Byung Kyu Park's Personal Website

Because no good scientist or scientific institution should be able to defend scientific fraud on any grounds:

In the end, what the UEA e-mails really show is that scientists are human beings — and that unrelenting opposition to their work can goad them to the limits of tolerance, and tempt them to act in ways that undermine scientific values. Yet it is precisely in such circumstances that researchers should strive to act and communicate professionally, and make their data and methods available to others, lest they provide their worst critics with ammunition. After all, the pressures the UEA e-mailers experienced may be nothing compared with what will emerge as the United States debates a climate bill next year, and denialists use every means at their disposal to undermine trust in scientists and science.

Oh, really? I won’t go into details of unfairness of words such as “denialist”, “stolen emails”, etc. Those word choices only serve to reveal the author’s strong bias, which may be a valuable service to the astute reader.

But the author’s conclusion is disastrous from moral and scientific point of view. First, from the moral point of view, how can one argue that circumstances excuse anyone’s criminal actions? Scientific fraud is crime—against the society and against the nature—there is no excuse for that. Just as no murderer can be excused that he is “a victim of the society”, those who murdered the peer review process—one of the pillars of Western scientific institutions—cannot be excused based upon what their opponents did. If their opponents were fellow scientists then they should have listened to their peers. If their opponents were idiots undisciplined in the way of science, then climatologists should have been able to rise above the unscientific criticisms.

From scientific point of view, now we have an editor at Nature, formerly one of the most prestigious peer-review journals, writing an editorial defending those who conspired to destroy and re-define “peer review”. This is either a case of scientific Stockholm syndrome, or this is a glimpse at how deep the corruption goes. Science, as a fundamentally experimental academic endeavor (all theories are subject to experimental verification), relies on the integrity of data. These climatologists endangered that integrity and quashed those who question their actions—because when data has been fudged with, sooner or later that fact becomes evident to fellow scientists—by attempting to—and given what Nature publishes now, probably succeeding in—destroy the peer review process, one of the checks and balances in science and academia.

No scientist should be able to defend these actions upon any ground, including but not limited to insanity—after all, do we want the insane using public funds to conduct fraudulent research?

The fact that Nature defends these criminal climatologists suggests that Nature may not be a scientific publication any more. Am I right?

Because if they were as right as climatologists pretend, we would be doomed:

“[Garrett discovered that] Throughout history, a simple physical constant… links global energy use to the world’s accumulated economic productivity, adjusted for inflation. So it isn’t necessary to consider population growth and standard of living in predicting society’s future energy consumption and resulting carbon dioxide emissions. … ‘I’m not an economist, and I am approaching the economy as a physics problem,’ Garrett says. ‘I end up with a global economic growth model different than they have.’ Garrett treats civilization like a ‘heat engine’ that ‘consumes energy and does “work” in the form of economic production, which then spurs it to consume more energy,’ he says. That constant is 9.7 (plus or minus 0.3) milliwatts per inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar. So if you look at economic and energy production at any specific time in history, ‘each inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar would be supported by 9.7 milliwatts of primary energy consumption,’ Garrett says. … Perhaps the most provocative implication of Garrett’s theory is that conserving energy doesn’t reduce energy use, but spurs economic growth and more energy use.”

I trust estimates like this far better. If you can estimate how much energy, i.e. electricity, is used by humanity as a whole and enter some assumptions about how much of it is generated from fossil fuels, then you can get a lower limit on carbon emissions from that alone fairly quickly (if you want to cut the work, you can assume Carnot efficiency for some ballpark estimates of heat reservoir temperatures; it won’t be off by more than a factor of 2). And until that assumption about what fraction of energy comes from burning off carbon breaks down (perhaps by acceptance of nuclear power, or what some people are trying to call “terrestrial power”), this is one calculation that will not depend on models and will stay true within (rather large) margin of error.

Oh, boy. How glad I am that our climate is a nonlinear, chaotic system. Thankfully, doubling CO₂ content of atmosphere does not lead to doubling global temperature. There isn’t even a linear relationship, as last 10 years might demonstrate. There definitely isn’t an exponential relationship—Thank God!

If one is a really serious advocate of these “climate change” theories, there is only one way he can be consistent (and not be a hypocritical political hack like Gore): (1) stop eating meat, as methane from cows is another greenhouse gas; and (2) start really pushing for more nuclear power plants everywhere—nuclear waste isn’t that big of an issue; we can recycle fuels until they run out of radioactive isotopes (… if we weren’t so hung up on non-proliferation, since recycling fuel is one way to build one type of atomic bomb). “Renewable energy” like solar and wind are all good, but they can only provide so much fraction of our grid power (let’s say, 50%) because they are not very reliable, and the rest have to come from somewhere: and the only viable long term option (at least until space travel and colonization becomes a reality) is nuclear power.

This is one problem (in fact, one among many, excluding Gore’s finances) that buying carbon offsets will not solve.

Update: Oh, and there’s always the Unabomber route, too. Although I have to say that as much as his anarchist manifesto appeals to me as far as it extols the virtues of a free man, I am not sure if I want to live in Mr. Kaczynski’s paradise: in his ideal society, if you could call it that, we are still trapped on this world—with no future for humanity beyond this little planet.

Update: This is exactly what I mean. Even if the hydrodynamics of climate were perfectly understood, numerical models can get us only so far—especially when the underlying system is nonlinear and chaotic. Blind faith in climatologists’ models is just as bad as blind faith in numerology or some sort of Bible code.

We already know peer review isn’t a panacea. For one, it is widely known that peer review simply cannot prevent scientific fraud, because as experimentalists, we tend to trust in the data—we may question the process of data gathering, but once the process itself seems free of error, we trust the data as presented, unless it claims something fantastically impossible, usually involving violation of energy conservation or something on that order.

