Guest essay by Andy West
Posts at WUWT have often featured scientific papers that are clearly impacted by a cultural bias towards CAGW. Given the impressive reach of WUWT and the likelihood that a number of folks from academia will be peeking here, some examination of the impact upon conclusions, and also how bias has occurred for particular scientists or organizations, not only keeps alive healthy skepticism in science but hopefully might result, one day, in a reduction of the CAGW bias. In that spirit, this post revisits ‘Science or Science Fiction? Professionals’ Discursive Construction of Climate Change’ by Lianne M. Lefsrud and Renate E. Meyer, LM2013; It is not pay-walled.
An article at Forbes plus the Investor’s Business Daily on the paper, triggered a WUWT post here. Unfortunately however, the former articles misfired into a tangent that was not well considered, greatly distracting from a deeper look at the paper; hence also from something that I believe is valuable, plus deeply ironic for the authors.
The post is adapted from supporting material in my essay The CAGW Memeplex summarized in a WUWT guest post here. However, no particular memetic insight is invoked here and none is needed to see how the authors of this paper have fallen victim to bias and ended up with unsupportable conclusions; just an appreciation (from history) that social narratives can acquire an inertia of their own, a kind of insistent culture that sometimes dominates events while leaving facts far behind. This can happen not only where the narrative is long-lived and wide in scope, e.g. mainstream religions evolving over many generations, but also where an original narrative is narrow in scope, e.g. Lysenkoism. Such narratives and counter narratives compete in our social space and may do so via strong or weak alliances and wider coalitions, for instance Lysenkoism was strongly coupled to Stalinism in the USSR, and the culture associated with Eugenics was loosely allied to right-wing politics in various countries, later becoming strongly coupled to Fascism especially in Germany. Religions have often found alliances within shifting maps of state and regional politics. The increasing number (and depth) of comparisons between CAGW and religion (e.g. see the varied selection: UK MP Peter Lilley , blogger John Bell, Michael Crichton via blogger Justice4Rinka [Jan 10, 2013 at 10:07am], Richard Lindzen, blogger BetaPlug, philosopher Pascal Bruckner, blogger sunshinehours1 [cult], professor Hans Von Storch [prophets], Evangelical skeptics, and a Climate Etc post discussing this area, plus very many more), acknowledges that CAGW is a (successful) social narrative, an ‘insistent culture’ that has indeed left reality behind.
With the above in mind, the approach of LM2013 seems at first to be admirable. For instance social coalitions (termed ‘discourse coalitions’) are understood to be important entities backing the survival / growth of competing ‘storylines’ within a contestable narrative space, where coalition members attempt to ‘frame’ the debate so as to promote their storylines while trying to ‘break the persuasiveness’ of competing stories, a process within which apparent truths are relative (‘…experts construct interpretive packages or frames that stand in for the ‘truth’.’) It is also recognized that these ‘frames’ are intimately linked to the legitimacy and identity of the framers: ‘Besides defining the issue, framing is also the means by which professionals draw from broader values (Hulme, 2009), construct their self-definitions and expert identities.’ The latter is consistent with literature (e.g. the concept of the ‘The Social Mind’ by neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniger) essentially saying that our thoughts and identities are in some part formed by the societal entities we’re embedded in. This concept not only helps with understanding the motives of the players, it also helps regarding awareness of one’s own social embedding and hence the attempt to distance oneself from personal bias, as presumably the LM2013 authors would wish. Ultimately the authors appear to grasp that it’s a narrative war out there, in which ‘the truth’ may not always win out.
So what’s not to like? Shouldn’t a paper that recognizes these principles be robustly impartial? In trying to analyze the various ‘storylines’ shouldn’t the authors have attempted to position themselves, at least so far as is possible, outside of all of the relevant narratives? Well, unfortunately not…
The survey that forms the heart of the paper was conducted upon experts from or associated with the petro-chemical industry (in Alberta, Canada), showing that within this sector frames largely supporting the ‘C’ in CAGW add up to 41% of respondents, and frames that are largely unsupportive add to 51%. These findings and others lead the authors to a large discussion and conclusion section that includes for instance this bold assertion: ‘it seems unlikely that the defensive institutional work by those in powerful positions within fossil fuel-related firms and industry associations can be breached in the near future without global enforcement mechanisms.’ While other conclusions are not so audacious and there is a reference to ‘scientific disagreement’, readers would be correct in assuming a similar flavor. The rather strident tone of this quote leads one to suspect a fatal flaw within the whole analysis, namely that the authors have failed to recognize their own framing, and hence have done nothing to prevent this framing from biasing the whole analysis. A search for such bias and inherent framing is all too easily rewarded.
For instance there is more than a nod to the ‘storyline’ that older males in senior positions ‘are more defensive’ to climate regulation. This invokes what is effectively a cultural cliché now, therefore alerting us regarding potential misuse to aid a particular framing. Of course within the context of the sector the authors are analyzing, whose interests lie largely in the petro-chemical industry and wider economy of Alberta, it is true; their survey is no doubt correct. But having read many of the Climategate emails, it is clear for instance that the core of defensiveness from the ‘Hockey Team’ (as they once called themselves) against making climate science more open, sharing data, and embracing rather than suppressing scientific uncertainties, also comes from older males in senior (academic) positions. Another similar scenario is that the core of defensiveness against toning down alarmism inside environmental NGOs, comes from older males in senior (administrative) positions. Regarding the latter, see the article about male domination within the leaderships of the WWF and Greenpeace, at No Frakking Consensus here: http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2013/05/09/the-male-dominated-green-landscape/.
So, by isolating a narrow (climate-change ‘resistive’) sector completely from the context of the wider narrative competition, the authors have thus succeeded in morphing a relatively firm metric that surely we all knew about anyhow (i.e. older males dominate org leaderships), and one that is neutral with respect to climate narratives, into a storyline that is not neutral with respect to climate narratives, and is subtly deployed within their CAGW supportive frame to try and morally undermine those who are leaders in the petro-chemical sector. The implied storyline is: ‘those bad old dudes are harming the climate for self-interest; dudettes and younger dudes are way cooler than those stuffy old types anyway’. This storyline is a recurrent meme within the social phenomenon of CAGW and indeed within other cultural movements that foster radicalism and seek a change to the current regime, sometimes attempting to frame that regime in terms of an ‘Ancien Régime’. Yet a universal truth regarding the statistically dominant position of older males in society (which recent changes addressing gender bias have not yet balanced out), lends no legitimacy whatever to subcultures like CAGW that attempt to leverage this fact for demonization of opposing leaderships; let CAGW adherents look to their own frame-related leaderships, most of which will have the same male over-weightings.
