A Heretic in the Religion of Climate Change

Man-made Global Warming is a religion. Why do I say that?

A religion is a belief system based on faith that's not easily provable. The adherents to a religious belief system typically base their belief on the testimony of others who they accept as having superior knowledge. Even though the average believer lacks the means to test and verify the belief themselves, they accept the orthodoxy presented by the high priests of the belief system, and can often quote the tenets of the faith scripture and verse.

Should someone challenge the belief system, the resultant response is angry condemnation. The naysayer is vilified, condemned as a heretic. The incredulity that anyone could suggest that the religion is wrong results in anger and public mockery. 

Science has never been a popular discipline for the average person. While some people are fascinated by how the universe works and eagerly consume every scrap of investigation on virtually any topic in science, most people neither know nor care, and are unwilling to exert the effort to educate themselves. Just 200 years ago, science and mathematics was the realm of the wealthy, of little practical use to the average person eking out a living from the land. Today, though scientific literacy is much higher in the average person in the industrialized world, most people don't really care why these technological marvels that populate every facet of our existence work the way they do, they just want their cars to go, the lights to be on, their phones and computers to work, and the TV to deliver entertainment directly to our living rooms.

Scientific discovery has yielded some fascinating results, and the entertainment industry has found a way to monetize this by delivering science to you packaged as entertainment, using flashy, state of the art video production and an entertaining host. Because of this, many people fancy themselves scientific experts with no practical understanding of how to develop a theory, design a test for the theory, and evaluate the results. While a lot of people can probably recite the scientific method, there's a lot to it that's unsaid which you really can't appreciate until you actually practice it day in and day out.

My background is in a field of hard physics, testing the electromagnetic characteristics of commercial products to ensure they meet industry requirements. To do that, I have to have a laboratory full of sophisticated equipment, and moreover, I have to prove on a regular basis that the results I get are reproducible to those arrived at by other labs with similar capabilities. 

There's an old saying: In theory, theory and reality are the same. In reality, they're not. One of the most difficult challenges in my field is when we have a standardized test article for performing interlaboratory comparisons. These are either objects with a specific emissions spectra, or articles that behave in a certain defined fashion in the presence of electromagnetic fields. Theoretically, each lab should produce the same results when testing these articles to a certain standard. Yet this is rarely the case, and many engineers pull their hair out trying to identify why this is so. The generally understood reason is that this can be a chaotic field - where small changes in input conditions can generate huge differences in behavior. Finding the culprits and correcting for them can be frustrating and educational. If two labs have different results, who's right? Why? Or maybe both labs are wrong? This can lead to heated discussions, and this in a field where all the input conditions can be controlled, and the only thing preventing a rigorous exploration of differing input conditions are time, space and money.

When it comes to climate science, everything is theoretical. We only have one data point of reality, and we have no way of altering the input conditions to test behavior. We can run computer simulations, but there's no way to know if our computer simulations account for every possible input condition -- and in my experience with practical science, they can't possibly -- or if the simulation isn't just a complicated exercise in curve-fitting. It's not like we can take a perfectly optimum Earth-like planet and pump its CO2 levels up and see what happens, with another identical planet sitting by as a control.

So what differentiates science from religion? I doubt many people reading this have a firm grasp on quantum mechanics, but we accept that as science, even though most of us - myself included - lack the mathematical background to understand it. If we get right down to it, the lay person's understanding of quantum mechanics is a religious belief, based on what the high priests of physics tell us. The reason it really doesn't fall into the religious category, though, is that if you scoff at quantum mechanics, or propose a different set of rules to govern it, you don't get branded as a heretic. So many people are scratching their heads over the theory in the first place that any hair-brained explanation is no more unbelievable than what mainstream science proposes. People readily admit they don't understand it, and so aren't willing to haul out the torches and pitchforks to defend it against the heretic.

