A team of NASA scientists have warned an upswing in solar activity combined with the next El Niño will trigger record global temperatures over the next three years.
The stark forecast was provided as researchers confirm global average surface temperature in 2011 was the ninth warmest since 1880. The finding continues a trend in which nine of the 10 warmest years in the modern meteorological record have occurred since the year 2000.
From a perspective of elementary epistemology, the difference between practice of religion and practice of science is really quite simple: in religion, one changes one's observations about reality to fit one's conception or model of reality ; in science, one changes one's model of reality to fit one's observations about reality. At the heart of this distinction are the notions of incontrovertible truth on the one hand and conditional (or convertible) truth on the other. Each has its place in the human affairs, and differences in place implies acceptance of one does not necessarily mean rejection of the other.
Of course the real world is more complex than this simple distinction implies and the different notions of truth coexist and overlap. Indeed, notions of Truth revealed though religious study, for example, have in fact changed over the long term, often in unwilling response to the progress of science. The causes of thunderstorms in antiquity were in realm of religion and explained as acts of gods; today those causes can be explained by advancements in scientific knowledge. The Catholic church successfully suppressed the views of Galileo in the short term, but in the long term adapted its religious dogma to them, ditto for the ideas of Darwin. In contrast, the practice of science views “facts” in the context of a conception of truth, be it convenient or inconvenient, that is by definition conditional or controvertible in the short term and always subject to refutation. All scientific theories are conditional hypotheses about reality, and as the historian of science Thomas Kuhn has shown, these hypotheses may be accepted as truth during the normal practice of fleshing out scientific knowledge, but they are nevertheless alway subject to refutation. In fact, to be a valid hypothesis, a scientific theory must be stated in a form that can be falsified by logic or experiment or both — and while its truth may be accepted by the scientist, he recognizes that his/her acceptance is always conditional and subject to change. Indeed, many of the greatest experiments in science are those that falsify generally-accepted theories of reality, like Galileo's observations of Jupiter's moons or the Michelson-Morley experiment. The other necessary condition for the practice of science, namely that its efforts must be transparent and subject to replication by other scientists, flows naturally from the notion of conditional truth — hiding data, suppressing competing views, and political or hidden agendas have no place in the scientific ideal.
Now, I urge you read the attached letter by 16 scientist/engineers, and ask yourself if the theory and practice of the incontrovertible “truth” of global warming is evolving along a religious or scientific vector of knowledge creation? Are its practitioners treating it as as a theory — an hypothesis — subject to falsification or as a dogmatic truth that should not be questioned?*
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* Of course, you can dismiss this letter. After all, it appeared in the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by the arch climate denier (itself a revealing epithet) Rupert Murdoch. On the other hand, if you are more openminded and want to determine for yourself if the anti-scientific behaviours alluded to in this letter are atypical isolated examples, I recommend you start by reading A.W. Montford's “The Hockey Stick Illusion,” which goes to the core of the question of whether or not it is an incontrovertible truth that the temperature increases since 1850 are unprecedented. But there is more — a lot more — readers interested in learning about alternative scientific hypotheses might explain the dynamics of climate change since 1850 can start their journey by reading Professor Akasofu's paper on the subject [here].
There's no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize' the world's economy.
Wall Street Journal [ op-ed], 27 January 2012
Note: The following has been signed by the 16 scientists listed below:
Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.
A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about “global warming.” Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.
INFORM's Secret Life series is truly the gift that keeps on giving. Every week, more people watch our short, lively films and learn how important making the RIGHT choices in their daily lives is to protecting our planet.
Take plastic bags: here in New York City, we are offered them several times a day. We accept them without a thought, carry them home, throw them in the trash and forget about them. Then what happens?
Well, many of the 100,000,000 plastic bags used annually in the United States end up in places they shouldn't be — as this picture, taken in Brooklyn, illustrates.
Our next SLife video, The Secret Life of Plastic Bags, will give the scope of the problem and show viewers what they can do to be part of the solution.
We know that 267 species of marine life are threatened by the massive amount of plastic in our oceans. Together, let's leverage the power of media to help them. If they could thank you, they surely would.
Thanks from the INFORM team for your support, and best wishes for 2012!
