01.29.08
Mr. Durkin’s Little Joke
Laughing at all Sides of the Global Warming Debate
Monty Python fans rejoice, there is a new and compelling offering in absurdist humor from a director who has created such pieces as “How to Start a Sex Cult”, “Ten Ways to Contact the Dead”, and “Extreme Ironing.” It’s entitled “The Great Global Warming Swindle.” (GGWS) It is easy for some people to take the peice much more seriously than it was intended. People interested in science, for instance Or those interested in public policy might be inclined to do so. True sophisticates may get the joke early and laugh their way through the piece. Once it is seen as a joke, once its dark humor is apparent, there is no going back. It’s really very funny.
Among people who have taken it seriously, it has caused a great deal of controversy. But there are compelling reasons not to take it seriously. If one can view the piece as a kind of a mocumentary on anti-science pieces it is both illuminating and entertaining. We propose that it be treated as being the joke that it is. But in order to make the case for its absurdist humor we will have to discuss its methods and claims with some specificity.
Setting the Tone
The humor starts early with a whirlwind tour backward through the history of weather in England. Whether an intentional misstatement of fact or an accidental artifact of the fast pace, this segment places guys with top-hats skating on the Thames in the 1600’s and Chaucer speaking of British climate in the 1500’s. But that the top-hat is a ninteenth century invention and Chaucer died in the 1200’s. This is just a brief hint of what is to follow.
What follows is an encyclopedic abuse of the documentary form. There are places where the facts are wrong. There are places where the facts are missing. There are places where the factually correct statements are used to illustrate factually false or questionable of false arguments. There are places where the piece provides us with conclusions obviously contradicted by the facts presented. There are places where Durkin knowingly uses the wrong authority. There are places where authorities are quoted out of context. And there is some suggestion that Durkin and some of the participants of the program understand the deceiptful nature of the enterprise and relish the fact. So the only logical conclusion is that Durkin is intentionally deconstructing the science documentary.
The Wrong Expert
On first viewing of the piece, and without any reseach into the background of the participants, an alert and intuitive observer might be able identify which participants are helping Durkin play his joke on us. They were fellows who were presented as having scientific credentials who were given lines that were completely unscientific. They were the guys who grinned and pretended to be enjoying the joke.
Among these was a fellow named Tim Bell who elsewhere has claimed to be Canada’s first climatologist. His field of education is in geography and history. He knows something about when global temperatures were warm and when they were cool. And he knows something about what happened to certain civilizations at certain points in time and how these events were related to weather. So when it comes time to ask a question about what happened to civilizations during the last warm period on earth Durkin turns the camera not on him, but on another so-called scientist who neatly summarizes the whole of the effect by stating that it “posed no problem” for humans. Why not ask Bell, who presumably knows? Bell, who is the authority?
But even more interesting than this question is one about language. To assert simply, categorically, and unequivocably that a global change in climate ten thousand years ago “posed no problems” is simply unscientific because it implicitly claims that we know more about the issue than we can know. This much we know; that most of the places on earth that might have been affected have not been mined for artifacts that would tell us the effects. And that if Tim Bell is one of a few dozen researchers working in the field, the stories of perhaps two or five or a dozen locations on earth might be well understood. A location being a small village. To extrapolate from five villages to a whole planet is a leap of imagination. It has no aound connection with science as a systematic study and categorization of fact. Or of science as a set of explanatory models wholly consistent with fact. It is nothing but a leap of imagination. As important as leaps of imagination might be in arriving at novel scientific theories they are anathema in describing bodies of factual data in which
a) most of the fact is lost, unavailable, missing, and
b) common sense would suggest precisely the opposite idea.
Among the most powerful tools known to science is the ability distinguish what is known from what is unknown. Descartes firmly established the idea of moving from known to known via reliable means in science. It is a fundamental principle in doing science. And if one fails to distinguish known from unknown, one will invariably end up believing things that are completely false. So making claims that are much greater than what you actually know sets you up to be wrong.
A person who presents scientific credentials and then makes such sweeping claims is either unacquainted with this principle or is unwilling to employ it correctly. This would either make them completely useless and undependable as a scientist, or it would mean they are selling an agenda for profit. It is possible that both are true.
A fundamental principle of scientific speech is to say what you know, no more and no less. Scientists will frequenly make mistakes here, but they will rarely be so grandiose as this one. A real scientist might say “anthropologists have found no evidence that higher temperatures during the holocene caused any problems.” Or one might say “For groups studied at a total of three sites in the Ukraine, Kenya, and France, no evidence suggests that holocene warming caused a problem.”
We know that the speech must be wrong: change always causes problems. And opportunities. One group’s opportunity may be another’s problem. A shift in global temperature must materially change the pattern of rainfall and of frost. It must, therefore affect the distribution of specific flora and fauna over many parts of the globe. To dismiss even the possibility that this caused problems is not simply unscientific, it is a perfect example of absurdist humor.
If all viewers were well-trained scientists who had confidence in the scientific natures of their fellow viewers, they should be rolling on the floor, howling with laughter. In such a context this is very funny stuff. This is a perfect example of a Durkin joke: use the wrong person as a souce. Use an absurdist in place of an authority. Have them say things that are obviously absurd.
