Evidence, not consensus, is what counts
My latest (and last) Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal:
Last week a friend chided me for not agreeing with the scientific consensus that climate change is likely to be dangerous. I responded that, according to polls, the “consensus” about climate change only extends to the propositions that it has been happening and is partly man-made, both of which I readily agree with. Forecasts show huge uncertainty.
Besides, science does not respect consensus. There was once widespread agreement about phlogiston (a nonexistent element said to be a crucial part of combustion), eugenics, the impossibility of continental drift, the idea that genes were made of protein (not DNA) and stomach ulcers were caused by stress, and so forth—all of which proved false. Science, Richard Feyman once said, is “the belief in the ignorance of experts.
My friend objected that I seemed to follow the herd on matters like the reality of evolution and the safety of genetically modified crops, so why not on climate change? Ah, said I, but I don’t. I agree with the majority view on evolution, not because it is a majority view but because I have looked at evidence. It’s the data that convince me, not the existence of a consensus.
My friend said that I could not possibly have had time to check all the evidence for and against evolution, so I must be taking others’ words for it. No, I said, I take on trust others’ word that their facts are correct, but I judge their interpretations myself, with no thought as to how popular they are. (Much as I admire Charles Darwin, I get fidgety when his fans start implying he is infallible. If I want infallibility, I will join the Catholic Church.)
And that is where the problem lies with climate change.
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I’m sure the AGW speculation will make a correct projection about something. Any day now.
2.5 C° is high by at least an order of magnitude. If the sign is correct.
I know that term “Daddy LongLegs” means different things in different places, but up here in the NorthEast USA we have Daddy LongLegs officially called “Harvestman”. But they are not spiders at all ( no venom ) and are easily recognized by apparent single segment bodies.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/Harvestman_on_white_01.JPG
According to Wikipedia they are now classed as Opiliones.
Jai M, curious to see you still “defending the indefensible” Mann. (Yes, that is a Cook quote directly relating to Mann’s proxy studies.) Concerning the whitewash, well unorganised scientist do not refuse to release their data, because someone “just wants to find something wrong with it.” And they do not try to “redefine the peer review process”, and a host of many other problems can be outlined, despite the internal whitewash. Now I will be happy to put these and other quotes in detailed context, if you like.
chris colose says:
July 8, 2013 at 8:28 pm
“Nonetheless, some ideas are pretty uncontroversial…plate tectonics is real, evolution happens, gravity is real, cells exist, CO2 absorbs infrared radiation and heats planetary atmospheres, etc.”
Are you sure that CO2 heats planetary atmopheres. How do you get rid of Kirchhoff’s Law which states that at local thermal equilibrium absorptivity equals emissivity. Furthermore if CO2 heats the atmosphere why don’t we observe it? It should lead to a tropospheric hotspot. The Troposphere should heat up faster than the surface. UAH and RSS measurements show that the troposophere does not warm at all over the last 17 years. If your theory, that the troposphere must warm up faster than the surface, were correct, this would imply that the surface is rapidly cooling. Which it might actually do.
So, no , the idea that CO2 heats the atmosphere is not only controversial, it is also a phantasy.
Chris Colose misses the point about the consensus argument.
Consensus does not prove anything. The evidence must precede a consensus, otherwise that consensus is based on nothing and is thus worthless.
Therefore, if you believe that the consensus is right, you must also believe that you have conclusive evidence. You cannot claim that because there is a consensus there must be conclusive evidence, because it is obviously true that the consensus has been wrong many times. So why not just show us the conclusive evidence that you must believe exists and which has led to the consensus?
Arguing about whether there is a consensus or that the consensus proves something is a total red herring.
chris colose (July 8, 2013 at 8:28 pm) said The “consensus” on all these things has emerged, often very slowly, after the science has been done… and that is what gets left over in the textbooks after countless disagreements, and refinements to knowledge…they aren’t labelled true because a big crowd of scientists decided to all agree on them after a vote. And actually, for most of those things above, agreement was rarely the response by the broader community when the ideas were initially put forward. For this reason, the development of consensus on a topic is usually taken seriously, particularly by those who have not been initiated into the field…
Let’s assume all of us are initiated to the field. Let’s first toss the idea that disagreement being replaced by agreement has anything to do with science. Science is simply the coherence of evidence with theory irregardless of anyone’s views. The theory, as DirkH, just pointed out, has a tropical hotspot. The evidence does not. Is there a new theory, or is it just 20 years of weather? Or is there actually a tropical hotspot but we skeptics are ignoring some evidence? Please point it out.
