You might look at Aubrey de Grey's thesis on this topic. His focus is applied biogerontology, but the general incentives and situation he describes can be applied just as well to any field of science. See the diagrams in this short article:
Actually, that's not really much of a comment. Based on your pitch I was expecting a nice little tear-down, instead it's just drive-by on a book they wrote.
I wish I hadn't upvoted that. He's usually pretty good, but on this score I wish he would engage, engage, and engage some more rather than get defensive and dismissive. Their solutions need criticism, but I agree that scientists have generally been part of the problem. I interpret the anti-science I see in society as a backlash against the lack of humility, and outright arrogance, many scientists use to push their favored field.
The bottom line is we're dependent on public dollars. It's our duty to explain what we do as public servants not as private dictators. We may not be comfortable talking about questions of faith, but that's what the public demands because it's closest to what they believe on a daily basis. I much prefer the Sagan model over the Dawkins version. From a distance it seems Sagan managed to advance science, while Dawkins seems to undermine it. It's all in how you treat people who disagree with you.
Blogs are great, but there's certainly room for improvement in the way they organize knowledge.
Hear. Hear.
I appreciate the comments here on HN above suggesting that I should have linked to PZ's review of the two authors' book rather than to his post today about the Boston Globe piece. I chose specificity of response to what was submitted here (yes, and personal convenience in slogging through PZ's blog to find the links) over lengthiness of post and point-by-pointness of reply.
I agree to a large extent. That's a big part of the app we're working on.
But in these posts, he comes across as angry and bitter. That's no way to engage the general public (even as it might be a great way to engage his audience).
I much prefer the Sagan model over the Dawkins version.
I think most members of the general public (in the United States) would consider both Dawkins and the late Sagan as rather hard-line critics of religious commitment, which may be part of what is at issue here. I'm still looking for the scientifically trained person with a "friendly atheist" manner who can talk about secular rationality as a view of the world without being dismissive of trust in traditional worldviews.
Or, start with the various leaders who discovered that anti-intellectualism is a great defense against criticism of bad ideas that they want to do anyway. This tactic isn't new -- remember Adlai Stevenson? Notice that the issues where public and scientific opinion diverge the most are the most politicized ones? It doesn't just happen in America; this is the effect of politicians and religious leaders targeting mindshare while scientists simply can't make that the priority. We eggheads don't stand a chance unless our research lines up with someone else's goals.
Or that our research aligns with the public's needs. That's what I take away from the miles of unused tubes in Texas.
The other problem is scientists aren't very good at organizing and lobbying. The biggest neuroscience organization, the one I belong to, has a well-known health care lobbyist representing them. His name? Newt Gingrich.
Scientific literacy is no shield against anti-evolutionists or global warming deniers, for example, who are often scientists themselves, who couch their arguments in sophisticated scientific language, and who regularly cite articles in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Having the knowledge equivalent of a PhD is more along the lines of what’s necessary to refute them, and even then, the task requires considerable research and intellectual labor, far more than most people have the time for.
As a "global warming denier", now I'm being lumped into the anti-evolutionist camp. What's next? Sticking us in with the flat-earthers and the folks who believe men didn't walk on the moon? Perhaps we can be included with the holocaust deniers. That's a fun group.
Science is about adbuction (inferring patterns from data), deduction (inferring rules from patterns), and induction (inferring new data from rules). You hypothesize and test to validate, and it's always provisional.
That means that science doesn't play the role of the oracle of ultimate truth. As the article points out, for scientists to take on this role is counter-productive.
Taking a cheap shot at the critics of current global warming theory is just so much political genuflecting. The article could have done without it.
That bothers me too. I would not call myself AGW denier, more like agnostic with some inclination to believe, but this attitude that if you don't believe in god that makes you believe that the Earth is flat is just stupid.
The whole GW issue to me looks most alike to faith from them all.
"As a "global warming denier", now I'm being lumped into the anti-evolutionist camp. What's next? Sticking us in with the flat-earthers and the folks who believe men didn't walk on the moon....Taking a cheap shot at the critics of current global warming theory is just so much political genuflecting."
Misuse of the word "theory" to imply debate where none exists puts you squarely in the same rhetorical camp as anti-evolutionists. It's not a cheap shot to group pseudo-scientific criticisms based on the common logical fallacies used to advance their respective agendas.
Just "having no debate" is NOT a good way or determining "this is science". Until a hypothesis has been tested, it's not science.
Global warming has not been tested. It's not even a theory, it's a conjecture, or a hypothesis.
Science is not done by majority vote, I don't care that more scientists that not believe in it. By that criterion phlogiston and luminiferous aether were both science. Until you test it, it's just an idea.
I understood him perfectly. There have been multiple, public IPCC reports, summarizing thousands of peer-reviewed, scientific journal articles documenting global warming in fields as diverse as oceanography, geology, biology, ecology and chemistry over the last 30 years. Meanwhile, neither of you have provided evidence for your own opinions, yet you have the gall to characterize an entire field of scientific research as completely false.
This exchange is a case study of why global warming critics are rhetorically identical to anti-evolutionists and flat-earth believers: it's trivially easy to throw stones from the fringe of a scientific debate, then hide behind the fallacy that that you're the unsung outsider, defending science from the bad logic of the mainstream. It's a remarkably convenient position, since it allows you to criticize everything, but provide evidence for nothing.
The IPCC reports have a lot more than just the "hockey-stick" graph. The "Understanding and Attributing Climate Change" report alone has over 500 citations to peer-reviewed papers.
Given that the report is public and free, I think you might want to take a look at it, rather than debating a straw-man.
Given fixed inputs, produce a testable, repeatable output.
It has nothing to do with peer reviews, political committees, cited papers, consensus or any of that. Nice try, but no banana.
So predict the worldwide temp in the year 2029. We'll wait around and see if that prediction holds true. As far as I know, nobody has yet been able to actually forecast climate and validate it. It's just all arm-waving and hysteria. That may pass as science for you, but it doesn't work for a lot of other people. Their position, which is mine, is that unless science is falsifiable, it's not science, no matter how much you gussy it up with anything else.
It doesn't even have to do on whether mankind is changing the climate -- that's a whole nother can of worms. Along with whether and how much we should do about it if we are. Or the role of science in politics (hint: both will have a corrupting influence on the other) Or the question of what the perfect climate should be, or how fast it should change. This is just about whether or not you talk about global warming with the confidence as you do gravity, integrals, or electromagnetism.
The globe does seem to be warming. I agree that the ultimate cause may be impossible to nail down in the same way that testable scientific theories have been. Still, given the warming globe, and the strong possibility that man is somewhat to blame (see the correlation between industrialization and climate change), isn't the risk of doing nothing far greater than the risk of trying to do something? In the former, we end up with unpredictable changes to the planet. In the latter, we might still end up with those changes, but at least funding has been invested in trying to understand and ameliorate them.
