How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704398304574598230426037244.html

by DanielBMarkham • 17 years ago

43 39 17 years ago

online.wsj.com

robk• 17 years ago

This is a pretty powerful article. Regardless of your thoughts on global warming, it's rather upsetting to see scientists' careers ruined through having opinions differing than the gatekeepers of the peer reviewing system.

Hoff• 17 years ago

Some of the gatekeepers of the peer review systems have had a long and celebrated history here, and sometimes to the detriment of the purpose of the review process.

The experiences of John Harrison and the Board of Longitude and the Royal Society, or the initial reception of the work of Barry J. Marshall and Robin Warren around H. Pylori, both come to mind.

Most any large shift can involve overcoming very strongly-held beliefs; of sticking your neck out.

KirinDave4• 17 years ago

This isn't a particularly powerful or insightful article. The entire subject is blown out of proportion and distorted until hardly any of the actual facts remain.

1. Scientists ruin their careers by repeatedly attempting to discredit theories they cannot find the evidence to discredit (or proving claims they cannot find proof to claim). If a truly compelling set of studies discrediting global warming trends came out, you can be sure that many publications would be eager to publish it. This is how science works, and how it has worked historically. It's a surprisingly stable environment of meritocracy. Politics intrude, as in any human endeavor, but we'll get to that in:

2. Differences in opinion in the peer review process are as old as science. That is why there are multiple publications and multiple standards for entering into those publications. The whole notion of "scientific consensus" is built around assumptions like schisms such as this. If everyone agreed about the exact criterion for publication we'd only have a few (perhaps regional) scientific publications (and then we'd truly be in trouble).

3. Science is about consensus, but that implicitly accepts dissent. People argue for awhile, a consensus is formed, and then things blow over. Seldom are careers ruined. For an example, see Einstein's extremely controversial claims that eventually became the next major stepping stone for physics. People violently opposed his propositions at first, and now we look at him is one of the greatest minds in human history.

The difference here is that there are active sources of misinformation trying, for whatever non-scientific reasons, to drum up controversy around the global warming issue of anthropogenicity. This issue is still under active debate and research, but unlike many other subjects in a similar status (e.g., quantum physics) there are "deniers" who will not accept any positive evidence against their claim and will resort to any means, social or otherwise, to make their point of view supreme.

Some might argue this is warranted because climate science is making predictions that require us to radically restructure our industry and energy infrastructures to the tune of massive sums of money. To be honest, I think this complaint is shortsighted. Scientific predictions, even those in the limbo state between "well-accepted" and "just a theory" that we are calling "consensus", have always dictated the allocation of resources. Consider the exorbitant cost of the LHC, which is one of the single greatest achievements of human engineering and physics.

InclinedPlane• 17 years ago

Science is NOT about consensus. "Scientists" have no monopoly on truth. Science is about facts. Observation. Falsifiable, objective, and independently reproducible theories. They either produce predictions that match reality or they don't. It doesn't matter if the scientific establishment believes or disbelieves in the hall effect, or special relativity, or high temperature superconductivity. They are either real or not independent of the opinion of the majority of scientists.

One hopes that the scientific community is sufficiently objective and disciplined to embrace true science when they see it, but that may not be (and has not been) the case always.

Consensus should follow science but consensus cannot create science.

epe• 17 years ago

> Consider the exorbitant cost of the LHC, which is one of the single greatest achievements of human engineering and physics.

And also two orders of magnitude less expensive than proposed global warming solutions:

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-09/defense-lhc http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05...

lutorm4• 17 years ago

As a scientist, I find it depressing that people would engage in this kind of behavior. But on the issue, I just watched this MIT "debate" about the impact of this incident:

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/730

One thing I specifically remember is that one of the panel members (and member of the IPCC) concluded that the attempt by Mann et al. to bury conflicting studies was not successful, as some of those very papers were discussed and cited in the IPCC reports.

DanielBMarkham4• 17 years ago

I believe if you reduce the argument to one or two specific papers you can easily see that they get out.

More distressing is the overall pattern of behavior, where editorial boards are rigged and scientists just "give up" working in this field. No amount of good papers getting through is going to fix that, unfortunately.

lutorm4• 17 years ago

Agreed. It's a fine line between rejecting "crackpots" and those with whom you simply disagree.

jacoblyles2• 17 years ago

I believe they were referring to the paper discussed here:

http://climateaudit.org/2009/12/17/climategatekeeping-2/#mor...

