A climate scientist who engages skeptics
dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com
dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com
As a thought experiment, I'm going to throw out the worst possible analogy I can think of: How should historians deal with holocaust revisionism?
Is it better to censor, criminalize, and ignore the deniers, or should their claims be refuted with discussion and evidence (if available)? Ken McVay and the Nizkor Project has been doing this with holocaust revisionism since the USENET heyday of the 1990s. Refutation of claims from revisionist texts is openly presented by Nizkor.
Open dialague hasn't proven to be horribly effective, but marginalization and not responding openly to skeptical claims is certainly less effective. Humans are social animals. We need to interact and talk, even if it sometimes seems the guys on the other side of the fence are the bad ones.
As a creator of a "NoSQL" database (CouchDB), I think I understand the skeptics that climate researchers must deal with, and how it's difficult. In our case, there are a great deal of skeptics who deny there are any advantages to something that isn't SQL. No amount of arguing can convince them otherwise.
So I don't argue with them, it' a waste of my time. That's not to say it's a waste of time, but it's a waste of my time. I continue to work on the project, make it better, grow the user base, etc. But I don't engage the skeptics, I let the code and real successes stand on it's own, and others can argue in it's defense if they are so inclined (and many are).
Anyway, for climatologists, the easiest way to deal with the skeptics is make as much data and methodology as possible public and easily accessible. Skeptics will still argue against it, but others will take up the fight of arguing for it. If it's possible that people will argue passionately about a new style of database, it stands to reason there's a whole army of people ready to take up the fight of supporting your data, methodologies and conclusions when it involves the entire Earth's climate.
And if the skeptics finds something in your research people can't defend, maybe your data or methods are flawed and need improvement. That's a good thing regardless if it came from skeptics or supporters.
AGW is not generally accepted by all scientists. Judging from the leaked documents some of the scientists have to do very un-scientific things like manipulation of, deleting and hiding data.
Criminalizing dissenting points of view sounds like a horrible idea.
Is it a good use of your time to argue with people who believe in astrology? How do you draw the line between a crackpot or idiot, and a serious dissenter?
I personally think that Holocaust happened - but I am not so convinced that the "official" number is accurate.
The best antidote for any skepticism is clear and open debate.
You know, this could be read very, very wrongly.
title: Mixing Politics and Science in Testing the Hypothesis That Greenhouse Warming Is Causing a Global Increase in Hurricane Intensity
If you don't understand the actual reasons that the deniers exist, which have absolutely nothing to do with your approach to the science, then you haven't got a hope of actually dealing with them.
Let's acknowledge that there will always be some minority view that will always be in direct opposition to whatever science there is. You cannot possibly think that hiding, claiming monopoly and even deleting original data sets helps any cause. Since when did the science go from attempting to discern an objective truth to advocacy?
It seems like the defense of the leaked emails essentially comes down to this: the data would be manipulated by evildoers therefore the only people who can be trusted to interpret and even hold the data are some select group of scientists. Oh and by the way, if you disagree with any of our interpretations we'll label you a "denier" and try to destroy you whether you're a scientist or a scientific journal. Sounds like religion more than science.
Advocacy of what? Shouldn't it be the duty of a scientist to be an advocate for better understanding of objective truth? Do you really think researchers should allow misuse of science to go unopposed?
What the researchers in this case are guilty of is not advocacy of a position, they're guilty of reckless disregard for scientific integrity. This is the case even if their position is correct.
the data would be manipulated by evildoers therefore the only people who can be trusted to interpret and even hold the data are some select group of scientists.
Well, it would be manipulated by "evildoers". There's no shortage of unscrupulous individuals seeking political gain on both sides of the climate debate. And chances are, the number of people outside their field of study who could correctly interpret the data is vanishingly small.
But it's still not an acceptable excuse.
The practical endeavor of science relies heavily on researchers acting in good faith, and on deferring to authorities in other fields, as no one has time to go back and personally recheck everyone else's conclusions. "Because the experts say so" is, generally speaking, a perfectly valid reason to accept a scientific conclusion--which is why even the appearance of impropriety is grossly damaging. It undermines the foundation of trust that the whole system is built on.
Although scientific progress relies on someone with integrity checking the methodology and results - peer review and verification of experimental results. The conclusions are the basis of the hypotheses on which the future experiments rest and so are tested by those experiments.
Climate is a chaotic system, non-Newtonian, we don't really know what's going to happen until it does. We have an idea of arching trends but the rationale of greenhouse effects leading to a mini ice-age (say) seems a priori consistent as an outsider.
"Because the experts say so" is, generally speaking, a perfectly valid reason to accept a scientific conclusion--which is why even the appearance of impropriety is grossly damaging.
Depends on what you have riding on the conclusions. In any field there are usually different factions of experts and you should consider all positions. If all experts agree (!) then assuming that position is probably not going to materially affect you even if they are not exactly on the right path. Often it takes outsiders to shake up a field.
Personally I'm with "House", assume everyone is lying (or at least wrong) and you're usually right.
