Climate Change Debate; comic opera; and C S Lewis

View 716 Sunday, March 04, 2012

We went to the opera last night to see Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring. It’s the second time we have seen it. The first time was at the Ebell Theater before the Los Angeles Opera company was forming. We saw John Mack as Albert. After the LA Opera company was formed, back when my wife was involved with the Board of the Opera League, we used to go to a lot of opera social functions – that was back when I had best seller income – and I had a number of performer friends, John Mack among them. I never discussed Albert Herring with him, but in fact I had not liked it at all. Had nothing to do with his singing ability. I just hadn’t liked the opera, which I found pointless, no tunes, nothing memorable about the music, and only a couple of lines memorable as comic.

I didn’t expect to enjoy last night’s Albert Herring, and I was wrong, It was funny. The difference was the acting and stage direction, which made this comic opera an actual comedy. Of course the social lesson was the usual ‘progressive’ social message, about not being inhibited and not letting someone else dictate your social and sexual mores, but then that was hardly unexpected. The difference is that this production actually manages to be funny and to deliver its jokes in ways that make people laugh. One would suppose that wouldn’t be hard to do, when the subject is Victorian moral hypocrisies. But then there is C. S. Lewis, channeling the elder Tempter Screwtape in his letters to his nephew Wormwood, in Chapter XI of The Screwtape Letters. Lewis, a literary critic as well as “apostle to the skeptics”, had a keen sense of humor.

Screwtape says of the various techniques for turning mirth and joy, a gift of The Enemy, into something useful to the Infernal:

But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy; it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it,

Britten actually makes the jokes in this opera, and this time the stage director understood that this was a comedy as opposed to broad farce. All very well done.

There is some discussion of the Sandra Fluke kerfluffel, but it belongs in mail. I will put up the best of what I have received with comments when this is over.

The discussion of Climate Science continues as well, an in particular the question of whether this is “settled science”. One principal paper involved is found here

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02148/RSL-HouseOfCommons_2148505a.pdf and if you have never read it, you should. After I recommended it I got comments, which I posted with my replies at https://jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=5889 .

Today’s important paper is given here, which points to a comment by Robert Brown of the Department of Physics of Duke University, and which addresses directly the question of “settled science”. You need not follow the links in Watts’ presentation to find it; Watts presents it fairly and completely in the following link:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/02/why-cagw-theory-is-not-settled-science/

I urge you to read the paper as presented. It’s all there in the link above. I am no fan of the practice of taking a paper and interpolating remarks within it, because it breaks the thread of thought and is no more fair to a writer than constant interruptions of a speaker would be. After you have read Dr. Brown’s comments, you can come back here for my commentary on his.

I begin in the middle of Brown’s paper:

This process continues today. Astronomer’s observe the rotational properties of distant galaxies to very high precision using the red shift and blue shift of the stars as they orbit the galactic center. The results don’t seem to agree with Newton’s Law of Gravitation (or for that matter, with Einstein’s equivalent theory of general relativity that views gravitation as curvature of spacetime. Careful studies of neutrinos lead to anomalies, places where theory isn’t consistent with observation. Precise measurements of the rates at which the Universe is expanding at very large length scales (and hence very long times ago, in succession as one looks farther away and back in time at distant galaxies) don’t quite add up to what the simplest theories predict and we expect. Quantum theory and general relativity are fundamentally inconsistent, but nobody knows quite how to make a theory that is “both” in the appropriate limits.

When I read this I thought of Petr Beckmann, whose Einstein Plus Two attempts to do away with General Relativity in favor of a modified aether theory. Of course Beckmann explains why his view is consistent with the Michaelson-Morley Experiment and the other evidence generally taken as substantial proof of General Relativity. As I understand it, Beckmann’s theory may provide an explanation for the data from which we infer the existence of dark matter and dark energy. Beckmann did not address that because he died before anyone seriously proposed dark energy and there was very little scientific discussion of dark matter. Beckmann’s aether is the local gravitational field, and the explanation of the Michaelson-Morely experiment is that the local gravitational field is entangled, and rotates with the planet. Tom Bethell’s Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessay? does a reasonable job of explaining Beckmann in lay terms.

