In principle this sort of technique seems like something that could benefit any sort of science, including climate science, immensely. The number of studies with unreproducible, and likely flat out wrong results, is scarily high. (And yes, there is certainly real critique that can happen in climate science, not on whether or not climate change exists at this point, but on details of certain papers, and even topics like "how realistic is the clathrate gun hypothesis".)
Unfortunately in practice this likely ends up being the government sponsoring the same sort of bullshit that the oil companies have been putting out for ages, and not real critique. Red team/blue team is also a unfortunate name given the political connotations...
"And yes, there is certainly real critique that can happen in climate science..."
The kind of critique that routine happens within the scientific community, over time. Scientists are highly motivated to prove the majority wrong, because that's how you make your career, by finding something new that everyone else missed.
By contrast, the EPA 'critique' will be a political charade, a circus of crackpots and shills assembled by the administration to rationalize its predetermined policy decisions.
> Scientists are highly motivated to prove the majority wrong, because that's how you make your career, by finding something new that everyone else missed.
Don't romanticize the scientific establishment too much.
Yes, you want to find something that everyone else missed and publish it. However, you don't really want to "prove the majority wrong" (they, after all, review your paper and speak often with people on funding committees) in any kind of funding- and career-invalidating way. What you really want is a detail your colleagues overlooked in their largely-correct approach to a problem. This kind of thing - generating results and techniques that your colleagues can integrate into their own research, citing you - is what makes careers.
Partly this is because (I honestly believe) the majority of people in my field (plasma physics) are competent and conscientious researchers, so "proving them all wrong" is the futile quest of a crank.
However, my point remains - as a junior scientist I do not want to stir up any shit with senior scientists, nor do I want to challenge any narratives that funding agencies like. I mean, I might want to, but it would be counter to my own interests in a big way.
"Proving them wrong" is a bit strong, I admit. Proving something they don't already know is closer to the mark. And sure, in any field there are people who don't want to rock the boat. They are necessary to do the grunt work for the people who do want to rock it. Not everyone needs to be a pioneer, but enough regularly appear that science continues to make great progress.
If that kind of critique was happening routinely we wouldn't have 50% of scientists not being able to reproduce their own paper [0]. The sad truth is that incentives have aligned so that sufficient critique doesn't happen, and that showing some paper doesn't reproduce isn't going to make your career. Government funding to encourage such critique would be great.
I don't disagree on this likely be(com)ing a political charade.
I think your take-away from the reproducibility crisis shouldn't be that science is corrupt, peer review is stuffed with cronies, or scientists don't know what they're doing, it should be that science is really fucking hard:
My old boss at Google used to run the data science program for Search - this is basic business intelligence, not even the natural sciences. He gave an hour and a half long presentation once on all the ways our experiments can and have gone wrong. It included everything from browser bugs disrupting logging, to service outages that happened in the middle of the experiment, to current events that change the normal traffic pattern, to software bugs that trigger failsafes that shut off the experiment but don't affect the control. By the end of the presentation, engineers were asking "So how is it that we actually get anything right?"
My brother-in-law is an actual scientist - he does cancer research, studying gene expression within head & neck tumors. The time it takes to get one rigorous, publishable result is measured in years. And it can be derailed by months by something as simple as a tech mixing up lab samples.
The thing is, when people use examples of these techniques going wrong as examples of why science is untrustworthy, they forget that normal human reasoning doesn't even bother trying. It's basically a given that most of the stuff you "know" is false. What would be the reproducibility stats for an everyday human belief like "vaccines cause autism" or "the economy does better under Democratic presidents" or "vitamin C prevents colds"?
The virtue of science is in being less wrong, it's not in being right. Which, given how often the average human is wrong, is something I'll happily take.
I did qualify my statement by adding "over time." Note Feynman's famous observation about scientific progress in a commencement address at CalTech:
"We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that ..."
But the number did eventually converge to a consensus, though it took many years to get there.
> 50% of scientists not being able to reproduce their own paper
In the case of the psychology replication crisis (note that I'm NOT talking about climate science here), the problem was the result of a few factors:
1. the lack of incentives to replicate others' work
2. the use of p-values to determine what gets published
3. the low probability of a true positive
These factors are not part of the critique process of peer review. That is, reviewers are looking at whether the methodology is valid. "Did the scientists follow proper procedures? Do the results match up with what they claim?" While these questions can identify methodological errors, they cannot identify when an experiment is a statistical fluke.
Suppose the true positive rate is 5% and the false positive rate is 5%. That means that only 10% of experiments will give results that suggest publishing. But if you look at published papers only, the probability that the paper is false is not 5%, it's 50%!
The solution to this problem is not to throw out peer review, it's to fix the three issues above. We must create a system that incentivizes replication. Perhaps 1st-year grad students will be required to attempt to replicate existing work. (This would be more interesting for the grad student than taking an additional class!) Perhaps we should move away from p-values (but what do we replace that with?)
However, the replication crisis is not really the problem of bad science or corruption -- it's mostly the result of bad incentives and false positives.
This. We need to change the world so such statements immediately discredit the people who made them in a consequential manner. They already do for some people, but not where it matters. We're already in such a world when it comes to racism and sexual harassment (Clipper's owner, Fox news anchors). We're just not there yet for political integrity, an oxymoron of sorts.
The IPCC has already done the work of summarizing climate science.
The role of government is to respond to those truths with estimates of the negative impacts and estimates of the cost of mitigation and then come to a consensus around actions.
This is just obfuscation designed to drive a wedge between accepted science and policymakers. Obfuscaters just want to avoid making the hard arguments over their desires to have either zero mitigation or to actively accelerate human caused climate change.
It's a perfectly fine position to hold that climate change is happening but that you don't care. It's not fine to lie about it happening purposefully create and spread lies in the public space.
Just make the argument that the money would be better spent elsewhere.
Has anyone ever got Pruitt in front of a camera and asked him the following question?
"Contaminants in our air and water cause X billion dollars of added health care costs and lost productivity to Americans every year. Rising sea levels and extreme weather patterns cause Y billion dollars of damage to real estate and crop yields every year. What is the EPA going to do to control these losses?"
