Home » Posts tagged 'science' (Page 9)

Tag Archives: science

Mainstream science — despite all its claims of objectivity, and despite the fact it attempts to lay claim to the truth — is itself a religion.

Science places itself on a pedestal and assures everyone it has dispassionately arrived at its conclusions. Meanwhile, however, it is full of assumptions, denials and limitations, and makes the serious mistake of presenting its theories as facts.

Materialism, the driving force behind mainstream science, has been shown again and again to lack the capacity to explain the world around us, especially in relation to idealism or other theories that account for the energetic nature of reality. However, the errors and assumptions of mainstream science are gladly seized upon by technocrats, who are eager to use science and technology to further their own ambitions of control. The planned New World Order has a massive technocratic aspect, and includes forcing the vaccine, GMO, surveillance, geoengineering, carbon-driven global warming, SMART and microchipping agendas onto an unsuspecting public.

Yet, despite this, we remain collectively bedazzled by materialism, a religion that has induced a certain faith in us. And up until recently, it has still been difficult for society at large to accept the fact that the unseen energetic realms of our reality are actually more powerful and more primal than the material realms we can see and touch … but that is starting to change.

Back to Ancient Athens – Materialism vs. Idealism

This is certainly not the first time we have struggled with the debate of whether the world can best be described by the philosophy of materialism; the ancient Greek philosophers and scientists thought long and hard about the issue.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Scientific Education as a Cause of Political Stupidity

July 17, 2016

Scientific Education as a Cause of Political Stupidity

While we’re discussing education, the theme of the current series of posts here on The Archdruid Report, it’s necessary to point out that there are downsides as well as upsides to take into account. The savant so saturated in abstractions that he’s hopelessly inept at the business of everyday life has been a figure of fun in literature for many centuries now, not least because examples of the type are so easy to find in every age.

That said, certain kinds of education have more tightly focused downsides. It so happens, for example, that engineers have contributed rather more to crackpot literature than most other professions. Hollow-earth theories, ancient-astronaut speculations, treatises arguing that the lost continent of Atlantis is located nearly anywhere on Earth except where Plato said it was—well, I could go on; engineers have written a really impressive share of the gaudier works in such fields. In my misspent youth, I used to collect such books as a source of imaginative entertainment, and when the jacket claimed the author was some kind of engineer, I knew I was in for a treat.

I treated that as an interesting coincidence until I spent a couple of years working for a microfilming company in Seattle that was owned by a retired Boeing engineer. He was also a devout fundamentalist Christian and a young-Earth creationist; he’d written quite a bit of creationist literature, though I never heard that any of it was published except as densely typed photocopied handouts—and all of it displayed a very specific logic: given that the Earth was created by God on October 23, 4004 BCE, at 9:00 in the morning, how can we explain the things we find on Earth today?

That is to say, he approached it as an engineering problem.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Toxic Wheat, GMOs and the Precautionary Principle

July 17, 2016

Toxic Wheat, GMOs and the Precautionary Principle

Ben Shahn Daughter of Virgil Thaxton, farmer, near Mechanicsburg, Ohio 1938Recently, I posted a two-tear old article on facebook.com/TheAutomaticEarth that was shared so many times it seems to make sense to use it for an Automatic Earth article as well. The article asks how toxic the wheat we eat is – or Americans, more specifically-, and why that is.

But first I would like to touch on a closely connected issue, which is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s ‘war’ on GMOs. Taleb, of Black Swans fame, has been at it for a while, but he’s stepped up his efforts off late.

In 2014, with co-authors Rupert Read, Raphael Douady, Joseph Norman and Yaneer Bar-Yam, he published The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms), an attempt to look at GMOs through a ‘solidly scientific’ prism of probability and complex systems. From the abstract:

The precautionary principle (PP) states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing severe harm to the public domain (affecting general health or the environment globally), the action should not be taken in the absence of scientific near-certainty about its safety. Under these conditions, the burden of proof about absence of harm falls on those proposing an action, not those opposing it. PP is intended to deal with uncertainty and risk in cases where the absence of evidence and the incompleteness of scientific knowledge carries profound implications and in the presence of risks of “black swans”, unforeseen and unforeseable events of extreme consequence.

