It's obvious why the public is divided: if you feed them (through the media) with the "debates" and "disputes" where "each side has to be represented" you're sending a signal: "there's 50% chance of X and 50% chance of not X." Average that then across the population and don't be surprised that you'll have almost 50% of people believing X and 50% of people believing not X.
If any media would make fair representation, they'd have to host for example 1000 scientists for one side and one (where they'd also have to constantly note that that one is typically not qualified in the area he disputes) for another (or even 10K scientists for one side and one for another etc.) That wouldn't make nice "debates" to sell advertising minutes or brag about the number of the viewers!
When you argue alone with the fool most won't see the difference.
Note also that the better title would be "The Unqualified Skeptics..."
I think there's a related phenomenon: we have "debates" and "disputes" over the expected effects of economic policies, social policies, political policies, etc. and then we get to see those policies in action. Neither major US political party seems to do better than 50/50 overall, despite having "expert" opinion from professional economists, social scientists, and so on. The media providing coverage of the debates, the arguments, and the policies don't generally do a good job of picking out the best analysis; their track record is far worse than 50/50. But viewers keep watching!
Then the same politicians and the same media trot out "scientists" in support of various measures. Sometimes the scientists are legit, and sometimes they're cranks. Sometimes the scientists are legit, but are talking about policy preferences rather than science. And most of the time, the politician or media member giving the "scientist" the podium doesn't have the expertise necessary to understand if the person is legit or totally nuts. And all of this gets ratings, so the media keeps it coming.
Throw in a little confirmation bias -- where people remember their side's successes and the other side's failures, and therefore trust of their side's experts and distrust of the other side's experts -- and you have a recipe for divided opinion even where there shouldn't be.
> Neither major US political party seems to do better than 50/50 overall
I'm not sure what that even means or how you could measure it. Most political policies don't have tangible win/lose results. There are not often going to be actions that make everything peachy. Usually choices have pros and cons, and it's easier to get the public to notice the cons than it is to get them to evaluate the trade offs involved. Also, if the cons don't materialize within two years, the public will probably not connect the dots.
So watch some cable news, form your half-ass opinion and go vote.
> Most political policies don't have tangible win/lose results.
No -- but occasionally politicians will state a particular tangible, directly measureable result they're expecting a policy to produce (either pro or con). They seem to be wrong as often as they're right, across the board.
Ideally, we'd have a policy suggestion, true experts would give us a clear understanding of the tradeoffs involved and the actual effects of the policy, and we could evaluate them and make sensible decisions. What we actually get are policy suggestions, statements from both sides' hand-picked "experts" declaring fictional effects of the policy, we vote for whatever sounds the best to us, and half the time the end result is totally different from what we thought we were voting for. And pretty much all the time, both sides cherry-pick statistics that don't really measure what they say they're measuring in order to prove that they were right all along.
Odd though that people only seem to doubt the evidence when they want to do something!
Don't want to give up smoking, drinking, sugar, driving an SUV or running the AC 24*7 ? Then convince yourself that the scientist are divided on the health benefits/global warming.
I've yet to see somebody say that scientists are divided on general relativity and therefore I don't need to worry about falling off this cliff.
There are a number of issues where there is no action to take (certainly no personal action), and where people irrationally ignore scientific evidence.
Consider, for instance, the distribution of human intelligence. There is quite a bit of solid data on this (how valid is the measurement of g, how g varies amongst different human subgroups), and yet most people want to ignore it. A much smaller subset want to exaggerate it. I can't see any action people could reasonably take based on this data (except for a very small subset of people, namely judges and HR departments).
Odd though that people only seem to doubt the evidence when they want to do something!
Creationists doubt the evidence for evolution, but what do they want to do? Similarly the Holocaust "deniers". (Most don't actually deny the Holocaust, they dispute the scale.)
I've yet to see somebody say that scientists are divided on general relativity and therefore I don't need to worry about falling off this cliff.