I really want this anti-science conservative to answer the question about what he really cares about: the wallets of people who own lots of things. His side doesn't care about "good science" or objective truth, and they don't care about the public's well being. They care about money above all else and I think that's where the discussion should be focused.
Critiquing a hypothesis is part of the scientific process, not "anti-science". If the science is sound, it will withstand scrutiny.
I have followed this debate closely, and I haven't seen anyone on either side put forth detailed policy proposals other than voluntary carbon caps. In my opinion, advanced technology will solve this problem before any major policy changes are needed.
Unless you he scrutiny is biased and meant to discredit the science that is. Republicans lie about scientific consensus on climate change all the time. Do you think, it by some miracle this review is not biased, that they will suddenly accept those findings?
Vested interests have vested interests. Reviews of publications doesn't change that.
Real science should even welcome biased, hostile scrutiny. Actually, that's the best kind of scrutiny.
Read Blaise Pascal's work where he demonstrated how to create a vacuum experimentally. At the time, everyone thought that was impossible. Pascal calmly addresses tons of detractors (many of whom had real skin in the game). If climatologists can't do that, then their work SHOULD be questioned.
This makes the naive assumption that the people evaluating the conversation are rigorous logicians who are not moved by emotional appeals and bad logic that confirms what they want to believe.
Yeah well the hostile scrutiny isn't trying to bias towards a different scientific conclusion. They are trying to undermine the entire concept of science. They don't want there to be objective facts. What we're talking about isn't biased scrutiny, it's dishonest scrutiny. Anything that endangers short term gains on Wall Street is to be destroyed.
There is no way that's compatible with such a complicated, subtle, and slow-moving field of study like climate science.
But that's not how it works. The EPA scrutinizes it in a biased way and comes to he conclusion that fossil fuels are just fine.
Conservatives get a talking point, people who don't know what a P value is and wouldn't read any of the publications that would cry fowl about this are now a little more sure that it's all a liberal Chinese hoax designed to take away hard won profits from nice American oil companies.
> Unless you he scrutiny is biased and meant to discredit the science that is.
The entire point of scrutiny is to discredit and of course it's going to be biased. That's the point. If the science is solid, it'll withstand the scrutiny. And if it's not, it won't.
Any kind of scrutiny or inquiry should be encouraged, regardless of where it comes from.
In a bubble, sure. In reality people still believe the thoroughly scrutinized paper linking vaccines to autism.
Once the news cycle has chewed through the "EPA says climate change is not real" headlines and that's soaked in, it will be regurgitated for years to come. No matter how biased the scrutiny.
We don't really care about laypeople in this discussion, that's the domain of journalists who are expected to do their homework.
Biased scrutiny is the best kind. Scrutiny needs to occur and I would rather the people doing it sincerely believe that community at large is wrong rather than someone playing devil's advocate. They should make the best possible case against climate change they can.
> We don't really care about laypeople in this discussion
And that's why this discussion is pointless, because they are exactly the people who will be fooled by a flawed and untruthful study and are exactly the people who a) will suffer most due to climate change and b) are able to take action to stop it.
Okay suppose somebody raises a concern about the state of the research. Climate scientists address the concern and show that it is not meaningful. Then two decades later people raise the same concern. That's what is happening here. There hasn't been any new criticism. It is the same debunked arguments over and over and over and over and over. At what point can we stop encouraging that?
At no point. That's how science works. Those who are opposed will bring up the best arguments available, even if those arguments aren't new. They'll get evaluated, rebuffed, accepted, etc. That's how it's supposed to work.
Many of the ideas you currently believe in were at some point rejected and ignored, frequently for decades and sometimes centuries. Bringing stuff up again, over and over, is a good thing.
If you are so thoroughly convinced that you are right, that is the surest evidence that you're doing it wrong. Always allow for the possibility that whatever you believe may be off and can be improved, even by ideas that aren't new.
> At no point. That's how science works. Those who are opposed will bring up the best arguments available, even if those arguments aren't new. They'll get evaluated, rebuffed, accepted, etc. That's how it's supposed to work.
No, this is not how Science works.
Repeating ad nauseaum the same debunked arguments is not how science works.
Or perhaps you think that is still valid to bring the Thomson atomic model today? Or the flogistum hypothesis?
The only thing those are doing is mudding the waters to stop the actions, nothing more.
> If the science is sound, it will withstand scrutiny.
Only if both parties to the debate are acting in good faith. In this case, one party has financial and ideological incentives to push for a certain outcome.
After all, you cannot convince someone of something if their paycheck depends upon them not understanding it.
Conservatives say the same think about the "liberal scientists", at least with respect to the financial incentives. Basically they say that the only reason so many scientists claim climate change is a problem is because their funding (and thus jobs and livelihood) depend on there being a climate problem for them to research.
> Basically they say that the only reason so many scientists claim climate change is a problem is because their funding (and thus jobs and livelihood) depend on there being a climate problem for them to research.
Thing that is false, if there is no climate change thwy still we be studying the climate
But there's far less urgency to just studying the climate. I suspect a lot of conservatives view it as an alarmist conspiracy designed to give liberals more power.
> I haven't seen anyone on either side put forth detailed policy proposals other than voluntary carbon caps
You missed a carbon tax, in my opinion the mechanism most likely to make a difference.
> In my opinion, advanced technology will solve this problem before any major policy changes are needed.
I agree with you to this extent: with the current state of affairs, only advanced (and as yet untried) technology can avert disaster. I don't think it is at all likely to happen, and major policy changes were needed twenty years ago.
> advanced technology will solve this problem before any major policy changes are needed
There's no way to know if that will happen, you're just blindly hoping the magic technology fairy will fix the problem because you hate taxes or liberals or both. Every ton of CO2 we spew into the atmosphere today will stay there for centuries. And there's a lag of decades between the spewing and the feedback effects to be felt, so there's little market pressure to fix the problem now.
Critiquing a hypothesis is part of the scientific process, not "anti-science".