It seems to have been included with a dismissive editorial comment ("Michaels says X, but he's wrong"), which was not supported by any literature, and which the authors were not given the chance to respond to before publication. Just mentioning that "it was included" is a bit misleading.

antidaily• 17 years ago

Should I overlook the fact this guy is employed by The Cato Institute, which is funded by big oil?

dpatru• 17 years ago

No, but also don't miss the fact that most of those on the other side are funded by big government. Neither side is neutral.

bballant• 17 years ago

Fair enough, but the security and welfare of citizens is the primary interest of big government (o.k. secondary, but aligned with the primary interest of getting re-elected), whereas big oil has no interest other than making loot. With respect to climate change, big oil loot comes at the expense of our planet (and our security, and lives our troops in the middle east, and our health, and our economy).

chubbard4• 17 years ago

Here's what I don't understand about the nobody's neutral point. Sure nobody's absolutely neutral (just like nobody's is absolutely truthful). It's all relative, but who's more neutral seems to be what they have to gain. Who benefits more by being right? If big oil is right then they get to carry on using fossil fuels until we run out. By some estimates there's still several trillion dollars of oil, coal, etc in the ground yet to be extracted.

If global warming advocates are right what do they get? Gold star, notoriety for being great scientists, pat on the back and a gold watch? Even billions of dollars in research grants? Once they're right research money dries up, and you still have to fix the energy crisis that would ensue. And, big oil is handing out money left and right for any study saying the opposite. If funding were your only incentive you could just as easily get money from the other side. If you can prove global warming is or IS NOT caused by human activity you'll be very very famous, maybe rich.

Still that's paltry in comparison to the revenue of the oil, coal, and to some degree gas industries. I can't seem to make the the pay offs for being right equal out.

I like to not be so paranoid, but quite frankly this whole debate just seems like a smoke screen from both sides at the moment. Which could be yet another tactic since status quo benefits the CO2 producers.

jacoblyles2• 17 years ago

This is just ad hominem. You might as well say "I am politically on the left and I don't like the Cato Institute". It would be more honest.

As an aside, the Cato Institute turned down a donation from Fannie Mae before the financial crash so as to avoid the appearance of bias in their advocacy, so I have a bit of respect for them. How many think-tanks would do the same?

Yes, they were founded with a gift from the Koch families decades ago, but does that invalidate the work of Michaels, who by all appearances is a climate scientist that has published real research? Should we dismiss his thoughts outright and not listen to what he has to say?

(Update: a link below shows 3/4 of Cato's annual funding comes from individual donations, only 2% comes from corporations. Presumably, the rest comes from non-profit foundations.)

Sorry, I accidentally up-voted you when attempting to do the opposite.

DanielBMarkham4• 17 years ago

meta-note: I've noticed a tendency on HN for commenters to impeach people sometimes without good reason (this case may or may not be a good example, that's not the point) On several articles today the comments basically boiled down to an ad-hominem -- and this was on subjects as far-ranging as naval warfare, startups, science, etc.

I'd like to call it out more, but there's so much of it -- it's a lost cause, I think.

jpwagner2• 17 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute#Funding

Looks like they receive funding from ~20 corporations annually accounting for 2% of their overall funding.

viggity• 17 years ago

Isn't it possible that the Cato Insitute's beliefs preempted the money and not the other way around?

I donate money to the NRA because they support gun rights. The NRA doesn't support gun rights because I personally give them money.

amackera• 17 years ago

No, you should not. Also keep in mind the author edited the World Climate Report funded by the non-profit "Greening Earth Society", which in turn was funded by the Western Fuels Association (a non-profit cooperative for "coal and transportation services"). On further reflection this might be a bit of stretch...

logjam• 17 years ago

The author of this sorry little polemic is whining about, in part, the justified criticism of an extremely poor paper whose publication and subsequent political use by the Bush Administration caused the resignation of half the editorial board of Climate Research.

