26 January 2012 – Sunshine, staple crops and rainbows

Colleagues,

Those of us living in the Ottawa area got seriously ripped off on Tuesday.  It was cloudy, and we missed the best light show in a decade.

Late on Sunday 22 January, the Sun erupted with an M8.7 class solar flare.  The resulting coronal mass ejection (CME), a burst of highly energetic protons, left the Sun's surface at about 2,000 km per second, and impacted the Earth at a little after 1000 hrs EST on Tuesday.  The Space Weather Prediction Centre at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US rated the storm as an S3 (the scale goes up to S5), making it the strongest space weather event since 2005, possibly 2003.  The resulting geomagnetic storm was rated G1 (minor).

Thanks to our atmosphere, solar storms can't harm humans, but when charged particles hit the Earth's magnetosphere, they can play hob with radio communications, and at high energy levels can damage satellites.  They also produce bursts of charged particles in the upper atmosphere, leading to tremendous auroral displays.  NASA had predicted that the Aurora Borealis could be visible at latitudes as low as Maine.  The following image was taken in Sweden:

See what I mean?  Awesome.  Elsewhere, the aurora was reported to have looked like a rainbow in the night sky.  Too bad we missed it here.

Who cares, though, right?  I mean, it's pretty, sure, but where's the relevance to what we do?  Well, this kind of solar activity is strategically very relevant, in a couple of ways.  First, powerful geomagnetic storms can impact humans - not through ionizing radiation, but through their immediate electromagnetic effects.  Geomagnetic perturbations can induce powerful currents on Earth.  Here's a plot from a Swedish lab showing the arrival of the CME:

Massive geomagnetic events can wreak havoc with power grids because, pursuant to Faraday's Law, a time-varying magnetic field induces a current in a conductor - and the surface of the world is positively covered with conductors.  A strong enough magnetic perturbation can create enough current in high-tension lines to overload switches and cause circuit breakers to blow.  Take a look at the magnetometer declination on that chart; last Tuesday's event induced a perturbation about 8 times the average maximum perturbation experienced over the hours preceding the event.  Frankly, the effects shouldn't be surprising; we're talking about billions of tonnes of charged particles hitting the planet at millions of kilometres per hour.  The kinetic energy alone of such an impact is staggering.  It's enough to bend the planet's magnetosphere out of shape.

There weren't any reports of power grid failures on Tuesday, but remember, this was only a G1 storm.  A CME that hit the Earth on 13 March 1989 knocked out Quebec's power grid for nine hours.  That one temporarily disabled a number of Earth-orbiting satellites, and folks in Texas were able to see the northern lights.  Another big geomagnetic storm in August of that same year crippled microchips, and shut down the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Those were bad, but the Carrington Event was something else entirely.  Back on 1 September 1859, British astronomers Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson independently recorded a solar superflare on the surface of the Sun.  The resulting CME took only 18 hours to travel to the Earth, giving the mass of charged particles a velocity of ca. 2300 km/second, somewhat faster than last Tuesday's bump.  When the CME hit, it caused the largest geomagnetic storm in recorded history.  According to contemporary accounts, people in New York City were able to read the newspaper at night by the light of the Aurora Borealis, and the glow woke gold miners labouring in the Rocky Mountains.  The more immediate impact of the Carrington Event, though, was the fact that the intense perturbations of the Earth's magnetic field induced enormous currents in the telegraph wires that had only recently been installed in Europe and across North America.  Telegraph systems failed all over both continents; according to contemporary accounts, sparks flew from the telegraph towers, telegraph operators received painful shocks, and telegraph paper caught fire.

Geomagnetic storms like the Carrington Event are powerful enough to leave traces in the terrestrial geology.  Ice core samples can contain layers of nitrates that show evidence of high-energy proton bombardment.  Based on such samples, it's estimated that massive solar eruptions like the Carrington Event occur, on average, every five hundred years or so.  Electromagnetic catastrophists (I've derided them before as "the Pulser Crowd") point to the Carrington Event, and lesser impacts like the 1989 solar storm, as an example of the sort of thing that could "bring down" Western civilization by crippling power grids (and they also tend to posit that a deliberate EMP attacker could accomplish the same thing via the high-altitude detonation of a high-yield thermonuclear weapon over the continental US - as if the US strategic weapons system weren't the one thing in the entire country that was hardened against EMP from top to bottom).  It hasn't happened yet - and the protestations of the Pulsers notwithstanding, the grid is a lot more robust than the old telegraph lines used to be, if only because we understand electromagnetism a lot better now than they did back in the days of beaver hats, mercury nostrums, and stock collars.

That said, this sort of thing does tend to make one look at our ever-benevolent star in a new light (no pun intended).  The second reason this sort of thing is strategically relevant is because recent studies and observed data seem to be confirming some disturbing solar activity trends identified a few years ago - and the potential consequences aren't pleasant.

As I've mentioned before, one of the perplexing claims in the IPCC's list of assumptions upon which all of the general circulation ("climate") models are built is that the aggregate impact of "natural forcings" (a term that the IPCC uses to lump together both volcanic aerosols and all solar forcings) is negative - i.e., that the sum total of volcanic and solar activity is to cool the Earth, rather than warm it.  The IPCC also argues that these natural forcings “are both very small compared to the differences in radiative forcing estimated to have resulted from human activities.” [Note A] The assumption that solar activity is insufficient to overcome the periodic cooling impact of large volcanic eruptions (which, let's face it, aren't all that common - the last one to actually have a measurable impact on global temperatures was the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo on 15 June 1991) is, to say the least, "unproven."  The IPCC has also dismissed the Svensmark hypothesis (the argument that the warming effect of seemingly minor increases in solar activity is magnified by the increase in solar wind, which interrupts galactic cosmic radiation and prevents GCRs from nucleating low-level clouds, thereby reducing Earth's albedo, and vice-versa - you'll recall this from previous COPs/TPIs), which, unlike the hypothesis that human CO2 emissions are the Earth's thermostat, is actually supported by empirical evidence.

