phoenix, a robotic NASA lander that explored Mars back in 2008. If all goes according to plan, Lockheed Martin could have a Mars One lander prototype ready for launch into space by 2018.

This year has thrown up a few difficulties, however. Among these are the volunteer signups. Mars One seeks interested volunteers from the general public. Applications have been coming in, but at a lower number than the project had been expecting: It’s gotten 165,000 at the time of writing but had been hoping for one million. Also, the applicant pool is overwhelmingly male, whereas Mars One’s ideal pioneer group would be an even number of men and women so as to ensure enough procreation to get a new thriving human settlement on the red planet up and running.

Still, some may argue that this initial pool of 165,000 applicants is already arguably close to enough for a final crew. The initial pioneering expedition isn’t supposed to take more than a dozen finalists when it launches.

In addition, the finalizing of a crew selection won’t move until the next phase until 2015. That’s when large groups of applicants will be chosen to form into teams and compete in tests of mental and physical capability. Only those who outshine all fellow competitors on round after round of these tests will be approved to join the mission.

The years 2018 to 2023 will see several unmanned missions take off for Mars and lay out infrastructure for the base. When the humans arrive, an event that Mars One expects will happen in 2024, an operational base will be there waiting for them.

Read more: http://www.sciencerecorder.com/news/mars-one-moves-closer-to-launching-humans-to-mars/#ixzz2pfaQUGlL

One-of-a-kind triple star system may offer clue to true nature of gravity

One-of-a-kind triple star system may offer clue to true nature of gravity
The system offers the scientists the best-yet opportunity to discover a violation of a concept called the Equivalence Principle.
Science Recorder | Jonathan Marker | Monday, January 06, 2014

According to a January 5 news release from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory , a team of astronomers using the NSF’s Green Bank Telescope has discovered a one-of-a-kind triple star system consisting of two white dwarf stars and a super-dense neutron star.  Intriguingly, all three of these stars occupy an orbit smaller than that of Earth’s.  This unique placement of three stars has permitted scientists to make the most accurate measurements yet of the intricate gravitational interactions in this type of star system.  Eventually, the detailed analysis of this system may offer a major clue for understanding the true nature of gravity.

“This triple system gives us a natural cosmic laboratory far better than anything found before for learning exactly how such three-body systems work and potentially for detecting problems with General Relativity that physicists expect to see under extreme conditions,” said Scott Ransom, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.  “This is the first millisecond pulsar found in such a system, and we immediately recognized that it provides us a tremendous opportunity to study the effects and nature of gravity.”

The astronomers embarked on an exhaustive observational program using the Green Bank Telescope, the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, and the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope in the Netherlands.  In addition, they observed the system using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the GALEX satellite, the WIYN telescope on Kitt Peak, Arizona, and the Spitzer Space Telescope.
“The gravitational perturbations imposed on each member of this system by the others are incredibly pure and strong,” Ransom said. “The millisecond pulsar serves as an extremely powerful tool for measuring those perturbations incredibly well.”

By accurately recording the time of appearance of the pulsar’s pulses, the scientists calculated the geometry of the system and the masses of the stars with unequaled precision.

“We have made some of the most accurate measurements of masses in astrophysics,” said Anne Archibald, a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy.  ”Some of our measurements of the relative positions of the stars in the system are accurate to hundreds of meters.”
The system offers the scientists the best-yet opportunity to discover a violation of a concept called the Equivalence Principle.  According to this principle, the effect of gravity on a body does not depend on the nature or internal structure of that body.

“While Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity has so far been confirmed by every experiment, it is not compatible with quantum theory. Because of that, physicists expect that it will break down under extreme conditions,” Ransom said.  ”This triple system of compact stars gives us a great opportunity to look for a violation of a specific form of the equivalence principle called the Strong Equivalence Principle.”

The complete research findings appear online January 5 in the journal Nature.

Scientists split water into hydrogen, oxygen utilizing light, nanoparticles

The experiments used different sources of light, ranging from a laser to white light simulating the solar spectrum. 

Scientists split water into hydrogen, oxygen utilizing light, nanoparticles

Science Recorder | Jonathan Marker | Monday, December 16, 2013
According to a December 15 news release from the University of Houston (UH), researchers there have discovered a catalyst that can rapidly separate hydrogen and oxygen from water using the sun’s rays and cobalt oxide nanoparticles.

Technology potentially could create a clean, renewable source of energy

Researchers from the University of Houston have found a catalyst that can quickly generate hydrogen from water using sunlight, potentially creating a clean and renewable source of energy.

Their research, published online Sunday in Nature Nanotechnology, involved the use of cobalt oxide nanoparticles to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

Jiming Bao, lead author of the paper and an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering at UH, said the research discovered a new photocatalyst and demonstrated the potential of nanotechnology in engineering a material's property, although more work remains to be done.

Bao said photocatalytic water-splitting experiments have been tried since the 1970s, but this was the first to use cobalt oxide and the first to use neutral water under visible light at a high energy conversion efficiency without co-catalysts or sacrificial chemicals. The project involved researchers from UH, along with those from Sam Houston State University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Texas State University, Carl Zeiss Microscopy LLC, and Sichuan University.

Researchers prepared the nanoparticles in two ways, using femtosecond laser ablation and through mechanical ball milling. Despite some differences, Bao said both worked equally well.

