If you try really really hard to ask questions a certain way, then you’ll get the answers you want. ~ charles the moderator
Scientists misread data on global warming controversy
By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY
Well-publicized troubles have mounted for those forecasting global warming. First, there was last year’s release of hacked e-mails from the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia, showing some climate scientists really dislike their critics (investigations are still ongoing). Then there was the recent discovery of a botched prediction that all Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 in one of the Nobel-Prize-winning 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. Instead, the glaciers are only shrinking about as much as glaciers everywhere, twice as fast as they did 40 years ago, suggest results from NASA‘s GRACE gravity-measuring orbiter.
The recent controversies “have really shaken the confidence of the public in the conduct of science,” according to atmospheric scientist Ralph Cicerone, head of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Cicerone was speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting last month on a panel calling for more communication and release of data to rebuild lost trust for scientists. IPCC chiefs have made similar calls in the handling of their reports.
Scientists see reason for worry in polls like one released in December by Fox News that found 23% of respondents saw global warming as “not a problem,” up from 12% in 2005. Also at the AAAS meeting, Yale, American University and George Mason University released a survey of 978 people challenging the notion that people 18 to 35 were any more engaged than their elders on climate change. Statistically, 44% in that age range — matching the national average — found global warming as either “not too important” or “not at all important,” even though they grew up in an era when climate scientists had found it very likely that temperatures had increased over the last century due to fossil fuel emissions of greenhouse gases.
But what “if” (apologies to Kipling again) scientists are misreading those poll results and conflating them with news coverage of the recent public-relations black eyes from e-mails and the glacier mistake? What’s really happening, suggests polling expert Jon Krosnick of Stanford University, is “scientists are over-reacting. It’s another funny instance of scientists ignoring science.”
Krosnick and his colleagues argue that polling suggesting less interest in fixing climate change might indicate the public has its mind on more immediate problems in the midst of a global economic downturn, with the U.S. unemployment rate stuck at 9.7%. The AAAS-released survey of young people, for example, finds that 82% of them trust scientists for information on global warming and the national average is 74%.
“Very few professions enjoy the level of confidence from the public that scientists do, and those numbers haven’t changed much in a decade,” he says. “We don’t see a lot of evidence that the general public in the United States is picking up on the (University of East Anglia) e-mails. It’s too inside baseball.”
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“It’s another funny instance of scientists ignoring science.”
“Funny” as in “strange” rather than “funny” as in “comedic” — as long as you consider an opinion poll to be more science than SWAG…
And here I had foolishly been thinking that the central concern of natural science was detemining truths about the structure and dynamics of the physical world. Silly me! The central concern of natural scientists, apparently, is to enhance and enforce the prestige of natural scientists.
But of course, there are no absolute truths and it’s all socially constructed anyway. Derrida, Derrida!
23 responses
John of Kent (02:29:25) R.S.Brown (05:00:23) :
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From reading through all the responses I submit that with regard to polls, all of these comments are true, valid, right on, etc.
Polling, surveys, whatever you will call them, can only give you miniscule pieces of feedback.
The trick, for each of us, is to take the piece(s) of value and leave the rest. Kind of like finding a fleck of gold in two tons of dirt and rock.
” Most wouldn’t even understand how a simple watch works .’
I dunno, it seems to me that to understand how the 30 dollar Cassio on your wrists works would require reading Quantum Mechanics for Dummies.
http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/local/33969/fall-in-mekong-water-level-not-china-fault-says-smith
Religion is really hard to shake off, isn’t it.
regards
Ocean2 @ur momisugly 4:24
Agreed. I’ve been in a couple of online debates on the issue of AGW and have tried to call attention to the turning-on-its-head of science. Of the AGW supporters who responded to questions about falsification the common responses were “what would falsify your denial?” and “when all the experts agree, I’ll agree.”. They have faith in the scientists, but can’t say why. They also saw nothing wrong with keeping data and methods hidden from those who “are only out to disprove the truth”. Such confounding lines as “experts have shown that the sun doesn’t affect earth’s climate” were also entered. The discussion of feedback loops versus buffering of complex systems got good, but for the most part it was a religious discussion rather than a scientific one.
The first part of the story states that the crisis of confidence in science is real:
“The recent controversies “have really shaken the confidence of the public in the conduct of science,” according to atmospheric scientist Ralph Cicerone, head of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.”
