33 Blind Mice and Eternity

 

With the rise of digital connectivity, attempted arguments for and against theism are more widespread than ever before, and frequently conducted with philosophical sophistication, confidence and enthusiasm. But while it's good to embark upon such ontological ventures of the mind, one should proceed with prudent caution. Imagine, if it were possible, 33 blind mice formed a symposium to discuss the nature of human civilisation. We might be impressed with their efforts to understand us through their mouse-like limitations, but we’d know the size of gulf between what we know and experience and what they could possibly understand.

I think this is the kind of humility (and more) we ought to employ when we try to comprehend things that belong to God’s realm, beyond creation. Things related to the first cause, the nature of possible creations, or the very essence of existence itself in relation to God’s eternal power and wisdom, are interesting topics on which to speculate - but the gulf between what we humans can comprehend and the actual reality of God's existence and Divine workings is unimaginably vast. We may only reasonably approach such matters with a humble curiosity and utmost reverence, recognising that our insights can only ever be, at best, mere shadows of the truths and causes beyond our comprehension.

The Cult's Loyalty Snare

One of the strangest things about humans is the phenomenon whereby cults often grow stronger, not weaker, after their beliefs, predictions, assumptions, and leaders all turn out to be wrong. We can justifiably hope to live in a world in which the opposite is true, but evidence shows we do not*. The primary reasons are the threefold old favourites of cognitive dissonance, sunk costs, and in-group tribal identity and association. 

Cognitive dissonance is well studied, and we know that people experience mental discomfort when confronted with evidence that contradicts their deeply held beliefs. In a cult, members invest a lot of emotional, social, and sometimes financial energy in their beliefs. So, when cults fail, they experience strong cognitive dissonance. People also feel more committed to beliefs and decisions as they invest more into them - whether it’s time, money, relationships, or personal identity – and after sinking those costs into the group, rejecting it and admitting they were wrong may feel like losing a heavy investment. To avoid this sense of loss, members might double down on their beliefs, and even intensify their involvement in the group, reinforcing their commitment and loyalty. 

Cults often provide a powerful sense of community and identity, which can be especially important for people who felt isolated before joining. When faced with a crisis of belief, members may cling to their group even more strongly to preserve their sense of belonging and identity. Leaving the group could mean losing this social support system and experiencing isolation, which many members would rather avoid.

You have to remember too, that whichever cult you’re in – Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientology, Just Stop Oil, Answers in Genesis (to name but four) - the golden rule of cult deception is that you don’t know you’re in a cult. Cults often operate by encouraging members to distance themselves from non-believers, which limits access to outside opinions and evidence that might otherwise challenge their beliefs. This isolation makes it easier to control information and, in turn, to reinterpret or ignore contradictory evidence. Leaders can reinforce the idea that doubting or leaving the group would mean betrayal, disloyalty, or even punishment, which keeps members aligned even when beliefs are under strain.

And don’t forget too that, at this stage, cult members are riddled with confirmation bias - where members are so heavily primed to seek or interpret information in a way that confirms their existing beliefs, that they habitually interpret events in a way that upholds the underlying narrative, even if the outside world has consistently showed it to be wrong. I’ve actually seen documentaries where failures and refutations are enthusiastically reinterpreted as steps toward a grander, impending moment, which heightens members' commitment to prepare or sacrifice even more.

The paradoxical nature of belief reinforcement through disconfirmation – driven by these toxic combinations of cognitive dissonance, sunk cost fallacy, social isolation, and commitment to a group identity - must qualify as one of the strangest of all human phenomena.

And, alas, one of the most stultifying things about being in a cult is that cults manipulate from the top down in a way that starves the members of the freedom to fulfil their potential. Membership of a cult is predicated on the understanding that none of its members are freely encouraged to be the best they can be in life – instead they are merely encouraged to serve the cult’s agenda; a dynamic that can only usually occur through repression and indoctrination.

*See the studies of Festinger, Riecken, Schachter, Stark, Weber and Landes for further reading (and Asch’s infamous conformity experiments are interesting in the above context too).

Offensive By Proxy Offence

 

One of the biggest societal blots of the modern age is the act of choosing to be offended on behalf of other people who aren't themselves offended. It's what I call the societal blight of proxy offense. 

