Things I don't understand >

Why I’ve nearly stopped blogging

Posted on October, 26 at 7:07 pm

Over the past few weeks, a lot of things have happened: I’ve changed jobs (to a much better one, I hasten to add), moved location (by 600 miles), and to a certain extent, changed attitude to blogging and blogs in general.

A part of that has been the new responsibilities that have come from my job – I just have less time to devote to blogging, commenting and participating in issues that I think should be of concern.

But there’s something else.

Because I am deliberately anonymous, I cannot write about issues which are close to my heart but which could identify me. That puts me at something of a disadvantage compared to people like Steve McIntyre or Benny Peiser or Tony Newbery (or others I could name but won’t) who can talk about any issue that they feel like.

Microblogging

For the most part, the amount of time that you can devote to blogging is usually too small to be of much interest except to a small audience of people who already know you (your family and friends). For them, the microblog phenomena like Tumblr and Twitter have been a godsend. They don’t have much to say and a small space to say it in might make them feel important and connected – who’s to say?

The “Me Too” Derivative blog

Then there’s the blogger who doesn’t actually create any new insight – he or she simply cuts and pastes articles or discussions from elsewhere and maybe adds a comment or two. This is a very large category of blogs on the Internet.

The Original Content blog

Finally there’s the blog where the author generates new and interesting comment and insight. The quotation mark and the blockquote tag are sparingly used. Climate Audit is one such blog (that I’ve been proud to have been a small part of) but there are others. Such blogs are relatively rare.

Most blogs, lets face it, are unoriginal, derivative and banal. Microblogs and “me too” blogs are the vast majority of blogs out there. The derivative blog finds its full expression in aggregating blogs like Slashdot, Digg or Instapundit – the ultimate accolade of a derivative blog is to get linked to by the aggregators – or perhaps its like the Internet equivalent of the celebrity drug that recently a family got into trouble for attracting attention just once too often.

That’s how I’ve felt about my blogging – its derivative not original, banal and desperate. I don’t really have the time to blog properly and produce original insight, so I feel I’ve got to do something so I copy and paste and add a comment or two here and there – in other words I’m a blog parasite.

I’m convinced that the only people who have time to produce original content are either retired, semi-retired, in some sort of academic tenure or self-employed. These people can pick and choose their times to produce original content.

Not the unemployed, because last time I was unemployed I spent all day every day trying to get a job and fretting about any time I was spending NOT trying to get a job. Besides which, who wants to read the diary of a guy who spends most of his time whining and fretting (don’t bother, I know what the answer is)? I don’t know if there is an interesting blog about an unemployed guy talking meaningfully about his life and other things without it all sounding desperate and hollow.

I have lots of ideas for blogs, but precious little time to bring them to fruition. I can only seethe in jealousy as other people get to talk about their favourite subjects because they have plenty of time and plenty of original material. Like Anthony Watts blog for instance.

Nearly limitless time if you’re crazy

There is one final category of bloggers but its not so much a problem of blogging as it is about message boards and social media – the mentally ill. Mentally ill people, particularly people with schizophrenic disorders appear to have infinite time to fill message boards and newsgroups with deranged crap. They make less assiduous bloggers because their mental illness makes them demand that PEOPLE RESPOND TO THEIR GOD-LIKE INSIGHTS IMMEDIATELY. But mentally ill bloggers are usually few and far between because mental disorders are usually the products of disordered minds, the exact opposite of what successful long term blogging is about.

A subset of the mentally disordered could be people who would be diagnosed as having autistic spectrum disorders, like for example Asperger’s Syndrome. These are more common as bloggers than out-and-out crazies.

People with obssessive compulsive disorders might blog, but Complete Nirvana for OCD sufferers is not blogging but Wikipedia – a gigantic opportunity to play with facts and history, as well as other people just like them. For OCD sufferers, Wikipedia is like shelf-stacking with an infinite number of tin cans and shelves to be arranged and rearranged endlessly – pure bliss if that what you feel compelled to do all of the time.

