See here .
money quote
In science, empirical evidence always trumps theory, no matter how much you are in love with the theory. If theory and evidence disagree, real scientists scrap the theory. But official climate science ignored the crucial weather balloon evidence, and other subsequent evidence that backs it up, and instead clung to their carbon dioxide theory ? that just happens to keep them in well-paying jobs with lavish research grants, and gives great political power to their government masters.
My gosh … a follow the money mystery? Who woulda thunk it?
At any rate, its good to see people resume the healthy skepticism that is needed for real scientific inquiry and advancement. Science is never settled, and anyone telling you otherwise is trying to sell you something. Sure enough, some of those doing the selling have a strong economic incentive for doing so.
Go figure.
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Hi,
I like the part of this post in bold. That makes sense. I don’t understand the rest. Are you talking about healthy scepticism in general or relating to climate change?
The author of the article you linked to has no credibility. Read:
http://www.desmogblog.com/who-is-rocket-scientist-david-evans
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/07/the_australians_war_on_science_16.php
Cheers,
Pete.
@Peter:
Talking about both. I’ve seen a propensity on the part of fanatics and activists to personally attack those who raise questions about whatever cause the activists and fanatics are promoting. To simplify terminology, I will call that group “AF”.
The AF do everything but render reasonable arguments about the issues, preferring instead to try to savage the critic personally, professionally, etc. This same pattern is demonstrated between many of the AF favorites, and is remarkably similar between them, even if the topics are incredibly diverse.
One can detect that one is in the presence of an AF takedown when one sees a personal destruction tear-down piece. Say, for example, like that very poor first link you provided.
Note, this is not an attack on you personally … I don’t know you, and you are probably a nice person whom I could have a good engaging discussion with, and enjoy it.
But that link is sad … as Wolfgang Pauli once said of something else he had read “not even wrong.” It attacked the author as obviously “not a rocket scientist”, and then attempted to savage his credentials, and his (lack of) peer reviewed publications in the space as being demonstrative of the reasons we should ignore him. The “not a rocket scientist” bit was … well amusingly sad.
When AF engage in this, they are pulling an Alinsky-ite “isolate” or “freeze” process. Find your opposition, freeze them, tear them down in whatever manner possible.
Never mind that such posts are inane. These posts reveal more about the author of such posts than the target of the smear. They tell us that the author, and those who nod their head in agreement as they read the post, are impervious to reasoned argument, and are more interested in personally attacking someone than dealing with their arguments.
This also means that one can stop worrying about such people as being valid contributers to scientific discourse. Its ok to dislike a person. Its ok to disagree with them. Attacking their background with specious arguments that aren’t even tangential … topical? Yeah, this reveals the clear and profound biases of the authors, and those who agree with them.
Which is why such AF should never be taken seriously.
I was amused also by the “peer reviewed publication” aspect of the post when coupled with the argument that he was an EE PhD from Stanford, and therefore not a “real rocket scientist.” I won’t fisk this in great depth. I will point out something that the AF are probably not very aware of. Scientists of different training often do publish in fields not directly relevant to their training. I have publications (going back to 1988) in experimental physics (hi Tc superconductors, etc.), theoretical/computational physics, computer science, and other fields. My business partner (a Comp Sci person) has publications in Computer Science, Neurology, Physics, … . I have no problems if people are critical of my previous work. This is precisely what science is about, advancement by critical thinking, synthesis, and explanation. I have lots of problems with people being critical of the source of the work, without dealing with the work.
Yes, there is irony here, in my use of the term AF to describe those whom may be unwilling or unable to deal with rational scientific criticism. The irony arises from the auto-classification of such people, and the treatment of them differently from those with a motive for rational discourse.
Ignoring the irony for now, the AF almost always engage in these tactics. Which makes them easy to spot, and then you can decide if you want the amusement of arguing with people whom are immune to rational argument. A long time ago, I used to do this with another AF group, creationists. Arguing with them was amusing, till one day, someone reverse engineered who I was and visited me at my work. Yeah … real amusing. Since then I’ve personally taken a step back, as AF aren’t always rational (well, its pretty much by definition that they aren’t).
But that group employs the same methods as the AGW faithful. Its both amusing, and sad.
The second article is boilerplate response to valid criticism of measurment processes. Some things I’ve learned from my years doing the theoretical side, and from my years doing the experimental side …
1) When theory and (correct) experiment conflict, theory is tossed. And tossed hard. Which is as it should be.
