The worst argument against global warming gets worserer

umm, isn't it somewhat futile to argue with a lunatic? And I say this as a mild global warming skeptic (though I'd have to say that the realscience blog is starting to push me away from that reasoning)

From a previous encounter with Louis I know he has bizarre ideas about statistics and thermodynamics, but this? It sounds like a meeting of the flat earth society.

Fortunately, Tycho Brahe never met Mr. Hessink.
http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/history/brahe.html

That's why we've got global warming! The Earth is falling into the sun! The aliens are responsible!

I remember wondering, when I read your earlier post about Hessink, if he'd been reading Velikovsky. I'd actually read a couple of his books when I was researching pseudoscience in college--I didn't think the books made any sense, and they weren't as entertaining as Erich Von Daniken's stuff. I find it hard to believe that anyone would take Velikovsky's theories seriously, but I guess bad ideas live forever...

I wonder if Louis even bothered to read any of my entries at the last post about this. Not only did I provide him with the same figures about geophysical contributions to the surface energy budget that Tim did, I even linked him to 3 formal lectures about where these budgets come from and a complete breakdown of the atmospheric energy budget for comparison. And I specifically referred to my numbers as energy budgets or evergy fluxes not temperatures. Sources were cited for all of it. Doesn't he even read any of the posts before he responds?

Note that the astrolabe and other sophisticated instruments were used for navigation over one thousand years before the telescope was invented.

If the Earth's axis had changed in the Middle Ages, it would be obvious when looking at pre-Medieval star charts from the Greeks, Chinese, Mayans, Persians, and others...

I have had only passing exposure to Louis previously via his comments ont his blog.

Overall many of his previous comments struck me as pretty reasonable even when I disagreed with them. However this current exchange is bizarre and rather sad.

My University degree is in Modern Asian Studies, with majors in Japanese studies and economics, even a basic undergraduate knowledge of chinese history is sufficient to know Louis is talking rubbish.

Chinese cosmology taught that the behaviour of the heavens reflected the state of the Earth. disorder in Heaven, reflected disorder on Earth. Failure to predict eclipses and other astronomic events correctly was a huge blow to the prestige of the ruling emperor.

Even minor errors in predictions led to major uproar, the execution of court astrologers and public inquiries. The idea that drastic changes in the length of the day could occur without it being remarked on at length in Chinese records is absurd.

And before Louis invokes the "government cover-up" theory, the Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese courts also maintained astronomers and used to compete with the Chinese and each other to show who had the best astronomers. There were also hordes of would-be offical astronomers in China who seized on any mistake by the incumbents to advance their claims.

But then Louis rather gave the game away when he accused advocates of anthropogenic global warmign of being social democrats (a label with presumably includes George Bush sr. and John Major asd signatories of the Kyoto Protocol along with Senator John McCain who recently co-authored a bill to reduce American greenhosue gas emissions.)

Louis is driven here not by the evidence or by scientific arguent but by political ideology, leading him to assume that the other side of the debate are driven by similar motives.

A closing question for Louis: if you support Velikovsky's theory about the biblical story of Joshua stopping the sun do you also endorse his theories that a close approach by Venus caused the parting of the Red Sea and that the mana eaten by the Israelites during their forty years in the wilderness was actually organic material raining down from a passing comet?

How about rewriting of middle eastern history to claim that the Hittie Empire never existed?

Louis,
Why not post the results of your calculations that would support the seeming gibberish you've written or, failing that, consider learning a little humility and when to keep quiet about things you understand not at all? You could "Remain silent and be thought a fool - or open your mouth and remove all doubt"! There's no virtue in having lots and lots of fanciful ideas that are all, absurdly, wrong. Absurd, that is, and defended with a foghorn and allegations of hubris in others.

It would be funny if there weren't people taking lunatics like this seriously. He claims to know science, but almost every statement he make demonstrates his lack of knowledge of any sort of physics. Its clear he will disregard anything rational and scientific if it conflicts with what he wants to believe, and as such its not point arguing with him, but still probably worth pointing out the stupidity as some might fall foul of it.

http://www.china.org.cn/e-gudai/6.htm

This page provides a quick history of Chinese astronomy. The Chinese were accurately predicting solar and lunar eclipses as early as the 5th century BC - and were accurating reporting their occurence as far back as the 13th century BC. (Of course, if Louis were rght and the length of the day has changed since then these predictions should be out of wack with modern calculations making it purely a coincidence that the Chinese recorded a solar eclipse as occuring on May 26, 1217 BC and that contemporary calculationa based on a constant speed of revolution for the Earth say that there was indeed an eclipse visible from China on that day.

