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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A much simpler explanation is that climate scientists are stark raving mad. What makes them mad? Why, it’s the famous quip from Lord Action that explains this: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
These lunatic scientists think they have the responsibility of saving the planet and they are backed by regulations made by the most powerful governments on earth. Combine that with a general academic predisposition towards socialist utopias and they have reason enough to go mad.
I agree that this all comes down to human nature. In that sense, this article is brilliant. But besmirching all scientists as having little regard for the truth is taking things too far. Get the damn government interference/mass media propaganda out of science and let science keep its dignity.
Dr Kealy is good, while appearimg to defend he rips the heart out of the behaviour he is highlighting.For the defenders of the CRU and climatology(the religion) I can only say, Ouch, ouch ouch. With apparent praise the good doctor eviserates his victim/client. The best part is some of the propaganist media will see this as a good defense and publish it. Initially I was enraged by the article but its too well written to be anything but spoof.Read it again and its pythonish in deed.
Looks like my spellchecker was on autocorrect mode? That would be Lord Acton, please.
“Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.”
– Albert Einstein
Just saw another great quote from our pal, Einstein and wanted to share it with Mike Jonas.
I guess it’s then, a Scientist’s responsibility to best figure out just who is who.
And, I think that in Einstein’s case, it was his ethical brilliance combined with true
humility that won the day…but, wasn’t he chided by his so-called ‘peers’ for courageous stands many times?
C.L. Thorpe
believers: humans are perverting the climate; AGW climate scientists are natural (human)
non-believers: The AGW team is perverting science; the climate is natural (cycles, etc)
Quoted above – “Anybody who expects absolute moral and intellectual integrity from anybody – even himself – is delusional. ”
This is not always the case.
Example. You work in mineral exploration. You report your findings to numerous colleagues and a chain of bosses. What percentage is there for you if you knowingly and fraudulently provide optimistic results? You know you are almost 100% likely to be caught out in your lifetime, if a mine is started and found to contain rather less ore than estimated. Therefore, why not be completely straight right from the start?
The big missing word in a much of this discussion is ACCOUNTABILITY. Those disciplines where individuals pay personally for their transgressions tend to be at the fore of science/engineering/math development and can be intellectually exciting places to inhabit.
huh says:
December 30, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Looks like my spellchecker was on autocorrect mode? That would be Lord Acton, please.
Should have had your quotechecker on, too. “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
I disagree with this premis too, bold mine:
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.
It is true that good scientists ( great is to be attributed after death usually) are partial to the theory that inspired them to get the data, and even more so theorists are partial to the theory they have developed. It is the same impulse that an artist has towards his/her creation. But what separates good scientists from mediocre ones and charlatans is the ability to be objective within their subjectivity.
The whole scientific training of the scientists of my generation was grounded in this. Mathematics is the great teacher because a wrong solution is always a wrong solution and humbles one, and it teaches clearly the logic of what is necessary and what is sufficient for a proof. A good scientist searches for proofs of assertions both of theories and data handling that appertain to those theories.
Maybe the recent falling of standards in education is also responsible for the mess in climate studies. Not grounded enough in hard mathematics .
A good scientist is always aware that a later theory and better data may distort or crumble or make irrelevant a favorite edifice that might be a lifetime’s work. If not, he/she is not a good scientist.
That they defend their particular project to the hilt is of course human, the same as players in a sports team will defend their team to the end. This does not mean that unethical methods are approved to reach that end, nor that other games will not exist to change the outcome next time.
The whole premise of the article is a hidden ethics problem. It is saying scientists/humans are inherently unethical. This is false as there would be no ethics in society for people to adhere to so there could be violations, as under discussion here.
Scientists as all humans are dancing as fast as they can, bar some satan offering them apples and they succumb to temptation. Those are not good scientists by definition.
At 7:25 PM on 30 December, Geoff Sherrington takes issue with my earlier statement to the effect that “Anybody who expects absolute moral and intellectual integrity from anybody – even himself – is delusional,” writing:
.
