‘Proof? We don’t need no steenkin proof’*
*With apologies to Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Rich Trzupek writes:
In a post over at Peter Guest’s blog, Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann is quoted making one of the most remarkable statements that I’ve ever heard coming out of a supposed scientist’s mouth:
“Proof is for mathematical theorems and alcoholic beverages. It’s not for science.”
He goes on to explain that science is all about “credible theories” and “best explanations” and his gosh-darn critics supposedly don’t offer up any of those.
Now it seems pretty obvious that Mann’s attempt to separate proof from science stems from increasing public awareness that the warming predicted by the high-sensitivity models that Mann and others have championed just hasn’t occurred over the last fifteen years. No matter. You don’t need “proof” when you have “credible theories”.
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As a surviver of the Crevo wars and the current Climate war, let me throw in my two cents worth.
All of this is just semantics. Proof can’t exist without agreement on basic assumptions. 2+2 of something can equal 5 for sufficiently large values of 2.
This is analogous to the Climate war where the assumption that changing temperature at the surface is equal to climate. There is no agreement on that basic assumption, therefore there can be no proof or disproof. 2+2 can equal a large range of values, that is the AGW theory.
We’ve all laughed at “The Most Interesting Man in the World” beer commercials and they beg a parallel for Mann, “Most Pompous Mann in the World” .
“I’m afraid that attacking a statement simply on the basis that it came from Michael Mann isn’t very scientific.”
No, but it is logical.
Hmm… If there is no proof in science, how can the science be “settled”?
No imaginable way 2+2 does not equal 4?
You underestimate the imagination of climate modelers, Mosher.
🙂
Karl Popper wrote the following in a short piece entitled Science as Falsification in 1963 (I apologize for the length, but it is a summary):
“[Considerations] led me in the winter of 1919-20 to conclusions which I may now reformulate as follows.
1. It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory — if we look for confirmations.
2. Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory — an event which would have refuted the theory.
3. Every “good” scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
4. A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.
5. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.
6. Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result of a genuine test of the theory; and this means that it can be presented as a serious but unsuccessful attempt to falsify the theory. (I now speak in such cases of “corroborating evidence.”)
7, Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirers — for example by introducing ad hoc some auxiliary assumption, or by reinterpreting the theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status.”
I’d say the Manns of the world have been the admirers of #7, and most of the work of the IPCC has been the looking for confirmations as noted in #1.
man… most of you need to learn something about epistemology.
proof is done using logic. it’s not a mathematical distinction from science. it is the basis of reason.
popper’s notion of falsification is based on this premise. falsification is disproof.
your problem is with dropping context. there is no truth without context.
when you define the context you have a logical proposition which bears the property of truth or not and you use logic to validate that, which is the process of proving.
you can not be said to properly think if you do not recognize the nature of cognition, logic, reason and proof.
now go ahead and try to use logic to prove there’s no such thing as proof, you poor maleducated idiotic post normal relativist mystics.
straighten these lamers out, mr whitman! get your site running.
FrankK says:
August 1, 2013 at 10:25 am
I beg to differ, unless you are being pedantic about the use of the word ‘proof’? the calculated effects of general relativity were pretty rough initially, but sometime in the 60’s I think they were confirmed as accurately reflecting the expected results of general relativity. i.e. the observations confirmed the theory and the theory was thus ‘proven’ to be of sound basis based on decreasing ‘error’ in observations versus theory. I agree that in principal one can really only falsify a scientific theory with observations, but it is not unreasonable to infer the reverse situation when observations are pretty convergent (towards the theory I mean)..
again, putting that in the context of Mann and CAGW – the observations are showing the theory to be way off – with an apparent increasing divergence (if you prefer) – thus the theory is most likely to be off base! Climate Scientists stating anything else is simply deliberate obfuscation, and using the ”science doesn’t have real ‘proof’! ” argument is a cover up!
just my view….
Mann is playing a game of “gotchya” with scientific and mathematical glossary terms. Silly game to play. Don’t join it.
What do Einstein, Dirac, Maxwell who arrived at correct physical laws by pure mathematical deduction know about science.Mann must belong to post normal cargo cult science.
I think this priest of the climatology cult is afraid of mathematics because in it lies his undoing.
Mann is relying on word games to support his position and to rationalize ignoring those who question him.
In other words, he is a loser.
