Introduction to Foci

I'm interested in the following disciplines:

1. Economics, Privatisation, The ALP's Identity Crisis,  The Fable of the Pensioners TV
2. Nutrition, The Ketogenic Diet, Anti-Aging, Sick People, Sick Planet, Monocropping is War
3. Climate Change
4. Cosmology
5. Anti-Realism versus Realism
6. Psychology
7. Ford Australia Ceases Production

A collection of theories, some useful, most problematic, theories motivated mainly by vested interests, unable to explain the evidence, assuming that the world conforms to the theorist's model of it, asserting that the world is how they claim it to be, not how it really is, as though asserting a theory to be true, makes it true. Our mainstream theories don't seem to contribute very much to human welfare - whether they be concerned with understanding the world, organising the world or feeding the world.

Economics

In economics, the mainstream neoliberal view is that unregulated capitalism is self-optimising. However, the unfettered application of the neoliberal Holy Trinity - deregulation, privatisation and globalisation - over the last three decades has all but brought the world to its knees. Deregulation – by removing all constraints on finance capital and speculation - has created a string of speculative booms and busts each more serious than its predecessor, an on-going series of stock market swings, panics and crashes - including the global financial crisis itself. Privatisation has cannibalised huge swathes of the world’s social and economic infrastructure. And - under the banner of comparative advantage - globalisation has impoverished both the developed and the underdeveloped world in a global race to the bottom.

The driving force behind all these developments is the capitalist corporation. Corporations don’t need or want regulations and controls; they don’t care about industrial safety or the environment. Corporations exist simply to maximise profits, dumping their wastes off onto the rest of society or the environment wherever they can, like cost externalising machines. Today, more than ever, corporations are highly mechanised, automated and mobile. They don’t need skilled workers anymore, instead just cheap, docile workers, easily acquired by relocating to parts of the world with plentiful supplies of cheap labour, to countries with no regulations or controls, to places that don’t care about decent living standards, industrial safety or the environment.

For three decades, neoliberal governments have encouraged globalisation, breaking down all barriers to the free flow of international capital, elevating so called free trade over fair trade, impoverishing workers everywhere, deskilling, casualising and relocating jobs, undermining trade union power, eroding progressive social and economic reforms which took many decades of struggle and sacrifice to achieve, delivering nothing more than a global race to the bottom. Workers in the third world haven’t fared any better either, with one low wage area being played off against another. And now, with the global financial crisis, the world is going through the worst market failure since the Great Depression, millions of workers around the world losing their jobs, their homes and their pensions – their very futures.

It seems fairly clear that the only thing that unregulated capitalism optimises is the corporate bottom line, albeit through ever increasing economic catastrophes, destroying wealth like some form of dog-eat-dog social Darwinism, whilst at the same time achieving an ever increasing concentration and accumulation of capital. The surviving Wall Street banks are bigger and stronger than ever, and in four years the Obama administration hasn't succeeded with a single prosecution.  

Nutrition

The mainstream view on nutrition is that obesity is caused by too much fatty food and too little exercise. Fatty foods elevate cholesterol and cholesterol causes heart disease. Individuals must achieve a balance between calories in and calories out. This is the mainstream view and there’s not a shred of evidence to support it. Western societies have been lowering their fatty food and cholesterol levels for decades but heart disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity continue to increase – in some cases reaching epidemic levels. The truth is that calories don’t count – but the type of foods they come from do. Carbohydrates make you fat and being fat is a major risk factor for all the above diseases. Consequently carbohydrates also make you ill.      

Climate Change

Again without a shred of evidence, the mainstream view rests on an incoherent concept of global temperature. But temperature is just not the sort of thing that can be averaged. Hence, global temperature doesn't exist except as a meaningless statistic. Nevertheless the mainstream asserts that carbon dioxide is causing runaway global warming - whatever that may be. The real problem is that the global warming faction has hijacked the environmental movement which has traditionally been concerned with improving public amenity including clean air, clean water and open, public spaces; saving natural habitat, ecosystems and forests, and making corporations accountable for their waste. All this has now been rendered subservient to global warming.

But reduced to essentials, global warming boils down to the commodification of carbon - carbon credits turned into commodities and traded in capitalist markets like oil or iron. But all the evidence from Europe shows that carbon trading schemes don't reduce emissions one jot. They do however allow big polluters to carry on as if nothing had happened. The commodification of carbon was invented by Enron. It was successfully marketed by Enron to environmentalists at Kyoto. Enron was destroyed shortly thereafter by its corrupt and incompetent management   

Cosmology

The mainstream Big Bang Theory (BBT) unites science and the Bible. According to BBT, the universe began as a single point particle which instantaneously expanded very much faster than the speed of light about thirteen billion years ago. It has been expanding ever since - just as the first millennium theologians theorised.  BBT is comparable to the Ptolemaic theory of planetary orbits. The theory can explain the orbits, but only if some very weird planetary movements are allowed, speeding up, slowing down, reversing etc. To 'save the appearances' the Ptolemaic system was rendered ever more complex with the introduction of increasingly intricate epicycles - cycles within cycles. Of course the weirdness came from the fact that the Earth is not at the centre of things. Once Copernicus dared to point this out, and Newton developed his theory of gravity, planetary orbits became really simple, elegant ellipses.

