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

From a different Anonymous: Dealing with Inexact Answers

[(Anonymous)]

Peggy Noonan's article includes quite a bit that sounds reasonable until one really thinks about it.

Let's take a look at some of her action items.

She wants "the greatest scientists" to get together and answer our questions about global warming. But this is not a real action item, because there's no demonstrably reliable way to figure out exactly who are the greatest scientists in the world, unless you are the sort of person who "solves" this kind of problem by counting column-inches of media coverage, or by using some other equally questionable method.

Also, the "greatest scientists" probably aren't specialists in climate, and in tackling climate change questions, they would be working far outside of the specialties where they are "greatest". For many scientists, working well outside their area(s) of primary expertise is a handicap that might make them reluctant to participate in Noonan's project (especially some of the wiser scientists) and this handicap would throw extra doubt upon their conclusions.

Noonan wants these scientists to "come to a believable conclusion" on a large number of questions (then she lists her many questions, for many of which it's practically impossible for scientists to give us guaranteed fully precise answers until after the events have already happened) and she wants the scientists to "do this, in good faith and with complete honesty and a rigorous desire to discover the truth."

Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to find answers to a question unconvincing unless the answers are (1) highly specific and precise, (2) supposedly absolutely provable, (3) seemingly absolutely provable even without much knowledge of the subject, and (4) what the listener wanted to believe anyway.

I don't have time today to discuss (2)-(4) :-) so let's look at (1).

Because for many people an admittedly imprecise answer undermines believability, demanding "a believable conclusion" about events *that cannot be fully known in advance* actually conflicts with good scientists' conducting their investigation "in good faith and with complete honesty and a rigorous desire to discover the truth."

Real scientists practicing 100% genuine science can't claim to absolutely know exact answers for everything before it happens. This makes a great excuse to ignore them. Even real scientists who run some computer models that happen to spit out exact numbers will freely admit they don't know that a temperature change will really be 5.2 degrees Celsius instead of 5.1 or 5.3. They will even admit that their answers could possibly be off by a lot more than .1 degree. This "proves" that they are "not reliable". If you want to smear the scientists more artfully, just take scientist A's computer model and ask scientists B, C, and D if the numbers that came out of the computer model are really proven facts. Scientists B, C, and D will tell you that the numbers are not really proven facts, just like scientist A would tell you if you'd bothered to ask scientist A or even bothered to read all of scientist A's paper.

A big real problem here isn't so much that scientists are terribly politicized, but rather that many laymen *cannot deal rationally with uncertainty*. (Not that practicing scientists are perfect, but the ideal scientist is certainly a lot better, and a good practicing scientist has some advantages when dealing with his/her own field.)

These laymen somewhat resemble heavy smokers refusing to quit smoking because their physicians know the smokers are at risk for lung cancer, but can't predict what day each cancer will start, and can't guarantee that a given patient's lung cancer will start at all. Ah, these smokers may point out to their doctors, you admit that you are rather ignorant, and unreliable. Why should the smokers believe that smoking is a serious risk at all? So they happily keep puffing away.

Maybe we won't have really good political decisions on climate change until the gambling casinos go out of business for lack of customers.