‘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”.
Read more here
Stephen Pruett says:
August 1, 2013 at 7:03 pm
Thanks for expressing your agreement.
I often wonder why climate scientists will not address scientific method. My best guess is that they are ignorant of it or afraid of it. In Mann’s case, it seems to be the former.
Smoking Frog writes:
“The warmists’ statement about proof is not the weasel element in their argument on the point. It’s only a lead-in to their claim that science is about “best explanations.” That is not true, since what if the best available explanation has only (say) a 70% chance or even a 40% chance of being correct? Since when is it wise to believe such an explanation simply because all the other explanations have lower probabilities?”
Very well said. The idea of “inference to the best explanation” totally overlooks the empirical evidence. Reminds me of the song “All the girls look better at closing time.”
I think Steven Mosher is correct in his observation, as he usually is. However, I wonder if there isn’t some semantic confusion here.
Proof, according to Merriam Webster:
Simply put, we use the word ‘proof’ in two ways. Proof by supplying empirical evidence, which can never absolutely establish the validity of the thing being proven, and proof by formal rules of math / logic, which can.
In my view, Steven is correct that the second use of the term isn’t what science is all about. Anthony Watts is correct that the first use of the term is absolutely what science is all about.
Regrettably, it appears to me that Mann’s statement clears him:
He appears to be making the same distinction I am. Case dismissed, don’t let me see you in this courtroom again buddy.
Science is not about proof it is about prediction. If you cannot predict it then it is not science. It is the final stage of the scientific method. For example. Newton came up with the laws of force, mass and acceleration. Now how are these laws verified? Are they not verified because we are able to aim a rocket on the moon and it actually goes to the moon? Are they not verified with gunnery, road vehicles and nearly everything else that is capable of moving. If we only hit the target once every 10 times then those laws of motion would be pretty useless.
Are not all the biological laws also verified? What would happen if we took a pain killer and nothing happened, ever? What about genetic modification. All verified by prediction .
Climate science has not yet made any successful predictions therefore it is not science. Evolutionary science has not yet made any predictions therefore it is not science.
MM is 50% with his statement that science isn’t about proof, however it is also not about what is likely. If you can’t predict anything with it then it is not science.
Come on y’all, he was talking about the PROOF of the alcohol obviously!!!
He knows nothing about mathematics proofs.
Steve B,
” Now how are these laws verified? Are they not verified because we are able to aim a rocket on the moon and it actually goes to the moon? ”
I think if you talked to the rocketeers with NASA you would find that they needed to make a HEAP’O Adjustments to get those rockets to orbit the earth BEFORE they even tried to go to the moon!! Newton’s work did NOT get them there. Just gave a very rough approximation. Over the years the further they went the more adjustments they had to make in the ole tool kit. The Voyager’s have introduced them to yet another adjustment they need to figure out.
No, it isn’t just the fact that the actual thrust and vector isn’t perfect, it really is that their numbers aren’t quite right in addition to the assumptions of the physics.
Quite a few people here are confused about what Mann and the rest of the 97% are doing. They are not creating new science which would be immune to requirements of proof, they are gathering data including data that exists only in models, manipulating it, torturing it, drawing conclusions from it, accepting those conclusions as if they were fact, and using that to influence policy makers. That is not science – it is statistics, and as such it is not unreasonable to expect them to show their data and math then to get out of the way and allow others to validate/falsify their results. They don’t do this because they know probabilities are not on their side.
This entire debate could be ended in days if they were honest and eager to destroy all doubt with the compelling power of their reproducible results based on unquestionable data and analysis. It is really that simple. If they are right, if they cannot be falsified, if their data and processes stand the scrutiny of the world’s finest skeptics, they are right and the consensus will fill to 100%. It can’t be made more simple.
They don’t do any of this because they know what will become of the consensus and more importantly the grant money when the facts are revealed – they’re living in a house of cards.
So here is another idea – stop funding the current 97% now, pass out grants to an entire new global team with new rules that says all data and processes funded by the people belong to the people of the world. Of course we know that won’t happen either because the granters are in it together with the consensus for the sole purpose of modifying behavior of the the wealthiest nations. We know that because that is what all the proposed solutions point to. That cat is out of the bag. This was never about climate.