AGW theory has weaker storms, and more poleward storm tracks. The evidence is mixed. In the US the strongest storms that spawn EF-3 and higher tornadoes are decreasing over the long term, so that evidence is coherent. They point to violent tornadoes as evidence of AGW. What is the new theory? That AGW produces cooler drier air (one essential ingredient)? Or is there a new theory of AGW that replaces the old theory? Where is that analysis?
The alarmists point to storms like Sandy and claim this is evidence of AGW. What is the new theory? That the polar jet is slowed by increased water vapor in the Arctic? IOW “This must inevitably have a more pronounced effect on the polar jet stream as we continue to warm the planet by burning fossil fuels.” http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=2095#96074
No, that’s not a theory, that’s a notion driven by the propositions that fossil fuel burning is bad, warming the planet is bad, etc. Science is clearly not the highest priority in those types of speculations. It is more simply a well-funded endeavor to blame “bad weather” on AGW using models or more simply in the example above, hand waving.
jai mitchell two small points , none of the reviews looked at the actual science , as they said themselves. And these reviews are utter rubbish in management and content, Mann’s consisted of asking him if he done anything wrong and then just taking his word for it , despite the fact it was public knowledge he lied to them . Although to be fair there were of the ‘standard ‘ consider acceptable climate ‘science’ , that is PP .
Despite his statement that it is evidence that counts not consensus, It is too bad that Dr. Ridley doesn’t really seem to understand how science works. He still clings to the “it’s possible” clause regarding CO2, as in “the question of whether current CO2 rises can cause dangerous warming, which I no longer think is likely, though it remains possible.”
I’m sorry, but I have to question the motives of someone who, while stating that it is evidence that counts throws in the completely antii-scientific statement that some fantasy outcome is “possible”. There is no evidence for the existence of a measurable manmade warming, so why would one fantasize about a future “dangerous” warming?
Apparently GISS staff must be on vacation…
Then again, with awful crap like GISTEMP and MODEL E, they are probably always on vacation…
Blade says:
July 9, 2013 at 1:48 am
I know that term “Daddy LongLegs” means different things in different places, but up here in the NorthEast USA we have Daddy LongLegs officially called “Harvestman”. But they are not spiders at all ( no venom ) and are easily recognized by apparent single segment bodies.
***
Right. The spiders are just called cellar spiders, of which I have many.
And Phil_dot needs to stick to astronomy since he’s seemingly incapable of applying his skepticism to climastrology.
Whatever CO2 will eventually do, it sure hasn’t done much to date.
The consensus needs to be rewritten if it is to remain current with actual observations or it will just become “global warming dogma” rather than a consensus. [or has that already happened]
Thou shalt not take the dogma in vain (or your academic position will be eliminated) or thou shalt never get into the pearly gates (of climate science conferences) and thou shalt ever be condemned to the hell (of being a rational person who uses real evidence on which to base decisions) – Phil Plait, Slate Blogs, Dogma Article#5, July 8, 2013.
“Deliberate”–that gives them a lot of wiggle room.
Nick Stokes says:
July 8, 2013 at 10:38 pm
No-one is saying there that CO2 is leading the temperature rise. But if he had tried a bit of quantitative reasoning, he’d see that none of this is relevant to AGW anyway. At Ice Age end, the temperature rises 6-8°C, and about 200 Gt carbon crosses to the atmosphere, some of which comes from the warming sea. But now we’ve directly injected 370 Gt fossil C into the air, and warming has so far been less than 1°C. This is nothing like what happens at the end of an Ice Age; that carbon isn’t a response to temperature. It’s something new that we have to work out.
Please, Nick. At the end of the last ice age we had, as you say a temperature jump, and a corresponding rise in CO2. All you have is correlation. You people like to suppose that at some point, the CO2 kicks in, causing further warmth – the famous “feedback loop”. It’s simply conjecture though, with no evidence to support it.
Then you say that we’ve “injected” (nice Alarmist word there) 370 Gt of C into the air AND (my emphasis) warming has SO FAR (my emphasis again) been less than 1°C, implying a cause-effect relationship with zero evidence in existence for said relationship, and further implying continued warming as a result of said fantasized warming effect.
