At this point in the debate over climate change, I doubt that any standard process of argument (reference to scientific research, analysis of data, refutation on Internet-derived talking points and so on) is likely to shift the views of those who accept some version of the anti-science position on this topic. Certainly, I don’t intend to try any further.
But, it seems useful for a number of reasons to try to understand why people take and hold such positions. In some cases, it may be that, where rational debate on the scientific merits has failed, some other mode of argument or persuasion might work. More generally, in any political process, it’s useful to understand the opposition.
Here’s a first attempt at a taxonomy, which I started in this Tim Lambert thread
. Looking at those who have either propounded or accepted anti-science views on this topic, nearly all appear to fit into one or more of the following categories
* Tribalists
* Ideologists
* Hacks
* Irresponsible contrarian
* Emeritus disease
Update John Mashey has a related taxonomy here
Further update The discussion has convinced me that I need to add a further category, that of irresponsible contrarian. I’d previously applied this to Richard Lindzen, see below, so it was a mistake not to have this category.
Tribalists are probably the biggest group, with two main subcategories.
First, there’s a group of people who really dislike environmentalists and can’t bear the thought that they could be right about something as important as climate change. This group is strongly represented among (though still a minority of) engineers and mining geologists, groups that appear to make up most of the rank-and-file membership of the Lavoisier Group, for example.
Second, there are rightwingers in the US and other countries (including Australia) where the political right derives most of its thinking from the US. The basic motivation is the same, except the animus is directed towards liberals (in the US sense) and leftists in general, rather than environmentalists specifically. Members of this group are notable for an obsessive focus on Al Gore: some seem to think that an An Inconvenient Truth and not, say, the thousands of pages of IPCC reports, is the primary document in the case for action on climate change.
There’s nothing much that can be done about the political right, which is wrapped in impenetrable layers of delusion, but there’s a lot that can be done (and is being done, to some extent) to bridge cultural gaps between environmentalism and professions like engineering and geology. Younger members of these professions tend to be lot more concerned about sustainability, while the spread of suits, haircuts and a generally pragmatic approach among environmentalists has done its bit also.
Ideologists overlap significantly with tribal rightwingers, but are potentially more amenable to argument. These are people with a libertarian, or more generally pro-market outlook, who have convince themselves that doing something serious about climate change involves a major step towards socialism (a view shared by a few hopeful socialists). Given this conviction, wishful thinking inclines members of this group towards scientific delusionism. For most of these people, the fears they have are groundless. The standard measures proposed to deal with climate change, emissions trading and carbon taxes, are minimally interventionist, both in scale (maybe $10 billion a year for Australia to start with, and not much more even in the long run) and form (these are market-based methods of correcting externalities).
There are, I guess, a handful of extreme libertarians whose ideological position depends on the non-existence of global public goods requiring global policy solutions. To this group, I can only say that if your political views are inconsistent with the existence of the atmosphere, perhaps you should revise those views rather than trying to adjust reality to fit them.
The third group, not large in number, but important as opinion leaders, are hacks, who argue against science for a living. This group can easily be recognised by their past track record. Since there aren’t many people prepared to do this kind of thing, the same individuals and institutions have pushed the corporate line on tobacco and passive smoking, the ozone layer, DDT and climate change, among many others. In Australia, the IPA has played the leading role in this respect, running hard on passive smoking before shifting to climate delusionism.
The individual who most exemplifies this group globally is Steve Milloy, an all-purpose compendium of hackery, who spent years presenting himself as a scourge of “junk science” while secretly on the payroll of tobacco and oil companies. He’s now the official Science expert for Fox News, which says it all I guess. People who have paid little attention to th issue and have accepted Internet factoids as trustworthy can often by persuaded by pointing out their origin with people like Milloy. But at this point the majority of delusionists have well-established mental defences for their own delusions; many have convinced themselves that it’s the real scientists who are spouting lies for money and that corporate funding for the likes of Milloy is just self-defence.
The best hope of dealing with this group has been making life hard for their paymasters. After being outed as the money pump for a string of front groups, Exxon has largely given up paying. For anyone old enough to have been in the game before the mid-1990s, it’s always useful to check the Tobacco Archives, which document every corrupt payment made by the tobacco industry to its legion of hired guns.
Fourth, there are irresponsible contrarians, exemplified by Richard Lindzen. The typical contrarian is skilled enough in argument to maintain a weak position, and successful enough in their own field (often tangentially relevant to the issue at hand) to have an inflated view of their own intelligence. And they prefer confuting the conventional wisdom (to their own satisfaction) to giving serious consideration to the views of experts on subjects where there own knowledge is limited. The type is most clearly illustrated by a 2001 Newsweek interview of Lindzen that I’ve quoted before
Lindzen clearly relishes the role of naysayer. He’ll even expound on how weakly lung cancer is linked to cigarette smoking. He speaks in full, impeccably logical paragraphs, and he punctuates his measured cadences with thoughtful drags on a cigarette.
Anyone who could draw this conclusion in the light of the evidence, and act on it as Lindzen has done, is clearly useless as a source of advice on any issue involving the analysis of statistical evidence. But, I imagine, he could hold up his side of this argument just as well as he does on climate change.
