What happens if each of those experts feels entitled, even obligated, to lie just a little, to shade his conclusions to strengthen the support they provide for what he believes is the right conclusion? Each of them then interprets the work of all the others as providing more support for that conclusion than it really does. The result might be that they end up biasing their results in support of the wrong conclusion—which each of them believes is right on the basis of the lies of all the others.
That is one of the reasons I am not greatly impressed by the supposed scientific consensus in favor of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming.
As I am fond of saying, it works like a stock market bubble. There is no need to posit a conspiracy. David Friedman’s view that this is a matter of a build up of many little lies rather than a few big ones is a more realistic as well as a more charitable picture of the mechanism at work.
I am yet more charitable than Professor Friedman. Though I completely agree with him that there are almost certainly many scientists shading their conclusions, it might well be the case that they are not doing so consciously at all. All it would take is for a lot of people with jobs to keep and mortgages to pay each to see which side their bread is buttered when the time comes round to apply for grants. As the American socialist author Upton Sinclair put it, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” On the unbuttered side of the bread, when a scientist observes that colleagues who raise doubts suffer for it, she would be acting much like the rest of humanity if she, while never aware of feeling fear, somehow finds herself more comfortable out of the intellectual proximity of these pariahs.
In a way the Rosetta scientists had it easy. All they had to do was hit a moving target half a billion kilometres away. Succeed or fail, there is no kidding yourself and no kidding others. Twenty-eight minutes later you and the world will know.
ADDED LATER: Fraser Orr comments:
“The answer to the CAGW people is simple: make a prediction that is falsifiable and can be measured in a reasonable length of time. Give me an example of a significant result where you predicted the future and it came true. Explain why your last fifteen years of prediction have been completely wrong, and if you have a wild ass explanation of something you didn’t factor in, give us a reason to believe that you didn’t forget something else.”
> “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Yeah, I once tried to explain to a prominent green academic at a conference that one could accept global warming, but also hold that it was possible the resultant warming wouldn’t be catastrophic. He just couldn’t process it. It wasn’t that I was explaining it badly. Everybody else listening in understood it easily enough. But you could see the shutters go up in this guy’s mind. Something in his subconscious was trying very hard, and succeeding, in preventing the very idea from getting through to him.
Hey I’m only a dumb Bogan but if CO2 molecules formed 1,000 parts per million of the atmosphere, that’s only one in a thousand, how the fuck does the atmosphere become a thermal blanket?
The Europeans don’t want the Chinese building power stations to provide cheap electricity for manufacturing to lift their people from poverty, Europe should be the world’s factory.
Think I’m joking, some time ago there was a concerted campaign in Australia to close Lucas Heights Nuclear Reactor in Sydney as it posed a catastrophic threat to Sydney although it was the only source of isotopes for medical purposes in Australia. That vile creature Peter Mandelson campaigned along them and his solution was for Australia to buy medical isotopes from Europe.
I know he isn’t well liked around here but this seems to be pretty much the same thesis behind Chomsky’s “Manufacturing of Consent”. I suppose when the boots on the other foot…
Two other problem with experts:
(1) As their knowledge and skill become greater, they also become much better at defending positions that less knowledgeable people think are a bit daft. They can justify all sorts of scenarios that lesser experts would never attempt to justify, and decision-makers, who have no idea wheather they are correct, are left to deal with wildly speculative proposals. This is particularly prevelent when the subject matter involves computer models of phenomena where you really don’t want to actually run an experiment.
(2) Everyone wants to be assisted by unbiased experts. I.e., people who know all about the subject matter, but don’t have any axe to grind or a financial conflict-of-interest, or any skeletons in the closet that would mark them as crazy. Unfortunately, you only become an expert when you take positions on issues that offend other peoples’ positions, or when you work for a company and have to show that your expertise can generate real money, or you study the subject matter so much that you overturn long-standing paradigms, and therefore make a lot of people unhappy.
