Tag: climate and religion

Tim has a go at some creationist.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t like being so rude or dismissive of creationists. Not because there is any truth in their conclusions, but because their arguments, while incorrect, are not actually stupid or insane.

What are the arguments for evolution? The primary evidence is the widespread existence of signs of relationship between different species, existing and extinct. But that evidence is spread pretty widely. It takes considerable time and research to find enough of it, or considerable experience of the workings of science as an occupation to see it in the literature. It is not reasonable to expect everyone to be able to make certain of themselves that evolution happens, when most people couldn’t explain how a fridge or CD player works.

So that leaves the secondary evidence, that just about everyone who has studied biology seriously for the last hundred years is in no doubt. To be sure, that’s a strong argument. But it does mean, more or less, that most people are being asked to take evolution on trust. Given that, the more we pressure people to accept what we tell them about natural history, the more they will reasonably suspect an ulterior motive.

Labelling creationists and ID’ers as “insane whackos” is therefore not just counterproductive, but wrong. More precisely they are ignorant, but no more ignorant than the many who “take our word for it” about natural history because they don’t have sufficient knowledge of the subject to make themselves sure. Creationists may be ill-educated, but they are not exceptionally ill-educated, just exceptionally disobedient to academic authority. I am not prepared to condemn their disobedience.

My sympathy with their disobedience has been enhanced by the global warming issue, where I have found myself in disagreement with the scientific mainstream, in a debate which appears to me more political than scientific. Possibly the two questions are similar, and if I knew more about climatology I would agree that global warming is almost certainly anthropogenic, and the dirty tricks, bad arguments and dogmatism of the other side would be beside the point. Conversely, if I am right about AGW, then when the whole IPCC steam train goes off the rails, any other politically significant scientific “fact” which is aggressively asserted on the basis of “we’re the experts” is going to take a popular battering.

Of course the difficult question is how to handle education. Should we permit children to be taught things which we are sure are not true? I’ve gone on too long so I’ll come back to this later.

I put the following work under your protection. It contains my opinion upon religion. You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.

The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.

Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

We do not consider that the right to freedom of conscience and religion requires the school curriculum to be exempted from the scope of the sexual orientation regulations. In our view the Regulations prohibiting sexual orientation discrimination should clearly apply to the curriculum, so that homosexual pupils are not subjected to teaching, as part of the religious education or other curriculum, that their sexual orientation is sinful or morally wrong. Applying the Regulations to the curriculum would not prevent pupils from being taught as part of their religious education the fact that certain religions view homosexuality as sinful. In our view there is an important difference between this factual information being imparted in a descriptive way as part of a wide-ranging syllabus about different religions, and a curriculum which teaches a particular religion’s doctrinal beliefs as if they were objectively true. The latter is likely to lead to unjustifiable discrimination against homosexual pupils. We recommend that the Regulations for Great Britain make clear that the prohibition on discrimination applies to the curriculum and thereby avoid the considerable uncertainty to which the Northern Ireland Regulations have given rise on this question. We further recommend that the Government clarifies its understanding of the Northern Ireland Regulations on this matter.

House of Lords / House of Commons Joint Committee on Human Rights, Sixth Report

Note that the position taken by parliament towards the theory that homosexuality is sinful is identical to that taken by the authorities of the church towards the Copernican theory as expressed by Galileo. He was permitted to believe that the Earth went round the Sun, and he was permitted to teach his model of the movements of celestial bodies. He was merely prohibited, like the church schools of the UK, from teaching that the things he believed were actually true.

Of course, the fundamental problem is that once you accept the principle of anti-discrimination laws, which nearly everyone now does, there is no logical justification for the retention of any individual autonomy whatsoever. After all, there is no logical distinction between a customer who prefers to buy clothes from shops owned and run by people of her own race, and a landlord who puts “No blacks” in his window.

The only sane argument for any anti-discrimination law is that there are some groups who are so vulnerable that they require special protection. I think it is on that basis that such laws are widely tolerated. However, that rationale is never stated, and instead the nonsensical theory is put forward that all “discrimination” based on group characteristics is wrong, and worthy of being banned.

For the record, I agree with Galileo, and disagree with the anti-homosexual position of certain church schools. But that is by the way. Like Paine, I believe that reason is the appropriate weapon against errors, and that The Human Rights Act 1998 is not.

A very interesting guest posting on Roger Pielke Sr’s Climate Science Weblog.

What’s revealing is that the writer, Benjamin Herman of the University of Arizona, is not a “climate scientist”. That is because hardly anyone is a “climate scientist”, as in someone who’s job it is to understand the climate. Like thousands of others, Herman is an expert in measuring, understanding or predicting one small element of the world’s climate processes.

The views Professor Herman expresses on the subject of global climate are pretty much those I would expect.