What can I say? I’ve stopped the Solar Science blog because I felt for too long that it was an aggregator blog, not a blog of original insight. I just don’t have the time to turn Solar Science into an original blog of content – or maybe that’s the excuse I give myself for not devoting to my subject and organizing my time better.

Or maybe I expect too much of myself. Maybe I’m just not that interesting after all.

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Clive James on scepticism and global warming

Posted on October, 24 at 9:12 pm

Clive James is always a fascinating read, but here’s one from a column on scepticism and “golf ball crisps”:

In Montaigne’s day you could get into terminal trouble for taking scepticism too far, which is probably one of the reasons why not even he pushed it on the subject of religion.

Since then, a sceptical attitude has been less likely to get you burned at the stake, but it’s notable how the issue of man-made global warming has lately been giving rise to a use of language hard to distinguish from heresy-hunting in the fine old style by which the cost of voicing a doubt was to fry in your own fat.

Whether or not you believe that the earth might have been getting warmer lately, if you are sceptical about whether mankind is the cause of it, the scepticism can be enough to get you called a denialist.

It’s a nasty word to be called, denialist, because it calls up the spectacle of a fanatic denying the Holocaust. In my homeland, Australia, there are some prominent intellectuals who are quite ready to say that any sceptic about man-made global warming is doing even worse than denying the Holocaust, because this time the whole of the human race stands to be obliterated.

Really they should know better, because the two events are not remotely comparable. The Holocaust actually happened. The destruction of the earth by man-made global warming hasn’t happened yet, and there are plenty of highly qualified scientists ready to say that the whole idea is a case of too many of their colleagues relying on models provided by the same computers that can’t even predict what will happen to the weather next week.

In fact the number of scientists who voice scepticism has lately been increasing. But there were always some, and that’s the only thing I know about the subject. I know next to nothing about climate science. All I know is that many of the commentators in newspapers who are busy predicting catastrophe don’t know much about it either, because they keep saying that the science is settled and it isn’t.

Speaking as one who lives at sea level, I don’t relish the prospect of my granddaughter spending her life on a raft 30 feet above where she now plays in the garden, but I still can’t see that there is a scientific consensus. There are those for, and those against. Either side might well be right, but I think that if you have a division on that scale, you can’t call it a consensus.

Nobody can meaningfully say that “the science is in”, yet this has been said constantly by many commentators in the press until very lately, and now that there are a few fewer saying it there is a tendency, on the part of those who still say it, to raise their voices even higher, and harden their language against any sceptic, as if they were protecting their faith.

Sceptics, say the believers, don’t care about the future of the human race. But being sceptical has always been one of the best ways of caring about the future of the human race. For example, it was from scepticism that modern medicine emerged, questioning the common belief that diseases were caused by magic, or could be cured by it.

A conjecture can be dressed up as a dead certainty with enough rhetoric and protected against dissent with enough threatening language, but finally it has to meet the only test of science, which is that any theory must fit the facts, and the facts can’t be altered to suit the theory.

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Energy Sprawl and the Green Economy

Posted on September, 18 at 3:07 pm

With the emphasis on sprawl. You can bet that environmentalists will oppose this sort of build-out in wilderness areas even though it is a direct response to environmental concerns about non-renewable energy changing the climate in the first place.

Energy ‘Sprawl’ and the Green Economy

We’re about to destroy the environment in the name of saving it.
By LAMAR ALEXANDER

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar recently announced plans to cover 1,000 square miles of land in Nevada, Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah with solar collectors to generate electricity. He’s also talking about generating 20% of our electricity from wind. This would require building about 186,000 50-story wind turbines that would cover an area the size of West Virginia not to mention 19,000 new miles of high-voltage transmission lines.

Is the federal government showing any concern about this massive intrusion into the natural landscape? Not at all. I fear we are going to destroy the environment in the name of saving the environment.

The House of Representatives has passed climate legislation that started out as an attempt to reduce carbon emissions. It has morphed into an engine for raising revenues by selling carbon dioxide emission allowances and promoting “renewable” energy.

The bill requires electric utilities to get 20% of their power mostly from wind and solar by 2020. These renewable energy sources are receiving huge subsidies all to supposedly create jobs and hurry us down the road to an America running on wind and sunshine described in President Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address.