For me, then, it's not about deniers or supporters. It's about making determinations for behaviors today based on the best possible evidence. That doesn't mean the evidence adds up to Truth. It just means that we take it seriously enough to understand the problem space. If we're wrong, we've lost, maybe, one year of defense funding as the Arctic freezes more fully in 100 years. If we're right, then maybe we got a head start on the order of twenty or thirty years.
My point is: Why wait? Scientists will adjust if they're wrong. And we'll adjust if they're right. Isn't it better to keep collecting data especially while we try to change human behavior?
I hear this one a lot -- why wait? Also the cousin: if there is such a huge possible downside, shouldn't we do something?
I guess I'd have to say "no".
There are so many problems I have with this -- even assuming we're changing the climate -- that it's difficult to know where to begin. First, is there some badness that is going to happen in the next 20 or 30 years? Or are we talking about 60+ years? Because if people seriously think they know anything about what the next century is going to look like, they're smoking crack. We could all end up as smoking radioactive rubble, in which case a couple degrees of warming would be the least of our risks. There is simply no way to compare various scenarios, likelihoods, and risk exposures to make an intelligent guess about things so far off in the future. It has nothing to do with "this won't effect me, so I don't care" -- although that's a perfectly natural point of view too. It's simply that freaking anything could happen in a hundred years. To sit around and worry about a few degrees temperature change leads me to believe a lot of people don't have anything better to do with their time.
That's the thing: without hard numbers this is a religious discussion -- a discussion about how most people "feel" about what's happening. I just don't "feel" the danger is anywhere near the level of being worried or changing the way our economies work. To me that sounds like crazy talk based on fear-mongering. It reminds me of every other religious movement I've seen -- mankind has sinned, we will pay the price, we must change our ways, punishment may come anyway, etc.
I'm sorry. Given the archaeological climate data, the current state of the models, and the distant future impact, it just doesn't seem very rational to me to be that concerned about it. That doesn't mean I'm not open to compromise. Heck -- build a few thousand nuclear reactors over the next 20 years. It'll make the air cleaner, reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, and make the greenhouse gas people happy. There's lots of room for working together, even with different worldviews.
There are numbers. They may be too correlational for your liking, but there is significant data. I think you have to be careful here. Saying the data are inconclusive, because controlled tests are difficult if not impossible, is one thing. But dismissing the data embraces the same fanaticism that you seem uncomfortable with. Science demands skeptics but deniers get thrown out of the tent. The difference might seem like a religious dispute but it really comes down to productive criticism versus unproductive needling.
The emotion probably comes from seeing something that seemed permanent, like permafrost and Arctic ice, melting away. Humans don't tend to like instability. And instability on a global scale is a relatively new phenomenon. Sunspots might be the next worry but what could we possibly do about that?
It's an interesting point on the cycle of religious movements (and it reminds me of deathbed confessions - what do you have to lose?). But what's an alternative explanation for rising temperatures? That's science. There's an existing and prevailing hypothesis that attempts to explain that data. You need another hypothesis that explains the data just as well. It could be that the Earth is simply repeating normal warming trends. The problem is, that's not a testable hypothesis. There is no experiment that could reject that hypothesis.
By contrast, if man is playing some role, then if we change our behaviors we should see a change in temperatures. If we see some reduction in global temperatures coincident with climate change interventions, that's another data point in favor of the hypothesis that man has some role to play. To me, that's another clear reason to pump research dollars into the problem. And sure, nuclear plants should be a part of the solution.
My point on not waiting is what can be gained by running interventions. Sure, it might be a wasted effort, but either way you gain knowledge you didn't have previously from simple observation. I really don't know what the alternative is. The planet appears to be changing. We're unsure of the cause - some more so than others. What's the problem with trying to figure out things through the scientific method? Wasted resources? Unnecessary hysteria? So what? Research and development is like insurance. You may not need it, but if you do, you'll be happy you put in the effort years ahead of time.
Nobody is throwing out all of the data. The data, last I checked showed no warming over the past decade or more, even though greenhouse emissions continue to rise. The data, last I checked showed temperatures much warmer and much colder at many times in our past (assuming we can extrapolate, which is a big assumption). The data, last I checked, is inconclusive over whether CO2 is a leading or trailing indicator of warming -- we've just assumed it's a leading indicator because of what we know about greenhouse gases.
Nobody is talking about not using the scientific method and continuing to take measurements and observations. Almost all of the types of data we are recording now have never been recorded in history, which means we have absolutely nothing to go on except some guesswork about cores and such. Nothing wrong with that either, but one has to put these observations of melting arctic ice in their place -- nobody knows what arctic ice was like back when Iceland was lush with farms in the during the Maurader minimum. Nobody had any idea of what arctic ice looked like from a low orbit view until we started launching satellites! And as for Antarctica, we haven't even been there that long, much less established any kind of track record to make comparisons. Cores can only take you so far.
I'm not a big fan of running interventions for half-baked fear-mongering masquerading as science. But let's assume for a moment that I were. How would you know what to measure, what to control, and whether or not anything was working? You pull on rope A and bell D rings, does that mean that rope A is connected to bell D? Or just that bell D was going to ring anyway? I'm telling you it's no better than bearskins and sky gods.
If you're questioning the existing data, you're doing science! That's all I'd like to see. And if that data is being collected for the very first time, isn't that the point? Then re-evaluate each year thereafter.
What's interesting to me about science in a democracy is the experiments can only be as grand as the public allows. The interventions now being discussed, even cap and trade, are more like small fixes. And look at the political difficulty of passing that! The difference with bearskins and crystals is you can measure and contrast effects. The system may be too complex to truly pull it apart and reduce it, but I still don't get what you're against exactly. You're for nuclear plants and for measurements. What's the problem then? Doing science is simply about trying to isolate causation. With more data and more interventions, it should be possible to see if man can have a causal effect on global temperatures. Most climate scientists think that we'll see positive changes. If they're wrong, we'll find out in our lifetimes. What's the alternative hypothesis you're pushing? Giving out large numbers of sky god dolls and watching for an effect? I don't think you really want to cut all research funding in the area, do you?
Yes. Absolutely continue the science -- data gathering, looking for patterns, proposing hypotheses, and testing. I'm all for all of that. Perhaps in a few hundred years we'll know enough to have something interesting. Lord knows it took Physics longer than that. Perhaps the climatologists will get lucky. Who knows? Although if I understand Wolfram's work, some chaotic processes may be simply incalculable.
I think there's a huge gap between "continue the science" and "turn over large sections of the world's economy to climatologists to make the earth their private lab" My contention is twofold: the use of the word "science" to describe the barest minimum of data collection when science is much more than that, and the mingling of scientists and politics. Flimsy science with a lot of unknowns and public policy are a really bad marriage. Sounds to me a lot like the medieval church and the early nation-states.
When Newton observed an apple falling, he didn't need a theory of gravity because he could take a million more apples and make them do the same thing. That means that even though the theory of gravity is in the same epistemological place that global warming is, we can have a lot more confidence in it. We only have one earth, and little data. Right now we have science-based conjecture, which is nothing as firm as proven theories. That means I'm not supporting huge changes in public policy. If we were talking an asteroid coming towards earth, you can better believe I'd have a much different position.
