“This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through… a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.”
– Lyndon Johnson, 1965

This extremely well-researched talk given by Naomi Oreskes and posted to Scientific American is generating some discussion online, and should generate much more. It reveals in detail how the same people have used the exact same rhetoric over and over again to prevent political action on a multitude of scientific issues where there was a strong, broad consensus.

Some notes I took while watching it:

“The Tobbacco Strategy”

The Science is uncertain

Concerns are exaggerated

Technology will solve the problem

There is no need for government interference

There’s much much more to Oreskes’ talk. If you can find an hour, even to let it just play in the background, you’ll be surprised at what you hear:

Many books I like to read with a yellow highlighter, reading Stephen Wolfram’s ANKOS I was compelled to whip out a red pen. While his 1,000-plus page field-guide to cellular automata and complexity theory is brimming with fantastic examples of all shapes, sizes, and dimensions, Wolfram’s writing and failure to acknowledge accomplishments in the field beyond his own research make this book a difficult read.

Wolfram violates the rule of science writing that you must disassociate yourself from your research. I was skeptical of the importance of this principle, until I saw what happens when you don’t follow it:

Just over twenty years ago I made what at first seemed like a small discovery: a computer experiment of mine showed something I did not expect. But the more I investigated, the more I realized that what I had seen was the beginning of a crack in the very foundations of existing science, and a first clue towards a whole new kind of science.

This book is the culmination of nearly twenty years of work that I have done to develop that new kind of science. I had never expected it would take anything like that long, but I have discovered vastly more than I ever thought possible, and in fact what I have done now touches almost every existing area of science, and quite a bit besides.

Wow! Stephen Wolfram considers his book an Earth-shattering iconoclasm that will revolutionize science, and it’s all on Wolfram himself and his 20 years of research; however, despite his repeated use of “I” and casual dismissal of all the research preceding him, Wolfram is not publishing in a vacuum, and that hurts his efforts profoundly.

Put simply, Wolfram believes he has discovered Emergence, the idea that complex systems and patterns can arise out of simple processes or rules. Wolfram mentions searching for patterns in primes, but never mentions Ulam’s spiral. Mentions seeking patterns in pi, but never mentions Carl Sagan’s Contact, which entertained the idea first. Chaos/Complexity Theory gets mentioned in a footnote. A footnote!!! Wolfram never acknowledges that he is standing on the shoulders of giants like Alan Turing, John Von Neumann, or Edward Lorenz.

Maybe Wolfram isn’t ignoring all the history behind his subject, maybe in the 15 years of writing his book, he simply never noticed that it’s all been discovered without him, before he even started writing. If we were to lose Einstein’s Theory of Relativity today, someone else would uncover it within a few years. That’s the nature of truth, everyone can arrive at it independently.

The problem is that Wolfram’s failure to explore the near century’s worth of work by his peers on this subject cripples his presentation. Instead of a broad, eclectic overview of ideas from across the field of research shedding light on each of his examples, we are forced to look at them with Wolfram’s blinders on, and given only his insights alone. This is a frustrating treatment, teasing at enlightenment, but never yielding any depth.

Wolfram hasn’t invented anything. Speculation isn’t invention. In the end nothing has been discovered. There is only more wonder. People speculated on these patterns before Wolfram, and they will speculate after him.

Cellular automata, emergence, chaos theory, and other incredibly complex mathematical wonders produced by basic rules allowed to play out over time are absolutely fascinating concepts. You can lose yourself for hours staring at fractals. You can wonder at the increasing wave function of unpredictability produced on a system by something as seemingly mathematically insignificant as a butterfly flapping its wings. You can ponder infinitely complex numbers like pi and phi impossibly running away forever, while appreciating the way they somehow manifest in nature. It defies logic.

Luckily, Wolfram’s book repeatedly appeals to his readers to take up this subject, to explore the phenomena of which he provides so many wonderful examples. Anyone experiencing an Ionian Enchantment from Wolfram’s book will continue his train of thought and discover Turing, Neumann, and myriad of mathematicians and computer scientists immersed in this field. They will discover the whole realm of mighty minds who have also immersed themselves in these puzzles.

Then they will return to A New Kind of Science, and appreciate that Stephen Wolfram has put together a very good coffee table book on cellular automata, just not a revolutionary one.

The Hall of Gems reminded me of this quote from Henry David Thoreau:

“When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopard’s paws or birds’ feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds.”

It was amazing how organic so many of these rocks look, some like flowers, others like candy, others like excrement. The intricate geometry found in others was fascinating as well.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

Per Bylund of Colliding Softly blog has an article the Dittoheads are all chirping about, The Myth of Recycling, where he derides the Swedish recycling program as “coercive environmentalism”:

This coercive recycling structure is set up in layers, where the consumer (“producer” of waste) gets to do most of the work of sorting, cleaning, and transporting the trash to collection centers. Government-appointed companies then empty the containers and transport the materials to regional centers where the trash is prepared for recycling. And then everything is transported to centralized recycling plants where the materials are prepared for reuse or burning. Finally what is left of the materials is sold to companies and individuals at subsidized prices so that they can make “environmentally friendly” choices.

