Ceterum autem censeo, Carthaginem esse delendam

Cato the Elder came from a humble background. Born around 230 B.C.E., his ancestors had made names for themselves in military service but nobody in his family had a reputation for public service. Cato was the one who, after attracting the notice of powerful people, was brought to Rome where he stayed in politics the rest of his life. He was a man on the move, a novus homo. He was a strict Roman, he was old school and he accomplished a lot in his long life.

In his 70s, Cato was sent to Carthage to arbitrate a regional conflict. Cato was so taken back by the wealth he saw in Carthage that he became convinced that Carthage was a grave and imminent threat to the safety of Rome and must be attacked at once. From that point forward, whenever he gave a public speech he ended by saying "Carthago delenda est" -- Carthage must be destroyed.

It didn't matter what the topic of the speech was. The farmers this year have brought in record harvests and we should write a letter of praise, "Ceterum autem censeo, Carthaginem esse delendam" (and furthermore, Carthage must be destroyed). I am sure this new public building will contribute to the health of the state, and furthermore Carthage must be destroyed. I would like to thank my hosts for this gracious dinner, and furthermore Carthage must be destroyed.

Cato was so convinced that Carthage was a threat that whatever he was doing, he felt it somehow logically tied back to Carthage.

Nothing else really mattered if Carthage destroyed Rome.

Cato is best known for "Carthago delenda est", but he did a lot more than that. He also was the first person to write a history of Italy in Latin. He wrote a book on how to farm that you can still buy on Amazon, explaining everything from the soil to the market to dealing with the weather.

Back then, the climate was basically the same back then in Rome as it is today. Perhaps wetter. As the climate changed over the centuries, farmers produced more or less food, eventually leading to all sorts of problems for the Romans in the late empire period. The role of changing weather patterns and climate on ancient civilizations and how they evolve, or fail to, is fascinating.

Which brings us to what's driving me nuts.

Several years ago, I'm reading a science article about some esoteric topic, say tree frogs. (Most mainstream science reporting is total crap. [Insert long explanation here] This tree frog example is allegorical, not factual). At the end, the researchers noted that Global Warming is changing the frog's habitat and this could cause the species to be lost.

This seemed like a reasonable thing -- if things get warmer certainly organisms that depend on temperature will be affected.

Later that month, I read another such article -- also biology-related. Then there was another, and another. Then there was a deluge of articles. From reading these articles, the subtext was clear: global warming was a real and imminent threat in some fashion or another to the entire planet's ecosystem.

At this point my bullshit alarm went off. Sometimes I have trouble tuning it, but this was a pretty clear signal. My interest was piqued.

So I started researching Anthropocentric Global Warming. I found that the more I researched the science and the public debate, the more skeptical I became about the quality of the discussion. Not the truthfulness of the claims or counter-claims. I became convinced that there was little honest skepticism within the clique of scientists doing climate research. I was perfectly happy saying I didn't know what was going on with the climate. Climate scientists did not seem to be able to be this open-minded. It seemed that by the time you took a role in the climate research community, you already knew what was happening. Your job was just to continue to gather data to support it.

Later on, as we all know, the hacked emails showed some small number of scientists trying to rig editorial boards, shunning critics, fuming at criticism, withholding data, and all the other little petty things that people do when they're thinking politically instead of scientifically.

I became convinced that the debate was terribly flawed.

I am not trying to beat the dead horse of arguing about global warming. Really I'm not. This article has a deeper purpose, so bear with me even if you are the most avid supporter of AGW.

Things got even weirder.

Scientists started using the term "Climate Change" instead of "Global Warming"

Now every article I read ends in something like "and scientists feel that Climate Change is one of the responsible factors" or "Smith noted that Climate Change will continue to threaten the turtles habitat" or whatever. People even note how many research articles include links to Climate Change research, mentioned Climate Change, or implicitly accept Anthropocentric Climate Change. This is supposed to be a sign of the seriousness of Climate Change.

Climate change is everywhere.

Carthago delenda est.

Which brings me back to evolution.

What IS evolution, anyway? Wiki defines it as "Evolution is the change in the inherited traits of a population of organisms through successive generations."

