The “exoneration” by Climategate investigations (like Muir Russell) that never bother to talk to skeptics, create an impossible conundrum of having essentially a trial with judge, jury, reporters, spectators, and defendant, but no plaintiff. The plaintiff is locked outside the courtroom sitting in the hall hollering and hoping the jury hears some of what he has to say.
Given this, I thought it valuable to revisit this Caltech lecture on the state of science and consensus by the late Michael Crichton.
– Anthony Watts
Caltech Michelin Lecture – January 17, 2003
My topic today sounds humorous but unfortunately I am serious. I am going to argue that extraterrestrials lie behind global warming. Or to speak more precisely, I will argue that a belief in extraterrestrials has paved the way, in a progression of steps, to a belief in global warming.
Charting this progression of belief will be my task today. Let me say at once that I have no desire to discourage anyone from believing in either extraterrestrials or global warming. That would be quite impossible to do.
Rather, I want to discuss the history of several widely-publicized beliefs and to point to what I consider an emerging crisis in the whole enterprise of science-namely the increasingly uneasy relationship between hard science and public policy.
I have a special interest in this because of my own upbringing. I was born in the midst of World War II, and passed my formative years at the height of the Cold War. In school drills, I dutifully crawled under my desk in preparation for a nuclear attack.
It was a time of widespread fear and uncertainty, but even as a child I believed that science represented the best and greatest hope for mankind. Even to a child, the contrast was clear between the world of politics-a world of hate and danger, of irrational beliefs and fears, of mass manipulation and disgraceful blots on human history. In contrast, science held different values-international in scope, forging friendships and working relationships across national boundaries and political systems, encouraging a dispassionate habit of thought, and ultimately leading to fresh knowledge and technology that would benefit all mankind.
The world might not be a very good place, but science would make it better. And it did. In my lifetime, science has largely fulfilled its promise. Science has been the great intellectual adventure of our age, and a great hope for our troubled and restless world. But I did not expect science merely to extend lifespan, feed the hungry, cure disease, and shrink the world with jets and cell phones.
I also expected science to banish the evils of human thought—prejudice and superstition, irrational beliefs and false fears. I expected science to be, in Carl Sagan’s memorable phrase, “a candle in a demon haunted world.” And here, I am not so pleased with the impact of science. Rather than serving as a cleansing force, science has in some instances been seduced by the more ancient lures of politics and publicity.
Some of the demons that haunt our world in recent years are invented by scientists. The world has not benefited from permitting these demons to escape free. But let’s look at how it came to pass.
Cast your minds back to 1960. John F. Kennedy is president, commercial jet airplanes are just appearing, the biggest university mainframes have 12K of memory. And in Green Bank, West Virginia at the new National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a young astrophysicist named Frank Drake runs a two-week project called Ozma, to search for extraterrestrial signals. A signal is received, to great excitement. It turns out to be false, but the excitement remains.
In 1960, Drake organizes the first SETI conference, and came up with the now-famous Drake equation: N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL
[where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fi is the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fc is the fraction that communicates; and fL is the fraction of the planet’s life during which the communicating civilizations live.]
This serious-looking equation gave SETI a serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses-just so we’re clear-are merely expressions of prejudice.
Nor can there be “informed guesses.” If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It’s simply prejudice.
As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from “billions and billions” to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion.
Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof. The belief that the Koran is the word of God is a matter of faith. The belief that God created the universe in seven days is a matter of faith. The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered.There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief. SETI is a religion.
One way to chart the cooling of enthusiasm is to review popular works on the subject. In 1964, at the height of SETI enthusiasm, Walter Sullivan of the NY Times wrote an exciting book about life in the universe entitled WE ARE NOT ALONE. By 1995, when Paul Davis wrote a book on the same subject, he titled it ARE WE ALONE? ( Since 1981, there have in fact been four books titled ARE WE ALONE.) More recently we have seen the rise of the so-called “Rare Earth” theory which suggests that we may, in fact, be all alone.
Again, there is no evidence either way.
Back in the sixties, SETI had its critics, although not among astrophysicists and astronomers. The biologists and paleontologists were harshest. George Gaylord Simpson of Harvard sneered that SETI was a “study without a subject,” and it remains so to the present day. But scientists in general have been indulgent toward SETI, viewing it either with bemused tolerance, or with indifference. After all, what’s the big deal? It’s kind of fun. If people want to look, let them. Only a curmudgeon would speak harshly of SETI. It wasn’t worth the bother.
And of course, it is true that untestable theories may have heuristic value. Of course, extraterrestrials are a good way to teach science to kids. But that does not relieve us of the obligation to see the Drake equation clearly for what it is-pure speculation in quasi-scientific trappings.
The fact that the Drake equation was not greeted with screams of outrage-similar to the screams of outrage that greet each Creationist new claim, for example-meant that now there was a crack in the door, a loosening of the definition of what constituted legitimate scientific procedure. And soon enough, pernicious garbage began to squeeze through the cracks.
Now let’s jump ahead a decade to the 1970s, and Nuclear Winter. In 1975, the National Academy of Sciences reported on “Long-Term Worldwide Effects of Multiple Nuclear Weapons Detonations” but the report estimated the effect of dust from nuclear blasts to be relatively minor.
In 1979, the Office of Technology Assessment issued a report on “The Effects of Nuclear War” and stated that nuclear war could perhaps produce irreversible adverse consequences on the environment. However, because the scientific processes involved were poorly understood, the report stated it was not possible to estimate the probable magnitude of such damage.
Three years later, in 1982, the Swedish Academy of Sciences commissioned a report entitled “The Atmosphere after a Nuclear War: Twilight at Noon,” which attempted to quantify the effect of smoke from burning forests and cities. The authors speculated that there would be so much smoke that a large cloud over the northern hemisphere would reduce incoming sunlight below the level required for photosynthesis, and that this would last for weeks or even longer.
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| The Drake Equation. Pure science -or Pure Hooey? |
The following year, five scientists including Richard Turco and Carl Sagan published a paper in Science called “Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions.” This was the so-called TTAPS report, which attempted to quantify more rigorously the atmospheric effects, with the added credibility to be gained from an actual computer model of climate.
At the heart of the TTAPS undertaking was another equation, never specifically expressed, but one that could be paraphrased as follows:
Ds = Wn Ws Wh Tf Tb Pt Pr Pe etc
(The amount of tropospheric dust = # warheads x size warheads x warhead detonation height x flammability of targets x Target burn duration x Particles entering the Troposphere x Particle reflectivity x Particle endurance, and so on.)
The similarity to the Drake equation is striking. As with the Drake equation, none of the variables can be determined. None at all. The TTAPS study addressed this problem in part by mapping out different wartime scenarios and assigning numbers to some of the variables, but even so, the remaining variables were-and are-simply unknowable. Nobody knows how much smoke will be generated when cities burn, creating particles of what kind, and for how long. No one knows the effect of local weather conditions on the amount of particles that will be injected into the troposphere. No one knows how long the particles will remain in the troposphere. And so on.
And remember, this is only four years after the OTA study concluded that the underlying scientific processes were so poorly known that no estimates could be reliably made.
