Guest post by David Middleton
This item on Real Clear Science caught my eye today…
Carl Sagan was fond of saying that, “Pseudoscience is embraced, it might be argued, in exact proportion as real science is misunderstood.” That was the conventional wisdom among skeptics at the time (quote from Demon Haunted World, published in 1997) – that the problem of pseudoscience or science-denial was essentially one of information deficit. Correct the deficit, and the science-denial goes away. We now know that the real situation is far more complex.
To reduce the acceptance of pseudoscience or the rejection of real science, we need to do more than just promote scientific literacy. We also need to understand what is driving the pseudoscience, and we need to give critical thinking skills.
[…]
They found that climate change denial was predicted mainly by political ideology, but not by low scientific literacy. Vaccine rejection was predicted by low scientific literacy and low faith in science, and also by religiosity and moral purity. Distrust of GM food was predicted by low scientific literacy and low faith in science. Neither vaccine or GM food rejection were predicted by political ideology.
[…]
Climate change is truly an exceptional science. It has been granted exceptions to the null hypothesis, the scientific method, and now it has clearly been granted an exception to basic logic.
“Pseudoscience is embraced, it might be argued, in exact proportion as real science is misunderstood.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Amazingly, Carl Sagan wrote The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark nine years after Al Gore and James Hansen invented Gorebal Warming.
In at least two recent papers, endorsement of the so-called scientific consensus that humans have been the primary drivers of recent climate change (AGW) wasn’t well-correlated with scientific literacy. Hence a special pleading: Climate science isn’t embraced, it might be argued, in exact proportion as real science is understood because conservatives are stupid.
In Not All Skepticism Is Equal: Exploring the Ideological Antecedents of Science Acceptance and Rejection, Rutjens et al., found the following:
Many topics that scientists investigate speak to people’s ideological worldviews. We report three studies—including an analysis of large-scale survey data—in which we systematically investigate the ideological antecedents of general faith in science and willingness to support science, as well as of science skepticism of climate change, vaccination, and genetic modification (GM). The main predictors are religiosity and political orientation, morality, and science understanding. Overall, science understanding is associated with vaccine and GM food acceptance, but not climate change acceptance. Importantly, different ideological predictors are related to the acceptance of different scientific findings. Political conservatism best predicts climate change skepticism. Religiosity, alongside moral purity concerns, best predicts vaccination skepticism. GM food skepticism is not fueled by religious or political ideology. Finally, religious conservatives consistently display a low faith in science and an unwillingness to support science. Thus, science acceptance and rejection have different ideological roots, depending on the topic of investigation.
Speaking as a small-r republican scientist, who believes in God, but rarely goes to church, I can categorically state that I have no more “faith” in science than I have “faith” in my engineers scale of box of Verithin colored pencils. Nor do I “support science”. I’m not even sure that it’s grammatically possible to “support science”. Science is a process, it is a tool. When it is properly employed, it works. It requires neither faith nor support.
Both Rutjens et al., 2017 (R17) and Drummond and Fishchoff, 2017 (DF17) found no correlation between acceptance of GMO foods with either politics or religion. DF17 found no correlation between acceptance of nanotechnology with either politics or religion. R17 found that increased scientific literacy was correlated with acceptance of vaccinations and GMO foods. However, neither study found a strong correlation between acceptance of AGW and scientific literacy.
This is from DF17:
Firstly, this does not demonstrate “a big gap between what scientists understand and what the public thinks it knows.” The two panels in the graph comprise a non sequitur to that “big gap.” The first panel has nothing to do with the supposed scientific consensus on climate change (humans are responsible for more than half of the warming since 1950). This is as bad as Doran & Kendall Zimmerman in its flawed logical reasoning. Accepting the assertion that humans are primarily responsible for climate change does not follow from knowing that carbon dioxide is a so-called greenhouse gas.
As a professional geologist, I know the answer to the first multiple choice question is “carbon dioxide” and the answer to the second question is “mostly because of natural patterns in the Earth’s environment.” There is no logical requirement for the first answer to lead to “mostly because of human activity such as burning fossil fuels.” Carbon dioxide can cause temperatures to rise without being the primary driver, or even a significant driver, of climate change.