Yet all this assumes renewable energy is a free lunch a benign, “sustainable” way of running the country with minimal impact on the environment. That assumption experienced a rude awakening on Aug. 26, when The Nature Conservancy published a paper titled “Energy Sprawl or Energy Efficiency: Climate Policy Impacts on Natural Habitat for the United States of America.” The report by this venerable environmental organization posed a simple question: How much land is required for the different energy sources that power the country? The answers deserve far greater public attention.

Quite. The so-called “solutions” to climate change are not benign at all, but will be highly disruptive to the environment.

By far nuclear energy is the least land-intensive; it requires only one square mile to produce one million megawatt-hours per year, enough electricity for about 90,000 homes. Geothermal energy, which taps the natural heat of the earth, requires three square miles. The most landscape-consuming are biofuels ethanol and biodiesel which require up to 500 square miles to produce the same amount of energy.

Coal, on the other hand, requires four square miles, mainly for mining and extraction. Solar thermal heating a fluid with large arrays of mirrors and using it to power a turbine takes six. Natural gas needs eight and petroleum needs 18. Wind farms require over 30 square miles.

Why do I keep finding that these so-called cures to the “problem” of climate change are worse than the disease?

The full article is here:
online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574404762971139026.html

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Aryan Physics Revisited: A Comparison of 1930s German Physics and Global Warming Science Today

Posted on September, 17 at 10:56 am

Essay by James H. Rust, Professor of Nuclear Engineering (ret.)

For more than a quarter century controversy has embroiled the scientific community over whether carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas formed from burning fossil fuels, is causing increased global temperatures with catastrophic consequences. This is also called anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Many supporters of AGW are adamant in their views and refuse to acknowledge the existence of scientists or the science that refutes their views. Some advocates could be described as self-assured, arrogant, and using unflattering terms to describe those who disagree with them.

The possible threat of AGW spawned research funds from the United States government to study climate science. An excellent paper by Joanne Nova titled “Climate Money“  traces the way money was spent from 1989 to 2008 in the amount of $79 billion. Research supporting AGW was able to generate more money; so the financing system fed upon itself. If initial research proved AGW did not exist, future funding would have ceased. Yet to be reported, the United States economic stimulus funds for 2009 will allocate billions of dollars [to be] spent in anticipation of AGW.

The AGW Advocates

Advocates of AGW have had much media attention so many have become household names. Five names are Dr. John Holdren, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology; Dr. James Hansen, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies; Nobel Prize Winner Al Gore, former United States Senator and Vice President; Nobel Prize Winner Paul Krugman; and journalist Ellen Goodman.

Doctor Holdren co-authored a book Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment in 1977 with Paul and Anne Ehrlich . This book describes means of population control of forced abortions, sterilizations, babies seized from single or teen mothers, etc. During Dr. Holdren’s confirmation hearing before the United States Senate in 2009, it was pointed out he had predicted in 1986 one billions deaths due to AGW by 2020. The question today about Dr. Holdren’s prediction is whether one hundred million will die annually for the next decade or will one billion die during 2019.

Dr. Hansen is a strong advocate for AGW testifying to this effect before the United States Senate in 1988. Recently, Dr. Hansen called for CEOs of fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for “high crimes against humanity and nature.” He testified in the defense of six British conservationists who vandalized a new coal power plant under construction .

The attitudes of Nobel Prize Winner Al Gore are well summarized by an article by John Dendahl “Nobel Peace Laureate Al Gore is a Threat to Peace” . Nobel Prize Winner Gore made the statement years ago “the science is settled” on AGW. MIT Professor Richard Lindzen wrote an article in the April 12, 2006 Wall Street Journal titled “Climate of Fear” . In this article Prof. Lindzen wrote Senator Gore in 1992 tried to bully dissenting scientists to agree with his climate alarmism. Later Vice President Gore tried to enlist Ted Koppel in a witch hunt to discredit anti-alarmist scientists.

Nobel Prize Winner Paul Krugman wrote in the June 29, 2009 New York Times his feeling about the June 26, 2009 debate on the Waxman-Markey Bill – “And as I watched the deniers make their argument, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason-treason against the planet.”

