Some may think that The Real Skeptic would write a column on things like effects, but that simply isn't the case. You can't write about something that doesn't exit. However, you can reveal a whole lot about an empirical science that produces made-up laws and physical realities out of whole cloth by discussing the imaginary beliefs and fantasies in which it indulges.
With respect to the greenhouse effect, if we took all of the degrees, credentials and honors of the signers of greenhouse treaties and entreaties that were also related to the subject matter involved and burned them to ash, placed them on a scale with an equal amount of gunpowder, there wouldn't be enough gunpowder to explode one of those little caps we used in guns as a kid (and which we would probably be jailed for owning today).
The truth of the matter is, as we will explore in this column, the production of the greenhouse effect took the creation of a whole new field of empirical science, a field dealing with atmospheric phenomena, a field which is all of three decades old. The other area in which the greenhouse effect might be a credentialed activity is meteorology which isn't even empirical. Because meteorology, and its practitioners, the very practical weatherman brought to you by your local television station, provides one of the more amusing stories in the greenhouse saga, I'll start with meteorology.
Meteorology's claim to being empirical rests on one imaginary force, the Coriolis force. Before the adoption of the Coriolis force as a way to supposedly mathematically measure the movement of winds, meteorology had no claim to empiricism. With no mathematical basis for prediction, it couldn't create mathematical models that would predict the future and because crystal ball predictions are what empirical science is all about, meteorology therefore it couldn't be considered empirical. We need to go back to dictionaries in use before the invention of atmospheric science in order to understand the Coriolis force that meteorology adopted as the basis of its mathematically inspired, but basically useless, weather models. I'll use The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, The Unabridged Edition released in 1966, for this purpose. To start with, the dictionary did not have a definition for the Coriolis force because physics held that the force did not exit. However, it did, as a service to the established science of meteorology, define what it used in its models as the Coriolis effect: "the apparent deflection (Coriolis acceleration) of a body in motion with respect to the earth as seen by an observer on the earth, attributed to a hypothetical force (Coriolis force) but actually caused by the rotation of the earth and appearing as a deflection to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and a deflection to the left in the Southern Hemisphere."
In short, shoot a rocket north, and the Earth turns beneath the rocket while it is in flight, meaning that a shot due north would end up east of its target because the Earth would be rotating while it was in flight. The science of telemetry takes this motion into consideration when targeting missiles. To the weather modelers, however, it is the force that produces the winds because Newton's Celestial Mechanics requires the Earth to be rotating as a result of an historical force, and if there was any friction between the Earth and the atmosphere as a result of its rotation, the friction would have long since slowed the Earth down to a dead stop. Physics had to buy into the meteorological claim that the Coriolis effect was actually a force because to deny it as a force would mean having to use its collective brain, again we're dealing with cap guns, to come up with the actual reason the Earth rotates on its axis.
As a result, we end up with Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, published in 2003, now defining for us idiots the Coriolis Force as an apparent force that as a result of the earth's rotation deflects moving objects (as projectiles or air currents) to the right in the northern hemisphere and to the left in the southern hemisphere.
Can't get rid of the "apparent" but that's small potatoes in the face of the fact that the force now deflects moving objects, I mean, actually deflects them, and the moving objects are the projectiles underneath of which the Earth moves to make the deflection apparent, and the air currents, which have no other source of movement other than this hypothetical force that hides empirical ignorance about the cause of the Earth's rotation in the fiction that meteorological weather models are based in mathematical realities.
During the 1997 kafuffle that was supposed to brand the greenhouse effect as scientific fact for all time in the form of the Kyoto accord, we had a very astute politician in the White House surrounded by a bunch of other very astute politicians. However, political astuteness only travels on smooth roads, and the road to the Kyoto accord was anything but smooth. Clinton and his band of merry men were running into a lot of opposition from actual scientists and needed to drum up some public support to get the political ball rolling toward ratification. Putting their political noggins to the grindstone, they came up with an ingenious plan. They would hold a high level conference at the White House, invite the Nation's foremost television weather presenters, inform them of the dire consequences if the United States didn't adopt the Kyoto Treaty as fact and then have them go back to their respective television audiences and inform the masses how important it was that everyone get on board in establishing this scientific fact as the reality of the land.
Well, the conference was held, the weather men and women willingly attended, after all, who wouldn't visit the White House on the government's dime, and they all listened politely. Afterward, they were a little puzzled about what they were supposed to do. Basically, they felt they were being told to go back to their television audiences and tell them what the weather was going to be like twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now. Their collective response? "We'd be laughed off the station. We're lucky if we get tomorrow right fifty percent of the time."
So much for political astuteness, but it was empirical stupidity followed by a rare rash of scientific astuteness that gave rise to the fictitious greenhouse effect, and the atmospheric science that exploits it for profit. The greenhouse effect was born out of empirical desperation in the early 60s. The story started back in the 40s, and of course involved the omnipresent Newton. A scholar named Velikovsky, through historical research, had come to the conclusion that Venus was a recent addition to the solar system. He wrote up his conclusions in a book, Worlds In Collision, which was peer reviewed and accepted for publication by the prestigious Macmillan Company.
Everything seemed to be coming up roses for Velikovsky until he excitedly let Harlow Shapley, the dean of the astronomical community, in on the contents of the book. It took Shapley a while to figure out what Venus being a new addition to the solar system meant, but when he finally did puzzle out the fact that if Venus was a recent addition to the solar system, then Newton's Celestial Mechanics was out the window, he went into a rage. Chalk one up for empirical perception.
