"DENIER science" aims for the stars : but sometimes hits London instead...

To Stars..or LONDON

A whole lot of Denier-Watchers themselves deny that DENIERS even have have "a science" - mostly because they insist that deniers deny and disbelieve the basic tenets of "Science".


Well obviously I strongly disagree with my good pals or this blog would have no purpose!

Not C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" but rather "Two Sciences"

Let me begin my friendly disagreement with them, by myself denying there is any one thing called "Science" .

Instead, I see ( per Canadian Allan Schnaiberg's famous distinction) two main types of science : Production science aka science of the first law of thermodynamics (wildly optimistic skygod science) versus Impact science of the second law of thermodynamics (cautiously grounded earthling science.)

Production science is very good at building rockets but is very indifferent as to the tragic consequences when they fall on London and Brussels rather than ascend to the stars ( to re-use an old, old gag about Nazi-American patriot Wernher Von Braun !)

Denier science is indeed "building" our human civilization but it is also killing our human civilization and our planet, in the process.

My job - as I see it it - is to stop them and I hope you will consider  starting up efforts to stop them as well.....

Thermodynamics laws for laypeople (the Entropy of War)

First Law : Fool's GOLD !

I am frequently called upon to explain the two main laws of thermodynamics that are my two lead characters in SVE and I generally try to explain them in a pared down sort of way.

 I begin by saying that the First law deals exclusively with the quantity of mass and energy in the universe : that quantity can never get bigger or smaller --- it can merely change its state ( ie character).

By contrast, the Second law deals exclusively in quality not quantity : it says that the quality (ie the character) of mass and energy becomes steadily less useful (to K-selected creatures like humans) as parts of it become more and more widely dispersed.

"Useful" for giant K-selected beings like humanity, is really code for "concentrated" : being giant in size and hunger and few in number, one molecule of sucrose every few miles along a trail won't keep us alive.

(Thus the concept of "lack of physical concentration as an biological limiting factor" is anathema to classical economists ,who have bathed exclusively in the Kool-aid of the First Law of Thermodynamics.)

Tell us, about ALL the gold in seawater...

Glad you asked, because 'Gold molecules in seawater 'is the classic 'dividing' example.

 People of the First law always proudly *deny* that we can be running out of gold - 'gosh, the amount in the oceans alone will last us folks for, oh say, billions of years at least.'

True, predictably sigh the folks of the Second law sardonically : only too true - if we but had the trillions of trillions in dollars needed to recover those molecules of gold scattered ocean wide!

But bacteria, being widely dispersed themselves (and thus being the ultimate in r-selected lifeforms) can profitably recover those widely dispersed gold molecules : they may only need a few dozen atoms of gold to make enough copies of a vital enzyme to survive and reproduce.

We humans demonstrate the superiority of the fundamental second law to the  derived first law every time we go to war.

The embodied energy in the artillery shell and gunpowder used to propel it along and blow it up, along with the embodied energy in the building it destroys , will never cease to exist as a quantity.

But as a quality, we can never usefully use them ever again : the energy has gone off to heat up the air and ultimately the Universe.

And the tiny fragments of shell body? They are now widely scattered and rusting in the soil. The building fragments have been used as rubble to fill holes in the ground.

That ,my friends, is a very uniquely human form of entropy : a wide - and useless - dispersing of once-usefully concentrated energy and matter.....

K-selection dominates history, First Law of Thermodynamics claims

Triumph of the K-selected ?

Nothing buttressed Victorian England's famous optimism and self-confidence more than that the fact that they understood the First Law of Thermodynamics far too well (and didn't understand or accept the Second Law of Thermodynamics at all !)

That First Law implies just one thing : that Reality is, on the whole and in the long term, simple, predictable and stable.

In other words, Reality is generally at or approaching Equilibrium.

In such conditions it seemed only natural that "the K-selected of all the K-selected", Man, would totally dominate "the niche of all niches",the Universe, a niche so vast that growth and expansion of man's domain was effectively infinite.

The K or the r : who has dominated history ?

Victorians didn't use the term "K-selected" but they knew, used and believed in the concept.

Bigger is better, might is right, law of the jungle, God is on the side of the bigger battalions.

 Never ending -ever upward - progress of ever bigger and more complex beings.

Bigger cities, bigger empires, bigger companies, bigger profits : ever onward and upwards : a tumour with "room to grow" (as if cancer chose to mate with Ontario premier Bill Davis).

But some Victorians - more sentimentalists than social darwinians, chose (consciously or unconsciously) to focus on the more fundamental of the two laws of thermodynamics : the Second Law.

