Byung Kyu Park's Personal Website

xkcd on “revolutionaries”

Yes, scientific process is treacherous. There are crackpots tilting at windmills—I see at least one at every large APS conference I’ve been to; I’ve listened to them and looked at what they have, but it turns out some of them can’t even do simple algebra—and then there are outsiders who have given plenty of time to learning the state of the art and either improving on it or fixing mistakes in it.

That’s why we have peer review. However, once that process has been corrupted either for political reasons or other reasons, we are back to square one: every claim must be examined as if it were serious claim, because we can’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.

I already know that Nature has thrown in its lot with the fraudsters. Fine. Nature isn’t Nature Physics, and given the culture of corruption among climatogists, it’s not too surprising that that culture seeps into the association of scientists.

But APS, the single organization that is supposed to be representing physicists in America and elsewhere? Have you sunk to these levels? This is the email I received today, and if you are a member of APS, you should have or will recieve one soon:

From: APS President <apsp...@aps.org>
Reply-to: APS President <apsp...@aps.org>
To: byun...@berkeley.edu
Subject: Unsolicited Climate Change Email
Date: Wed, 9 Dec 2009 20:26:05 -0500

Dear APS Member:

Recently, you may have received an unsolicited email from Hal Lewis,
Bob Austin, Will Happer, Larry Gould and Roger Cohen regarding the APS
and climate change.  Please be assured that this was not an official
APS message, nor was it sent with APS knowledge or approval.   A
number of members have complained to APS regarding this unsolicited
e-mail.  If the e-mail addresses used to send this message were
obtained from our membership directory, this was contrary to the
stated guidelines for members' use of the directory.   We are
continuing to investigate how the senders obtained APS member email
addresses.

As many APS members are already aware, the Council of the Society has
tasked the Panel on Public Affairs to examine the 2007 APS statement
on climate change for issues of tone and clarity.  Duncan Moore, the
current chair of POPA, is in the process of convening a subcommittee
to carry out the task.  The subcommittee, which he is also chairing,
will report its recommendations to POPA in early February, and shortly
thereafter POPA will post the text for a three-week APS member comment
period.  We will alert the APS membership by email when the posting
occurs.  Duncan Moore's subcommittee will use the comments it receives
to finalize the wording in time for the April Council meeting.

Some members of the APS have asked the Society to craft a statement
regarding the issues surrounding the release of climate files stolen
from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia.
The CRU maintains the repository for temperature measurements used by
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  The APS
leadership has concerns about both the improper release of private
e-mails and any premature rush to judgment regarding scientific
integrity at the CRU.   Both the CRU and the IPCC are in the process
of investigating the affair.  Once the full range of information is
made available, the APS Panel on Public Affairs will examine the case
and recommend how APS should act.

We will continue to keep the APS membership informed about climate
change issues through postings on the APS home page; articles in APS
News; commentaries on the APS blog, Physics Frontline; and direct
email alerts to the membership when necessary.

Best Regards,

Cherry Murray
APS President

From private communication (forwarded to me by someone else), I can attest that Prof. Happer did not access APS member directory in the manner APS president claims he did. In fact, I did not receive Prof. Happer’s email (if one was sent), and I know quite a few (including myself) who would have liked to receive that email and not the one from APS.

And she says: “The APS leadership has concerns about both the improper release of private e-mails and any premature rush to judgment regarding scientific integrity at the CRU. Both the CRU and the IPCC are in the process of investigating the affair. Once the full range of information is made available, the APS Panel on Public Affairs will examine the case and recommend how APS should act.” So in the case of serious scientific fraud by people APS has no duty to represent (climatologists are not physicists, at least not as a rule), she would like to wait until all the information is available before making any judgment. But in the case of a respected member of APS, whose crime, in the worst case scenario, would have been one of spamming, she jumps to conclusions without letting him defend or explain his actions. If this is not a double standard and intellectual dishonesty, well, I’ve been using the wrong definition of “dishonesty” my whole life.

Partisan politics, and the attendant politics of personal destruction that APS president is engaging in by defaming (since that’s what accusation sans evidence is) a well-known and respected physicist like Prof. Happer, has no place in a professional organization such as American Physical Society. And someone like a president of APS must remember that she works for us, not the other way around. Represent member interests—and as a corollary, stop attacking members personally without due cause—and not the leftist agenda, especially not against the accepted standards of proper scientific conduct.

I know climatoligists, as a group, have been corrupted by the allure of public funding and now cannot be trusted to conduct good science, not without supervision from adults. I was holding out some hope that physicists, guardians of the oldest modern scientific endeavors, would be somehow immune to the corrupting forces of the state. I guess it’s my fault for having that hope. I guess I should have known that liberals have no principles or concept of Truth, not even Scientific Truth, so such lofty ideals as Scientific Method means nothing to them, when that gets in their way.