"Critiquing" the same hypothesis by sea-lioning ("We're just asking some questions," when the questions have been well answered a hundred times), over and over again for years on end, is very much "anti-science." It's the same minimally-within-the-rules strategy used by the Holocaust deniers, Gamergate shitlords, and the neo-Fascists. It's not debate in good faith, it's a strategy of attrition, an attempt to waste human resources.
I think the reality is that those things do not impact immediate-term profits the way environmental regulations do, so it won't help sway anyone who sides with Pruitt and the rest of the Trump administration on climate change.
I take your point, but I'm not really talking global warming here. I'm just going with the stuff everyone can see right now. Rising sea levels, drought, hurricanes, etc. The idea being that you get Pruitt to respond without having to invoke the buzzwords that shut everything down.
The talking points have moved from "it's not happening" to "it's not our fault" in the last decade or so. The response would just be "the science isn't settled on whether humans caused that" and stuff like "plants need CO2, so maybe it's good!"
Strangely enough, there seems to be a believe among non-science-literate liberals that CO2 is a poison. Obviously this is not the case and plants can increase biomass like gangbusters with extra CO2, as long as they have the sunshine and water. There might even be a measurable difference in certain crops. I imagine that would be little consolation after losing major fisheries to the secondary effects of ocean acidification.
>plants can increase biomass like gangbusters with extra CO2, as long as they have the sunshine and water. There might even be a measurable difference in certain crops.
Not universally true, some plants will be negatively affected by the co2. Either way its not the case that we are going to get amazing plants or that plants will grow to solve the situation.
This. They've started saying things like, "The earth goes through natural cycles. How do we know this isn't normal? There weren't any humans around to cause the last ice age." Honestly I can't event say I completely disagree with that logic. But for me I'm not willing to risk being wrong about climate change.
As an interesting note, the Murray referenced in the article is the same Robert Murray that threatened to (and then did) sue John Oliver after his segment on coal this month [0][1].
Yep. I remember conservatives crowing about how this was a study by a climate skeptic and respected scientist and they'd be willing to accept the results. Of course, when the results weren't what they wanted, They turned against the whole thing.
Brings to mind Gingrich and his "Mueller is an excellent pick" tweet a few months ago, only to completely flip his position a few weeks ago. These people are unredeemable.
> If it is done by experts in good faith this will probably be a good thing to strengthen the signal/noise ratio in climate science.
“Aye, and”—to quote Scotty—“if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon.”
It's not like Pruitt and his boss haven't already staked out a definitive position on climate science, or like Pruitt would structure (or his boss would tolerate him structuring) this in any way not assured to support that position.
Since public belief drives public policy, which is a substantial factor in science funding, and, ultimately, can also impose limits on performing or publishing research, either explicitly or indirectly by imposing penalties for publishing material damaging to industry.
Which is exactly what should be happening! Imagine that the situation was reversed and that the scientific community at large concluded that humans weren't the cause of climate change. Wouldn't you like it if public policy changed after this group published their findings?
The title is kind of misleading. From the article:
>The program will use "red team, blue team" exercises to conduct an "at-length evaluation of U.S. climate science," the official said, referring to a concept developed by the military to identify vulnerabilities in field operations.
As Senator Franken pointed out, the scientific process itself is a "red team, blue team" exercise, and the settled result of that process, the consensus view of climate scientists, is that human-induced climate change via carbon emissions is happening and is a real threat.
The article title is technically correct, in that at least one of those teams will be on the "critique" side. It is also substantially correct, germane, and honest in implying with its scare quotes that this new effort is superfluous, unless it is an effort to gum up the works with climate denial.
I'm reminded of this wargame that was essentially scripted to give a specific outcome (and restarted and changed when that outcome did not happen): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 I wonder if they'll employ a similar approach here?
I don't think it's misleading at all. Here is more context:
"The administrator believes that we will be able to recruit the best in the fields which study climate and will organize a specific process in which these individuals ... provide back-and-forth critique of specific new reports on climate science," the source said.
So they will recruit "the best in the fields which study climate" which basically means they will recruit a few of those "scientists" who get paid to reject climate science and put them on the "red team" or whatever, and that team will be listened to exclusively by the administration.
The worst legacy of Trump will be his denying of climate change. USA is the greatest polluter of the world. Their carbon output per capita is ten times greater than everybody. The country always stopped every tentative to slow climate change. Now with Trump they will accelerate it.
Per capita you are the highest, and historically as well. That's slowly changing and may not be true in the future as other nations industrialize, but you can't escape the facts.
Edit: downvotes, but no comments? Nice. Care to point out why I'm wrong?
I agree. Per capita is the only fair measure when comparing countries,. Although it's scary to think about china and India catching up on that measure...
It measures CO2 production adjusted for total economic production and weather. I.e. it shows you which countries are the most inefficient vis-a-vis CO2 production, instead of just which countries are the richest or happen to have colder weather that requires more heating.
China is a good example. It's not in the top 10 of CO2 emitters per capita, but only because it's still pretty poor. When you adjust for that, it jumps into the top 10, and the U.S. falls out of it. In other words, if you cut economic output by 1 unit in the U.S. (to lower CO2 production), and increase it by 1 unit in China, world total CO2 output will go up.
Of course, when you stop trying to massage the figures to make it seem more favourable it comes out with USA in #2, with 300 million people, and china in #1 with 1.3 billion.
Your per-capita consumption is more than 4 times that of China, and for a long time you had the most emissions in the world. Your way of life isn't sustainable in more ways than just emissions. You have to accept that.
The USA got rich polluting, China also has the right to improve the standard of living of their people. Any measure that isn't per capita is deceiving.
And American companies send high polluting industries to China, so it goes to their account.
What does this change about the core observation, that shifting a unit of productivity to China from the US would increase CO2? If the goal is to minimize CO2, this seems like an important fact.
The weirdest part of it all is how these folks are now on the sharp end of capitalism. They're rapidly being dismantled at a more local level by on-site generation, which simply needs less global infrastructure to meet demand.
So now we have these folks with massive empires largely based on the promise of future capital, with heavily leveraged current holdings. They have incentive to act against efficiency and the market to preserve the investments they made. In any other scenario folks would probably say that they "deserve to lose".