I'm okay with that. It's not provable science in the strict prepositional "if A, then B" sense, but it represents a state of affairs that I believe to be true. I have grown up a lot since I was ten years old.

Just to repeat, evolution is not a theory like you see in physics that can be proven true or false. It's a general category of theories, all which deal with various pieces of how life changes over time. Some of these theories may be able to be proven one way or another. Some will be proven wrong. Some will be tweaked. We do not know everything about evolution because we've only been studying it around 150 years.

But generally, yes, makes sense to me. I agree that the title "Evolution" covers all of these theories. I also believe that most of these theories have been or will be proven true. I think evolution is an awesome thing to study. What I object to is the liberal use of the title "evolution" to describe and obscure anything you feel like saying.

Richard Dawkins is a popular writer. As i understand his works, he uses "evolution" to describe how religion may have evolved in human culture. Some writers use evolution to show us how human mating has become what it is. Some writers explain how corporations have "evolved" from the early days of barter. It seems that anything that changes over time is considered to be "evolving".

Worst still, it also seems that scientists can take a word like "evolution", pull apart various aspects and sub-theories, mix in a little imagination, and then expand at length on how "evolution" might explain everything from God to the Income Tax.

Poppycock.

Take a really smart person, give them an intractable problem, and ask them to take a stab at an answer. What do you get? A lot of scientific speculation, that's what. Creative answers based on shared beliefs about things that are still unknown.

As it turns out, we already have a great word for shared creative beliefs about things that are still unknown. It's called "religion"

I'm not saying Dawkins is wrong -- hell if I know how people became convinced about gods. I can certainly talk about God in the philosophical sense, and i think it's an important metaphysical topic, but I don't think anybody knows what humans thought of deities 400 thousand years ago. If they do, it's the first I've heard of it.

Dawkins is creatively speculating, pulling little anecdotal pieces of evidence here and there that supports his speculation.

I really, really love reading articles like this. It is fascinating to see what really smart people think about such difficult problems. If they're good writers, all the better -- I get to be one of the "in crowd", sitting in a bar having a beer with the best minds in the world while we talk about space-time, evolution, sociology, or any of a hundred other fascinating topics. It's like, for a little bit, I'm at the forefront of science, hearing about what the new stuff coming out is going to be before it comes out.

Very cool.

But we must remember what it is we consume. It's shared creative speculation by some of the smartest people we have using all the information in their field. It may have a lot of big words and contain all sorts of fascinating stories and observations, but it also may be very wrong. We don't know. After all, that's one of the reasons it's so much fun to read.

And let's be honest here, there is quite a bit of money and notoriety in it for the scientists as well. That's not saying they are crooked. Not at all. Just that it's not always clear whether you are helping them become wealthy and famous or helping their noble cause. Or both. Or neither. Motivations are unclear, and there can be subtle and powerful conflicts of interest that are not apparent to the consumer.

To be blunt, at the end of the day, epistemologically there's little difference between reading this kind of writing and listening to the local shaman explain why the river god has caused the floods due to a lack of sufficient sacrifices and offerings. The shaman was wrong, but he also lived ten thousand years ago. Somebody sometime is going to be looking back on us from ten thousand years in the future. I can guarantee you we're going to look the same way.

When I realized I only had a week to finish my research to debate Evolution with David, I tried to find the best sources I could. An older person at my church gave me a copy of The Genesis Flood, a detailed apology for the Biblical notion of how the world came to be. And there it was, in black and white! Pictures of human footprints next to dinosaurs, the reason we don't have dinosaurs (They couldn't fit on the Ark? Been a long time ago). Heck, this thing was written by real scientists. With footnotes and everything!

I am no longer ten years old, and I am embarrassed by this entire story. But at the time, there were really smart people with all sorts of credentials using big words telling me something I already knew was true. It wasn't like I was asking a bunch of questions or double-checking the details.

As I got older, I learned to ask questions -- especially of the things I felt strongly to be true. Those were the things I usually ended up being the most wrong about. It appears my BS detector has a tendency to automatically adjust itself downward without my noticing it.

