Science

Shrinking Waves May Save Sea Ice

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2014-06-10 sn-seaice

The whole global warming issue is pretty controversial, and one of the reasons for that is that–no matter what the consensus on the science might be–there’s actually a long and convoluted path from “human carbon emissions make the world warmer” to answering the question “what should we do about it?”

One of the big uncertainties, of course, is the cost-benefit analysis of policies designed to slow global warming. That’s what the Freakonomics guys did in one of their chapters from Super Freakonomics, and their conclusion was that–assuming climate change is real–there might not be any policy to stop it that is worth the cost. That claim, as you can imagine, landed them in some hot water.[ref]Time, The New Yorker, and many, many others weighed in as well. Questioning the global warming orthodoxy, which includes policies as well as science, is a big deal.[/ref]

But there are other uncertainties as well. So the planet gets warmer. So ice at the poles melts and sea levels rise, right? Well, maybe not so fast:

It’s a nagging thorn in the side of climatologists: Even though the world is warming, the average area of the sea ice around Antarctica is increasing. Climate models haven’t explained this seeming contradiction to anyone’s satisfaction—and climate change deniers tout that failure early and often. But a new paper suggests a possible explanation: Variability in the heights of ocean waves pounding into the sea ice may help control its advance and retreat.

That’s Carolyn Gramling writing for Science. She goes on to summarize the paper’s theory: warmer climate means lower waves, lower waves means less pounding on sea ice, less pounding on sea ice means slower melting to the point where (as noted above) sea ice in Antarctica is actually growing instead of shrinking.

The reality is that the Earth’s atmosphere and land and ecosystems and the sun’s radiation all work together to form a very, very, very complex system full of all kinds of negative and positive feedback loops that we know nothing about. This is just one example. Ice has been growing since at least 1979 despite projections, but no one had a clue. Now they have one but it is, of course, still just a clue. As science goes: this is great. When the data doesn’t line up with your predictions, it means you’re not understanding something and you have a chance for a new discovery.

But as a basis for expensive, global policy-making goes, this is not so great. The one thing all policies to thwart global warming have in common is making energy more expensive which will have the effect of lowering growth which will have the effect of keeping more people in the developed world in poverty for longer. We can be much more certain about that then we can about the corresponding threat from global warming. After all, we can’t even predict if the sea levels will rise at all, let alone by how much, so how can we begin to make a careful evaluation of the cost/benefit of policies to mitigate this unknown danger?

The consensus on global warming is often trotted out as a cudgel with which to beat skeptics, but this isn’t really effective once you step back and realize that climate change, itself, is only one part of a much, much more complex puzzle.

Evolution, Scientific Literacy, and Culture (Again)

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2014-06-09 Evolution

Every so often there’s a poll that comes out showing that only 50% of Americans believe in evolution (give or take) and the hand-wringing and demagoguery commences. Not too long ago, I wrote about the particularly Mormon aspect of this boring, repetitive, non-issue in a post for Times And Seasons called Beware Instrumental Beliefs. It turned out that Mormons were especially unlikely to agree with the statement “evolution is the best explanation for the origins of human life on earth” and some among the Mormon intellectual classes started hyperventilating again.

My argument was that the only signal that survey really picks up is a cultural one. Americans see the issue of evolution as fundamentally one of cultural identity, not science, and they answer accordingly. So the common assumption that religious people are so mentally hamstrung by superstitious mumbo-jumbo that they can’t grasp enlightened science is really just an expression of prejudice and not a valid reflection of survey data. That was my theory, in any case. I felt it was a pretty strong one, given that plenty of the most vociferous critics of those who expressed doubt in Darwinian evolution were humanities majors rather than biologists, but still: it’s nice to be vindicated.

That’s Dan Kahan at the Yale Cultural Cognition Project who cites new research to draw three conclusions:

First, there is zero correlation between saying one “believes” in evolution & understanding the rudiments of modern evolutionary science.

Second, “disbelief” in evolution poses absolutely no barrier to comprehension of basic evolutionary science.

Third — and here we are getting to the point where the new data come in! — profession of “belief” in evolution is simply not a valid measure of science comprehension.

The last point might seem redundant, but it isn’t. It’s a separate point, and it’s an important one because it shows a clear path forward for those who believe that teaching the ideas of human evolution is important and don’t want to get hung up with an irrelevant culture war. As Kahan reports, the NSF tried to get the question “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals” removed from a test of scientific literacy not to assuage conservatives, but for the simple fact that:

the answer people give to this question doesn’t measure their comprehension of science. People who score at or near the top on the remaining portions of the test aren’t any more likely to get this item “correct” than those who do poorly on the remaining portions.