BBT again puts the Earth at the centre of an alleged expanding universe. But, as with Ptolemy, every new anomaly forces BBT to introduce ever increasingly complex explanations to again 'save the appearances'. According to the BBT 98% of the universe is missing. With gravity as the driver, there is just not enough matter in the universe to account for its configuration. BBT therefore invents dark matter and the corresponding dark energy to save the day. Neither of these substances have ever been detected, and it is doubtful whether they even exist. They certainly cannot have any of the properties of ordinary matter. So BBT turned to the physicists for help. Particle physics is now searching for what it calls the God particle - the Higgs Boson. And Stephen Hawking is busily trying to understand the mind of God. The Large Hadron Collider has so far found nothing.              

Realism versus Anti-Realism

And, to top it off, anti-realism denies the existence of a mind-independent real world altogether. Social constructivism is one major form of anti-realism which claims that facts, justifications and explanations are all socially constructed. It must be acknowledged that some facts are socially constructed - money is one of them. Clearly money wouldn't exist without society. But fact constructivists claim that all facts are created by society - including facts like rivers and mountains. These facts seemed to exist long before humans. But, according to fact constructivists, they didn't. Human consciousness and language carved these facts from the primeval substance which had no form or structure until human contingent needs and interests intervened and created facts about the world.  This strange philosophy is examined in detail in the Realism versus Anti-Realism post.

Climate Change

The mainstream view on climate change holds that the world is warming up, sea levels are rising, polar ice caps are melting, and all life on Earth is doomed. The cause of global warming is human induced carbon dioxide emissions; this phenomenon is called Anthropogenic Global Warming or AGW. Everyone knows that the oil companies have either paid or duped anyone who denies this thesis.

The idea of Global Temperature

This attitude is unfortunate because, in truth, climate scientists do not have a clue what global temperature is, nor is the idea even remotely coherent. First, no single number exists that can stand for global temperature; clearly the temperature is hotter at the equator than the poles, hotter in summer than winter, hotter at midday than midnight and so on. Is ‘global temperature’ an average of some kind? The most common average is the ‘mean’ where one adds up a series of numbers and divides the result by the number of numbers. For example, finding the average height of a set of persons in this way is easy. Temperature however is not like height; temperature is an ‘intensive’ property of matter. We cannot add intensive properties together in any simple way because they are not quantities like height. Intensive simply means not related to the quantity of matter. Temperature is similar to a percentage.

For example, some mixture may contain various constituents of different sizes, and some substance S may be present in the various constituents in varying percentages. We cannot find the 'global' percentage of S in the total mixture by simply adding the percentages of S in the constituents. To be an accurate measure of the ‘global’ percentage, we must weight each percentage by the relative size of its respective constituent. Temperatures, like percentages, are not additive. Globally, then, if scientists have to weight temperatures in order for them to be significant, what are the weights? Do they weight the Indian ‘temperature’ by the share of India in the global land mass, surface area or what? And if so, how do they arrive at an ‘Indian temperature’ to start with; presumably by carrying out the above procedure at ever smaller scales.

In practice, we do nothing of the kind. Virtually ignoring two thirds of the Earth’s surface area – the oceans – some scientists simply add the adjusted temperatures gleaned from about 4000 stations mostly in North America and Europe and calculate the resulting mean to be the measure of global warming. This measure is a meaningless statistic. No derived statistic can represent the infinity of numbers that make up the Earth's multi-dimensional temperature field. And climate change, if affected by temperature at all, is always local. For example, glaciers melt for many reasons; one of them may be changes in their local temperature field. However, wherever scientists measure local temperature fields around melting glaciers there have been no discernible changes in the field.

So what is climate change? What is the link to weather? Scientists have known for some time that predicting even short term (two or three days) weather is a risky business. They even know why – weather models have chaotic properties. Small changes in initial values can quickly accumulate into large differences in the final values - the so-called butterfly effect. These differences quickly grow to be so large such that sensible weather predictions are difficult if not impossible.

Climate is not weather, although obviously linked to weather. If a region has a dry climate, then one can safely infer that, on a day-to-day weather basis, it does not rain much. If weather is fractal, then data derived from fractal series is also fractal. We cannot predict climate using any data series based on fractal weather series.