As I mentioned before, Mann defended his thesis in 1996. He did not receive his “Doctorate” until 1998, when he published the original Hockey Stick farce. Mann apparently flunked his defense, but was then recruited to become the poster boy for CAGW. Politics, academics, so trustworthy, where is Ike when we need him most?
Michael Moon,
Where was Ike when we needed him??? Like most politicians, he was making those wonderful speeches to the public while being a tyrant with cover from the media behind the scenes.
“McCarthy would thus end his investigative career very much as he began it—up against a stone wall of denial. Truman had issued his secrecy edict of 1948, affecting all the early McCarthy cases, and Ike his even more stringent gag order of 1954 affecting the conflict with the Army. Truman had squirreled away State Department security records in the White House, and Eisenhower would follow suit with the Army phone transcripts. In both cases, McCarthy clamored for disclosure, but his protests availed him little. The wall of selective silence stood impervious against him.
To all this there was an Orwellian sequel that can’t possibly be omitted. On May 31, 1954, two weeks to the day after issuing his secrecy order gagging federal workers and choking off information to the Congress, Eisenhower spoke to a Columbia University gathering in New York, a symposium on the weighty topic “Man’s Right to Knowledge and the Free Use Thereof.” On this occasion Ike asserted, to great applause, that “whenever man’s right to knowledge and the use thereof is restricted, man’s freedom in the same measure disappears.” It was, the media sages agreed, a clear, long-needed rebuff to Joe McCarthy.
Evans, M. Stanton (2007-11-06). Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies (Kindle Locations 11498-11506). Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. “
Dr. Mann, please don’t ever shut up. You make our case better than we ever could.
You’d hardly know from the comments above that we’re all knuckle-draggers!
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Inference to the best explanation seems like OK science to me. But “More CO2=CAGW” is only the best explanation within the reality tunnel of radiative physics.
Mann not only wants science to be determined by consensus, he also wants to control who gets a vote. It would be like allowing the salary of union workers to be determined by a consensus derived from a poll of union workers.
Pat Frank says:
“…Theorems in math can be definitively proven, never to be unproved.”
A theorem may be true in one axiomatic system, but false in another axiomatic system.
Steven Mosher says:
August 1, 2013 at 9:45 am
Science is not about proof…there is no proof in science.
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Which means that science can never “be settled”. The phrase “the science is settled” is unscientific, because you never never prove that something unknown today but well known tomorrow will upset all your carefully thought out theories and throw them into the rubbish bin.
Which is why the insistence on a “mechanism” in science is a complete nonsense. We put labels on the most fundamental forces in nature and call this an “explanation” for how they work, but in reality we don’t know. We get hints all the time that there is something “underneath” at work, but every time we improve our instruments and discover what this is, we find hints that there is still something underneath that. We forget that in an infinite universe, infinity extends in all directions, including scale.
What we know is that there are relationships between observations. These relationships can be observed and over time we may learn to predict one from the other. Does this mean we understand the mechanism? Or do we simply understand how to predict the relationship?
When someone tells me they have a plausible explanation, they have nothing. There are an infinite number of plausible explanations for any event. Plausible explanations are the product of Sooth Sayers and Flimflam Artists. When someone can RELIABLY predict events tomorrow, then they have something. They have science.
kuhnkat says:
August 1, 2013 at 8:44 pm
Steve B,
” Now how are these laws verified? Are they not verified because we are able to aim a rocket on the moon and it actually goes to the moon? ”
I think if you talked to the rocketeers with NASA you would find that they needed to make a HEAP’O Adjustments to get those rockets to orbit the earth BEFORE they even tried to go to the moon!! Newton’s work did NOT get them there. Just gave a very rough approximation. Over the years the further they went the more adjustments they had to make in the ole tool kit. The Voyager’s have introduced them to yet another adjustment they need to figure out.
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That is not a failure of Newtons laws of motion, they are a failure of understanding ALL the forces involved.