Durkin uses the technique more than twice. After Durkin has carefully put together an argument showing a relationship between CO2 and temperature, he asks Tim Bell a question about the mechanics of global warming. When Bell comments on the data he says something that we interpret to mean that it shows no relationship.
If we take Bell at face value we are led to believe that there is no relationship between atmospheric CO2 and temperature. But Durkin has already established that there might be one. Bell, then, comes off to knowledgable people sounding like an idiot. To the people who are not listening carefully, however, Bell is doing the same thing as Durkin, refuting the standard theory of global warming. Either Durkin wants is to believe Bell is an idiot or he just doesn’t care if we do.
Tim Bell has studied history and geography. To use him as an authority on the mechanics of global warming makes sense in roughly the same way that having access to a Merck Manual should qualify Martin Sheen to write medical prescriptions. Bell makes mistakes that are obvious to an educated observer. And he treats it as if it were a little joke.
Making the matter even more humorous is that Bell complains that people attribute to him bad motives and accuse him of accepting money from oil majors. But he is one of the founding members of a group, ironically named “Friends of Science” whose chief source of income is a video that casts doubts on global warming. Another of the group’s founding members was not long ago a VP at Halliburton. Its members are known to advocate loudly and publicly for a number of policies that favor the oil and gas production industry. Several are known or presumed to be paid lobbyists for the oil and gas industry in Canada. The group’s affiliation with the University of Calgary was recently suspended after an audit revealed that its funding structure was not as claimed. We may not know why Bell has an agenda, but we know his is not the voice of a completely disinterested scientific expert. Rather the opposite, in fact.
The Wrong Data
Many of Durkin’s jokes are extremely subtle and require technical background not presented in his piece. Roughly five or seven minutes into the piece Durkin shows a pivotal graph from which he concludes that CO2 production by man is not corellated with global warming. But the mechanism of global warming - the reflection of thermal radiation by global warming gases - depends upon the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the stronger the global warming effect will be. But Durkin uses CO2 production instead of atmospheric concentration of CO2. It’s not the same thing. Indeed, if all the CO2 that humans produced were absorbed by the oceans, or by plant material, the rate of production would not matter. Regardless of what humans did, CO2 levels in the air would remain the same. And we would not be having this debate.
So the CO2 production data series, is a joke. On the same graph Durkin has plotted a global temperature time series ranging back roughly 100 years. Source materials list the time-series of temperature data as “Nasa.” This is not to be confused with NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; rather, the data is traceable to a lobbying group in Washington DC whose work involves lobbying against the global warming theory.
The programme-makers labelled the source of the world temperature data as “Nasa” but when we inquired about where we could find this information, we received an email through Wag TV’s PR consultant saying that the graph was drawn from a 1998 diagram published in an obscure journal called Medical Sentinel. The authors of the paper are well-known climate sceptics who were funded by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the George C Marshall Institute, a right-wing Washington think-tank.
The great punchline to this joke is that if you plot these misconceived and illegitimate time-series together you would find that quite a bit of the variation in the made-up data is accounted for by variation in the badly chosen data. Even as the the voiceover is telling us the data doesn’t fit, the eye tells us that it fits remarkably well. It’s another laughing moment. We can almost hear Durkin laughing. The joke is on the guy who listens uncritically. And, if Durkin is getting funding for this work from the lobbying group that supplied the temperature time series, he is laughing at them, too. By this point, if we had any doubts whether Durkin was serious, we may give them up.
The Wrong Model Verification Technique
In the segment that follows we can see that a number of scientists are looking a little sheepish when they refer to temperature measurements in the upper atmosphere in the context of verifying global warming models. Although Durkin tries to depict the question otherwise, good scientists know that predicting upper atmospheric temperature effects of global warming is much trickier than predicting surface effects, and they know that getting the upper atmosphere predictions wrong does not disprove the thesis of CO2 induced global warming. The reason has to do with the nature of the heat transfer calculations.
The greenhouse effect in real greenhouses is due to convection. Hot air rises. The glass stops locally heated air from escaping. And so it gets hotter as it absorbs more thermal energy. The greenhouse effect for the planet is due to radiant heat transfer - CO2, methane, and water vapor absorb heat emitted from the earth’s surface and they re-emit it, with roughly half of what they emit going back toward the surface of the earth. This is a sort of trapping effect. The math involved in radiant heat transfer can be complicated, but it is deterministic. That means, if you can do the math, you can get a correct answer. But the math involved in certain kinds of convection problems can be non-deterministic. For certain specific kinds of problems the answers are unknowable. One can estimate or bound the answer, but one cannot arrive at an answer by solving the three equations that govern fluid flow. Turbulence is one reason. Another has to do with problems inherent to solving the momentum equation numerically and is sometimes called the butterfly effect. The consequence of these calculational problems is that one can make reasonable guesses about the answers using certain techniques, but one cannot predict the specific values of temperature in space and time for certain regions of the atmosphere.
The consequence of this is that calculating the effect of global warming on surface temperatures is a little easier, a little more reliable, a little more deterministic than the caclulation of temperatures in the mid-atmosphere and high atmosphere. And if your global warming model does this correctly, you are definitely on the right track. So a difference between high atmosphere temperature measurements and those predicted in global warmng models has virtually no bearing on the verity of global warming theory.