Nevertheless, the TTAPS study not only made those estimates, but concluded they were catastrophic. According to Sagan and his coworkers, even a limited 5,000 megaton nuclear exchange would cause a global temperature drop of more than 35 degrees Centigrade, and this change would last for three months.
The greatest volcanic eruptions that we know of changed world temperatures somewhere between .5 and 2 degrees Centigrade. Ice ages changed global temperatures by 10 degrees. Here we have an estimated change three times greater than any ice age.
One might expect it to be the subject of some dispute. But Sagan and his coworkers were prepared, for nuclear winter was from the outset the subject of a well-orchestrated media campaign. The first announcement of nuclear winter appeared in an article by Sagan in the Sunday supplement, Parade. The very next day, a highly-publicized, high-profile conference on the long-term consequences of nuclear war was held in Washington, chaired by Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich, the most famous and media-savvy scientists of their generation.
Sagan appeared on the Johnny Carson show 40 times. Ehrlich was on 25 times. Following the conference, there were press conferences, meetings with congressmen, and so on. The formal papers in Science came months later.
This is not the way science is done, it is the way products are sold. The real nature of the conference is indicated by these artists’ renderings of the effect of nuclear winter. (Not Shown)
I cannot help but quote the caption for figure 5: “Shown here is a tranquil scene in the north woods. A beaver has just completed its dam, two black bears forage for food, a swallow-tailed butterfly flutters in the foreground, a loon swims quietly by, and a kingfisher searches for a tasty fish.” Hard science if ever there was.
At the conference in Washington, during the question period, Ehrlich was reminded that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scientists were quoted as saying nothing would grow there for 75 years, but in fact melons were growing the next year. So, he was asked, how accurate were these findings now?
Ehrlich answered by saying “I think they are extremely robust. Scientists may have made statements like that, although I cannot imagine what their basis would have been, even with the state of science at that time, but scientists are always making absurd statements, individually, in various places. What we are doing here, however, is presenting a consensus of a very large group of scientists”
I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.
Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world.
In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.
In addition, let me remind you that the track record of the consensus is nothing to be proud of. Let’s review a few cases.
In past centuries, the greatest killer of women was fever following childbirth. One woman in six died of this fever.
In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them. The consensus said no.
In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compelling evidence. The consensus said no.
In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management. The consensus said he was a Jew, ignored him, and dismissed him from his post. There was in fact no agreement on puerperal fever until the start of the twentieth century. Thus the consensus took one hundred and twenty five years to arrive at the right conclusion despite the efforts of the prominent “skeptics” around the world, skeptics who were demeaned and ignored. And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women.
There is no shortage of other examples. In the 1920s in America, tens of thousands of people, mostly poor, were dying of a disease called pellagra. The consensus of scientists said it was infectious, and what was necessary was to find the “pellagra germ.” The US government asked a brilliant young investigator, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, to find the cause. Goldberger concluded that diet was the crucial factor. The consensus remained wedded to the germ theory.
Goldberger demonstrated that he could induce the disease through diet. He demonstrated that the disease was not infectious by injecting the blood of a pellagra patient into himself, and his assistant. They and other volunteers swabbed their noses with swabs from pellagra patients, and swallowed capsules containing scabs from pellagra rashes in what were called “Goldberger’s filth parties.” Nobody contracted pellagra.
The consensus continued to disagree with him. There was, in addition, a social factor-southern States disliked the idea of poor diet as the cause, because it meant that social reform was required. They continued to deny it until the 1920s. Result-despite a twentieth century epidemic, the consensus took years to see the light.
Probably every schoolchild notices that South America and Africa seem to fit together rather snugly, and Alfred Wegener proposed, in 1912, that the continents had in fact drifted apart. The consensus sneered at continental drift for fifty years. The theory was most vigorously denied by the great names of geology-until 1961, when it began to seem as if the sea floors were spreading. The result: it took the consensus fifty years to acknowledge what any schoolchild sees.
And shall we go on? The examples can be multiplied endlessly. Jenner and smallpox, Pasteur and germ theory. Saccharine, margarine, repressed memory, fiber and colon cancer, hormone replacement therapy. The list of consensus errors goes on and on.
Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough.
Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.
But back to our main subject. What I have been suggesting to you is that nuclear winter was a meaningless formula, tricked out with bad science, for policy ends. It was political from the beginning, promoted in a well-orchestrated media campaign that had to be planned weeks or months in advance.
Further evidence of the political nature of the whole project can be found in the response to criticism. Although Richard Feynman was characteristically blunt, saying, “I really don’t think these guys know what they’re talking about,” other prominent scientists were noticeably reticent. Freeman Dyson was quoted as saying “It’s an absolutely atrocious piece of science but who wants to be accused of being in favor of nuclear war?” And Victor Weisskopf said, “The science is terrible but—perhaps the psychology is good.”
The nuclear winter team followed up the publication of such comments with letters to the editors denying that these statements were ever made, though the scientists since then have subsequently confirmed their views. At the time, there was a concerted desire on the part of lots of people to avoid nuclear war. If nuclear winter looked awful, why investigate too closely? Who wanted to disagree? Only people like Edward Teller, the “father of the H bomb.”
Teller said, “While it is generally recognized that details are still uncertain and deserve much more study, Dr. Sagan nevertheless has taken the position that the whole scenario is so robust that there can be little doubt about its main conclusions.”
Yet for most people, the fact that nuclear winter was a scenario riddled with uncertainties did not seem to be relevant. I say it is hugely relevant. Once you abandon strict adherence to what science tells us, once you start arranging the truth in a press conference, then anything is possible.
In one context, maybe you will get some mobilization against nuclear war. But in another context, you get Lysenkoism. In another, you get Nazi euthanasia. The danger is always there, if you subvert science to political ends.
That is why it is so important for the future of science that the line between what science can say with certainty, and what it cannot, be drawn clearly-and defended.
What happened to Nuclear Winter? As the media glare faded, its robust scenario appeared less persuasive; John Maddox, editor of Nature, repeatedly criticized its claims; within a year, Stephen Schneider, one of the leading figures in the climate model, began to speak of “nuclear autumn.” It just didn’t have the same ring.
A final media embarrassment came in 1991, when Carl Sagan predicted on Nightline that Kuwaiti oil fires would produce a nuclear winter effect, causing a “year without a summer,” and endangering crops around the world. Sagan stressed this outcome was so likely that “it should affect the war plans.” None of it happened.
What, then, can we say were the lessons of Nuclear Winter? I believe the lesson was that with a catchy name, a strong policy position and an aggressive media campaign, nobody will dare to criticize the science, and in short order, a terminally weak thesis will be established as fact.
After that, any criticism becomes beside the point. The war is already over without a shot being fired. That was the lesson, and we had a textbook application soon afterward, with second hand smoke.
In 1993, the EPA announced that second-hand smoke was “responsible for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths each year in nonsmoking adults,” and that it ” impairs the respiratory health of hundreds of thousands of people.” In a 1994 pamphlet the EPA said that the eleven studies it based its decision on were not by themselves conclusive, and that they collectively assigned second-hand smoke a risk factor of 1.19. (For reference, a risk factor below 3.0 is too small for action by the EPA. or for publication in the New England Journal of Medicine, for example.)
