Since I did not attend Lisbon even though invited and initially accepted, (other business and family obligations took precedence) the very least I can do is to help elevate the discussion. Here’s a report from Dr. Judith Curry, and I urge WUWT readers to read it in it’s entirety. Hopefully Mosh will weigh in here with his report once he’s recovered from the trip. I’m sure Steve McIntyre will be posting on the conference also. Since this is a new topic, and one bound to be widely discussed, I’ve added a “climate reconciliation” category to WUWT. I’ll have some thoughts later. – Anthony
Lisbon Workshop on Reconciliation: Part II
by Judith Curry (excerpts from her blog)
Here are some reactions from the Lisbon Workshop on Reconciliation in the Climate Debate. These are my personal reflections, and include some of the perspectives and statements made by others (without any attribution of names).
The first issue is what exactly is meant by reconciliation, and who actually wants it? Reconciliation is defined (wikipedia) as re-establishing normal relations between belligerents: re-establish dialogue, reinstate balance, restore civility. It is not clear that there has ever been normal relations between, say, the mainstream IPCC researchers and the skeptical climate blogosphere. Consensus building was not seen as having any part in a reconciliation. Rather there was a desire to conduct impassioned debates nonviolently, and to create an arena where we can fight a more honest fight over the science and the policy options.
So who actually wants some sort of reconciliation or an increase in civility? One perspective was that the alarmists shooting at the deniers, and deniers shooting at the alarmists, with a big group in the middle, with both the deniers and the alarmists ruining the situation for reasoned debate about the science and the policy options. Another perspective described the fight as entertaining theater. One perspective was that there is no incentive for conciliation by either side; both sides like the “war.” In the context of the “war,” the hope was expressed that more moderate voices would emerge in the public debate.
The issue of civility and nonviolence in communication was regarded as an important topic by the Workshop organizers. They brought in an expert to facilitate nonviolent communication. This frankly didn’t go over very well with the Workshop participants, for a variety of reasons. This particular group of participants wasn’t very volatile in terms of emotions running high, use of offensive language, or heated arguments. The main format of the Workshop was for groups of 7-8 to discuss various controversial topics. Each group had a different dynamic; the group I was in had some colorful personalities but not terribly impassioned positions on the alarmist-denier spectrum. One table did encompass the entire spectrum, but the dynamic of that group seemed collegial. So the issue of getting skeptics to sit down with alarmists (these were the two words that were generally used to describe the two poles of the debate) and talk politely and constructively didn’t turn out to be a problem. This is partly a function of the individuals invited, who for the most part weren’t too far out there on either extreme and expressed their willingness to communicate by actually agreeing to attend the Workshop.
…
Towards reconciliation
Some principles/strategies that were discussed to improving the scientific debate:
- Acknowledge that there are real issues and we don’t agree on how to resolve them
- Disagreement with mutual respect
- Find better ways to communicate criticism
- Find better ways to admit mistakes without damage to reputation
- Find some common ground, something to work on together
- Find where interests intersect
- Importance of transparency
- Communication engenders trust
- Search for win-win solutions (i.e. both sides work to increase the funding base to collect more paleoproxies).
==================================================================
I urge readers to read the rest in entirety here: Lisbon Workshop on Reconciliation: Part II
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And while we’re debating all this … we in the midwest and eastern U.S. have yet another big snow storm to contend with!
Smokey says:
January 30, 2011 at 12:41 pm
I would enjoy watching Prof Richard Lindzen discuss AGW with anyone at all on the alarmist side.
—-
I’ll second the motion!
I haven’t read all the comments, but until Curry ceases calling me a ‘denier’, I will continue to refrain from reading any of her posts. Reconciliation? The arrogance of these people.
I have spent the last decade studying ‘climate science’. And the politics of this science is more interesting to me, as the natural physics of the atmosphere is still in its infancy, despite what Curry thinks.
She wants to play in the political spectrum of this issue with political rhetoric.
So be it. I am just following her lead. Shall I refer to her as an eco-religious zealot? How about a fraud, ‘… the fraudsters’?
I think I like Gestapo Judy. It fits.
This looks like that famous socialist egalitarian pastime.
“lets have an Olympics where everybody wins”
Let everybody get a medal for participation – not for being the best and fairest.