The ‘older male’ storyline within LM2013 is only a minor contributor to the total narrative of the paper. But it exposes the fact that the authors have failed to recognize the full scope of the narrative competition and hence their own place within this contest, and thus are working within their own inherent framing. At the heart of this blindness is a critical and fatal error; the assumption that framings are to a large extent consciously constructed, deliberate if you will. This error occurs despite the authors having recognized a link to identity (and so potentially to subconscious behavior).
Hence I speculate that the authors’ reasoning regarding personal bias would run somewhat like this: “we are not consciously or deliberately constructing any frame, we are merely ‘seeking the truth’, hence we must be impartial.” But this is not so. They have not grasped that their own identities are linked to a very powerful framing (i.e. *C*AGW) within the wider contest, and so they’re unknowingly engaged upon promoting the storylines within that framing as though these were unbiased ‘truths’. This error is in turn based upon the lack of recognition that CAGW, with an emphasis on the ‘C’, is simply another framing in itself, i.e. another (and aggressively infectious) culture if you like. They have mistaken this framing for ‘scientific facts’ or ‘environmental reality’, and then identified with it.
This all too common mistake is revealed by the opening of the ‘Discussion and Conclusion’ section: ‘Climate change could irreversibly affect future generations and, as such, is one of the most urgent issues facing organizations’. While the authors mitigate slightly with the word ‘could’, the level of impact and urgency (if any!) is precisely one of the relative truths that is being fought over in the narrative contest of storylines and their alliances within frames. Above a certain level of scientific uncertainty about climate behavior and interactions, there is no absolute truth regarding the major issues of impact and urgency. Despite (at one time) a successful narrative about ‘settled science’, it transpires that there is and always was a wide enough uncertainty to allow a blossoming of arbitrary narrative competition (in essence, no scenario could be completely ruled out). Hence every position, including of course that of the IPCC itself, is just an interpreted package (frame) filled with storylines that promote this position. This does not mean that all frames are completely devoid of facts, just that the ability to compete in a narrative war is rewarded more than the level of verifiability, a situation which typically results over the long-term in factual content being skewed or drowned out. (Skeptic and Luke-warmer narratives have tended to compete poorly, in my opinion partly because they rely more heavily on unadorned facts, including the realities about uncertainty, which thus seed much less sensational storylines).
LM2013 applies terms that lend an inappropriate emotive weighting to certain frames; for example the terms ‘resist’ or ‘resistance’ are used to describe the defensiveness of professionals against challenges to expertise or legitimacy, but the context is always in the sense of those groups resisting (the cause of) climate change or associated emissions regulation. This short statement within the conclusion effectively summarizes the context of LM2013’s usage: ‘With our findings, we provide additional insights into climate change resistance.’ Yet there appears to be no equivalent terminology regarding the resistance of professionals to that which calls out problems with Consensus climate change theory or related policy (and which skeptics might be tempted to call ‘science resistance’, though I’d be kinder and call it something like ‘debate resistance’). An objective analysis of the narrative competition ought to apply the same terminology and associated meaning to all players, all frames. Where no-one does or can own ‘the truth’ (the authors must assume this in order to aspire to complete objectivity), no differential weighting of terms should be applied. So it is perfectly fair to use ‘climate resistance’ only if one also uses ‘climate-debate resistance’ and ‘moderate policies resistance’ and all the other ‘resistances’ that each frame is engaged upon for their own best interests. (For this same reason I expressed all my frame comparisons five paragraphs above using same term ‘defensive / defensiveness’). In the great majority of cases, ‘their own interests’ will be inclusive of what the frame promoters believe is a good course for society as well as self, but belief is not absolute knowledge and is formed in part from narrative immersion.
Despite the above interpretive bias LM2013’s assessment of the emotive content of frames is likely reasonable, and says of the ‘economic responsibility’ frame (which is unsupportive to the ‘C’ in CAGW): ‘They express much stronger and more negative emotions than any other group’. Yet once again we must remember that only a small sub-sector of the total narrative competition is considered, and one that is relatively skeptical overall. So while no doubt in this extremely limited context their results are once again true, what of the full narrative competition and the content of all frames?
Well even a cursory look at the full picture regarding CAGW shows that many frames are absolutely saturated with emotive content, which also appears to be heavily biased towards pro-CAGW frames (e.g. as supported from the major NGOs like Greenpeace and WWF, advocacy orientated climate scientists, mainstream media, political framings allied to CAGW, mass comments on pro-CAGW sites, etc.) Content includes the highly exaggerated language of disaster, the inappropriate emotive leverage from ‘threatened grandkids’, demonization of ‘denialists’ and more, all of which proliferate. This does not mean that the cynical and emotive content within ‘climate resistive’ framings per the LM2013 examples (centered on ‘scam’, ‘hoax’, or ‘left-wing conspiracy’ perceptions) doesn’t exist, but within the full narrative contest these are heavily outgunned by opposing emotive storylines such as (I paraphrase) “we’re all gonna fry”, “your coastal cities are gonna drown”, “your grandkids are gonna die”, “only N days to save the planet”, and the attempted suppression of argument by deployment of the ‘denier’ term, which diverts enormous and negative emotive power from a completely different narrative domain (Holocaust denial) and injects this into the climate arena.
This high level of emotive expression is not merely from some fringe framing. It is mainstream and systemically applied, plus legitimized by influential folks in the media, government, charities and science. Indeed many from all of these domains use the ‘denier’ term, and the scientist that folks associate most with Global Warming, James Hansen, not only pushes the psychological hot-button regarding threatened grandchildren, but calls coal trains ‘death trains’. Due to such a high level of promotion there is also mass public adherence to these emotively charged frames, an adherence that overwhelms skeptic numbers (and also objections). Yet attempts to find plausible real-world drivers for this excessive emotive content show only that Consensus science as summarized by the IPCC itself does not support any of the above paraphrases or the actual quotes they represent; the emotive content is due to iterative framing activity, and so is not rooted in likely outcomes (at least for approx a century timescale), even as perceived by the majority of scientists who contribute to the IPCC. Indeed AR5 confirms that the IPCC now fosters at least two frames, if not more; the framing represented by the summary for policy makers being significantly more alarmist than the core Consensus science framing.
