Guest essay by Dr. David Deming
We live in a scientific age. The sciences are viewed as the only real sources of authoritative information. Knowledge derived from other epistemological systems is regarded as having less credibility. The conclusions of philosophy are untestable, and religion is often cynically interpreted as nothing more than superstition and myth. Public policy decisions made upon the basis of scientific recommendations may have economic consequences measured in trillions of dollars. Yet few people realize how unreliable scientific authority can be.
The popular conception is that scientists dispassionately discover truth through a foolproof technique called the scientific method. In some simplistic views, the scientific method reduces to a series of procedural steps analogous to instructions in a cookbook. The results produced by this hypothetical scientific method are verified by something called peer review, a process that allegedly certifies reliability.
But the common understanding of science is largely an ignorant misconception.
Although most science is based on observation and reason, there is no such thing as an agreed upon scientific method. It doesn’t exist. With the exception of supernaturalism, almost everything is allowed in the sciences. Both inductive and deductive logic are employed. Analogical reasoning is alright. So are speculation and hunches. Serendipity plays a role in scientific discovery. Both radioactivity and penicillin were discovered accidentally. Objectivity is not required or taught, nor are there any totally objective human beings. Bias is ubiquitous and fraud occurs.
Peer review is a highly unreliable process that produces nothing but opinion. A study conducted in 2010 concluded that reviewers agree “at a rate barely exceeding what would be expected by chance.” Furthermore, the peer review process may be, and usually is, cynically manipulated. Scientists aggregate in social cliques that facilitate orthodoxy and suppress dissent. When manuscripts are submitted for review authors are commonly asked to suggest reviewers. Invariably these tend to be acquaintances holding the same views. Thus peer review often amounts to pal review. Neither does peer review detect fraud. In 2011, Tilburg University in the Netherlands suspended psychologist Diederik Stapel for publishing at least 55 scientific research papers based on fabricated data.
US Secretary of State John Kerry has said that climate science is “irrefutable.” He is categorically wrong. There is no certainty in science. The very notion of scientific consensus implies that the validity of scientific knowledge is subject to human judgment and therefore inherently problematic. No one speaks of consensus when discussing geometrical proofs. Scientists are not philosophers trained to avoid intellectual fallacies, but technical specialists possessing ideological and political persuasions that influence their scientific activity. Like other human beings, they tend to take note of what is consistent with preexisting beliefs and filter out what contradicts preconceptions. The influence of money can be corrupting. A group of people offered billions of dollars to investigate climate change is unlikely to conclude that it is a benign, natural process unworthy of further attention.
The history of science is a chronicle of revision. For two thousand years, physicists maintained that heavy objects fall faster than light ones. Astronomers thought the Sun moved around the Earth. Physicians supposed that plagues were caused by bad air and treated their patients by bleeding them to death. The icons of the Scientific Revolution, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, all made serious errors. In the late eighteenth century, Neptunists formulated a theory to explain the origin of rocks. They described their conclusions as incontrovertible because everywhere they looked they found evidence that supported their theoretical conceptions. The Neptunist theory turned out to be completely erroneous. At the end of the nineteenth century, geologists thought the Earth was less than 100 million years old. Radioactive dating in the twentieth century showed they were in error by a factor of 46. In the 1920s, American geologists rejected Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift with near unanimity. They were all wrong. The history of science is a history of error. Has the process of history ceased? Has human nature changed?
We are now asked to change the world’s economy on the basis of yet another scientific theory. The fifth assessment report of the IPCC has concluded that there is a 95 percent probability that humans are responsible for climate change. We are induced to accept this conclusion on the basis of naive faith in scientific authority. But this faith can only come from an ignorance of how science really works. Count me out.
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David Deming (ddeming@ou.edu) is a geophysicist and author of a three-volume history of science, Science and Technology in World History (McFarland, 2010, 2012).
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Leif Svalgaard says:
“When an honest man finds he is wrong, he either stops being wrong (corrects his error) or stops being honest”
What an excellent quote! That about says it all, WRT the folks who refuse to stop being wrong — even after every prediction they ever made has turned out wrong. I suppose the grant money and the jaunts to exotic locales are just too good.
================================
Steven Mosher says:
“Can u say renormalization… I knew u could.”
