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

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Okay, I have to speak up here.

I have a PhD in Physics.

My dissertation is best summarized as, "where 'Chaos Theory' and 'El
Niño' intersect."

I knew more than a few climatologists, oceanologists, geologists, and meteorologists before I finished my doctorate in 1998 and left academia. And the one thing I recall is this:

• There is no debate on "global warming" in the scientific community. That discussion ended 15-20 years ago.
• There is no debate about if humans are contributing to climate change. That ended 10 years ago. The data shows unequivocally that we are doing something to the climate.
• 8-10 years ago, the debate was (and still is) how big is the anthropogenic component, and what are we doing to the Earth-system by dumping all of this CO2 and methane into the works.
• The only scientists, 10 years ago, who claimed, "There is no Global Warming," were:
  1. Employed by oil, coal, or gas companies or by Republican Party think-tanks.
  2. And, were not doing any research in the field. No data collection. No modelling of the data.
     All that they were doing was making commentary on select misquotes of select papers. And that's not science; that's rhetoric.
  3. There are legions of commentators, Party apparatchiks, and "true believers" who keep parrotting the distortions and lies of these handful of Climate-Change-Deniers.
     Repeating a lie over and over does not make it true. Killing the messenger does not make the message go away.

In summary: Climate Change research is, was, and continues to be backed by the data. There is a human contribution to climate change, a fact also based in the data. The only question is, "How much of a contribution?" The data is not yet clear on that. The Climate-Change-Deniers have no basis in the data and can only resort to ad-hominem attacks on individual well-known climatologists.

That isn't helping

[(Anonymous)]

Statements like this one:

There is no debate on "global warming" in the scientific community.

are an attempt to suppress the discussion, not encourage it. Obviously there's debate. One focus of the debate is the magnitude of the effect and its possible consequences. If it's just a few degrees over 100 years, which the data seem to indicate, then it's not far outside our range of historical experience and we need to figure out whether it matters very much.

If there's really a "tipping point" situation-- and climatologists are debating that point like crazy-- then the situation could be terribly much worse. We wouldn't need to nail down the exact magnitude of the effect before acting because it would obviously be catastrophic. We need to find out.

Similarly, statements like this one:

The only question is, "How much of a contribution?"

are not helpful either, because obviously there are a great many other questions. What are our options for influencing the anthropogenic component? What wil these options cost? What are the other options for influencing climate change aside from reducing CO2 emissions?

There are plenty of scientists eager to investigate these questions who are not "Employed by oil, coal, or gas companies or by Republican Party think-tanks." And anyway, since you understand the harm that comes from ad-hominem attacks, you should avoid using them yourself. These organizations employ honest scientists just as Greenpeace does. Sure, they have opinions. Sure, their opinions are often aligned with those of their employers. Why is that surprising? People tend to work where their opinions are valued. That doesn't make them dishonest.

Ad-hominem is one style of fallacious argument. Other fallacious arguments include appeal to widespread belief, argument by repetition, argument from authority, and the appeal to fear. MIT scientist Richard Linzen recently addressed the application of these fallacies to the global warming debate in an article in the Wall Street Journal:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008597

Lindzen isn't saying that global warming isn't real. He's just saying that the public discussion is not well served by the mindless fear-mongering from the left wing, just as it is not well served by the mindless rejections of the right wing. We need to figure out what's going on, and decide what to do about it. That's all.