When Subpoenas Threaten Climate Science
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The Exxon subpoena was basically a blatant attempt to chill free speech by people that are skeptical of climate change. Even though, I think the skeptics are wrong, attempting to chill speech is not a good look for science.
Now people who supported the Exxon subpoena are getting upset when they get subpoenaed.
The whole fossil fuel and climate change debate is more about policy than individual choices. As it is about public policy, everybody should be free to advocate freely for whatever position they support, and donate money to people who advocate for such. Any other way leads to loss of free speech in the long term.
The minute you cross that line, the minute you start advocating for an outcome, you are an activist, not a scientist. You are now playing in the political arena. Messaging becomes important. Fundraising. Making sure the right people get elected. Preventing the wrong people from getting elected.
As a layman who likes watching smart people argue, I'd said for some time that the climate debate is the worst public debate today, mainly because it's dragging the name "science" through the muck of politics.
Now I'm hearing from both sides that politicians (gasp!) want to get involved. Well, what the hell did you expect? Do you really think it's reasonable one day to be yucking it up with politicians from party X and then expect folks from party Y to just leave you alone because science?
Real scientists can't be advocates. It's a conflict of interests. This, along with open science being a requirement for public funding, has become abundantly clear over the last few years. Science itself it awesome. It's mankind's only future. The actual practice of science over the last decade or so has been full of fail.
If you'd like to hear the other side, here's a great Reason article. http://reason.com/archives/2016/07/15/the-lefts-insidious-wa...
The bottom line is that if we want to make good public policy, we need scientists to honestly evaluate the science, not engage in political muck-raking, venture into economics of the year 2100, posit that big companies are misleading the common rubes through purposely-slanted studies, or anything else. Just science.
At the end of the day, it's perfectly fine to have an opinion and feel passionately about something. Just don't do it as a scientist. Do it anonymously. The military has very similar concerns. If you're an expert on an enemy, and you think they're going to attack, shouldn't you warn folks? Well yes, you should warn your commanding officers. And you can feel free to participate in political causes around doing things. But never in uniform. And never as a member of the armed services.
I think the most difficult part of all of this is that government is not about doing the right thing, it's about consent of the governed. So if an asteroid were approaching Earth, everybody might vote to ignore it. People have a right to voluntarily choose to self-destruct if they wish. You don't get to overrule the consent of the governed because you have special knowledge. You can certainly advocate, but not as some representative of a more elite caste of people.
Politics -- and science too, for that matter -- is full of people who absolutely "know" what's right. Unfortunately, 1) they rarely unanimously agree with one another, 2) we don't have a priestly class to make wise decisions, we have elected representatives, and 3) if the only requirement for telling others what to do was an unshakable knowledge that you know better, we'd be out in the street beating each other with clubs. We got over that kind of government. At least I hope so.
You're also misleading about the consent of the governed. The governed don't have to agree with every policy that the government institutes. Elected representatives are often only bound to their conscience and not to the direct will of the electorate. This may be hard to swallow in some instances, but the in your example the people that choose to ignore the asteroid have no right to also initiate the destruction of all those that don't agree.
Btw: The arguments in the reason.com article you posted upstream about lies as part of lobbying campaigns have been refuted in the nytimes article quite well. Knowingly engaging in a dangerous activity and lying about the outcome does not deserve 1st amendment protection.
I will note that the issue the Reason article brings up -- using state AGs to prosecute people who publish research, even if it's fraudulent research, is very serious. It's also the exact flip-side of the complaint that congressman are subpoenaing things. It's not going to end well. What one side can do when they're in power, the other side can do when the tables are turned.
This is what happens when policy is made without principle, and down this path lies authoritarianism and suffering. Might-makes-right doesn't end well.
Now, you could use a different line of lobbying: We're aware that using non-renewable carbon based energy sources are an issue, but they're the best we have and the benefits outweigh the costs. This wouldn't be lying despite better knowledge and certainly be protected. That would also be about policy decisions (what do we want and which risks do we accept) which is a valid target for lobbyism.