As soon as Shapley realized that Velikovsky, although without intention, was attacking the basic belief of empirical science, he rolled up his sleeves and got to work. Unfortunately, he had been too slow on the uptake and the book had been released to booming sales, becoming a subject of widespread public discussion. Shapley had the editors at Macmillan fired and forced Macmillan to transfer the book to Doubleday, which went on to reap extraordinary profits from the venture, but it was too late to stop the public rush for information on Venus as a recent planet.
Shapely therefore started a campaign to discredit Velikovsky in the public press. With the public press working from information provided by the empirical mouthpieces, the journals that every branch of science uses to put out the party line, Velikovsky started getting vilified in the public press. Not being stupid, and not being one to sit down and take it quietly, Velikovsky struck back using empirical methodology as a battering ram. He said, okay, I'll play your game. I'll say I have a theory that Venus is a young planet. I will use that theory to predict the fact that Venus has a temperature in the range of 900ºs Fahrenheit.
The hoots and catcalls to this proposition spread throughout the empirical community. Making unprovable predictions was the function of the empirical community, and it wasn't about to let some outsider adopt the con. The empirical community publicly and viciously pilloried Velikovsky for this foolishness, putting their entire defense of Celestial Mechanics on the line, sure that the temperature of Venus could never be established and that therefore the objection to Velikovsky could never be proven wrong.
Then the Russians put a little thing called Sputnik into orbit in 1957, opening up the possibility that Venusian probes actually could prove the temperature of Venus. This, to say the least, presented a problem, especially as Venus was scheduled for one of the earliest probes. The empirical empire had to cover itself, and it had to do so fast. But how could it cover itself when its practitioners had based their entire reputations on the fact the Venus was a cloud covered planet like the Earth that had been formed at the same time that the Earth had been formed and that was therefore the same temperature as the Earth?
Enter stage right a young, uncredentialed researcher named Carl Sagan. Take an unknown, use the power of the foremost empirical society in the world, The American Association for the Advancement of Science to place Sagan on the cover of the most prestigious empirical journal in the world, Science, let him ramble on about how there might be a possibility that the temperature of Venus would be higher than expected because the cloud cover acted like a greenhouse acted on Earth, it let the sunlight and heat in, but only let the sunlight out, capturing the heat, and if Venus turned out to be hot, then it would be empirical science rather than Velikovsky that predicted the heat, Venus could continue to be a part of the solar system since its inception, Newton's Celestial Mechanics would be saved and Velikovsky could be relegated to the memory hole of historic frauds.
And thus the world was treated to the unheard of event of an unknown capturing the cover of Volume 133, Number 3456, the March 24, 1961 Science published by the AAAS. When Mariner 2 confirmed Velikovsky's prediction on December 14, 1962, empirical science announced that it had confirmed Earth observations of temperature and explained that the heat was due to the empirically established greenhouse effect already published in Science.
A decade later, the AAAS held a symposium to enshrine the greenhouse effect as the cause of the Venusian heat. Of course, once empirical science says something is so, it has to come up with empirical proof that it is so, and thus the search for cause and effect of the greenhouse effect on Earth was underway, with the atmospheric science of, well, it's hard to say what, becoming established on the discovery of a hole in the atmosphere down south in the Antarctic where only those with Government approval can go, eliminating the possibility of independent, objective confirmation. The atmospheric sciences can't tell you why heat moves in the atmosphere, but it can outline precisely what the atmosphere will be like twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now.
The most amusing aspect of atmospheric science fiction is its use of rising sea levels to point to melting ice caps as proof of the greenhouse effect producing global warming when, knowing nothing about gravity, it doesn't realize that the planet's slow cooling is lessening the gravity that holds the oceans to the Earth's surface, decompressing them slowly in the process. Sagan, a decade after the symposium, perhaps alarmed at what he had wrought, started pushing for the nuclear winter, but winter will be with us soon enough as the Earth cools off, its growing areas diminish, and its occupants, stuck in an empirical mindset of mirrormensis that sees the opposite of reality, while ignoring reality and puzzling over diminishing resources, reforming into feudal communities to fight over a land that is gradually dying, leaving the life that formed on this planet a memory, footnotes in other civilization's sociology books.
The entire subject tells us more about the process of empirical science than it does about reality. First, nothing can disagree with the basic tenet of mass/gravity. Second, once one branch of empirical science establishes a fantasy as fact, it will be honored by all other branches, especially if to dishonor it would endanger the branch's own fantasies.
But more to the point, empirical science is not a community activity of scientists searching for the answers to reality. It is a consortium of people who making good livings represented by a sort of union made up of the heads of the associations representing the various fields and the editors who are the gatekeepers of the journals that lay out the party line.
All of these protectors are themselves protected by a public relations machine that takes care of the peripheral duties, duties like making sure dictionary entries reflect fantasy as closely as language will allow.
No one wants to know about reality. It might be too costly. And it would certainly be too scary.
NOTE: Climatology is not a science and by definition, it's not empirical. It is most closely aligned with meteorology, which is empirical on the basis of a false assumption dealing with the Coriolis effect. Simply put, a climatologist is someone who studies climatology, which is the study of climates. Climatology, like meteorology, has a course mix that includes earth sciences, physics, chemistry and biology, and people who want to practice as experts in climatology also take courses in sociology, and of course, PhDs can be collected on such topics as the effect of climate on clam shells. The fact remains, climatology models, like meteorology models, are created using differential equations based on facts that don't exist and the misinterpretation of facts that do exist. While meteorological forecasting, with the aid of satellite imaging, is becoming a pretty precise art, a science it's not.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com