Watching Science 20 - Road to the Middle Class

In the chaos of French-occupied Germany after the disaster of defeat at the hands of Napoleon the Germans decided: Never Again. They determined to build up Germany so that the French could never be strong enough to invade the German heartland, as they had been doing with annoying regularity for nigh on 200 years.

Part of the plan was education, to educate Germans and strengthen the state. And part of the education plan was the research university with its tenured professors. Pretty soon, everyone was copying them, converting universities from churning out clergymen to churning out scientists and engineers. The first research university in the US was Johns Hopkins.

But there’s a problem with this plan, especially if we look at it from the perspective of Micvhael Novak’s Three Sectors: political, economic, and moral/cultural.

The research university and its professors are creatures of the political sector. In fact, you could say that today the education system exists solely to bolster the power of the political sector. Of course, that’s what the Germans had in mind in the first place.

But in the Novak system the idea of the three differentiated sectors of society is that they are separate and independent, and jealous of each other’s power, just like the three branches of government. In their separation and their jealous monitoring of each other’s power they preserve and defend freedom and justice.

You can see the problem when you look at physics, which got all its money because it could offer the politicians H-bombs. Or the social scientists, who could offer the politicians the tools to run (or at least pretend to run) the welfare state.

Now we have the global warming scientists, who get huge sums of research money to investigate global warming for the politicians. Not surprisingly they instinctively understand that the continuance of the research grants depends on a continuing crisis. So they deliver.

Enter Science 2.0. Today, thanks to the internet and to open-source software, anyone can open a blog and start analyzing the data from the government-grant-maintained scientists. As often as not, they find problems. After all, with all their money and their titles, and their powerful political patrons, these grant-maintained chaps are still bureaucrats.

Over the last week we have seen a couple of brilliant entries in Science 2.0 on the global warming front.

First of all there is the effort of Willis Eschenbach at Climate Audit. In an elegant analysis of Michael Mann’s hockey stick data, he showed that the hockey stick signal was carried by only 25 of Mann’s 95 temperature proxy series, and that all of the 25 were problematic. Take out the 25 problem series and you got a temperature series that looked like the old consensus view of the earth’s climate in the last millennium. You start with a Medieval Warming Period followed by a Little Ice Age, followed by the current warming period—which is still cooler than the peak of the MWP.

Second is a nice analysis by Bill Illis at Watts Up With That. Illis takes the global temperature record and removes the fluctuations caused by the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). ENSO is the primary fluctuation associated with the Pacific Ocean and AMO is the primary fluctuation associated with the Atlantic Ocean. What happens? Well, you get a lot less global warming, because we are just at the peak of the last AMO uptick that began in about 1975.The grant-maintained scientists have been telling us that the temperature increase since 1975 has been a global warming signal. They have not told us that we should take into account that the global warming signal has been amplified by the AMO and ENSO fluctuations.

Of course, these amateurs, Eschenbach and Illis, could be wrong. So could the government grant-holders. So could any man. But their analysis is out there, and anyone can take a whack at it. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong. No harm, no foul.

There’s an inherent advantage to the Science 2.0 model. The Science 2.0 chappies don’t have careers at stake, so they don’t have to be as defensive as the Science 1.0 careerists who are, in the last analysis, only front men for powerful patrions in the political sector.

And politics, the postmodernists tell us, is all about building a narrative of power.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.