More from Jerome Ravetz: Response to Willis

tallbloke says:
February 25, 2011 at 6:29 am
Theo Goodwin says:
February 25, 2011 at 6:07 am
OK, you think Ravetz deserves respect. Would you please choose one of his theses, articulate it, and then defend it here? I would just love to have the opportunity to engage you. Keep in mind that he has been pontificating here in the last few days. You might want to defend one of those statements.
“I am proud to count Jerome Ravetz among my friends. I have my own scientific and philosophical position. I am not his spokesman, nor does he need one. If he wants to engage with what you say, he will.”
In effect, your statement that I addressed is very much like the statement that your grandmother is a proponent of AGW and you love your grandmother and you are not going to criticize anything said by your grandmother. So, please tell me, why are you allowed to post here? Has WUWT shifted to an empathy standard for posts?

Jerome,
I, for one of many, appreciate your posting this apology to Willis.
I like your anecdotes and they took me on my own journey of thought around the difference between a climate scientist and a global-warming scientist. For the GW scientist, it goes to another anecdote, when all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail. That sort of modifies this,
“It’s like the old fable about the contest between the wind and the sun, as to who could get the man’s coat off. In more modern terms, when the wagons are circled, all those inside have to conform, but when there is a ceremony of peacemaking, understandings can be created.”
The global warming scientist is fuming because Aesop did not mentioned how CO2 was there egging them on.
As for the climate scientist, I rate you guys better than economist, but not by a whole lot. As long as models are used as proofs and some folks keep intentionally fitting the data to support the conclusion, well… (but those are the closest and announced global warming scientists).
My history is that 23 years ago, I quit working on my previous goal of what I wanted to be when I grew up. Then, my goal was to be able to write economic models. The $ of computer programming changed that and there are no regrets. So, just a layman (bolded and italic if I ever posted at other sites, and would start to doubt my own sanity if I did anyway). I have a strong, but dusty background in statistics and modeling. We can get away with a lot with models. But every econometrics guy worth is salt knows that the null hypothesis is more telling than any model we can craft.
My favorite story of correlation (R2) was from Dr. Kenneth White (IIRC) at UCF, GNP and the average winning speed at the Indy 500 were a great fit. It was way up there, but you have to evaluate why and it just does not make sense. But, if you add post-Tony George data to that list, you get a decline. It so much looks like a Briffa tree model too. But instead of understanding that maybe they had a bad correlation, they just kept the part that they liked without understanding why it changed. Oh, and I know that the decline at Indy was because Tony changed the car formula significantly. But that still does not explain how GNP relates to speed (but I bet we could come up with some dandy model on how CO2 output causes the cars to go faster and ignore tire technology, track surface, engine technology, material science, and design safety were more important).

Colonial says:
February 25, 2011 at 12:56 am
One major step Dr. Ravetz could take to measurably improve the tone of this discussion would be to stop using the word “violence” to mean debate, discussion, and/or dissension. As has been alluded to above and elsewhere, misuse of language to gain an advantage in debate is a tactic that seems to be universally favored by the Left.
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Has anybody told some posters on WUWT that the Cold War is over?
As long as you keep yelling that anybody who does not share your political views (whatever they might be) is automatically bereft of integrity and intelligence, the widespread public support for reinstating rigorous science (as opposed to spin) which is so badly needed will not be forthcoming.
I find myself agreeing with people whose political views are generally a long way from mine on this particular issue. It happens on other specific issues as well. There are sleazebags, and good people, right across the political spectrum. Deal with it.
As for Dr Ravetz, apart from his apology (which he admits is a result of not checking the facts before publicly traducing someone – not the best model for civil discourse) – I read this rambling stream of consciousness twice and still don’t understand it. The weird reference to Sarah Palin – which is couched in terms designed to offend both her supporters and her detractors, is another uncivil grenade lobbed by this advocate of polite and respecful discussion. It is also completely irrelevant, as has been pointed out.
