Guest opinion by Leo Goldstein
One of the most popular alarmist arguments is likening the “consensus climate scientists” to medical doctors. For example, this essay on “climate denial” from Andrew Winston at medium.com took part in the bashing of recently hired climate skeptic Brett Stevens at the NYT, saying:
Imagine your doctor tells you that you have dangerously high cholesterol and blocked arteries. She says you may drop dead soon. [Note: Based on comments/questions, I should clarify here. By “doctor”, I mean the entire medical establishment. So imagine you got not just a “second opinion,” but 100 opinions…and 97 say the same thing].You might have four basic reactions based on two dimensions, belief (or doubt) in the basic facts/science, and whether you commit to action or delay.
Refutation of this fallacy is confounded by the fact that there are two distinct problems: miscommunication of science and the intentional corruption of science. The former one has persisted for over 30 years while the latter one became noticeable in the late 90’s and has been growing ever since.
Most climate alarmists’ knowledge of science comes from TV shows like “The Big Bang Theory.” But the differences between the relationships they have with medical doctors and the ones they have with putative climate scientists can be easily explained even to them.
1. A medical doctor is a highly-qualified professional. Medical doctors must successfully complete a medical school, spend 3-7 years in residency actually treating patients, and be licensed by a state medical board composed mostly of proven doctors.
In contrast, anybody can call him- or herself a scientist and speak on behalf of science. There are no licensing or certification requirements. Enviro-activists and certain media personalities have been abusing this freedom for decades. Unfortunately, a terminal degree and affiliation with a formerly prestigious university or institution cannot serve as evidence that a person is a scientist.
2. A medical doctor is accountable. A doctor would lose patients or be fired if his or her advice isn’t sound. A doctor can also be sued by a dissatisfied patient. In a number of cases, doctors have been indicted.
A putative climate scientist can hardly even be criticized. Remember how a mere investigation of the misconduct by Michael Mann caused pandemonium. News media shouted about infringement of academic freedom (although the Constitution does not provide for any academic privileges, and the Article I, Section 9 might be interpreted to explicitly prohibit grant of such privileges). Nevertheless, perceived academic immunity is widely abused by con scientists and leftist operatives in universities and research institutions.
3. Patients have direct bidirectional communication with their doctor. “Direct” means that the patient usually speaks face-to-face with the doctor. “Bi-directional” means the patient can ask the doctor questions and get answers. Very few accept TV personalities’ talk as real medical advice.
The so-called “climate science” is usually communicated to the public in third person point of view like “The scientists say that …”, “Majority of peer-reviewed articles conclude …”, and even “Models show that …” These used to be typical introductory clauses before statements about alleged climate dangers. Recently, climate alarmists dropped those qualifying statements together with any pretense for honesty. They are actors, media personalities, politicians, and other people who are as far from science as one can be. Communication with “climate science communicators” is always one-sided. When faced with non-rehearsed questions they assuredly fail, causing laughs among climate realists.
4. One takes initiative to seek a doctor, rather than the other way around. Any unsolicited email offering a medical procedure or a wonder pill is sent straight to the spam folder.
But climate alarmism promoters always come unsolicited! That started with James Hansen, who made a front page article in the NY Times in 1981 while the possibility of future harm from carbon dioxide release was being considered by the Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee. After that, every time real scientists rejected alarm in scientific proceedings, the environmentalists invited themselves to the media and shouted about impending catastrophe that could only be avoided if we repented and did whatever they told us to do. Then, they chased out most real scientists from climate-related research and declared that there is scientific consensus in favor of alarmism.
5. Doctors do not demand patients to trust them. They earn their trust.
Climate alarmists demand trust because they have earned mistrust.
I would like to finish by paraphrasing Edmund Burke:
Alleged science looks for defense from Washington when it fails in the real world.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
+10. Unfortunately this is all probably too late. The disease that allowed climate obsession to thrive has greatly worsened. We are likely entering a dark period that may cost skeptics and those who have resisted the mobocracy quite dearly.
In addition to the illogical Argument from Authority and Argument from “Consensus”, there is an implied analogy of the earth being a patient in need of care to fix a threat to its “health”. Al Gore launched this idea back in 2006 when he said “The Earth has a fever and just like when your child has a fever, maybe that’s a warning of something seriously wrong.”
The “Mother Earth” idea is bogus. Nobody calls the bricks of his house “mother” . The earth is a lumberyard. To live implies exploiting the earth. The canonization of -wild- nature is a basic mistake.