The NSF faced a backlash, however, “from those who either couldn’t get or didn’t care about the distinction between measuring science comprehension and administering a cultural orthodoxy test.” Kahan goes on:

But those of us who don’t have to worry about whether taking a stance will affect our research budgets, who genuinely care about science, and who recognize the challenge of propagating widespread comprehension and simple enjoyment of science in a culturally pluralistic society (which is, ironically, the type of political regime most conducive to the advance of scientific discovery!) shouldn’t equivocate.

We should insist that science comprehension be measured scientifically and point out the mistakes — myriads of them — being made by those who continue to insist that professions of “belief” in evolution are any sort of indicator of that.

Definitely read the entire article for more insights and the very interesting data analysis Kahan did to arrive at his conclusions.

 

No Safe Level of Alcohol

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“Responsible drinking” has become a 21st-century mantra for how most people view alcohol consumption. But when it comes to cancer, no amount of alcohol is safe. That is the conclusion of the 2014 World Cancer Report (WCR), issued by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).

So begins a new medical report on alcohol consumption. A few years ago, psychiatrist David Nutt had an article in The Guardian claiming “there is no such thing as a safe level of alcohol consumption.” His views now seem to have even more backing.

Check it out.

The Scientific-Mystical Objectivity of Pavel Florensky

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Pavel Florensky and Sergei Bulgakov.
Pavel Florensky and Sergei Bulgakov.

Nathaniel’s recent post on Newton and Parsons raises some very good points about science and the very things that it supposedly opposes, such as magic and the occult. As far as I understand things (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong), a fundamental belief for both scientists and esotericists is that the world follows certain patterns, and is governed by forces and laws that can be discovered, harnessed, and sometimes even manipulated, be it for good or for bad. It really shouldn’t be terribly surprising that an interest in one can include an interest in the other, yet the current, popular scientific narrative wouldn’t touch the esoteric with a ten-foot pole.

Pavel Florensky (1882-1937) is another of those immensely influential scientists that hardly anyone knows. He was also a mystic, Russian Orthodox priest, theologian, Symbolist, art critic, and martyr. Florensky’s book, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, written as a sort of a vast dialogue with Christ on the topics of “Divine Truth, Beauty, and Goodness” as “revealed and manifested in Creation,” is filled throughout with dozens of mathematical formulas! If that weren’t odd enough, the math itself is explained in theological terms.[ref]“[Consubstantiality] expressed not only a Christological dogma but also a spiritual evaluation of the rational laws of thought.” Rationality- the teachings of Aristotle- lost.[/ref] This refusal to see the natural sciences as divorced from divine, spiritual matters allowed Florensky to make important contributions to both. He was led to radical developments in set theory by his interest in the mystical doctrine of Name-Worshipping, and during the early years of the Soviet Union he wrote scientific textbooks, helped electrify the country, and invented a non-coagulating machine oil while still serving as a priest.

georgia6 www,nikitafirct.com_.ua_Florensky grew up in the Caucasus. He claimed that his childhood there lent him “an objective, noncentripetal perception of the world, a kind of inverse perspective” which allowed for a “penetration into the depth of things.” The Caucasus is a wild and mysterious region with snow-capped mountains, deep ravines, and roaring rivers. It exerted a tremendous influence on Russian writers, and although I had read extensively on it, nothing prepared me for my first glimpse of it. Pictures can never convey just how remarkable it is. I then understood instinctively Tolstoy’s laconic cry, “the mountains, the mountains,” and I confess to being a little awestruck even today.[ref]Some of my favorite books on this topic are Leo Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat, Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Times, and Lesley Blanch’s The Sabres of Paradise: Conquest and Vengeance in the Caucasus. These give an idea of the pull that the Caucasus can have on the imagination.[/ref] I share this because there really is a feeling there of a “native, solitary, mysterious and infinite Eternity, from which everything flows and to which everything returns,” as Florensky described it. Paradoxically, it was this other-wordly feeling that Florensky claimed enabled one to see the world as it really is. “The child has absolutely precise metaphysical formulas for everything other-worldly, and the sharper his sense of Edenic life, the more defined is his knowledge of these formulas.” It is hard to imagine someone like Wallace Stegner concurring with Florensky’s definition of objectivity, yet as Nathaniel noted, the scientific narrative has increasingly tended to absorb and adapt religious ones, resulting in something not far removed from Florensky’s objectivity.[ref]See the multiple examples in Carl Youngblood’s recent MTA paper.[/ref]

Florensky’s religious convictions eventually led to his imprisonment in a labor camp, where he was murdered in 1937.