Oddly enough, Doran & Kendall Zimmerman found that a majority of academic & government economic geologists (53%) agree with me (they only surveyed academic & government scientists. They excluded all Earth Scientists working in private sector businesses. The two key questions were:
1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?
2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?
I would answer risen to #1 and my answer to #2 would depend on the meaning of “significant contributing factor.” If I realized it was a “push poll,” I would answer “no.”
Interestingly, economic geologists and meteorologists were the most likely to answer “no” to question #2…
The two areas of expertise in the survey with the smallest percentage of participants answering yes to question 2 were economic geology with 47% (48 of 103) and meteorology with 64% (23 of 36).
The authors derisively dismissed the opinions of geologists and meteorologists…
It seems that the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes.
No discipline has a better understanding the “nuances” than meteorologists and no discipline has a better understanding of the “scientific basis of long-term climate processes” than geologists do.
Unless geologists are inherently more conservative than other scientists, this kind of blows a hole in their special pleading fallacy on behalf of climate science. Lefsrud & Meyer 2012 (LM12) analyzed a 2008 survey of APEGA, the organization responsible for certifying and licensing professional geoscientists and engineers in Alberta. They found that 64% of geoscientists rejected the so-called consensus for various reasons, with climate change being overwhelmingly natural leading the pack.
LM12 indicates that the polarization is more along the lines of private sector vs. government, with geoscientists being even more skeptical than the overall oil & gas industry.
What drives the skepticism among geoscientists? LM12 categorized the responses as:
64% of APEGA geoscientists reject the so-called consensus for many different reasons. 70% either rejected or were skeptical of climate models and the assertion that it is settled science. When 70% of a group of scientists reject the primary evidence for AGW, climate models, you have a scientific problem, not a political problem.
The polarization with scientific literacy is more likely to be driven by the nature of the scientific literacy rather than politics. As Kuhn wrote,
“Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction. Again, that is not to say that they can see anything they please. Both are looking at the world, and what they look at has not changed. But in some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations one to the other. That is why a law that cannot even be demonstrated to one group of scientists may occasionally seem intuitively obvious to another.”
–Thomas Kuhn, 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Vol. II, No. 2 p. 150
Petroleum geologists tend to be sedimentary geologists and sedimentary geology is essentially a combination of paleogeography and paleoclimatology. Depositional environments are defined by physical geography and climate. We literally do practice in a different world, the past. Geologists intuitively see Earth processes as cyclical and also tend to look at things from the perspective of “deep time.” For those of us working the Gulf of Mexico, we “go to work” in a world defined by glacioeustatic and halokinetic processes and, quite frankly, most of us don’t see anything anomalous in recent climate changes.
The following is from “God’s Undertaker:Has Science Buried God?” by John C. Lennox. “C.S. Lewis’ succinct formulation of Whitehead’s view is worth recording: ‘Men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.’ ” In order to do science, you must have faith that you can do science.
Most interesting thing in that study was the graph on the right of the first two in the article. As scientific literacy rises the growing divergence in views about the cause of GW is very pronounced. That’s very counter-intuitive and more than a bit of a head scratcher.
That’s because it is most likely fabricated B.S., a purposely manufactured meme so that they can say, skeptics are only skeptics because they are conservative.
How to do polls… the Yes Minister way…
Dodgy Geezer
Brilliant.
And all we get now is ‘I’m a celebrity, get me out of here’ (which I refuse to watch, along with Eastenders and BBC News. Oh, and the blue Planet which is a mesmeric presentation with an underlying, gentle, commentary supporting CAGW.
Good old brainwashing at it’s very best.
Is there anything British comedy cannot do?
And ban Yes (Prime-)Minister too.
Yes, yes. Oh god, please, yes. My god, I’m an atheistic scientist, but someone has actually noticed something important to me. You can’t believe how happy I am when somebody writes that.
Dating websites should take note. These are real questions that will sort the sheep from the goats.
michael hart
Strange dating sites. 🙂
Must be in New Zealand, a cross tasman barb to our good friends because they deserve it .. now don’t mention the rugby.
David,
“Science is a process, it is a tool. When it is properly employed, it works.”