Okay, let’s pursue this “work in mineral exploration” bit.
Instead of “knowingly and fraudulently provide optimistic results,” I could readily see a field geologist “knowingly and fraudulently” providing his home office with false pessimistic reports, forbearing to disclose potentially lucrative findings. This information he subsequently conveys – for pecuniary or other consideration – to another actor in the minerals exploitation market sector.
But that’s not what I’d intended when I posted that line above. What I’d meant was that the most susceptible victim of one’s deceit is one’s own self. Anybody who has proximal experience of any kind of research will acknowledge – if he is honest – the persistent and at times overwhelming temptation to see what one wishes to see, to report findings that support the premise you’ve set out to prove, to fulfill the expectations raised by your grant applications, to lead yourself further along the exploratory path you’d been able to scope out, visions of tenure in your beady little eyes.
How the hell many people reading here have personal familiarity with how bloody difficult it is to come up with a viable line of original research in any scientific area? The inclination to lie to oneself when one’s research runs aground upon the rocks and shoals of reality has got to be acknowledged.
Even if one appreciates that one is “almost 100% likely to be caught out in [one’s] lifetime,” most of us human beings in real life are looking at this year and the next. What was that line from Keynes at Bretton Woods when told by an honest economist that his idiot scheme of international counterfeiting would result, in the long run, in financial decompensation and disruption?
“In the long run,” he said, “we are all dead.”
Or do we even better fall back on that old Middle Eastern joke about the condemned man who promised that – if given a full year’s stay of execution and special stuff to feed the critter – he could teach the sultan’s favorite horse to sing?
One of his fellow prisoners observed privately to him that he wasn’t going to succeed. To this, the condemned man responded:
“Much may happen in a year. The sultan may die. I may die. And, who knows? Perhaps the horse will sing.”
At least the fellow in this old story wasn’t lying to himself. A lot of people working in research do so all the flaming time.
The assumption of “absolute moral and intellectual integrity from anybody – especially one’s own self – is most definitely delusional. Like all delusions, it leads to cataclysmic error. Better you should try to cross over into Iran with a knapsack filled with Farsi translations of the Gideon Bible, copies of every text in the Baha’i literature, and Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.
Error-checking (not necessarily “ACCOUNTABILITY“) is the sine qua non, and it’s got to be both scrupulous and rigorous within the researcher’s own mind.
Peer review is supposed to help with that by “incentivizing” persnickety adherence to real-world tests of validity. It was when the AGW cabal co-opted peer review in what we’ll laughingly call their discipline that they slid into utter damnation, from whence they will never be recovered.
Somebody who understands and accepts for himself Crowell’s Admonition (“I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken“) gives in to the necessity for that error-checking at ever step of his research process.
Those who don’t…. Well, if we’re lucky, somebody in their IT department will aggregate their e-mails, their computer codes, and their doctored datasets and download the whole sheban to the ‘Net for all the rest of the world to examine.
“…it would be naive of the general public to expect scientists always to present their work and theories dispassionately.”
Yes, and I agree many CAGW sceptics make this error.
“It would also be naive of the general public to expect scientists to disclose all their data promptly.” Not if they are publicly-funded, they can’t. The price of their freedom to be passionate is that they stick to the Scientific Method, which was devised precisely to render their passion nugatory. It’s astonishing that a man can give such a complete account of the birth of the Scientific Method without, it seems, understanding its purpose.
researchers “….will be permitted a reasonable period of exclusive access to data sets they have collected”. Maybe, but – in the case of publicly-funded science, informing vertiginously expensive policy decisions, that period cannot reasonably extend beyond the publication of the findings. And I’m not aware of anyone demanding unfettered access to someone’s workings BEFORE they have been used to make scary predictions – er, precognitive assertions….
Sorry, “Not if they are publicly-funded, they can’t. ” should read “Not if they are publicly-funded, it isn’t. “
On this theme, plase see Michael Crichton – State of Fear – Why Politicized Science is Dangerous, at http://www.crichton-official.com/books-stateoffear-policy.html
Kev-in-UK , please note, I referred specifically to ‘academics/scientists/humans’, not to ‘scientists’. The weaknesses and foibles described are universal they do not apply (nor is the author seeking to attribute them imho) only to scientists.