This is probably why the IPCC's climate models have utterly failed.  Temperature trends are below the lowest IPCC estimates for temperature response to CO2 emissions - below, in fact, the estimated temperature response that NASA's rogue climatologist, James Hansen, predicted would occur even if there was no increase in CO2 emissions after 2000. 

(Dotted and solid black lines - predicted temperature trends according to Hansen's emissions scenarios.  Blue dots - measured temperatures.  Red line - smoothed measured temperature trend.)

The lowest of the black dotted lines is what Hansen predicted Earth's temperature change would be if global CO2 emissions were frozen at 2000 levels.  Obviously, that hasn't happened; in fact, global CO2 concentrations have increased by 6.25%.  Temperatures haven't increased at all.  In other words, while CO2 emissions have continued to skyrocket and atmospheric CO2 concentrations have continued to increase, actual measured temperatures have levelled off, and the trend is declining.  Don't take my word for it; the data speak for themselves. 

I particularly like the next graph, which shows the last 10 years of average global temperature trends as measured by the most reliable instruments available to mankind:

The satellite temperature measurement data are maintained by the University of Alabama at Huntsville, and the short puce line at the left of the graph shows 2012 temperatures to date.  That's right - according to satellite measurements, this is the coldest winter in at least a decade.  Have you heard anything about that from the mainstream media?  Have you heard anything about it from NASA?  Probably not; Hansen just released another statement shrieking that 2011 was the "11th-warmest" year on record.  This was after modifying the GISS temperature dataset - again - to make the past colder, and the present hotter.  Seriously, where apart from climate science is it considered acceptable to change the past to conform to your theories about the future?  Well, apart from communist dictatorships, I mean.

Why aren't the data following the GCM predictions?  Well, let's look back a few years.  In a paper I wrote back then, I took a look at what solar activity trends had to suggest about the likelihood of continued, uninterrupted global warming.  Here's an excerpt.  Bear with me here, and please excuse the dated charts; the paper, after all, was written in January 2009, and updated in April 2009, using sources and data available to that point:

Solar physicists have begun to speculate that the observed, and extremely slow, start to solar cycle 24 may portend an unusually long, weak solar cycle.  According to NASA, in 2008 the Sun experienced its “blankest year of the space age” – 266 spotless days out of 366, or 73%, a low not seen since 1913.  David Hathaway, a solar physicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, noted that sunspot counts were at a 50-year low, meaning that “we’re experiencing a deep minimum of the solar cycle.”[1]  At time of writing, the figure for 2009 was 78 spotless days out of 90, or 87%, and the Goddard Space Flight Centre was calling it a “very deep solar minimum” – “the quietest Sun we’ve seen in almost a century.”[2]

This very low solar activity corresponds with “a 50-year record low in solar wind pressure” discovered by the Ulysses spacecraft.[3]  The fact that we are simultaneously experiencing both extremely low solar wind pressure and sustained global cooling, incidentally, may be considered prima facie circumstantial corroboration of Svensmark’s cosmic-ray cloud nucleation thesis.

Figure 17 - Solar cycle lengths 1750-2007; and the 2 longest cycles of the past 300 years [4]

Measured between minima, the average length of a solar cycle is almost exactly 11 years.  The length of the current solar cycle (Solar Cycle 23, the mathematical minimum for which occurred in May 1996), was, as of 1 April 2009, a little over 12.9 years.[5]  This is already well over the mean, and at time of writing, the minimum was continuing to deepen, with no indication that the next cycle has begun.[6]  Only one solar cycle in the past three centuries has exceeded that length – solar cycle 4, which lasted 13.66 years, 1784 to 1798 (see figure 17).  This was the last cycle before the Dalton Minimum, a period of lower-than-average global temperatures that lasted from approximately 1790-1830. The Dalton Minimum was the last prolonged “cold spell” of the Little Ice Age, from which temperatures have since been recovering (and which, as noted above, the IPCC and the proponents of the AGW thesis invariably take as the start-point for their temperature graphs, in a clear demonstration of the end-point fallacy in statistical methodology).[7]  On the basis of observations of past solar activity, some solar physicists are predicting that the coming solar cycle is likely to be weaker than normal, and could result in a period of cooling similar to the Dalton Minimum.[8]

If we were to experience a similar solar minimum today – which is not unlikely, given that, as noted above, we are emerging from an 80+-year Solar Grand Maximum, during which the Sun was more active than at any time in the past 11,000 years – the net result could be a global temperature decline on the order of 1.5 degrees over the space of two solar cycles, i.e. a little over two decades.[9]  According to Archibald, during the Dalton Minimum, temperatures in central England dropped by more than a degree over a 20-year period, for a cooling rate of more than 5ºC per century; while one location in Germany – Oberlach – recorded a decline of 2ºC during the same period (a cooling rate of 10ºC per century).[10]  Archibald predicts a decline of 1.5ºC over the course of two solar cycles (roughly 22 years), for a cooling rate of 6.8ºC per century.  This would be cooling at a rate more than ten times faster than the warming that has been observed since the mid-1800s.  “At this rate,” Monckton notes wryly, “by mid-century, we shall be roasting in a new ice age.”[11]

Well, since predictive analysis ought to be subject to review, what do things look like today, three years after that paper was written?  Let's turn to NASA's David Hathaway, who - as a solar physicist - continues to track and refine predictions for the depth and duration of the next solar cycle.  Back in 2006, Hathaway, looking at the Sun's internal "conveyor belt", predicted that the next solar cycle - #24, the one we're currently in - would be higher than cycle #23, and that #25 would be lower.