Yes, but it’s a poor example for the MD. The liped theory of coronary artery disease has simply not been proven. Consider
1. starins (to lower cholesterol) do not slow calcium and plaque build up creating Coronary Artery Disease (CAD)
2. compare 2004 death certificates to 2014 death certificates and, with 60% of men and 45% of women using statins by 2014, heart attacks as listed on the death certificates cause of death is still about 25% – essentially zero effect.
3. biochemists have decoded the entire chemical reactions of CAD and the driver are the trans fats, polyunsaturated fats triggering a cascade where iron is one of the primary catalyst (which is why men have more CAD than women). These fats are not from animals but from corn oils, conola oils, saffron oils which are all heavily processed.
4. exercise, diet change (i.e., lifestyle) changes are as effective as drugs and surgeries and stenting comparing survival rates.
5. even with blocked coronaries the body’s arteriogenesis can create it’s own “bypass”
Plus there’s lots and lots of books and studies regarding the lipid theory.
The point is the lipid theory still prevails due to the huge amounts of money involved. Just like “climate change”. Almost anything in Western medicine would be a better to use as an analogy. For example, if the patient had pneumonia.
Exactly, cedarhill. I just wanted to write a similar but less profound comment on the comparison between climate scientist/skeptic and medical doctor/cholesterol induced disease but yours is listing all the current findings.
If you reject the advice of the doctor, his income does not change. AGW alarmists on the other hand…
This article:
http://www.pharmaceutical-journal.com/opinion/comment/prescribing-statins-time-to-rein-it-in/20068145.article
Gives a good history of the Statins debate, including the question: should we give healthy people Statins to reduce the incidence of heart problems.
It describes how all of the original patient data used to justify prescribing Statins to the healthy public, was and still is ‘secret’ and unavailable to independent researchers.
Imagine your climate scientist tells you that you have dangerously high temperatures and rapidly rising sea levels. She says you may drop dead soon. [Note: Based on comments/questions, I should clarify here. By “climate scientist”, I mean the entire alarmist, government-funded, ideologicially-motivated, attention-seeking crowd. So imagine you got not just a “second opinion,” but 100 opinions…and 97 parrot the same mistaken themes]. You might have onebasic reaction: malpractice lawsuits.
There, Andrew Winston at medium.com, I fixed your example for you.
Yup, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if 97% of Doctors privately admitted they really haven’t a clue as to where the truth about cholesterol currently lies. As William Ockham opined, paraphrased in one of my undergrad medchem text books, “that which is attempted in vain by the many, is done well by the few.”
Pre statins, the same text books made no mention of any biochemical justification for the mechanisms of potential ‘cholesterol-treating’ drugs, quite unlike the way they did for most other succesful pharmaceutics. A few years later I was reviewing the literature to write a grad-student term paper on cholesterol-chelating compounds and their receptor binding energy enthalpy/entrotpy-compensation variation with changes in molecular structure. Still I never saw any biochemical rationalisation of the broad therapeutic approaches of ‘cholesterol-treating’ drugs.
Then, just a few years later, I saw products being prescribed and sold on mass.This has always struck me as slightly strange.
Statins are to cholesterol as carbon mitigation schemes are to climate change: completely ineffective, but making some people a lot of money. Also, don’t question the science in either case, because it isn’t there.
In many areas of medicine, there are well-known treatments based on YEARS of controlled studies. There are no controlled studies in climate science. Even with all the practice and studies, there are still controversies (like statins, see above) and conditions with no known cure. Perhaps climate change is more like MS or Alzheimer’s–we know you have the disease but we don’t know why or how to cure it. Admitting this would be honesty.
And many that are not:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/02/when-evidence-says-no-but-doctors-say-yes/517368/
I do not think that climate change is a disease. It is something that always happened and it will happen in the future. Alzheimer, on the other hand, is a problem. Climate change it is not.
Helicobacter pylori. ..enough said. ANY profession can be corrupted.
https://xkcd.com/435/
While it is true that the medical profession does use consensus to come up with the recommended treatment, that in no way means that the recommendation is infallible.
After the WWII, the recommended treatment for chronic strep-throat and tonsilitis was X-Ray therapy !
Decades later, many children who had had this therapy developed thyroid cancer.
There are clear parallels between climate change and saturated fat. The “low fat diet” has been completely debunked. Just 10-15 years ago there was complete “scientific consensus” on the dangers of foods high in saturated fat. But slowly, we understood that trans-fats and certain processed meats and other factors were the cause. Basic steak and cheese and whole milk and eggs are actually good for you. Whuddathunkit? Your great grandma certainly knew this.