It got rid of those pesky infinities. So as a scientific concept, it had an impact equal to inflation.
After reading through the comments, I would have to agree that the fourth paragraph in this article could easily be misread/interpreted to be much in error. It does contain some serious errors. I don’t think that is what David Deming meant to project in considering the rest of the article, at least I would hope. David, were you simply showing the post modern method of research? If so, you should have offered an explanation. As written it was rightfully hammered in the comments.
Science must be objective. There is no other way.
There are agreed upon scientific methods to confirm any conclusions. There is no other way.
Big Don says:
October 1, 2013 at 6:02 pm
NO! NO! NO! The scientific method is hypothesis, independent experimental confirmation, conclusion. It is NOT hypothesis, peer review, conclusion. Peer review is the academic method, not the scientific method. The classical scientific method eschews peer review as a means of validating a hypothesis. In the scientific method, peer review is meaningless. Independent confirmation is everything.
===================
thank you!
The problem with climate science is not the actual science it is the whole truncation of debate because it is viewed a some immediate problem and the impending doom drama that actually is political not scientific.
Take for example the latest figure sea level rise of 1 metre (just over 3 foot) in 100 years. The first part to get over is that current sea level rise is 3mm per year so 300mm or 0.3 metre (1 foot) rise in 100 years. The question is obvious, is 1m in 100 years that much worse than 0.3m in 100 years you are going to have to do a degree of planning for it in either situation.
In a normal world, hard science and engineering would recommend we look at and map areas that may be effected work out strategies that may need to be enacted for a guaranteed sea rise of 0.3m but allow scope to increase it to 1m.
Now look at what climate science does with the argument which is this is a doom story and we must stop burning fossil fuels immediately. The problem they truncate is by there own science they acknowledge that even if you stopped new production of CO2 and headed back down towards lower earlier levels (which is their plan) the current sea level rise problem remains. Sea level rise is a problem with or without AGW and it needs to be addressed the only thing AGW adds to is the severity of the problem and that assumes that sea level rise will accelerate as predicted.
This is the huge disconnect of climate science, the creation of a doom story to get political urgency and newspaper headlines but the creation of those stories is pseudoscience junk.
Willis Eschenbach says:
October 1, 2013 at 2:25 pm
>>>>>>
I agree with Willis 100%.
Transparency and falsification are key. However, “predictability” is also HUGE.
I can call a press conference and state that when I drop an apple from my hand, it will fall to the ground. Then, tomorrow, I can call another press conference and perform the same “trick” again.
REAL science allows us to “predict”.
Obviously, climate “science” is not REAL….
The problem with science is that it is done by humans, highly fallible, gullible, narcissistic, narrow minded, bored minded, bigoted, not bigoted. . . . Blah,blah, blah.
The climate science community fell prey to their own self perceived success and came to believe they were infallible and must not only be listened to, but obeyed.
The thought of Mikey Mann as the butt naked Emperor still remains highly disturbing.
lsvalgaard says:
October 1, 2013 at 5:33 pm
… the solar irradiance has likely decreased some since about 2000, although not in a linear fashion. Unfortunately the best data we had from the SORCE experiment has stopped as the satellite has suffered a failure of a battery. They hope to be able to get some data later this year.
>>>>>>
So Leif, “It’s the Sun, stupid”?
(Also, last I knew, “data” was plural. So “has stopped” should be “have stopped”, if you want to appear “academic”….)
geran says:
October 1, 2013 at 7:03 pm
(Also, last I knew, “data” was plural. So “has stopped” should be “have stopped”, if you want to appear “academic”….)
As usual you don’t know much.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/data
Usage Note: The word data is the plural of Latin datum, “something given,” but it is not always treated as a plural noun in English. The plural usage is still common, as this headline from the New York Times attests: “Data Are Elusive on the Homeless.” Sometimes scientists think of data as plural, as in These data do not support the conclusions. But more often scientists and researchers think of data as a singular mass entity like information, and most people now follow this in general usage. Sixty percent of the Usage Panel accepts the use of data with a singular verb and pronoun in the sentence Once the data is in, we can begin to analyze it. A still larger number, 77 percent, accepts the sentence We have very little data on the efficacy of such programs, where the quantifier very little, which is not used with similar plural nouns such as facts and results, implies that data here is indeed singular.