This quote from the afore-cited web-page is relevant here:
The period from the 3rd to the 6th centuries was an important stage in the development of culture and science in China, as many outstanding scientists emerged. Zu Chongzhi (420-589) made outstanding contributions to mathematics, astronomy and machine building. He was the first person in the world to bring the calculation of the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter to the seventh decimal place, between 3.1415926 and 3.1415927. His achievement was more than a thousand years earlier than that of his European counterparts. Zu put dozens of his writings on mathematics into a book titled The Art of Mending, which represented the highest achievements in the realm of mathematics at that time. In astronomy, the Daming Calendar he worked out was China's most advanced calendar of his era. After observations and studies, he concluded that a year lasted exactly 365.24281481 days which was only 46 seconds different from the modern estimate.

I really should have included these sections in my first post, sorry:

Guo Shoujing (1231-1316), a noted scientist of the Yuan Dynasty, made major improvements to the sundial. First he created a tower sundial, raising its height from the original 2.66 meters to 13.33 meters, which drastically increased its accuracy. Based on his research, the calendar was revised. His calendar had 365.2425 days in a year, which was only 26 seconds different from the time it takes the earth to go around the sun. His achievement was 300 years earlier than the finalization of the modern calendar. Xing Yunlu, an astronomer of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), further raised the height of the sundial by erecting a twenty-meter-tall one and his statistics derived from this sundial enabled him to calculate that there were 365.2417 days in a tropical year, which constituted the most accurate figure at the time in the world, with a difference of only 2.3 seconds from the modern calculation.

While I'm at it:

Global warming skeptics like Louis like to use rhetorical arguemnts along the lines "the Earth is extremely big how can humans hope to have a major effect on it?"

But we aren't talking about a major effect. while an increase from an average global temperature of, say, 20 degrees to 22 degrees celsius sounds dramatic, we're actually talking about an increase on less than 1% - from 293 degrees Kelvin to 295 degrees kelvin.

Why argue with a lunatic is a very good question. It is surely not to convince Hissink or his supporters.

The point is to keep alive on the internet the arguments that contradict these people in close proximity. That way, anyone who googles the material finds the counter argument.

We will probably never know if this is important. But it surely sticks in my craw to let those parallel reality arguments go uncontested.

It is also a great model for students. They get to see how scientific reasoning actually works.

Another reason to argue with Louis Hissink: it's the funniest thing going these days.

www.crank.net...Vote for the crank of the day.

I am that great a threat - thanks :-)

Louis:

That great a threat? That great a threat? Oh, my friend, you are going to be forever associated with the assertion that the ancient Babylonians, Greeks, and Chinese, amongst others, never observed the heavens because the telescope hadn't been invented yet. Most of us had never heard of you before, and now, to us, `Hissink' will be synonymous with absurdity. To be taken as a threat, you have to be first taken seriously; that is not an option you have left for yourself.

Merry Christmas,
Jonathan

Louis Hissink wrote:

I am that great a threat - thanks :-)

And the Black Knight always triumphs!!

I thought the evil greens were the big threat.

Fair enough on most of the physics but only iron is magnetic? Something of an error there....nickel? gadolinium? Agreed, only some metals are magnetic but iron isn't the only one. Trivial point I know.

Yeah all right, I was trying to keep it simple for Louis. Read ferromagnetic material for iron in my post.

If we're going to get really pedantic - and seeing as no theory is too bizarre for Louis - a sufficiently strong electrical field will also affect paramagnetic non-ferrous elements such as carbon and oxygen.

Of course, fields that powerful kill humans by attracting the iron in their blood so strongly that their hearts are unable to beat.

Louis will probably argue that no-one noticed such effects prior to the discovery of compasses.

On a different point, has anyone asked the rest of the Lavouisier (sp?) Group what they think of Louis' latest contribution?

Maybe there needs to be an addition to Godwin's Law that involves mentioning Velikovsky during a scientific argument ...