–and–
“Scientists see reason for worry in polls like one released in December by Fox News that found 23% of respondents saw global warming as “not a problem,” “
But then the story pivots and conjectures that maybe we are asking the questions wrong.
“But what “if” (apologies to Kipling again) scientists are misreading those poll results and conflating them with news coverage of the recent public-relations black eyes from e-mails and the glacier mistake? What’s really happening, suggests polling expert Jon Krosnick of Stanford University, is “scientists are over-reacting. It’s another funny instance of scientists ignoring science.” “
The story then digresses into ‘if we only ask the right leading questions we can get the poll numbers we want so no worries’.
http://www.busreslab.com/tips/tip34.htm
My take? Science is staring into the abyss. Professional science, (e.g. (here in the USA) AAAS, NSF, American Physical Society (APS), American Meteorological Society (AMS)) have “gone all in” on AGW and left themselves not a crack of wiggle room. This goes so against the spirit of science that it astounds me.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7170299/Sir-David-King-IPCC-runs-against-the-spirit-of-science.html
“In science, people are supposed to rock the boat. If someone challenges your findings, you make measurements, check the arguments, and see if they might be right. Well-established theories such as evolution and relativity have survived this process. The ideas you don’t hear about are the ones that didn’t make it through this ordeal by fire.
If you depart too far from this in your desire for consensus, the consequences can be disturbing. The emails from scientists at the University of East Anglia suggest that certain members of the IPCC felt that the consensus was so precious that some external challenges had to be kept outside the discussion. That is clearly not acceptable.”
And what is Dan Vergano’s solution? Denial. After all, the science is settled.~
The next to last paragraph is telling.
“One Senator who has complained loudly is Sen. James Inhofe, R.-Okla., who in 2003 famously called climate change a “hoax.” But Inhofe has already convinced the people he is going to convince, Krosnick says. “Public opinion changes when leaders who previously held one opinion, suddenly switch.””
This top down view of public opinion is laughably incorrect. Public officials lead public opinion at their peril. Note Obamacare. Instead, successful leaders respond to public opinion. If they don’t then they are voted out. Senator Inhofe will have the last laugh. And if professional science doesn’t get its act together they will go off that cliff.
Mike Ramsey
This is all part of a counter propaganda campaign.
It’s just like Pachauri saying we are sinking into the dark ages where ideology trumps reason!
Or Gavin Schmidt who stated that skeptics are full of “paranoia and ClimateGate has allowed the nutters (that’s us) to control the agenda!
We are fine if we concentrate on the science.
There is only one back side of the story.
You can shake hands and make it up with the media and the frauds once, but it won’t happen twice.
As it looks now, the same papers are falling into their old habits.
And we have been promoted from “Deniers” to “Nutters”!
That is the real world.
And the real world to stop this scam is the world of politics.
All we can do now is to get rid of this Government and stop the funding of the AGW Machine.
That’s our reality.
TinyCo2 (04:15:51) :
Among the most seriously myopic are the climate scientists themselves. Each time they’ve assumed that the science from another department is accurate, without actually asking some fundamental questions, they’ve weakened the science.
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I think this is a HUGE part of the problem of the global warming scare. Earlier, colleagues accused me of being a conspiracy theorist for claiming that scientists were pushing what looks like a huge hoax in their alarmist predictions. My historian colleagues could not understand how a majority of scientists (a very large number of people) would be in on the hoax and not let the fact that it is a hoax slip. Very difficult to explain to them how science can be wrong (not necessarily a hoax) and how large numbers of scientists can subscribe to ‘group think’.
But if you consider how very specialized scientists are, how focused on the minutiae of their discipline, and how incapable so many are of standing back and seeing the big picture, then you can begin to understand how the global warming catastrophist theory would persist. In my experience, from biology undergrad and grad-student days, there are many individuals like this in science: it is understandable because of the degree of expertise that is required to advance science in any discipline, but it does not make scientists good philosophers, or really help them understand the history – and therefore the fallacies – of science in the past. Being scientists, many have chosen to put their trust in other scientists, because they have to. Therefore the degree of incompetence and mendacity at the CRU and probably elsewhere is outside their normal reckoning. Nor are they necessarily interested in, or understanding of, politics – being a Ph.D does not give one extraordinary political insights, although many on the left chose to think so.
As David L (03:38:19) says:
“…. I’m a scientist and I know a lot of scientists. None of them along with all of the nonscientists I know are aware of Climategate. It’s amazing to me how many are more worried about sports news and to a lesser extent the economy and local news. The climate just never crosses their minds.”
