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
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The University of Buckingham is uniquely funded in the UK, he can be very independent..
As a member of the GWPF (a very sceptical to AGW organisation,) I think he is pragmatically telling the world in the essay about the reliaties of science…
Tale a look just who else is on the GWPF advisory board……
http://thegwpf.org/who-we-are/academic-advisory-council.html
Professor Ross Mckitrick, Professor Carter, Professor LIndzen, Professor Plimer, Professor Hal Lewis, Professor Stott, Professor Tol.. and many more
I think that it is safe to saythat the GWPF is on the non AGW consensus side of the debate.. and then some.
he is nor defending anybody…
[Should that be: “He is not defending anybody”? Robt]
If the scientists who invented global warming had kept the invention a secret and blindfolded anyone who wanted to buy carbon credits and locked them in a room, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. In fact, I wish they had kept it a secret. But don’t ask me to reduce my carbon footprint back to the stoneage, pay higher energy prices and fork over taxes to fund research if all the data are not going to be made available to verify.
If “no-one should expect a scientist to be anything other than a biased advocate” then that’s all the more reason not to trust them until their findings can be duplicated independently. To say that scientists are “biased advocates” for their own self interest, and then expect us to trust that they have OUR best interest at heart is laughable.
well, this topic is getting depressing. Yes, scientists are human.
But this is a particular type of humanness. The In group against an intruder (out group). The failure to provide data is a different requirement for climate scientists, as opposed to most other scientists. Providing method is always required….but isn’t true that Mann was reluctant to provide enough of his method?
The other part that was just hinted at in the piece in the funding. We have quite a nice climate industry. I saw an Antarctic piece on the Science channel….as always, interesting….but many UMass people on the expedition. I’m sure everyone is on the same page, as are all the other teams of climate sciences.
what we have is a large infrastructure for studying climate…my guess would be the confirmation bias, and generalizing from small groups of observations and groupthink are common
So then it becomes not so much the idiosyncratic nature of one or several individuals, it becomes a system. And that system is within the orbit of the general Political system…as seen by the origins of RealClimate.
Unfortunately, while the theories may outlast individuals, they have become systematic…at least until it become obvious that they are wrong
tl;dr – the history of science teaches us all about the modern corruption of science, Humanity enver learns.
At 5:44 PM on 29 December, timheyes had written:
.
Gotta quibble, if only because timheyes is drawing improper parallels.
(1) A pharmaceuticals manufacturer who gets evidence of a new chemical entity (NCE) having therapeutic efficacy would be out of his corporate friggin’ mind to suppress promulgation of that information. It’s a marketing point. You want people to know that your promising pipeline item is able to secure clinical outcomes at such-and-so rates.
It’s adverse safety data that the pharma companies shuffle and wheedle and handwave to suppress. Look up Vioxx (rofecoxib, Merck) and the events of 2004 associated therewith. That’s when we found our that the manufacturer had suppressed safety data aggregated in the 1998 VIGOR trial to make their “blockbuster” COX2 inhibitor look less likely to predispose patients to thrombotic cardiovascular and cerebrovascular occlusions than was actually the case.
Once that particular rock got flipped over, all the rest of the unpleasant risk information about rofecoxib and other COX2-selective non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) got the recognition a lot of us had been suspecting was being suppressed by the pharma companies and the FDA regulators they’d captured.
Yet another case of “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you.” Government regulation is invariably undertaken at the behest of established actors in the market segment to be regulated, chiefly as a means of suppressing competition. And regulatory capture is something those established corporations count upon.
(2) If the tobacco companies can come up with objective and verifiable evidence that smoking is not carcinogenic, does anybody except persons arguably psychopathic want to suppress that information?
The epidemiologic support for tobacco carcinogenicity began to accrue many, many decades ago. Moreover, the correlation between tobacco smoking and both acute and chronic respiratory diseases was appreciable despite the fact that medical practitioners in the 19th Century actually prescribed “asthma cigarettes” and suchlike similar blithering nonsense. The damned things weren’t commonly called “coffin nails” for nothing.
Gawd, I’m old enough to remember when the tobacco companies used doctors in their advertising. There used to be cigarette ads in JAMA.