I have not the mathematical skill to present the argument, but Beckmann does it well. As to dark matter, I infer that if the aether is a local gravitational field, then that aether gets thinner and thinner between galaxies, and light travelling from far galaxies is much affected by that: moreover if it must pass through spinning galaxies on the way to Earth it will suffer a sea change. Note that my inference is pure speculation, and not due to any substantial work on my part.

The Great Climate Debate, however, is predicated from the beginning on one things. We know what the global average temperature has been like for the past N years, where N is nearly anything you like. A century. A thousand years. A hundred thousand years. A hundred million years. Four billion years.

We don’t, of course. Not even close. Thermometers have only been around in even moderately reliable form for a bit over 300 years — 250 would be a fairer number — and records of global temperatures measured with even the first, highly inaccurate devices are sparse indeed until maybe 200 years ago. Most of the records from over sixty or seventy years ago are accurate to no more than a degree or two F (a degree C), and some of them are far less accurate than that. As Anthony has explicitly demonstrated, one can confound even a digital electronic automatic recording weather station thermometer capable of at least 0.01 degree resolution by the simple act of setting it up in a stupid place, such as the southwest side of a house right above a concrete driveway where the afternoon sun turns its location into a large reflector oven. Or in the case of early sea temperatures, by virtue of measuring pails of water pulled up from over the side with crude instruments in a driving wind cooling the still wet bulb pulled out of the pail.

I have considerable experience in attempting to measure temperatures to a tenth of a degree, and I know how difficult that is; yet we are shown graphs and told to be alarmed by warming in the tenths of a degree. Attempts to question the consensus scientists on this subject have not resulted in any answer that satisfies me: that is, the data gatherers concede my point and say that they don’t really know how to get results accurate to a tenth of a degree over a wide area, and the modelers simply assume they have that data. When I point that out, I am usually given a lecture about oil company sponsorship of skeptics.

In truth, we have moderately accurate thermal records that aren’t really global, but are at least sample a lot of the globe’s surface exclusive of the bulk of the ocean for less than one century. We have accurate records — really accurate records — of the Earth’s surface temperatures on a truly global basis for less than forty years. We have accurate records that include for the first time a glimpse of the thermal profile, in depth, of the ocean, that is less than a decade old and counting, and is (as Willis is pointing out) still highly uncertain no matter what silly precision is being claimed by the early analysts of the data. Even the satellite data — precise as it is, global as it is — is far from free from controversy, as the instrumentation itself in the several satellites that are making the measurements do not agree on the measured temperatures terribly precisely.

In the end, nobody really knows the global average temperature of the Earth’s surface in 2011 within less than around 1K. If anybody claims to, they are full of shit. Perhaps — and a big perhaps it is — they know it more precisely than this relative to a scheme that is used to compute it from global data that is at least consistent and not crazy — but it isn’t even clear that we can define the global average temperature in a way that really makes sense and that different instruments will measure the same way. It is also absolutely incredibly unlikely that our current measurements would in any meaningful way correspond to what the instrumentation of the 18th and 19th century measured and that is turned into global average temperatures, not within more than a degree or two.

This complicates things, given that a degree or two (K) appears to be very close to the natural range of variation of the global average temperature when one does one’s best to compute it from proxy records. Things get more complicated still when all of the best proxy reconstructions in the world get turned over and turned out in favor of “tree ring reconstructions” based upon — if not biased by — a few species of tree from a tiny handful of sites around the world.

Precisely. Brown then goes on to his conclusion

No matter what, we will be producing far less CO_2 in 30 years than we are today. Sheer economics and the advance of physics and technology and engineering will make fossil-fuel burning electrical generators as obsolete as steam trains. Long before we reach any sort of catastrophe — assuming that CAGW is correct — the supposed proximate cause of the catastrophe will be reversing itself without anyone doing anything special to bring it about but make sensible economic choices.

In the meantime, it would be so lovely if we could lose one single phrase in the “debate”. The CAGW theory is not “settled science”. I’m not even sure there is any such thing.

I agree with his last paragraph. I am intrigued by the notion that we will be producing less CO2 in future, and I am not at all certain of it. That I need to think about more.

But I urge you to read his entire paper. It’s not that long, and it asks the right questions.