We're not that far apart then. But I don't see where "turn over large sections of the world's economy to climatologists to make the earth their private lab" is true. That sounds like a scare tactic itself. And Physics did pretty decent work in it's first 100 years. The next 100 were even more revolutionary. I see no reason why Climate Science, with 30 - 50 years under its belt, can't mine important insights, and suggest and test changes, within our lifetimes.
As to the connection between science and politics, I really think it's inevitable. Politicians fund science in every democracy. We need to lobby them on the importance of the work. Unfortunately that sometimes means grandstanding and fear mongering. But the alternative is the science doesn't get funding. I sort of have skins in the game so here my own objectivity gets dicey.
I agree with you on your philosophy of science. But I don't see huge changes in public policy. Kyoto hasn't done much. What's the real risk of cap and trade? Some marginal costs go up? Even as it may appear scientists are running roughshod over and through debates, they're constrained by political and economic pressures, as they should be. The bigger the change in America, at least, the harder it is to pass through Congress, even with one party holding a supramajority. More problematic for climate scientists is the need to get all nations on-board, including developing nations. I don't see that happening. Debates among nations will prevent what you're most worried about up until it's clearly an asteroid.
Just coming back to your main point, on conjecture versus hypothesis-driven research, it seems pretty clear to me what the prevailing hypothesis is: Humans are responsible for some measurable, and significant, changes in the climate. I'm still unclear on the alternative hypothesis and, more importantly, how it can be tested. Can you enlighten me?
Apologies for the hyperbole, but I believe your position is that we should adjust the inputs -- control gas emissions -- and then see what happens. If I've misunderstood you please explain. Assigning that kind of political power isn't something one does lightly.
The science and politics thing is indeed dicey. I would suggest that a set of ethical guidelines be established to keep both parties honest, much like we have with the doctor-patient relationship in psychoanalysis. There's simply too much temptation for each side to use the other for their advantage. We don't want to end up with one party "scientifically" proving the other party is a bunch of morons (substitute much more PC adjectives here). We certainly don't want politicians announcing that scientific or political debate is "over" for a particular topic. E-gads man, that's a travesty.
Last time I had a AGW discussion on HN (several months back), somebody pointed out that we've actually been seeing a cooling trend, not a warming one. If the current year continues that trend, the original models will have been invalidated -- the actual observed data will fall outside of the 95% confidence range. I know this sounds like stalling for time, but since I'm not in a hurry anyway, I'd like to see the current year's data.
I'm not a climatologist, and of course it's not incumbent on me to put forth any alternatives. I am, however, aware of several. (I've spent some time researching this issue). There's the 1500-year cycle theory, that since the last great ice age we've seen regular 1500-year cycles. There's the average-global-temperature-is-primarily-a-result-of-solar-radiation crowd. I think those guys, Russians if I recall, made a bet back in 2000 that the next decade would see cooling, not warming. Perhaps they'll get paid? I don't know. There are theories that cosmic radiation is responsible for cloud coverage and that cloud coverage is the primary ingredient in climate. My personal half-baked theory is that since we are talking about a mixed chemical and biological system, with hundreds of thousands of variables, the climate is probably a chaotic system with an attractor based around solar input. This means that small inputs could have large effects, but it also means that large inputs may have no effect at all. With a little more research I'm sure we could find a lot of other ideas out there.
The smoking gun in current model application is the fact that all of them have runaway conditions at the end. This has been interpreted as portraying some pending doom, but any computer science nerd who has played around with chaotic and CA systems can observe that the default behavior is runaway systems. So on general principle I'm skeptical that we're not seeing much more than experimentation noise.
Thanks. To me, controlling gas emissions just doesn't seem like a big deal and it certainly seems to be a weak form of political power, especially if something like cap and trade is implemented. Moreover, suppose all it means is turning every coal power plant in the world into a nuclear power plant in the next fifty years. That level of intervention, if other CO2 emissions from fossil fuel consumption were kept relatively constant, seems like a simple test of the human impact hypothesis. Coal operators may not be happy they're being put out of business, but can they prove their product is safe?
I'm no climatologist either. But I sometimes know testable hypotheses when I see them. I don't see how a 1500 year model is testable. Even if you're okay with waiting another 1450 years that's still not science. No intervention is being measurable so you should be just as dissatisfied with the science impact claimed there. I also don't see how a solar radiation model is testable. How can we block or change solar radiation? Giant mirrors in space? Or how can we change cloud coverage?
I have no problem with other ideas. But ideas without some validation test(s) are really no different than faith-based opinions. I thought that's the big problem for you?
Right now, it seems we have a clear hypothesis to explain climate change (note that I think the debate is shifting away from more limited "warming"): Human activities, namely industrialization, have negatively impacted the globe's climate patterns. We also have a clear test: Change human activities, specifically carbon output, and you change the climate. I don't see a better alternative at this time - one that clearly states the problem and proposes a solution. That doesn't mean there isn't an alternative framing and solution. I just haven't seen it.
If one denies climate change, then, they aren't offering an alternative to explain and prevent it. If one denies the role of humans, same problem. Neither of these framings are scientific. They present hypotheses without any way of rejecting them. That's faith.
Here's another framing that's much simpler: Deforestation has led to climate change. That's a subordinate hypothesis to the one above, but it offers a clear cause to test and a way to do so. Plant more trees because of the role of carbon in photosynthesis. Of course, the problem, if you really want to nail causality, is getting the globe's inhabitants to only plant trees for fifty years and change nothing else. Instead, that will be one intervention among many. But importantly, they'll all tend to share the goal of reducing carbon output. And that seems to be the direction we're headed. Over the next twenty years I suspect we will become much better at controlling worldwide carbon output, at least enough to see any effects.
What's beautiful to me about science is if that hypothesis is rejected, and the climate continues to be chaotic, scientists (and their funding agencies) will formulate new hypotheses and tests. The process may seem slow and insulated, but it is self-correcting. If the problem seems to go away - the Arctic starts freezing again - the funding for climate research will dry up.
As for politics and science, I'm afraid it's as good as it gets. And it's not bad. When priorities align we put men on the moon, cure diseases, and explain, to some extent, human nature and suffering. For the most part, politicians leave scientists alone because the most difficult quandaries of our time are ethical in nature. Scientists become advisers but not decision makers.
We can agree to disagree about the nature of the intervention being suggested.
As to testability, you have to remember that I believe we're still in the abduction stage of climate science -- finding the patterns from the data. We haven't even reached the hypothesis stage. So the 1500-year and solar-input theories are all about pattern-spotting. If a pattern is spotted, then I'm sure we can begin talking about hypotheses.
That's just where the science is, at least for me. That doesn't mean that it's "full" or "mature" science. I guess I'd call it honest science.
