The Science Credibility Bubble

eldavojohn writes "The real fallout of climategate may have nothing to do with the credibility of climate change. Daniel Henninger thinks it's a bigger problem for the scientific community as a whole and he calls out the real problem as seen through the eyes of a lay person in an opinion piece for the WSJ. Henninger muses, 'I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them,' and carries on in that vein, saying, 'This has harsh implications for the credibility of science generally. Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons. But the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and "messy" as, say, gender studies.' While nothing interesting was found by most scientific journals, he explains that the attacks against scientists in these leaked e-mails for proposing opposite views will recall the reader to the persecution of Galileo. In doing so, it will make the lay person unsure of the credibility of all sciences without fully seeing proof of it, but assuming that infighting exists in them all. Is this a serious risk? Will people even begin to doubt the most rigorous sciences like Mathematics and Physics?"

Comments

Dumber dumbed-down discourse

[oldspewey]

When I was a kid, I used to genuinely believe that humans were on a path to greater wisdom, more profound discourse, and perfect knowledge.

Lately, I just see a bunch of power-hungry assholes doing their utmost to discredit intelligent thought and dumb-down the world around them, so they can continue on an unimpeded path toward greater assholism.

Re:What

[h2oliu]

I would argue that people don't know when to doubt, and when to believe.

Which scientists do they believe when it comes to Autism and vaccines? Which scientist to believe when it comes to global warming? It is just they have more insight into the infighting that is present into the community now.

The infighting has ALWAYS been there. When I was in graduate school I never saw a larger bunch of petty people whining over who was the bigger fish in there tiny ponds.

Scientists are human.

[Remus Shepherd]

I work in a field closely associated with climatology (satellite remote sensing), and I work with climatologists. And I agree with the article on one point: We really do not understand how big a deal this 'climategate' is.

The worst bits in that email dump are petty squabbles between researchers and critics. That's standard -- often critics are dishonest people who are attacking the science in order to advance a political agenda, and that is very frustrating to someone who wants to do honest science. Yes, tempers flare in private emails. Scientists are human. If people are going to lose faith in science because scientists are human...then we as a race are doomed, in my opinion.

As for the results of the CSU climate research, they're not in any doubt. Every criticism of them has been answered, and there are other studies that agree with the CSU results. So attack the scientists for being human if you must, but the science is sound and must be heeded.

I really do not understand why this has blown up into such a conflagration. Anyone who gives up on science because of this trifling matter is welcome to go back to the dark ages and live their short, wholesome, science-free life.

One citation explains it all.

[BlueParrot]

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."
- Bertrand Russel

As evidence of the validity of Russel's insight, consider the people who are cocksure enough to assume it is they who are the doubters. They will even quarrel amongst each other about which of them is the intelligent, when in reality they are all idiots.

Skeptical of science?

[jollyreaper]

Oh, I'm sorry. I guess that we can't really thank science for medicine, computers, airplanes, the food on our table. I guess that one murderous programmer working on an open source file system means all of Linux is shit, too. And you know what? I got taken for a ride buying speculative real estate in Florida. I guess this means that you can't make money in real estate, that the whole thing's a rotten idea. Incidentally, I threw out the bath water. Where'd the baby go?

I'll buy that argument once religious whackadoodles promise to renounce their faith because of televangelists and pedo-priests.

Re:Open source

[Anonymous Codger]

Sure, you can go through the proofs and run some experiments - if you're a mathematician or a scientist. For the average Joe, these activities are as foreign as eating boiled locusts for dinner. Average Joe will doubt (and already does doubt) because he lacks the training to understand how math and science work. And average Joes outnumber and outvote mathematicians and scientists by a large margin, and end up electing the scientific ignoramuses who dominate one of the US national political parties.

Re:Yes, Here's Why

[Austerity Empowers]

The argument from incredulity is often applied to science by the layperson. You don't need an opponent or a debate to use a logical fallacy. The fact that the Kitzmiller vs. Dover case had to happen proves that people question science regardless of it's validity.

Exactly. There has never been, nor ought their be, an automatic trust of anything, including science. By definition of "layperson", we do not know and are not read-up on, the exact arguments for an against any particular theory. It has long been the case that unscrupulous individuals will try to sell a product or an idea "because science says so". This is behind every diet fad, every exercise machine, every crackpot "business methodology", that we've been exposed to for centuries (see: snake oil salesman).

The reason that climate change has been resisted and argued by so many, for so long, is exactly this. We do not trust the people interpreting this for us at the national level. We see a group of people who have financial motivation to resist, a group of people who have financial motivation to sell green-wash products, and a group of people who advocate shucking technology and returning to some insane, idealized view of nature, where man and animal and nature all get along, and don't eat or kill each other. All "climategate" has done, is confuse us further. We still lack faith in science, we still do not trust any of the people arguing, and we have good reason for this lack of trust.

