House of Eratosthenes

Just about a year ago I made an entirely valid criticism against the global warming religion. Consuming a great many words to make the point that something called “mean earth temperature” is based on surface readings of an object with a very cool surface and a much larger and very heavy core, I then noted:

It is the natural hazard that an argument must expect to encounter, when it is based on two-dimensional measurements of a three-dimensional thing. This hazard is insurmountable. The only way you can get around it is to take the Earth, throw it in a huge blender, crank it up to puree, and stick a thermometer in the resulting mush. That would be an accurate measurement of “mean temperature,” provided entropy has been reached.

Obviously, we aren’t doing that. We look at land masses, take readings and average them out. Just think on how much that ignores. It’s staggering.
:
This thing we’re supposed to associate with the very word “science,” is based on the notion that a much larger thing can be measured by the average of a randomly-selected, much smaller sample…and under ordinary conditions the resulting number should remain absolutely, positively static with no measurable variance whatsoever.

Where else do we believe in such a thing?

I wish it were better written than my usual stuff. It should have been; it was not the product of an hour-long fresh-coffee-consumption-in-underwear session full of hasty gropings for nouns & verbs — like this is. Five or six years prior to that posting, I had conjured up in comment threads all around the intertubez the concept of the “Freeberg celestial blender.” It would be quite a silly thing to do if real science frowned upon it. But of course, real science does not frown upon it; couldn’t if it wanted to. There are three dimensions, there are two dimensions. Completely different worlds. Like I said, the hazard is insurmountable. Perhaps that’s why the “blender” concept is never discussed in establishment circles.

I don’t know if Nobel Laureate Ivar Giaever reads my blog. I have always taken it as a given that hardly anybody does. But how then do you explain this gem which appeared in his resignation letter from the American Physical Society on Tuesday:

The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.

I’ve been robbed, but I’m not calling the police. I’m quite flattered.

Or it could be he was sitting under another tree and a similar apple fell on his head.

It would be tough to measure the temperature of the earth indeed, but it is not nearly so difficult to find what we are looking for. And for eight billion dollars, scientist will find whatever they are expected to find.

Highly inclined to socialism anyway, they could have been had cheaper.
- xlibrl | 09/16/2011 @ 09:21
I want a Kelvin thermometer. How cool would it be to say “Hot? It’s only 310 degrees! You don’t know from hot!”
- bpenni | 09/16/2011 @ 09:23
The “science” that the AGW true believers have been peddling is arrant nonsense. It’s sitting over in the corner, waving a flag shouting, “Look! Nonsense!” Scientific theories are falsifiable. If said theories are not falsifiable, they cease to be theories. Instead, they’ve leapt into the realm of faith.

I’ve had this discussion with other physicist friends of mine-

“So it’s sorta social, demented and sad, but social. Right? ”

– about the historical temperature data. What’s known is that there have been multiple ice ages interspersed with warmer periods, some of which (say, the Medieval Warm Period) were substantially warmer than today. If you were to take the temperature record, put it out as a raw data file as time versus X (can’t call it temperature or it gives the game away) and ask people to analyze the data to glean what information they could from it, there’s no way in hell that you could possibly come up with “My car is going to kill us all!”

I remember some years back, someone asked a group of true believers who believed completely in AGW. Every hand went up. The second question was “Is there any evidence that, if presented to you, would be able to change your mind?” Not a single hand went. The guy (whoever he was) then said “Amen”, because he realized that he had stumbled into a prayer meeting.
- Physics Geek | 09/16/2011 @ 09:32
Celsius thermometer + Sharpie = Kelvin thermometer. See how practical I can be when I try? 🙂
- mkfreeberg | 09/16/2011 @ 09:33
PG, it shames me to recall Thing I Know #402 is #402. The confusion of solid evidence with the observer’s own intransigence — “It is proven, for look at how dauntingly difficult it is to change my mind” — it’s all around us, everywhere, nowadays. I should have picked up on that one & jotted it down years and years before I did. Better late than never I guess.
- mkfreeberg | 09/16/2011 @ 09:38
Morgan, at least you have a #402. The people to whom you are referring? Not so much.
- Physics Geek | 09/17/2011 @ 18:24
No, it should have been #12 or #15 or something — and you’ll never change my mind no matter what. Hehe, hey, this is kinda fun.
- mkfreeberg | 09/17/2011 @ 18:29
Maybe that’s the best one-size-fits-all way of doing one’s arguing with progressives. Just ask them, completely serious-like, what evidence could be made available to them — if anything could — to persuade them to just consider the possibility that they might need to re-think. It’s a sincere question.