Different sources of light were used, ranging from a laser to white light simulating the solar spectrum. He said he would expect the reaction to work equally well using natural sunlight.

Once the nanoparticles are added and light applied, the water separates into hydrogen and oxygen almost immediately, producing twice as much hydrogen as oxygen, as expected from the 2:1 hydrogen to oxygen ratio in H2O water molecules, Bao said.

The experiment has potential as a source of renewable fuel, but at a solar-to-hydrogen efficiency rate of around 5 percent, the conversion rate is still too low to be commercially viable. Bao suggested a more feasible efficiency rate would be about 10 percent, meaning that 10 percent of the incident solar energy will be converted to hydrogen chemical energy by the process.

Other issues remain to be resolved, as well, including reducing costs and extending the lifespan of cobalt oxide nanoparticles, which the researchers found became deactivated after about an hour of reaction.

"It degrades too quickly," said Bao, who also has appointments in materials engineering and the Department of Chemistry.

The work, supported by the Welch Foundation, will lead to future research, he said, including the question of why cobalt oxide nanoparticles have such a short lifespan, and questions involving chemical and electronic properties of the material.

Extinct ancient ape did not walk like a human, study shows

Jul 25, 2013 
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-extinct-ancient-ape-human.html#jCp

    
According to a new study, led by University of Texas at Austin anthropologists Gabrielle A. Russo and Liza Shapiro, the 9- to 7-million-year-old ape from Italy did not, in fact, walk habitually on two legs.

The findings refute a long body of evidence, suggesting that Oreopithecus had the capabilities for bipedal (moving on two legs) walking.

The study, published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Human Evolution, confirms that related to habitual upright, two-legged walking remain exclusively associated with humans and their fossil ancestors.

"Our findings offer new insight into the Oreopithecus locomotor debate," says Russo, who is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Northeast Ohio Medical University. "While it's certainly possible that Oreopithecus walked on two legs to some extent, as apes are known to employ short bouts of this activity, an increasing amount of anatomical evidence clearly demonstrates that it didn't do so habitually."

As part of the study, the researchers analyzed the fossil ape to see whether it possessed lower spine anatomy consistent with bipedal walking. They compared measurements of its lumbar vertebrae (lower back) and (a triangular bone at the base of the spine) to those of modern humans, fossil hominins (extinct bipedal ), and a sample of mammals that commonly move around in trees, including apes, sloths and an extinct lemur.

The lower spine serves as a good basis for testing the habitual bipedal locomotion hypothesis because lumbar vertebrae and sacra exhibit distinct features that facilitate the transmission of body weight for habitual bipedalism, says Russo.

According to the findings, the anatomy of Oreopithecus lumbar vertebrae and sacrum is unlike that of humans, and more similar to apes, indicating that it is incompatible with the functional demands of walking upright as a human does.

"The lower spine of humans is highly specialized for habitual bipedalism, and is therefore a key region for assessing whether this uniquely human form of locomotion was present in Oreopithecus," says Shapiro, a professor of anthropology. "Previous debate on the locomotor behavior of Oreopithecus had focused on the anatomy of the limbs and pelvis, but no one had reassessed the controversial claim that its lower back was human-like."
 

'Ardi' skull reveals links to human lineage -- did our pre-chimp ancestors walk upright?

 Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-01-ardi-skull-reveals-links-human.html#jCp
'Ardi' skull reveals links to human lineageEnlarge        
This is the 4.4 million-year-old cranial base of Ardipithecus ramidus from Aramis, Middle Awash research area, Ethiopia. Credit: Tim White.
One of the most hotly debated issues in current human origins research focuses on how the 4.4 million-year-old African species Ardipithecus ramidus is related to the human lineage. "Ardi" was an unusual primate. Though it possessed a tiny brain and a grasping big toe used for clambering in the trees, it had small, humanlike canine teeth and an upper pelvis modified for bipedal walking on the ground.
 
Scientists disagree about where this mixture of features positions Ardipithecus ramidus on the tree of and ape relationships. Was Ardi an ape with a few humanlike features retained from an ancestor near in time (6 and 8 million years ago, according to DNA evidence) to the split between the chimpanzee and human lines? Or was it a true relative of the human line that had yet to shed many signs of its remote tree-dwelling ancestry?

New research led by ASU paleoanthropologist William Kimbel confirms Ardi's close evolutionary relationship to humans. Kimbel and his collaborators turned to the underside (or base) of a beautifully preserved partial cranium of Ardi. Their study revealed a pattern of similarity that links Ardi to Australopithecus and modern humans and but not to apes.

The research appears in the January 6, 2014, online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Kimbel is director of the ASU Institute of Human Origins, a research center of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change. Joining ASU's Kimbel as co-authors are Gen Suwa (University of Tokyo Museum), Berhane Asfaw (Rift Valley Research Service, Addis Ababa), Yoel Rak (Tel Aviv University), and Tim White (University of California at Berkeley).

White's field-research team has been recovering fossil remains of Ardipithecus ramidus in the Middle Awash Research area, Ethiopia, since the 1990s. The most recent study of the Ardi skull, led by Suwa, was published in Science in 2009, whose work (with the Middle Awash team) first revealed humanlike aspects of its base. Kimbel co-leads the team that recovered the earliest known Australopithecus skulls from the Hadar site, home of the "Lucy" skeleton, in Ethiopia.
"Given the very tiny size of the Ardi skull, the similarity of its cranial base to a human's is astonishing," says Kimbel.

