Their stories are well known: Galileo was put in “house arrest” because he said Copernicus was right in saying Earth moved around the Sun; Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake because he said the universe might have no center, that the stars were suns, and that other planets might house life. And now, there’s Peter Ridd. Who?
Ridd’s story is well known in Australia, where he lost a job he held for decades because he criticized the “science” associated with global warming, science that said the warming process was killing off the Great Barrier Reef. Ridd, who had studied the reef for 30 some years, claimed that the reef was actually healthy, a contention contrary to popular “reef belief.” Ridd said the popular misconception about reef health was driven by what I term Agenda-Science. The global “warmists” took offense, of course. Ridd’s criticism of his fellow scientists did not sit well at his university. And--would you believe it?—it did not sit well in the Australian courts. What occurred was censure of yet another person who isn’t in the back pocket of the IPCC.
I’ve written about climate science before. There’s much to discuss and much to study there. But in a world that has seemingly more journalists making scientific pronouncements than scientists, it’s a bit difficult to outshout the unified faithful mob. The world is probably on the cusp of Common Speak, of one-idea-for-all governing, and of the end—maybe for centuries—of true skepticism. Note to George Orwell: “At the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, people are living in your 1984.” And as we know from examples of censored speech in socialist and communist countries of the last century, once a society commits itself to Common Speak, it takes decades at the very least to undo. Generations steeped in the appropriateness of accepted metaphors will only reluctantly give up their notion of how the world works and how science works—or is supposed to work.
Stories of contention between the new One and the old Many are not new. Galileo and Bruno lived the individual’s struggle against entrenched thought. In the twentieth century, decades passed before geologists came to accept Alfred Wegener’s “continental drift” (now known as seafloor spreading).* American geologists actually ridiculed Wegener, using in part as their argument that he was a meteorologist and climatologist and not a “true” geologist while ignoring the fossil and petrological evidence from which he derived his conclusions. Fortunately for Wegener, his many detractors did not have the power of the Inquisition that imprisoned Galileo and burned Bruno. But Wegener, who died before WWII , wasn’t really accepted into “mainstream geoscience” until the 1950s when irrefutable evidence for seafloor spreading began showing up. I suppose there’s an analog in Bruno. He was a monk and a bit of a polymath, not strictly what we might call an astronomer and his contemporaries might term an astrologer. Nevertheless, like Wegener he was a somewhat insightful fellow. With respect to the cosmos, Bruno was definitely way ahead of his time. Rejected in his era, Bruno, if he were alive today, would be delighted with our own era’s discovery of extra-solar planets, and Wegener would know he established one of the most fundamental principles of modern geoscience.
Who knows what will happen to Peter Ridd’s contentions? In a world of “cancel culture,” Ridd might fall into the sea of forgotten rebels, his work on reefs expunged from the “science du jour.” The machine of Common Speak and common thinking has been grinding out the dire circumstances that global warming is the cause of every environmental change. Fluctuations in lake levels? Anthropogenic global warming. Melting ice caps? Anthropogenic global warming? Frigid polar vortexes? Anthropogenic global warming? Species extinction? Anthropogenic global warming. Extensive droughts? Anthropogenic global warming. Increased flooding? Anthropogenic global warming. Human migrations? Anthropogenic global warming. Wars? Anthropogenic global warming. Dead reefs? Anthropogenic global warming. Pandemics? Anthropogenic global warming. Years with many hurricanes? Anthropogenic global warming. Years without many hurricanes? Anthropogenic global warming. Asteroids and comets? Yes, in the mind of CNN's Deborah Feyeric, who asked on air if an Asteroid 2012 DA 14 was caused by global warming, probably anthropogenic global warming. The “science” of climate change now permeates the minds of the laity, just as Ptolemy’s cosmology held sway for more than a millennium, such is the status of knowledge about how our world and the cosmos at large works and how a rigorous scientific method yields to popular belief and indoctrination.