I would like to ask a question of everyone. I asked it of Mosher on Curry’s site, but got no response. The question presents the problem of Jones’ “trick” to “hide the decline.” I contend that PNS (post normal science) has nothing to say about the matter, except maybe to exonerate Jones. If PNS has nothing to say about the matter then that is a reductio ad absurdum proving that PNS cannot serve as a guide to scientific method. Here is my post:
Steven Mosher writes:
“And even if you apply political force, you have no simple path back to normal science, principly because ‘normal science’ is an ideal which really isnt practiced.”
It does not have to be practiced. It does have to be understood. It is there all the time whether you have turned your back on it or not. It can be used to explain to others that, for example, Phil Jones’ “trick” to “hide the decline” is a case of hiding 55 years of data which showed that tree rings are not a good proxy for temperatures. Hiding data that tends to discredit one’s so-called theory is a violation of scientific method and it requires deception to achieve. So, Mr. Mosher, now that you are out there, beyond mere “normal science,” how do you like it? Do you prefer lies to the truth? Or have you simply forgotten the difference?
Dr. Dave says:
January 30, 2011 at 12:34 pm
I like and respect Judith Curry, but she’s still a bit too dependent on the teat of government grants to be truly objective. In the larger sense this isn’t just a squabble between climate scientists (and journalists). This is, indeed, a war. There is national sovereignty, entire economies and human liberty at stake. There are billions, perhaps trillions of dollars of global wealth at stake. And, as “violent” a term as it may be, we ARE fighting fraud.
—————————————
One more thing at stake: If they take us back 1860’s level CO2 emission, which is their stated goal, the resulting ecomonic collapse will kill billions. That’s with a “b”.
Oh, by the way, at Montford’s website, http://bishophill.squarespace.com, Paul Dennis who is a scientist at UEA is pushing the argument that Phil Jones’ “trick” was a lie and reprehensible conduct for a scientist.
“Acknowledge that there are real issues and we don’t agree on how to resolve them.”
What a mindless opening “principle.” The way to resolve disagreements in science is by the scientific method.
Anyone who disagrees with that is, by definition, a sophist.
Dr. Dave, thoroughly agree and very well said.
The most significant thing I found in Dr. Curry’s summary:
“Apart from competing knowledge claims, there are areas of ignorance that are not explicitly recognized.”
Unfortunately, Climate Etc. gets bogged down in incredibly dull climate politics and only very rarely goes anywhere interesting, like natural climate variations, which are absolutely fascinating. (In fairness, maybe things will change for the better moving forward.)
I feel, Dr. Curry, that the hill in front of you is very steep. A simple visit over to the comments on various articles in the U.K. MSN shows the concerted effort being carried out by the warmers at the moment, to muddy the waters.
Sorry Judith but when I see the letters PNS associated with a subject, I turn away.
To paraphrase Robert Frost – to practice Post Normal Science is like playing tennis with the net down. Once you have eliminated compelling peer pressure to exhaust the resources every problem will come to be seen through the lens of PNS. I’m reminded of something one of my staff quipped some years ago: “This is hard – let’s do it wrong!”.
It tries to make climate science out to be the Norwegian Blue of Science (It’s not dead – it’s restin’!). Did they have to give it a cool name like Post Normal Science so people won’t think PNS practitioners are a bunch of slackers?
Lovely plumage.
I’ll offer a slogan: “Post Normal Science – It’s an unfinished work”
There are two major things wrong with the AGW program:
1) The process is wrong
2) The application of scientific method is wrong
So it is a flawed process, both procedurally and operationally.
The “Powers that Be” know this. The scientists & policy makers know this and are paid to give the message, since literally $trillions are in the kitty.
One tip-off to the grand scam is the hiring of public relations agencies and psychologists to see what spins well. Dupes and stooges from Hollywood stand in the gaps. The “team” thus comes up with really clever diversions, like first “the Precautionary Principle”, now this “Reconciliation” process.
It is kind of interesting that this reconciliation trial balloon is flying from the warm-earth cultists, at the same time the Democrats in Washington are pretending to make nice with the Republicans. Why? Dems lost the last elections. Similar reasoning here? I wonder?
