According to a NBC News poll last February, 76% of American voters were concerned about President Biden’s age.
In March, it was reported that in an October 2023 interview with special counsel Robert Hur, Biden repeatedly mixed up dates, countries and the timeline of significant events, including the year Donald Trump was elected.
Twice on the same day, Biden struggled to find the words for "fax machine."
Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, suffers from a comparable brain freeze.
It’s presumption that carbon dioxide, CO₂, is the dominant cause of climate change is a frozen artifact from a bygone era.
I’ve written at length before about the tortured legal reasoning that put CO₂ on the EPA’s hit list of life-threatening ‘pollutants’.
CO₂ is a natural component of the atmosphere. It’s not toxic. In fact, it’s vital to life on earth.
To recap briefly: in 1999, environmental NGOs and — no surprise — the renewables industry came up with a brilliant stratagem.
They could box the EPA into protecting the public from CO₂ produced by their competitors.
What better federal regulatory agency to ‘capture’ and have in your pocket?
As a business strategy, regulatory capture is as old as regulation itself.
In 1887, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) was created to protect farmers and other shippers from rate-gouging by the railroads.
In short order, the railroads had control of the ICC and using its regulatory powers to further their cartel.
The EPA capture scheme faced some legal obstacles. Those would have to be overcome.
The Clean Air Act of 1977 only authorized the EPA to go after real air pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide (SO₂) and nitrogen monoxide (NO).
CO₂ wasn’t one of those.
Long story short, the renewables lobby got what it wanted in 2009.
Last week, they got a whole lot more.
In the EPA’s latest round of regulatory edicts, CO₂ is the new basis of US industrial policy.
If the new edicts hold up, they will shape the future of everything from AI to automobiles.
And be life-changing for ordinary Americans. Half of new cars sold in 2032 will have to be electric.
If there’s enough electricity around to charge them. The CO₂ edicts will eventually put an end to generating electricity the way we do now, with natural gas.
To be fair, the EPA gives natural gas and coal-fired electricity generators a choice.
They can employ carbon capture technology, which no one has ever gotten to work economically, or ‘voluntarily’ go out of business.
It would seem that the EPA has entered a world of fantasy and delusion.
The EPA will counter that it has ‘the science’ on its side.
In this essay, I want to freeze the video right there, on ‘the’ science.
There’s only one?
If we unpack ‘the science’, we find two presumptions: that science is monolithic; and that somehow its epistemology is superior to that of other kinds of human knowledge.
It’s the one True Truth.
If you believe that, authoritarianism is an easy next step.
Thus ‘the science’ has become a cudgel among some of the educated elite who might otherwise fancy themselves to be open-minded, liberal thinkers.
Their attacks on ‘skeptics’ and ‘deniers’ would do the Holy Inquisition proud.
Likewise, talk about ‘the consensus’ is an assertion of power. The skeptics need to be reminded who has the votes.
Where did this notion of ‘the science’ come from?
And what gives some of its bad ideas such staying power?
I diagnose the EPA as suffering from paradigm paralysis.
Paradigm paralysis is the inability, or refusal, to change one’s way of thinking.
In individuals, paradigm paralysis is often considered an age-related debility. It indicates a lack of cognitive flexibility and adaptability.
In organizations, paradigm paralysis is typically a product of groupthink and confirmation bias.
The concept of ‘paradigm’ was, of course, made famous by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
When I was a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley, Structure was one of those books everybody was supposed to have read.
Or pretend they had read.
A paradigm defines the legitimate problems and methods of a research field for each succeeding generations of practitioners.
That’s one definition, anyway. Towards the end of his life — Kuhn died in 1996 — Kuhn said he’d counted 21 or 22 different ones.
In Kuhn’s take on the history of science, ‘dominate’ paradigms have demonstrated an extra-ordinary ability to absorb contrary evidence.
Kuhn calls those ‘anomalies’.
Anomalies get ignored because the dominant paradigm is much more more than a theory or hypothesis.
The paradigm sets the research methods by which evidence is gathered. It determines what observations ‘count’.
On rare occasions, an alternative paradigm may win favor among scientists in a particular field.
If the new paradigm wins out, it’s a scientific ‘revolution’, in Kuhn’s dramatic word.
The new paradigm may explain the old anomalies better. But it will start accruing new anomalies of its own.