> The weirdest part of it all is how these folks are now on the sharp end of capitalism. They're rapidly being dismantled at a more local level by on-site generation, which simply needs less global infrastructure to meet demand.
I wish the climate change alarmists could realize that 90% of what they're freaking out about is a non-problem. It'd just take a small amount of focused investment (cogeneration and AC time-shifting tech, etc) to make the energy industry obsolete.
I think it's a very big problem for my descendants. This is something I am sensitive to as my parents and grandparents have left America in such a terrible state for me to inherit, and now resist any attempts to yield power.
The energy industry is fighting against both economics and ecology to maintain dominance. It does so for lots of reasons. It has no right to exist.
The one glimmer of hope I have in all this is that emerging markets like China and India seem keen to push for green tech. I don't think capitalists of the type we're referring to will understand anything more clearly than losing money.
We can't wait for them to accept the science, we should be pushing for the economic incentives to do the right thing to get better.
As they kill off journalism through litigation, it will only worsen - there will be no fact checking, only what the government tells you to accept as the truth. John Oliver's segment on the coal industry was particularly telling. There's a Netflix documentary just released called Nobody Speak that gets into this a bit more. I'm sincerely afraid of the damage this administration will do to our country in just 4 years' time.
This effort is ultimately kind of laughable. Coal is going to collapse not because any global warming regulations, but because it is no longer cost competitive with natural gas, solar, or wind. And many jurisdictions have committed to upholding the Paris Accords with state & local laws. [1]
It's a dying industry that will die out for the normal reasons - economic forces - regardless of what the federal government does.
"Carbon capture and sequestration does not work. It's a pseudonym for 'no coal,'" Murray said while waiting for a ride outside DOE headquarters. "It is neither practical nor economic, carbon capture and sequestration. It is just cover for the politicians, both Republicans and Democrats that say, 'Look what I did for coal,' knowing all the time that it doesn't help coal at all."
So "clean coal" is BS just like I thought? Is this guy trying to shoot himself and Trump in the foot or what?
Sometimes I think too much focus is being put on climate change as the reason to reduce fossil fuel consumption, while all the other good reasons get less attention. The US economy has a dangerous dependence on finite resources. Its cheap availability and consumption has devastated country sides, caused pollution, wars, economic instability, disconnected societies, obesity, the list goes on.
I honestly don't think this is going to be politically solvable without violence. If it comes down to civil war the evil billionaires will have more money for weapons. My prediction for the next couple centuries is an increasingly ruthless dictatorship controlled by a billionaire class trying to prevent revolt while civilization slowly collapses.
Kind of an open question here. I am not a climatologist and neither are most people. Climate science is subtle and easy to misinterpret (and hence, spin) on the mater of anthropogenic climate change, or ACC.
To the average person, myself included, the arguments made by both "sides" (ACC exists, ACC does not exist) are equally convincing. That is, both seem logical and well-argued at the superficial level we can understand without training.
To the average person, myself included, both "sides" have a profit motive in fudging the numbers. (If ACC exists, the energy industry will fight because it ultimately harms their profits. If ACC doesn't exist, the academic lobby will fight for their prestige and grants)
Both sides are, ultimately, dirty, due to politicization if nothing else.
Both sides, ultimately, cannot be simultaneously correct.
And so I ask: Who should be trusted, why, and how, given the limited number of hours in the day available to people who aren't directly involved in climatology as their day job?
For bonus points, do any of the answers to those questions not boil down to the genetic or appeal to authority fallacies?
(The snark below in response to a legitimate, good-faith question is leading me to believe this topic cannot be discussed among reasonable people)
You assert that both sides have a profit motive, but there is a huge disparity in the quantity of profit. The fossil fuel energy companies profit to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. The academic lobby grants 1) are minuscule in comparison and 2) most of the concerned academics have plenty of other things they'd rather be studying - climate change is what they choose now because of its existential nature.
I don't see how that matters - if you trained your whole life for one branch of science (or one career), you're a lot more likely to stay where you are rather than spend years starting from zero to move where you think more money might be.
"Climate Scientists" did not train their entire life to be climate scientists they come to it from a general background in geology, environmental science or physics with a two-three class "focus" during undergrad, another two to three class focus during grad school and maybe a phd.
Maybe.
Some of them just wound up there because they were the only people in the department with the Fortran chops to get the models working.
>To the average person, myself included, both "sides" have a profit motive in fudging the numbers.
Yeah, this is almost entirely wrong. I'm sure there is slightly more public funding available in the Earth sciences because of the urgency of climate change, but not much- NSF funds for Earth science projects have been pretty steady for the last 20 years [0] and before that too. If climate change simply didn't exist, researchers would just get grants to work on the plethora of other important Earth science issues- human water usage, the ozone layer, ocean acidification, forest fires, coral bleaching, agricultural runoff, glacier retreat. There was no shortage of important Earth science problems- why on Earth would researchers go to such (impossible) lengths to fabricate one? The idea that international researchers have created some conspiracy to increase funding in their field is bizarre and incoherent and just demonstrates a lack of understanding of how science funding works. It also doesn't explain the international consensus on climate change- how has every major scientific organization and metereological society agreed upon it, when all of them have completely different funding situations? And if they have, well then surely they would have realized that this plan has not drastically increased their public funding in 20 years and given up on it by now! But in all seriousness, this idea is just insulting to the scientists and the fact that it's popular amongst American conservatives is pretty telling of how scientifically ignorant that ideology is.
> To the average person, myself included, the arguments made by both "sides" (ACC exists, ACC does not exist) are equally convincing. That is, both seem logical and well-argued at the superficial level we can understand without training.
Understanding climate change requires high degrees of expertise, the collection of large amounts of data, the use of large mathematical models, and the cooperation of a large number of scientists. A large number of scientists work very hard to track the state of climate change, and their assessment is that "climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities" [0].
> If ACC doesn't exist, the academic lobby will fight for their prestige ang grants)
Please see the list of scientific bodies and their statements on climate change [1]. The idea that a large majority of all scientists with knowledge pertaining to climate science in the world would be corrupted, falsify results, and make false statements over many years to fund further studies seems exceedingly unlikely.
