Climate Rationalization, Beliefs and Denialism

By the time the next Little Ice Age has arrived and several billion people have starved to death, it will all be blamed on witches, wizards, bad spirits, djinns and angry gods. Then, a few hundred years later someone will reinvent rationality.

The now endemic corruption of science that has been engendered under the banner of climate change could be easily and effectively addressed by the establishment of a science court resourced to investigate and make determinations on prima facie instances of scientific misconduct. The most appropriate penalty might also be to simply disqualify offenders from any further public funding.

The science court idea, as originally proposed decades ago, did not focus on punishing misconduct, and was not an arm of government. It concentrated on weighing opposing scientific claims. At a minimum, it would provide the public with thorough presentations of each side’s case, including rebuttal papers and cross-examination of witnesses. Nothing like this exists now. There has never been a formal, all-encompassing, multi-week debate before a panel of scientists, with transcripts available online. There are maybe 100 contentious issues in the GW debate. A court, or several courts, could rate the strength of each individual argument, or argument cluster, separately, and issue a finding that condemning those that are outrageously bad.
It wouldn’t matter if the judges decided wrongly, because any egregiously bad decision could be mocked sharply, and because the judges could be asked to justify their arguments against their critics by an oversight committee. Only nonpartisans would be allowed as judges. They should also be persons of high achievement (like Koonin) and character. An arrangement can be found that prevents stacking the deck with partisans, etc. The transcripts of Koonin’s APS inquiry are the best summary to claims and counterclaims in existence, according to J. Curry.
A British court ruled against the claims in Gore’s movie. A science court would have been even more severe. The IAC severely criticized IGPOCC. Given independent appointment of judges, it’s likely that similarly good results can be achieved. There’s still plenty of integrity among scientists as a whole.
Whatever flaws a science court might have, it would have vastly cut down on bad arguments in the debate, and clarified the issues. It would meet every five years, say, maybe after every IGPOCC Report, to thrash over the arguments again, so the court’s findings wouldn’t be cast in stone. (These sequels would give it an opportunity to hold alarmists’ feet to the fire regarding their failed predictions.)
Here are extracts from an article and comments on Curry’s site:

http://judithcurry.com/2014/08/19/institutionalizing-dissent/
[need to counteract consensus]
Institutionalizing Dissent: A Proposal for an Adversarial System of Pharmaceutical Research
Justin Biddle
Abstract. There are serious problems with the way in which pharmaceutical research is currently practiced, many of which can be traced to the influence of commercial interests on research. One of the most significant is inadequate dissent, or organized skepticism. In order to ameliorate this problem, I develop a proposal that I call the “Adversarial Proceedings for the Evaluation of Pharmaceuticals,” to be instituted within a regulatory agency such as the Food and Drug Administration for the evaluation of controversial new drugs and controversial drugs already in the market. This proposal is an organizational one based upon the “science court” proposal by Arthur Kantrowitz in the 1960s and 1970s. The primary benefit of this system is its ability to institutionalize dissent, thereby ensuring that one set of interests does not dominate all others.
In 1967, Arthur Kantrowitz published an article in the journal Science entitled “Proposal for an Institution of Scientific Judgment,” in which he argued for the establishment of a “science court” where scientific questions that are relevant to public policy debates would be adjudicated. Emphasizing the growing entanglement of science and politics, Kantrowitz argued that we are increasingly forced to make consequential “mixed decisions,” or decisions that have both a scientific and a moral/political component. Whether it is the decision to build an atomic bomb or to enact policies to curb ozone depletion, we are increasingly confronted with science-based public policy decisions that have wide-ranging effects on the social and political landscape.
In a number of essays beginning in 1967, Kantrowitz argued that we do not have the appropriate organizational structures for making mixed decisions effectively. The primary reason for this, he argued, is that individual scientists engaged in cutting-edge research are almost always affected by various biases. For example, scientists who become involved in the policy-making process almost inevitably allow their moral and political beliefs to influence their appraisal of scientific hypotheses. Similarly, scientists who are immersed in researching a particular question for an extended period of time almost always develop cognitive prejudices, including preconceptions about the results of future experiments . In addition, the fact that mixed decisions must be made quickly, typically before a consensus is formed within the scientific community, makes it even more likely that such biases will affect individual scientists.
As argued, privatization is impeding the ability of communities to instantiate the norm of organized skepticism. Yet, as should be clear from the discussion of Kantrowitz’s proposal, one of the primary epistemic benefits of an adversarial system is the way in which it institutionalizes dissent. Given this, it is plausible to think that an adversarial system could help to alleviate some of the problems that privatization is causing. In particular, an adversarial system could help to expose the kinds of bias that are so often found in current pharmaceutical research, such as bias in the choice of hypotheses, bias in the interpretation of results, and bias in experimental design.
The adversarial system of pharmaceutical research that I will outline – Adversarial Proceedings for the Evaluation of Pharmaceuticals (APEP) – retains several of the features of Kantrowitz’s original science court proposal. Two groups of advocates would present arguments for a specific position, and a panel of judges would adjudicate between these two groups. The issues to be discussed should be issues that are controversial; in certain circumstances, there will be previously-existing evidence that is sufficient to close the controversy, but in general, the central questions will be underdetermined. The conclusions arrived at by the panel of judges should not be considered definitively true, but should rather be viewed as provisional and subject to change with the acquisition of further information.
Conclusions
I have argued that there are serious problems with the way in which pharmaceutical research is currently done – epistemic, moral, and socio-economic problems – and that an important cause of these problems is inadequate dissent. As a means of improving this situation, I have proposed that an adversarial system of pharmaceutical research, APEP, be instituted within a regulatory agency such as the FDA. The adversarial nature of APEP represents an acknowledgment that pharmaceutical companies, and the scientists that they sponsor, should not be viewed as disinterested arbiters of research but, rather, as advocates for particular hypotheses. APEP, in other words, is an institution that acknowledges that interests play an inevitable role in the evaluation of pharmaceutical research, and it ensures that the interests of pharmaceutical companies are not allowed free-reign but rather are checked by interests that are diametrically opposed to them. In this way, it enforces organized skepticism.
JC reflections
The analogy with climate science is that the dominant moral and political beliefs of climate scientists are introducing problems and biases into climate research. To use just one example, consider climate models and the bias in experimental design. Until very recently, driven by the UNFCCC/IPCC mandate, climate models have focused on the time series of temperature anomalies (not on getting the absolute temperatures correct), on anthropogenic forcing (with little attention paid to solar forcing and indirect effects), and on global average surface temperatures (not on regional variations or the disposition of heat in the ocean). Preference bias is evidenced in how climate information is displayed graphically – alternative graphical representations would send a different message.
One of the norms of science is organized skepticism. Those working at the climate science – policy interface (including the IPCC) have worked hard to kill organized skepticism by manufacturing a consensus on climate change. The idea of a climate red team has been put forward by John Christy. Kantrowitz and Biddle have thought through how institutionalizing dissent might actually work. Particularly for climate science, implementing something like this wouldn’t be simple, and actually achieving the desired objectives would be quite difficult.