Climate models

Many climate models do not even attempt to do this since meteorological weather data has only been around for a few years. Instead, they rely on tree ring or ice core data going back thousands of years. Modellers process this data using a sophisticated statistical technique called principal components analysis to derive the ‘hidden’ causes of variation in the data. The hidden cause in this case is global temperature.

The idea is similar to that used in IQ testing where statisticians give batteries of verbal and non-verbal reasoning tests to people, especially kids and job interviewees. They then subject the results to a principal components analysis and the outcome measures an alleged hidden variable called intelligence. This was the basis of the old UK 11+ education system where the government sorted kids according to their test results, at age 11, into grammar school streams and secondary modern streams. Grammar school kids went on to university and secondary modern kids went into the factories and the infantry. The government abolished this system because Cyril Burt, whose advice underpinned the system, had faked his analysis of sets of twins. Burt claimed dishonestly that nature was stronger than nurture.

Talking of faked data, when unknown sources leaked the climate change emails from East Anglia a few years ago, it emerged that several climate scientists had attempted to subvert the peer review process, to ‘doctor’ the data sets, and to questionably modify the statistical techniques underlying the Mann climate model. This model had become famous from the publicity around Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Gore’s graphic featured the time trend of the Mann model in the shape of a 'hockey stick' with the handle horizontally covering the last one thousand years; finally reaching the blade which turns up sharply in the 20th century. Gore’s hockey stick graphic quickly became the icon of the AGW movement. This affair was remarkable because the hockey stick showed no signs of the medieval ice-age. Until then, climate scientists had generally accepted the presence of a well recorded medieval ice-age.

Climate modellers fiercely opposed the release of their publicly funded data, and for good reason, redoing the correlations without the questionable series and statistical procedures caused the hockey stick to disappear, and the medieval ice-age to reappear. For a full account of this extraordinary tale see: 'The Hockey Stick Illusion - Climategate and the corruption of Science', Montford, A. W. 2010. It turns out that the sharp upturn of the blade of the hockey stick was simply an artefact of the unconventional statistical procedure used; random data could cause the same effect. Climate scientists quietly buried the hockey stick.

Unpredictable data and fudged statistical techniques lower confidence in the results. So too do the actual models used. Weather and climate are complex systems involving multiple interacting feedbacks - positive and negative. Positive feedback causes the value of one or several variables in the system to grow without bound, whereas negative feedbacks cause one or several variables in the system to diminish up to the point where they disappear. An example of a positive feedback: warmer climate caused by carbon dioxide causes the oceans to warm thereby releasing the carbon dioxide dissolved in them causing greater global warming. An example of negative feedback: warmer climate caused by carbon dioxide causes greater evaporation from the land and the oceans which cause more cloud cover. More cloud cover lightens the Earth’s albedo and thereby reflects solar radiation back into space leading to global cooling. The critical point is that none of the climate models currently in use model the effect of water vapour or clouds on global temperatures.

The Earth is not self-regulating

The reference to interacting feedbacks may have given the impression that the Earth is homeostatic like the Gaia hypothesis asserts. But the Earth is not self-regulating, and nor can it be with tectonic plates moving about randomly all over the place in geographic time. Incidentally, the AGW hypothesis so excites James Lovelock, author of the Gaia Hypothesis, that he sees nuclear energy as "... a wondrous gift of pollution free energy." The Revenge of Gaia, Lovelock, J. page 119, 2007. Those who would go down this road are treading a dangerous path indeed especially in the light of the recent Japanese nuclear meltdown at Fukishima.

As the tectonic plates move around, the relative composition of land and sea surface area slowly but continuously changes. Consequently, the albedo and therefore the climate of the Earth continuously changes as well. Indeed, in the Earth's 4.5 billion year history there have been several snowball earth super ice ages lasting millions of years when global temperatures have been so low that ice and snow up to a kilometre thick at the equator covered the entire planet. We recovered only because of shifting tectonic plates and greenhouse gases emitted from erupting volcanoes.

In short, no matter what we think, the Earth will continue to do what it has been doing for billions of years utterly oblivious to the existence of humanity or anything else for that matter. The really sad thing is that global warming has hijacked the environmental movement. Climate change has subsumed all the great struggles to protect the forests, to protect public amenity and to get the corporations to clean up their own mess. The only major policy ‘victory’, pyrrhic to say the least, occurred when the government introduced a carbon tax. Within a few years, the government will turn the tax into a market-based cap and trading system. But such market systems while useless at reducing emissions, are brilliant at providing escape hatches for the big polluters. Enron, by the way, is responsible for the idea of carbon as a tradable commodity. They sold it to the world at Kyoto. A few years later, the same corrupt management drove Enron into bankruptcy and collapse.