Here are three plausible explanations for why the sky is blue:
1. that is the way god made it
2. it had to be some color, it accidentally turned out to be blue.
3. because that is the color of sun-light reflected by the atmosphere.
these are all mechansims by which the sky is made blue. here is the challenge: prove which one is the most credible. such a proof cannot be provided unless one operates in a system of “formal beliefs”. Things that are held to be true. these “axioms” can then be manipulated according to the rules of the axioms, to “prove” something in mathematics.
The axioms however are above proof. they are taken to be self-evident. thus, all “proof” in mathematics rest upon an unproven series of beliefs about the foundation of mathematics. So, to argue that mathematics is “proven” is in fact a nonsense. Mathematics is proven given that the axioms are true. Mathematics is not proven however in any absolute sense.
Steve B says:
August 1, 2013 at 10:58 pm
That is not a failure of Newtons laws of motion, they are a failure of understanding ALL the forces involved.
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and a recognition that even if we know all the forces involved, the solution to the problem as calculated on a computer quickly diverges from the real answer. the “error” or “noise” does not converge to zero the way climate modellers would have us believe.
Otherwise, there would be no need for mid-course corrections. One could simply aim a rocket at Jupiter and all the small errors plus and minus in the course setting would average out to zero according to the law of large numbers. just the same way the climate modellers tell us the noise will average out in the climate models.
Only noise does not average out, except in very simple models, with very specific statistical properties. what happens with rockets and climate models is that they “drift” in an unpredictable fashion. Sometimes towards, sometimes away. It is this unpredictable motion in Nature that give rise to all sort of superstitious beliefs, as our minds try and find patterns in the inherently unpredictable.
Science is not a single homogeneous thing. There are different kinds of knowledge that are defined in different ways.
“The maximum temperature at Sydney airport tomorrow will be 25°C.”
That may be proven/disproven rather easily by turning up and measuring it.
“The maximum temperature at Sydney airport tomorrow will be 1°C higher than it would have been if CO2 had remained below 350ppm.”
This is probably impossible to prove/disprove as there are too many uncertainties.
For very simple systems, we might be able to prove that a model accurately represents the system and thus prove/disprove statements about the real world. Generally, however, non-trivial problems are too complex to make provable models.
Asserting that something does not exist (or always exists) can usually be disproven by a single counter example — but can seldom be proven. In such a case, the best we can hope for is, after multiple failures to find a counter example we might be able to say that “X is likely”.
4. Color is a perception that exists only within the minds of certain life forms. It cannot be known if all color-aware living entities perceive colors in the same as any other life form even of the same species. By repeated exposure and comparison intelligent life forms not affected by certain genetic combinations can identify and communicate color variations and co-identify colors using names that roughly represent the frequency of that light. This has no scientific significance and is completely dependent upon light intensity. In science the frequency of the light is a repeatable measurable characteristic. How it is perceived is in the eye of the beholder.
Or as the Moody Blues put it: “Red is gray and yellow white, but we decide which is right. And which is an illusion?”. Queue violins.
All real sciences have incorporated some mathematics in them. Including theorems with proofs. All real sciences use logic. With proofs. The closer the science is to fundamentals, the more rigorous it is, the more precise it is, it uses more mathematics. More logic.
Check physics for example.
It’s true that in some philosophical sense, a science cannot prove anything. But it can disprove, and hopefully the AGW lunacy will be disproved, eventually.
This quote from Mann is not new. In his book, The HS and Climate Wars (March 2012) (p. 23 on my Kindle version), he states:
“Science can only ever offer weights of evidence, degrees of confidence, and estimated risk. ‘Proof’ is reserved for mathematical theorems and alcoholic beverages.”
I agree with quite a few comments here (and I can’t believe I’m defending Mann), but his comment is quite reasonable (and interesting to see he has some element of wit). Little is gained by knocking Mann on this comment.
