John A: This is a provocative essay, and I’ve thought of at least a couple of replies to counter some of the arguments, but I think it deserves a wider audience.
The Global Warming Policy Foundation
by Dr Terence Kealey, Vice-Chancellor, University of Buckingham
Member of the Academic Advisory Council for the Global Warming Policy Foundation
The Mont Pelerin Society Meeting Seminar on Science, Scepticism and the Future. Sydney, Australia, October 2010
The hard core of a programme is rendered unfalsifiable by the methodological decision of its protagonists. — Imre Lakatos Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge 1974
The scientist is restricted by his instruments, money, the attitudes of his colleagues, his playmates, and by innumerable physiological, sociological, historical constraints. –Paul Feyerabend, Against Method 1975
The emails sent by members of the climatic research centre at the University of East Anglia have provoked international outrage, as have the many flawed global warming papers that have appeared in recent years such as those describing the hockey stick graph(1), to say nothing of the flawed predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) over such issues as the rate of disappearance of the glaciers in the Himalayas. But such outrage has been naive because it has been premised on the assumption that scientists are – and should be – dispassionate seekers after truth. Yet in fact scientists are and should be advocates. Science has always been rooted in advocacy, as was illustrated by an episode from its very beginnings during the 5th century BC.
Pythagoras (of the Theorum) was a good scientist but he was of a mystical bent and he revered ‘rational’ numbers (whole numbers or whole fractions). He believed they explained the Harmony of the Spheres. Pythagoras, indeed, believed that whole numbers underpinned the universe from music to the movement of the planets. But Pythagoras had a student called Hippasus, and Hippasus discovered that the square root of 2, √2 is not a rational number. It is in fact an ‘irrational’ number, and its exact quantity will never be precisely calculated because, as Hippasus showed two and a half thousand years ago, irrational numbers can never be definitively calculated. This proof upset Pythagoras and he asked Hippasus to retract it. But Hippasus refused, so Pythagoras had him drowned.
That’s what scientists are like in their natural state. Now – call me soft – but I think Pythagoras went too far; I think that scientists should desist from killing each other or even from telling outright falsehoods. But, like advocates in court, scientists can nonetheless be expected to put forward only one very partial case – and that as strongly as possible – and no-one should expect a scientist to be anything other than a biased advocate.
Consider the early controversy over the age of the earth. The 19th century geologist Sir Charles Lyell had, by his study of the rate of erosion of cliffs, proposed the earth not to have been created at 9.00 am on the 23rd of October 4004 BC but, rather, some hundreds of millions of years earlier. But, as we know from volcanoes, the core of the earth is red hot. And when contemporary geologists measured the temperature of the molten core, and when they calculated its rate of heat loss, they concluded that the earth could be only a few millions of years old. Had it been any older its core would have completely cooled. Lyell had apparently been falsified.
In the face of this apparent falsification, did Lyell’s followers ditch their ideas? No. Like advocates presented with contradictory data that cannot be challenged, they simply ignored it. They knew how old the sedimentary rocks had to be, and they didn’t believe the falsifiers. So, not knowing how to falsify the falsifiers, they simply pressed on with their own pre-existing programme of research, assuming
that something helpful would turn up eventually. Which it did. Somebody in some other discipline discovered radioactivity, somebody discovered the core of the earth to be radioactive, somebody discovered that radioactive reactions emitted heat and hey presto the problem was resolved: the core of the earth generates heat, which is why it is still hot; and the earth is indeed very old.
In his 1605 book The Advancement of Knowledge, which helped launch the modern discipline we call the philosophy of science, Francis Bacon proposed a four-step process by which science advanced, namely by (i) observation, (ii) induction, (iii) deduction and (iv) experimentation. Bacon saw this as an almost mechanical or determinist activity based on logic, which he supposed precluded individualistic human whims. But because the number of potential observations is so large (does the colour of an astronomer’s socks correlate with his or her recordings of the movement of a planet?) scientists must inevitably select the observations they believe to be relevant, from which they then deduce and induce the theories they seek to test.
Scientists therefore select particular theories out of a range of possibilities. And they then (being human) design experiments to prove their own theories right. Consequently, contrary to what many people believe that Karol Popper wrote, science is in practice not about falsification.2 In practice great scientists ignore embarrassing data, and they refuse to feel falsified when they don’t want to be.