But then, where do I go from here? I don’t want to go Galt.

Update: APS, with its action to demonize its own dissenting members, is only adding fuel to this fire. Please. Now isn’t too late to stop. Don’t get on the Titanic.

Update: This post has the full text of Prof. Happer’s email that was sent to a few physicists, but not all the members as they did not have access to the APS members mailing list, nor did they use the APS member directory in contradiction to the anti-spam rules (as for the blog itself, I don’t know who that is; I’m linking only because it has the full text of the email that is very relevant). How can any honest physicist find anything wrong with the content of that email? All that the petitioners are trying to do is get APS to withdraw its statement on a subject that it had no business commenting on anyway (we are physicists, not climatologists; many of us, including myself, have not examined climatologists’ work in detail and we have no business, as a collective, rubber stamping someone else’s work), and given the Climategate scandal, are we so sure of our climatologist “colleagues” that we are willing to go down with them? Climatologists have mixed public policy with science and may have destroyed science in the process. We physicists need to defend it.

Update: ‘Might as well post the full text here, since widest distribution is the intent of the petitioners:

Dear fellow member of the American Physical Society:

This is a matter of great importance to the integrity of the Society. It is being sent to a random fraction of the membership, so we hope you will pass it on.

By now everyone has heard of what has come to be known as ClimateGate, which was and is an international scientific fraud, the worst any of us have seen in our cumulative 223 years of APS membership. For those who have missed the news we recommend the excellent summary article by Richard Lindzen in the November 30 edition of the Wall Street journal, entitled “The Climate Science isn’t Settled,” for a balanced account of the situation. It was written by a scientist of unquestioned authority and integrity. A copy can be found among the items at http://tinyurl.com/lg266u, and a visit to http://www.ClimateDepot.com can fill in the details of the scandal, while adding spice.

What has this to do with APS? In 2007 the APS Council adopted a Statement on global warming (also reproduced at the tinyurl site mentioned above) that was based largely on the scientific work that is now revealed to have been corrupted. (The principals in this escapade have not denied what they did, but have sought to dismiss it by saying that it is normal practice among scientists. You know and we know that that is simply untrue. Physicists are not expected to cheat.)

We have asked the APS management to put the 2007 Statement on ice until the extent to which it is tainted can be determined, but that has not been done. We have also asked that the membership be consulted on this point, but that too has not been done.

None of us would use corrupted science in our own work, nor would we sign off on a thesis by a student who did so. This is not only a matter of science, it is a matter of integrity, and the integrity of the APS is now at stake. That is why we are taking the unusual step of communicating directly with at least a fraction of the membership.

If you believe that the APS should withdraw a Policy Statement that is based on admittedly corrupted science, and should then undertake to clarify the real state of the art in the best tradition of a learned society, please send a note to the incoming President of the APS ccal...@princeton.edu, with the single word YES in the subject line. That will make it easier for him to count.

Bob Austin, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Hal Lewis, emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara
Will Happer, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Larry Gould, Professor of Physics, Hartford
Roger Cohen, former Manager, Strategic Planning, ExxonMobil

Update: CBS article covering the debate and issues.

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.

Global warming always had many signs of bad science (politicization, demonization of skeptics, and lack of verifiable predictions), but had many liberal scientists believing in it. Hopefully fraud is where even these liberal scientists stop:

One of the most damning e-mails published comes from Dr. Jones himself. In an e-mail from almost exactly ten years ago, Jones appears to discuss a method of overlaying data of temperature declines with repetitive, false data of higher temperatures:

Now that the fraud on the part of some of its advocates is known, will scientists (climatologist or not) finally start acting like scientists, looking at claims with skeptical, analytical view and being wary of inconsistent data—even while, as we always do, trusting it as a rule of thumb (experiments are expensive and difficult to repeat, and for a scientist to alter his raw data is like a clergy altering words of the Bible)?

Or will they brush this aside, saying, “So, what if some of us committed fraud? It was for the public’s own good. They need to be scared into doing the right thing!”

Well, the public will be scared into doing the right thing—they will cut off science funding, and backlash doesn’t need to be limited to global warming research—and it will be for their own good—and the scientists, if only as a lesson for posterity.

Seldom is it good science ever comes out of politics. When someone tries politicizing their research (Al Gore and his acolytes), be very wary. Politics has a way of freezing everyone into their (often prejudiced) position, and there is no room for that in science.

This is just amazing:

Most voters trust themselves more than either Congress or President Obama when it comes to the economy, but they have way more confidence in themselves when it comes to the news media.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 85% of U.S. voters trust their own judgment more than the average reporter when it comes to the important issues affecting the nation. Only four percent (4%) trust the average reporter more. Eleven percent (11%) aren’t sure.

