Why Philosophy Matters for Science : A Worked Example
"Fox News host Chris Wallace pushed Republican presidential candidate to expand on his criticism of Pope Francis for talking about climate change.... “if he’s not a scientist, and, in fact, he does have a degree in chemistry, neither are you …So, I guess the question would be, if he shouldn’t talk about it, should you?” "
It's not often I agree with Fox "News" about anything, but I've been saying this for a while. The "I'm not a scientist" defence is fine provided you don't then express an opinion about scientific matters. You don't somehow magically become more qualified to have a scientific opinion by not being qualified. That's not how it works.
"To that Santorum essentially said that politicians have to talk about things they’re not experts in all the time so anything is fair game. ... And Santorum pushed back that fighting action on climate change is about defending American jobs."
Yes, politicians have to talk about things they're not experts in. But you wouldn't formulate a financial strategy without consulting the bankers. Rick, you're either saying that a) you're more qualified than the experts but non-experts shouldn't talk about science, which is self-contradictory, or b) you understand the scientific consensus but just don't care about it. Which is like saying that if a team of engineers have told you a dam is about to burst and flood a town, you don't need to evacuate that town.
At this point, Rick, I see no way to avoid labelling you as an idiot.
"At one point, Wallace notes that “somewhere between 80 percent and 90 percent of scientists” who have studied the issue agree. But Santorum is having none of it, calling it a “speculative science” and saying that he doesn’t believe anyone who is so sure of their facts. “Any time you hear a scientist say the science is settled, that’s political science, not real science, because no scientists in their right mind would say ever the science is settled.”
Yes Rick, I agree you shouldn't believe anyone who says an issue is settled. But perhaps you should believe everyone if they say an issue is settled. If a single engineer says the damn will burst, then perhaps you've got a problem or maybe you've just hired an incompetent engineer. If, however, 45 out of a team of 50 engineers say the dam will burst, treating that opinion as mere speculation is a recipe for disaster.
See also : http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2014/09/quack-quack.html
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/06/07/fox_host_to_santorum_if_only_scientists_can_talk_climate_change_shouldn.html
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It's easy to avoid labeling him an idiot: label him a liar.
ReplyDeleteWallace is wrong, that 80 to 90% agreement is among scientists who have NOT studied the issue. Climate science is a multi-disciplinary field, so unless that glaciologist or aerosol expert has stepped outside his specialty and read the model diagnostic literature and the model independent attempts to assess climate sensitivity, he doesn't have an informed opinion on the core issue in the science.
ReplyDeleteIt is better to be quite and thought a fool, than to open your mouth and be know as one!
ReplyDeleteKenny C No, because the skeptics are perhaps a third or more as numerous as the model diagnostic community and make up half of those attempting observation based estimates of climate sensitivity.
ReplyDeletehttp://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
ReplyDeleteThe headline for any story involving this clown should always be:
ReplyDeleteThis is BREAKING NEWS...
This just in to our insert news outlet name here Newsroom...Republican Presidential Candidate Rick Santorum said something completely inane and moronic, today, his remarks indicating, yet again, his complete and total lack of any higher cognitive functions, whatsoever. In fact, it has been determined that the candidate, who is the front-runner in the race for the Republican nomination, incidentally, has never had an intelligent thought, not even accidentally, in his entire adult life.
Speaking to neurologists at Johns Hopkins Medical School, it has been concluded that, should Santorum be elected, it is unlikely that he ever will have a single thought of any intellectual substance throughout the entirety of his administration, and will, in fact, rely upon the hand shoved up his rectum, through his intestinal tract and esophagus, which will manipulate his mouth, to appear as if he is speaking, when in fact he will be merely lip-syncing the talking points his corporate masters have placed into his mouth before the cameras rolled.
This has been BREAKING NEWS
Kenny C Even the skeptics are in agreement that the anthropogenic contribution to the warming is "significant", that is different than any agreement that it is happening rapidly. There was a lesser consensus that most of the rapid warming of the 80s and 90s was anthropogenic. That consensus is now thought to have been wrong, with the latest research attributing half of that increase to natural multidecade ocean and trade wind modes. So, if you take the overall trend of the last 60 years, there is probably a consensus that is anthropogenic. There is not a consensus for the higher sensitivities at the top end of the IPCC range.