Sorry if I sound paranoid and seem to be saying this is a grand conspiracy.
Because… it kind of is…if we catch a band of safecrackers in the act of robbing a bank, are we conspiracy theorists if we say they were in cahoots to rob the bank? When they were found with the cash (Grant money) and the safecracking tools (Models), and the plan (Climategate)? Or were they, like Curly Howard used to say, “victims a’ Soycumstance.”
Mary Graber is a conservative professor and so is well positioned to translate for us what is meant in the Academic world by the push for “civility” and “non-voilent” debate.
‘They [students] are now judged not on their abilities to use logic and evidence to make a cogent argument but on the attitudes they hold. Socratic dialogues and Aristotelian rhetorical strategies are rarely mentioned in the classroom. On an education program recently, I heard a teacher assigning a five-paragraph essay exploring “inside feelings.”
The new argumentative strategies have evolved into their own disciplines. Now entire classes and programs of study are available in “conflict resolution” and “peace studies.” As I discovered by spending two days in workshops at a conflict resolution education conference, discourse that deviates from the peace and one-world government orthodoxy is silenced. It is silenced, not by words or logic, but by social ostracism. In one workshop on discussing certain preselected “upstanders” who worked on behalf of social justice, I found my tentative suggestion of a free market alternative to a social problem met with the benevolent looks usually directed at people who rant about fluoride in the water. Participants simply repeated “Be the change.” To engage me in debate, in their opinion, would mean engaging in rhetoric that is less than “peaceful.”’
Her column here.
Schadow:
You bring up a good example of the way the scientific method has been compromised with the Lynx study. There are so many like this.
They implied that human induced climate change(?) (or disruption? I forget what the PC word is anymore) was causing the decrease in the Lynx population.
Okay, then Prove It! Prove it unequivocally, and then I’ll believe it. I won’t have to believe or not believe it, actually, the facts will be the final arbiter.
If a scientist cannot prove some off the wall statement like this, then he should shut up. Very unprofessional and unscientific. If I were to have made such unsubstantiated statement like this in the papers I have written in the past, it would not have even made it to the peers for review. Angewandte Chemie, or Experientia or other journals where I had published would not have wasted peers’ time. Of course, that was way back in the 80s and 90s. Prepostmodern?
Dr Curry is doing some good work but this meeting seems a waste to me. As previous posters have said what is there to reconcile?Science or rather quality science speaks for itself. I consider this PNS a con, nothing more, philosphy of science? Try the scientific method first and just a grain of uncommon sense,CAWG or AWG has failed as a concept and without the claimed data and methodology ever being published in their entirety, it was never acceptable as a hypothesis or theory.
What I see and sense from the alarmists is panic, time is running out and they left few ways to climb down from the caterwaulling of doom. The upcoming congressional hearings will be the official start of the political end, and I beg all American scientists who can, to assist the Republicans to ask the right questions this time. Do not miss this opertunity to nail the lid down on the team ,as they have shown that they will attempt to manipulate the politicians and public opinion any way they can and asking only the wrong/non questions is a great way to avoid transparency. Inquiries of the British standard would give the team cover to escape justice and that would be a travesty. Now I can understand scientists being reluctant to engage in the political mess but if this climatology scandal drags on all scientist will be tarred with the same brush and face a far more savage reduction of funding not too far down the road. Lying to the people paying your bills is a very short term science plan. I am hoping 2011 will be a very good year for truth and science.
Our own very civil tallbloke reports from Lisbon:
“There was a great diversity of backgrounds and approaches to the issues, including research on the history of attempts and ideas for geo-engineering, analysis of decision making in the face of conflicting evidence, historical comparisons with previous scientific conflicts, my own missive on the need for parallel development of alternative hypotheses and possible cross fertilisation of results and ideas, setting the climate change question in context with other pressing human issues, and many more.”
The only “common ground” that’s necessary in “climate” “science” is competing alternative hypothesis! 😀
Isn’t this current notion of reconciliation really all about saving climate careers.
The AGW motives seemed once aimed at the expansion of careers and the research arena. It slowly moved into various attack the messenger, cover up and bunker efforts and now appears to be about the preservation of existing activities and careers with growing signs of avoiding lawsuits, prosecution and jail.