In my understanding of the relevant lingo, that is most definitely a statement of faith.
“It requires neither faith nor support.”
Science does not conduct itself . . (Why would someone “employ” it unless they had faith in it? When’s the last time you “employed” a Ouija board? ; ) . . so, how can it be true that faith is not required?
PS ~ How does this relate to your line of science based work?
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
; )
I am not a “scientist”. I am a retired lawyer, and I know when questions are badly formed.
“What gas do most scientists believe causes temperatures in the atmosphere to rise Is it: hydrogen, helium, carbon dioxide, radon?”
The question lacks several predicates. The questioner must define scientist establish that there is group of people who are scientists, and that there a sufficient number of them to say that “most” of them believe something. Another missing predicate is a demonstration that gases can cause temperatures to rise. Further, the list of possibilities does not include none of the above, which renders the question badly formed and unanswerable.
Is the earth getting warmer (a) mostly because of human activity such as burning fossil fuels, or (b) mostly because of natural patterns in the earth’s environment.?
First, predicate, that the earth, or more precisely the earth’s atmosphere is getting warmer is (compared to when, and by how much?) not in evidence. Second the question is badly posed. The alternatives are not mutually exclusive and word mostly is not defined. Further its not logically possible fro a phenomenon to be caused by a pattern. A pattern is a human perception, caused by some process. The process could be non-human, but the word natural does not presuppose that.
” When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?”
How far back does pre-1800 go. I once read that there were forests in Antarctica. in some long past age. Is cyclical activity a possible answer.
2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?”
Predicate are global temperatures changing?
If lawyers conducted surveys, no one would get past the disclaimers… LOL!
Walter
“Further, the list of possibilities does not include none of the above, which renders the question badly formed and unanswerable.”
I’m not quite sure I understand that. “does not include none of the above”? It seems like a double negative, but I’ll happily accept it’s an appropriate term.
“It seems like a double negative”
Not if “none of the above” is understood to be in quotation marks or italics.
David ==> Very nicely done, thank you.
Polls, and social attitude studies that use questionnaires, are almost invariably extremely biased — and their creators almost never realize it. The questions used in the studies in question are ridiculously prejudiced and the expected answers transparently biased.
There is some hope that if they keep up this kind of study, they will discover that liberal/democrat/progressives simply believe what they are told without any attempt at critical thinking and that more conservative thinkers use their existing knowledge, seek further knowledge when unsure, and then critically examine the issues and data and make up their own minds, being natively distrustful of self-appointed “authorities”.
So far, the data is leaning pretty strongly towards towards my view.
Thanks Kip.
“Polls, and social attitude studies that use questionnaires, are almost invariably extremely biased — and their creators almost never realize it.”
I think the pollsters realize their poll is biased, but they are counting on their target demographic never realizing it.
SR
The one question I keep asking is – is this at all important?
The clear answer is – most certainly it is.
Having just listened to my Prime Minister talking with/about Al Gore and climate change, how can we combat such ingrained beliefs, in a person with such ‘power’ and influence?
Science should be the gold standard, but in this arena, it is proving anything but.
PM Ardern stated that 44,000 homes, 4 (or was it 5) airports and numerous other issues, were going to be affected by sea level rise.
Sheez!!!
And she and her government ARE going to move heaven and earth to make things right with the environment.
All based upon scientific best practice and evidence…..
Double sheez!!!
Geologists and petroleum engineers in private enterprise have to use observational data and their professional knowledge and experience to make important decisions. If they’re no good at it, they lose their jobs. Similarly academic geologists know they have to train their students to be competent to survive in the real world, or they will lose their jobs too. In contrast, most climate scientists are paid from tax-payers money, and it doesn’t matter whether their prognostications are right or wrong. They and their students never have to have their predictions tested in the real world, where there are direct and serious financial implications. That’s why they can afford to pursue the pathetically weak carbon dioxide hypothesis. In fact, to keep their jobs, they can’t afford not to.
Climate change is undefined. Hard to deny – or agree with – the undefined.
Actually, Climate Change is defined as anything other than a static climate. That is why the name of the theory was changed from “Global Warming” which predicts a change in a specific direction which can be proven or disproven to “Climate Change” which is true as long as some change happens and since the climate is never static, “Climate Change” is a proven theory!
