Wednesday, 16 September 2009

Science, Not Guaranteed To Give Us The Answers We Like

Debating earlier on Letters From A Tory's Blog, and it got me amused by how we all - and I do include myself in this - try to weasel out of scientific conclusions if they don't suit us, or align with our prejudices.

Take Global Warming, the pro crowd will do practically anything to snuff out debate, whilst the anti crowd cheerfully throws out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to the science. Neither side seems overly keen on the actual facts that much, mainly because there are no hard numbers, no simple models, no definitive ability to predict.

Global Warming itself isn't a science, it's a confluence of various disciplines, creating a hugely complex system that is inherently unpredictable. But those disciplines that comprise it? Most of those are scientific, and their results do need looking at. Sadly we're too far into some retarded ideological war to do that in an adult fashion.

It's not just that though. The problem with science is that's horribly big, and we're pretty small. We can admire pictures made by the Hubble Space Telescope, what we can't do is imagine evolution in action. We can understand adding 1+1 equal two, but we find it hard to understand adding another atom of CO2 adds more than one extra atoms heating effect.

We live in a crazy and wild universe, where there could be magnetized particles with just one pole, where understanding many fields require insanely complex tensor equations, and we all want to try and boil it down into something easily understandable.

That's why we invented Gods and Demons, to try and put all the chaos into some form of context. But we need to accept that it's complex - we're not children any more, scrabbling around in the dirt, we've grown into a species capable of leaving its motherworld - and we need to accept that science sometimes comes up with answers we don't like.

I'm not saying accept the science blindly, it needs fisking, it needs arguing, it needs proving - but don't try to hide in the gaps, because all you're doing is painting yourself into a corner, and for what? A comfort blanket against cold, hard reality? If you do need that, no need to make your own - civilizations past and present have an entire pantheon of them ready to wear.
Posted by Obsidian at 16:56
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2 comments:

  1. All this global warming palava, or more precisely this alleged man made global warming palava is a constant quandary for me.
    If the immutable forces of nature have managed from year zip up until the industrial age and there have been extreme swings in global temperature and what is upon us is solely or largely due to our interference by burning squished dinosaur juice and compressed plants, we should be able to locate some fairly repeatable experiments or even hypothetical scenarios.
    I'm mostly unconvinced, mostly because groups from either side of the debate seem all to keen to hijack the genuine phenomenon of global climate change for there own political ends, however I do feel that we should be ridding ourselves of the dependency of imported energy sources from fossil fuels, mostly because they are finite and probably now either at peak oil or fast approaching it and also it means the western governments have to "play ball" with some rather dubious regimes, just because they have the good fortune to geographically located above said reserves.
    This is starting to get a bit tl;dr so I shall bid you good day.
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  2. The system's too complex to model for repeatable experiments. For example, take around Indonesia, the burning of forests created an ash that cooled the area, thus masking any heating of that area. Thats one of, literally, millions of interconnected climatic effects.

    It's why all these predictive models are utter bunk, and consistently fail to be accurate - there are simply too many inputs, all interacting in ways we don't always know.

    As for humans affecting the climate, the biggest change to Earths atmosphere was by the humble bacteria evolving photosynthesis, we're a lot more capable.

    We know there is some GW, we know some of it is man-made, bt what the IPCC and Greens are peddling is out-and-out bullshit, as such I don't blame people being unconvinced - the pro-GW haven't shown their argument to be compelling yet.
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