Science

Science and Scientists

Before I get on to more serious matters, I thought I'd have some fun with Science. Science can be more esoteric than religion, but it is not a faith and ultimately seeks proofs. A faith cannot be proved, by definition, otherwise it then would become a science.

If you hear a scientific explanation which sounds nonsense it is probably nonsense, or at least the explanation is nonsense. This particularly applies to Relativity theory and much of modern Physics. However, you don't need to understand something to be able to form equations around it and make good use of it. An example of this is the Quantum Theory, without which we would not be surrounded by electronics like mobile phones, iPods, satnavs and the computer s systems that this is transmitted on. Try getting someone to explain how these devices really work in understandable language.

For the first time in human history we use devices which no one person or even a team of persons could make. Or even repair - when they go wrong we have to chuck them. I once visited an Amazonian tribe who were puzzled by our paper and pens and asked how they were made. We couldn't explain how, but nowadays these guys have the toys and we call this progress. Ask who is more likely to be still alive after the Climate Flip.

I studied Relativity 60 years ago and am a bit rusty on the equations, but I still think I know what a quantum is. When it comes to the Large Hadron Collider, I know what large is (27 kilometers), what a hadron is (bit of an atom) and I've collided a few times in my car. What the LHC is looking for is a boson, a "fundamental particle". That is a bit of a problem as they know that they will not see or even detect a boson, but the best they can hope for is to detect where a boson has been. That knowledge is worth €2.6 bn, and I'm not being sarcastic.

Science is run by scientists who are frail human beings like the rest of us. the have their pet theories and foibles and need to earn money. We shouldn't get annoyed with them for being partisan about their pet ideas because science itself is ultra-critical with its participants, always demanding proofs and verifications and taking nothing for granted.

The problems arise when scientists are asked for advice by non-scientists or even politicians. They have got to come up with something a classics graduate can understand, someone who despised science when a student and someone who never got to grips with mathematics. You will find highly eminent lawyers, authors, philosophers, politicians, with strings of letters after their names who have no better understanding of mathematics or science than the average man in the street, which is not much. What amazes me is that these highly intelligent people are not ashamed of this lack of knowledge and are indeed proud of it because they can call upon someone else to take care of all that boring stuff. The danger is that they will believe what a scientist says without a proper scientific scrutiny.

Now imagine the plight of a group of scientists brought together to "save the World" - the International Panel on Climate Change or IPCC. They are tasked with producing a Global weather forecast for the next 100 plus years, when the biggest computers in the World can only do a fair job with 5 days. Worse still they have to produce a mathematical formula which can be understood by the Arts and Classics graduates who run our countries with no personal abilities in mathematics.

Bully for those scientists who put up their hands saying "I can do it", but think about those who refused the invitation and why. The climatologists who took up the challenge knew what they were in for, and came up with a stupidly simple formula equating slightly lowered but continuing carbon dioxide releases with a stabilised average temperature, which is a massive oversimplification to the extent that it is totally misleading.

I will return to this theme again and again in this blog. The formula given to our legislators is too simple to work but still too unacceptable to most voters to apply.

You can't really blame the scientists, even though they know the huge global complexities involved, and about the 110 year climate cycle revealed by Antarctic ice core samples, because they have to produce a simple solution which is both applicable and acceptable to try to combat the Global problem.

Not only is there no simple solution, and anything simple enough to be understood by a legislator is going to be unsuccessful, but they have failed to find any formula that the Rio, Kyoto or Copenhagen Conferences and all the other talks in between can stomach.

Read the scientists who are out of this loop and are free from the constraints applied to the IPCC. My postulation is that we have triggered the next 110 year climate event many centuries early by inconsiderate geoengineering. Tinkering with one factor - carbon dioxide - is distracting us from planning some serious restorative geoengineering starting now.

One of the foremost thinkers of the 20th Century who is still fortunately alive today is James Lovelock. Don't be put off by his Gaia Theory as it is many times more sensible and understandable than anything the IPCC have put out. We must learn to be custodians of our biosphere, not its exploiters. Beg or borrow his book: "The Vanishing Face of Gaia."