But if – and I’m using the conditional with due deliberation – there’s something else figuring in smokers’ high rates of cancer, I sure as hell want to learn about it.
timheyes, the problem with your statement about the tobacco companies is that it’s explicitly suppressive. Yeah, the cigarette manufacturers have always had a helluvan incentive to lie about their addictive and invidious products. So?
By the same token, every time a politician opens his mouth to bamboozle the public, he ought to get a slug in the kisser. Ceteris paribus, he’s lying with malice aforethought and intent to criminally injure the private citizenry every waking minute of every day, right?
I, for one, may have misunderstood Dr Kealey’s point.
I apologize for my criticism of him personally, but I stand by my general point about publicly-funded scientists.
Dr. T. Kealey:
After reading your rather warbling little essay, my first question was: What is this man trying to say?
Why did he dig up some little known tidbits from the past and do this in a very haphazard way? Two thoughts occurred almost at once: “Watch for the pea” and “look how smart I am”. I am therefore going to quote you Lord Thurlow as Lord Chancellor: “I’ll be perfectly frank with you, Gentlemen. I am against you and for the established church. Not that I like the established church a bit better than any other church, but because it is established. And whenever you can get your damned religion established, I’ll be for that too.” To put a point on it, Dr. Kealey, you write as the perfect fence sitting bureaucrat that is for anything that the powers that be are for, and against everything else because those same cheque writers are against it. This brings me to your “pea”. It is true that the Royal Society was established to aid and abet the “peer” review. It is however no great surprise to me that the corresponding corollary is omitted: It would keep competing, undesirable (read: foreign) knowledge and scientists out. In other words, if you were not part of the Royal Society, you were just noise. (see my quote, above). I therefore will suggest to Dr. T. Kealey that he read the Wiki page on scurvy and Dr. James Lind. Tens of thousands of sailors died because the Royal Navy was not for established research and therefore against it. Perhaps, in a few years time when the lights go out in Birmingham because the windmills cannot produce enough electricity that the shut down coal plants did provide, Dr. Kealey will mutter to himself:
“How was I to know that I was supposed to use my own mind? I relied on you to use yours ethically!”
That is presuming that scientists base their theories on observable science rather than poorly programmed computer models with a built-in groupthink bias which is as far from real science as you can get.
Latakos and Fyerabend ?
Nothing testifies to the sheer silliness of the anti-climate science agenda like seeing Mount Pelerin on the postmodern skids .
Anent the Chamberlens’ proprietary chokehold on obstetrical forceps, at 10:32 PM on 29 December Zorro had written:
.
Nope. There’s much of that kind of “It’s mine, and you can’t make me!” stuff going on in the practice of medicine today, and it will always be so.
Nobody who innovates in any area of endeavor – medical or otherwise – is morally obliged to hand over the product of his effort to anybody. When officers of civil government intervene to compel such disgorgement or disclosure, they’re acting as criminals, no matter what legal fictions are muttered in the courts of law or other public fora.
In the course of my own personal professional career, I’ve known plenty of colleagues who had come up with some kind of trick or technique that gave them a competitive edge of some kind. Almost every one of them emphatically did not spread that information around, or teach it to his medical students, or talk about it at hospital staff meetings, particularly if he knew that it could be easily picked up and used by other practitioners.
Even with professional licensing (which has pretty much nothing whatsoever to do with ensuring that the guy with the license is really going to treat you safely and effectively) designed to restrict patients’ options, doctors can’t force people to seek out their care.
Even in the HMO era, where us family doctors get “incentivized” to deny the mangled care clients access to expensive tests and treatments, us primary care grunts have got to get people to select us so we can be paid that regular monthly pittance. They either perceive us as better than the doc down the street or we starve.
So guys work up patient-pleasing tricks, and if they come across something particularly effective, they do not encourage their colleagues to copy them.
The practice of medicine is a business. That’s one of the reasons why doctors try – all the time – to do their jobs more effectively. All other things being equal, the ones who are most effective tend to make more money.