Unbiased experts don’t exist – if they are experts on a subject, then they have well founded opinions with which other experts are going to disagree. If they arean’t biased, then they don’t know enough about the subject matter. It is usually best in these situations to try to hire a few semi-knowledgeable people to manage the experts, and get the semi-experts to listen to a bunch of expert contractors with different opinions. The decision-makers then have to trust the semi-experts to give them good advice about which experts is right, and which one can/should be ignored. This is not easy, especially when the contractor experts are all out there churning hatred and discontent, to support their contracting businesses.
Cui bono.
The Romans understood that phrase, that logical tool. Most of us do, instinctively, but not clearly, not precisely, and it’s not used often enough or harshly enough.
While I have no doubt that many individuals are indeed fudging results to give more support to the CAGW interpretation, we also know from the climategate documents as well as other uncovered collusion that there is ALSO an active and wide-ranging conspiracy to pervert the truth, that is, to lie when necessary if the evidence doesn’t support their case. The fact that such lies keep the money flowing doesn’t hurt their motivation either.
It is also possible that many proponents have fallen in love with the hypothesis because it implies human culpability and punishment which resonates with residual religious instincts. By declaring for AGW they advertise themselves as “moral” people, hypothetically willing to forgo the benefits of cheap energy in order to “save” the planet. Once religion is injected, they are incapable of intellectual doubt and committed to the modern equivalent of calculating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and condemnation of heretics, preferably by burning.
To me, ultimately, it is the denigration of the word “science” that bothers me the most. Science, the way I was taught it in high school was about reproducible experiments testing falsifiable theories. I mean these are the two pillars of what science is all about, it is what defines science. They are both absent in climatology to a very large extent.
The word “science” means “knowledge”. To know something for sure based on a history of getting it right. Ultimately the purpose of science is to predict the future, as in “If I drop this ball it will in the future hit the floor. If I connect these transistors up in this way and feed it these inputs it will tell me the path of this spacecraft around this comet.”
And that is the real curse here. For sure the extreme whackos want to return us to the stone age, but Barak Obama over taxing coal power stations? The market can adapt. However, to undermine science itself leaves us in the situation where we can’t predict the future.
Finally, in human history we have got to the point where our prognistications are actually reliable. No more chicken viscera and astrological signs. Our science can actually, reliably, predictably, consistently, accurately tell us the future.
And these bozos want to toss it in the garbage to advance their political agendas? Don’t fight against the CAGW nonsense, fight against the profound undermining of that thing which makes civilization possible, our science.
The answer to the CAGW people is simple: make a prediction that is falsifiable and can be measured in a reasonable length of time. Give me an example of a significant result where you predicted the future and it came true. Explain why your last fifteen years of prediction have been completely wrong, and if you have a wild ass explanation of something you didn’t factor in, give us a reason to believe that you didn’t forget something else.
Campaigning for measures to reduce CAGW is a thing that appeals to the human spirit. It makes people feel important, like they are making a difference. It makes them feel righteous. It allows them to build a community with a shared value, and a shared outrage. A community that is built around us and them, and the “us” are the good guys and the “them” are the bad guys. Humans love that stuff and CAGW, like all religions, is perfect for it, and consequently immune to repudiation or the intrusion of facts.
“The answer to the CAGW people is simple: make a prediction that is falsifiable and can be measured in a reasonable length of time. Give me an example of a significant result where you predicted the future and it came true. Explain why your last fifteen years of prediction have been completely wrong, and if you have a wild ass explanation of something you didn’t factor in, give us a reason to believe that you didn’t forget something else.”
Simply brilliant.
The other point to make to them is that if the science is settled, as it is in 2H2 + 02 = 2H20, then you don’t need any more funding.
Mr Black writes, regarding Climategate, “that there is ALSO an active and wide-ranging conspiracy to pervert the truth”
Yes and no. There was certainly active conspiracy to subvert the Freedom of Information Act, and some of them should have been in court for that. However the Climategate emails also showed that the senders did themselves believe in global warming. I read the subconscious thought processes behind “hide the decline” and similar things as something like “Obviously it’s true, but for some reason it’s not showing up clearly. People outside don’t understand the difficulties we face. It’s so important, yet so complex. We must do something to present it in a way the ignorant public will understand.” In a way, as Fraser Orr implies, this attitude is worse for science than conspiracy for gain.