Finally, and most unfortunately, there is Emeritus disease, a problem that is found in every area of academic controversy. The typical sufferer is an older male, with the archetypal case being the holder of an emeritus position. Unfortunately, aging tends to go along with both a hardening of intellectual arteries and an unwillingness or inability to keep abreast of recent developments in the field in question, with the effect of dogmatic attachment to views formed long ago. Having taken a view of an issue on the basis of very limited consideration, they remain dogmatically attached to it until the end of their days.
(Looking at the description, I’m obviously a high-risk candidate for going emeritus myself. That’s one reason I try to engage in discussion with people holding a range of views from which I might learn something, most recently economists of the Austrian school).
Unfortunately, Emeritus disease has a bad prognosis. As Max Planck observed long ago
a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
I’ll lay down a few rules for discussion on this post. I’m not interest in rehashing delusionist talking points (GW stopped in 1998, Al Gore is fat and so on) and comments containing such points will in general be deleted. On the other hand, I’d be interested in anyone claiming to have reached a sceptical position who doesn’t fit into one or other of the categories I’ve mentioned (to be credible, you may have to forgo anonymity). And, obviously, I’m interested in refinements of the classification, better targeted counterarguments and so on.
John Quiggin 
I frequently encounter a group that is a little different from your four categories. These are people who are mostly over 40, have seen material standards of living improve throughout their lives and who make or build things. They have have always believed that their whole working life has helped contribute to a better world. Whether that was their purpose is irrelevant – even if they see it only as a side effect, they have always seen progress. Now they are confronted with people who they have always accepted were smarter than them telling them that the trajectory of their lives is probably leading to catastrophe for them and their children. They don’t want to know and they clutch at any simple idea that seems to refute global warming.
I feel very sorry for them and I have no idea what to say to them.
Where extensive empirical evidence on the clear scientific merits of a case fails to convince, the main reasons are;
(a) general scientific illiteracy;
(b) lack of understanding of what constitutes logical argument per se; and
(c) a vested or perceived self-interest in denial.
These three conditions may overlap.
People need to receive an education which makes them scientifically and logically literate (for which basic literacy and numeracy are necessary but not sufficient conditions). Without this early advantage, they will only rarely be able to garner such an education from the media, libraries and public debate.
The long term solution is a better educated citizenry. Education in late stage capitalism has been hijacked to provide a narrow preparation for consuming and working within the current system. This education does not provide people with the capacity to confront new problems nor to discern when the system itself needs changing.
I won’t try to improve upon your classification, but I can present one line of argument against professional scientists (whether currently employed as such, or not) who use the excuse that their new book – nearly all of the “sceptics” who have been or are professional scientists have a new book out – is written for people who “have an open mind”, and who wish to “learn the truth” about global warming, climate change, etc.
In brief, consider a professional scientist who has been paid at least in part by the taxes of the public, and who has previously published research articles that met the scientific standards of the day for accuracy and principled analysis of all evidence – both for and against – relevant to their articles. Their scientific integrity and reputation depend upon the quality of their scientific work, and that in turn implies that they are scrupulously careful to treat the facts, and other scientists’ prior work, with intellectual integrity.
Now this professional scientist chooses to write a book on their favourite hobby-horse, one on which they have a fixed but contrary opinion to the majority of scientists in the relevent discipline. In this case the professional scientist, of which Ian Plimer is an example, holds a contrary position on anthropogenic global warming and believes that the experts in the discipline fail to make use of the findings of experts in other relevant fields (eg geology). This professional scientist proclaims far and wide that his book is not written for scientists, it is for the public, the layperson, who wishes to understand the arguments and to see the evidence.
This professional scientist’s book is not a scientific discussion, but rather a detailed polemic against greenies, social democrats, and any number of political groups, who in the opinion of the author are against change and consequently against progress (eg mining). The editing is missing with such simple errors as mis-spelling “Callendar” as “Challendar”, both in the reference and in the body of the book; and graphs are not up to the standard that any other scientist would expect if this was a book of (in this case) geological facts and theories.
When such a professional scientist is out proclaiming that their new book is not written for scientists, but for the layperson, challenge them on it. Make them explain why in their career they were meticulous in meeting the standards of fellow scientists because that is what allows science to advance; and yet they are quite happy to treat the public to a lower standard in their book. Shouldn’t the public be entitled to the standards any scientist must meet? Why should the public be subject to lowere standards of scholarship (and editing) just because they aren’t scientists?
Bit of a ramble but the real point is the emeritus prof sees no problem in giving the public a book on a scientific topic, in which the scholarship is far short of that required of a working scientist in their field. Do the public get a discount for that?
I object.This is a humorless attack on those people you will claim show no essential qualities of thinking that can determine matters of a predictive type.I keep on finding sites with physicists and other scientific credentials.I have read matters on the Internet that would surely show Australian Scientific pursuits are not that good. A site like this one, will one day very soon be whacked,for its pretence outside the global domain of the same sets of insistences and counter ones. I have known about sunspot activity etc. since the age of eight.Can anyone,as a function of their memory using, determine when the sun as a only energy source for this Planet crept into the abilities of being conscious!? And then as a fair exercise in just looking at the planets and stars found something insignificant about human life,then backed up by mathematical similarities!? Newtonian physics, a rip off of Hooke and others gave us, amongst other matters the understandings,in a modern sense of hydraulics, and thus the powerful forces at work in the majesty of very tall trees from very small seed.Is it wise to say that the complete biological existences of the Planet and humanity are completely dependent on carbon dioxide lockup of earth plant life, and sea, when electrical storms come and go in patterns and strike down the tallest of the species of carbon encapturers,and the oceans shake with a violence that only the capacity of whales and their bouyancy only just can handle it!? Wherein lies the satisfaction of the Earth concerned, to reduce all matters to fit the impossibility of mathematical modelling for their modellers!? What you are failing to grasp,is the potential for another group of your critics,those who don’t display the academic mortar board on their heads, either because to them it isn’t that important.Or, they have noticed you people up close and distant for years..and found your weakness,whilst you find fault with those who have failed your tests. You cannot argue against me,because I am a vegetarian,when you ask me about my diet,I swing my arms around and get hot under the collar.And seemingly worship the cow.