In Europe everything has gone silent on the subject
It is out of the press, there is no information from the political channels.
Just total radio silence.
The reasoning behind it:
If the polls show the public is not interested in the subject, why creating a media hype?
They will do the dirty job behind the scenes.
Last week the Dutch Government crashed and every Government decision has stalled except for a treaty between the Netherlands and Indonesia to fight Global Warming.
We still have a very long way to go!
Excessive reductionism is the enemy of good science, and there many examples of how it fails. If complex systems could be readily explained by a singe variable, we would have cured cancer by now.
The writer of the article is just doing his part to bail out the AGW cause. Hopefully he won’t be successful.
Rockmike, Don’t believe fairytales about viable electric cars in the 50’s. GM doesn’t produce very car that is conceived even the gasoline powered ones.
Is there a turkey in that climate straw?
AGW still is being embedded in blank minds very strongly in the K-16 US educational system with no whiff of any skepticism except to repeat the meme of an energy supplier funded conspiracy to deny the science. That won’t change until teachers begin to doubt the veracity of what they’re teaching. The best that might be hoped for is that young scientists will be able to break out of the restrictive group-think going on now and do research that refines the cartoon picture we have of climate. A richer understanding eventually will filter down to the educational system. Counter-acting that, of course, is the need of the MSM and politicians to hype crisis so that they can sell their products. Crackpots on all sides further obscure things with their noise, too. In the end, though, people believe and do what’s in their best interest as they understand it. It’s up to advocates of any position to tell the truth because truth really does have a way of being the last one standing.
Is the “OMG, it’s Global Warming” novelty wearing off for you?
How often do you mentally flog yourself for your participation in the usage of fossil fuels in your daily life routines?
Are you ready to forego the modern world and return to the 19th Century lifestyle over Global Warming?
Are you warmer or colder than you were 5 years, 10 years, 20 years ago?
Are you more worried about Global Warming or the Next Ice Age?
In your opinion, is Climate Change swamped by other far more pressing problems, or is Climate Change the mother of all problems?
When an ad appears talking about or referring to Climate Change, does your heart leap for joy, or do you think to yourself “Oh brother, here we go again”?
IS GLOBAL WARMING MAN MADE?
CO2 is known to be a heat trapping greenhouse gas. The theory of man made global warming assumes that the CO2 in the atmosphere (about 0.04% of air) that has increased due to use of fossil fuels by humans has been causing global warming.
In science, the method used to verify the validity of a theory is to compare the theory with actual observations. To verify the theory of man made global warming, we may compare the change in CO2 in the atmosphere to change in mean global temperature during the same period.
In science, for a theory to be valid, it must apply at all times. As a result, to verify the validity of the theory of man made global warming, we can consider the years since 1998. The result of this comparison is shown above.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/plot/esrl-co2/from:1998/normalise/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/trend/plot/esrl-co2/from:1998/normalise/trend
In the chart above, based on the data since 1998, for more than a decade, there has been increase in CO2 in the atmosphere, but there has not been any change in the mean global temperature trend.
As a result, based on more than a decade long data, global warming is not man made.
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Using Minitab:
Mean =-.0105
S.D. = .269
Distribution NOT “Normal”. Actually, flat random noise from the -.5 to +.5 realm. RANDOM no pattern.
Max
“R.S.Brown (05:00:23) :
[…]
This is a form of interaction wasmade famous by Irvine L Janis
a number of years ago in his “Victims of Groupthink” .
It’s partly supported by selective attention, partly by selective
exposure, and partly by the groups/goals with whom you
tend you identify though time.”
Very true, and also a danger for skeptics. What helps most is reading the other groups best offerings (even if it hurts) and talk to people with a different opinion. We could be wrong after all – if the ocean heat content would be rising for instance i would have to reconsider my position.
“rbateman (07:50:34) :
Is the “OMG, it’s Global Warming” novelty wearing off for you?
How often do you mentally flog yourself for your participation in the usage of fossil fuels in your daily life routines?”
The AGW scam brought me the cheapest fuel i ever had. The German government doesn’t tax LPG and i have my car running on LPG. You know, LPG produces less CO2… It’s half as expensive as the hugely taxed gasoline and slightly less taxed Diesel here. So no, i don’t flog myself, i’m a good citizen – and a whore for subsidies!
