How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/730
One thing I specifically remember is that one of the panel members (and member of the IPCC) concluded that the attempt by Mann et al. to bury conflicting studies was not successful, as some of those very papers were discussed and cited in the IPCC reports.
More distressing is the overall pattern of behavior, where editorial boards are rigged and scientists just "give up" working in this field. No amount of good papers getting through is going to fix that, unfortunately.
http://climateaudit.org/2009/12/17/climategatekeeping-2/#mor...
It seems to have been included with a dismissive editorial comment ("Michaels says X, but he's wrong"), which was not supported by any literature, and which the authors were not given the chance to respond to before publication. Just mentioning that "it was included" is a bit misleading.
The experiences of John Harrison and the Board of Longitude and the Royal Society, or the initial reception of the work of Barry J. Marshall and Robin Warren around H. Pylori, both come to mind.
Most any large shift can involve overcoming very strongly-held beliefs; of sticking your neck out.
1. Scientists ruin their careers by repeatedly attempting to discredit theories they cannot find the evidence to discredit (or proving claims they cannot find proof to claim). If a truly compelling set of studies discrediting global warming trends came out, you can be sure that many publications would be eager to publish it. This is how science works, and how it has worked historically. It's a surprisingly stable environment of meritocracy. Politics intrude, as in any human endeavor, but we'll get to that in:
2. Differences in opinion in the peer review process are as old as science. That is why there are multiple publications and multiple standards for entering into those publications. The whole notion of "scientific consensus" is built around assumptions like schisms such as this. If everyone agreed about the exact criterion for publication we'd only have a few (perhaps regional) scientific publications (and then we'd truly be in trouble).
3. Science is about consensus, but that implicitly accepts dissent. People argue for awhile, a consensus is formed, and then things blow over. Seldom are careers ruined. For an example, see Einstein's extremely controversial claims that eventually became the next major stepping stone for physics. People violently opposed his propositions at first, and now we look at him is one of the greatest minds in human history.
The difference here is that there are active sources of misinformation trying, for whatever non-scientific reasons, to drum up controversy around the global warming issue of anthropogenicity. This issue is still under active debate and research, but unlike many other subjects in a similar status (e.g., quantum physics) there are "deniers" who will not accept any positive evidence against their claim and will resort to any means, social or otherwise, to make their point of view supreme.
Some might argue this is warranted because climate science is making predictions that require us to radically restructure our industry and energy infrastructures to the tune of massive sums of money. To be honest, I think this complaint is shortsighted. Scientific predictions, even those in the limbo state between "well-accepted" and "just a theory" that we are calling "consensus", have always dictated the allocation of resources. Consider the exorbitant cost of the LHC, which is one of the single greatest achievements of human engineering and physics.
One hopes that the scientific community is sufficiently objective and disciplined to embrace true science when they see it, but that may not be (and has not been) the case always.
Consensus should follow science but consensus cannot create science.
PS: Ask a astronomer happened before the big bang and they will say "we have no clue" but wait or prod for a little bit and each will provide their own little pet theory.
The entire scientific method is built around consensus. As science is a process subject to continual refinement. Almost all propositions put forth by science are ultimately incompletely, inaccurate in some cases, or limited to specific situations we can test.
So, the scientific process (and the method itself) rigorously challenge all propositions. Some simply fall apart under the weight of their own inconsistency, which is what happens when results can not be replicated. But those which can be replicated achieve consensus until a more accurate proposition can be made.
Thusly, Newtonian physics was supplemented and updated by Relativity. Wave-particle duality gradually replaced competing theories. Et cetera. These are consensus opinions. They are not facts. They're the closest models we can get based off our observations. The core of the scientific method is that things are given a continuous opportunity to be falsified.
I always thought it was more like a dinner party where really smart people were usually wrong and engaged in petty groupthink, and the guy who was able to show they were wrong (by reproducible experiment) eventually changed their minds (after quite a bit of trouble, and sometimes by having to wait until they retired or died)
Have you heard of the book "The Structure of Scientific Revolution", probably one of the top ten books on science in the last hundred years? Wasn't the entire point of that book that the way science is sold to kids, ie, a linear process where one good idea comes out and naturally replaces another, was a complete fable? In reality science gets "stuck" in various paradigms and it takes quite a bit of pushing to get them to change.