Scientists know they are working at the limits of knowledge, which means that that knowledge must necessarily be imperfect, so (like Charles Lyell) scientists will refuse to draw definitive negative conclusions from unhelpful new findings because they know that those new findings might themselves need re-evaluation in the light of further subsequent data (such as radioactivity) that has yet to be revealed.
Indeed, as Thomas Kuhn explained in his classic 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, scientists’ personal attachment to their own theories in the face of conflicting data means that the research community’s dispassionate collective verdict over what is ’truth’ can be delivered only after all the competing data has come in and only after all the arguments have been made (or, as was said humorously by Max Planck:- “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it “). These arguments have been summarised by Alan Chalmers of Finders University in his excellent introduction to the philosophy of science What Is This Thing Called Science? (3rd ed 1999, Open University).
Consequently, we can see how the climate change scientists of the IPCC and of the conventional global warming paradigm saw no conflict between their partiality in the arguments they put forward and their responsibilities to ‘truth’, just as advocates in court under the common law see no conflict between their partiality in the arguments they put forward and their responsibilities to ‘justice’.
In both cases, the scientists and advocates see their prime responsibility as being the putting forward of the best arguments to support their case/client, and they delegate the adjudication over impartial ‘truth’ to the jury of peers.
Such partiality cannot excuse misrepresentation, of course, nor the persistent non-disclosure of inconvenient facts, and those will always be ethical crimes, but it would be naive of the general public to expect scientists always to present their work and theories dispassionately. It would also be naive of the general public to expect scientists to disclose all their data promptly. In his otherwise excellent 2010 book The Hockey Stick Illusion (Independent Minds) where he dismissed the claims of many climate change scientists, AW Montford nonetheless professed astonishment that researchers might feel that they can legitimately withhold original data. But as Tim Birkhead recently reported in the Times Higher Education, such withholding is a conventional aspect of many disciplines in science. Indeed, it is endorsed by the British Government’s research councils. Thus the Natural Environment Research Council states that “individual scientists, principal-investigator teams and programmes will be permitted a reasonable period of exclusive access to data sets they have collected” while the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council states that ‘researchers have a legitimate interest in benefiting from their own time and effort in producing the data, but not in prolonged exclusive use. ‘3
But why should scientists publish anything at all? In his 1942 essay The Normative Structure of Science Robert Merton, the great sociologist of science, described science with the acronym CUDOS (note how it is pronounced). The letters stand for Communism, Universalism, Disinterestedness and Organised Scepticism, by which Merton meant that scientists share knowledge (communism), that knowledge is judged objectively (universalism), that scientists act in ways that appear selfless, and that ideas are tested collectively.
But actually Merton was being ahistorical. Pace his acronym, scientists indeed seek either kudos or money or both (ie, they are not communistic, they are selfseeking, which is legitimate but not particularly noble) but their publishing has always been dictated by self-interest. Indeed, in its natural state science was originally characterised by the paradox of secret publishing: researchers did not want others to benefit from their advances. So some scientists, having dated the report of a discovery, would seal and deposit it with a college or lawyer, to open it only to dispute priority with a later competitive publication. Others would publish in code or in anagrams: Galileo published his discovery of the rings of Saturn in 1610 as smaismrmilmepoetaleumibunenugttauiras for Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi (I have observed the most distant planet to have a triple form) while Robert Hooke published his law of elasticity in 1660 as ceiiinosssttuu for ut tensio sic vis (stress is proportional to strain.)
Secrecy was originally normal: when around 1600 a young London obstetrician called Peter Chamberlen invented the obstetric forceps, for over a century he, his younger brother, his younger brother’s son and that son’s son (all obstetricians) kept the invention a secret. Rich women, knowing that the Chamberlens were the best obstetricians in Europe, engaged them to deliver their babies, but the price those women paid (apart from handsome fees) was to be blindfolded and trapped alone with the Chamberlens in a locked room during labour so that no one could discover the secret of the forceps. That emerged only during the 1720s when the last Chamberlen, having retired rich but childless, finally divulged it.