2) Doing correct and accurate experiments is very hard. Myriad of details, getting them right is very very hard.
3) Its very easy to accidentally bias data, by making fundamental measurement errors.
4) “Explaining away” good hard data that disagrees with your model is a sure way to leave the scientific realm and enter the activist realm. At this point, you’ve fallen in love with a theory, and you are unable to let go of it, preferring to savage the data, regardless of whether or not such savaging is rational or not. Many scientists fall into this trap. This is why scientific meetings are so very important, and the healthy dose of skepticism is absolutely needed in all matters.
Sometimes theorists can help with “rail” calculations … e.g. take a particular case to its limits (to the “rails”), and calculate as it is simpler to calculate using that than the general case. This often provides bounds for both theoretical testing, and for suggesting measurements that can be done to help identify reasonable theories from unreasonable ones.
And science is never settled. It is a process. I used to laugh at the profound misunderstanding of the language of science when I heard creationists talk about “Darwinism” being only a “theory”. Notice what was done. First, they took what is generally considered in scientific circles as a very likely theory that is testable and has withstood the test of inquiry thus far, and tried to cast it as a religion (e.g. “Darwinism”, or more apropos for this discussion “AGW denial industry” and variants thereof). Second, they profoundly misunderstand the word “theory” as it applies to science, using the definition from the legal world instead.
This is pretty amusing. I’d ask people if Newtonian Gravity was a law or a theory. I’d ask them if Maxwell’s Electrodynamics was a law or a theory. And so on. And then at the end I’d ask them if we could ever violate the “Law of Gravity”. I mean, its a law, right? A law of nature? You can’t violate those …
… which showed the profound non-comprehension of those making the argument that a theory was not a theory but a law. General Relativity corrected problems with Newtonian gravity theory. Gravity is not a law, it is a theory. One result could invalidate the theory, and in the case of Eddington’s experiment with starlight deflection, did that to Newtonian gravity theory.
Same thing is true of AGW. You need only a single shred of evidence in conflict with AGW to render AGW as busted. Needless to say, there are quite enough skeptical scientists out there who’ve pointed out the flaws in AGW. Doesn’t mean that AGW shouldn’t be discussed, but that either the flaws correctly addressed, or the theory (or parts that are incompatible with reality) tossed in exchange for a better/more accurate theory.
Newtonian gravity is still a simpler formalism to present to high schoolers than hauling out the full mechanism of General Relativity. I’d expect many jaws to drop and eyes to glaze over if we forced kids to start dealing with anti-deSitter metrics and calculating orbits by plotting geodesics. Newtonian gravity is “wrong”, and we know how its wrong, but it makes for a useful calculation engine for some basic things, and it gets the basic elements pretty correct.
AGW may have elements that are useful. A better tactic than trying to destroy critics would be finding those useful bits, and getting the AGW proponents in science to work on addressing the fundamental issues that need to be addressed.
Finally, some very bright people can be stuck on “disbelief” and work actively against a theory. Its how you do it that matters. Einstein hated, with a passion, quantum mechanics. The guy couldn’t stand it. All the more ironic considering what his Nobel prize was for. Rather than savaging Neils Bohr and others in the press, he kept working on strong counter examples, insisting that “God does not play dice with the universe.” Eventually, he, Podolsky, and Rosen came up with a paradox. There are interesting side effects of this paradox, but the fact that they worked hard and tried to come up with an alternative explanation or counter example that made sense, rather than personally attacking their scientific opponents is what matters.
And this is what provides the difference between an AF and a scientific discussion. The AF will attack the person. The scientific discussion will explore the concept, point out flaws, and argue for better and more data. AF generally don’t do that, or pretend to do this under the guise of discussing, but they pull the same tricks in trying to savage data as they do in savaging people. Which allows one to detect them fairly early.
AGW proponents mostly fall into the AF group. Those not actively paid to work on the underlying theories and tests of the theories, those that have either an emotional or a financial reason for which AGW going away would be a bad thing … yeah, they are AF.
AGW as a science is in pretty bad shape, models and data are in significant question. Lots more work needs to be done, at a scientific level, without all the AF distraction, so that we can have a better sense of whether or not there is signal in all that noise.
Creationism is another AF topic, with a profoundly different group of AF. There are many others (sadly).