Donald Oats, you might have missed capitalising on your best inherent point!
Ask them why they are addressing a book of unestablished work to the general public when in the rest of their career they established their hypotheses (hopefully) by addressing their work to scientific peers who could check their findings by repeated experiments and observations.
I feel Philip is thinking in some inimitable language of his own and then translating it into English. It has echoes of Blakean thunder and a kind of prophetic poetic logic to it. Even his colloquialisms have a certain archness in context.
If Philip is warning that the entirety of reality is beyond all of us… then he has a point.
I wonder what this taxonomy would look like overlayed or integrated with Dryzek’s environmental discourses. A lot of the tribalists seem as if they are Prometheans, whereas others (the bushies) look like (shock and horror!) green romanticists.
And what’s the odds that Emeritus disease involves a degree of Dunning-Kruger bias?
There’s “skepticism” as cover for inertia, too:
Bernard Woolley: What if the Prime Minister insists we help them?
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Then we follow the four-stage strategy.
Bernard : What’s that?
Sir Richard Wharton: Standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis. In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
Sir Humphrey : Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
Sir Richard : In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there’s nothing we *can* do.
Sir Humphrey : Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it’s too late now.
Mark, I love a bit of Yes Minister. I reckon Dryzek would have Sir Humphrey down as an Administrative Rationalist. 😉
Re: Extra class of deluded people
I tend to agree with Alen (1) and Iconoclast (no 2). I have met quite a few people who are just not interested in the issue, not willing to reconsider their way of life, or too lazy to find out what the real state of affairs is. The arguments they use are typically ‘But the scientists do not even agree, do they’ and ‘AIT is just propaganda isn’t it?’. (Also, some of them are taken in by the ‘reasonable arguments’ of Lomborg).
The trouble is, it is not easy to show the facts in a casual conversation. While the principle is easy enough, there are many tricky details. I now wrote a summary of the issues of a few pages for some people I know in this category – we’ll see if that will do any good.
I want to point out an symmetry here: if somebody publishes a rubbish letter in a newspaper, it is disproportionately difficult to refute it! The truth is always more complicated, and sometimes tedious; at the same time letters to the editor must be short and witty.
See Reasons for Anti-Science over at Deltoid last December, and I’ve got several additional types beyond that.
Here are some more cases:
Triblaism-1
A small subset of meteorologists and weather presenters really disbelieve climate science. This is somewhat like Tribalism-1, but seems more related to the psychology of being whacked for not predicting weather a week of, then compared to people who make (different kinds of) predictions for climate 30 years off. This may be a discipline jealousy thing, or include psychology issues as well, like anchoring on older methodologies.
Ex: William Gray, Anthony Watts
I think that’s slightly different from mining geologists, who after all, may have ECON-1 and ECON-3 as direct economic interests.
(This is slightly odd, that JQ didn’t address more of the economic interests 🙂
Note of course that mining geologists are not hopeless: Naomi Oreskes started as one, even worked in Australia a while.
Tribalism-2 POL-2
Somewhat missing was my POl-1: politicians (who may or may not actually be deluded), but who have constituencies where they will gain votes by attacking environmentalists or Al Gore.
Ideologists: IDEOL-1, IDEOL-2
Hacks: ECON-2, ECON-3, (POL-1), but sometimes PSYCH-1, PSYCH-2, PSYCH-3, i.e., someone starts ina direction for other reasons, then finds they can get paid for it.
See also Cato & Pat Michaels, just yesterday.
Emeritus: PSYCH-5
However, there is another variant, related to some of the PSYCH reasons, which is “took an early position” and won’t change”.
See my my comment on JQ’s Deltoid post, as Richard Lindzen is in a different category than Ian Plimer, for example.
Another grouping is the existence of a small set of physicsts who attempt (for a plethora of reasons) to disprove the physics behind AGW. I’m not sure if this a tribalist thing, or some combination of the other reasons. At least some are not far along enough to be emeritus…
(more later)
It seems to me the impediment to action is political short-termism rather than GW denial. We demonise deniers for sabotaging the process when it is really the lawmakers who have lost their nerve. Very few politicians (eg Sen. Joyce) actively dispute GW. Yet it is the Rudd government that is hypocritically building more coal infrastructure like railroads and loading terminals.
I fear we will see this yet again after the Copenhagen conference. There will be the usual heartfelt resolutions but subsequent concrete action will almost certainly be feeble. The press will interview prominent deniers and we will seethe with indignation against them. I suggest next time we demonise politicians.
First off the science is complicated, and it is science so you are allowed to argue an alternate point of view. The problem is how the alternate view is argued.
I see a lot of farmers, they have all seen droughts before, that is the weather varying. Whats the big deal they ask? Farming does required a lot of faith that things will be better next year.
