Nigel Calder's junk science: Nigel Calder's junk philosophy of science

The world gets worse. Vast dust storms develop in China, and uninsured middle class homeowners from Hull in the UK to New Orleans, victims of unprecedented floods, are promised help but not given help.

There's a distinct possibility here that as society builds monuments to victims conveniently dead, living, struggling victims of global warming might simply fall off the radar screen because corporate media is really and truly invested not in giving you "all the news that's fit to print", but instead the tools for a "safe" middle class existence and mindset, from superficial, profoundly "framed" news, to adverts, to classified ads for jobs that may or may not exist.

Comes now a column (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1363818.ece?Submitted=tr...) by Nigel Calder, former editor of the (British) journal New Scientist, who says that global warming as a consequence of economic activity is a modern myth.

Note in passing the rhetorical impact of such "skepticism". It appears to deny, in a skeptical, enlightened, curmudgeon-Voltairean way, a "fashionable" view "mindlessly" adopted by English professors, ambitious scientists, and girls in bikinis at the beach.

Rhetorically, it seizes a "male" terrain wherein the patriarch represents a moderating influence on the Dionysian excess of the youths and women, who are as I write running off to a rock concert to "save the earth", on the face of it as foolish as dancing to placate Dionysius.

It appears to replace a maximal claim, one with a lot of And operators in it (where p And q is harder to establish than p or q as individual cases), by a skepticism and a disbelief, a wise and far more scientific caution.

The problem is that as I've pointed out before, in programming and in thinking about science "science" is considered as one activity and no distinction is made between pure science and applied science. In addition, the wise curmudgeon merely wishes to REPLACE the global warming assertion with an assertion of equal dubiety and logical strength, and he cannot be "skeptical" about his alternate explanation.

In the Times piece, Calder's argument is twofold. Number one, he points out that since 1999, global average temperatures have leveled off. Number two, he advances what are supposed to be alternative explanations notably sun activity and cloud seeding by solar radiation.

Now, at this point what usually follows is a data smog as proponents of rivals climate change theory confuse each other and the general public with ever more detailed numbers, claims, and, when those don't work, self-reflexive conspiracy theories which constitute mostly accusations of bad faith on the part of one's opponent.

I'd prefer to stay at the level not of science (whether pure or applied) but the philosophy of science, and its rationality criteria.

First of all, pointing out that warming trends have leveled off ignores that in a complex, stochastic graph, you can always find plateaus, even descents into temporary valleys. You only have to select a time interval. This stunt is in fact a favorite of "scientists" funded by oil companies: I first encountered it in a Wall Street Journal article in 1995 which "proved" that global warming was "false" by presenting a crude Excel plot of temperatures since 1981, where my addition of the temps for 1980 caused their trendline to reverse direction. Their article, just like Calder's contained the usual rant against "unscientific" people but committed either an elementary mathematical blunder or a criminal fraud.

Secondly, the text at the link, in a way that is irresponsible for "a former editor of New Scientist", ignores that solar radiation levels, as well as interstellar radiation that according to some scientists seed clouds at varying levels, and economic activities are COFACTORS, each participating in causing the rapid increase in temperatures of the 1990s and, during the current decade, the extaordinary frequency of significant weather events.

The editors of the London Times, a paper now funded by Australian press lord Rupert Murdoch (a vulgar, stupid, and greedy man who rode his father's fame to wealth and power, like most of the rich bullies of my generation of vipers) trust that the reader won't even ask about the possibility that global warming (the unprecedented rise in temperatures of the 1990s and the killer weather events of the 2000s) has multiple causes!

But worse, no distinction is made between applied and pure science.

Calder holds global warming to canons of pure science in which the scientist is like a Turing machine, able to "do anything" (simulate any other Turing machine) because he can always get more time and storage, more time and research support in the case of the pure scientist.

But two forms of applied science, computer programming and medicine, have had quite on their own to develop methodologies, little known by prestige people in mathematics or biological science, which unlike the Turing machine are bounded by real world demands (not just "business needs", an *ersatz* demand made to ensure that resources are overdiverted to private profit).

In computer science, few computer "scientists" understood what computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra was about and he got a lot of flak because he insisted on entering an applied science without using the limitations, in applications, on time and resources, as an excuse for *schlamperei*, grab-ass, and good-enough-for-government work.

Instead, Dijsktra recursively applied, in a unique way, the scientific method to an affair normally placed just outside the door of pure science by the fact that money talks, and while Western "civilization" acknowledges the need for a committment to truth at commanding heights, it makes no such acknowledgement lower down, where the older feudal relationships of grab-ass and smash-and-grab continue to apply; Rupert Murdoch is a man of the Dark Ages empowered by little men of the Enlightenment, the latter made little by the absence of social change.

Dijkstra with an admirable naivety judged applied science by the meta-standards of pure science while simultaneously acknowledging the reality on the ground of actual computers.

Likewise, and as has been pointed out by others at this site, doctors and nurses apply science by doing "differential" diagnoses. Using checklists which MAY ignore possibilities in a way that MIGHT be called unscientific, they try to get to the best diagnosis quickly so the patient doesn't die.

Likewise, when an ace programmer is confronted by a problem isomorphic to forming the union of two sets, he asks first if the sets are sorted, because then he can use a fast algorithm:

while (not at end of set one or not at end of set two)
Compare the pair of members at the front of each list
Emit the lower to the union set and advance the lower's position: by convention consider "end of set" to be "as big as possible"

Otherwise he may have to use a slow algorithm:

for each member in the first set, find it in the second set: if found, add the common member to the union and continue.

Now, the reified illusion, that when Teacher tells us that this is this and that is most assuredly that, that the two concepts are in all respects different, and that to find commonality is superstition, causes us, in the intellectual subconscious, to believe that if there is applied science and there is pure science, then no meta-science, no committment, like Dijkstra's, to mere truth, can exist.

Reification in other words blinds us to the ability to use "philosophy of" as an operator without a sneer, as when the manager ridicules the engineer for being, heaven forfend, "philosophical" and thus inhabiting a terrain OTHER than, and OUTSIDE of, either pure science (considered only a source for ideas we can steal) or applied engineering (which is what we're paid for doing, as the manager reminds us).

Now, Calder's readers are precisely people victimized into positions in applied science of various kinds, and during the work week, they are blind to their own victimization and that of others. They are also blind to Calder's equivocation between solving a purely scientific problem, and doing something about global warming, when it is KNOWN that it may turn the Earth into a "different planet" in decades, where a "different planet" will probably be uninhabitable (there being so many planets with no life indicating that the earth's environment is unique, and destroying it would be a second Holocaust).

At his foulest, he raves against the serious global scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as spinmeisters merely for doing their jobs.

He pretends in fine to be a moderate, minimalist skeptic when his skepticism is actually a heavily freighted alternate theory which requires us to believe too much in the ability of sun spots and cosmic radiation to warm the earth, and to REJECT as a source the one reason we can do something about. This rejection would be harmless in pure science.

In applied science it is criminal, since global warming systematically selects The Wretched of the Earth as the victims of castatrophe. We've already been sticking it to The Wretched of the Earth with our economic exploitation, and for us to make them inhale our fart gas is worse.

Forcing applied science to be pure while ignoring the higher purity of a committment to truth creates victims, from the users of bad data systems to flood victims in New Orleans. But the owners of newspapers want us to identify at all times with the winners.

Don't they.