PS I’ve added the part of Fraser Orr’s comment highlighted by Stonyground to the main post.
” make a prediction that is falsifiable and can be measured in a reasonable length of time”
That is a good request, but not always applicable, as in this case (climate) – we lack a good grasp and knowledge of climate processes. It is too complicated, too chaotic.
In the absence of good knowledge, or the chance to acquire good knowledge within some ‘reasonable length of time” – scientists (the alarmists) present partial knowledge, supplemented by belief as absolute knowledge, or as better knowledge than it actually is.
So we have the formula: some partial knowledge (about the heat absorbing of CO2) is believed, and presented as complete knowledge of the climate system. We cannot prove it one way or the other – cannot prove that the warming will be dangerous, cannot prove it won’t be.
The “sin” of the alarmists is that they claim to posses more knowledge than they do. That is a universal sin, most people, most of the time, pretend to know more than they do, and are even sure they know more than they do, they believe so with great confidence.
And, all this elaborate explanation does not eliminate the possibility that there are also charlatans out there, promoting positions for personal gain.
>The answer to the CAGW people is simple: make a prediction that is falsifiable and can be measured in a reasonable length of time.
They’ve made plenty of those. They turned out to be false.
I rather fear that some of the handful of scientists/geographers/programmers at the heart of the scaremongering actually want there to be a crisis in the offing. Many who find them to be useful idiots for their political or financial ambitions would encourage them in their wishful, albeit malevolent, thinking.
“David Friedman’s view that this is a matter of a build up of many little lies rather than a few big ones is a more realistic as well as a more charitable picture of the mechanism at work. I am yet more charitable than Professor Friedman.”
The circling the wagons around clear misbehavior looks pretty indefensible to (and alarmingly ubiquitous among tax-funded researchers) to me. Some of it is an “accessory after the fact” thing, which we naturally tend to be more charitable about because it is both passive (not active) and after the fact (so it’s too late to prevent the bad thing from happening). But even if those passive-not-active and too-late-to-prevent conditions held in this case (and I will argue below that they don’t) the underlying misbehavior is not just little lies, it’s got a fair helping of people who are conspicuously making a mockery of science.
E.g., I agree with http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/the-art-of-evasion regarding the severity of the screwed-up-ness of the points in the main post about (1) the Cook paper dysfunctionally biased methodology and (2) the Cook paper misrepresentations about the methodology. And beyond that I am with him in his point in the comments section about the travesty of the peer-reviewed journal involved (ERL) having Peter Gleick(!) on their review board. But with few exceptions (notably Judith Curry, whose blog is the first place I heard of Duarte) who are stubborn enough to speak out against great pressure, this kind of crap is approved and sheltered by the grant-funded research community (and of course mainstream media, mainstream politicians, public educators, etc.).
When it comes to pressuring insider critics like Judity Curry to shut up and go along, and trying to delegitimize outsider critics like Steve McIntyre, we are out of the passive-not-active realm where charity is appropriate. When it comes to protecting an ongoing enterprise of corrupting science — the Cook paper is only one recent example of an ongoing school of concocting studies claiming Leninist-election-style 90+% levels of consensus, and the protectors of this school have every reason to expect that their protection will help the corruption to continue with more papers in this vein — we are out of the too-late-to-prevent realm where charity is appropriate. So on two counts it looks to me as though we’ve left the special case where charity is appropriate even for clear misbehavior, and moved into the ordinary case where clear misbehavior is ordinary villainy. Admittedly it’s mostly petty villainy, but that is not much of an excuse: in real life in any enormous enterprise, most people can only be minor actors no matter what, not because any sizable fraction of people who remain in tax-funded research are upright enough (and stubbornly ornery enough) not to be complicit in this clear misbehavior.
Bookers coloumn last week is worth a scan, in relation to this;
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/11216582/IPCCs-scary-new-report-is-needle-stuck-in-an-old-groove.html
rxc
November 14, 2014 at 1:41 am
At college we had an expression :-
EXPERT: Someone who knows more and more about less and less. Finally he knows everything about nothing