And it portrayed a Universe of constant, but uncertain, change : progress yes, but downwards.

A niche that steadily was getting smaller over time, with beings constantly forced to adjust to less and less incoming "useful" resources of matter and energy.

Who was right ?

Have K-selected giants dominated the world's history of life over the last 4 billion years ?

Or have tiny nimble r-selected survivors successfully endured whatever reality has thrown at them , for the last 4 billion years ?

Dinosaurs or bacteria : who has been around the longest, dominated more habitats, had more individual unique members, had the greater biomass .

The K or the r ?

Put it like that to the libertarian think tanks of Washington and even they, they of the intellect a mile wide and an inch deep, even they squirm in embarrassed silence ....

MATTHEW 7:3 to Josh Floyd & Frank L. Lambert : Lighten up !

Science's uncivil War : Part XXXCCCVIII

OCEANS of GOLD !

Not a second goes by, but without some hard scientist bristling at the (mis)use of the term of entropy by someone without a PhD in , and a career, in the hard sciences. The usual depressing "science turf war while the world burns"  poop -- or so it must seem.

By way of complete contrast, not an Eternity goes by without all the world's hard scientists all ignoring the far more egregious (mis)use of the First Law of Thermodynamics in areas like geology (shout out to Sir Charles Lyell) or in economics (shout out to almost everyone with tenure).

Ignoring beams to focus on moles usually signifies a much deeper mental issue, as my old shrink Dr Jesus would say .

I would suggest this is because the First Law of Thermodynamics paints quite a rosy picture of Man's ability - particularly Scientific Man - to profitably manipulate the Universe, while the Second Law of Thermodynamics  is much less hopeful in this respect.

The Constant - conscious - touting of the First Law of Thermodynamics, by scientists, as the fundamental law of all human activity is what convinced gullible lay people all those years back to pay basic scientists to just sit about and think,  rather than to put themselves out to work as traditional ,Non-U, hands-on inventors.

Replacing the First with the Second threatens paycheques, pensions and (above all)  prestige and this why I believe the Second Law is always attacked when used as a metaphor while the first law's foundational use in, of all things, the science of human behavior cum economics is ignored .

Here is how I describe entropy to friends and foes alike : in the form of a joke.

In fact, a classic good news / bad news joke.

See, a feller walks into the bar and tells all the patrons that "There is trillions of dollars worth of gold just lying about in the sea".

That's the good news, he says.

The patrons ask - in one voice : well what then is the bad news ?

But the silly feller just repeats what he told them.

"There is trillions of dollars worth of gold just lying about in the sea."

Yes indeed. There is lots of gold in the sea but unlike in a miner's mother lode, it is so finely and widely dispersed over such immense distances and depths that it effectively worthless --- actually worth far less than zero .

This is because it will cost more ( money=energy) to collect it than it is worth (gold=money=energy),  when it is sold to pay back the energy used to collect it.

Now entropy as useless because dispersed energy versus concentrated and hence useful energy is not strictly a case of "order versus disorder", at least to the 70,000 or so hard scientists who object strongly every time lay people use this metaphor to describe entropy to other lay people.

But unfortunately the 7 billion rest of us find it works - as a metaphor - just fine.

Why ? I blame Mom.

A Iraqi college inside a brick building is nice and orderly, till a big smart bomb enters and blows all those bricks into a fine powder and the desert winds scatter that dust all over the Middle East.

Dispersed and useless and messy and dirty : disorderly, as my Mom would say.

Hard scientists  - like Floyd and Lambert - apparently never had a Mom - or at least not one like mine.

 My Mom had a acute sense of "disorder" being defined as me scattering (dispersing as people with PhDs say) all my clothes all over the floor,  instead of hanging them up neatly and "orderly" in one corner of my closet.

My advice to Josh Floyd and Frank Lambert ?

Get some Metamucil , loosen up, have a beer, watch some TV and think back again to whatever metaphors that their Moms did use whenever little Frankie and Joshie's rooms were messy .....

The high school teachers of WWII's leaders, got THEIR high school education back in the Early Victorian era

MY high school teachers ran WWII !

It is striking how just old the leaders of WWII were: not just politicians, but also the generals, bureaucrats, CEOs, professors and editors. Anyone who was anybody was usually far older than today's leaders is in equivalent positions.

Most were born in the 1870s and 1880s and so got their last science education in the 1890s, from high school teachers who themselves got their last science education at a high school at the end of the Early Victorian era !

So : the Science of the late 1840s used to guide the world of the early 1940s.

The leaders of WWII , Modernists to the core, had a firm faith grounded on a distinct impression that the First Law of Thermodynamics and Lyell's Law of Uniformitarianism was the Alpha and Omega of scientific knowledge ----- for all time.