Surveying the environmental NGO and activist sectors using the methods defined by this paper would likely produce results off-the-scale regarding plays of emotion, and most especially negative emotion. Yet no context or balance from the wider narrative competition is invoked by the authors, which would enable readers to realize for instance, that the ‘economic responsibility’ frame as defined by LM2013 is very far from being the strongest emotive play in the whole game. Providing this balance would almost certainly give the paper a very different flavor and undermine the current conclusions. Though the authors have limited their scope to just one narrow sector (which they regard as ‘resistive’), I’d love to see a similar survey of the entire CAGW narrative landscape, including all the Catastrophe ‘sympathetic’ sectors, using the same criteria to characterize frames. I suspect very different conclusions would then emerge.
The emotive term ‘denier’ is also used in the conclusion of LM2013; this is yet another sign that the authors are blind to their own inherent frame and associated framing activity. It does not appear in the sense say, of merely acknowledging the use of the term by others or attempting to analyze its arising and effect; the authors do actually use it to identify and label a class of opposition to CAGW. For instance: ‘However, given the polarized debate (Antonio & Brulle, 2011; Hamilton, 2010; McCright & Dunlop, 2011), gaining access to the reasoning of deniers and skeptics (Kemp, Milne, & Reay, 2010), let alone unraveling their framings, is far more difficult than analyzing supporters of regulatory measures.’ I have not followed up Kemp, Milne, & Reay, which appears to be pay-walled. But my opinion is that this statement is sheer myth. It is no more difficult to analyze skeptical framings than any other. But if one starts from the position that they are ‘deniers’, ‘an aggressive framing in action’, one will seriously cloud any data one may attempt to analyze further, and most likely it is therein that lies the source of their problem. All framings contain some level of narrative aggression, this is their entire point. Yet all are analyzable using a single methodology, unless one is too immersed oneself in a particular frame within the competition, especially a frame that attempts to characterize opposing frames as ‘not normal’. No analysis of the relevant competition can survive such an immersion bias. Essentially, another storyline is being promoted here: ‘regulatory supporters are normal and so can be analyzed; skeptics are not normal and so cannot easily be analyzed’. This of course is utter tosh!
I return now to this snippet from the conclusion: ‘it seems unlikely that the defensive institutional work by those in powerful positions within fossil fuel-related firms and industry associations can be breached in the near future without global enforcement mechanisms’. Underneath the trappings of academia and the raft of references, this quote highlights that LM2013 is treating us to more than a hint of those calls from highly immersed green street-activists; i.e. CAGW must be right and thus forcing regulation must also be right, where in the activist case overriding democracy plus direct action against oil and coal interests are both candidates for action. No doubt, unfortunately, such activists will benefit from this type of academic work. What a disappointing and very unenlightened dead end to a promising approach, which if it were but wider in context could hardly fail to identify to the authors their own framing work, and maybe provide a good formal entry port into an analysis of the memetic mechanisms that drive narrative wars. Not to mention exposing the aggressive framing of the self-named ‘Hockey Team’ (the small core of climate scientists promoting the original Global Warming theory). As the well-known climate commenter and contributor to BEST surface temperature series, Stephen Mosher, said: ‘Rather than using this methodology to understand skeptics, it’s probably better used to understand “the team” .’ See here for the original comment.
In not explicitly mentioning that the same process (of narrative competition) occurs across all sectors, and also in taking the word of the IPCC as an ‘absolute truth’ that is somehow magically defined as outside of this entire competition, the authors have painted a picture of the narrative struggle as though it is merely a secondary issue. An issue regarding only the dissemination of this ‘absolute truth’, plus the consequent policy action (or lack thereof), both of which are impeded or accelerated by the resistive or supportive frames within their arbitrarily narrowed contest. Yet the authors’ own frame and the supportive home for their storylines is enabled entirely by (unacknowledged) CAGW culture, by far the most dominant uber-frame within the environmental domain. Hence a very intelligent and careful work, no doubt associated with a great deal of effort to conduct their survey and analyze the results etc. is in my opinion completely undermined by a cultural bias to which the authors appear almost entirely blind.
To summarize: The authors’ haven’t sought to distance themselves from their own immersion in a (dominant) frame within the narrative competition they seek to analyze. Hence LM2013 is highly entangled with their own framing activity, including emotive content. While equal terminology ought to have been applied to all frames, this simply cannot be done in any case when only one small sector (experts from or associated with the petro-chemical industry [in Alberta]) of the battleground is considered; many entire frames that prosper outside this sector aren’t even acknowledged! One cannot analyze a single narrow sector in isolation from the wider narrative competition, and still draw useful conclusions about that wider competition. Even the more limited conclusions one might draw should be tested for possible framing bias from the wider competition. Nor can one take a near universal truth (e.g. regarding older males in society) as being meaningful for or against any particular frame in a given narrative competition; it will have near equal weight in all frames and hence should be disregarded. The authors appeared to recognize that all ‘truths’ in the total narrative competition are relative, yet then contradict themselves by singling out one particular relative ‘truth’, i.e. that of the orthodox IPCC view, and granting this the status of an absolute. While they may claim that the law (in the form of emissions regulation) supports their ‘absolute truth’, it is well established that arbitrary framings can in any case alter the law* and even morals* in their favor; hence this is no excuse for ceding objectivity. [*see my essay for more on this, including supporting refs].
