We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Unreasonable costs Reason TV has a very fine lecture by Bjorn Lomberg on global warming available. Bjorn is one of the few people out there who represent a position similar to mine. Yes, it is happening; yes, there will be winners and losers… but it is not the end of the world.
He shows in case after case how governments are throwing away billions upon billions of dollars, pounds, and yen for ‘solutions’ which will have virtually no effect at all.
It is well worth watching.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Both you and Bjorn clearly miss the point.
Whether Global Warming is happening or not is irrelevant.
There are political oganizations that have a need to do battle, to visit violence upon their foes, and to win.
Details like ‘truth’ and ‘consequences’ are of no concern. It is the battle and the Will to Power.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got cookies to toss.
But the truth is it isn’t happening. There is no global warming. The claim that the earth is warming has been quite comprehensively rebutted and in fact temperatures are down over the last decade.
I’m not going to spew too many links here; you can use google too. But you could do worse that start at climate skeptic
Carbon dioxide is not warming the Earth.
To someone that lives in the city all live-long life, it is easy to look out and marvel at all of the cars on the road and the factory stacks belching gas into the atmosphere, and think, “of course all of this has to do something!”
But there is no concept of scale there. The planet is enormous. Sailing the Pacific ocean puts that into perspective. All the cities, towns and villages put together on Earth would hardly cover single percentage point just that body of water.
On the way to Japan from Okinawa, we’d fly by an active volcano which 24 hours a day, everyday including Christmas, spewed more gas into the atmosphere than every car in New Jersey. That’s something outside almost everyone’s experience.
As cultured and open-minded as cosmopolitans believe they are, they are prisoners of their own provincialism. They cannot believe that the world dwarfs them.
And then there’s all the data which screams “solar power” louder than the Sierra Club.
But if you still cannot shake the AGW bug, I’ll bet you a Coke that the Polar Ice Caps will still be there in 5 years. No diet, please. 🙂
Here we go again. Sad to say, the cost-benefit studies of the likes of Lomborg, or discussion about the massive rent-seeking by the likes of the Carbon Trust, gets buried under mad cross-accusation between those who want to believe that climate change is a punishment for human wickedness and the most serious and urgent threat ever, and those who want to believe anything at all except a human cause.
There is a vast gulf between green fanatics who play numbers through their PS3s and consider their high scores the definitive proof of AGW, and skeptics who treat science as solemnly as it should be treated. This is not a game. The scientific method is designed to eliminate falsehoods, not support magical thinkers.
There are three suppositions here: one, the world is actually warming, which it may not be; two, a warming Earth is a bad thing, which it probably isn’t; and three, the forgotten third, that human beings are causing it.
The first supposition (the world is warming) has not been proven, and the “evidence” put forward so far rarely makes it out of XBox360 computer simulations. The second is conjecture. The third is so unlikely it is a joke that anyone would believe it.
Really, you believe that your SUV is going to add anything to the Earth’s atmosphere (by weight, 53 million million tonnes) that will, even over centuries, measure even over the standard deviation? Really?
Again, extremely unlikely, even if you put hundreds of millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year and that percentage monotonically increased.
But, what do I know? After all, Nobel Prize winner Al Gore says the science is settled and so does Leonardo DeCaprio. It must be true!
Vercinfetorix, you more than prove Guy’s point.
Dale,
I disagree with you on AGW but I do wish these folks (above) would have kept OT because you raise an interesting point.
I am very AGW skeptic but of course I could be wrong. If you hop over to The Whited Sepulchre Allen has a piece about “food miles” which Greens go on and on about. Problem is the shipping of food from producer to store accounts for only 4% of the energy involved in producing said food. It really is rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. And there are loads more “Green Myths” and these are things at the individual consumer scale so God knows what gubbermint thinks…
The point is if AGW is nonsense we are fecking about needlessly and to no end other than bending the economy out of shape completely.
If AGW is true then all this Greenery is just not helping either. It is baling out the Atlantic with a thimble.
So we’re damned either way. We either needlessly wreck the economy or we tackle a huge problem with window dressing.
Oh and as Paul Marks has said repeatedly –
If the Greens are serious about CO2 then why aren’t they cheerleading for nuclear power?
I agree that the question that libertarians should be asking is not is AGW true but what should people living in a free society do about it? It seems to me that there ought to be a sober, cost-benefit assessment of whether mitigating its effects through various fixes is a better way of dealing with AGW than trying to eliminate production of carbon, as seems to be the argument of the most fanatical Greens.
But I agree that simply shoving one’s head in the sand and saying that AGW is a scare put about but hippies and misanthropes is not going to persuade any outside the ranks of the committed.
Slightly off-topic: I recommend the movie “Sunshine”, which is about how a group of scientists try to “fix” the problem of the sun losing its heat power. Not a bad film.
The big problem you have there is that that is what is actually the case. It is a deliberate scare with no factual basis. The Enemy basically runs all its programmes based on such scares- obesity, passive smoking, what have you.
It’s pointless, utterly, totally, fucking completely, pointless, accepting a lie that trying to argue for some kind of moderate response to the lie. The whole reason for the lie is to set the terms of the discussion and constrain policy to a set of consequential answers. If carbon is destroying the planet- and let us pause here to let sink in the sheer absurdity of the assertion that carbon, the basis of all life, is harmful- then of course it follows that draconian restrictions on carbon will have to be imposed.
But it is a lie. It is a bald, bare-faced, astonishingly ridiculous lie, and the greatest tragedy is that it is been so ruthlessly hegemonically imposed that even sensible people feel shy about squarely refusing to accept it.
There is no use to a discussion of mitigation of a problem that does not exist, and frankly anyone who thinks the AGW theocrats are going to have a rational discussion about cost benefit analyses is living in a land of clouds and cuckoos. They’re not interested in that. It’s not the purpose of the lie.
Ian B: “and let us pause here to let sink in the sheer absurdity of the assertion that carbon, the basis of all life, is harmful”
Thank you, about time some one said that.
And by the way, how do you put ‘Carbon’ into the atmosphere in any lasting way?
What goes into the atmosphere are oxides of Carbon. Carbon and its oxides have different properties, put one into the atmosphere and you very likely get dust, put the other specifically Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere and the evidence suggests you actually get an increase in vegitation.
FFS plants like the stuff.
Nah, Dale is right. Warming happened. Whether it was anthropogenic is open to dispute, but what is not easily disputed is that the specific AGW hypothesis, as implemented in the models cited by the IPCC, has been falsified.
The behaviour of the climate for the past (13, 11, 7 (reasonable people can disagree)) years is contrary to the predictions made by the models, and it is the failure of the AGW proponents to acknowledge this, or even discuss it, that I find reprehensible.
That the solutions proposed are usually command and control, rather than free market, tells me all I need to know about the rationale behind it all.
Ian B,
Yes carbon is the basis of all life. So’s water. Try inhaling some and see how long you last. Your argument is no more scientific than the AGW types passing off computer models as actual experiments.
Obviously a lot of Greens are just lunatics who are thoroughly misanthropic nut-jobs and have seized on a staggeringly complicated scientific problem as justification for their quasi-religion but that does not refute them scientifically now does it? For that you have to get down and dirty in the trenches of fluid mechanics and God knows what else.
That’s why I’m a AGW skeptic. I don’t believe they’ve proved anything because the problems are so effing complicated and involve so many interacting systems. I’m saying the case is not proven and it is utterly disingenous of the AGWers to say it is and to demand surreal quantities of money are spent on going “carbon-neutral” or whatever.
I suspect it’s all (oddly enough) non-linear hype as the result of a confluence of interests but I’m not prepared to dismiss it just because of that. I’m rationally skeptical on it as science. What I do though hate is it’s cack-handed incarnation as policy.
I’m going to let the debate run… I have little to say to the religious of either sect. I prefer science out of peer reviewed journals.
… but what I will discuss is policy, because that is simply a matter of human choice, not physics.
Yes, because the two sides of the argument are just the same, just like biologists and creationists**. Right? To oppose the promotion of absurdity is the same as to promote absurdity. Right?
Really, Dale? Chanting “peer reviewed” is always useful, isn’t it. Let’s remember what peer review is- the editor of a journal asks some friends what they think of a paper. If the editor and his mates believe in faeries, the journal will only print faerie-positive papers.
It’s called self-policing. It’s that system whereby a class scrutinises itself (e.g. police, or judges, or politicians) and the declares that everything is fine and nobody need question them. You trust the police, judges or politicians to self police? No? What’s that? Scientists are unique among humanity in being able to achieve absolute objectivity and never be biased towards their own benefit? Oh, fuck off.
Dale & Everyone
Congrats to the Samizdata crowd (What do you call a horde of Libertarian individualists?)
This is the most adult and intelligent debate on AGW I’ve ever seen.
One point that I’d like to bring up is about CO2. Fans of the AGW theory like to point out that there is more CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere than ever in history.