When your high school science teacher tells you the universe is eternally unchangeable, why bother to drop by to be posted on the latest updates in basic science . There aren't going to be any , there can't be any.

Just take a bit of time to keep up on the latest wonderful new technological offerings.

Now do the horrors of Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Stalingrad seem more understandable ?

The Panglossian NAIVETY of the climate denier cum skeptic

NAIVE denier cum skeptics

The Early-Victorian era may have ended over 150 years ago, but living fossils of its optimism, exuberance and naivety still beat on, inside the hearts of today's climate denier cum "skeptic" .Think of  today's deniers as  perfect clones of Voltaire's Doctor Pangloss (albeit as updated by Sir Charles Lyell).


In the 1830s, Lyell chose to modify Pangloss's famously naive philosophy.

It now read - in the light of Lyell's own even more optimistic theory of Uniformitarianism : "We live in the most average, the most normal, the most typical and representative of ages : our charmingly tasteful present is a roadmap back into the mists of the past and forward into those sunlit uplands of our future."

In the Lyellian cum deniers' minds , Man is endlessly progressing : ever upward, ever forward.

But the Universe ? The Universe, by way of total contrast, with all its inanimate but varying objects and all its animate, varying, beings, is in their minds but a passive backdrop.

 A crudely painted canvas drop , with only one actor allowed on stage : Man.

Reality, to a denier, is literally, "all about me". Selfish self-centeredness deified into a scientific philosophy and political ideology.

Libertarianism is the political wing of Uniformitarianism 

Libertarianism is Uniformitarianism is Libertarianism : a perfect circle, round and around a static, mildly oscillating , Universe.

Oh yes, the Universe, and our Earth : to the Lyellian denier, they do not progress  forward and upwards or backwards and downwards - in fact, do not radically move any which way.

Instead they merely oscillate, over a very narrow range, back on forth over a normal, typical, average, representative, mean : the mean of  present day values.

Local, temporary volcano up, local, temporary earthquake down neatly balancing each other : the perfect proof of the First law of Thermodynamics.

That Law, crudely and incorrectly stated, holds that Matter and Energy can not be created or destroyed but merely (and usefully for Man) changed into different forms of themselves, back and forth ; forever and ever Amen.

The early Victorian optimists and their 21st century kinfolk  viewed this law - erroneously - as the fundamental law of the universe.

But don't blame them too much ; instead blame our High School science teachers from the 19th , 20th and 21st century  for teaching that to them.

The true fundamental law of the universe, the one from which the First law of Thermodynamics is derived , is the Second law of Thermodynamics.

(First and Second refers to the time of their formulations : the First was formulated and popularized before the Second was realized to be the truly important one.)

The Second (in simple english) states that , statistically, all energy and matter becomes less and less useful to humanity with each use and eventually all energy and matter and life will be frozen dead at a temperature very near Absolute Zero.

So, in fact, the Universe and Life does have a direction and is constantly changing and that direction is more or less steadily downhill, albeit very slowly.

So, some of the heat from every time we burn even a small lump of coal eventually escapes the world's atmosphere and winds up heating, ever so ineffectually, some distant corner of the frozen Universe.

Probe a climate change denier skeptic or climate change believer warmist and you will find the concept of a steadily changing universe is their dividing line : both are people of either the First or the Second law.....

"PETER C GLOVER" to receive NOBEL for 5th law of thermodynamics ?

GLOVER takes the Fifth

Peter C Glover, the well known evangelist, is said to be set to receive the Nobel Prize for Theology for formulating (stepping in for God) the Fifth Law of Thermodynamics : "Thou can not change the Climate, get over it".

Glover , like the rather more  illustrious Sir Charles Lyell , left a field he was good at (the law) to dabble at something he is terrible at (science).

Glover (not yet Sir Glover) is best known for his thesis that "Humanity can not change the Climate for good or for bad". Full stop.

Most critics of the theory of human-caused climate change at least allow change in the climate with sufficient inputs of extra or less energy : but they mathematically quantify these inputs to be at such levels that humanity as of yet simply doesn't have the means to generate them.

Prolonged shifts in the Earth's relationship, distance-wise, to the Sun, or sharp rises and falls in the energy output of the Sun are held by these critics to be big enough to cause the Earth Climate to change fundamentally.

This is a serious argument, a serious scientific argument, and the various sides argue over whether smaller changes in energy inputs (small enough for current humanity to evoke) are sufficient to evoke pronounced changes in the Earth's climate.

Glover does not make these sort of arguments - he is a lawyer by trade and so may be intellectually unequal to making logical rather than rhetorical arguments.

