This non fiction book is a thought provoking and realistic look at what could be one of the biggest scams ever pulled off on the public worldwide. The physics and thermodynamics of the so called “greenhouse” gasses do not confirm the postulate that man’s addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere is warming the planet dangerously. In fact, they soundly refute it. The planet may well be warming, but other factors are far more likely to be the actual cause than increased CO2 in the atmosphere.

     For example: one report used as confirmation of global warming by the supporters of AGW was the greatly diminished snows on Mt Kilimanjaro in recent years. The AGW supporters wrongly blamed that on CO2 caused global warming. The truth is, man has caused this obvious change, but it had nothing to do with CO2. Loggers have almost completely deforested the lower slopes of the mountain. Those forests once fed millions of tons of water into the air which flowed up the sides of the mountain and fell as snow near the top. With the forests gone the water no longer flows up the mountain so little or no snow falls. Deforestation of the slopes, a human activity, is the actual cause of the lack of snow on the summit. Deforestation worldwide is lowering the moisture in the atmosphere. This may cause a far greater increase in the Greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide at its worse.

     Increasing numbers of scientists, particularly those well versed in the physical gas laws and how gas molecules absorb and radiate energy, are now speaking out about the grossly exaggerated claims of the IPCC and other promoters of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). It is becoming increasingly clear that not only is increasing carbon dioxide not detrimental to life on earth, but that it is highly beneficial. Learn of the fantastic agricultural benefits of increased CO2 worldwide.

     The book also outlines a recent theory linking global temperatures with the frequency of nearby super novas. Radiation from these explosions of giant stars links directly with global temperatures for the last 500 million years. There are a substantial number of detailed color graphics that demonstrate the correlation convincingly. The AGW people would kill to have such powerful confirmation of the physics they ignore. The theory is less than twenty years old, about where the theory of plate tectonics was when most scientists ridiculed that theory.

     The book also describes other real and growing dangers man is perpetrating on our planet and its life. These dangers are very real, measurable, evidenced by many concrete happenings, and are increasing on a daily basis. These very real menaces are infinitely worse for humanity than the worst possible global warming scenarios, and there is no redeeming benefit like greatly increased crop growth.               Published 2014

EXCERPT:


Infinitely Politically Correct Anthropogenic Global Warming:

This foolishness has achieved such power that nearly all of the news media, politicians, academics, intellectual elitists, and virtually all of the misinformed public treat it as a scientifically proven fact. This is nonsense. It s nothing but consensus science driven and tilted by politics and the lure of money—lots of money. The really sad part of this whole thing is the polarization it has brought about in the otherwise usually objective scientific community and the valuable effort diverted from countering some truly dangerous menaces, the real problems facing us and their real solutions. If you question any aspect of the global warming mantra you will be ridiculed and called names (as I have been) and ostracized. (They can’t do that to me, but can to others.)

Witness what happened to Dr. Judith Curry, head of the School of Atmospheric Sciences of Georgia Tech. Just because she will not condemn 100% of those who question the efficacy of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, she has been the subject of many verbal attacks. To my great admiration, she has not backed down. She has accused the IPCC of, corruption and says, “I’m not going to spout off and endorse the IPCC because I don’t have confidence in the process.” This was before the Climategate email revelations of doctored computer simulations.

She has been jeered, insulted and otherwise badly treated, just because she doesn’t knuckle under to the pressures of the PC church of global warming. Incidently, she’s not a denier, just a questioning skeptic, as am I, who would like a whole lot more proof. I looked into what she is asking and her questions are virtually the same ones I have been asking. Where is the hard science, the physics and chemistry, that proves global warming from carbon-dioxide is as real as proponents of the theory say it is? What about the many other factors that effect global temperatures? How about Svensmark’s theory?

I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes from Peter Abelard, “By doubting we are led to inquire. By inquiring we learn the truth.” Incidentally, Abelard’s words are a quite good description of the scientific method. Apparently the global warming crowd will tolerate no doubting or inquiring from anyone, even highly qualified scientists. I do not believe that is even a remotely scientific attitude. Good science welcomes doubters and questioners. As a matter of fact, the entire basis of science, the scientific method, is based on repeated and thorough questioning. The idea that consensus science (a group opinion) is superior to hard science (math, physics, chemistry) is ludicrous. It goes against the grain of all true scientific reasoning, and in truth, the opposite is always true. Hard science always trumps consensus science. This does not mean that consensus science is wrong or is not a valuable tool. It merely means that it is a consensus opinion of a group of scientists, a group that could even be a minority of scientists. Sometimes it is all we have when hard scientific evidence is lacking. (Not the case with global warming.)