"Some journalists are digging even deeper into the sources of Soon and Baliunas’s funding. Their Climate Research paper includes acknowledgements to NOAA, NASA and the US Air Force, as well as to the American Petroleum Institute. Yet NOAA flatly deny having ever funded the authors for such work, while the other two bodies admit to funding them, but for work on solar variability not proxy climate records, the topic that has caused such a storm."

http://www.sgr.org.uk/climate/StormyTimes_NL28.htm

And now here we are on "Hacker News", where this axe-grinding swill keeps getting endlessly posted by the same axe-grinding posters to "Hacker News" and voted up by folks who frankly haven't taken the time to begin to look into the actual science.

("Hacker News"? This particular little niche website is fast becoming Wall Street Blog West. People who came for the tech are leaving because of the increasing emphasis on how to make a few fast buck any old way.)

Meanwhile, as an experiment a few days ago I posted an article from FactCheck that concluded "ClimateGate" is overblown nonsense, and that, "The American Association for the Advancement of Science released a statement "reaffirm[ing] the position of its Board of Directors and the leaders of 18 respected organizations, who concluded based on multiple lines of scientific evidence that global climate change caused by human activities is now underway, and it is a growing threat to society." The American Meteorological Society and the Union of Concerned Scientists have also reiterated their positions on climate change, which they say are unaffected by the leaked e-mails."

http://www.factcheck.org/2009/12/climategate/

"Hacker News" response: ~crickets~

It was obvious that facts are the last thing Cato and the Wall Street Journal and the axe-grinders here are interested in.

antonovka2• 17 years ago

I agree. I found it depressing that your comment was down-voted to the negatives.

chubbard4• 17 years ago

Why is this occurring now? If this type of behavior was going on then it sounds like there were a number of scientists that could have spoken out about this long ago? Especially when the "hockey stick" paper came out if it was questionable. Why did it take a mysterious "hacker" to reveal this bias? If all the scientists at the CRU are being unfairly treated why didn't Sallie Baliunas pull a Zed Shaw when she left science?

The timing just makes all of this very suspect. Had this occurred six months prior I might be less skeptical, but at this point I don't know who to believe.

Until someone figures this crap out I'll be in my hummer doing donuts in the parking lot.

teilo• 17 years ago

It didn't take a mysterious "hacker" to reveal this bias. It has been known for a long time.

I heard about the "smoothing over" of the MWP and the weighted bias used to produce the hockey stick many months ago. A significant number of climatologists have been vocalizing these concerns in varying degrees for some time. No one would listen to them.

The only reason YOU are hearing about it now is that once light was shed on the CRU shennanigans, it lent legitimacy (whether or not it is deserved) to said climatologists, and the opportunity to voice their concerns to a larger listening audience.

chubbard4• 17 years ago

But as cited in the article Mr. Mann tried to put Climate Research "out of business" as it's put after a 2002 paper didn't agree with him. If YOU heard about the smoothing over of MWP data only months ago doesn't make it very current. The paper was from 1999. It's not like this stuff just happened within the last year.

If these small enclave of scientist felt CRU was being railroaded why did it take 10 years for them to get a larger audience? They couldn't come up with some way to expose this problem? He's sending these emails around. I'm sure plenty of them were CC'ed on one or two of them. "as stonewalling and requesting colleagues to destroy emails to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)." Those emails could have been sent along to any paper and they would have been published. There are plenty of journals that could have published this research, and would have been happy to do so if they were compelling.

Why did someone choose to expose this through the shady hacker route?

At least Patrick Michaels went to WSJ when he wrote his article.

chubbard4• 17 years ago

Seriously?! I get modded down for asking a serious question? WTF? And, the response I get is basically "well you weren't paying attention. Anyone with half a brain knew this." Really?

Just the hummer joke alone should garner something. Sweet baby jeez no sense of humor.

rmason• 17 years ago

What we are seeing is the politicization of science. Free and open debate in the scientific community has been choked off by the true believers.

Data not showing what you want, then change it. Allegiance to the cause trumps the search for the truth and we are all losers in this debate.

sunshinegroopie• 17 years ago

Consensus != truth

hugh_• 17 years ago

I was thinking about this the other day: what _is_ the best scientific statement we can make, at present, about anthropogenic global warming?

On one hand, we have theory. There's reasonably good theoretical reasons to expect that increasing carbon dioxide should increase global temperatures. However, every good scientist knows not to trust theory too much until it's been verified by experiment, especially when the system in question is so complex.