I've been observing your comments, and I wonder how you make these two things fit together.
I think this is the thing I said. Ideally the change is purely a matter of data being presented and reproduced, but human politics inevitably creep in. But either way, saying "Science is not about consensus!" is at best a misunderstanding and in some cases it's actually a tactic for climate change denialists.
But I'm not sure how my comments require me to reconcile the information you mentioned from "The Structure of Scientific Revolution" with my viewpoint? Could you explain, please?
Here's the thing. There are two concepts here that people mix up quite a bit: the scientific method and the politics of science.
The scientific method is about 1) Abduction. Collecting data and finding patterns. 2) Deduction. Forming the patterns into possible rules, and 3) Induction. Showing through reproducible experimentation that the rules work (or not) and then extrapolating that to the universe at large.
There's not much argument on the scientific method. A lot of philosophers point out it's many problems (induction, for one, is a thorny one. And there's the problem of instrumentation) but in general the scientific method is the light that lets our species see in the darkness. The reason you get into an airplane and trust it is because these three processes have been followed. The reason medicine is fundamentally different than, say, physics, is that in some cases strong correlation between data and induction is all you have -- there is no hypothesis holding it all together (or a very weak one). Different sciences and different subjects have various levels of maturity in all three of these areas. It's important to understand that when talking what the status of those sciences are.
The politics of science is all about consensus, funding, peer reviews, press coverage, political causes, etc. The actual practice of science, because it is full of people and not demi-gods or robots, has a lot of politics built into it.
The interesting questions for any discussion of science are 1) what is the maturity of the science in all 3 of these areas, and 2) are we talking about the scientific method? Or the politics of science? (either one may be important, but you have to know which you're discussing)
Over the years schoolkids are taught some sort of propaganda that mixes all of this into one big pot and stirs in a little hero worship. (I think the hero worship is well-placed. Scientists are some of my greatest heroes). Scientists are these really smart guys who move from one great idea to the next as new information comes out, and science is the process of being the most "enlightened" by being up-to-date on whatever the current consensus is.
But a funny thing happened on the way to nirvana -- Thomas Kuhn started looking at how the work of science gets done. And he found this huge gap between the legend of how science gets done and how it actually gets done. There's really too much there for me to do justice in this format, but as an exaggeration suffice it to say that scientists have turned out to be as human as the rest of us, and consensus is probably very much a lagging indicator of where the actual science is leading. Lagging by perhaps as much as decades.
So when you say "consensus is what separates science from philosophy" or that "science is all about consensus" I find I must interpret that as "the politics of science" for it to make sense to me. But then when you start using that consensus in some sort of functional context just like the real work of science, it doesn't fit any more.
It's probably me. I'm just confused.
And also two orders of magnitude less expensive than proposed global warming solutions:
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-09/defense-lhc http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05...
And how does the LHC affect everyone's daily life? It does not. It's an investment in the future which may pay off. It's almost certain that focus on renewable energy, reduced pollution, and better use of resources will positively affect everyone's everyday life on a 5 year timescale. And I don't just mean "Everyone you know," I mean "Everyone on the planet."
On one hand, we have theory. There's reasonably good theoretical reasons to expect that increasing carbon dioxide should increase global temperatures. However, every good scientist knows not to trust theory too much until it's been verified by experiment, especially when the system in question is so complex.
On the other hand, we have experiment. Unfortunately, we only have a sample size of one, and we don't have a control group. We tried increasing the CO2 emissions, and found that sure enough, the temperature did wind up increasing. But given there's only one planet in the sample and no planets in the control group, we certainly can't eliminate the possibility that there's no causal link. If we forget that we're looking at global temperature vs CO2 concentration and pretend we're looking at a high school kid's science project about whether playing music to plants makes them grow faster, we'd have to say that the experiment lends some support to the hypothesis but is hardly conclusive.
So what can we reasonably conclude? I think the fairest thing we can say is that it's more likely than not that increasing CO2 emissions causes an increase in global temperatures. Anyone who claims the science is "settled" though, the way it's settled for heliocentrism, evolution or relativity, is not much of a scientist.
(I am also, despite years of Year 9 science projects, still unsure whether playing music to plants makes them grow faster.)