A. Is this true ? Was there a period 100,000 years ago or so when thanks to volcanos, forest fires, etc there was more CO2 ?
B. Does it matter ? Will the carbon cycle work itself out?
I’m a skeptic, since I think that any time you have a theory that just happens to fit somebody’s political agenda it’s time to get very very nervous. That goes for Intelligent Design as well as for AGW.
I think I have to come down on IanB’s side here.
Us/the AGW skeptics are not dealing with an opponent here that is prepared to argue in good faith, and the last thing the opposition want to do is debate this issue using the Scientific Method.
If the terminology seems too combatitive, that’s intentional. This isn’t science , it’s an ideology; one where not only the message itself, but the legitimacy of their campaign and their real agenda should be thrown into disrepute.
The meme that man is causing Global Climate Change deserves (and needs) to be utterly discredited in its current form. Society needs to throw this back with a damn huge ‘F’ on it and make these people resubmit their papers when they’ve done their homework. And the only way to make that happen is to expose not just the message, but the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of their whole endeavour.
The real issue underlying this is not so much AGW itself, it’s the pernicious democratization of science that legitimizes all sorts of faulty reasoning, particularly Argument by Popularity. Without demolishing this ‘enabling mentality’, all that’ll happen is the fight against shitty AGW research will be replaces with a fight against some other junk science shibboleth. And all they have to do is luck out and predict some crisis that actually does become a crisis (despite their faulty reasoning) and ‘good science’ itself will be discredited.
I see a lot of people here argue that principles matter, and that fighting the symptoms of a social disease like statism is not enough – you have to treat the cause. Similarly, AGW’s the symptom. Society’s acceptance of Scientific Cargo Cultism and Shamanism is the cause.
FWIW, I suspect that given time and some real research and attention to honest computer models, there will be solid evidence that mankind is affecting CO2 levels. Whether these are shown to be detrimental to Gaia is an ENTIRELY different matter.
For Taylor’s question A: concerning the long history of atmospheric CO2, try this from Wikipedia.
There is lots of variability, to say nothing of doubt. Current levels are at a historical low, on the grand scale of things, which is hardly surprising given so much carbon in fossil fuels and calcium carbonate rock, both from deposition by various lifeforms.
Best regards
This misses the point. What if global warming, either man made or not, is happening. What should be done about it? It seems to me that simply stating that AGW is part of some “watermelon” (green on the outside, red on the inside) conspiracy of the enemy class, etc, etc, is not much use.
The trouble with libertarians who just want to change the subject over AGW is that they/we sound a bit like those isolationist characters who want to square the problem of terrorism/civil lberties by just denying that there is a significant terrorism problem at all. But what if there is a problem? It seems that without the ability to at least consider such possibilities, the libertarian worldview is vulnerable. That is broadly what Dale Amon is driving at.
Jonathan,
What if global warming, either man made or not, is happening? What should be done about it?
That is a question that does need to be answered. Unfortunately I suspect that the answer you’ll get here will be “it’s all a watermelon conspiracy” over and over again.
What if ice-cold winters / sweltering-hot summers are happening: what should be done about it?
Given that weather extremes are vastly more upsetting than the average (or at least I find them so), perhaps we should concentrate on those first. Any ideas on what controls we have available?
And then some people in some places would probably like things to be a bit colder: say ski resorts that have had a bad time during the recent spell of rather warm snowless and/or rainy winters. Others might like things to be a bit warmer: say farmers or winemakers that have had poor crops because of inadequate ripening periods.
Even if we could control climate or weather, what would be the right target(s)?
Best regards
What if the world is slowly being consumed by mutant termites? What if Allah is expressing anger at us by causing hurricanes? What if the moon is hurtling towards earth? What if the geist has gone haywire thus leading inevitably to the end of all human existence? What if an international Jewish cabal is manipulating energy markets in order to create a Zionist super-empire?
Sure, Libertarians should reject statist answers to these problems, but they must provide their own solutions: the intellectual integrity of Libertarianism demands it!!!!
Or maybe it doesn’t, because what I care about, to be blunt, is f**king over the scumbags who are driving this country and the western world simultaneously towards tyranny and chaos, not providing solutions that are compatible with the literary output of Bastiat to imaginary problems.
Stop trying to be so damned clever all the time.
This is a great discussion bringing together a wide spectrum of opinions on the matter. Here’s my two-penneth:
1. There is no proof whatsoever that AGW is definitely happening. What the IPCC and Al Gore puts out as proof has been shown to be either exaggerated, based on unrealistic computer modelling, or simply made up.
2. There is, however, some evidence that AGW MAY be happening, and this evidence shouldn’t be discounted. There is little doubt that we have been going through a lengthy and strong warming period, although it appears we may be coming out of it right now.
3. It is wholly good to look for economically viable ways of reducing our (and I hate this phrase) “Carbon Footprint” and certainly good economic and security-related reasons to reduce our dependency on oil and fossil fuels. Not least the fact that oil – although tales of its scarcity are hugely exaggerated – is a finite substance.
4. It is not, however, acceptable to just throw money at this problem and adversely affect the whole world’s economic stability. I refer to point 1 again.
5. To say this is a “Watermelon” invention is probably unfair.
6. However, there is no doubt that unscupulous politicians the world over are using AGW as an excuse to tax and control their populations. This must be resisted at all costs, and is indeed a greater danger than the threat from global warming itself.
7. The mistake that many people here appear to be making is to think that points 5 and 6 aren’t compatible. Global warming – like the “terror threat” – may, to a greater or lesser extent, be real, but that doesn’t stop politicians being able to abuse and manipulate it for their own ends.
If global warming is happening I would advise farmers and companies involved in agriculture to consider the development (either through breeding programmes or GM) of crops that are better suited to the changed climate. This may need a little more information on the likely direction of change before serious money will be invested.
I would advise those living at or near sea level to invest in improved flood defences (I believe the Dutch government is already doing something along these lines).
It might be appropriate for governments to start considering the likely impact of mass migrations and what (if any) their response would be.
These, and any other, strategies are not likely to be cheap and may be unaffordable of the policies enthusiastically espoused by the greens are followed.
I can see no advantage in pretending that global warming can be prevented or reversed by the destruction of western economies and the prevention of other economies from achieving the same state of development.
The IPCC reckons the earth has warmed 0.7C in the last century and the sea has risen an inch or two. They project, not predict, that the earth may warm another 1 to 5C in the current century and that the sea will rise by a few more inches. This is based on peer-reviewed science and computer modeling. This can be argued with using peer reviewed science and different models. There is plenty of peer reviewed science doing just that, as well as a few models.
The “we’re all doomed”, “we must act drastically now, before it’s too late”, “it’s already too late”, “the seas will rise, there will be a plague of frogs, darkness will be upon the land, the seas will rise and smother us all, unless you give me lots of money” stuff is coming from politicians and must be argued politically.
Arguing things politically these days needs to be very loud and involves lots of stunts, papier mache heads and icon burning.
I would suggest that we skeptics march on Westminster and Brussels with lots of signs and papier mache puppet heads and burn effigies of Al Gore, James Hanson and Monbiot.
Of course the sensible thing to do would be to establish a worldwide network of climate stations that measured temperature, humidity and CO2 content supported by weather balloons, satellites and ocean buoys. Had we done this at the beginning we would have by now a much clearer picture of global climate and many clues as to the role of CO2, and possibly anthropogenic CO2, in climate change. The study of the contrast between dry areas and humid areas might be particularly instructive.
It is not too late to do this, but it doesn’t FIX THE PROBLEM NOW, so it is of course a non-starter.
So, papier mache puppet heads it is then.
Oh yes it bloody well does. If libertarians constantly go around denouncing all such theories as mad scares, then what is going to happen when one of the scares happens to be proven correct?
Of course, I favour property-based systems, markets, etc, in dealing with AGW etc, but I do not rule out that such problems might exist.
Me too, of course. Anything that involves using the the state to coerce people would be immoral.
Johnathan, if a real problem comes along great, we’ll deal with it. But the only rational response to a mad scare is to denounce it as a mad scare. Otherwise you end up advocating free market solutions to the “witch problem” instead of just stating the correct view that there is no such thing as sorcery.
Some stunts that might help:
Get some of the shapelier female skeptics, (preferably with PhDs in the hard sciences), to strip naked and lie on the side of a hill, (just below the snowline), spelling out the message “CO2 IS PLANT FOOD”.
I realise that this stunt could be construed as sexist but, given the fact that it is difficult to attract the media to the skeptical message, this sadly may be neccessary.
Lots of signs and leaflets saying “NO TO CARBON TAXES” and “GIVE ME ENERGY OR GIVE ME DEATH” and “NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION”, (this for Brussels, obviously).
I’m sure that a bit of thought by those cognisant of modern political methodology can come up with some more.
We also need some handsome, smooth talking presenters as well as some avuncular scientific looking types to make our case in the media. (A call to central casting should provide what we need.