I have known people who denied Einstein's theory of special relativity. They don't seem to want anything other than to argue about it. In fact annoyance over that was why I stopped reading James P. Hogan. (This was before he expressed his more controversial views.)
There are also a number of scientists who have doubted general relativity, and they are generally credited with moving the discussion forward by providing something concrete to test. GR has done well under those tests, but it was important to have reasonable alternatives presented. (It is worth noting that 2 of the 3 classical tests of GR match the first order predictions of any theory that reconciles gravity with special relativity, and gravitational redshift falls out of quantum mechanics. So the classical tests didn't actually test the theory very well.)
Nobody sane doubts the reality of gravity though. People who are prone to walking off cliffs because they think gravity is not real generally end up dead or institutionalized for good reason.
Scientists are still people, funded by money that comes from other people. I don't think they should be revered. I don't think that there should ever be a "come on, this is what we believe now, get with the program". I'm always up for skepticism. I don't like this "what's wrong with these people that they're not listening to us" attitude.
EDIT: It's not a bad article, but it ignores the possibility that people doubt the particular scientists for legitimate reasons.
Sure, people shouldn't pretend to be scientists either. This is just about the fact that people have the right to raise objections outside of the realm of science. "Are these scientists paid by politicians or corporations?" "Are these scientists a little too sure of themselves on this theory to be dictating our lives just yet?"
You missed the point: people manufacture controversy in their heads when scientists say things they don't like. They don't argue against them, they erroneously think there's not a concensus.
While I agree with you in principle that healthy skepticism is good, this is not that. Whether there is a scientific consensus is a fact that people reasonably are not free to be skeptics about.
"
..
The Semmelweis reflex or "Semmelweis effect" is a metaphor for the reflex-like rejection of new knowledge because it contradicts entrenched norms, beliefs or paradigms. It refers to Ignaz Semmelweis, who discovered that childbed fever mortality rates could be reduced ten-fold if doctors would wash their hands (we would now say disinfect) with a chlorine solution. His hand-washing suggestions were rejected by his contemporaries."
I just read Atul Gawande's Better where there is a good discussion of Semmelweis, Apparently, Semmelweis was an extremely obnoxious nutjob, which is why he was ignored. When Lister started a lower profile, less obnoxious, program to do basically the same thing a few years later, he was much more successful.
This is not the first Ars Technica article I've seen that erroneously compares the "controversy" surrounding evolution with the controversy surrounding global warming. Evolution is a binary fact. It's either true or not and, as rational, informed people know, it's true.
On the other hand, anthropogenic global warming is a matter of degree. Scientists largely agree that there has been some AGW (although it's not settled to nearly the confidence of evolution). What people object to is the constant bombardment with doomsday scenarios. The magnitude and implications of AGW are NOT settled and yet it's often claimed that hugely invasive and costly public policy initiatives must be enacted to combat worst case outcomes. Scientists and activists who carry the science further than its legs undermine their credibility and make it tough to discuss the issues fairly. It's pretty sneaky to suggest that if you don't toe the popular line on AGW, you're probably a Creationist.
They aren't. Here's the spectrum of beliefs as I understand it.
YC = Young Earth Creationist
PC = Progressive Creationist
TE = Theistic Evolutionist
NE = Naturalistic Evolutionist
ID = Intelligent Design
- -
| | Selection pressure drives changes in balance of genetic traits
| | in a population over time
| |
| YC Trivial, yet novel, beneficial mutations happen
| |
| | Some mutations permanently change populations
| |
| ... Trivial speciation occurs via natural means
|
| | Species within a 'kind' of animal (e.g., dogs and wolves) may
| | share a common ancestor
| |
| | Earth and universe are billions of years old
| |
| PC Different species have arisen over millions of years of history
| |
ID | Some classes of creatures not mentioned in Genesis (e.g., bacteria,
| | algae) may share a common ancestor
| |
| ... Fossil record accurately reflects biological diversity over time
| |
| | 'Kinds' of animals are not necessarily uniquely created; some may have
| | been the result of external genetic tinkering
| |
| | Some types of creatures may have been created *ex nihilo*, some may
| | have been genetically engineered, some may have evolved from others;
| | no ideological preference, it is a purely scientific question.