It might be true that the planet is warming. So far, that warming amounts to about a degree Celsius rise over a century of record-keeping. It might also be true that on a complex planet beneath a fickle sun, we don’t really have an irrefutable intellectual handle on all ongoing cosmological and terrestrial processes and their subtle and interlocked effects. Is there, for example, a limit on the effect of carbon dioxide because it captures only certain wavelengths of light? If the troposphere warms, will the stratosphere warm, also? Will the troposphere expand and the stratosphere contract? Will a burst of plant growth sequester carbon? Or, will increased forest lands engender soils that release more carbon? What role will ocean currents play in altering climate?
That Agenda-Science and Common Speak confound science seems obvious to me. Worse, the confounding both ruins and elevates careers. Ridd gets ruined; someone else gets elevated. And climate science isn’t the only affected discipline. Try denying the validity of string theory while applying for a physics professorship at a “major” university. There’s no way to test string theory; yet, there are many string theorists, all making a great living by producing complex math in support of their hypotheses—and many of them enjoying the cuisine and repartee at government-funded conferences just as climate scientists enjoy such ego-boosting events.
I was watching an interview of Tim Palmer, a climate scientist, by Sabine Hossenfelder, a popular YouTuber who explains scientific principles.** Palmer, at the end of the interview, brings up migration: Africans and Middle Easterners flooding into Europe and South and Central Americans flooding into the United States. He appears to fault “climate change” for the migrations. Hmnnnn. Has Tim not been watching the news? Does he dismiss the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people by ISIS, al-Qaeda, Syrian democidal gas attacks and bombing, African poverty, governmental incompetence and corruption, and terrorism as causes of such migrations? And what of the poverty in Central America, typically fostered under corrupt governments and drug cartels? Don’t these causes outweigh climate and drive people toward the security and affluence in Europe and the United States? Does the promise of an endless cornucopia of social services in the United States not play a role in driving migration more important than the role played by climate change? No doubt Tim Palmer is an expert in climate science, but to conflate twenty-first migrations and climate seems an oversimplification of political and social realities and an obfuscation. Conflating the migrations of the past two decades with changes in climate just plain misses all the other causes. What climate change occurred in Guatemala in this century that drove thousands to migrate? I’ve been to Guatemala, the “land of eternal spring.” Beautiful country. Magnificent volcanoes. Tons of jade and native artists. Avocadoes everywhere. Coffee, too. Half-millennium old Spanish cities, and millennium-old Mayan ruins. Wonderful, but it houses a suspicious and undereducated people. Migrations? Not because of some radical climate change. Guatemala seems to have suffered that natural event during the Mayan apex. Can anyone say “corrupt government, weak economy, and drug cartels” that followed a thirty-year civil war? And, by the way, guns everywhere, even in the banking district of Guatemala City, so many guns and so many potential criminals, that the police, who might also be corrupt, and the military show up in town centers as daily guards to supplement the many guards paid to stand outside businesses, even restaurants. What to talk “anthropogenic”? What of the human causes of human changes?
The problem with “climate science” is that it’s “all over the map” in themes and topics, including political and economic themes. There’s money to be made, monopolies to be established, funding to be had for academics, conferences to attend in exotic places—damn the fossil fuels burned to get there—and egos to support.
All those clerics invested in the Ptolemaic system wouldn’t yield their pride to Galileo. Same for those who condemned Giordano Bruno. It took three decades for Wegener’s ideas to inch into the scientific mainstream, spreading, I suppose, as slowly as the Thingvellier Graben in Iceland and the rest of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Will Ridd’s reef science be accepted eventually? Maybe, but only a century from now when scuba-diving tourists frolic in the waters among the box jellyfish of the Great Barrier Reef in a time long after his persecution and the deaths of his persecutors. Is it possible that the healthy reef he and others have documented will undergo bleaching? Sure, reefs die off for various causes, including warming waters. But reefs have always died, just as all life-forms undergo catastrophes. Is there some evidence that humans are changing the chemistry of the seas and affecting sea life? Of course. We’ve upset the balance of the food chain by overfishing. But made the Great Barrier Reef die? Not according to Ridd. There’s still a Great Barrier Reef, millions of years in the making with probably quite a few more years left in generations of coral polyps of various species. Could we see the Australian government’s data on the reef? Not today.