But, recent global warming scandal, a.k.a. ClimateGate, has uncovered even more problems with peer review: it’s done by “peers”

In response to an article challenging global warming that was published in the journal Climate Research, CRU head Phil Jones complains that the journal needs to “rid themselves of this troublesome editor”-hopefully not through the same means used by Henry II’s knights. Michael Mann replies:

I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.

Note the circular logic employed here. Skepticism about global warming is wrong because it is not supported by scientific articles in “legitimate peer-reviewed journals.” But if a journal actually publishes such an article, then it is by definition not “legitimate.”

In short, if your peers are crackpots, would you want your work reviewed (and judged) by those peers? Peer reviews are used to keep crackpots out of legitimate science journals—but, if the crackpots have already taken root inside that fence, then, well, crackpots can use it to keep legitimate science out of journals.

I wouldn’t call these failures of peer review necessary … failure of science. It represents pitfalls and setbacks of frontiers of research. Eventually (on the time scale of decades or even centuries), scientific theories are judged by their ability to produce predictions that no other theories can. And short of time travel, there is no way to fake that.

And they are subject to the failings that the rest of the human race is prone to

Last week Steve McIntyre of the Climate Audit website cracked the walls of the fortress at Britain’s Climatic Research Unit. A “mole” sent him a sample of global temperature data that CRU Director Dr. Phil Jones had refused to share with the climate audit community. By Sunday Christopher Booker had reported the news in the Daily Telegraph.

For some reason government scientists like Dr. Jones that get millions in government research grants are considered to be disinterested experts. Yet anyone who has ever taken a dime from an oil company is bought and paid for.

Of course that is nonsense. To politicians, scientists are just another interest group competing for favors. It’s pay to play. To get their grant money scientists need to deliver science that helps argue for bigger government. And they do, especially in the climate sciences.

I still believe that scientists, as someone who has taken an oath to trust in the data and believe in the experimental verification (or falsification) of theories (not literally, of course, but anyone who hasn’t taken such oath in his heart is not a scientist—maybe a mathematician, because they don’t believe the “real world”, where experiments reside in, exist anyway), can ultimately be held to be accountable.

Climate scientists, for all their excesses, eventually have to show result by either successfully predicting the impending doom, or successfully predicting the results of the policies enacted to prevent the doom on the quantitative basis. Either they do that, or in time, they will be ostracized and ridiculed by the rest of the scientific community, as string theorists are.

But I don’t know if this will take place in my lifetime, or during my career in science. It can take a long time for a scientific theory to be properly recognized (just look at things like discovery of prion; there is no political agenda or money involved here, but it took decades for the community to recognize the correct hypothesis). And given that, today, practically all academic scientists have their livelihood held hostage by the government (through NSF or other agencies which fund basic science), some more willingly than others (overwhelming percentage of scientists are tax-and-spend Democrats), I don’t know how long it will take for this change to come. I certainly don’t hold out any hope better than 50-50 that this change will come within my lifetime.

Scientists are people too. They can be influenced by money, and they have been influenced. We need to recognize that. Now the only question is, if this dominance of science by the government and political agenda will continue, leading us to death of science (or rather, hibernation—the truth never dies out, only the people who believe in them) and another dark age, or if we can reverse the trend.

It’s published more than 5 years ago, but still every bit true.

Some materials cost so much to recycle, that if it weren’t for forced, tax-supported (think CRV) recycling programs, no one would bother recycling.

Some programs, especially ones that recycle metal resources like aluminum cans, are highly successful, but even for those there’s no need to support such programs with CRV. If there’s demand for such recycled material, someone will step up and fill the niche. It doesn’t have to be the government.

Prof. Happer says,

On February 25th, 2009, Will Happer spoke before the Committee on Environment and Public Works in the U.S. Senate about climate change and carbon dioxide.

There are several places on the web where you can find his testimony—here are two:

• The Environment and Public Works Blog
• The Science and Public Policy Institute

I guess there are two ways of looking at it. The first way would be to dismiss Prof. Happer (who has written a very nice optical pumping primer that everyone that goes through Physics 111 Advanced Lab should read) saying, “But he’s an atomic physicist, what does he know about climate?”

Another way would be to recognize that perhaps only someone who’s not a “climatologist” (or whatever they call themselves these days) can speak the truth against the global warming orthodoxy. After all, is there a single lie or exaggeration in his statement (compare that to Gore’s famous work of fiction)?

After all, Gore’s only a politician. What does he know about science?

In Guardian:

‘It does not really matter whether 2007 or 2008 is the worst year on record for Arctic ice,’ Maslowski said. ‘The crucial point is that ice is clearly not building up enough over winter to restore cover and that when you combine current estimates of ice thickness with the extent of the ice cap, you get a very clear indication that the Arctic is going to be ice-free in summer in five years. And when that happens, there will be consequences.’

Good!

Now, in only 5 years, we can see if global warming is hoax.

Either the North Pole’s icecap disappears in 5 years, in which case these scientists are true prophets, or it is still there, in which case these scientists are at best fearmongerers and at worst charlatans.

And I thought that I would have to wait a lifetime before seeing the global warming (… as a consequence of human activities thus far) hoax dispelled.

Note that if this “5 year” estimate is based on a true trend (rather than a linear fit on two freak accidents), it is already to late to change that figure—so, the usual leftist excuses, such as “our campaign against global warming is succeeding” is not going to work here. Either icecap does melt (in summer, I presume some come back in winter) in 5 years, or global warming is a hoax—at least in the sense it’s not as serious a problem as the false prophet Gore makes it out to be.