Here's what it seems like:
1. The Earth is warming at a slow rate, but at least some of this is natural as temperatures were historically considerably higher, then considerably lower than now.
2. We're still well within the bounds of normal, habitable historical temperatures.
3. Warming definitely occurs at local levels with deforesting, mining, and urbanization. This can decrease condensation and make areas less habitable to life. This can be stabilized to a large extent by planting trees, restoring soil quality, and so on.
4. Carbon dioxide currently makes up 0.3% of the greenhouse gases including water vapor, and about 5% of the non-water vapor greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide increases are lagging temperature increases - suggesting that CO2 is not the biggest culprit of global warming.
5. That said, fossil fuels will gradually be replaced - the two current biggest hurdles are battery quality and political/public fears about nuclear power. Nuclear has gotten incredibly more stable and safe, and the advent of thorium reactors is exciting. Innovations in batteries and transitions to next generation nuclear will reduce fossil fuels a lot.
6. Much of green technology isn't so green - in many areas, turbines and solar panels take enough energy to create that they won't "pay back" their energy cost within 50 years, at which point we'll likely be able to produce energy much cheaper anyways. Some areas are very well suited for green energy - deserts with solar, very windy areas with turbines, hydroelectric on rivers, but they're brute forcing some very Earth-unfriendly alternative energy into areas it's not well suited for. Much of what's called green is marketing.
Personal judgment call based on everything I've seen? Money into R&D for hydrogen power, better batteries, fusion, and safer next-gen nuclear probably goes a lot further towards cleaning up the Earth than the current proposed solutions. Fossil fuels seem like they're going to largely be obsolete within 100-150 years or sooner, and rumors of the Earth's imminent demise appear to be greatly exaggerated.
"2. We're still well within the bounds of normal, habitable historical temperatures."
This is a severe oversimplification, IMHO. Human society is sensitive not just to whether the Earth is overall habitable, but to impacts to the significant "sunk costs" we have in the locations of population centers. It's not much comfort to the people of California if the Earth remains habitable on average when the Sierra snowmelt disappears and the state faces a drought of unprecedented proportions.
"4. Carbon dioxide currently makes up 0.3% of the greenhouse gases including water vapor, and about 5% of the non-water vapor greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide increases are lagging temperature increases - suggesting that CO2 is not the biggest culprit of global warming."
Where do you get that CO2 is 0.3% of greenhouse gases? It's true that water vapor is the largest contributor to the greenhouse effect, but CO2 is next. It accounts for 50% of the non-water greenhouse gases and for way more than 0.3% of the total greenhouse effect. Besides, counting water is a little spurious because the water content of the atmosphere is set by the temperature. Thus, if temperature goes up, water content goes up. So saying that CO2 doesn't matter because water vapor is much more important is wrong, it's precisely the opposite. CO2 matters more because its effect is amplified by water. (Barring controversies about cloud covers.)
CO2 is also the greenhouse gas that has the longest lifetime in the atmosphere. The others (methane, etc) break down a lot quicker.
It's a really long discussion, but our ability to locally adapt to climate change is actually quite good and improving regularly. Temperatures are rising really, really slowly - you can get the 2-3 degrees per 100 years back by planting trees and irrigating. Desalination has come along incredibly fast too. I can go into greater detail if you have specific questions, I know a fair bit about this stuff.
> Where do you get that CO2 is 0.3% of greenhouse gases?
"Carbon dioxide (chemical formula CO2) is a chemical compound composed of two oxygen atoms covalently bonded to a single carbon atom. It is a gas at standard temperature and pressure and exists in Earth's atmosphere in this state. CO2 is a trace gas being only 0.038% of the atmosphere."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide
I think a lot of people forget that CO2 is naturally occurring and necessary for life.
Also of note:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_list_of_greenhouse_gases
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Greenhouse_effec...
Wikipedia has CO2 accounting for between 9% and 26% of the greenhouse effect, the citation was from the American Meteorological Society.
IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Working Group I Report: "The Physical Science Basis" ?
Data not showing what you want, then change it. Allegiance to the cause trumps the search for the truth and we are all losers in this debate.