But not impossible. The closest I’ve seen was the APS Workshop to consider its climate change statement. A committee of eminent physicists, each with no particular expertise in climate science or an apparent dog in the public debate, selected 6 scientists (Held, Santer, Collins, Curry, Lindzen, Christy) to address specific questions prepared by the committee. The committee has not completed its deliberations (I’m not expecting to hear anything from the committee before the end of the year) so the end of this story has not yet been written. But this is the kind of thing that is more likely than a manufactured consensus seeking process to move the science forward while at the same time providing decision makers with a better sense of the uncertainties and areas of disagreement and ignorance.
[JC commented:]
An intriguing aspect of the Science Court is that it makes the debate about advocacy and sources of funding as a pernicious influence essentially moot. It takes away the responsibility from individuals in these matters by institutionalizing dissent.
I’m certainly in favor of this general idea, but I can easily see this falling into the usual rathole for climate science if groups like the NAS are put in charge. Your thoughts on this?
David L. Hagen | August 19, 2014 at 1:05 pm | Reply
Formalize Red Team Funding to support the Science Court
Verification and validation are essential to science. For highly important public issues we need a science policy that further formally allocates a substantial portion of funding to “Red teams” to test hypotheses and generate the evidence, and analyses which such a tentative science court could weigh. Current grant making groups are too easily swayed by political correctness and the “lemming factor”.
e.g. Where is the research examining the timing probabilities of global cooling into the next glacial period and the effort needed to prevent that?
That has far greater threat to civilization than the IPCC’s warmist alarms.
Hank Zentgraf | August 19, 2014 at 1:54 pm | Reply
To institutionalize dissent you must start with the money for grants. All federal grants would require on-line publishing of results (no paywall) including all code, data, and math. Grants would be available to other scientists who wish to dissent either against a specific research publication or in response to position statements made by Federal agencies (NOAA, NAS, EPA, etc. ). These dissent papers would also be published on-line. A separate function would be formed under NSF to assure the quality of the process and report on its efficacy. The funding would come from the existing $7.0 B NSF budget.
This is just one idea. I am sure this blog can come up with something better.
rhhardin | August 19, 2014 at 2:00 pm | Reply
Hostile skeptics are the ones you can trust. They’ll explore corners without sweeping anything under the rug.
Institutionalized skeptics will be co-opted like the rest of the consensus.
Nobody’s shouting that climate science isn’t a science in the first place, for instance. It gets assumed that it is, and the presence of certain science procedures is enough to guarantee it, a sort of science cargo cult.
I’d recommend instead a climate curiosity group. They could point out weird stuff and perhaps analyze this or that somehow. But not put it together into a picture it doesn’t support.
Matthew R Marler | August 19, 2014 at 3:27 pm | Reply
These problems include the suppression of undesirable results, bias in the design of studies and in the interpretation of results. These problems can be traced to the influence of commercial interests on research.
Ioanides and colleagues have documented that 40% of the results published in medical journals and physiological research are non-reproducible, and hence most likely are false positives. In light of that, I don’t think it can be established that the problems in pharmaceutical research are worse than the problems in academic research, or that they are traceable to the influence of commercial interests. They are “traceable” to a common underestimation of the prevalence and magnitude of random variation, and the desire of investigators to be associated with “discoveries” instead of null results.
One recent innovation is that FDA requires all clinical trials of a drug to be registered in advance, in a publicly searchable registry. A clinical trial that has not been so registered can not be counted in support of marketing a drug in case the results turn out favorable to the drug. This ought to cut down on the suppression of undesirable results.
Faustino | August 12, 2014 at 1:16 am | Reply
Hal, you conclude: “Our TRCS research team experience with the Shuttle Challenger and Columbia accident investigation boards, as well as numerous independent and non-advocacy review boards regularly conducted on NASA manned and unmanned programs, leads us to believe that a similar independent review activity for the SCC calculation methodology is required. Following the template for successful independent review familiar to us, we recommend that in addition to climate science experts, numerous review board members selected from a broad array of technical fields that utilize the same basic technical disciplines, but are not directly involved in climate science research, are needed to achieve an adequate independent and objective review. Review board members should be vetted for identification and resolution of any possible conflicts of interest.” I’ve been advocating something similar for many years as necessary before engaging in expensive programs of dubious merit. No joy, though, your group has more clout, good luck.

https://www.mailman.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/Gift of God Rosner Markowitz.pdf
I read through this yesterday, and the parallels to today are striking. On one hand, we have science and business pushing progress. On the other hand you have chicken-littles who are absolutely determined that there is a threat.
They demand a conference, a conference is held, they declare victory, then months later complain that they were duped. They demand research, the business community does research, they reject the research because the businesses did it. They demand that the taxpayers should not have to pay for new research, so the government steps up and plans a research study and the business community pays for it. Then after the results come back that there is no serious threat they dismiss the findings because the businesses funded the study. They also complain that the study design couldn’t detect long-term, low-level impacts on the entire population and environment, and therefore the results are inadequate.
They always come up with a non-scientific reason to reject the science.

Not to worry.
All that is necessary is to make payment dependent upon actual results, not modeled silliness.
There is always the possibility that the elitists driving the antiscience movement towards forming a new socialist world order will actually achieve their dastardly ends. Again, not a problem; Socialistic coups almost always involve denouncing and executing all of the intelligentsia, so science will get a new chance to start. Eventually.