Free Speech, Science, and Diversity

View 716 Friday, March 09, 2012

I am still climbing out of the doldrums. This malaise doesn’t want to go away, and although the glycerin has eased nasal inflammation, my head still gets stopped up unless I take Sudafed. And my energy levels are low.

“Free Speech Under Fire” by Jonathan Turley in today’s LA Times http://jonathanturley.org/2012/03/09/free-speech-under-attack/ is worth your attention. Excerpt:

Some historical debates have now become hate speech. After World War II, Germany criminalized not just Nazi symbols but questioning the Holocaust. Although many have objected that the laws only force such ignorance and intolerance underground, the police have continued the quixotic fight to prevent barred utterances, such as the arrest in 2010 of a man in Hamburg caught using a Hitler speech as a ring tone.

In January, the French parliament passed a law making it a crime to question the Armenian genocide. The law was struck down by the Constitutional Council, but supporters have vowed to introduce a new law to punish deniers. When accused of pandering to Armenian voters, the bill’s author responded, “That’s democracy.”

Perhaps, but it is not liberty. Most democratic constitutions strive not to allow the majority to simply dictate conditions and speech for everyone — the very definition of what the framers of the U.S. Constitution called tyranny of the majority. It was this tendency that led John Adams to warn: “Democracy … soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

The whole notion that it is a “hate crime” to question any part of a consensus is frightening. As an example, it is extremely unlikely that the number of persons killed in the Holocaust was 6 million. That number was promulgated at a time when the true number could not possibly be known. That doesn’t mean that the Holocaust never happened; but it is exceedingly unlikely that the true number was known at the time the estimate was first announced. I expect that I will get at least one accusation of being anti-Semitic for saying that. But either one believes in rational discussion or one does not; either one believes in evidence, or one does not. At one time there was a healthy debate on the subject of Hitler’s Final Solution. There was a lot of nonsense put forward by all – there were many more than two – sides in that debate. I can’t think the world is worse off for that. I don’t think that refusing to discuss an issue is a good idea.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free. And Democracy is not liberty. Sometimes democracy is the best protection for liberty, but that is not always so; there can be and often are conflicts between liberty and democracy. For a discussion that, read about the Convention of 1787 and what was said and done there.

I have this:

Without a true global average temperature covering a long enough period to establish a STATISTICALLY VALID trend (not just a regression line thrown across disparate measurements from here & there); then there is no way to prove that the planet’s climate has warmed.

You can repeat all year long that "we know" that the Northern Hemisphere was colder because this or that growing season was shorter (according to some guy) or because the Delaware had ice on it when Washington crossed it — it proves nothing, it is not science.

If you disagree, why not submit what you "know" to a scientific publication? Why not present it as a "scientific" paper? Go collect your Nobel Prize in "What everybody knows" or in the "If you don’t believe what I say, because I say it, you’re a dope" category.

You ASSUME that it is uncontested fact.

I contest it. And you CANNOT PROVE WHAT YOU SAY. I DARE YOU TO TRY.

You do not know. You presume. That’s not science. It’s not scientific. It includes no measurement. No observations. You have absolutely no way of determining the extent of the reported cold (or, have you been keeping the hourly-averaged temperature in Tempe, Arizona on October 12, 1872 hidden from us?), yet you claim that the temperature was colder than "normal" (whatever that might be) all across the Northern Hemisphere.

Without ACTUAL THERMOMETER MEASUREMENTS year-round, randomly distributed, and giving full coverage of the hemisphere — what you say you "know", you do not actually know. It is a gratuitous assertion. A baseless BALD-FACED LIE.

And anyone who makes such unfounded, ignorant assertions should probably not go around pretending to be "science-minded" or even rational.

Name Withheld

I am not sure I know what to say. Given those criteria I cannot prove that George Washingon ever existed. I have said that we infer – and that we have confidence in that inference, which is a long way of saying ‘we know’ in the same sense that we know that George Washington existed – that it was colder in 1800 than in 1900, just as I say that we infer, and have confidence in that inference, that it was warmer than at present during the Viking era. This is I think the first time I have ever heard the first statement contested. They certainly thought in 1900 that it was warmer than it had been in 1800. We have records of growing seasons, the dates on which ice formed, a fair number of sea temperature measurements (of varying accuracy and reliability, but they were temperature measurements), almanac readings, newspaper stories of rivers and lakes frozen over, stories of ice skating on brackish canals, and a number of other effects that we would reasonably expect from a colder climate. If the objection is that we don’t know to anything like 1/10^th degree what that temperature was in 1800 I agree heartily; indeed I have said that often. I don’t really know how to get an average temperature over a large area to 1/10^th degree even today, but I can at least describe repeatable operations producing temperatures we can compare from year to year. That will have to do, just as crop records and dates of ice formation and breakup will have to do for earlier times when we didn’t keep accurate temperature records.