[Quote from article]”The two areas of expertise in the survey with the smallest percentage of participants answering yes to question 2 were economic geology with 47% (48 of 103) and meteorology with 64% (23 of 36).”
I find it surprising that 64% of meteorologists from Alberta would agree that human activities caused warming. I used to work for a company of air pollution dispersion modelers with degrees in meteorology, and the vast majority of them did NOT think that carbon dioxide caused global warming. Meteorology is the study of the weather, and what is climate other than long-term weather patterns? So, meteorologists should know the science behind the causes of climate change better than most other scientists.
Perhaps the meteorologists who didn’t think that human activities cause warming were fired by a meteorological authority that are True Believers. That would be about par for the course.
Science is in the business of constantly proving itself wrong. That’s how it moves forward. There will always be resistance but in the long run as the Borg would say ” resistance is futile.” Sooner or later reality will take a giant bite out of the alarmists ass.
I am puzzled and distressed by the frequency with which the word “believ” appears above. “Believe” and “Belief” are religious words, and have no place in a discussion of science.
In fact, as I teach in a college-level course on course on critical thinking and the scientific method, the use of such words, if done on purpose, reveals the user to be a non-scientist.
Everything is based on some fundamental assumption or “belief”. For example, science is based on the belief that the universe has fundamental laws that can be logically deduced and are true everywhere in the universe. This is likely true but in reality it is an unproven assumption. Likewise in geometry, if you assume that the sum of the three angle of a triangle equal 180 degrees you can create Euclidean geometry from that (and a few other) assumptions, but you can just as easily assume that the sum of the angles of triangle are greater than 180 degrees and still create a perfectly logical and consistent non-Euclidean geometry.
Science is a system of doubt – Question Everything, as I tell my students. Only Religion contains some statement or assumption which is based on belief.
You refer to something which is “likely true”. I do not know what “truth” is when I speak of science.
And BTW, it is Reverend Geologist Down the Pub. In addition to practicing a science for some 60 years, I am ordained.
““Believe” and “Belief” are religious words, ”
Not5 really; “I believe” is equivalant to “It is my opinion that.” So saith my dictionaries.
Geologist: what is your definition of “knowledge?”
Generally, in short, in epistemology, the definition is “justified belief.”
I believe that the freezing point of water is 32 degrees F.
An experiment can be run many times in many ways, and I will end up having this observable evidence be the justification, the convincing, for holding this belief in my mind. In the end, what we are concerned with is the belief in my mind. And the minds of others.
As noted: science is a tool used to figure out what claims of knowledge we should believe. It is all about belief.
This thread and related article had me thinking of pseudo-scientific gibbersih that political “scientists” and social “scientists” engage in. Then it struck me about how literacy is so important.
So folks, with those Christmas/Hanukkah holiday parties and social gatherings season here, how do you get a way to get a conversation going with your liberal friends/family without immediately PO’ing them off.
Answer: Bring up a story that everyone can agree on, then segue from there to science illiteracy on the Left for “believing” in climate change alarmism.
Recently there was a news story of the Tampa Bay Police American sign language interpreter who was video-recorded signing gibberish.
Read about it here to familiarize yourself with the details.
Phony sign language interpreter signs gibberish
http://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2017/12/05/sign-language-interpreter-imposter-tampa-orig-trnd-lab.cnn
So to the sign-language illiterate watchers (me, hand held-high), this suposed sign-language interpreter made all the seemingly correct gestures, she paused when the speaker paused, she moved her hands in ways that to my illiterate eyes looked like sign language. But to the sign-language literate, it was pure gibberish.
This is exactly where social sciences and political sciences are. They make Pure gibberish to the trained eyes of a real scientist. They make moves and actions that kinda look like science with statistics and data gathering and all. But still it is gibberish. And it is this gibberish that allows the politically biased left in those university academic departments to create fake interpretations to smear the climate skeptics.
Use sign-language gibberish story to segue in a holiday conversation with your liberal friends and family about how the Left uses science illiteracy to promote the 97% climate consensus propaganda lie.