Furthermore, since there was no statistical association at the 95% confidence limits, the EPA lowered the limit to 90%. They then classified second-hand smoke as a Group-A Carcinogen.
This was openly fraudulent science, but it formed the basis for bans on smoking in restaurants, offices, and airports. California banned public smoking in 1995. Soon, no claim was too extreme. By 1998, the Christian Science Monitor was saying that “Second-hand smoke is the nation’s third-leading preventable cause of death.” The American Cancer Society announced that 53,000 people died each year of second-hand smoke. The evidence for this claim is nonexistent.
In 1998, a Federal judge held that the EPA had acted improperly, had “committed to a conclusion before research had begun”, and had “disregarded information and made findings on selective information.”
The reaction of Carol Browner, head of the EPA was: “We stand by our science; there’s wide agreement. The American people certainly recognize that exposure to second hand smoke brings a whole host of health problems.”
Again, note how the claim of consensus trumps science. In this case, it isn’t even a consensus of scientists that Browner evokes! It’s the consensus of the American people.
Meanwhile, ever-larger studies failed to confirm any association. A large, seven-country WHO study in 1998 found no association. Nor have well-controlled subsequent studies, to my knowledge. Yet we now read, for example, that second-hand smoke is a cause of breast cancer. At this point you can say pretty much anything you want about second-hand smoke.
As with nuclear winter, bad science is used to promote what most people would consider good policy. I certainly think it is. I don’t want people smoking around me. So who will speak out against banning second-hand smoke? Nobody, and if you do, you’ll be branded a shill of RJ Reynolds. A big tobacco flunky. But the truth is that we now have a social policy supported by the grossest of superstitions.
And we’ve given the EPA a bad lesson in how to behave in the future. We’ve told them that cheating is the way to succeed.
As the twentieth century drew to a close, the connection between hard scientific fact and public policy became increasingly elastic. In part this was possible because of the complacency of the scientific profession; in part because of the lack of good science education among the public; in part, because of the rise of specialized advocacy groups which have been enormously effective in getting publicity and shaping policy; and in great part because of the decline of the media as an independent assessor of fact.
The deterioration of the American media is dire loss for our country. When distinguished institutions like the New York Times can no longer differentiate between factual content and editorial opinion, but rather mix both freely on their front page, then who will hold anyone to a higher standard?
And so, in this elastic anything-goes world where science-or non-science-is the hand maiden of questionable public policy, we arrive at last at global warming. It is not my purpose here to rehash the details of this most magnificent of the demons haunting the world. I would just remind you of the now-familiar pattern by which these things are established.
Evidentiary uncertainties are glossed over in the unseemly rush for an overarching policy, and for grants to support the policy by delivering findings that are desired by the patron.
Next, the isolation of those scientists who won’t get with the program, and the characterization of those scientists as outsiders and “skeptics” in quotation marks-suspect individuals with suspect motives, industry flunkies, reactionaries, or simply anti-environmental nut-cases.
In short order, debate ends, even though prominent scientists are uncomfortable about how things are being done. When did “skeptic” become a dirty word in science? When did a skeptic require quotation marks around it?
To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global warming controversy is the overt reliance that is being placed on models. Back in the days of nuclear winter, computer models were invoked to add weight to a conclusion: “These results are derived with the help of a computer model.”
But now, large-scale computer models are seen as generating data in themselves. No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world-increasingly, models provide the data.
As if they were themselves a reality. And indeed they are, when we are projecting forward. There can be no observational data about the year 2100. There are only model runs. This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well.
Richard Feynmann called it a disease. I fear he is right. Because only if you spend a lot of time looking at a computer screen can you arrive at the complex point where the global warming debate now stands. Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we’re asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future?
And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?
Stepping back, I have to say the arrogance of the model-makers is breathtaking. There have been, in every century, scientists who say they know it all. Since climate may be a chaotic system-no one is sure-these predictions are inherently doubtful, to be polite. But more to the point, even if the models get the science spot-on, they can never get the sociology. To predict anything about the world a hundred years from now is simply absurd.
Look: If I was selling stock in a company that I told you would be profitable in 2100, would you buy it? Or would you think the idea was so crazy that it must be a scam?
Let’s think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horse****?
Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses? But of course, within a few years, nobody rode horses except for sport.
And in 2000, France was getting 80% its power from an energy source that was unknown in 1900. Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Japan were getting more than 30% from this source, unknown in 1900. Remember, people in 1900 didn’t know what an atom was.
They didn’t know its structure. They also didn’t know what a radio was, or an airport, or a movie, or a television, or a computer, or a cell phone, or a jet, an antibiotic, a rocket, a satellite, an MRI, ICU, IUD, IBM, IRA, ERA, EEG, EPA, IRS, DOD, PCP, HTML, internet. interferon, instant replay, remote sensing, remote control, speed dialing, gene therapy, gene splicing, genes, spot welding, heat-seeking, bipolar, prozac, leotards, lap dancing, email, tape recorder, CDs, airbags, plastic explosive, plastic, robots, cars, liposuction, transduction, superconduction, dish antennas, step aerobics, smoothies, twelve-step, ultrasound, nylon, rayon, teflon, fiber optics, carpal tunnel, laser surgery, laparoscopy, corneal transplant, kidney transplant, AIDS. None of this would have meant anything to a person in the year 1900. They wouldn’t know what you are talking about.
Now. You tell me you can predict the world of 2100. Tell me it’s even worth thinking about. Our models just carry the present into the future. They’re bound to be wrong. Everybody who gives a moment’s thought knows it.
I remind you that in the lifetime of most scientists now living, we have already had an example of dire predictions set aside by new technology. I refer to the green revolution. In 1960, Paul Ehrlich said, “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”
Ten years later, he predicted four billion people would die during the 1980s, including 65 million Americans. The mass starvation that was predicted never occurred, and it now seems it isn’t ever going to happen. Nor is the population explosion going to reach the numbers predicted even ten years ago.
In 1990, climate modelers anticipated a world population of 11 billion by 2100. Today, some people think the correct number will be 7 billion and falling. But nobody knows for sure. But it is impossible to ignore how closely the history of global warming fits on the previous template for nuclear winter.
Just as the earliest studies of nuclear winter stated that the uncertainties were so great that probabilities could never be known, so, too the first pronouncements on global warming argued strong limits on what could be determined with certainty about climate change.
The 1995 IPCC draft report said, “Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced.” It also said, “No study to date has positively attributed all or part of observed climate changes to anthropogenic causes.”
Those statements were removed, and in their place appeared: “The balance of evidence suggests a discernable human influence on climate.” What is clear, however, is that on this issue, science and policy have become inextricably mixed to the point where it will be difficult, if not impossible, to separate them out. It is possible for an outside observer to ask serious questions about the conduct of investigations into global warming, such as whether we are taking appropriate steps to improve the quality of our observational data records, whether we are systematically obtaining the information that will clarify existing uncertainties, whether we have any organized disinterested mechanism to direct research in this contentious area.
