Reflections on questions concerning global warming
Part Six: 5% of scientists can’t be wrong or Science Whoring
By Richard Jones
I intended to write about attribution. I will, but mostly just to introduce the concept and the bare bones of the problem, as nothing I could write would compare with simply referring readers to the recent series by Roger Pielke, Jr. (which, of course, I shall do).
I have cited Pielke, calling him a climate scientist. It turns out that I was mistaken, misled by the fact that he writes more scientifically than what we typically find outside the science journals, but it seems that he is a ‘political scientist’. He has a particular interest in the interface of politics and science, which is at the core of my interest in climate fact and fiction. Pielke as a climate scientist is not lost, however: I never paid attention to the ‘Jr’, but I have at last noticed, and found ‘Sr’. His father is a scientist, with scope including meteorology and climate; the two have collaborated and father doubtlessly contributed to son’s ability to hone in on the nitty gritty of climate politics.
We know about presstitutes: journalists who whore their pens and mouths to the highest bidder. We also know about bent cops who do the same. Fortunately, the latter are probably a small minority, in most places and times, but we also know that, in the news columns of the corporate media (outside the news columns, for example fashion, arts, and sports, I have no notion) the presstitutes are the overwhelming majority. 5% would be a very optimistic estimate for the exceptions. Depending on the topic, honesty can guarantee the sack. Sticking to safe topics is hardly an honest choice.
About 40 years ago I read that most science research globally was funded, one way or another, by the US military machine. That proportion is probably lower now, mainly because the US is less relevant, but then there is the pharmaceutical industry, arms manufacturers not included in US military stats, such as the British merchants of death at Porton Down, Plessey, etc. Not to mention military funding by other countries. Moreover funding agents need not be evil in purpose to subvert scientific integrity by contracts for non-disclosure, ownership of findings, etc.
There are many definitions of what constitutes science, many of them pointless. One that surprised me, in an agreeable way, was from a mathematician, Dutch I think, who defined science by contrast with magic. Science, he said, was social and public, in contrast to magic as secretive esoteric knowledge. If you give that a few moments to sink in, you will realise that very little of what is presented to us as science qualifies. The norm is that whoever pays the piper controls the tune and research outcomes are only public when they suit the paymaster. As a definition of science, this is novel, but as a description, as far as it goes, it is hard to dispute. Science is of necessity a social endeavour. How can the evidence for research outcomes be tested if it is conducted in secret?
An off-the-cuff response from a critic of my remarks on attribution of weather events to climate change, “5% of scientists can’t be wrong”, uses sarcasm as a fig leaf for the absurdity of assessing which scientists are right by any means other than considering what they say, and what evidence they provide.
Counting heads is a slightly useful method, though with dismally poor results on the whole but perhaps better than autocracy when on occasion it is not merely a smoke screen for autocracy, for deciding on social and political courses of action. For distinguishing correct and mistaken or deliberately misleading information, it is completely useless. I won’t say that scientific disputes have never been decided by voting (though I haven’t heard of it), but if they have, then the outcomes should be re-examined. Scientific claims should never be assessed on who makes them, who supports them, or the proportion of scientists that support them.
If the majority of scientists, or at least of those engaged in research, are locked in part or total secrecy (hence involved in ‘magic’ rather than science) then this is plainly one of the ways that the majority of scientists can be wrong. There are other ways that come naturally from the intrinsic nature of science. Science is an activity, but also a body of knowledge, and knowledge has its own inertia. New ideas naturally meet resistance. Scientists that make spectacular discoveries acquire a status that shouldn’t, but does, lead other scientists to have undue faith in their opinions. Newton pronounced that light was made of particles, not waves, so many scientists looked away from the strong evidence for the wave theory.
Now regarding climate change, there are people who will avoid looking at evidence (why?) and prefer to recruit support for their views by appealing to numbers.
It is astonishing that one scientist who has become a professional lobbyist for the view that most scientists support the standard media narrative on climate change, Naomi Oreskes, has form for misrepresenting the numbers, despite early in her career asserting (rightly, I think) the overwhelming opposition among scientists to the discovery of plate tectonics (The Rejection of Continental Drift, OUP 1999). Of all people, she is one that we can be certain is fully aware of the possibility of most scientists being wrong. Yet she chose to claim unanimity among scientists on climate change as a proxy for evidence, and when called out on the matter, she merely acknowledged using the wrong words, rather than acknowledging that such unanimity is imaginary if not a downright fabrication (DOI: 10.1126/science.1103618, see erratum).
If you want to count heads, then you should at least be clear about what it is that you are counting. Climate is always changing and always has been. Of course scientists are unanimous on this. On the other hand, getting down to specifics about the changes, I don’t think anyone has offered any evidence of unanimity or even majority support for anything more than vague statements like “average surface temperatures have been rising” and “this is partly due to humans adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere”.
Every detail of climate change is subject to dispute among scientists. There’s perhaps no aspect of this subject to stronger disagreement than attribution. So, what is attribution?