> And so I ask: Who should be trusted, why, and how, given the limited number of hours in the day available to people who aren't directly involved in climatology as their day job?
You should trust what 97% (or more) of all climate scientists agree upon. Arguing that a group of experts of a domain should be trusted is not logically fallacious.
It doesn't have to be knowingly false, though - you think that all of the studies in psychology that wound up being non-reproducible were all submitted by pathological liars?
Keep in mind that I never even mentioned deception, that was something you just set up and knocked down on your own. I have no doubt that most climatologists are doing exactly what they should be doing and aren't Saturday morning cartoon villains,
But if there's a more meta issue involved, such as bad data, I argue that it'll never see the light of day given the political incentives.
(In other words, the politicians are the villains, not the scientists running the data)
> It doesn't have to be knowingly false, though - you think that all of the studies in psychology that wound up being non-reproducible were all submitted by pathological liars?
> But if there's a more meta issue involved, such as bad data, I argue that it'll never see the light of day given the political incentives.
This is why single studies alone should not be the basis for large changes in policy. The current consensus in climate science is based on a large number of studies from different universities, science bodies, countries, using different sources of data, using different methods, and over a period of time. All of these factors makes it likely that the consensus is something which we should believe, and which should guide our policies.
> Keep in mind that I never even mentioned deception, that was something you just set up and knocked down on your own.
You stated that scientists have a profit motive for fudging their numbers, which if they did would be deceptive behavior.
> If ACC doesn't exist, the academic lobby will fight for their prestige ang grants
It would be better for "the academic lobby" to peddle the idea that climate science is unsettled, which would create more of a need for grants to study the issue.
It is not always true. Imagine the system, where the government is a primary source of grants. There is a possibility that government will prefer funding the scientists whose work supports government's political agenda.
Neither we nor our politicians should adjudicate scientific results and pick and choose what makes sense to us. We are not qualified. Scientists have a process as well as peer review which determines valid vs invalid results.
I subscribe to 'Science' magazine which is one of the most respected publications among scientists (along with 'Nature' magazine). The consensus among scientists is settled: ACC is real. ACC deniers do not get published in respected science magazines because their peers do not respect their results.
Scientific results should be settled by the peer group of scientists, not by politicians or the general public (see vaccine conspiracies for example).
I've kind of lost faith in the peer review process after the reproduction crisis in psychology field broke, and it is quite believable that any study that arrives at the "wrong" (read: not acceptable politically) result will result in the paper not getting published, or worse.
And it's not like this is some conspiracy theory. Unspoken social consequences don't require people getting together and stroking their goatees cartoon-villain style.
The "consensus among scientists", looking at the psychology thing, can and has been wrong, so holding the concept up as if it makes error impossible doesn't seem to wash.
Both are peer reviewed science at the end of the day. What's to say the climatology studies are "rigorously recorded and analyzed" any better than the psychology studies? Am I to trust climatologists more than neuropsychologists for some reason?
* Both are experts in their field
* Both have prestigious journals
* Both are supposed to have a peer review process that prevents bogosity from being published and accepted.
Yet in one field, the peer review process, the ultimate guard that's supposed to prevent junk science from being published, failed. Is failing. Repeatedly. For a long time. It's not one failure, it's a chain of systemic failures.
That tells me that the entire concept of peer review is not immune to degenerating. And if it can happen in one field, it can happen in another, especially one that's harshly politicized (which psychology isn't, at least not anywhere near the same insane degree).
> That tells me that the entire concept of peer review is not immune to degenerating. And if it can happen in one field, it can happen in another, especially one that's harshly politicized (which psychology isn't, at least not anywhere near the same insane degree).
Politization occurs almost only in the US.
Are you accusing the scientists of being politized?
Do you have any argument for your claims of not reprodicibility in climate science?
Do you have any argument for doubting the data that has been used for more than 40 years?
Do you have any argument apart of your political views?
How is consensus settled, when there are renowned scientists out there who object the CAGW hypothesis? Roy Spencer, Richard Lindzen, Judith Curry, Freeman Dyson - are they all bought and paid for by oil industry?
Roy Spencer is a satellite observation expert, who has reversed his opinion of satellite measurements, and now believes that warming is about as described by the traditional thermometer datasets.
Judith Curry doesn't disagree with AGW, she disagrees with the scale predicted. That would mean less immediate, strict action, but action nevertheless.
Freeman Dyson isn't a climatologist, he also says himself "[m]y objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have." He also believes in AGW.
It's good to have sceptics, and in particular being sceptical about the scale of AGW is very reasonable. The IPCC predictions actually have a wide variance for these reasons. These scientists don't really speak against the moderate action currently proposed, they aren't backing for Trump's position.
I don't mind AGW at all (it's obvious that human activity influences the climate, and probably the effects of deforestation are as severe as effects from CO2 emissions), but I find CO2-CAGW (i.e. anthropogenic warming caused by CO2 emissions and leading to catastrophic consequences) unconvincing, to a lesser degree due to personal knowledge (uncertainty in clouds feedback, under appreciation of positive effects of higher CO2 concentration etc), and to a higher degree, due to views of Lindzen, Curry, Spencer Dyson, and other scientists.
Yes, Dyson's rhetoric on climate moved a bit towards "alarmist" side, but he still doesn't believe in catastrophic consequences:
"The good news is that the main effect of carbon dioxide … is to make the planet greener, [by] feeding the growth of green plants of all kinds [and] increasing the fertility of farms and fields and forests."
Even by the late '90s there were renowned medical scientists who disagreed with the consensus around the "HIV causes AIDS" hypothesis, despite ample evidence.
You asked how there could be "consensus" on the existence of ACC when some scientists dispute its existence.
The parent post gave an example of a case where some credentialed scientists continued to dispute the HIV-AIDS link well after the balance of evidence was against them.
Many people would say there was a "consensus" on the HIV-AIDS link despite the continued skepticism of some scientists, and that this scenario has parallels with climate science.