If I am a scientist, an I have a choice of paths to explore but cannot explore them all at the same time, then there are many things which may guide my decision making, including expectations of recognition and better employment. That is personal activism, yes? And that's because several hundred years ago scientists decided that "first to publish" was the best way to couple scientific advancement with the desire for personal advancement.
If I submit a proposal to a funding source, or a rare resource like the HST, I need to convince them that the science I'm doing is worthwhile. That's activism, yes?
Even then, you've left out "passivism", which might not be a word but I think it gives the intent.
If Exxon scientists do research in the 1980s which concludes that fossil fuel use leads to global warming, and decide to not publish, is that activism? For another real-world example, if a scientist wants to study "Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male", and doesn't tell the participants that penicillin could now treat the disease, and those men end up suffering and dying though the willful passivism of the scientist, who is more interested in the science of what happens than the morality, is that "activism"?
On the flip side, how do I conduct research to test if advertisement for flu shots is an effective way to reduce flu deaths without some sort of "activism"?
I also don't like your use of the term "politics". I prefer "ethics", where politics is an applied form of ethics.
That's why I don't like your majoritarian definition of what "government" means. Ethics can lead someone to break the law, and later even be praised for doing so. See Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" and the many people who followed that principle. Or even further back in time, and to quote de Tocqueville's "Tyranny of the Majority":
> "If it be admitted that a man possessing absolute power may misuse that power by wronging his adversaries, why should not a majority be liable to the same reproach? Men do not change their characters by uniting with one another; nor does their patience in the presence of obstacles increase with their strength. For my own part, I cannot believe it; the power to do everything, which I should refuse to one of my equals, I will never grant to any number of them."
You correctly point out "we don't have a priestly class to make wise decisions" but you uncoupled that from the military. Even in the military, some orders and laws must not be followed, as Nuremburg Priniciple IV:
> "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him".
An Earth-killing asteroid will lead to genocide as a side-effect. The moral choice, if possible, is to prevent genocide. Even if 51.9% of the U.S. votes to die. One's right to commit suicide does not justify genocide.
Or slightly more analogous to climate science: OK, so you've found the bomb. But there are 19 different ways of trying to defuse it and/or limit the impact of it exploding, including just evacuating the area and letting it blow. Bomb-science might tell us something about what either option is likely to result in, but it probably intersects heavily with a lot of other fields in doing so, and there will still be inherently non-scientific trade-offs to be made at the end of the day (do you send in three bomb-technicians with a 70% chance of defusing/30% chance of getting blown up to save a $10m building? Or do you send in a robot with a 60% chance of success? What if it's a $1m building? What if it's a power plant and 100,000 people and a hospital depend on it? etc etc).
Ok, so you've found the bomb. You've found it inside a school, disguised as a soda vending machine. The moment you publish your results, you find yourself under attack from school administrators and soda vendors, and they all use the same argument: "there's thousands of soda vending machines in schools, and not one of them has blown up. Your results must therefore be faulty". The attacks are not based on their own scientific rigour, but only serve to sway public opinion against any action. It seems the soda vendors are happy to let this one bomb explode in order to protect their revenue stream.
You don't think of those people trying to tell you that Exxon done bad as scientist, and you don't have to! But if you try to insist that just 'cause you don't think them be scientist anymore that they don't know anything about how to combat climate change: you are wrong.
While I agree with a lot of what you say, and your point is well made, I do think it is also important to note that science isn't morally or politically neutral.
I recognize the dangers of politicising science, but it isn't clear to me what the appropriate response is when politicians refuse to acknowledge facts.
Yes, it is: all it can say is what it thinks is true about the physical world. To take the nuclear-weapons issue: science can say that if you assemble these elements in this way and initiate that action in that way then there will be a release of some amount of energy; it can't say whether releasing that much energy is good or bad, or politically wise or unwise.
Now, science can certainly inform moral and political judgements. Science can tell folks of one race that folks of another race are identically human; it can tell folks of one age that folks of another age are identically human. But it cannot come up with principles like 'treat all human beings equally.'
From there, it typically descends into the sort of courtroom contest where "my expert is better than your expert" because of all the politics involved. One side says we must radically change the foundations of society and the economy or the world will end, the other side says it's not a big problem and it's been happening since forever.
