Bloody Serious Game of Mathematics at KTH

In this very moment a tough game of mathematics is going on at the Royal Institute of Technology KTH, between Classical Analytical Mathematics and Computational Mathematics.

The battle ground is a course in Numerical Methods and the fight is about the course literature BodyandSoul Mathematical Simulation Technology (BS), available for inspection from my home page.

Formally, the Program Administration (representing Classical Analytical Mathematics) buying the course, has "stopped" BS from being used as course material. But the course continues as if BS has has not been stopped. An interesting situation indeed, as the course now enters into its two final weeks.

Why has BS been "stopped"? Try to find out yourself by taking a look at the text.

Media represented by Ny Teknik is watching the match and will be reporting. The current betting odds is 0.67 in favor of Computational Math, but in a match like this anything can happen. Stay tuned to follow the thrilling final rounds...

The match continues Monday Nov 29 at 10.15 am with a new version of BS. If this serve will be stopped by PA, then a tie-break will follow...

Slaying the Sky Dragon Is Out as Ebook

From lulu.com:

Even before publication, Slaying the Sky Dragon was destined to be the benchmark for future generations of climate researchers. This is the world's first and only full volume refutation of the greenhouse gas theory of man-made global warming. Nine leading international experts methodically expose how willful fakery and outright incompetence were hidden within the politicized realm of government climatology. Applying a thoughtful and sympathetic writing style, the authors help even the untrained mind to navigate the maze of atmospheric thermodynamics. Step-by-step the reader is shown why the so-called greenhouse effect cannot possibly exist in nature. By deft statistical analysis the cornerstones of climate equations – incorrectly calculated by an incredible factor of three - are exposed then shattered. This volume is a scientific tour de force and the game-changer for international environmental policymakers as well as being a joy to read for hard-pressed taxpayers everywhere.

Slaying the Sky Dragon: Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory has now appeared as an Ebook, at the modest price of $8.99. Don't hesitate to download for immediate inspection and reaction. The paperback version will be available in a week.

Implications of Climategate

In mathematics a statement A is said to imply a statement B, if there is a proof of B with A as hypothesis, which means that B is true whenever A is true. A proof is a chain of implications using rules of logic leading from A to B.

What is then the implication of A = Climategate? We know that A is true: the emails were real emails sent by real people. The evidence of manipulation of data and the referee process underlying the IPCC AR4 is overwhelming. A is true. Climategate happened.

What has been the implication of A? Well, the observable effect of A after one year of

action is B = collapse of climate science and politics. It is now natural to ask if this was

inevitable, or if the collapse could have been prevented by governmental whitewash supported by scientific societies denying the truth of A.

No, the collapse of IPCC science and politics which we are observing is a logical necessity, because science and in particular climate science follows the logic of mathematics, which is the same logic as used in legal processes. If A = person X was found with a smoking gun in hand and B = person Y was lying shot dead in front of X, then X will be sentenced for murder (unless X is whitewashed). To manipulate scientific data is the same as killing science, and this is outside the law of science. And climate politics based on unlawful science cannot be enforced in a democratic society.

The net result is that UN climate politics is in free fall because the scientific basis has disappeared. It may well be that the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference Cancun - COP 16 will be the last. For COP15 in Copenhagen A was still untrue, but for COP16 A is true and that changes everything. If X murdered Y that changes everything.

Climategate has not only changed climate politics, but also the practice of the scientific method: The open free Blogosphere has taken the initiative from closed autocratic scientific societies and journals, simply by using the scientific method of combining facts with logic. The implications of this shift of priority of interpretation is potentially far-reaching, which I will report on as it unfolds.

Part of the process is the Blogosphere book Slaying the Sky Dragon: Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory appearing later this week.

Bloody Serious Games, of Mathematics

Johan Huizinga identifies in Homo Ludens (1938), games and play as the origin of all human culture, while noting that as culture develops, its playful elements get lost: In folk music performing musicians are allowed to play according to their own inspiration, while in serious classical music this is possible only for composer and conductor.