Journalist and AGW expert Ellen Goodman wrote “Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.”

To illustrate uncivil behavior by AGW advocates is not confined to the United States; a June 16, 2009 meeting between Australian Senator James Fielding, Australian government AGW proponents, and four independent climate scientists [was] reported by Dr. David Evans.

Senator Fielding and four independent climate scientists met with the Minister for Climate Change Peggy Wong, Chief Climate Scientist Penny Sackett and Professor Will Steffen to discuss current science on AGW. The government scientists were aloof, self-assured, and created an aura of intimidation. They made no eye contact or shook hands at the end of the meeting.

In another vein, President of the British Science Association, Lord Robert May of Oxford, addressed his association and said faith groups could lead in the policing of human behavior. In a plea to enforce climate change, Lord May said, “How better it is if the punisher is an all-powerful, all-seeing diety.”

A warning from history

After WWI, a movement was started to promote accomplishments of German physicists which soon took on racial aspects because these accomplishments were restricted to Aryan or German physicists . Thousands joined this movement and notable members where Nobel Prize Winners Johannes Stark and Philipp Lenard. Naturally, Aryan Physics excluded the works of Jewish scientists – the most famous being Albert Einstein.

Many physicists, including Stark and Lenard, joined and became active members of the National Socialist Party. This provided a perfect match with National Socialists views on race. They saw that the works of Jewish scientists were stricken from textbooks, papers could not be published in scientific journals, research funds denied, and finally by the mid 1930s, employment with universities or research institutions terminated. Jewish science was ignored. Supporters of Aryan Physics could be described as self-assured, arrogant, and using unflattering names to describe Jewish scientists.

• This author strongly states this essay does not imply any connection of advocates for Aryan Physics to the atrocities committed by advocates of National Socialism.

Finally Aryan Physics fell apart because it was recognized the Secrets of the Universe could not be unlocked without use of Einstein’s Theories. For the record, Nobel Prize Winner Stark was jailed for four years after WWII.

A link between National Socialism and Conservatism movements was reported by German historian Uekoetter’s The Green and the Brown: a History of Conservatism in Nazi Germany published by Cambridge Press in 2006. A detailed review of this book was written by William Walter Kay . Conservatism movements started in Germany in the late nineteenth century and found easy mixing with National Socialism with their members having memberships in their local groups and the National Socialist Party. Millions of trees were planted in the name of Adolf Hitler.

The modern form of Aryan Science

The behavior of many AGW advocates is remarkably similar to that of supporters of Aryan Physics in 1930s Germany. They ignore entreaties of scientists who disagree with them. They attempt to stifle publications of research papers, obstruct funds for research that challenges AGW, and refuse public debate on the science of AGW.

It is ironic that scientists who question AGW are placed in a similar position as Jewish scientists in 1930s Germany. Their fate is most certainly not as grim. Labelling those who question AGW as deniers implying they deny the Holocaust is immoral.

The mixing of science with forces (such as politics, religion, or advocacy groups) contrary to scientific principles of postulating theories and then using observations to prove or disprove theories have been around since the birth of human thought. Noteworthy is Galileo Galilei being found vehemently suspect of heresy and forced to recant his belief the sun was the center of the solar system instead of the earth in 1634. This setback may have slowed development of astronomy; but did not seriously alter world’s history.

Germany’s experience with Aryan Physics may have cost them, and indirectly Japan, greater harm from WWII. Without Jewish physicists, the Germans were years away from developing an atomic bomb. The scientist who fled Europe in the 1930s insured the United States would successfully develop an atomic bomb in time to force a conclusion to WWII.

Subscribing to AGW may produce a large global impact if nations decide to alter means of energy production because of a perceived belief in catastrophic events due to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide. The proposal to reduce the world’s production of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels in 2050 to fifty percent of the level of 1990 will have negligible impact on global warming or any other climate change. Great economic damage will be done to the earth’s inhabitants with energy shortages and vastly higher energy costs. Undeveloped nations will be doomed to maintaining the same lifestyles as years in the past. All will suffer except those who trade in energy credits and produce alternative energy sources.

