Saturday, March 13, 2010 ... Deutsch/Español/Related posts from blogosphere

Ian Lowe: use LHC money for AGW propaganda

Ron de Haan has brought my attention to a fascinating event:

BREAKING NEWS: Top Aussie climate scientist goes feral on skeptics and fellow scientists
I have always believed that particle physics and the science of man-made climate change are the two most natural enemies in the context of science.

Particle physics is the most accurate scientific discipline where emotions don't play any role. Moreover, the goal of the discipline is to find the truth about Nature, regardless of economic profit: it's driven by the passion for the truth. The truth is never known at the beginning. Only hard research can get us closer to the truth. Answers of one kind or another have no political implications. People are naturally impartial and honest.

On the other hand, the science about man-made climate change is completely based on emotions, sociological arguments, intimidation, and personal interests of the people. Most of those who work in this discipline today are completely corrupt, they don't give a damn about Nature and Her laws. They have decided about their key answers from the beginning by realizing that their preferred answers are good for their politics, prestige, careers, and financial interests.

However, we could have rarely seen a confrontation between the scientific purity on one side and the corruption and bigotry on the other side as clearly as the participants of a climate meeting in New Zealand. Ian Lowe, a retired climate scientist and one of Australia's main proponents of the AGW hysteria, has repeated a lot of the usual preposterous man-made climate change dogmas, e.g.
  • hurricane Katrina was clearly caused by man-made climate change
  • it is necessary for the media to present all bad events as consequences of AGW: that includes e.g. the floods in Mozambique
  • their movement should prepare methods to eliminate all politicians who don't join the "climate action"
  • climate skeptics are parts of a conspiracy of white male Anglo Celtic elderly men
So far, it's been just the usual far-left, Marxist, politically correct rubbish that underlies the whole AGW movement even though some people sometimes try to pretend that something else is the driver. However, he also said something new:
  • the Large Hadron Collider is nothing else than a "nuclear billiards machine" and the LHC money should be used for AGW propaganda instead.
That's too little, too late because the collider has already been build and the expenses that remain are much smaller than those that have already been paid. ;-) Nevertheless, the attitude of Ian Lowe is so stunningly barbarian that I am not ready to consider him a civilized human being.

The LHC is the greatest experiment ever built. Starting on March 30th, 2010, it will collide protons at 7 TeV of the center-of-mass energy - three times the previous record - and is likely to discover things that will count among the top 3 discoveries of all of science during the last 40 years. All this fun only costs $10 billion or so. The money were being saved literally for decades.

On the other hand, climate science which has brought no results and no major progress for decades costs several billions of dollars every year and the extra costs for the world's society that are justified by this lousy scientific discipline are comparable to $500 billion a year. Despite its unprecedented discovery potential, the LHC only costs as much as one week of the carbon regulation, a flawed policy that has been largely justified by "climate science". The latter has no positive impact whatsoever.

I find it incredible that even several months after it has been shown that the contemporary mainstream climate science is one gigantic scam and a movement of pseudoscientific gangsters and crooks, its advocates are able to find the arrogance not only to apologize their previous unethical behavior but even to attack other scientific disciplines whose standards and merits are orders of magnitude above those of the climate science.

Ian Lowe is a pile of garbage and should be treated as a pile of garbage by everyone.

And that's the memo.

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snail feedback (9) :

reader Unknown said...

If particle physicists are so dedicated to accuracy, why are the skeptics in the physics community primarily AMO, plasma, and astro? The
leaders of HEP and NP are absent at best.

reader Jan Pompe said...


You are a master of understatement

reader Luboš Motl said...

Dear californiabrowser,

particle physicists are not active skeptics but they're not active alarmists (or proponents of paranormal phenomena, if you meant this thing), either. They're focusing on their work and they're doing it carefully, with the old-fashioned standards of scientific integrity and rigor.

Also, they tend to be some of the most left-wing people in the Academia. But that doesn't directly affect their work.

This is how science should be done - regardless of the political orientation of the people. Your assumption that the community should be active - de facto politically active - is just another version of the politicization of science that I criticize, even though you may prefer the other sign.

Science shouldn't be affected by any of these things, whatever the sign is.


reader Sirius said...

"Ian Lowe is a pile of garbage and should be treated as a pile of garbage by everyone."

Yes indeed!

reader Brian G Valentine said...

There was a time when I wasn't aggressive or abusive toward "global warmers."

Over the past couple of years, however, my approach has changed.

The reason is, these people are just dismissive of "polite dissent" and they hear nothing unless it it is harsh, abrasive, and abusive.

Then they hear me, well enough.

reader Unknown said...

Dear Lubos,

You and I agree that particle physicists have standards of proof (including taking great care not to fool themselves) that are rigorous and commendable. They would not tolerate a colleague who went around publicizing something like the hockey stick. But we know this because we know the people involved and their scientific culture. At some point, I think, climate science has gotten so big that the loss of credibility of climate scientists will simply spill over to all of us. Should we expect someone to understand distinctions between physicists and climate scientists when our APS statement is, if anything, more hysterical than that of the AGU or AMS? It is ONLY credibility that allows a discovery at the LHC to be widely believed: people believe physicists are careful and honest, and do not, for example, just invent some particle to keep the funding going. After all, no one could actually tell, except the people involved. You and I know such fraud is not a credible scenario. I wonder about those looking from the outside. The APS does us all a disservice, and HEP and NP could be at risk here. Re the politics of the physicists, I don't think they just focused on their work in the star wars period--they had opinions. Now it is (politically) convenient to focus on their work, and just 'trust the consensus'. While they may do great work, their credibility is at risk, rightly or wrongly, and it is dumb of them not to pay more attention. Climate science would be improved if they did.


reader Unknown said...

To je ale kus hovězího... :-D

Kosmocvok zdraví Luma! ;-)

reader Luboš Motl said...

Lumo zdraví Kosmocvoka! Jo, je to hovězí skot. ;-)

Dear californiabrowser,

except that you overestimate the influence of the HEP community on the AGW issues, I kind of agree with you. I do agree that the official APS-like statements are disgraceful and, in some sense, worse than the pure climatologists' statements. I do agree that the loss of credibility will diffuse to other fields besides climate science. And in fact, I think it will be a very well deserved fact. It's rational for the people to generalize their learned "lack of confidence" to the surrounding disciplines and human activities.

You know, I remember that my opinions (and knowledge) on AGW was kind of tolerated and respected by my former HEP colleagues. That couldn't change the fact that even people whom I considered most sensible (although manifestly left-wing) found it normal to have lunches with Al Gore followed by dinners with Naomi Oreskes. ;-)

That's clearly how the sociology works. The bulk of the HEP community is surely close to the Democrat Party, and there are many close personal links to the top of the Democrat Party. I have no doubt that they belong into the same clique.

But I still think that it's true - and important - that the actual HEP research, what the HEP community is paid for, is far less corrupted by anything than the AGW and other environmental research.

Best wishes

reader bernie said...

You obviously know more particle physicists than most. However, I have just finished Graham Farmelo's new biography on Paul Dirac and early quantum physicists seem as prone as others to siren songs of utopian socialist ideas and ideals that are not that far epistemologically from AGW.