Yes, it does seem as if the political language has shifted away from "warming" to "change". Perhaps because warming is actually something you could conceivably measure? Whereas "change" is what, exactly? One of the signs that something is not science is when it gets stretched to meet incoming data that would normally disprove it.
One does not have to deny anything. Indeed, the onus is on the scientist to prove a connection, not the skeptic. You're getting it backwards. Perhaps we just don't understand how the climate works, and won't for another 500 years. Ignorance is the default position. It's up to science to move us from that. "deniers" have nothing to do with anything.
If the problem seems to go away - the Arctic starts freezing again -- why is the arctic thawing a "problem". Because sea levels will rise? And because some people can't move out of the way quickly enough? You see, we go immediately from observation to guesswork to moral outrage to political action. Something wrong with that. From a political standpoint, I find it odd that we have some idea of what a "problem" is. When I ask about this, I've yet to get an answer that makes any sense to me. It all sounds so much like "Man changes environment. Man is bad. Therefore, change is bad" If a thousand sheep run across a mountaintop and ruin the tundra it's natural, but take a thousand people with cameras doing the same thing and it's a travesty.
These are aesthetic considerations, not scientific ones. I agree with most people's view of beauty in these areas -- who wants a ruined mountaintop or dirty air? But the devil is in the details here.
Science is self-correcting. I'm a hug fan of way science works. It's the intellectual light we have in the darkness. In practice, however, it's done in a very political atmosphere. People hang on to old ideas for a long time after they've been disproven. Not all new ideas are subjected to the same skepticism. Scientists are very cliquish. Science propagandizes itself to the masses -- scientists are always pure and noble. Progress always happens in a straight line.
We can also agree to disagree about science and politics. When I see government employees who are scientists lobby for political causes that directly support their research -- and then call dissenters "deniers" "uneducated" "rubes" "shills" -- we've entered a bad feedback loop.
The problem with the Arctic melting isn't one particular result. It's that we have no frickin' idea what the range of effects could be or if they're bad. We may end up wasting a lot of resources trying to understand the myriad changes. But current theory at least suggests one common cause. The goal is to see if we can change the climate by changing carbon output. Don't we have to see how that plays out?
As to the abduction stage, the data absolutely has to be collected. Would any climate scientist say otherwise? The problem is if there are multiple competing hypotheses, and one has a clear set of tests, that's the one that will get funding and move forward. As it should. We can only test testable hypotheses. Those that require more data until tests can be developed will inherently lag behind. Not only is that the way science works, it's only way it could work.
That's what I don't understand about where you're coming from. You believe in the scientific method but with concerns about how humans practice it. You also believe that some hypotheses don't have enough data to support specific tests. But how does that take you to rejecting current efforts? That is science and it is hypothesis testing. If the hypotheses are wrong, climate scientists will need to come up with new hypotheses. Sure, many will die clinging to the old ones. But the new generation will be forced to do so - to publish, gets grants, be honored faculty, etc. There's a club but there is wide latitude to question prevailing logic even if it sometimes takes decades. It's an entrepreneurship of ideas.
As for politics, I'll go so far to say that a representative democracy helps to correct Science and her focus through funding priorities. It makes science somewhat accountable to the will of the people. You could still do science in a fascist regime. But you'd end up with eugenics and human testing without informed consent. That doesn't mean the Western system is perfect. Not at all. I just have a hard time thinking about how it could be better. It may be a bad feedback loop, but it isn't a closed one.
Your oaths are a good idea. But I think they're unnecessary. Good science replicates. It's really that simple. If experimental outcomes aren't repeatable that scientific line of thought withers and dies. You can continue to pump in funding, but sooner or later the priorities change and, sure, sometimes for the worse.
The same is true of the current approach to climate change. If we control or reduce worldwide carbon output and we see climate changes back closer toward the early 20th c. then the assumptions in the carbon "theory" will be strengthen. If we don't, it won't. Carbon output won't be the theory. That process may take a generation or three, but it will play itself out. Without an alternative testable hypothesis, what else can we do until we discover one?
To come back to one possibility. Suppose you're right that cloud cover is a big part of climate change. Now suppose that Sadir Smith invents device in his garage that takes the humidity in clouds and turns it into fresh water and using solar power. The more the device clears the clouds the more it's able to generate its own power. Fresh water. Fewer clouds. No more carbon. Don't you think an enterprising scientist will see this and start to study its effects on the local climate? Won't another scientist try to expand the program internationally? Soon there will be conferences and journals devoted to "cloud hydration".
I think a big part of the problem is we're witnessing the creation of a new form of science and one that no seems to understand. But that's exactly it. We won't understand this science until we do science. Testing hypotheses is the only way to do science.
That is, indeed, a simplistic argument. Unfortunately, it has absolutely nothing to do with anything I've said here. I have not -- and would not -- suggest that science is a matter of consensus. The IPCC is relevant only in that it acts as an excellent, public summary of the scientific knowledge on global warming. It's a review article, not a popularity contest.
Your comment is only interesting in that you have, once again, used a favorite rhetorical tool of the pseudo-scientific debater: a faulty redefinition of "science". By your standards, a scientific experiment must:
"Given fixed inputs, produce a testable, repeatable output."
which is supposed to imply that global warming can't be science, since we can't predict the weather next Wednesday, let alone a random Wednesday in 2030.
Unfortunately, while this line of faulty reasoning is superficially appealing to those untrained in scientific thinking, this definition excludes 99.9% of all scientific research done today. We can't evolve a complex organism in the lab -- yet we know that it happens in nature. We can't grow a human in a dish -- yet we've been able to do a huge amount of research into human embryonic development. We can't do repeatable experiments with nearly any human genetic disease -- yet here we are, making measurable scientific progress year over year in nearly every field that touches human genetic medicine.
A scientific theory needs to produce a testable hypothesis, nothing more. The experiment doesn't have to be practical on any particular time-frame. And since you've (rather conveniently) provided a experiment for any theory related to global warming, you've refuted your own straw-man attack. Global warming theory is quite obviously within the domain of "science". It is patently absurd to suggest otherwise.
The IPCC is relevant only in that it acts as an excellent, public summary of the scientific knowledge on global warming. It's a review article, not a popularity contest.
It's not a review article, it's a political statement put out by a political organization in order to effect political change. Read some of the dissenting opinions.
which is supposed to imply that global warming can't be science, since we can't predict the weather next Wednesday, let alone a random Wednesday in 2030.
Sometimes I think you're just talking to yourself, timr. Nobody is talking about the weather. Pick any inputs, predict any outputs. Take projected levels of greenhouses gases in the atmosphere (what are those, anyway?) and predict average global temperature. Take solar input and predict cloud cover. You choose. For us to have any sort of reasonable discussion about this "science" of yours, you actually have to make some testable hypothesis. Without that we have bupkis go on. You're the person saying something bad is going to happen. Logically you have to have some idea of what output amounts to "bad". It's your problem, not mine.
Have the conversation that we're having, not some other conversation you wish we were having.