In Kuhn’s history, scientific revolutions don’t happen often, or easily, or overnight.
It took 150 years — from Copernicus in 1543 to Newton in 1687 — to put the last nail in the coffin of the earth-centered solar system.
Last year’s El Niño made 2023 was the warmest year in the four centuries humans have used thermometers to record the temperature.
The ‘thermoscope’ dates to 1612. Daniel Fahrenheit started his experiments with sealed glass mercury thermometers in 1713.
One might have expected climate alarmists to take a victory lap.
A few did. But the cheering was surprisingly muted.
The problem is that El Niño offered no support for the ‘CO₂ is everything’ paradigm — the proposition that CO₂ is the “Principal Control Knob Governing Earth’s Temperature”, to use the title of a 2010 paper.
An El Niño event is a heat redistribution. Warm water previously below the surface of the ocean spreads across the top.
The higher sea surface temperature takes land air temperatures along for the ride. And leads to a lot of rain in some places, like California.
El Niño put those clutching on to the CO₂ paradigm in a tough spot.
The physics are clear that the global oceans couldn’t care less about a little back radiation from anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Those wavelengths only penetrate seawater a few millimeters deep.
They had to dismiss El Niño as ‘just weather’.
In fact, El Niño supported the ‘other’ paradigm in climate science.
The ‘other’ paradigm is not, in fact, new.
It’s actually the previous one.
Which was not set aside in a Kuhn-style scientific revolution, but rather toppled by a UN-led scientific coup d'état in 1995.
Along the lines of what in politics Lenin and Stalin called ‘revolution from above’.
‘Natural variation’ is a phrase associated with the other paradigm.
I prefer ‘natural chaos’.
Although the dictionary definition of chaos as ‘complete disorder and confusion’ can lead people astray.
The chaotic systems routinely studied in math, science and engineering are not complete disorder and confusion.
The turbulent air flowing over an airplane wing? That’s a chaotic system.
In nature, chaotic systems are the rule. Especially in fluids.
What is what the oceans and the atmosphere are.
Worse, the two interact.
Which enables us to parse this very dense statement made by the International Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, in 2001:
“We should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled nonlinear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
Politicians and policy-makers have a hard getting their head around chaos.
"There is always a well-known solution to every human problem," H.L. Mencken wrote. "Neat, plausible, and wrong."
The policy-makers want one of those.
If alarmed about 1° C. of warming since the last century, politicians will say to the scientists: “It has to be something, right?”
Wrong.
In a chaotic system, ‘it’ it doesn’t have to ‘be’ anything.
Or, put equivalently, ‘it’ can be everything.
That, of course, seems highly unfair.
It’s like a multiple-choice question whose answers include:
None of the above
All of the above
But if you study chaotic systems seriously, you can begin to tease out structure and pattern.
Most are bounded. They don’t spiral out of control.
They repeat in odd ways.
On a computer, it’s very easy to create up a toy chaotic system. You need a few oscillations that ‘beat’ against each other in the right way.
In climate, ‘all of the above’ includes the numerous ocean oscillations; a long list of astronomical cycles; the Sun’s various cycles, including its magnetic ones; cosmic rays and clouds; and on and on.
Nobody said it would be simple.
But, there can be flashes of insight into chaotic systems that make it worthwhile.
El Niños happen every 4 or 5 years or so. The are detectable early on, but not predictable.
Since an El Niño starts in the Pacific ocean, in 2007 two Canadian scientists looked at El Niños against the 18.6-year lunar cycle that measurably affects the tides.
It was hardly a definitive match. El Niño is, as the French say, overdetermined.
But when the Canadians looked at their data in 2007, they predicted another major El Niño might come along in 2015. Which it did.
There’s been a sea change in our thinking about the centrality of CO₂ in climate change.
El Niño and the Hunga Tonga volcano are its most visible flags.
The demotion of CO₂ from its privileged position does not come from ‘denial’ of the basic greenhouse effect.
Rather it comes from evidence that the magnitude of that effect is likely much smaller than previously thought, especially when compared to other things in the ‘all of the above’ category.
The tiny (0.2° C. per decade) warming trend in surface air temperature is swamped by the large oscillations from El Niño events.
Do the math one way, and El Niño alone can account for all the modern air temperature warming.
Clouds — ordinary clouds — were also filed away in the anomaly bin almost from the start.
Clouds hung in abeyance, as paradigm anomalies do.