Here, I think, is the right way to think about offence. Offence isn't really given - it is taken by the person who chooses to take it - so if you personally choose to be offended at something, that's on you, and others are free to decide how they feel about you. Sometimes people may feel like your choice to be offended is a reasonable one - and on those occasions, your offence might improve their future behaviour and make them more mindful of their conduct. Sometimes they may find your choice of being offended pitiable, and tell you you're being unreasonable.

But…..none of this happens to the same extent when someone is offended on other people's behalf - they’ve simply chosen to be the kind of citizen that gets on most people’s nerves - and their only in-crowd consists of other people that are widely considered to be as equally annoying and victim-seeking. I'm not, of course, talking about those who courageously stand up for a good cause for the underdog. Proxy offence-seeking is different. In most cases (there are always exceptions), those who habitually choose to be offended on other people's behalf only serve to inflate the reality of what reasonable people are likely to personally find offensive; they distort behavioural signals about what balanced individuals ought to find acceptable; and they help create a society of people trapped in a gilded cage of self-imposed inadequacy, where the cage door is bolted shut from the inside, and where people become weaker and more and more over-sensitive, utterly unable to cope with other people's ideas, opinions, lifestyle choices, tastes and freedoms.

Science & Climate Change - Closing Thought: Myopic Fears, Transformative Solutions

 

These climate discussions we've been discussing this week are about a complex set of considerations involving assessing trade-offs, allocation of resources, forecasting, and so on – and one thing we know for sure from history is that present day analyses that fail to factor in this complex suite of considerations are always woefully sub-standard in their analysis, leaving their protagonists ill-equipped to make prudent decisions and sensible forecasting.

Here’s what else we know. We do know that virtually every time we’ve tried to solve problems without foresight for how we are growing in knowledge and enhancing our capabilities we make errors. For example, in the late 19th century, Manhattan faced a serious "horse problem." Horses were the primary means of transportation, pulling carriages, wagons, and streetcars, and their population created significant issues, like massive amounts of manure, filthy, smelly streets, a disposal of dead horses problem, and the spread of diseases due to the unsanitary conditions. What those concerned didn't foresee was the advent of a transformative technology: the automobile. By the early 20th century, motor vehicles began to replace horses, effectively solving the horse problem in a relatively short period. By the 1920s, cars had become the dominant mode of transportation, and horses were largely relegated to recreational or ceremonial roles.

Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb predicted that overpopulation would lead to mass starvation and societal collapse, due to insufficient food supply – being myopic about advances in agricultural technologies, including high-yield crops, synthetic fertilisers, and modern irrigation – and how they dramatically increased food production, and ensured sufficient food for growing populations in many parts of the world. And we all know about Malthus’s similarly miscalculated prophecies of doom in the late 18th century, inaccurately predicting that population growth would outpace food production, leading to global famine and societal collapse.

There are so many more examples of this kind. People have thought there was a potential wood crisis without understanding the transition to coal (and later coal and electricity). People have feared urban darkness by failing to see the transition from oil lamps or candles to gas and electric lighting. People have been concerned about a potential telecommunications saturation with increasing population, with not enough insight into how a digital telecommunications revolution made communication scalable on a global level. Early computer scientists worried that the memory storage and processing power of early computers could never scale to meet the needs of more complex tasks – overlooking the invention of transistors, followed by integrated circuits and modern semiconductor technology, that enabled exponential growth in computing power.

These examples, and countless more, reflect exactly what is inadequate about extreme environmentalism, which continues to spread unremittingly like an unhealthy social contagion. It’s not that we need speculative faith that the trajectory of technological and scientific innovation will just eliminate all problems that once seemed insurmountable. But the balance of analysis and reaction is way too far on the myopic side of failing to account for the transformative power of present breakthroughs and of potential of future breakthroughs – largely because the whole thing has been politicised and manipulated to pay scant regard to them. These truths don’t serve politicians’ interests well, they don’t make splashy headlines for the media, they don’t enable the narcissism of virtue-signalling, and they are thinly spread so they are harder to apprehend for people whose considerations and agendas lack sufficient balance, perspective, wisdom and historical knowledge.