JimS says;
“So, warming or cooling can happen with rising CO2 levels. Hmmm, maybe CO2 is not such a big factor when global temperatures are concerned.”
Well, there are those of us that have understood for a long time that the “alleged” Greenhouse Effect (“trapping” of IR radiation) by a very very trace gas has NO EFFECT on the average temperature of the Earth. But that is heresy at this site. The Greenhouse Effect is REAL and anybody who does not “believe” it is a “denier” and does not understand “radiative physics”.
Funny thing, I have made a very good living for many decades “understanding” radiative physics (I design electro-optical systems for a living) and my models match the performance of my designs (within the allocated money for the model, every project reaches the stage where you “just build it and see if it works as predicted”).
But, the Greenhouse Effect is REAL, really it is REAL and of course it is REAL. Eventually the Earth will warm as predicted; just you wait and see, it is certain.
The “GHG effect” simply acts as a hybrid “optical/thermal” delay line and causes energy to flow though the Sun/Atmosphere/Surface/Atmosphere/Universe system multiple times at the speed of light. Given the distances and velocities involved this simply delays the flow of energy by a few tens of milliseconds. Since there are about 86 million milliseconds in each day, this delay has no effect on the average temperature of the Earth.
It does change the “response time” (an electrical engineering concept), but the historical temperature records do not contain this data and attempts to water board them until they confess have failed so far.
Cheers, Kevin.
…if you want to appear “academic”….
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/data?s=t
But, hey, if you have a “consensus” otherwise….
geran says:
October 1, 2013 at 7:23 pm
…if you want to appear “academic”….
Perhaps you should stop making a fool of yourself. It is painful to watch.
We live in a new dark age of science. A generation from now, government’s monopolization of the funding of science for the last 60+ years will be understood as a dark age in science much like when the Catholic Church ruled the west. From physics and cosmology to global warming and second hand smoke, all government funded science will be exposed as phony.
The U.S. President, the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House of Repersantives and all the media tell us that the U.S. Goverment is closed down.
Yet the tax collection is still full speed.
The CO2 fraud had a 1,000 mile head start. They have speed traps set up to fine U.S. and spike strips out in the road to flaten our tires and other means to slow or stop U.S. as needed.
Yet the CO2 lies speed past the limits. The fix is in.
So, use other means they do not expect U.S. to use.
We can not win fighting a fair fight from our side only.
We will have to trip some of them, turn the lights out and make them fall, lie in wait and spoil the lie based evidence.
Act Up.
Leif Svalgaard says:
October 1, 2013 at 4:25 pm
“When an honest man finds he is wrong, he either stops being wrong (corrects his error) or stops being honest”
>>>>>>
I didn’t mean to cause any pain.
Mosher,
Popper is not perfect. His hobby horse, corroboration, became a pillar of his work. Take that away and you have good fundamentals. Imre Lakatos developed those fundamentals in his work.
I prefer Hempel, Scheffler, Quine, Stegmuller, Levi, and some others. They went far beyond the fundamentals. You need to know them before you can try your wings in philosophy of science.
Kuhn and Feyerabend mounted furious criticisms of the philosophy of science but their criticisms were rebutted long ago.
Everyone must know the fundamentals.
HIT Method: Hypothesis creatively imagined, Inference from hypothesis to facts, and Test of factual claims in the world. Hypotheses can be statistical but not subjective and certainly not Bayesian. Inference from hypotheses to facts is also known as Prediction. (Prediction is a technical topic that requires explanation.)
(Note that the HIT Method stands is stark contrast to the view held by all followers of Kuhn, Feyerabend, the postmoderns, Habermas, the Frankfurt School, and all communist thinkers that our “world view” or our “conceptual scheme” determines our experience of the world.)
Publicity or Reproducibility: everything you do while employing the HIT method must be published so that other scientists can replicate your work.
Criticism: you must compete to be the most severe critic of your work and you must encourage all other critics. Sound criticism is no less valuable than creation of valuable hypotheses.
Theory: the purpose of theory is to specify all the facts as lucidly, conveniently, and economically as possible. (If we could manage all the factual information without theory then there would be no need for theory.)