The cranial base is a valuable resource for studying phylogenetic, or natural evolutionary relationships, because its anatomical complexity and association with the brain, posture, and chewing system have provided numerous opportunities for adaptive evolution over time. The human cranial base, accordingly, differs profoundly from that of apes and other primates.

In humans, the structures marking the articulation of the spine with the skull are more forwardly located than in apes, the base is shorter from front to back, and the openings on each side for passage of blood vessels and nerves are more widely separated.

These shape differences affect the way the bones are arranged on the skull base such that it is fairly easy to tell apart even isolated fragments of ape and human basicrania.
Ardi's cranial base shows the distinguishing features that separate humans and Australopithecus from the apes. Kimbel's earlier research (with collaborator Rak) had shown that these human peculiarities were present in the earliest known Australopithecus skulls by 3.4 million years ago.
The new work expands the catalogue of anatomical similarities linking humans, Australopithecus, and Ardipithecus on the tree of life and shows that the human cranial base pattern is at least a million years older than Lucy's species, A. afarensis.

Paleoanthropologists generally fall into one of two camps on the cause of evolutionary changes in the human cranial base. Was it the adoption of upright posture and bipedality causing a shift in the poise of the head on the vertebral column? If so, does the humanlike cranial base of Ar. ramidus confirm postcranial evidence for partial bipedality in this species? Or, do the changes tell us about the shape of the brain (and of the base on which it sits), perhaps an early sign of brain reorganization in the human lineage? Both alternatives will need to be re-evaluated in light of the finding that Ardi does indeed appear to be more closely related to humans than to chimpanzees.

"The Ardi cranial base fills some important gaps in our understanding of human evolution above the neck," adds Kimbel. "But it opens up a host of new questions…just as it should!" 

Anthropologists confirm link between cranial anatomy and two-legged walking

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-09-anthropologists-link-cranial-anatomy-two-legged.html#jCp
Sep 27, 2013

Anthropologists confirm link between cranial anatomy and two-legged walking










Comparison of the skeletons of three bipedal mammals: an Egyptian jerboa, an eastern gray kangaroo and a human.

Anthropology researchers from The University of Texas at Austin have confirmed a direct link between upright two-legged (bipedal) walking and the position of the foramen magnum, a hole in the base of the skull that transmits the spinal cord.

The study, published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Human Evolution, confirms a controversial finding made by anatomist Raymond Dart, who discovered the first known two-legged walking (bipedal) human ancestor, Australopithecus africanus. Since Dart's discovery in 1925, physical anthropologists have continued to debate whether this feature of the cranial base can serve as a direct link to bipedal .

Chris Kirk, associate professor of anthropology and co-author of the study, says the findings validate foramen magnum position as a for fossil research and sheds further insight into human evolution.

"Now that we know that a forward-shifted foramen magnum is characteristic of bipedal mammals generally, we can be more confident that fossil species showing this feature were also habitual bipeds," Kirk says. "Our methods can be applied to fossil material belonging to some of the earliest potential ."

The foramen magnum in humans is centrally positioned under the braincase because the head sits atop the upright spine in bipedal postures. In contrast, the foramen magnum is located further toward the back of the skull in and most other mammals, as the spine is positioned more behind the head in four-legged postures.

As part of the study, the researchers measured the position of the foramen magnum in 71 species from three mammalian groups: marsupials, rodents and . By comparing foramen magnum position broadly across mammals, the researchers were able to rule out other potential explanations for a forward-shifted foramen magnum, such as differences in .

According to the findings, a foramen magnum positioned toward the base of the skull is found not only in humans, but in other habitually bipedal mammals as well. Kangaroos, kangaroo rats and jerboas all have a more forward-shifted foramen magnum compared with their quadrupedal (four-legged walking) close relatives.

These particular mammals evolved locomotion and anteriorly positioned foramina magna independently, or as a result of convergent evolution, says Gabrielle Russo, who is a postdoctoral research fellow at Northeast Ohio Medical University and lead researcher of the study.

"As one of the few cranial features directly linked to locomotion, the position of the foramen magnum is an important feature for the study of human evolution," Russo says. "This is the case for early hominin species such as Sahelanthropus tchadensis, which shows a forward shift of the foramen magnum but has aroused some controversy as to whether it is more closely related to humans or African apes."




The current, and very disturbing long term trend is clear?


















The current, and very disturbing long term trend is clear. As noted above by Composer, since 2004 the 1998 (& 2002)record has fallen. It should be noted that that record was also exceeded in 2007 and 2009, although those were not record years because lower than the 2005 (and 2010) record. (Data) None of those records are certain because they all lie within error of each other, but all clearly exceed any record prior to 1998.

Note:  the admitted uncertainty of historical data, if  "they lie within error of each other" means that the Medieval Warm Period could be around current temperatures.  More accurate readings are needed.

A graph of modern temperatures from 1880 -- 2012 is shown below.  (The black lines are mine.)



 
Besides the obvious warming trend, other interesting features stand here, which my lines attempt to demonstrate more clearly.  Notice the warming follows a step pattern, and a highly repetitive one, with periods of longer warming back to back with shorter cooling.  The line is of course rough, but I think the pattern comes out pretty clear. 
 