They also rise in the esteem of their colleagues, but the money is damned important. That’s why Obamacare and the rest of the “socialized medicine” stupidity is so invidious. If you just reduce the matter to a consideration of Skinnerian behavioral conditioning, you’ve gotta understand that depriving the pigeon of those feed pellets is gonna result in a helluva lot less purposeful and therefore effective pecking.
Though I suppose you’d always have plenty of people entering medicine for nothing more than the pleasure of being able to meet perfect strangers, tell them to take all their clothes off, and then do painful and embarrassing things to their shivering flesh.
The “climate fraudsters,” however, are decidedly not “playing the same game” as had the Chamberlens.
In the latter case, those monopoly obstetricians were claiming to get improved results and (you’ll pardon any inadvertent pun) delivering on their claims. In the latter, the AGW fraudsters were claiming an ability to interpret observational data, derive from those observations reliable predictions of outcomes, and voice definitive policy recommendations to mitigate what they claimed would be adverse outcomes.
In every particular, these “climatologists” were lying.
The Chamberlen family simply withheld information that could have been beneficial to lots of patients, and that’s nasty-damned-mean of them. But the various generations of Drs. Chamberlen didn’t take active steps to prevent anybody else from inventing obstetrical forceps, did they? Had somebody come up with the same idea, would the Drs. Chamberlen have precluded other obstetricians’ use thereof? Could they have, even with today’s intellectual property laws in force?
When I was taking that History of Medicine course as a first-year medical student, the story of obstetrical forceps was mentioned, and it goes back a lot longer than the Chamberlen family. There’s reason to understand that the idea of a crash helmet with a handle to get a neonate’s noggin through the curve of Carus goes back to times when you wrote your progress notes in hieroglyphics. It was a concept that got discovered, used, forgotten, re-developed, used again, lost again – over and over and over.
Don’t be too hard on the Chamberlens. They were simply comporting themselves according to the prevailing standards of ethical conduct in the provision of a service to their customers.
Gary Crough wrote:
“Second, I don’t think Pythagoras or anyone before say 1575 or 1600, was a scientist. Until the scientific method evolved (Perhaps Francis Bacon has a claim but I don’t think a single person can really lay claim to the idea) there was no science.”
What an insult to the intellectual giants of antiquity! If you were drawing up a league table of the greatest scientists of all time would Archimedes be missing from it? Most people would include him in the top three, along with Newton and Einstein. If the poll were restricted to historians of science I would be surprised Archimedes only came in at number 3. He would probably be battling it out with Newton for the top spot with Einstein coming in third.
Progress in science depends to a considerable extent on measurement and calculation. One of the greatest examples of this is the way in which Erastothenes calculated the circumference of the Earth.
People living in past ages were every bit as clever as we are today and without their achievements we would still be living in the Stone Age.
anopheles says: “I did not read it the way almost all commenters have. I think they have the wrong end of the stick. This guy is an observer, not an advocate, and he wants to point out that we are all human, and this affects scientists too.“.
Not so. See his use of the word should and its context.
I do wonder why the Global Warming Policy Foundation have Dr Kealey on their team. But a lot of wisdom in the replies is a good antidote to his depressing, inaccurate, bombastic, partisan essay, with the exception of these words:
Particularly I like the replies of
Geoff Sherrington: December 29, 2010 at 9:49 pm
Chris: December 29, 2010 at 9:58 pm
anna v: December 29, 2010 at 10:29 pm, and
memoryvault: December 29, 2010 at 11:28 pm (except for the call for hanging)
Zeke the Sneak says: December 29, 2010 at 11:07 pm
Hahaha.
Dr Kealey, like the CRU whitewashes, you are speaking for the defendants while ignoring the case for prosecution. Such miscarriage of the process of justice will only inflame the prosecution further.
Perhaps papers should be published with a caveat like ‘DRAFT – NOT FOR SCRUTINY’ until such time as the author is willing to publish the original data, any computer code along with its documentation and all of the author’s discussion. This level of publication would serve to allow the scientist to puff his ego up because he got there first. Once the author is willing to publish a completed version so that the paper can be properly scrutinized, debated openly and, if possible, falsified the caveat should be removed.