We are being asked to believe in something not backed up by personal experience. I haven’t traveled to the North pole, I haven’t stood on Greenland’s ice sheet, but I was convinced when I saw an article in Scientific America describing how fast the North pole and Greenland ice were melting. It wasn’t Al Gore or the IPCC report ( like 99.9999% of the population and probable most of the people commenting here, I haven’t read it)
I have visited Cities in China, I have seen in the 80’s European forests that were being destroyed by acid rain, and I have seen life in Europe improve as they cleaned up their act.
I was convinced long before I believed in climate change that technology needed to be used to generate clean power, we need big projects to keep our economies humming, whats wrong with using spare capacity to make stuff to clean up our act, and whats wrong with putting a price on the stuff that messes of a cities air. It’s better than another war.
I don’t think that my position is anti-science. I just don’t share the widespread confidence of many that say the science is all done an dusted and we are cooking the planet. Which is not to say that they have it wrong. I won’t be confident that we are cooking the planet for many, many decades simple because of the nature and scale of the topic. Although if we stop CO2 emissions tomorrow I think our knowledge will still evolve so I’m not merely stating that we wait for the outcome. I remain open to contrary evidence and I’m happy that people willingly expend time dismissing contrary evidence that does not stack up.
Assuming that my position actually is anti-science then do I fit the bill?
* Tribalists
An easy charge because aren’t we all to some extent. In fact a lot of people that support the warming side of the debate are doing so not because of science but because of tribal loyalty. Only a small number of people are doing it because they have done the math. So perhaps I’m part tribablist. Although I’m not wedded to any of the mainstream tribes.
* Ideologists
A revenue neutral carbon tax that reduced payroll tax or income tax will not make socialism any worse than it already is. An ETS will because it will create yet another class of permanent rent seekers. It is repulsive in the same way that the NSW taxi licenses system is repulsive far beyond what an equivalent tax would be. So maybe this one is me.
* Hacks
Not me.
* Emeritus disease
Yuck.
Ok, I’ll take you at your word.
I am a (former) scientist, but don’t fit any of the categories: I am 42 years old, so rather too young to qualify for an Emeritus pension; I am no ideologue: hard evidence is enough to convince me; I identify with no tribe, and I make no money from questioning the case for global warming alarm.
I am sceptical primarily because:
A) The science is dodgy, and not nearly as well understood as we are led to believe.
When you dig deep and look at a lot of the more trumpeted papers they do not stand up to scrutiny. Of course you have the whole hockeystick fiasco, but that’s almost old-hat now. More recently there’s the oft-repeated claims of diminishing sea-ice (fact check: global ice is growing or static, and even Arctic ice coverage is more-or-less back to normal). Or the latest from Steig et al on Antarctic warming (turns out his technique is highly sensitive to basic parameter choices). Or the claims that computer models accurately model the real climate when their parameterizations of clouds and other water vapor effects are so far off. Or the claim that hurricane Katrina was a result of global warming. Or the refusal by many leading lights in the climate science community to release their data so that their studies may be replicated (eg Lonnie Thompson, Gore’s chief advisor). The list goes on and on.
B) In view of A), I am not convinced that a wait-and-see and adapt-if-necessary approach is not more sensible. Additionally, I have a lot more faith in people to change their behavior when it is clearly in their economic interest to do so. For example, why force better mileage on automakers when the market will do that as soon as oil prices climb high enough? (SUV sales almost ended overnight when gas hit $4 a gallon in the US).
C) Human impact on the environment is already enormous. Take a window seat next time you fly and estimate the area of the Earth that has not been drastically modified by humans. Outside of oceans, deserts, and mountains, there’s almost none left. Will a couple of degrees (if that) of warming really make that much difference on top of everything else we’ve already done?
TerjeP:
Sorry, your position is anti-science, but maybe further discussion will generate some more insight. JQ has some useful overall categories, but there are more detailed characteristics that fall through the cracks.
“I won’t be confident that we are cooking the planet for many, many decades simple because of the nature and scale of the topic.”
That is usually called “argument from ignorance” (no insult intended, it’s just what it’s called). Basically, you are saying you don’t understand the problem, because it’s big.
There are much larger problems.
Are you confident that:
– Earth will still orbit the Sun as usual in 2050.
– The Sun will not have blown up before then?
Why? (Basic orbital physics, and astrophysicists who study solar evolution say we’re safe for a while.)
Unless you have a disproof of:
– Conservation of Energy
– greenhouse gas behavior
Earth as a whole, with jiggles, will be getting warmer. A little basic physics goes a long way.
(If you do have a disproof, it’s Nobel time, and I’d be ecstatic. We already have enough problems with energy and agriculture, that it would be awfully nice if the planet’s temperature flattened right now. Would save some ski resorts, as well.)
====
Have you read any books by real climate scientists?
Do you know any real climate scientists?
Do you attend any lectures by them?
You might try How to learn about science, although I’d add as the first book to read:
David Archer, The Long Thaw, 2008, which appeared after that piece I wrote.
===
However, JQ’s groups are top-level categories,and as I noted, I think there exist more attributes.
Does any of the following apply:
1) Some people think in terms of *distributions* of likelihood, not just single numbers like averages (or forecast temperatures). They tend to think in terms of values with error bars. Most scientists think this way, by nature or by training.