You have taken exception to what you regard as a general swingeing attack on the ethical and moral standards of all scientists. I can understand where you’re coming from but I read it differently. Whilst dealing with science, the practices and their origins are rooted in human nature and that’s the point I think; science is done by humans.
The article employs a robust rhetorical style for effect and takes extreme examples in order to illustrate certain points. There are a million shades of grey between deliberately concealing life saving advances and total openness. What the article does show very nicely though is that the motivation for many of the practices that we associate with good science was initially at least partly self serving too, or in other words, human. This is useful context.
To argue that scientists are necessarily partial and that they should be partisan and interested in all cases is of course as contentious as arguing the opposite but it does at least get us thinking, which I’m guessing was the plan. These two pars sum it up well I think –
‘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!”
There’s plenty to argue there, not least that there should be no public subsidy of science, which strikes me as an extreme stance but does pose questions over what science public money should fund. There’s also plenty that rings true though. A good provocative piece overall.
How often to we hear in the MSM; ‘scientists say’, ‘according to leading scientists’, ‘a top scientist predicts’….? How different those words sound if we regard science as arcane, collegiate, partial and human rather than disinterested, objective and above self interest!
By the way this is a great blog and happy new year to Mr W and all those who have contributed so much here.
Tucci78 says:
December 30, 2010 at 9:12 pm
At 7:25 PM on 30 December, Geoff Sherrington takes issue with my earlier statement to the effect that “Anybody who expects absolute moral and intellectual integrity from anybody – even himself – is delusional,”
Response.
I gave you an example, you gave no compelling counter-example. Stick to structures where accountability matters, not the grey of the cardigan. In my example, people work for salaries, promotion is on merit, salaries are derived from past successes, there are no grants, there are no sinecures, the key scientist in a new discovery seldom shares directly in the spoils. There is simply no incentive to cheat because you are surrounded by people smarter than you who, in combination, pick you up in a flash. There is a court case in Canada right now about a fellow who tried to cheat with mining analyses and was caught.
I did not want to go from my funding structure to your model because your model shows much of what is wrong with present research structures in the USA – that is another story, but there are worlds of scientists out there that do not work in the types of offices you envisage. Advice from Plutarch “Abstain from beans; that is, keep out of public offices, for anciently the choice of the officers of state was made by beans.” Confirmed in Brooks, M., “Blazing Saddles”. http://au.wrs.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0oGkzYHnx1NLT4A_jY36At.;_ylu=X3oDMTByZWgwN285BHNlYwNzcgRwb3MDMQRjb2xvA3NrMQR2dGlkAw–/SIG=1206ptvt1/EXP=1293873287/**http%3a//www.youtube.com/watch%3fv=R6dm9rN6oTs
If you use the KISS principle as you observe, you will find many scientists who have very high moral and intellectual integrity. (Scientists typically shy from use of the word “absolute”.)
Sheer sophistry — making the worst argument seem the better. The moral corruption at our universities runs deep.
The belief system that underlies the thinking that went into this article is repulsive. Everything this man has ever published needs to be checked for lies and deceit. Reading this article you just know he has done all the things he excuses. Should a man like this be in a position of authority? — especially at a university where the hope is to train the young to be “better” human beings.
The bad that humans do should not be condemned — why? — because it is merely human to behave that way. Therefore all actions performed by humans are excusable.
People rob and steal — therefore it is human nature to do so and the behavior should not be condemned. In fact if you don’t rob and steal you will lose advantage in dealing with your fellow man. This man has no morality whatsoever. He does not understand the meaning of the word. I think the only word to describe this article is “sick”.
You do not excuse reprehensible behavior. Instead you punish it. That way you get less of it, not more. The behavior revealed in Climategate was whitewashed by the universities that employed those people. Really, who was more corrupt? — the perpetrators of Climategate or the people who whitewashed it?
