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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.
Science is verifiable and reproducible often in a variety of ways, or it is not "science."
I craft a theory according to the current state of knowledge, and to verify it I do a study on X and come out with results Y, which I use to come to conclusion Z. My article is peer reviewed and published in the relevant accepted journal of science.
Did I do science? By most measures, YES.
However, only steps 1-3 were done on the actual scientific process - it's missing verification until a 3rd party comes along and repeats my study, gathering the same results within an acceptable margin of error.
The problem is that doing my own study is 'sexy', repeating somebody else's, especially when their results are within mainstream theory, isn't.
I don't read AC A human right
It's not necessarily valid. An appeal to authority can be completely wrong. I'll just copy past wikipedia because it hits the points.
"Fallacious examples of using the appeal include any appeal to authority used in the context of logical reasoning, and appealing to the position of an authority or authorities to dismiss evidence,[2][3][4][5] as, while authorities can be correct in judgments related to their area of expertise more often than laypersons,[citation needed] they can still come to the wrong judgments through error, bias, dishonesty, or falling prey to groupthink. Thus, the appeal to authority is not a generally reliable argument for establishing facts."
So just because a bunch of really smart people who have spent their adult lives studying something say that something is so, doesn't make it so. People like John Oliver, trotting out a bunch of people in lab coats saying, "look how many people say your wrong" is not an argument; funny yes, but not a valid argument.
Any thorough examination of the so-called "solutions" to climate change will show they align almost exactly with radical environmentalists and to a great extent with the various "isms" that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions.
Broadly:
1. Artificial scarcity of resources in order to reduce emissions.
2. Increased authoritarian government to ensure compliance with #1.
3. Consolidation of population into compact localities (to facilitate #2)
4. Regulation of information in order to suppress dissenting opinions.
You are misinformed. American English is not English, it's not about the number of speakers, and never will be (you will find that the form of English spoken on the Indian sub-continent outnumbers your "largest group of English speakers" - maybe time to notice the world outside your borders?). English refers to the form of English spoken in England. Yes there are dialects within this, but the fact of the matter is, the originating country gets to set the baseline.
Thank you for stating it much better than I can. I've never considered myself a "denier", and yet every time I ask someone to point to the evidence, I hear that slur tossed out. I've only briefly attempted to search for evidence online, and had virtually no success except to find things like the 97% consensus page at NASA's site. So, if anyone here has better sources, I'm all "ears".
Just another day in Paradise
Dont' forget that crackpots hawking perpetual motion machines, miracle cure-all pills, and anti-vac nutters are "squelched" by the consensus.
For every nobody that turns "the establishment" on it's head there are a billion hacks prevented from running their scams, or slimy fucks from promoting their agenda of robbing the unsuspecting public blind.
Yes, at one time things like heliocentrisim and the genetic inferiority of Africans was "consensus" but time and perseverance and careful study is what truly reveals the truth.
Progress isn't flashy. It isn't a moving story with a happy ending. It's boring, slow, methodical, dry, uninteresting, and makes a terrible news story or movie plot or book title.
If we, as humans, have a particular fault it's our addiction to excitement and relevance pornography. Too many of us think anything without sharp and loud "AH-HA!" moment isn't important.
Of course I do. Clear explanations are not the problem here.
Climate change science can be turned into an executive summary quickly and easily. These summaries are essentially a bunch of incontestable facts that still get contested.
A. Carbon dioxide provably has much stronger absorption bands in the infra-red wavelengths than Nitrogen, and Oxygen, and a little more than water. These are the only compounds more prevalent in the atmosphere than CO2. You can run experiments in the lab seeing different radiative rates of cooling from different mixtures of "air" and CO2.
B. Paleoclimate reconstructions have show than CO2 concentrations consistently acts as a primary moderator of temperature on earth after the first occurrence of plantlife.
C. Naive modeling shows that substantially increasing the CO2 concentrations from current levels of the atmosphere shift the equilibrium temperatures of the planet substantially. More complex models incorporating other known factors, within the entire range of their uncertainty levels, show the same thing.
D. Human activity has almost doubled CO2 levels.
None of these 4 points are really scientifically questionable, and only naive skepticism(that is, pseudoskepticism) or ignorance leaves much room for debate on them.
Their implications are obvious, and we still get denial, and the problem is not with the structuring, but the behaviors of the deniers.
And yet no one believes in phlogiston anymore. Science did what it was supposed to do.
I can think of plenty of examples of the old guard trying to hang on to discredited ideas. The Out of Africa theory of human origins, when it first came out, flew in the face of a general view among European experts that modern humanity had evolved in Eurasia. The old guard, to some extent, were more informed by racial biases (the very 16th-19th century idea that sub-Saharan Africans were somehow lower on the evolutionary chain), and indeed there were a few angry bastards, notably on the Continent, that clung to the idea of a Eurasian origin of H. sapiens even into the 1980s, when finally enough molecular data had been gained both from extant human populations and from the remains of ancient humans (including Neanderthals) that it became irrefutable that modern H. sapiens had a very recent origin (sometime between 200,000 and 150,000 years ago) in Africa.
And again, on the same general topic, for a long time the idea that modern humans and Neanderthals had interbred was viewed as completely invalid. mtDNA studies were flung in the faces of researchers who insisted that modern humans and Neanderthals had interbred in Eurasia. Those that insisted that the interbreeding had happened were tut-tutted, in some cases viewed almost as hippies. Indeed, even into the 1990s, the "consensus" view was that any interbreeding was so rare as to have had no impact on the genetic makeup of modern human populations.
Well, lo and behold, by the 21st century, better techniques for DNA extraction and genome mapping revealed that virtually all human populations outside of sub-Saharan Africa did have nuclear genes that came from Neanderthals.