It was Robert Boyle who, by his leadership of the Royal Society of London, which was created exactly 350 years ago this year, negotiated (i) the convention whereby priority – and therefore esteem – goes to the scientist who publishes first, not to the scientist who might have made the discovery earlier but who has kept the findings secret, and (ii) the convention that papers are accepted for publication only if they contain a methods section as well as a results section, to allow reproducibility.
We see here, therefore, that science is not innately a public good: it is innately a discreet one where, in a state of nature, scientists would publish not their methods but only their findings – and where they would sometimes delay or obscure the publication even of those. But it was Boyle who realised, in classic game theory mode, that if the Fellows (aka members) of the infant Royal Society collaborated with each other in publishing their findings (i) openly, and (ii) including their methods sections, then the scientists within the Society would do better, by virtue of their access to the whole of the Society’s membership’s collective discoveries, than would those isolated researchers who worked outside the circle of mutual disclosure. And it was because the Royal Society’s original experiments were conducted collectively but in the presence only of its Fellows, and because its publications were preferentially circulated to its Fellows, that the Fellows enjoyed an advantage over non-Fellows.
Science, therefore, only appears to be public because, over the centuries, most scientists globally have gradually modelled themselves on the Royal Society’s ‘new’ conventions, the better to take advantage of the mutuality of knowledge. But not all scientists have done so completely, and as Birkhead showed in his THE article many disciplines have elaborated the convention of publishing their findings a year or two before they publish their data, thus keeping a lead on the further study of their data.
Everyone in those disciplines agrees that, since the exploitation of other people’s data is so much easier than discovering it for oneself, a discoverer’s year or more of monopoly is only fair.
To conclude, therefore, scientists are not disinterested, they are interested, and as a consequence science is not dispassionate or fully transparent, rather it is human and partially arcane. As I argue elsewhere, science is not the public good of modern myth, it is a collegiate and quasi-private or invisible college good.4 That means, by the way, that it requires no public subsidies. More relevantly, it means that individual scientist’s pronouncements should be seen more as advertisements than as definitive.
Peer review, too, is merely a mechanism by which scientists keep a collective control over access to their quasi-private enterprise. One the e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia included this from Professor Phil Jones, referring to two papers that apparently falsified his work:- “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
So what? Climategate tells us no more than the philosophers of science have long told us about research, and the public should be less naive.
Notes and References
1. Mann ME, Bradley RS, Hughes MK, 1999, Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium Geophysical Research Letters 26: 759.762
2. It should be noted that falsification and falsifiability are different. As Popper proposed, a statement cannot be seen as scientific unless it is falsifiable and can thus be tested by the scientific method. So the statement that the moon is made of green cheese is a scientific one, because it can be tested and falsified. But the fact that none of the moon missions to date has found green cheese does not falsify the hypothesis because not every part of the moon has yet been explored.
3. Birkhead T, 2009, Whose Data is it Anyway? Times Higher Education 1,901, 27.
4. Kealey T, 2008, Sex, Science and Profits William Heinemann
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
So…. lying, cheating, caniving and stealing are nothing new to the scientific community. Am I supposed to take comfort in that?
Carl;
good point, but Genghis was doing the opposite of infanticide: he was keeping the youngest alive and killing the rest. Not sure what the right “-cide” noun is for that!
Note that this guy’s examples are all from times in which the people did not have a legal right to data and/or a full explanation. Times are different and it is precisely for this difference that his argument is completely incorrect.
Mark
Another pathetic, contrived, after-the-fact apologia. I confuses advocacy with ethics.
You could run your club that way, I suppose. Particularly if privately funded. Who was funding the work of these comfortable pioneers, again? Universities? Parliament? Or patrons?
But I believe that FOIA has definitively answered the question, as far as publicly-funded science is concerned. You can contemplate your collegial privileges while doing your time in some sort of isolation.
In a way I agree with much that is said in this article and how scienrists in the past have acted. We do not live in an ideal world and scientists are only human.
However, I think that climate science (and I use that latter expression generously since there does not appear to be much scientific method being adopted by the majority of climate scientist) is different and due to its politicisation has come into the public domain.