Clever, but sadly I think most of my liberal acquaintances would only hear gibberish since they don’t recognize either facts or the truth.
joelobryan December 5, 2017 at 6:43 pm
That is a powerful metaphor (analogy?)!
Which is the “real” science? The old science collected, analyzed, and published years ago or the new science where the same old data were reimagined into something contradictory?
I was reading a recent story about Roy moore where a woman provided evidence of a friendship with roy years ago when she was 17.
The evidence included thoughtful cards, her own contemporaneous notes about dates they went on, etc. Everything showed that she was thrilled to be involved with him, very much enjoyed their social interactions, left on friendly terms, and she even sent him a gift years later when he was appointed as a judge.
But now, in December 2017, she realized that all of these pleasant memories were actually very troubling and revealed a pattern of deviant behavior on his part.
Every time the Warmists reimagine the old data to change the interpretation, i just shake my head and write them off as hacks. They are serial data torturers, and deserve every ounce of skepticism they receive.
“But now, in December 2017, she realized that all of these pleasant memories were actually very troubling and revealed a pattern of deviant behavior on his part.”
That’s because she just realized that he was pursuing others as well at the same time. She’d thought she was the only one and that their relationship was special.
Pseudoscience is science based on opinion by so-called “experts”, who may have never ventured out farther than the library. It reminds me of the fall of science described in Asimov’s “Foundation Trilogy”, where the galactic empire was beginning to collapse and the use of opinion science was a symptom (or one root cause) of the failure.
We seem to have moved away from data driven science to “peer reviewed” paper science, where a peer review of other “experts” is enough to validate a theory (or model, which is just a hypothesis turned into code), and “expert” opinion trumps actual data.
Don’t get me wrong, models are an important part of defining the expectations, but they are just that, an expectation with little supporting data yet. But nothing beats data, and not just conveniently-selected data. Had I used the fraudulent means used by many today in my career I would have been in prison. As a working experimental physicist it was my job to find ways to measure difficult phenomena and then to use the instrumentation we developed and proved to validate models created to predict how our eventual sensors would perform. Bad experimental practices or fraudulent selective data would mean failed instruments and (for the second part of my career—after I left pure science and worked for a defense contractor) dead American soldiers.
Just imagine if the turbulent atmospheric model used to correct for refractive effects on a defensive missile system were fudged, or the data selectively used. You miss the incoming warhead by a lot and everyone dies. With climate models, we can have just as much damage to the economy, which severely impacts people’s lives and the misallocation of resources leaves families struggling and unable to buy what should be affordable medical care or whatever. And when the “expert opinion” is held up as a replacement for data, that’s what we get.
AGW is a conjecture based on only partial science. I cannot defend it as a matter of science. There is no consensus regarding the AGW conjecture because scientists have not registered and voted on the matter. Such a consensus if it existed would be meaningless because science is not a demoracy. The idea of such a consensus is political and has nothing to do with science.
The math behind Einstein’s relativity theorems is incomprehensible to most people. People accept his theorems anyway because most scientists accept his theorems. Thus, acceptance of these theorems by the public is driven by the consensus of belief among scientists.
“Climate scientists” took note of this fact, and think their conjectures will be accepted by the public if the public believes there is a consensus of belief among scientists. Thus the phony 97% claim.
Since “climate scientists” are not real scientists, they don’t realize that Einstein’s theorems were only accepted by scientists following the confirmation of certain predictions made by his theorems; that all they have to do to earn a consensus of belief is demonstrate a confirmation of their predictions.
On the other hand, perhaps they realized confirmation of their predictions wasn’t gonna happen, so their only hope of continuing the gravy train was to fabricate the 97% consensus.
Incompetence or fraud, or both. The failure of all predictions eliminates the possibility they don’t know they are wrong.
SR
People believe Einstein because scientists conducted a world shattering experiment in the desert that broke the atom and validated his theory of energy and mass.
When these climate clowns unleash the power of CO2 so I can heat my house this winter by opening a can of soda or exhale, they will be afforded the same general acceptance.
Further, I agree with your characterization of their motives and strategy. I see no hard science in climate science like the Manhattan Project.
Note under the two chart graphic ”
“Predicted probabilities derived via Monte Carlo simulation based on logistic regression”
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