We have no idea how gravity works, yet we are able to model it quite accurately. Why? Let's take a look at your examples to see what we can learn there: life evolving, embryonic development, etc. These examples are complex systems that we can only make Bayesian links between. Why would we do that? Because we're still in the process of abduction in a lot of these areas. Nothing wrong with that. With gravity we've moved to induction. But it means that the science in those fields has not advanced to the same point as physics, for instance. Various fields of science are harder or softer than others.
Because you choose to conflate all of this for purposes of argumentation, let me give you an easy discrimination rule: the amount of data observed makes correlation more reliable even if hypotheses are flimsy. To give a real-world example, if I go to my doctor with cancer, he prescribes some medications. Now even though he may have no idea of how cancer works or be able to predict how it will progress in me, I can have confidence his treatment will be "mostly" good. Why? Because he has a million other cancer cases to statistically draw on. He may have not idea why the treatment he is using works (he may have not deduced any rules), but he knows from the patterns of a large set of data that, given a certain treatment, most patients get better. (He has abductively progressed)
Compare to those millions of patients (or millions of embryos or millions of cells to use your example) to the global warming guys who have one earth and about a hundred years of data. That's like me going to a witch doctor for brain surgery. Ain't happening.
The problem we have is that the softer the science and the sparser the data, the more easily Kuhn's observation of scientific paradigms plays itself out in research. In other words, groupthink takes over. It's very difficult to get anybody to believe that scientific consensus means anything when talking about integrals, but if you're talking about something like psychology consensus is really all you have. That's because without an inductive model we're stuck looking at data and attempting to find patterns. Biology sits nicely between hard and soft sciences. So it's a good example. The basic chemistry we have down. Some of the other stuff we're just guessing.
So while I think it's very interesting that current scientific thinking is that some sort of string theory explains the universe, I'll feel a lot better when we have a theory that can't be bent into saying whatever you'd like it to say. While I think evolution is a profitable and reasonable generally good thing for folks to believe, I don't think it's the answer to every open biological question there is. It's simply the best we have to address the big questions. And while I'm certain...
Pretty sure that what science is is taught pretty early in school.
"Scientists must make it clear that while they don’t have all the answers, science is about searching for the truth, an imperfect process of doing the best one can with the information available"
Really? I'm pretty sure I knew this when I was given an overview of scientific process in grade school.
This article starts by complaining about lack of basic knowledge "what is a stem cell", and then ends with complaints about the unwashed masses not toeing the line on global warming.
Science used to be only about testable things. Not anymore, now if you think about it really hard, and everyone else does too, and no one can find a flaw, it's science.
Global warming, evolution, and most of cosmology are not testable. Are they true? Maybe. But they are not at the same level as the rest of science. Will they be testable? I hope so.
So I'm not surprised that many people don't believe in those things, and scientists too. It's for a good reason. And complaining when scientists dispute global warming, when they have every right to is part of the problem! This article does EXACTLY what it itself is complaining about.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadThe Curious Case of the Catatonic Biogerontologists http://www.longevitymeme.org/articles/viewarticle.cfm?articl...
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/07/solution_blame_sc...
Earlier on his blog he provided detailed criticisms of the book by the same authors.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/07/unscientific_amer...
and the followup:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/07/unscientific_amer...
The bottom line is we're dependent on public dollars. It's our duty to explain what we do as public servants not as private dictators. We may not be comfortable talking about questions of faith, but that's what the public demands because it's closest to what they believe on a daily basis. I much prefer the Sagan model over the Dawkins version. From a distance it seems Sagan managed to advance science, while Dawkins seems to undermine it. It's all in how you treat people who disagree with you.
Well, isn't that as much a problem with blogs as a problem with PZ? As I found by digging through his archives, he'd already engaged, at some length.
The problem is that it's a hassle for either him or us to dig through his backlog and provide links to the meat of his arguments.
Blogs are great, but there's certainly room for improvement in the way they organize knowledge.
Hear. Hear.
I appreciate the comments here on HN above suggesting that I should have linked to PZ's review of the two authors' book rather than to his post today about the Boston Globe piece. I chose specificity of response to what was submitted here (yes, and personal convenience in slogging through PZ's blog to find the links) over lengthiness of post and point-by-pointness of reply.
But in these posts, he comes across as angry and bitter. That's no way to engage the general public (even as it might be a great way to engage his audience).
I think most members of the general public (in the United States) would consider both Dawkins and the late Sagan as rather hard-line critics of religious commitment, which may be part of what is at issue here. I'm still looking for the scientifically trained person with a "friendly atheist" manner who can talk about secular rationality as a view of the world without being dismissive of trust in traditional worldviews.
The other problem is scientists aren't very good at organizing and lobbying. The biggest neuroscience organization, the one I belong to, has a well-known health care lobbyist representing them. His name? Newt Gingrich.
As a "global warming denier", now I'm being lumped into the anti-evolutionist camp. What's next? Sticking us in with the flat-earthers and the folks who believe men didn't walk on the moon? Perhaps we can be included with the holocaust deniers. That's a fun group.
Science is about adbuction (inferring patterns from data), deduction (inferring rules from patterns), and induction (inferring new data from rules). You hypothesize and test to validate, and it's always provisional.
That means that science doesn't play the role of the oracle of ultimate truth. As the article points out, for scientists to take on this role is counter-productive.
Taking a cheap shot at the critics of current global warming theory is just so much political genuflecting. The article could have done without it.
Misuse of the word "theory" to imply debate where none exists puts you squarely in the same rhetorical camp as anti-evolutionists. It's not a cheap shot to group pseudo-scientific criticisms based on the common logical fallacies used to advance their respective agendas.
If that puts me in some rhetorical camp of yours (or anybody else's) then I'm happy to be there.
Just "having no debate" is NOT a good way or determining "this is science". Until a hypothesis has been tested, it's not science.
Global warming has not been tested. It's not even a theory, it's a conjecture, or a hypothesis.
Science is not done by majority vote, I don't care that more scientists that not believe in it. By that criterion phlogiston and luminiferous aether were both science. Until you test it, it's just an idea.
This exchange is a case study of why global warming critics are rhetorically identical to anti-evolutionists and flat-earth believers: it's trivially easy to throw stones from the fringe of a scientific debate, then hide behind the fallacy that that you're the unsung outsider, defending science from the bad logic of the mainstream. It's a remarkably convenient position, since it allows you to criticize everything, but provide evidence for nothing.
I'm actually in favor of Kyoto agreements, but please, it's more complicated than Al Gore vs. ignorants.
Given that the report is public and free, I think you might want to take a look at it, rather than debating a straw-man.
Given fixed inputs, produce a testable, repeatable output.
It has nothing to do with peer reviews, political committees, cited papers, consensus or any of that. Nice try, but no banana.
So predict the worldwide temp in the year 2029. We'll wait around and see if that prediction holds true. As far as I know, nobody has yet been able to actually forecast climate and validate it. It's just all arm-waving and hysteria. That may pass as science for you, but it doesn't work for a lot of other people. Their position, which is mine, is that unless science is falsifiable, it's not science, no matter how much you gussy it up with anything else.
