Geological-change deniers 1920s : "The unchangeability and predictability of the present is key to yesterday's pay cheque and tomorrow's pension"

Wegener ain't stealin' me PENSION !

Would we be having a debate at all,  about whether it is even possible for the climate to ever change, if 1960s science hadn't finally accepted Alfred Wegener's theory that continental positions can and do change ?

A whole lot of powerful - tired - old men have spent a profitable lifetime defending the idea that while the weather is always changing, the climate never does.  Can't change, in fact.

It is the Rock of Stability upon which they have built their profitable claim that they can predict the limits in the change in weather , against the supposedly historically stable regional climates.

If climate change exists, these tired old men would have to throw away their old textbooks and their present day prestige, to re-learn 70 years of 'weatherman science'.

They are too tired, too old, to do that : but not too old to decry it all as a conspiracy to ruin their well-earned retirement , to call it "junk " science.

Yesterday's  orthodox science is today's "junk" science

Almost a century ago, "earth scientists" felt at least as threatened by new ideas as many of today's weather scientists do.

They raised a lot of false arguments against Alfred Wegener's idea of continental drift (aka Tectonic Plates) but made only one statement that told "The Truth, the Whole Truth and nothing but the Truth".

The tag team of Tom and Rollin Chamberlins , pa and junior , ganged up the hardest on Wegener ----- but then gave the whole show away:

"If we believe Wegener then we must throw away everything that has been learned for 70 years and start all over again !!!!!"

Actually not just the last 70 years of learning : the idea that geology (or any subject area of science) changes unpredictably threatens the attractive idea that scientific events are "predictable by professionals for profit".

Why fund the teaching of something called geology science - why fund its research - why hire and fund its graduates ?

Where does this tree sugar off ? Where, if not for the ultimate profit of big mining and petroleum companies ?

Wegener's ideas about a dynamically uncertain and changing geological crust threatened the ability of publicly-listed corporations to get money from skeptical investors by assuring them we have experts who can predict where the ore or oil field is.

Science professionalization was so new in the 1920s that most of the senior members of each scientific discipline were the first ever persons to be paid full time for performing that discipline.

Scientific pay, prestige, pensions were all still too new and too fragile to let mere (awkward) new scientific truths destroy it all for the old gang.

Martin Henry Dawson's changeable (transformable) bacteria, Harlen Bretz's Missoula floods or Alfred Wegener's continental drift, Paul Dirac's vacuum sea are just some of the new science of the 1920s that severely threatened a scientific world view that reality and nature were fundamentally  "simple, stable and profitably predictable".

All - and more like them - were true and rejected.

Still just as true (but finally accepted)  in the late 1960s : the science hadn't changed a bit, but society - and hence scientists - had.....

The intellectual "Drift" of former mining company geologist Naomi Oreskes

LYELL, prophet of Victorian Optimism

Unlikely indeed is it to expect that the expert on the scientific debates of 100 years ago on geological Continental Drift  will turn up one day,  reborn , as the expert on present day Climate Change debates !

The head-spinning requires makes one's neck hurt to even to think about it.

Of course if continents do "drift", they do change and if they change, why not the climate as well ? One begins to see a possible connection. And both subjects do involve dissecting furious debates among scientists.

So we have some inklings of Oreskes' possible metamorphosis.

Still she IS a rarity : a former mining company geologist who stoutly defends climate change rather than climate denial.

The key may lay in a just few paragraphs on Page 199  in her first - very long - book on the debates around continental drift.

The historical geologist Charles Schuchert (1858-1942)  seems heaven-sent to make one of the "bad guys" in present day popular books about the decades-old battle over accepting the theory of tectonic plates ( with Alfred Wegener as the much-maligned "good guy").

But Oreskes doesn't fall into that trap.

Like a patient - and fair - bloodhound she goes through all information we have on Schuchert's long and troubled internal debate on the worth of Wegener's theory, rather than featuring only his few - but overheated - verbal outbursts on the subject.