The answer to all these questions is no. We don’t. In trying to think about how these questions can be resolved, it occurs to me that in the progression from SETI to nuclear winter to second-hand smoke to global warming, we have one clear message, and that is that we can expect more and more problems of public policy dealing with technical issues in the future-problems of ever greater seriousness, where people care passionately on all sides.
And at the moment we have no mechanism to get good answers. So I will propose one. Just as we have established a tradition of double-blinded research to determine drug efficacy, we must institute double-blinded research in other policy areas as well. Certainly the increased use of computer models, such as GCMs, cries out for the separation of those who make the models from those who verify them.
The fact is that the present structure of science is entrepreneurial, with individual investigative teams vying for funding from organizations that all too often have a clear stake in the outcome of the research-or appear to, which may be just as bad. This is not healthy for science.
Sooner or later, we must form an independent research institute in this country. It must be funded by industry, by government, and by private philanthropy, both individuals and trusts. The money must be pooled, so that investigators do not know who is paying them. The institute must fund more than one team to do research in a particular area, and the verification of results will be a foregone requirement: teams will know their results will be checked by other groups.
In many cases, those who decide how to gather the data will not gather it, and those who gather the data will not analyze it. If we were to address the land temperature records with such rigor, we would be well on our way to an understanding of exactly how much faith we can place in global warming, and therefore with what seriousness we must address this.
I believe that as we come to the end of this litany, some of you may be saying, well what is the big deal, really. So we made a few mistakes. So a few scientists have overstated their cases and have egg on their faces. So what?
Well, I’ll tell you.
In recent years, much has been said about the post-modernist claims about science to the effect that science is just another form of raw power, tricked out in special claims for truth-seeking and objectivity that really have no basis in fact. Science, we are told, is no better than any other undertaking. These ideas anger many scientists, and they anger me. But recent events have made me wonder if they are correct.
We can take as an example the scientific reception accorded a Danish statistician, Bjorn Lomborg, who wrote a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist.
The scientific community responded in a way that can only be described as disgraceful. In professional literature, it was complained he had no standing because he was not an earth scientist. His publisher, Cambridge University Press, was attacked with cries that the editor should be fired, and that all right-thinking scientists should shun the press. The past president of the AAAS wondered aloud how Cambridge could have ever “published a book that so clearly could never have passed peer review.” (But of course, the manuscript did pass peer review by three earth scientists on both sides of the Atlantic, and all recommended publication.)
But what are scientists doing attacking a press? Is this the new McCarthyism-coming from scientists? Worst of all was the behavior of the Scientific American, which seemed intent on proving the post-modernist point that it was all about power, not facts.
The Scientific American attacked Lomborg for eleven pages, yet only came up with nine factual errors despite their assertion that the book was “rife with careless mistakes.”
It was a poor display, featuring vicious ad hominem attacks, including comparing him to a Holocaust denier. The issue was captioned: “Science defends itself against the Skeptical Environmentalist.”
Really. Science has to defend itself? Is this what we have come to? When Lomborg asked for space to rebut his critics, he was given only a page and a half. When he said it wasn’t enough, he put the critics’ essays on his web page and answered them in detail.
Scientific American threatened copyright infringement and made him take the pages down. Further attacks since, have made it clear what is going on. Lomborg is charged with heresy. That’s why none of his critics needs to substantiate their attacks in any detail. That’s why the facts don’t matter.
That’s why they can attack him in the most vicious personal terms. He’s a heretic. Of course, any scientist can be charged as Galileo was charged. I just never thought I’d see the Scientific American in the role of Mother Church.
Is this what science has become? I hope not. But it is what it will become, unless there is a concerted effort by leading scientists to aggressively separate science from policy.
The late Philip Handler, former president of the National Academy of Sciences, said that “Scientists best serve public policy by living within the ethics of science, not those of politics. If the scientific community will not unfrock the charlatans, the public will not discern the difference– science and the nation will suffer.”
Personally, I don’t worry about the nation. But I do worry about science.
Sources:
Michael Crichton’s speeches and essays at these two URLs
http://www.fileindexer.com/find/Michael-Crichton-Speeches
http://www.fileindexer.com/find/Michael-Crichton-essays
Crichton’s official web page:
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Brendan H says:
July 12, 2010 at 8:42 am
Bruce Cobb: “But, perhaps it is just intellectual laziness on your part.”
Bruce, an insult is not an argument, and nor is argument by authority a logical fallacy when the authority is genuine.
————
Oh. My. God. You really don’t understand logical fallacies, do you?
Yes. Arguing by authority is always a freakin’ fallacy regardless of the authority.
Holy crap!
Six guys driving out into the outback for a fishing trip, all good friends. They are a motley crew of two mechanics, a marketing guy, a chemist and a CEO but they met back in school and have stayed close since.
Their transport, an old Chevy C10 witha Blue flame petrol engine does just fine for these trips. It’s a long way on back roads and they all talk about guy stuff, including cars.
Without warning the truck starts to cough and splutter and rolls to a stop. After a few attempts to restart out they get and open the hood. They don’t see anything obvious so the quick debate is what to look at first. The consensus is that it’s a fuel issue, all of them agree except for the chemist who opines that it’s a spark problem.
The mechanics set to work checking out the fuel supply . After some time the mechanics say that the fuel supply is fine so they move over to the ignition system.
Very quickly it is obvious that the points in the old distributor have closed up. It’s a simple fix that doesn’t take long and off they go.
My point is they all had opinions but the chemist was right. Not because he knew better but that was his gut feel , just as the others had a gut feel for the fuel supply being the problem.
The consensus had been wrong and the facts showed them that this was the case. That doesn’t mean they were wrong to start with the fuel it’s just that fixing the fuel didn’t solve the problem. The next time the truck packs up the chemist may well form the consensus but it doesn’t mean he will be right , only the facts can do that.
We have been working on the fuel supply by consensus for the last 20 years and it still hasn’t been shown to be malfunctioning. It’s time the other points of view got some attention.
We need some unequivocal facts about this climate business, hell we don’t even agree that we actually have a problem so any solution being offered hasn’t got a snow ball’s chance in hell of being right. The consensus said look at temperature and then blamed anthropogenic CO2 while the rest of us were asking where the temperature numbers came from and how they point to a problem.
Consensus is opinion, educated and uneducated. Science is facts.
Frank Lee MeiDere: : “Oh. My. God. You really don’t understand logical fallacies, do you?
Yes. Arguing by authority is always a freakin’ fallacy regardless of the authority.
Holy crap!”
Settle down. Argument by authorirty is not always a fallacy. The argument is fallacious when the claim is made necessarily dependent on the supposed qualities of the purported authority, ie a formal claim.
Informally, however, since some people will have greater expertise in a particular subject than the general population, it is reasonable for non-experts to accept the views of experts, keeping in mind that experts can be wrong.
One more time:
Science ≠ consensus. Consensus ≠ Science.
Ever.
There are many kinds of fallacies, and argument from authority is only one of them. Paraphrased for clarity, it goes like this: “Thou shalt believe me because I have quoted the Big Authority who is never wrong in these matters. Trust me.”