“I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything…” — Richard Feynman
For others (see PSYCH-4 in my list – ambiguity-intolerant personality), this is a terrifying worldview. In the extreme case, such would think that if scientists can’t predict the average world temperature for 2050 and 2100, to within .1C, then they aren’t certain, and hence don’t know. They do *not* feel comfortable with models that say: under A1F1 scenario, we most like get +4C, with a likely range of 2.4-6.4C
Are you comfortable with probabilistic projections, or very uncomfortable with them?
Do you believe that cigarette smoking increases chance of disease? If so, why? Is it OK if some younger relative of yours starts smoking at 12? Not everyone who does, dies of lung cancer.
{For what its’ worth, the scientific understanding for climate change is probably as good as it is for cigarette smoking, and better in some ways.)
2) There’s another psychology effect, which wasn’t called out explicitly in my older list, although I mentioned the related topic, the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
One always has to be careful with experts, as not all who claim to be are, sometimes experts are wrong. At least, scientists are generally careful to say what they know and what they don’t, sometimes with enough caveats to put people to sleep.
But, some people seem to have a reflexive distrust of science and scientists, and basically assume they are incompetent. On blogs, I can’t count the times I’ve seen:
Aha! these scientists haven’t thought of *this*!
Of course, it usually turns out that they had, long ago, and rather than just thinking about it, had gathered data, analyzed it, quantified it, modeled it, and wrote papers about it, in some cases predicting effects not yet seen, that were seen later. [A good example of this would be the continued refrain that temperature rise precedes CO2 rise in ice-age termination, and that scientists seem ignorant about this. Wrong: famous paper: Lorius, et al, 1990.]
So, the question is: do you discount the expertise of:
a) scientists in general
b) certain categories of scientists, including climate scientists
c) only climate scientists
(It is clear that you’ve dismissed the work of most climate scientists, so the question is whether that’s specific to climate science, or more general.)
3) Physics does not *care* about ETS schemes or political alignments or economics. Basic physics is really pretty brutal, and postmodernist arguments don’t make it go away.
No matter who tells you it’s fine to jump out of a 20th-story window with no parachute, or that you think someone is infringing on your rights by putting up a guardrail, the Law of Gravity will have its way with you. 🙂
Terje, while you may not be a member of one of the main tribes, as a member of (and IIRC, Parliamentary candidate, for) the Liberal Democratic Party, which presented as its policy the standard delusionist position
I think you fall into the tribalist category on this issue.
AnonOne, your list of examples certainly makes you sound like an anti-environmental tribalist, sourcing your talking points from ClimateAudit or somewhere similar. As I said, it’s hard to make a convincing claim to the contrary while preserving anonymity.
The assumption that man can change the environment of the Earth to such an extent that it threatens the very existence of much of the present life on the planet, is what needs to be accepted and reinforced. Life will continue to exist just not what we have at this moment in time.
Personal views are a response to the perceived threat to lifestyle and in many cases this perception is the basis for scepticism. I find a scientifically logical process is difficult to establish these days because the majority of the population I associate with, no longer have the mindset of logic based on fact but is dominated by perception based on the interpretation of others. The consequencees are that anything that influences a personal situation detrementally is opposed. This is possibly the root of the tribalism of both sides of the arguement not the complexity of the data.
I’m with Hermit and Mark Picton. The problem is not with those that deny. The problem is that people think it will cost too much to fix, do not want to compromise their comfortable way of life and believe if we simply close our eyes it will go away or that something will turn up to fix it for us.
One way to get these people to move (and very likely most people fit this category) is to work out ways that we can become wealthier while fixing the problem.
One way to do that is to use mechanisms other than price manipulation to direct investment. Increasing the price of energy will always meet resistance. Reducing the cost of investment does not meet the same resistance.
AnonOne (15),
I am exactly like you (I am scientist still).
I do think that the “science argument” is actually an authoritarian argument.
Most of the “science” is actually mumbo jumbo that supposedly rational people (like our blogger) accept without any criticism (the exact opposite of one would expect of rational people).
I work in computational science (simulating natural processes, in my case epidemiology and genetics related). I have 2 arguments to offer.
1. One of the most widely known and cited climate simulators (from one of the top 5 universities in the world) gives completely different results if you change compilation flags. We are talking about a gigantic Fortran simulator which some of the authors have died and nobody knows what some parts of the code do (like developed in the 70s)
2. If you believe in the ability to predict the future by computational terms (other the the behaviour of proteins in the next few seconds), I have a bridge to sell you. Just think about quantitative finance if you want an example.
The big problem about predicting the future with computational models, is that the scientists that do it are not there to suffer the consequences (strictly speaking is not science as it is very difficult to create a refutation), they are just there to reap the benefits (get the publications and associated tenures).
Regarding more empirical (hard) evidence, I have not much to say and I would guess that that part is probably the sound part of the argument. But forecasting the future is as honest as astrology.
@#20 AnonTwo – I agree with you – you are exactly like AnonOne
John, where in your classification would you place George Pell, who I notice the other day was praising Plimer’s book (evidently Pell doesn’t read the Weekend Australian?
No doubt Pell has no love for environmentalists, so perhaps he is a tribalist, but in my view he belongs to a different sub-tribe from the Lavoisier crowd – I doubt Pell and Peter Walsh would agree on much at all.