Science & Climate Change Part III: Understanding the Limits of Climate Models in Risk Assessment

Following on from part 1 and part 2 in this series, let’s conclude by exploring climate models and risk assessment. On the physical nature of climate change, some scientists argue that climate modelling should be trusted because it is specific and can point to physical laws that are currently observable and constant. Alas, this is only partially true - but even if it were wholly true, that still does not justify such confidence that the world’s extreme and hugely costly reactions to climate change are sensible, balanced and well-conceived. Just because a model relies on physical laws doesn't mean it has far-reaching predictability. The specific weather on any given day relies on physical laws, but it does not have far reaching predictability. The predictions are relatively short-term; in issues surrounding the perturbations of the environment, short-term predictions are not very reliable antecedents for long-term outcomes. Climate change science suffers from the same problem. Trying to rely on long-term predictions by extrapolating current patterns would be a bit like a man from another planet visiting earth for the first time in January and measuring the temperature in Trafalgar Square every day from January 1st through to August the 1st (increasing over the months from freezing up to 28°), and hypothesising that by December the temperature in Trafalgar Square will be 40°. But I don’t suggest that illustration just in terms of future problems – it’s current and future problems plus current and future solutions. Once you factor in responsive and pre-emptive human innovation into the equation, the model is not as unyielding as most environmentalists assume by their narrow projections.

Furthermore, focusing solely on the situation from a purely physical perspective is not helping the so-called climate scientists' cause. No one disputes that the underlying physics behind any purported climate changes gives us empirical objects of study - and few deny that changes will occur, and there will be problems to solve. But the climate change considerations must give more emphasis to how humans will respond to those changes. The environmentalists’ fear of the rate of temperature change - and that its impact on ecosystems, societies, and economies can outpace the ability of ecosystems and human systems to adapt – is highly likely completely backwards. Because what we are dealing with is slow, gradual change in temperature, and a rapid rate of change and adaptability from human ingenuity and natural scientific and technological advancement. Most environmentalists fear x is fast and y is slow, when the reality is almost certainly that x is slow and y is fast.

Yes, it is almost certainly true that climate change is in some parts anthropogenic, but most of what we’ve done industrially and technologically has been to the huge benefit of the human race, not least in the way in which the industrial revolution and consequent progression-explosion of the past 200 years has increased standards of living, life expectancy, prosperity, well-being, knowledge, and the many other qualities that benefit the human race. Don’t forget that our global emissions in the past century have been part of the very same scientific and industrial advancements that have facilitated this extraordinary human progression. To criticise our innovations as being environmentally detrimental is a bit like criticising a vegetable patch for ruining perfectly good soil, or criticising medicine for ruining perfectly good plants.

Professor Richard Tol (do Google his work - there's plenty of it) has perhaps done the most of anyone I've researched to show that when you factor in the economic, the ecological, the humanitarian and the financial considerations, there is an overall positive effect in climate change. He arrived at this conclusion after undertaking 14 different studies of the effects of future climate trends. One of professor Tol's key findings is that climate change would be beneficial up to 2.2˚C of warming from 2009 (when his paper was written). Some say those temperatures may not be reached until the end of the century, some say even longer. The IPCC predicts we will reach that temperature increase by 2080. This means that, far from being a so-called ‘climate emergency’, even at worst case scenario, global warming could continue to be of net benefit for another 60 years. And even if it is the case that global warming will only benefit us for another 60 years (assuming current conditions) then the people who will have to deal with it in 2080 will be about nine times as rich as we are today (assuming economic growth continues on its present trajectory), and more scientifically and technologically advanced than we can possibly imagine. While I'm encouraged by Richard Tol's research, I actually think he slightly underestimates the mood for optimism by making an understated assumption himself. He talks of global warming possibly being a problem by the time the planet undergoes 2.2˚C of warming (in 2080) without paying enough regard to just how much better equipped we'll be in 60 years from now to tackle perceived problems in 2009 (or even today).

This has always been a strange solecism from climate change alarmists too: Look at how the world has gone from 1924 to 2024. Nobody sane thinks that the world's population hasn't benefiting immensely from industrial progression and technological advancements alongside a changing climate during the past 100 years. Given that we are richer and more advanced in this day than in 1924, it’s absurd that so many people are unconvinced that the world's population won't benefit immensely from industrial progression and technological advancements alongside a changing climate in the next 100 years. Moreover, given that we in 2024 have most of the advancements to have been able to solve the majority of economic problems people in 1924 faced, we should be more confident of having similar capacities 60-100 years henceforward, given that we are starting from an even stronger place, and that we have far more people on the planet to help solve the problems that might arise. We seem drastically unfair on ourselves when it comes to forecasting our ability to work together to solve complex problems.