When that argument fails, another popular one is argumentum ad bacculum, the argument from the club. “Thou shalt believe, because if thou dost not, I shall clout thee.” Beating someone until he believes the sky is blue is not a valid argument even if the sky is blue. It may, however be an effective method of persuasion, as are many fallacies. Torture can easily gain false confession.
To get others to follow your logic as you argue from Authority, it is proper to establish how the Authority connects purported facts to reality. It is part of a valid argument to say, “Read the Authority’s words, which I quote below, or to which I point you.” It is not a valid argument to say, “The Authority says I am right,” or even “Millions of Frenchmen can’t be wrong.”
“The argument is fallacious when the claim is made necessarily dependent on the supposed qualities of the purported authority, ie a formal claim.
Informally, however, since some people will have greater expertise in a particular subject than the general population, it is reasonable for non-experts to accept the views of experts, keeping in mind that experts can be wrong.”
When you say it’s reasonable for non-experts to accept the views of experts, do you mean blindly? Ought not ‘experts’ be challenged to provide scientifically sound evidence? Should we simply accept their role as expert, a spurious label at best, and, having accepted their label blindly, subscribe to their views with just as little examination of the methods by which they arrived at their conclusion?
The most intelligent men in the world are often wrong – why, then, have you such faith in droves of experts regurgitating the results of purely speculative and arbitrary climate models?
A x B = C. C = 5.
It seems that ONLY an ‘expert’ can tell us what B is, because only an ‘expert’ is willing to ignore the fact that he cannot possibly know what B is in the name of providing an answer. So the expert tells us that the consensus is that B is 3 and then proceeds to ‘prove’ what A is.
And even if the AGW people are right – I’m not precluding that possibility at all – they have yet to demonstrate it, and so anything they do in the name of AGW is inherently unethical. If you kill a man for pleasure and it turns out the man was a notorious rapist, you are not suddenly a hero – the fact that you’ve racked up a net win for the world is irrelevant. IT MATTERS “WHY”.
So even if the scare tactic DARE program reduced addiction, it cannot claim to be ethical because it accomplished its goal by dishonest means.
Even if the AGW crowd ends up saving the world there is no virtue in it because in not possibly being able to know what the truth in the matter is, the only other motivation one can turn to in order to explain their actions are those of self interest. They’re killing the rapist to take his wallet.
Mr Lynn says:
July 11, 2010 at 4:34 pm
BTW, the lead cartoon has it backwards, making fun of the conservatives refusing to acknowledge a threat, no matter how serious.
/Mr Lynn
So according to yourself, then, all SCIENCE is nought but a political football?
Since when, I’d like to know, did science suddenly become an extension of the political?
And while I’m on the subject, you appear to be declaring that science = politics = religion.
Nothing rigorous needed there, right? Just belief?
And you do understand here –do you not– that a mere majority is all that’s needed in order for suppression of the truth, no matter how onerous?
“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”
~ Thomas Jefferson ~
899
Actually, 899, I don’t think that’s what Mr. Lynn was saying at all. But I do agree with you that the majority often suppresses the truth.
Brendan H says:
July 11, 2010 at 11:32 pm
Jose Suro: “Sorry, but after reading your posts I’m afraid that your diatribe…consensus does mean Unanimity.”
I don’t accept that my writing constitutes a “diatribe”, and consensus can also mean “general agreement”, which does not involve unanimity and nor does it demand agreement on every last detail. So there is still room for disagreement within a consensus.
You seem to be intentionally avoiding the matter of distinction.
By dictionary definition, ‘consensus’ is a group opinion. It is NOT science. There is no such thing as ‘group science,’ unless you desire to proclaim something new under the Sun.
And opinion, by definition is NOT scientific.
If a group of scientists got together and said “We agree with the fact that the Earth is a globe,” they could well be said to have remarked that the science which was used to determine the fact had been rigorously tested and found to be accurate.
THAT is NOT a ‘consensus.’ Rather, it’s an agreement that the theory has been tested and found to be both repeatable and accurate in every instance.
That particular agreement isn’t isn’t consensus, because it is based upon criteria both testable and repeatable, and being such, opinion is no longer as aspect which is used to define the essence of the matter.
Ultimately it devolves to just this: Is it a ‘1,’ or is it a ‘0’?
If it is neither, then there is no solid scientific fact. What you’re left with –at that point– is opinion.
So then, they aren’t making a ‘consensus,’ if only that the facts have been well tested and found to be accurate and true, or not.
Factual truth isn’t a matter of opinion. It’s reality. Facts + truth = reality. Take away any one of them and you end up with a fantasy and a ‘consensus.’
What we are left with here is just this: The propagandist faction of the climate science school of thought have it in mind to dispense with critical analysis, and inject opinion into the matter, pretending to declare that certain things are true.
Well, if it were true that CO2 causes warming, then WHERE are the tested facts and repeatable truth?
Got none? Then you’ll have to resort to ‘consensus.’
Brendan H, you have been talking in circles for a number of days now. I am a trained scientist and have made my living as a researcher, or in applied aspects of research-oriented fields, for more than 25 years. I’m not speculating or playing games when I say that an argument of consensus is meaningless. Either you have the data or you don’t. First, produce the data. Don’t tell me that I might not understand it, or that I need certain experts selected by you to tell me what it means. Show me the data. It’s fine to provide your interpretation along with it, but if you can’t or won’t show the data then you have no argument. That’s how science works. Your complete failure to engage on the basis of a factual argument, instead persisting in an awkward attempt to tell us that “consensus” actually has meaning in the absence of supporting data, just tells us all that you can’t muster a fact-based argument and must play with semantics instead. Sorry, but that’s not good enough. Bye now.
Brendan, researchers on staff at the International Arctic Research Center have not come to a consensus. If you look through the authors, you will find varied opinions alongside their published research. For example Polyakov does not adhere to the consensus that Arctic ice reduction is driven by CO2. He states he does not yet know the degree to which greenhouse gasses have contributed to this decrease. He does speak of natural causes as clear and strong drivers of this decrease based on observations and modeling.
Brendan H says:
July 11, 2010 at 11:31 pm
[–snip–] I cannot verify your experience, but in my experience I have seen many climate debates on blogs where the warming proponents offer plenty in the way of arguments and evidence.
To hell with the arguments! WHERE is THE evidence?
If all you’ve got is ‘opinion’ and ‘consensus,’ then you’ve got not a thing.
So, once again: WHERE is the evidence that CO2 causes CAGW/CC?
Why are NOT the polar regions melting as a result of the CO2 trapped in the ice?
Why are the waters NOT roiling and hissing fiendishly because of all that CO2 which has been absorbed by them??
Why is NOT that atmosphere –verily filled with that gas– turning the lot of us into baked hams??
John Burford says:
July 12, 2010 at 12:48 am
Anthony,
You are a breath of fresh air in the cesspit of modern “science”.
I worked for NASA on the Mars Exploration Team and my project was to make estimates of the chance of catastrophic damage from asteriods striking the proposed manned spacecraft. With the limited data at the time, I did manage to come up with a figure (with wide error bar!). My prediction was for a greater than 5% probability.