• He can see that the anthropogenic CO2 -> global warming theory is basically plausible.
• He can see many sources of uncertainty that seem to have been ignored in the IPCC literature, with the effect of exaggerating the confidence of its statements.

It seems to me that the majority of scientists with specialties relating to climate hold pretty much these views, along with a third belief:

• That pushing world energy production away from fossil fuel burning is highly desirable or essential over the long term, for a number of reasons mostly unconnected with climate.

As such, they have until now refrained from speaking up against the dishonesty or bad science in the AGW debate. After all, it might well be true, and it’s in a good cause even if it isn’t. Why step into the politically charged and dangerous arena of global climate prediction if you don’t have to?

The only people who have to take a scientific position on the issue are the holistic climate scientists. And pretty much the only reason for being a climate scientist in that sense is to predict global warming. The vaunted “consensus” that the IPCC represents is a consensus of a small group of people, fortified by the silence of the thousands of relevant scientists whose work they cite but who are not directly concerned with predicting the global climate, and who have better things to do than quibble about the confidence levels. If they have any hostility to the “consensus”, it is a kind of resentment that the work they’re doing is considered irrelevant: the questions they’re spending their careers working on are treated as already answered for the purposes of global climate prediction.

It’s an effect of the astonishing specialization in modern science. Scientists do not in general work on “big questions”. They work on small questions, and answering the big questions is left to summarizers, who are relatively few in number.

Of course, just because the police have fitted someone up doesn’t mean they’re not guilty. Even if this scenario has been foisted on us by a dishonest and politically motivated clique, that doesn’t mean it’s not true: it easily might be, and the alternative explanations of 20th century climate, while plausible, are not any better proved than the IPCC’s.

Watching the much-anticipated C4 film “The Great Global Warming Swindle”.
The science is OK – I was worried they would over-egg the pudding and drag in some of the siller arguments (the Monckton stuff, e.g.) It’s more cautious than that – nothing I have seen so far can be trivially dismissed.
The only really startling claim (1/2 hour still to go) is that Baroness Thatcher kicked the whole panic off in the 1980s in an attempt to undermine the NUM. According to Nigel Lawson, she wanted nuclear power to reduce dependence on coal and oil, saw the early suggestions that anthropogenic CO2 might cause warning, and set up a large Royal Society research project to go and back it up, leading directly to the IPCC etc.
I’ve never heard that storyline put forward before, and I can hardly wait to see if it stands up to scrutiny. Just imagine telling all the anti-capitalists that they’re just left-over pawns of their most hated enemy.

The programme seems to be winding up with whacking some easy targets – the idea that malaria would spread because of warming is plain silly, and I have never actually heard it before. Apparently the IPCC reports have put it forward, so it is perhaps worth taking on.

There has been some discussion on econblogs, originating, I think, with this Economist blog piece, attacking the idea of carbon offsets and particularly of subsidising clean energy as a way of reducing pollution from traditional energy sources.

The first pro-subsidy argument is that subsidising clean energy will cause clean energy to be substituted for dirty energy, which is good.

The reply, in the Economist piece, and also Arnold Kling’s recent TCS article, is that a subsidy to clean energy is a subsidy to energy, and will increase overall consumption of energy, possibly producing more total pollution than would otherwise have been the case. Pigouvian taxes on dirty energy can be justified, but not subsidies.

In a comment on a Kling EconLog entry on the subject, I put forward a second pro-subsidy argument:

The purpose of subsidising clean energy is not simply to displace dirty energy in the immediate sense — that is undoubtedly done better by taxing the dirty energy.

New technologies require a lot of development investment to bring to market. Once they are being successfully produced and sold in the market, experience and competition often produce rapid improvements, particularly in efficiency. The subsidy to clean energy use should not be seen so much as encouraging a certain quantity of clean energy to be produced, but more as a subsidy to the of clean energy technologies, to bring them more quickly to the stage where they can be rapidly and profitably developed.

The intervention in the market is then not aimed at correcting the direct negative externality of pollution, but at the positive externality of improving technological knowledge.

I believe that this is what the proponents of subsidised clean energy have in mind.

I brought the argument up not because I agree with it, but because I don’t like to see important points being missed.

Note that because the point of the subsidy is to encourage industry to invest in the relevant technologies, the effects if it works correctly — increasing the profits of businesses in the relevant sectors — would end up looking an awful lot like pork, which is the major criticism. The profits might not be rents, but fair reward for valuable additions to the knowledge of clean energy technology.

There are, nonetheless, a number of problems with the argument.

First, there are other mechanisms which are intended to address this very general market failure (that is, the positive externality of R&D). Most relevant in this case are patents and direct state-funded or state-subsidised research. The existence of these alternatives do not automatically invalidate the use of energy subsidies — one would have to show that it is a less effective approach. Both government research and patents are far from perfect, and should not be presumed to be the best solutions.