 
Perhaps better than straight lines is a sine wave fit (sorry for the difficulty reading this).  I prefer this because it is a more natural model of temperature change, the fit is still good, and the last ~decade of temperature stabilizing (or even decreasing) is explained in a straightforward way.
 
For reasons that aren't reasonably clear to me, the warming-catastrophe clique objects to these lines and curves, regarding them as statistical chicanery.  For example, I happened on the chart below:
 
 
This, it claims, is how believers think skeptics view the data.  In this case, I agree; it's too short a time period with too much random noise.  You can also fit noise to some pattern, if you're determined to.
 
Having said this, however, believers then produce this graph:
 
The lower chart, which has been adopted by the catastrophist community without a quibble, uses decades (of course we all know that nature follows human conventions) to create decade by decade average bars.  Why?  Because, quite suddenly the stabilization or even slight cooling 2005 - 2013 instantly disappears.  No other logic than to blind us to what any open-eyed/mind can see is plainly obvious.  Hypocrisy knows no shame.
 
Well, enough for a while.  What have we found?  Some time back I reposted an article showing that much of published, even peer-reviewed, science is simply wrong.  I recently found a similar post showing the same is true of medical science.  Combine that with our ideological, political, cultural, religious, and other biases, not to mention group-think, it is no wonder there is so much confusion and contradiction on this subject.
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Study: Most Scientists Have Serious Doubts About The Claimed Extent Of Man-Made Global Warming

Study: Most Scientists Have Serious Doubts About The Claimed Extent Of Man-Made Global Warming


By P Gosselin on 16. Februar 2013 Reader Aetheress left a comment, which I’ve upgraded to a post.

Here it is: Post by Aetheress: I’ll try to keep this short - While all of the following scientists believe the globe is warming, the vast majority of them do NOT believe in the theory of “Anthropegenic” GW. Survey: “Peer-Reviewed Survey Finds Majority Of Scientists Skeptical Of Global Warming Crisis” 02-13-2013

Highlights:

'We find that virtually all respondents (99.4%) agree that the climate is changing. However, there is considerable disagreement as to cause, consequences, and lines of action (as outlined in Figure 2). On this basis, we find five different frames, each of them summarized in Table 3. Eight percent of respondents did not provide enough information regarding their framing of climate change to be categorized.’

‘The largest group of APEGA respondents (36%) draws on a frame that we label ‘comply with Kyoto’. In their diagnostic framing, they express the strong belief that climate change is happening, that it is not a normal cycle of nature, and humans are the main or central cause.’

‘The second largest group (24%) express a ‘nature is overwhelming’ frame. In their diagnostic framing, they believe that changes to the climate are natural, normal cycles of the Earth. Their focus is on the past: ‘If you think about it, global warming is what brought us out of the Ice Age.’ Humans are too insignificant to have an impact on nature.’

”Fatalists’, a surprisingly large group (17%), diagnose climate change as both human- and naturally caused. ‘Fatalists’ consider climate change to be a smaller public risk with little impact on their personal life. They are sceptical that the scientific debate is settled regarding the IPCC modeling: ‘The number of variables and their interrelationships are almost unlimited – if anyone thinks they have all the answers, they have failed to ask all of the questions.’’

‘Ten percent of respondents draw on an ‘economic responsibility’ frame. They diagnose climate change as being natural or human caused. More than any other group, they underscore that the ‘real’ cause of climate change is unknown as nature is forever changing and uncontrollable.’

‘The last group (5%) expresses a frame we call ‘regulation activists’. This frame has the smallest number of adherents, expresses the most paradoxical framing, and yet is more agentic than ‘comply with Kyoto’. Advocates of this frame diagnose climate change as being both human and naturally caused, posing a moderate public risk, with only slight impact on their personal life.’

 99.4% say that the climate is changing. No ‘climate change’ deniers here. NONE.

There IS NO CONSENSUS.

2010 ‘Only one in four American Meteorological Society broadcast meteorologists agrees with United Nations’ claims that humans are primarily responsible for recent global warming, a survey published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society reports. The survey results contradict the oft-repeated assertion that a consensus of scientists believes humans are causing a global warming crisis.’

‘The survey was conducted by the congressionally funded National Environmental Education Foundation and vetted by an advisory board of climate experts from groups such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service, and Pew Center for Global Climate Change.’

‘Joe D’Aleo, executive director of the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project and first director of meteorology at the Weather Channel, is not surprised by the survey results.’

‘AMS has tried very hard to brainwash broadcast meteorologists by forcing them to attend conferences and teleconferences with one-sided presentations where global warming evangelism is preached,’ D’Aleo said. ‘Broadcasters send me notifications they get from AMS telling them they must attend these conferences where only the alarmist point of view is preached. This survey shows that broadcast meteorologists are not swayed by these one-sided presentations.’

Now in 2013- ‘In an AMS survey, where all respondents are AMS meteorologists, a majority have Ph.D.s and fully 80% have a Ph.D. or Masters Degree, position statements by organizational bureaucracies carry little scientific weight.’

www.climatechangecommunication.org/report preliminary-findings-February

‘According to American Meteorological Society (AMS) data, 89% of AMS meteorologists believe global warming is happening, but only a minority (30%) is very worried about global warming.’