 

Protecting the Reputation of Science from Scientists

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2014-05-01 Jack Parsons
Jack Parsons, near the future site of the JPL, is on the far right.

Here’s one of the more ironic passages I’ve read in my life:

Sir Isaac Newton’s accomplishments border on the uncanny, as does his image in the world of science. As the historian Mordechai Feingold has written, “With time, the historical Newton receded into the background, overshadowed by the very legacy he helped create. Newton thus metamorphosed into science personified.” So what is that legacy? What were those accomplishments? Here, familiarize yourself with Newton’s greatest contributions.

Here’s the irony of this quote (which comes from the PBS show NOVA): Feingold was talking about the way Isaac Newton as a human being has been lost to history because his image has been co-opted as a poster child for science. Getting back to the real Isaac Newton would entail rescuing his humanity. Such as, perhaps, his devout and sometimes odd religious views. He was, by the standards of his day, a heretic. He is, by the standards of our day, an occultist.

There is no grand conspiracy to hide the truth, and it’s out there if you take a look, but there’s a definite reluctance on the part of modern intellectuals to embarrass one of the titans of the tradition. Newton has become in a real way a kind of sacred cow. He represents, as NOVA put, science itself.[ref]It’s instructive to contrast the way that Newton’s legacy is treated with laboratory care with the revisionist callousness to the legacy of the Founding Fathers. Nobody wants to blemish Newton, but taking down Jefferson or Franklin or others is the intellectuals version of big-game hunting.[/ref] So it would be really rather awkward for everyone if folks were made aware of the extent to which he wrote about his very literal interpretation of the Biblical text. This is part of how science preserves its reputation today: by controlling the narrative.

So here’s another, more recent example: Jack Parsons. Never heard of him? That’s kind of the point. And yet he was a founding father of rocket science in general and of the famous Jet Propulsion Laboratory in particular (it was jokingly referred to as the Jack Parsons Laboratory for a while). So what happened to Parsons? Well, he had some really weird occult beliefs, for one thing, and a penchant for orgies for another. In his own lifetime this led to his fall from grace (because the US government didn’t like sexual occultists in the 1950s any more than they liked communists) and since then his legacy has been borrowed.

Not because there’s a secret Star Chamber out there controlling our history books, but for the much more prosaic but even more effective reason that nobody really wants to embarrass the modern narrative of bold, rational, scientific progress. And so it is, from Galileo to Newton to Parson, that what we think we know about the history of science and the actual history of science diverge radically.

Climate Change Solutions

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[V]irtually every major national environmental organization continues to reject nuclear energy, even after four leading climate scientists wrote them an open letter last fall, imploring them to embrace the technology as a key climate solution. Together with catastrophic rhetoric, the rejection of technologies like nuclear and natural gas by environmental groups is most likely feeding the perception among many that climate change is being exaggerated. After all, if climate change is a planetary emergency, why take nuclear and natural gas off the table?

While the urgency that motivates exaggerated claims is understandable, turning down the rhetoric and embracing solutions like nuclear energy will better serve efforts to slow global warming.

So concludes an excellent op-ed in The New York Times. I remember reading in The Economist a couple years ago that America’s CO2 emissions had decreased largely due to fracking and the shale gas boom. Yet, many environmentalists continue to object to both natural gas and nuclear power as solutions to climate change.

Just one more reason why I think a serious scientific issue has been hijacked by political agendas.

Times And Seasons: As Much As I Know Anything

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2014-03-31 Before the PulpitToday’s post for Times And Seasons is basically just my testimony. I’ve had lots of people ask me why I believe over the years, and usually I’ve been incapable of giving a simple, concise answer. When I got asked the question again the week before last, however, I finally had an answer. Along with it, I had an understanding of why I’d been unable to express my faith more easily in the past. Read the post at Times And Seasons for the rest. It’s called As Much As I Know Anything.

Incidentally: I neglected to link to my last Times And Seasons post when I posted it two weeks ago. That one was called Human Evolution: Problems and Possibilities.