So it strikes me that this, and numerous other examples, consensus that does not fit the evidence is always ultimately discarded. But that some consensus views are wrong does not mean all consensus views are wrong.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Climate scientist to layperson: "And here's where things get interesting. CO2 by itself only warms the planet modestly, at about one degree per doubling. We introduced feedbacks into our models which amplify that warming by 300%, turning a fairly benign warming into a dangerous one. This has garnered us a lot of international attention. Unfortunately, nature has not been cooperating and surface temperatures have not increased for the last decade and a half, despite an enormous increase in CO2. Rather than revise controversial feedbacks, we figured out a way to preserve the theory by claiming the deep oceans have absorbed all the extra heat. Since we can't measure the deep oceans with any accuracy it's not falsifiable, and since we don't know if or when the heat will "reappear", we can continue to educate the public for another 50 years even if surface temperatures start to cool."
Very true, feminists are particularly frequent abusers of scientific openness. From the combined deconstructionist assault with postmodernism in the 90s back to Luce Irigaray describing E=mc^2 as a sexed equation and Mary Koss' wacky statistical contortionism and on and on. I recommend Paul Gross and Norman Levitt's book “Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science”, where they give an illuminating account of the growth of fallacious theories in US universities and how these have been allowed to grow unchallenged.
The biggest problem with climate change science is that there is only one experiment running that matters: is the state of the climate. Furthermore, the only predictions or interest are those who's outcomes won't be known for decades or centuries. This means that climate scientists can make lots of models which fit the past data, but they get no chance to see if those models are actually good at predicting the future until it is here. The whole thing will then become a "told you so" when either nothing happens, or sea levels rises 3 meters.
Because of the single experiment problem with climate change, taken as a whole, it doesn't lend itself well to the usual application of the scientific method: make some observations, propose a theory, craft and experiment to prove or disprove the theory, and repeat.
I think this is one reason that climate change is so contentious. The prove or disprove step doesn't happen enough to get rid of all the bad actors and crackpots. This is also the reason that an appeal to consensus must be made, because if there are not enough prove or disprove steps, the only way to advance the field is to run different theories by the people with the most knowledge on the subject and hopefully the wisdom of the INFORMED crowd will be enough to sort out the best answer.
It could very well be that the minority opinion is the correct one, but since the proof will not occur for 100 years when the sea level has not risen 1 m, it doesn't make sense to believe only the minority opinion, knowing what the consequences could be. Instead, policy wise, it makes more sense to make the choices today which will have the lowest probably future cost. Perhaps each scientists opinion should be given a weighting, so for example (I'm just making up numbers here) we can say with 90% certainty that the sea level will rise 1 m which will have an impact of $20 trillion, so if the cost of mitigating all effects of sea level rise is $10 trillion dollars, maybe we only spend $9 trillion and accept $500 billion in damage. (Obviously this is probably not the best solution. I'm just trying to show using the best estimate today to pick our response).
You get some points there. But, I'll remain hung on this bit: " I have explained the expansion of the universe to many lay people without trouble."
If you explain something to 100 laymen, and more than 20% actually understand what you are talking about, then all is good. If another 30 or 60% understand parts of what you are talking about, that's good too. And, if I am among the remaining group that didn't understand a damned thing you said - then so be it. I can look around at my fellow laymen, and realize that they probably have more education and expertise in this area than I have.
If, however, less than 1% of those laymen can understand what you've explained, then we have problems. You might propose that your area of study is simply way over our heads. But, then, I might propose that your own understanding is insufficient to explain the relevancy of your studies.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
"CO2 concentration is measurably increasing year on year and accelerating...this is because of release of fossil fuel sequestered CO...CO2 in the atmosphere traps heat...These are not up for debate...The only debatable point is what do these facts mean for the climate."
Here are some more facts. The atmospheric co2 concentration is increasing by about 2 ppm per year. The world currently produces about 4.9 x 10^13 kg of co2 per year from the combustion of fossil fuels. Therefore, the small total amount of co2 in the earth's atmosphere (atmospheric mass x co2 concentration) means that the earth currently sequesters ALL of the co2 produced by living organisms, decay, natural methane seeps, etc. as well as approximately 80 percent of all of the co2 produced annually from the entire world combustion of coal, oil, and natural gas. Based on all known reserves, there are approximately 75 years remaining of fossil fuels at current consumption rates. What this means is that, even if the natural sequestration rate remains unchanged (it is likely to increase with increasing co2 conc), the atmospheric c02 concentration will not increase more than 150 ppm ultimately reaching a concentration of approximately 550 ppm from the current 400 ppm. Even that increase, however, is unlikely, as rising fossil fuel prices and the diminishing returns of production will mean that global consumption of fossil fuels will decline over the next century as they are replaced by solar, wind power, nuclear power, conservation measures, and increased energy efficiencies. Therefore, rather than reach a maximum of 550 ppm and then decline precipitously as the last chunk of coal is burned, the atmospheric co2 concentration will more likely never reach that number as consumption tapers off and consumption continues at a lower rate of several centuries. What this means to an AGW true believer is that you have to believe that the earth's climate would dramatically warm if the atmospheric concentration of co2 went from the current 400 ppm to 550 (or less) and, there is absolutely no scientific basis for that belief. The atmospheric co2 concentration has increased by approximately 84 ppm since co2 measurements began in 1958 and the earth's climate has not changed dramatically. Even the small amount of warming that we have seen during that time is much more likely to have resulted from increased solar activity and long-term climate effects (we are in the middle of an interglacial warming period) than an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Moreover, there are actually signs of climate cooling as both the arctic and antarctic ice extent have increased in recent years. So, no, 'consensus' is not science.