Durkin exploits the fact that the calculational modelling of this phenomenon is so complex that only graduate students of fluid mechanics will be capable of understanding why it must be so. Curiously, he finds people whom he presents as scientists yet who seem to pretend, sheepishly, that it’s a problem. But maybe they were being mislead by Durkin at the time. They would not be the only scientists with that complaint.
The Wrong View of Science
Durkin here is using a sophist’s trick to exploit a misperception about science. Many people think that scientific propositons must be “true” in some strict, logical sense. But science is a collection of models that make approximations about the world. They are not in actual fact flawless representations of the physical world. They are approximations. And in a sophist’s view of things they are all in the strictest sense wrong. Using mathematical language: “For each physical model of a system and each corresponding measurement taken with arbirtrary precision, there exists some error greater than zero by which each measurement will disagree with the corresponding theory.” So in the strictest logical sense every scientific theory is always false because every calculation must disagree with every piece of experimental or real-world data. ( This idea holds only for theories governing categories that take on real, continuous values )
If, on the other hand, we relax the condition just a bit so that the error in question - the disagreement between the model and the data - can be in some sensible way “relatively small” or “not very meaningful,” or “not significant” then sound theories will have the property of reliably agreeing with much of the well measured experimental data. And, perhaps, with real world data. We will know nothing with arbitrary precision but we can know much in a sort of approximate way. This is the nature of all quantitative scientific models.
In light of this idea, Durkin might have interviewed scientists who believed in global warming and asked them if there were any data that did not agree very well with the model. And the scientists would think for a moment and say “Well, yes, the high atmospheric temperature data.” Scientists deal all the time with bits of data that do not fit their models. But when that data is confined to a particular category, it suggests not that the general model is wrong but that the model fails to treat a special case well. Durkin’s piece purposefully misinterprets a minor problem with a particular class of data as being a major problem for the model.
It is much more productive to view scientific models not as instruments of truth but as instruments of practical utility. We might find them useful in the same way we find a hammer, or a car, or a glass of beer to be useful for some purpose. There is no mystical “deeper meaning” hidden in science. And the “truthfulness” of science depends as much on how we use it as the usefulness of a hammer or a glass of beer depend on their correct use. Durkin and his faux scientists use science the way a twenty five year old with a hot car might use beer. He guzzles it mindlessly and drives quickly. The twenty five year old poses a threat to himself, his car, and a small number of others. But Durkin, if he is taken seriously, threatens many more.
Not all of Durkin’s “scientists” treat science this way. One in particular strikes us as being a serious person. In introducing Dr. Wunsch, Durkin tells us that he has written a text from which every student of oceonography has studied. And that virtually every weighty publication on oceanography has Wunsch as a coauthor. In the interview, Wunsch conveys a sense of gravitas. If a scientifically educated person were to listen carefully to what Wunsch is saying, they will hear a person saying very measured, sensible stuff. Wunsch comes off as being the only credible scientific authority in the film.
Of course, part of this effect is due to the directorial treatment. Durkin uses the tight, long-lens close-up of Wunsch peering soberly through a large window to depict him as a serious person. And just so we get the joke, he uses the same manipulation with another scientist who says something totally goofy - something like “the fact that polar ice caps wax and wane in size with the seasons disproves the thesis that global warming has anything to do with changes in polar ice cover.” This is essentially the same as saying every effect can have but a single cause. It’s an idea that would play havoc with all of science. Consider sexual reproduction; which parent is the cause of offspring? Choose one. Pull on this strand of logic long enough and all of science comes unravelled.
Again, if we could all have confidence that those watching were good scientists, we would be rolling on the floor howling with laughter. Even the guy who says it cannot keep a straight face.
The Lawsuit
Wunsch, however, stays in character as a serious scientist through the film, and afterwords, too. He is also an educatior and he knows not everyone has Durkin’s level of sophistication. He knows that not everyone will get Durkin’s joke. He knows that what he said was true, but he objects to the fact the Durkin has taken it out of context. Durkin, he believes, is using Wunsch’s own words to materially mislead the public about global warming.
The issue at hand is the correlation between CO2 and global temperature. Durkin’s piece claims that CO2 levels are correlated with temperature change, but that the correlation has a lag of 800 years. If that is so then one would reasonably believe the assertion that in the historical record global warming causes atmospheric CO2 spikes, not the opposite.
Durkin is suggesting that CO2 levels change as a result of changes of global surface temperature. And that this is because oceans release CO2 as they warm. Wunsch appears in the piece saying that changes in ocean temperatures may lag changes in air temperatures by hundreds or thousands of years. And Wunsch says that warmer oceans hold less CO2, the implication being that they release it to the atmposphere if they warm up. Both of these are simple facts, easy to discover or ascertain.