Huizinga also notes that games are played with a "bloody seriousness" (Heiligen Ernst) which goes way beyond the importance of kicking a ball around. This is probably connected to the symbolic function of a game, like Americas Cup, which can be "bloody serious" in the sense that it measures the strength of a superpower. Or a soccer match measuring the relative importance of two villages.

How about science? Yes, science is a form of culture and thus also is a form of game. This falls

into Kuhn's classification of "normal science" as games with set rules, and "shifts of paradigm" about the rules of the game.

Mathematics as the foundation of science is maybe the most bloody serious game of all, and

bloody serious games are called battles. A big battle was fought in the 1930s between the constructivists (Brouwer) and the formalists-logicists (Hilbert-Russell). Scientifically

Brouwer won the game by scoring 2-0 by Gödel's incompleteness theorem and the Turing machine. But politically the formalists-logicists won by taking over mathematics departments and kicking out all constructivists to computer science, the booming new field of constructive mathematics.

In the 1970s the formalists-logicists made a serious push to set a new standard and consolidate their political victory, by introducing set theory already in Kindergarten. But this mass education withered away because nobody could understand why it was so illuminating to construct a set by putting one banana, two shoes and a dog inside the loop of a rope.

Today, the battle reappears in mathematics education as a battle between computational mathematics and classical analytical mathematics, between realism and idealism, between

constructive and formal mathematics, as a paradigm shift battle about the rules of the game,

with the latter really bloody serious.

And so Brouwer and Turing are back again with an IT-society using constructive mathematics in massive computation on billions of computers, day and night all over the globe. The battle to bring politics and science together has started. Brouwer as David against the Mathematics Church as Goliath. My contribution to the game is the upcoming e-book BodyandSoul Mathematical Simulation Technology, which can be downloaded from my home page and inspected. Any comments are welcome.

Another battle is going on, between CO2 climate alarmists and CO2 alarmism skeptics. Again politics has been separated from science. Here David is a skeptic and the IPCC State Church is Goliath. This is also a bloody serious game of mathematics, because global climate follows mathematical physical laws and not climate tax laws by governments.

If you are betting money on this match, check out the new book by David

Slaying the SkyDragon: Death to the Greenhouse Gas Theory, coming to you next week.

A resume of the ongoing climate battle is given in Penn and Teller Bullshit: Global Warming.

Science: The Art of Making Distinctions

Compromise in gladiator fight and science has little (public) interest.

Judith Curry writes in Ending the War with Skeptics:

• The big war is arguably over.
• The political war over whether anthropogenic climate change will be the primary driver of global energy policy is pretty much over.
• But it seems that climate change is not going to be the primary driver for global energy policy; the UNFCCC is losing that war.
• Without political impetus, what is the rationale for continued trench warfare between the climate scientists that defend the IPCC and the skeptics? I can’t think of any.
• Climate science will continue on its merry way, with a spectrum of view points and ideas on how and why the climate system is changing, and how humans and ecosystems respond and react to this change.
• Climate scientists have made a clear and cogent case that we are facing risk from the threat from anthropogenic climate change.
• The nature and magnitude and likelihood of this threat is the subject of continued active investigation.
• Let the economists, military/defense intelligence experts, resource managers, and yes politicians, sort out how we should manage these risks.

Maybe the political war is over, but not the scientific. So, why not then a nice peaceful compromise between CO2 alarmists and CO2 alarmism skeptics? Because, science is not about making compromises. Science is about making distinctions and compromise blurs distinctions and thus is non-science.

The same holds in war, love, arts and sports, where compromise is of little interest. In the big battle for survival mixing between different species is prevented. A compromise between a peacock and a pig is not fit for life.

A large part of science is classification, and classification is about making distinctions.

It is possible to formulate a compromise between a flat earth and round earth theory, e.g. by saying that the Earth is locally flat and globally round, with the result that both theories are correct: The earth is both flat and round! But what is the interest of such a hybrid theory?

It is possible to formulate a compromise between CO2 alarmists and skeptics, by saying that

CO2 may have some influence (possibly zero) on global temperatures. But again this has no

interest. And the essential role of a scientist is to say something of interest (to humanity), to make a distinction and not a compromise.