Characterising climate science as somehow ‘different’ and ‘special’ is precisely how its standards came to fall so far even as its political clout increased. Ravetz and his apologists put the cart before the horse. If the burden of proof had been applied to the claims of CAGW alarmists right from the start in the same way as is expected in ‘normal’ science, the vast majority of the propaganda emanating from the IPCC would never even have been published. Willis’ article on the latest travesty in ‘Nature’ , which involves cycling synthetic data through a series of models, not revealing the code, and then claiming that the product means something, is a good example.

tallbloke says:
February 25, 2011 at 6:32 am
“The fact that we had great difficulty in getting the higher profile people from the pro AGW side to attend Lisbon and defend their science on neutral ground speaks volumes by itself, without the organiser having to compromise his diplomatic neutrality by saying so.”
Oh, I see the problem. You continue to believe that there is going to be rational discussion over these matters and that Hansen and Schmidt and others are going to appreciate rational criticisms of “hide the decline.” To me, that is water under the bridge. The only thing to do now is to get funding removed for the whole lot. The Republicans in the House have made a good start.

The notion of Post Normal Science can be exposed for what it is rather easily. Ravetz speaks of a fable, the sun and the wind arguing about which of them can force a man to take off his coat, somehow stretches that into being equivelant to the “modern” analogy of a clique of scientists having circled the wagons and demanding conformism out of self defense. The logic is disingenuous at best, and easily shredded in my earlier comment. But the concept of a simpler story as an analgous explanation has value when it isn’t applied in a such a misleading manner. Here is a brief story from human history that nicely sums up PNS.
For years the tribe lived in fear of the nearby volcano. They were frightened when it shook and roared, and then it erupted there was hunger in the land for the crops were destroyed and the game fled. A shaman amongst them, who could speak to the spirits within the volcano and was also privy to much other knowledge because he could speak to the spirits bade them to once a year slit the throat of a virgin and throw her into the volcano to appease the angry spirits. The chief had a son, a good hunter who ranged far and wide in search of game to feed the tribe. One day the son, who was by now as respected a leader of the tribe as the chief himself spoke at the tribe council meeting. There was a pass between two mountains, and on the other side was a verdant valley with fresh flowing water, much game and much fertile land, and best of all, no volcano.
The shaman stood and spoke and said this would make the spirits angry, and worse would befall the tribe if they left. The chief’s son asked how much angrier could the spirits get that they make the volcano erupt, scattering the game and destroying the crops even though we sacrifice the virgins as you say the tell us to. Let the spirits be angry, we will be far from their volcano where they cannot hurt us with it.
The council agreed to ponder the matter for many days. On the first day there was a thunderstorm with terrible lightning and thunder. See? said the Shaman, we have angered the spirits. We get thunderstorms every year at this time said the Chief’s son, they meant nothing before, why should they now? On the second day a boar was found nearby, drowned in a pool of water from the flash flood of the storm. See? said the Shaman, we have angered the spirits. Every big rain and flash flood traps some animals in pool of water where they drown, this is not new, why suddenly does it mean the spirits are angry?
And as days went by, and each one there was an event that the Shaman seized upon and claimed it was a sign the spirits were angry. And the Chief’s son protested that they were regular occurances that had meant no more in the past than they did now.
Amongst them arose great philosopher, a Ravetz, an elder who could make obvious with just a story what others could no understand. He was wise in the ways of the world, though he had never been a hunter, nor a farmer, nor a shaman, nor had accomplished anything of use in his entire life, but he’d dedicated himself to study and so knew many things. And the Ravetz spoke and said if the spirits are as angry as the Shaman says, might they not bring the entire mountain down upon us as we try to leave? The matter is urgent, the stakes high, the facts uncertain. No one but the Shaman can speak to the spirits, best we heed his warnings, stay where we are, and double the number of virgins to be sacrificed. For if we leave and the Shaman is right, we may all be destroyed.
And it came to pass one day that the tribe was visited by shamans from other nearby tribes who scoffed and said there are no spirits in the volcano, and the signs your shaman says mean the spirits are angry happen all over the place, all the time, they are natural, you’ve been murdering virgins for no reason, and living in a dangerous place when there is a safer and better valley just beyond the pass.