Re:Nobody deserves a free pass

[stevelinton]

The more science is viewed with skepticism the better the science will be in my opinion.

Fair enough, but sometimes you have to make a decision now, based on what you know now. If you allow your "skepticism" to turn into "I'll make decisions based on the theory that is most personally convenient to me, even if the current evidence, while not conclusive, weighs against it" then you are not just being skeptical, you're being foolish.

Every serious scientific review that has looked at the evidence carefully (and at the raw data and at the analysis procedures, etc.) has concluded that the balance of evidence strongly supports AGW and strongly supports action now to curb emissions.

It is possible that in ten years time the balance of evidence will shift (or even tomorrow) but for the decisions we have to make today, that is irrelevant.

Re:What

[NeutronCowboy]

Indeed. Personally, I would like to see a bit more skepticism when it comes to science. As in "Hey, show me some data and explain to me why what you say should work before I take your word for it." Or at least go out and do some of your own research before accepting something from some random scientist. Too often news organizations quote someone with some professorial or scientific title and pretend that the quote has value. Unless I know that person and have been able to assess their credibility in some way beforehand, they could have just as well quoted my barber. This presentation issue is a failing of news organizations though. Any person can still do their own filtering.

What we're getting now though is that ad hominem attacks on scientists (of the sort of "You work for institution XYZ, you're automatically disqualified from contributing.") is seen as valid approach in any discussion on any topic. This is complete idiocy, and a mark of the intellectually lazy. To some extent, the public press and scientists themselves contributed to the problem. The press has elevated scientists to the status of oracles, and the public was happy to believe the oracles. Many scientists thrived on that elevated status, and did little to dispel it. Now that the oracles have been shown to be as human as everybody, the public is engaging in a massive back-lash. To some extent, it's to be expected.

But no matter how explainable the situation, there is a fundamental problem if science is being put on the same level as high-school English Lit (see posters above for ready examples) - and that's going to cause more problems down the line. Sadly , I find this attitude is mostly prevalent in the US - and various voodoo-practicing countries.

Nothing interesting? Look at the code

[SuperKendall]

It's amazing the poster can claim with a stright face "nothing interesting" was found, when the top Slashot post in the very article he links to has a very long debate covering the source code that was released.

One very "interesting" item from that is this code:

;mknormal,yyy,timey,refperiod=[1881,1940]
;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
(...)
;
; APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,x)
densall=densall+yearlyadj

Which to me, is pretty damning stuff. Yes if you look currently that recalculation is not used (in that module anyway) but that code should NEVER have been typed and is a giant red flag something weird is going on. Yes I mock up sample data in my own code, but never have I taken real data and applied varying magic constants across the dataset. At the very least you'd expect to see a source for these amazing numbers quoted in the code - the only information we have is that it is "a correction for the decline" which is the heart of what worries people about the emails too.

Furthermore, the use of this is commented out NOW. But when exactly was it commented out? What datasets were published when this code was running? You can't say "look it does nothing now" because at some time it was doing something. And that is the heart of the problem, without data or the code visible no-one can know. So all the output they have produced is simply not science, even if parts of it happen to be accurate - because we have no way to independently discern what is fact and what is manipulated speculation.

Modern-Day Galileo

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us have noticed this about cosmology for a long, long time now. Global warming is just a trendier issue so it gets noticed first, that's all.

“Certain results of observational cosmology cast critical doubt on the foundations of standard cosmology but leave most cosmologists untroubled. Alternative cosmological models that differ from the Big Bang have been published and defended by heterodox scientists; however, most cosmologists do not heed these. This may be because standard theory is correct and all other ideas and criticisms are incorrect, but it is also to a great extent due to sociological phenomena such as the ‘snowball effect’ or ‘groupthink’. We might wonder whether cosmology, the study of the Universe as a whole, is a science like other branches of physics or just a dominant ideology.”
—Martin Lopez-Corredoira, astrophysicist.
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=bqx15w21

Some of you more knee-jerk types would also benefit from this article because some of you use some really weak arguments.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[Wyatt Earp]

There is the difference, just as people have been distrusting some sciences recently there has also been an increase in intellectual elites showing distain for the, lets call 'em Plebes. I think it stems from being walled up in Universities and not having to work for a living.

Someone in the real world that works on cars, develops deodorant or makes heart medication doesn't say "I'm a Scientist so I'm right!" They say "I'm an automative engineer, or a chemist that works on medication, or I'm a chemist that designs right guard." Its like the BASF commercials here in the US, "Helping Make Products Better."