I suspect that Common Speak will quash most skeptics as a means of control exerted by politicians and compliant journalists, by scientists unwilling to question their own findings—as the scientific method demands—and by the willing masses who follow along as they have been told. Listen to the language used by those who believe disaster is around the corner: Climate change—once known as “global warming”—is commonly called “an existential threat.” And many use the term, particularly politicians with no scientific training: “But 97% of climate scientists say anthropogenic climate change is a fact.” Is the percentage really that high?*** On what set of documents is that claim based?
There will at times be Galileos, Brunos, Wegeners, and Ridds who will suffer censure and even persecution and death as in the case of Bruno. On occasion, their ideas and findings will become mainstream just as today we accept Galileo’s science, Bruno’s extra-solar planets, and Wegener’s movement of the continents. But ideas contrary to the commonly held beliefs of Agenda-Scientists are like the rocks Sisyphus had to push uphill. Contrarians work against the steepness of a mountain of accepted, entrenched thought. Ridd, for example, was awarded $1.2 million by a lower court only to have the judgment overturned by a higher court.**** His effort to push the rock uphill has been Sisyphean. Great effort or long time is required to overcome the gravitational pull of popular Common Speak and common thinking.
*Wegener, Alfred. 1915. Die Enstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane.
**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fkCo_trbT8 Accessed November 7, 2020. Palmer’s linking climate change to the recent mass migrations comes at the end of the video. Hossenfelder, normally a voice of reason, doesn’t seem to question the premise, but maybe she just ran out of time or cloud space.
***Naomi Orestes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewJ6TI8ccAw
****https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-22/james-cook-university-can-appeal-unfair-sacking-of-peter-ridd/12481974 Accessed November 7, 2020. There are YouTube videos on the subject, including an interview or two of Ridd, and there are other articles online about him and his travails. If you want to see him argue his side of the climate issue, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nETKLfJyY9E Accessed November 7, 2020.
Ridd’s story is well known in Australia, where he lost a job he held for decades because he criticized the “science” associated with global warming, science that said the warming process was killing off the Great Barrier Reef. Ridd, who had studied the reef for 30 some years, claimed that the reef was actually healthy, a contention contrary to popular “reef belief.” Ridd said the popular misconception about reef health was driven by what I term Agenda-Science. The global “warmists” took offense, of course. Ridd’s criticism of his fellow scientists did not sit well at his university. And--would you believe it?—it did not sit well in the Australian courts. What occurred was censure of yet another person who isn’t in the back pocket of the IPCC.
I’ve written about climate science before. There’s much to discuss and much to study there. But in a world that has seemingly more journalists making scientific pronouncements than scientists, it’s a bit difficult to outshout the unified faithful mob. The world is probably on the cusp of Common Speak, of one-idea-for-all governing, and of the end—maybe for centuries—of true skepticism. Note to George Orwell: “At the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, people are living in your 1984.” And as we know from examples of censored speech in socialist and communist countries of the last century, once a society commits itself to Common Speak, it takes decades at the very least to undo. Generations steeped in the appropriateness of accepted metaphors will only reluctantly give up their notion of how the world works and how science works—or is supposed to work.
Stories of contention between the new One and the old Many are not new. Galileo and Bruno lived the individual’s struggle against entrenched thought. In the twentieth century, decades passed before geologists came to accept Alfred Wegener’s “continental drift” (now known as seafloor spreading).* American geologists actually ridiculed Wegener, using in part as their argument that he was a meteorologist and climatologist and not a “true” geologist while ignoring the fossil and petrological evidence from which he derived his conclusions. Fortunately for Wegener, his many detractors did not have the power of the Inquisition that imprisoned Galileo and burned Bruno. But Wegener, who died before WWII , wasn’t really accepted into “mainstream geoscience” until the 1950s when irrefutable evidence for seafloor spreading began showing up. I suppose there’s an analog in Bruno. He was a monk and a bit of a polymath, not strictly what we might call an astronomer and his contemporaries might term an astrologer. Nevertheless, like Wegener he was a somewhat insightful fellow. With respect to the cosmos, Bruno was definitely way ahead of his time. Rejected in his era, Bruno, if he were alive today, would be delighted with our own era’s discovery of extra-solar planets, and Wegener would know he established one of the most fundamental principles of modern geoscience.