Much has been written about the science of climate change and the influence of carbon dioxide. A recent 2009 book “Climate Change Reconsidered – The Report of the Nongovernmental Panel on Climate Change” contains numerous references as current as 2009. The futility of trying to restructure the United States energy production from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources by 2050 is well described by Donn Dears 2009 book Carbon Folly.

A vast amount of material is available to support the thesis of a similarity between militant advocates of Aryan Physics and AGW. Internet reference were given for this essay and those willing to check these references and use available links can have months of reading.

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650 million years of Plate Tectonics in 80 seconds

Posted on September, 12 at 4:41 pm

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Lord May: Environmentalism and Religious Authoritarianism

Posted on September, 11 at 12:49 pm

Strangely enough the climate alarmist blogosphere hasn’t mentioned the latest statements of Lord May, former President of the Royal Society and self-appointed scold of Exxon Mobil.

It seems that the noble Lord has taken it upon himself to reveal his real motivations for his concern for the environment and they have nothing to do with the propagation of scientific knowledge.

This from the UK Guardian:

President of the British Science Association, Lord May, says faith groups could lead policing of social behaviour

Religious leaders should play a frontline role in mobilising people to take action against global warming, according to a leading scientist.

Lord May, a former chief scientist to the government, said religious groups could use their influence to motivate believers into reducing the environmental impact of their lives.

The international reach of faith-based organisations and their authoritarian structures give religious groups an almost unrivalled ability to encourage a large proportion of the world’s population to go green, he said.

Lord May highlighted the value of religion in uniting communities to tackle environmental challenges ahead of his presidential address to the British Science Association festival at the University of Surrey in Guildford today.

He will use the address to raise what Charles Darwin considered one of the great unsolved problems of his time: the evolution of co-operation. While scientists can explain the emergence of co-operative behaviour in small, related groups of animals, understanding co-operation among distant human societies has been more difficult, he said.

May will argue that the puzzle is as pressing today as it was to Darwin 150 years ago, because of the urgent need for global co-operation to tackle the environmental issues of water shortages, greenhouse gas emissions and unsustainable energy consumption

Now, there are many people who might complain that this imposition of religion in order to control the population’s sinful desires for economic uplift.

Some might even draw comparisons with other similar calls “religion in uniting communities” and what a wonderful result that has turned out to be.

But what do I know?

Some Americans might unreasonably draw the comparison between the state-sponsorship of religion and America’s own “Wall of Separation between Church and State”, but don’t they realise that Lord May is only humbly trying to save the Earth?

I always wonder what would happen if  “faith groups could lead policing of social behaviour”. Perhaps someone from Northern Ireland, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan or other fun places could tell me what its like.

Its fascinating that May invokes Charles Darwin, because as we know from history, faith groups were particularly important in helping Darwin propagate his theory of Evolution by process of natural selection, weren’t they?

Maybe I should ask PZ Myers about

“The international reach of faith-based organisations and their authoritarian structures give religious groups an almost unrivalled ability to encourage a large proportion of the world’s population to go green”.

Here for example is how faith-based organizations and their authoritarian structures can give an almost unrivalled ability to encourage a large population to accept a disputed election

I’m sure PZ would be in favour – after all, aren’t they on the same side?

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Starving themselves for purity’s sake

Posted on August, 29 at 7:34 pm

This from the UK’s Guardian newspaper, the newspaper of choice for the green ethically obsessed:

Eating disorder charities are reporting a rise in the number of people suffering from a serious psychological condition characterised by an obsession with healthy eating.

The condition, orthorexia nervosa, affects equal numbers of men and women, but sufferers tend to be aged over 30, middle-class and well-educated.

The condition was named by a Californian doctor, Steven Bratman, in 1997, and is described as a “fixation on righteous eating”. Until a few years ago, there were so few sufferers that doctors usually included them under the catch-all label of “Ednos” – eating disorders not otherwise recognised. Now, experts say, orthorexics take up such a significant proportion of the Ednos group that they should be treated separately.