Fair enough.

But I do not believe that Glover's thesis rests on science at all : he does not qualify or quantify his argument with any caveats.

His law is a Law in the Mosaic sense : laid down on tablets as imperative commands.

Moses' tablet laws are different from both changeable laws of humanity in the court of law and in the court of science.

Legislatures bring criminal and civil laws in and out of existence daily.

Science Laws once judged fundamental, like the First Law of Thermodynamics which forms the intellectual underpinning (such as it is) beneath Glover's thin reed of theory, can and were demoted to mere 'derived laws'  , once the truly fundamental nature of the Second Law of Thermodynamics became apparent.

The Theology of Peter XXXXXIII

But Glover's Law that humanity never could, never can and never will be able to change the climate has a much more eternal ring to it.

Humanity may be the most powerful species on this rock, third from the Sun, but God in his wisdom has apparently not granted us the hubristic power to destroy the Earth.

As a Christian , don't I daily wish that it be so !

But I see no evidence that our species can't destroy our own nest and that, in fact, it is happily doing so, as I write.

Nor do I see any hand-waving and finger-pointing from Peter as to just what other species, then, caused the Ice Ages .

Perhaps it was the Lilies of the Field, who despite weaving and spinning not, are apparently a dab hand at hexing the weather patterns big time......

With deniers believing in Victorian Era Science, conspiracy belief inevitably follows

There is nothing at all logically inconsistent with finding that most climate change deniers sincerely believe that talk of global warming is a scam to enable one group of people take over the world by subterfuge.

That strange belief logically follows from their continuing belief in the equally strange - and scientifically disproven - axioms of Victorian Era science.

They are, in a phrase, "People of the First Law" , when the 21st century's leading (tenured/peer-reviewed) basic scientists are all  "People of the Second Law".

Thermodynamics , dear Watson : the two sides of the climate change debate are fighting over nothing more than the human consequences of assigning differing priorities to the two Laws of Thermodynamics !

Majority of deniers think Watermelons, not Jewish families, are behind Climate Change

Some deniers may think that conspiracy group consists of old world Jewish "banking families", but the vast majority of deniers think the actual group planning a world takeover on the backs of a bogus claim of a warming planet are the so called "watermelon conspiracy".

After "Our Side" won the Cold War in the early 1990s, deniers explain, "The Red Side" (not at all to be confused with the Red States - they are the good guys) cheated by just pretending to accept defeat.

But what it actually did was paint a new colour all over itself by expressing a sudden new "green" interest in saving the environment while still secretly planning to dominate humanity via a One World Government scheme, based on old "red" socialist-communist values.

Voila ! "The Watermelon Conspiracy" : green on the outside and red on the inside.

Hence the election of Obama-the-birther, some deniers claim ( shout out to the Viscount !), because "we all know how them there colored boys love ther watermelon".

Along with straight razor fighting and beatin' their gal : yep, its the Era of  "The Coon Song Redux" .

And why not ? Because the science of the deniers is also from that long ago era of more than a century ago - might as well be consistent.

Belief in the priority of the First Law of Thermodynamics sees nature as a largely static backdrop to the dynamic activities of humanity : the climate literally can't change,  can't do more than merely oscillate within a narrow range, back and forth or up and down, around a fixed, eternal, central equilibrium.

If you are over the age of sixty and took any geology in your science education at high school or university, you might recognize this as geology's all-ruling DOGMA, until very, very recently : Sir Charles Lyell's Uniformitarianism.

Expressed in slightly different forms, it dominated all science and in fact all human thought until well after 1945 and the uniformitarian debacle of WWII.

In mainstream Economics and in Darwinian Biology, this mid-Victorian scientific delusion still does dominate.

And of course, in the minds of  the deniers. Most of them are old enough to have the genuine excuse of claiming that it was, after all,  the cutting edge theory of its day at the high school where they last encountered the formal study of science.

With Nature passive and yet Reality highly active, believers in the First Law are almost forced to credit all change in the climate to just two things : a claim that these large and long term changes in our climate are in fact just temporary and local, if you view them from a long enough and distant enough perceptive, like that of say Simon-Pierre LaPlace in his executive suite high above the Universe.

Or that some group of humans, credited as a consequence of the First Law with virtually unlimited powers of will and mind power, have managed to fool all other humans into believing in a delusion : the delusion that the climate - and Mother Nature herself - can actually change.

Deniers sincerely - and consistently following from incorrect axioms - logically believe it is not they but the rest of humanity that is deluded.

As I have always claimed, all debate and all conflict is over initial axioms and nothing else......