In a material sense Wunsch and Durkin agree on the fact that when earth’s surface temperatures rise for a millennium or so the oceans release CO2. But they disagree on how to predict the effect. Wunsch believes, as do the most knowledgable scientists, that this increase in CO2 from oceanic sources would augment the effect of other atmospheric CO2, increasing the effects of global warming. So Wunsch is arguing that oceanic CO2 can both respond to global warming by coming out of the oceans and produce global warming by doing so. But Durkin has depicted Wunsch in a context that suggests he supports Durkin’s assertion that CO2 doesn’t cause global warming. Wunsch objected.
Wunsch is suing Durkin, asserting that Durkin has played a practical joke on him. Wunsch believed that he was being asked in good faith to give credence to the concerns that global warming theory raises. He thought his comments would lend credence to the proposition that we ought to take the theory of global warming and the supporting data very seriously. Rather, Durkin is using his ideas to raise questions about the theory.
At one level one has to admire Wunsch for going after Durkin. Durkin has played fast and loose with the facts, and there is a sense that he should be punished for trying to deceive uneducated Brits. One imagines, however, that the purpose of the suit is mostly rhetorical. Wunsch wants to make it clear to the average Joe on the street that he does not agree wtih Durkin’s assessment that global warming is a myth. And Wunsch wants to protect his credentials. He does not want to be though of as one of the loonies falsely depicted by Durkin as authorities.
But there is a darker side to the suit. It suggests that anyone who questions orthodoxy in science is at risk of being sued. This interpretation may be at odds with Wunsch’s intentions and with the actual language of the suit; but were Wunsch to win the suit that might be one of the popular interpretations of the outcome. While such an outcome would do much to improve the representation of fact in documentaries; and while it would force those of the sort Durkin is producing to be more evidently representations of fancy rather than fact, it might also have the incredibly destructive long term outcome of placing scientific orthodoxy beyond public scrutiny and outside of the realm of question by the public. And that would kill science, not the models it has already produced, perhaps; but the possibility of creating new ones.
In a purely apolitical world where science thrives apart from any vested interests, asking ridiculous or difficult questions is a highly cherished practice; for it sometimes leads one to view difficult problems differently and it helps one to approach new bodies of scientific understanding. To the extent that pieces like GGWS provoke such questions, they can be extremely valuable. So any lawsuit that threatens to allow questioning only within the context of serious, credentialled scientists threatens placing science outside the service of common interest.
Circle the Wagons
Wunsch’s reaction to Durkin’s piece suggests a kind of “circle the wagons” mentality among scientists to threats. It is the response of scientists who are accustomed to being under attack. This kind of reaction raises two sorts of concerns. One sort is that it suggests we live in a world unsafe for good science. And to the extent this is true, it means we have arrived at the dawn of a new medieval age.
At the very core of the definition of medieval is a world bound by superstition and tradition and bounded by tribal interests. It is a world not open to outside ideas and enriched by commerce of goods and ideas. It is a world of self-sufficiency in material goods and ideas. It is a world of fundamentalism and orthodoxy and stasis rather than one of learning, synthesis, and change.
This, interestingly, is a concern Durkin raises. In some sense it is ironic, because if we took Durkin’s piece too seriously it would assure that we reject good science and replace it with a product that looks like science but neither bears science’s obligations to represent fact accurately nor is encumbered by the need challenge the faults of existing theories. If we use the wrong means to reject Durkin we end up creating a scientific orthodoxy fixed and changeless except to the extent that change enhances the grasp of the power-elite.
A second sort of problem that “circle the wagons” suggests is that science has been reduced from a search for good explanatory models to a discipline searching for more resources to defend entrenched interests and orthodox ways of looking at the world. Science under attack must react or run the risk that humanity will lose its legacy. When it reacts, it does so to preserve all of science’s vital institutions; its body of knowledge, its body of people skilled in its its arts, and the buisness of doing science.
That’s all necessary. But there is a fundamental distinction between the product of scientific work and the scientific process itself. And there can come a point at which institutional defense trumps scientific process. The scientific process is one that requires lots of open dialogue, lots of room to make mistakes. And when science itself comes under attack, there is a tendency to make speech that questions science more difficult. The result is that science as an act of creating new and better scientific models, is frozen in its tracks like a deer in the headlights. Not long after it is run down by the vehicle of state and is dead until the next great frontier opens.
When solid evidence comes along suggesting a theory may be wrong, it is unscientific to dismiss it without examining it. But who is to say what solid evidence is? Only a very broadly educated public is capable of being trusted here. It is not the authorities alone. And when serious, well-meaning, educated people produce ideas that compete with ones of the orthodox scientific community, the simple fact that the idea is different does not mean that it is a priori wrong. So let us examine the merits of the model Durkin talks about.
The Wrong Scientific Model
One of the ideas present in Durkin’s model but notoriously absent from all popular discussions of changes in global climate is a place for the sun. Durkin’s place for the sun is a little absurd; but the idea that the energy output of the sun might vary with time could make a material impact on the whole discussion.
Implicit in every discussion I have heard about global changes in temperature since the 1970’s is the assumption that the solar energy output is perfectly constant over any time frame. It is my own recollection that scientists in the solar energy industry in the 1980’s, in fact, would calibrate their radiometry instruments against the sun. There were practical reasons for doing this even if one understood that solar flux changed with time; but the fact remains that these were the very instruments one would use to detect changes in solar energy arriving at the earth. And there were evidently no better methods available then. One assumed solar flux constant.