Science and Seances

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Image result for seances

Nathaniel posted this past week on the relationship between religious faith and scientific evidence in the wake of new evidence for cosmic inflation. I followed up with a brief post about religious scientists (including Big Bang discoverer Georges Lemaitre). To top it off, this month’s issue of Nautilus has an excellent article entitled “Why Physicists Make Up Stories in the Dark.” The author presents a fascinating history of modern science. Here are a few gems:

  • “Who now will stand up for the British physicist Edmund Fournier d’Albe, who in 1908 put forward the theory that the human soul is composed of invisible particles called “psychomeres” possessing a rudimentary kind of intelligence?”
  • “[W]hen science first began to fixate on invisible entities, many leading scientists saw no clear distinction between such occult concepts and hard science…Victorian physicists were particularly prone. Some conjectured that there exist intelligent, unseeable beings on the subatomic or the cosmic scale. Others speculated that high-frequency waves outside the visible range could transmit thoughts between minds, or that immortal souls were consistent with the laws of thermodynamics. Anything seemed possible, as it often does when we awaken to our ignorance.”
  • “It is no coincidence that these discoveries [e.g. radio waves] happened at the height of the Victorian enthusiasm for spiritualism, in which mediums claimed to be able to contact the souls of the dead. The two trends supported each other. The new physics hinted at explanations for thought transference, whether from other people or from spirits; and a widespread belief in invisible influences and intelligences created a receptive environment for ideas in physics that seemed scarcely less incredible. If radio waves could transmit invisibly between a broadcasting device and a receiver, it did not seem so hard to imagine that human brains—which are after all quickened by electrical nerve signals—could act as receivers.”

And so on. Check it out.

Scientist Priests

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Georges Lemaitre: scientist priest
Georges Lemaitre: scientist priest

Nathaniel made an interesting observation the other day about physicist Andrei Linde’s reaction to the new evidence for cosmic inflation. The scientist worried, “What if I believe into this just because it is beautiful?” This led to a discussion about religious faith and scientific evidence. It might be worth remembering in light of the new discovery that Georges Lemaitre, the Father of the Big Bang, was a Catholic priest and a physicist at the Catholic University of Louvain. RealClearScience has a couple brief pieces on the history of scientific and religious thinkers:

Check them out.

What If I Believe This Just Because It Is Beautiful?

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2014-03-25 Bicep2 Telescope

Just over a week ago reports with headlines like Big Bang’s Smoking Gun started to appear all across the Internet. Just yesterday the New York Times weighed in on the significance of the discovery, ranking it alongside the Higgs-Boson:

These gravitational waves are the long-sought markers for a theory called inflation, the force that put the bang in the Big Bang: an antigravitational swelling that began a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the cosmic clock started ticking. Scientists have long incorporated inflation into their standard model of the cosmos, but as with the existence of the Higgs, proving it had long been just a pipe dream.

There are already skeptics[ref]Cosmologists Say Last Week’s Announcement About Gravitational Waves and Inflation May Be Wrong[/ref], but I want to focus on an odd, impromptu interview with Andrei Dmitriyevich Linde and what it says about the relationship between science and faith. Linde is one of the physicists who first proposed the theory of inflation decades ago, and in the video Professor Chao-Lin Kuo surprises him at his home with initial results confirming that Linde has been right all along. Something Linde said really struck me:

If this is true, this is a moment of understanding of nature of such a magnitude that it just overwhelms and… let’s see. Let’s just hope that it is not a trick. I always live with this feeling “What if I am tricked? What if I believe into this just because it is beautiful? What if…?” Yes, so this is really helpful, to have evidence like that. It’s really, really helpful.[ref]This is my own transcription from the video.[/ref]

Professor Linde’s question really struck me the first time I heard it. “What if I believe it just because it’s beautiful?” What that expresses to me is a much more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of human belief and faith than we are usually allowed to glimpse when the guardians of right and proper rationalism are busy trying to drive their wedges between religious faith and scientific evidence. Just so we’re clear: I’m not equivocating the two, nor am I in any way suggesting that this new discovery itself validates theism.

What I’m doing is just pointing out that belief is about more than just rationality and objective evidence. It’s about intuition and symmetry and beauty and value. I think it would be a terrible misrepresentation of Linde’s faith in his unverified theories to call it “wishful thinking,” or “blind belief,” although there are aspects of both wishing and blindness in it. Similarly, ugly dismissals of religious conviction using the same labels strike me as a fundamentally impoverished view of what it means to be a human being in a world of mystery and contradiction where questions always outnumber answers on any truly meaningful issue.

From where I’m standing, the kind of tentative, pioneering scientific faith that precedes (but dos not obviate) experimental validation is a close cousin of the kinds of thoughtful, humble religious conviction that have animated so many believers in so many traditions for thousands of years. Obviously we should never merely accept this kind of faith where there is the prospect of evidence at hand. But isn’t it just as clear that this kind of faith is intrinsically noble and important? Clearly there are important differences between religious and science inquiry, but this is one commonality: faith is the beginning and not the end of inquiry.