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
I can’t recall having read such a piece of arrogant tripe in years. So scientists are given a pass to act unethically at best, and the solution to this is simply that the public should be less naive?
What sets this particular bit of science apart from the rest in human history that I can recall is that we are being asked to expand untold wealth and completely reorder society based on the belief that the science is undisputed. Under that rubric, to allow for studies to be published without all supporting data, methodology and computer programs is beyond outrageous. Will it take mobs in “their natural state” to start hanging some climate scientists before climate scientists and their political allies to become “less naive?”
David S:
I have worked for an insurance broker ( a large one, in fact) and saw it from the other perspective – the broker working tirelessly on behalf of the client to extract the best real from the underwriters etc.
But the fact of the matter is that the underwriters are the ones putting large amounts of money where their mouths are – the brokers are client advocates of varying levels of creepiness. The client is aware of a risk and wants someone else to take on that risk for a fee, and would love to play down the actual likelihood of risk as much as possible.
The underwriters must be skeptical of claims made by the brokers on behalf of their clients or the underwriters will quickly go broke or alternatively everyone’s premiums go so high that no-one can afford to be in business.
This is where the allied creepiness of climate alarmists comes in – that they have no financial skin in the game in regard to a result going against them. Which makes them very dangerously partisan.
Also, as an insight into the insurance industry, I found that many people would ignore clear evidence that their risk analysis was wrong just so long as it hadn’t blown up in their face – yet. Like investors in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, they quiet their doubts and take the money on offer.
So, Dr Terence Kealey advises us to be tolerant of and accept the scientific processes/behaviors that produced climategate and to do so because he thinks he has shown climategate-like processes to be the same as the baseline processes of +2500 yrs of science.
Remember when Dr. Ravetz asked us to have a tolerance of climategate science/scientists based on the acceptance of ‘post normal science’ over previous philosophies of science? That strategy didn’t work. So, now we have Dr. Kealey trying to erase the philosophies of science which are inconsistent with climategate science by saying science has always been like climategate science.
Move on, recommends Dr. Kealey, nothing is different about climategate science than the whole history of science.
After Dr. Ravetz and Dr. Kealey perhaps we will next get another Dr. from academia posting at WUWT to advocate that there is no such thing as science at all. That next Dr. will just state that humans just believe what they feel as the sole basis of human knowledge.
John
As I am not a government scientist, I missed this = John Holdren’s “Scientific Integrity” memorandum regarding how government scientists should comport themselves! It is very interesting to read and ponder.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/scientific-integrity-memo-12172010.pdf
OK, now…is Holdren admitting that there has been a problem with government scientists (GAVIN!) being too strong in their advocacy, paid lectures etc.? I’m not quite sure what to make of this, but the timing is significant.
Happy New Year to all!
Thank you Dr. Kealy for a very interesting post. It has always been interesting to read science history and philosophy. I don’t think this was meant as a defence post for the Hockey-Team. On the contrary? More an explanatory text for us to understand their state of mind? I hope so.
Nice to see our suspicions put down on paper like this.
But a very depressing read, it was, too.
The pure clean scientist is just an egocentric advocate for molecules and tax.
In ancient days great minds sought to feudal masters for financial support. They often lived by the court and did their investigations, and their goal was often immortality through great findings. Almost like a prostitue, only selling their brains, instead of their body.
Of course they wanted to keep it a secret until they could publish a book or some pamphlet.
But nowadays they more and more live by government grants.
Government grants means it’s our data, and our results. Right?
Maybe a good idea for the UN to follow Hans Roslings idea of public data also within Climate Science;
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
The only proper role as advocate for a scientist is a “Devil’s Advocate”; someone who takes an unpopular, generally unaccepted view to test a popular hyphothesis, theory, or belief. If scientist should be advocates, as Kealey believes, then the skeptical Devil’s Advocates should be honored not derided.
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.
So scientists should act more like lawyers in court? I don’t buy it. I think one of the greatest problems in our society is that lawyers DO act as biased advocates instead of dispassionately uncovering truth. Lawyers should act more like scientists, not the other way round.
The essay in question provides an analysis of economic, sociological and psychological factors that too often produce extraordinary amounts of junk science some of which is fiercely defended long after it should have been completely discredited. Terence Kealey simply tells it like it is; not how it ought to be.
I have seen scientists with little hope of grant renewal frantically attempting to find some way to exploit whatever the current zeitgeist might be. It’s publish or perish folks and you darned well better produce whatever those offering grants want if you hope to get additional helpings. It is survival of the fittest and the measures of fitness include the quantity of publications produced in support of the agendas of grant giving institutions. That’s life in the big city. Get used to it. It’s not going to change.
The article is an example of the degeneration of morals in society a a whole. Finding out that a senior academic expects people to misrepresent the facts known to them in the same way a weasling lawyer ‘protects the rights of his client’ thus shielding them from true justice is, to say the least, a disappointment.