The climate change alarmists' assumption is that because climate change is an emergency, we should be risk-averse, and risk-aversion here means spending more money and resources on tackling climate change in the here and now. But this is faulty reasoning, because risk-aversion should primarily focus on the world’s biggest risks - and the biggest risk of all is not that future (richer) generations will be born into a warmer climate, it is that present (poorer) people are going to be born in a poverty-stricken state where they can’t afford access to cheap, necessary, dependable energy. The way to be rationally risk-averse is to help poorer people become more prosperous - not adopt short-sighted climate change policies that make energy unaffordable for those that need it most.

Here I refer you to a passage about risk in my previous series on climate change risk:

“Risk is assessing the potential costs with known probability. Uncertainty, on the other hand, is not knowing the probability, which means an inability to calculate a risk. If I have to draw a Jack, Queen or King card from a 52 card deck to win £1,000,000 or else die, that is a ‘risk’ because I can calculate the probability (12 in 52). On the other hand, if I have to draw a Jack, Queen or King card from an unspecified pile of cards, and I don't know how many are missing from the pack, then I have ‘uncertainty’. I cannot calculate the probability of drawing a picture card because I don't know if any picture cards have been removed.

Let me make it even clearer with an illustration. Suppose there is a pile of 99 cards - all of which are either a Jack, a Queen or a King, and all three cards are represented. You know that 33 of the cards are Jacks, but you don't know the ratio of Queens and Kings in the remaining 66 cards. You can choose from two scenarios:

Scenario 1: You win £1,000,000 if you draw a Jack, and nothing if you draw a Queen or King. 

Scenario 2: You win £1,000,000 if you draw a Queen, and nothing if you draw a Jack or King.

Which scenario would you prefer? Due to scarcity of information there really is no way to know which scenario is preferable because you don't know the ratio of Queens and Kings - you only know there are 33 Jacks. If you choose Scenario 1 you know you have a 1 in 3 chance of £1,000,000. If you choose Scenario 2 you don't know what chance you have because you don't know how many of the remaining 66 cards are Queens - there could be as few as 1 or as many as 65. Scenario 1 offers you a risk; Scenario 2 offers you uncertainty.

The climate change assessments are generally more like Scenario 2 than Scenario 1 - they involve uncertainties where drastically little is understood about the probability. It was important to mention that before we got under way with the series. In the next part I will look at how mindful we should be of future generations, and what we owe them.”

Rising tides sinking some boats?
Let’s now focus one of the other main messages of the environmentalists - that even small increases in temperature in the next 100 years are going to be disastrous for people living in coastal areas (this amounts to about 650 million people according to a BBC report in 2019). Alas, this prophecy of doom is a presumption they never attempt to justify. Whatever science tells us about the changing climate, the future is far too complex for anyone to know the magnitude of the effect of those changes, how future humans will be equipped to deal with them, and who will be better and worse off. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either mistaken or lying (or perhaps a bit of both).

Suppose the world gets a little warmer in the next 100 years, as predicted. Through today’s lens of analysis, it’s expected to have a net negative effect on places like Ethiopia, Uganda, Bangladesh and Ecuador. But no one talks about the net positive effect it could have in regions of Russia, Mongolia, Norway and Canada, where inhabitants are subjected to harsh winters. But even that’s too simplistic, because you then have the unenviable task of considering what future Norway or future Bangladesh will be like compared to now, and undertake a separate measurement of forecasted temperature increase alongside perceived impact at any given time. This is not a method of analysis that we can undertake right now – and this is something that seems to be almost entirely missing from the climate discussions.

Not only is a forecasted temperature increase alongside perceived impact at any given time very complex, it’s almost certain to be short-sighted and hasty. China in 1965 would be very poorly-equipped to deal with a metre of rising tide compared with the China of now or future China, who could pay for it with loose change. Just as in every decade that has passed recently, global warming has produced both negative externalities and positive externalities, and future global temperatures are too hard to predict in terms of whether or not longer growing seasons and milder winters produce a net cost on the world.

All that said, let’s be generous to the environmentalists and declare that their spectre is wholly accurate (against what my own reasoning says) - that increases in temperature in the next 100 years are going to be disastrous for people living in coastal regions. What might they still be overlooking? Currently we live in a world in which about 71% of our world’s surface area is ocean, where it could rise by half a percent if the ice caps melt very much in the next few decades. Humans have done pretty well in the past few hundred years adapting their industry in a world in which 71% of our world is ocean – so it shouldn’t be so hard to believe that people in the future with more money, greater knowledge and better technology will find it within their grasp to adapt to a world in which 71.5% of the world’s surface is ocean.