As an example, subsidising the research, rather than the energy, reduces the incentive on the producer to actually improve efficiency. If the subsidy directly targets the energy use, then there is competition between firms producing the subsidised energy, whereas if the subsidy is on a particular research project, it is a pure rent.

More significantly, there is no guarantee that the subsidies will go to the most promising technologies. I don’t believe that making ethanol from corn will ever be a useful contribution to the energy industry, no matter how much more efficient the process becomes. It will be carried on only for as long as it is actively subsidised, and is pure deadweight loss. But as long as it is subsidised, it might be profitable for producers and consumers. Solar panels, on the other hand, while not really worthwhile at the moment, might well, if pushed into the market by subsidy, and improved in efficiency once there, develop to the point where they are a major portion of energy production at a genuinely low cost.

Since the policy is currently directed far more to biofuels than to solar energy, I think it is not working.

That’s not to say it can’t work. There are many other points that can be made pro and con. I am, as always, sceptical that any interventionist policy will be effective in the long run, but the argument has too much merit to be ignored or dismissed out of hand.

I’ve made two comments about Pope Benedict’s lecture last week – one complaining about the bad internationalization of the website, the second dealing with the spurious outrage from Islamic rentamobs.

Given that, I will complete the “trinity”, so to speak, by addressing the actual content of the speech.

Benny is cool with science. “The scientific ethos, moreover, is – as you yourself mentioned, Magnificent Rector – the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit.”

But he claims that science depends on assumptions about the nature of reality which are not themselves scientific:

“This modern concept of reason is based, to put it briefly, on a synthesis between Platonism (Cartesianism) and empiricism, a synthesis confirmed by the success of technology. On the one hand it presupposes the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently: this basic premise is, so to speak, the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature. On the other hand, there is nature’s capacity to be exploited for our purposes, and here only the possibility of verification or falsification through experimentation can yield ultimate certainty.”

The conclusion is that to justify the presupposition of “the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality”, one must resort to the twaddle of the philosophers from Plato to Descartes to Kant, thereby importing Christian theology into the scientific worldview.

Of course, there is no necessity to do any such thing. The only necessary presumption to start doing science is that there is an external reality which exhibits some regularities. One can then start to probe what those regularities might be.

That necessary presumption is unprovable, but it is necessary not only for science but for any kind of social activity. The only alternative to it is solipsism, for if one denies that an external reality exists, or if one claims that it could vary entirely unpredictably, there is no mechanism by which one could become aware, even in principle, of the existence of another mind. It would then follow that anyone other than me that I am aware of is merely a figment of my imagination, and there is no point in attempting to to convince them of anything.

There has been an important development in the story about the Pope’s lecture at the University of Regensburg.

They’ve fixed the HTML. If you follow the same link that I gave in my previous entry on the subject, the rubbish characters have been replaced by html entities for the correct greek letters. It now renders correctly, at least in IE on my desk.

I didn’t think the other controversy arising from the lecture was worthy of comment, but now that people are being killed over it, I feel compelled to state the obvious.

Benny was talking about the relationship between religion and reason, and the different attitudes to that relationship that have shaped Christianity through history. His conclusion in a sentence is: “The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur – this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time.”

Along the way, he affirms that the “synthesis with Hellenism” (i.e. Greek philosophy) is not an incidental “preliminary inculturation” of Christianity, but is a necessary part of it: “the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.”

It was in the context of this “synthesis” that he opened with the “startling brusqueness” of Manuel II Paleologus.

“The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident.”

Benny then moves on through history: “in the late Middle Ages we find … in contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God’s voluntas ordinata.

“The thesis that the critically purified Greek heritage forms an integral part of Christian faith has been countered by the call for a dehellenization of Christianity – a call which has more and more dominated theological discussions since the beginning of the modern age.”

… “Fundamentally, Harnack’s goal was to bring Christianity back into harmony with modern reason, liberating it, that is to say, from seemingly philosophical and theological elements, such as faith in Christ’s divinity and the triune God.”

So there is the reason for citing a 14th century emperor — to show the views that were current before the first “dehellenization” in the middle ages.

There are two questions that have been raised regarding this lecture. One is whether Benny anticipated the global reaction to the “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman” snippit of the quotation, but had some nefarious reason for wanting to stir things up.

Maybe I’m being overgenerous, but the Church seems to me to have a track record of saying exactly what it means, right or wrong. If Benny had wanted to take a more aggressive stance towards Islam, he could have done so in his own words.

