elfs | Jaw-droppingly Stupid!

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.)

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From:

memegarden.livejournal.com

can she really be so stupid and arrongant at the same time?

From what I've seen, stupidity and ignorance are very helpful to building up a good head of arrogance.

From: (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.

From:

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.

From: (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.

From: (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.

From: (Anonymous)

Elf,

When are you going to change the links on your blog here away from your Drizzle URLs and point them to your new site? I had to read back through many entries starting at current to find the post where you talk about changing ISPs for the better.

---DB_Story