Any discussion by a layperson of these things results in the worst sort of internet crap, particularly if it seems to dispute the "facts" that seem to be undisputed to one side but not to the other.
So it's not just politicians who "refuse to acknowledge facts," it's also a lot of ordinary people who are skeptical when those facts are not undisputed, nor the theory that frames them, and then those who say it is so demand policy changes that disrupt their entire lives. Ask anyone from coal country if you don't believe me.
> The minute you cross that line, the minute you start advocating for an outcome, you are an activist, not a scientist.
I'm not a scientist, but that seems like a rather simplistic view based on an artificial dichotomy. Firstly, and while I agree that the primary concern of science is the examination of reality, politics can direct science. Experimenting on humans and sentient animals is strongly regulated, for example, as is scientific work that can cause environmental damage (radioactivity, chemicals). The motivations for these are political/legal, not purely scientific.
A major concern in politics is choosing between alternatives, but science can and does influence this. Consider the safety of fracking or whether geoengineering is an alternative to atmospheric carbon reduction. Political considerations may indicate one set of views, but the scientific evidence may (with some level probability) indicate others. I think that scientists have a right, and sometimes an obligation, to advocate outcomes based on their scientific knowledge. Especially when the consequences can be grave.
> Real scientists can't be advocates. It's a conflict of interests.
This comes worryingly close to asserting that scientists who advocate are not real scientists, which is a powerful tool for silencing people. Scientists have a lot of practice with dealing with conflicts of interest (pharma, nuclear weapons, medicine, etc.) and while that is not in itself part of science, it is part of how science is done when it is embedded in complex human societies.
Professions have ethics. These ethical standards evolve over time based on how these professions interact with the larger society. Lawyers can't testify on their clients, for instance, because to do so would destroy the adversarial system of justice. Doctors don't prescribe medicines for themselves. Elected officials can't receive personal gifts from foreign countries over a certain amount. And so forth.
There are conflicts of interests here between the professional responsibilities these people have and how their profession can interact in a free society. A good set of ethics requires that we identify those conflicts of interest and prevent even the appearance of impropriety.
This is just ethics 101. Doesn't matter what your profession is.
We can quibble about what ethics should be for publicly funded scientists. We should not be quibbling about whether those ethical standards should exist or not. At least I hope not.
Nobody is asserting that scientists that advocate are not real scientists, and more than doctors who self-prescribe are real doctors. The question on the table here is in a democracy which funds lots of science, what is the appropriate ethical standard for recipients of public funding? How about for scientists in general?
I can define the word "science" for you, and it's not about persuading people in a democracy. People who do this thing can also do many other things. There is no dichotomy.
I've pointed out the conflict of interest. We can either continue exploring that conflict with an eye to finding solutions -- or run off into the deep grass with the misunderstandings and whatnot.
With the reproducibility crisis alone, science has a lot of problems. It doesn't need to be adding any more. We all have the same goals here -- at least where it concerns the advancement of human knowledge.
Star Trek did not say that politicians had to be scientists. Archer was UFP president from 2184–2192, and was not a scientist.
Star Trek is also, of course, fiction. As is Plato's "Republic", ruled by a philosopher king and thus (supposedly) based on wisdom and reason.
As far as Star Trek goes: that's fiction.
In short: scientists are human (i.e. fallible), and science is an amoral process. A "government based on science" might well conclude that taking care of the poor, the elderly, the ill, those born with genetic disorders, etc, is inefficient, a poor use of resources, and that such problems should be "optimized away." Why let a mother give birth to a defective fetus? Why spend resources to sustain a human who uses more than it contributes? What good is an elderly person who is confined to a wheelchair and can't work anymore?
Of course, you and I are humane, and we value human life, and we have moral values--but a "rational" government "based only on science" would not be. The 20th century alone is full of examples of where utilitarianism leads: horrific suffering and death on an unimaginable scale. Millions upon millions of people suffered and died due to it. Yet there are always those who think we'll get it right This Time, that they know better.