“I am definitely seeing significantly more orthorexics than just a few years ago,” said Ursula Philpot, chair of the British Dietetic Association’s mental health group. “Other eating disorders focus on quantity of food but orthorexics can be overweight or look normal. They are solely concerned with the quality of the food they put in their bodies, refining and restricting their diets according to their personal understanding of which foods are truly ‘pure’.”

Orthorexics commonly have rigid rules around eating. Refusing to touch sugar, salt, caffeine, alcohol, wheat, gluten, yeast, soya, corn and dairy foods is just the start of their diet restrictions. Any foods that have come into contact with pesticides, herbicides or contain artificial additives are also out.

The obsession about which foods are “good” and which are “bad” means orthorexics can end up malnourished. Their dietary restrictions commonly cause sufferers to feel proud of their “virtuous” behaviour even if it means that eating becomes so stressful their personal relationships can come under pressure and they become socially isolated.

Of course the link between the British Dietetic Association’s own propaganda on organic food has yet to been seen by a fully qualified dieticians, such as the ludicrous “5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day” recommendation which prevents no cancer at all but does cause people to gain weight through all the fruit sugars they ingest leading to insulin resistance and worse.

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Self-awareness

Posted on August, 29 at 2:56 pm

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Quote of the week: Miranda Devine

Posted on August, 14 at 5:26 pm

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Something stinks in the climate science industry. The confected sense of urgency. The comic predictions by the United Nations that we have only "four months" to save the planet or that next year as many as 50 million climate refugees will be "displaced" by human-caused climate change.

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Scientific Alliance: Popper versus Kuhn on Climate Science

Posted on August, 6 at 10:03 pm

This just came in from the Scientific Alliance, and I thought it was so good it should be reproduced for posterity:

Time for a new paradigm on climate change?

There are two alternative ways to look at how science progresses. In one corner is the concept of the falsifiable hypothesis, credited to Karl Popper. Popper argued that all science is based on hypotheses, which must be tested to destruction. Sound evidence which does not fit with the hypothesis must logically cause it to be rejected. However, the other side of the same coin is that no hypothesis can ever be said to be proven. Over time, the body of evidence consistent with a successful hypothesis builds up to the extent that it becomes regarded as a theory, for example the theory of General Relativity, or Tectonic Plate theory.

At this stage, theories are treated, to all intents and purposes, as fact. However, even then, quite basic knowledge may, with time, be seen as merely provisional. A classic example is Newtonian mechanics, which fully describes the motion of bodies on the scale we are familiar with, but which breaks down both at the level of elementary particles (hence the development of quantum mechanics) and at a cosmological scale (where relativity comes into play).

Popper used the concept of falsifiability as his criterion for whether something is genuinely scientific or not. Thomas Kuhn, in the other corner of this contest, contributed a different view of how scientists work. He introduced the concept of “normal science” to cover the situation where scientists work on various topics within a central paradigm. In contrast to Popper, the Kuhnian view is that “wrong” results (ie, those which are in conflict with the prevailing paradigm) are considered to be due to errors on the part of the researcher rather than findings which jeopardise the consensus view. However, as conflicting evidence increases, a crisis point is reached where a new consensus view is arrived at: a so-called paradigm shift.

These two philosophical approaches represent the extremes of a spectrum. Popper is the purist, who describes how scientific progress ought to work in an ideal world. On the other hand, Kuhn’s description is more pragmatic and a more realistic view of what actually happens. When a hypothesis is first put forward, it would be quite easy to discard it if early experimental results falsified it. However, when a consensus builds up over time that a particular view is “correct”, it takes plenty of hard evidence to convince people they have been wrong. After all, scientists are only human.

The example often used of this happening in the fairly recent past was the derision which was directed at Wegener’s hypothesis of continental drift, when the prevailing scientific view was that land masses were immobile. Although there were some supporters of this view during the first half of the twentieth century, it was only in the 1950s that an understanding of plate tectonics led to the general acceptance that continents are not static. This was a revolutionary shift in thinking, but the paradigm took many years to change.