Not convinced? Ok, let’s take a worst case scenario - that all of the 650 million people living in coastal regions are going to be negatively affected by rising sea levels in the next hundred years. A few key facts: firstly, almost all of those 650 million people won’t be alive in 100 years, and during that time they and future descendants will have had the capacity to move inland or make the necessary infrastructural changes in response to the very gradual increase in sea levels. During slow, gradual changes, the next 100 years is a long time to make adjustments, especially in a future in which everyone is richer than now and more technologically astute. Remember, environmentalists fear x is fast and y is slow, when the reality is almost certainly that x is slow and y is fast.

We are not sure how many of the 650 million people (and more factoring in population increase and migration to cites) will be affected by rising sea levels, but here's what we do know. If moving inland or making the necessary infrastructural changes would be costly, not moving inland and not making the necessary infrastructural changes will be a lot costlier. It's one thing to discuss the costs of moving inland and making the necessary infrastructural changes and weigh up those against all the benefits and the future capabilities of dealing such things - but it's quite another thing to warn about staying in coastal areas and getting washed away, because that's just not going to happen.

If some relatively short-term extreme changes are the price that future unborns have to pay for living in such a prosperous world (and it's still a big IF), then it is certain that those future unborns will pay those costs, and almost certainly a lot more easily than we can pay them. If rising oceans and dealing with the consequences are not the price that future unborns have to pay, either because we are burning almost no fossil fuels in the future (which is highly likely to be the case) or because climate alarmists have got their predictions wrong, or because future humans have technology that easily helps them adapt to the gradual changes (which is almost certainly going to be the case), then the alarmism has been absurdly wasteful and largely unnecessary, because global market innovation is already doing about as much as it can, and will continue to do so.

The environmentalists frequently seem to be confused by a base rate fallacy regarding what they are doing. Even if we ignore the fact that this level of uncertainty is not an obvious call to action (and we shouldn’t ignore that, but we will for simplicity’s sake), and the fact that these reactionaries have no real clue of the appropriate measure of range of possible outcomes against range of possible actions, they are utterly confused by the concept of ‘doing’. They peddle the narrative along the lines of ‘What we should be doing’ when really they mean ‘What we should be doing now’. And I’m not saying that everything we are doing is reactionary – we are making some terrific progress on a whole range of innovations to help make us greener – but doing reactionary things now for projected future scenarios is hasty and presumptuous because time is inevitably going to reduce the cost of dealing with the problems (because we’ll be richer, and with better technology, and have more information and understanding).

That fact that uncertainty will decrease over time, and our knowledge, resources and richness will increase over time is an argument that, relative to our abilities, the problem will get smaller not larger, and our ability to manage it will get better not worse. If you don’t believe me, and still think we need immediate action otherwise it’ll be too late, you only need remember that this has been said for every decade for at least the past five decades, and with every passing decade we have gained in understanding, reduced our uncertainty, made humanity better off, reduced poverty, increased global trade and prosperity, become greener, and enhanced our technology - and this in spite of the extreme environmentalists, not because of them.

So many people are getting taken in by the doomsday eco-fundamentalism, on the pretext that ‘we have a climate emergency’ (or worse 'the end is nigh') is a consensual view among climate scientists. Climate scientists are experts at understanding the climate (the clue's in their job title) and the problems we are facing, but they are not economists, so they are unlikely to present the full menu of considerations. Climate scientists can tell us about the relationship between our activities and global warming, and they can tell us about how different levels of carbon emissions in the near future are likely to impact on climate change (to a degree, pun intended). But the climate change situation is not simply a matter for the physical sciences, it's largely a matter for economics.

Science is the systematic study of the physical environment within nature. Economics is the science of allocating resources efficiently amidst competing preferences. Science tries to tell us which challenges a region of the Middle East might have to face if the planet is n degrees warmer in 20 years' time. Economics tries to consider the future resources and technology available to change human behaviour in the region. Science tells us what might happen to our ocean levels. Economics tries to consider how our coastal regions will adapt to those changes. Politicised climate science focuses largely on the costs of climate change, and is wilfully myopic when it comes to trade-offs. Economics focuses on the costs and benefits of climate change, and on the complex trade-offs that have been made over the past 150 years of humanity's great material enrichment and unprecedented rise in living standards.

