From my perspective it fits with what we are learning about the amygdala and pain/fear memories.

Phyllis Chessler chimes in on the relationship of child abuse to Mid East pathologies. Roger did a bit on it here. As I did on my blog.

Then there is a study coming out in 2006 that is likely to show that it is the sun that is driving climate change. What is one of the reasons that this idea is catching on? Global warming on Mars.

Global warming may be the ultimate in junk science.

The Christmas orders are staring at me from the table, but how can I resist a good chat? (I’ll just have to try, but first …)

I wonder if you – a scientist/logician in Colorado – aren’t already a friend of mine? I know it’s a long-shot but you remind me of just such a Charlie. We’d have a mutual friend in NY, initials JAL? At any rate you and he would be most sympatico, which I gather is unusual in those parts of CO that might attract a Buddhist.

We’re agreed on excuse-making then; the middle way, as is usual, holding the best potential for open-mindedness. To revive the ghost of Hume yet again, isn’t it amazing how quickly these new concerns expose our individual values and customs? I’m speaking essentially of our respective cosmologies here, and I mean cosmology as a literary art. Whether they come in the form of Judeo-Christian customs or the customs and biases that must attend any interpretation, scientific or not, when it comes to climate it seems we’re immediately adrift in a discussion about values.

Your post reminded me that I once had a very heated discussion with Lynn Margulis, Sagan’s ex-wife. Most posters here would get the wrong idea upon learning that it was Margulis and Lovelock who penned the “Gaia Hypothesis”. To wit: she couldn’t share any of my ambivolence about genetic engineering since she adhered to the line that ‘we are ourselves nature, ergo anything we do … ‘ Perhaps she was selling a book then too, but her bombast looked like pure hubris to me. Whatever it took, she seemed to be saying, engineer it and get it out there. Evidently we had very different ideas about the biblical term “dominion”.

At the time I was working in molecular biology (a mere technician but still an enthusiast) so I didn’t and still do not propose a moratorium on all bio-tinkering. But coming from a more continental perspective I argued – after Adorno really – that we are in a compromised position in regard to nature, being neither of it, nor not of it.

As a non-Judeo-Christian American – insofar as that’s even possible – I’m still a traditionalist, but in a Burkean, and pragmatic sense (I enjoyed your reference to Peirce). And Gadamer too: if we’re thrown into the context and value-nexus that’s produced us then tradition ought to enjoy some degree of authority while also tempering our actions (and arguments).

Speaking politically, I see the greatest threat to this approach in the kind of dogmatic progressivism we increasingly associate with European thinking, something Burke identified long before us. But in terms of science and technology, potentially odious “progressivisms” are manifesting on either side of the current political divide.

This is what’s so difficult for me to parse on each occasion, but it always begin with the funky smell of “excuses” in the air.

“The global warming scam”

http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/000854.html

In which she lays out 5 articles that discuss research into temperature and CO2 relation.

“http://www.co2science.org/journal/v7/v7n42c1.htm

Article one says that a number of studies show that that ëthe decline in atmospheric CO2 concentration post-dated the decline in air temperature at the onset of the four glacial epochs that are evident in the Vostok ice core data.”

etc.

But you’re absolutely right: the real problem is that what ought to be a scientific question turns into an excuse. That’s much what happened with “nuclear winter”: the models involved were dubious at best, but the conclusions were too politically useful. Sagan and others consciously continued to use the nuclear winter models for political leverage long after the falsity of the models was well understood. But the falsification of the models didn’t mean nuclear winter would be a good thing.

I apologize for having weighed in before reading the excellent comments following Roger’s first Crichton post.

You completed the rest of my Hume for me – the upshot being much the same – when I was merely sounding out the degree of your scepticism generally. It’s so hard to tell from a few blurbs where people are really coming from, but as I read the other page I understand better that you’re not about sophistry.

Like you I’m sceptical about the modeling, and I hope you can glean from my posts that I also view ‘Kyoto’ as quite dubious. But I’m sure you’ll agree that it would be a shame, not to mention foolish, to have the counter-anthropogenic argument predominantly formed by an equally dogmatic counter-rhetoric.

I think I’m beginning to see the outlines of an approach that is interested in the science only inasmuch as the data confirms one necessary finding: that global warming is the invention of “socialists”. That may well be true, but that doesn’t also mean that there isn’t warming, or that the outcome wouldn’t be as bad as your average anti-capitalist would like to believe. In that necessarily ill-informed denial of what may still come to pass – who really knows? – there may be a psychology at work that needs to rationalize chance above all else (which is why I brought up Lyell’s Uniformitarianism in relation to Crichton, not to mention Pangloss).