All citicizens in the developed world are, on the back of some warmist’s conjecture, being asked to make great sacrifices (the cut back in CO2 emissions will hinder industrialisation and move the country backwards such that the standard of living will not progress as fast as would otherwise be the case and may even go backwards) and great expense (in the form of green taxes and levies being paid as subsidies to green energy providers etc) such that the public have a right not to be duped. This right extents to the just expectation that the scientists (the advocates promoting a personally held view) will act honestly, without misrepresenting facts or data and will promptly make available raw data and their methodolgy so that the veracity of their findings/predictions can be properly tested.
Personally, I would not be much troubled by what these so called scientists were up to, if the politicians shut the public purse and did not give away generous grant money/funds for research into climate change and if the politicians adopted the stance that we will do nothing to combat climate change and we will simply adapt only if and when a problem arises, in the meantime business as usual with energy generation and investment in other scientific areas.
Passionate advocacy of one’s scientific position is one thing.
Conspiracy to stifle dissenting views, as clearly revealed in the Climategate emails, is quite another, entirely reprehensible scientific behaviour.
The malice evident in the emails could not be condoned as acceptable behaviour by anyone other than an enquiry with whitewash as it’s underlying objective.
What? Some of this is quite unbelieveable, especially considering the source. I saw enough of both the good and bad inside academia to realise that protectionism, pal review and withholding occur, but that does not mean it is right. There is a line that should not be crossed and the climategate emails reveal that the ‘hockey team’ crossed it – time and time again.
So academics are granted a few years exclusivity of their data? yes that can be a good thing, but a few years means a few years.
Pal review? The best scientists I know collaborate with others to keep up or improve the quality of their science – a weak paper should not get a free pass even if a ‘pal’ wrote it – that is one reason to have anonymous peer review. OTOH keeping rivals out of a journal because they are rivals is not done – science should stand on its merits, not on its origins.
As to Lyell plodding on in the face evidence to the contrary – yes that is science – but he was not advocating the world spend trillions as a result of his theories, therein lies a big difference.
I said at the time that the emails revealed ” a disregard for the high principles of scientific method and show that the scientists themselves answer to political cause and self-serving practices. and that the team were not deserving of the title ‘Scientist’. I stand by that one year on.
This article makes an effective argument as to why we should not listen to the “science is in” crowd on global warming. Amazingly, though it was not their intent, the authors have made an excellent case for ignoring the AGW scientist “advocates”.
That means, by the way, that it requires no public subsidies
That’s fine by me. Our government has spent billions on the likes of Phil Jones to get the results that the various bureaucrats and politicians want. It’s hardly Jones’s fault that all that money flowed in his direction. But once Jones decided to redefine peer review, he should have realized that the bureaucrats use that same peer review to dole out funds and what he was doing was unethical despite the arguments made above.
Wow! This has got to be the most wretched example of human bile I’ve come across in a long time.
This guy is trying to validate “inventor’s syndrome”. Nasty thing that. But perhaps more forgiving, he’s coming to the defense of “scientific dogma”.
What, prey-tell should the Frenchman who proposed “plate tectonics” have done? Held the Royal academy at gunpoint? Arranged a propaganda campaign? Tried to develop a political following?
How about the WRIGHT BROTHERs? Should they have listened to the “academics” as Langley, who had CALCULATED the impossibility of “heavier than air flight”, perhaps 10 years before the first Wright Flight?
Or Dr. Barry Marshall, (2005 Nobel Prize in Medicine), discoverer of the Hector Pylori bacteria? Should he have mounted a campaign to flood the journals with his “theory papers”? And recruited a bunch of sycophants to promote his ideas? (Instead of quietly isolating the bacteria, developing an antibiotic regime to cure it, and then INGESTING it to give himself ulcers?)
Oh, heavens, I forgot. All of the above had the “established science” completely against them. And ALL of the above PROVED themselves with their own dogged persistence. None of them had to be ADVOCATES for their “beliefs”. In point of fact, “belief” is DOGMA. Blind following of dogma, tends to lead to a lot of beheadings and “burning at the stake”..
Sorry, I’ll take my steak RARE and unburned, but my claims backed by RESULTS. And in POINT OF FACT when the “consensus” community rallys against a rebel in a circle the wagon fashion, I think it’s time to get out the tomahawks and join the other side.
Max
In a similar vein, I once complained to Canada’s national broadcaster about the objectivity of the IRA coverage by their reporter, who was of strongly Republican views. This reporter had previously made the statement that a “strong personal viewpoint” was necessary for any good reporter.