Today, with the advent of solid state devices that emit light with known efficiency, one could create instruments that calibrate radiometry equipment with a very high degree of accuracy and with little drift. With such instruments it becomes possible for radiometers to tell us if the sun’s output varies with time.
But we don’t need to make real radiometry measurements to know that the sun’s surface is not a static surface. Durkin’s piece provides some evidence, if we can rely on it. It tells us, for instance, that during the 1600s there was very little sunspot activity. And it tells us that the earth was in a cool period. It is well known and understood that at other times in history there has been a cyclic nature to the sunspot activity, and that this activity peaks roughly every ten or eleven years. A decade’s worth of data suggests that the eleven year cycle produces roughly a 1 W/m2 variation in solar output. Several sources estimate this amount of variation to produce roughly a .1 degree C change in surface temperature. Variations of longer time period affect more of the solid and liquid material on earth’s surface and may produce feedback effects and therefore produce slightly larger effect. Other sources suggest a crellation between solar irradiance and sunspot activity.
Durkin shows us data corellating sunspot activity with surface temperature of the earth. There appears to be a correlation between sunspot activity and terrestrial surface temperatures. And this correlation requires explanation. The simplest and most comprehensible explanation for this would be the following:
From time to time huge streams of super-hot material deep within the sun percolate to the surface of the sun. This material, being much hotter than the sun’s surface, emits more thermal energy into space. But because it is much hotter, it also is much more energetic, and the material flies out from the surface of the sun, cooling quickly, forming sunspots. It also produces solar wind. In this model a common mechanism creates sunspots and causes the sun to emit more thermal energy. And that extra thermal energy emitted by the sun causes the earth to warm up when there are sunspots. Sunspots do not cause the warming effect, they are a symptom, along with solar wind and high solar energy output, of some other causal factor. It’s a model that any six year old who has stood near a fire could comprehend qualitatively.
Of course it may be that the sunspots themselves are symptoms of increased convective activity moving hot material from the sun’s interior spaces to the surface; so we need not expain irradiance in terms of sunspots, we need only understand sunspots and increast solar irradiance as being symptoms of a common mechanism. Furthermore, we have data that suggest that over a period as short as a decade solar flux does, in fact, vary by roughly 1 W/m2 and we have reason to believe that this produces at surface temperature change of roughly .1C. Larger changes in solar flux over longer time periods would necessarily cause larger changes in earth’s surface temperature. There is some controversy over what the tranfer function might be, but there is little controversy over the idea that it is a component. Serious work in this area suggests that perhaps a quarter of earth’s warming since 1900 can be attributed to changes in solar irradiation.
The people who have built global warming models will probably tell you that they have assumed constant solar flux at earth’s orbital surface. If this is so, it is not because they know it must ever be so. Nor is it due to some powerful agent or speciial interest group instructing them to do so. Rather, they would do it because we just don’t have good models to predict anything else. They would do it because their models are built to predict responses to other phenomena. Scientists model what they can, and try to make reasonable assumptions about what they cannot model. There is nothing wrong with the approach so long as one remains aware of the limitations of the model. The wrongness only arrises if one tries to defend the assumptions by saying that the insolation actually must be a fixed constant.
It strikes one as strange to the point of being bizarre that the issue of variation in solar thermal flux is never discussed. In a fundamental physical sense, it is one of the few first-order physical phenomena that can make a difference. Dismissing it before having a compelling reason to do so is a little like saying climate change ten thousand years ago “caused no problems.” It’s like discussing how far a car can travel on a tank of gasoline by discussing issues of fuel additives, headwinds, coefficient of drag, lubrication, hills, pavement, tires, relative humidity, air temperature, and automobile weight, but never discussing the size of the gas tank. And in this sense, Durkin’s piece answers one bizarre practice with a vital jolt of absurdism. It may not be enough. It may not be the right thing. But at least it’s something.
Why the exclusive focus on CO2? It’s easier to measure and predict than the oscillation of solar output. It is also easier to imagine doing something about CO2 than it is about changing the solar flux. These are two practical reasons to focus on CO2. Another practical reason we’ve alluded to is that we don’t have good models that predict solar energy output.
As a response to a brighter sun one could, of course, wrap the Sahara Desert in aluminum foil. It would: preserve moisture, employ a great many underemployed people, and mitigate the effects of increased solar radiation. It would take a good deal less time than regrowing primal forests to the point where they are full of 250 year old trees. But it would require a substantial amount of aluminum which, in itself, would consume a considerable amount of carbon to produce. But if the real problem is the sun and its increased thermal output rather than atmospheric CO2, then it might be a feasible answer. It might not even be a bad idea for solving CO2 generated global warming.
The question of solar flux, as fundamental as it is, never appears in Durkin’s piece. Instead, the piece presents an unusual model with rather obscure inputs. It has these components:
1) Cosmic rays cause nucleation and cloud formation.
2) Solar wind from sunspots decreases cosmic rays.
3) Decreased cosmic rays lead to lower nucleation: there is less cloud formation and the atmosphere holds more water vapor during sunspot activity.
4) Temperature fluctuations at the surface are a result of the global warming effect of higher levels of atmospheric water vapor.
