Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Stephan Lewandowsky (of retracted Recursive Fury fame ) has just released a paper supporting the “precautionary principle” (h/t JoNova). According to Lewandowsky, the more uncertain you are about risk, the more you should spend to contain the risk.
Lewandowsky of course applies this principle to climate sensitivity – he suggests uncertainty increases the high end risk.
But now that Lewandosky has opened our eyes, let’s try applying his principle to other issues.
Witch burning. Just as there has never been a clear anthropogenic climate signal, so there has never been a clear demonstration of supernatural power. Yet can we be absolutely certain? Lewandowsky teaches us that the less you know about something, the more worried you should be. So for the sake of the children, we had better dust off those old witch finding books.
Flying saucers. There has never been a verified case of human contact with aliens. But there have been plenty of anecdotal accounts of alien encounters, many of which sound rather unpleasant. Lewandowsky teaches us that uncertainty is risk – can we be absolutely certain Earth is not being observed by malevolent alien beings? Better step up efforts to keep us all safe from the unknown.
I’m sure readers can think of other examples – chemtrails, rains of frogs, strange wart like pimples… it’s a long list.
Thank you Lewandowsky, for opening our eyes to what is really important.
Leo Geiger
Most people are not gifted with the “absolute certainty” of the typical WUWT blog reader/contributor that (a) green house gas emissions are not a problem and (b) steps to reduce them will destroy the economy.
_____________________________________________________________________________
For the sake of argument I’ll assume that the amount of Human Caused CO2 in the atmosphere is a problem. In order to solve that problem you must reduce the source of that CO2. Since the source is tied up intimately with our economy then removing the source, fossil fuels, will have an absolute deleterious affect on the economy. There is no way around it as this time.
“Oh. My bad. I thought he’s a psychologist or sociologist. So you’re saying he’s now an expert on science, economics, and mathematics? You’re kidding me, right?”
When in a hole, quit digging. Nowhere in my comments did I say…or by any stretch imply that he was an expert in anything. You argued that the paper was about psychology, which had you paid the slightest attention you’d have realized was incorrect. Now you’re playing the old switcheroo by claiming your argument was about whether or not he’s an expert. You’d make an excellent warmist. Make wildly incorrect statements in an arrogant way, then when you get caught try to wiggle out by changing the terms. Exactly what they do.
In short Lewd Donsky is a perfect ass.
The more uncertain we are, the more we should act.
This is the process of the phobias, OCD, and agoraphobia.
A little avoidance of fear is rewarded by the behavior. Eventually, you retreat ever-farther from your fear, and end up house-bound, or unable to drive over a bridge at any cost to you.
Maybe Lew has bridged this psychology observation to the climate.
In this the psychologist is clearly worried about the consequences of catastrophic change and expects his readers to feel the same and to act as he would act to mitigate the outcome of such predicted change,predicted by the IPCC presumably.
He clearly is overdue for a holiday.
***
Hey Lewis,
Personally, I think he’s in need of medication 🙂 Otherwise, I think you’re reaching a bit if you’re trying to argue the paper is “about” psychology. Presumably anyone with an alarmist mindset is by definition worried about catastrophic climate change, and wants his readers to feel the same way. Doesn’t need to be a psychologist to fit that description, and as far as I can make out they’re using mathematics to come to their conclusions concerning risk.
Leo Geiger says:
April 8, 2014 at 8:22 am
Most people are not gifted with the “absolute certainty” of the typical WUWT blog reader/contributor that (a) green house gas emissions are not a problem and (b) steps to reduce them will destroy the economy…
That’s why people do things like buy fire insurance, spend money on fire extinguishers and smoke detectors, and pay taxes for fire stations. They haven’t dismissed the possibility (not the certainty) of a fire in their house and assign value to those actions.
==============================================================
Good grief.
There are uncountable numbers of “possible” disasters. Limited resources should be spent mitigating ones considered “probable” (not just “possible”).
People DO NOT buy fire insurance because it is a “possible” risk – they buy it because they’ve seen someone’s house burn down (i.e. it’s judged to be a “probable” risk). Likewise (at least in the USA), people are highly reluctant to buy elephant stampede insurance.
This is where science academics are supposed to help, and, at least to date, have miserably failed. Give me a call if you want some elephant stampede insurance.
I do not see how this paper’s argument could possibly work without crippling assumptions. I’d really like to see the argument on this, because it goes against normal logic to assume that increased uncertainty specifically increases risk. The usual assumption is that the actual value is somewhere in a range, with a probability based on the normal distribution. What is his argument for skewing the distribution high? He would be requiring the confidence interval to go from say +/- 5, to +9 / -1 instead.