After my complaint was rejected (CBC was quite happy with her work) I reflected more closely for the biases in all the other stories I heard, and came to the conclusion that she was probably correct, that it is impossible to seperate the reporter from the story.
To make our own judgements possible, I think we need to know as much as possible about the history of reporters; bio, background and previous work.
Reading some course descriptions at my local universities which recommend not taking the course unless you are aligned with the thrust of the prof’s interests, makes it seem that fear of stumbling into something new and disrupting the established order is now the operating rule.
How times (and climates) change.
The thing thta climategate told everyone who was not familiar with the modern academic process, is that it can be corrupted and hijacked by a small cabal.
Sadly, this doesn’t look ‘good’ for you ‘real Scientist’ guys…
It seems that the philosophical elitist contrarians (it’s a word for lovers of linguistics)
are making a sincere attempt at ‘explaining away’ your Fields of Study, guys.
I know you’ll be up to turning crap like this on it’s head, too.
If it’s any (little?) comfort……. My ‘chosen field’ (managed corporate travel agencies for folks like Thomas Cook) years ago was ‘usurped’ seemingly by the underlings of these ‘bozos’.
In…..ohhhhh…..mebbe 1987… ‘They’ suddenly morphed ‘Travel Agents’ into simple ‘data input operators’ and my clientele who formerly depended on me when they’d call at hours like, 3am (when things like briefcases were left on the American Airlines flight to Frankfurt…stuff like that) when they were ‘a world away’ found that I had enough of the B.S. and up an’ quit.
The ‘supposed reason’ for the down-grading of my ‘Chosen Field’ -or- let’s just be real an’ call it like it is… a ‘smokescreen’ (all cigarettes, please excuse the pun)… was to ‘save money’ (our modest 10 percent commission paid by airlines, etc…in other words…..our Industry…) but, the END RESULT has been to have all of us without TRUE Corporate Agents (my analogy is comparing them to that of TRUE Scientists) so that when business men and women need ‘real help’ while vaulting through their itineraries…there is only your impersonal computer… -or- literally No one to help you at all…No One PAID to give a sh**.
My example is to be used purely for what ‘it was’……. and what I now ‘feel’ your Field is being subject to.
In other words, gentlemen……. you’re Field has been hijacked and it needs you now more than ever. ‘Science’ is NOT like ‘Travel’ in that: our children are having to be FED more and more of this B.S. just like WE were in the 60’s and 70’s with all the John Dewey et al, crud. I’ve made a point to make a line in the sand and say ENOUGH to their ‘garbage’ and how much ‘they’ want us to re-cycle it.
IF stuff like this assault on Science continues, and rest assured, it SHALL, if you don’t make an individual and principled ‘STAND’ in your area of expertise, more and more children will simply be force fed indoctrination and it’ll be ALL of our ‘faults’.
Well, just consider this note to be yet another ‘wake up call’….and I sincerely pray each of you is up to the challenge of halting this ‘supposedly scientific’ farce with characters like that ‘craven’ guy with no germane degree to speak of……HOW PATHETIC.
The title of this article SHOULD’VE BEEN: ‘Behaviorism Amoeba Consumes Thousands of years of Legitimate Science without nary a BURP’ and I for ONE pray that you guys all give these hopeless elitists HEARTBURN.
Be Blessed and know non-scientists are praying for you into this New Year.
Your Sis’
Cynthia Lauren
“That means, by the way, that it requires no public subsidies”
But they are publicly subsidized.
Overall I find this piece rather depressing. Yes scientists have defended their personal paradigm literally to the death in the past but I would like to think we have grown up a little since then.
“…the scientists and advocates see their prime responsibility as being the putting forward of the best arguments to support their case/client, and they delegate the adjudication over impartial ‘truth’ to the jury of peers.”
This analogy with “advocates in court under the common law” is not particularly helpful. In a court of law you can’t (legally) fix the jury (and no one involved in the case gets to chose the Judge). Further, all parties have equal voice. I suspect much of the “science” advocated would not withstand such scrutiny.
In court it is also most often only necessary to show beyond a reasonable doubt that a single law has been broken. Yes or no. Forward casting climate scenarios is (you may have noticed) somewhat more complex and does not have a simple yes or no, right or wrong outcome. Advocacy, though rife, is inappropriate in science.