One could even say that most people have a religious belief in electronics. They don't understand it, lack the educational background to understand it, and take what the experts say about it on faith. The difference is that electronics works. Even if you don't understand it, those who do can demonstrate that their understanding yields predictable results every single time - to the point where we actually get angry when our electronic talismans fail to live up to their billing.

But climate science is an obscure field of scientific study, not what one would consider "mainstream." It cannot be experimentally tested with rigorous controls in a laboratory environment. There's no way to know if the input variables are accounted for or fully understood. The interactions and feedback mechanisms between the various input variables are complex and chaotic* and poorly understood. Computer simulations rarely come close to modeling previous observed behavior, and so are "tweaked" until they reproduce that which has been observed. This sort of model has some value, but cannot be relied upon for predictive value, as there is no way to quantify how closely the model actually represents reality, or how much the model's behavior is a result of an exercise in curve-fitting.

As an aside, a classic example of curve fitting can be seen in trading the stock market. If one examines any historical stock chart, apparent patterns leap out. This is partly because the human mind is very good at seeing patterns in chaos - even when no such pattern really exists. These stock price patterns have been retroactively analyzed in a myriad of ways, each of which has many adherents who use them to time stock trades. Moving Average Convergence/Divergence, Multiple Moving Averages, Fibonacci levels, any number of patterns all can retroactively show that if you trade on this or that signal, you'll have a successful trade. Except it rarely works that way as a predictive tool, and when the "signal" supposedly occurs you might as well flip a coin over whether it will be a win or loss. In retrospect most of the signals are false. But you don't see the false signals in the historical charts, because our brains are only geared to see the successful ones. This same problem arises to some degree in any statistical analysis of data, and the more chaotic inputs that drive the data, the more patterns and false signals will likely be observable. There's probably no data set with more interacting chaotic variables than the climate record. Even the stock market with thousands of independent traders affecting stock prices is a model of predictability by comparison.

Since climate science is based on observation and analysis of a single data set with no mechanism available to perform experimentation and reproducible independent studies (there's only one data set), climate scientists are understandably inconsiderate of such things as uncertainty calculations and identifying sources of error. Since there's only one data set available, the climate scientist has no need to explain discrepancies in the collected data, analyze sources of error that may skew the data or calculate the measurement uncertainty based on multiple independent sources. These exercises are the bane of every lab manager's existence, and even in the most stringent environments often amount to nothing more than a scientific wild ass guess. Climate scientists can make a show of identifying measurement error, and have even used it as an excuse to modify their data. However, an interesting thing is that if all your identified measurement errors only adjust your data in a direction to reach a preconceived result, you're not being objective, you're curve-fitting.

What differentiates man-made global warming from scientific theory is an intolerance for dissension. Science relies on skepticism and criticism. Science only moves forward when someone says, "Hey, wait a minute!" It doesn't matter how elaborate your theory is, how many peer-reviewed papers its been written up in, how much data you have to support it, if anyone comes in and drops a single fact in your lap that disproves it, then your science is worthless, and you need to start over. A scientist -- well, a reputable scientist -- needs to be able to explain all the data. When someone presents a refutation, it's up to the scientist to demonstrate why the refuting evidence doesn't apply, why it actually fits into the theory, or how the refuting evidence is wrong. 

This can be very difficult for climate scientists who are experts at paleo-climate and historical weather patterns and weather/climate data collection. These people work in a field immersed in data and spend a significant amount of time studying and explaining the data patterns. They're not full-time physicists. They're concerned with patterns and explaining those patterns. They make assumptions that may or may not reflect the actual physics involved. I happen to work in an esoteric field of electromagnetics, not climate science. But when a climate scientist comes to me and makes a statement of how a certain gas acts in response to an electromagnetic input that's the underpinning of an entire hypothesis, I'm certain that I'm more equipped to understand that electromagnetic interaction between the terrestrial IR emissions and the gas than the climate scientist is, and if it doesn't work the way the climate scientist assumes, then I know that the foundation of their hypothesis is flawed.