This is my interpretation from a pointedly unflattering and somewhat misleading article about Dr. Curry in the November 2010 issue of Scientific American. The title, Climate Heretic, is insulting. There is a full page photo of Dr. Curry opposite the title page that is also less than flattering. The only reference to her well-earned title is the following on the first paragraph. “For most of her career, Curry, who heads the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has been known for her work on hurricanes, Arctic ice dynamics, and other climate related topics. But over the past years or so she has become better known for something that annoys, even infuriates many of her scientific colleagues, probably because it might threaten their grants. (She refuses to go along with the crowd like a sheep.) Curry has been engaged actively with the climate change skeptic community, largely by participating on outsider blogs such as Climate Audit. The Air Vent and The Blackboard. Along the way, she has come to question the science, no matter how well established it is.” (The consensus science promoted by many of those at the global warming money trough.)

In typical misleading fashion, Scientific American printed a version of the hockey stick graph of global temperatures (see first graph, on page 13) showing best guess temperatures from 1000 CE to the present. Since the Little Ice Age began around 900 CE, well before the dates on the graph, this version, commonly used to illustrate how temperatures have risen in recent years, gives an extremely erroneous picture. If you compare it with a similar graph starting say 10,000 BC, a very different picture appears. It is quite plain from the expanded data that current global temperatures are considerably lower than those during the  Medieval Warm Period from 200 CE to 900 CE and even warmer at several times since the last ice age. Why is it that global warmers never refer to this data and will certainly not show these graphs?

The author of the article is one I consider to be a dedicated member of the fundamentalist church of global warming, a political hack writer. His name is Michael D. Lemonick and he was a longtime far-left science writer for Time Magazine. He now writes for Climate Central, a non profit, non partisan climate change think tank. (I about choked on that oxymoronic description, non partisan. I have come to recognize the label non partisan as an indication of extreme partisanship of any person, organization, or proposal. Like many other politically correct labels, it means precisely the opposite of what it says. This type of mislabeling is a favorite tactic of liberals. Another example is The Affordable Care act.) Climate Central is one of the hundreds of usually non profit organizations that have sprung up to feed on the leavings from the global warming fantasy promoters. The Internet is loaded with them, all soliciting donations for their noble purpose. They may be non profit, but I’ll wager their principals receive a hefty paycheck along with many perks. Many NPOs have highly paid executives who fly around in private jets. (Like Nancy Pelosi whose NPO was Congress) NPOs can offer all the perks of any profit making corporation for their owners and employees. The only difference is they don’t pay their owners in dividends, they simply pay them in salary and benefits.

OK, so I rambled about. I just wanted to share some realities from the wonderful world of liberalism.

The following is a response to the article on Dr. Curry from one Climatologist made on 10-23-2012

This article completely neglects to mention the enormous amounts of grant money being shoveled into climate studies. $Billions every year are handed out by the federal government, with much more payola coming from shadowy, politically oriented NGOs that are often at odds with honest science.

Big money corrupts, as can be seen throughout the Climategate emails, where journals are threatened and blackballed, and journalists and FOI officers are corrupted, and professional careers are ruined, simply for not toeing the alarmist line. The mainstream climate clique has both front feet in the public grant trough, and it brazenly shoulders aside scientific skeptics (the only honest kind of scientists, according to the scientific method).

Dr. Curry has taken a brave stand, breaking ranks with the current orthodoxy. She is a finger to the wind, indicating a sea change in the public's growing awareness of the fact that there is zero credible evidence showing that the rise in CO2 has been harmful while there is solid, testable, empirical evidence showing that the rise in CO2 has been beneficial, such as increasing agricultural production in a world that needs more food.

The IPCC has become entirely self-serving since AR-1. It is now much more interested in protecting its grant gravy train than in allowing skeptical scientists to be a part of the process. It took knowledgeable outsiders to debunk Michael Mann's hockey stick chart; the iconic poster of the IPCC.