Clouds are almost impossible to model.
Since the paradigm-approved research method is computer modeling, clouds went on the list of things to get around to later, perhaps when we have better supercomputers.
In the meantime a lot of studies using other methods, such as satellite measurements of the top of atmosphere, have moved clouds far up in the league table of importance.
The plain language gives the flavor of these studies without getting into the nerdy details: “dominated by cloud cover changes” and “caused almost entirely by cloud effects.”
A recent defection from CO₂-is-everything paradigm is the German weather service, the Deutscher Wetterdienst. It studied warming in Europe and estimated the effect of cloud cover 5 times that of any greenhouse gas effect.
The central villain in the CO₂ paradigm, CO₂ itself, is not cooperating.
The percentage of CO₂ in the atmosphere just keeps going up.
It’s repeatedly blown past levels that previously were asserted as certain to bring on catastrophe.
And the percentage-concentration-of-CO₂-in-the-atmosphere line did not so much as wiggle when humans massively scaled back their emissions, during Covid.
If CO₂ is a control knob, the handle or the crank appears to be freewheeling.
There’s still more evidence that the paradigm’s fundamental hypothesis may have cause and effect the wrong way round.
The percent of CO₂ in the atmosphere clearly increases along with warmer sea surface temperatures.
The physics of that are simple: the warmer the water, the more CO₂ out-gasses.
As to why catastrophe hasn’t happened yet, there’s another anomaly that was acknowledged by the IPCC long ago, but also filed and forgotten.
The warming power of CO₂ falls off logarithmically with increasing concentration, due to an effect called saturation.
That anomaly is usually kept safely caged in nerdland.
But, put in English and in a different way: with 1° C. of warming, humans may have already paid 80% of the price of the Industrial Revolution.
Some big philosophical assumptions divide the two paradigms.
In the orthodox climate paradigm, nature wants to be in balance. Its default mode is more-or-less a steady-state.
Until other things come along and knock it off kilter. Those other things are what the paradigm studies as ‘forcings’.
A volcano eruption, like Hunga Tonga, is a ‘natural’ forcing.
And there are the ‘anthropogenic’ ones, which the paradigm sets as the preeminent things climate science should study.
In a chaotic system, large variations can be generated internally, by the system itself. They need not come from the outside.
For example, the amount of energy received by the Earth from the Sun is relatively constant.
Thus the orthodox paradigm can dismiss changes in solar activity as a factor. In a homeostatic system, they will quickly damper out to the central flatline.
In the chaotic view, the energy coming in may be constant, but what happens to it once it enters the ocean and atmosphere is not constant at all. It enters into the chaos.
Natural variability does not require any ‘external’ forcing, natural or anthropogenic.
That’s not a very satisfying answer for many. It has to be something, right?
No. ‘It’ doesn’t have to ‘be’ anything.
Another philosophical disagreement between the paradigms is about the size of the Earth.
Or, more precisely, man’s place on it.
The Earth is a big place.
And 71% of its surface is ocean.
Bob Tisdale, who knows more about El Niño than anyone, suggests the following warm-up exercise to appreciate the size of the Pacific Ocean, which covers 32% of the Earth’s surface:
Open Google Earth and enter ‘0, -160’ as the search coordinates.
Zoom out.
Way out.
Keep going.
Eventually, you’ll be looking at something like this:
In the old geocentric paradigms, the Earth was at the center of the solar system.
Man was at the center of it all.
Everything revolved around us. Literally.
In the opening chapter of The Copernican Revolution, Thomas Kuhn talks about the conclusions almost every ‘primitive’ civilization — sorry, his word — drew from their observations of the heavens.
They all concluded they had been blessed by their God to be the center of Creation.
And, as Kuhn points out, concluded this quite plausibly, given what they were seeing. The Sun, Moon and stars obviously travel in circles around us.
The Scientific Revolution was very hard fought.
Not because the new theory made different astronomical predictions, but because it threatened to take Man — and by extension, God — out of His central place.
Followers of a late 20th century intellectual fashion, postmodernism, now reject as fuddy-duddy much of the Enlightenment worldview.
All knowledge, including science, is socially determined.
So thinking you know anything special about objective reality is out.
Seeking consensus is in.
Postmodernism is a sort of counter-revolution against the Copernican Revolution.
Man is back at center stage.
Once again, it’s all about us.