You mentioned science-fiction--there is plenty out there that imagines such dystopias. ST is mostly utopia, punctuated by DS9 and the trend toward "gritty." Both are fiction, but at least balance your sci-fi perspective. ;)
It worth mentioning that past governments did exactly that, "based on science". The crimes of the nazis makes it easy to forget that eugenics enjoyed broad popular and scientific support across western Europe and the US (one might even say that the science was considered to be settled) in the first decades of the 20th century.
Some would note that Star Trek is fiction (and rather didactic, poorly-written fiction at that, although an enjoyable-enough diversion on its own), and that the only technocracies the world has ever seen (Soviet Russia, Maoist China) have been hellholes of murder, starvation, human misery and repression.
Humanity has already "solved" most of the scientific problems that threaten us. Vaccines, agriculture, HVAC, electric power, etc. We are not threatened by unavoidable disease, starvation or freezing, wild animals, etc. (Rare genetic disorders will probably always be with us; they are in their own category, not threatening all of humanity. And age-related diseases are also inevitable, at least to a degree.)
Of course, in many parts of the world, people do suffer from these problems--but these are not caused by a lack of science or technology! They are caused by political problems, corruption, war, etc--in other words, people problems.
And this gives the lie to the whole thing. A few moments of googling reveals the not-so-well-publicized statements by UN officials, IPCC members, NGO activists, etc, who admit--to their peers, in their private conferences--that the AGW/climate-change narrative is a "vehicle" to effect global policy change. International treaties and the UN are the means to their end, which is largely wealth redistribution (they say this explicitly).
And this is why you find scientists who openly advocate misleading the public, because only by exaggerating risks and telling scary disaster stories will the media write about it, people read about it, and convince their government to do things. To them, the ends (their desired policies) justify the means (lying to the public). This is why we see stories saying that the storm of the week is caused by fossil fuels--nevermind that the actual data shows that, e.g. hurricanes are at a low.
These people have such faith in their narrative that they think that they should lie to scare people into doing what they think people should do. In principle it's no different than any other authoritarian government scheme in history: a bunch of people who think they know best, and that the ends justify the means. Only, in this case, rather than actually forming an authoritarian government by force, they try to transform the system gradually from within by convincing the public that, if they don't make the government do what they say, disaster will strike us all.
Of course, according to them, they're really being compassionate, wanting to end poverty and hunger--except in the process, they would cement themselves as a new class of global elites. They dream of UN councils run by trained philosopher-scientists who issue edicts (I'm not making this up--as much as it sounds preposterous, there are people who want this to happen; I'm not saying that it will). And this necessarily corrupts the process, as power corrupts people.
And by centralizing the decision-making processes, it makes everyone vulnerable. This is why it's good to have individual nation-states, subdivided further into provinces, cities, etc: it compartmentalizes this "ship" we're all riding on, so that if one part is flooded by collision with an iceberg of bad ideas, the whole ship doesn't sink.
But the hubris of those who would be elite is to think that they will get it right This Time ("right" defined by them, of course). Nevermind that the progress we have made in technology and stable political rule has been by decentralizing, not centralizing.
And so the real battle is the battle for truth, and then understanding, and then wisdom. The truth is already out there--the data, the numbers, the history, etc. But there are so many who would hide and distort it, because they think they know best, and only by deceiving the masses can they steer the ship as they wish. In places like North Korea, they do this by owning the media, preventing outside influence, etc. In freer places, they do this by drowning out the truth, feeding the media falsehoods--and the media, motivated by ratings and views, will publish whatever gets eyeballs. And only a few people will go to the trouble to look behind the curtain.
It's quite telling that your entirely reasonable comment is already gray. Not big surprise. At least writing is a good exercise. Keep fighting the good fight.
Do you have any examples of reputable scientists doing this?
"This is why we see stories saying that the storm of the week is caused by fossil fuels"
We might "see stories" that claim this; but do you have an example of a reputable climate scientist making a claim like this?
[0] http://www.dailydot.com/news/reddit-unidan-shadownban-vote-m...
By the way, here's his LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/beneisenkop
And here's a Wikipedia article about him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidan
Yes, and thank you for asking. Here is the most prominent example I have found:
"""“On the one hand, as scientists, we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means we must include all the doubts, caveats, and ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change.