In retrospect, the scientific establishment should have promptly sounded the alarm when it was claimed in MBH98-99 that the planet's temperature was essentially unchanging over many centuries. Instead, the Mann et al. attempt to erase the MWP and the LIA was unquestioningly accepted, at least publicly, due to the immense flow of grant money at stake. Further, the IPCC still continues to avoid the scientific method, instead protecting its catastrophic AGW hypothesis from any and all attacks by skeptical scientists. Since when has it become the duty of scientists to falsify hypotheses?

But the cracks in the defenses of the climate alarmists are widening. Taxpayers are disgusted with the unaccountable hand over fist money grabbing by a completely unaccountable UN/IPCC. As the public becomes more aware of how the system is being gamed at their expense, push back is increasing. And it will continue to escalate.

End of the climatologist’s response

You see, I’m not the only one. Increasing numbers of people are asking all kinds of probing and even embarrassing questions of climate alarmists. A lot of this was triggered by the revelations of doctored computer simulations by the famous hackers who found much evidence of mischief in University computer files.

Here are some graphs the reader may find interesting.

This is the famous IPCC hockey stick graph shown in an accurate scale. Compare it with the same period shown on the next graph below. Notice only one line, the black one, goes up sharply at the end. This line represents tree ring growth for the last 150 years that the IPCC uses erroneously to show temperatures. It is just one of the eight types of temperature estimates shown, and is highly unreliable. A far more logical explanation of expanding tree ring growth in recent times is that the increased amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the direct cause of the increased growth.

It is interesting to note that the high point in the first graph (the black line) is based on tree ring growth data. It is very difficult to correlate the various other well-documented representations of temperatures calculated from various indirect measurements in atmospheric CO2 which has been found to greatly increase plant growth including trees. This holds true almost without regard for temperature so tree ring data is totally useless as a measure of ambient temperatures unless the data is corrected for changes in atmospheric CO2. You will also note that the black line is only shown for the last 150 years. If it were shown for the full thousand years, it’s irregular meanderings would prove it to be totally meaningless as an indicator of temperature. A careful look at the graph reveals that several of the colored lines disappear around 1960 and only the black line for tree ring measurements is shown to 2000. That is because almost all the other lines would show a decided downward trend of temperatures just before 2000.

To see how the graphs were manipulated by AGW proponents, view the graphs on page 32. These show what the real numbers indicate, and how they were manipulated to paint a false picture of supposed AGW. (Anthropogenic Global Warming)

This graph is a more telling graph of temperatures since the end of the last ice age. As you can see, the tree ring data (red line) wanders a path very different from most of the others. It is the only one that goes up sharply at the zero point. Most of the indicators are well below the zero line and one (light blue) is farther below the median at zero than at any time since the ice age. It is obvious that most of the preceding 8,000 years have been warmer than the present and that just 400 years ago we reached lower temperatures than the earth has seen since the last ice age. It is interesting to note that at the time Stonehenge and the Pyramids were built the earth was a lot warmer and probably a lot wetter than it is today. Most of that warmth flowed into the north and south temperate zones while the tropics remained much the same as it is today. In fact, the tropics probably stayed relatively warm even at the ice age minimum temperatures.

This next graph is the IPCC temperature graph before Michael Mann published his hockey stick graph and report that completely ignored the  Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, and exaggerated the effects of increased atmospheric CO2.

For more information on the hockey stick graph goto:  http://www.john-daly.com/hockey/hockey.htm

The above graph is from data collected during the Vostok ice core study. It plots temperatures and Carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere back through the last four ice ages. As you can see, an earth much colder than the present has been the rule for many millennia. Clearly, cold periods are quite long while temperate periods like the present are relatively short. If past cycles repeat as it looks like they will, we are about due to drop into the deep freeze in the near future. If it has any effect, man’s addition of CO2 to the atmosphere might temper the next ice age. This graph is a far better indicator of where we will be going in the future than the others. It is fairly obvious and thus quite definitive that the CO2 variation (the green line) follows the average temperature (the blue line) rather than the other way around. This significant indication shown clearly on the graph indicates  that increases and decreases in CO2 content follow increases and decreases in temperature and do not precede them. This is positive and convincing data proving that changes in the amount of CO2 are the result of temperature changes, not the cause.