In climate science, the tell was in plain sight.
The UN resolution that created the IPCC instructed it study human influence on climate.
Old-school climate science, the causes of ice ages and such, was so boring compared to talking about us.
Lest the IPCC have any doubts about its mission, the UN made the new paradigm perfectly clear from the start, in 1988.
The IPCC was to study “the continued growth in atmospheric concentration of ‘greenhouse’ gasses [that] could produce global warming with an eventual rise in sea levels.”
As Kuhn says, the paradigm sets the legitimate problems and methods of a research field.
So there were a lot of changes.
Previous climate science had been backwards-looking in time, studying it on timescales from recent human to deep geologic.
That could be dispensed with. The new paradigm was about now and especially the future. Anything prior to 1850 was irrelevant.
In olden days, a ‘climate’ was something a specific geographic region had.
Now the ‘global’ climate, whatever that was exactly, was what mattered.
The new paradigm invented a novel metric, ‘global average temperature’.
Which makes no sense to anyone not deeply embedded in the paradigm.
You add nighttime Arctic temperatures to daytime tropical temperatures and … that’s your yardstick?
Like GDP in economics, it measures everything and nothing.
But what the UN really wanted was climate prediction.
Kuhn called the non-revolutionary day-to-day work ‘normal science’.
Kuhn was a hard-science kind of guy. He didn’t think economics or the social sciences were ‘real’ sciences, really.
He sometimes used the term ‘pre-paradigm’ for these. I doubt he would see contemporary climate science as superior.
In Kuhn’s view, in periods of ‘normal science’, the hard sciences do make incremental progress. Within the context of their paradigms, of course.
The closest thing to Kuhn-style normal science in climate science is probably the building of ever higher-resolution computer models.
That, and publishing articles of the sort for which Patrick Brown has provided a useful template: “How will climate change negatively impact [whatever it is]?”
For the modelers, unfortunately, what was true in 2001 remains true today: “the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
More expensive supercomputers won’t help.
Climate modeling sometimes draws inspiration from the history of numerical weather forecasting.
It, too, deals with a chaotic system. And took decades to get good out to 3 days.
But its predictions could be fact-checked the next day.
If you were wrong, you could make changes and try again. Tomorrow is another day. Rinse and repeat.
That’s hard to do in climate science.
Although I sometimes think climate model predictions should be put in little time capsules and only opened 30 years later.
Error is a specific difference between prediction and observation. With a lot of work, numerical weather forecasting reduced its error.
Climate modeling takes a throughly post-modern approach. Gone is a principle known as the Unique Result.
You take a lot of bad results from a lot of models with and average them.
You might think that number is just the average of a lot of bad results.
But it’s the outcome of a vote.
Consensus is all.
Gaining consensus is not helped if you come off as uncertain.
If you want people to get upset about it being 1° C. hotter now than in 1850, you don’t rush to remind them that the combined (instrumental and observational) uncertainty of a thermometer reading from 1850 is ±1.6° C.
Weakens your case.
Doing math on numbers with uncertainties is like doing math with complex numbers.
Those second bits, the ± uncertainty, can’t be thrown away. They have to be added.
And propagated through all successive calculations.
It’s hard to see the epistemic value of an assertion that, as per one real model on one scenario, the average temperature in 2100 will be 1.8° C. warmer plus or minus 23° C.
The ‘plus or minus’ is an affirmative statement of our ignorance.
When the uncertainty is larger than the result, we don't know anything.
The correct answer is not 1.8° C.
It’s “Don’t know.”
Which gets me back to why bad ideas stick around so long.
When I read Thomas Kuhn as a student, a lot of things bothered me.
And bother me now, as they play out in orthodox climate science.
I could appreciate that science was a social process.
But tossing out the crown jewels of the Enlightenment — touchstones such as observation, experiment, and falsification — was, for me, a bridge too far.
If science is just another factious area of human endeavor, what, if anything, distinguishes it from the similarly messy pursuits of politics and religion?
Good (non-revolutionary) science, for Kuhn, was monolithic and authoritarian.
Paul Feyerabend, one of my professors at Berkeley, was particularly scathing about this. As he parodied it, Kuhn’s recipe for science was: “to restrict criticism, to reduce the number of comprehensive theories to one, and to create a normal science that has only this one theory as its paradigm.”