| |
| | All life may have a common ancestor
| |
| | Biological diversity is explained entirely via mutation and natural
| TE selection, but some mutations may be of 'hidden' supernatural origin
| | (e.g., God orchestrates cosmic rays to make unlikely things happen)
| |
| | Any creative influence exerted by God on evolution occured in
| | the setup of the universe; biological diversity in history is solely
| | a result of the operation of natural laws.
- |
| The origin of life itself has a purely naturalistic explanation.
-
|
NE The origin and diversity of life, including the suitability of the
| universe to life, is explicable solely in terms of natural laws.
-
To add to your point that there is no comparison, the claims of evolutionists can be easily checked (DNA analysis, fossil morphology, speciation in the wild etc.). The _historical_ claims of climate scientists can also be verified (pollen analysis, study of ice cores etc.), although it is much more difficult to do so (what with people throwing away the original data sets and so forth).
However, the _predictive_ claims of climate scientists only follow from the historical facts through the means of statistical, computerized models that are, AFAIK, essentially unproven. In fact, exact quantitative predictions have consistently failed for the last two decades. There is no more science in _predictive_ climatology, I believe, than there is in forecasting the stock market (where the same kind of computer models are also used extensively).
I completely disagree with you. While there are certainly uncertainties in global circulation models, they are based on the laws of physics. Stock market modeling is not, it's entirely based on unproved/ad-hoc statistical models that likely have no relevance to the real world.
Yes, but stock market modeling is also based on the law of supply and demand, which is pretty well proven. The trouble is that, in both cases, the base is far removed from the superstructure, and there's a chaotic system in between.
The "law" in law of supply and demand is a very different thing than the law in the laws of physics... I agree with you about the chaotic thing, though.
It's not that different from the laws of gases, really. Increase pressure, temperature increases (can't tell what individual molecules do). Increase demand, price increases. (Of course, this only works predictably for very, very atomized markets.)
I disagree. Quantifying the energy balance of the planet is easier than quantifying the aggregate behavior of individual, semi-rational actors in the marketplace. What happens within the climate system of the Earth is chaotic, but the energy balance itself is measurable.
I'm not going to track down all the literature behind those numbers here, but there are published, falsifiable arguments supporting them. Climate models aren't similar to Wall Street voodoo.
Looking at the Summary for Policymakers that you linked to, we are given measurements of [+0.6 to +2.4] W/ sq m at 90% confidence. Notice the huge interval: the interval length is three times the least value. If we'd re-scale it for 95%, or even 99% (the FDA will require that much for some drugs!), the warming disappears completely.
And this is simply the measurement part. _Predicting_ what will happen is a thousand times more difficult. If you want predictive science based on the laws of physics, look at astronomy. 4000 years ago, the Babylonians could predict astronomical events with much more precision than anything today's climatologists can predict about average temperatures.
No they aren't. They are based on the laws of physics with all sorts of wild assumptions tacked on to make them tractable. For instance, water is typically modeled as having the consistency of molasses in the x-y directions, and some even more viscous material in the z-direction. Many important components of climate modelling are simply not derivable from simple physics (e.g., biological effects, cloud formation), and these are just made up to fit historical records, if not ignored.
Scale separation and statistical pseudoequilibrium (forget the exact term) are just assumed in order to "get results". I.e., if you didn't make those assumptions, simulations would require so many data points that they would be impossible. Nonphysical energy damping is added, since without it, most simulations blow up. Lots of important parameters are just picked roughly at random, just to calibrate the model to historical data.
