Climate crusaders lost in space

Climate derangement has claimed another celebrity astrophysicist.

Last month, Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time, declared that Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement meant that earth could become like Venus, where it rains sulphuric acid and temperatures reach 250 C.

Now Neil deGrasse Tyson, “science communicator” and host of the 2014 TV series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, has claimed that climate science is as certain and predictable as next week’s solar eclipse. deGrasse Tyson tweeted: “Odd. No one is in denial of America’s Aug 21 total solar eclipse. Like Climate Change, methods & tools of science predict it.”

With regards to Hawking’s claim, Roy Spencer, a climate specialist at the University of Alabama, pointed out that Venus had 93 times as much atmosphere and 22,000 times as much carbon dioxide as earth, so we shouldn’t be too worried about it raining acid any time soon. Whatever Donald Trump’s flaws, he’s not threatening to repeal the laws of physics and chemistry.

DeGrasse Tyson’s tweet was immediately leaped upon by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Black Swan, a classic work on probability, uncertainty and randomness. Taleb tweeted back “Thus (sic) guy is an intellectual fraud. Nonlinear domains like climate & markets!= mechanics like solar eclipses. If it were true he wd be rich.” But we’re talking something more serious here than calling the market.

I asked Christopher Essex, professor of applied mathematics at the University of Western Ontario, and an expert on climate chaos, to comment. He said that circumstances for climate prediction are even worse than suggested by Taleb’s legitimate concern over nonlinearity. “Tyson writes about using science to ‘predict it.’ But what is ‘it?’ ‘It’ remains physically not so well-defined. An essential prerequisite for prediction is to know precisely what you are trying to predict. Eclipses satisfy this prerequisite, while climate does not.”

Climate is complex and chaotic, quite unlike the Newtonian predictability of planetary motion, but DeGrasse Tyson doesn’t seem to be very clear about that either.

His 13-part Cosmos series, first aired in 2014, was conceived as a successor to popular scientist Carl Sagan’s 1980 series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. With the aid of computer graphics, deGrasse Tyson travels through space and time to present the very latest in science. However, the opening episode contains a major error, embodied in a graphic of how people understood the cosmos before Copernicus and Galileo.

The ancients believed that the earth was the centre of the universe, and that everything moved around it, but Cosmos has the sun, moon and planets all revolving in a circle about the earth. This is not what pre-Copernicans believed, because it’s not what they saw. The sun and moon appear to circle the earth regularly, but the planets don’t, precisely because they circle the sun rather than the earth. Viewed from earth they appear to wander back and forth in “epicycles.” That was why they were called planets, from the Greek for “wanderers,” and why navigational charts based on the Ptolemaic system were so complicated (although the planetary dance was indeed recorded and calculated with great precision, until a better theory came along).

The Cosmos graphic amounts to ignorance rather than misinformation, but the solar eclipse claim speaks to the peculiar psychology of climate conviction: that the science is so “settled” that it is like Newtonian clockwork. Doubting impending catastrophe would be like being an eclipse denier!

An additional irony is that the Cosmos mistake about the movement of planets is followed by a segment on Giordano Bruno, the Dominican friar who was burned at the stake for embracing Copernicus’ geocentric theory, and other heretical notions. DeGrasse Tyson sombrely bemoans the Catholic Church’s “thought police” but doesn’t seem to grasp the possibility of similar forces at work today in the Church of Climate.

Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pointed out that the advance of science is much messier than people think. Scientists adopt and commit to theoretical “paradigms,” which then become fundamentally unquestionable, particularly once they have been “professionalized” and if there is a moral element involved.

Not only have governments poured tens of billions into confirming rather than testing the theory of CO2-driven climate change, the resulting dire predictions are claimed by the likes of Al Gore to be the greatest moral issue of our time. The problem is that moralism eclipses any inclination to treat skepticism with the respect it deserves, however much you hate Donald Trump.

Last week, celebrity economist Paul Krugman suggested in the New York Times that climate skepticism was the fruit of an “Axis of Evil” that combines fossil fuel money (which is apparently much more corrupting than government funding), ideological rejection of any and all regulation, and contrarian egoism. Krugman wrote that he couldn’t think of a single climate skeptic who was acting in anything but bad faith. But has he ever spoken to a climate skeptic? Then again, why would he bother? They’re all evil.

DeGrasse Tyson, who National Review called “the dumbest smart person on Twitter,” has suggested that the world needs a new kind of virtual state called “Rationalia” with a one-sentence constitution: “All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence.” This is embarrassingly facile, particularly coming from somebody who doesn’t seem to understand the difference between a clock and a thunderstorm.

No sensible person “denies” climate change. The issues are whether it is outside the range of normal variation, what contribution humans are making, and what prudent policies the situation demands. Rational examination is hardly helped by forecasts of sulphuric rainstorms, much less by a total eclipse of truly “settled” science. Or at least settled for the moment.