Why Science Can Be Hard
Jul. 20th, 2015 11:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peristaltorRecently, I commented on a comm. I shouldn't have. It was just another citation of yet another scientific theory that has been embraced with way, way too much enthusiasm by outlets beholdened to that sweet, sweet advertiser cash. And many if not most of those sponsors are somehow complicit in the carbon economy. The less this irritating Anthropogenic Global Warming theory is quashed, discounted, and thwarted, the better for business, if not our future. (Either way, we'll see.)
So I found I need to read a book, William F. Ruddiman's Plows, Plagues & Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate. For some reason, Albert Bates mentioned Ruddiman's conclusion in his book The Biochar Solution, but forgot to note the source in the notes. I had to reconstruct that Ruddiman's conclusions were available in a book form.
So I'm reading this book, and I come across a passage. He's talking about Darwin's theory of natural selection, and how it has morphed over the years, being challenged by other scientists who force the original theory to consider new evidence and paradigms.
Here we have a problem. Just three years later, Peter Ward published Under a Green Sky. The entire book is a synopsis of the, er, impact of the Alvarez Hypothesis (1980), that the dinosaurs were leveled by a gigantic meteor impact 65 million years ago. After that theory was given greater credence, the move in paleontology (according to Ward) was to find the other impact sites that led to the other 4 major extinction events.
And after decades of looking, those sites haven't been found.
What has been found? Here Ward notes that carbon dioxide may have been more influential than previously thought. According to Green Sky, the dinosaur killer 65 million years ago might have been the only major extinction not caused by an increase/sudden change in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. The other culprits were probably volcanoes.
It gets more confusing. In a slightly later passage, Ruddiman notes:
Er, no, once again. Richard Wrangham digresses here. The problem is that very, very few campfire sites have been found of any age. Therefore, people jump to the conclusion that there weren't any.
I posted about Wrangham's specific digressions early, early on.
So, we cooked our food and then our brains could grow. Not other way around.
So, what's the point? Why do I bring this up?
Unlike the "Humans are not to BLAME!" crowd, actual scientists are trying to sift through all the evidence available, not just the stuff that gets people off the blame hook (and allows for more carbon to be dumped in our atmosphere). Sadly, each scientist is merely human. Each scientist has a finite amount of eyeball time with books. Each has only a non-infinite amount of mulling to do before results must be published. Therefore, the seep of new ideas and the information that supports these is a slow process.
So, when climate scientists in the 1970s note that a new ice age is coming, they weren't wrong. According to Ruddiman, were it not for human activity starting 8,000 years ago—not 150 years ago, 8,000—we would have been starting a re-glaciation phase based on the position our planet happens to be in relative to the sun. The folks that published that re-ice age stuff just happened to not be aware of the research being published by the nascent group studying why this had yet to happen.
He doesn't blame those scientists (well, most of them). After all, if he were perfect, he would run each and every declaration in his own book through the mill looking for the most recent and interesting challenges to what he was taught so many years ago in his own undergraduate days.
For me, this is something to keep in mind every time a "Humans are not to BLAME!" voice sounds resoundingly with accusations of "Scientists were wrong HERE!" example of why science in toto should be ignored in favor of simply Motoring Happily well into the loss of every shred of natural ice on the planet. It's easy to be a nay-sayer. Saying something positive takes more than just effort; it takes a tenacious focus on The New.
So I found I need to read a book, William F. Ruddiman's Plows, Plagues & Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate. For some reason, Albert Bates mentioned Ruddiman's conclusion in his book The Biochar Solution, but forgot to note the source in the notes. I had to reconstruct that Ruddiman's conclusions were available in a book form.
So I'm reading this book, and I come across a passage. He's talking about Darwin's theory of natural selection, and how it has morphed over the years, being challenged by other scientists who force the original theory to consider new evidence and paradigms.
For example, only recently has it become clear that very rare collisions of giant meteorites with Earth's surface also play a role in evolution by causing massive extinctions of most living organisms every few hundred millions years or so.