ReplyDeleteClimate science is as settled as Einsteins theories & more settled than the smoking/cancer link.
ReplyDeleteWhereas that isn't 100% it is as settled as anything ever gets DRh Powell.
Adrian Parsons Then perhaps you know what the climate sensitivity to CO2 forcing is? The IPCC estimates it is within the range of 1.5C to 4.5C, but research since AR5 suggests it might be lower.
ReplyDeleteThere was also research that suggests that neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light.
ReplyDeleteThat is not to say that they do.
The very nature of science is that it is never settled.
ReplyDeleteWhen 97% of the experts in a field agree on something, dismissing them because the science is "not settled" is an empty argument.
Sarge Misfit The IPCC admits that they don't know the climate sensitivity even within a factor of 3, that is a relevant argument, hardly empty. Adrian Parsons In the climate case, the peer review challenges to the low end of the range still stand. BTW, Einstein's GR has singularities, and problems currently patched up with dark matter, dark energy and inflation.
ReplyDelete"Einstein's GR has singularities, and problems currently patched up with dark matter, dark energy and inflation."
ReplyDeleteConsequences =/= problems.
General Relativity may not be perfect (and it would be disappointing if there were no advances beyond that) however that is not a reason to conflate consequences with problems. It will take more research yet to determine if dark energy/matter is a patch or a revelation. Until that day it is neither a point for nor against relativity Martin Lewitt.
And again, the climate issue is as scientifically settled as anything ever gets. If "the science isn't settled" is a valid argument against that it is a valid argument against how computers operate or that DNA encodes hereditary factors.
Adrian Parsons The valid argument against the "climate issue" is that there is no evidence that the climate sensitivity to CO2 forcing is more than 1C to 1.2C.
ReplyDeleteI think you mean definitive evidence. The evidence points to a (fairly wide) range & saying "there is no evidence showing that it will be above the lower end of the range" is disingenuous at best.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to potential devastation (even low potential) we should adopt a "better safe than sorry" attitude. Or if you prefer a different preparedness platitude "Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it".
"Multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree:
ReplyDeleteClimate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities."
How does CO2 factor into that, other than being one of the results of human activities?
And how many other things beside CO2 are factors in how the climate is changing? What about sulfur dioxide? Unburned hydrocarbons? H2O? The various chemicals used in consumer aerosol products?
Martin Lewitt
ReplyDeleteCitations please.
Not links to blogs. Citations to papers by climate scientists.
ReplyDeleteAnthony Shaw The best evidence for a lack of evidence is the model diagnostic literature. The key issue faced in the AR5 assessment was interpreting the discrepancy between climate sensitivity estimates based on climate models (higher values) versus recent empirically-derived sensitivity analyses (lower values). A footnote to the AR5 Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) states: “No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies.”
ReplyDeleteKiehl investigated how all the models could agree so well on the 20th century trends, yet disagree with each other on climate sensitivity. He found that the model agreement was achieved through variation within the aerosol forcing uncertainty. It was a serious enough result that subsequent publications and AR5 had to address Kiehl in WG1 Ch 9, 10 and 12.
https://www.atmos.washington.edu/2008Q2/591A/Articles/Kiehl_2007GL031383.pdf
Anthony Shaw One interesting thing about the science, is that almost every new result raises model diagnostic issues, after all, if the models already explained the issue, it wouldn't be a new publishable result. But guess what, evidently the previous model based results were not falsifiable and never have to be retracted.
ReplyDeleteAt least two papers on the pause point to the correspondence of the pause with the mid-century cooling.
"Here we show that a pronounced strengthening in Pacific trade winds over the past two decades—unprecedented in observations/reanalysis data and not captured by climate models ..." [emphasis mine]
"No historical or preindustrial simulation ever captures 20-year Pacific wind trends at the magnitude of the recent observed 1992-2011 trade wind acceleration."
"Thus both cooling due to external forcing (aerosols) and cooling due to variability in the IPO (which may be internally generated or externally forced) appear to have contributed to the mid-20th Century hiatus in surface warming."
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2106.html
Interesting stuff, thanks. I will have to read the paper by Keihl carefully. An equation similar to (1) in the paper by Keihl is briefly discussed in David Randall's book Atmosphere, Clouds, and Climate, p 207. Randall's analysis is interesting in that he shows, using his equation, how practically no energy flows in and out of the surface of land, and a huge amount of energy flow into and out of the ocean. (From my understanding.)