Can you offer a counter example, where a holdout group of scientists who disagreed with consensus in their field were proved right?
Climate changes anyway, so why do anything about it? People die anyway, so who cares what causes AIDS?
Call it "climate science denialism" if you prefer. It's no different from AIDS denialism.
Thabo Mbeki, President of South Africa in 1999-2008, listened to the denialists' views about the AIDS outbreak. He had an AIDS advisory panel staffed with consensus critics -- just like Trump and Pruitt are doing. The estimated number of premature deaths due to Mbeki's counterproductive actions is around 300,000.
The article is about paradigm shifts in science. Obviously those happen, but not every minority opinion is such a shift. They are notable because they are so very rare.
What do you see as the paradigm shift that turns climate science on its head and proves the consensus wrong?
Suppose that new discovery in natural climate variability provides IPCC with better models, and these models show that CO2 has only minor influence on global warming and climate overall. "Paradigm shift" would be a good description for this development.
This 'consensus' approach is biased from the start, because it automatically gives a benefit to the so-called "scientists" as if they are somehow more wise or knowledgable about anything any more than a soothsayer or even pulling a few stones out of the ground and interpreting the residual dirt in their cracks while intoxicated on some brewed concoction of plants.
Nope. The IPCC consensus has been reached through a lot of hard, unpaid or very poorly paid, work by people passionate about helping others, that all the time know they could easily get bought to spread falsehoods and reap large rewards.
consensus as in general agreement, as in a majority. Pointing out that some minority group exists is hardly a refutation. Would you not say there is a consensus the Earth is round?
Why should one trust majority, and not minority, if "minority" people are also qualified and respected (Spencer, Curry)? There were episodes in the history of science, when the majority turned out to be wrong.
I won't object to the fact that majorities can be wrong. There are many examples, ancient and recent. But that is a different argument from your other comment.
I trust majority in science because it is rarely wrong. I'd need a bit more than "majorities have been wrong before!" to switch sides.
Which part of the science do you find unconvincing? We have great ice core data going back 1000's of years, the greenhouse effect itself is universally agreed upon and understood, we have a measurable rise in global average temperature over the last 2 centuries, and we see that people are spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Solar cycles, volcanoes, and other non-human sources have been refuted and disproved time and time again. only scientists paid to lobby on behalf of the source of warming disagree with the cause. What's missing that could ever convince you?
The CAGW builds upon following argument: increased concentration of CO2 reduces the EM radiation's emission in frequencies that CO2 absorbs, ergo the surface temperature should rise in order to keep Earth's thermodynamic balance.
Increased temperature clearly affects the formation of clouds which have both positive and negative effects: they deflect incoming solar radiation, but also deflect surface radiation. The net effect is unclear, unfortunately.
I'm also quite puzzled by apparent lag between CO2 and temperatures in Vostok ice core data. Contrary to CAGW, temperature rises first, and CO2 follows.
My layman understanding is quite limited, of course, that's why eventually I go to the scientists for their expertise. I don't believe that all opponents of CAGW theory are shills; some of them are very respected people: Lindzen, Spencer, etc. My only conclusion is that science is not settled and CAGW is still an unconfirmed hypothesis.
ACC doesn't build upon the hypothesis that CO2 reduces the energy emission. The underpinning is the greenhouse effect whereby gasses, particularly CO2 prevent heat absorbed by the Earth's surface from radiating back out into space. Only about 26% of the Sun's energy is reflected by clouds or the atmosphere. CO2 concentration increases heat retention but not cloud albedo(reflectiveness) nor atmospheric reflectiveness.
Cloud formation is not related to CO2. CO2 is the primary factor driving the greenhouse effect. In fact research is beginning to show that a warmer planet may have lower cloud cover [1][2]. There is no cloud controversy, you are literally making that up.
It does build on the fact that increased concentration of CO2 reduces EM waves emission (in the parts of frequency spectrum that can be absorbed by CO2) from Earth to space. Earth is presumed to maintain thermodynamic balance (i.e. energy received should be equal to energy lost). To compensate for reduced emission caused by CO2, Earth's surface warms up and restores the balance. This is global warming 101, I believe.
Have you read your links?
"One of the biggest questions in climate sensitivity has been the role of low-level cloud cover. Low-altitude clouds reflect some of the sun's radiation back into the atmosphere, cooling the earth. It's not yet known whether global warming will dissipate clouds, which would effectively speed up the process of climate change, or increase cloud cover, which would slow it down.
But a new study published in the July 24 issue of Science is clearing the haze. A group of researchers from the University of Miami and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography studied cloud data of the northeast Pacific Ocean — both from satellites and from the human eye — over the past 50 years and combined that with climate models. They found that low-level clouds tend to dissipate as the ocean warms — which means a warmer world could well have less cloud cover. "That would create positive feedback, a reinforcing cycle that continues to warm the climate," says Amy Clement, a climate scientist at the University of Miami and the lead author of the Science study."
That's one study that recorded the cloud data for subset of Earth.
"Point to" is not confident enough. Even skepticalscience, the "alarmist"-side site, admits that "While clouds remain an uncertainty, the evidence is building that clouds will probably cause the planet to warm even further".
"A group of researchers from the University of Miami and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography studied cloud data of the northeast Pacific Ocean"
Study from your first link recorded cloud cover data over subset of Earth's atmosphere. It doesn't say anything about whether clouds feedback is positive, or negative. Local data is not very useful evidence, global data would be preferable.
Here is an explanation of what is cloud feedback: increase of temperature has effects on cloud formation. If feedback from changes in cloud formation is positive, it will lead to even more warming. Negative feedback would mean that changed cloud formation actually reduces warming.
I did read the links, they both point to positive feedback cycles, and you cherry picked that quote to obfuscate that point.
Your first statement is proving my point, CO2 contributes to the greenhouse effect, causing warming on average. Human activity is the cause of historically high CO2 levels.
Freeman Dyson is not a climate scientist at all and never has been.
Roy Spencer isn't a "renowned scientist"; he's a paid oil-industry shill.
Lindzen used to be a scientist; now he's retired and gets paid to be a Cato Institute shill.