‘This sharp contrast between the large majority of meteorologists who believe global warming is happening and the modest minority who are nevertheless very worried about it is consistent with other scientist surveys. This contrast exposes global warming alarmists who assert that 97% of the world’s scientists agree humans are causing a global warming crisis simply because these scientists believe global warming is occurring. However, as this and other scientist surveys show, believing that some warming is occurring is not the same as believing humans are causing a worrisome crisis.’

‘Other questions solidified the meteorologists’ skepticism about humans creating a global warming crisis. For example, among those meteorologists who believe global warming is happening, only a modest majority (59%) believe humans are the primary cause. More importantly, only 38% of respondents who believe global warming is occurring say it will be very harmful during the next 100 years.’

Climate change sceptics bet $10,000 on cooler world

 
 
               





















Two climate change sceptics, who believe the dangers of global warming are overstated, have put their money where their mouth is and bet $10,000 that the planet will cool over the next decade.
The Russian solar physicists Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev have agreed the wager with a British climate expert, James Annan.

The pair, based in Irkutsk, at the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics, believe that global temperatures are driven more by changes in the sun's activity than by the emission of greenhouse gases. They say the Earth warms and cools in response to changes in the number and size of sunspots. Most mainstream scientists dismiss the idea, but as the sun is expected to enter a less active phase over the next few decades the Russian duo are confident they will see a drop in global temperatures.
Dr Annan, who works on the Japanese Earth Simulator supercomputer, in Yokohama, said: "There isn't much money in climate science and I'm still looking for that gold watch at retirement. A pay-off would be a nice top-up to my pension."

To decide who wins the bet, the scientists have agreed to compare the average global surface temperature recorded by a US climate centre between 1998 and 2003, with temperatures they will record between 2012 and 2017.

If the temperature drops Dr Annan will stump up the $10,000 (now equivalent to about £5,800) in 2018. If the Earth continues to warm, the money will go the other way.

The bet is the latest in an increasingly popular field of scientific wagers, and comes after a string of climate change sceptics have refused challenges to back their controversial ideas with cash.
Dr Annan first challenged Richard Lindzen, a meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is dubious about the extent of human activity influencing the climate. Professor Lindzen had been willing to bet that global temperatures would drop over the next 20 years.

No bet was agreed on that; Dr Annan said Prof Lindzen wanted odds of 50-1 against falling temperatures, so would win $10,000 if the Earth cooled but pay out only £200 if it warmed. Seven other prominent climate change sceptics also failed to agree betting terms.

In May, during BBC Radio 4's Today programme, the environmental activist and Guardian columnist George Monbiot challenged Myron Ebell, a climate sceptic at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in Washington DC, to a £5,000 bet. Mr Ebell declined, saying he had four children to put through university and did not want to take risks.

Most climate change sceptics dispute the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which suggest that human activity will drive global temperatures up by between 1.4C and 5.8C by the end of the century.

Others, such as the Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg, argue that, although global warming is real, there is little we can do to prevent it and that we would be better off trying to adapt to living in an altered climate.

Dr Annan said bets like the one he made with the Russian sceptics are one way to confront the ideas. He also suggests setting up a financial-style futures market to allow those with critical stakes in the outcome of climate change to gamble on predictions and hedge against future risk.

"Betting on sea level rise would have a very real relevance to Pacific islanders," he said. "By betting on rapid sea-level rise, they would either be able to stay in their homes at the cost of losing the bet if sea level rise was slow, or would win the bet and have money to pay for sea defences or relocation if sea level rise was rapid."

Similar agricultural commodity markets already allow farmers to hedge against bad weather that ruins harvests.

What Catastrophe? MIT’s Richard Lindzen, the unalarmed climate scientist

What Catastrophe?

MIT’s Richard Lindzen, the unalarmed climate scientist

Jan 13, 2014, Vol. 19, No. 17 • By ETHAN EPSTEIN
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When you first meet Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, leading climate “skeptic,” and all-around scourge of James Hansen, Bill McKibben, Al Gore, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and sundry other climate “alarmists,” as Lindzen calls them, you may find yourself a bit surprised. If you know Lindzen only from the way his opponents characterize him—variously, a liar, a lunatic, a charlatan, a denier, a shyster, a crazy person, corrupt—you might expect a spittle-flecked, wild-eyed loon. But in person, Lindzen cuts a rather different figure. With his gray beard, thick glasses, gentle laugh, and disarmingly soft voice, he comes across as nothing short of grandfatherly.
 
Thomas Fluharty

Thomas Fluharty
 
Granted, Lindzen is no shrinking violet. A pioneering climate scientist with decades at Harvard and MIT, Lindzen sees his discipline as being deeply compromised by political pressure, data fudging, out-and-out guesswork, and wholly unwarranted alarmism. In a shot across the bow of what many insist is indisputable scientific truth, Lindzen characterizes global warming as “small and .  .  . nothing to be alarmed about.” In the climate debate—on which hinge far-reaching questions of public policy—them’s fightin’ words.
 
In his mid-seventies, married with two sons, and now emeritus at MIT, Lindzen spends between four and six months a year at his second home in Paris. But that doesn’t mean he’s no longer in the thick of the climate controversy; he writes, gives myriad talks, participates in debates, and occasionally testifies before Congress. In an eventful life, Lindzen has made the strange journey from being a pioneer in his field and eventual IPCC coauthor to an outlier in the discipline—if not an outcast. 
 
