Jaw-droppingly Stupid!

[elfs]

Peggy Noonan, former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, wrote what has to be the most infuriating, obtuse, and arrogant piece of punditry about science writing I've seen in a long time:

I got thinking, again, of how sad and frustrating it is that the world's greatest scientists cannot gather, discuss the question of global warming, pore over all the data from every angle, study meteorological patterns and temperature histories, and come to a believable conclusion on these questions: Is global warming real or not? ... You would think the world's greatest scientists could do this, in good faith and with complete honesty and a rigorous desire to discover the truth. And yet they can't. Because science too, like other great institutions, is poisoned by politics. Scientists have ideologies. They are politicized. If global warming is real, and if it is new, and if it is caused not by nature and her cycles but man and his rapacity, and if it in fact endangers mankind, scientists will probably one day blame The People for doing nothing. But I think The People will have a greater claim to blame the scientists, for refusing to be honest, for operating in cliques and holding to ideologies. For failing to be trustworthy.

Everyone got that? If global warming isn't real, we can blame the scientists because they were too political and weren't clear enough. If global science is real and disaster takes hold, we can still blame the scientists because they were so political we, "The People" (how arrogant, how outrageous does she think she is to capitalize that?), can feel morally righteous in our willful ignorance of the alarms they raised.

Peggy, here's a hint: other than the tiny smattering of shills and ideologues from your party who happen to have PhDs in something or other, the vast majority of climatological scientists have said, in one voice, global warming is real and human activity is causing most of it. Now deal with it. It's their job to tell politicians what can be done, but:

Also, if global warning is real, what must--must--the inhabitants of the Earth do to meet its challenges? And then what should they do to meet them?

It is not the job of science to tell the rest of humanity what it should do.

Grief, can she really be so stupid and arrongant at the same time? This isn't the flamin' 1950s, scientists in lab coats are no longer robots in service to Science And Man, but human beings who do good science. The process is open and more democratic than Peggy Noonan's brain, and still her side of the aisle can't figure out how this science thing works.

(Hat tip to Chris Mooney for the headsup.)

Comments

Some of it, anyway

[(Anonymous)]

I think it's more fair to say that climatologists agree that human activity is responsible for "some" of the warming trend. Only the Mann studies support the "most" claim, and the more they get looked at, the weaker they look. Let's face it, Mann's data doesn't predict what DID happen over the last millenium, never mind what WILL happen in the next.

There's also the basic problem that climatology is suffering from cronyism. It was never a large field, and it's come to be dominated by one school of thought. Not because the facts are obvious, but because the development of the field over the last few decades has been controlled by a single point of view. The very reason we know what "climatologists agree" is that James Hansen and those who agree with him demand ideological purity; every so often, they demand and publish what amount to loyalty oaths from climate scientists in order to have their papers cited by other researchers, receive cooperation on research projects, and even to get government funding. (Remember, Hansen has been pushing Global Warming for decades; he isn't just some random NASA researcher who recently formed an opinion on the subject.)

And a lot of the pro-Global Warming people are cranks, Hansen included. Before Mann, the data was most reasonably interpreted as showing that increasing temperature forces an increase in CO2-- look at the graphs yourself in Hansen's 2004 "Scientific American" article. Look what changed first: temperature, not CO2. But Hansen and his supporters are too attached to their preconceptions to consider alternate interpretations or to help other people do research that might weaken their positions.

I wish disclaimers weren't necessary, but someone's bound to think I work for Peabody Energy if I don't say something before offering my conclusions. I'm not in the energy industry at all; I'm in the computer industry. I'm not a Republican. Republicans such as Noonan are wrong to doubt the reality of global warming and stupid to treat this as a political issue. (Of course, many Democrats are stupid to treat this as a political issue too.) The evidence is strongly in favor of global warming, and strongly indicates that human activity is playing a role.

So, my conclusions:

Before global warming can become a legitimate political issue, we need to resolve the scientific issue, and that has NOT been done. Kyoto was premature and corrupted by other priorities, but eventually we'll need a political decision on that scale.

The magnitude of the overall trend and the magnitude of the human contribution have yet to be computed to the level of accuracy we need to make such a decision. We also need to know what our options are for dealing with the problem, and what the costs of these options are.

If Noonan had just said that, instead of the crazy stuff she actually did say, I don't think there'd have been much controversy.