All too often in the debates about GCC someone who is a climate researcher will go "Well I'm a climate researcher so I'm right and the people that don't agree with me are idiots." Yea, not the best way to approach people. /Disclaimer, I spent the last 6 years at a University not working for a living, now I'm out doing real work again.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[secondhand_Buddah]

I think the issue here is that someone like Al Gores makes a film full of factual inaccuracies, wins a Nobel peace prize for his efforts and is lauded by the pro Climate change scientists.
The scientists should actually have pointed out the inaccuracies in the video, but they didn't. So when average Joe like me sees this, what do I use to draw my conclusions? Well its not rocket science - Al Gore talks rubbish and the scientists still support him. Where does that leave the credibility of the scientists? Well in my book, up the creek without a paddle.
As far as I am concerned, this is an engineered crisis to manipulate people to start being more conservative with their energy consumption, while moving towards using sustainable and renewable forms of energy and manufacturing. While I am all for the objective, I object being lied to and coerced, and will never be able consciously align myself ethically with people who believe that they have the right to behave in such a manner.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[Stradivarius]

They have every right to say this; when the people arguing against them are not climate scientists, or in scientific fields related. If I tell someone with a PhD in climate science that they are wrong, they have every right to chuckle at me, since I really don't know what I'm talking about. This is not a problem.

It is when the guy with the PhD thinks his expertise entitles him to refuse to publish the full, raw data he used along with his analytic methods. It is when he uses his influence with a journal to exclude equivalently credentialed scientists' papers because they disagree with his interpretations of the data. Science is not a priesthood. We do not (and should not) accept proclamations from scientists as truth because they hold a piece of paper or have three letters next to their name. We analyze their data and their methods,and try to poke holes. If nobody can poke valid holes, then his analysis gains acceptance until someone comes up with a better analysis. When certain scientists - the very people who should know the merits of scientific scrutiny the best - start trying to circumvent this process, it damages their credibility and the hard-earned reputation of science as being based on fact rather than emotion or politics.

It is also a problem when the guy with the PhD thinks his expertise in a given scientific field makes him an expert on public policy. Folks can accept scientific observations that the world has been warming in recent years yet have differing views on appropriate solutions. One of the disturbing things about many practitioners of climate science is how they've been merging with a parallel alarmist religious/political movement that thinks warming is our capitalistic sin against the planet, and which assumes the solution has to be drastic carbon output reductions regardless of how much economic collateral damage it would cause. The thought of engineering other ways to produce planetary cooling is dismissed. Discussions of such policies is not the realm of science. It is the realm of public policy, which thankfully is not left simply to a handful of people whose expertise is often exceeded by their hubris.

We need to remember that scientists are human beings too. They are as fallible as anyone else. Back in the 1970s there was a big scare from climate scientists that we were going to have massive global cooling and enter a new ice age. The problem is that climate is very complex, and attempts to model it inevitably miss something. While such models are valuable tools to gain understanding and predict future events, they do need to be taken with a grain of salt. So let's have a debate about what we should do about global warming. But let's go into it open-eyed, realizing that the participants and the models all have faults that should make us leery of hasty and dramatic changes in policy.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[ehrichweiss]

Funny you should say that. There is a guy at the heart of a branch of psychology who, before he got into psychology, was a computer programmer back in the 60's and all the grad students used to come to him so he'd make a program that could create data that fit within their deviation. He now says that it scares the bejesus out of him because those studies are now heavily quoted and HE was personally responsible for make all that shit up...

Laypeople.

[SanityInAnarchy]

You're assuming that everyone who has an opinion about this will actually be informed, will take the time to look through those proofs, reproduce those experiments, etc.

Read this.

In particular, look at that graph. Are you frightened yet?

Evolution is one of the crowing triumphs of modern science. It has more evidence than any other theory I know of, from many branches of science -- the "tree of life" is repeated, exactly, in genetics, in the fossil record, in the geologic record, everywhere we care to look for it. It informs pretty much all of modern medicine and biology, and it is a humbling look at our origins and our true status with respect to other life on the planet. It is beautiful, important, and solidly supported by fact.

Even the Catholic Church has officially embraced evolution, and the big bang theory, as truth.

And a third of Americans reject evolution outright. These aren't people who just aren't sure -- they say it is definitely false.

Want to guess why?

Because they feel it threatens their religion. Because if evolution is true, the Earth (and certainly the Universe) cannot be six thousand years old, and they must accept that they are descended from apes -- or that, by any honest classification, humans are still a species of ape. Because they cannot accept the fact that at least some part of that religion is a fairy tale, or at least a metaphor.