(Source: NASA, David Hathaway, "Solar Cycle 25 peaking around 2022 could be one of the weakest in centuries", 10 May 2006 [Note B])

Hathaway's prediction was based on the conveyor belt model (look it up if you're interested).  In 2010, two different authors, Matthew Penn and William Livingston of the National Solar Observatory, developed a physical model based instead on the measured magnetic fields of sunspots.  Based on their model, which seems to have greater predictive validity, they argued that the sunspot number would not be low (75 or so) like Hathaway predicted, but exceptionally low, less than a tenth of that - a total peak sunspot number of around 7, or the lowest in observed history.

Independent of the normal solar cycle, a decrease in the sunspot magnetic field strength has been observed using the Zeeman-split 1564.8nm Fe I spectral line at the NSO Kitt Peak McMath-Pierce telescope. Corresponding changes in sunspot brightness and the strength of molecular absorption lines were also seen. This trend was seen to continue in observations of the first sunspots of the new solar Cycle 24, and extrapolating a linear fit to this trend would lead to only half the number of spots in Cycle 24 compared to Cycle 23, and imply virtually no sunspots in Cycle 25. [Note C]

The authors predict that umbral magnetic field strength will drop below 1500 Gauss between 2017 and 2022.  Below 1500 Gauss, no sunspots will appear.  This is what the predictive chart from their paper looks like:

For the record, that's not a happy prediction.  A maximum sunspot number of 7 is virtually unheard-of in the historical record.  Using the Penn-Livingston model and NASA's SSN data, David Archibald, another solar expert, has projected sunspot activity over cycle 25...and this is what it looks like [Note D]:

First, note that measured data have already invalidated Hathaway's 2006 prediction about solar cycle 24; turns out it is proving to be considerably weaker than cycle 23.  If Penn and Livingston are correct, however, cycle 25 could be less than 1/5th the strength of cycles 5 and 6, which in the first quarter of the 19th Century marked the depths of the Dalton Minimum.  During this period, as noted above, temperatures plummeted, leading to widespread crop failures, famine, disease, and the delightful sociological and meteorological conditions that entertained Napoleon during the retreat from Moscow, and that Charles Dickens spent most of his career writing about.  A SSN of less than 10, in fact, would be considerably lower than the Dalton Minimum; it would put the world into conditions not seen since the Maunder Minimum in the 17th Century, which was even worse.

How significant could this be?  Well, look at the above chart.  The last time there was an appreciable dip in solar activity - cycle 20 (October 1964 - June 1976), the smoothed SSN curve peaked at 110, more than 10 times as strong as cycle 25 is expected to be...and the entire world went through a "global cooling" scare.  In 1975, Newsweek published an article entitled “The Cooling World”, claiming, amongst other things, that “[t]he evidence in support of these predictions [of global cooling] has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it.”  The article's author had some grim advice for politicians struggling to come to grips with the impending cooling: “The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.” [Note E]

Sound familiar? 

That was 36 years ago.  Now here we are in solar cycle 24, which is looking to be a good 20% weaker than solar cycle 20, which prompted all the cooling panic.  Temperatures are once more measurably declining.  Models of solar activity (models based on observed data, remember, not hypothetical projections of mathematically-derived nonsense) project that the modern solar grand maximum that has driven Earth's climate for the last 80+ years is almost certainly over.  This means that, based on historical experience, the coming solar cycles will probably be weak, and the Earth's climate is probably going to cool measurably.  "Global warming" is done like dinner, and to anyone with the guts to look at the data and the brains to understand it, there is no correlation whatsoever between average global temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations (let alone the tiny proportion of atmospheric CO2 resulting from human activities).  The only questions left are (a) whether we are on our way to a Dalton-type Minimum, where temperatures drop a degree or two, or a much worse Maunder-type Minimum, where temperatures drop more than two degrees; and (b) whether we have the intelligence and common sense as a species to pull our heads out of our nether regions, look at the data, stop obsessing about things that are demonstrably not happening, and start preparing for the Big Chill. 

Based on observed data, I'm guessing we're definitely in for colder weather - but I'm doubtful that we have the mental capacity to recognize that fact and do something about it.  Like, for example, develop the energy resources that we're going to need if we're going to survive a multidecadal cold spell. 

Oh, and why is this relevant?  Well, because we live in Canada.  A new solar minimum - the Eddy Minimum, as some are beginning to call it - would severely impact Canada's agricultural capacity.  As David Archibald pointed out in a lecture last year (ref F), Canada's grain-growing belt is currently at a geographic maximum, thanks to the present warm period (the shaded area in the image below).  However, during the last cooling event (the one capped off by Solar Cycle 20, above), the grain belt shrank to the dotted line in the image.  A decline in average temperature of 1 degree - which would be consistent with a Dalton Minimum-type decline in temperatures - would shrink the grain belt to the solid black line; and a 2-degree drop in temperature would push that black line south, to the Canada-US border. 

In other words, if we were to experience a drop in temperatures similar to that experienced during the Maunder Minimum - which, if Solar Cycle 25 is as weak as Penn-Livingston suggest it might be, is a possibility - then it might not be possible to grow grain in Canada. 

This could be a problem for those of us who enjoy the simple things in life, like food.  And an economy.

So what we should be asking ourselves is this: What's a bigger threat to Canada's national security? 

·         A projected temperature increase of 4 degrees C over the next century that, according to all observed data, simply isn't happening - but that if it was, wouldn't improve our agricultural capacity one jot, because that shaded area is a soil-geomorphic limit, and sunshine doesn't turn muskeg or tundra into fertile earth no matter how warm it gets; [Note G]

or

·         A decline in temperatures of 1-2 degrees C over the next few decades that, according to all observed and historical data, could very well be on the way - and which, if it happens, might make it impossible to grow wheat in the Great White North?

You decide.  I'll be looking for farmland in Niagara.

Cheers,

//Don//

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27 January 2012 – Update to ‘Sunshine’, etc.