For the purposes of our piece, cosmic rays may be considered to be streams of high energy protons and helium nuclei. They interact with charged particles in the earth’s upper atmopsphere. And they interact quite strongly with the earth’s magnetic field and with the sun’s.
It is common knowledge that early twentieth century physicists used “cloud chambers” to visualize the paths of charged particles such as protons. Supersaturated vapor coalesced into tiny liquid particles leaving a visible trail where the particles had passed. So it is not out of the question that cosmic rays might play some role in nucleation in the atmosphere. In fact, this very idea is widely known among climate scientists and a good summary of it can be found at NOAA.
But because cosmic rays interact strongly with the earth’s magnetic field and with the materials in the upper atmosphere, the effect of cosmic rays is principally confined to the highest regions of the upper atmosphere where air density is very low and only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere’s water vapor exists. Cosmic rays never reach the level at which most water vapor is found and where most clouds form, so they can have a negligible effect on most cloud formation. Even at these heights, cloud formation is rarely very substantial, regardless of the conditions.
Probably, the effect Durkin talks about is miniscule, but it seems to be directionally correct. If a decrease in cosmic rays leads to less cloud cover at high altitudes, the incremental moisture might have a miniscule global warming effect. Similarly, delayed nucleation may admit a tiny bit more solar energy; light that would otherwise be reflected by frozen water droplets passes through to earth unimpeded. But again, only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere’s water vapor is in this region, so the effect ought to be pretty small.
Durkin’s piece also tells us that “solar wind” somehow deflects cosmic rays; but anyone with some knowledge of the underlying science will laugh out loud at the assertion, even as they are laughing at the coy fifties style graphics that illustrate it. For the solar wind itself to produce the effect would require a density of material in space that would be visible at night with the naked eye. And solar wind is orders of magnitude less dense.
Solar wind occurs during sunspots when the sun’s magnetic field is strongest. And it is the strong magnetic field of the sun that deflects cosmic rays. It is for this reason that there is a negative corellation between solar wind and cosmic rays. Again, from NOAA.
The cosmic rays show an inverse relationship to the sunspot cycle because Sun’s magnetic field is stronger during sunspot maximum and shields the Earth from cosmic rays.
This last issue is a matter of interest. Why would anyone who claims to be a scientist concoct a theory using provisions that are obviously wrong when the obviously correct ones correlate perfectly? Why attribute the cosmic ray diminution to solar wind when it is correctly attributable to a temporally coincident solar high magnetic field?
One might do it if one were trying to appeal to the uneducated. Few people who have not gone through a college physics course on electricity and magnetism will understand how magnetic fields deflect charged particles. But everyone who breathes knows something about wind. This clue tells us who the target audience for this piece is. And it explains why Durkin is evidently so unconcerned about the use of bad logic and falsehoods. He assumes that the uneducated masses either cannot detect the shotcomings or do not care. They respond to cheesy graphics and crisp rhetoric, especially if it seems to appeal to their own simple self interest. Durkin is using wrong models to fool simple people.
Durkin, in talking about the althernative hypothesis fails to tell us how its predictions would be calculated. Why? Even the proponents of the model in question would use the same mathematical models as are used by the guys who are predicting global warming. The argument, then, would be over a slightly different set of bounding assumptions. But Durkin wants us to believe that the problem is basic, not a matter of disagreements over “boundary conditions.” He wants to depict global warming scientists as being wrong in a big way, not a marginal way.
A Recurring Dilemma
To the extent that Durkin’s piece helps promote work within the scientific community to resolve questions about bounding assumptions in the global warming debate, it helps to keep science working as it ought to. To the extent that Durkin’s attacks cause scientists to circle the wagons and point at credentials and old orthodoxies, it undermines science. The actual effect seems to include some of each.
Questioning the assumptions of the model and presenting alternative models could help foster constructive discussion. But attacking scientists for being unscientific would have opposite effects. In this sense, GGWS, shows serious people who tell us that scientists no longer deal in facts but deal in manipulations of science. He tells us that science is but a polical propaganda arm of government, that its scientists produce theories and ideas that are contrived to suit some political agenda, and that it has been so for some time.
There is, of course a legitimate concern about science and how it is used and abused by political operatives. We need to worry about how money affects science and the people who do it. We need to wonder out loud to what extent people posing as scientists feed us pure lies and bullshit. But Durkin got there long before we did. Durkin has set us up with authorities whom we cannot trust. We find out quickly not to take Durkin’s authorities seriously.
(BTW: The practice of accusing your opponents of the sins you yourself plan to commit in the very near future is a standard neo-con operating procedure. It must be written on page one of their operating manual, because this practice which was rarely seen in public discourse twenty or thirty years ago, has gained wide current usage. We saw it used a number of times in the Bush administration. One decides what dirty, underhanded trick to play on the general public, then one accuses one’s political opponents of that trick. This done, one is innoculated from any accusations by opponents. Their accusations simply cannot stick, no matter how true. So if you want to act like a fascist, you simply accuse all opponents of being fascists. If you want to drain the treasury, you accuse your opponents of draining the treasury. And so on. With this in mind we might want to take Durkin’s point that scientists are now in the pay of government officials and are making up science to suit a political agenda with a grain of salt. We might also wonder when the other shoe is going to drop. )
Durkin’s little joke is that he is undermining the authority of science by setting up people whom he claims are scientific experts and then making them look ridiculous to those who listen carefully. And to those who do not listen carefully, he is using people who are, in actuality not experts, setting them up as experts, and using them to refute good science. In this very piece he is using people who have some vested interest, some special project, some point of view that trumps the scientific one. In this very piece he is using them to further a special interest by representing something that is pure garbage as if it were science. The joke is on all those who would take him seriously.
