What is climate science?

One of my minor ambitions has been to settle on a promising area of climate science and study it in depth. Downloading papers, data, plotting my own graphs and calculating my own stats – that kind of depth. However a problem arose.

What to study?

The more I look at the climate sciences, the more convinced I become that we are not even close to articulating the main climate drivers with their timescales and uncertainties. Well maybe we are getting to know more and more about the uncertainties, but that's the problem.

Although we are accustomed to speak and write of climate science and climate scientist, there are no such beasts. We use the terms as established norms of verbal behaviour, but in my view they do more harm than good. Our global climate is far too complex to be studied within a single discipline and it's time we acknowledged it.

In much the same way we speak of chemistry and chemists when what we really have are specialist chemists working in related areas we place under the umbrella of chemical science.

Unfortunately, sticking with the chemistry analogy, climate science has yet to discover its periodic table. Without something of the kind, some overall theory to justify the term climate science, there is not enough coherence to stitch the various climate sciences together. It is also possible that some climate sciences such as dendroclimatology may become obsolete.

I think a good deal of confusion has arisen from a perception that the climate is a cluster of known scientific laws so the stitching together is already done by those laws. There seems to be a largely covert assumption that all will become clear if only climate scientists select the appropriate data and build models to encapsulate known scientific laws.

This is essentially philosophical assumption – that it must be possible to resolve climate behaviour into known physics. However, with numerous failed climate predictions and the current warming hiatus, it is obviously not so. The current state of the game is that climate behaviour cannot be resolved into known physical laws.

So I haven’t found an area promising enough to be worth studying in depth because so far there isn’t one. That may be one reason why the public domain is saturated with embarrassing falsehoods, emotional rhetoric and appeals to authority. For those who must persuade and those who must be persuaded, there is nothing else on which to base the arts of persuasion.

The climate is fiendishly complex on all timescales. We need much more data and a huge flash of inspiration, but in any event there are no experts with a grasp of the whole subject.

As yet there is no such thing as climate science.

Carbon-free blogging

This post demonstrates a new carbon-free technology where individual green blog posts can be entirely powered by wind turb

                                                                                                                                 see

                                                  how                                    
      blow                                    

                                                                                job




                                            turns out.

False gods

From Wikipedia

For some of us without a belief in God, it may be disappointing that so many false gods have slipped into the godless vacuum that is modern society. At least a belief in God tended to highlight the worship of false gods, bringing out the fact that they were gods, were worshipped and were false.

Take whales as a crazy example. Study the ecstatic faces of those who observe their first whale – after all it’s something we see on TV often enough. Why ecstatic? Have whales been promoted to minor deities? Ludicrously enough, yes they obviously have – for some. The environment appears to be a zoo of minor deities apart from its human denizens. Humans seem to be the demons in this strange new Godless but god-riddled world.

The great and somewhat covert myth of western secularism was that social control would somehow turn out to be less rigid and oppressive than during our predominantly Christian social evolution.

Yet what is a person in our brave new secular world? As far as ruling technocrats and global corporations are concerned, a person seems to be no more than a pattern of behaviour. Not a mind, not an individual, not a free citizen with spiritual values, moral standards or any of those old-fashioned notions, but simply a pattern of behaviour.

So how wide is this range of person-defining behaviour? Well surely the first and most obvious question is – what range of behaviour might be acceptable to our puppet masters – given what we already know of them?

So that’s a narrow range of behaviour isn’t it?

The only important behavours are probably political and social timidity combined with naive shopping habits. That’s it – that’s probably all that is required of ordinary citizens.

Truth is one of the most obvious casualties, truth so often being inimical to manipulative narratives. So a politician’s job is not truth-driven and politicians are not truth-seekers. Why would they be in a secular society wholly based on manipulative narratives designed behind the scenes? It wouldn’t work.

A truth-seeking culture would screw up all those manipulative narratives. In a secular society, political and commercial dishonesty always have this covert yet wholly essential rationale.