As it became obvious to the people of the tribe that their Shaman had lied to them, had invented evidence where there was none, correlated meangless events with the discussion and attached significance to them by claiming the evidence of the spirits, which only he could speak to was all a sham to control them. As they packed to leave the valley of the volcano, they wondered if perhaps it would be fitting to not only leave the Shaman behind, but perhaps make him the volcano’s last sacrifice as punishment for having lied to the tribe.
But the Ravitz stood and spoke to them and said though the Shaman had lied, it was like the Sun and the Wind arguing over a man with a coat, and that this was similar to the two hunters who, just the day before, had both claimed a deer that had been brought down by both their arrows at once coming to blows. But he the Ravetz had asked them to love each other and share the deer, and give him one large haunch for helping them to become friends. And so by analogy said the Ravetz, the Shaman and the tribe and the shamans from other tribes should all do the same, and he the Ravetz would lead the way by helping to conciliate.
The chief’s son, who had over the years grown in stature and was now the chief, thought long on what the Ravetz had said. And when he had considered all those who had been sacrificed, those who had starved when crops were destroyed and game scarce, he spoke his judgment.
We’d have left this place long ago if it were not for your words that the stakes were high, the matter urgent, the facts uncertain. You took the lies we knew were lies, and cast doubt in our minds, cast fear in our minds, that perhaps the lies, despite all the evidence that they were lies, were not lies, and so we sacrificed and starved because you made the lies into even bigger lies. Now you throw all the blame on the Shaman, and babble of Sun and Wind and a man with a jacket being like two hunters who agreed to share a deer between them and so bringing some sort of appeasment to the tribe as a whole should fall to you. I have a different idea.
The shaman shall be banished, and the word spread far and wide that he is a false shaman, and never to be allowed to be a shaman again, ever. And the Ravetz shall come with the tribe and be given a task. Each day he must stand in the midst of the tribe council and speak for 15 minutes on anything he pleases. And when he is done, each counciler, each visiting shaman, each hunter and each farmer shall say to him, loudly so that the young hear what is said:
When a man who has never been a farmer tells you how to farm, when a man who has never hunted tells you how to hunt, ignore him and make it plain to the young ones that he knows not of what he speaks. But when a man who has never been a farmer, nor a hunter, nor a shaman nor any other profession that provides any value to anyone sows fear amongst you that what you know to be lies might somehow not be, then the wasted lives of thos sacrificed and those who died of starvation are as much upon his head as they are upon the Shaman who lied, and he is brought forth to be made fun of this way to remind the tribe that many suffered for the Shaman’s lies, but more still for the foolishness of the Ravitz who absolves himself of his own sins and then asks that we the victims of his sins, allow him to present himself as peace maker between the tribe and the evil Shaman. The Ravetz practices a magic more wicked than the Shaman. For he gave the Shaman even more power to draw upon, despite knowing no more about the spirits than he does about hunting and farming.
He is to be shunned, and his babble repeated and repeated until the reality of our own observations make it fade into background noise that cannot even be discerned as a babble.

Steve Mosher,
You move back to normal science by doing good science and showing there is nothing abnormal or extraordinary about current climate. The Hockey Stick was the main tool to used to convince people, even many climate scientists, that we had entered a period of abnormal heating. Well, the Hockey Stick has been debunked. Every study published to support the Hockey Stick has been debunked. The fact politics once entered the realm of science is meaningless if the science shows the motivation of that intrusion to be ill-founded.
Post-normal science is less effective than normal science. Can we agree on that?
The science has not shown any clear and present danger. Can we agree on that?
Therefore, the best way forward is to return to normal science where we take the time to do the science right. We cooperate with all scientists from all viewpoints who have displayed honesty in their approach, but shun those scientists who have attempted to defend the indefensible such as hiding the decline, lack of transparency, and other violations of the scientific method.
Doesn’t that make sense to you?

I have the horrid feeling that I have offended a few good people here, such as Tallbloke. But if Ravetz (or anyone else) needs an ideology while discussing or practicing science, that sounds like a very dubious proposition to me – an ideology is essentially socio-political and has nothing to do with the physical world of the ‘hard’ sciences. The essential problem with climate science and the CAGW camp is one of honesty; Dr Ravetz seems to be attempting to find ways to allow dishonest scientists to find an accomodation with and be reconciled to those scientists hewing to accepted scientific method. I still maintain that Ravetz’ attack on Willis on the basis of a faulty memory is nothing short of ludicrous and indicative of a rather odd state of mind.