The idea of reconciliation is almost funny coming from warmers after they threw everything nasty they could at skeptics.
Reminds me of the common criminal who only after being caught, again, is crying about finding the path to righteousness.
Particularuly offensive to me has been the warmers disdain for the public at large.
This local example of county commissioners who were caught rigging board votes on public policy showed such disdain by labeling the public comment time at their earings as “Sound and Fury time”.
Communication with commissioners:
“I am working on talking points for those who want a few bullet points on specific items. I will share those with you. “On the rumor front, the room will most likely be packed tonight with angry voices – – as I keep reminding Rob- – this is sound and fury time! And then it will be over. Thanks Phyllis”
It’s hard to say if the reference was from Macbeth’s soliloquy or the Faulkner novel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sound_and_the_Fury
But this is explanation of the novel’s title “Sound and Fury”
The title of the novel is taken from Macbeth’s soliloquy in act 5, scene 5 of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth:
“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
Dr Curry:
=========
Search for win-win solutions (i.e. both sides work to increase the funding base to collect more paleoproxies).
=========
Modern climatology has given us nothing. It has not improved our lives, our understanding of the world, or our ability to predict it. It has been used only as a vehicle to kill hope, promoting irrational fear and contempt for humanity.
Given the return on our investment to date, I see no rational argument for increased funding.
“when stakes are high and when decisions appear urgent”
There’s the PNS lie.
We’re adding CO2 to the air. What’s the problem?
It’s plant food, and plants are animal food and fungus food, etc., so we’re feeding the world.
It warms the world (they say), which helps the plants use the CO2 plant food to grow.
It increases the water cycle (perhaps) to water the plants and help them grow.
So we’re in danger of having big healthy plants feeding lots of animals, are we?
And that’s a bad thing how?
Reconciliation in the Climate Change Debate
Reconciliation can only be achieved if policy is based on verified science.
Verification of the science can be achieved as follows:
Here is IPCC’s projections on global temperature trends:
http://bit.ly/caEC9b
Here is my suggestion on how reconciliation in the debate can be achieved
a) For the period from 2000 to 2030, if the global warming rate is 0.2 deg C per decade, the AGW theory is proved and policy follows.
b) For the period from 2000 to 2030, if the global warming rate is less than 0.1 deg C per decade, the AGW theory is disproved and it is rejected.
Proponents and opponents of AGW, don’t you agree with my suggestion for reconciliation?
Zeke the Sneak says:
January 30, 2011 at 7:56 pm
The only “common ground” that’s necessary in “climate” “science” is competing alternative hypothesis! 😀
——–
Agreed!
The “Delphi Method” is a meeting format or protocol for achieving consensus on contentious issues that was originally developed by the Rand Corporation but has now become (in)famously developed as an unethical method of neutralizing opponents in staged meeting(s).
http://www.eagleforum.org/educate/1998/nov98/focus.html
The method includes dividing meetings into small groups and through the provision of facilitators and unacknowledged supporters. Don’t know if this is what Steven Mosher and the others were subjected to, but from his and Judith Curry’s comments I am suspicious. If the AGW crowd felt they were on the ropes, a big win for them would be to neutralize the voice of prominent “deniers”.
I have seen this be used to advance other leftist projects and had it used on me too. Not pleasant.
Whether AGW is true or not still does not justify any change in policy as there has yet to be any demonstrable net negative and and of the so-called solutions are known to be overwhelmingly disastrous.
Mark
Steve Oregon says:
January 30, 2011 at 8:01 pm
Remember that deniers are just astro-turfers paid off by big oil? Remember how Hansen went before Congress and claimed that Bush “agents” were suppressing his ideas when it was the other way around? Remember how countless scientists within state and federal administrations lost their jobs because they expressed dissent at one little brick in the “settled science” pyramid of shame? I could go on all day. There is a principle in Christianity that you forgive others for wronging you, but that they should ask for forgiveness first, else they will be further harmed by such “easy forgiveness” in the long run. Sort of like tough love.
So, I suggest these cAGW perps go through the ten step process first. When they get to step 9 or so, admission of wrongdoing, then they will be almost cleaned up. Step ten, they should resign, and design shoes or computer games or something. If they agree to such a self-help strategy, then we can seriously talk and reconcile.