Judith Curry also used to be a scientist and quit her academic job; presumably being a shill pays WAY better.
So, basically, yes, they are all bought and paid for, or, they simply have no credentials or knowledge of the field in question.
Dyson is a renowned physicist interested in climate science. I believe that his physics/math skills and general intelligence allow him to be quite competent in climate issues.
Lindzen retired only in 2013. I don't see how this makes his opinion about CAGW less valuable, especially given the fact that he was skeptical about CAGW hypothesis for a long time.
"Judith Curry also used to be a scientist and quit her academic job; presumably being a shill pays WAY better." - where's the proof that she is a "shill"?
Roy Spencer is a renowned scientist in my book: "Roy Warren Spencer is a meteorologist, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA's Aqua satellite. He has served as senior scientist for climate studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center."
Again, where is the proof that he is oil industry's shill?
To my knowledge, Freeman Dyson has no peer reviewed research contributions in the climate literature. That should be the price of entry, otherwise there is nothing of substance to critique.
This is exactly what I meant by fallacies. Either their research is legitimate or it is not. And that legitimacy is not a factor of the employer - if their science sucks, it'll manifest in the data, analysis, or conclusions, regardless of who's paying for it.
I know what the word shill means, and your inverse variant of red-baiting isn't very effective. Simply taking money from some group does not mean you are a shill for that group.
Changes in temperature and sea-levels based on man made actions are harder to convince people of than other factors. My go-to in cases like this is ocean acidification. The following is a straightforward introduction to this part of climate change:
The process seems fairly simple. Oceans absorb a high proportion of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels. This changes the pH levels of oceans, which then alters the environment that marine animals live in, causing a necessity to adapt. You could perform water pH experiments to prove the effects on marine life if you needed to convince yourself (though I wouldn't want to promote animal testing if there was another way to reach clarity on this).
> (If ACC exists, the energy industry will fight because it ultimately harms their profits. If ACC doesn't exist, the academic lobby will fight for their prestige and grants)
Why climate scientists won't have grants if there is no climate change?
Climate doesn't need to be studied?
> Both sides are, ultimately, dirty, due to politicization if nothing else
Please, give me examples of climate scientists dirty by politization.
> For bonus points, do any of the answers to those questions not boil down to the genetic or appeal to authority fallacies?
Well, if you think that Theory of Evolution is appeal to authority, yes.
When the big majority of a field have consensus, you have to look at the motives and arguments of the minority dissenting, not saying that the majority appeals to authority
If ACC doesn't exist, the future is much scarier. It suggest that the climate is changing, but that human kind isn't causing it, suggesting that it's much harder for us to revert, suggesting that we are much more likely to be screwed.
Of the data we have, climate change being human caused is MUCH more preferable. The alternative is that the climate is changing and we aren't responsible.
How in the world is listening to climate scientists an "appeal to authority" fallacy? How are people supposed to get information about anything if this is your argument? Most of our knowledge comes from experts and specialists...
I take this same "both sides" approach to gravitation in particular. Gravity is subtle and easy to misinterpret but to the average person, myself included, the arguments made by both "sides" are equally convincing.
Anyone who has passed a freshman physics class is equipped to (with significant effort) verify Newton's law of gravitation.
Any middle school student with a stopwatch and a tower can drop things off and determine that there are laws describing the ways that unsupported objects move downward.
Everyone who ever lived has been in a position to independently observe many of the properties of gravitation without needing to trust even a single statement or datapoint provided by another person.
In order to even understand the theory of ACC, much less test it, requires a person to first have a ton of education and then to navigate a substantial amount of academic literature.
It doesn't matter what you think. What are the other sides of the statements you make? We need to hear hear them out and debate them as well.
You assume that so-called "freshmen physics" is a legitimate source of material and that middle school students are being taught legitimate science to begin with, when it could all be part of a pro-science agenda put forth by academic science thumpers promoting self-interested concepts of scientific ideology so that these people can continue to be employed and earn upwards of $40,000 per year as science propagandists. Let's not ignore the fact there's a lot of money at stake on these issues here, and for the involved parties getting you to believe in concepts like middle school science of freshmen physics are entirely based on a monetary incentive, despite what the evidence may show and even against contradictory evidence.
Also you assume that gravitation is proven beyond a theory or a concept, which is demonstrating your pro-gravity bias. The understanding of so-called "gravity" is based on nothing more than a theory, but general relativity and quantum theory are entirely incompatible with one another which basically debunks the entire thing as many leading scientists would agree, but again this assumes that any of the so-called "science" or the basis of any of this is even legitimate in the first place.
Finally, and this is very important, all of this completely disregards what religions might say too, and we need to hear each of the arguments of each individual religion and belief system and what their opinions and thoughts are on so-called "gravity", which, by the way, is not even mentioned in any holy books or writings whatsoever. That "gravity" is left out of every religious teaching entirely is very telling, and it demonstrates that from a theological standpoint that "gravity" has absolutely no basis in truth whatsoever, otherwise it obviously would be a subject of these belief systems and written about endlessly if it were a real thing. Can you really dispute or discount the words of supreme beings, let alone every God and belief system?
How so? If you could demonstrate a natural process that accounted for the data, that would pretty well falsify the claim that human production of greenhouse gases is the leading cause of climate change.
It doesn't work like that. The null hypothesis is that natural processes fully account for observed temperature data. In order to generate enough thrust to escape the gravity of the null hypothesis, you must do the following, according to Karl Popper (cribbed from here [1]):
1) Describe a difficulty or gap in scientific knowledge, a "general problem", clearly defined, and show that the problem needs to be addressed.
2) Formulate a hypothesis, a "tentative theory", addressing the general problem, stated as clearly as possible in the language of science, which is mathematics.
3) Try to invalidate the tentative theory, and apply a certain scientific ethic described by Richard Feynman in his famous essay "Cargo Cult Science"[2]
I'm not sure the "general problem" has even been established. From 1880 to 2015 the Earth's temperature has gone from 288 K to 288.8 K, a 0.3% increase. So first of all you need to prove that the Earth system is not able to keep the climate stable.