With Pell, I think his motivation is straight out of the pre-Enlightenment anti-science playbook. If you are a religious leader of a certain type, the idea that the great decisions on the future of how we will live should be led by scientific evidence, gathered by the class of people (scientists) who the Church has been at war against, on and off, for hundreds of years, must be galling.
A few posters in this thread make the claim “I am a scientist yet I am sceptical about AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming).”
The general tenor of their unsubstantiated claims makes it clear that either they are not scientists or they are very poor scientists with no understanding of basic scientific method.
The claim by AnonTwo in his point 1 certainly smacks of a factoid drawn from a denialist site. Can anyone with some real knowledge in this area clear this up for us?
The next claim is even more absurd (because it is so broad); “If you believe in the ability to predict the future by computational terms (other than the behaviour of proteins in the next few seconds), I have a bridge to sell you.”
Science (in established fields) predicts aspects of the future by computational means ALL THE TIME. It is the very reason that science works and has been generally adopted in preference to magic and wishful thinking. In fact, the engineers and quantity surveyors who design that bridge use calculations to predict what loads and stresses that bridge must cope with and what materials and structural design will bear that load, be of feasible construction and also be cost effective.
How people can claim to be scientists without understanding the basics of scientific method (pure and applied) is beyond me. In a nustshell scientific method comprises (where an hypothesis is ultimately successfully tested) a process of development of a testable hypothesis, tests by experiment, observations, confirmation and finally further tests of the predictive power of the theory.
Where the hypothesis fails, the expected confirmation stage and any attempts to make predictions based on the theory instead deliver a refutation of the theory. To date, empirical observations are confirming the general theory of AGW.
If people want to accept anecdotal evidence, I suggest they do not do it by going to anti-AGW web sites. Rather they should go and travel in the far northern parts of Canada and talk to the indiginous people with their long standing cultural-historical understanding of that environment. Ask them if they think global warming is happening. You will get a resounding yes and many examples of local knowledge to support it.
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This may appear twice – looks like a spam filter is objecting to something below.
These problems are well known and discussed in several places on the web. climateaudit is one of the best. If you have refutations of any of the issues raised at climateaudit, you would be well treated if you were to raise them over there: the climateaudit crowd is honest and throough.
Ok. I am AnonOne. You can google me. FWIW All but two of the references on that first page of hits are me (I haven’t looked further). Obviously I wasn’t a climate scientist but I have a strong numerical background.
I am AnonOne. I posted a comment but it looks like the spam filter ate it.
AnonOne and AnonTwo, there is an excellent thread over at realclimate.org explaining the differences between protein folding models and climate models.
Essentially the difference, so I understand, is that the output from protein models is digital; it’s either correct or it’s not. On the other hand, climate models give an analogue result i.e. a probability distribution.
Indeed, Ikonoklast, I have $100 that says that the Sydney Harbour Bridge will be standing tomorrow, based on a computational prediction I have made. To sweeten the deal for AnonTwo, I’m prepared to give odds of five to one.
AnonTwo,
Interestingly, I have heard that there tends to be a fair amount of skepticism of climate simulations among people whose principal experience with computer modelling is protein folding simulations.
Climate models are a bit different because (as I understand it) a) they are much more bounded systems due to basic conservation of energy issues and b) the results that are reported are the average of a large number of runs of the model assembled into a probability distribution of outcomes from different initial conditions, rather than a single specific protein configuration (not my field, so maybe I have this wrong).
To address your complaints, which are rather abusive in nature towards climate scientists.
I have a BSc in physics and a PhD in Cultural Anthropology – in other words, I know very little about epidemiology and genetics. How would you feel if I came up to you and said “I think computational epidemiology and genetics is all a load of authoritarian mumbo-jumbo! after all, the NAZIS believed in genetics and they got lots of supposedly rational people (e.g. Starck) to accept their genetic science without any criticism!”? Because that is about the level of the argument you have put here.
1) This is unsourced gossip. Names. Places. Facts. References. Does this alleged simulation in fact have any contribution to the IPCC reports?
2) I believe, based on having programmed an astronomical simulation as an undergraduate, that I can predict the position of Jupiter’s moons in 100 years. Bridge, please.
2a) What sort of scientist are you if you think that quantitative finance is a science and climatology is not?
3) The big problem with computational genetics is that the people who run the simulators don’t suffer the consequences. After all, they aren’t made to be the test subjects of the pharmaceutical compounds they design. They are just there to reap the benefits of money from the pharmaceutical companies. Forecasting the spread of disease is as honest as astrology.
jquiggin, can you retrieve my post from the spam bucket? I tried a couple of variants but it got swallowed both times.
correction: Stark (Johannes) not Starck.
#anon 2
Your example number 1 is a misinterpretation of what was one of the great “discoveries” of our time. It gave rise to what has been called the butterfly effect. That is, you make a small change in the underlying assumptions (in this case the precision of rounding of a number in a calculation) and you can get a big difference in outcomes. This is a characteristic of many dynamic systems with positive feedback characteristics. .
On point number 2. Dynamic systems modeling using computational methods such as weather forecasting and financial modeling can only predict a certain length of time because the results of the interactions with interacting components display emergent behaviour that is “unpredictable”. To get a better understanding of the power and limitations of computational modelling please look at “Complex adaptive systems” by Miller and Page.
When we find systems that are difficult to predict we know that there are positive feedback loops inside the systems – hence we know the financial system has such mechanisms – because it is unpredictable. If however we remove the positive feedback mechanisms we can make the systems more predictable. We can do this with financial systems but we have difficulty with weather and climate systems.