“Climatology’s consensus has not been the result of ordinary scientific give-and-take, ” P’raps it is time to take a cue from the astronomers. “Astrology”= “the stars” + “speaking, discourse” or merely talking about stars. “Astro”=”stars” + “nomy”=”systematized knowledge of or the system of laws governing:” Climatology is talking about climate(the weather as we remember it). Climatonomy would be the systematic knowledge and study of the climate.
Most of the hard sciences went through their “talk” periods before they settled down to business, without changing from an “-ology” of talking nonsense to an “-onomy”- physics, chemistry, mathematics. Biology went through the same embryonic stages of science but managed to keep the “-ology” while becoming scientific. Ecology is still struggling. Fortunately, computer science never went through a numerlogy stage.
I’m sure you meant the delusion of infallibility.
Here are a few things that we can glean from “the evidence”:
1. In the ~4 billion years since it’s formation, the earth has not once experienced a climactic “tipping point” that resulted in “runaway warming”. This is true in spite of the fact that temperatures have been at various times much warmer, and much cooler than the present. Additionally, atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been much, much higher in the past than our fossil fuel emissions could possibly achieve. So the evidence is pretty clearly against the “tipping point” or “runaway warming” theory, at least within the range of temperatures and CO2 concentrations relevant to today and the foreseeable future.
2. For the more “recent” geological past (with the continents approximately in their current arrangement), the planet has oscillated regularly between two stable equilibria, ice-ages and interglacials, undergoing rapid transitions between the two states. This is evidence of overwhelming negative feedbacks over the broad temperature range, with a narrower range of positive ice-albedo feedback in the middle of the range. The strength of ice-albedo feedback diminishes as the leading edge of glaciation retreats to the polar regions.
3. A resumption of the ice-age cycle would be far more detrimental to humanity than continued incremental warming and a few inches of higher sea levels. http://xkcd.com/1225/
Delusion on what specific points; pls spot me two, or just the one if that is what your claim (or is it belief?) is based on.
.
This idolization of Mike Mann sounds like Plait has been bought and paid for.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/07/07/michael_mann_climate_scientist_talks_about_the_attack_against_him.html
chris colose says:
July 8, 2013 at 8:28 pm
//”I recognize that “evidence not consensus” is a slogan and worthless for that reason. But are you suggesting that you want to defend the thesis that consensus belongs to scientific method? If so, please do explicate and defend the claim. Your work will be graded.”//
“Nonetheless, some ideas are pretty uncontroversial…plate tectonics is real, evolution happens, gravity is real, cells exist, CO2 absorbs infrared radiation and heats planetary atmospheres, etc. The “consensus” on all these things has emerged, often very slowly, after the science has been done… and that is what gets left over in the textbooks after countless disagreements, and refinements to knowledge…they aren’t labelled true because a big crowd of scientists decided to all agree on them after a vote.”
Chris,
You are just beginning to think about your thesis that consensus has a role in scientific method. Your reference to textbooks shows that you haven’t dug very deep. A textbook is nothing more than a starting point for lecture and lecture often fails to address research. Consensus, as the IPCC would have it, must be a consensus about research. That brings up obvious questions such as “What is the consensus on the influence of cloud behavior on global warming/climate change/climate weirding?” The answer to that question cannot be the next IPCC report because that report is controlled by a small number of people who might or might not reflect broad agreement in the community of cloud researchers/modelers/climate scientists/physicists/scientists. Consensus has to be consensus on hypotheses that have attained some reasonable level of confirmation in recent research. You are most likely going to say that there is no consensus on such matters. You would be right. Consensus has no role to play in scientific research. In textbooks, consensus rules.
Love it:
” the “consensus” about climate change only extends to the propositions that it has been happening and is partly man-made,”
“Besides, science does not respect consensus.”
“I agree with the majority view on evolution, not because it is a majority view but because I have looked at evidence. It’s the data that convince me, not the existence of a consensus.”
(And adding here one sentence from Salby: “if it disagrees with observations its wrong”)
“If I want infallibility, I will join the Catholic Church.)”
Said very clearly, in a few words. Thank you Matt Ridley!