Colleagues,

It figures that the same day I send out a TPI featuring a 6-month-old slide, the author of the slide would publish an update.[Note A]  I thought I'd send it along as the refinements to his arguments sort of emphasize the reason that we should be taking a closer look at the question of what might really be happening to climate, and why.

David Archibald, who produced that grain-belt map I cited above, has refined his projection based on new high-resolution surface temperature studies from Norway, and on new solar activity data, including data on the cyclical "rush to the poles" of sunspot clusters, of which our understanding has improved considerably over the past five years.  Here's how one paper puts it:

“Cycle 24 began its migration at a rate 40% slower than the previous two solar cycles, thus indicating the possibility of a peculiar cycle. However, the onset of the “Rush to the Poles” of polar crown prominences and their associated coronal emission, which has been a precursor to solar maximum in recent cycles (cf. Altrock 2003), has  just been identified in the northern hemisphere. Peculiarly, this “rush” is leisurely, at only 50% of the rate in the previous two cycles.”

So what?  Well, it means that cycle 24 is likely to be a lot longer than normal.  And what are the consequences of that, you ask?

If Solar Cycle 24 is progressing at 60% of the rate of the previous two cycles, which averaged ten years long, then it is likely to be 16.6 years long.  This is supported by examining Altrock’s green corona diagram from mid-2011 above.  In the previous three cycles, solar minimum occurred when the bounding line of major activity (blue) intersects 10° latitude (red).  For Solar Cycle 24, that occurs in 2026, making it 17 years long.

The first solar cycle of the Maunder Minimum was 18 years long.  That's the last time the world saw solar cycles as long as the coming cycles are projected to be.

For humanity, that is going to be something quite significant, because it will make Solar Cycle 24 four years longer than Solar Cycle 23.  With a temperature – solar cycle length relationship for the North-eastern US of 0.7°C per year of solar cycle length, temperatures over Solar Cycle 25 starting in 2026 will be 2.8°C colder than over Solar Cycle 24, which in turn is going to be 2.1°C colder than Solar Cycle 23.

The total temperature shift will be 4.9°C for the major agricultural belt that stretches from New England to the Rockies straddling the US – Canadian border.  At the latitude of the US-Canadian border, a 1.0°C change in temperature shifts growing conditions 140 km – in this case, towards the Gulf of Mexico. The centre of the Corn Belt, now in Iowa, will move to Kansas.

Emphasis added.

Now remember, that's the center of the corn belt.  What about the northern fringes of it?  Here's Archibald's updated grain belt map.  Note the newly-added last line:

 

"All over."  That's 25-30 years from now - or as some folks around this building like to call it, "Horizon Three".  And here we are, still talking about melting sea ice, thawing permafrost, and building deep-water ports in the Arctic.  Maybe we should be talking about building greenhouses in Lethbridge and teaching beaver trapping in high school.

Just something to think about the next time somebody starts rattling on about how the science is settled and global warming is now inevitable.  We'd better hope they're right, because the alternative ain't pretty.

Cheers...I guess.

//Don//

Notes

A)    http://joannenova.com.au/2012/01/global-cooling-coming-archibald-uses-solar-and-surface-data-to-predict-4-9c-fall/

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Notes (From original post)

A)    4th AR WG1, Chapter 2, 137.

B)    http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/10may_longrange/

C)    http://www.probeinternational.org/Livingston-penn-2010.pdf

D)    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/25/first-estimate-of-solar-cycle-25-amplitudesmallest-in-over-300-years/

E)    Peter Gwynne, “The Cooling World”, Newsweek, 28 April 1975, page 64. 

F)    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/12/potential-agricultural-impact-of-the-eddy-minimum/

G)    H/T to Neil for the "sunshine doesn't turn muskeg into black earth" line.

---

[1][1] NASA, “Spotless Sun: Blankest Year of the Space Age”, NASA Press Release, 30 September 2008 [http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/30sep_blankyear.htm?list878321].

[2][2] “Deep Solar Minimum”, Nasa.gov, 1 April 2009, [http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/ 01apr_deepsolarminimum.htm].

[3][3] NASA, “Spotless Sun: Blankest Year of the Space Age”, ibid.  The Sun is also going through a 55-year low in radio emissions.

[4][4] Data obtained from the National Geophysical Data Centre of the NOAA Satellite and Information Service [http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/SOLAR/ftpsunspotnumber.html#international].

[5][5] At time of writing the minimum for Solar Cycle 24 had not yet been established.  The longer Solar Cycle 23 continues, the more likely a prolonged period of cooling becomes.  For those wishing to perform their own calculations, all of the data on sunspot numbers (and much more) are available at the website of the National Geophysical Data Centre of the NOAA Satellite and Information Service [http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/SOLAR/ftpsunspotnumber.html#international].

[6][6] Based on current science, the date for the solar minimum ending a prior cycle is generally determined from sunspot counts and is generally agreed by scientists post-facto, once the subsequent cycle is under way.  However, in addition to very low smoothed sunspot numbers, solar minima are also defined in terms of peaks in cosmic rays (neutrons) striking the Earth (because the Sun’s magnetic field, which shields the Earth from cosmic rays, is weakest during the solar minimum.  For more information on this point, see chapter 5).  Because the neutron counts, at time of writing, were still increasing, it is unlikely that the solar minimum separating solar cycles 23 and 24 has yet been reached.  See Anthony Watts, “Cosmic Ray Flux and Neutron monitors suggest we may not have hit solar minimum yet”, wattsupwiththat.com, 15 March 2009 [http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/15/cosmic-ray-flux-and-neutron-monitors-suggest-we-may-not-have-hit-solar-minimum-yet/#more-6208].  For anyone interesting in charting the neutron flux data for themselves, these can be obtained from the website of the University of Delaware Bartol Research Institute Neutron Monitor Program [http://neutronm.bartol.udel.edu/main.html#stations].