But, the whole time, there were persistent skeptics. Annoying skeptics who I am sure were only doing it because they were being paid big bucks by the beef and dairy industry.
The issue with fats is that they are calorie intensive, more so than protein and carbs. Ounce per ounce you will double your caloric intake with fats over carbs. So if you need to cut calories, a good start would be cutting down on fat intake.
and coal has an even higher calorific value!
Thinking of food as combustible fuel (where the calorific values come from) is wrong. Sure fats when burned have a higher calorific value but we don’t have a furnace inside us, we break those fats down to fatty acids and use them to build proteins, with some being catalysed in the liver to produce sugars on demand – and that’s the interesting part – it’s energy intensive to break them down that way so the body avoids doing it. Much easier to take sugars in straight from the gut ready to go, hence the sugar drive built into each of us that makes us grab fruits whenever they’re available.
But once you get into the studies on gut biota and discover just how those little monsters living in your gut can and do put their needs above yours – to the point they’ll drive cravings in you that will lead you to consume things that can do you harm while serving their wants. Mice naturally avoid chocolate, it’s mildly nuerotoxic .. but mice fed the poop of mice raised eating chocolate will immediately start eating chocolate. Purge those bacteria and the mice revert to chocolate avoiders. Populating guts with appropriate bacteria is what keeps koalas eating Eucalypt leaves.. I’d love if someone researched whether giving them their first meal from a possum’s butt instead of their mothers might give the little guys a broader diet and thus a better chance of long term survival, but that’s just idle speculation.. Point is, the presumption that high fat intake leads to high fat body is as wrong as thinking eating gelatin (an indigestible protein) will lead to growing stronger nails .. since nails were made from gelatin (as a doctor once told me was the case.. )
I’ve a few friends who were once large, those who with trepidation went on a high fat diet of cheese, cream, fatty meat and no carbs all had their weight plummet so rapidly they became concerned that they were becoming gaunt. All have remained slim afterwards, and many lost all taste for sugary foods – I guess once their chub-inducing gut tenants were purged, the new inhabitants were not impressed by sugar 😉
I disagree with several of the comments here about statins and cholesterol and heart attack risk…
… there has been a clear reduction in CVD (cardio vascular disease) mortality in recent decades. Amazingly, since the introduction of statins, rates have fallen even more despite the raging obesity epidemic.
… cholesterol is correlated with CVD with clear causation confirmation
… statins have significantly reduced CVD mortality with relatively minor side effects.
… statins have significantly reduced “fastballs”. These are typically men in their 40s or 50s who just drop dead. ER docs call them fastballs because they come in and docs have virtually no time to save them.
… Walk the Walk… almost all cardiologists are taking statins unlike climate alarmists who still seem to flying and driving all over the place.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27905702
But then you are saving people from natural selection and watering down the gene pool.
Many of the people and comments hear give skepticism a bad name.
There’s also the simple issue that Doctors/ the medical community has also been vastly wrong about things recently- the McGovern report caused them to push an unhealthy diet on America for political reasons which created the obesity and diabetes problems we have now. . .
Telling them to stuff off and continuing to eat the diet we had eaten before they gave us wonder foods like margarine, high fructose corn syrup, and processed grains would have been better.
McDonald’s and the like are equal creators of obesity, diabetes and other diet related ailments.
I eat at McDonalds all the time. I maintain a normal weight. I don’t have diabetes. And I have no know dietary ailments (colonoscopy at 58 showed zero problems.)
McDonalds is not the problem. They are, at worst, enablers. But that’s the natural consequence of living in a free society. People will help you make bad choices if you are willing to pay them to do so.
Jay your comment shows how there is no “one size fits all”. However, in general, when children are fed a diet consisting of mostly fast foods, that enables bad eating habits, sometimes for life. And the high salt and sugar content of those meals can become addicting.
I am a practicing CPA – Early in my career, I was going to grad school working on my masters in taxation (at night ) after working several years in the field. The professor of the course was a phd in taxation, and the author of several textbooks used by some of the leading univerisities, one of the leading professors in taxation.
Since I had 3 or so years of experience in the field, I became the defacto asst professor in the class – mostly clarifying and/or correcting the errors of the professor.
The point is that when there is real money on the line, the quality of the work product increases dramatically.