On the other hand, we have experiment. Unfortunately, we only have a sample size of one, and we don't have a control group. We tried increasing the CO2 emissions, and found that sure enough, the temperature did wind up increasing. But given there's only one planet in the sample and no planets in the control group, we certainly can't eliminate the possibility that there's no causal link. If we forget that we're looking at global temperature vs CO2 concentration and pretend we're looking at a high school kid's science project about whether playing music to plants makes them grow faster, we'd have to say that the experiment lends some support to the hypothesis but is hardly conclusive.

So what can we reasonably conclude? I think the fairest thing we can say is that it's more likely than not that increasing CO2 emissions causes an increase in global temperatures. Anyone who claims the science is "settled" though, the way it's settled for heliocentrism, evolution or relativity, is not much of a scientist.

(I am also, despite years of Year 9 science projects, still unsure whether playing music to plants makes them grow faster.)

lionhearted2• 17 years ago

> I was thinking about this the other day: what _is_ the best scientific statement we can make, at present, about anthropogenic global warming?

Here's what it seems like:

1. The Earth is warming at a slow rate, but at least some of this is natural as temperatures were historically considerably higher, then considerably lower than now.

2. We're still well within the bounds of normal, habitable historical temperatures.

3. Warming definitely occurs at local levels with deforesting, mining, and urbanization. This can decrease condensation and make areas less habitable to life. This can be stabilized to a large extent by planting trees, restoring soil quality, and so on.

4. Carbon dioxide currently makes up 0.3% of the greenhouse gases including water vapor, and about 5% of the non-water vapor greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide increases are lagging temperature increases - suggesting that CO2 is not the biggest culprit of global warming.

5. That said, fossil fuels will gradually be replaced - the two current biggest hurdles are battery quality and political/public fears about nuclear power. Nuclear has gotten incredibly more stable and safe, and the advent of thorium reactors is exciting. Innovations in batteries and transitions to next generation nuclear will reduce fossil fuels a lot.

6. Much of green technology isn't so green - in many areas, turbines and solar panels take enough energy to create that they won't "pay back" their energy cost within 50 years, at which point we'll likely be able to produce energy much cheaper anyways. Some areas are very well suited for green energy - deserts with solar, very windy areas with turbines, hydroelectric on rivers, but they're brute forcing some very Earth-unfriendly alternative energy into areas it's not well suited for. Much of what's called green is marketing.

Personal judgment call based on everything I've seen? Money into R&D for hydrogen power, better batteries, fusion, and safer next-gen nuclear probably goes a lot further towards cleaning up the Earth than the current proposed solutions. Fossil fuels seem like they're going to largely be obsolete within 100-150 years or sooner, and rumors of the Earth's imminent demise appear to be greatly exaggerated.

lutorm4• 17 years ago

As you say, much of your points are personal judgments. I do want to respond to some that aren't:

"2. We're still well within the bounds of normal, habitable historical temperatures."

This is a severe oversimplification, IMHO. Human society is sensitive not just to whether the Earth is overall habitable, but to impacts to the significant "sunk costs" we have in the locations of population centers. It's not much comfort to the people of California if the Earth remains habitable on average when the Sierra snowmelt disappears and the state faces a drought of unprecedented proportions.

"4. Carbon dioxide currently makes up 0.3% of the greenhouse gases including water vapor, and about 5% of the non-water vapor greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide increases are lagging temperature increases - suggesting that CO2 is not the biggest culprit of global warming."

Where do you get that CO2 is 0.3% of greenhouse gases? It's true that water vapor is the largest contributor to the greenhouse effect, but CO2 is next. It accounts for 50% of the non-water greenhouse gases and for way more than 0.3% of the total greenhouse effect. Besides, counting water is a little spurious because the water content of the atmosphere is set by the temperature. Thus, if temperature goes up, water content goes up. So saying that CO2 doesn't matter because water vapor is much more important is wrong, it's precisely the opposite. CO2 matters more because its effect is amplified by water. (Barring controversies about cloud covers.)

CO2 is also the greenhouse gas that has the longest lifetime in the atmosphere. The others (methane, etc) break down a lot quicker.

lutorm4• 17 years ago

Isn't the answer to your question what you find in:

IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Working Group I Report: "The Physical Science Basis" ?

How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus

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