Don Aitkin.
April 09, 2008
http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/yoursay/index.php/theaustralian/comments/good_science_isnt_about_consensus/
QUOTE: "What I see, rather, is something that political theorist Paul
Feyerabend wrote about a long time ago in Against Method (1975): the
tendency of scholars to protect their theories by building defences
around them, rather than being the first to try to demolish their own
proposition."
AUSTRALIA is faced, over the next generation at least and almost
certainly much longer, with two environmental problems of great
significance. They are, first, how to manage water and, second, how to
find acceptable alternatives to oil-based energy. Global warming is not
one of those two issues, at least for me, and I see it as a distraction,
writes Don Aitkin.
(Read the full article here (pdf)
I am going against conventional wisdom in doing so. But Western
societies have the standard of living, the longevity and the creativity
we have because we have learned that conventional wisdom has no absolute
status and that progress often comes when it is successfully challenged.
If you listen hard to the global warming debate you will hear people at
every level tell us that they don't want to hear any more talk, they
want action. I feel that the actions I have seen proposed, such as
carbon caps and carbon trading, are likely to be unnecessary, expensive
and futile unless there is much stronger evidence that we are facing a
global environmental crisis, whether or not we have brought it about
ourselves.
The story about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) doesn't seem to stack
up as the best science, despite the supposed consensus about it among
"thousands of scientists".
Indeed, the insistent use of the word consensus should cause those who
are knowledgeable about research to raise their eyebrows, because
research and science aren't about consensus, they are about testing
theories against data.
In any case, there exists vigorous debate throughout the climate change
domain. For example, there is disagreement about whether 2007 was a
notably warm year (it had a hot start but a downward cool trend). And
all that is simply about measurement. In climate science I see no
consensus, only a pretence at a contrived one.
Despite all the hype and the models and the catastrophic predictions, it
seems to me that we human beings barely understand climate. It is too
vast a domain. Though satellites have given us a sense of the movement
of weather systems across the planet, ****trayed every night on
television, we still know little about the oceans, one of the crucial
elements in climate processes, not much more about the atmosphere,
another such element, a little about solar energy and the effect of the
sun's magnetic field on Earth, and only a little about the land.
The Earth is a big place.
One of the yardsticks of the debate is average global temperature. We
can all imagine what it might mean: an average of the temperatures taken
in a multitude of carefully plotted points across the globe, measured
the same way, providing a single figure that could be measured over time
to show trends. The actuality is much less. NASA's Goddard Institute for
Space Science, the National Climate Data Centre and the Hadley Climate
Research Centre in Britain produce the data. All use temperature data
recorded 1.3m to 2m above Earth's surface and obtain an arithmetic
average of the maximum and minimum temperatures over 24 hours.
None covers the entire planet, and the southern hemisphere is not as
well measured as the northern.
A recent study of one-third of the sites in what is arguably the best
temperature measuring system, that of the US, showed that in a majority
of the sites surveyed the instruments were inappropriately located:
close to buildings, on asphalt or concrete, next to parking areas, on
top of roofs, and so on. Common sense tells us that if our knowledge of
climate and weather cannot provide forecasts with much accuracy past 24
hours, we don't know enough about the inter-relation****ps inside the
model, no matter how much data we have, even supposing it to be perfect
data. Models are models: they are highly simplified versions of reality
and cannot provide evidence of anything.
What I see, rather, is something that political theorist Paul Feyerabend
wrote about a long time ago in Against Method (1975): the tendency of
scholars to protect their theories by building defences around them,
rather than being the first to try to demolish their own proposition.
We seem to be caught up in what a pair of social scientists has called
an "availability cascade": we judge whether or not something is true by
how many examples of it we see re****ted. Fires, storms, apparently
trapped polar bears, floods, cold, undue heat: if these are
authoritatively linked to a single attributed cause, then almost
anything in that domain will seem to be an example of the cause, and we
become worried.
I should say at once that climate change has become the offered cause of
so many diverse incidents that, for me at any rate, it ceases to be a
likely cause of any.
Greens and environmentalists generally welcome the AGW proposition
because it fits in with their own world-view, and they have helped to
popularise it. Governments that depend on green sup****t have found
themselves, however willingly or unwillingly, trapped in AGW policies,
as is plainly the case with the Rudd Government. The hardheads may not
buy the story, but they do want to be elected or re-elected.
In short, AGW is now orthodoxy, and orthodoxy always has strong latent
sup****t. Because AGW is supposedly science, even well-educated people
think it will be too hard for them.
David Henderson, a respected British economist and former Treasury
official, has called the orthodoxy in climate change a case of
"heightened milieu consensus", in which prime ministers and other
leaders tell us that nothing could be more serious than this issue.
These are not statements of fact; they are no more than conjecture. But
they have become, in his phrase, "widely accepted presuppositions of
policy". Intellectually, AGW is what is known in politics as a done
deal. But on the evidence that is available, I think it has to be said
that the assertion that the increase in carbon dioxide has caused the
temperature to rise is no more than an assertion, however attractive or
worrying the association may be. There is simply no evidence that this
causal relation****p exists.
Earth's atmosphere may be warming but, if so, not by much and not in an
alarming or unprecedented way. It is possible that the warming has a
"significant human influence", to use the term of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, and I do not dismiss the possibility. But there
are other powerful possible causes that have nothing to do with us. If
this were simply an example of scientists arguing among themselves, we
might recognise that this is how science proceeds and move on.
But if there is no true causal link between CO2 and rising temperatures,
then all the talk about carbon caps and carbon trading is simply futile.
But it is worse than futile, because one consequence of developing
policies in this area will be to reduce not only our own standard of
living, but the standard of living of the world's poorest countries.
As someone who has worked closely with ministers in the past, I cannot
imagine that I could have advised a minister to go down the AGW path on
the evidence available, given the expense involved, the burden on
everyone and the possible futility of the outcome.
Some readers of drafts of this paper have raised the precautionary
principle as an indication that we should, even in the face of the
uncertainty about the science, take AGW seriously. Unfortunately, as I
see it, the precautionary principle here is very similar to Pascal's
wager.
Pascal argued that it made good sense to believe in God: if God existed
you could gain an eternity of bliss, and if he didn't exist you were no
worse off. Alas, Pascal didn't allow for the possibility that God was in
fact Allah, and you had opted for belief in the wrong religion.
The IPCC's account of things seems to me only one possibility, and the
evidence for it is not very strong.
For that reason, I would counsel that we accept that climate changes,
and learn, as indeed human beings have learned for thousands of years,
to adapt to that change as rationally and sensibly as we can.
This is an edited extract from a paper presented to the Planning
Institute of Australia. Professor Don Aitkin, historian and political
scientist, is a fellow of three learned societies.
--
Regards
Bonzo
"IPCC staff is working feverishly on a theory that sup****ts global
cooling as proof of global warming. Stay tuned." Addison Gardner
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