MD’s have real patients on the line
Climate scientists have no money on the line, so they can be right or wrong with zero consequences.
Climate scientists have lots of money on the line. It’s just that the research grants will only continue to flow if they keep producing the studies the governments/environmentalists want.
Almost anyone can now obtain a degree in almost any field, including medicine, given the time and money. Not all are that bright. Medical research is also subject to the same bandwagon/lemming effect relative to consensus science and looking at correlations as being the same as causation. Like many other fields of science, statistical analysis is many times poor due to poor sampling methods in particular and the multitude of potential causal variables as noted in some of the above posts re dietary fat etc. That said, medicine is still light years ahead of climate science.
“Most climate alarmists’ knowledge of science comes from TV shows like “The Big Bang Theory.””
I call these people ‘comic book scientists’.
The very notion that earth (or climate) science can make predictions as accurately as medicine is less than credible. Medicine is proven over generations of humanity, where this is still the first generation “Gaia” which has existed on a time scale that’s many orders of magnitude greater than what we’ve collectively experienced.
Yeah but medical doctors can bury their mistakes.
For many of the reasons the author himself mentions in his opening post, the comparison between medical doctors and climate scientists is inappropriate. As Mr. Goldstein says, Medical Doctors are highly-qualified professionals, are accountable to individual patients, and must earn the trust of patients to succeed. Climate scientists, meanwhile, are not accountable to any individual. They are often students breaking into the field with their theses, and are accountable only to their graduate advisers whose predilection is to support the status quo and keep the government grants flowing. Government, as we have seen, supports climate alarmism.
I would suggest a better comparison might be between Medical Research and Climate Science Research
Both seek out and depend on big government grants
Both have a history of beginning with falsified or incorrect information and “going from there” to form conclusions.
Both utilize slipshod “pre-trial” measures – they set up their experiments poorly
Both tend to guide their trials towards intended results
Both have too little incentive to check results before they publish
Both cherry pick the results they choose to report.
Supplemental data are omitted casually or deliberately
As many as half of research studies published are irreproducible
In many cases, graduate or post-doc students, do the research, then move on to other institutions or areas of employment. Their work cannot be reconstructed.
Cancer Research Is Broken
Article: “There’s a replication crisis in biomedicine—and no one even knows how deep it runs.”, by Daniel Engber
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/future_tense/2016/04/biomedicine_facing_a_worse_replication_crisis_than_the_one_plaguing_psychology.html
Agreed. The medical research may be the problem area. Much of it is based on statistics just like global warming. There are many statements about “deaths averted” and so forth, which have no possibility of empirical verification. Whatever the media loves gets put out there as the truth. Even “real” doctors push bad science if they can increase their audiences on TV or in the news. One-time studies with 5 subjects can “prove” something, rather than just being one piece of research to be taken in context with others.
Here’s a collection of past WUWT posts on the 97-Doctors analogy:
It’s pseudoscience fest again. Sigh…….
I have looked at this debate and it seem that the only thing missing is the bit about angels balancing on a pinhead.
Can anyone tell me who first coined the aphorism that putting ‘climate’ in front of ‘scientist’ is a bit like putting ‘witch’ in front of ‘doctor’ in terms of qualifying the professions involved?
All medical doctors and PHDs are significantly more susceptible to arguments based on appeals to authority than those less specially trained because they face higher pressures to conform.
They spend considerable time in academic environments which are breeding grounds for groupthink.
My sibling is a medical doctor and she can’t believe “scientists” like Mann would do anything nefarious and is easily swayed by the 97% meme. They are also dependent on many experts in pharmacy, research, testing, anesthesiology; so tend to accept the “authority” of these 3rd party experts which is easily transferred to believing “experts” in other disciplines.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
“Further, humans have been shown to feel strong emotional pressure to conform to authorities and majority positions. A repeat of the experiments by another group of researchers found that “Participants reported considerable distress under the group pressure”, with 59% conforming at least once and agreeing with the clearly incorrect answer, whereas the incorrect answer was much more rarely given when no such pressures were present.[35]
Scholars have noted that the academic environment produces a nearly ideal situation for these processes to take hold, and they can affect entire academic disciplines, giving rise to groupthink.”
FTOP_T May 17, 2017 at 4:05 pm says, “All medical doctors and PHDs are significantly more susceptible to arguments based on appeals to authority than those less specially trained because they face higher pressures to conform.”
+++FTOP-T
Experts are alright, if you learn to avoid them when they are exhibiting collective manias, psychoses and obsessions.