[7][7] Jeff Id, “Sunspot Lapse Exceeds 95% of Normal”, posting at wattsupwiththat.com, 15 January 2009 [http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/15/sunspot-lapse-exceeds-95-of-normal/].  Id’s data, and the data one which this chart is based, are drawn from official NASA figures.

[8][8] C. de Jaeger and S. Dunham, “Forecasting the parameters of sunspot cycle 24 and beyond”, Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 71 (2009), 239-245 [http://www.cdejager.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/2009-forecasting-jastp-71-239.pdf].

[9][9] Archibald (2006), 29-35.

[10][10] Archibald, ibid., 31.

[11][11] Christopher Monckton, “Great is Truth, and mighty above all things”; valedictory address to the International Conference on Climate Change, 10 March 2009, 3 [http://www.heartland.org/full/24881/ Great_ Is_Truth_and_Mighty_Above_All_Things.html]

2 November 2011 – Ridley on pseudoscience

Colleagues,

A quick note this week to introduce a very thoughtful lecture on "scientific heresy" by Matt Ridley, a British scientist who has published numerous books in the fields of genetics, human society, and the philosophy of science.  I've copied the first third of the lecture below, though in my opinion the whole piece is worth a read  (the full piece can be found here: http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/11/1/scientific-heresy.html).

Ridley's list of "lessons" is particularly useful.  I won't spoil it for you.  Here it is.

It is a great honour to be asked to deliver the Angus Millar lecture.

I have no idea whether Angus Millar ever saw himself as a heretic, but I have a soft spot for heresy. One of my ancestral relations, Nicholas Ridley the Oxford martyr, was burned at the stake for heresy.

My topic today is scientific heresy. When are scientific heretics right and when are they mad? How do you tell the difference between science and pseudoscience?

Let us run through some issues, starting with the easy ones.

Astronomy is a science; astrology is a pseudoscience.

Evolution is science; creationism is pseudoscience.

Molecular biology is science; homeopathy is pseudoscience.

Vaccination is science; the MMR scare is pseudoscience.

Oxygen is science; phlogiston was pseudoscience.

Chemistry is science; alchemy was pseudoscience.

Are you with me so far?

A few more examples. That the earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare is pseudoscience. So are the beliefs that Elvis is still alive, Diana was killed by MI5, JFK was killed by the CIA, 911 was an inside job. So are ghosts, UFOs, telepathy, the Loch Ness monster and pretty well everything to do with the paranormal. Sorry to say that on Halloween, but that’s my opinion.

Three more controversial ones. In my view, most of what Freud said was pseudoscience.

So is quite a lot, though not all, of the argument for organic farming.

So, in a sense by definition, is religious faith. It explicitly claims that there are truths that can be found by other means than observation and experiment.

Now comes one that gave me an epiphany. Crop circles.

It was blindingly obvious to me that crop circles were likely to be man-made when I first starting investigating this phenomenon. I made some myself to prove it was easy to do.

This was long before Doug Bower and Dave Chorley fessed up to having started the whole craze after a night at the pub.

Every other explanation – ley lines, alien spacecraft, plasma vortices, ball lightning – was balderdash. The entire field of “cereology” was pseudoscience, as the slightest brush with its bizarre practitioners easily demonstrated.

Imagine my surprise then when I found I was the heretic and that serious journalists working not for tabloids but for Science Magazine, and for a Channel 4 documentary team, swallowed the argument of the cereologists that it was highly implausible that crop circles were all man-made.

So I learnt lesson number 1: the stunning gullibility of the media. Put an “ology” after your pseudoscience and you can get journalists to be your propagandists.

A Channel 4 team did the obvious thing – they got a group of students to make some crop circles and then asked the cereologist if they were “genuine” or “hoaxed” – ie, man made. He assured them they could not have been made by people. So they told him they had been made the night before. The man was poleaxed. It made great television. Yet the producer, who later became a government minister under Tony Blair, ended the segment of the programme by taking the cereologist’s side: “of course, not all crop circles are hoaxes”. What? The same happened when Doug and Dave owned up; everybody just went on believing. They still do.

Lesson number 2: debunking is like water off a duck’s back to pseudoscience.

In medicine, I began to realize, the distinction between science and pseudoscience is not always easy. This is beautifully illustrated in an extraordinary novel by Rebecca Abrams, called Touching Distance, based on the real story of an eighteenth century medical heretic, Alec Gordon of Aberdeen.

Gordon was a true pioneer of the idea that childbed fever was spread by medical folk like himself and that hygiene was the solution to it. He hit upon this discovery long before Semelweiss and Lister. But he was ignored. Yet Abrams’s novel does not paint him purely as a rational hero, but as a flawed human being, a neglectful husband and a crank with some odd ideas – such as a dangerous obsession with bleeding his sick patients. He was a pseudoscientist one minute and scientist the next.

Lesson number 3. We can all be both. Newton was an alchemist.

Like antisepsis, many scientific truths began as heresies and fought long battles for acceptance against entrenched establishment wisdom that now appears irrational: continental drift, for example. Barry Marshall was not just ignored but vilified when he first argued that stomach ulcers are caused by a particular bacterium. Antacid drugs were very profitable for the drug industry. Eventually he won the Nobel prize.

Just this month Daniel Shechtman won the Nobel prize for quasi crystals, having spent much of his career being vilified and exiled as a crank. “I was thrown out of my research group. They said I brought shame on them with what I was saying.”

That’s lesson number 4: the heretic is sometimes right.

What sustains pseudoscience is confirmation bias. We look for and welcome the evidence that fits our pet theory; we ignore or question the evidence that contradicts it. We all do this all the time. It’s not, as we often assume, something that only our opponents indulge in. I do it, you do it, it takes a superhuman effort not to do it. That is what keeps myths alive, sustains conspiracy theories and keeps whole populations in thrall to strange superstitions.

Bertrand Russell pointed this out many years ago: “If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.”

Lesson no 5: keep a sharp eye out for confirmation bias in yourself and others.