Therefore, Curry's call for End of War with Skeptics, has little interest. If the big war is now over, there must be winners and losers.

Blurring of differences is an essential element of democratic society: We are all equal with equal opportunities (in theory). But science is not democratic politics, and equality science is not interesting (to the public financing science).

Compare with the new SPPI report Is the Western Climate Establishment Corrupt?

American Meteorological Society: Incorrect Science

The American Meteorological Society has approved a new policy statement, however without changing its previous Climate Change An Information Statement:

• Direct human impact is through changes in the concentration of certain trace gases such as carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, and water vapor, known collectively as greenhouse gases. Enhanced greenhouse gases have little effect on the incoming energy of the sun, but they act as a blanket to reduce the outgoing infrared radiation emitted by Earth and its atmosphere; the surface and atmosphere therefore warm so as to increase the outgoing energy until the outgoing and incoming flows of energy are equal. 
• Further, increases in greenhouse gases are nearly certain to produce continued increases in temperature. Such changes in temperature lead to changes in clouds, pressure, winds, and rainfall in a complex sequence of further effects. 
  

So we have here the same IPCC mantra of an alarming "greenhouse gas effect", which we in previous posts have discovered to lack scientific basis. 

The End of IPCC

Judith Curry makes in Reversing the Direction of the Positive Feedback Loop an analysis of IPCC which can only mean that the end of IPCC is near:

• At the heart of the IPCC is a cadre of scientists whose careers have been made by the IPCC.  
• These scientists have used the IPCC to jump the normal meritocracy process by which scientists achieve influence over the politics of science and policy.  
• Not only has this brought some relatively unknown, inexperienced  and possibly dubious people into positions of influence, but these people become vested in protecting the IPCC, which has become central to their own career and legitimizes playing power politics with their expertise.
• When I refer to the IPCC dogma, it is the religious importance that the IPCC holds for this cadre of scientists; they will tolerate no dissent, and seek to trample and discredit anyone who challenges the IPCC.  
• Who are these priests of the IPCC?  Some are mid to late career middle ranking scientists who have done ok in terms of the academic meritocracy. Others were still graduate students when they were appointed as lead authors for the IPCC. 
• These scientists  have used to IPCC to gain a seat at the “big tables” where they can play power politics with the collective expertise of the IPCC, to obtain personal publicity, and to advance their careers.  
• This advancement of their careers is done with the complicity of the professional societies and the institutions that fund science.  
• Eager for the publicity,  high impact journals such as Nature, Science, and PNAS frequently publish sensational but dubious papers that support the climate alarm narrative.
• While the IPCC priests loudly cry out against the heretical skeptical scientists and the dark influences of big oil and right wing ideology that are anti-science, we all join in bemoaning these dark forces that are fighting a war against science, and support the IPCC against its critics. 
• The media also bought into this, by eliminating balance in favor of the IPCC dogma.
• So do I think these priests of the IPCC are policy advocates? They are mainly concerned with preserving the importance of the IPCC, which has  become central to their professional success, funding, and influence.  
• Supporting the emissions and stabilization policies that they think logically follows from the science is part and parcel of this.  Most don’t understand the policy process or the policy specifics; they view the policy as part an parcel of the IPCC dogma that must be protected and preserved at all cost, else their success, funding and influence will be in jeopardy.

No organization can survive such an analysis. And politics and media has no pardon for a star showing weakness. Will IPCC survive another year after Climategate? Nixon was out of office two years after Watergate. 

Recall the clever business model of IPCC: 

• IPCC is the leading body for the assessment of climate change. It reviews and assesses the most recent scientific, technical and socio-economic information produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of climate change.  
• By endorsing the IPCC reports, governments acknowledge the authority of their scientific content. 
  

In short: IPCC assesses and governments endorse and acknowledge,  and non-IPCC scientists have no role. It is a closed self-propelling perpetuum mobile (running on tax money). But a government can change mind over one short Election Day...

Will G.O.P. endorse IPCC? No: New Republican House Promises Investigation Of Global Warming Fraud.

