The Perils of Pop Sci

By Alfred Burdett

“NASA Study Acknowledges Solar Cycle, Not Man, Responsible for Past Warming” is the headline claim of a Daily Tech story. Reading the finer print, however, one learns that a Goddard Space Flight Center report concluded, merely, “that solar variation has made a significant impact on the Earth’s climate.”

This more specific information does not quite confirm the impression given by the heading that solar variation “Not Man, Responsible for Past Warming,” but the article’s penultimate paragraph leaves no doubt that the implication of the heading was intended:

While the NASA study acknowledged the sun’s influence on warming and cooling patterns, it then went badly off the tracks. Ignoring its own evidence, it returned to an argument that man had replaced the sun as the cause current warming patterns. Like many studies, this conclusion was based less on hard data and more on questionable correlations and inaccurate modeling techniques.

But is this so?

Not according to Science Daily, an online publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which in an article referenced in the Daily Tech story, states:

…scientists have learned that about 1,361 watts per square meter of solar energy reaches Earth’s outermost atmosphere during the sun’s quietest period. But when the sun is active, 1.3 watts per square meter (0.1 percent) more energy reaches Earth. …

… Over the past century, Earth’s average temperature has increased by approximately 0.6 degrees Celsius (1.1 degrees Fahrenheit). Solar heating accounts for about 0.15 C, or 25 percent, of this change, according to computer modeling results published by NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies …

So who are you going to believe?

Daily Tech has an ethics policy that …”prevents external forces from influencing the website’s content and keeps articles unbiased and accurate,” a statement of such absurd epistemic self-confidence that I’m inclined to go with the Triple-A S. But in any case, this seems a good time to review Bertrand Russell’s rules of scepticism:

The scepticism that I advocate amounts only to this:

(1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain;

(2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and

(3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.

These propositions may seem mild, yet, if accepted, they would absolutely revolutionize human life.

Here, of course, we are not dealing directly with the opinions of experts but with what science journalists would like one to believe are the opinions of experts, something that Russell would surely have urged one to discount altogether.

The UK Rejects First Ever Sensible EU Proposal

The UK has rejected proposals from the EU which call for a ban on petrol and diesel cars from city centres by 2050.

The European Commission said phasing out “conventionally fuelled” cars from urban areas would cut reliance on oil and help cut carbon emissions by 60%. …

The idea that it requires a noisy, pollution-creating, ton-and-a-half mobile living room with leather arm-chairs and a 200-horse-power motor to haul some commuter’s arse across town at an average speed of about eight miles an hour is simply insane.

It is time for the developed nations to redesign and rebuild their cities and transportation infrastructure to provide a safer, healthier, more beautiful, and vastly more energy efficient human habitat.

City thoroughfares need to be multi-leveled. A belowground service tunnel should accommodate — and provide immediate access to — not only water, gas, electricity, sewers, and telecommunications, but rubbish disposal and parcel delivery services.

The sewer will have multiple channels, including a storm sewer, a septic sewer and an industrial sewer. All sewer access points will have electronic sensors and shut-off valves to prevent illicit dumping of toxic materials, thus allowing efficient recycling of water and industrial waste products.

All items purchased will be bar-coded or chipped, allowing automatic sorting of rubbish according to the appropriate mode of disposal or recycling.

Transportation, either by underground tunnel or at the surface will be by small electric vehicles, robot controlled and powered by induction from cables embedded in the roadway. Travelers will select their destination from a touch screen map, then sit back and enjoy the ride. Vehicles may be privately owned or coin-operated rentals.

Population density will be comparable to that in Hong Kong: 30,000 per square kilometre. At 33 square metres per inhabitant, there will be a residential floor space to ground area ratio of one. Assuming that average building height is six stories, that would mean a residential building ground coverage of only 16%, leaving plenty of room for tree-line avenues, parks, playing fields, as well as commercial and industrial buildings.

All residential buildings would be cited conveniently in relation to business services, recreational facilities and places of employment. Intelligent placement of residential and service buildings relative to one another, the compactness of the city, and the use of light electric vehicles for transportation would mean a reduction of something like tenfold in the energy cost of personal transport.

Buildings will be properly insulated so that a home can be heated with a hair-dryer. Well insulated and properly designed to reject excess summer heat, air-conditioning would rarely, if ever, be necessity.

With twenty percent of the workforce unemployed or only partially employed, the reconstruction of Britain can begin without delay. The government should expropriate hundreds of square miles of derelict industrial land around such dismal industrial towns as Wolverhampton or Burnley for immediate urban reconstruction. It should then launch an international competition for the design of at least a dozen new towns. The competition should offer huge prizes and be open to all comers throughout the World including architects, university departments of Geography, Design, Planning or Architecture, construction and engineering firms and consortia. Winning proposals should then be financed through the capital markets.

Libya: When is regime change not regime change? When it is partition

March 21, 2011:

… Mr. Cameron told MP’s that while he still wanted Col Gaddafi to go, the UN resolution was “limited in scope” and “explicitly does not provide legal authority for action to bring about Gaddafi’s removal from power by military means”.