NOTE: The 41% largely supportive of the ‘C’ in CAGW (or at least the need for strong controls on human emissions to combat climate change) is made up of two frames, a 5% ‘regulation activist’ frame and a 36% ‘comply with Kyoto’ frame, of which only the latter strongly believes that ‘humans are the main or central cause’ of global warming (the 5% frame accepts the possibility of a larger natural component). Some skeptics have thus made much of this result, i.e. only 36% of the respondents, a significant minority, believe ‘humans are causing a global-warming crisis’. For example see the Forbes article and IBT article (later discussed at Watts Up With That here). However this article, which calls the LM2013 survey respondents simply ‘geo-scientists and engineers’, fails to point out that the entire sample consisted of experts from or associated with the petro-chemical industry in Alberta, Canada, a state in which this industry also dominates the economy. Hence the respondents would clearly be defensive of their industry and economy and thus pretty biased towards skepticism. I very much doubt that a truly broad world-wide sample even among generic ‘geo-scientists and engineers’, would produce anything like this result. While I agree with the Forbes article regarding unmistakable bias, and indeed the article makes a similar point to me regarding biased terminology, stretching the LM2013 results inappropriately ‘out of sector’, a similar error to those the authors themselves make, is not the way to set matters straight. In my opinion this paper completely falls apart on its own merits; it needs no push whatsoever. (The comment by Brian Angliss at WUWT alerts to inappropriate assumptions in the Forbes article, as do various comments below the article itself – though the scientist/engineer ratio is not a critical issue and I am not endorsing or otherwise further comments by Brian – the limited sector of the respondents is highly relevant). In their own objection at Forbes, Lesfrud and Meyer warn against making generalizations from a ‘non-representational data set’. The data is indeed not at all representative of the whole narrative contest, and hence should not make assumptions about unexamined frames within the contest, such as for instance that IPCC framings contain ‘more truth’, or indeed ‘an absolute truth’.
Once a major narrative war is well under way, the accumulated weight of narrative frames will tend to dominate over any truths that may still survive beneath the battle. Critically, highly persuasive storylines from winning frames will actually alter perceptions so much that searches for the truth (scientific or otherwise) will very likely become highly biased or outright corrupted, as occurred in the historic examples mentioned at the top of this post (and it is all too easy to see this in climate science). Hence the successful narratives will tend to maintain conditions that maximize those uncertainties which led to the narratives arising in the first place. The apparently rampant CAGW bias in academia is a result; very likely the extremely poor progress on bounding climate sensitivity in the last twenty-five years (perhaps the single largest contributor to uncertainty) is also a symptom of this mechanism.
Many articles at WUWT have highlighted CAGW bias in academic papers across a great diversity of topics from ‘threatened’ butterflies to agricultural impacts to core climate metrics like temperature and sea-ice extent. I picked this particular paper because its mode of investigation holds both a very deep irony for the authors, and also something very well worth rescuing indeed; something immensely valuable in fact. I mentioned above that more and more folks in the climate sphere, whether well-known or less so, and some even from within the Consensus itself, are applying religious metaphors to CAGW. Also they are increasingly using terms like ‘framing / reframing’, ‘meme’ and ‘narrative’ (e.g. ‘narrative competition’ ‘successful narratives’, ‘reframing the Climate Change narrative’, ‘dominant narrative’ etc) to characterize the evolution of the CAGW phenomena and the many struggles this spawns. LM2013 homes in upon this angle, and it is the right angle, a highly valuable angle, for attempting to understand the social phenomena of CAGW. Religions are essentially successfully evolved narratives, and the same mechanisms that support them also support the rise of CAGW. Reality (including acknowledging the real uncertainties) has been left far behind because once conditions were right for a narrative war to blossom, narrative success became more important than factual content; the winner so far in this particular war is the aggressive CAGW culture. Understanding that culture will help defeat it.
The deep irony for the authors is that they had in their hands the right tool that could provide a much better understanding of what is really happening regarding CAGW, yet they discovered nothing of note. They failed to acknowledge their own cultural immersion and hence have not realized their uncritical acceptance of CAGW supportive frames. While I see no reason to doubt the immediate findings of their survey of Alberta’s petro-chemical industry, what this paper doesn’t say regarding the whole narrative contest, plus the fact of the authors’ CAGW cultural bias, together rob the conclusions of any real meaning and betray the paper’s supposed objectivity. Rather than remain neutral as academics should, they have significantly furthered the purpose of their own frame with LM2013, which might be labeled ‘authority of academia’, and which appears to be wholly allied and committed to CAGW.
Religious narratives essentially never run out of fuel; there is and likely always will be some level of uncertainty about the existence of God(s). Secular narratives, especially those spawned by science, should in theory run out of fuel one day, *if* the scientific method survives of course, as this is the means to eventually remove uncertainty. But there is vast social inertia behind CAGW now, to the extent that even a 17 year ‘hiatus’ in global temperatures has had surprisingly little impact on the big narrative beast. Most likely it won’t be tamed for some years yet, but understanding the nature of the beast can only help.
Footnote 1: I make the caveat here that the narrative competition is essentially unrelated to whatever is happening in the real climate, and whether that is good, bad, or indifferent. Social narratives feed upon uncertainty, and even if a ‘bad’ real climate scenario emerged (though this seems increasingly less likely), most of the excesses of the aggressive CAGW culture would swiftly die-out. This is because a real enemy not an array of fantasy ones would now be identified, and just like for a war or a natural disaster, society would soon grasp what to do and folks would simply get on and do it.
Footnote2: References regarding various points above, such as the comparison by many folks of CAGW with religion (or use of religious metaphors), narratives altering the law, etc. can be found in my essay The CAGW Memeplex; a cultural creature. A memetic perspective provides great insight on the competition of social narratives, and allows a detailed exploration of how and why these happen, which is simply not possible in the space of the post above.
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andywest2012 says:
January 27, 2014 at 5:55 pm
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You are confusing the existence of a primal imperative with the systematic abuse of it. Not every paper that assumes CAGW as a given is an example of the latter, Most would be an example of the reference frame enabled by the primal imperative. But this specific paper is very specific. It doesn’t survey people in general. It survey’s people from a very specific industry. It then goes on to define them as wrong and hence defective. Then it muses about what to do about the defective people and proposes that there may be a need to “control” them. This is text book hate mongering. It is abuse of the existing reference frame, not a consequence of it.
Gary Pearse said @ur momisugly January 27, 2014 at 9:09 am
Maybe Gail’s a collective… 🙂
[ducking and running]
The Pompous Git says: @ur momisugly January 27, 2014 at 7:37 pm
Maybe Gail’s a collective… 🙂
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Not hardly, more a GDI
A soggy wet snowball from the snow we are supposed to get tomorrow is headed your way.