However, and most importantly, it should be absolutely clear to any government that it would be very unwise to base policy decisions on a version of any scientific paper carrying the NOT FOR SCRUTINY caveat.
Well, what a surprise.
‘Please Mr President, scientists are really just a bunch of self-serving, money-grabbing, self-publicists.’
‘Right: well as an equally self-serving, money-grabbing self-publicist myself, can I explain to you and your kind that unless your bunch of self-publicists help me to get re-elected, they can whistle for a pot to piss in in future.’
‘Of course Mr President. Supply us with a list of papers you would like to see published and I’ll organised the scientists to write them.’
Science is indeed advancing………
But Hippasus refused, so Pythagoras had him drowned.
That’s what scientists are like in their natural state.
So, the logical, data based scientist was drowned by the ego-driven, irrational, agenda-obsessed wacko. Are you describing J. Hansen?
Hardly a proof of what a scientist should be. But you describe vividly what they shouldn’t be, but are in climate science.
This is Craven — the seqiel
Lucy Skywalker says:
December 30, 2010 at 2:59 am – re Geoff Sherrington et al
Thank you for the compliment. I suspect we are seeing the wisdom that comes of age and experience showing through, versus the speculation of the still-learning youngsters. It is easy to observe that discipline has gone slack in the past 20 years, especially in some climate work. Geoff.
Didn’t Pythagoras have a thing about beans?
Kealey isn’t really defending Climategate, except in a couple of weakly reasoned and overstated passages. He’s affiliated with the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which is a skeptics group.
Rather, he’s engaging in hard-boiled sociology, rather like “judicial realism,” which is the (well-accepted) view that judges don’t try to interpret the (objective) law, but rather try to to find pretexts to inject their preferences into it. Consider:
And similar statements. His basic point seems to be that the public should be cynical about scientific findings and not put science up on a pedestal, implying, seemingly, that much of the “findings” and “consensuses” of “concerned” scientists should be treated as mere “advocacy research.”
See? I told you it was a provocative, and I disagreed with the imputation that because scientists are human, they are entitled to the kinds of behaviour that the Hockey Team are particularly well known for.
Dr Kealey’s apologia for the all-to-human AGW scientists is speckled with lots of famous names, but sadly, in his zeal to defend the indefensible he has overlooked a fundamental of scientific endeavour – and that is the thirst for knowledge, for exploration, for going where the experiment, or the observations, or, in philosophy, the argument leads.
His essay does not touch on the underlying problem of climate ‘science’. This is not that it is publicly funded, it is that from the beginning it was based on a preconceived, political idea.
I’m sure mentioning Maurice Strong in this context is sufficient.
Thus his defense of scientists being activists anyway, and all of them being keen to promote just themselves falls flat on its face.
Any criminal detective knows that having a preconceived idea of who the culprit is, to the exclusion of everybody else, will lead the investigation astray and may well lead to innocents being accused.
So with scientific research. Excluding a priori the possibility that what I want to find out isn’t there, while torturing my data to show it is, is simply wrong.
Has nobody taught them in their first year at Uni that no result is also a result – and sometimes even a way of driving experiments forward?
It isn’t just the ‘boys-will-be-boys’ behaviour of The Team which is reprehensible – although it is that – it is that they call what they’re doing ‘science’.
It isn’t – it is an aberration, and does not deserve to be defended, least of all by a Vice-Chancellor.
Terence philosophized
————-
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
————
Ahh so Terence is promoting the ideas of a left wing post modernist philosopher.
Some of the baggage that comes along for the ride includes:
— astrology is just as valid as science
— scientific conclusions should be controlled by political committees.
—————
The ironies that spring forth when you are trying to make AGW go away by discrediting climate scientists.
And such polite academic camouflage for an obnoxious aim.
So now we understand the mindset of the participants in the Climategate whitewash inquiries.
John A says:
December 30, 2010 at 5:20 am
“See? I told you it was a provocative,……”
======================================================
lol, yes, yes it was. I’m just sad that I had already imbibed so much as to lose much eloquence. Others, though, stated their case wonderfully. I suppose I should say thanks, but I find myself needing another keyboard. Some of my keys have cracked under the pounding they took last night.