I presented my report to my boss. As he read it, his smile slowly turned into a deep frown. “John, I think you had better re-work the numbers, if you catch my drift”. That was code for “Congress and my bosses won’t like this, and we need to keep the funding going”. That was in 1971.[–snip rest–]
I’m surprised!
My goodness, do you realize the chances of having a fatal accident on the highway, each and every day one travels?
The statistical odds of just anything happening in the modern world are far greater than a mere 5%, and likely you know just that!
But I understand the thrust of your remarks: Tell them what they want to hear.
When I served in the USN, one Chief Petty Officer I worked for, flat told me this: “If I ever catch you telling me what it is I want to hear –at the expense of telling the truth– why I’ll have you busted down to an E1, and drummed out of the Navy!!!”
That’s what was known as being read the ‘riot act.’ 😉
I can’t imagine how 899 came to such conclusions from my entirely trivial complaint about the cartoon at the top of this thread. Perhaps he was responding to my subsequent (and I hope more substantive) comment at July 11, 2010 at 4:59 pm.
But even then, I am puzzled. I was discussing Dave H’s use of well-established scientific paradigms to illustrate ‘consensus’ among scientists, which they certainly do. But that does not mean they are the same as the underlying reality that science attempts to describe and understand.
Scientific theories, hypotheses, speculations and whatnot are all subject to greater or lesser degrees of agreement within particular communities (academic departments, professional societies, etc.—even the blogosphere). They can become the objects of fervent advocacy, even emotional attachment akin to religious faith. This has nothing to do with their ultimate truth.
On the contrary, to the extent that statements about the world, however couched, become handmaidens of political or ideological commitment, and their advocates become resistant to the need to replicate, test, and falsify—to that extent, the ethos and aims of science are diminished and vitiated.
That is clearly what has happened to ‘climate science’. The extreme advocates of the hypothesis that mankind’s production of carbon dioxide is heating up the Earth have become so enamored of the idea, for entirely extra-scientific reasons, that they have effectively abandoned the aims and discipline of the scientific enterprise. It has become an idée fixe, so that any attempt at falsification is met with either obfuscation or unbridled opposition and the appeal to authority (‘consensus’).
This has happened many times in the history of science, and indeed of all human knowledge. But it does not mean that “science = politics = religion.” It does mean that even science, ever since Sir Francis Bacon, is not immune to the blandishments of ego, ambition, avarice, and ideology. The scientist (and indeed, any rational human being) must always be careful to distinguish the quest for knowledge, wherever it might lead, from the smug conclusion that he and his colleagues have The Answer.
/Mr Lynn
See, 899? I thought you’d gotten the wrong end of the stick on that one. It happens.
nutbastard: “When you say it’s reasonable for non-experts to accept the views of experts, do you mean blindly?”
No. That’s why I appended the comment: “…keeping in mind that experts can be wrong”. Experts should certainly be challenged to provide scientifically sound evidence.
“If you kill a man for pleasure and it turns out the man was a notorious rapist, you are not suddenly a hero…”
That’s a moral, not a factual claim. The factual reality would be that the rapist is dead.
“…because in not possibly being able to know what the truth in the matter is…”
As a general comment (and I accept you may not mean it as a general comment), I find this flawed. We may not be able to find The Truth scientifically, but we can discover useful information.
899: “THAT is NOT a ‘consensus.’ Rather, it’s an agreement that the theory has been tested and found to be both repeatable and accurate in every instance.”
I’m happy to go with general agreement if you find the term consensus off-putting.
“To hell with the arguments! WHERE is THE evidence?”
I think you’re being a bit cavalier in dismissing argument in that way. Much of our knowledge is communicated via argument, and a well-formed argument can provide people with information and intepretations they might not otherwise have considered.
As for evidence, I can point you to the blogs I referred to, or to reports which reference scientific papers.
“Why is NOT that atmosphere –verily filled with that gas– turning the lot of us into baked hams??”
Or baked Alaskans.
Robert Kral: “Your complete failure to engage on the basis of a factual argument, instead persisting in an awkward attempt to tell us that “consensus” actually has meaning…”
Consensus does have meaning. It means “general agreement”. The reason I have been focusing on consensus is because that’s a central topic of Crichton’s essay and it’s a topic I find interesting. I appreciate that you want to talk about something else, but I’m not obliged to follow your attempt to change the subject.
Pamela Gray: “…researchers on staff at the International Arctic Research Center have not come to a consensus.”
I don’t know anything about this research centre, Pamela, so I can’t comment, but keep in mind that consensus means general agreement, not unanimity.
There seems to be continuing confusion on the meaning of a scientific consensus. “Consensus” can mean several different things.
Ten million people can agree – that is, reach a consensus – that the world is flat. This matters not a bit to the earth, which will remain stubbornly non-flat. This consensus, although about a scientific fact, is scientifically worthless. This seems to be the type of consensus Crighton was talking about.
On the other hand, ten million people can perform their own measurements of some physical variable; say, sea levels. (The equipment is not complex, all that’s needed is access to one of the world’s oceans, an immovable reference point, and some time. I’ve made these measurements, and so can most anyone else.) These ten million observers can reach a consensus that the average sea level has not changed by any notable degree in the recent past. Unlike the first type, this consensus is of scientific value. The observers didn’t arrive at their conclusions because they believed that the others had reached the same conclusions, and assuming that there must be something to it by sheer weight of numbers. They arrived at them by independent measurement of the same variables.
One of these consensuses is good science, the other is of no scientific value at all.
Dave H, Brenden, and Geo have it right, actually.
See Michael Crichton pontificate.
The late novelist was a writer (albeit simpleton “See-Spot-Run” constructions, and stick-figure characterizations in much of his work are also noted) and a speech-meister of notions stacked together like prefabricated henhouses.
The whole speech looks like a car wreck, gory and twisted and tendentious, with the horrific t-bone crash hitting John Q. Public occurring somewhere between the pretentious garbage from Cato and Heartland Institutes and yet more oil money gushing in for the Herr Docktor Docktor Lindzin.
It’s all “Free enterprise” tripe and the alter of Ayn Rand, for which I assume by now most participants here know we should just as soon take all remaining copies of Atlas Shrugged and see that for what they’re worth chunk them into the BP gusher to plug the hole “free enterprise” has bequeathed the world. Never let it be said quaint notions have no value whatsoever. Nor quaint people like the good writer.
A total fisking of Crichton would take 50 pages, but here’s the basics, gang:
First and worst, it is far from clear that most writers know much about climatology. That should do the trick, but the fun here demands more for the really good shiggles.
Next, there is this whole bruha about “consensus.” Well, paraphrasing Operation Bravo Job refugees like Bill Clinton, that really depends on just what the definition of “consensus” is. No doubt you’ll find “consensus” is different and somewhat less trustworthy for the opines of writers, hairstylists, and nannies on a host of science topics than the input from real scientists doing real work with real data. No one seems to take note that he had other hobbies besides writing–and yet no one asks him about these. They should. His input on roses and cooking would be more meaningful than his take on climatology.