The Swedish recycling policies, as Bylund describes them, place responsibility on the individual for their waste products. He maintains that such a system of personal responsibility is extremely socialist and bad for the market: “Imagine a whole population spending time and money cleaning their garbage and driving it around the neighborhood rather than working or investing in a productive market!”

So personal responsibility equals socialism, because the government is making Swedes assume responsibility. This leaves full-service government waste management or government-sponsored market-incentives (ie. tax cuts) as the only alternatives. How either of these alternatives is somehow less socialist I leave to the reader to muddle out. Bylund’s point is that recycling is a costly waste of time and does not actually save energy or resources.

Following similar logic in 2002, New York City gave up recycling to save money, only to quickly reinstitute the practice and expand it dramatically. Why? Because recycling saves money, energy, and resources.

The libertarian news magazine The Economist, came to the same conclusion in a recent article:

Extracting metals from ore, in particular, is extremely energy-intensive. Recycling aluminium, for example, can reduce energy consumption by as much as 95%. Savings for other materials are lower but still substantial: about 70% for plastics, 60% for steel, 40% for paper and 30% for glass. Recycling also reduces emissions of pollutants that can cause smog, acid rain and the contamination of waterways.

Is mandatory recycling unfair? Is personal responsibility unfair? Why should everyone who recycles have to pay for the landfill space of people who don’t have the aptitude or motivation to sort their waste into different containers?

Waitaminute! Why the heck are Swedes still sorting their recyclables anyways?!?! Really, what Bylund is complaining about is the inefficiency of the Swedish mandatory recycling system, and that’s all he’s complaining about. In America, we have overcome this sorting hurdle by giving citizens two great big bins, one for recyclables, one for everything else, and let machines sort it out at the plant, in a process known as single-stream recycling, perhaps Bylund should argue for modernizing the Swedish recycling system instead of arguing for recidivism.

That is, unless sorting trash into two bins is still too complicated for Swedes.

: P

Phil Plait on My Facebook

Look upon my Facebook Friends List ye mighty and despair!!!

Author of the Bad Astronomy blog, Phil Plait’s book Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing is highly recommended by the National Science Teachers Association. He has a new book, Death from the Skies, due out in 2008 about the multiple ways our cosmos could squash us like bugs. With such an unassuming title, I fear it might not do well with our sensationalism-starved masses.

; )

Plait is also a regular contributor to the Huffington Post. His politics #$&%ing rock and his logic is impeccable. Unfortunately, the Huffington Post won’t let me RSS just Phil Plait.

Most importantly of all, Plait got pwned by Wil Wheaton at Star Trek fandom. Anyone who would dare even face Wil Wheaton in a battle of trecknobabble has much much larger cajones that I could ever aspire to.

I see Plait as what Chris Mooney refers to as a Science Ambassador, like Carl Sagan or EO Wilson… only hipper.

This latest addition to my Facebook Trophy friends will further serve my quest for World Domination. You hear me you high school jocks? Your days are numbered!!!

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has been quoted in the New York Sun as making the following statement to the UN General Assembly:

“Terrorists kill people. Weapons of mass destruction have the potential to kill an enormous amount of people,” Mr. Bloomberg told reporters after addressing the U.N. General Assembly, but “global warming in the long term has the potential to kill everybody.”

Dittoheads love it when politicians make this sort of innocent mistake, and with such a famine of scientific data to support their skepticism of Global Warming, they are all ready jumping all over this statement as if it were the only news on the issue in months.

In fact, the Drudge Report has given it one of it’s top headline spots, so we can just imagine all the Dittoheads dancing naked around a stone-monument to Rush Limbaugh tonight (Not a carved monument, just an ordinary rock, as all semi-round amorphous lumpy rocks look like Rush Limbaugh), jiggling and chanting “Ooga-Booga! Ooga-Booga! Ooga-Booga!“–on second thought, don’t imagine that. It’s gross.

While his overall points were valid and Bloomberg’s one extreme statement was not technically untrue, it did venture to far into the uncertain realm of speculation. We don’t know how the Earth is going to ultimately react to a long-term and sustained build up of greenhouse emissions. Is it possible that our planet could experience the runaway greenhouse effect that gives our cosmic neighbor, Venus, its sulfuric rain and semi-molten rock surface? Hypothetically, yes, but we lack the data to see that far into the future.

In his book Storm World Chris Mooney points out that it was inaccurate for AGW proponents to blame hurricane Katrina on Global Warming. Hurricanes of such strength will happen regardless of Climate Change. What Global Warming will do is increase the frequency of such powerful storms.

This is the tightwalk of articulating the Global Warming threat that science-minded people must navigate. While Dittoheads can say whatever unsupportable inane thing that comes into their heads, we have the responsibility to provide the clearest understanding of scientific issues we have available to us at the time.

It’s hard to imagine humans not surviving Global Warming, we are amazingly adaptable, and we will innovate our way through the challenges Climate Change will bring. It’s incredible what we can achieve when we pull together for a common purpose. E Pluribus Unum, after all.

