But there’s consensus!
And consensus is science! Oh, wait:
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.
June 17th, 2010 at 10:04 am
When I was in middle school, my science teacher, who had a doctorate in Chemistry and worked for Dow Corning before she was injured by some else’s negligence, made it very clear that in science, there are NO FACTS. Ergo, there’s no such thing as a “Scientific Fact”, there are Laws, which can generally be proven to a limited extend, even if the mechanisms are not fully understood, there are Theories, which mesh with known laws and appear as if they would be provable, and there are Hypothesizes, which are untested, but logically sound, theories. All of these things can be changed, and in the spirit of scientific discovery, challenged.
A consensus is not, nor was it ever, an aspect of the physical sciences. It is political science. “We took a vote” is not how scientific understanding and knowledge is advanced. It can either be proven, disproven, or unknown, there is no certainty, because certainty becomes belief, and belief becomes faith, and faith becomes religion, which is the intellectual opposite of science, and the basis for Anthropogenic Global Warming.
The most disturbing thing that came to light over this entire scandal is how many people with a scientific training DO NOT KNOW THIS, and how many people were willing to abandon reason in pursuit of a blind and irrational goal motivated entirely by faith.
June 17th, 2010 at 11:09 am
sigh…
June 17th, 2010 at 11:12 am
Notice especially that this is Bolt (and in your case Lawrence parroting Bolt) quote-mining Hulme – not Hulme making the statement himself as an IPCC “insider” as Lawrence leads you to believe.
June 17th, 2010 at 11:37 am
Three things should be clear from this. First, I did not say the ‘IPCC misleads’ anyone – it is claims that are made by other commentators, such as the caricatured claim I offer in the paper, that have the potential to mislead. Second, they have a potential to mislead if they give the impression that every statement in IPCC reports is ‘signed off’ by every IPCC author and reviewer. Patently they are not, and cannot. Third, it is the chapter lead authors – say 10 to 20 experts – on detection and attribution who craft the sentence about detection and attribution, which is then scrutinised and vetted by reviewers and government officials. Similarly, statements about what may happen to the meridional overturning circulation (MOC) of the ocean are crafted by those expert in ocean science, statements about future sea-level rise by sea-level experts, and so on.
…
Mike Hulme
here
June 17th, 2010 at 11:38 am
sorry about the botched nested blockquote tag.
June 17th, 2010 at 11:58 am
While Feynman did work with others, such as on the Manhattan Project. There is no evidence he ever tried to develop a consensus to justify his work.
June 17th, 2010 at 12:10 pm
JKB – Feynman didn’t think that mere obtuseness on the part of the uninformed in the face of expert opinion is what constitutes science, or that it was even helpful. You misunderstand the point he was trying to make.
It’s true that his job wasn’t the creation of consensus – it was the creation of theories that matched evidence well enough that consensus formed around them. Had he failed to do so, we would not have heard of him.
June 17th, 2010 at 1:33 pm
Well never mind then. Lord knows our elected officials are competent enough to review scientific literature for accuracy, just like they’re completely capable of balancing budgets, running education, capping off oil wells, and the myriad of other things omniscient masters should do.
June 17th, 2010 at 5:47 pm
Argh! Bolt and Monkton and their ilk are a bunch of idiots! They need to go away. Talk about doing more harm than good. In this case, much more harm. The only “skeptics” I listen to are Christie and Lindzen. The rest really need to simply fuck off.
June 17th, 2010 at 6:55 pm
ben, Do you mean John Christy and Richard Lindzen? If you have to pick 2 climate skeptics to listen to, you could do a helluva lot worse. For Birds are Not Dinosaurs, I only listen to Alan Feduccia. He’s smart & makes good arguments (though he isn’t the best about conceding the point when those are successfully challenged.) For a contrarian view on the Two-Source Hypothesis I listen to Mark Goodacre (he’s not the “best”, but he’s the most enjoyable, and he’s certainly good enough).
Listening to contrarians and skeptics – if you choose smart and reasonably responsible ones – helps you get a view of the bigger picture. It’s a good idea to do so.
Christy and Lindzen are both on record that the earth is warming and that human activity (at least probably) contributes somewhat to it. So, it’s really hard for me to think of them as “skeptics”. They support the basics. They downplay human involvement and potential risks as much as is reasonably possible – they focus exclusively the lower end of the error bars for both (and in terms of risk the error bars extend from ‘mild inconvenience’ to ‘apocalyptic’) – but they don’t go below the error bars to claim that there’s no evidence of a human contribution or that the risk is potentially zero.
Listening to them is a good reminder that there is a possibility that the results will be less catastrophic than scientists expect… But we also need a reminder that the risks may be *greater* than what scientists expect… and that most scientists who study the problem as closely as these two have (or more) see more risk than these two do.
And by the way – birds are dinosaurs.
And the two-source hypothesis may in fact be wrong – historical/literary certainty is rarely as high as that of the hard sciences. And the Farrer hypothesis is very attractive.
Anyhoo – your stock is way up in my book just for noticing that Monkton is an idiot. Wouldn’t have hurt to also note that he is pretentious.
June 17th, 2010 at 8:17 pm
smijer, yes. Richard Lindzen and John Christy.
“And by the way – birds are dinosaurs. ”
Good luck proving that. 🙂
I don’t pay enough attention to Monkton to know that he’s pretentious. I stopped the instant I figured out he was an idiot. Mostly from Lambert. It’s a good thing Time Lambert used to go on about guns a lot, since that’s the reason I read him in the first place. And now he’s my primary source of info on bogus climate science.
June 18th, 2010 at 9:30 am
smijer, et. al:
It is a good idea to make sure that the scientists are quoted accurately.
It is also a good idea for everyone involved (scientist, reporter, historian, internet wonk, disinterested bystander) to learn about what climate science involves.
I, in my inexperience, see several things in climate science.
(1) lots of data, but data of uncertain quality. (See wattsupwiththat.com and the related surfacestations.org to get a hint of how the data for the past century, for the US, may or may not be valid
(2) computer models based on the data.
I don’t know much about climate, but I do know a fair bit about computer models. And I know that computer models are only as good as (A) the assumptions that go into their construction AND (B) the data used in the modelling.
Further, I know that computer models are really only useful if you can show that the model has successfully predicted the outcome of the experiment (global temperature) for a given set of inputs and outputs (CO2 emissions, solar irradiance, cloud reflectivity, and maybe the Milankovitch cycle) over a period of time.
Given the size of the Earth and the number of possible variables in the climate, I wouldn’t trust a model until it had been shown to produce a good decade of climate predictions on the global level. Not precise predictions, but Global Temp will be within X% of Y for year N+1, and within X% of Z for year N+2….
But we will also need to make sure that we have a good way of measuring global temperature, so that we can test the results. (Reference the sites listed above.)
For the moment, I am skeptical that human behavior is the dominant, forcing factor in global temperature. I am also skeptical that any rise in global temperature will be, overall, bad for humanity or the global climate.
But that’s just my opinion.
June 18th, 2010 at 9:32 am
Gah! bad links.
http://www.wattsupwiththat.com
http://www.surfacestatios.org