Then, of course, there is the wild eyed prophet of doom who stomps about predicting disaster if the various government carbon reduction schemes are put in place.
We can do this people. Let’s get to it!
Johnathan,
I think the true direction is to be intellectually rigorous and demand scientific PROOFS based upon the elimination of bogus theories and hypotheses. Anything else isn’t science, and to accommodate the fears of the unscientific but loud voices is as likely to discredit science as anything else.
However, I’d support you and say that denouncing these THEORIES as ‘mad scares’ is counterproductive. We should be demanding strict and unassailable proof from these asshats. Nothing more, nothing less. Account for every anomaly. If a model can’t model the past (including such inconveniences as the medieval cooling periods etc) then that model is worthless. If these people claim to be scientists, let’s hold them to the credo of the scientist.
Simultaneously (in order to save time) I have no problem with taking a belt and braces (belt and suspenders to all the Americans) view and propose multiple solutions to the problem, including and not limited to migration, climate tinkering and even economic destitution. Lay ’em all out on the table.
The monomania among the opposition is a huge clue as to why they are wrong. They see a supposed problem and have one and only one proposed solution to it. I agree with you that the watermelon analogy will come back and bite us if we (over)use it. Let’s not get into arguments about the precise nature of the totalitarian utopia these people want to take us to, let’s just ensure people know what’s down the road if we let elected know-nothing technocrats and their lickspittle Igors take control of our lives.
We do not have to provide solutions to whatever hobgoblins the left dreams up. Why cede to them the moral high ground? Their theory has no evidence, hence we are under no obligation to waste our time writing tedious “cost-benefit” analyses on the basis of arbitrary “what-if” stories. I wouldn’t say that such analyses are totally useless, but they are very much secondary to the argument that the theory is tosh in the first place.
It’s just like arguing economics. You can argue with lefty dunces until you are blue in the face why free markets make people better off. They don’t care. They will always find a reason why it is necessary to regulate, control and dictate. The fundamental argument is always about ethics, and until you address that issue you won’t make any headway.
The same argument is tied in here; give in to their nonsense that there just might be “global warming”, despite their being no evidence for it and plenty against it, and you consign yourself, unnecessarily, to an argument you can’t win.
There seems to be a very strange belief that keeps cropping up that anyone involved in climate research is a leftist, authoritarian, or both. I am neither, and I don’t know any colleagues I’d put into either category.
Leftists and authoritarians might find particular scientific hypotheses to their liking if they can be used as an excuse to justify state intervention, but that does not necessarily imply that the scientists who came up with them did so to satisfy leftist, authoritarian urges.
To throw in another bone.
I’ve always maintained that using the Language “Global Warming” is just damn disingenious regardless of whether or not AGW is occurring.
What is likely actually happening is a shifting of climate patterns both at the local level, microclimates, and on a wider scale. Some places get colder, some places get hotter. The ice melts on one side of antartica and gets thicker on the other side.
knirirr
I try to differentiate the scientists from the political activists in my comments, but I spend a fair amount of time browsing ClimateAudit and sometimes the behaviour of the AGW scientists makes it difficult.
For instance, scan through the posts there on the ‘Santer 17’ paper. Santer et al is a paper, (with seventeen co-authors), that seeks to rebut research casting doubts on the model predictions of temperatures in the tropical troposphere.
Steve McIntyre contacted Hadley CRU seeking data and documentation on which the paper was based. When he was met with the usual stonewalling he brought a FOI request. Each of the researchers he sought data from returned the same, legally parsed, denial. It seems that none of Santer’s co-authors had any data or documentation on the paper they were so deeply involved with. This seems to be typical of all the scientists involved with the IPCC process. Data and methods have to be dragged out of them and denial is common.
An early request to HADCRU was met with a refusal along the lines of “why should I share my data and methods with you when you’ll only try to cast doubt on them”. Requests for comments submitted by HADCRU on IPCC reports, (what puts the peer in peer review), was met with a variation on “the dog ate my homework” excuse.
Then there’s James Hansen. The leader of the GISS team that is responsible for one of the main temperature records of the recent past as well as the models which project the future is also one of the main prophets of doom who spread exagerated claims and demand immediate drastic action from governments. He also flew to the UK to give evidence in support of the greenpeace protesters who defaced a coal-fired power station, arguing that they were on the side of the greater good.
So, yes, I’ll accept that not all scientists involved with climate change are leftists/authoritarians, but there are a large number of them who behave like it, and the closer they are to the IPCC the more authoritarian they seem.
I’m with Nick M on this. “We either needlessly wreck the economy or we tackle a huge problem with window dressing.” If AGW isn’t a myth (and I happen to think that it is) all the Kyoto-esque proposals will accomplish nothing. (I remember reading somewhere that their own models predict that if all the Kyoto Protocols were adopted and implemented it would only affect the global temperature by about 1/10th of a degree over the next century, which would be essentially meaningless.)
I don’t know (and nobody else does, either) if Global Warming is happening right now or not, but clearly it will happen some day. So what? The history of this planet is one of constantly changing weather. A thousand years ago the world was much warmer than it is today; maybe we’re just regressing to the mean. There’s a lot of good which would result from a warmer climate, and rather than engaging in a quixotic and unwinnable battle against it we should be preparing to embrace it. The change isn’t going to happen overnight, so even if the mean sea level rises a few feet we can deal with it over the decades we’ll have. Building a few sea walls, and maybe even abandoning some low-lying property, will be immensely cheaper than trying to shrink our “carbon footprint.”
I might note that many commenters seem to not have listened to the video on Reason TV for which I provided a link. I strongly urge you do so.
Most of you have much to learn about meme subversion. Even if you are a skeptic, you should still figure out a way to hijack the dominant meme to serve your goals, at the same time as you push the truth. There should be no contradiction.
For example: we all have a serious interest in breaking free of oil, to screw over OPEC and the other enemies of humanity who rely on it. Ergo, we should fight for control of the AGW narrative, and focus not on rationing carbon per se, but making oil unnecessary. This is already going on with the development of the electric car, and to the degree that AGW has added to the impetus, then it has been a good thing. See for example how nuclear power has suddenly been put back on the table, reframed as a global warming fix.
Additionally, I’m sure we could find a government policy or five that promote wasteful use of energy, if we tried. That way, you attach libertarian concepts to the dominant meme, and weaken its link with statism.
To focus all your energies on skepticism, when you can accomplish more by pursuing a mixed strategy, is self-defeating.
Indeed. Science is for skeptics, not zealots.
Buy an umbrella perhaps and some Hawaiian shirts?
But if AGW is the case, I would say that Malthus was wrong and this several century “disaster” is quite survivable.
Still, the hubris of AGW supporters is enough for me to be patient and let the gods work their vengeance.
AGW is no longer a hobgoblin of the left. the public’s imagination has been captured by the doomsday scenarios. addressing the concerns of the public (whether real or imagined) is what policy is about. if libertarian policies and policy-makers (oxy-moron that it is) can not or will not address the concerns of the public, be prepared for statist solutions.
Vercingetorix is correct. The scale of the earth is so big that it is incomprehensible. According the the US Dept of Agriculture, only 5% of NON-Federal land in the US is developed. Considering Federal land is about 70% of the US, less than 2% of ALL land in the US is developed. Yet, we must recycle (at a larger cost of energy) to save landfills. Idiots!!!
As with Verc volcano analagy. when Mt St Helens erupted years ago, by itself, it emitted more ‘STUFF’ into the air than all the cars emitted in the history of this planet together. Mother Nature is laughing at us.
Nick nails it, as always, especially when it comes to science.
I also have to agree with Gabriel here. Why should libertarians be expected to deal with each and every problem humans might be facing, be it real or imaginary? I thought that the whole point of libertarianism is to show that humans are able to deal with any such problem without the interference of governments. AGW, whether it is real or not in my view, is a real problem in some (many) people’s view. Consequently, they are the people who should be looking for solutions of the kind that don’t force anything on those of us who don’t consider it a problem. The question whether these particular people happen to be libertarians or not is irrelevant, except for the “don’t force anything” part. It’s just the same as if we were discussing Muslims who might think that humans eating pork angers Allah and might bring about the end of the world or whatever. Whether I believe this is of no interest from a libertarian point of view, as long as no one forces me to give up pork. I guess my point here is simply that the scientific question needs to be completely separated from the political one.
Lastly, and long overdue, I really like Kevin B’s comments. Of course, it is easy for me to say, since, even though I am a female skeptic, I have no PhD in hard science.
Dale:
I did have a look at the presentation but didn’t watch the whole thing as it started off looking very much like this one which I have watched in full (including Lomborg’s opponent’s presentation) already. I might have a another look later as I think your link has a longer version.
Kevin B:
I understand why people might look upon scientists with suspicion for such behaviour as you describe.