This would be a funny joke were it not for the danger that many people might take it seriously. People who take Durkin seriously are presented with a dilemma that goes like this. Taking his piece seriously in any respect logically requires that one must either:
- Reject the “standard” models that science provides us - in this case global warming, or one must
- Reject the means of open debate by which we arrive at scientific theories
The Great Global Warming Swindle, when taken seriously and at face value suggests that we reject the standard global warming model. But if one objects to the Durkin’s piece too seriously, if one objects by suing, one sets up the threat that public statements about science must one day adhere to some orthodox governmental position. Thus, any serious response to Durkin undermines science.
There is great genius in posing dilemmas such as this. And people who insist on finding intelligence behind genius may find it interesting to note that this is precisely the dilemma creationism poses. A group poses an alternative hypothesis and the debate never goes where it should. The alternative hypothesis, though it is by definition not a hypothesis at all but an outright denial of science is treated as if it were a legitimate hypothesis. And we debate it on its merits. Or we silence the discussion. Both actions undermine science. The right thing to do is never enter the discussion. The right thing to do is demonstrate why creationism is not bad science but no science at all.
In light of this dilemma, it is difficult to decide what to think of the Wunsch suit against Durkin. Wunsch asserted that he had been deceived by Durkin. He had been asked to interview under one pretext, but his comments were cast in a different sense. Durkin countersued. One can think of many reasons one would countersue in many kinds of cases. But in this case, the reasons to countersue have little to do with the goodness of the science in GGWS or with good legal practice.
If one thinks about the reasons to sue one might come up with reasons such as this:
- to get publicity
- as a kind of sophisticated joke
- because it’s sinply wacky and its triviality is meant to suggest the same of Wunsch’s complaint.
When one thinks about all the absurd things going on in Durkin’s piece and when one considers the camp sensibility to Durkin’s approach, it is tempting to imagine he himself is chuckling as he edits the whole thing; for one cannot help but conclude that at one level this is nothing but an elaborate joke Durkin is playing on everyone; the BBC, the public, scientists, environmentalists, and anti-environmental special interest groups. At one level or another he makes each group look ridiculous to some other group. There is a kind of chuckle unique to the demented bad guys of old cartoons and old James Bond movies that seems perfectly suggestive of Durkin’s frame of mind.
“Those Stupid Plebs”
Once Durkin has finished laughing at all sides of the scientific debate he turns to laughing at both sides of the political debate.
Late in the piece he travels to Nigeria where a conference on global warming is being held. Six thousand attendees have flown there from Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The delicious irony that tens of thousands of tons of CO2 were produced by this act is not lost on Durkin. But he goes further.
He goes into the bush some tens or hundreds of miles from any city, and he finds a small health clinic. It’s a simple concrete and brick building about the size of a small bungalow. On its roof are two solar panels that might produce 60W, peak power. Inside is a refrigerator and some lights. The doctors have a complaint. They complain that they cannot simultaneously operate lights and refrigerator using the solar panels.
Once again, Durkin’s penchant for inside jokes surfaces. In the first place, using solar energy to produce light is like relying on sunshine to stay warm in the high desert at night; the supply of the economic good that will mitigate the problem is scarcest when it is most needed. When one realizes this, it’s really quite laughable. The joke is on the poor, befuddled rural doctors. And it is on the agencies who paid for light fixtures run by solar panels. The only reason we might not get it, is because we have not really thought very deeply about the technology. Durkin exploits this fact to suggest that solar energy is a bad thing. But in reality, what he is showing us is a questionably engineered application.
The declared purpose of this segment is to convince us that “sustainable” sources of energy are bad. Durkin, as he is showing us the clinic, tells us that solar and wind power are three times as expensive as other kinds of power. But again he is having his little joke on us. In remote locations in Africa, far from existing power grids such as the location of this clinic, solar installations can provide power for less than grid power because of the expense of running electrical wires. And in applications that passively store energy such as a refrigerator, they can be ideally suited to the task.
Even in the US, there are remote locations in which solar power is less expensive than grid power if the cost of extending transmission lines to the location is included. In such locations solar power can be part of a cost-effective solution. Solar power also makes economic sense for peak-shaving in hot southwestern areas. For peak-shaving applications in Texas, for instance, it is less expensive than other power generating systems, even the cheapest fossil fuel systems. So as a blanket claim, Durkins claim is a boldfaced lie.
If, however, one is talking about operating lights at midnight when there is neither sunlight or wind, solar and wind power generally be more expensive than other forms of grid power power because of the energy storage systems involved in keeping energy generated at one instant available for use at a much later one. There may be situations in which this is 3x.