[..] We believe that the PP should be evoked only in extreme situations: when the potential harm is systemic (rather than localized) and the consequences can involve total irreversible ruin, such as the extinction of human beings or all life on the planet.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

We asked for an energy miracle and all what we are getting are lousy killer robots

May 14, 2016

We asked for an energy miracle and all what we are getting are lousy killer robots

If you have four minutes, turn down the horrible background music and watch this clip up to the end, which is truly revealing. So, maybe you were hoping that science would bring to us a technological miracle that could solve the energy problem. But this is what we are getting. Oh, wait…. at least this may solve the overpopulation problem. (source)

Why you can’t argue with a “modern”

May 2, 2016

Why you can’t argue with a “modern”

The modern world is filled with things many of us regard as antiquated and old-fashioned. Modern people often say that ancient rituals are mere superstition, that science tells us what is real and what is not, and that we are now free from ideas including untestable ideas from religion that have slowed continual improvement in the lot of average humans.

That the modern outlook has all the hallmarks of a religion never occurs to a thoroughly modern person (whom I’ll refer to merely as a “modern”). A modern believes that the modern outlook is above and outside all superstition and groundless belief. In effect, the modern outlook is a myth that does not believe it is a myth.

In using the word “myth,” I do not mean to label the modern outlook false. In this context myth is simply a narrative that outlines a worldview. It turns out that a myth of any vintage, ancient or modern, can be a powerful tool in motivating behavior, in explaining and manipulating the world, and in assigning meaning to human existence. And any myth of any vintage can turn out simply to be mistaken in some or all of its details.

The modern myth has some unique characteristics that make it particularly powerful and particularly dangerous at the same time. The modern myth tells us the following about the world and our place in it:

Humans are in one category and nature is in another.

Scale doesn’t matter.

History can be safely ignored since modern society has seen through the delusions of the past.

Science is a unified, coherent field that explains the rational principles by which we can manage the physical world.

Let me take these claims one at a time.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Factual Science and Maybe Science

March 24, 2016

Factual Science and Maybe Science

I am not against genetic modification but only against the way that herbicide manufacturers are using it to justify patenting any plant in nature that interests them and then, in my opinion, trying to use the patents to gain unfair monopolies in the food and farm economy. So whenever I see research favoring agricultural GMOs that sounds to me like only maybe science, not proven science, you can hear my teeth grinding clear across the room. The latest is some research out of Purdue University being publicized all over and in at least one publication, Farm and Dairy, under the headline “Eliminating GMOs Would Raise Food Prices.” Note well that it doesn’t say “could” raise prices but “would” raise prices, insinuating that the findings conclude with a fact, not a possibility.

Purdue scientists fed data gathered from worldwide cropland production in 2014 into a computer model which then told them that eliminating all GMOs in the United States would mean a decline in corn yields of 11.2%, soybean yields down 5.2%, and cotton down 18.6%. They then stated, as if it were written in stone and not in a computer program, that 250,000 acres of pasture and forest would have to be converted to cropland to make up for that loss. If not, commodity prices for corn would increase as much as 28% and soybeans 22%. Food prices would rise one to two percent or $14 billion to $24 billion a year.

Snot. This is not proven science but just maybe science. Maybe it’s correct, maybe it’s not. First of all it is based on an assumption that GMO crops produce higher yields than conventional crops. Plenty of data out there indicates that this is only true when GMOs decrease weed and insect infestations enough so the crop can reach its potential.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Can Geology Tell Us What is Warming the Climate?

March 18, 2016

Can Geology Tell Us What is Warming the Climate?

On Monday this week, and rather late in the day, Dr Colin Summerhayes from the Scott Polar Institute, Cambridge University, left this lengthy comment at the end of the thread on Prof. Richard Lindzen’s post called Global Warming and the Irrelevance of Science. I wanted to respond to some of the points raised but did not want to do this at the end of an old comment thread, and so asked if I may publish the comment as a guest submission. Dr Summerhayes responded by expanding on the comment and submitting the Opinion Piece that is published below.

Here are some of the highlights from Dr Summerhayes’ CV:

April 2010: Emeritus Associate, Scott Polar Research Institute
January 1 2004 part time, and full time from April 1 2004- April 9 2010: Executive Director, International Council for Science’s Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR)
1997-2004: Director Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) Project Office; UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, Paris
1995-1997: Southampton Oceanography Centre; Deputy Director, and Head of Seafloor Processes Division.
1988-1995: Director, Natural Environmental Research Council’s Institute of Oceanographic Sciences Deacon Laboratory, Wormley, Surrey.
1982-1988: BP Research Centre. (A) 1982-1985: Research Associate; (B) 1985-88: Senior Research Associate and Manager, Stratigraphy Branch.
1976-1982: Research Associate and Project Leader; Petroleum Geochemistry Branch, Exxon Production Research Co, Houston, Texas.