From the scientists’ point of view it may not seem worth discussing research other than in the peer reviewed journals as it is likely to be misunderstood or misrepresented and facing a hostile audience isn’t much fun anyway.
I linked to this last time I commented on a blog to say that we’re not all bad; it may be of interest.
Dale, I am listening to the video as I type this. Lomborg is presenting some very sound logical thinking, which, in my view, happens to be based on a false premise. Am I missing anything?
Lomborg’s presentation eloquently addresses Jonathan Pierce’s hypothetical: “What if AGW is real?”
If real, reducing carbon emissions will do no good. The money even in worst cases would work better in other directions.
The focus on emissions is one clear indicator that the people running this show, even the ones who believe it, don’t really believe it. Emissions are the wrong point at which to measure. Baking bread emits CO2, but its contribution to (hypothetical) AGW would be zero, since it is simply releasing some of the carbon it previously absorbed when growing as wheat. The only thing that would matter would be adding extra carbon to the biosphere. Once carbon is in the biosphere, you can’t control it. It will cycle in and out of the atmosphere. This is such basic science that it seems to me beyond doubt that the believers, especially those in the sciences (as opposed to the barmcakes in the NGOs who probably think trees are made of soil, or something) do not believe in AGW.
What I mean by this is- when I was a youngster we had another apocalypse to think about- nuclear war. And me and my friends, we knew lots about nuclear war, and talked about it a lot, about airbursts and the best kind of fallout shelter and whether to kill granny at the first sign of radiation sickness, or let her die in the shelter. And we talked about this thing as a real thing. But did we really believe it would ever happen? I don’t think we did. We believed we believed, but we didn’t believe really at all.
The green apocalypticists strike me as being the same; elderly adolescents jabbering excitedly about the details of this apocalypse, because it’s titillating. It’s exciting. They imagine the shotgun battles with the packs of dogs, and eating the neighbours if things get really bad, and discussing what tins to stockpile, but it’s really just an abstraction, a narrative to chatter about before double maths.
Dale, as a non-scientist I can’t deal with Lomberg’s initial assertion that AGW is happening and that’s the end of that discussion. Greater intellects such as Freeman Dyson are skeptical, more knowledgeable scientists such as Richard Lindzen are deniers.
To believe in global warming based on an unproven causality with rising carbon, when we are in a cooling period, is to believe 2 + 2 = 5 without being subjected to room 101.
When Bjorn Lomborg wrote the Skeptical Environmentalist, he took as a foundational principle that he would present the “official” figures, whatever they might be. A lot of the time, he quotes the UN, for example. And in a lot of those cases the official figures contradict the Green claims.
For him to suddenly pick and choose because he doesn’t like what the “official” figures say would open him to the charge of hypocrisy, and he’s under heavy attack already. So instead he takes the line that even if you accept what the IPCC says at face value, it still isn’t a disaster, and it still isn’t our most urgent or serious problem. (Which is true.)
He fights in his way, and the rest of us fight in ours, and hopefully between us we cover all bases.
It’s a valid approach. You don’t have to agree with him on the details.
knirirr:
The point about the scientists behaviour is that according to the IPCC charter the whole process should be entirely open, and most of the journals in which the peer reviewed studies are published demand open archiving of data and methods as a condition of publication.
Yet the scientists at the core of the IPCC, (who are also at the core of GISS and HADCRU), do their best to obstruct any attempt at auditing their work. This defensive ring at the heart of the ‘consensus’ is bound to evoke cries of “what have they got to hide”.
The irony is that Steve McItyre is a lefty who admits that if he were a politician, he would follow the advice of the scientists on global warming.
He’s a statistician who hates to see improper use of statistical methods and started by challenging Mann et al’s infamous Hockey Stick. His later brushes with Hansen, Gavin Schmidt and the rest came from that.
Alisa:
Thanks. Of course I did say the PhD was “preferable” not necessary, so if you’re volunteering…
I see a great deal of conflation of ‘science’ with ‘policy’ in this discussion. The omigod its a disaster scenarios are from the political side, not the science side. This is not to say that some scientists are not running away with politics. But by and large, the properly peer reviewed papers are done rigorously and critiqued.
just because there are some folk who run around yelling exagerated stories about what the data implies, does not mean the science is bad or that most of the scientists are some how ‘corrupt’.
If you start taking your science from non peer reviewed sources you are wide open to all sorts of nonsense in many fields, not just this one.
Science is self-correcting. Politics is not. Or if it is, the corrections to political nonsense are very hard lessons long delayed…
Dale,
Science is indeed self-correcting, but sometimes it takes a while getting there.
Two points:
Firstly, peer review. The purpose of peer review is not, repeat not, to check the accuracy and correctness of a paper. The purpose of publishing papers is not to present finished science.
Scientific journal papers are work in progress. They are a hypothesis for which there is some evidence that you are throwing out there for people to test, to take pot-shots at, to disprove, or to confirm and expand upon. Something like a third of them are proved wrong within a few years of publication.
Peer review is only there to filter out the obvious crack-pots and stuff the journal’s audience probably isn’t interested in. Peer-reviewed is not rigorous settled science – that’s the role of textbooks.
Second, in this case, a lot of the problem is that the peer-reviewed articles are not even receiving the basic critique that they ought to be in the rather lax system I describe above. The peer reviewer cannot possibly have checked the method, because it turns out vital bits of the method are not published. Data is not published. Adverse results are not published. Criticisms by peer reviewers are ignored. Requests for more information are refused. And when flaws are found, the response is to stonewall, and to attack the messenger.
That’s not science.
They’re trying to stop or at least delay the self-correcting. And then they put out another dozen papers, just as bad, and say they’ve moved on.
They’re playing politics and calling it science. The IPCC is not “a body of 2000+ climate scientists”, it’s an intergovernmental agency of the UN. The same UN whose human rights council appoints a truther antisemite to investigate Israel’s cruelty to Hamas in Gaza.
Argument from authority is not science, anyway. Using the UN as your scientific authority is… is… there isn’t a word for it.
Dale:
Google “Cascade Effect”. You will find references on John Tierney’s NYT column with respect to ‘Killer Animal Fat’. The same effect is evident in the ‘Great Salt Debate’. Other examples include the resistance to plate tectonics and, it is my contention, (and that a lot of better qualified people than me), that AGW is a classic case.
The basic contention is that once a theory becomes rooted in the scientific establishment, then in order to get puplished in the ‘prestigious’ journals a paper must support the dominant paradigm. Any paper which challenges the orthodoxy is rejected and winds up in lesser journals, and the researcher who has the temerity to challenge his ‘peers’ is ostracised.
There is plenty of peer reviewed literature challenging the IPCC version of climate change, but it is immediately attacked by the establishment, mostly with ad hominem argument, so in order to reach an audience, the researchers have to use the modern equivalent of, dare I say, samizdat. That’s why people get their climate science from non-peer reviewed sources. Better that than the BBC which is entirely committed to the ‘consensus’, ‘the science is settled’ view along with the rest of the legacy media.
The heart of the IPCC process is rotten and more and more scientists are perceiving this and removing themselves from the process.
I’ve laid out earlier what I think the scientific approach should be, (more research aimed at finding out what’s actually happening rather than a rush to save the world NOW!!!), and I’ve also laid out, (not entirely tongue in cheek), what I think the political approach should be, (lots of noise aimed at pointing out the consequences of the stupid, statist, policies of govenments around the world).
But we need to spread the word and spread it loudly or we might end up paying a heavy price.
No, peer review does not guarantee things are *right*. But it does help set the bar at a certain level of rigour. A journal paper might turn out to be wrong; in some rare cases there might be falsified data. In the case of a good journal, if error is caught, it will be published there as part of the record and the paper ‘retracted’.
In the non-peer reviewed world, anyone can claim anything and you have no way of knowing whether they are a 14 year old know it all (like I was) or someone who actually knows their physics (or bioloigy or whatever.)
I take non-reviewed work with a grain of salt. It might be interesting salt, it might even be fun… but I take it as amateur opinion for the most part unless I happen to know the creds of the person talking… and even then I have to discount somewhat because even a ‘pro’ can get away with claims on a blog that would just not cut it with a journal.
It may not be perfect, but the alternative is so totally worthless as to be not worth the bother.
Dale, no one is arguing that peer-review is better – or worse – than non-peer review.
We’re discussing a matter of truth and also of epistomology – of whether we can even know the truth with any certainty.
Whether AGW is true or not does not depend upon the number, the authorship, the publication, or even the quality of research supporting it. The natural world is not a democracy, and scientists do not get votes. One million Nobel Prize winners for or against is to no account.
It is still very much a pertinent matter whether we can predict anything about the weather, especially a century in the future.
Unless Cambridge offers electives in Advanced Prophecy or Harry Potter heads up the IPCC, a hundred year forecast just won’t fly and I won’t spend hundreds of billions of dollars for a penny on a percent of lower temperature, maybe.