There have been some very good books on this recently. Michael Shermer’s “The Believing Brain”, Dan Gardner’s “Future Babble” and Tim Harford’s “Adapt”* are explorations of the power of confirmation bias. And what I find most unsettling of all is Gardner’s conclusion that knowledge is no defence against it; indeed, the more you know, the more you fall for confirmation bias. Expertise gives you the tools to seek out the confirmations you need to buttress your beliefs.

Experts are worse at forecasting the future than non-experts.

Philip Tetlock did the definitive experiment. He gathered a sample of 284 experts – political scientists, economists and journalists – and harvested 27,450 different specific judgments from them about the future then waited to see if they came true. The results were terrible. The experts were no better than “a dart-throwing chimpanzee”.

Here’s what the Club of Rome said on the rear cover of the massive best-seller Limits to Growth in 1972:

“Will this be the world that your grandchildren will thank you for? A world where industrial production has sunk to zero. Where population has suffered a catastrophic decline. Where the air, sea and land are polluted beyond redemption. Where civilization is a distant memory. This is the world that the computer forecasts.”

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts", said Richard Feynman.

Lesson 6. Never rely on the consensus of experts about the future. Experts are worth listening to about the past, but not the future. Futurology is pseudoscience.

The rest of Ridley's speech examines the consensus position on climate science from a perspective of attempting to determine how much of what is widely accepted as scientific fact is in fact pseudoscience.  While Ridley acknowledges that there has been some evidence of faults in the camp of the critics (the "heretics", as he calls them), those flaws, he argues, are dwarfed by the scientific sins of the proponents of the "warmist" position.  Moreover, he argues, the sins of the warmists against science are more important because they, and not the skeptics, are the ones who hold in their hands the levers of public policy:

The alarmists have been handed power over our lives; the heretics have not. Remember Britain’s unilateral climate act is officially expected to cost the hard-pressed UK economy £18.3 billion a year for the next 39 years and achieve an unmeasurably small change in carbon dioxide levels.

At least sceptics do not cover the hills of Scotland with useless, expensive, duke-subsidising wind turbines whose manufacture causes pollution in Inner Mongolia and which kill rare raptors such as [the] griffon vulture.

At least crop circle believers cannot almost double your electricity bills and increase fuel poverty while driving jobs to Asia, to support their fetish.

At least creationists have not persuaded the BBC that balanced reporting is no longer necessary.

At least homeopaths have not made expensive condensing boilers, which shut down in cold weather, compulsory, as John Prescott did in 2005.

At least astrologers have not driven millions of people into real hunger, perhaps killing 192,000 last year according to one conservative estimate, by diverting 5% of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel.

When pseudoscientists are handed the reins of power, Ridley reminds us, the results are rarely pleasant.  The Lysenkoist version of genetics was favoured by Stalin, resulting in millions of deaths by starvation during the forced collectivization of the peasantry, and setting the Soviet biological sciences back by two generations (a blessing in disguise, perhaps, given the Soviets' dogged pursuit of biological weapons despite having signed the BTWC).

And eugenics - the pseudoscientific doctrine much beloved of early 20th Century intellectuals like George Bernard Shaw - was widely praised, and in fact became state policy in places like Nazi Germany, with appalling results.  60,000 "genetically unfit" persons were sterilized in the Untied States between the 1920s and 1970s.  Eugenics even became policy in Canada.  Tommy Douglas, the hero of Canadian socialism and darling of the Canadian left, who in 2004 was voted "the greatest Canadian", advocated state use of genetics in his 1933 masters' thesis, which was entitled "The Problems of the Subnormal Family", and in which he advocated "sterilization of the mentally and physically defective."  Forced sterilization of "mental defectives" indeed took place in Canada; in Alberta, for example, between the passage in 1928 of the province's eugenics-inspired sterilization statute and its abolition in 1972, 4,725 sterilizations took place.  All in the name of a spurious pseudoscientific doctrine. To paraphrase Ridley, the cerealogists might be kooks, but unlike the eugenecists, no government has ever cited cerealogy as justification to take a knife to your 'nads.

History demonstrates that there can be horrific social and international costs when pseudoscience is permitted to gain a stranglehold over public policy.  All the more reason for those of us who style ourselves "scientists" to eschew pseudoscience in favour of the real thing; and all the more reason, as Ridley argues, not to be afraid to be dubbed "heretics" when our professional ethics oblige us to call B---s--- on pseudoscientific nonsense whenever, wherever, and in whatever shape it rears its ugly head.

Cheers,

//Don//

20 October 2011 – The dangers of citation

NOTE: As of today, 5 September 2012, Bill C 51 had not progressed beyond introduction and first reading in the House of Commons. The government has not reintroduced it.

Colleagues,

 

According to a ruling issued yesterday, the Supreme Court says it’s okay to use footnotes, but not citations.

 

...yeah, maybe I should back up a little.  Back in the last session of the 40th Parliament (the one that ended on 26 March 2011), the government introduced Bill C-51, entitled “An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Competition Act and the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act”.  The short title of this bill was the “Investigative Powers for the 21st Century Act”.[Note A]  Obviously, it died on the order paper when Parliament was dissolved.

 

One of the controversial aspects of the bill was that Clause 5 would have altered the Section 319(7) of the Criminal Code.  This part of the Criminal Code deals with hate speech and hate propaganda.  At present, Section 319(7) contains definitions applicable to this section of the Code, and includes the following language:

 

“communicating”

« communiquer »

“communicating” includes communicating by telephone, broadcasting or other audible or visible means;[Note B]

 

Clause 5 of Bill C-51 proposed changing this definition to the following:

 

5. The definition “communicating” in subsection 319(7) of the Act is replaced by the following:

 

“communicating” means communicating by any means and includes making available; [Note A]

 

This, I think you’ll agree, significantly alters the definition of “communication” as it currently stands.  The lawyers who prepared the legislative summary of the Bill for the Library of Parliament thought so, too.  In reviewing the Bill, they had this to say about Clause 5:

 

Clause 5 of the bill provides that the offences of public incitement of hatred and wilful promotion of hatred may be committed by any means of communication and include making hate material available, by creating a hyperlink that directs web surfers to a website where hate material is posted, for example. [Note C]

There is a significant difference between publishing hate speech in a book or on a website, and merely calling attention to the existence of hate speech through use of a footnote.  Back in August, I wrote a letter to the Minister of Justice - in my capacity as a private citizen, naturally - to express my discomfort with legislation that equates what amounts to a footnote with full-throated approval.