As usual I am nearly overwhelmed by these replies, and I only wish that I could respond to each of them.
Let me try to handle some issues that came up repeatedly.
First, we can find it very useful to look at the correspondence in today’s London Independent newspaper between Steve Connor and the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson (here described as an ‘heretic’), on http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/letters-to-a-heretic-an-email-conversation-with-climate-change-sceptic-professor-freeman-dyson-2224912.html?action=Gallery. Dyson makes a very basic point, that the uncertainties are just too great for any firm policy decision to be made. Connor, by contrast, presents a number of scientific claims, all of which he believes to be solid and factual. Then the argument shifts to more general issues, and Dyson eventually pulls out. Now some people on this blog may believe that Connor is some paid hack or prostitute who is peddling alarmists’ lies; but it is also possible that he really believes what he is saying. For Dyson, it could be (and here I am mind-reading, on the basis of what I would do in similar circumstances) that he saw that short of taking a couple of crucial issues and digging ever deeper into the debates about them, he was on a path of rapidly diminishing returns. That left him looking like someone who didn’t want to argue, and so leaving the field to the expert.
For me, that is a reminder that before one engages in a debate one needs to be sure of one’s ground. And that requires an investment of personal resources, taking them from other commitments. That is one reason why I do not engage in detailed discussions of scientific issues, but try to do my best with the issues of procedure. Of course, that can seem cowardice to some, but so be it.
Now there is the fundamental point of the sort of science that ‘climate change’ is. The big policy question is whether there is enough strength of evidence for AGW to justify the huge investments that would be required to do something about it. There are the ‘error-costs’ to be considered, where those of erroneous action or inaction would be very large. The decision is made even more complex by the fact that the remedies for CO2 that have been implemented so far are themselves highly controversial. Therefore, although the issues of: the policies to adopt; the strength of the scientific evidence for AGW; the behaviour of the AGW scientists – are all connected, they are distinct. People can hold a variety of positions on each of these issues, and they may have been changing their views on each of them. This is why I tried to argue that the situation is best not seen as one of goodies and baddies.
As to Post-Normal Science, I was recently reminded of an example that was very important in setting me on the path. Suppose we have an ‘environmental toxicant’, on which there is anecdotal evidence of harm, leading to a political campaign for its banning. Such evidence is not sufficient, and so scientific studies were undertaken. But these used test animals, over short timespans with high doses. On the basis of those results a dose-response curve was obtained, which in principle should lead regulators to define a ‘safe limit’. But those results were from a temporary acute dose, while the policy problem related to a chronic low dose. And then (and here’s the kicker) it was realised that in extrapolating from the lab situation to the field situation, the method of extrapolation was more important in defining the dose-response relations in the field than was the lab data itself. So Science was producing, not a Fact but an artefact. That for me became a good example for the PNS mantram. For that sort of problem, there was a classic paper about policy for environmental toxicants’, by A.S. Whittemore, published in Risk Analysis in 1983. In any real situation of that sort, there will be plenty of experts on both sides of the value-conflicted policy process, who really believe that their data is conclusive (children with unusual symptoms on the one side, lab rats with LD50 doses on the other). In practice, there is a negotiation, where scientific evidence is introduced and contested as one element of the situation.
Reflecting on that sort of problem in relation to PNS, I came up with point about science now needing to relate to Quality rather than to Truth. That was rather neat, but also a cause of much trouble, for which I issue another apology. My critics on this issue (notably Willis) have provided me with much food for thought. I don’t resolve these things in a hurry, and there are still others in the pipeline, but here’s how I see it now. In a recent post, Willis gave his definition of truth, which is a very good one relating to scientific practice. But for him (and I agree) it means that a scientific truth is a statement that might actually be false. From a scientific point of view, that’s good common sense; to imagine that any particular scientific statement ranks with 2 + 2 = 4 is the most arrant dogmatism. However, that means that our idea of scientific truth is quite different from the ordinary one, where there is an absolute distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false’.
