An unimportant moment in science history, but perhaps a lesson in “normal science” that will shut down Cuccinelli’s witch hunt

A physicist named Hal Lewis who doesn’t know the first thing about climate science has resigned from the American Physical Society because he doesn’t know the first thing about climate science.

The anti-science crowd has, with unintentional irony, compared his words of resignation to “a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door.”  That laughable assertion might be a half-truth, I suppose, if scientific views were no different from religious ones, which, I suppose, for the disinformers they are.  And it might even be a quarter truth if Luther hadn’t actually included any theses in his letter but instead cited, say, the work of Nostradamus in defending his critique of the Catholic Church.  But it isn’t even be a semi-hemi-demi truth because it won’t be leading to a major new science religion of Lewisism, since, of course, that’s not how science works.

As we’ll see, Lewis couldn’t even bother himself to learn the basics of climate science and he apparently doesn’t know or talk to very many if any climate scientists.  Indeed, this whole story isn’t terribly newsworthy:  Lewis isn’t even the first physicist born in 1923 who was a longtime member of the JASON defense advisory group, who studied nuclear winter, and who has said absurdly unscientific things about climate science.  That honor belongs to Freeman Dyson.

UPDATE:  To see the APS’s reply, click here.

But it did inspire me to break out my copy of Thomas Kuhn’s landmark book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which is marked up from my MIT undergraduate physics days and still has some amazingly relevant insights for today, as we’ll see.  It was Kuhn, after all, who originated the term “normal science,” a term confusionists and Tea Party extremists like Viriginia AG Ken Cuccinelli are, well, confused about.

If you want some backstory on Lewis and the APS, read our good bunny friend at Rabett Run, “Dear fellow member of the American Physical Society.”

Lewis’s letter itself is almost a satire of one of those “when I was a kid” reminisces of how great things used to be when people (physicists, in this case) were pure and poor:

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Texas oil companies Tesoro and Valero are attempting to hamstring their clean energy competitors in California with a job-killing dirty energy initiative called Prop 23. CAP’s Rebecca Lefton and Jorge Madrid have the story.

New findings from Next 10, an independent, nonpartisan organization, document California’s global leadership in the clean-tech sector and the striking economic benefits of a low carbon economy.

In the first half of 2010, California attracted 40 percent of global clean-tech venture capital, totaling more than $11.6 billion in investment.  The 2010 California Clean Energy Index also finds that California leads the nation in clean technology patents, including 39 percent of all solar energy patents, and 20 percent of all advanced battery technology patents.

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Solar cycle 24 revs up, though changes in the sun are increasingly a bit player in the global warming trend

The 2000s were  the hottest decade in recorded history by far “” even though we’re at “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.”  The 2000s were a full 0.2°C warmer than the 1990s, which of course had been the hottest decade on record, 0.14°C warmer than 1980s (according to the dataset that best tracks planetary warming).  Hmm.  It’s almost like the warming is accelerating.

Yet when the anti-science crowd isn’t perversely spending their time trying to stop all efforts to cut global warming pollution that might slow warming, they are perversely trying to convince the public and policymakers we’re not warming at all.  That’s why many of them have been rooting for this deep solar minimum to become a Maunder Minimum (“also known as the prolonged sunspot minimum”), to mute the warming signal and hence the motivation for action for a few more years.  Yes, they have a self-destructive streak.

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Is progressive messaging a “massive botch”? Part 6

Here’s the narrative you hear everywhere: President Obama has presided over a huge expansion of government, but unemployment has remained high. And this proves that government spending can’t create jobs.

Here’s what you need to know: The whole story is a myth. There never was a big expansion of government spending. In fact, that has been the key problem with economic policy in the Obama years: we never had the kind of fiscal expansion that might have created the millions of jobs we need.

Ask yourself: What major new federal programs have started up since Mr. Obama took office? Health care reform, for the most part, hasn’t kicked in yet, so that can’t be it. So are there giant infrastructure projects under way? No. Are there huge new benefits for low-income workers or the poor? No. Where’s all that spending we keep hearing about? It never happened.

The second most disappointing surprise about President Obama (beyond his back-burnering the climate bill) has been that he is dreadful at messaging.  That is driven home for the umpteenth time in a superlative NYT piece by Nobelist Paul Krugman, “Hey, Small Spender.”

Who would have guessed that such a great speech-maker would be such a dud when it comes to the basics of developing two simple, memorable messages (a positive one for what he’s doing, a negative one for what the other side is doing) and repeating it endlessly?

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