One potential outcome of this is for ‘climate science’ to be put into a social category of its own wherein there are no moral standards to uphold, where misrepresentation and obfuscation are the norm, where funding is a right and accountability is a word meaning, ‘count the money’.
Real science, the searcing after the truth about life, the universe and everything, will continue to strive for fairness, truth, balance and an ever-advancing civilisation.
Dr. Kealey cannot possibly be unfamiliar with Hal Lewis’ spectacular resignation letter from the American Physical Society, earlier this year. But Dr. Lewis covered this situation in brutal detail:
Emphasis mine.
Dr. Kealey, I disagree that science has always been done this way. We justly credit Isaac Newton, and not Robert Hooke for our understanding of gravitation, in no small measure because he published clearly and transparently. Hooke’s refusal to release his work was all the community needed to see to allocate credit.
And yet today’s climate science establishment seems to think that it’s perfectly normal to change data after it’s been recorded, or fail to release data and methods.
Newton would be ashamed.
“no-one should expect a scientist to be anything other than a biased advocate.”
Hmm … There’s “expect” meaning what one feels morally entitled to receive, and “expect” meaning what one thinks will probably happen. Is Kealy using “expect” in the first, second or both senses? The thing is: whatever sense he means, the social institution of public science needs to cope with the tendency of the scientist to be “a biased advocate” and that is best accomplished by requiring full disclosure and maintaining an open public forum for debate.
Keeley discusses science and behavior of scientists as if issues they research have little consequence or importance for people and countries, and therefore have no need for public funding:
“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.”
Either climate change or climate disruption or whatever else it will be called next year are not important to people or countries generally — and therefore shouldn’t get massive government funding — or in the alternative may be potentially quite important, and therefore should get government funding. Another article today in WUWT discusses whether we are about to plunge into the next ice age, or whether we have several thousand more years to go. The article suggests we may wish to hope for the promised warming! It does seem important to me to know how much warming we might get, and whether we are about to get another ice age.
If in fact climate change science has an important “public good” aspect, then Keeley’s arguments about scientists not making their data publicly available go out the window. If we fund it, if the answers are important for us, then the data doesn’t belong to the scientist, and it needs to be available for others to also use. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like Patrick Michaels or John Christy or Steve McIntyre or Ross McKittrick — they deserve to see if you’ve done the math correctly. Michael Mann evidently did not do so, and it is wonderful luck for all of us that Steve McIntyre had the ability to figure out Mann’s machinations in spite of Mann’s obstruction.
MAKE THE DATA AVAILABLE, OR STOP THE FUNDING.
Note also that in a different field of science, econometrics, researchers must make archived data available upon publication of a paper — stated by Ross McKittrick.
Ah, the standardised British VC, the very well-paid academic civil servant and government spokesman (‘scientists are and should be advocates’) of twenty-first century British Higher Education, whose only actual aim is to protect the self-interest and privileged position of himself and his government-funded academic chums (whilst he pulls in an enormous salary and waits for his ‘K’ or his MBE). Don’t expect a well-developed sense of ethics or scientific integrity from these people, they don’t exist for such a purpose; PR men with letters after their names.
“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.”
Then the public should not be funding science.
“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.”
I wonder how Dr Kealey would view matters, if the long suffering public, as well as wising up and becoming a bit less naive, also become a bit less tolerant, and paid a visit to his university mob handed to reclaim goods to the value of their taxes which had funded research there.
Will we sit around bemoaning the situation via our keyboards forever, or having had the situation spelled out very clearly for us by the CRU emails, and missives such as Dr Kealey’s will we act to put academia and science back on the straight and narrow?
How might this be achieved without resorting to Luddism?
Show trials are long winded and boring. ‘Inquiries’ are toothless and ineffective and corrupt.
What to do? Short of revolution, how do we oust the complacent placemen and get some real science done?
Cynthia Lauren Thorpe says:
December 30, 2010 at 7:15 am
and ‘p.s.’ Anna V ~ I’m sorry that ‘Christians passed’ have offended ~ or……’
Quite a long p.s. :).
Please note that I said:
If Christianity had not prevailed in the form it did
Certainly it is the organized religion that was responsible for the stasis in science, and I am just repeating an often said observation. I just pointed out that it was not fair to blame greek philosophers/scientist in an inclusive way for the particular choices imposed by organized religion, as the greeks had proposed other systems that were much closer to the present science, which were repressed .
It is a matter of history and not of offense.
This is a thoughtful and interesting article. It has elicited a number of rather extreme knee jerk responses in the comments here. Many seem to have misunderstood the context of the piece. It is not seeking to excuse the activities of the pro AGW gravy train scientists but rather to expose their motivations and characterise those activities as entirely predictable.
I read it as an entirely credible acknowledgement (from an academic) of the weaknesses and the foibles, the vanities and the compromises of the vast majority of scientists/academics/humans.
A key distinction is well made (but missed by some posting) regarding funding and particularly the inappropriate use of public funds for enterprises which are not (and never were) in the public interest.