Richard Lindzen was born in 1940 in Webster, Massachusetts, to Jewish immigrants from Germany. His bootmaker father moved the family to the Bronx shortly after Richard was born. Lindzen attended the Bronx High School of Science before winning a scholarship to the only place he applied that was out of town, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, New York. After a couple of years at Rensselaer, he transferred to Harvard, where he completed his bachelor’s degree and, in 1964, a doctorate. 
 
Lindzen wasn’t a climatologist from the start—“climate science” as such didn’t exist when he was beginning his career in academia. Rather, Lindzen studied math. “I liked applied math,” he says, “[and] I was a bit turned off by modern physics, but I really enjoyed classical physics, fluid mechanics, things like that.” A few years after arriving at Harvard, he began his transition to meteorology. “Harvard actually got a grant from the Ford Foundation to offer generous fellowships to people in the atmospheric sciences,” he explains. “Harvard had no department in atmospheric sciences, so these fellowships allowed you to take a degree in applied math or applied physics, and that worked out very well because in applied math the atmosphere and oceans were considered a good area for problems. .  .  . I discovered I really liked atmospheric sciences—meteorology. So I stuck with it and picked out a thesis.”
 
And with that, Lindzen began his meteoric rise through the nascent field. In the 1970s, while a professor at Harvard, Lindzen disproved the then-accepted theory of how heat moves around the Earth’s atmosphere, winning numerous awards in the process. Before his 40th birthday, he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In the mid-1980s, he made the short move from Harvard to MIT, and he’s remained there ever since. Over the decades, he’s authored or coauthored some 200 peer-reviewed papers on climate.
 
Where Lindzen hasn’t remained is in the mainstream of his discipline. By the 1980s, global warming was becoming a major political issue. Already, Lindzen was having doubts about the more catastrophic predictions being made. The public rollout of the “alarmist” case, he notes, “was immediately accompanied by an issue of Newsweek declaring all scientists agreed. And that was the beginning of a ‘consensus’ argument. Already by ’88 the New York Times had literally a global warming beat.” Lindzen wasn’t buying it. Nonetheless, he remained in the good graces of mainstream climate science, and in the early 1990s, he was invited to join the IPCC, a U.N.-backed multinational consortium of scientists charged with synthesizing and analyzing the current state of the world’s climate science. Lindzen accepted, and he ended up as a contributor to the 1995 report and the lead author of Chapter 7 (“Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks”) of the 2001 report. Since then, however, he’s grown increasingly distant from prevalent (he would say “hysterical”) climate science, and he is voluminously on record disputing the predictions of catastrophe. 
 
The Earth’s climate is immensely complex, but the basic principle behind the “greenhouse effect” is easy to understand. The burning of oil, gas, and especially coal pumps carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere, where they allow the sun’s heat to penetrate to the Earth’s surface but impede its escape, thus causing the lower atmosphere and the Earth’s surface to warm. Essentially everybody, Lindzen included, agrees. The question at issue is how sensitive the planet is to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases (this is called climate sensitivity), and how much the planet will heat up as a result of our pumping into the sky ever more CO2, which remains in the atmosphere for upwards of 1,000 years. (Carbon dioxide, it may be needless to point out, is not a poison. On the contrary, it is necessary for plant life.) 
 
Lindzen doesn’t deny that the climate has changed or that the planet has warmed. “We all agree that temperature has increased since 1800,” he tells me. There’s a caveat, though: It’s increased by “a very small amount. We’re talking about tenths of a degree [Celsius]. We all agree that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. All other things kept equal, [there has been] some warming. As a result, there’s hardly anyone serious who says that man has no role. And in many ways, those have never been the questions. The questions have always been, as they ought to be in science, how much?”
Lindzen says not much at all—and he contends that the “alarmists” vastly overstate the Earth’s climate sensitivity. Judging by where we are now, he appears to have a point; so far, 150 years of burning fossil fuels in large quantities has had a relatively minimal effect on the climate. By some measurements, there is now more CO2 in the atmosphere than there has been at any time in the past 15 million years. Yet since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the average global temperature has risen by, at most, 1 degree Celsius, or 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit. And while it’s true that sea levels have risen over the same period, it’s believed they’ve been doing so for roughly 20,000 years. What’s more, despite common misconceptions stoked by the media in the wake of Katrina, Sandy, and the recent typhoon in the Philippines, even the IPCC concedes that it has “low confidence” that there has been any measurable uptick in storm intensity thanks to human activity. Moreover, over the past 15 years, as man has emitted record levels of carbon dioxide year after year, the warming trend of previous decades has stopped. Lindzen says this is all consistent with what he holds responsible for climate change: a small bit of man-made impact and a whole lot of natural variability.
 
The real fight, though, is over what’s coming in the future if humans continue to burn fossil fuels unabated. According to the IPCC, the answer is nothing good. Its most recent Summary for Policymakers, which was released early this fall—and which some scientists reject as too sanguine—predicts that if emissions continue to rise, by the year 2100, global temperatures could increase as much as 5.5 degrees Celsius from current averages, while sea levels could rise by nearly a meter. If we hit those projections, it’s generally thought that the Earth would be rife with crop failures, drought, extreme weather, and epochal flooding. Adios, Miami.
 