This guy should not be at a university. All arguments are not equal. Facts and lies are not equivalent. We must judge and we must condemn. If we do not we will continue on this downward spiral.
Eugene WR Gallun
sean boyce says:
December 31, 2010 at 12:23 am
Yes, I would tend to agree with the sentiment that you ‘read’ from the article – but not the ‘application’ or implication.
For example, Kealey describes per review as the ‘collective control of scientists’ – but to my mind, ONLY the AGW science peer review ‘system’ has shown that dedicated (I’d call it fraudulent!) level of control. Yes, I am sure some rare past ‘scientific control’ has been exhibited in some fields or other – but certainly not to the degree that AGW has!! I just think he wasn’t explicit enough. As he is an academic, I really would have thought he could be a little more considered in his words and more importantly, could have tempered the implication of the essay instead of being derogatory to all scientists!
I agree, it was probably his intention to promote thought about the subject – and as this thread of comments shows – that is indeed the outcome! – but I cannot condone the wide brush that has been used to besmirch science as a whole.
Everyone (and esp. those with a science background) can understand that the peer review system has been abused by the climate team – but to imply, nay, he almost ‘defines’, that all science follows the same approach is taking it too far.
”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.”
I do not see this para as being particularly specific, do you? If he had inserted the term ‘research’ in front of the two uses of ‘scientists’ and ‘science’ it would make a massive difference to the implication.
Just my personal view….
To Eugene W.R. Gallun ~ Sir. I applaud each succinct word in your recent post.
It was eloquent while ‘hitting the nail on it’s proverbial head’ with each point.
Thank you for your lucid synopsis!!! I find heartening inspiration when reading clear and compelling Truthful thought.
Please know you have many others here at WUWT who whole-heartedly agree with each word brilliantly presented. I sincerely thank you. Please keep on posting. I (and others!) need the encouragement that true character alone, can provide.
In short, Sir ~ you’ve made my ‘day’ which, here in South Australia…is soon to be New Years morning… which I will now face with a smile as a direct result of your thoughts.
Thanks Again.
Cynthia Lauren Thorpe
The fact that fewer than 10% of those commenting here are aware that the Global Warming Policy Foundation is a climate skeptics organization, and that the Mont Pelerin Society is a free market advocacy group, kind of indicates that we’re not in their pockets.
(Or that we’re damned clever about concealing it.)
At the time it was probably the best option for Pythagoras when dealing an unruly pupil. Had he invented dynamite he could have just blasted the little creep into pink mist. History would have been made and these days we would be awarding “The Pythagorean Prize in Chemistry”.
Life’s a beach. Always changing. Always the same.
At 1:17 AM on 31 December, we’ve got Geoff Sherrington (who really ought to learn how to use TinyURL) griping that I’d given:
.
The reason that example of Mr. Sherrington is extremely shaky – despite the real-world case he had in mind and is just now obliquely discussing – is that false information can be passed along for a variety of motives and in a number of different ways. Mr. <bSherrington wants to confine the discussion to one kind of prevarication – the reporting of false-positive findings – which would very shortly thereafter be tested and found to be divergent from reality as the exploitation people followed the survey guy into the field to get the extraction processes going.
What I came back with was an example of a false-negative report – much more difficult to detect – uttered knowingly by the field geologist in order to keep the find under wraps until he could sell it to a rival mining and minerals company. Or he could simply be withholding the information because he’s got a hard-on for that “chain of bosses” of whom Mr. Sherrington writes. Same putative guy, equally deceitful practice, but different intentions and effects.
False negative reports are a helluva lot more difficult to disprove. Witness please my earlier mentions made about pharma manufacturers suppressing reports of adverse safety data (my example having been the Merck VIGOR study). Mr. Sherrington is fixated upon one stupid lying field geologist who was easily caught out. My own f’rinstance is a multibillion-dollar actor in the international pharmaceuticals industry whose conduct in the reporting of false negative findings is pretty much abysmally commonplace throughout that enormous market sector.