They forgot what despicable and pesky commoners usually have: Common Sense, a kind of delicate sense of “smell” to detect rotten living corpses by the odor they emit, while walking or talking. By now, everyone knows that the “king is naked” 🙂
tallbloke says:
December 30, 2010 at 12:43 pm
What to do? Short of revolution, how do we oust the complacent placemen and get some real science done?
You have done enough…..more, it would be abusive 🙂
The full goes to the vacuum to fill it, but it takes time. It is not “their way” things will change, it is “our way”, the way of the small things, of the shortest wavelengths and of the highest frequencies.
I found this quote which to me says it all about these climate pscientists.
“The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalise false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit”
C. P Snow, “The Search”
At 8:55 AM on 30 December, Tenuc had written:
.
Could be a helluva lot more than that. What they’ve done almost certainly is illegal.
Insofar as I’m aware, submitting an application for a grant of funds to conduct research or any other activity – whether your signed papers go into the hands of a government bureaucrat or some private foundation flunky – on the basis of assertions you know to be untrue most decidedly constitutes attempted theft of value by deception.
There’s criminal mens rea out the kazoo in those AGW fraudsters’ grant applications. Anybody else out there have any experience writing those things?
That deception in pursuit of funding is a felony right there. Accepting the funds is receiving stolen value, which is yet another criminal offense. An experienced prosecuting attorney could hit the members of the Hockey Team (with emphasis on Dr. Michael Mann) with indictment after indictment after indictment.
In the meanwhile, the tort lawyers go after them in the civil courts for compensatory and punitive damages. Whee!
This was a brilliant article, really telling it exactly like it is.
That’s why it’s so damnably depressing.
Dear Anna V ~
Sorry. I ‘get it’ and ‘got it’ when you ‘wrote it’, actually. The ‘tone of voice’ I read just sounded like angst mixed with Truth to me, that’s all.
I wrote because I wanted to be part of ‘forgiveness’ for past errors… if that can even
occur. And, to Sean Boyce ~ the good ‘Doctor’ was setting a new ‘Science Bar’ altogether too low. To forgive humans for ‘being human’ is a no brainer in my book. But, to brandish a broad verbal ‘brush’ ~ lumping ‘many’ ethical Scientists (who take great pride *and rightly, so. in their chosen fields of study) in with prostitute and ‘sell-out Scientists’ isn’t simply ‘unfair’… It is ‘setting the bar’ or…..’re-arranging the bar by stealth-articles’ and it can do great damage to a profession if it remains without open dialogue. That’s simple Truth.
Also, ‘Science’ is, at it’s CORE, OBSERVATION. (even ‘I’ know that) and now it seems that in 2010+ we now will need the word ETHICAL in front of observation…which ~ sadly ~ in ‘latter times’ was……….I believe………..a given.
That’s why Kealy’s article ‘hit a chord’. And, I for one, am glad it did. It showed me that the ‘stewards of Science’ are still keen to serve it and serve the general public on it’s behalf. It’s about ETHICS, man. What humans will sell themselves for ~ or, what they won’t.
C.L. Thorpe
I must be living in a different world to Dr Kealey because i am shocked by this confession.
I also struggle to accept that the hockey team and their kin are scientists. All they seem to do is collect data, manipulate it, homogenise it and the add in their own particular GL70. Having completed the recipe, they put all the ingredients into the computer and cook it. Isn’t that what accountants do. How can that procedure be described as science. Furthermore, the products of their labour should more properly described as predictions.
p.s. GL70 reference. See Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard (if it is still about)
Thank you sean boyce. At first, reading some of the hyperventilated comments here, I wondered whether I had totally misread Kealey’s article and misunderstood his intent. Or indeed, that I had read a totally different Kealey article and somehow slipped through the time-space-internet continuum to end up in the comments section of a totally different Kealey article, by a totally different Kealey (an anti-Kealey, if you will). Glad to find at least one other understood the context in which his words were made. Like you, I thought the article thoughtful and worthy of more than the kneejerk reaction which a peremptory and less considered reading seems to have induced.
sean boyce says:
December 30, 2010 at 1:06 pm
>>I read it as an entirely credible acknowledgement (from an academic) of the weaknesses and the foibles, the vanities and the compromises of the vast majority of scientists/academics/humans.<<
The essay is a good description from the point of view of presenting scientists as 'fallible' but certainly not (IMO), as you say, the vast majority!! I actually take exception to that, purely on the basis of being a Joe Average scientist doing an ordinary type job (i.e. not cutting edge research) and I am sure all the chemists, biologists, microbiologists, forensic scientists, pharmacists, radiologists, etc, etc – doing ordinary science jobs do NOT allow their personal beliefs and foibles to actually influence their actual work!
On second reading of the essay, I can agree with your synopsis that it is exposing the AGW gravy train nuts as predictable in their behaviour but IMO it is not made explicitly enough, instead he paints a more general disregard for scientists – and THAT, I do take exception too!