In any field there are usually different factions of experts and you should consider all positions. If all experts agree (!) then assuming that position is probably not going to materially affect you even if they are not exactly on the right path.
Really? I can't actually think of any scientific fields with significant factional divides. Disagreements over trivia, perhaps (such as quantum mechanical interpretations), but nothing major. Disputes over major issues in science tend to be worked out pretty quickly, rarely persisting as stable factions. And yes, on the current topic, experts in climatology do pretty consistently agree on the science (proposed political "solutions" are another matter entirely...). What did you have in mind?
Factional wars may crop up around the fringes in fields that are only partially scientific, but it's typically parts of the field that are especially difficult to study scientifically that the factions split over.
Often it takes outsiders to shake up a field.
Often? Really? Do you have any examples? The only significant shakeups in science that I can think of were started by people trained and acknowledged in the field (though typically young, obscure researchers, not famous and influential scientists).
Personally I'm with "House", assume everyone is lying (or at least wrong) and you're usually right.
In matters of science, everyone is wrong, but some are less wrong than others.
Lol, the very nature of reality itself == trivia.
I wasn't aware that because I don't buy into the AGW religion that I was a Joe Redneck from the Bible Belt.
I guess I will have to go to the local Philly area DMV to get the address on my driver's license change, will have to choose a state that is south of the Mason-Dixon line ... is South Carolina OK with you, or should I choose Georgia?
And on Monday I will stop in at the local Ford dealership and trade in my Toyota for an F150.
So, much as you'd apparently like to get your dander up, you've presented yourself as nothing more than an anecdote, and tried to imply that we should generalize from your case to the general case, a generalization not supported by the actual facts.
Assuming that party identification is roughly equally split three ways, that means that if all you know about a person is that they think the planet isn't getting warmer, you have 2-to-1 odds of that person being a Republican. Not a sure thing, but probably qualifies as "most". If you really need a source for people in rural areas and southern states, white people, and strongly religious people being disproportionately Republican I could probably find one, but c'mon.
So, sure, he was probably overgeneralizing a bit but the statistical tendency is there and not exactly subtle. I'm sorry if you're offended by demographics, but that's the way things are.
Outside the USA, of course, I doubt views on climate change correlate much at all with membership in US political parties, but I don't think that's what you meant.
The Republican/Democrat thing is just more stupid tribalism. It doesn't matter how good of an idea a Republican has, you'll never see an urban educated middle-class young person agreeing with them on the merits because the idea is from the wrong tribe.
So, I'm not really sure what you're trying to prove, other than to whip up tribal sentiments in favor of the misbehaving scientists (silicon valley is VERY blue country).
Pointing out a prominent exception doesn't really disprove the demographics involved; if you know a person has a characteristic of one tribe you can usually confidently guess that they're substantially more likely to share other, apparently unrelated characteristics of that tribe, precisely because many people take political positions as a way to announce group identity, not because they've actually thought things through in any rational manner.
I've no particular interest in defending the scientists involved in this nonsense (even under the most charitable interpretation of events, they've embarrassed themselves and their colleagues and undermined the credibility of their field) and I don't really like or identify with any of the popular political tribes. I just thought the person I replied to was being silly for apparently denying that the political tribe he seems to belong to has certain demographic tendencies.
And, frankly, I don't have the expertise to actually engage the debate on its merits, and neither do most people who take positions on the issue, so you'll have to forgive me if I assume most people with strong opinions on the matter have those opinions because of group identity.
But, try this: stop and look around at your real peer group, people whose opinions you respect, whose moral values you share, whose political perspectives you agree with. If you find that you and they have in common many beliefs about contentious issues of a factual nature... you might want to stop and think about why that might be the case.
Such rigidity and blindness to reason is not limited to skeptics, as even George Monbiot noted this week: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/nov...
Stephen McIntyre, and those like him who consider it their duty to science to check whether the data and modelling really does support the story we're being told, can hardly be dismissed so blithely.
Christians obviously have their own distinct end times view. So if climate changers couch their arguments as "Pay attention or the human species will go extinct!" it's really a non-starter. If you really care to start a discussion, try instead: "Pay attention or the entire Eastern seaboard will be flooded in 2020!", or, better yet, what I say (as a Christian myself), "We are commanded to be good stewards of God's creation, which means not polluting/raping/short-term-thinking."
To be very specific, I think one major obstacle is that many Christians consider God's promise to never flood the Earth again (Genesis flood, Noah) as a guarantee that God will not allow a sea-level rise to wipe out a "significant" percentage of humankind. That's a misconception that's significant to the debate but rarely addressed by either side.
So what is the correct way of dealing with them? Insult them until they agree with you?
Merely being correct may be good enough in science and technology fields, but it's not going to get you very far with the public; at that point it's a problem of marketing and PR. Would you say that "appearing secretive and refusing to disclose data" is a good PR move?
My point being your rank generalisations tip you foul of the religious belief you accuse others of. This is not a black White issue :-)