Will Mann Be Sued for Incorrect Science?

Andrew Revkin NYT sends out the following alarm:

• In the wake of Election Day, prepare for a new round of politicized skirmishes in the never-ending climate wars, with the battleground shifting once again to Capitol Hill hearing rooms. 
• Many climate scientists, still reeling from a year of  largely unsubstantiated accusations and attacks, are already girding for battle, with some publicly decrying the prospect of congressional hearings on climate science under the near certain shift to Republican control of the House.

Revkin's worries concern in particular 

• Michael Mann, the climatologist at Pennsylvania State University who has for years been a focal point for assaults on climate science, made the point most directly in a recent Op-Ed article in the Washington Post. He listed some of the elected officials who have used, or plan to use, their offices to probe the integrity of climate research and rejected any claim that such efforts are about revealing the truth.
  

Let us then listen to what Mann is saying:

• The basic physics and chemistry of how carbon dioxide and other human-produced greenhouse gases trap heat in the lower atmosphere have been understood for nearly two centuries. 
• Overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is heating the planet, shrinking the Arctic ice cap, melting glaciers and raising sea levels. 
• It is leading to more widespread drought, more frequent heat waves and more powerful hurricanes. 
• Even without my work, or that of the entire sub-field of studying past climates, scientists are in broad agreement on the reality of these changes and their near-certain link to human activity.
• Burying our heads in the sand would leave future generations at the mercy of potentially dangerous changes in our climate. 
• The only sure way to mitigate these threats is to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions dramatically over the next few decades. 
• But the attacks against the science must stop. They are not good-faith questioning of scientific research. They are anti-science.
  

So Mann is claiming that a certain "greenhouse gas effect" is "understood"  since 200 years, evidently referring to the work by Fourier, Tyndall and Arrhenius, in "broad agreement".

But this claim is scientifically incorrect: The effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide is not understood scientifically: It is not even clear if increasing levels will cause warming or cooling or nothing.   Evidence is presented in previous posts and in particular in the upcoming book:

• Slaying the Sky Dragon: Death to the Greenhouse Gas Theory.
  

So we now see a process forming, in the wake of Election Day,  where scientists claiming dangerous effects of CO2 based on a certain "greenhouse gas theory", will be tried in court. This is the only way to resolve the "climate war". It will be interesting to follow the trial, and maybe contribute a bit to the process...And Mann is not alone: There are many CO2 alarmists speaking very loudly, and so it will be a quite big process..

A most essential aspect of a trial is that you cannot as accused refuse to show up: The tactics of CO2 alarmists to not debate with CO2 alarmism skeptics, thus does not work. 

In fact, a scientific debate is a form of trial where different parties present evidence to a court of scientists deciding the truth. Mann seeks to avoid trial by claiming that scientific debate is "anti-science", but this is also incorrect: Open debate is a most essential principle of science,

and of democracy....Science without some form of trial is anti-science... 

 

Can You Sue a Scientific Society for Incorrect Science?

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences states in The Scientific Basis for Climate Change:

• While the effect of greenhouse gases is well established, the effect of aerosols (mainly providing a compensating cooling) is much less understood. 
• In view of the potential long-term negative effects of increasing atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases on climate and ocean chemistry (for example, acidification), development of mitigation technologies should be given priority. These should seek ways of reducing CO2 emission and the other components of anthropogenic forcing (including CH4, N2O, tropospheric ozone and black carbon aerosols) as well as focusing on CO2 sequestration, involving both the biosphere and the geosphere. 

When I ask the Academy about the scientific basis of this "well established greenhouse gas effect", the Academy refers to work by Fourier, Tyndall and Arrhenius. In previous posts I have shown that this work cannot be viewed to give a scientific justification of  the claim made of a "well established greenhouse gas effect".  It is very unclear what in fact is the "greenhouse effect" and to claim that it is "well established" lacks scientific evidence. And in science evidence is needed.

What is now the responsibility of the Academy  for its statement, including its message to society to reduce CO2 emissions with possibly far-reaching consequences for people?  