My theory is, by definition, a liberal/progressive would have to answer “NEVER!!!!” They’re out to maintain their group-membership. Considering the evidence and forming reasonable opinions from it, is just an act.
- mkfreeberg | 09/17/2011 @ 18:32
It is possible to measure atmospheric temperatures over nearly the whole earth (poles excluded) by satellite, and this has been going on since 1979. These data are not the semi-fraudulent numbers produced by Hansen and his co-conspirators. For updates and data see,

http://www.drroyspencer.com/

Of course this is a short record, and is not suitable for many problems. However, it is an independent check on other techniques.

And you can average the data, you can average any collection of numbers. And there are many different kinds of averages in use, arithmetic, geometric, harmonic, et al, depending on the data and purpose.. But the question remains, What does it mean?

Temperatures have increased over the last 150 years, and we should be grateful for it. The cause of the increase is a legitimate scientific question, and there are legitimate techniques for investigating it. The real issue is that some climatologists have imposed a political agenda on the investigation and have managed to subvert the peer review process at several journals and funding agencies.

However, the crimes of a few self-deluded sociopaths does not invalidate the work of others or the legitimacy of their work.
- Bob Sykes | 09/18/2011 @ 06:32
My issue is, though, that it isn’t a “global” temperature when there’s nothing global about it, nor is there any practical purpose to be served by finding an average of it all when it isn’t really global. The poles, as you say, are already being excluded; so is everything beneath the surface. An average doesn’t take into account the shifts that take place when heat energy moves from water, which has a high heat density, to land masses which have a much lower heat density. Also, the earth absorbs energy from without and it discharges it too.

So the layman hears “earth mean temperature rising over the last century” and all kinds of meaning is read into this: Something artificial must have made it that way (not so) and the mean temperature will continue to slide in the same direction at the same speed unless something stops it (we don’t know that at all). Since our ecosystem is not contained heat-wise and we’re really only measuring a part of that, we don’t really know that anything “global” has changed. The only scientists who are managing to find a voice are the hacks like James Hansen, so the misconception goes uncorrected.

Frankly, I think the scientific community is learning the hard way what all the other communities have been learning: You can’t just partition off the political animals from the practical people, leaving the P.R. to the political animals and the work to the people who tend to get it done. When you do that, nobody is visible except the people whose favorite desktop application is the e-mail client, and wouldn’t know genuine accomplishment if it bit ’em in the butt. You end up bogged down in rules that have been made by people who destroy everything they touch and create nothing…which is where we are with everything right now…so the people who use data for legitimate scientific purposes need to spend some hours & days not getting their work done, addressing the public directly, and get the other side of the story told. It stinks like rotten meat, but it has to get done and I believe that’s the story we’re all learning right now. That is the moral to the parable we are living.
- mkfreeberg | 09/18/2011 @ 07:26
“So the layman hears…” etc.
Wait, isn’t that the plot of many stories (fables, allegories, et al) written with a least-common-denominator of a child’s assumed level of comprehension, that they might benefit from centuries of consistently reproduced observations of the human condition?

I hear by declare exothermic “geo-thermal” energy sources as irrevocably detrimental to the core “engine” that keeps the “planet average” flexible, and maintains crucial…um… diversity.
Yeah, diversity, that’s the ticket.

My main concern in AGW theory is the conservation-of- motion of the goal posts,
regular evolution of the nomenclature, and the apparent peer-reviewed absolute theorem of transfer-of- wealth/resources from doers, to “big thinkers” and supernumerary placeholders, that they might enjoy MORE of the “windfall” fruits of the doers.
- CaptDMO | 09/19/2011 @ 06:53
I wonder how much knocking off the “tilt” of the planet, by the mass of water bodies subsequent to renewable hydro-electric energy dams (Aswan, Hoover, that Asian one) has contributed to the “average” 0.8K variable in the last 150 of the millions of years this planet has been kicking around?

I always thought the previous “global cooling of the planet” thing (also apparently demanding reallocation of “earthly possessions” ) was funny, considering that it’s proponents were able to walk on it’s surface-between the admissions office and the Rathskeller.
- CaptDMO | 09/19/2011 @ 07:13
Bob Sykes

I know that name! I know it from way back. And if it’s the same Bob Sykes I’m thinking of, this is no random commenter.

The real issue is that some climatologists have imposed a political agenda on the investigation and have managed to subvert the peer review process at several journals and funding agencies.

That really sums it up very, very well. And I’m always looking for succinct ways to “say it all”. That really nails it.

And I’m familiar with Roy Spencer — but I didn’t know he had such a nice slick website. I’ll need to side-bar that in the “resources” section of my blog’s sidebar.
- philmon | 09/19/2011 @ 09:36
@Buck

Heh. Out of curiosity, does it get above 120 F out there very often?

‘Cause …. we could easily make you one. 🙂
- philmon | 09/19/2011 @ 10:22

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