Ice floes of reality!
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/03/ice-floes-of-reality.html
When it comes to public opinion, it should come as no surprise that CAGW Theory would face increased scrutiny and opposition around the same time as Copenhagen and other Cap and Trade schemes are/were up for serious consideration.
We are talking trillions of dollars, why would people not want to make absolutely sure that the cost, benefit, and efficacy of the proposed solution makes sense?
The CRU e-mails, IPCC errors and cold winter in the NH have, IMO, made this backlash more pronounced… but anyone reading these polls should consider how much of this is a result of scandal, and how much of this should be expected for any really-really big spending program that does not demonstrate direct, tangible benefits.
Someone quoted in the NYT Partisan Attack Ad Plan post a quote from Napolean along the lines of “When your enemy is in the middle of making a mistake, never interrupt them”. The more conspiracy and wild hand waving the Gores, Romms, and Hockey Team do about Big Oil, conspiracy, not getting adequate air time (like that was ever an issue but anyway), McCarthy (lol, how many CAGW sites out there list names of scientists and alleged links to “Big Oil”?), hottest X EVAR… the more they will drive people (other than their base) to question them. So by all means, let them continue to fight the wrong battle, please do not interrupt them!
No, there are times when no matter how careful (and fair) you are when crafting a question, you still won’t get an answer out of a scientist.
The problem is that scientists want to project certainty (there tends to be an inverse relationship, the less actual certainty, the more they attempt to project certainty) to the general public.
For the objective scientist, “I don’t know,” is a completely valid answer.
But it tends not to win grants, get papers published, or move political agendas — in other words in pure Science, “I don’t know,” is preferred above claiming more certainty than actually exists.
But in the politics of science, “I don’t know,” is a dead-bang loser.
It takes ethics and courage to resist the temptation to over-state your case.
Don’t kid yourself, going along with the crowd is just as easy in science as anywhere else — maybe easier — and more necessary to your professional survival.
But, “going along to get along,” isn’t a profile in courage or the fulfillment of objective scientific responsibility.
Sadly, this corrosive desire to “fit in” has corrupted many a scientist.
— Laboratory Science
— Field Science
Two different animals because Laboratory science can vigorously test a hypothesis and field science often can not test a hypothesis at all.
And the difference in the results can be night and day.
Maybe they could separate the wheat from the chaff by asking “do you consider C02 to be a dangerous pollutant?”
MichaelC58 (04:49:46) :
All three young intelligent people in our LA office at my recent visit there, barely knew of AGW, were not in the slightest concerned about it, knew nothing of the climate controversy or ClimateGate or of Cap&Trade (or health reform for that matter).
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That’s the issue at hand. THIS is why the AGW crowd have been able to propagate.
Laissez-faire mentality. This is what the AGW’ers are hoping for. Thanks to the ” leaker “, MANN-made global warming ” deniers ” like myself have had a chance to look at some data and opposing views.
Many thanks to this website as well as Steve’s, now my friends and family have a chance to discern what is and what isn’t.
If it weren’t for this place( and Steve’s as well as other websites), they would have never seen the manipulation, destruction, lying and suppression of the Mann-made global warming cronies.
* by * the Mann-made…
My social group includes two engineers, a physics professor, a pharmacist, a lawyer, and a medical librarian. The economy, the stock market, house prices, and Iraq have been frequent topics of conversation at our gatherings. If the subject of global warming ever came up, I missed it.
…..challenging the notion that people 18 to 35 were any more engaged than their elders on climate change……Statistically, 44% in that age range — matching the national average — found global warming as either “not too important” or “not at all important,” even though they grew up in an era when climate scientists had found it very likely that temperatures had increased over the last century due to fossil fuel emissions of greenhouse gases.
…………………………………………………………………………..
I find this pretty cool. I like the young generation coming up. There is something about them that is unlike other generations of my lifetime.
My generation is the 60’s early 70’s. Despite the belief that that generation was peace-loving I found (and still find) my generation to be constantly confrontational and always trying to overthrow every and anything that moves—even if that overthrow makes no sense.
The next generations since then until now have not really had an identity expect for maybe video games, the internet, and cel phones. But they seem to not have a particular identity.
But this current young generation seems to have a face. They seem to want to face reality. My generation wanted escape from reality and to create a utopia that never could happen. This current generation seems to be creative about the real world. They seem to want real answers. And they are anything but confrontational.
I like it!