The no fly zone plus “all necessary means” to prevent Gaddafi “from killing his own people” will prevent the Libyan Government from suppressing the separatist rebels in Benghazi. The consequence will be the UN-sanctioned partition of the country between the Eastern state of Cerenaica, most likely under a restored Sennusid monarchy, and a Western state of Tripolitania.

If by chance, Gaddafi and all his sons are killed in the application of “all necessary means,” it would likely hasten acceptance of the division of the country. Cerenaica, which has the oil and gas, would be subservient to Western interests, while Tripolitania, without oil and thus impoverished, would be left to its own devices however regressive its government might prove to be.

Gaddafi prospects thus appear grim. However, as Winston Churchill observed:

The statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. Antiquated War Offices, weak, incompetent, or arrogant Commanders, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant Fortune, ugly surprises, awful miscalculations — all take their seats at the Council Board on the morrow of a declaration of war. Always remember, however sure you are that you could easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.

Is an asteroid impact America’s only hope?

Fred Reed believes that short of the total destruction of Washington, DC, America is doomed. In a piece entitled “Why we need an asteroid strike” he writes … societies are like people in that they get old, clot, lose flexibility, and then croak. They can’t get better. Like most things, they just get worse. A rule of thermodynamics says that rivers don’t flow backwards, plaque does not voluntarily leave arteries, and governments do not become more reasonable, efficient, or interested in the well-being of their populations.

Carroll Quigley, Bill Clinton’s history mentor, said pretty much the same thing about the inevitable decay of complex societies in his book The Evolution of Civilizations. But Reed’s account is shorter.

Where these authors differ is in the end game. Reed thinks that The best hope is that a patriot will learn how to impel some unused interplanetary object, Phobos or Deimos or Ganymede maybe, into Washington at ninety percent of the speed of light.

Quigley acknowledged the certain eventual death of every civilization, but by conquest, not an extraterrestrial impactor. However, he was optimistic enough to believe that a declining civilization can sometimes be revitalized through either the invention of a new method of wealth creation, which leads to a new phase of productive social development, or the formation of new institutions to fulfill the functions of those that have become corrupt beyond the possibility of reform.

Today, in America, can be seen many efforts to bypass corrupt institutions by creating new institutions that serve the same purposes as the old: for example, home schooling, state immigration laws to deal with the Federal government’s failure to implement national immigration laws, and the creation of local money systems and systems for payment with precious metals, while the Fed turns the dollar to worthless paper.

Overall, though, Reed’s pessimism about the US being long able to evade the doleful consequences of the second law of thermodynamics is hard to dispel.

Fat people are different from you and me

“Yes, they have more weight,” as Ernest Hemingway might have said.

But they differ in other ways too. In a study of Columbia University students, Schachter, Goldman and Gordon (1) measured consumption of crackers in a supposed test of the effect of tactile sensation on taste, which was in fact, designed to determine the effect of emotion and fullness on eating behavior.

The students were classified according to weight, height and deviation from the norm in the ratio of weight to height. Students weighing 15% above the norm for their height were classified as obese (fat versus thin). Subjects were required to miss a meal before the experimental session, and were either fed roast beef sandwiches (full condition) or not fed (empty condition) before the initiation of the experiment.

The tactile stimulus, so subjects were told, would be an electric shock. Before administration, some subjects (calm condition) were told that the shocks would produce only a mild tingling sensation or, perhaps, would not be felt at all. Other subjects (frightened condition) were shown an eight-foot-high, jet black console loaded with electrical junk and told by the experimenter “That machine is the one we will be using. I am afraid that these shocks will be painful. To affect your sense of taste, they must be of a rather high voltage. There will, of course, be no permanent damage.” The subject was then connected to the console by attaching a large electrode to each ankle and asked in the process “You don’t have a heart condition do you?” (Devising Psych experiments must be a lot of laughs).

So prepared, subjects expected to do taste tests both before and after the administration of electric shocks. The pre-shock test consisted in a 15 minute session during which subjects tried five kinds of crackers, eating as many as they wished and recording their impressions about the taste on a complicated assessment sheet. After the pre-shock taste test, the experiment was terminated and the rationale for the study explained to the subjects.

The experimental measurement of principal interest  was the weight of crackers consumed.

The results were remarkably clear-cut. When calm, thin subjects eat almost twice as many crackers on an empty stomach than on a full stomach (28 versus 17). When frightened, however, thin subjects eat no more when empty than when full (16 versus 14 crackers), this quantity, presumably, being about the minimum necessary to complete the taste assessment.

Fat subjects, however, showed little or no response to either treatment. They ate almost exactly as much when full as when empty (18 crackers in each case), and a similar amount whether frightened or calm (20 versus 17 crackers).

To summarize, when provided with an opportunity to snack on crackers, thin subjects eat more when empty than when full, but less when manipulated into a state of fear or anxiety than when calm. However, neither fear nor fullness had a significant effect on the number of crackers snacked by fat subjects.

The information presented here is derived from a chapter about the physiological correlates of hunger in the book Emotion Obesity and Crime (1971) by the late American psychologist, Stanley Schachter.

(1) Schachter, s., R. Goldman and A. Gordon. 1968. The effect of fear, food deprivation, and obesity on eating. J. Personality and Social Psychology. 10: 91-97.