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Global Warming - ACS - excerpt - 12-29-07 +new    http://glowarmacs.blogspot.com
Global Warming and the Gulf Stream Facts & Facts    http://hjgulfstream.blogspot.com
Global Warming and Earth Hour  http://hjglobalwarming.blogspot.com

A stellar revision of Global Warming Realities

Climate Change: News and Comments and The Svensmark Hypothesis

The Photo - The Pleiades - The Seven Sisters

Visible to the naked eye as the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades are the most famous of many surviving clusters of stars that formed together at the same time. The Pleiades were born during the time of the dinosaurs, and the most massive of the siblings would have exploded over a period of 40 million years. Their supernova remnants generated cosmic rays. From the catalogue of known star clusters, Henrik Svensmark has calculated the variation in cosmic rays over the past 500 million years, without needing to know the precise shape of the Milky Way Galaxy. Armed with that astronomical history, he digs deep into the histories of the climate and of life on Earth.   (Image ESA/NASA/Hubble)

The following are quotes from Svensmark’s Cosmic Jackpot and other comments by Nigel Calder. Nigel Calder is the author of a marvelous science book, The Magic Universe. Note the British spelling in his article.

The Royal Astronomical Society in London published (online) Henrik Svensmark’s paper entitled “Evidence of nearby supernovae affecting life on Earth.” After years of effort Svensmark shows how the variable frequency of stellar explosions not far from our planet has ruled over the changing fortunes of living things throughout the past half billion years. Appearing in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, It’s a giant of a paper, with 22 figures, 30 equations and about 15,000 words.

See the RAS press release:
http://www.ras.org.uk/news-and-press/219-news-2012/2117-did-exploding-stars-help-life-on-earth-to-thrive

By taking me back to when I reported the victory of the pioneers of plate tectonics in their battle against the most eminent geophysicists of the day, it makes me feel 40 years younger. Shredding the textbooks, Tuzo Wilson, Dan McKenzie and Jason Morgan merrily explained earthquakes, volcanoes, mountain-building, and even the varying depth of the ocean, simply by the drift of fragments of the lithosphere in various directions around the globe.

In Svensmark’s new paper an equally concise theory that cosmic rays from exploded stars cool the world by increasing the cloud cover, leads to amazing explanations, not least for why evolution sometimes was rampant and sometimes faltered. In both senses of the word, this is a stellar revision of the story of life.

Here are the main results:

      The long-term diversity of life in the sea depends on the sea-level set by plate tectonics and the local supernova rate set by the astrophysics, and on virtually nothing else.

The long-term primary productivity of life in the sea – the net growth of photosynthetic microbes – depends on the supernova rate, and on virtually nothing else.

Exceptionally close supernovae account for short-lived falls in sea-level during the past 500 million years, long-known to geophysicists but never convincingly explained.

As the geological and astronomical records converge, the match between climate and supernova rates gets better and better, with high rates bringing icy times.

Presented with due caution as well as with consideration for the feelings of experts in several fields of research, a story unfolds in which everything meshes like well-made clockwork. Anyone who wishes to pooh-pooh any piece of it by saying “correlation is not necessarily causality” should offer some other mega-theory that says why several mutually supportive coincidences arise between events in our galactic neighborhood and living conditions on the Earth.

NOTE: correlation of increased CO2 and global warming are several orders weaker than Svensmark’s graphical data.

An amusing point is that Svensmark stands the currently popular carbon dioxide story on its head. Some geoscientists want to blame the drastic alternations of hot and icy conditions during the past 500 million years on increases and decreases in carbon dioxide, which they explain in intricate ways. For Svensmark, the changes driven by the stars govern the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. Climate and life control CO2, not the other way around.

By implication, supernovae also determine the amount of oxygen available for animals like you and me to breathe. So the inherently simple cosmic-ray/cloud hypothesis now has far-reaching consequences, which I’ve tried to sum up in this diagram.

 Figure 19Cosmic rays in action.