But Popper’s description was more nearly correct in the case of cosmology. In the 1950s, there were two competing primary models of the Universe: the Big Bang and the Steady State. By the mid-60s, the accumulation of evidence led most astronomers to accept that the Big Bang was the hypothesis which gave the better explanation of how the Universe behaves.

Coming now to the more topical and contentious case of climate change, it is clear that science is operating in a Kuhnian fashion. There are a number of observations which would apparently serve to falsify the hypothesised enhanced greenhouse effect. Not least of these are the missing signature of CO2-driven warming (an enhanced rate of warming in the upper troposphere relative to the Earth’s surface) and the lack of warming across the greater part of Antarctica. The response to this – from those who do not simply dismiss the evidence out of hand – is to point instead to evidence which is consistent with the AGW hypothesis and to introduce a range of fudge factors such as aerosols to account for the observed lack of correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide level and average temperatures.

The behaviour of a great many researchers involved in climate change is far from Popperian. Rather than test their hypothesis by trying to falsify it, they look instead for evidence which supports it and, in a deeply unscientific manner, will often simply dismiss contrary evidence on the basis of minor flaws or criticism. This is research done according to prejudice rather than with an open mind. To compound the error, and because evidence can only be gathered by observation rather than experiment, increasing reliance has been placed on computer models.

Making headlines in the Guardian last week was a study not yet even published. Jointly written by Judith Lean of the US Naval Research Laboratory and David Rind of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and due to appear in Geophysical Research Letters, this is billed as the first analysis of the combined impact of human influences (including CO2 and aerosols), solar radiation, volcanic eruptions and ENSO (the El Nino Southern Oscillation) on global temperatures.

Their main conclusions are that anthropogenic global warming has been masked in recent years by reduced solar activity and a lack of a strong positive El Nino, but that a projected increase in solar activity will cause temperatures to rise at a rate 50% faster than projected by the IPCC. Many readers will of course remember that mainstream researchers have generally downplayed the role of variations in the Sun’s output as insignificant in terms of global temperatures, but there now seems to have been a reinterpretation to fit the facts.

But the main criticism of this paper (or at least, what has been reported prior to publication) is that it is not a scientific study but the output of a computer model. The study smacks of damage limitation, of a desire to find some rational explanation for the lack of temperature rise over the past seven or more years. The explanation is that well, yes, natural variation can be important, but that this is only creating a temporary masking effect, soon to disappear. Suspicions about the motivation for the paper are only increased by the Guardian headline: “New estimate based on the forthcoming upturn in solar activity and El Niño southern oscillation cycles is expected to silence global warming sceptics”.

Highly unlikely, as this is merely hypothesis and, crucially, it is not directly falsifiable. But what is important is that the authors are predicting the return of global warming in the next few years, and that the upward trend will be higher than before. If this does not occur, then we must conclude that their analysis is wrong. If they are wrong, it may be because the coming solar cycle will be a weak one, as many people are predicting. And, if so, the logical conclusion may be that natural cycles are more important than carbon dioxide emissions.

In the meantime, Henrik Svensmark and colleagues from the Danish National Space Centre have published a paper in the same journal which gives support for the hypothesis that cosmic rays, modulated by the solar wind, can indeed alter the degree of cloud cover and hence affect temperature (Svensmark et al; Cosmic ray decreases affect atmospheric aerosols and clouds; Geophysical Research Letters; Vol 36, L15101, doi:10.1029/2009GL038429, 2009). Their measurements indicate that cloud cover measured over oceans decreases to a minimum approximately a week after cosmic ray minima. The effect can take large quantities of liquid water out of the atmosphere. This hypothesis may or may not be right, but it remains a working possibility and should certainly not be dismissed lightly.

So, climate science, heavily influenced by global warming politics, continues to adhere to a central paradigm as described by Kuhn. Contrary evidence is clearly not going to be accepted as falsification. It will be fascinating to see what trends there actually are in climate over coming years and, if the predictions of renewed (and faster) global warming come to nothing, then what else will be necessary to cause the crisis which will lead to a paradigm shift. In the meantime, we have to hope that politicians do not take us too far down the road of trying to control the climate based on the current paradigm.

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