There might never be absolute proof, but there is something called Bayesian Confirmation Theory that can provide a lot of information about whether a hypothesis is correct or not. Couldn’t find whether an analysis of this type has ever been conducted on the global warming/climate disruption/climate change hypotheses.
When I was in high school a friend’s father (a man with an strong penchant for sarcasm) had a sign on his wall: “I KNOW WHAT I KNOW. DON’T TRY TO CONFUSE ME WITH FACTS.”
How can he misunderstand the basic premise of scientific and logical criticism so completely?
To falsify a theorem it is only necessary to show it does not accord with observations. I do not need to provide a working theorem of my own. That’s it. There is no more.
How can he have gone so far with so little knowledge?
Someone better tell the WWF: Scientific proof: climate change is happening now
And Skeptical Science: The final piece of evidence is ‘the smoking gun’, the proof that CO2 is causing the increases in temperature. CO2 traps energy at very specific wavelengths, while other greenhouse gases trap different wavelengths.
Mann also said “Science works in evidence through best explanations, most credible theories …” so he accepts an explanation cannot be ‘best’ and a theory cannot be ‘credible’ without evidence to support it. Science does proof it just isn’t the same proof as maths and alcohol.
OT
[SNIP]
REPLY yes it is OFF TOPIC ….that doesn’t mean I’ll allow it just cuz you say “OT”. Sheesh. Be as upset as you wish.
And what’s with this BS of changing screen names “crito” “Gorgias” ??? Permanent spam bin for you. – Anthony
“He goes on to explain that science is all about “credible theories” and “best explanations” and his gosh-darn critics supposedly don’t offer up any of those.”
A shame that Mann hasn’t offered up anything either. Perhaps he should go back to school and learn something about his science and its methods? BEST’s Muller, hardly a skeptic, does’t have kind things to say about Mann’s work. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BQpciw8suk
I agree with what Pat Frank said. Mann is technically correct, unfortunately for Mann most if not all of CAGW or AGW ‘theory’ shouldn’t be credited as scientific theory as it is not falsifiable. If it was I’m not sure this website would exist as it does. What is interesting about Mann’s statement is not what he said but why he said it????
Part of the problem is that “proof” means different things in different contexts. Does mathematical grade proof happen in science? Not very often. But the question that Mann is dealing isn’t a scientific question, it’s a legal/policy question. Is legal grade proof appropriate for science that advises policy possible and necessary? Yes. Does his hockey stick meat that standard? Not even close.
If the stick don’t fit, you you must acquit.
Mann is trying to sell us a truth based upon consensus, with his acolytes being the arbiters of that truth. Sorry, not going to happen
I’ve read that there are now exceptional situations where that theory has to be stretched a bit to fit.
Yes.
See my thread, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/16/notes-from-skull-island-why-skeptics-arent-well-funded-and-well-organized/
Well, if you ever needed proof that Mann is a pseudo scientist than that statement is it.
Oh, wait, proof not needed, oops.
Mann and Mosher are right. Proof isn’t for science. No theory is ever proven. Theorems are proven, but that’s maths.
Popper argued that the type of proof offered by mathematics is impossible in science. One cannot demonstrate certain proof of a scientific theory no matter how many confirming experiments you conduct. This is the problem of the inductive method much favoured by Bacon and Darwin, for example. However, Popper’s idea that a single refuting instance is enough to ‘disprove’ a theory is equally wrong – as Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos and numerous others have pointed out.
The problems with ‘falsificationism’ are two fold: first, no observation is completely ‘theory free’. Behind every observation lie the theoretical concepts and constructs which make it work. So is a refuting observation down to the theory being tested or down to problems in the underlying theory of measurement and observation? The second problem is that any well formed theory will have embedded within it various conditionalities: ‘other things being equal’ type terms and again any refuting observation could be down to these constraints upon the theory being tested rather than the theory itself.
In the end, science is both a rational and social process where we attempt to align our observations of the world with our understanding of it. It is an uncertain and provisional process where theories are born, they have their day and then they die to be replaced by ones that better approximate our understanding of the world. There is no ultimate certainty either in proof or in disproof. All we can hope to do is to create more and more convincing narratives about the way the world works. In this discussion Mann is right.
“who is that “wottsupwiththatblog” that showed up in Mann’s twitter feed. Is someone attempting to spoof this site’s host?”
Not quite. It says on the page that the site has been set up to refute what is published here on WUWT. Good luck with that