To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical blind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”"""
– Stephen Schneider, quoted in Jonathan Schell, “Our Fragile Earth,” Discover Magazine, October 1989, p. 47.
As far as him being a reputable scientist, according to Wikipedia:
"""Stephen Henry Schneider was Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change at Stanford University...the founder and editor of the journal Climatic Change and authored or co-authored over 450 scientific papers and other publications. He was a Coordinating Lead Author in Working Group II IPCC TAR and was engaged as a co-anchor of the Key Vulnerabilities Cross-Cutting Theme for the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) at the time of his death.
An annual award for outstanding climate science communication was created in Schneider's honor after his death."""
Gee, that last bit isn't ironic at all...
> We might "see stories" that claim this; but do you have an example of a reputable climate scientist making a claim like this?
Respectfully, I feel you are verging into sea-lion territory here. One need not look far to find this. This is commonly stated in prominent scientific journals, such as Nature. If you are legitimately curious, I'll let you do this bit of homework yourself.
But I have significant doubts about the legitimacy of your curiosity, because if you were really interested in finding the truth of what's going on in this quagmire, I think you'd have done enough of your own reading to have seen examples of these for yourself. Hopefully I'm wrong. :)
I'm not familiar with the term "sea-lion territory", sorry.
"This is commonly stated in prominent scientific journals, such as Nature."
I don't think so. And I'm not surprised that you can't come up with an example.
> Your example quotes Schneider as recommending honesty, explicitly, while admitting the utility of simplifying the story for the public. Not really an example of what you were claiming.
False. This is an example of selective omission and dismissal. Let's look again at what Schneider actually said:
"We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have....Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective and being honest."
The last sentence, speaking of a balance, implies that being honest is not effective, and being effective requires being dishonest. He says that each scientist has to decide for himself how dishonest he is justified in being in order to "get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination...getting loads of media coverage."
You couch his words as "recommending honesty," while he actually recommended dishonesty, believing that it is justified by "the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change."
You see, when it comes to honesty, it's a binary: you're either honest or you're not. Anything less than 1.0 is dishonest. A scientist ought to be ethically obligated to be completely, 100% honest--because this is what the public expects, and because, since he is a human with his own biases and flaws, real science requires it--yet here is Schneider encouraging the opposite.
And by twisting his words as you have, you yourself are 0-for-1 in the honesty department.
> I'm not familiar with the term "sea-lion territory", sorry.
This isn't a pure example of it (depending on your definition, I suppose), but your attitude is in line with it, in principle, with your faux-reasonable requests for evidence, refusal to do your own research, and mischaracterization of my responses.
> I don't think so. And I'm not surprised that you can't come up with an example.
Nice try, but this is a typical example of a condescending, twisted strawman. To me, this is your strike-2 and strike-3 in the honesty department. In the interest of sharing the truth with other readers who happen by, I'll indulge you:
http://www.nature.com/news/scientist-versus-activist-debates...
Choice quotes:
"""Certainly, the question posed by journalists in response to an extreme weather event — “Is this caused by climate change?” — is sensible and good news. Such questioning implicitly accepts the basic science that the climate is changing and that human activity has a central role. It moves the discussion on to the severity of the impacts, rather than the existence of a problem....
It is a promising question, but too often we hear that no single weather event can be attributed to climate change. Although that used to be the case, research has moved on. Last September, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published analyses from 18 research groups examining 12 extreme weather events from 2012 (hurricanes, droughts, severe cold, floods and heatwaves) and concluded that anthropogenic climate change was a contributing factor to half of the extremes examined."""
Not dissimilar from your own techniques, this writer selectively omits those who point out that, for example, hurricanes have been less extreme in the past decade, that "extreme weather events" have happened for all of recorded history, and that it's physically impossible to prove any weather event was caused by human activity of any kind.
Oh, and notice that, "the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published analyses from 18 research groups examining 12 extreme weather events from 2012 (hurricanes, droughts, severe cold, floods and heatwaves) and concluded that anthropogenic climate change was a contributing factor to half of the extremes examined."