Empiricism: we must always strive to ensure that developments in theory serve the purpose of specifying the facts and, as a bonus, we will be testing our theory and staying responsive to reality.
A [terrain] following radar is [worthless] if it does not [measure] the distance from the ground to the plane correct every time at every speed. It would not help one bit if there were 10,000 peer reviews saying the radar was all ok, yet the plane and the pilot a bunch of burnt flesh and metal due to one missed [measurement] and transmission of the data.
geran says:
October 1, 2013 at 7:35 pm
I didn’t mean to cause any pain.
It is always painful to watch a fool, even when he didn’t mean to expose him himself.
lsvalgaard says:
October 1, 2013 at 7:11 pm (replying to)
geran says:
October 1, 2013 at 7:03 pm
I would politely but firmly, though not all too emotionally, argue that a “datum” is ONE specific and precise point, or a fixed point for which everything else can be referenced or measured as a baseline for all future measurements: The sea elevation datum is 0.00 mm on June 22, 1992 for example.
Any use of “data” by use and practice MUST BE a singular group of several items (so does this means that it IS “plural”) regardless of what the Romans or Greeks might have said 2000 years ago; specifically because (1) that is how “data” IS used, and (2) that use of “data” in conversation, papers, literature, the law, and in everyday practice “data” is used to show the information contained in and represented by several different points that HAVE been measured: by interview, by laboratories, by astronomers, by geologists, or by engineers.
Using “data” rather than “datum” is deliberate and indicates and assures the listener or reader that more than “one” factual point has been measured and established as objective truth. Not opinion, but “data” specifically and deliberately implies “factual measurements”.
lsvalgaard says:
October 1, 2013 at 7:40 pm
geran says:
October 1, 2013 at 7:35 pm
I didn’t mean to cause any pain.
It is always painful to watch a fool, even when he didn’t mean to expose him himself.
>>>>>>
Exactly
Fred says: @ur momisugly October 1, 2013 at 6:47 pm
….The thought of Mikey Mann as the butt naked Emperor still remains highly disturbing.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
It could be worse. It could be Al Gore.
RACookPE1978 says:
October 1, 2013 at 7:40 pm
Any use of “data” is by use and practice MUST BE “plural,”
The beauty of English is it fluidity. There is no central body dictating what people MUST say. Most scientists [and in ordinary educated usage] would use data as a singular mass noun in the context in which I used it, meaning the stream of data from the satellite. Too bad that a fool like geran pollutes the thread with his uncalled for snide ignorant nonsense.
Leif, is right.
==================
Science is not done by methods.
Science is done by scientists.
Certainly we know. who are scientists.
Policy is done by methods.
Certainly we know. who are political
fobdangerclose says:
October 1, 2013 at 7:40 pm
Somewhat valid, but IF you tell me the rules of the game (give me the knowledge of when that instrument IS valid) then it may still be useful. On the moon, I will willingly ignore the altimeter (because there is no atmospheric pressure), and use the radar only under 10 km/minute horizontal speed IF you tell me those are the limits. Back on earth, the altimeter “might” give me information about how high I am when the parachute opens.
But, the IPCC is demanding I pay trillions of dollars each year, and kill millions of innocents and harm billions more innocents by denying them efficient and inexpensive energy, based on ever more expensive altimeter and terrain-following radar that THEY demand I install in my never-to-leave-sea level submarine! If natural forces (the tides) are raising and lowering the submarine every 12 hours, does it matter that the terrain-following radar is getting better at telling how far above Mt Everest it shows in a simulation?
Their Terrain-following radars (their climate models) have not run long enough and accurately enough at ground level for us to know if any ONE of the different radars are EVER going to even measure the altitude under our future airplane’s position at any speed!
Too bad that a fool like geran pollutes the thread with his uncalled for snide ignorant nonsense.
>>>>>>>>
WOW!
KevinK says: @ur momisugly October 1, 2013 at 7:22 pm
….The “GHG effect” simply acts as a hybrid “optical/thermal” delay line and causes energy to flow though the Sun/Atmosphere/Surface/Atmosphere/Universe system multiple times at the speed of light….
>>>>>>>>>>>>.
Now that makes sense. Just as I thought, it is TIME they leave out of all the hand waving about the GHG effect of CO2 (which is different than the effect of water) .