Off topic, but just to let you know –
The head of the Bussard fusion research team has just announced that the WB7 results were positive.
http://www.countingcats.com/?p=1089
I agree with Dale. While I can understand some of Ian B’s points about how “peers” can often produce an incestuous intellectual world, it is difficult to see what would provide a more rigorous testing approach if we get rid of the peer-review approach to scientific theories. To dismiss it with a “fuck off” strikes me as, well, not very useful.
Ian B,
It is a deliberate scare with no factual basis. The Enemy basically runs all its programmes based on such scares- obesity, passive smoking, what have you.
Oh dear. You don’t think it is just possible that some such causes are not deliberate fictions centrally orchestrated solely for the purpose of destroying…. er… what is it you think The Enemy is an enemy of?
And quite right, too.
The subject of how to properly archive raw data and make them available is one that I hear quite a lot about at the moment and not just in the climate field – it seems that every other guest speaker where I work has some cunning scheme to improve how the data and metadata from research projects are handled. This is certainly needed as these data are often not well archived for a variety of reasons.
It’s quite possible that in some cases scientists may not make the raw data available simply because they are not able to come up with an easy way to do so; e.g. there may be no existing archive for it and they lack the funding to buy more hardware and pay someone to set up a proper archive (it’s not an easy job to do).
I should also point out that I’m not trying to excuse this, merely to point out that it happens.
Sounds good to me.
Concerning “more research” a favourite target of criticism is climate modeling. Although there are a great variety of models with different capabilities and purposes all are generally lumped together as completely worthless. If so, then should research not be done to improve them? Someone usually comments that scientists should try to develop models that can predict present or past climate, but amazingly enough the climate physicists have already thought of that one and are also familiar with the limits and constraints of modeling (whether politicians are is another matter).
This misses the point. What if global warming, either man made or not, is happening. What should be done about it?
Speaking as someone who’s been dealing with temperatures about 20 degrees below ‘normal’ for the last week, I’d celebrate. This cold stuff all over the ground is a hazard- people around here don’t have the first clue how to drive on ice, and there are lots of hills.
IMO, a case can be made that warming things up a bit would be a net benefit.
Johnathan, the point I and others are making is that peer review is held up to be far more than it is; it is commonly used as, effectively, a “truth test”. “This has been peer reviewed”, say the campaigners, “and it is thus true” (is the implication). Now if you actually say that to a scientist, they’ll say, no no no, we’re not claiming that- but that is how it is used in the vernacular. And the fact is, it isn’t a truth test at all. At its best, it is a method for spotting some, hopefully most, errors, before publication. That’s it.
Now the basic problem with peer review is that it is, er, review by peers. Peers aren’t necessarily the best people to review anything. There was an idea put forward a while ago that business trials shouldn’t have jurors from the general public because they’re too dim to understand the complexities of business, and that instead the jurors should consist of business leaders. This was quite rightly laughed out of, er, court, because of the obvious problem to anyone that it’s an invitation for bias, corruption and mutual back-scratching. It is a very, very bad idea for members of a class to be scrutinising members of that same class, for that very reason. But this is precisely what peer review is.
There is also the problem that if an entire field has “gone bad” then no degree of peer review will spot it; indeed it will reinforce it. Imagine a journal of homeopathy reviewing homeopathic research. Will the peer reviewers ever notice that homeopathy as a field is bullshit? Of course they won’t. So if we suspect that climatology, or epidemiology, has “gone bad” we cannot hope for climatologists or epidemiologists to self correct. They can’t. If they believe bullshit is the right way of things, they will just endlessly produce peer reviewed bullshit.
Now in much of science, bullshit is unsustainable- the field self corrects- because it is tested against reality. If atoms didn’t have electrons in, electronics wouldn’t work. We can thus safely assume that physics is broadly correct about atomic structure. But many fields, such as predictive climatology or (lifestyle) epidemiology are not tested against reality. Error can continue indefinitely. And when most of the field’s funding and research depends on the persistence of that which may be erroneous, nobody, nobody is going to blow the whistle. They have no incentive to do so. There’s no point.
No it isn’t. One improvement has already been suggested by Steve McIntyre, and met with a resounding “fuck off” from the scientists- auditing. When science is as important as AGW- trillions of dollars and radical lifestyle alteration for the mass of humanity- it should be subjected to the most rigorous auditing approach, and not just from scientists within that field. Much of the science that many of us suspect is laden with bullshit relies heavily on complex statistical methods to tease a signal from noise of equal magnitude. The experts in such matters are not, in fact, the scientists using these methods (climatologists or epidemiologists). Why aren’t statisticians going over this data and methodology with a fine toothed comb? Wouldn’t rigorous auditing give us a bit more confidence than a small group of scientists and journal editors and the cursory inspection of peer review? Why aren’t the climate scientists keen to have their work validated? Is it because they’re scared of being shot down? Looks like it, doesn’t it?
The fact is, scientists want things both ways. They want to be left alone in splendid isolation to do their science and they want to be political policy makers. Well, when the science doesn’t matter to the rest of us- fine. But once it enters the political sphere, it becomes a matter for all of us, and we should demand its most rigorous scrutiny. Alice peer reviewed Bob’s paper, Bob peer reviewed Alice’s paper, Bob and Alice both agree that they’re both right is not good enough. When they refuse to be scrutinised by anybody else, it raises a strong reasonable suspicion that they’re hiding something. Until this crucial science is undergoing hostile, rather than friendly review, we have every right to treat it with the utmost skepticism.
Also, Dale-
Can you not figure that out by reading what they have written?
If everyone can tell the difference between a 14 year old’s research claims and those of people who are actually cognizant of their fields, why is it so many people are willing to believe in so many idiotic conspiracy theories, creation ‘science’ and a million strange claims that are out there?
If I here an interesting but off the wall theory in physics that is beyond my level, I ring up a couple friends who are practicing theoretical physicists for an opinion.
I will re-iterate. If you haven’t published and been reviewed why should I believe you? You certainly shouldn’t believe me either. You should go to the published and reviewed literature to see what the current state of thinking is. It might not be right, but it is a damn sight better than all the quackery out there in cyberland.
If the literature doesn’t fit your own world view, then too bad. You can either get a degree, work in that field for 10 years to get your chops and then take on what you see as wrong, or you can sit outside and snipe.
Or alternatively, you can do something which is truly in libertarian interests, which is to work to decrease the interference of government in science along with government interference in every other facet of life.
If you don’t like the research results, you can be an amateur critic of the field. But don’t expect anyone in that field to take you seriously, nor most anyone who has been an active worker in research.
If you want to look at ways of dealing with science and public policy (rather than science) then you should probably look at Dr. Kantrowitz’s work on the idea of “science courts’.
There is probably only one person in this discussion whose opinion on the actual research I would take seriously; on the other hand I would take virtually everyone here seriously when they are discussing their opinion on policy.
I didn’t ask whether everyone can. I asked whether you can, Dale. You’re presenting the view that you don’t know whether to believe something if it’s not peer reviewed. I’m asking why you don’t just use your own scientific knowledge to decide that.
What is this “belief” of which you speak? Science is about belief now is it? You’ll believe Professor Smith because he’s an eminent scientist, regardless of what he’s saying in a particular paper?
Look. Consider a particular scientific assertion, being presented in a paper, or on a website (e.g. Climate Audit). Now there are two options regarding yourself- either you have sufficient grasp of the field to form an assessment of its scientific worth, or you don’t. If you do, then you don’t need the argument from authority to decide its validity. You can read the paper and form a judgement.
If you don’t have that grasp, then it’s pointless reading it, and there’s no point having an opinion regarding it, because you don’t understand it. You’re left with “I believe it because Professor Smith is an eminent scientist”, which isn’t science. It’s just authority.
So what you’re doing is, basically, using the figleaf of peer review to justify refusing to read things, which is of course the “circle the wagons” institutional view presented by scientific institutions. You’re saying they should just be believed, because of who they are. You’re not willing to scrutinise their output. You are judging not what is written, but whether the person who wrote is in your club.
Well, you’re welcome to hold that view, of course. It’s the standard progressive technocratic view. I just hope you aren’t going to take it upon yourself to hold any outsider views on, say, economics. The mainstream, institutional, consensus economic view of professional economists is for Keynesian intervention, big government and controlled markets. Clearly an amateur like you thinks he has a right to hold alternative views is just a crank. You want an opinion, train as an economist and get your chops in the field before you start spouting nonsense about “small government” and shit like that. Right?
Even better, we could attack the problem of science interfering in government, which is the actual problem and has been for the past 100 years.
Lacking the superior knowledge and experience of Prof. Smith, what can we do to determine whether or not what he is saying is reasonable? One method that is available to consider what people with similar knowledge and experience to him think, and what people think of them, and so on in turn. We might also consider evidence as to the character of these people in addition to considering their experitise.