Financial systems positive feedback comes mainly from the way we increase the money supply.
Climate change models are going to be wrong (and are almost certainly worse than the worst predictions being made public) because of positive feedback loops within the system. For example increase the temperature and that increases the release of methane from the tundra areas and that increases temperature etc. These effects are unpredictable in magnitude because they are positive feedbacks but they are real.
AnonTwo is actually quite funny.
The general acceptance of the the scientific method comes about because of it’s success in predicting the future, not because of tablets sent down from the mount or because the results are ordained truth.
Obviously Anontwo is no scientist. I suppose that is the problem with the internet, you can claim to be what you want.
Regards
Napolian
I think that this exercise runs the risk of being perceived as petty point scoring.
So I propose to generalise it away from climate change debate all together.
Even though collective human knowledge might be increasingly ordered along rational lines, individual people frequently behave irrationally, or believe irrational things.
Situations range from the everyday and mundane (arguing rationally with a partner, knowing you are right, even though the act of arguing and ‘being right’ is just going to make partner more angry)
to the large scale e.g. vaccination versus anti-vaccination, 9-11 conspiracies, global warming etc.
We all have emotions, weaknesses, weak moments, bumpy psychological histories, drives, fears, passions etc which frequently mean that we don’t act rationally.
Being smart is being able to think rationally, quickly, effortlessly. But being wise is to be able to grapple with the irrationality of others in the best possible way.
A wise person knows when not to argue with their partner, even though they know that their argument is correct and the partner is at fault.
A wise person knows when the person who they are debating is immune to rational argument.
A very wise person knows what to say/do to bring a person to sense when they are straying into the untenable/absurd/unsupported.
The kinds of mental processes and emotional histories that bring people to be climate delusionists are often quite human, and quite understandable I think (except perhaps for hacks), even if not rational or informed.
I guess what I’m saying is that irrationality isn’t limited to climate delusionists, and our methods of engaging with the irrational have to become markedly more advanced if we are to get anywhere.
Its not a balanced debate when the climate scientists share equal or less media space with climate deniers.
All climate scientists are confident that global warming is occurring, they are unsure how fast its occurring.
So when Queenslanders want government handouts to rescue their collapsed tourist economy because global warming has acidified and bleached the reef, I will point out they chose the coal industry.
Steve @34 – being smart doesn’t neceesarily immunise you against being irrational, it just makes you better at justifying your irrational position 🙂
John, I fear you have laid another trap for yourself that will be exploited by more “quote miners” from the Australian. Expect to see a piece by William Kininmonth tomorrow:-“Even former left wing crusaders like John Quiggin now admit that ‘GW stopped in 1998.'”
#6 “I feel Philip is thinking in some inimitable language of his own and then translating it into English. It has echoes of Blakean thunder..”
I think Philip is inspired by James Joyce. There’s a kind of rhythm to it that could have come straight out of Finnegan’s Wake. I thought the following passage particularly moving:
“Or, they have noticed you people up close and distant for years..and found your weakness,whilst you find fault with those who have failed your tests. You cannot argue against me,because I am a vegetarian…”
Of course in post #38 “Finnegan’s Wake” should be “Finnegans Wake”. (Sorry about the off-topic. I’ll go now.)
AnonTwo(20), James Haughton (29)
It is a *common* error for people familiar with one flavor of simulation to over-generalize their knowledge to that of other simulations, rather than *asking*:
“I’m familiar with X. Is Y like X, or different?”
See psot at RealClimate in which I gave somewhat of specific examples (protein folding, software configuration, some forms of financial modeling), and discussed some of the cases from disciplines like (EE, software engineering, mechanical engineer, petroleum engineering, financial engineering).
As for worrying whether compilation flags change results, or that’ there’s old code:
a) That’s why people use more than one model.
b) And, computers’ floating point hardware is only an approximation to real numbers, and sometimes it matters. This is the wrong place to discuss the tradeoffs between performance, precision, and compiler optimization …
but if the term “SPEC benchmarks” means anything to you, we had to work very hard to compare the results of floating point benchmarks from different computers to see if they were within range. They certainly weren’t bit-for-bit identical, and that was no surprise to any of us, and that was 20 years ago. 🙂
In any case, the key quote is that of (famous statistician) George Box:
“all models are wrong, but some are useful.”
Climate models are all physics-based approximations (like the models used for car crashes or fluid dynamics, or even Barbie Doll simulations). Still, they were useful 20 years ago, and the current ones are more useful.
John Mashey (40):
Maybe so, but it is not an error to conclude on the basis of the published climate science literature that many practitioners (or at least the ones that seem to receive the most press) do not understand what it means for conclusions drawn from modeling to be statistically robust.
The hockeystick is the most famous example but the trend continues with the recent Nature paper by Steig et. al.
@41 This really is snooze-able, but just what is the relevence of the ‘hockeystick’ to the science? One paper with methodological errors that may or may not be substantive with respect to the conclusions. So what. There wouldn’t be a single field in science where there aren’t papers published that have flaws. It’s scarcely the point when other researchers using different data and methods uncover much the same result.
re: 41 Jonathan
Sigh.
This is silly: why do you want to debate statistical issues in *this* blog?