It is to avoid those disasters that the “alarmists” call on governments to adopt policies reducing the amounts of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere. As a result of such policies—and a fortuitous increase in natural gas production—U.S. greenhouse emissions are at a 20-year low and falling. But global emissions are rising, thanks to massive increases in energy use in the developing world, particularly in China and India. If the “alarmists” are right, then, a way must be found to compel the major developing countries to reduce carbon emissions.
 
But Lindzen rejects the dire projections. For one thing, he says that the Summary for Policymakers is an inherently problematic document. The IPCC report itself, weighing in at thousands of pages, is “not terrible. It’s not unbiased, but the bias [is] more or less to limit your criticism of models,” he says. The Summary for Policymakers, on the other hand—the only part of the report that the media and the politicians pay any attention to—“rips out doubts to a large extent. .  .  . [Furthermore], government representatives have the final say on the summary.” Thus, while the full IPPC report demonstrates a significant amount of doubt among scientists, the essentially political Summary for Policymakers filters it out. 
 
Lindzen also questions the “alarmist” line on water vapor. Water vapor (and its close cousin, clouds) is one of the most prevalent greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. According to most climate scientists, the hotter the planet gets, the more water vapor there will be, magnifying the effects of other greenhouse gases, like CO2, in a sort of hellish positive feedback loop. Lindzen disputes this, contending that water vapor could very well end up having a cooling effect on the planet. As the science writer Justin Gillis explained in a 2012 New York Times piece, Lindzen “says the earth is not especially sensitive to greenhouse gases because clouds will react to counter them, and he believes he has identified a specific mechanism. On a warming planet, he says, less coverage by high clouds in the tropics will allow more heat to escape to space, countering the temperature increase.”
 
If Lindzen is right about this and global warming is nothing to worry about, why do so many climate scientists, many with résumés just as impressive as his, preach imminent doom? He says it mostly comes down to the money—to the incentive structure of academic research funded by government grants. Almost all funding for climate research comes from the government, which, he says, makes scientists essentially vassals of the state. And generating fear, Lindzen contends, is now the best way to ensure that policymakers keep the spigot open. 
 
Lindzen contrasts this with the immediate aftermath of World War II, when American science was at something of a peak. “Science had established its relevance with the A-bomb, with radar, for that matter the proximity fuse,” he notes. Americans and their political leadership were profoundly grateful to the science community; scientists, unlike today, didn’t have to abase themselves by approaching the government hat in hand. Science funding was all but assured. 
 
But with the cuts to basic science funding that occurred around the time of the Vietnam war, taxpayer support for research was no longer a political no-brainer. “It was recognized that gratitude only went so far,” Lindzen says, “and fear was going to be a much greater motivator. And so that’s when people began thinking about .  .  . how to perpetuate fear that would motivate the support of science.”
A need to generate fear, in Lindzen’s telling, is what’s driving the apocalyptic rhetoric heard from many climate scientists and their media allies. “The idea was, to engage the public you needed an event .  .  . not just a Sputnik—a drought, a storm, a sand demon. You know, something you could latch onto. [Climate scientists] carefully arranged a congressional hearing. And they arranged for [James] Hansen [author of Storms of My Grandchildren, and one of the leading global warming “alarmists”] to come and say something vague that would somehow relate a heat wave or a drought to global warming.” (This theme, by the way, is developed to characteristic extremes in the late Michael Crichton’s entertaining 2004 novel State of Fear, in which environmental activists engineer a series of fake “natural” disasters to sow fear over global warming.) 
 
Lindzen also says that the “consensus”—the oft-heard contention that “virtually all” climate scientists believe in catastrophic, anthropogenic global warming—is overblown, primarily for structural reasons. “When you have an issue that is somewhat bogus, the opposition is always scattered and without resources,” he explains. “But the environmental movement is highly organized. There are hundreds of NGOs. To coordinate these hundreds, they quickly organized the Climate Action Network, the central body on climate. There would be, I think, actual meetings to tell them what the party line is for the year, and so on.” Skeptics, on the other hand, are more scattered across disciplines and continents. As such, they have a much harder time getting their message across.
Because CO2 is invisible and the climate is so complex (your local weatherman doesn’t know for sure whether it will rain tomorrow, let alone conditions in 2100), expertise is particularly important. Lindzen sees a danger here. “I think the example, the paradigm of this, was medical practice.” He says that in the past, “one went to a physician because something hurt or bothered you, and you tended to judge him or her according to whether you felt better. That may not always have been accurate, but at least it had some operational content. .  .  . [Now, you] go to an annual checkup, get a blood test. And the physician tells you if you’re better or not and it’s out of your hands.” Because climate change is invisible, only the experts can tell us whether the planet is sick or not. And because of the way funds are granted, they have an incentive to say that the Earth belongs in intensive care.
 
Richard Lindzen presents a problem for those who say that the science behind climate change is “settled.” So many “alarmists” prefer to ignore him and instead highlight straw men: less credible skeptics, such as climatologist Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama (signatory to a declaration that “Earth and its ecosystems—created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence—are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting”), the Heartland Institute (which likened climate “alarmists” to the Unabomber), and Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma (a major energy-producing state). The idea is to make it seem as though the choice is between accepting the view of, say, journalist James Delingpole (B.A., English literature), who says global warming is a hoax, and that of, say, James Hansen (Ph.D., physics, former head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies), who says that we are moving toward “an ice-free Antarctica and a desolate planet without human inhabitants.” 
 