This is how human society works. I may never have met A, but I know B and C who have met him and give good reports of him, so I assume A trustworthy until he proves otherwise.
If you are not a scientist then it may surprise you to know that not all scientists are happy with the actual mechanisms of peer review, but it is the best thing we have.
Although I understand your meaning, it would be better to complain of scientists meddling in government or governments misusing scientific results. The answer is, of course, get rid of governments.
The peer review process is supposed to be anonymous, although one sometimes has an idea who might have looked at something or may be able to suggest to a reviewer people who might be suitably qualified.
But, to assume that this review process is friendly would be rather naive; it is usually rather exacting and it would not be at all uncommon for editors to solicit reviews from known rivals of the scientists submitting the paper.
Of course, there are still complaints about lax reviewing just as their are complaints about unfairly harsh reviewing. Overall I think it works.
The problem is that such a strategy fails if you suspect that B and C are similarly untrustworthy, not necessarily because they are malign, but because they share a common view which is in error, which may be the case if A, B and C are members of the same class (i.e. class as a group with common interests, such as climatologists, electricians or organic farmers). If I ask one christian as to the divinity of Jesus, it is no use asking other christians whether he is correct or not.
Unfortunately, much of the growth of government and the state over the past century has been directly at the instigation of professional groups, including academics, scientists (and particularly medicine).
I may as well add here that although I come across as “anti science” I come from a position of having spent most of my life as a “science loyalist” promoting views much aligned with Dale’s or yours; always a staunch defender of science against the dark forces of creationism or supernaturalism. I reluctantly changed my view as I became more interested in libertarian issues and started studying the history of “how we got here” and eventually reluctantly came to the view that the institutional science I had so constantly supported bears much of the blame (not all of course, but much). At one time I thought that government had corrupted science, but now I see the reverse causality. I remain a staunch believer in the scientific method, but also now believe that the scientific structure- it’s institutions and interface with society at large- is fundamentally broken and causing profound harm. The lifestyle tyranny is driven by groups in the medical profession, environmental and social sciences who really believe that society should be ruled by experts enforcing particular “science based” policies, and everyone else should just do as they’re bloody well told. And there is little hope of resistance to this from within science. If it is to be stopped, it will have to be stopped by “outsiders”. Corrupt structures don’t reform themselves. They have no incentive to do so.
The Wegman report demonstrated quite clearly that in the small field of climate reconstructions, a small group of scientists were all reviewing and publishing each others’ work.
Also, even if Alice doesn’t know Bob wrote the paper, if Alice and Bob both believe the same (erroneous) theory, neither will reject the other’s work at the peer review stage.
I would agree that your point might hold for matters of opinion, e.g. asking all politicians whether taxes are a good and necessary thing. But, the results of scientific enquiry are not the same thing; if you have the tools you may perform the experiment and test it whether you are part of the “scientific class” or not.
Whilst the state exists, and we are led to believe that it is there to help us, is there not an incentive for any group to press for the state to do what is “right”?
Interesting, and not an entirely unreasonable point. I suspect that my faith that adherence to the scientific method can overcome the corrupting touch of the state is somewhat higher than yours, though.
‘You’ll believe Professor Smith because he’s an eminent scientist’
Ian B – a thousand cheers – that is the crux of MANY problems faced today. The belief that something is correct SIMPLY because it is stated by someone with ‘authority’ ( multiple PhD’s, professor of this or that, whatever ).
It starts is school ( can’t question ANYTHING ) is nurtured in college ( professors are SO SMART and you’d better NEVER question them if you expect to pass) and then grows into full fledged starry-eyed acceptance of almost ANYTHING stated by someone in ‘authority’ in adulthood – mostly due to laziness and/or an unwillingness to question/research & an apathy of ‘oh well, who cares’.
“I’m asking why you don’t just use your own scientific knowledge to decide that.”
Good question.
There is so much nonsense masquerading as (peer reviwed) science and paraded in UN reports, that you can’t believe anything.
Everyone neeeds to read as many papers and stuff as he can digest, and form his own opinion. There is no other way.
Or, as Dale says – you can ask a trusted, qualified friend. Dale – have you done this?
What irks me is that the process of scientific inquiry has been corrupted, and a lot of charlatans and ideologues pose as scientists, peer reviwed scientists.
Don’t believe a word of it all. (Not all climate scientists are charlatans, just some, others are plain stark mad).
You need to form your own judgement, the best way you can. I guess it’s always so, in every domain.
We all tend to have an idealistic view of the lofty endeavour of science. We need to get more real. Some of the things claiming the title “science” aren’t what they claim.
Very well put.
I’m not sure, to be honest, how the peer-review process in scientific journals differs from that in History journals. That’s not to say that I doubt that the scientific method/approach can provide answers to a certain class of question that have a kind of certainty to them that no historian can ever provide for answers to his questions, but I don’t the peer-review process is material to this.
Peer-review, in my experience, does two things. First, it weeds out most articles that are either utter crap, completely regurgitations of what someone else has said before, very poorly written, possessed of some fairly obvious logical flaw, missing the obvious implications of a well known piece of evidence that the writer has ingored &c. It leaves in articles that are still pretty bad, unoriginal, have stilting prose and the like. Thus, peer-review is like the intitial weeding out process of job applicants rather than the interview stage. Secondly, though this is rather less remarked upon, it tends to herd articles of particular biases into corresponding journals, thus allowing the reader to know what sort of bias is present and correct accordingly.
So what does peer-review in the scientific journals add that is different? How does then respond, then, to the deservedly infamous Lancet article on Iraqi deaths?
There seems to be this presumption that the outsider is correct. Sometimes they are. Sometimes it takes decades for science to catch up with a farseeing maverick. Usually they aren’t. Sometimes they are just sad souls who have been left behind.
I remember one particular elderly researcher who would stand up at conferences and insist that lunar craters were volcanic. This was in the eighties and pretty much no one had believed that since the sixties at the latest.
One can speak of people like Wegener… but in the context of his time it was probably correct for his theory to not be taken into the mainstream. There was no mechanism for moving continents around like chess pieces. It took another 30-40 years at least for that to become clear.
As to science taking over government… if anything has taken over government it is lawyers who pick and choose the science that helps whatever cause they represent and ignore the fact that it is usually not cut and dried.
This rather famous blog postBishop Hill: Caspar and the Jesus paper does a good job in explaining how the peer review process was subverted and much else around this issue.
“One method that is available to consider what people with similar knowledge and experience to him think, and what people think of them, and so on in turn.”
No, it doesn’t work.
You can’t trust people. You need to judge the evidence, the data, the formulae, the methods employed. You can’t trust people (scientists).
If you feel you’re not qualified to dig into the evidence, into the facts, then confine yourself to the domains you are qualified in (say – music, or philosophy or finance).
There is no “presumption that the outsider is correct”. The point, or one of the points, I am making is that when scientists seek to rule the lives of outsiders, said outsiders gain the right to some kind of input on that, and particularly to demand that those scientists seeking to rule them are properly scrutinised and forced to explain themselves, which they currently are not.
And stop trying to shift the blame. There aren’t any lawyers poking Jim Hansen and his chorus of muppets into rushing into the media at every opportunity to yell that we’re all going to die. There aren’t any lawyers forcing the anti-smokers, the anti-drinkers, the obesity panickers, food nazis and so on to lobby government constantly for lifestyle controls, sit on committees, run campaigns and leech taxpayers’ money for their nasty little projects.
Well, lets set this straight then. I am familiar with wide swathes of science and expert in a few. Some of those are close enough to modeling that I have strong opinions on the peer reviewed evidence. Those opinions are not based in ignorance, and are probably based on far more serious knowledge than many in society have in math and science. I am not a worker in the field and do not have the current knowledge of who is working on what and what results are not good enough for publication yet but that everyone knows about, etc. But I know enough to make a judgement which I personally feel secure in.
My opinion is that they are correct.
You have a different opinion and are absolutely certain that your opinion is the correct one. But it is just that, an opinion on science, not the science itself.
And don’t even mention the IPCC. It’s not science, it’s UN politics and probably pretty worthless. I’ve never even wasted the effort to read it. I’d rather get information from Science or Nature or perhaps from arxiv (its cheaper that way and I am not exactly flush) or from scientists who are friends and will argue back and forth over dinner at a conference somewhere.
I really have the feeling that some are pushing an agenda that requires that I be bludgeoned into accepting the true belief that it ain’t happening. I don’t accept that belief any more than I have absolute acceptance that it is. I think it is, with a high probability, true that we are modifying the climate. I do not believe it is a certainty because there is more science to be done. Not because the science which has been done is bad; not because the media hypes a few outliers in the field who I class as the religious warmists, as opposed to the religious anti-warmists.
That, in an overly large nutshell, is where I stand.
No, Dale. I do have an opinion on the actual science itself, that just doesn’t happen to be what we’re discussing at the moment.