Stock market predictions also tend to have one major advantage over GCM models - their proponents admit their limits.
>On the other hand, anthropogenic global warming is a matter of degree.
Yes, few informed people would disagree. The problem, however, is with how the debate is presented to the public. Watching CNN or MSNBC someone would come away with the impression that the debate is between the political conservative position (either wait and see, or it's not a problem), and the IPCC.
In reality, the scientific debate is centered around the IPCC[1], with some scientists being more conservative in future projections, and some being more dire. The scientific uncertainty that you speak of cuts both ways, and could also end up revealing a nightmare scenario of climate feedbacks. See:http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/roulette-0519.html
While the graph is nice, error bounds would be extremely useful. Comparing two groups based on a sample size of 5 (per group) is an extremely tricky thing to do.
It's even trickier when you try to rule out systematic errors by reducing your sample size further. For instance, the blog mentions one systematic error caused by D->R transitions. He then claims this is ruled out by analyzing two R->R and one D->D transition, ignoring the fact that 2 of those three transitions were based on fluke circumstances themselves (specifically Kennedy->Johnson and Nixon->Ford).
32 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 87.8 ms ] threadIf any media would make fair representation, they'd have to host for example 1000 scientists for one side and one (where they'd also have to constantly note that that one is typically not qualified in the area he disputes) for another (or even 10K scientists for one side and one for another etc.) That wouldn't make nice "debates" to sell advertising minutes or brag about the number of the viewers!
When you argue alone with the fool most won't see the difference.
Note also that the better title would be "The Unqualified Skeptics..."
Then the same politicians and the same media trot out "scientists" in support of various measures. Sometimes the scientists are legit, and sometimes they're cranks. Sometimes the scientists are legit, but are talking about policy preferences rather than science. And most of the time, the politician or media member giving the "scientist" the podium doesn't have the expertise necessary to understand if the person is legit or totally nuts. And all of this gets ratings, so the media keeps it coming.
Throw in a little confirmation bias -- where people remember their side's successes and the other side's failures, and therefore trust of their side's experts and distrust of the other side's experts -- and you have a recipe for divided opinion even where there shouldn't be.
I'm not sure what that even means or how you could measure it. Most political policies don't have tangible win/lose results. There are not often going to be actions that make everything peachy. Usually choices have pros and cons, and it's easier to get the public to notice the cons than it is to get them to evaluate the trade offs involved. Also, if the cons don't materialize within two years, the public will probably not connect the dots.
So watch some cable news, form your half-ass opinion and go vote.
No -- but occasionally politicians will state a particular tangible, directly measureable result they're expecting a policy to produce (either pro or con). They seem to be wrong as often as they're right, across the board.
Ideally, we'd have a policy suggestion, true experts would give us a clear understanding of the tradeoffs involved and the actual effects of the policy, and we could evaluate them and make sensible decisions. What we actually get are policy suggestions, statements from both sides' hand-picked "experts" declaring fictional effects of the policy, we vote for whatever sounds the best to us, and half the time the end result is totally different from what we thought we were voting for. And pretty much all the time, both sides cherry-pick statistics that don't really measure what they say they're measuring in order to prove that they were right all along.
And then we wonder why people are skeptical...
Don't want to give up smoking, drinking, sugar, driving an SUV or running the AC 24*7 ? Then convince yourself that the scientist are divided on the health benefits/global warming.
I've yet to see somebody say that scientists are divided on general relativity and therefore I don't need to worry about falling off this cliff.
Consider, for instance, the distribution of human intelligence. There is quite a bit of solid data on this (how valid is the measurement of g, how g varies amongst different human subgroups), and yet most people want to ignore it. A much smaller subset want to exaggerate it. I can't see any action people could reasonably take based on this data (except for a very small subset of people, namely judges and HR departments).
Creationists doubt the evidence for evolution, but what do they want to do? Similarly the Holocaust "deniers". (Most don't actually deny the Holocaust, they dispute the scale.)