One way out of that problem is to believe that scientific truth is indeed absolute. On that there is the classic pronouncement by Galileo: “The conclusions of natural science are true and necessary, and the judgement of man has nothing to do with them.” This is echoed in practice by generations of teachers, who present the facts dogmatically and discourage any questioning. I was one of those who reacted against that authoritarian style of scientific indoctrination. Now, if one is doing routine puzzle-solving research, the issue of truth is not too pressing; one can know that somehow, somewhere, one’s results will be superceded in one way or another; but that’s all over the horizon. But in cases of urgent policy-related research like the toxicant example I mentioned above, to believe that one’s anecdotes or one’s lab-rats give the truth about the danger of the toxicant, is mistaken and inappropriate. For when such conflicting results are negotiated, what comes into play is their quality.
Having said all that, I now see clearly that Truth cannot be jettisoned so casually. I have two paths to a rescue. One is to make the issue personal; to say ‘this is the truth as I see it’, or ‘to the best of my knowledge it is true’, or ‘I am being truthful’. This allows one to acknowledge a possible error; what counts here is one’s competence and integrity. And of course this has been at the core of the Climategate dispute, arising out of the CRU emails, the question of the correctness of their results is tangled with the morality of their behaviour.
The other path brings in broader considerations. Our inherited cultural teaching mentions a number of absolutes, including The Good, The True, The Just, The Holy and The Beautiful. These provide the moral compass for our behaviour. Now we know that these are goals and not states of being. Those who believe that they have achieved them are actually in a perilous state, for they are subject to delusion and hypocrisy. Perhaps someone reading this will take offense, for they might be sure that they have achieved perfection in one of these, and (for example) be perfectly good or just. If so I apologise, on a personal basis, for giving offense. For the rest of us, life is a struggle, always imperfect, to achieve those of the goals that define who we want to be. Now, if we say that science is mainly devoted to achieving the goal of truth, and that every real scientist realises that as much as possible in his or her imperfect practice, then we have something that works. All this may be obvious or banal to those who never had this problem; I am inflicting it on you all because I have been exposed to so many scientists who sincerely believed that Galileo’s words settled the issue forever.
As usual, this is going on and on. Let me deal with my Quaker friend. I never said that I am a Quaker, only that I attended Swarthmore. I have looked up the site for Quaker Business Practice, and find it very inspiring. Although I do not express my beliefs in the same way, I find there an approach that expresses my own commitments. In particular, there are some recommendations about practice, which I shall quote (for brevity, out of context).
*A Sense of the Meeting is only achieved when those participating respect and care for one another. It requires a humble and loving spirit, imputing purity of motive to all participants and offering our highest selves in return. We seek to create a safe space for sharing.
*We value process over product, action or outcome. We respect each other’s thoughts, feelings and insights more than expedient action.
And, just as a reminder of the issues I discussed above,
*Friends would not claim to have perfected this process, or that we always practice it with complete faithfulness.
It might seem all too idealistic, to expect such attitudes to survive outside a rather special (and small) group of dedicated people. But I recall that some have seen the life of science as an approximation to just that. In the interwar period there were two distinguished scientists who involved themselves in public affairs, one on the far Left and the other on the Right; they were J.D. Bernal and Michael Polanyi respectively. Their disagreements were urgent and profound. But they both loved science, and saw in it an example, imperfect but still real, of the ideal community of selfless sharing in which they believed. I should say that the motivation for my first book was to see whether, and in what ways, that essential idealism of science could be preserved under the ‘industrialised’ conditions of the postwar period. What happened in that quest, and after, is quite another question; but the commitment is still there.
And finally. What I said about Sarah Palin was not about her but about me. It is one of the complexities of life that issues are there in a variety of dimensions, not all of our choosing. I have friends in the critical-environmental movement who are really grieved at my defection; and as I have seen all too clearly, there are those in the anti-AGW camp who think very ill of me. So be it.
Thanks for bearing with me through all this, and thanks for stimulating me to a better understanding.