But let’s look at how science institutionally behaves. Take the (in)famous “hockey stick”, MBH98. This paper was peer reviewed, published, and played a major part in the IPCC report that followed.
The paper included a statement that a “novel [statistical] method” had been employed. The paper did not describe this method. Neither was the data on which the novel method had been used archived anywhere. We can thus be certain that neither the peer reviewers, nor any scientist who read and accepted the findings of the paper, nor the IPCC, had actually checked its methodology. We can thus safely conclude that you didn’t either. In fact, nobody did until McIntyre and McKitrick.
Now regardless of which side you take; whether you think Mann et al’s paper was right or wrong, we can thus conclude that the climatology community, at least in this case, agreed a consensus without having in any way scrutinised the paper in question. Presumably climatologists and other scientists formed an opinion based on “seems plausible”.
In other words, the opinions of scientists- at least on this one paper (and if you were to read through the goings on at Climate Audit you’d see it applies far more widely)- are useless. If scientists are accepting findings without checking them, we cannot trust them- nor you. Your informed opinion is not scientific. So no amount of waving your diplomas about is going to change that. Since I cannot trust you, or scientists in general, to be reliable, then my only rational fallback position is one of skepticism. If at some point the scientific community start spending some of the time they spend jetting to climate conferences actually applying some scrutiny to each other, then maybe more trust from us ignorant knuckle-draggers may be appropriate.
I ought to attempt to amplify and clarify my earlier remarks, then.
One can rely on reputation, qualifications and so on to determine whether someone has actually studied a subject and to what degree, and whether they are known to be honest or not. One can assume that anyone who has studied a topic probably knows more about it than someone who has not.
So, if we have a situation where it is necessary to seek an opinion on something and there is no time or opportunity to do the necessary study then the best chance of getting an answer is to ask someone who knows more about it. The fact that they know more does not guarantee that they are “right” (whatever that means in the context) and there should be a default position of skepticism on any matter than one cannot personally verify (I agree with Ian B on this).
Wikipedia says what I’m trying to say better than I do here:
” The more relevant the expertise of an authority, the more compelling the argument. Nonetheless, authority is never absolute, so all appeals to authority which assert that the authority is necessarily infallible are fallacious.”
” A person who is recognized as an expert authority often has greater experience and knowledge of their field than the average person, so their opinion is more likely than average to be correct. In practical subjects such as car repair, an experienced mechanic who knows how to fix a certain car will be trusted to a greater degree than someone who is not an expert in car repair. There are many cases where one must rely on an expert, and cannot be reasonably expected to have the same experience, knowledge and skill that that person has. Many trust a surgeon without ever needing to know all the details about surgery themselves. Nevertheless, experts can still be mistaken and their expertise does not always guarantee that their arguments are valid.”
…and so on.
Ian for the love of God… One hockey stick does not a team make. And that has of course now been challenged – what more do you want?
Dale is right. I think you’re being utterly unrealistic in your desire for absolute perfection in the actual practice of science. I have seen some drivel in my time that was peer reviewed but as has been noted it is the initial filter in the same way that a clearly illiterate CV gets canned is for an employer. That filter does not in and of itself ensure the right person gets the job.
The “expert thing”… Well, where do you start? You have to start somewhere and that means trusting the system at least provisionally. We all do this all the time. We do it everytime we see a medic or take the car into the shop or employ me. Hell, Ian, if I wanted to know about cartoon pr0n I’d ask you!
OK, it’s not perfect but the alternative reductio ad absurdam is to believe that the guy in the chippy has as valuable a view on cosmology as a Professor at Cambridge. The point that makes this OK is that science is challengeable in principle – if you know your basic onions and what not.
Back in the 20s/30s Eddington ruled the astrophysical roost (as the sort of scientific authority figure you dislike) but it didn’t stop a young Indian called Chandrasekhar proving him wrong. And now that’s the orthodoxy on degenerate stars – aka as Lindsay Lohan.
Sorry Ian. I agree with you on much of your thinking about AGW and certainly the political machinations and the campaign groups antics are instructive but… I think Dale is right here wrt science in general.
knirrir-
Two points here. The first is that the danger of expertise is that, to put it crudely, expertise is power. For instance, an expert accountant may use his expertise to cheat me out of the millions I wish I had. The ignorant thus need some kind of protective strategy against experts- such as independent auditing in the accounting example. If I have no idea what my accountant is up to, because I don’t understand accounting, I’m at risk.
Now following your A, B, C example, you may say “ask another accountant” and I agree. A key thing though is the choice of accountant- I want somebody as independent as possible to advise me about accountant A- not one of A’s close friends and colleagues. So I’m asking for better independent scrutiny of science. How that is to be done is a matter for debate, but I don’t think we can solve the problem by pretending it doesn’t exist. Trillions of dollars and the question of for instance third world development are at stake here. It really matters.
The second point is defining expertise. A surgeon may be an expert on surgery, but that doesn’t mean he’s an expert on medical policy- even surgical medical policy. He might be a great surgeon but a lousy manager of a surgery unit, let alone a health service. Likewise, if we accept that a climatologist is an expert on climate, this tells us nothing about his expertise on climate change mitigation or environmental or social policy. He can advise us on climate. Other scientists may advise us on the effects of climate change, engineers may advise us on the best power generation strategies for minimal carbon usage. But the question of what is to be done is not one for climatologists, or power plant engineers any more than car mechanics or veterninary nurses. A climatologist, when it comes to politics, is no more expert than anyone else. The desire of some climatologists to be politicians and dictate policy displays, at the very least, a lack of awareness of their own limitations.
In principle that is a reasonable thing to ask for. What the best way of arranging would be it is rather tricky to determine, though.
I am tempted to continue with your accountant analogy and say that perhaps one answer is to make sure that there’s more of a free market in science, as there is with accountants. But, I have no special expertise that would enable me to usefully comment on how best to go about arranging such a thing.
Knowledge of climatology would indeed not automatically grant expertise in politics. But, assuming that there is such thing as political expertise that can be learned then there is no reason that a climatologist might not possess expertise in that field as well. Having expertise and/or qualifications in multiple areas is hardly unusual.
Still, I am in general agreement with your second paragraph.
Sorry, I meant “third” not “second,” i.e. the one about defining expertise.
NickM,
“OK, it’s not perfect but the alternative reductio ad absurdam is to believe that the guy in the chippy has as valuable a view on cosmology as a Professor at Cambridge.”
No, the one whose equations balance, whose working can be checked, who doesn’t rely on dubious assumptions, whose ideas have stood up to testing scrutiny is the one to be believed. If that happens to be the guy in the chippy, that’s where you go.
We tend to believe the Cambridge Professors because most of them do things in the right way while the guy down the chippy generally does not, but it’s fundamentally because of the methods he uses, not because of his job title or reputation. (“Ad hominem” is not only insult!)
When you see your Cambridge (or Norwich) Professor do things the wrong way, you dismiss them. And when a respected Professor says “We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?” you don’t need a PhD in climatology to spot that there’s something sickeningly wrong with that. It cuts at the very core of the scientific method – Karl Popper’s falsification and all the rest of it – that even the scientific layman should know.
If you don’t have the capability to judge, then you may have to trust authority, as a child trusts what their parents tell them. A lot of what you say is about how a layman should judge science. Fair enough – although I would put no great weight on those views. But scientists should judge it by the scientific method, which makes no distinction between professors and patent clerks.
Nullius in Verba. When did we so thoroughly forget that?
Tedious naive explanation of falsification follows. Experts run away.
The peer review process is not some sort of credentialing mechanism. The point of peer review is to establish that it’s worth publishing. For example reviews should ensure that it is “scientific” in the sense that it has something to do with testable claims or the results of such tests. Not only that of course, but at least that.
One of the ways in which a paper or conjecture is “scientific” is that it enables or assists attempts by others at falsification or refutation by doing such things as providing data, codes, procedures and what not.
Such papers, no matter how rigorously peer reviewed, mean very little. Our truth claims are so fallible. Eventually and over time other papers detailing very many failed refutations will have been published. Then, and only then, we have something which, although we cannot know it to be true, we can being to have some confidence in.
The more surprising or significant the original claim is – the more we require it to be tested – though we can never be certain that it is true.
Of course most scientists are unaware of this epistemological structure.
That was a very clear statement of the concept. One must also take into consideration that a single paper may be at several points in this process. It may introduce a new claim; rely on old and well established science and also rely on newer and less well established work. A good paper should make it clear which is which. If you read someone like Dawkins you will see this sort of thing made quite explicit.
There seems to be an indication that elder scientists are unassailable fonts of wisdom. That might be truer in some certain European countries, ie German science was notorious for the rule of Herr Professor. However it is not the general case around the world. The best parallel is to think of the elder prof as ‘the fastest gun in the West’. All the newly minted post-docs are out gunning for him because there’s hardly a faster way to move up than to prove error in the work of a Big Name.