Philosopher David Stowe puts to bed the Columbus Myth (and that story is not what you think, as the fool RAN into the Americas, he didn’t “find” it via advanced cartography) and the torment of Galileo. Galileo and Copernicus were indeed assaulted for their beliefs in their day–but not by “consensus” minds from science but rather an unholy coalition of Church “consensus” teaching, mysticism about dragons on the edges of the known world, and authorities who felt new cosmological notions would upset the established order of morals, etc.
The same argument employed against Darwin to this very day.
Also, even if these common tales of woe for those daring individuals at the vile hands of “consensus” were true in the absolutist sense usually told, Stowe reminds us that more often things are the other way around. Consensus is a natural human assemblage in the mind’s eye, and if from reputable authority, is (unfortunately for the tall tales about persecution and Crichton) more often right than wrong. Thus for example “they” told the fool Columbus that it was not possible to navigate his way to India in search of spices and that he was on a fool’s errand. They were right. It was not done. The slamming into Central America is what saved the fool’s life and those of his sailors–Not his mastery of the seven seas. Sometimes luck trumps brains. This is not, however, good reasoning for going against the wisdom of your betters.
Galileo and Copernicus turned out to be correct, yes, but their opponents were primarily mystics steeped in church doctrine from the Dark Ages–not studious men who had some alternative point of view.
Even so, the exception demonstrates the general rule, no? Many people who “went against the grain” (Karl Marx) might have had an ignition of popularity coming as his notions did on the edge of a new age of scientific discovery and latching onto those hemlines, yes, But it fell later. The balonious notions always fall. Likewise Milton Friedman and the Libertarians of economic theory and the laughable Laffer Curve adherents are hardly taken seriously by anyone. Why? Because, while these are not considered the hard sciences and are more about philosophy, nonetheless, the consensus of history applies here also. Marxism leads to hunger, terror, and death. Radicalized capitalism that ignores economic bust cycles, manipulations of media and politicians (see Gulf Oil Splooge) and the plight of the downtrodden, for its part, leads to abject misery if left unchecked. This is not to say the Keynesians have a complete handle on morals and facts, or that the sky’s the limit on government spending, no. But it does mean we now know that government intervention in the economy is a vital part of balancing the private and public interests.
Radicals like Crichton, like his presumed SuperGreen “back to nature” type enemies, both end up with feet planted firmly in the air. Consensus is there for a reason. It is engineered as a defense mechanism in society to protect people from nutcases. Sometimes it fails us. But as David Stowe notes, there are far more nutcases like Marx than heroes like Copernicus. Consensus is an evolutionary outgrowth of human experience. Like lizards who lift their feet to keep from getting burned in the desert, it is not 100% effective. But it has it’s moments. The “consensus” not being science puppet show Mr. State of Confusion puts on is, at the very least, very incomplete. Context is key. There is much confidence in the consensus of true climatologists than mere pundits, late night talk radio hosts talking about how cold Wasilla Alaska is in January (thanks, we knew that!) or Rush Limbaugh mocking Al Gore.
Next, we have Crichton’s handy-dandy and rather interesting history lesson about what was not around a century ago or so–the only bright spot in the whole speech. Not bright for it’s meaning for the speech. It has none. But it IS a very useful distraction. Clever. To his credit, would that more kiddies learn how industry and science and government find ever new ways to bequeath to us these sumptuous benefits and fripperies that didn’t exist in the year 1900. Yes, a mere 110 years ago. Yes, the world changes: Thanks for the hot tip. But along those lines the science of everything gets better in leaps and bounds also. For example, the computer modeling he slams as shoddy.
His example fails in any event to make the point that has some others here jumping and hopping: Crichton is trying to say that because the world changes utterly beneath our very feet and within the space of a mere generation in some cases, we cannot extrapolate certain products, processes, movements, demographics, etc, and then he tries to apply this to raw data about the world.
More fool him. Non-sequiter. The very fact that much has changed also applies to computing science. The gold ring I’m wearing would’ve looked the same in the year 20 million BC and will remain the same in the year 20 million AD. Yes, a goldsmith could change the shape, but the point is we know the properties of “AU” and the relativistic reasons the election cloud of this heavy metal makes it reflect an appealing yellow light rather than the standard silverish of most other metals. This does not change. The fact that we can now unlock the secrets of why people used to kill each other over precious metals-THAT is the part that changed. Today, computer modeling is more accurate than at any time. If it was truly in doubt, then we’d have no confidence in…oh..to pluck from the ether….tax assessments for entire cities, mass property appraisals geared to analyze for the same, weather forecasts for entire weeks that are usually spot on, engineering projects of all types and sizes, predictions of demographic shifts for entire states, and even analysis of the effects of new drugs on animal and human biology even without testing living subjects.
Guess what? I will go out on a proverbial limb here and declare here and now that this ring must surely confound the ghost of Crichton–it will indeed be yellowish in the morning (!!!), and 50 years in the future. Protons decay, yes, but for the most part the structure of the earth and Cosmos is about the same at the atomic level as today. Ditto for weather cycles on our planet and the interaction of carbon and water. Yes, I know the climate changes, but the the reasons behind this change are about the same. Water retains heat and is the main thermoregular, and so does carbon dioxide, except that carbon dioxide is now understood to be a forcing agent.
We may err sometimes–and surely did—back in the days of ENIAC when the punchcards could not extrapolate the future of warming due to increased CO2. Today, we have this nailed. It is not in doubt. We cannot say for certain the level of sea rise and environmental impact, but to now say that the computers are being unduly manipulated, or that the processes can’t keep up with the data, is getting to be a thin argument at this point. Once we know all the feedback and forcing mechanisms, the rest is just making sure the modeling is complex enough to take account of all the known variables. From what we have so far, and barring some whopper like a rash of volcanoes and a large meteor impact or industrial civilization getting blasted back to the days of Laura Ingalls, we can say that the world is warming. It’s settled.
Crichton goes on about plate tectonics, for example, but the back-story on that old debate is not as he said. The area of disagreement from the consensus days against Wegener’s theory was over the movement of rocks. The consensus was correct, actually. The continents indeed cannot plow through rock. Indeed, they pointed out that the plates–the base–had to move as well. And so they do.
His next trick is the Drake equation, which oddly has nothing to do with what he’s talking about, because climate science has far more knowns to fill in the variable spaces than guestimations about the conditions for alien life to evolve. Ditto for his odd dissertation on Nuclear Winter. He merely demonstrated without noticing that science is self-correcting when it truly hits snags or new information is available. So while he cries foul at political or philosophical forces having some ungodly influence over science, the fact is laid bare that the nuke winter advocates DID make adjustments. Crichton also claimed–just as damningly–that “none of the variables can be determined. None at all.” Laughably false. Payloads, dust, water vapor, numbers of missiles strikes, MIRV technology–all of these were known.