The US military is responsible for the most egregious and widespread pollution of the planet, yet this information and accompanying documentation goes almost entirely unreported. In spite of the evidence, the environmental impact of the US military goes largely unaddressed by environmental organizations and was not the focus of any discussions or proposed restrictions at the recent UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. This impact includes uninhibited use of fossil fuels, massive creation of greenhouse gases, and extensive release of radioactive and chemical contaminants into the air, water, and soil.
The violence at the heart of colonialism is exposed in Richard Gott's history
Richard Drayton
Guardian, 7 December 2011
Amazon Page for Reviewer's Book Nature's Government
“We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers.” So David Lloyd George explained the British government's demand at the 1932 World Disarmament Conference to keep the right to bomb for “police purposes in outlying places”. Airpower had shown its value in spreading what Winston Churchill, when defending in 1919 the use of poison gas against “uncivilised tribes”, had called “a lively terror”. Richard Gott shows how a hundred years earlier more hands-on means were used to similar ends: the heads of rebel slaves in Demerara in 1823 and Jamaica in 1831 were cut from their bodies and placed on poles beside the roads. The mutilation of the corpses of the defeated never quite goes out of fashion.
Amazon Page
Empires have always depended on violence. Killing, torture and the destruction of property are essential to those tasks of destroying resistance, extracting information and collaboration, and demonstrating dominance that underly all conquest. But it is the privilege of conquerors to tell stories that flatter their own past. It is, thus, rare to find the historians of any imperial power describing the ugly business of the frontier as more than unfortunate exceptions to an otherwise honourable enterprise. Britain is no exception: from the Victorians until the 1950s, its historians mainly saw in the British empire a great engine for diffusing liberty and civilisation to the world. If such Whig piety declined in the era after Suez, later scholars, studying particular places and times, never connected all the episodes of massacres, rebellions and atrocities. Popular historians continued profitably to sell happy stories of the empire to the British public – always marketed as daring revisionist accounts.
Gott's achievement is to show, as no historian has done before, that violence was a central, constant and ubiquitous part of the making and keeping of the British empire.
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What Gott loses by this focus on resistance, however, is any subtlety in understanding the meanings of collaboration. He repeatedly imposes the lens of 20th-century nationalism, and even anti-fascism, so that those who did not rebel become traitors or “fifth columnists”. He does not examine with care or sympathy the varieties of loyalism, and the motives and experiences of those who chose, however mistakenly, to throw in their lot with the British. Neither does he explore how the economic and technological bases of British power changed between 1750 and 1850. For the revolution that science and industry brought to production, transport, communication and war made Britain able to attract and to extort indigenous collaboration more easily, and changed how the British understood themselves as a nation and their rights in the wider world. The empire was made by more than violence.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — The United States is awash in gasoline. So much so, in fact, that the country is exporting a record amount of it.
The country exported 430,000 more barrels of gasoline a day than it imported in September, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That is about twice the amount at the start of the year, and experts and industry insiders say the trend is here to stay.
The United States began exporting gas in late 2008. For decades prior, starting in 1960, the country used all the gas it producedhere plus had to import gas from places in Europe.
But demand for gas has dropped nearly 10% in recent years. It went from a peak of 9.6 million barrels a day in 2007 to 8.8 million barrels today, according to the EIA.
Phi Beta Iota: The entire Tar Sands scheme is a scam on the US public, and atrocity against the Canadian public. In Canada, they are proposing to use precious water they do not have to spare, to flush tar we do not need out of the sands; in the US, there is no need for the tar sands as the sleazy campaigns suggest, the oil companies want the tar sands so they can externalize the costs to the US public and privatize the profits of exporting the gasoline.
On Sunday November 6 the Tar Sands Action will return to Washington DC to send an unmistakable message to the President.
Exactly one year before the election, we want to encircle the whole White House to ask President Obama to reject Keystone XL and live up to his promise to free us from the tyranny of oil. In doing so, we want to remind him of the power of the movement that he rode to the White House in 2008. This is bigger than any one person – President or no – and we will carry on, with or without him.
Phi Beta Iota: November 6th is also a useful target date for demanding that Congress and the White House accept for action the public demand for Electoral Reform.
CORRUPTION is the common enemy, both in government and in the private sector.