Every extreme weather event nowadays triggers media clamour about climate change. Often, we are told that climate change is the cause. As some people realise that climate is just averages of weather and can’t cause anything, we may be told more cautiously that an event was caused by global warming, greenhouse effect, etc. Still more cautiously, we may see assertions replaced by possibilities: ‘this may be related to climate change’ or questions: ‘the role of climate change in this catastrophe is to be investigated’. Hot or cold spell, wet or dry, windy or calm, any outlier weather will always draw extra entertainment value by the mention of climate change.
This is ‘attribution’ of weather events to changes in the climate system.
(Climate is the statistical summary of weather, usually for a location but sometimes summarising averages over a region or the globe. Outliers (simplifying slightly) are data points that are near the minimum or maximum of a data set, so they are nearly always there. “Hottest day in three years” (or 20) has to be there, though maybe not uniquely, yet the media use such language to excite their victims and generate a feeling of something unusual. Often the manipulation is careless. Here in Perth, Western Australia, they seek to impress with ‘news’ that road fatalities are the highest since three years ago. As the population is growing at a high rate, that actually means that the chance of getting killed on the road is diminishing.)
There are several flavours to attribution. When the latest flood or fire is blamed on climate change, this is bunk. The more cautious approach, raising the question, or passively-aggressively asking is it unreasonable to think there could be a connection, hides behind the impossibility of finding evidence to deliver an answer with even a modest level of confidence.
A better appeal to reason is made with assertions (or questions) about whether ‘events like this’ are more likely in our changed climate. The problem is that we actually know very little about climate change. We know that average surface temperature, globally, has risen slightly in recent years. On the strength of that, people come up with claims that the higher surface temperature has resulted in–for example–more frequent or more powerful tropical cyclones, floods, drought, heat waves, cold spells, wind, calm. So the weaker (less aggressive) or stronger (more plausible) attribution claims don’t say that a severe storm was ’caused by’ climate change, but instead they say that similar events are more likely under the new climate regime. Often they are more reckless and put numbers to the claim, like “40% more likely”.
I won’t go into great detail about attribution studies or inept or contentious attribution claims. There is nothing I could say that has not been said better by Roger Pielke, Jr. I stumbled on his writing when looking for information and I doubt if there is a better source. He recently wrote a series on the subject, and I refer readers to the first article in the series, and if anyone wants more, he has written volumes.
There is one more thing to be said, to link the matter of attribution with my preamble about science and magic. I had no inkling of this before recently reading Pielke on the topic. We are familiar with the corporate media passing on deliberate distortions of current events fed to them directly or through channels made for the purpose. Absurdities such as Russia entering Ukraine ‘unprovoked’ are no mystery. But why do they keep passing on hocus pocus as science, in regard to the weather?
To explain I need to introduce (thanks again to Pielke) one other variable in the equation: litigation.
For analogy: quite recently, around the time that the world’s two major chemical warfare criminal companies merged, a French court awarded staggering damages against Monsanto in relation to the cancer of a worker who had been exposed to glyphosate. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think that any single cancer case has ever been scientifically attributed to a cause. The only way litigation like this can work is for civil courts to adopt statistical attribution, as in the plaintiff’s actions made this event x % more likely. This is nonsense scientifically but reasonable legally (civil courts are required to assess probabilities and ignore ‘reasonable doubt’ i.e. science, even when presented with ‘expert’ scientific evidence).
Extreme weather does a phenomenal amount of damage, killing people and destroying property. If a person can become the richest in the world, in part by conning people into believing that lithium-battery-powered cars are a Good Thing, then imagine the riches flowing to anyone who can convince a court that plaintiffs were responsible for even one destructive US hurricane.
It turns out that the pot of gold at the end of this rainbow is enough to entice people to associate into magical guilds for the purpose of ensuring that all weather events are appropriately attributed, and above all to disseminate the illusions that scientists are united in agreement with the attribution.
Defenders of the Climate Truth sometimes, abandoning reason and evidence, accuse skeptics of being paid by the oil industry. Well, Climate Truthers are well-funded by vested interests. However, funding is not evidence for or against scientific integrity or scientific claims.
The IPCC, the closest thing we’ll find, however unconvincing it may be, to a scientific consensus, adopted a rather slack 90% standard for statistical analysis in attribution. Meaning that they will not accept an attribution unless the probability that an event was ‘normal’ is less than 1 in 10. If you take a lot of medicines, then even with the highest trust in the integrity of the pharmaceutical companies, this level of proof means that about one in ten medicines does absolutely nothing (while others may help some people but not you). Oreskes, spokesman for the litigation industry, objects that the IPCC sets too high a bar! There could be stupendous rewards for anyone who can kid a US court that scientists are unanimous in attributing a damaging event.
A very recent article by Pielke demonstrates what a staggering incentive exists for anyone willing to devote themselves to persuading a civil court to swallow the attribution pill.
The weather attribution alchemy series mentioned above reveals, among other things, the institutionalisation of efforts to get first claim on these rewards.
Labour Affairs 