It doesn't even have to do on whether mankind is changing the climate -- that's a whole nother can of worms. Along with whether and how much we should do about it if we are. Or the role of science in politics (hint: both will have a corrupting influence on the other) Or the question of what the perfect climate should be, or how fast it should change. This is just about whether or not you talk about global warming with the confidence as you do gravity, integrals, or electromagnetism.
For me, then, it's not about deniers or supporters. It's about making determinations for behaviors today based on the best possible evidence. That doesn't mean the evidence adds up to Truth. It just means that we take it seriously enough to understand the problem space. If we're wrong, we've lost, maybe, one year of defense funding as the Arctic freezes more fully in 100 years. If we're right, then maybe we got a head start on the order of twenty or thirty years.
My point is: Why wait? Scientists will adjust if they're wrong. And we'll adjust if they're right. Isn't it better to keep collecting data especially while we try to change human behavior?
I guess I'd have to say "no".
There are so many problems I have with this -- even assuming we're changing the climate -- that it's difficult to know where to begin. First, is there some badness that is going to happen in the next 20 or 30 years? Or are we talking about 60+ years? Because if people seriously think they know anything about what the next century is going to look like, they're smoking crack. We could all end up as smoking radioactive rubble, in which case a couple degrees of warming would be the least of our risks. There is simply no way to compare various scenarios, likelihoods, and risk exposures to make an intelligent guess about things so far off in the future. It has nothing to do with "this won't effect me, so I don't care" -- although that's a perfectly natural point of view too. It's simply that freaking anything could happen in a hundred years. To sit around and worry about a few degrees temperature change leads me to believe a lot of people don't have anything better to do with their time.
That's the thing: without hard numbers this is a religious discussion -- a discussion about how most people "feel" about what's happening. I just don't "feel" the danger is anywhere near the level of being worried or changing the way our economies work. To me that sounds like crazy talk based on fear-mongering. It reminds me of every other religious movement I've seen -- mankind has sinned, we will pay the price, we must change our ways, punishment may come anyway, etc.
I'm sorry. Given the archaeological climate data, the current state of the models, and the distant future impact, it just doesn't seem very rational to me to be that concerned about it. That doesn't mean I'm not open to compromise. Heck -- build a few thousand nuclear reactors over the next 20 years. It'll make the air cleaner, reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, and make the greenhouse gas people happy. There's lots of room for working together, even with different worldviews.
The emotion probably comes from seeing something that seemed permanent, like permafrost and Arctic ice, melting away. Humans don't tend to like instability. And instability on a global scale is a relatively new phenomenon. Sunspots might be the next worry but what could we possibly do about that?
It's an interesting point on the cycle of religious movements (and it reminds me of deathbed confessions - what do you have to lose?). But what's an alternative explanation for rising temperatures? That's science. There's an existing and prevailing hypothesis that attempts to explain that data. You need another hypothesis that explains the data just as well. It could be that the Earth is simply repeating normal warming trends. The problem is, that's not a testable hypothesis. There is no experiment that could reject that hypothesis.
By contrast, if man is playing some role, then if we change our behaviors we should see a change in temperatures. If we see some reduction in global temperatures coincident with climate change interventions, that's another data point in favor of the hypothesis that man has some role to play. To me, that's another clear reason to pump research dollars into the problem. And sure, nuclear plants should be a part of the solution.
My point on not waiting is what can be gained by running interventions. Sure, it might be a wasted effort, but either way you gain knowledge you didn't have previously from simple observation. I really don't know what the alternative is. The planet appears to be changing. We're unsure of the cause - some more so than others. What's the problem with trying to figure out things through the scientific method? Wasted resources? Unnecessary hysteria? So what? Research and development is like insurance. You may not need it, but if you do, you'll be happy you put in the effort years ahead of time.
Nobody is talking about not using the scientific method and continuing to take measurements and observations. Almost all of the types of data we are recording now have never been recorded in history, which means we have absolutely nothing to go on except some guesswork about cores and such. Nothing wrong with that either, but one has to put these observations of melting arctic ice in their place -- nobody knows what arctic ice was like back when Iceland was lush with farms in the during the Maurader minimum. Nobody had any idea of what arctic ice looked like from a low orbit view until we started launching satellites! And as for Antarctica, we haven't even been there that long, much less established any kind of track record to make comparisons. Cores can only take you so far.
I'm not a big fan of running interventions for half-baked fear-mongering masquerading as science. But let's assume for a moment that I were. How would you know what to measure, what to control, and whether or not anything was working? You pull on rope A and bell D rings, does that mean that rope A is connected to bell D? Or just that bell D was going to ring anyway? I'm telling you it's no better than bearskins and sky gods.
What's interesting to me about science in a democracy is the experiments can only be as grand as the public allows. The interventions now being discussed, even cap and trade, are more like small fixes. And look at the political difficulty of passing that! The difference with bearskins and crystals is you can measure and contrast effects. The system may be too complex to truly pull it apart and reduce it, but I still don't get what you're against exactly. You're for nuclear plants and for measurements. What's the problem then? Doing science is simply about trying to isolate causation. With more data and more interventions, it should be possible to see if man can have a causal effect on global temperatures. Most climate scientists think that we'll see positive changes. If they're wrong, we'll find out in our lifetimes. What's the alternative hypothesis you're pushing? Giving out large numbers of sky god dolls and watching for an effect? I don't think you really want to cut all research funding in the area, do you?
I think there's a huge gap between "continue the science" and "turn over large sections of the world's economy to climatologists to make the earth their private lab" My contention is twofold: the use of the word "science" to describe the barest minimum of data collection when science is much more than that, and the mingling of scientists and politics. Flimsy science with a lot of unknowns and public policy are a really bad marriage. Sounds to me a lot like the medieval church and the early nation-states.
When Newton observed an apple falling, he didn't need a theory of gravity because he could take a million more apples and make them do the same thing. That means that even though the theory of gravity is in the same epistemological place that global warming is, we can have a lot more confidence in it. We only have one earth, and little data. Right now we have science-based conjecture, which is nothing as firm as proven theories. That means I'm not supporting huge changes in public policy. If we were talking an asteroid coming towards earth, you can better believe I'd have a much different position.
As to the connection between science and politics, I really think it's inevitable. Politicians fund science in every democracy. We need to lobby them on the importance of the work. Unfortunately that sometimes means grandstanding and fear mongering. But the alternative is the science doesn't get funding. I sort of have skins in the game so here my own objectivity gets dicey.
I agree with you on your philosophy of science. But I don't see huge changes in public policy. Kyoto hasn't done much. What's the real risk of cap and trade? Some marginal costs go up? Even as it may appear scientists are running roughshod over and through debates, they're constrained by political and economic pressures, as they should be. The bigger the change in America, at least, the harder it is to pass through Congress, even with one party holding a supramajority. More problematic for climate scientists is the need to get all nations on-board, including developing nations. I don't see that happening. Debates among nations will prevent what you're most worried about up until it's clearly an asteroid.