You can see the religious zealotry when you honestly suggest that maybe the science is flawed. Try it. Here's a taste of what I have experienced by making such a statement on a science forum recently:

"Shut the fuck up, boomer."

"Just because you say so it doesn’t make it so." (Really? That cuts both ways, doesn't it?)

"u be dumb."

"Pay no attention to troll bots"

"only fools and Fox news think climate change is a hoax"

"are you willfully ignorant? Or just plain fucking stupid?"
"maybe your drugs are cleaner..."

Of course, this is also accompanied with numerous links to sources to support the man-made global warming narrative, i.e. quoting from scripture. They don't understand it well enough to make the case on their own, so they appeal to the authority of the high priests. One of the leading sources of scripture is the pseudo-scientific blog Skeptical science, which is neither skeptical or scientific. It's completely on board with the man-made global warming narrative, and neither harbors nor entertains any skepticism at all. Its science is cherry-picked and lacks objectivity. Like any religious screed, it appears to attempt to bury criticism and ironically, skepticism, by sheer volume, ignoring the scientific axiom that it doesn't matter how much data supports your hypothesis, it only takes one fact to topple the whole thing.

So why do people have the religious adherence to the orthodoxy of man-made global warming? Well, the primary driver of this is fear. Like the ancient pagans, we're afraid of the doom that has been predicted by a select few climate scientists. We seek to stave off this doom by sacrificing as the high priests instruct us, in an attempt to placate the impending doom so that it passes over us and leaves us unharmed. The sad fact is that when you instill fear in someone, there's good money to be made in offering a solution to their fear. Whether the predictions of climate change are real or not, no one can deny that some people have become very rich in the effort to avert it. Whether it's green technology that isn't economically sustainable on its own, or a carbon exchange scheme similar to the stock market where the market makers get a cut of every trade, if you make enough people scared enough, you can make some big money.

To make this work, you need several things to line up for you: 

You need a population that's basically scientifically illiterate, but not so illiterate that they can't follow a well-considered line of reasoning. People who are capable of understanding the concepts, but incapable themselves of testing the concepts or analyzing the data on their own and formulating their own theories. 

You need a way to control the narrative, and deliver the accepted narrative to the population. Journalism 101: If it bleeds, it leads. Disaster is good news.

You need to be able to suppress and marginalize dissenting opinions. Many many highly qualified scientists, including doctorates in physicists and climatology from well respected universities around the world, some Nobel prize winners, refute the narrative of man-made global warming. They're easy to find. Why do they never get any air time to present their views to the average news consumer?

Once you have these three things, the stage is set for you to proselytize your religion without interference. When you have enough converts, you can influence political discussions and political decisions. And someone is going to get very rich as a result.

How do you know if you're a religious zealot or a serious scientist? If your initial response to a skeptic is to scoff, call names or try to shout down the skeptic and marginalize them by public shame, you're a religious zealot. If you don't understand the science well enough to be able to discuss it in your own words, but insist that your position is the only correct one, you're a religious zealot. If you quote from the sacred scripture of man-made global warming, and dismiss refutations without being able to demonstrate why they're in error in your own words, you're a religious zealot. If you publicly endorse your high priests as oracles of knowledge, and dismiss other dissenting experts - no matter how prestigious or well-qualified - you're a religious zealot.

What can you do? Educate yourself. Not in a circular reasoning exercise of confirmation bias, but actively seek out dissenting opinions and try to figure out for yourself why they're incorrect, if they are.

Lose the opinion that only climatologists are qualified to discuss climatology. Science doesn't work like that. All disciplines interact with all others, and a physicist probably has all the necessary qualifications to speak authoritatively on certain aspects of climate science as anyone else (I pick on physicists here because my field is physics-based, and many of the high-profile skeptics upon whose shoulders I stand are physicists).

Follow the money. Who stands to gain?


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* When I say something is chaotic, I'm using the classic definition: tiny changes in input conditions can yield staggering differences in outcomes.