With lots to do today let me think about that initial conversation a little more. I may get fuzzy pretty quickly, especially where modeling is concerned, but my point is that we’re all out to sea a little here and just as soon clinging to this or that piece of cultural flotsam – the uniformitarian bias being one such artifact, catastrophism being another.

Frankly, I don’t understand why everone isn’t sounding fuzzy?

Pothos, Hume pretty well disposed of the notion that this makes empiricism useless at the same time as he posed the problem. Beyond that, there’s been a good lot of work done since Hume on the philosophical issues involved, eg, Popper and … oh, gee, Hungarian name, I’ve just gone blank. Oh, and Peirce, with “adduction”. Anyway, the point is that while empiricism can never deliver deductive certainty, there are still certain qualities that we expect of an empirically derived law, which to date the computer modeling approach to these climate issues doesn’t satisfy very well.

Among those are that the model should be distinguishable from other models with other causal drivers, and that one in particular is one the modeling “confirmations” of anthropogenic global warming appears to fail. I don’t really want to re-iterate them, so let me suggest you run back down the thread; RogerA, Chuck, Patrick, and I, among others, did them over in the first Crichton thread. The gist of it is that anthropogenic global warming as a hypothesis depends on models based around the original “hockey stick”. That hockey stick model shows effectively flat climate through periods we know historically were climatically very different, and the anthropogenic model depends upon that fairly flat baseline. As you note, there are good reasons, such as variation in effective albedo, not to mention the apparent fact that we’re at a Maunder maximum that’s heating up Mars as well, to question basic assumption in those models.

Given that the models are based on questionable interpretations of historical data and don’t appear to account for other data very well, I think it’s fair to question them.

They are, however, politically convenient for some people; sadly, as with the “nuclear winter” fad 15 years ago, political convenience sometimes outweighs scientific rigor in the minds even of the peer review boards.

But this is really secondary. Let’s assume, for the moment: that there is unusual global warming; that this global warming is primarily or wholly anthropogenic; that the mechanism is increased CO2 concentration; that we’ll continue to find cheap sources of carbonaceous fuels sufficient that the cost of other non-carbon energy sources will never be more economical; and that “Gaia’s” counteractions (like increased albedo, increased plant growth, etc.) are insufficient to maintain equilibrium sufficiently.

Then we’re still presented with two problems: (1) Kyoto wouldn’t make much difference; and (2) it would cost a lot.

And that’s the real problem: all the current approaches to dealing with global warming cost lots of money that could go into something more useful, in order to ameliorate a tiny fraction of a problem that we can’t actually be sure is even there.

Charlie, I agree that, on the face of it, there seems little we can do if warming is not anthropogenic, and maybe even if it is. The question as I was putting it to Roberts was meant to challenge a new set of counter-reactions that may be just as politically motivated as those our colleagues are aiming to expose. So, now to the science…

You stated perfectly the very thing that I learned from Lewontin, Gould, Eldridge and others. That the mere fact that we can construct any model doesn’t make the model correct, which Gould ridiculed as the adaptationist’s “panglossian paradigm”, at least in the field of biology. In his scenario evolutionary biologists routinely displace the unknowns of evolution into that endlessly receeding realm called “adaptation”. If adaptation doesn’t explain all things now then surely one day it will, thus removing any need to entertain any other possible mechanisms, and thus “Pangloss”.

The way you’ve posed the CO2 problem though is more like David Hume’s contention that, just because we observe that ‘A’ happens in repeated conjunction with ‘B’ we should not then infer that ‘A’ causes ‘B’, and so on … which gets empiricism nowhere fast. In terms of how far a limited empiricism should go towards influencing our policies – either within its foundational limits as illustrated by Hume, or in the limits imposed on any particular experiment as with climate modelling – here’s a good place to remember Wretchard’s “hueristics” comment (above).

Having said that, I’m wasn’t aware that in regard to CO2, “it doesn’t appear that any model is particularly more predictive than any other”. In terms of the initial consequences of greenhouse gas build-up, that would be news to me, and frankly, I doubt the truth of what you’re saying. Are you referring to the secondary effects of CO2 build-up that lead to cooling, like increased cloud reflectivity?

Anyway, doesn’t it strike you that Lomberg’s otherwise refreshing suggestion – which is meant to sell his books – encourages a debunking attitude which may result in a decrease of science funding? That’s very different from what Crichton is proposing – I think. My idea, probably closer to Crichton’s, would be to expend more effort cracking problems like fuel cells, or developing that ultimate dream-machine that would transform gaseous CO2 into limestone. All of these are worth doing. Certainly it makes more sense to develop the latter technology and then to decide later whether it wouldn’t behoove us to put more CO2 back into the system. We’d be sitting pretty in that case.

I will read it too. I think the problem is that politcs and science have gotten too dependent on one another.