Climate scientists speak of future problems with scant regard for how innovative, collaborative future humans will be economically, technically and scientifically equipped to solve those problems. Isolated, reactionary appeals to the expert climate science consensus are anaemic appeals, because climate science consensus on its own is too a narrow perspective that neglects to include many of the most relevant tenets of the analysis. Let's have more gratitude and more humility - and we can work together to solve these problems with more balance, and less extremism. Imbalanced extremism almost never acts as a force for good, or as a vehicle for efficient problem-solving. 

Science & Climate Change Part II: There Is No Single Scientific Method

 

In the previous blog post, I introduced a poser to show an easy way to establish basic scientific principles. Here, I want to say that despite there being good and bad ways to make inferences, the idea of there being a single ‘scientific method’ is problematic, as the complexity of scientific inquiry cannot be encapsulated by one method or definition. That is to say, the idea that any human mental processes can encapsulate a singular method for science is a faulty one.

Last time, we applied modus ponens (affirming the antecedent) and modus tollens (denying the consequent) to explain why Team B’s method is more reliable and why modus tollens can be effective in some cases. Now, consider the affirming the consequent method:

If P, then Q.
Q.
Therefore, P.

While this logical form is a fallacy, science sometimes uses it to form hypotheses - yet it's precarious without corroboration. For example:

If a carbon atom has 4 valence electrons, then it can bond with up to four other atoms at the same time.
A carbon atom can bond with up to four other atoms at the same time.
Therefore, a carbon atom has 4 valence electrons.

While it is a fact that a carbon atom can bond with up to four other atoms at the same time because has 4 valence electrons, this kind of hypothesis would not qualify as a scientific theory were it stated as a one-off isolated hypothesis. To see why, let’s use a comparable example:

If it is midnight, then my watch will say it's midnight.
My watch says it's midnight.
Therefore, it must be midnight.

In isolation, this kind of fallacy of thinking would be exactly true of science too – one claim by one scientist is inadequate to the task of a reliable inference; we need corroboration from repeated sources, because if stated in isolation there may well be something (as yet unknown) that falsifies the proposition that “a carbon atom can bond with up to four other atoms at the same time because has 4 valence electrons”, just as seeing my watch has stopped gives me reason to doubt whether it really is midnight. 

But equally, suppose my watch says it’s midnight, and also my neighbour’s watch says it’s midnight – I have a much better reason to think it’s midnight, as two watches in 2 houses side-by-side stopping at midnight is less likely. The more verification I get when I look at other people’s watches and see they say midnight, the stronger the corroboration, and the stronger the justification for my belief.

That is what science is all about. Science uses arguments at the singular level, but they become stronger with further corroboration. We infer to the best possible explanation, where a theory best explains the facts in front of us. Of course, if scientific theories are inferences to the best explanation, then the best explanations will also have good predictive success rates too. But context must be established in order for this to happen. For example, the earth is both spherical and flat when seen from the right context. When I place a spirit level on my concrete driveway, I see it as flat, but if I view the earth from space then it is spherical. It would be a fallacy to measure my driveway as flat and infer that the whole earth is also flat. 

The strength of science is found in inferences based on repeated corroboration, but there is no single scientific method from which we obtain this. While we often use the term 'scientific method' for ease (by which we mean testable, repeatable, verifiable, and predictable), it is difficult to justifiably claim science to be amenable to some kind of singular ‘scientific method’. It does little good to simply say that the value of science is in an observation being testable, repeatable, verifiable and predictable, because science is only one particular lens of reality, which by itself has no singular ‘method’. 

Even if we ignore for a moment the fact that science is limited to only a scientific lens of reality, there are many philosophical questions attached to the process of an observation being testable, repeatable, verifiable and predictable. How does one confirm that one’s observations are sufficiently free from psychological bias to be balanced? How does one decide what is testable? At what level does repetition confirm the validation of an observation? How can prediction be informative without a philosophical framework to police our concepts? What links our methods of experiment with the complexity of data? How do we account for the fact that different levels of reality are attached to different levels of physical behaviour in nature? How does the overarching narrative of our interpretation of reality align with the lenses of reality to which science is amenable?

It’s not that these questions can’t be answered; it’s that there is no singular ‘method’ by which they are all answered, as humans have such a complex nexus of perceptions and conceptions, and require many lenses of interpretation with which to understand the world.