Gail Combs said @ur momisugly January 27, 2014 at 8:35 pm
The thermometer outside my office reads 43°C, so it doesn’t stand much of a chance of arriving here in anything other than that condition… sadly 🙂
You are most certainly more than a Graphical Design Interface!
I always like your posts, Andy. Keep them coming.
Steven Mosher says @ur momisugly January 27, 2014 at 8:57 am
“not believing “deluded people” is not suspending judgement because you’ve made the judgement that they are deluded. Suspending judgement– is just that, living in uncertainty
which includes the recognition that you might be wrong about your own lack of knowledge.
In short, you are living and acting as if you know, while proclaiming that you dont.”
there is no uncertainty to the question of whether or not the ‘C’agw alarmists are deluded as per my first line in that post, they are, i framed that. the uncertainty is in agw itself, not ‘C’agw. there are a broad range of sceptics that believe many different things about the function and level of agw, some delusional as well, but there remains one simple identifier, they do not BELIEVE the perceived consensus that IS ‘C’agw. why? because in the past they have reviewed enough information to make that judgement about that one particular aspect.
this need to constantly box sceptics into some fixed position is the game of the alarmists, not the reality. you look at the variety of beliefs, questions and ideas on this website and you will see that there is NO frame for sceptics, it is merely a term to say we do not believe in the ‘C’agw delusion.
When I first started out in scientific research I had the delusion that an individual scientist could be objective. While it’s possible to be as objective as a human can be, this depends on the objective individual totally eliminating emotion from their reasoning. Unfortunately, elimination of emotion also deprives one of the holistic analyses of the non-dominant hemisphere which communicates its reasoning via “somatic markers” (in D’Amasio’s terminology) which are gut feelings about the rightness of a particular hypothesis. The best way to attain an approximation of objectivity, in my experience, has been assembly language programming. The computer is ones totally logical adversary who demands absolute perfection in code and I find the mindset one needs to code efficiently in assembly language resulting in numerous insights into aspects of daily life which I had previously accepted without question. The only problem with such frames of mind is that they make other people wonder about my sanity.
The best description of CAGW is a religion as its adherents believe utterly in its pronouncements and there is an a-priori assumption that the tenets of CAGW are correct. Thus, we have such physical impossibilities as Trenbeth’s “missing heat” and the creation of a theory which, if one views the history of the warmists, is logically unfalsifiable as every negative climate event is viewed as “proof” of CAGW.
One of the more depressing aspects of human nature that I’ve run into recently is the case of “the seekers” who were a UFO cult that predicted the end of the world via a massive flood in 1954. The psychology of cult members was studied by Leon Festinger as they were more determined than ever to hang onto their delusional belief once the apocalyptic event they had prepared for never came to pass. Festinger gives a number of conditions which must be met in order for a social group to maintain a belief in direct opposition to objective evidence of which the presence of social support is probably the most important. More detail at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails
One of the problems that humans living in cities have is that completely delusional beliefs are possible unlike a single individual living in a remote setting where such delusions lead to death from a very unforgiving and objective external reality. Matters aren’t helped any by deluded “academics” who preach that reality is a social creation. For the majority of people, reality is whatever the majority says is true. When I first did psychiatry electives in medical school, I was perturbed by the notion that what I thought to be clearly deluded beliefs were seen as “normal” if that is the way the population in which the individual holding those beliefs also thought.
For an individual who is a member of a particular social group, it is very possible that they are completely unable to imagine that someone would think differently from them. They’re in the position of a fish in the deep ocean being asked to imagine life on land. Those people who think objectively tend not to fit into social groups rather well and, unfortunately, true individualism is far less common than groupthink. For those who think that the notion of consensus is unscientific, in medicine consensus rules. This is a profession that considers itself to be scientifically based!
Aside from discovering that pointing out the obvious to most people is far harder than it would appear, I have no solutions to the problem of bringing objectivity to the majority of the population who is quite happy to be living in their delusional world regardless of how convoluted the attempts to utilize a wrong theory to explain reality become. Reason doesn’t work as most people don’t base their lives on logic.
“and the culture associated with Eugenics was loosely allied to right-wing politics in various countries”
Do you mean right wingers like Woodrow Wilson or John Maynard Keynes?
Andy West, you show yourself to be an ordinary leftist history rewriter.
Can we please shut down the whole eugenics/fascism/communism/socialism/liberal/conservative thing? The entire debate is based upon the false premise that all political philosophies can be mapped on a single linear dimension of “left” vs “right”. That’s like conflating all aspects of the personalities and leadership styles of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton merely because they were both extroverts. It is an invalid mapping that generates a great deal of emotional rhetoric but no useful information.
Mapping political philosophies on multiple dimensions gives a much better sense of how and why they are different. The Nolan Diagram at two dimensions is still a gross simplification of the true similarities and differences but it has vastly more explanatory power than the one-dimensional left/right.
This seems to be an example of the ‘relativists paradox’
I.e. the metaphysical problem that cultural relativism expresses by maintaining that what we conceive to be the truth is always relative to our cultural positions, never an absolute thing.
Ergo the truth can be whatever we say it is. Social consensus.
Of course it takes but a moment to point put that the *proposition* that truth is relative to culture, is a truth that is therefore relative to culture, and has no absolute basis in fact.. 😉
This seemingly trivial bit of sophistry is however a massive and fundamental flaw in something that lies at the heart of all post modern (so called) thinking.
And bear with me for a minute why I try and explain…
You might say that the 20th century was the century in which the certainties of material realism were swept away. One theorem after another was able to prove that certain things were unprovable. Or un measurable. Or incomputable.
Kants critique of pure reason, warning the 17th century scientists, that logic and reason had limits, came of age.
The One True Thing we could say was that we could never arrive at the One True Thing.
The effect of that on people who think about such matters was stark: science was deposed from being the Truth,. to become a ‘culturally relative’ truth, and the notion that by changing culture one could change the truth, emerged as a sort of godsend to the left, truth, they surmised was in fact simply what people believed it to be and if you changed their beliefs truth and reality would somehow follow the trend of the faithful.