Phil Plait is not much of a scientist, his depth of understanding even of physics is pretty poor. Amusingly, I’ve called him out in the past on his physics errors, and he grumbles a bit (never admitting he is wrong, but that he’ll look into it… then never does).
But when it comes to climate, his political extremism comes out. When I pointed out his physics errors, he allowed my post. When I pointed out errors in his climate analysis – he deleted my comment and blocked me completely from his blog!
My comment was moderate as well – it wasn’t even a link to a sceptic site, but a link to Roger Pielke Jr’s blog on extreme weather. Absolutely mainstream scientific perspective from an expert in the field, and he deleted it. The reason was simple – the link called out Mike Mann, and Plait idolises Mann, as others have noted. I expect the references to Mann were the reason Matt Ridley’s post did not get through.
It is astonishing because Mann’s work is of exceptionally low quality – the problem is that Plait’s understanding of science is not good enough to see this. It’s hardly a ringing endorsement of the “skeptic” community that Plait claims to be a member of.
Another topic – for the warmers here arguing that feedbacks show CAGW is real – you should listen to the electronic engineers.
I assume you are referring to water vapour feedback analysed using linear systems theory (the simple “climate sensitivity” linear relationship). This fails trivially at the first hurdle – the system is not linear, and the linearised feedback analysis is worthless.
We know that water vapour is not linearly related to temperature, because if it was, then death valley would be one of the wettest places on earth. Observation: it is one of the driest places on earth. Conclusion: water vapour is not linearly related to temperature, and the feedback analysis must be rejected as the assumptions do not hold.
The difference between electronic engineers and climate scientists is that it can take nanoseconds of data to show an electronic engineer that a simple model is wrong. Climate scientists have to wait a lifetime to be shown their model is wrong, so they never learn the hard lessons about models that electronic engineers know even at an undergraduate level. It takes a certain level of arrogance and hubris to ignore that.
At 2:18 PM on 9 July, Spence_UK had commented:
Honestly, I’m not trying for a threadjacking, but my curiosity is piqued. What would be required to make of Death Valley “one of the wettest places on earth”?
What climatic conditions would have to prevail in order for significant arguably beneficial changes to occur in such desert places?
@Tucci78
Hot areas can certainly be humid – hot places include very dry, arid regions (desert), semi arid (e.g. savanna) or high humidity (e.g. rainforest). I’m more familiar with regions such as the Sahel, which sees regions transition between desert and savanna.
Although these changes often occur in patterns, it is a mistake to argue that the patterns are causal. The reality is that these changes are part of a complex non-linear interacting system, and beyond a certain timescale, it is simply impossible to meaningfully assign cause and effect. This equally renders it impossible to predict behaviours beyond a certain time scale.
You can certainly point to patterns and perhaps even contributory factors – geography, land use, biological impacts – but these all interact with one another and cannot fairly be described as single causes.
In response to my question about what might cause an arguably improving change in the humidity levels prevailing in Death Valley, at 4:15 PM on 9 July we had from Spence_UK:
Darn. There goes the water-skiing and skin diving vacation resort idea.
Buzzkill….
“..their [Black Widow spider] jaws are so small they cannot bite through a human’s skin.”
Though they rarely bite, adult female Black Widows can and do bite through human skin.
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/first-aid-spider-bites/FA00048
“…the daddy long legs…is more lethal then[sic] the black widow.”
Whether referring to harvestman or cellar spider, this is a myth.
http://spiders.ucr.edu/daddylonglegs.html
Best to squelch this nonsense ASAP, before Internet repetition makes it the consensus belief.
@Tucci78 July 8, 2013 at 6:04 pm:
Abso-freaking-lutely. I looked at that Hockey Stick and blurted out, “WTF did the idiot do to the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age? Nobody actually BELIEVES that thing, do they?”
It has actually been fun since then watching as it has lost its luster and has been abandoned by all but the truly delusional.
And with Climategate it was lovely having that same Michael Mann at Ground Zero of the “Hide the Decline” debacle – the one that caused a crustal shift in the believability of any and all things Mannian. After all, in a court of law, when a witness is shown conclusively to have lied, his testimony isn’t worth squat from then on.
So, the Hockey Stick will go down in science history as one of those consensus Big Lies – ones like Matt Ridley points out: Phlogiston, eugenics, etc.
Go, Matt!