For Kuhn, science education was a form of indoctrination. It was necessary for future practitioners to ‘receive’ the dominant paradigm.
In the movies, this initiation ritual would probably be set in a crypt of some sort.
If not receiving The Word, as in religion, future practitioners were at least receiving the Last Word, of their chosen field:
In receiving a paradigm the scientific community commits itself, consciously or not, to the view that the fundamental problems there resolved have, in fact, been solved once and for all.
That from an essay by Kuhn called “The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research.”
Those future practitioners, far from becoming revolutionaries, would practice ‘normal science’, the solving of small puzzles.
The purpose of normal science is to deepen and enlarge — not challenge — the dominant paradigm.
Another thing that bothered me about Kuhn was his politics.
Or lack thereof.
For someone whose best-selling book had ‘revolution’ in the title, Kuhn was pathologically apolitical.
By choice, Kuhn’s history of physics ended around 1912, at the end of classical quantum mechanics.
You could read Kuhn’s history of science unaware of the Twentieth Century’s two catastrophic wars.
One of which, in Churchill’s inimitable phrasing, came close to sinking the world “into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”
Kuhn did not get up to the era of Big Science.
At Berkeley, you only had look around to see its fruits. The Lawrence Lab is always visible up on the hill.
Or you could stroll by Room 307 of Gilman Hall, where in March 1941 Glen Seaborg had isolated plutonium and determined it to be fissionable.
Kuhn’s ‘sociological’ definition of science had some troubling edge-cases.
Lysenkoism no doubt enjoyed a 97% consensus in the old Soviet Union. Probably higher, after the last 3 dissidents were shot.
Eugenics had all the trappings of science. It took a war with the Nazis to get rid of it.
Buried in a 1977 amendment to the Clear Air Act is a requirement that the EPA, every five years, review the rationales on which it bases its standards.
The EPA included in the package announcing the recent greenhouse gas standards a perfunctory statement from its Science Advisory Board.
It’s short. That’s because it harks back to the 2009 review, which in turn deferred to the IPCC’s report of 2007.
All based on models of the future.
In regulatory capture, ‘cognitive’ or ‘cultural’ capture is every bit as important as old-school ‘materialist’ capture.
Materialist capture includes such easy-to-understand things as bribes, revolving-door job offers, political donations, and the like.
A nice history of the EPA’s 2012 push to revamp its fine particulate (PM) standard from 15 µg/m³ to 12 µg/m³, written by Jason S. Johnson, shows the EPA’s expert review process is pretty much a self-licking ice cream cone.
Zealous regulators appear unaware of a principle — well known to businesses that stay in business — that ‘adequate’ can be good enough.
The same scientists paid by the EPA to do the research were appointed to the expert panel that reviewed the work.
The sponsored studies had searched valiantly for a ‘link’ between extra-fine particulates in the air and some detectable increase in human mortality.
As might be expected, the well-known socioeconomic factors known to determine the quality of health care swamped the minuscule effect of finer particles.
Some studies did arbitrary things like throw out negative results from Phoenix “because they have air conditioning there.”
Despite that the results were statistically close to zero, well within the range of ignorance.
The EPA made the finding it wanted to make anyway, referring to a “majority of the evidence”.
In other words, it counted the number of papers it had sponsored.
Consensus is all.
I don’t think there will be a scientific revolution in climate science anytime soon.
Too much money is involved. And not a little ego.
But possibly the CO₂ hypothesis will die with a whimper, becoming a sort of junior member in an ‘all of the above’ paradigm.
But embracing that paradigm would require the funders of climate science to actually want to study the climate.
All of it. Not just human influences.
In the meantime, a lot of time and money has been wasted: ‘malinvestment’, to use the term future economic historians will no doubt use for the vast sums poured into renewables in the early part of this century.
There’s fortunately still a science basis remaining for a new/old paradigm.
For various reasons of their own, a goodly number of climate scientists declined to swear allegiance to the dominate, IPCC paradigm.
No without some sacrifice. They don’t get the big grants. They aren’t flown halfway around the world to sit on expert panels. They may have to publish on the internet.
But they keep doing what they do.
I liken them to the Islamic translators or Irish monks who, during the Early Middle Ages, protected the ‘pagan’ wisdom of ancient Greece and Rome from the Latin Church.
Those scientists are keeping real climate science alive.
We should grateful to them.
They’re doing God’s work.