Then you need to prove that recent increases in temperature are fundamentally different from past increases in the same system, i.e. the current interglacial period of the last 10,000 years. Again, this is not conclusive at all.
Then you need to prove that CO2 plays a huge part in the recent temperature changes. Correlation does not imply causation. Two independent variables can both increase and you have not proven that they are causally linked (beyond the first-order effects of course). All we have so far are computer models which, so far, are no more than best-fit lines on observed data.
In order for a computer model to be a good enough piece of evidence to favor dropping the null hypothesis and accepting the basis of the model, you would have to leave the model alone and see how well it predicts climate going forward. So far the models have not done well predicting actual climate [3].
I'm not sure that the average earth temperature is all that important here. The alarmism I hear usually relates to the biosphere either radically altering or collapsing outright due to sea level rise if the ice caps melt - which would take about 8 degrees Fahrenheit over a relatively small area of the planet.
My beef is with the alarmism based on observations of the last 100 or so years. We are talking about a climate system that has gone through at least four glacial periods in the last half million years. You would think that science would be very careful about making assertions based on such limited evidence, but that's not what's happening.
You're right, I oversimplified the null hypothesis.
Based on my best understanding climate scientists have pretty well proven that CO2 plays a huge part in the recent temperature changes. Perhaps an actual climate scientist lurking on the forum could weigh in.
That's been pretty well refuted as well.[1] Basically, the solar cycle can affect ocean temperature in the pacific to the degree that it can change circulation and some weather patterns, but has been shown to not be the cause of observed average temperature increases over the past 50 years.
Though open, this is a fantastic question, and one that everyone who is not a climate scientist should ask. The answer inevitably will vary depending on what you are willing to take people's word for, and how much time you're willing to spend digesting enough evidence to be convinced one way or another.
As shorthand in the following I will say that everyone, on this issue, can be classified as an "agnostic", an "alarmist", or a "denier", and I will trust you not to take those labels to insinuate anything about who is right or wrong (I myself am mostly in the alarmist camp).
IMO, the alarmists win A LOT of points (maybe not quite the whole game) for having a coherent, universally accepted, physics-based theory of the temperature of planets which correctly predicts observations from a variety of planets and requires radiative forcing from greenhouse gases in order to do it, while the deniers (as far as I can tell) do not propose an alternative theory or even generally agree on which part of the alarmists' chain of inference is broken. In, fact, until I see such a theory presented by the deniers (why are the planets we know the temperatures that they are, and what is the relationship between those temperatures and atmospheric GHG concentrations?), I really think the only sane stances to take are that of the alarmist or that of the agnostic.
Now, if you doubt that people can agree on the current surface temperatures and atmospheric compositions of Venus, Earth, the moon, and Mars, and are unwilling to spend the time to convince yourself that they do, then you're likely doomed to agnosticism. Same deal if you doubt that we can agree on the amount of CO2 we're emitting as a species on an annual basis.
Even then, you'll have to remain agnostic unless (1) you're willing to accept an appeal to authority or (2) you're willing to spend tens (but probably not hundreds) of hours understanding the basic theory of ACC, which holds that a doubling of the earth's CO2 concentration will result in an increase of 3C (plus or minus 1.5C) in the Earth's equilibrium temperature.
If you want to spend those tens of hours, you could start with this article[1] or this video lecture[2] or the wikipedia articles on "Planetary Equilibrium Temperature", "Radiative Forcing", and "Climate Sensitivity". The trick to not spending more than tens of hours is to remain laser-focused on understanding what those three terms mean, how they're related, and how one can try to measure climate sensitivity. In particular, a lot of discussions about prehistoric climate, on feedback mechanisms, and on the specific effects of global warming on specific regions of the globe will lead you astray if you let them.
If you don't have even a few hours to dig in on climate science, all I can say is that appeals to authority become a lot less unpalatable when the authorities appealed to are sufficiently numerous. Even if you think it not unlikely that NASA, NOAA, the EPA (all of whom are definitively, officially in the alarmist camp according to their websites) are in conspiracy with faculty at dozens or hundreds of universities, what about the 197 nations that were engaged in negotiating the recent Paris Climate Accord, or the 84 signatories of the Kyoto Protocol?
Lastly, just out of curiosity, in what form do you tend to see the genetic fallacy applied for or against ACC? I'm not sure I've encountered it.
Lastly, just out of curiosity, in what form do you tend to see the genetic fallacy applied for or against ACC? I'm not sure I've encountered it.
Generally, a saying that because group X funded the study, or that person X that has Y beliefs did the study, that it's automatically invalid (without even trying to actually examine the claims in the paper).
You can see examples of that in this very thread. A variant of adhom, basically.
Shut up or put up:
Come back when you have implemented your own model that reproduces the 21st century's climate to date without human CO2.
This is the standard that scientists are judging themselves by.
For bonus points predict 2003 based on 1800-2002.
Do you really see those things as having equivalent sureness of proof as climate change? I grok the things you listed quite well, and I've been following climate science as a hobbyist for years, and by comparison climate science is a mess compared to thermodynamics and even evolution. And I say this as a person who fully believes that anthropogenic climate change is happening.
2020: the Red Team at NASA has some interesting new ideas about how prayer affects orbits. They should get their share of satellite launches to test these ideas so that we can understand the controversy better. Critique will make the other scientists work better, right?
I think Al Franken referenced some time where some Koch brothers funded institution already did this. That's also ignoring the fact that this is already how science works for the most part
In the video, Al Franken pointed out that the Koch brothers had funded a "red team" of climate skeptics - and the skeptics (or at least one of them) became believers and stated as much. Oh snap!
Maybe they could launch a program to 'critique' cancer? Is cancer actually bad? Does anything actually cause it? Is it even real? Let's hear both sides of this debate.
Talk about wasteful, frivolous, and counterproductive government... This is the politicization of settled science and at cross purposes with the agency's mission, but what else is new in 45's America?
Unfortunately in practice this likely ends up being the government sponsoring the same sort of bullshit that the oil companies have been putting out for ages, and not real critique. Red team/blue team is also a unfortunate name given the political connotations...