Comments will be strictly moderated. Additional commenting guidelines are given at the end of the post.

———————————

Despite the world’s politicians finally agreeing, in Paris in December 2015, on what to do about global warming, many scientists still reject the evidence for it being caused by humans, or question that it is a significant problem.

For example, Dr Lindzen (2016) agrees that although carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas, which absorbs and re-emits infrared radiation from the Earth’s surface, the increase in its concentration in the atmosphere is not important because its climate sensitivity (the amount by which temperature will rise for a doubling of CO2) is low.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Nuclear Radiation, Kierkegaard, and the Philosophy of Denial

January 13, 2016

Nuclear Radiation, Kierkegaard, and the Philosophy of Denial

shutterstock_217225549

It used to be, and indeed children are still taught in schools, that the advances that have been made in the last five hundred years (antibiotics, electricity, computers etc) resulted from the application of Science and its overthrow of dogmatic belief.

All ideas are put to the question in the auto da fe of experiment: Galileo’s observations versus the Inquistion’s biblical earth-centric world view and so forth. But over the same period, the power of belief (in Jesus, Marxism, Allah, perhaps ‘Economics’) has continued to flourish alongside the supposedly observation- based, empirical philosophy that we call Science.

Belief is strictly about what we cannot know but I am not going down the Dawkins black hole on this one since there are certainly some very odd things that science cannot explain. But I want to apply the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s approach to something that Science can explain and has: the health effects of ionising radiation.

Kierkegaard said of belief that it becomes stronger the more impossible and threatened it is. And this seems to be rapidly coming true in the case of nuclear energy. The torture imposed on logic, reason and observational data by the advocates of nuclear power has now reached the level of clinical psychosis.

A psychosis is a thought disorder in which reality testing is grossly impaired. There is so much evidence that nuclear power kills, causes cancer, mutates populations, reduces fertility and kills babies that only a mad person would continue with the belief that it is a good thing and should be pursued no matter what the cost in money and death.

And as they move to even greater levels of psychotic delusion they present two new survival strategies which make it brilliantly clear that the proponents of nuclear are off their heads.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ecological Panic: The New Rationale For Globalist Cultism

December 16, 2015

Ecological Panic: The New Rationale For Globalist Cultism

Faith in an ideology based on a desire for power over others and the need to feel personally superior without any legitimate accomplishment is perhaps the most dangerous state of being an individual or society can adopt. I would refer to such a mindset as “zealotry,” an integral element of cultism and an extreme result of the elitist side of faith.

Zealotry and cultism are not limited to the realm of the religious. Zealotry is a clever devil hiding in the woodwork of any political or academic construct, and this includes the scientific community when it strays away from empirical logic and honest data into a world of pseudoscience and social engineering. I cannot think of a better example of zealotry feeding scientific cultism than the highly propagandized climate change/global warming movement.

Anthropogenic (man-made) global warming is quickly becoming the overarching rationale for almost every policy toward global centralization, as well as a scapegoat for nearly every major crisis from mass shootings and the rise of ISIS to geopolitical shifts in economic structures. Global warming has been projected as a magical force deviously underlying everything. It is presented by climate scientists and activists as an all-encompassing behemoth of cause and effect, yet nearly all of this frantic pontificating is supported by faith, rather than hard data.

The issue is one of transparency. Without transparency of experimental data, climate scientists and think tank operatives become immune to examination. That is to say, if climate scientists and organizations, many of which are funded by public tax dollars, are not required to reveal the raw data behind their claims on global warming, then their claims are no longer a matter of “fact” or scientific process.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Climate facepalm: the Italian Society of Physics declares that climate science is not science

December 2, 2015

Climate facepalm: the Italian Society of Physics declares that climate science is not science

So, Mr. Darwin, what is the equation of evolution?

With the climate negotiations in full swing in Paris, 14 Italian scientific societies got together to release a document in which they expressed their support for the COP21 negotiations and for the need of taking action against anthropogenic climate change. However, one scientific society was conspicuously missing: the Italian Society of Physics (SIF).

Later on, the president of SIF, Prof. Luisa Cifarelli, diffused a statement on this issue as a comment to the blog of the Italian Society of Chemistry. This comment has not been officially confirmed, but neither it has been denied, so it appears to be real. Let me report its initial statement here, translated from Italian.

The SIF is an association of physicists used to consider physical laws determined by equations of varying degrees of complexity and results expressed with appropriate confidence or likelihood levels. This is, after all, the scientific method.