Who knows what will happen to Peter Ridd’s contentions? In a world of “cancel culture,” Ridd might fall into the sea of forgotten rebels, his work on reefs expunged from the “science du jour.” The machine of Common Speak and common thinking has been grinding out the dire circumstances that global warming is the cause of every environmental change. Fluctuations in lake levels? Anthropogenic global warming. Melting ice caps? Anthropogenic global warming? Frigid polar vortexes? Anthropogenic global warming? Species extinction? Anthropogenic global warming. Extensive droughts? Anthropogenic global warming. Increased flooding? Anthropogenic global warming. Human migrations? Anthropogenic global warming. Wars? Anthropogenic global warming. Dead reefs? Anthropogenic global warming. Pandemics? Anthropogenic global warming. Years with many hurricanes? Anthropogenic global warming. Years without many hurricanes? Anthropogenic global warming. Asteroids and comets? Yes, in the mind of CNN's Deborah Feyeric, who asked on air if an Asteroid 2012 DA 14 was caused by global warming, probably anthropogenic global warming. The “science” of climate change now permeates the minds of the laity, just as Ptolemy’s cosmology held sway for more than a millennium, such is the status of knowledge about how our world and the cosmos at large works and how a rigorous scientific method yields to popular belief and indoctrination.
It might be true that the planet is warming. So far, that warming amounts to about a degree Celsius rise over a century of record-keeping. It might also be true that on a complex planet beneath a fickle sun, we don’t really have an irrefutable intellectual handle on all ongoing cosmological and terrestrial processes and their subtle and interlocked effects. Is there, for example, a limit on the effect of carbon dioxide because it captures only certain wavelengths of light? If the troposphere warms, will the stratosphere warm, also? Will the troposphere expand and the stratosphere contract? Will a burst of plant growth sequester carbon? Or, will increased forest lands engender soils that release more carbon? What role will ocean currents play in altering climate?
That Agenda-Science and Common Speak confound science seems obvious to me. Worse, the confounding both ruins and elevates careers. Ridd gets ruined; someone else gets elevated. And climate science isn’t the only affected discipline. Try denying the validity of string theory while applying for a physics professorship at a “major” university. There’s no way to test string theory; yet, there are many string theorists, all making a great living by producing complex math in support of their hypotheses—and many of them enjoying the cuisine and repartee at government-funded conferences just as climate scientists enjoy such ego-boosting events.
I was watching an interview of Tim Palmer, a climate scientist, by Sabine Hossenfelder, a popular YouTuber who explains scientific principles.** Palmer, at the end of the interview, brings up migration: Africans and Middle Easterners flooding into Europe and South and Central Americans flooding into the United States. He appears to fault “climate change” for the migrations. Hmnnnn. Has Tim not been watching the news? Does he dismiss the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people by ISIS, al-Qaeda, Syrian democidal gas attacks and bombing, African poverty, governmental incompetence and corruption, and terrorism as causes of such migrations? And what of the poverty in Central America, typically fostered under corrupt governments and drug cartels? Don’t these causes outweigh climate and drive people toward the security and affluence in Europe and the United States? Does the promise of an endless cornucopia of social services in the United States not play a role in driving migration more important than the role played by climate change? No doubt Tim Palmer is an expert in climate science, but to conflate twenty-first migrations and climate seems an oversimplification of political and social realities and an obfuscation. Conflating the migrations of the past two decades with changes in climate just plain misses all the other causes. What climate change occurred in Guatemala in this century that drove thousands to migrate? I’ve been to Guatemala, the “land of eternal spring.” Beautiful country. Magnificent volcanoes. Tons of jade and native artists. Avocadoes everywhere. Coffee, too. Half-millennium old Spanish cities, and millennium-old Mayan ruins. Wonderful, but it houses a suspicious and undereducated people. Migrations? Not because of some radical climate change. Guatemala seems to have suffered that natural event during the Mayan apex. Can anyone say “corrupt government, weak economy, and drug cartels” that followed a thirty-year civil war? And, by the way, guns everywhere, even in the banking district of Guatemala City, so many guns and so many potential criminals, that the police, who might also be corrupt, and the military show up in town centers as daily guards to supplement the many guards paid to stand outside businesses, even restaurants. What to talk “anthropogenic”? What of the human causes of human changes?