Are they "reputable" enough climate scientists for you? Is that not Nature? But you "don't think so," and you refused to do your own googling. Well, readers can make up their own minds.
But let's continue with a few more quotes:
"""By approaching questions about extreme weather and climate change in this way, scientists can avoid a common trap set by ‘climate sceptics’ and the media: drawing us into a refusal to say definitively whether a given event is caused by climate change. Furthermore, this approach separates scientists from such sceptics because focusing on past predictions and model projections — even if uncertain — highlights that climate contrarians have not produced alternative predictive models, and therefore have little to contribute."""
Here the author exposes his bias, referring to those with opposing viewpoints as "sceptics" and "contrarians" who "have little to contribute." They have little to contribute because they "have not produced alternative predictive models." But this, of course, begs the question, since such "contrarians" would point out that 1) such models cannot be accurate due to the impossibility of accounting for the number of variables and the numerous processes which are yet to be understood well enough to model, and 2) that the "non-contrarians" have yet to produce a model which can even match historical data. The writer reverses the burden of proof and begs the question. This is intellectually dishonest.
Well, I think that's enough. I don't expect to change your mind, but any readers can examine the evidence and come to their own conclusions. And since you've shown you're not interested in the discovering the truth, but rather in making condescendingly taunting non-arguments, I will not be continuing this discussion with you. Good luck on your quest for the truth.
Again, I don't think so, and I'm not surprised that you can't find any examples.
And you're just moving the goalposts all over the field. My original claims:
* "We see stories saying that the storm of the week is caused by fossil fuels...commonly stated in prominent scientific journals, such as Nature."
Your rebuttal:
* Not by reputable climate scientists.
* That I could not find any examples.
My rebuttal:
* Article in Nature quoting a report by reputable climate scientists claiming that "analyses from 18 research groups" show that "anthropogenic climate change was a contributing factor to half of" "12 extreme weather events from 2012."
Your rebuttal:
* It's an editorial, not a scientific paper.
And that editorial quotes a scientific paper. And that editorial confirms my original claim.
You 1) move the goalposts, 2) claim that I "can't find any examples" when in fact I did and you refused to even google it, and 3) completely ignore the "scientific paper" that you demanded and that I provided.
And your next goalpost-moving is to argue over the phrase "storm of the week."
I've substantiated my claims and answered your rebuttals with factual evidence. You've done nothing but assert that I'm wrong and tear down your strawmen. I rest my case. (For real, this time, because you're being intellectually dishonest. Your comments are effectively a form of trolling, using up my time providing proof while you contribute nothing. This is the sea-lioning tactic, wearing down one's opposition by unending, asymmetric argument.)
I was referring to exactly that, not ignoring it.
'And your next goalpost-moving is to argue over the phrase "storm of the week."'
No goalposts were moved. This was your phrase. I asked for an example, since you claimed they were abundant. You haven't supplied one.
1.) There is no great Conspiracy. That would imply that climate scientists were somehow well organized, and they are not. These are normal human beings who go to work every day, and most of whom spend very little time worrying about exaggerating to the public,and a lot of time worrying about deadlines, funding, and the nearly infinite amount of work that most research academics have to deal with. Source: My mother is a physical oceanographer, my father a biological oceanographer, and I worked for five years at HPL at UMCES building water quality robots.
2.) I would claim that most scientists understate the dangers of climate change. This is because we are well past the point of no return, as far as "fixing" the problem goes. The climate models show that there are already going to be big changes to the earth's climate in the near future, some of which are already taking place in the ocean, which is particularly vulnerable. At this point our efforts are just damage control and that is not an easy message to send.
3.) Science communication and scientific literature are not the same thing. Stephen Schneider, was making simplified statements to the public, not to his peers in his publications. So if you are unwilling to trust what scientists say, then maybe you should read what they write (at a library because elsevier owns their publicly funded findings and you and I probably can't afford a subscription to any of it.).
4.) If the weather man can't predict rain consistently over the next 24 hours than why should climate scientists be expected to have perfectly accurate predictions? Climate is really really chaotic, and that leads to unpredictability. As for your hurricane worries please see the following (http://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2646.epdf).