I am so accustomed to being taken to task by AGW Believers that I haven’t really prepared for someone who attacks me as a warmer.

I have no accurate thermometer records for the period of the Ice Age, and no direct knowledge that northern North America was covered by hundreds of meters of ice, nor do I have any photographs showing that sea levels were hundreds of feet lower during those Ice Ages; but I have seen enough evidence to convince me that we may reasonably conclude that there was ice, just as I have come confidence that Arrhenius was correct when he concluded that the planet was slowly warming in 1900. He had no direct temperature measurements of the average temperature of the Earth, nor was there any reasonable way to collect them even with the technology of his time if he had unlimited funding. So far as I can see, his back of the envelope conclusions on what would happen if atmospheric CO2 level doubled have held up pretty well for a hundred years – indeed about as well as have all the expensive models.

In any event, I see no reason to continue to flog this horse. Those who insist that the Earth hasn’t been getting warmer at all since 1800 do not have the weight of the evidence – in my judgment.

Nor do I think it reasonable to ignore the possibility of climate changes, or to study the effect of CO2 increases on it. The CO2 increases are very real and quantifiable. In my judgment the warming trend from 1800 to present is also very real, but not so accurately quantifiable. I do not accept the accuracy of the climate models, but that does not mean that they are not studying a real phenomenon.

We can’t “prove” the “observational data” of this graph, but I think there is enough evidence to accept it as at least as accurate as any other, and a good general picture of what is going on:

http://m-francis.livejournal.com/47705.html

I haven’t seen any history/prediction I like better. Note that it is a pretty simple model. If you now impose the 11 year solar cycle on the multi-decade observation it appears to give an even better fit to the observations. Of course by that time you are way beyond the actual limit of accuracy of the observations, and it’s more of a game than any serious scientific effort.

Do note that Arrhenius predicted an “extra” temperature rise from the rising CO2, but so far that appears to be lost in the noise; as far as we can tell, it’s getting warmer but there’s an oscillation. Perhaps the CO2 effect is in diminishing the cold trends, but we don’t have data accurate enough to confirm that, so far as I can tell.

Prying in the Name of Diversity, http://www.jewishjournal.com/thewideangle/item/prying_in_the_name_of_diversity_20120309/ describes an astonishing new law. Excerpt:

The results are in. Of the 1,005 California judges who responded to a government survey released last week, 969 identified themselves as heterosexual, 19 as lesbians and 17 as gay men.

We know this — though it’s none of our business — because of a highly intrusive law passed by the Legislature last year. Under its provisions, every judge in the state, as well as all judicial applicants, nominees and appointees, is asked to provide information about his or her “gender, gender identity and sexual orientation.”

The statute that authorizes this new intrusion into judges’ private lives was enacted after lopsided votes in both the Assembly (52 to 25) and the Senate (23 to 15). But if the Legislature seemed to have no concern about the bench’s privacy, many of the state’s judges do. Some 40% of those surveyed didn’t answer the question on this year’s survey.

The goal of the legislation, according to those who backed it, was to promote greater diversity on the bench. But treating sexual orientation as if it were totally analogous to race, gender or ethnicity is wrong. Of course people should be protected from discrimination in employment or public accommodations because of their sexuality. But there’s no justification for the next level of intrusion — seeking to develop demographic data to ostensibly further “diversity.”

I am in agreement with Mr. Lehrer. It’s none of our business. I don’t think the government ought to be collecting or even be aware of much of the data on which it seems eager to make decisions. It is part of the Gnostic heresy that has taken over what used to be called “Progressives” and are now known as Liberals. There are no social problems that cannot be “fixed” by suitable laws and regulations, and there are no principles that limit what government should attempt.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/nyregion/fatal-shooting-of-ex-marine-by-white-plains-police-raises-questions.html?_r=1 will worry you. And an unarmed active duty Marine sergeant was shot dead by an Orange County Sheriff deputy sheriff in front of his children, for no discernible reason. The Marines at Pendleton are incensed.

http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2012/03/06/gingrich-invites-snl-space-camp

Newt was a space cadet before he was Minority Whip. It’s the most consistent thing about his policy I know of.

The Magyars’ Revenge, Jerry

It appears the new post-Communist constitution of Hungary offends some of the usual poobahs of political correctness:

http://takimag.com/article/the_magyars_revenge_charles_coulombe/print#axzz1ofHhPGmn

I really love the term “moral munchkins in Brussels and Washington.”

Ed

I haven’t time to give this the commentary it deserved. In 1956, the Hungarians acted like Poles, the Poles acted like Czechs, and the Czechs acted like swine. That hasn’t been forgotten among any of those peoples.