Since when are critiques peer reviewed? Proof of something is of course held to higher standards.
Not so much for criticisms. That is because it is logically impossible to prove a negative.
I hear ya, Dale, but the burden proof of AGW rests with the theory backers, not the skeptics.
Dale:
Well, the science is bad. At least as far as the hockey stick is concerned, and paleoclimatology in general. I’m sure that if you dig into the data and papers, instead of relying on peer review, you will come to the same conclusion.
And it is not just a “few outliers” hyped by the media – it’s the main pillars of the climatologist community, Mann, Hansen, Kery Emanuel, etc.
Nick M:
“One hockey stick does not a team make”
One hockey stick does not a team make, but when the team applauds and promotes and cheers a rotten piece of science, and refuses to even debate it, or reconsider after it has been proved rotten – it’s a whole stinking team.
That is certainly true, although getting co-authorship with a Big Name can also be helpful. This collection of posts may be of interest to other readers who aren’t familiar with how research is undertaken.
Nick M
But if Eddington was a true scientist (I don’t know) he would have been the first to accept the new truth and congratulate Chandrasekhar.
It seems to me that the important point in this debate needs to be stated:
The question is NOT whether there is warming or not – the climate probably warms and cools, there is plenty of evidence for that, the claim that it hasn’t changed in 2000 years is patently absurd.
The question isn’t even if man has some influence on the climate or not, he may have some, the question is how much? Is it a significant amount or not?
But the main question is this: does the man made warming cause a vicious feedback cycle – an unstoppable, ever escalating warming run away effect?
For this “tipping point” theory there isn’t one iota of scientific evidence, not in the IPCC, not in peer reviwed papers. Maybe in the models, which, as far as I know, are NOT peer reviwed (has any outside reviwer scrutinized the models ?).
Maybe there are negative feedback mechanisms that mantain or restore some equillibrum? A warming of a couple of degrees wouldn’t be catastrophic in itself, only if it was the start of a runaway cycle.
So, Dale, do you wish to claim that you have been convinced by peer reviewed scientific papers that we are nearing a tipping point ?
Jacob,
Eddington’s response was apparently “I think there should be a law of Nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way!”
The bit quoted at the link above from Chandrasekhar’s biography is particularly interesting:
“Although Bohr, Fowler, Pauli, and other physicists agreed with Chandrasekhar’s analysis, at the time, owing to Eddington’s status, they were unwilling to publicly support Chandrasekhar.”
I have read very little of ‘tipping points’ other than in popular media. I know there are some who think this is possible, but I would put any such claim in the category of wild claim requiring a decade of research to back it up.
Now, being a good scientist myself, I will have to say that does not mean either that there are or are not possible tipping points. I can only say that I do not believe current knowledge would make such a claim viable.
What is meant by a tipping point is of course a bifurcation in a chaotic system. That would require that the Earth’s climate by metastable and that is known to be a fact to a certain extent… ever since South American and North America collided and closed the channel between the Atlantic and Pacific, we have been shifting back and forth between two states: Ice ages and Inter-glacials.
Given that we are metastable and given the energy we are pumping into the system, we are more likely pushing the system away from the transition point than towards it. That is mere wild speculation on my part, but if true it makes global warming a good thing if we can stabilize it artificially at a slightly warmer climate and keep it up for a few millennia. There is no reason to my knowledge to suppose that anything basic has changed in the Earth’s climactic system during our civilizations interglacial. So if you increase the energy in, you push further from the change; if you drop the energy inputs, you push closer to it.
That is all as pure speculative opinion as one can get.
“I have read very little of ‘tipping points’ other than in popular media.”
Hansen is the main promoter of the tipping point theory (guess?). He is not a reporter, but the MAIN scientist of the team. Journalists have trumpeted the news, but Hansen (Dr. James Hansen) is the author. And he publishes this not in peer reviewed publications but in the MSM.
Is that scientific behaviour ? Does it enhance or confidence in “science” ?
What happened to to Popper?
Are there not clear ‘tipping points’ in the prevailing balance of scientific thought (and other aspects of mass human belief)?
Best regards
A really interesting debate, thanks to all above.
Re the question of the ‘man in the chippy’, clearly we shouldn’t place much weight on his opinion of AGW.
I thought for some time that AGW must be true. But increasingly, scientists too numerous to name have begun to express doubts about the science of AGW, and statisticians express doubts about the way statistics have been used in AGW.
In my own personal experience, and in statements by the likes of Gore and Hansen, the angry reactions of the committed to the expression of any doubt is striking. They want AGW to be real.
While this dogmatism doesn’t mean the science is wrong, it nevertheless reflects doubt on its foundation. Whenever such ‘certainty’ is expressed so forcefully about something as complex and unpredictable as climate, we should suspect its origins.
It fails the smell test. And some of us in the chippy do know a bit about that…
I suspect that hundreds of years from now people will point and laugh at this whole fabricated panic, and wonder how we could have been so gullible and easily led. They, after all, will be much too sophisticated to fall for such fairy tale movements and beliefs. Until they, in turn, adopt the latest mass craze. Repeat ad nauseum.
There is no limit to human self-deception.
The only correct response to what is most likely a fraud, is to label it as such.
Doubting and challenging research is part of science. Whatever our opinion on the data we have to keep testing it.
One thing that I have found rather strange about this business is that on various blogs one will see complaints that one can’t trust scientists and that non-climatologists who generally accept the prevailing scientific views are “appealing to authority.” Yet those same people generally appear to be happy to appeal to the authority of or to trust scientists who say AGW isn’t happening or isn’t a problem. The same skeptical view should be maintained whether the research suits one’s political views or not.
Ah the green’s “food miles” is one of those untruths that looks so pretty because it ‘proves’ the importance of local produce. The problem is that food miles are an essential thing that is the primary determinant of whether most of the worlds population has food to eat or is starving. Even the UN agrees that starvation and malnutrition are not due to a shortage of food production, but limitations on food distribution. The Ethiopian ‘famine’ for instance, was actually a government policy to starve out rebellious Eretrians, not an actual shortage of food in Ethiopia.
If the greens had their way about limiting food miles through legislation, I can guarantee you that the number of people dying of starvation/malnutrition every year will increase tenfold.
“Yet those same people generally appear to be happy to appeal to the authority of or to trust scientists who say AGW isn’t happening or isn’t a problem.”
Some of them do, some do so intending it ironically (i.e. ‘using their own methods against them’), and quite a lot of the better ones don’t accept sceptical claims on trust either.
Even as a sceptic, I’ve had quite a few arguments with ‘lay’ sceptics where I’ve explained that some popular sceptical talking point they’re getting excited about doesn’t work, or has weak/insufficient evidence. I’ve had more experiences of sceptics accepting the point or agreeing to check further than I have had believers, although that’s no doubt a biased sample.
When people are just expressing their uninformed opinion presented as such, like they do about politicians or celebrity gossip, I don’t generally bother. What really winds me up is when they take on the priestly mantle of scientific authority to browbeat people into accepting their assertions, without understanding.
(And the other thing that irritates out of all proportion is the “bait-and-switch”: where they start with some outrageous media distortion like 10-100 m sea level rises, and then when you challenge it switch in the far more conservative academic position and require you to match world-class experts on their own turf – telling you off for constructing ridiculous strawmen that aren’t any part of AGW science – and then as soon as they’re done dismantling you, switch back to the sensationalism.)
You’re quite right. The same sceptical view should be maintained whether the research suits one’s political views or not. When we see that virtue practised a bit more often with regard to all the scare stories, sceptics must follow suit.
“If the Greens are serious about CO2 then why aren’t they cheerleading for nuclear power?”
Some of us are.
In the meanwhile, this thread has inspired a post on my pirate blog, in case anyone is interested in some somewhat offtopic discussion.
Interesting discussion. The ignored Libertarian point is about who pays for research?
Very big bucks are being invested in “climate change” research. Last time I checked (some time ago), there were about 340 (!) journals publishing papers in the field; the US alone was spending over $2 Billion a year on “climate research” — that was when $2 Billion was seen as a lot of money, before taxpayers got comfortable with the costs of bailing out Robert Rubin.
Many people have been told that President Eisenhower warned about the (taxpayer-funded) “military-industrial” complex in his farewell address. Less frequently remembered is that, in the same speech, Ike warned about the dangers of government becoming the primary funding source for research. It injects politics right into the very heart of science (my interpretation of his meaning).
Taxpayer-funded “climate change” research has led precisely to the problem that Ike predicted. The Libertarian response should surely be to get government out of funding research — or at least to find a way that shields funding decisions from political pressures.
The Libertarian response should surely be to get government out of funding research…
Bring it on!
By the way, I have pointed out on other threads/forums and at other times that a lot (but not all) of the climate research in which I am involved is paid for by a private corporation. That doesn’t seem to help as it is generally assumed that scientists will tell funding bodies “what they want to hear” no matter who provides the funds.