Durkin does not have the time to represent the issue properly; on its face, the purpose of this segment is to get us to believe simply “sustainable energy is bad.” And anyone who says otherwise is playing power politics.
Durkin depicts this whole sustainability fad as a conspiracy by the power-elite to keep underdeveloped Africa, South America, and Central Asia from developing economically. But again he is fooling us.
Investment in Africa is retarded by a host of things, not the least of which is a tendency toward governmental corruption, a different cultural norm about the meaning of private property, infrastructure problems, and an unfriendly habit of nationalizing large corporate enterprises without compensating the original owners. Sadly, these and other factors cause risk that a project to fail to scale with the size of investment. In light of this it is generally viewed as being insane to lend to many parts of Africa for large projects. Grid power generation systems are big investments. And there are solid historical reasons to believe they might not pay off. When good bankers have little reason to expect any return on their capital, they are disinclined to lend. These are some of the real reasons for the lack of investment in Africa. And they are widely known.
Again, Durkin’s model for why Africans rarely get money to invest in grid power systems is laughable. We can almost see tears of hilarity rolling down his cheeks as he writes and edits this segment of the program.
Meanwhile, we can only imagine he is thinking “Who is the most powerful person? Not the man who punches other men’s brains out for a living, for in the end he loses his mind. Not the man with the best guns or the most skilled soldiers. For he must then worry whether they will be disposed against himself. No, the greatest person is the man who can deceive the man who punches into selling his mind for money and for the thrill of a fight. The greatest person is the man who can deceive the most skilled soldier into betraying the trust of his own people. The greatest man is the person who can convince the common man that science, to which he owes much of his economic prosperity and a fair share of his political freedom is actually a bad thing.”
Durkin’s brazen attempt to decieve in The Great Global Warming Swindle is on such a grand scale that if he is believed both widely and uncritically he can have a powerful influence on people’s view of global warming in particular and of science in general. It’s hard to know whether Durkin is after the power per se or if he is just after the sense of power that comes with the knowledge that one has successfully decieved another. Maybe Durkin is just having a good laugh at our expense.
The Last Laugh
The funniest joke comes in the middle of the program when Durkin has finished telling us that CO2 has nothing to do with global warming and wishes to tell us why the theory exists despite its evident scientific flaw. At this point we are informed that global warming was invented by Maggie Thatcher in the early 1980’s. The argument here is that Thatcher wanted to shift the UK to nuclear energy, and global warming was a theory that would do quite nicely. Of course, it might be correct that Thatcher exploited the idea of global warming. But that is not Durkin’s claim. He claims, rather, that she invented it. With a government contract. To break the backs of the coal miner’s union which was on strike at the time.
To those of us who know that in the ninteenth century Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist, looked upon man’s increased fossil fuel usage, foresaw increased atmospheric CO2 levels, and put together his own global warming model, attributing the idea of global warming to Maggie Thatcher induces another weepy-eyed, roll on the floor laughing fit. But the working-class bloke whose father was put out of work by Maggie’s cunning use of the theory is not likely to know or to care who invented the theory. They will mistake Durkin’s idea for what actually happened. And will likely find some sense of rage in the fact that science was manipulated to produce a political outcome.
When we consider the political ramifications of Durkin’s act we are likely to conclude that his humor is both dark and subtle. Perhaps it is for this reason that many of us were slow to get the joke. But if we do get it, we might understand that the butt of the joke is his intended audience, people who certainly do not have graduate degrees in the physical sciences. Some with college degrees in non-technical areas, some with highschool educations, many with less education.
Durkin’s piece is reminiscent of an old habit of thinkiing within the British Aristocracy, one of thinking about the uneducated masses in contemptuous terms, “the masses are asses,” for example. The attitude went underground at some point early in the twentieth century when labor became scarce in the UK, perhaps after WWI. But the fact that it is emerging today suggests that we need to be prepared for a world in which economic and political power is centered on the elite, not on the middle classes. That brief period of middle class enfranchisement since WWII was brought to us courteousy of cheap carbonaceous fuel and its ability to make labor highly productive. But we are on the threshold of a different age, one where the middle classes are poorer and enjoy fewer economic and political choices.
Whether Durkin is consciously trying to place the British underclasses in this age-old position or he expressing a gestalt that reduces to that idea without actually making a conscious choice to do so matters only at the margins of public debate. It’s another symptom of a slide from democracy into the feudal ages.
To the extent that The Great Global Warming Swindle is taken both seriously and uncritically it has the potential to change the debate around energy in a way that will make fossil fuels remain the de-facto standard for primary energy usage. And Durkin’s piece will have done its part to convince the gullible crowd that sustainable energy and global warming alike are but a great conspiracy to keep down the masses.
Investors with large holdings in petroleum and coal extraction enterprises, meanwhile, will laugh all the way to the bank. As oil and coal get ever more scarce and the price of the good is driven up, simpletons who believed Durkin and voted for leaders advocating his policies will find they can no longer heat their homes and fuel their cars. Profits for fuel companies will continue to soar. If the enterprise is to succeed, however, science itself must be sacrificed on the altar of expediency. The only viable alternative is to laugh Mr Durkin’s joke into oblivion.