Equilibrium-obsession syndrome

The main “intellectual fallacy” dominating climate alarmist’s ideas is the notion of a natural equilibria. It assumes our current climate is in equilibrium. That any climate change must be bad and man-made (upsets the equilibrium). That energy systems should be some variation of imaginary perpetual motion machines (they call it “renewable”, and say it makes “free” energy). The climate scare rename from "global warming" to: “climate change” was because it's the “change” that really scares. These people are afraid to stray from an imaginary stasis of equilibria. It’s an ideal or template they think all things should be in thrall to. They are not so much environmentalists, more “equilibrilists”. We see it in their neo-Malthusian economic suggestions too. It perfectly explains their hostility to none-CO2 emitting nuclear power as well. Many such people are called environmentalists, and may use that term for themselves. But anyone who prefers wind-turbines and solar farms to nature has travelled very far away from loving their environment.

I medicalized it by post-pending "syndrome" because it's become a pervasive pathological condition. These ideas are genuinely harmful to our fellows.

Notes

1. Unfortunately, for me, the term “equilibrist” is already in use and it means a circus performer who keeps things in balance during performance.
   equilibrilist seems to be some kind of TMed product.
2. “intellectual fallacy” = a wrong system of thought which dominates thinking. Examples: Marxism, Freudism, neo-Malthusianism. It’s basic precepts are taken for granted. It cannot be seen, by its believers, as a fallacy. It’s understood as “how the world works”. In this case as “how the world should work”
3. When I talk of neo-Malthusianism I refer to a general limits obsession in economics. To sustainable economics, scarcity thinking, and other systems which relegate human welfare behind equilibria concerns.

Scientific Consensus.

171 ya: Dr Ignaz Semmelweis makes hand-washing mandatory for obstetricians at Vienna General Hospital. The incidence of puerperal fever, a mass murderer of mothers, drops by 90% overnight, vindicating Semmelweis’ hunch that iatrogenic contagion is to blame. His students soon replicate this miracle in maternity wards throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire and publish their results in the scientific press.

153 ya: Almost two decades have passed since the empirical confirmation of Semmelweis’ ideas, but mainstream pathology perseverates in ignoring them, sticking to the ancient and evidence-free consensus on miasmas, ’humoral imbalance’ and leeching. Semmelweis himself has been vilified and hounded from his job by the medical establishment, to whom the very suggestion that their hands might be vectors of disease was an affront, coming as it did from a Jew with a low h-index. Unemployed, angry and deeply depressed by the needless deaths of thousands of women a year, Semmelweis is committed to an insane asylum. The guards welcome him with a savage beating. His injuries fail to heal and within a fortnight, at the age of 47, he has died of blood poisoning.

by Brad Keyes (part reblog from)

Hal Lewis. Resignation from The American Physical Society

Sent: Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19 Hal Lewis
From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society
6 October 2010

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence – it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it…

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club.