I am reading Mann’s book in parallel with a re-read of The HS Illusion. Though painful to spend money on a book by Mann, its fascinating to see the two sides. You also see that Mann is a genius when it comes to communication and spin. He could probably make a lot of money using those skills in another context. For example, early on he slips in two examples of how scientists use a ‘trick’ or short-cut to solve a problem, with (so far) no reference to ‘hiding the decline’. He also explains how the term ‘censored’ is “standard statistical terminology” for running sensitivity tests with certain proxy records removed. He manages even to make a jokey comment of how he regretted naming one of his data directories as such.
And of course, while few readers here would be fooled by Mann’s ‘genius’, it works well with his main target audience.
It is so so easy to discredit Mann’s absurd statement.
Einstein postulated that light would be bent by gravity his theory at the time was incredible yet was subsequently proven by theory.
The early is flat at one time was credible? But was subsequently shown to be wrong.
Pure Water comprise of oxygen and hydrogen. Proof: mix oxygen and hydrogen and voila.
For the life of me I’m not sure why I am addressing the absurd statement from this purveyor of nonsense.
Stacy, no, we can’t mix two atoms of oxygen with one atom of hydrogen.(bleeding hard to do) We can test water though that is already formed and find out its molecular structure. Mann is just making it up. Scientific theories are only proven by experiment, otherwise as posters have suggested they are only speculative hypotheses. Like all research it benefits over time with a deeper understanding, like Quantum mechanics or physics added a deeper level of understanding of our natural laws and universe. Mann and his cohorts are lousy scientists with downright lies to prove a point that they feel they will personally benefit. It is called at my university (UNE) ‘Corrupting the data to prove the hypothesis’ happens a lot not only in science but also in history. In archaeology and human evolution, there are a lot of gaps in the archaeological record but so far we have a time line to go on, and humans nor the hominins ever walked with dinosaurs as the creationists believe, and the world is older than 6000 years. Time for bed folks, enjoy. Be frosty tonight as there is no cloud cover. A proven fact.
Mann is trying to distract the discussion away from the fact that there has been 16 years without warming, a plateau in planetary temperature (a wiggly line that does not increase), not a lack of warming (a wiggly line that increases at a slower rate than predicted). The climate science issue/problem is however more serious than a simple failure of the general circulation models.
There is a train of logic and consequences concerning climate observations (past and recent) vs what mechanisms change climate vs the planet’s sensitivity to forcing changes and how the planet’s temperature will change in the immediate future.
A significant solar magnetic cycle change is now underway. That is a fact not a theory. Mann and the climate change activists have not accepted that there is a very strong scientific case which supports the assertion that the planet will now cool. A significant cooling planet is a game changer for the climate ‘change’ war.
There is an advantage for the so called skeptics to be slightly ahead of the curve when we are sure that the observations support significant cooling.
I am truly curious how the warmists, the media, the public, the politicians, and the scientific community would react to significant cooling.
1) Observations and analysis support the assertion that something is fundamental incorrect with the general circulation models (plateau of no warming for 16 years)
2) Analysis and logic appears to supports the assertion that a majority (at least 75%) of the warming in the last 70 years was due to solar magnetic cycle changes rather the increase in atmospheric CO2 (There are cycles of warming and cooling in the paleo record that correlate with solar magnetic cycle change. The same regions that warmed and cooled in the past when there were solar magnetic cycle changes are the regions that warmed in the last 70 years. There was a physical reason for the past cycles of warming and cooling that correlate with solar magnetic cycle changes. The pattern of warming in the last 70 years is different than the pattern of warming that would occur based on the CO2 forcing mechanism.)
3) If assertion 2 is correct, the warming in the last 70 years is reversible. As there has been an abrupt slowdown in the solar magnetic cycle, if assertion 2 is correct it is expected the planet will cool. In the past there is a delay of roughly 10 to 12 years from the time the solar magnetic cycle changes to when there is observed cooling. There is now the first observational evidence of the start of cooling in high latitude regions both hemispheres.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/06/climate-modeling-epic-fail-spencer-the-day-of-reckoning-has-arrived/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/22/kevin-trenberth-struggles-mightily-to-explain-the-lack-of-global-warming/
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-hans-von-storch-on-problems-with-climate-change-models-a-906721.html