ReplyDeleteIf you follow the references at the end of the wiki article on the hiatus you will find one where scientists predicted with current models the hiatus, so I don't see why some people are so quick to dismiss the models.
DRh Powell
ReplyDeleteAd hominem attacks will not be tolerated. My followers include alien conspiracy theorists and Creationists. I welcome non-mainstream views. But either behave with common courtesy and respect, or leave.
Rhys Taylor What I do not understand, is why scientist continue to blame "man", when there is this enormous "yellow orb", called the Sun that spews extremely hot CME's in the direction of Earth, along with providing us warmth, it is also taking it's own sweet time to grow into a Red Giant. Is man going to get blamed for that, too??? I haven't decided yet, if man is totally to blame, for "climate change" or if man is only a part of the issue. It's been doing that longer than man has been on the planet..
ReplyDeleteJust because we can talk and make up equations (that some of us still have a difficult time understanding, because they substitute symbols and infinity symbols in place of numbers, not to mention triangles), yet they fail to think the Sun might have more of an influence on our climate than we understand.
Mark Ruhland
ReplyDeleteThat is jumping to a conclusion. Of course climate scientists have taken the sun, and many other things, into account.
By the way there is great logic in how equations are put together that comes from centuries of applied math and physics. They are not just "made up".
ReplyDeleteAnthony Shaw True, you may be right. But, to blame man for all the world's ills is rather short sighted, in my view. There has to be a realization that "man" is about as big to the SUN as an ant is to humans. Miniscule.
ReplyDeleteGamma rays, x-rays (from outside the planet, and other various heat sources could also explain why the Earth is acting like it needs to be on medication...lol But, then you have volcanoes, that man has no control over, spewing hot gases into the air, or mountains blowing their lids (Mt St Helens, almost 36 yrs ago) and other large mountains like the one in Iceland that affected air traffic for a good while or Mt Aetna and Vesuvius, not to mention the constant lava float from the Hawaiian island's volcanoes.
Anthony Shaw Unless you have some "unscrupulous scientists" who are trying to manipulate policy, for their own profit... It happens.
ReplyDeleteMark Ruhland
ReplyDeleteThere probably isn't a better counter-argument than was made by potholer
http://youtu.be/OjD0e1d6GgQ
to the argument that we are too small to have any effect, or that CO2 couldn't possibly have anything to do with warming because there is too little of it in the atmosphere. What has been found by science with regards to natural processes sometimes goes against our feeling of what should be true.
Of course climate scientists have taken volcanos into account.
DRh Powell
ReplyDelete"I engaged in the above having experienced you as a man who takes things seriously and thoroughly."
Well, OK, but calling what I wrote "drivel" was hardly likely to foster a rational debate, now was it ? Still, I thank you for trying to make amends.
The intention of this post was not to debate climate change per se, but whether or not non-experts should act against the consensus. I could look into the specific issues of climate change, but this would be of limited benefit. I'm not a climate scientist. I'm not qualified to say what's true or not. Neither are Rick and Francis. Why, then, do I advocate Rick following the consensus and don't have a problem with Francis preaching the consensus ?
One can make any issue seem controversial by cherry-picking reports from those who disagree. Any issue. There are always people who disagree with the consensus, even when that consensus is literally rock solid (case in point : creationists). And yes, there are times when the consensus is wrong. But it's still, by and large, the most sensible point of view for any non-expert to adopt, provided it's being reach by the highly rigorous process it's supposed to be.
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2015/06/consensus-and-conspiracy.html
In the specific case of climate change, no-one in their right mind would want humans to be the cause of climate change. So the allegation is that a bunch of scientists who are bent on attacking each other's work and don't like the conclusion are trying to fool the public into thinking that this is the case. This does not seem remotely likely to me. The alternative is that politicians are engaged in a conspiracy, which people usually say is to raise taxes. Again, not plausible. It's taken decades to get climate change on the political agenda in any kind of serious way and even now it's being pursed half-heartedly. Moreover, oil revenues generate a great deal of money for governments through taxation. Why in the world would politicians want to fight this ? What do they have to gain ? Greater taxes on solar energy ?