The Climategate tiff continues to annoy me. I have serious concerns about the methodology that has been used in the mathematical models which purportedly “prove” that we need to spend trillions of dollars, keep the third world in poverty, and restructure the global economy in order to avert impending disaster. Such concerns are greatly amplified and exacerbated when I see something like this. At the very least, it seems reasonable to believe that advocates of Action Now (TM) carry a significant burden of proof.
What has been the response of those who have an interest in assuaging my concerns, heightened as they are by some of the non-email items in the Climategate Data Dump? They practice a preaching-to-the-converted style of rhetoric by attacking the weakest arguments of the skeptics. Hence the constant refrain of “look, there’s no conspiracy!” and “in whose interest would be a conspiracy?“. Julian Sanchez refers to this as the “weak man” argument. It’s lazy, intellectually dishonest, and doesn’t convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with you. Convincing people would involve directly addressing their arguments or attacking your own weakest points and then explaining why you still believe your position to be reasonable. There has been a palpable lack of this.
As Arnold Kling has pointed out, very, very few of the skeptics believe that a conspiracy exists. Rather, they see a small, insular group of well-connected people that has defined that which is science to be that which agrees with them; and have, perhaps unconsciously, but we now know very consciously, excluded all differing viewpoints from participating in the scientific dialogue. That isn’t hard to do; in fact, speaking as someone who’s currently involved in some scientific fights (regarding modeling of nonlinear dynamical systems, no less), it’s extremely common. Nor does it require a conscious conspiracy. It’s human nature.
And yet, those who have an interest in assuaging my concerns persist in spending all their time attacking a non-argument that neither I nor any other vaguely serious concerned person has advanced. It’s eerily similar to Democrats who think that they can “win” the healthcare debate by proving that death panels don’t exist or that comparing Obama to Hitler is a bad thing. They’re right: death panels do not currently exist, are unlikely to exist in the near future, and comparing Obama to Hitler is bad and stupid; but there are plenty of other perfectly legitimate reasons to oppose the legislation as it stands.
The tragedy of the thing from the perspective of the Action Now (TM) crowd is that I was a pretty committed believer in global warming and a believer that we had to do something big up until 6 months ago or so. Since then, I’ve become much more skeptical and conflicted. Not disbelieving, mind you, just skeptical, particularly with regard to the severity of the problem and the proposed solutions. A robust response to the leaked CRU emails by my former comrades could have done a great deal to rope me back into the fold. Instead, the utter lack of a serious response has driven me even further away. I imagine that I’m not alone in this.
December 1st, 2009 | 2:33 pm
You are not alone. This was a scam for more funding dollars.
December 1st, 2009 | 3:59 pm
“As Arnold Kling has pointed out, very, very few of the skeptics believe that a conspiracy exists. Rather, they see a small, insular group of well-connected people that has defined that which is science to be that which agrees with them; and have, perhaps unconsciously, but we now know very consciously, excluded all differing viewpoints from participating in the scientific dialogue.”
Well, if it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, maybe it is a duck.
December 1st, 2009 | 8:21 pm
Well, but that’s the point – the group you refer to could not possibly be “small” or “insular”, since anthropogenic climate change is supported by data from such a wide variety of sources and disciplines. By necessity it would have to include nearly every single professional climatologist, every paleobotanist, every physicist and chemist since Svante Arrhenius in 1900, the scientists who operate nearly every global weather station, every contributor and panelist on the IPCC, the governments of nearly every European and Asian nation, and 59% of Americans (numbering 206 million people.)
It’s an absurd position for you to hold. Either you’re being disingenuous or you’re completely ignorant about how widely held – just about universally in the relevant disciplines – the basic AGW position is among the scientific community. Many of the details are under continuing debate, of course, but the basic contention – human emission of CO2, NO, SO2, and CH4 is forcing an ahistoric warming trend in global temperatures – is so greatly supported by evidence as to be a fact.