Then, Professor Cifarelli goes on, stating that the Italian Society of Physics refuses to sign a document in which some statements are given as certainties and not as possibilities, and that science cannot be based on consensus and on “mixing science and politics”. She concludes that it is important that the earth is protected from pollution, but that the study of climate should be “based on physics.”

And so, here we stand. What Prof. Cifarelli is saying is that science is science only if it is based on equations. Therefore, since an “equation of climate” doesn’t seem to exist, climate science is not a science. In a single stroke, Prof. Cifarelli has removed from the category of legitimate sciences everything from earth sciences (what is the equation of dinosaurs?) to the study of complex systems (what’s the equation of Bak’s sandpile?).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Duality in climate science

October 16, 2015

Duality in climate science

A commentary published in Nature Geoscience (online Oct. 2015)

Brief Abstract:
The commentary demonstrates the endemic bias prevalent amongst many of those developing emission scenarios to severely underplay the scale of the 2°C mitigation challenge. In several important respects the modelling community is self-censoring its research to conform to the dominant political and economic paradigm. Moreover, there is a widespread reluctance of many within the climate change community to speak out against unsupported assertions that an evolution of ‘business as usual’ is compatible with the IPCC’s 2°C carbon budgets. With specific reference to energy, this analysis concludes that even a slim chance of “keeping below” a 2°C rise, now demands a revolution in how we both consume and produce energy. Such a rapid and deep transition will have profound implications for the framing of contemporary society and is far removed from the rhetoric of green growth that increasingly dominates the climate change agenda.

DOI:10.1038/ngeo2559 http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2559.html

The commentary should also be available to all, including non-subscribers, via http://rdcu.be/eoQY (this may not download onto phones, iPads, etc.)

An open access and pre-edit pdf is available at: On the duality of climate scientists – pre-edit version of a submission to Nature – 2015 This pre-edit version is also copied below.

*****

On the duality of climate scientists:
… how integrated assessment models are hard-wired to deliver politically palatable outcomes

The value of science is undermined when we adopt questionable assumptions and fine-tune our analysis to conform to dominant political and economic sensibilities. The pervasive inclusion of speculative negative emission technologies to deliver politically palatable 2°C mitigation is but one such example. Society needs scientists to make transparent and reasoned assumptions, however uncomfortable the subsequent conclusions may be for the politics of the day.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Age of Finance Capital—and the Irrelevance of Mainstream Economics

September 11, 2015

The Age of Finance Capital—and the Irrelevance of Mainstream Economics

Despite the fact that the manufacturers of ideas have elevated economics to the (contradictory) levels of both a science and a religion, a market theodicy, mainstream economics does not explain much when it comes to an understanding of real world developments. Indeed, as a neatly stylized discipline, economics has evolved into a corrupt, obfuscating and useless—nay, harmful—field of study. Harmful, because instead of explaining and clarifying it tends to mystify and justify.

One of the many flaws of the discipline is its static or ahistorical character, that is, a grave absence of a historical perspective. Despite significant changes over time in the market structure, the discipline continues to cling to the abstract, idealized model of competitive industrial capitalism of times long past.

Not surprisingly, much of the current economic literature and most economic “experts” still try to explain the recent cycles of financial bubbles and bursts by the outdated traditional theories of economic/business cycles. Accordingly, policy makers at the head of central banks and treasury departments continue to issue monetary prescriptions that, instead of mitigating the frequency and severity of the cycles, tend to make them even more frequent and more gyrating.

This crucially important void of a dynamic, long-term or historic perspective explains why, for example, most mainstream economists fail to see that the financial meltdown of 2008 in the United States, its spread to many other countries around the world, and the consequent global economic stagnation represent more than just another recessionary cycle. More importantly, they represent a structural change, a new phase in the development of capitalism, the age of finance capital.

A number of salient features distinguish the age of finance capital from earlier stages of capitalism, that is, stages when finance capital grew and/or circulated in tandem with industrial capital.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Economists vs. Economics

September 10, 2015

Economists vs. Economics

Ever since the late nineteenth century, when economics, increasingly embracing mathematics and statistics, developed scientific pretensions, its practitioners have been accused of a variety of sins. The charges – including hubris, neglect of social goals beyond incomes, excessive attention to formal techniques, and failure to predict major economic developments such as financial crises – have usually come from outsiders, or from a heterodox fringe. But lately it seems that even the field’s leaders are unhappy.

Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate who also writes a newspaper column, has made a habit of slamming the latest generation of models in macroeconomics for neglecting old-fashioned Keynesian truths. Paul Romer, one of the originators of new growth theory, has accused some leading names, including the Nobel laureate Robert Lucas, of what he calls “mathiness” – using math to obfuscate rather than clarify.

Richard Thaler, a distinguished behavioral economist at the University of Chicago, has taken the profession to task for ignoring real-world behavior in favor of models that assume people are rational optimizers. And finance professor Luigi Zingales, also at the University of Chicago, has charged that his fellow finance specialists have led society astray by overstating the benefits produced by the financial industry.

This kind of critical examination by the discipline’s big names is healthy and welcome – especially in a field that has often lacked much self-reflection. I, too, have taken aim at the discipline’s sacred cows – free markets and free trade – often enough.

But there is a disconcerting undertone to this new round of criticism that needs to be made explicit – and rejected. Economics is not the kind of science in which there could ever be one true model that works best in all contexts. The point is not “to reach a consensus about which model is right,” as Romer puts it, but to figure out which model applies best in a given setting.

Read more at https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/economists-versus-economics-by-dani-rodrik-2015-09#xgLwXaG0L2E8thiJ.99

Would the Steady-State Economy Be a Miracle?

August 7, 2015

Would the Steady-State Economy Be a Miracle?

Many people think that advocating a steady-state economy is like wishing for a miracle. I understand their reasoning and take their point—in the present era of growthism it does seem rather like advocating a miracle. But that raises the question: exactly what is a miracle? And how many other miracles are we wishing for these days? Of course science, by definition of its method, rules out the existence of miracles, if by miracle we mean either something not explainable physically in terms of efficient causation, or else overwhelmingly improbable. Consequently, if a miracle did exist science could not see it. Looking for a miracle with science is like looking for darkness in the narrow beam of a flashlight.

Consciousness, reason, and good and evil are undeniably real, yet we have no convincing explanation for them in terms of efficient causation or biophysical evolution. And the origin of first life (as opposed to its subsequent evolution into different forms) also qualifies as a miracle by the above definition. Sir Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, thinks the origin of life on earth is so physically improbable (miraculous) that it must have arrived here from space—”directed panspermia” is the elegant name for this miraculous sidereal ejaculation. Science considers the whole amazing experience of life on earth as just a cosmic accident.

Given that life on earth is, according to science, eventually going to end, why make extraordinary efforts to prolong it, especially if, as the modern intelligentsia assures us, the universe and all life are just temporary accidents? We, as non-miraculous random events, can have no objective idea of what a good life is. Therefore we cannot know how much per capita consumption is sufficient for a good life. Instead of a steady-state economy the default economic rule of scientific materialism seems to be, “more and more (especially for me) while things last.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Recession, Not Fracking, Behind Drop in U.S. Carbon Dioxide Emissions, Scientists Conclude

July 22, 2015

Recession, Not Fracking, Behind Drop in U.S. Carbon Dioxide Emissions, Scientists Conclude

It’s been a talking point for boosters of the shale gas rush for years: as fracking spread across the country and the supply glut drove prices down, utilities have been shuttering dirty coal plants and burning natural gas instead – meaning that America’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions dropped sharply. Fracking, the argument went, is actually good for the environment because it’s good for the climate.

“The boom in American natural-gas production is doing what international negotiations and legislation couldn’t: reducing U.S. carbon-dioxide pollution,” Bloomberg reported in 2012.

“While other factors, including a sluggish U.S. economy and increasing energy efficiency, have contributed to the decline in carbon emissions from factories, automobiles and power plants, many experts believe the switch from coal to natural gas for electricity generation has been the biggest factor,” said the Wall Street Journal in April 2013.

“In these last years, the natural gas revolution, shall we say, has been a major contributor to reducing carbon emissions,” the Obama administration’s Department of Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said at Columbia University on Aug. 26, 2013, as he described the President’s goals for reducing carbon emissions. “We are about halfway there, and about half of that is because of the substitution of natural gas for coal in the power sector, essentially driven by market forces.”

But, it turns out, correlation is not the same thing as causation. And while the drop in emissions happened at roughly the same time as the fracking rush spread, shale gas had relatively little to do with the drop in carbon emissions, according to a scientific paper published today in the journal Nature Communications.

“Before 2007, rising emissions were primarily driven by economic growth,” ecological economist Dr. Klaus Hubacek and his fellow researchers wrote. “After 2007, decreasing emissions were largely a result of economic recession with changes in fuel mix (for example, substitution of natural gas for coal) playing a comparatively minor role.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tag Archives: science

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Post navigation

Latest Posts