I read a story today, "Arctic explorers get nasty surprise: rain"

In what looks to be another sign the Arctic is heating up quickly, British explorers in Canada's Far North reported on Tuesday that they had been hit by a three-minute rain shower over the weekend ... The rain fell on the team's ice base off Ellef Rignes island, about 3,900 km (2,420 miles) north of the Canadian capital, Ottawa ... "It's definitely a shocker ... the general feeling within the polar community is that rainfall in the high Canadian Arctic in April is a freak event," said Pen Hadow, the team's expedition director ... "Scientists would tell us that we can expect increasingly to experience these sorts of outcomes as the climate warms..."

Now I'm not an arctic explorer, or even a world-renowned scientist, but I'll give you a thousand dollars if you can show me detailed records from the last couple thousand years concerning 3-minute rain showers in the arctic. And no, a century or two isn't going to work, nor will measuring the temperature 3000 miles away and guessing rainfall. The statement was about rainfall, and I'd like to see the data, please.

Homeboy is not falling for this again.

Just like the problem with the word "evolution", when we moved from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change" we've broadened the terminology so much that it can freaking apply to anything.

Epistemologically (epistemology is about what you can know and what you can't know), we either agree with the idea that the climate is changing or not. I know of nobody in their right mind that thinks the climate is not changing, so we all agree with climate change. The only question is, what does "climate change" mean? It changes. We all agree. Now it's one thing. Later on it will be something else.

I can use "climate change" to apply to just about anything that involves temperature, humidity, rainfall, snowfall, wind, barometric pressure, sunlight, diurnal rate, adiabatic lapse rate, tornadoes, thunderstorms, hurricanes, beach erosion, tides, salinity of the ocean, migration patterns of swallows (African or European)...

I can go on. "climate change" is the ultimate wild-card.

It's also a hot-button political issue, by the way, and people feel very strongly about it, including many of the scientists studying it.

Whenever you have the same people that feel passionately about something who are also supposed to be dispassionately and intellectually evaluating it -- better pay close attention. Bias can sneak in a million different ways, and it happens to everybody. This isn't a situation where you can somehow train yourself to the point where the bias is not there. Oddly, the more educated and elite you are, the less likely you are to be able to see your own bias. Lawyers and doctors already know this -- never have yourself as a client.

So now whenever I read anything involving research and walking outside, I get to "climate change" at some point in the article. I'm willing to bet a huge number of news stories, papers and research reports will continue mention "climate change". After all, it's so poorly defined it works for anything. Simply drop it in there towards the end with the rest of the factors. Makes you feel good to be bringing it up, puts a little bit extra out there for the good cause, and after all, it is a really important thing to be reminding people about.

Nothing else really matters if climate change destroys the ecosystem.

So, for me, "climate change" makes for a nice marker to look for where scientists or reporters are slipping up, perhaps being a little lazy. Taking shortcuts. Pitching softballs to each other to hit out of the park. If the tree frog is dying off because of poor rainfall, then let's see the rainfall stats -- as much as you can -- and track those against tree frog populations over time. Or let's capture some frogs and raise them in various rainfall conditions. Let's take one variable -- rainfall -- and change it while we hold the other variables the same. Multivariate analysis is cool, but there are a lot of alligators in there which we'll save for another day.

I hope some of this is sounding familiar to anybody who's been in a high school science class.

So while I believe in natural selection, and in genetic drift, I do not believe in "evolution" -- it is a fun word but has so many meanings as to make it useless. Likewise while I believe in the absorption spectrum of CO2 and the other greenhouse gases, and I believe in humans changing the environment around them, I do not believe in "Climate Change". It is a silly phrase that cannot be discussed at all with any sort of meaning. It gets in the way of discussion and research instead of assisting it. And while I love listening and reading really smart people tackle the problems of our age, I do not confuse that with "science" -- the application of abduction, deduction, and induction in a linked fashion to allow us to understand and manipulate the universe.

This article is not about evolution, climate change, God, or religion, even though I use them as examples. It's about the standards we critically need to apply when conducting science and making public policy that involves science. If you got emotional about one of these topics and stopped reading or posted some snarky commment then you missed the point -- and you are demonstrating mine. There is a deep systemic problem here. It's mostly hidden, and we only see it when the stakes are high, such as happens in these topics. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Ask questions, look for bias, and challenge assumptions. Always.

Furthermore, Carthage must be destroyed.