How the Science became "Settled"

Didn't those CRU scientists ever have a chemistry or physics teacher?

A lot of people seem to be in shock that they threw away their raw data and won't reveal their computer models. The Big 3 networks maintained a news blackout concerning ClimateGate for 12 days (and the BBC had kept the information under wraps for 6 weeks before that). But now Jon Stewart has done a segment on the scandal. Won't be long now until the Big 3 (and other reluctant journalists) have to say something. Maybe they'll focus on the leak, like Senator Barbara Boxer or the New York Times:

We won’t publish on illegally acquired documents. You know, unless doing so would hurt national security, or something.

Meanwhile, the "swarm-intelligence of the blogosphere" is producing lots of information on the technical aspects of the scandal. A ClimateGate document database is up at PajamasMedia if you want to take your own look into how the data fell short of normal scientific standards. More resources here, and here. Or follow some of the links below for a quick education about why the current scandal is important.

Why are scientific standards so low for "climate science"? The medical device company Tigerhawk works for has to validate the software for its studies. Officers of the company (like him), and others, would be subject to prison time if they threw away the raw data for a study which they used to support the use of a new product. He reacts to the revelation that scientists at CRU threw away much of their raw data:

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.

So, basically we are being asked to restructure the entire economy of the planet on the say-so of a few "scientists" whose work cannot be verified or even reconstructed. Is there any intellectually honest person who thinks that is a good idea?

THERE APPARENTLY ARE people who still think it's a good idea. Prodigious amounts of carbon will be spewed into the environment for the upcoming climate conference in Copenhagen.

Asked to comment on the Climategate scandal, some environmentalists still insist that nothing much has changed because the studies were peer reviewed and because "The Science is Settled".

Fabulous how the "Pentagon of Climate Change" at CRU was able to get the science "settled" in spite of so many obstacles. Like a prominent, tenured professor of meteorology at MIT who is a "denier":

The notion that the earth's climate is dominated by positive feedbacks is intuitively implausible, and the history of the earth's climate offers some guidance on this matter. . . .

What does all this have to do with climate catastrophe? The answer brings us to a scandal that is, in my opinion, considerably greater than that implied in the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit (though perhaps not as bad as their destruction of raw data): namely the suggestion that the very existence of warming or of the greenhouse effect is tantamount to catastrophe. This is the grossest of "bait and switch" scams. It is only such a scam that lends importance to the machinations in the emails designed to nudge temperatures a few tenths of a degree.

The notion that complex climate "catastrophes" are simply a matter of the response of a single number, GATA, to a single forcing, CO2 . . . represents a gigantic step backward in the science of climate. Many disasters associated with warming are simply normal occurrences whose existence is falsely claimed to be evidence of warming. And all these examples involve phenomena that are dependent on the confluence of many factors.

Our perceptions of nature are similarly dragged back centuries so that the normal occasional occurrences of open water in summer over the North Pole, droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea-level variations, etc. are all taken as omens, portending doom due to our sinful ways (as epitomized by our carbon footprint). All of these phenomena depend on the confluence of multiple factors as well.

A re-cap of some of the techniques used by the alarmists to "settle" the science:

1. Coercion and manipulation involving peer review: Some scientific journals published papers with which they disagreed, so they got those journals blacklisted and/or editors fired.

2. Ad hominem attacks: Some of the alarmists equated anyone who didn't follow the narrative with holocaust deniers. But as Tim Blair, Andrew Bolt and Clive Jones remind us, the Holocaust actually happened. Blair has a little fun imagining a counter-slur for the "warmies" at the last link.

3. Denying access to data: Since they couldn't even replicate their own data, top global warming alarmists refused to provide any information to people who wanted to check their work in a normal, scientific manner. They even threw away much of their raw data. They discussed deleting even more information after receiving FOI requests, and probably actually did delete more data.

4. Reinforcing "the narrative" outside the scientific community: The media and celebrities advanced the narrative.

5. Protecting moneyed interests: Politicians, along with Big Business and Big Academia had a lot riding on their conclusions. Careers of scientists have been ended and lives ruined for challenging the data of people with more prestige, when the stakes were not nearly as high.

This helps explain why many of the "denier" scientists who have publicly challenged the alarmist data are already retired or are professionals in other fields. And why a scientist who agrees with the theory of man-made global warming, but who suggests cheaper and more people-friendly solutions which do not involve control over the world's economy, lost his job after an inquisition-style hearing.

Why did they think they were justified in these (un)ethical practices? There have long been reasons to suspect that rigorous scientific methods were not being used by many of the scientists who "settled the science". It's time we better understood the philosophy behind Post-normal Science and its use in the Proof of Global Warming. From 2007:

Mike Hulme, the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, argues in the Guardian that while scientific evidence may cast doubt on Global Warming why believe science? When a larger truth must be expressed, then "post-normal" science must be employed. . . .

Hulme argues that Global Warming is so important that everyone must act to stop it, whether or not it is scientifically known to exist.

Seems to me that this philosophy gave people permission for the distortions of traditional science which allowed the science to become settled in the most politically advantageous way. The discussions in the comment threads for these two-year-old posts are extremely interesting in light of the recent scandal. If politically-correct thinking like "post-normal science" is invading even the hard sciences in universities, we have some serious reforms to consider. Incidentally, costs for higher education are rising faster than health care costs in America.

Historic perspective: We've been facing doom from melting arctic ice off and on for 128 years.