The second question is whether he should have anticipated the result. Again, the church is not a modern political party. It does not employ focus groups, and if it has spin doctors, they are not primarily concerned with “popular opinion”. The Pope may be regretting having used the words he did (though interestingly, his so-called apology does not actually say so), but I do not think it occured to him or anyone else to scan what he was preparing to say for things that could be taken out of context by the ignorant and the stupid.

I recently read Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear”. As a thriller, it’s good but not exceptional. As a contribution to climate debate, I’m not sure it’s helpful – there’s an obvious problem with claiming the media is drowning out the real science in a novel. I assume (and hope) that the claim in the author’s postscript, “Everybody has an agenda. Except me.” is not meant to be taken seriously.

What is a useful contribution is the Appendix in which Crichton draws an analogy between the global warming movement and the eugenics movement of the early 20th century. You can read it on his website.

There’s one point in his argument which I think is interestingly wrong. He says, “there was no scientific basis for eugenics.” Perhaps I’m quibbling over words, but if we’re talking about the fundamentals, there was a very solid basis for eugenics. Evolution is real. Genetics is real. It is true that if a person who, for reasons stemming from their genes, would be unable to live and reproduce in a primitive society, is, in our advanced society enabled to live and reproduce, then the gene causing their inability will as a result become more common than would otherwise be the case. That’s basis.

The problem, of course, is in the details, and in what is built on the basis. To what extent is failure in society due to genetic reasons? To what extent is failure of a society or a race as a whole due to genetic reasons? To what extent is the spread of genetic problems restrained by ordinary individual behaviour in the absence of a concerted policy? How long would it take for a change in selection pressures to have a noticeable effect on the human gene pool – decades or millenia? What can we do about changes that occur? Who is to decide which genes are superior? What are we giving up in exchange for genetic improvement?

Global warming has a very solid scientific basis, as I understand the word “basis”. The greenhouse effect is real. Carbon Dioxide concentrations are increasing. The increase is almost certainly anthropogenic. The basis of the theory of global warming is completely sound.

And the details are less clear. What is the magnitude and speed of the change? How much climate variation is due to atmospheric constitution, how much to land use, how much to solar variation, how much to natural oscillation, how much is random, how much is due to causes we haven’t even thought of? What will be the effects, how can we deal with the effects? Who is to regulate atmospheric emissions? What are we giving up in exchange for a cooler climate?

Where Crichton really hits the nail on the head is in his title. This is all about fear. I have worried in the past about the suspicious way in which my assessment of factual issues such as global warming always seems to support my political views. But the issues I have addressed are not purely factual. Fear is always part of the question. The question I have been dealing with is not “what is the matrix of costs and probabilities associated with climate change?”, it is “how much fear should we have of climate change”. And fears are (or should be) relative to other fears.

I have an agenda. My agenda is freedom. To me, the ideas that 10% of our land area might fall below sea level, and that we won’t be able to grow the crops we currently grow, are worrying. The idea that governments could have the power to regulate CO2 is terrifying. When I disagree with the climate science mainstream, I’m not so much disagreeing with the science, I’m disagreeing with the fear. I have different fear.

And fear leaks into the factual assesments also. If science were done perfectly, it wouldn’t, but it does. I think actually the factual disagreements, though they do exist as a result of the leakage, are less significant than they seem, because when they are converted into something meaningful to people, the fear has to play a part in the conversion.

If my terror seems a bit extreme, let me explain. After all, pollution regulations have been around a long time, and have resulted in huge environmental benefits. The difference is locality. The Clean Air Act was a response to local problems. The people who benefited from the act were either the same people as suffered its restrictions, or else lived among them – and we always have to compromise our interests with those we live among.

But the core assertion of the CO2 issue is that my emissions have effect on others independent of their distance from me. It is not enough, therefore, for me to compromise my interests with those of my neighbours, I must compromise with the whole population of planet Earth. That is a qualitative change from any kind of politics that has ever existed. The Kyoto Treaty, by seeking to restrict the essential private activity of burning fuel, is the establishment of a world government in a way that the creation of the UN, which sought to regulate only relations between states, originally was not.

Humankind has always faced environmental threats and problems, and has a good and improving record of coping with them. We have no such comforting record in dealing with overreaching government and tyranny – as Milton Friedman said in the old TV interview that has been going around recently, tyranny and serfdom are the normal state of mankind, and freedom is the rare and precious exception.

The eugenicists sold their participation in a common humanity for a lower incidence of genetic illness. My fear is of selling the existence of a private sphere within which the individual or group can be free for better weather.

The best source for mainstream climate science is realclimate.org. Their criticism of State of Fear is here.
A good source of purely scientific challenge to the mainstream is Roger Pielke Sr
A more obviously political critic of mainstream climate science is Patrick Michaels, who writes at TCS
Michael Crichton’s main attack on global warming is Environmentalism as Religion