December 2nd, 2009 | 7:59 am
Dear Chet,
I fear that you’re overgeneralizing. There are, very roughly, three levels of inquiry in the AGW question (actually, there are many more, but I’m going to simplify). There is the level of basic science, the level of computational climate modeling, and the level of policy/political decisions. I am currently most interested in the middle level, and it’s the level about which I am best qualified to speak.
If you think Svante Arrhenius and paleobotany have something important to tell us about dynamic modeling beyond specification of input conditions and refinement of governing equations, perhaps you also think that Galileo is uniquely qualified to render an opinion on fluid dynamics simulations? On second thoughts, I’m not sure I want to know the answer to that question.
As I mentioned before, I had methodological concerns before the CRU leak, and those concerns have now gotten much more severe. In fact, the problem is not unique to climate science, but is actually rather systemic. See this (and the linked pages at the bottom) for a brief overview:
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/10436.html
Cheers,
Will
December 2nd, 2009 | 8:07 am
I should clarify, since the above comment gives the impression that my major methodological concern is that the simulation code is written by amateurs and not peer-reviewed. This is a serious concern, but not the major one. In fact, even if the sims were coded by genius-savants and picked over with a fine-toothed comb, I would still have worries. My largest worry is that there’s a great deal of extremely poor technique being used — particularly fine-tuning of model results to fit existing data, use of models in domains where they have not been validated, etc. I’ve seen this happen in fields where there is a lot less money and a lot less prestige at stake.
The CRU leak has now given us two additional worries:
1) The training data for the models appears to be extremely suspect.
2) The code is simply horrible, and likely full of bugs.
This makes me even less likely to entrust the decision of whether to redesign the global economy to the outputs of these models.
Finally, I suggest that if you’re interested in these issues, you start by reading the portions of the IPCC AR4 Report that deal with the modeling, and follow up with a few of the references. Frankly, it’s enough to make a skeptic out of anyone.
Best regards,
Will
December 2nd, 2009 | 10:24 am
Will,
Here’s my taxonomy of climate science, organized in what seems like a logical sequence.
1) Observation and reconstruction of the climate history
2) Computational modeling to identify and quantify forcing factors to date
3) Predictive modeling to estimate likely future forcing factors
4) Predictive modeling to derive response functions that quantify how the future climate will respond to different forcing factor scenarios
The CRU research applies to steps 1 and 2, and as long as the battle is between “deniers” and “true believers,” that’s where the action is.
Too many people, though, act like an affirmative answer to “have carbon emissions caused an ahistorical warming trend?” tells us all we need to know to start coordinating a global economic transformation. Once we get past the question of “should we do anything at all,” and graduate to “what should we do,” the methods and results in steps 3 and 4 get really important, and deserve more scrutiny. How certain are we that stabilizing concentration at 550 will actually keep us within the green range shown on graph (c) here? http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports//tar/slides/02.18.htm
You know what would be a drag? Paying the price to hold emissions at 10 GtC by 2050, and then discovering that we’re still on track for 4 degrees of warming by 2150.
December 2nd, 2009 | 11:27 am
Thanks Matt! Your taxonomy is far more finely-grained than mine, and I endorse it completely. I was trying to explain to Chet that I am not interested in picking a fight with the basic science.
You may have deliberately left it out, since your comment is about the science, but I’d consider one of the most important steps to be the final one:
5) A non-scientific, political, economic, and HUMANISTIC debate in which we as a society determine what we value and how we wish to negotiate a complex set of tradeoffs.
December 2nd, 2009 | 12:41 pm
Will,
You’re right about step #5 – I was just talking about the technocratic analysis that has to feed into that debate.
The political debate is hard enough within the US. Just wait until you try to scale “we as a society” to the global level.
December 2nd, 2009 | 1:09 pm
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December 4th, 2009 | 5:49 pm
By all means, let us keep trashing the nest to a fair-thee-well whilst amply demonstrating that we have yet to understand the obviously subtle relationship between moral prudence and technology. Let us have a scientific debate while the junkyard accretes. Perhaps we can describe the geometry of the landfill with the graceful arc of a Mandelbrot Set.
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