(William F. Ruddiman, Plows, Plagues & Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate, Princeton University Press, 2005, p. 8.)
Here we have a problem. Just three years later, Peter Ward published Under a Green Sky. The entire book is a synopsis of the, er, impact of the Alvarez Hypothesis (1980), that the dinosaurs were leveled by a gigantic meteor impact 65 million years ago. After that theory was given greater credence, the move in paleontology (according to Ward) was to find the other impact sites that led to the other 4 major extinction events.
And after decades of looking, those sites haven't been found.
What has been found? Here Ward notes that carbon dioxide may have been more influential than previously thought. According to Green Sky, the dinosaur killer 65 million years ago might have been the only major extinction not caused by an increase/sudden change in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. The other culprits were probably volcanoes.
It gets more confusing. In a slightly later passage, Ruddiman notes:
By 100,00 years ago, or slightly earlier, fully modern humans existed. This long passage was marked by major growth in brain size; progressively greater use of stone tools for cutting, crushing, and digging; and later by control of fire.
(Ruddiman, ibid, pp. 9-10, I emboldened.)
Er, no, once again. Richard Wrangham digresses here. The problem is that very, very few campfire sites have been found of any age. Therefore, people jump to the conclusion that there weren't any.
I posted about Wrangham's specific digressions early, early on.
Richard Wrangham has tasted chimp food, and he doesn’t like it. “The typical fruit is very unpleasant. . . . Fibrous, quite bitter. Not a tremendous amount of sugar. Some make your stomach heave.” After a few tastings in western Uganda, where he works part of the year on his 20-year-old project studying wild chimpanzees, Wrangham came to the conclusion that no human could survive long on such a diet. Besides the unpalatable taste, our weak jaws, tiny teeth and small guts would never be able to chomp and process enough calories from the fruits to support our large bodies.
Then, one cool fall evening in 1997, while gazing into his fireplace in Cambridge, Mass., and contemplating a completely different question — “What stimulated human evolution?” — he remembered the chimp food. “I realized what a ridiculously large difference cooking would make,” Wrangham says. Cooking could have made the fibrous fruits, along with the tubers and tough, raw meat that chimps also eat, much more easily digestible, he thought—they could be consumed quickly and digested with less energy. This innovation could have enabled our chimplike ancestors’ gut size to shrink over evolutionary time; the energy that would have gone to support a larger gut might have instead sparked the evolution of our bigger-brained, larger-bodied, humanlike forebears.
So, we cooked our food and then our brains could grow. Not other way around.
So, what's the point? Why do I bring this up?
Unlike the "Humans are not to BLAME!" crowd, actual scientists are trying to sift through all the evidence available, not just the stuff that gets people off the blame hook (and allows for more carbon to be dumped in our atmosphere). Sadly, each scientist is merely human. Each scientist has a finite amount of eyeball time with books. Each has only a non-infinite amount of mulling to do before results must be published. Therefore, the seep of new ideas and the information that supports these is a slow process.
So, when climate scientists in the 1970s note that a new ice age is coming, they weren't wrong. According to Ruddiman, were it not for human activity starting 8,000 years ago—not 150 years ago, 8,000—we would have been starting a re-glaciation phase based on the position our planet happens to be in relative to the sun. The folks that published that re-ice age stuff just happened to not be aware of the research being published by the nascent group studying why this had yet to happen.
He doesn't blame those scientists (well, most of them). After all, if he were perfect, he would run each and every declaration in his own book through the mill looking for the most recent and interesting challenges to what he was taught so many years ago in his own undergraduate days.
For me, this is something to keep in mind every time a "Humans are not to BLAME!" voice sounds resoundingly with accusations of "Scientists were wrong HERE!" example of why science in toto should be ignored in favor of simply Motoring Happily well into the loss of every shred of natural ice on the planet. It's easy to be a nay-sayer. Saying something positive takes more than just effort; it takes a tenacious focus on The New.