Just coming back to your main point, on conjecture versus hypothesis-driven research, it seems pretty clear to me what the prevailing hypothesis is: Humans are responsible for some measurable, and significant, changes in the climate. I'm still unclear on the alternative hypothesis and, more importantly, how it can be tested. Can you enlighten me?
The science and politics thing is indeed dicey. I would suggest that a set of ethical guidelines be established to keep both parties honest, much like we have with the doctor-patient relationship in psychoanalysis. There's simply too much temptation for each side to use the other for their advantage. We don't want to end up with one party "scientifically" proving the other party is a bunch of morons (substitute much more PC adjectives here). We certainly don't want politicians announcing that scientific or political debate is "over" for a particular topic. E-gads man, that's a travesty.
Last time I had a AGW discussion on HN (several months back), somebody pointed out that we've actually been seeing a cooling trend, not a warming one. If the current year continues that trend, the original models will have been invalidated -- the actual observed data will fall outside of the 95% confidence range. I know this sounds like stalling for time, but since I'm not in a hurry anyway, I'd like to see the current year's data.
I'm not a climatologist, and of course it's not incumbent on me to put forth any alternatives. I am, however, aware of several. (I've spent some time researching this issue). There's the 1500-year cycle theory, that since the last great ice age we've seen regular 1500-year cycles. There's the average-global-temperature-is-primarily-a-result-of-solar-radiation crowd. I think those guys, Russians if I recall, made a bet back in 2000 that the next decade would see cooling, not warming. Perhaps they'll get paid? I don't know. There are theories that cosmic radiation is responsible for cloud coverage and that cloud coverage is the primary ingredient in climate. My personal half-baked theory is that since we are talking about a mixed chemical and biological system, with hundreds of thousands of variables, the climate is probably a chaotic system with an attractor based around solar input. This means that small inputs could have large effects, but it also means that large inputs may have no effect at all. With a little more research I'm sure we could find a lot of other ideas out there.
The smoking gun in current model application is the fact that all of them have runaway conditions at the end. This has been interpreted as portraying some pending doom, but any computer science nerd who has played around with chaotic and CA systems can observe that the default behavior is runaway systems. So on general principle I'm skeptical that we're not seeing much more than experimentation noise.
I'm no climatologist either. But I sometimes know testable hypotheses when I see them. I don't see how a 1500 year model is testable. Even if you're okay with waiting another 1450 years that's still not science. No intervention is being measurable so you should be just as dissatisfied with the science impact claimed there. I also don't see how a solar radiation model is testable. How can we block or change solar radiation? Giant mirrors in space? Or how can we change cloud coverage?
I have no problem with other ideas. But ideas without some validation test(s) are really no different than faith-based opinions. I thought that's the big problem for you?
Right now, it seems we have a clear hypothesis to explain climate change (note that I think the debate is shifting away from more limited "warming"): Human activities, namely industrialization, have negatively impacted the globe's climate patterns. We also have a clear test: Change human activities, specifically carbon output, and you change the climate. I don't see a better alternative at this time - one that clearly states the problem and proposes a solution. That doesn't mean there isn't an alternative framing and solution. I just haven't seen it.
If one denies climate change, then, they aren't offering an alternative to explain and prevent it. If one denies the role of humans, same problem. Neither of these framings are scientific. They present hypotheses without any way of rejecting them. That's faith.
Here's another framing that's much simpler: Deforestation has led to climate change. That's a subordinate hypothesis to the one above, but it offers a clear cause to test and a way to do so. Plant more trees because of the role of carbon in photosynthesis. Of course, the problem, if you really want to nail causality, is getting the globe's inhabitants to only plant trees for fifty years and change nothing else. Instead, that will be one intervention among many. But importantly, they'll all tend to share the goal of reducing carbon output. And that seems to be the direction we're headed. Over the next twenty years I suspect we will become much better at controlling worldwide carbon output, at least enough to see any effects.
What's beautiful to me about science is if that hypothesis is rejected, and the climate continues to be chaotic, scientists (and their funding agencies) will formulate new hypotheses and tests. The process may seem slow and insulated, but it is self-correcting. If the problem seems to go away - the Arctic starts freezing again - the funding for climate research will dry up.
As for politics and science, I'm afraid it's as good as it gets. And it's not bad. When priorities align we put men on the moon, cure diseases, and explain, to some extent, human nature and suffering. For the most part, politicians leave scientists alone because the most difficult quandaries of our time are ethical in nature. Scientists become advisers but not decision makers.
As to testability, you have to remember that I believe we're still in the abduction stage of climate science -- finding the patterns from the data. We haven't even reached the hypothesis stage. So the 1500-year and solar-input theories are all about pattern-spotting. If a pattern is spotted, then I'm sure we can begin talking about hypotheses.
That's just where the science is, at least for me. That doesn't mean that it's "full" or "mature" science. I guess I'd call it honest science.
Yes, it does seem as if the political language has shifted away from "warming" to "change". Perhaps because warming is actually something you could conceivably measure? Whereas "change" is what, exactly? One of the signs that something is not science is when it gets stretched to meet incoming data that would normally disprove it.
One does not have to deny anything. Indeed, the onus is on the scientist to prove a connection, not the skeptic. You're getting it backwards. Perhaps we just don't understand how the climate works, and won't for another 500 years. Ignorance is the default position. It's up to science to move us from that. "deniers" have nothing to do with anything.
If the problem seems to go away - the Arctic starts freezing again -- why is the arctic thawing a "problem". Because sea levels will rise? And because some people can't move out of the way quickly enough? You see, we go immediately from observation to guesswork to moral outrage to political action. Something wrong with that. From a political standpoint, I find it odd that we have some idea of what a "problem" is. When I ask about this, I've yet to get an answer that makes any sense to me. It all sounds so much like "Man changes environment. Man is bad. Therefore, change is bad" If a thousand sheep run across a mountaintop and ruin the tundra it's natural, but take a thousand people with cameras doing the same thing and it's a travesty.
These are aesthetic considerations, not scientific ones. I agree with most people's view of beauty in these areas -- who wants a ruined mountaintop or dirty air? But the devil is in the details here.
Science is self-correcting. I'm a hug fan of way science works. It's the intellectual light we have in the darkness. In practice, however, it's done in a very political atmosphere. People hang on to old ideas for a long time after they've been disproven. Not all new ideas are subjected to the same skepticism. Scientists are very cliquish. Science propagandizes itself to the masses -- scientists are always pure and noble. Progress always happens in a straight line.
We can also agree to disagree about science and politics. When I see government employees who are scientists lobby for political causes that directly support their research -- and then call dissenters "deniers" "uneducated" "rubes" "shills" -- we've entered a bad feedback loop.
As to the abduction stage, the data absolutely has to be collected. Would any climate scientist say otherwise? The problem is if there are multiple competing hypotheses, and one has a clear set of tests, that's the one that will get funding and move forward. As it should. We can only test testable hypotheses. Those that require more data until tests can be developed will inherently lag behind. Not only is that the way science works, it's only way it could work.