 

A hyperlink is not approval, it is not “dissemination”, and it is most certainly not “making something available”.  It is a citation, pure and simple.  Under the proposed legislation, if I were to hyperlink to a website that does promote hatred in order to indicate my disapproval thereof, I would be guilty of an offence.  More insidiously, if I were to link to a website that someone were to subsequently object to for any reason whatsoever, I would also be guilty of an offence. 

 

Much to my surprise, I received a long letter back from the Justice Department.  The text and tone of the letter didn’t surprise me all that much (I’ve written several dozen Ministerial Inquiries myself, many to people who might - also - be described as ‘cranks’), and the arguments employed did nothing to allay my concerns:

 

Clause 5 proposed to update this definition to state that communicating means communicating by any means and includes making available.  While it is true that providing a hyperlink would fall under this definition in certain circumstances—as it would under the current definition of communicating in subsection 319(7)—providing a hyperlink alone is not enough to commit either of these two hate propaganda offences.  As the previous paragraph shows, many other elements must be proven before a person can be found guilty.  The amendment merely described the manner in which a prohibited statement could have been made.  It would not have determined whether a statement was of a prohibited nature, or whether a communicator had the necessary guilty mind to commit the offence.  The necessity to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the existence of a guilty mind for these crimes is an important safeguard that protects freedom of expression.  For example, in the case of R. v. Keegstra, the Supreme Court of Canada held that the crime of “wilfully” promoting hatred against an identifiable group means “intentionally” promoting hatred.  This excludes the reckless or negligent promotion of hatred from the scope of this crime.  These stringent requirements already exist in the Criminal Code and would not have been changed by the amendments proposed in former Bill C-51. 

 

It is also worth noting that the crime of wilfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group contains several defences found in subsection 319(3) of the Criminal Code, which further limit the scope of this crime.  For instance, the fact that a statement is true is a defence.  So too is the communication of statements that are relevant to any subject of public interest, the discussion of which is for the public benefit, where the person reasonably believed them to be true.  None of the defences would have been affected by the amendments proposed in former Bill C-51.

 

There are a number of things about this response that should ring alarm bells.  First, if the current definition of ‘communicating’ in subsection 319(7) would capture hyperlinks (presumably under the definition of ‘visible means’), then why was it deemed necessary to update it at all?  Second, and more importantly, the legal defences against a charge of hate speech - whether a statement was of a prohibited nature, whether it is true, and whether a ‘communicator had the necessary guilty mind’ - are all matters that can only be elicited in the course of a trial.  In other words, the presumption of the legislation is that the ‘truth will out’ during the prosecutorial process, and that only someone who is proven beyond a reasonable doubt to have “wilfully” or “intentionally” promoted hatred will be convicted.  Maybe that’s true – but it’s irrelevant.  As folks like Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn can attest, even if you are ultimately acquitted, the process is the punishment.  It cost Ezra more than $100,000 to be acquitted after having been the subject of a frivolous and vexatious complaint of hate speech.

 

Consider openly anti-Semitic speech for a moment.  What is the substantive difference between a footnote citing Mein Kampf or the Koran, and a hyperlink that ‘makes available’ the same grossly objectionable material?  Both books are available in on-line text format from Project Gutenberg. From a pragmatic perspective, providing a URL is certainly more convenient to the reader, as it allows him to check references with the click of a mouse button rather than a trip to the library.  But neither a footnote nor a hyperlink necessarily imputes approbation or even concurrence on the part of the author.  Bill C-51 would make it a crime, for example, to provide a hyperlink to Deuteronomy 25:17-18, because the text incites the reader to violence against an identifiable group, the Amalekites; it encourages the Israelites to “blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.”[Note D]  Is citing the Bible (or the Torah) really hate speech?  I use this example deliberately, because “Amalekite” has resurfaced in the past century in some extremist rhetoric in connection with everyone from Zionists to Nazis to Palestinians, in circumstances that, under Canadian law, would doubtless be considered hate speech – but does this mean we can’t cite the Bible?

 

Needless to say, an overly strict interpretation of what constitutes “publishing” hate speech would be a problem for professional academics.  How, for example, could one of us write an analytical report on Islamic extremism if it were an offence to footnote the source material necessary to provide scholarly support to our analysis?  How could we write about some of the more pernicious aspects of Soviet Russia, or Nazi Germany, or Communist China, if we had to worry about citing references that could potentially be deemed as being “hateful” with respect to an “identifiable group”?

 

Well, this is where the Supreme Court comes in.  Yesterday, the SCC issued its decision in Crookes v. Newton, a case that bears directly on the question of what references, especially hyperlinks, are, and what their status is in legal terms.  Basically what happened is that the respondent, Newton, owned a website that discussed, amongst other things, free speech and the internet.  On his website were a number of hyperlinks, including two that linked to articles elsewhere on the internet that Crookes alleged were defamatory.  Crookes sued not the original author who wrote and posted the allegedly defamatory articles, but Newton, for “making available” defamatory statements, arguing that creating hyperlinks to the articles amounted to “publishing” the defamatory content.  