Now, the lazy way out would be to ignore the cost of taking action. If there is no cost to acting on a false alarm, then there is no reason not to take action. This is Pascal’s Wager, in essence – belief in God is an action without cost, so even the slightest chance of Hell is enough to warrant conversion. Now, it is blatantly false to claim that this applies to climate change. There is clearly a cost to measures designed to reduce GHG in the atmosphere, and I would say the fact that they have not been implemented completely is the best evidence of that – if it is a cost-free decision, why not do so? People aren’t supervillains out to destroy the world.
With that in mind, the paper becomes very hard to understand. False alarms will become more probable as there is more uncertainty, along with black swan catastrophes. If the risk bottoms out at the bottom of the range, the costs of false alarm should skyrocket. Can anyone that has actually red the paper tell me more?
Leo Geiger says:
April 8, 2014 at 1:36 pm
Unless you have a time machine, deciding to go that route is effectively another all-in bet that this turns out to be true. The rationale for doing absolutely nothing is near certainty there is no risk, and any avoidance costs will be prohibitive.
Welcome to settled science *and* settled economics.
Wrong again. The burden of proof is on the doomsayers. The first inconvenient fact for Warmists is that nothing out of the ordinary is happening, climate-wise. The second one is that no connection between manmade CO2 and the slight warmup during the 80’s and 90’s has ever been made. Warmists don’t have a leg to stand on, thus there is no rationale for doing anything. Spending $trillions to “prevent climate change” would have no effect on climate whatsoever. But mankind would be considerably worse off for it.
Recursive amusement: Comedic ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on taxpayer-funded-fraud.
So your model ensemble gives you a range of temp increases for a doubling of CO2, say
1 – 4 deg C.
But hey, we are “uncertain” re the exact parameters, so range could be 1 – 6 deg C.
But hey, hey, we are absolutely certain the “uncertainty” is restricted to upside, not downside,
so range can go up, but never down, like a rev counter that starts at 1 and goes to infinity.
Hey hey hey, Lew and Dowsky do the math and presto, look everybody, see how if the number
can only go up, the number is likely to go up.
The climate science TM constellation is a brilliant one!
Uncertainty principle says that given an action which may be harmful, AND no scientific consensus regarding the action’s harm, then the burden of proof is inverted so that those
who wish to undertake the action must prove it non-harmful.
Whenever I come across people who want to invert (Hey mikey, here’s looking at Tiljander kid)
things for no good reason, then I know there’s a pig in that poke.
Upside Down Mann (Homo Inverterus)
How is Lewandowsky different from a political party push pollster (other than being called perfesser)?
All he seems to do is run small sample polls of dubious design and then torture his data to get a result that he likes.
The worst possible outcome is that we spend billions preventing CAGW for nothing. As seems increasingly likely.
If Stephan Lewandowsky is correct that “the more uncertain you are about risk, the more you should spend to contain the risk” then the proper course of action to totally mitigate the global warming / climate change / climate variation is an 80% reduction is anthropomorphic emissions. Since it is increasing apparent that technological approaches are incapable of achieving the required reduction in per capita, then a compensating reduction of the population to required level of approximately 1 billion should be immediately implemented. I am sure Lewandowsky would approve.
Not only does the Lewandowsky et al. approach to “uncertainty” give them carte blanche to spend trillions of dollars in re-shaping the world to their preferences, but they have previously announced that they aim at …. “Shaping” …. “Tomorrow’s” …. “World” ….
So what skeptic could possibly be sufficiently grandiose in “conspiracy ideation” to deal with people who have already announced their explicit intentions to (re-)shape the entire world??
[the following is cross-posted with Climate Audit]:
A general point that I have not seen emphasized (I may have missed it): Lewandowsky et al. interfered massively and pervasively in the materials of their “research” by first founding a blog with the grandiose title “Shaping Tomorrow’s World”…. They announce that they intend to shape (re-shape) the world, then pretending that they had not provoked the very critical responses they pretend to “study”….
Merely that title, never mind the many vitriolic and alarm-oriented screeds which they published there before and during their so-called research, propounds their comprehensive goal of…..
“shaping” …… “tomorrow’s” ……. “WORLD”
So first Lewandowsky, Cook, Skeptical Science moderators, et al. issue declarations of their intent to “shape” the very “world” in which we all live.
Then they attempt a study which is supposed to be scientific analyzing critical responses to their own grandiose pomposity.
Talk about injecting themselves and their ideas into their own subject of study, and then pretending to “research” the critical responses.
Fear and doubt, two factors man does not cope well with. So Lewandowsky plays on it! How pathetic!