To over simplify, basically in his own area of scientific expertise, Schuchert saw nothing but support for Wegener's ideas.

But like about half of all scientists, Schuchert was too overawed by strong comments of the "big guns" from other scientific disciplines, to actually put his own mind to work to consider the evidence first, through what ever he or she had learned of that discipline's methods .

The other half of scientists share the reverse flaw : believing that being an expert in say, nuclear physics, makes one an expert in every other science.

It is a quite a trick, trying to be intellectually honest, without falling down either of these slippery slopes.

Schuchert rejected his own (literally) "world-class" knowledge of the fossil record ,on the mere second-hand say so that all the "experts" in climate agreed that the climate in the past, at each latitude, was the same as it is today : climate uniformitarianism.

In 1912's intellectual "climate"  it seemed internally self evident that if climates can't change, then neither can continents.

In 2012's intellectual "climate", it is equally self evident, to what Modernists call "warmists",  that if continents can change, why not the climate as well .

Oreskes , Dawson & Daly 

I pay a lot of attention to Oreskes because I suspect that she came to see that yesterday's house wine of Modernity - the theory  of uniformitarianism - was still today's house wine of the climate deniers .

 Just as I have come to that conclusion as well - albeit coming at the subject of climate change via the distinctly odd angle of the Modernist debates over the worth and meaning of Martin Henry Dawson's  Natural Penicillin and Transformative DNA.

I think Herman Daly has also come to see the enduring strength of 1840s uniformitarianism in mainstream 21st century economics.

Given the wampum-like characteristics (In the Flanders & Swann sense of that word)  of this hyper-flexible meme, I almost hesitate to call "Uniformitarianism" a scientific theory : it seems - today - to be more a pseudo-scientific cover story, designed to  assure exuberant Victorians that their intuitive optimism had a  basis in scientific fact.

A dangerous truism today - just as uniformitarianism was in its heyday - is that in 1945 , Modernity fell and Post-Modernity arose.

I used to hold this position myself.

But now I believe that Modernity's hegemony fell apart and that modernity existed uneasily along side post-modernity (aka Global Commensality) in today's post-hegemonic era.

Now this  view at least lets us see the climate wars as the tippy-top of a much larger battle between modernity and commensality for hegemony (while the fate of the planet hangs in the balance) ....

Come on ,Deniers, learn from the best : the sleazy tactics of GG Simpson, the world's best known continential drift DENIER

Climate deniers are already pretty good at presenting nonsense arguments in science to deny the existence of human-cause climate change ----- but they can always do better.

One of the best of the old school deniers at slashing and smearing opponents was the world-famous paleontologist, George Gaylord Simpson , one of the eternal deities of the "Darwinian Heaven".

One of the most effective torpedoes ever aimed at the idea of continental drift was Simpson's 1943 claim that he had studied the evolution and spread of the mammals better than anyone else and that evidence showed no sign of  continental drift.

Wegener was long dead by then so he couldn't defend his thesis - but his chief supporter, South African Alexander Du Toit, tried his best.

Tried, by agreeing wholeheartedly with Simpson's claim.

Agreeing wholeheartedly and then asking "and your point is ??"

He agreed because he showed that both opponents and supporters of continental drift had long ago agreed that mammals only emerged after the last major drifting apart of today's continents , so they offered no proof one way or another about events before their emergence.

I've said it before : the best work Naomi Oreskes ever did about climate change denying was her earlier, lesser known, work on continental drift deniers. I am willing to bet my farm that many geologists were involved in both : both equally wrong.

Consistent in their wrongness, if in nothing else !

GG Simpson was a past-master at bogus arguments to destroy his opponents

Simpson had put up a totally bogus argument, in other words,  in one peer-reviewed prominent journal in one field of science, to smear a scientist in another field.

Now Fred Singer and his ilk might "point with pride" to their unequalled ability to smear other scientists by illogical scientific arguments but are they truly worthy of this bold claim to scientific infamy ?

Come on Freddie : pull up your socks, learn from the best, er, worst : GG Simpson ,past-master of sleeze....