Having built the foundations in parts 1 and 2, we are now ready for a meatier part 3, which is up next: Science & Climate Change Part III: Understanding the Limits of Climate Models in Risk Assessment

Science & Climate Change Part I: How To Do Science

 

In my book The Science & Economics of Climate Change: How the Mechanisms and Physics of the World Really Work, I have a bulky section on what many think of as “the science of climate change”. When you hear environmentalists – from the serious scientists, to the raving climate alarmists – you’ll often hear them say "The science is clear on this" or "We have to listen to what the science is telling us and act urgently". And when they say those words, they are signalling to you that they haven’t got a thorough grip on the matter, because no one who understood the complex, multivariate analyses required for a subject like climate change would ever use the term THE science.

How to do science
Regarding the methods associated with science, let me start with a poser. You've been tasked with hiring a team for a science project as yet unknown to you. You have 2 teams of eight from which to choose (call them Team A and Team B), and you know only one thing about the teams. Here's what you know.

Both teams worked independently on the same project; it was an investigation into seventy deaths that occurred in a factory on one day last September. Everyone in the building was found dead on the floor one day, and both teams knew that the factory had recently started to use a new chemical X, but they weren't sure for how long. Team A and Team B were given 35 of the dead bodies each and access to the entire factory, and were tasked with finding the cause of 70 deaths. Here's what they did differently:

Team A gathered evidence A, B, C, D, E and F and sat down together in a room discussing all the possibilities. After some deliberation, they hypothesised that methyl isocyanate had escaped into the factory's atmosphere and caused the deaths. After this, they did a postmortem on the 35 bodies to see if the cause of death matched their hypothesis. The 35 bodies they tested all had methyl isocyanate poisoning.

Team B did the post mortems first, found the cause of death as methyl isocyanate poisoning, and then gathered evidence A,B,C,D,E and F to see if the evidence matched their post mortem conclusion. It did. The evidence suggested that methyl isocyanate had escaped into the factory's atmosphere and caused the deaths.

That's all you know about the teams; you have a project coming up, and you need to hire Team A or Team B. Which do you choose to hire?

Conclusion..............

To see which team is a better candidate for your hiring, we need to consider how science works at a general level - and for that, we should start with two kinds of inference; modus ponens and modus tollens. For those unfamiliar with the terms, modus ponens means 'method of affirming', and modus tollens means 'method of denying'. They are rules of inference, where if the premises are true, we can reach a logical conclusion and make inferences about how the world is. We say an argument is a valid argument when it is not possible for the conclusion to be false if the premises are true.

With modus ponens, if we know that P is true, and we know that P implies Q, we can infer that Q is true. So for example:

If today is Tuesday, then tomorrow will be Wednesday

Today is Tuesday

Therefore tomorrow will be Wednesday

With modus tollens, if we know P implies Q, and we know that Q is false, we can infer that P is not true. So for example:

If today is Tuesday, then tomorrow will be Wednesday

Tomorrow will not be Wednesday

Therefore today is not Tuesday

In the first case, we are affirming the antecedent, and in the second case, we are denying the antecedent. That is to say, with modus ponens we are affirming that today is Tuesday, meaning tomorrow is Wednesday. With modus tollens we are denying that tomorrow will be Wednesday, meaning today is not Tuesday 

Now, if all argument forms were as valid as that, and if all premises were as unambiguous as that, then there would be no fallacies committed. But it isn't the case, because some argument forms are faulty, and some premises are ambiguous. Consider this common type of error:

If I have flu, then I'll have a runny nose.

I have a runny nose

Therefore I have flu

This is an unreliable argument, because my runny nose may be caused by something else (like hay fever) that is not flu. Or consider this:

If it is midnight, then my watch will say it's midnight

My watch says it's midnight

Therefore it must be midnight

Here we get into difficulties again, because just because my watch says it's midnight doesn't mean it is midnight. My watch might have stopped at midnight, and it may actually be 1am. We can also see a logical fallacy when we consider an inference in the negative sense:

If the street is wet, then it is raining.

It is not raining

Therefore the street is not wet.

Clearly, this is also unreliable, because even though it is not raining it does not prove that the street will not be wet. It could be that the street is wet due to a burst pipe, or snowfall, or by being washed by the council. 