First off, before you indict the climate community, you may want to give them an appropriate amount of time to respond to these *recent* papers and reevaluate data that is out there. Hard data is hard data and if what he claims is even half true the models will have to change in due time. I don’t believe there is any formal or informal attempt to hide the truth as Occam’s razor would dictate that it would be impossible to sustain such a conspiracy for so long with so many people. The fact that the current model has flaws should not be a shock to anyone, it’s a very difficult problem.
Secondly, if the climate data is so easily manipulated to come to an erroneous conclusion, should we not be just as skeptical about this researchers findings as the previous results? I’ve often notice over the years that those that cry the loudest about the big mean *fill in the blank* often have their finding crumble under the weight of heightened scrutiny which comes after the media fervor and headlines have faded. In the last few centuries, how many big, bad, government/big pharm/big oil/big whatever conspiracies have ended up being true and how many have been the fiction of those on the wrong side of a dispute?
On the flip side of the argument, there is an amount of fudging that goes on in ever discipline. Publish or perish combined with journals stacked with recognized researchers that don’t like being criticized leads to a lot of “me too” research or research that works with soft questions rather than hard ones. There was a great article on the subject…
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/
while it concentrated on medical research, forecasts and modeling have some of the same problems. It’s a fundamental problem with research in this day and age and will require effort by all to try and correct.
I wish the researcher all the luck in following his mystery. I just wish he had chosen to work with the community rather than calling them all liars and cheats.
@Eric
No one is indicting the “entire climate community.” My understanding as an outsider of that community is that discussion is strong and vibrant, when external influences aren’t involved. That is, the research community is doing good work. The issue comes about when people with very specific agendas, and large checkbooks, come a-knocking.
What we need is something with far less outside influence. There is a huge, by any measure, policy apparatus combined with a growing “green” industry, that would not be … er … well served … by data indicating support for competing claims.
This is the “A” part of the group from before … they have a fundamental conflict in terms of financial outcomes relating to what is published. This is a fundamental danger to the free scientific inquiry in the field. It risks tainting research as biased. In fact, we’ve seen accusations of bias lobbed around as part of the pro-AGW’s tactics, when discussing research that might be in part supported by big oil companies. This cuts both ways though.
Unfortunately, the major issue is that, at the end of the day, the data needs to be collected, models compared to the data and refined. All the noise coming out of the “AF” camps needs to be quelled, so that people can do their work.
We can’t guarantee that they will come up with answers, or that everyone will like the answers. Moreover, they won’t settle the debate. But they will generate better models over time which do a better job of backwards time simulation (to match historical data), and hopefully better forward time simulation, to get a more accurate picture of what could happen.
Right now we largely have alarmists insisting on a dynamical system biasing in a particular direction. I’d suggest a look at a Hamiltonian coupled oscillatory system with sources and sinks, and ask what happens to the trajectory maps when you add (or remove) energy. This is something pretty simple to model, and may be a reasonable way to look at the problem.
My conjecture would be a tendency to explore more extrema. This doesn’t mean hotter summers and colder winters, it just means that the trajectories of the state of the system would explore a larger portion of the configuration space.
To your first point, the East Anglia bits (data, actions, etc. ) suggest, at least on the surface, that there is a dedicated effort on the part of some to suppress contradictory results. I do agree with you, that this is always a bad idea. It will get discovered. Moreover, such things are, sadly, common in the scientific community as a whole. The NIH in the US has an office which deals with the ethics issues, and in the publications I receive from them weekly, often announce which researcher(s) were barred from getting grant money for how long based upon some ethical violation or the other, including COI. Unfortunately it happens, whereever there is some sort of financial or political interest. I am not accusing anyone of wrong doing, only noting that it does happen, and some disciplines are at least open enough to admit it and handle it.
To your second point, yes, we should be skeptical of all results. New data that contradicts old data needs to be looked at with as much rigor as possible. If you can’t find fault with the data, then you are left with measurements that must be explained. If you can find fault with the data, then things that depend upon that data are in trouble (e.g. the temperature measurement issues in cities and near heat sources as lending support to AGW). All data, and all theories built as synthesis of ideas and supported by data needs to be open to scruitiny and critique.
As I said before, the science is never … ever … settled. Our models and data do get better over time though.
I agree with you on many of the points. The issue is that this science is largely getting obscured by people with specific interests, usually financial, and political. We need to treat all data, all models with skepticism, until they can be examined in depth, and have legitimate criticism of them correctly answered.
There will always be illegitimate criticism of results and models, but this is usually easy to spot … especially when people start with the “science is settled” and similar garbage.