5.) Sea level is going to rise, and many many people will die as they are displaced and find themselves with no where to go. I will be very impressed if you can find credible evidence that contradicts this.
Edit: Note, I read both or your comments, and googled the assertions you made and examples you provided. I hope you will do the same.
> 1) There is no great Conspiracy. That would imply that climate scientists were somehow well organized, and they are not.
For starters, the UN IPCC is an obvious counter-example. I suppose you'll claim it's "not well organized," but I'm not going to argue with you about that; if you think that many scientists from around the world working under one name to advocate for a single view is not "well organized," I can't convince you otherwise.
Secondly, there need not be a "great conspiracy"--that is a strawman, which I did not claim. Instead there need only be an emergent phenomenon in which the interests of a variety of entities coincide to compel them to behave a certain way. Briefly, this is exemplified by scientists whose careers are based upon research grants, which are issued by governments whose politicians are lobbied by certain groups. A scientist today will not get any grants for wanting to do research to disprove AGW theory. This is not a "grand conspiracy" with a person or a council at the top, issuing edicts to bureaucrats who issue grants--this is simply the way the politics have evolved over a period of time, due to the tremendous efforts of certain lobbies.
> 2.) I would claim that most scientists understate the dangers of climate change. This is because we are well past the point of no return, as far as "fixing" the problem goes. The climate models show that there are already going to be big changes to the earth's climate in the near future, some of which are already taking place in the ocean, which is particularly vulnerable. At this point our efforts are just damage control and that is not an easy message to send.
You are begging the question: you have already presupposed that there is a problem, that we are causing it, that we can do anything about it, and that there will be disaster if we don't. And your own point #4 contradicts this.
> 3.) Science communication and scientific literature are not the same thing. Stephen Schneider, was making simplified statements to the public, not to his peers in his publications. So if you are unwilling to trust what scientists say, then maybe you should read what they write (at a library because elsevier owns their publicly funded findings and you and I probably can't afford a subscription to any of it.).
So you also think it's justified for scientists to mislead the public, because you assume that their findings must be correct, and their policy proposals must be as well.
You don't seem to realize that this not only effectively takes away the power of people to self-govern (because doing so relies on information provided to them, and tainting it taints the result), but it also effectively makes science into a religion and scientists into priests, whose expertise and pronouncements cannot be questioned.
You clearly have greater faith in science and in scientists than I do. They are people, as fallible as anyone, as vulnerable to bias and self-aggrandizement as anyone, and history shows that while science as a whole tends to move forward, individual scientists are quite often wrong. Science is a process of steps both forward and backward, with pauses in between.
> 4.) If the weather man can't predict rain consistently over the next 24 hours than why should climate scientists be expected to have perfectly accurate predictions? Climate is really really chaotic, and that leads to unpredictability. As for your hurricane worries please see the following (http://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2646.epdf).
If climate scientists can't be expected to make accurate predictions, and climate is "really really chaotic," why do you think their predictions are accurate? You can't have it both ways: you can't praise their expertise and put blind faith in them while also saying that they can't be expected to be accurate. You are contradicting yourself. And you want to make policy based on this? In principle, this is no different than hundreds of years ago when the church ran everything, except instead of blindly trusting a few people who interpreted ancient texts, it's blindly trusting a few people who interpret numbers and write in periodicals.
As for that article, all I get from that URL is a redirect loop, but Nature is, unfortunately, a heavily biased publication. See my other comment in this thread for an example. It would be more instructive to look at some raw statistics, but this isn't really the place for that, and I don't think you'd be convinced by them, anyway.
> 5.) Sea level is going to rise, and many many people will die as they are displaced and find themselves with no where to go. I will be very impressed if you can find credible evidence that contradicts this.
You have already made up your mind. You are predicting unavoidable disasters and death and destruction. Nothing anyone can show you would change your mind. Anything I would present to you would be dismissed as "not credible." It's the standard dismissal technique, throwing anything out that doesn't meet your preconceived notions.
> Note, I read both or your comments, and googled the assertions you made and examples you provided. I hope you will do the same.
