Sokal so good; on targets, reports, fantasies…

The “keeping anthropogenic global warming (global average) to less than 1.5 degrees above pre-Industrial levels” at COP21 was never a serious proposal, surely?  I mean, you’d have to be totally fricking scientifically illiterate to… oh, wait.

But look, even if the policy-makers put it in there to keep the AOSIS (fn1)  crowd from vetoing the agreement, then the scientists themselves ought to know better, and tell the UNFCCC lot that it is a waste of time and bandwidth to study ‘how to hit 1.5 degrees”?  Or would that be too fraught? Is this just a Nekkid Emperor shituation, independent of it being  a nice little job creation scheme and prestige-arena for some social scientists?

I don’t know. But I DO know the last time what happened the last time some social scientists didn’t understand basic physics and ignored shit.

Hilarity and egg on face is what happened. It was called the ‘Sokal Hoax‘-

The Sokal affair, also called the Sokal hoax,^[1] was a publishing hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor atNew York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal’s intellectual rigor and, specifically, to investigate whether “a leading North American journal of cultural studies – whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross – [would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions”.^[2]

The article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”,^[3] was published in the Social Text spring/summer 1996 “Science Wars” issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.^[4][5] On the day of its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax, identifying it as “a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense … structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist academics] he could find about mathematics and physics.”^[2]

The hoax sparked a debate about the scholarly merit of humanistic commentary about the physical sciences; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; academic ethics, including whether Sokal was wrong to deceive the editors and readers of Social Text; and whether Social Text had exercised appropriate intellectual rigor.