AGW is in a sense a classic example of this. By getting enough people – especially scientists – to believe in it, it would become – well at least at a human level – the truth.
But in the end, this has been shown to be just another example of faith failing to move mountains as effectively as a chain of excavators. The truth, it seems, has some existence beyond our mere capacity to conceive of it.
As an avid student f modern phislophy, I would say that this conundrum has not been resolved yet. The neo idealists maintain that the truth cannot be arrived at except in the sense of pictures in our heads, the neo realists maintain that there must be something beyond ourselves creating -or at lest affecting – the pictures in our heads.
Consider if both were in fact correct. What then emerges is that there is a Truth, out there somewhere, but we can never gain more than a highly imperfect and possibly totally erroneous image of it, turned into human digestible concepts. Science is not characterised by truth content so much as its efficacy in constructing a coherent consistent logical predictable framework to connect the dots of such data points as we consider to represent pretty reasonable measurements of what is ‘out there’ rather than ‘in here’, in whatever way we conceive that to be..
This works. And it shows the relativists paradox in a new light. What they can then be seen to be doing is to use the data sets of one set of cultural assumptions to redefine a new cultural assumption altogether. That cannot be done. So long as you are in fact interpreting global warming in terms of actual measurements with thermometers and so on, then you have already ‘bought into’ the whole paraphernalia of rational materialism in order to give those measurements any validity!
And if they fail to agree with your faith based predictions in the New Culture, you must actually abandon science and deny the validity of those measurement altogether. As being ‘just science practising its delusional arts’.. You will find this sort of doublethink pervading the whole theatre of New Age thinking.
And this brings me to the final point, and is about relative levels of delusion. And a way of understanding metaphysics.
There is in the final analysis, no way to distinguish an external reality from a complex self or other generated illusion, If we are doing reality to ourselves, and we might be, then its a part of ourselves we cant consciously reach and affect, or even subconsciously reach or affect, so it might as well be treated AS an externality with its own unfathomable rules and by noting the effect these rules seem to have on the illusion of external reality, we achieve exactly the same results as if we consider that there IS an external reality.
At this point idealism versus realism is resolved. It is irrelevant which it is, what matters is what control we can exert over it. How well and accurately we can posit mathematical or other relationships that describe it. And so on. Once we note that no matter how many impossible things we believe in before breakfast, THEY DO NOT COME TO PASS BY TEATIME, then the idealists assumptions are shown to be non pragmatic. And the realists assumptions to have some element of dominance. We can heave a sigh of relief, carry on practising science AS IF there were an external reality revealed to us via our senses and internally generated pictures. That these pictures are not the reality itself, is a given, as is that fact that we are constructing the pictures internally. In that the idealists are correct, but what they have forgotten is that we do not have total carte blanche in the construction. The elephant in the room completely hidden by cognitive dissonance, can still tread on your toes. And at a given point, it becomes harder to blame it on ingrowing toenails and you shift your assumption base in a new Occamian (or Kuhnian) moment of revelations and yell ‘my god, all this stuff that’s been happening is AN ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM, and this new simpler explanation then becomes the new orthodoxy.
We can understand science on a new way, with this.
Things that exist that do not reveal themselves to us in any way at all, might as well not exist for all practical purposes and there is no need top posit their existence except as objects of emotional impact that may be used to sway the way people act … Cf black magic, religion, marketing, etc etc.
Things that do reveal themselves that appear to display patterns of behaviour are valid subjects of rational analysis as we attempt to impose one pattern or another of our own construction on them, until we find a pattern – a new mathematical Law – that seems to explain what they do, and over a period of time often enough and predictably enough to be useful. These things we call laws of Nature, and presume on an ad hoc basis to be as close to ‘scientific fact’ as it is possible to get.
Things which display phenomenally complex patterns, that defy simple explanation, we have to shrug and say ‘there may be something causing it, but we are nowhere near any model that is accurate enough to be USEFUL’.
Always remembering that any study of OURSELVES by such rational analysis will be doomed to uncertainty, because the self that does the studying is irrevocably altered by the act of studying..too much self analysis leads to any conclusions at all. Seek and ye shall find. Social science, is not science, because the moment you publish the result, its changes the people you were studying in the first place!
In a study of sexual behaviour, 90% of males under 25 say they have sex at least once a night. When the results are published, 90% of males now feel totally sexually inadequate, because they are lucky to get it twice a week in fact. A new marketing campaign for a make deodorant is launched and is an overnight success. Statistical modelling then shows that if 90% of males were having sex twice a night, the actual birthrate reflects an appallingly low incidence of fertility in the populations. This is a Matter Of Concern. Government funds are directed into ‘incidence of male and female infertility in the populations at large post 2000’.
Years later an billions spent a new survey goes round and actually asks people to RECORD honestly, backed up with selfie videos, just how much sex they are actually getting, and it turns out to be once or twice a week. The survey is instantly suppressed by the makers of deodorants, and thousands of social scientists who have been studying infertility, and they are accused of fabricating evidence. Of being ‘Deniers of the true facts’
I hope this clarifies matters, rather than obfuscates..
My main points are that:
Rational Materialists who Believe In Externalities And the Evidence Of Their Senses should always bear in mind that there is a lot of hardware and software between them and the Real World (TM).
Cultural Constructivists should bear in mind that if its all in the cultural mind, believing in fairies should bring them into palpable existence, but so far its not been demonstrated. However you can sell a lot of stuff based on invisible fairies that have no visible effect on the world at all, if people DO believe in them enough…
Post Post-Modern philosophers should bear in mind that regardless of the Absolute Truth (TM) it makes sense pragmatically to proceed AS IF there were Something Out There , bearing in mind the final impossibility of deciding what it is, or where out there actually is,…
And those sceptical of ‘climate science’ so called should understand it in terms perhaps of a broader struggle being waged by those who espouse one or other of the elementary positions delineated above.
What is not Logical, Captain, is to proceed on the basis that science and materialism has meaning when you are actually advancing the proposition that it does in the final analysis not.
That is real denial.
Boris Gimbarzevsky says: @ur momisugly January 28, 2014 at 1:17 am
…One of the problems that humans living in cities have is that completely delusional beliefs are possible unlike a single individual living in a remote setting where such delusions lead to death from a very unforgiving and objective external reality. Matters aren’t helped any by deluded “academics” who preach that reality is a social creation. For the majority of people, reality is whatever the majority says is true…. Reason doesn’t work as most people don’t base their lives on logic.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Thank you for putting into words one of my observations.