 The main findings in the new Svensmark paper concern the uppermost stellar band, the green band of living things and, on the right, atmospheric chemistry. Although solar modulation of galactic cosmic rays is important to us on short time scales, its effects are smaller and briefer than the major long-term changes controlled by the rate of formation of big stars in our vicinity, and their self-destruction as supernovae. Although copyrighted, this figure may be reproduced with due acknowledgment in the context of Henrik Svensmark's work.

By way of explanation

The text of “Evidence of nearby supernovae affecting life on Earth” is available via

ftp://ftp2.space.dtu.dk/pub/Svensmark/MNRAS_Svensmark2012.pdf.

The paper is highly technical, as befits a professional journal, so to non-expert eyes even the illustrations may be a little puzzling. So I’ve enlisted the aid of Liz Calder to explain the way one of the most striking graphs, Svensmark’s Figure 20, was put together. That graph shows how, over the past 440 million years, the changing rates of supernova explosions relatively close to the Earth have strongly influenced the biodiversity of marine invertebrate animals, from trilobites of ancient times to lobsters of today. Svensmark’s published caption ends: “Evidently marine biodiversity is largely explained by a combination of sea-level and astrophysical activity.” To follow his argument, you need to see how Figure 19 draws on information in Figure 20. That tells of the total diversity of the sea creatures in the fossil record, fluctuating between times of rapid evolution and times of recession. The count is by genera which are groups of similar animals. Here it’s shown freehand by Liz in Sketch A. Sketch B is from another part of Figure 20, telling how the long-term global sea-level changed during the same period.

The broad correspondence isn’t surprising because high sea-levels flood continental margins and give the marine invertebrates more extensive and varied habitats. But it obviously isn’t the whole story. For a start, there’s a conspicuous spike in diversity about 270 million years ago that contradicts the declining sea-level. Svensmark knew that there was a strong peak in the supernova rate around that time. So he looked to see what would happen to the wiggles over the whole 440 million years if he normalized the biodiversity to remove the influence of sea-level. That simple operation is shown in Sketch C, where the 270-million-year spike becomes broader and taller. Sketch D shows Svensmark’s reckoning of the changing rates of nearby supernovae during the same period. Let me stress that these are all freehand sketches to explain the operations, not to convey the data. In the published paper, the graphs as in C and D are drawn precisely and superimposed for comparison.

This is Svensmark's Figure 20, with axes relabeled with simpler words for the RAS press release. Biodiversity (the normalized marine invertebrate genera count) is in blue, with vertical bars indicating possible errors. The supernova rates are in black.

There are many fascinating particulars that I might use to illustrate the significance of Svensmark’s findings. To choose the Gorgon’s story that follows is not entirely arbitrary, because this brings in another of those top results, about supernovae and bio-productivity.

The great dying at the end of the Permian

Out of breath, poor gorgon? Gasping for some supernovae? Named after scary creatures of Greek myth, the Gorgonopsia of the Late Permian Period included this fossil species Sauroctonus progressus, 3 metres long. Like many of its therapsid cousins, near relatives of our own ancestors, it died out during the Permo-Triassic Event.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgonopsia

The Poor Gorgon

Luckiest among our ancestors was a mammal-like reptile, or therapsid, that scraped through the Permo-Triassic event, the worst catastrophe in the history of animal life. The climax was 251 million years ago at the end of the Permian Period. Nearly all animal species in the sea went extinct, along with most on land. The event ended the era of old life, the Paleozoic, and ushered in the Mesozoic Era, when our ancestors would become small mammals trying to keep clear of the dinosaurs. So what put to death our previously flourishing Gorgon-faced cousins of the Late Permian? According to Henrik Svensmark, the Galaxy let the reptiles down.

Forget old suggestions (by myself included) that the impact of a comet or asteroid was to blame, like the one that did for the dinosaurs at the end of the Mesozoic. The greatest dying was less sudden than that. Similarly the impressive evidence for an eruption 250 million years ago—a flood basalt event that smothered Siberia with noxious volcanic rocks covering an area half the size of Australia—tells of only a belated regional coup de grâce. It’s more to the point that oxygen was in short supply. Geologists speak of a “superanoxic ocean” where there was far more carbon dioxide in the air than there is now.