I've done a lot of reading on the subject over the years, and I continue to do so. I've no doubt that you do as well. Unfortunately, when you trust blindly, you can be lead down dark paths. I encourage you to spend some time reading alternative views and be more skeptical of what you read. After all, real science is a process of disproving, and is best served by skepticism.
P.S. This response will be quite delayed because, since I expressed unpopular views in my earlier comments, they were downvoted, which penalizes me by making me "slow down. Thanks." One of these days I'm going to just stop wasting my time...
That is a laugh, you are going to just assert that scientists may not posit that things are happening that are actually happening?
Why does hacker news attract so many industry shills?
I dunno about your other terms, but "social science" is a pretty old term, dating from the 1820s. It (or the "social sciences") has come to be the standard term for the superset of economics, political science, sociology, psychology, anthropology, archaeology, and related scientific fields involving the study of Man. This seems like a pretty reasonable term, just as "physical sciences" or "biological sciences" refer to their respective supersets.
Like falsifiability. Oh, wait, you can't falsify most of the climate-related speculations because of complexity of the system.
This is not how falsification works. If you provide another hypothesis, even if it was better tailored to your measured data, you now have two of them that work. The former one didn't magically stop working. Which one is valid? (Hint: may be the former, if you account for variables you didn't think about previously, or may be neither of them).
And most hypotheses are formed as a cause-effect explainations. How to verify that in a correlation of two phenomena one of them is the reason for the other? Climatology has only offered speculation till this day.
> Sometimes scientist find flaws and refine models, but nobody has yet found a fundamental flaw or provided a better explanation.
Well, nothing to brag about in this case. Those climatologists claim that atmospheric CO2 concentration is major (or even main) cause for greenhouse effect, yet CO2 has twenty times smaller(!) heat capacity compared to atmospheric water at current concentrations.
I think your understanding of falsification is confused.
Also, it doesn't account for the opposite causation: when rising CO2 level is the effect of rising temperature.
Still, you didn't show that the hypothesis that CO2 level causes global warming has a way to falsify.
This has nothing to do with data validity; the data can be both valid and sufficient to falsify a claim. Invalid data do not falsify claims, because they are invalid.
Further, you're arguing that correlation doesn't imply causation. This is true, but again has nothing to do with falsifiability.
However, the absence of a correlation is sufficient to falsify the claim that global warming is caused by CO2.
I truly mean no disrespect, but you're betraying dire ignorance.
> Further, you're arguing that correlation doesn't imply causation. This is true, but again has nothing to do with falsifiability.
No, I didn't argue that (I don't need to). I just said (suggested could be more appropriate word) that showing the opposite cause-effect relation would be enough to show the claim invalid. OK, excessive thing, because you had an implication there in your comment, but given your stance about showing no correlation in data that already had the correlation, my guess is it was a coincidence.
> However, the absence of a correlation is sufficient to falsify the claim that global warming is caused by CO2.
Would be. The correlation of currently collected data is there, it just may be a coincidence (http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations), or an indicator of the opposite causation, or indicator that there is a common cause to both observations.
The original question was "how could we falsify the claim that CO2 causes global warming"?
One answer is: "show that they're not correlated".
Since they are correlated, the claim has not been falsified. That doesn't make the claim unfalsifiable.
Questions of validity and presence of the effect are another matter altogether.
The claim was laid as "CO2 causes global warming", basing on some correlation in collected data. How can this claim be realistically shown invalid?
The claim that CO2 causes (or, more precisely, contributes to) global warming isn't based solely on correlation in the collected data on global warming, its based on results separate from climate statistics that demonstrate the mechanism which make CO2 a greenhouse gas (and which also explain other greenhouse gases, and the relative effect of each as a greenhouse gas).
There's a whole web of falsifiable (but not falsified, quite likely because it closely reflects the underyling reality) science here.
The fact that it hasn't been falsified doesn't mean that it's true, just that it's amenable to scientific inquiry.
Anything you might claim now is (at best) shifting the goalpost. However, if you'd like to submit another claim, I'd be happy to share my thoughts on it's falsifiability; maybe you have a less trivial one than "CO2 is a causal force in global warming" ?