So secular society has not proved to be the brave new rational world many secular folk may have dreamed of – and in many cases worked for. What was overlooked is that a secular desire to control behaviour in pursuit of political security and commercial advantage has no reason to stop at any particular juncture other than economic and technical feasibility.

So the only limits we have on attempts to control behaviour are economic and technical – not moral or spiritual. Control cannot be halted by any countervailing moral or spiritual force because to an increasingly large extent there isn’t one. We secular folk rejected it.

Christian religious traditions on the other hand, whatever faults and corruptions may have occurred over the centuries, were rational attempts to make moral and spiritual sense of the human condition. Our shift towards a more secular society leaves a moral hole inevitably filled by political correctness simply because that’s the biggest game in town. Promoted to that position by secular indifference and outright stupidity.

That is certainly not to say that one society is to be preferred over another. I don’t hanker after Victorian morality, but those of us with a secular outlook have a problem we seem reluctant to acknowledge. The defects of secular society may at the moment be tolerable to many, but much of that tolerance may be due to little more than physical comfort. Food, shelter and entertainment have subverted us – or too many of us at least.

Should our physical situation become less comfortable, then the defects of a secular society may well become startlingly apparent. Startling to those who missed what was going on any rate.

The Lone Ranger

From Wikipedia

I still have the remnants of a cold, so yesterday we decided to spend the evening watching a film. I braved the chill winds to search out a DVD in Sainsbury’s – anything even vaguely watchable was the brief.

After peering a row after row of dross I settled on The Lone Ranger, partly because I watched the TV series as a child in the fifties and partly because the film was a flop and the critics generally panned it. I hardly watch films, but anything panned by the critics must be worth a look.

Well it’s rather long at 143 minutes, but I thought it was fine. Good guys, bad guys, lots of gore, lots of action and plenty of knockabout humour.

Apart from the gore, special effects and humour, it’s a fairly straightforward western with runaway trains, a whorehouse madam with a shotgun hidden in her false leg, Johnny Depp with a dead crow on his head and a somewhat reluctant Lone Ranger.

I won’t give anything away in case you haven’t seen it, but although a little long, I found it to be watchable fun. What else is a film supposed to be?

Does the web think?

From telegraph.co.uk

It is obvious that most politicians do not see truth-telling as a helpful career option. To my mind this has always been the case. Our comparatively recent access to a huge mass of information via the web has simply made their lying disturbingly blatant.

Lying to the punter is how political business is done and as far as I can see it has never been any different. What has become startlingly different in recent years is how those lies are more easily spotted via the web. They stand out because they don’t fit a web-centric public domain.

Yet the toads have no other way of doing business.

Putting the best spin on things and if necessary resorting to outright lies – hasn’t that always been the way of things? In other words, we don’t have honest politics because we never invented it. So will the political classes of the twenty-first century ever evolve another way of doing business?

Maybe, but I think they were unprepared for the web. So familiar were they with lying, spinning and dissimulation, that they never saw it coming. They never realised how the web would shine a cold blue light on their lies and evasions.

Maybe that cold blue light is far from perfect and maybe it will be attenuated by censorship and manipulation, but just possibly it may survive and flourish. There is another, more subtle aspect to the web though.

Does the web think?

Does it take a view on things? I think in a sense it does. We already know what it thinks of Tim Yeo, although as yet we aren’t clear how it works because web thinking is complex, multi-dimensional, contradictory and not always what we expect. Except in Tim's case of course.

It may be a weirdly ambivalent and mysterious network of competing narratives and possibilities, but if those narratives coalesce towards a conclusion, however tentative, subtle and nuanced, then in that sense the web is thinking.

If so, the conclusions it reaches may shape our lives.

Windows 8 is

An idea from coyoteblog. Various search engine completion suggestions for "Windows 8 is "

Bing

Yahoo

Google

I do enjoy a nice graph

So about 99.6% of the UK adult population don't buy the Guardian - an overwhelming consensus. 

Source.