“Let another praise you, and not your own mouth; a stranger, and not your own lips.” Such is the wise counsel of Proverbs 27:2.

Well, recently that happened, in a big way. Ken Haapala, President of the Science and Environmental Project (SEPP), was so impressed by the Cornwall Alliance’s From the Stacks livestream November 23, with guest Dr. Christopher Essex, that he devoted the first part of SEPP’s weekly e-newsletter The Week that Was November 27 to summarizing and commenting on some of its important points.

We asked his permission to reproduce his summary here, and he generously gave it. If you’ve never viewed a From the Stacks episode, we hope this will whet your appetite. You can view this livestream on Facebook or YouTube. All our livestreams are available on Facebook here and YouTube here.

Following are Ken’s summary and comments on the November 23 program, “Just What Does ‘Just Follow the Science’ Mean?” His summary is in normal typeface, his comments are in italics. Our insertions are in {…}.

Belief in the Ignorance of Experts: The blurb under the video of Christopher Essex by Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation reads:

“‘Just follow the science!’ That exhortation gets used to silence anyone who questions anything from COVID lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates to catastrophic manmade climate change to Darwinism to atheism. Challenge official public policy on lockdowns, masks, and vaccines, or on catastrophic global warming, and you’re a ‘science denier.’ Challenge Darwinism or atheism, and you’re a ‘science denier.’ But just what is science? How can it contribute to our understanding of our world—and how we get along with each other? Tonight’s wide-ranging discussion features Dr. Christopher Essex—no, not the country music singer/songwriter Christopher J. Essex, but Christopher Essex the professor of both physics and applied mathematics at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, co-author with Dr. Ross McKitrick of Taken By Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy, and Politics of Global Warming (one of my favorite books on climate change), and all-round creative and challenging thinker. The conversation will go far beyond climate change to the whole state of scientific activity today.”

The interview is wide-ranging with a number of succinct comments by Essex. Some of them are presented below in an effort to encourage readers to watch the entire interview, which is one hour and forty minutes.

There is no such thing as average temperature of the earth. An average is a statistic, not a measurement. Temperature indicates a state (condition), which is not meaningful.

NOAA’s Climate.gov. no longer reports a single temperature and states: “Earth’s temperature has risen by 0.14° F (0.08° C) per decade since 1880, and the rate of warming over the past 40 years is more than twice that: 0.32° F (0.18° C) per decade since 1981.” {Satellite global temperature measurements, however, show warming since 1979 of only 0.14°C per decade.—CA}

The more Essex learns about thermodynamics of radiation the less he feels humanity knows.

When at St. Peter’s {Cathedral, in Rome}, the most striking things he observed were the Sierpiński triangles in the floor. These are fractals (never ending patterns), not Euclidean, and deal with coping with the problems of infinity and considered modern mathematics. Here they were in a floor built five hundred years ago! Such patterns started appearing in the decorative geometry in Italy in the 12th & 13th centuries known as Cosmatesque and date back to the third century BC Greek geometer Apollonius of Perga.

Essex is suspicious of probability and statistics. As Ross McKitrick has shown, using tools of descriptive statistics for inferential statistics is a giant leap, which advocates of dangerous CO2-caused global warming have misunderstood. Descriptive statistics explain the characteristics of a sample of a population, whereas inferential statistics rely on probability theory to suggest underlying characteristics of the entire population. The IPCC’s greenhouse gas attribution process is based on a misunderstanding of the Gauss-Markov (GM) Theorem and the conditions needed for unbiased and efficient rules for calculation.

The IPCC claims very small changes in temperature are significant. But these are tiny when compared to daily, seasonal, and annual changes.

The models do not build the effect of water vapor until later, but it is an integral part of the greenhouse effect. You cannot throw it in later and expect the model to predict. [This is done after falsely balancing CO2 with aerosols to meet surface temperatures.] Water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas. He {Essex} designed a completely good atmospheric model with only water vapor; the other gases have minimal effect. People doing modeling first recognized they were working with “cartoons” but lost track of that.

Making policy is a far deeper problem, and working with computers to see into the future is a deeper problem than many realize, even experts. Numerics are a question of recipes. Computers are not an oracle. Mathematics goes beyond computers.

The weather-based mathematical modeling has not progressed for about 40 years, and climate science has stagnated. The approach by van Wijngaarden and Happer uses different mathematics and databases and seems to meet the physical description of what is occurring in the atmosphere.

With weather-based models there is a symmetry problem. What is conserved in the differential equations is not the same that is conserved in the discrete maps (graphs).

Along with Richard Lindzen, Essex believes the highly used Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) concept does not matter. ECS does not exist in nature; it’s a value in models. As a result, we have computational overstabilization, trying to stabilize problems in the models, etc. As a result, long-term dynamics is gone. A big problem is over-interpreting the models and not understanding their limits. Anyone who has a tool must understand the limits of the tool.

After a discussion on the closure problem in turbulence which goes back to the 19th century and that the influence of clouds completely overwhelms the effect of greenhouse gases (at least in the real atmosphere), Essex discusses the corruption of science and states that it has happened. For example, the claim that there is a consensus is a corruption. There is no one view.

Scientists engage in a duality, they must be humble, not to fool themselves, yet they have the arrogance to tackle the mysteries of the universe. This requires humility.

A good definition of science is the “belief in the ignorance of experts” [the quote from Richard Feynman]. We need to see evidence and reasoning. See for yourself.

Highly educated people get caught up in herds, including scientists. Ordinary people often don’t. You have to stop being afraid! The doom that will come to get you is not the one you are expecting.

The above is a sample of what was discussed. TWTW readers may benefit from watching the entire interview. It reinforced the efforts by TWTW to question everything, including assumptions, physical evidence, reasoning process, and conclusions. Even though mathematics is the language of science, mathematics and logic are not sufficient for understanding. This was demonstrated when scientists attempted to apply Newtonian Mechanics to the behavior of matter and energy on the atomic and subatomic scale. An entirely new pattern of thinking was needed—Quantum Theory.

[Illustration by Beojan Stanslaus, Creative Commons, from Wikipedia, used by permission.]