That's what I don't understand about where you're coming from. You believe in the scientific method but with concerns about how humans practice it. You also believe that some hypotheses don't have enough data to support specific tests. But how does that take you to rejecting current efforts? That is science and it is hypothesis testing. If the hypotheses are wrong, climate scientists will need to come up with new hypotheses. Sure, many will die clinging to the old ones. But the new generation will be forced to do so - to publish, gets grants, be honored faculty, etc. There's a club but there is wide latitude to question prevailing logic even if it sometimes takes decades. It's an entrepreneurship of ideas.
As for politics, I'll go so far to say that a representative democracy helps to correct Science and her focus through funding priorities. It makes science somewhat accountable to the will of the people. You could still do science in a fascist regime. But you'd end up with eugenics and human testing without informed consent. That doesn't mean the Western system is perfect. Not at all. I just have a hard time thinking about how it could be better. It may be a bad feedback loop, but it isn't a closed one.
Your oaths are a good idea. But I think they're unnecessary. Good science replicates. It's really that simple. If experimental outcomes aren't repeatable that scientific line of thought withers and dies. You can continue to pump in funding, but sooner or later the priorities change and, sure, sometimes for the worse.
The same is true of the current approach to climate change. If we control or reduce worldwide carbon output and we see climate changes back closer toward the early 20th c. then the assumptions in the carbon "theory" will be strengthen. If we don't, it won't. Carbon output won't be the theory. That process may take a generation or three, but it will play itself out. Without an alternative testable hypothesis, what else can we do until we discover one?
To come back to one possibility. Suppose you're right that cloud cover is a big part of climate change. Now suppose that Sadir Smith invents device in his garage that takes the humidity in clouds and turns it into fresh water and using solar power. The more the device clears the clouds the more it's able to generate its own power. Fresh water. Fewer clouds. No more carbon. Don't you think an enterprising scientist will see this and start to study its effects on the local climate? Won't another scientist try to expand the program internationally? Soon there will be conferences and journals devoted to "cloud hydration".
I think a big part of the problem is we're witnessing the creation of a new form of science and one that no seems to understand. But that's exactly it. We won't understand this science until we do science. Testing hypotheses is the only way to do science.
Your comment is only interesting in that you have, once again, used a favorite rhetorical tool of the pseudo-scientific debater: a faulty redefinition of "science". By your standards, a scientific experiment must:
"Given fixed inputs, produce a testable, repeatable output."
which is supposed to imply that global warming can't be science, since we can't predict the weather next Wednesday, let alone a random Wednesday in 2030.
Unfortunately, while this line of faulty reasoning is superficially appealing to those untrained in scientific thinking, this definition excludes 99.9% of all scientific research done today. We can't evolve a complex organism in the lab -- yet we know that it happens in nature. We can't grow a human in a dish -- yet we've been able to do a huge amount of research into human embryonic development. We can't do repeatable experiments with nearly any human genetic disease -- yet here we are, making measurable scientific progress year over year in nearly every field that touches human genetic medicine.
A scientific theory needs to produce a testable hypothesis, nothing more. The experiment doesn't have to be practical on any particular time-frame. And since you've (rather conveniently) provided a experiment for any theory related to global warming, you've refuted your own straw-man attack. Global warming theory is quite obviously within the domain of "science". It is patently absurd to suggest otherwise.
It's not a review article, it's a political statement put out by a political organization in order to effect political change. Read some of the dissenting opinions.
which is supposed to imply that global warming can't be science, since we can't predict the weather next Wednesday, let alone a random Wednesday in 2030.
Sometimes I think you're just talking to yourself, timr. Nobody is talking about the weather. Pick any inputs, predict any outputs. Take projected levels of greenhouses gases in the atmosphere (what are those, anyway?) and predict average global temperature. Take solar input and predict cloud cover. You choose. For us to have any sort of reasonable discussion about this "science" of yours, you actually have to make some testable hypothesis. Without that we have bupkis go on. You're the person saying something bad is going to happen. Logically you have to have some idea of what output amounts to "bad". It's your problem, not mine.
Have the conversation that we're having, not some other conversation you wish we were having.
We have no idea how gravity works, yet we are able to model it quite accurately. Why? Let's take a look at your examples to see what we can learn there: life evolving, embryonic development, etc. These examples are complex systems that we can only make Bayesian links between. Why would we do that? Because we're still in the process of abduction in a lot of these areas. Nothing wrong with that. With gravity we've moved to induction. But it means that the science in those fields has not advanced to the same point as physics, for instance. Various fields of science are harder or softer than others.
Because you choose to conflate all of this for purposes of argumentation, let me give you an easy discrimination rule: the amount of data observed makes correlation more reliable even if hypotheses are flimsy. To give a real-world example, if I go to my doctor with cancer, he prescribes some medications. Now even though he may have no idea of how cancer works or be able to predict how it will progress in me, I can have confidence his treatment will be "mostly" good. Why? Because he has a million other cancer cases to statistically draw on. He may have not idea why the treatment he is using works (he may have not deduced any rules), but he knows from the patterns of a large set of data that, given a certain treatment, most patients get better. (He has abductively progressed)
Compare to those millions of patients (or millions of embryos or millions of cells to use your example) to the global warming guys who have one earth and about a hundred years of data. That's like me going to a witch doctor for brain surgery. Ain't happening.
The problem we have is that the softer the science and the sparser the data, the more easily Kuhn's observation of scientific paradigms plays itself out in research. In other words, groupthink takes over. It's very difficult to get anybody to believe that scientific consensus means anything when talking about integrals, but if you're talking about something like psychology consensus is really all you have. That's because without an inductive model we're stuck looking at data and attempting to find patterns. Biology sits nicely between hard and soft sciences. So it's a good example. The basic chemistry we have down. Some of the other stuff we're just guessing.
So while I think it's very interesting that current scientific thinking is that some sort of string theory explains the universe, I'll feel a lot better when we have a theory that can't be bent into saying whatever you'd like it to say. While I think evolution is a profitable and reasonable generally good thing for folks to believe, I don't think it's the answer to every open biological question there is. It's simply the best we have to address the big questions. And while I'm certain...
"Scientists must make it clear that while they don’t have all the answers, science is about searching for the truth, an imperfect process of doing the best one can with the information available"
Really? I'm pretty sure I knew this when I was given an overview of scientific process in grade school.
Science used to be only about testable things. Not anymore, now if you think about it really hard, and everyone else does too, and no one can find a flaw, it's science.
Global warming, evolution, and most of cosmology are not testable. Are they true? Maybe. But they are not at the same level as the rest of science. Will they be testable? I hope so.
So I'm not surprised that many people don't believe in those things, and scientists too. It's for a good reason. And complaining when scientists dispute global warming, when they have every right to is part of the problem! This article does EXACTLY what it itself is complaining about.