Humans in advanced civilization are insulated from the reality. If you screw-up and go walking in the field with the bull and the bull puts you in a wheel chair for the rest of your life, why you sue the farmer. After all it is NOT YOUR FAULT you ignored the fence and trespassed in a field plastered with beware of the bull and no trespassing signs….
At least in the USA we have wrapped people especially children in cotton batting trying to remove all possible danger from their lives.
_Jim:
your post at January 27, 2014 at 5:15 pm
I could not care less “which side” you are on or “want to play”.
I will not contribute to derailing the thread. Read my post from which you quote.
Richard
The paper, discussion and comments made very worthwhile contribution to WUWT. Thanks; we need more of this and also open mindedness. I think we need to hear more about academic (research) funding and the wish of academe which has grown hugely to be appreciated as important and socially useful, and as looking towards the future. The alleged ‘environmental crisis’ acted as a major stimulant to research and was possibly encourahed by ‘power’ because it deflected concenrs away from human problems. Once environmental threats were adopted as
THE new issue for research, science debates about claims and assumption were largely ignored by ‘do-gooding science itelf, and even more so , by the social sciences. WWF /IPCC ‘science’ was believed as truth and few of us had any knowledge about the hisotry of sientific disputeds and even ‘wars’. The social sciences could and did base their new contributions to knowledge on the assumptions of an approaching climate catstrophe caused by carbon dioxide. I experienced all this in the UK from the mid 1990s onwards with specialists in environemnetla economics, sociology, international relations and even energy studies. By the end of the 1990s very few academic journals would accpet ‘sceptical’ papers and a very small group of geographers here even lost the battles over whether a new research group should be called climate research or climate change research… the changers won of course and teh term denier crept in. In the Uk this seems to have come from sociology, from people we memories of the holocaust. There is a long history here going back to the late 1980s, and also much more literature.
Friends:
At January 27, 2014 at 7:34 pm davidmhoffer wrote:
Repeated for emphasis and to help those who missed it.
Richard
Frederick Colbourne says: January 27, 2014 at 6:38 pm
Txomin says: January 27, 2014 at 10:07 pm
Thanks.
DirkH says: January 28, 2014 at 1:36 am
Well I’ve certainly no intention to rewrite history. And I hadn’t intended to spawn an entire sub-topic regarding Eugencis, was just using a couple of v brief summary 1-liners for other social narrative instances. While the detailed history of Eugenics is not an area of expertise for me, I was aware of more complex and varied detail beneath that summary line, and on reflection the precise snippet you quote is a rough approximation at best. I’ve probably still got someones else’s potentially incorrect summary I read floating about in my head, and confess I didn’t think at all deeply about that line, as no doubt I should have. Ah… the dangers of replicating narrative! I’m perfectly happy to stand corrected re a more varied history, and maybe it should read ‘loose alliance to various political affiliations’, which in fact are different flavoured in some different countries anyhow. Rather belatedly, I recall now info per Gail Combs mention of Fabian Society, which pricked my memory core. Lack of thought, not intent.
I am a life long SF reder and fan. It is astounding that academics who are claiming to be well informed ignore the decades long use of global cllimate apocalypse as a plot device in SF stories and novels.
The SF stories, to my knowledge, have seldom if ever used the climate apocalypse plot device as a way to show how scientists can be wrong. Except for one satire on climate apocalypse that I can recall, the story lines are always about how humans have destroyedthe climate and how people are more or less getting by.
For these academics to decline to look at the striking similarities bewtween SF climate plots and the modern AGW movement’s similarities is to miss an obvious area of study. For them to pretend that those who doubt the apocalypse claims of AGW are the ones engaging in science fictional thinking is their demonstration of either cynicism or ignorance.
davidmhoffer says: January 27, 2014 at 7:34 pm
Okay, if you’re arguing from the position of a minority of specific examples, of which LM2013 is one, then this is plausible and I see where you’re coming from. I guess we can never know for sure. However, my default would still be deep immersion of these folks in the orthodox CAGW frame as the main cause. Remember these folks don’t recognise the IPCC output as just another frame(s), to them it is ‘absolute truth’, along with the whole 9 yards of all the scientific societies and government departments and such as coat-tails. So to them sceptics are folks who inexplicably are contributing to harm of the planet in contradication to practically all ‘official’ info. I’m guessing they genuinely have no explanation for that (but cannot ‘see’ outside their frame to discover the truth). So they analyse the ‘hard core’, the petro-chemical industry, to try and analyse why these strange folks are ‘resistive’. Of course they find no revelation and hence travel down dubious lines like suspecting nefarious motives and that these sceptic folks are ‘not normal’, which the ‘denier’ term leads them easily into (and was not invented by them, they swallowed it with the narrative). This is all classic for folks who are deeply immersed (like those you see on TV who are pulled out of cults or extreme religions or racists groups, who are interviewed years later and are completely different, failing to even understand themselves at the time). You have the benefit of fishing all the many frames here that allows the shape of reality to be sensed, no doubt you fished in Consensus sites and papers too, as many here do. But many academic authors do not fish widely; in their ivory towers they are so blinded by CAGW that nefarious motives (enabled by ‘denier’ and ‘merchants of doubt’ memes) are all they can come up with to explain the otherwise inexplicable sceptics. .
I figure this is a subjective matter and not one that is ever likely to have proof. So assuming the above does not sway you, I guess we shall have to agree to disagree. I do appreciate your points and your iterative responses that helped me see your PoV better.
Boris Gimbarzevsky says: January 28, 2014 at 1:17 am
Nice contribution, thanks. About 30 years back I spent quite a lot of time programming in assembly language. 8085, Z80, some 80186/286; unforgiving mistresses all!
hunter says: January 28, 2014 at 8:37 am
That’s actually a neat point, which as I’m an SF author on the side has crossed my mind also.
