Climate Change and the Integrity of Science

blau tips news of an open letter from 255 members of the US National Academy of Sciences, including 11 Nobel laureates, decrying the "recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular." The letter lays out the basics of the scientific method, and explains how certainly highly-regarded theories — such as the big bang, evolution, and Earth's origin — are commonly accepted due to the strength of the evidence supporting them, though "fame still awaits anyone who could show these theories to be wrong." It goes on to "call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them." According to the Guardian, the letter "originated with a number of NAS members who were frustrated at the misinformation being spread by climate deniers and the assaults on scientists by some policy-makers who hope to delay or avoid making policy decisions and are hiding behind the recent controversy around emails and minor errors in the IPCC."

Comments

Science always predicts the future

[mangu]

all those theories that are trying to explain the past. Climate change is trying to predict the future

*ALL* science is about predicting the future. If you have a theory that cannot make predictions, then it's not a scientific theory, it's not right, it's not even wrong .

Re:Almost Godwin...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

climate deniers

Wow, is that what they're called?

A skeptic is someone who is dubious of a claim, but is willing to be persuaded by sufficient evidence. A denier is someone who will never be persuaded by any amount of evidence. There's precious little skepticism with regards to climate change these days, because the evidence is sufficient to convince those who were initially skeptical, but there's a hell of a lot of denial. If people who still refuse to accept the evidence don't want to be called "deniers," then you're welcome to come up with a different word -- but you can't have "skeptic," because that word already means something different.

And you can take your Godwin and stuff it. Godwin's Law is invoked when someone brings Hitler or the Holocaust into the conversation where they don't belong. So far, the only people doing that in this conversation are the climate change deniers. You don't get to, er, deny other people the use of the word "denier" just because it's often used with the word "Holocaust" in front of it. The verb "to deny" is a perfectly good English word going back to the 1300s, and it can be used in reference to many, many things that have nothing to do with the period from 1933 to 1945. In this particular case, the label fits: deal with it.

Re:No mention

[tgibbs]

Certainly! Just give me access to the raw, un-adjusted data that these scientists have been hoarding for decades. Oh wait, they keep destroying it.

Sorry, but somebody has been lying to you. The raw, unadjusted data is owned by various national meteorological services, and it has not been destroyed. Some of it is available for a fee, but quite a bit is available freely. You can find it here

Also, lets look at what their models from 10 years ago predicted that the weather would be for the next 10 years and compare to the historical record.

Certainly. Such a comparison may be seen here

Re:hmm

[tgibbs]

Over 10% in such a short period of time? That's pretty impressive. Of course, virtually every major scientific society in the world has previously come out in support of climate science and concerns about global warming

Re:No mention

[FooAtWFU]

Here's how the Wall Street Journal puts your point:

The implicit claim that scientists are better qualified than nonscientists to answer ethical questions points to the broader problem with the liberal attitude toward science. It seems to be more about asserting the political authority of scientists than adhering to the scientific method. This is very clear in the global-warming debate, in which, as last year's "Climategate" scandal showed, scientists disregarded the scientific method in order to promote an ideologically favored hypothesis. In ignoring the scandal and pushing ahead with its "climate" agenda, the Obama administration has shown that it is more interested in ideology than science.

It then goes on to talk about the recent "americans are bombarded with cancer" report:

"This is an evenhanded approach, and an evenhanded report," Dr. Leffall said. "We didn't make statements that should not be made."
He acknowledged that it was impossible to specify just how many cancers were environmentally caused, because not enough research had been done, but he said he was confident that when the research was done, it would confirm the panel's assertion that the problem had been grossly underestimated.

He is confident that once the research has been done, it will confirm the conclusions that he has already reached--conclusions, by the way, that would seem to point in the direction of a vast expansion of government power, consistent with the administration's ideology. Is this what the president meant when he promised to restore science to its proper place?

(Agreement with or refutation of the specifics of the case being made are left as an exercise to the reader.)

Re:It won't work

[shutdown -p now]

There is no such thing as AGWs. "Global Warming" has now become "Climate Change".

It did, for the same reason why Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging became simply Magnetic Resonance Imaging: the gullibility of a common man.

Apparently, there are still too many idiots unable to comprehend the concept of averaging temperatures across the globe, so as soon as they see one place that didn't warm up for one year, they get confused by the "warming" bit in "global warming", and decry it all as a conspiracy theory by a socialist world government.

Still, it's just a name change for the sake of PR. Global average temperature keeps going up - the planet is warming.

Re:Integrety

[IICV]

The guy who created the hockey stick brouhaha certainly did keep the data "in the dark", in that he did not release it to other scientists.

You want some AGW data? Here's an aggregate of a bunch of different universities' measurements. I look forward to your analysis of it.

Oh, do you want Michael Mann's (the hockey stick guy) data specifically? Here's the data behind one of his most recent papers. Note that he's included his Matlab code.

The whole "show us the data" thing was kind of an issue before, but now there's just no excuse. I bet you still don't know what to do with it, even now that you have it. I sure don't.