To me, this says two things: (1) Despite all the slander and misinformation spread by the media, Americans are not stupid—they know when someone is trying to push and nudge them in a direction they don’t want to go, and they resent it; (2) This is how a once respectable profession gets destroyed—through politicization and injection of overt bias in what is supposed to be professional work.

The collapse of mainstream journalism is something scientists should take notice from—it could happen to us. Some scientists think they know better than the John Q. Public. They think that they need “scare” the public into action, “for their own good.” They think they need to misrepresent their own work (you know, tweak a point here, hide some data there, to make, e.g. global warming seem more dire than it actually is, etc. etc.) so that the public will be duped into doing the “right thing”.

They are playing with fire, and its their reputation and credibility that’s going to burn, much as that of journalists has.

At least for the moment, the public trusts scientists in generic terms. Perhaps they take a step back on specific issues such as evolution or global warming, but in general, when a scientist speaks, they listen and trust. This should be more a note of caution than jubilee and abandon, for with great trust comes great responsibility—not to betray that trust.

But will scientists listen to this warning (I’m sure others have said this many times; at least Prof. Muller said a similar version at the colloquium earlier this semester), or will their ego make them hear without listening?

is that they consider themselves expert in everything, because they are the undisputed experts in some things.

And apparently Einstein was not immune to this … disease of the mind:

Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is.

When Einstein speaks on a scientific matter, he deserves all the attention one can pay—although he was occasionally wrong (EPR paradox and existence of blackholes) his genius earned that much respect. But, when he writes on a subject outside physics, then he is as smart as the next guy with 2-digit IQ.

This warning was uttered more than two millennia ago, supposedly by Socrates (see point 10). And it appears Einstein may have been aware of this warning. Then why did he choose to ignore it and so blatantly? Is it human nature to be stupid?

Ron Lipsman writes about being a conservative in a university:

I emerged from the exercise as an enthusiastic conservative. Thus I was no longer your average faculty member who adhered to the liberal party line, but instead one of a tiny cadre who completely disagreed with the leftist mentality that dominated the thought of campus faculty and administrators.

The overwhelmingly liberal atmosphere on campus is well known. In the one place in society at which there should be diversity of thought, exploration of conflicting ideas and a propensity to challenge conventional wisdom, we have instead a mind-numbing conformity of opinion and a complete unwillingness to entertain any thought or idea that deviates from the accepted truth.

This is not a particularly uplifting essay, but I don’t see how else it could be. Which part of intellectual freedom dictates that everyone should agree on a host of controversial religious, political, and social issues? And yet, the culture on university campuses are exactly that—even if you accept the weak excuse that professors are Democrats because Republicans “want to destroy higher education”, should academics such as college professors be encouraging open debate in their courses (if it’s germane to the course material) or should they be pushing their agendas and political views onto malleable students?

I honestly don’t know where I can go from here. I will be here to finish my Ph.D. But will I remain where my kinds are not welcome?

Max Schulz argues that global warming is a myth because computer simulations can’t be trusted:

At this point, there was every reason to think that running other problems through these increasingly powerful machines would yield useful results. That was the thinking that led Forrester to collaborate with the Club of Rome in the early 1970s. They devised a model of planetary resources that considered a variety of interconnected dynamic systems and global scenarios — death rates, birth rates, natural-resource depletion, population density, capital investment, crowding, pollution, etc. They fed the model into a large MIT mainframe and flipped the switch.

Forrester’s partners published the results in the 1972 bestseller Limits to Growth. They predicted a rapidly growing global population combining with rapid resource depletion to spark violent social upheaval. Limits to Growth suggested that disasters and die-offs were imminent, and that the survivors would live in a world of misery and scarcity.

Well, in fairness to climatologists (unlike Scientologists, I think they deserve some respect), their models are not completely wrong—and they are not trying to model something as complex as a human, only the amount of CO₂ generated by one and the effect of the released “toxin”.

In fact, Prof. Muller says that he trusts the latest computer models—at least as much as he trusts the back-of-the-envelope calculation performed about 100 years ago, which happens to agree with the latest computer models. (Colloquium webcast. It’s a good talk; abstract here.)

Of course, if the current calculation is only as accurate as what they could do without computers 100 years ago, then it goes without saying that we haven’t made much improvements in that area, i.e. the calculation is not complete garbage, but it ain’t gospel either.

In case you don’t want to listen through Prof. Muller’s talk at the colloquium two weeks ago, here’s the scientific consensus on global warming: (1) warming is real, there is overall rise in global temperature, at least up until 2000 or so; (2) the hypothesis that natural causes (solar activity, etc. anything but CO₂ levels) alone are responsible for the warming is excluded within 90% confidence level, i.e. outside that 10% chance, human activities probably contributed to, although is not solely responsible for, global warming seen in the 20th century.

Aside from these, I don’t know any other broad, data-backed scientific consensus on climate change. Anything more dire you hear is probably either a politician or a scientist (or both) trying to scare you into action.