That is not to say that scientist should not also be advocates. They are members of society and enjoy the same freedoms of speech as any other (though they should not ever attempt to deny that right to others as some have done). When they advocate however they cease, for the duration, to be scientists.
Ignore him. The Uk and all who sail (and flounder) on her are irrelevant.
Max;
I appreciate and mostly approve of your aggressive post, but DON’T MESS WITH MY HEAD!
I had to go googling to remove “HECTOR PYLORI”. >:-(
It’s “helicobacter pylori”.
Is Hector a boyfriend of yours or something?
If you believe what has been written in this essay then you will feel empowered to abandon Scientific Method, all evaluation of scientific claims, and all talk of truth in science. You will feel empowered to counter your opponents in the scientific arena by telling lies about their work, their character, their goals, and, of course, the same for your own. For those of you who can see some distance down the road, you will agree that this approach leads to Mao’s position that “politics (and now science) comes from the barrel of a gun.”
Kuhn, Feyerabend, and similar thinkers were extremely popular in the Sixties and Seventies. They were fun for a while. They departed from evaluative philosophy of science and became sociologists of science. I hope everyone here can see that a sociologist of science can tell you which theory is more popular but might have no clue whether it is reasonably well-confirmed. See the difference?
I can recommend some of Feyerabend’s essays, namely, those that discuss Galileo. Feyerabend discusses some of Galileo’s famous arguments and his criticisms get the philosophy of science just backwards. A lot can be learned from these essays.
It would be unnatural of science to remain in a “state of nature” where scientists keep methods and even findings secret indefinitely into the future. Science certainly has sped up since that sort of behavior got tamped down. Science’s nature is to speed discovery up, even though science’s nature does not always avoid conflict with the nature of homo sapiens. The natural thing for science is to become more reasonable by learning from experience – for example that the benefit of secrecy does not always outweigh the cost of secrecy to scientific progress. To a considerable extent, that learning has actually happened.
Science comes to actualize ideals and increasingly to “look like itself” with time and experience. Reality is independent of particular opinions but discoverable, and the recognition of that implies hopeful fallibilism in reasonable inquiry and the idea of a community without definite limits, as Peirce said, potentially capable of self-correction as far as needed (unless one is so deluded as Descartes was to think that one person can complete science in a lifetime). Sometimes the actual falls short of the ideal – people whose profession is science do not always apply scientific method in their work. Sometimes the actual surpasses the stereotype – people generally use scientific method (let’s say by Feynman’s description – make a guess, compute its implications, and test them against reality) in all cases where they can see how to apply it. And often enough it’s hard to clarify the ideal – it’s not a bad thing to fall short of a mistaken or simplistic idealization, whether that turn out to be Popper’s or anybody else’s.
If one is to test a hypothesis or a theory, one must believe in it, or in its possibly being true, believe in it enough to give it a fair shake. Sometimes one can’t let go of it for some scientifically bad reason, that is, a reason that keeps one from learning from experience. The inquiry method of “authority” is just one of various methods of illegitimate influence or determination in theoretical opinion and inquiry – politics, finance, fashion, and affairs of status or standing, become coercion, corruption, emotional manipulation, and deception. If enough scientists come to believe that the CAGW movement has been wrong-headed and gone off the scientific tracks, then they will seek to learn from it and to institute better practices and understandings taking into account what the scientific project, for better and worse, has actually become.
I mean that people supposed to learn from it, not just declare themselves formerly naive, foolish ever to seek better, and foolish to get annoyed at those who fail to live up to the ideals which they profess and on the basis of which they enjoy a special standing and legitimacy in our society.
“…a discoverer’s year or more of monopoly is only fair.”
But after SEVERAL years of sitting on their data and NOT using it (only releasing it to a grad student), shouldn’t they let others have a chance?
At what point does “discoverer’s monopoly” become obfuscation?
Some thoughts:
1) I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand I’m glad that someone in the CAGW club has at least leveled on the total lack of integrity and honesty in the climate community he is part of. On the other hand I find the lack of integrity disgusting and not at all representive of the Scientists that I have worked with in other fields.