Ian,
Much thanks for the Chinese history. I stopped by to read the ongoing whack-a-mole that Tim is playing with Hissink, and I end up learning a bunch about Chinese astromony. These internets are awful nifty.
Dave T- I agree with posting counterarguments on those grounds most of the time (ie that we need to counter idiocy wherever it exists or it will flourish. Er, flourish more than it already is). Otoh, this guy is such a wingnut that I suspect that the group of people who are both [1)finding him a credible source and 2)swayed in any way whatsoever by logical arguments] is tiny. But on the third hand, no one ever lost money betting against the existence of foolishness...

patrick, I think that might be covered under Item 23 in the Crackpot Index:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

Don't look now, but Louis now blames the failure to predict and protect against the recent earthquake and tsunamis on greens and too much funding for global warming.

See here.

A quote:

In Short, the tragic loss of life from this latest natural catastrophe, would have been far less if funding for the geosciences, in preference to climate, had been greater.

Putting it bluntly, the Greens and their fellow travellers must accept responsilibility for the loss of life on December 27, 2004 from the tsunamis of that day.

Presumably, Louis includes the Howard government's massive spending on "clean coal" technology in that indictment.

Not to flog a dead horse but I also have to wonder what research Louis thinks was needed and what good it would have done.

The quake that caused the tsunami was detected and its epicentre located within minutes. If the political will had existed in the affected coutnries to set up an early warning system along the lines of the one that already operates in the Pacific adequate warnign would have been given.

Then again the countries in East Africa were so poorly prepared for this that despite having hours of warning after the tsunami had struck Sri Lanka and southern India
virtually nothing was done to warn the public or evacuate low-lying areas.

Since Louis feel obliged to use ANYTHING - holiday pictures, massive nature disasters - to advance his arguments let's look at how the Sumatran quake affected the Earth's rotation.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/12/29/quake.wobble.reut/index.html "Richard Gross, a geophysicist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, theorized that a shift of mass toward the Earth's center during the quake Sunday caused the planet to spin 3 microseconds, or millionths of a second, faster and to tilt about an inch on its axis."
So an earthquake rated 9 on the Richter scale slowed the Earth's rotation by 3 one-millionths of a second.
Let's assume the mechanism which caused the sun to appear to stand still for several hours in ancient Canaan and forced medieval societies to alter the length of the year by several days (according to Louis) was similar to that which caused this quake.
How big a force would be required and where is the physical evidence for such a catastrophe?

But Ian, Louis thinks it wasn't an earthquake, but a meteor impact: http://timblair.net/comments.php?id=94_0_1_0_C

Oh good grief, now the tsunami and earth-axis shifting have collided in Louis's brain. http://foxhunt.blogspot.com/2004_12_01_foxhunt_archive.html#11043003413…
See, if the earth shifted on its axis that would cause a big tsunami. So these strata that everybody but Louis thinks were laid down over millions of years but Louis think were created by a big tsunami show that the earth shifted on its axis in the past. Simple really.

Louis still seem to think that there were axis shifts in historic times. I guess no one noticed the big tsunamis that this would have caused on account of the fact that the microscope hadn't been invented so no-one was looking at the ocean.

"Louis da fly, I'm Louie da fly; straight from rubbish tip to you."

I used to think Louis was just someone who didn't agree with my viewpoint, and I debated with him. Then I thought he was idealogically right wing, then I thought he was extreme right wing, then I thought he was a bit crazy, then I thought he was a total loon, and quite funny.

Now I think he is just an attention seeker. He is lapping up the press he has been getting the last few weeks. Everyone is talking about Louis Hissink. And despite what has been commented in earlier threads, I don't even think he is funny anymore. I think he should be ignored. You do great work with this blog tim, you have bigger fish to fry.

It's interesting that the posters on the Timblair blog - which has a distinct right-wing tone - got just as exasperated with Louis as people here.

I guess Tim Blair is just another social democrat in disguise.

what do you people t think what is the big arguent about global warming is

The problem isn't global warming, the problem is what will happen to the earth and all those American companies, and their executives, who are not prepared for it.
We can predict what will take place and the masses of people who will die from it. Too bad it won't kill only those responsible for it.
I just want to survive so I can take pictures and put them on cave walls.