So let's look at the above example with our two science teams. We can see that team A used the modus tollens method whereas team B used the modus ponens approach. Here's a reminder:

TEAM A: Team A gathered evidence A,B,C,D,E and F and sat down together in a room to discuss all the possibilities. After this, they did a post mortem on the 35 bodies to see if the cause of death matched their hypothesis.

TEAM B: Team B did the post mortems first, found the cause of death as methyl isocyanate poisoning, and then gathered evidence A,B,C,D,E and F to see if the evidence matched their post mortem conclusion.

Personally, I would hire Team B, because the modus ponens method is a better method for confirming a hypothesis in science (modus tollens is better for falsification). Team A made themselves candidates for the modus tollens fallacy by gathering evidence A,B,C,D,E and F and hypothesising that methyl isocyanate had escaped into the factory's atmosphere. Here they made an educated hypotheses and turned out to be right, but their method may not have accounted for the other possible conclusions that could be reached from evidence A,B,C,D,E and F.

Team B's modus ponens approach means they began with the 'method of affirming', by doing the post-mortems first and finding the cause of death to be methyl isocyanate poisoning. They then gathered evidence A,B,C,D,E and F to see if it matched their post mortem conclusion, which I think is a better way to make inferences. This approach builds a solid foundation by grounding hypotheses in observable evidence. On the other hand, Team A’s approach, where they formed a hypothesis before examining the bodies, had the potential to run into problems if the post-mortem results contradicted their hypothesis. While this approach can work if the evidence supports the initial hypothesis, it is prone to confirmation bias and could lead to ignoring contradictory evidence. Given the foregoing, Team B's approach demonstrates a more reliable method of scientific inquiry, and they are the Team I’d advise hiring.

There are cases when the modus tollens approach gets you to the right answer more quickly. If the hypothesis is that methyl isocyanate escaped into the factory atmosphere and caused the deaths of the 70 people, they could use modus tollens to frame the logic as follows:

P1: If methyl isocyanate escaped into the factory atmosphere, then all the victims' post-mortems should show evidence of methyl isocyanate poisoning.

P2: The post-mortems do not show evidence of methyl isocyanate poisoning.

Conclusion: Therefore, methyl isocyanate did not escape into the factory atmosphere, and it is not the primary cause of the deaths.

This would open the team up to other lines of enquiry.

In conclusion, modus ponens and modus tollens are essential tools in science, each suited to different stages of investigation. Team B's modus ponens approach is ideal for confirming hypotheses based on solid evidence, reducing the risk of confirmation bias. Meanwhile, Team A's modus tollens approach is useful for quickly eliminating incorrect hypotheses.

For the factory investigation, where reliable confirmation of facts is key, Team B’s method is preferable. In seeing that their approach builds more efficient conclusions on observable data, making them the better choice for future scientific inquiries that require careful validation, we have shared in a good insight about some of the basics of science.

Stay tuned for part 2: Science & Climate Change Part II: There Is No Single Scientific Method

Hell And God’s Love

Some of the New Testament language used about hell is unnerving. But I assume God inspired text that reflects hell as an undesirable outcome, as a potential state that is compatible with God’s love and justice, and as a final state that it is in our control to avoid.

If we have the freedom to control our own ultimate destiny, and if every one of God’s relationships with humans is grounded in God’s love for us, then the corollary seems to be that within the total expressions of God’s love for humanity, there is the inclusion of the liberty for us to self-choose hell as our final state, if we so wish.

That’s pretty profound, especially when you consider how we are also grounded in a striving for cosmic justice. It seems that, in the end, those who self-choose hell will be able to have no justified objections about the ultimate justice of their finality. A creature that chooses to place itself in rejection of God’s love, grace, mercy and justice may have no more natural finality than hell, whatever hell turns out to be.

One way to think more tolerantly about the idea of hell, is to think that whatever hell is in terms of punishment must be ultimately good for creation as a whole, because everything God does for creation is good. When Satan and his army of demons face their ultimate punishment, I assume most Christians think that those punishments are a positive thing in the creation story, just as a village that locks away a local serial murderer is good for the remaining inhabitants.

Perhaps if we can reconcile the punishment of the dark forces as being good for the creation story as a whole, it might be conceivable that the state of hell for some of the baddest people in creation is good for creation as a whole, especially if hell is a state of self-choosing.

It’s profound to think that when the time comes, everyone in heaven and everyone in hell will be bowing before God and recognising Him as Lord, to His glory (Philippians 2:10-11), although under very different circumstances, of course.