Mr. Sherrington‘s objections notwithstanding, “the grey of the cardigan” is what those of us with experience of objective reality like to call “the real world.”
Hm. If he’s going to pull up Blazing Saddles references (personally, I like the Reverend Johnson’s wonderful line that concludes: “Or are we just jerking off?”), why don’t we look to the early classroom scene from Back to School (1986)?
Y’know. The one in which Rodney Dangerfield’s character concludes his reactions to the ivy tower snotty lecturing professor’s fatuous infliction of a hypothetical business case utterly divergent from business realities with a response to the credentialed idiot’s “The next question for us is where to build our factory?” being:
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That ought to be enough to neatly fold and mothball Mr. Sherrington‘s grey of the cardigan bullpuckey.
Anybody else getting to the conclusion that Mr. Sherrington is “…just jerking off“?
The fact that (according to Mr. Sherrington) “…there are worlds of scientists out there [who] do not work in the types of offices [I] envisage” does nothing to address the equally valid (and hellaciously more pertinent) fact that what we’re dealing with in the enormous AGW fraud is a cabal of academically credentialed snake-oil salesmen who most emphatically are cancerously pervading “the types of offices” which give them not only the illusions of probity and veracity but also access to whopping great amounts of funding ripped from the bleeding flesh of innocent human beings in the private sector by politicians conspiring with these power-drunken credentialed confidence men to plunder and destroy productive enterprise in human society.
It has also given them pervasive control of the acceptedly authoritative land and ocean surface temperature datasets, enabling them to “cook the books” while denying examiners skeptical of their assertions access to the raw data required to verify or disprove their conclusions.
Big difference from Mr. Sherrington‘s extremely shaky example of a field geologist salting his samples to deceive that “chain of bosses” back in the home office.
You wanna talk about “the grey of the cardigan,” Mr. Sherrington“? Look to your own wardrobe.
And try a little Beano while you’re at it.
Sean boyce wrote:
“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.”
He is not excusing the activities, but he is hardly lamenting it either. At best it is a shrug of the shoulders. His last paragraph reads “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 normally impute the key point – the punchline – to the final paragraph. Note the ‘So what?’ Note the ‘public should be less naive.’ He could have finished with a paragraph that acknowledged that the public and their elected representatives had been sold short. He did not. What he is giving us is the ‘finger.’ The rest of the article is just noise – it counts for didly squat.
At 4:50 AM on 31 December, Roger Knights had written:
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Not me. I hadn’t known diddly about the Global Warming Policy Foundation, but anybody familiar with the Austrian School of Economics knows that the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society had been convened in 1947 by Friedrich von Hayek and has been pervasively influenced by Austrian School thinkers throughout its history.
Beyond that, it was clear to me from the start that Dr. Kealey’s discussion was focused on the pathology prevailing in the sciences today, and thereby accounting for what we find in the way of lapses from intellectual integrity and ethical standards of conduct on the part of the fraudsters posing as legitimate climatologists in support of the “Cargo Cult Science” of anthropogenic global warming.
I’ve simply taken exception to certain of Dr. Kealey’s citations of past historical events – the matter of Sir Charles Lyell and his “ancient earth” followers in geology, the history of the Drs. Chamberlen and their refusal to disclose their re-development of obstetrical forceps, that kind of thing. In my opinion, there’s damned little parallel, and I believe I’ve supported my arguments to that effect.
There is great danger in letting stand the notion that scientists should act as advocates like lawyers in a courtroom.
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 augments 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.
A better word for the acceptable behavior of a passionate scientist is “Proponent”. “Advocate” has become synonymous with Lawyer and the adversarial process. “Proponent” is one who proposes without an adversary, but with an obligation to defend honestly and objectively.
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.
If scientists believe it is appropriate to be an advocate, as a lawyer in a court of law, it is naïve to expect ethical crimes of misrepresentation and non-disclosure of inconvenient facts will not be common place.
timheyes beat me to it. Although I was going to say: I can’t believe a British Academician wrote something so full of crap.