But, even better, let’s forget blogs:
Assuming you are indeed the Jonathan Baxter in the Medical Faculty @ Imperial College, you are in the lucky position of working at a world-class institution that employs world-class climate scientists and has frequent seminars by others.
There aren’t that many places in the world where that’s so easy to get.
You might try:
1) Sir Brian Hoskins, who heads the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, which runs regular seminars and other events. I see Wally Broecker will be there June 11, and several other events will be held in June. I’d guess there are several interesting events per month, and there is no better way to learn.
To have such a strong opinion on climate scientists’ incompetence, you must surely attend such things regularly? And ask questions? And talk to climate scientists live?
2) Jo Haigh, who heads the Physics Department these days, and has done a lot of research in atmospheric physics.
Both have done participated in IPCC,work.
I’ve never met Sir Brian. I’ve heard Jo talk on climate science and spent some time talking to her. Unsurprisingly, she is a very sharp lady.
Is it conceivable that these folks *might* know a little more climate science than a Candain mining/minerals guy?
[yes, I know you trust ClimateAudit strongly. *Please* go talk to some real climate scientists. I’m fond of Imperial, and I hate to see people there doing silly things like this.]
Jonathan, you seem like a potential target for the kind of persuasion I’m interested in.
Would it make a difference to your thinking if I could show you that, far from being the trustworthy and disinterested group you take them to be, the main critics of the hockey stick are (with no exceptions of which I’m aware) Tribalists, Ideologists or Hacks?
I suspect many hold anti-science positions only lightly. For example, Jonathon Baxter tells us “Arctic ice coverage is more-or-less back to normal” There are many people, me included, who would give him very-very-good odds against this September’s Arctic ice being at 1950s levels and for that matter good odds against it even getting to the levels seen in the 1980s. But I doubt he’ll back his assertion.
I feel I have travelled the Blakean matter more than once,so I wont rehash that as a smart potato.And my fine motor skills at typing means,at large, I simply cannot fit into any of the categories.I am limited therefore by the evident and real problem,of how I assess matters when I come across them as positions,understandings,acceptances, qualities ranges and their errors…and whatever is momentarily defineable to my mind as I try to process the information for my own sense,of accepting that information for its attempts at validity.This isn’t a graduate response,but a everyday matter,unless Iam so pissed off I assert in the darkness of not being interested in wether or not there are vast fault lines in the assertion.I therefore claim a pyscho-philosophical strata to my thinking on the matter.I am firstly aware I am a limited physical chap of a person,to underline the very existence of the politeness,rather than the English of this attempt.So like the bodyliner of ancient cricket lore,in this game of categorising,has not the history of the IPCC and major batsmen like Hansen of NASA,as a guest of the IPCC side,duly been undermined by his cricket box ,and undies supplier by the name of Theon,who has recently retired as his number one cleaner of his sports’ showerhead and chief polly-sock wearing of said Hansen!?That is, upon retiring from cleaning up his mess as a sort of NASA rib for the Man,Theon did his nana and basically said Hansen has been talking non-science for more moons in a year than you would find in a Mayan Calendar.And if the highly thought of Prof.Quiggins hadn’t come across this about Hansen, then smirking and amusement about global warmers will increase with a predictive quality, that, will not be unfathomable.The Abominable Snowman has thus duly arrived.
Jonathan Baxter @ 25 Says:
Jonathon, others have had the opposite experience at climateaudit. It appears the blog keepers at CA are keeping you from knowing what everyone’s treatment is like .
There have been some attempts elsewhere to break down the “denial” crowd, esp. here in the States. Yours makes better sense though.
The anti Al Gore crowd is the one I run into most often here in the SE USA. They seem to hate him with a passion I cannot fathom. Many of these also add in Hansen in their half page long paragraphs (I’ve read many as we all have).
As a Meteorologist who works in TV, I do think the tide is really turning there. Most of the ones that in the denial camp, (but not all) are those with very minimal science backgrounds.
John Coleman is actually in this camp, and perhaps the fringe of the emeritus camp simultaneously.
The first comment by Alan (about the over 40 hard workers) hit home- I see these too and they are easier to convince with real science, on a one to one basis.
Dan Satterfield.As a reasonable polite person,who often as not goes to DavidIcke.com and AlexJones’ PrisonPlanet.com Infowars.com, Rense, and then onto other fields of sites including a man with the name of Goddard,who lifted a few eyebrows and eyelashes for me on matters Artic..the matter of Al Gore is simple,straight forward and precise.And you must of read it or scanned so to come to matters legend of the sea. And that is Temperature is following Carbon Dioxide counts,and not as Al Gore presents the other way round.There is much about Al Gore,I have backgrounded ,via the Net, that suggests,when it comes to Gore,don’t accept what seems to be presented at face value.And Americans who are on his silvertail will probably go about being on the shallow end of that,simply because it would seem quite easy to hate him a lot,thus, hating oneself beyond a needed self capacity in doing so.So whatever reason you are here,I guess it could be found somehow,in the origins and meaning of your name and those of immediate family members.Doing thus, what Australians know about U.S.A. singers and movie stars ..going to Sydney to attract a lot of attention back home to restart their careers.Goddard’s approach was one of the finest responsive and clear headed matters under constant blog activity I have come across so far.Perhaps, you and another here are typing in code.Because,frankly,unless it was the hour from where you sent your posts from,they don’t seem fiesty enough.
#49, are you generating your posts with Markov Chains?