“Well there you go,” some people will say. “We told you CO2 is bad for you.” That, of course, overlooks the fact that the notorious gas keeps us alive. The recently increased CO2 shares with the plant breeders the credit for feeding the growing human population. Plants and photosynthetic microbes covet CO2 to grow. So in the late Permian its high concentration was a symptom of a big shortfall in life’s productivity, due to few supernovae, ice-free conditions, and a lack of weather to circulate the nutrients. And as photosynthesis is also badly needed to turn H2O into O2, the doomed animals were left gasping for oxygen, with little more than half of what we’re lucky to breathe today.

When Svensmark comments briefly on the Permo-Triassic Event in his new paper, “Evidence of nearby supernovae affecting life on Earth,” he does so in the context of the finding that high rates of nearby supernovae promote life’s productivity by chilling the planet, and so improving the circulation of nutrients needed by the photosynthetic organisms.

This is a sketch from Figure 22 in the paper, simplified to make it easier to read. Heavy carbon, 13C, is an indicator of how much photosynthesis was going on. Plumb in the middle is a downward pointing green dagger that marks the Permo-Triassic Event. And in the local supernova rate (black curve) Svensmark notes that the Late Permian saw the largest fall in the local supernova rate seen in the past 500 million years. This was when the Solar System had left the hyperactive Norma Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy behind it and entered the quiet space beyond. “Fatal consequences would ensue for marine life,” Svensmark writes, “if a rapid warming led to nutrient exhaustion . . . occurring too quickly for species to adapt.”

One size doesn’t fit all, and a fuller story of Late Permian biodiversity becomes subtler and even more persuasive. About six million years before the culminating mass extinction of 251 million years ago, a lesser one occurred at the end of the Guadalupian stage. This earlier extinction was linked with a brief resurgence in the supernova rate and a global cooling that interrupted the mid-Permian warming. In contrast with the end of the Permian, bio-productivity was high. The chief victims of this die-off were warm-water creatures including gigantic bivalves and rugose corals.

Why it’s tagged as “astrobiology”

So what, you may wonder, is the most life-enhancing supernova rate? Without wanting to sound like Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss, it’s probably not very far from the average rate for the past few hundred million years, nor very different from what we have now. Biodiversity and bio-productivity are both generous at present.

Svensmark has commented (not in the paper itself) on a closely related question – where’s the best place to live in the Galaxy?

“Too many supernovae can threaten life with extinction. Although they came before the time range of the present paper, very severe episodes called Snowball Earth have been blamed on bursts of rapid star formation. I’ve tagged the paper as Astrobiology because we may be very lucky in our location in the Galaxy. Other regions may be inhospitable for advanced forms of life because of too many supernovae or too few.”

Astronomers searching for life elsewhere speak of a Goldilocks Zone in planetary systems. A planet fit for life should be neither too near to nor too far from the parent star. We’re there in the Solar System, sure enough. We may also be in a similar Goldilocks Zone of the Milky Way, and other galaxies with too many or too few supernovae may be unfit for life. Add to that the huge planetary collision that created the Earth’s disproportionately large Moon and provided the orbital stability and active geology on which life relies, and you may suspect that, astronomically at least, Dr. Pangloss was right — “Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

Don’t fret about the diehards

If this blog has sometimes seemed too cocky about the Svensmark hypothesis, it’s because I’ve known what was in the pipeline, from theories, observations and experiments, long before publication. Since 1996 the hypothesis has brought new successes year by year and has resisted umpteen attempts to falsify it.

New additions at the level of microphysics include a previously unknown reaction of sulphuric acid, as in a recent preprint. On a vastly different scale, Svensmark’s present supernova paper gives us better knowledge of the shape of the Milky Way Galaxy.

A mark of a good hypothesis is that it looks better and better as time passes. With the triumph of plate tectonics, diehard opponents were left red faced and blustering. In 1960 you’d not get a job in an American geology department if you believed in continental drift, but by 1970 you’d not get the job if you didn’t. That’s what a paradigm shift means in practice and it will happen sometime soon with cosmic rays in climate physics.

Plate tectonics was never much of a political issue, except in the Communist bloc. There, the immobility of continents was doctrinally imposed by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. An analogous diehard doctrine in climate physics went global two decades ago, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was conceived to insist that natural causes of climate change are minor compared with human impacts.

Don’t fret about the diehards. The glory of empirical science is this: no matter how many years, decades, or sometimes centuries it may take, in the end the story will come out right.