But the issue here is why should it have to come to that? Why should the human race incur the unimaginable expenses of time and resources it will take to engineer protections against a changing climate that’s our own fault?

Why not simply choose to change our behaviors and preempt the whole thing so we aren’t forced into changing our behaviors by having to build levees against rising sea levels, pest-control for the ticks and killer bees that will thrive, changing the crops and livestock we farm as gardening zones move toward the poles, and all the unexpected consequences this will set in motion… all this and then having to innovate into a non carbon-based energy society anyway in order to keep things from getting even worse?

Yet again my religious faith in Anthropogenic Global Warming has been shaken to its core by the power of Conservative Science. Witness the headline appearing on the Drudge Report last week:

“Sun’s ‘disturbingly quiet’ cycle prompts fear of global COOLING…”

The article in question points out that there is nothing to show CO₂ variations have any effect on climate:

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada’s Carleton University, says that “CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales.”

I simply cannot dispute this statement. In fact, the following graph based on the New Antarctic Ice Core Data starkly illustrates this complete and utter lack of correlation:

As anyone can plainly see, the line representing the Atmosphere’s CO₂ is bright red, while the line representing the Earth’s Temperature is a vivid blue. The difference is plain as black and white… or red and blue, obvious to anyone. Well… obvious to anyone who isn’t colorblind or otherwise blind, like maybe ideologically blind like all those silly tree-hugging hippies who can’t even read a graph they’re so busy hugging trees and stuff. I bet they even wanna marry a tree, they love them so much (That’s why they support gay marriage, it’s a gateway to vegisexuality).

All of this irrational focus on demonizing CO₂ has blinded the world to the real threat, sun spots:

Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.

Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.

This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.

Unlike the imaginary correlation between CO₂ levels and the global mean temperature, there is a real-life actual honest-Abe indisputable correlation between sun-spot proclivities and temperature:

Sure the sunspot line is gold and temperature red, but notice how cool those two lines look. The sunspot and temperature lines have squiggly lines over them that make them dynamic, exciting, attention-grabbing. These are two lines that have a lot in common with each other, and bear no resemblance to that drab blue CO₂ line. Hmph. Nobody but silly, uneducated liberals could find meaning in a boringly gradated line like that.

And if that doesn’t convince you then check out these peer-reviewed journal articles (or just their summaries) on sunspots and temperature correlations here, here, and here. Makes all those tree-sex-having people seem pretty silly huh? I mean, even sillier than the vegetable sex makes them seem.

PS – Exxon, can I get my check now?

Sam Shepard, Apollo 14

dorancha has correctly pointed out, without implying that I personally was a communist, that the Smurfs are pretty much commies living in a Marxist Utopia. Some bloggers have accused me of socialism in my Tragedy of the Commons Explained with Smurfs article.

You know who the real commies are in the blogowebs? My critics, who give their content away for free!!! (Gasp! Scandal Alert!)

That’s right. I get paid to blog. Okay? If I was a socialist, I would be blogging for free, like all those faux free-market bloggers.

You think they really believe in the free market? Then why aren’t they getting paid to write about it? Because they’re closet Marxists, snuggling up with the Communist Manifesto before bed every night! Reading their blogs is like having cybersex with someone claiming to be a BBW asian girl who’s actually a hairy trucker wearing panty-hose!!!

So remember. Every time you use a Commie-based, Web 2.0 resource like Wikipedia, a blog that isn’t ideonexus, or the webbernets in general, you are taking money away from honest, hard-working American capitalists, like myself. That’s what I think everyone needs to know and understand here.

I am a 100% All-American Heterosexual Capitalist Blogger.

Darwin Day

Check out the official Darwin Day Website here.

A Happy American Inventor Day to everyone, which occurs on Thomas Alva Edison’s birthday. The same Edison who’s DC power was finally turned off in November after 125 years of inferiority and who swindled Nicholas Tesla out of $50,000. That’s right, today is in honor of Thomas Edison the hypocrite who bootlegged the film Voyage dans la Lune, distributing it in America so that the filmmaker never profited from it, while forcing American filmmakers to flee to the West Coast in order to escape his oppressive monopoly on filmmaking equipment. Today’s celebration glorifies a man who electrocuted cats, dogs, and even an elephant for publicity purposes.

Happy 161st birthday Thomas Edison. Thpppt!!!

Five Fists of Science

These reasons are why I got such a kick out of the historically fictional graphic novel The Five Fists of Science, where Mark Twain, Nicholas Tesla, and Bertha Von Suttner join forces to battle J.P. Morgan, Thomas Edison, and Andrew Carnegie’s evil plot for world domination. Morgan, Edison, and Carnegie summon supernatural demons through occult rituals and human sacrifice, which Twain, Tesla, and Von Suttner must battle with electricity guns and a giant robot (I wuv giant robots).

The comic’s introduction goes over the characters and clarifies how much of each presentation is real, and how much is the author’s imagination. The result is a fun ride, filled with witty dialogue and characters that feel true to form based on our historical understanding of them.

Thomas Edison makes the perfect villain, one we love to hate. May he rot in peace.