The problem is, in order to reject evolution, they find they have to doubt just about every legitimate scientist who has an opinion on the subject, and keep themselves willfully ignorant. Furthermore, in order to believe the earth is six thousand years old, they pretty nearly have to stick their fingers in their ear and go "la la la la" in order to avoid pretty much every branch of science that has anything to say about the subject.

That is, if they are right, even the most basic grade-school cosmology must be wrong -- there are objects more than six thousand light years away from us. Geology must also be wrong -- not merely carbon-dating (which is already quite rigorous), but the kind of time scales modern geology suggests. And of course, modern medicine must be wrong -- our understanding of things like antibiotics relies on evolution to work.

And yet, they will feel qualified to address these issues, to challenge real scientists with such arguments as, "That's microevolution. Show me one 'kind' turning into another, and I'll believe it." When this fails to get them anywhere, they again close their eyes, ears, and minds, and ultimately turn to the very simplistic, reassuring, and ultimately wrong words of Ken Ham: "Who should you believe -- God or the scientists?"

The problem here is not just the validity of evolution. It is that in order to believe what the creationist wants to believe, they have to reject huge chunks of modern science. In order to continue to be relevant, they have consistently attempted to get their strange ideas taught in school -- not just as a philosophy, or a class in its own right, but as part of science.

And it's not just america -- 22% of Canadians are creationists. Something like a third of Americans are.

So, the short answer is, yes, laypeople absolutely will doubt whatever they feel they have a problem with. If they doubt evolution, cosmology, Einsteinian relativity, geology, archeology, paleontology, etc, just so they can believe a certain way, it's certainly not a stretch that they would doubt anything that conflicts with their actual (polluting, wasteful) lifestyle.

And unfortunately, even when 99.9% of scientists agree on something, it doesn't help if they can't convince the public -- because laypeople are also voters.

We need another Carl Sagan.

Re:And that's bad how?

[dlt074]

so you're saying that global warming is so complex and hard to understand that scientists who are used to doing real science need some sort of special scientific method to analyze the global warming data? only enlightened bought and paid for "scientists" are capable of reading the "proper" answers from the holy data? the climate changes over time. always has always SHOULD. it's not my fault and i don't want to pay for something natural and necessary. i especially don't want to handy cap humanity because of a bunch of whack jobs who think the sky is falling.

Re:Real problem is Conservatism.

[DamonHD]

Not all scientists (a) are American (b) have fixed party-political views or allegiance (c) use the word "liberal" like you do above or associate it with the same concepts, etc, etc, etc.

Just as a data point, Mrs Thatcher (UK Prime Minister 1979 to 1990) was a chemist and apparently was brought up a strict Methodist. Where does that appear in your world map?

My point being: scientists are not a homogenised entity, distributed along a small number of dimensions. There is an awful lot of variety amongst the humans that practise science. Generalisations are generally misleading.

Rgds

Damon

Ooh! Links! I know this!

[SuperKendall]

I can link too:

http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/12/climategate_was_data_faked.php

My link is better than yours! It does not rely on group think and manipulated data! Thhpt!

If they so drastically manipulated data from Australia, what else have they done... this is why access to raw data is so vital, and why things that are based on raw data we cannot see simply cannot be trusted (especially given the penchant from the emails we have seen to shut out people going off-message).

Thanks for giving me an opportunity to shed even more light on the disturbing revelations from the data and code (which matter far more than the emails).

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

About That Data

[sycodon]

Interesting thing about the NASA Data. Check this graph from NASA

This shows that virtually all of the warming seems to come from their "corrections".

Seems this would have a difficult time passing the smell test.

Re:Yes, Here's Why

[BobMcD]

In a networking analogy, it's RIPE, ARIN and the other registrars facing people calling them chicken little for pointing out IPv4 exhaustion and suggesting to use ip addresses "with higher than 256 parts", calling networking engineers "stupid people didn't think of that" and calling IPv6 a scam "to sell some routers".

Perhaps this is a sound analogy. Especially because, in a lot of ways, IPv6 is indeed inflated to sell some routers. Or at least it is aggressively timed. There still exists no foreseeable need for each node in the network to communicate with every other node and the very presence of NAT-based firewalls have eroded this from common practice. In fact, the ISP's won't let you operate 'servers' on their end nodes anyway, without extra fees, and the non-elite user stands to lose from this transition. Finally, nothing at all precluded the adoption of VLANs or similar wire-sharing technology that could segregate telephony (for example) and allow re-use of address space.

So yes, this is kind of the same thing. We're seeing a religious push towards the most drastic and least convenient of changes when there is little agreement about the exact date when we will have no other choice.