Crichton, like other advocates for Wild West Capitalism ruling the roost, has this Glenn Beck-hittin’-the-chalkboards fantasy/conspiracy-mongering notion that climate scientists are bought and paid government hacks all working to some ulterior motive to usher in a new Dark Ages of Carbon Oppression, perhaps via Obama and SEIU and ACORN or being the sockpuppets of nefarious nabobs like Soros? Who the hell knows. But the point should be noted that in reality, climate science is the LEAST of any politicized sciences we could have. Indeed, it is far below the radar of most people, even IF sometimes you have boneheaded politicians quote Real Climate or Al Gore making big bucks. So what. Pols are opportunists, not scientists.
People have much mirth with the likes of Sagan, Drake, questionable chaps like Paul Ehrlich. But so what? They are not climate scientists either. And perhaps unbeknown to many, while they might have gotten some fawning press in their day, they were NOT universally admired for their work, and the consensus then as now slammed them for their loony ideas on some things. Just because you can dredge the mud pits of any philosophy hard enough and find people who’re contradictory or pretend to be staid and true researchers but turn out to be nutty, does not indict an entire branch of science. There are nuts who’ve promoted “survival of the fittest” notions and tried to apply it to sociology, or socio-biology and have us all placed in Skinner Boxes. These people being dangerous or crazy as hell for what they’ve latched onto in order to justify abuses of people is not the same thing as saying “Behold, therefore Darwin is wrong.”
Far from the case.
Elsewhere, we have Crichton’s odd ignorance on smoking. I’m not a nanny-stater, but it seems to me that based on dozens of studies in this regard, second-hand smoke is just as nasty for human health as firing up one yourself. We know the lower thresholds, in that even light smokers are smokers nonetheless (100 standard cigarettes a YEAR is about the low end of truly being in danger of lung cancer or emphysema and heart problems–that’s less than a third of a cig a day, gang) so if you’re in an average-sized bar and merely are breathing in the air of those smokers around you, or you smoke around your kids in most any tight-windowed house under 10,000 square feet (most of them, I take it) you or your kids and spouse will be second-hand smokers, and moreover, the equivalent of smokers themselves. It’s been estimated that the children of parents who merely smoke one pack of cigs a day in the confines of indoors are uptaking the equivalent of 2-5 cigarettes themselves, the main difference being the sidestream is more dangerous in fact than the exhaled smoke due to burning at a lower temperature and not oxidizing all the carcinogens, etc. and 2-5 cigs–however indirect–is within the research threshold of calling you a true “smoker” (100 cigs or more a year) rather than an “occasional” one (less than 100 cigs in an entire year).
Sorry Michael, but certainly kids should not smoke–and so-called “second-hand smoke” IS smoking by default. It’s therefore as dangerous to human health as smoking outright.
Lastly, Crichton’s recommendations of just “waiting” on technology to come in like the knight in shining armor to rescue us (He does not say it, but I’m assuming his analogy must be something along the lines of dissing Paul Erlich’s absurdist gloom via Norman Borlog’s Supe Rrice Revolution or some such “miracle of human inventiveness” type moment?) is really bizarre.
Perfectly asinine, in light of what we know. Ordinarily, I would give some leeway on the issue, as we often do see the appearance of “miracles” here and there, rescuing humanity from things like starvation, deprivation, illness, and much else. True in part, but at some point we’re going to have to realize that certain lifestyles and habits are dangerous to the planet and ourselves, and that trying to send wheat to Biafra or keep up with the Joneses, or have carbon -belching unabated in order to give juice to the grid so that people can soak in 60 degree temp sets on the thermostat, or drain large lakes dry for hydration of suburbia’s unnaturally thirty, non-native lawn covers, MUST come to an end. It’s a fools errand. And, as with the “Miracle Rice” that supposedly saved millions of lives, it needs to be understood that just as with the encouragement of living beyond our means due these technological miracles, and seeing now that just as Norman Borlog himself warned about not getting jaded or too comforted in the population explosions due the minor uptick in food, we need to reduce–not make excuses or hope that technology can save us. Because–mostly–what needs rescuing is US–from our own stupidity.
Brendan, you said, “As for evidence, I can point you to the blogs I referred to, or to reports which reference scientific papers. ”
Thank you. Now I guess you had previously posted these pointers somewhere, but I’ve apparently overlooked them. Would you be so kind as to provide them again?
Just to be clear here, what I’m ultimately looking for, and have not seen, is the full tables of numbers that are actual recorded data of weather observations, the actual algorithms by which those data are to be corrected to reduce systematic error, and the full chain of logical reasoning that yields the conclusions that climate scientists accept as consensus. I think that I’ve seen bits and pieces.
The algorithms I’m hoping to see should include not only what was done to the data, but why. Just to take one example, in some calculations, outliers are rejected, resulting in a more precise value for the mean. I would expect that for every single outlier there should be a stated reason for its removal, and I would be very suspicious if “improving the precision” was the only reason. Sometimes the outliers contain valuable information, including hints at unsuspected inputs. Improvement of precision can greatly reduce accuracy and can even discard knowledge.
Here’s what William Thompson, Lord Kelvin, had to say about mathematical work in science:
“Accurate and minute measurement seems to the non-scientific imagination a less lofty and dignified work than looking for something new. But nearly all the grandest discoveries of science have been but the rewards of accurate measurement, and patient, long-continued labour in the minute sifting of numerical results. The popular idea of Newton’s grandest discovery is that the theory of gravitation flashed into his mind, and so the discovery was made. It was by a long train of mathematical calculation, founded on results accumulated through prodigious toil of practical astronomers, that Newton first demonstrated the forces urging the planets towards the Sun, determined the magnitude of those forces, and discovered that a force following the same law of variation with distance urges the Moon towards the Earth. Then first, we may suppose, came to him the idea of the universality of gravitation ; but when he attempted to compare the magnitude of the force of the Moon, with the magnitude of the force of gravitation of a heavy body of equal mass at the Earth’s surface, he did not find the agreement which the law he was discovering required. Not for years after would he publish his discovery as made. It is recounted that, being present at a meeting of the Royal Society, he heard a paper read, describing geodesic measurement by Picard, which led to a serious correction of the previously accepted estimate of the Earth’s radius. This was what Newton required. He went home with the result, and commenced his calculations, but felt so much agitated that he handed over the arithmetical work to a friend : then (and not when, sitting in a garden, he saw an apple fall) did he ascertain that gravitation keeps the Moon in her orbit.” —British Association Keports, vol. Ill pp. xci. xcii. Introductory address by Sir W. Thomson. (Quoted in The Dublin University magazine: a literary and political journal, Volume 89, 1877.)
Twenty years after Thompson made those remarks John William Strutt, Lord Rayleigh, announced the discovery of argon. He had been bothered by the discrepancy between measurements of atmospheric nitrogen and those of nitrogen derived from chemical decomposition. My college professor of physics, Reginald J. Stephenson, said that Rayleigh was better able to understand his data because of his careful attention to recording minutiae in his laboratory notebook, including whether or not the door to the room was open or closed.
Whoopsie!
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100715_globalstats.html
“The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science.”
I know little about SETI, so I have no opinion on whether it is worthy of criticism for one reason or another.
What I find difficult to understand, however, is how SETI can be dismissed as non-science when there seems to be a falsifiable hypothesis at its heart, namely that no signals from alien beings are reaching us. Would anyone care to explain why this is not science?