If you are interested, I have a free-to-read very skeptical cli-fi / sci-fi novelette called ‘Truth’ available in various download formats here at Smashwords. No apocalypse! It featured in Judith Curry’s cli-fi review at Christmas 2012. If you like it you can find your way to more sci-fi (and a 3 book techo-thriller jointly written with UK author Ian Watson) from my website, though most of the rest is not free I’m afraid.
Good analysis, but wallows in buzz-word abstractions. To call it verbose and prolix would be an understatement. Needs to be edited down to about 1/3 its current bloated length.
Leo Smith, excellent exposition on the nature of reality. You note:
Rational Materialists who Believe In Externalities And the Evidence Of Their Senses should always bear in mind that there is a lot of hardware and software between them and the Real World (TM).
That paragraph is an understatement as the function of the brain is best viewed as a reality generating engine (RGE) which is just as able to produce an invalid reality as one which is based on a reasonable model of external reality. The brains RGE has been perfected over tens of millions of years of vertebrate evolution and, being rather conservative, nature has preserved the basic architecture of the brain in all vertebrate phyla. Prior to the massive enlargement of the human cortex, external reality served as a rigid selection mechanism for invalid RGE’s. Those RGE’s which failed to properly model external reality were eliminated and the RGE’s that faithfully modeled external reality survived.
Once modern civilization came about, selection pressure was greatly reduced and invalid RGE’s can survive and can reproduce to increase the proportion of the population with invalid RGE’s. The existence of modern civilization has resulted in an explosion of unique RGE’s which makes modern civilization so interesting, but it also is civilizations Achilles heel as memeplexes completely at variance with external reality can infect populations and cause their demise.
The statist memeplex is currently ascendant again and threatens to enslave humanity with a very distorted vision of reality from RGE’s that believe they have the right to mould the contents of other people’s RGE’s.
One book that does an excellent job of describing the neurologic underpinnings of reality generation is Noretrender’s The User Illusion which, ironically, I picked up from a pile of low cost computer books as presumably the bookseller assumed that the book had something to do with GUI design. Well worth reading.
As Gail Comb’s noted, modern western civilization insulates people from external reality and in doing so, infantalizes them. Much of what I did as a child would now bring a swat team down on my house as in the 1960’s making explosives, playing with dynamite and building gunpowder rockets were considered to be part of a normal childhood (at least in Northern Alberta where I grew up). In a rural environment, one can’t escape external reality for long whereas in a large city it’s possible. Statists utilize the power of fear to steer people away from realities which threaten the state which is likely one of the reasons that research into psychedelic drugs has been effectively banned by the state.
A fundamental tenet of RGE’s is that there exists an objective reality which, while the RGE cannot model precisely, must be modeled sufficiently well to ensure the survival of the RGE long enough to pass its genes on to another generation. WRT this underlying physical reality which we think we know but can never know in detail, there is no denying its validity. However, what has happened with the development of large conglomerations of people is that social reality is what people perceive to be the fundamental reality. One of my interests is in eating disorders and I find it bizarre but fascinating how young women with eating disorders inhabit a reality where all that seems to exist for them is their bodily appearance, interactions among their peers, current fads as well as the ubiquitous dependance on cell phone technology. Dropped off in a wilderness setting they wouldn’t survive very long at all. They’re trapped in their dysfunctional realities and haven’t a clue that other things exist in life.
For most individuals, their social reality is far more meaningful to them than external reality as they can’t conceive of anything outside of the social reality. Thus, in order to convince individuals that their RGE is defective, it is first necessary to educate them that what they perceive as reality is a brain generated illusion and that controlling individuals are very aware of defects in the wetware of most people to ensure that their RGE’s conform to the RGE of the individuals who believe that they have a right to determine other individuals realities.
The current selling point for such control is “safety” which is being used as the rationalization for more and more repressive legislation. If one has to create a binary distinction for the political philosophies of individuals, it would be as those who believe in spontaneous organization of groups of individuals to perform a task vs those who believe that only centralized hierarchical control is valid. All other elaborations on the reasons for stating that only a hierarchical system of government is valid are irrelevant and thus National Socialist and Communism are isomorphic under this metric.
Those who are believers in CAGW inhabit a social reality in which all of the people they know are convinced that technologic civilization is going to lead to the destruction of the planet. One cannot argue with them when the argument is based on basic physical principles which demonstrate that their model is incongruent with the external physical reality. These individuals, for the majority of their lives, don’t inhabit physical reality. In order to interact with these individuals in a manner designed to get them to question their weltanschauung, one needs to utilize the laws which apply to social realities. There are simple principles which one can use to influence people’s perceptions which were gathered by Cialdini in his book Influence.
What I’ve noticed is that there’s quite a divide between individuals who seek understand nature and thus become chemists and physicists and those for whom their RGE is entirely geared to modelling social realities. The gap is as wide as that between programmers who still do assembly language programming and those who know little beyond javascript. The latter is a high level language that any purist would consider to be obscenely inefficient, but given the power of modern computers, it allows for the easy manipulation of complex objects without having to know the dirty underlying details of how its done.
We have lots of people who are skilled with interacting with reality on a low level, but to make a difference in peoples perceptions, it’s necessary to move up to a higher level and operate at the level of social reality where completely new paradigms are needed. The level of social reality is a system that functions according to rules which politicians instinctively seem to figure out and what is needed is to use the same rules to fight the warmists in this higher order battlefield.
Looking up the BS artist known as Derrida explains all of Mosher’s behavior. Mosher really believes he is being philosophically brilliant.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/205550/i-derrida-i-derrida-etc/mark-goldblatt
Mosher believes that fantasy is a frame of comparison that we use to define reality, when in fact fantasy tells us nothing about reality. of course we hear a lot of that ‘you make up your own truths’ crap these days. mainly from those who have no argument to offer.
eg we now have more than enough evidence to say conclusively, without personal opinion, that Cagw is false. the condition cannot exist, and is fantasy. of course there is a similar level of evidence that agw must exist, just not to that level.
when considering the frame we talk from re agw, we dont include mickey mouses big air con, so why the hell should we give any consideration to the like fantasy of Cagw? its just nonsense to consider the non-position of being sceptical, a position. it is NOT! Mosher tries to frame that argument that maybe I have not considered all the possibilities of HIS fantasy, well i probably have not because it is his, and his fellow alarmists fantasy. he should learn that people have a mind of their own and not all will be dictated to.