2) I think that Dr Terence Kealey, Vice-Chancellor, University of Buckingham piece should be the lead in to the executive summary of the IPCC report so that every one can fully understand where the authors’ are coming from, what motivates the IPCC crowd, and the likehood that everything that follows is B.S.
3) The comment re peer review ” Peer review, too, is merely a mechanism by which scientists keep a collective control over access to their quasi-private enterprise” should also be included in the IPCC report. Also everyone who braggs about the peer review process should have this comment thrown into their face.
4) re “Consequently, we can see how the climate change scientists of the IPCC and of the conventional global warming paradigm saw no conflict between their partiality in the arguments they put forward and their responsibilities to ‘truth’, just as advocates in court under the common law see no conflict between their partiality in the arguments they put forward and their responsibilities to ‘justice’” Really? These folks are prepared to expose virtually everyone on this earth to their radical ideas and ask us to suffer the consequences of their “religion” I thought the standards were higher for scientists than ambulance chasing lawyers and lying politicians.
5) Yes the science is settled: There is absolutely no integrity in the CAGW community!
6) One final thought, since most of these CAGW activities are tax payer funded, the concept of not releasing the data is normally without any legal basis.
First of all, what exactly is a “Theorum”?
Secondly, if I take Vice Chancellor Kealey’s point correctly, we are asked to believe that science is not, nor should it be, objective, but rather more of a vehicle for expression of the egos of scientists. Therefore the pronouncements of scientists cannot be separated from their personal commitment to the significance of their research.
Thirdly, he states that “it (science) requires no public subsidies.” (!) I doubt that this assertion will win him many friends among the vice chancellors of the great research universities in the United States, if nowhere else.
Fourthly (and perhaps I missed this), he appears oblivious to the fact that the scientists of climate change are not only asking the world to recognize the extraordinary importance of their research and assertions and thereby pump up their egos, they are also insisting that the world spend trillions and trillions (to up Carl Sagan’s ante by 10^3) of dollars to ameliorate the change that they claim their research shows.
The essence and goal of science is prediction. A theorem that fails to provide the means for reliable prediction cannot be considered of value, and perhaps cannot even be considered “scientific”, except inasmuch as it can point out areas of research which will yield little of value.
Granted, predicting the outcome of changes in climate 10, 30, or 100 years in advance is far more difficult than predicting that paper will ignite at 451 degrees Fahrenheit, but the warmists act as though their predictions are just as valid. If we were told that the models showed that burning all the books in the world would-paradoxical as it may seem-eliminate any risk of global warming, would we burn them? I doubt it. We are, however, being urged to burn just about every dollar the world can produce on the altar of those very models.
Let the scientists have their ego trips, but make them keep their hands-and more particularly the hands of the politicians and the bureaucrats who will feel themselves empowered by the scientists’s Theorum[sic]s-out of the pockets of the rest of us!
Dr. Kealey
You are profoundly misguided, to put it politely.
Where scientific research is funded by the public out of taxation on their earnings for the public good – as apparently is the bulk of climate science – then there are a number of duties which attach itself to that publicly funded research.
If you, as is apparent from your essay, cannot see that nor can see where condemnation of the behaviour of such publicly funded scientists is both appropriate and necessary, then I am ashamed to see you as vice-chancellor of one of our technical colleges turned university.
Many problems with this, not enough time. Dredging back centuries and millenia for examples of how science worked takes it completely out of context, or worse, puts into a modern context. The main reason for Galileo’s secrecy certainly must have been fear of the Synod of Holy Bishops – poor G was only exonerated by the church in the 1960s (I heard it on the news in Leysin, Switzerland at the time).
A defence lawyer is obliged to provide the best defence he can for a murderer who was caught at the scene with his hands around the victim’s throat and with the testimony of several independent witnesses to the crime. He has to work with extenuating circumstances – a plea not available to a dishonest or negligent scientist.
Finally, although scientists needed support from somebody even in the days of the independent researcher, today’s lot are largely paid for out of the public purse and as such are civil servants who are supposed to be a benefit to the taxpayer. Destroying data, cooking results and writing up your work in a secret language to be kept by your lawyer was legitimate when you were operating on your own funds or those of a nobleman who endulged you and used you to entertain your guests. But not if the public is payiing your way.