I've yet to see somebody say that scientists are divided on general relativity and therefore I don't need to worry about falling off this cliff.
I have known people who denied Einstein's theory of special relativity. They don't seem to want anything other than to argue about it. In fact annoyance over that was why I stopped reading James P. Hogan. (This was before he expressed his more controversial views.)
There are also a number of scientists who have doubted general relativity, and they are generally credited with moving the discussion forward by providing something concrete to test. GR has done well under those tests, but it was important to have reasonable alternatives presented. (It is worth noting that 2 of the 3 classical tests of GR match the first order predictions of any theory that reconciles gravity with special relativity, and gravitational redshift falls out of quantum mechanics. So the classical tests didn't actually test the theory very well.)
Nobody sane doubts the reality of gravity though. People who are prone to walking off cliffs because they think gravity is not real generally end up dead or institutionalized for good reason.
EDIT: It's not a bad article, but it ignores the possibility that people doubt the particular scientists for legitimate reasons.
While I agree with you in principle that healthy skepticism is good, this is not that. Whether there is a scientific consensus is a fact that people reasonably are not free to be skeptics about.
I'm surprised it wasn't higher.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmelweis_reflex
On the other hand, anthropogenic global warming is a matter of degree. Scientists largely agree that there has been some AGW (although it's not settled to nearly the confidence of evolution). What people object to is the constant bombardment with doomsday scenarios. The magnitude and implications of AGW are NOT settled and yet it's often claimed that hugely invasive and costly public policy initiatives must be enacted to combat worst case outcomes. Scientists and activists who carry the science further than its legs undermine their credibility and make it tough to discuss the issues fairly. It's pretty sneaky to suggest that if you don't toe the popular line on AGW, you're probably a Creationist.
However, the _predictive_ claims of climate scientists only follow from the historical facts through the means of statistical, computerized models that are, AFAIK, essentially unproven. In fact, exact quantitative predictions have consistently failed for the last two decades. There is no more science in _predictive_ climatology, I believe, than there is in forecasting the stock market (where the same kind of computer models are also used extensively).
If you'd like to see a chart summarizing the various climate forcings, then look at page 4 of this link: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-spm...
I'm not going to track down all the literature behind those numbers here, but there are published, falsifiable arguments supporting them. Climate models aren't similar to Wall Street voodoo.
And this is simply the measurement part. _Predicting_ what will happen is a thousand times more difficult. If you want predictive science based on the laws of physics, look at astronomy. 4000 years ago, the Babylonians could predict astronomical events with much more precision than anything today's climatologists can predict about average temperatures.
Scale separation and statistical pseudoequilibrium (forget the exact term) are just assumed in order to "get results". I.e., if you didn't make those assumptions, simulations would require so many data points that they would be impossible. Nonphysical energy damping is added, since without it, most simulations blow up. Lots of important parameters are just picked roughly at random, just to calibrate the model to historical data.
Stock market predictions also tend to have one major advantage over GCM models - their proponents admit their limits.
Yes, few informed people would disagree. The problem, however, is with how the debate is presented to the public. Watching CNN or MSNBC someone would come away with the impression that the debate is between the political conservative position (either wait and see, or it's not a problem), and the IPCC.
In reality, the scientific debate is centered around the IPCC[1], with some scientists being more conservative in future projections, and some being more dire. The scientific uncertainty that you speak of cuts both ways, and could also end up revealing a nightmare scenario of climate feedbacks. See:http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/roulette-0519.html
[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/04/1003187107.full...
Has anyone told them?
It's even trickier when you try to rule out systematic errors by reducing your sample size further. For instance, the blog mentions one systematic error caused by D->R transitions. He then claims this is ruled out by analyzing two R->R and one D->D transition, ignoring the fact that 2 of those three transitions were based on fluke circumstances themselves (specifically Kennedy->Johnson and Nixon->Ford).