 

The original trial judge dismissed the complaint, concluding that hyperlinks are analogous to footnotes, and that merely referring to defamatory material without repeating it does not constitute publication.  A majority of the appellate court upheld the trial judge’s ruling.  And the Supreme Court dismissed the appeal…but the arguments advanced by the Court in doing so were not entirely comforting.

 

The majority decision was written by Justice Abella, with concurrence of five other members; the remaining members provided amplifying remarks.  The summary of the majority decision is as follows.  I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting relevant passages.

 

    To prove the publication element of defamation, a plaintiff must establish that the defendant has, by any act, conveyed defamatory meaning to a single third party who has received it.  Traditionally, the form the defendant’s act takes and the manner in which it assists in causing the defamatory content to reach the third party are irrelevant.  Applying this traditional rule to hyperlinks, however, would have the effect of creating a presumption of liability for all hyperlinkers.  This would seriously restrict the flow of information on the Internet and, as a result, freedom of expression.

 

    Hyperlinks are, in essence, references, which are fundamentally different from other acts of “publication”.  Hyperlinks and references both communicate that something exists, but do not, by themselves, communicate its content.  They both require some act on the part of a third party before he or she gains access to the content.  The fact that access to that content is far easier with hyperlinks than with footnotes does not change the reality that a hyperlink, by itself, is content neutral.  Furthermore, inserting a hyperlink into a text gives the author no control over the content in the secondary article to which he or she has linked. 

 

    A hyperlink, by itself, should never be seen as “publication” of the content to which it refers.  When a person follows a hyperlink to a secondary source that contains defamatory words, the actual creator or poster of the defamatory words in the secondary material is the person who is publishing the libel. Only when a hyperlinker presents content from the hyperlinked material in a way that actually repeats the defamatory content, should that content be considered to be “published” by the hyperlinker.

 

    Here, nothing on N’s page is itself alleged to be defamatory.  Since the use of a hyperlink cannot, by itself, amount to publication even if the hyperlink is followed and the defamatory content is accessed, N has not published the defamatory content and C’s action cannot succeed.[Note E] 

 

I’m sure you’ve spotted the Trojan Horse in this argument.  In paragraph three of the summary, the Justices argue that if a hyperlinker “presents content from the hyperlinked material in a way that actually repeats the defamatory content”, this should considered “publication”.  In the text of the decision, the explanatory paragraph reads as follows:

 

[42]      Making reference to the existence and/or location of content by hyperlink or otherwise, without more, is not publication of that content.  Only when a hyperlinker presents content from the hyperlinked material in a way that actually repeats the defamatory content, should that content be considered to be “published” by the hyperlinker...[Note E] 

 

This is, in my view, extremely problematic.  It means that while you can provide a footnote to potentially objectionable material, you cannot cite that material in your own papers without making yourself liable to a charge of defamation (or hate speech).  In other words, you could write “Hitler, in Mein Kampf, accused Jews in vile terms of using adverse societal conditions to advance a social democratic agenda”, and then provide a hyperlink to the text (for example, at Project Gutenberg); but according to the Court’s interpretation, no matter how disapprovingly you do so, you could not cite the actual relevant passage (“A cold shiver ran down my spine when I first ascertained that it was the same kind of cold-blooded, thick-skinned and shameless Jew who showed his consummate skill in conducting that revolting exploitation of the dregs of the big city.” [Note F]) without making yourself liable to a charge of “publishing” hate speech.  Indeed, according to Bill C-51 and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of what “publication” means, arguably, by citing that passage, I’m guilty of contravening the Criminal Code.  I'm equally guilty for citing Deuteronomy's rabid hatred against the Amalekites.

 

So according to the SCC, footnotes are not “publication”, but citations are.

 

Is this really what the Criminal Code’s provisions against hate speech are supposed to be about?  How in heaven’s name are we supposed to be able to conduct research and analysis into the darkest and most repellent corners of the human spirit without holding the bile and venom of those who seek to destroy us up to examination?  Whatever happened to “sunlight is the best disinfectant”?  Sure, there’s obviously no “intent” in my message to communicate, publish, or otherwise convey “hate speech” - but according to the SCC decision in Crookes v. Newton and the legislative changes proposed in Bill C-51, if someone were to complain about that citation, the only way for me to prove that my intent is academic rather than pernicious would be via a trial that could cost me a hundred grand and more in legal fees.  All it would take would be a complaint.

 

Is this the future of scholarship - one where academics seeking to practice their profession in good faith must face a choice between courting calumny and financial ruin, and deliberately eschewing any subject that might potentially attract an allegation that an “identifiable group” has been defamed?  Is restricting our work to bland, inoffensive, irrelevant subjects and publications the only way for us to succeed in an environment of institutionalized hypersensitivity?

 

And are these stupid questions in a country where our “fundamental freedoms”, including freedom of speech, are described in section 2 of the Charter, while the government’s right to impose “reasonable limits” on those freedoms is described before them, in Section 1?

 

Anyhow, the government plans to reintroduce Bill C-51 in the current session of Parliament.  Anybody working on a subject where your research is likely to lead you to hard truths about an “identifiable group” might be well advised to think hard before you cite those hard truths in your text.  It might be safer to simply refer to them in an innocuous, noncommittal and pathetically content-free footnote.  That's the safest course to take in today's hypersensitive Canada.

 

Cheers,

//Don//

 

Notes

A)    [http://www.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?Docid=4745885&file=4]

B)    [http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/page-137.html]

C)    [http://www.parl.gc.ca/About/Parliament/LegislativeSummaries/bills_ls.asp?source= library_prb&ls=C51&Parl=40&Ses=3&Language=E&Mode=1#a8]

D)    [http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+25&version=NKJV]  Note: according to the Ministry of Justice, providing this link would constitute a violation of the Criminal Code provisions against hate speech as amended by Bill C-51 because the material at the other end of the link incites hatred against Amalekites.  Be warned.

E)    [http://scc.lexum.org/en/2011/2011scc47/2011scc47.html]

F)    [http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200601.txt]