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How Scientific Consensus Has Gotten a Bad Reputation
nerdyalien writes From the article: "Fiction author Michael Crichton probably started the backlash against the idea of consensus in science. Crichton was rather notable for doubting the conclusions of climate scientists—he wrote an entire book in which they were the villains—so it's fair to say he wasn't thrilled when the field reached a consensus. Still, it's worth looking at what he said, if only because it's so painfully misguided: 'Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results.'" As a STEM major, I am somewhat biased toward "strong" evidence side of the argument. However, the more I read literature from other, somewhat-related fields (i.e. psychology, economics and climate science), the more I felt they have little opportunity to repeat experiments, similar to counterparts in traditional hard science fields. Their accepted theories are based on limited historical occurrences and consensus among the scholars. Given the situation, it's important to understand what "consensus" really means.
No functioning computers would exist without "Science." Science is verifiable and reproducible often in a variety of ways, or it is not "science."
It's actually much worse than that.
Studies in economics and psychology tend to suffer from certain problems which limit their real-world application and the likelihood that they actually mean what people think they mean.
First, they are often based on correlation rather than causation. This is especially true with psychology studies, and readily allows confirmation bias, incorrect interpretations of data, and interpretations of data which are heavily influenced by the perspective of the researcher.
Second, they are often done on western college students. This tends not to yield rules of general applicability.
Third, most economics (and psychology of economics) experiments are advertising experiments. They are done by corporations for financial gain and the results are generally kept secret because they are part of a company's IP and help the company sell its products, and because it simply saves the company money to not bother publishing.
Science is about provability, consensus is about getting majority or even a plurality of opinions. These two things are mutually exclusive.
Piltdown Man was once "consensus". We know how that turned out.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
"Science requires only one investigator who happens to be right, "
What do you call many many many scientists who happen to be right? Right! A consensus. It's a consensus of the fucking science. Jesus Christ.
Consensus is something that helps us keep crackpots and bad actors (Say, those that pay for fake/biased studies that support their political or financial position) from pushing their agenda. Charisma and slick marketing are dangerously effective so the practice of gathering the collective opinion of all the experts in a given field is important.
It's not perfect. Occasionally the community is slow to move on new evidence, but science should be a careful and methodical practice.
We enjoy stories about underdogs and misunderstood geniuses or the rogue new guy that goes up against the "establishment" but in reality actual true stories of this nature are quite rare. Statistic noise rare. Real breakthroughs are nearly always the culmination of decades of work from hundreds of researchers.
Michael Crichton, frankly, was a hack that enjoyed the above fantasy a bit too much. He did do a bit of research for his projects but it was always just dressing for the same plot over and over again.
That man has done more damage to the world than he ever knew. When he fell in to the climate change denial camp he provided legitimacy to the anti-intellectual nonsense that we're struggling to deal with today.
Going along with your science department's political position so that you continue to have a job and funding.
It's absolutely true that science is not about consensus. Science is not a body of knowledge, but a process of (roughly speaking) formulating an explanation of phenomena, devising a means to test the explanation, and then using that test to determine whether the explanation adheres to the "real world". One of the criteria of a good test is that it must be reproducible, but nothing in the process of science actually requires "consensus".
However, you have a bunch of different scientists with different specialties studying different phenomena, so much so that no single person can actually be aware of it all. Certainly no single person can actually reproduce all of the tests and experiments. In the face of such complexity, we've developed another system which, speaking strictly, is not "science". It's more of a social/political system whereby the various experiments are reviewed by other scientists who attempt to determine whether the tests were good, and whether the tests actually tested the explanation/phenomena they were supposed to. In a formal setting, this process is called "peer review", but it also happens informally (i.e. scientists read each others' work, challenge it, devise other tests).
The upshot of this social system is that, if you aren't enough of a climate scientist to review the existing knowledge of global warming and evaluate its validity, then you should probably just trust the consensus. You trust that there are a lot of smart people working on the problem, and if 95% of the climate scientists agree, then the safe guess is that they're probably at least on the right track. It doesn't mean that they're absolutely correct-- no scientific or social process can guarantee absolute correctness-- but you're going to find more success going with the overwhelming consensus than going against it.
Of course, every once in a while, there is some genius who figures out that the overwhelming consensus is wrong. Most of the time, the scientific community catches on pretty quickly and the consensus changes.
Thankfully, you can get climate data here http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov
And even more thankfully, you can see how both satellite and balloon data for atmospheric temperatures have consistently tracked each other since satellite data became available in 1980:
Graph of satellite, balloon, and climate model temps since 1980
You'll also note how climate model temps don't agree with reality.
'Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results.'"
The phrase "One investigator who happens to be right" assumes one would be able to tell who is right and who is wrong immediately as it happens. The consensus is agreeing who got reproducible provable results.
People who do not understand science, who want to game the system are intentionally gaming the system. They bring in rules used in philosophical debates and legal arguments into science. Equal time for both sides works ok in philosophy and in courts. But not in science. Let us say one side has tons and tons of data and the other side is waving hands. Giving equal time to both is doing a great injustice to the side with data.
If one side is just asking questions, raising doubts, etc and the other side is actually answering the questions and clearing the doubts, it is a great injustice to give equal time to both. It takes much longer to answer questions than to raise them.
One should gain standing to raise doubts. Getting funding from industry groups with vested interests is not getting the standing. Must publish in the relevant field, get peer reviewed papers. Must risk reputation gained by hard long work to raise questions.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Sure, sure...
Utter nonsense. What's settled is that the climate is changing at the hands of man, what's open to debate is what the impact on us will be in the short and long term. The "consensus" is the same as the "consensus" that supports the modern understanding of evolution - it is a refinement and agreement across the field on the gross mechanism for something, and all the arguments lie in the details.
