Overview

This website is formatted as a book to emphasise the need for knowledge to be definitively differentiated from belief, if social policy, is ever to be compliant with reality.  The Foreword recalls that my earliest attempt to satisfy this need was to associate craftsmanship, science and technology with knowledge of reality, and everything else with the debate of belief/counter-belief to one or other belief-consensus irrespective of reality; but that this differentiation by association failed to differentiate knowledge from belief definitively.

As to the absence of any earlier attempt at this differentiation, I recognise in the Preface that the terms ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’ have been used synonymously in everyday speech since time immemorial, and have been elided/conflated throughout the history of academia; that nobody had previously recognised debate to be indicative of an absence of the knowledge which would terminate it; that I have now differentiated the knowledge/belief dichotomy for the first time ever by showing that belief is transformed to positive or negative knowledge by evaluation of its compliance or non-compliance with the reality common to all; that belief remains belief if it is beyond this reality-evaluation in principle or pro tem practice; and that rationality per se cannot produce knowledge from belief, however long belief/counter-belief is debated and however often a belief-consensus is thus transiently adjusted. 

With knowledge of marine pollution prevention and response being the exemplary subject of this website, my Acknowledgements are for those who assisted in acquiring it by the experimentation which reality-evaluates cause-effect hypotheses (beliefs) to positive or negative knowledge by isolating the hypothetical cause of the effect from all other potential causes, this being my definition of Scientific Method, while I define pseudoscience as belief-consensus by its absence of the experimentation which would reality-evaluate its  belief-selected cause-effect relationships to positive or negative knowledge. 

Thus, this website shows that environmentalist pseudoscience has been suppressing environmental science since the mid 1960s, while showing that the presence or absence of my newly defined reality-evaluation resolves epistemology itself, by not only differentiating the knowledge/belief dichotomy, but also those of truth/falsehood, wisdom/folly, right/wrong, good/bad, science/pseudoscience and commonsense/nonsense for the first time ever.  Thus, it shows that whatever the policy-area, my newly definitive differentiation makes the implementation of reality-refuted beliefs inexcusable, and makes inadvisable the implementation of beliefs prior to their reality-validation. Thus, policy should be knowledge-only rather than belief-only, these terms denoting the absence of belief or of knowledge.

On this basis, the preamble to the knowledge repository of this website shows that the knowledge currently suppressed by belief, could have been improving the cost-effectiveness of marine pollution prevention and response from the mid 1970s onwards, such knowledge having been publicly available through successive R&D reports and two books thereon; that this knowledge was subsequently differentiated from its counter-beliefs in a series of weekly articles in the Newsletter of the International Spill Control Organisation (ISCO) from November 2011 to August 2014, in seven parallel documents to the Technical Group (TG) of the Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC) of the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), in two summary documents to the MEPC itself, and in two documents specific to the concerns of the International Oil Pollution Compensation Fund (IOPCF) Assembly and Executive Committee, these four documents being at Annex I to this website for convenient reference to the knowledge repository which conclusively supports them from within it.

Thus, this website retrieves and collates the previously suppressed knowledge of marine pollution-  response in its newly created knowledge repository from which a knowledge-only contingency plan is derived, and from which in turn, incident-specific response plans are derivable for all future incidents, provided policy-makers accept knowledge, reject beliefs already refuted, and suspend beliefs not yet reality-validated or reality-refuted.  The beliefs of particular concern to this website are that accidental releases and operational discharges from ships cause species-extinction/ecological-disaster, that combustion of ‘fossil’ fuel causes anthropogenic global warming. and that emissions of sulphur and nitrogen oxides are toxic regardless of exposure-concentration, despite the first having been reality-refuted in the mid 1970s, the second being a belief yet to be reality-validated, and the third being  a belief yet to be reality-validated by exposure-concentration measurement for specific locations. 

The summary documents presented to the MEPC and to the IOPCF are at Annex I to this website, those presented to the TG having been omitted to reduce repetition, while the references cited in my first two books are at Annex II to indicate the context within which the repository knowledge was acquired.  I intend to report progress towards knowledge-only marine policy adoption at Annex III.  I judge the repetition within this website and its Annex I documents, to be a necessary minimum, given the continuous and ubiquitous repetition of the environmentalist belief-consensus which has treated all environmental knowledge as the counter-belief of a dismissible minority since the mid 1960s.

However, with my newly definitive knowledge/belief differentiation having shown the preference for belief over the knowledge which refutes it to be the irrationality of definitive madness, this website records that while there was thus no overt dissent when my documents on the need for knowledge-acceptance/belief-rejection were presented to meetings of the TG, the MEPC or the IOPCF, there has as yet, been no overt preference for knowledge over belief at the level of seniority above the delegates to these meetings.  Nonetheless, this website can already record that this preference is detectable in the 2015 Report of the MEPC Correspondence Group on Guidance for Dispersant Use; and that this detectability augurs well for the current stage of my campaign for knowledge-only policy in all aspects of response to accidental releases, operational discharges, and emissions from ships; and in all other fields in which belief is currently preferred to knowledge.  Readers may conclude from this website, that if the UN system continues to prefer belief to the knowledge which refutes it, and to prefer belief/counter-belief debate to the knowledge which terminates it, its presumed objective of global government will never be achieved.  Indeed, how will individual Member States ever resolve their internal and external difficulties while preferring belief/ counter-belief debate to conclusive knowledge?  This website thus encourages its readers to recognise that policy-making is everywhere dependent on belief-consensus; that belief ought to be replaced with knowledge wherever and whenever possible; and that where and when such knowledge is unavailable, this pro tem unavailability ought to be recognised and policy-making suspended until the relevant knowledge is acquired – the true ‘precautionary principle’ being to act on knowledge – not on belief.