If global warming advocates are right what do they get? Gold star, notoriety for being great scientists, pat on the back and a gold watch? Even billions of dollars in research grants? Once they're right research money dries up, and you still have to fix the energy crisis that would ensue. And, big oil is handing out money left and right for any study saying the opposite. If funding were your only incentive you could just as easily get money from the other side. If you can prove global warming is or IS NOT caused by human activity you'll be very very famous, maybe rich.
Still that's paltry in comparison to the revenue of the oil, coal, and to some degree gas industries. I can't seem to make the the pay offs for being right equal out.
I like to not be so paranoid, but quite frankly this whole debate just seems like a smoke screen from both sides at the moment. Which could be yet another tactic since status quo benefits the CO2 producers.
As an aside, the Cato Institute turned down a donation from Fannie Mae before the financial crash so as to avoid the appearance of bias in their advocacy, so I have a bit of respect for them. How many think-tanks would do the same?
Yes, they were founded with a gift from the Koch families decades ago, but does that invalidate the work of Michaels, who by all appearances is a climate scientist that has published real research? Should we dismiss his thoughts outright and not listen to what he has to say?
(Update: a link below shows 3/4 of Cato's annual funding comes from individual donations, only 2% comes from corporations. Presumably, the rest comes from non-profit foundations.)
Sorry, I accidentally up-voted you when attempting to do the opposite.
I'd like to call it out more, but there's so much of it -- it's a lost cause, I think.
Looks like they receive funding from ~20 corporations annually accounting for 2% of their overall funding.
I donate money to the NRA because they support gun rights. The NRA doesn't support gun rights because I personally give them money.
"Some journalists are digging even deeper into the sources of Soon and Baliunas’s funding. Their Climate Research paper includes acknowledgements to NOAA, NASA and the US Air Force, as well as to the American Petroleum Institute. Yet NOAA flatly deny having ever funded the authors for such work, while the other two bodies admit to funding them, but for work on solar variability not proxy climate records, the topic that has caused such a storm."
http://www.sgr.org.uk/climate/StormyTimes_NL28.htm
And now here we are on "Hacker News", where this axe-grinding swill keeps getting endlessly posted by the same axe-grinding posters to "Hacker News" and voted up by folks who frankly haven't taken the time to begin to look into the actual science.
("Hacker News"? This particular little niche website is fast becoming Wall Street Blog West. People who came for the tech are leaving because of the increasing emphasis on how to make a few fast buck any old way.)
Meanwhile, as an experiment a few days ago I posted an article from FactCheck that concluded "ClimateGate" is overblown nonsense, and that, "The American Association for the Advancement of Science released a statement "reaffirm[ing] the position of its Board of Directors and the leaders of 18 respected organizations, who concluded based on multiple lines of scientific evidence that global climate change caused by human activities is now underway, and it is a growing threat to society." The American Meteorological Society and the Union of Concerned Scientists have also reiterated their positions on climate change, which they say are unaffected by the leaked e-mails."
http://www.factcheck.org/2009/12/climategate/
"Hacker News" response: ~crickets~
It was obvious that facts are the last thing Cato and the Wall Street Journal and the axe-grinders here are interested in.
I agree. I found it depressing that your comment was down-voted to the negatives.
The timing just makes all of this very suspect. Had this occurred six months prior I might be less skeptical, but at this point I don't know who to believe.
Until someone figures this crap out I'll be in my hummer doing donuts in the parking lot.
I heard about the "smoothing over" of the MWP and the weighted bias used to produce the hockey stick many months ago. A significant number of climatologists have been vocalizing these concerns in varying degrees for some time. No one would listen to them.
The only reason YOU are hearing about it now is that once light was shed on the CRU shennanigans, it lent legitimacy (whether or not it is deserved) to said climatologists, and the opportunity to voice their concerns to a larger listening audience.
If these small enclave of scientist felt CRU was being railroaded why did it take 10 years for them to get a larger audience? They couldn't come up with some way to expose this problem? He's sending these emails around. I'm sure plenty of them were CC'ed on one or two of them. "as stonewalling and requesting colleagues to destroy emails to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)." Those emails could have been sent along to any paper and they would have been published. There are plenty of journals that could have published this research, and would have been happy to do so if they were compelling.
Why did someone choose to expose this through the shady hacker route?
At least Patrick Michaels went to WSJ when he wrote his article.
Just the hummer joke alone should garner something. Sweet baby jeez no sense of humor.