Kudos for tossing in the pinch of anti-government paranoia, it has to be that and not the desire for massively profitable fossil fuel corporations to defend said profits.
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Scientific consensus is an group of scientists agreeing on a proven theory or the proof of a theory.
Political consensus is a group of people ganging together to push their opinions on others.
The latter has a negative connotation which Mr. Crichton is using to taint the former.
I think there is a subtle difference between being right (in the usual sense of providing a model that happens to accurately represent measurable stuff) and the process of scientific discussion. Consensus is just an outcome of a process, ie collaboration. That process is extremely important but does not guarantee being right.
In the end, without resorting to unnecessary complicated terms, if a bunch of people who are supposed to know what they are saying all agree on something that is not immediately testable (say, long-term human impact on the climate), odds are they are more likely to be right than some random wacko or idiot reporter because they spent some time discussing together and have highlighted potential errors.
In the absence of definitive hard data, which will only be available in retrospect, we have to pick sides. Consensus seems a safer bet than the probability that some random guy is the new Galileo or Einstein.
For climate change skeptics are always attacking the science and the scientists. But they never deal with the known facts.
1. CO2 concentration is measurably increasing year on year and accelerating. If you want a running tally have a look here: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
This is one of a number of different high quality analytical chemistry studies that all tell the same story. CO2 concentration is increasing significantly.
2. We know this is because of release of fossil fuel sequestered CO2. By careful investigation of the change in carbon isotopic ratios, and by simply accounting for the CO2 released. Human release of CO2 more than enough accounts for the CO2 increase in the atmosphere, and actually shows that a significant proportion is actually getting absorbed into the ocean and other carbon sinks. But clearly no where near all of it.
3. CO2 in the atmosphere traps heat due to the wavelengths of light it does and does not absorb.
This is all hard chemistry measurement, and are known with a high degree of confidence. These are not up for debate!
The only debatable point is what do these facts mean for the climate and the environment going forward. And here we get into prediction and modelling. The best models and predictions shows that the climate will increase in temperature, and that will have significant and mostly detriment effect on most of the worlds environments and sustainability of human populations going forward.
If you are a climate change skeptic scientist, what you have to come up with is a model that sensibly and scientifically shows why this increase in CO2 won't have any significant detrimental effects. Then put it up for publication in peer reviewed journals. And if your scientific argument has any legs it will change the scientific consensus. All the other stuff being thrown around is political motivated bull shit, with no scientific basis and should be simply ignored.
True as that may be, people who are absolutely nuts tend to use the perpetual openness of science as an excuse to inject irrelevant, arbitrary insanity into discussions of fact.
You seem to be missing the point of TFA. Science doesn't need you to discuss it - it stands on it's own.
If this were true, we wouldn't have multiple physics/cosmological theories trying to explain observed phenomena or expected attributes on the nature of time and space.
If you have to discuss/debate it you have moved well out of the realm of science and into politics.
Kinda like the time when physicists were divided between those who theorized the Universe to be eternal and immutable vs those who thought of it as having a dynamic nature (expanding/shrinking with a creation starting point)?
Science not only relies on explanations of observations already taken. It also relies on PREDICTIONS (and the theories that proposed them) that are thought to be logical/inevitable based on what is has already been observed. Further experiments take place until these theories are debunked, reaffirmed or revisited. The process by which this takes place is strongly based on debate.
Even mathematical proofs are open to debate. You submit your proof. Peers attack it. If they find a chink in the armor, they send it back to you, and you now have to prove that the error is not fundamental, that your original proof can still be revisited and salvaged.
All politics are discussions. Not all discussions are politics - or are you not familiar with scientific discussions? If discussions have no place in science, then we pretty much close the door in the creation and presentation of scientific theories (which are just discussions and proposals which only become facts when experiments corroborate their predictions.) There is no exception to that and frankly it's disgusting you claim affinity for scientific knowledge and understanding and can't grasp such a basic concept.
I think there is a difference between what scientists mean by a consensus in the scientific community and how it is understood by the wider public.
If a climatologist says "there is a consensus" (s)he hardly means that a bunch of people came together to have a popular vote on the issue. Rather, it suggests that the majority of fellow climatologists have examined some evidence each and found the collection of all that evidence (and their respective analysis) to be conclusive (as far as statistically possible). However, no individual alone can "convince themselves by looking at the evidence" because the evidence consists of more data than anybody could study in a life time. So we have to put a certain degree of trust into our colleagues. An individual only has partial evidence, which by itself is insufficient to come to far-reaching conclusions about global climate developments. These conclusions can only be reached collaboratively -- in this sense it requires a consensus. Fortunately though I don't even have to trust any individual climate scientist or their data, just that there is no conspiracy by the majority. Furthermore, I know that I could examine any evidence if I wanted to, I just can't examine it all because there is simply too much of it. This applies similarly to other large-scale observational endeavours.
However, to a non-scientificially minded person "consensus" might indeed suggest something weaker (people sharing an opinion) and therefore mistrust the conclusions. And then they can't look at the evidence themselves because there is too much data and that data comes from exactly the people whom they mistrust in the first place. So instead they look at the evidence they can see and understand, which explains why acceptance of climate change drops on snowy days.
There wasn't a learned man in Europe who believed the Earth was flat. It may have persisted much longer in China, but in Europe and among Arab geographers, there was no one who seriously believed in the flat Earth. The Greeks had figured that out nearly 2000 years before Columbus ever accidentally ran into the Americas on his way to China.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.