Is the Academy free to make incorrect scientific statements? Or can the Academy be sued for

incorrect science?  If you think of it for a while, it is likely that you will tend to answer Yes.

Another example is the recent statement by The Geological Society:

• The Greenhouse Effect arises because certain gases (the so-called greenhouse gases) in the atmosphere absorb the long wavelength infrared radiation emitted by the Earth’s surface and re-radiate it, so warming the atmosphere. This natural effect keeps our atmosphere some 30ºC warmer than it would be without those gases. Increasing the concentration of such gases will increase the effect (i.e. warm the atmosphere more).
  

The Society evidently takes the existence of a "Greenhouse Effect" for granted (it is even "natural"), but again the science is missing. Can the Society be sued for making incorrect scientific claims? Well, if an Academy can, then the same should hold for a Society.

Timely, The Geological Society brings  together scientists from around the world in London this week to study how the world coped with climate change in the past, with the warning: The Earth will take 100,000 years to recover from global warming.

Compare with The Guardians Is Climate Science Disinformation a Crime Against Humanity?

Here skeptics are to be sued. And yes, the same rules should hold for all, alarmists as well as skeptics, and the only thing that should matter is science and scientific evidence.

Can You Sue a Scientist for Incorrect Science?

   Suing scientists for incorrect science has a long tradition: Galileo in front of the Inquisition.

Global climate politics has been strongly influenced by the sequence of Assessment Reports 1-4 by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC describing itself as follows:  

• IPCC is the leading body for the assessment of climate change, established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of climate change and its potential environmental and socio-economic consequences. 
• The IPCC is a scientific body. It reviews and assesses the most recent scientific, technical and socio-economic information produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of climate change. 
• It does not conduct any research nor does it monitor climate related data or parameters. Thousands of scientists from all over the world contribute to the work of the IPCC on a voluntary basis. 
• By endorsing the IPCC reports, governments acknowledge the authority of their scientific content. The work of the organization is therefore policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral, never policy-prescriptive.

Climategate and other scientific scandals connected to IPCC, bring up the following questions pointed to by legal expert John O'Sullivan in Legal Defeat for Doomsayers:

• What is the legal responsibility of IPCC?
• What is the legal responsibility of scientists contributing to IPCC?

More precisely, the following questions present themselves:

• Can IPCC be sued for assessing incorrect science?
• Can a scientist be sued for supplying IPCC with incorrect science?
• Can a scientific academy be sued for supporting incorrect science assessed by IPCC?
• Can a governmental institution be sued for forming politics according to incorrect science assessed by a scientific academy or IPCC and (incorrectly) acknowledged as scientific authority by the institution? 
• Is selling science knowing that it is incorrect, similar to receiving and selling property knowing that it is stolen?
• Is selling science without checking that it is correct, similar to receiving and selling property without checking that it is not stolen?
  
• Is receiving grants to pursue incorrect science illegal?

According to John O'Sullivan:

• ... ultimate victory (for climate realism as opposed to IPCC climate alarmism) would come not from the darkened corner of some obscure science lab but under a stark legal light. Canny climate realist MP’s such as Sammy Wilson will certainly exploit the significance of this new legal phase in the climate war and speak directly to the moral standards of us all.
  

So what does this new legal phase mean? Is a scientist legally responsible for claims made,

e.g. concerning the effect of increased CO2 on global temperatures? Can a scientific statement be subject to trial in a court? Can you sue your academic competitors for making incorrect scientific statements? Can you be sued yourself for the same thing? Can a court decide if a scientific statement is incorrect or not?  

To answer No to these questions seems to be difficult to defend, and thus the only possible answer seems to be Yes, once the questions have been asked. And now the questions are being asked...It will interesting to follow the lawsuits...

We see that IPCC has taken on the role of a Haag Tribunal or Inquisition of Climate Science. But who gave IPCC this role? IPCC seems to believe that this mission comes from governments endorsing IPCC reports. How is this endorsement carried out? 

The final question is: Can you sue IPCC and Pachauri for incorrect science? The comment below

by Dr Watkins seems highly relevant...