But Lindzen, plainly, is different. He can’t be dismissed. Nor, of course, is he the only skeptic with serious scientific credentials. Judith Curry, the chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, William Happer, professor of physics at Princeton, John Christy, a climate scientist honored by NASA, now at the University of Alabama, and the famed physicist Freeman Dyson are among dozens of scientists who have gone on record questioning various aspects of the IPCC’s line on climate change. Lindzen, for his part, has said that scientists have called him privately to thank him for the work he’s doing.
 
But Lindzen, perhaps because of his safely tenured status at MIT, or just because of the contours of his personality, is a particularly outspoken and public critic of the consensus. It’s clear that he relishes taking on the “alarmists.” It’s little wonder, then, that he’s come under exceptionally vituperative attack from many of those who are concerned about the impact of climate change. It also stands to reason that they might take umbrage at his essentially accusing them of mass corruption with his charge that they are “stoking fear.” 
 
Take Joe Romm, himself an MIT Ph.D., who runs the climate desk at the left-wing Center for American Progress. On the center’s blog, Romm regularly lights into Lindzen. “Lindzen could not be more discredited,” he says in one post. In another post, he calls Lindzen an “uber-hypocritical anti-scientific scientist.” (Romm, it should be noted, is a bit more measured, if no less condescending, when the klieg lights are off. “I tend to think Lindzen is just one of those scientists whom time and science has passed by, like the ones who held out against plate tectonics for so long,” he tells me.) Seldom, however, does Romm stoop to explain what grounds justify dismissing Lindzen’s views with such disdain. 
 
Andrew Dessler, a climatologist at Texas A&M University, is another harsh critic of Lindzen. As he told me in an emailed statement, “Over the past 25 years, Dr. Lindzen has published several theories about climate, all of which suggest that the climate will not warm much in response to increases in atmospheric CO2. These theories have been tested by the scientific community and found to be completely without merit. Lindzen knows this, of course, and no longer makes any effort to engage with the scientific community about his theories (e.g., he does not present his work at scientific conferences). It seems his main audience today is Fox News and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal.”
 
The Internet, meanwhile, is filled with hostile missives directed at Lindzen. They’re of varying quality. Some, written by climate scientists, are point-by-point rebuttals of Lindzen’s scholarly work; others, angry ad hominem screeds full of heat, signifying nothing. (When Lindzen transitioned to emeritus status last year, one blog headlined the news “Denier Down: Lindzen Retires.”)
 
For decades, Lindzen has also been dogged by unsubstantiated accusations of corruption—specifically, that he’s being paid off by the energy industry. He denies this with a laugh.
“I wish it were so!” What appears to be the primary source for this calumny—a Harper’s magazine article from 1995—provides no documentation for its assertions. But that hasn’t stopped the charge from being widely disseminated on the Internet. 
 
One frustrating feature of the climate debate is that people’s outlook on global warming usually correlates with their political views. So if a person wants low taxes and restrictions on abortion, he probably isn’t worried about climate change. And if a person supports gay marriage and raising the minimum wage, he most likely thinks the threat from global warming warrants costly public-policy remedies. And of course, even though Lindzen is an accomplished climate scientist, he has his own political outlook—a conservative one. 
 
He wasn’t reared that way. “Growing up in the Bronx, politics, I would say, was an automatic issue. I grew up with a picture of Franklin Roosevelt over my bed.” But his views started to shift in the late ’60s and ’70s. “I think [my politics] began changing in the Vietnam war. I was deeply disturbed by the way vets were being treated,” he says. He also says that his experience in the climate debate—and the rise in political correctness in the universities throughout the ’70s and ’80s—further pushed him to the right. So, yes, Lindzen, a climate skeptic, is also a political conservative whom one would expect to oppose many environmental regulations for ideological, as opposed to scientific, reasons.
By the same token, it is well known that the vast majority of “alarmist” climate scientists, dependent as they are on federal largesse, are liberal Democrats. 
 
But whatever buried ideological component there may be to any given scientist’s work, it doesn’t tell us who has the science right. In a 2012 public letter, Lindzen noted, “Critics accuse me of doing a disservice to the scientific method. I would suggest that in questioning the views of the critics and subjecting them to specific tests, I am holding to the scientific method.” Whoever is right about computer models, climate sensitivity, aerosols, and water vapor, Lindzen is certainly right about that. Skepticism is essential to science.
 
In a 2007 debate with Lindzen in New York City, climate scientist Richard C. J. Somerville, who is firmly in the “alarmist” camp, likened climate skeptics to “some eminent earth scientists [who] couldn’t be persuaded that plate tectonics were real .  .  . when the revolution of continental drift was sweeping through geology and geophysics.” 
 
“Most people who think they’re a Galileo are just wrong,” he said, much to the delight of a friendly audience of Manhattanites. 
 
But Somerville botched the analogy. The story of plate tectonics is the story of how one man, Alfred Wegener, came up with the theory of continental drift, only to be widely opposed and mocked. Wegener challenged the earth science “consensus” of his day. And in the end, his view prevailed.
 
Ethan Epstein is an assistant editor at The Weekly Standard

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