The problem with “climate science” is that it’s “all over the map” in themes and topics, including political and economic themes. There’s money to be made, monopolies to be established, funding to be had for academics, conferences to attend in exotic places—damn the fossil fuels burned to get there—and egos to support.
All those clerics invested in the Ptolemaic system wouldn’t yield their pride to Galileo. Same for those who condemned Giordano Bruno. It took three decades for Wegener’s ideas to inch into the scientific mainstream, spreading, I suppose, as slowly as the Thingvellier Graben in Iceland and the rest of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Will Ridd’s reef science be accepted eventually? Maybe, but only a century from now when scuba-diving tourists frolic in the waters among the box jellyfish of the Great Barrier Reef in a time long after his persecution and the deaths of his persecutors. Is it possible that the healthy reef he and others have documented will undergo bleaching? Sure, reefs die off for various causes, including warming waters. But reefs have always died, just as all life-forms undergo catastrophes. Is there some evidence that humans are changing the chemistry of the seas and affecting sea life? Of course. We’ve upset the balance of the food chain by overfishing. But made the Great Barrier Reef die? Not according to Ridd. There’s still a Great Barrier Reef, millions of years in the making with probably quite a few more years left in generations of coral polyps of various species. Could we see the Australian government’s data on the reef? Not today.
I suspect that Common Speak will quash most skeptics as a means of control exerted by politicians and compliant journalists, by scientists unwilling to question their own findings—as the scientific method demands—and by the willing masses who follow along as they have been told. Listen to the language used by those who believe disaster is around the corner: Climate change—once known as “global warming”—is commonly called “an existential threat.” And many use the term, particularly politicians with no scientific training: “But 97% of climate scientists say anthropogenic climate change is a fact.” Is the percentage really that high?*** On what set of documents is that claim based?
There will at times be Galileos, Brunos, Wegeners, and Ridds who will suffer censure and even persecution and death as in the case of Bruno. On occasion, their ideas and findings will become mainstream just as today we accept Galileo’s science, Bruno’s extra-solar planets, and Wegener’s movement of the continents. But ideas contrary to the commonly held beliefs of Agenda-Scientists are like the rocks Sisyphus had to push uphill. Contrarians work against the steepness of a mountain of accepted, entrenched thought. Ridd, for example, was awarded $1.2 million by a lower court only to have the judgment overturned by a higher court.**** His effort to push the rock uphill has been Sisyphean. Great effort or long time is required to overcome the gravitational pull of popular Common Speak and common thinking.
*Wegener, Alfred. 1915. Die Enstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane.
**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fkCo_trbT8 Accessed November 7, 2020. Palmer’s linking climate change to the recent mass migrations comes at the end of the video. Hossenfelder, normally a voice of reason, doesn’t seem to question the premise, but maybe she just ran out of time or cloud space.
***Naomi Orestes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewJ6TI8ccAw
****https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-22/james-cook-university-can-appeal-unfair-sacking-of-peter-ridd/12481974 Accessed November 7, 2020. There are YouTube videos on the subject, including an interview or two of Ridd, and there are other articles online about him and his travails. If you want to see him argue his side of the climate issue, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nETKLfJyY9E Accessed November 7, 2020.
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