I think it’s obvious that we need to devote all of our resources into perfecting a second-hand-smoking gun to repel the aliens in the UFOs that are causing space-weather climate change to bring Planet X into a collision course with Earth so they can mine the fragments to make the Illudium Q-36 explosive space modulator which they will require to conquer Venus from Mars.
Of course, I might be wrong but all the more reason to do it.
We might even all get really neat second-hand-smoking jackets out it! But I can’t be certain.
(Do i need a sarc tag? I’m not sure.)
anengineer:
No doubt Lew would be one of the first voulunteers to be ‘implemented’…
[/sarc. <– just in case]
I’m pretty sure the aliens like boiling oceans.
(DANG! There goes my theory!)
Leo Geiger
Equating main stream science with alien abduction is just a round about way of saying you are absolutely certain there is no risk. Either that, or you believe there is a realistic probability of being abducted by aliens.
Most people do not share that kind of absolute certainty.
I am not saying there is zero chance Climate Change might be an issue.
What I am saying is I prefer to worry about problems for which there is supporting evidence.
For example, it is possible to construct convincing models which “prove” that Earth might be closely monitored by potentially hostile aliens.
Consider the current science of nanotechnology. It is not unreasonable to extrapolate current technology by a few decades into the future, and postulate that it will shortly become possible to build useful space probes the size of a grain of sand, or smaller. Space probes that small could be accelerated to near light speed for a fraction of the cost of a full size probe, using something which resembles a giant nuclear accelerator, or other technology such as light sails.
We even know how such probes could be steered and even slowed down when they reached their destination, using the galactic magnetic field. Within a century at most, we will be able to send sand grain size probes to every one of the galaxy’s 100 million stars, at trivial economic cost, and have them arrive at all of their destinations over the next 200,000 years or so.
So if there is just one alien species in the galaxy, which reached our level of technology at least 200,000 years ago, they are already here.
So why don’t I lose sleep about my compelling hypothetical model of alien invasion? The reason is that my alien invasion model, however scary, is not backed by any evidence.
Just like models of dangerous anthropogenic climate change are not backed by any evidence, that the hypothesised dangerous changes are actually occurring.
Next it’s going to be Lew is right because he is uncertain. Then they’ll all get on the bandwagon. Uncertainty will become the new proof. 97% of his pals will be certain of it… ooops!
Hey, maybe they will begin the 97% are uncertain, because up is down and it pays to be sure.
From the paper ‘Scientific uncertainty and climate change (in two parts)’ by Lewandowsky et al (2014)
– – – – – – – – – –
Lewandowsky is refuted by his own findings in the paper. Since he is certain of his conclusions then they are not considered (by his own findings in the paper) to be a high risk and therefore should not get any significant priority for government / cultural actions. Conversely , by the findings in his own paper, if he didn’t have certainty of his conclusions in those papers then they would be represent higher risk and would require highest priority for action by governments and culture.
My CONCLUSION wrt the paper ‘Scientific uncertainty and climate change (in two parts)’ by Lewandowsky et al (2014): I think that Lewandowsky et al are perfectly irrational intellectuals of the variety caused by post-modern philosophy/science and also caused by post-normal science.
Lewandowsky requests us to be intellectually irrational for the sake of our children and grand-children.
John
Richard, thank you for the Harrison Ford documentary.
Would this be the same Harrison Ford who said this………………..?……………..”I’m so passionate about flying I often fly up the coast for a cheeseburger.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1251762/Harrison-Ford-I-love-flying-planes-riding-bikes-Thats-Ive-got-of-nine.html
http://blog.seattlepi.com/people/archives/195703.asp
This line of thinking is moot, because unilateral action is futile and the developing world won’t reduce its ever-increasing emissions.
Another perspective on grandiose plans for “Shaping Tomorrow’s World” —
a different example, related to my previous comment above:
Karl Marx famously said, ““The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”
(from “Theses on Feuerbach”)
These words are even inscribed on his gravestone.
Now suppose that Marx or any of his followers had started railing against anyone who objected to their plan to “change” the world by publishing pseudo-scientific “research” in psychology journals etc. (well had such existed at that time…during most of the 19th century psychology was still treated pretty much as un-empirical philosophy)
Suppose such Marxist psychologists had raged that anyone who objected to their grandiose plans to “change” the world must be in the grip of “conspiracist ideation” with delusions of “nefarious intent” … “unreflexive counterfactual thinking” …. “must be wrong” …. “nihilistic skepticism” …. “nothing by accident” …. etc.
My oh my, such Marxian psychologists would have a field day giving pseudo-psychological explanations for every form of intellectual and scientific criticism of their plans.
Better leave the car at home. You might crash.