Scientific paradigms change one death at a time.
Unknown, perhaps apocryphal
The ability to change one's mind about beliefs in which one has a significant emotional investment may be the most difficult task for any rational being. The entire edifice of science, based on transparency and requiring independent confirmation of data and predictions, has been constructed just so that we can see reality most clearly despite our blindness. The list of logical errors and fallacies which the human mind is capable of harnessing in order to persist in believing nonsense is long and varied.
For a very long time I firmly believed that Anthropogenic Global Warming represented a threat to our biosphere. I have always been a conservationist (and made it a personal goal, upon moving to our present home, to rid our property of all non-native vegetation*) and continue to believe that our husband-ship of the environment is one of the more important tasks for any generation that cares about its children. My convictions about AGW were, like most people's convictions, based upon a reliance on authorities who I felt knew more than me about the subject. Having spent years studying Medicine, Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis while helping raise four children, my time was at a premium and the resources were simply unavailable to easily check the claims of those eminent climate scientists whose alarm i shared. The development of the internet and the arrival into adulthood of my children allowed me, for the first time in a very long time, to indulge my curiosity about any topic which caught my attention. Although I knew I could not become an expert via the internet, I did have confidence that I could become a reasonably competent amateur in most areas of interest.
My first concerns about AGW grew out of the wildly escalating claims of those who we now know to be religious fundamentalists, ie Warmists. By the time Al Gore was peddling his carbon credit dispensations, the recognition that there was something corrupt about the science of AGW was inescapable for anyone with scientific training who was paying attention. No reputable scientist can hide his data for long and scientific theories that fail their predictions do not hold sway for long. Unfortunately, by the time of the recently leaked e-mails and computer programs from the CRU, too many people had too much time, money, and prestige invested to let the scientific evidence speak for itself.
Consider a close reading of one CRU data point, discussed by Willis Eschenbach at Watts Up With That?
The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero
People keep saying “Yes, the Climategate scientists behaved badly. But that doesn’t mean the data is bad. That doesn’t mean the earth is not warming.”
Let me start with the second objection first. The earth has generally been warming since the Little Ice Age, around 1650. There is general agreement that the earth has warmed since then. See e.g. Akasufo . Climategate doesn’t affect that.
The second question, the integrity of the data, is different. People say “Yes, they destroyed emails, and hid from Freedom of information Acts, and messed with proxies, and fought to keep other scientists’ papers out of the journals … but that doesn’t affect the data, the data is still good.” Which sounds reasonable.
[NB: The earth was warmer during the Medieval Warm Period than it is today, which should have raised questions about the current role of CO2 versus longer term climate inputs, but instead led to data manipulation to erase the MWP.]
I cannot do the rather lengthy post justice; Willis Eschenbach does a wonderful job looking in depth at one set of data points; his conclusion is remarkable, but no longer surprising:
What this does show is that there is at least one temperature station where the trend has been artificially increased to give a false warming where the raw data shows cooling. [Emphasis mine-SW] In addition, the average raw data for Northern Australia is quite different from the adjusted, so there must be a number of … mmm … let me say “interesting” adjustments in Northern Australia other than just Darwin.
And with the Latin saying “Falsus in unum, falsus in omis” (false in one, false in all) as our guide, until all of the station “adjustments” are examined, adjustments of CRU, GHCN, and GISS alike, we can’t trust anyone using homogenized numbers.
My suspicion is that once the AGW proponents became convinced that their worst fears, of a runaway greenhouse effect caused by human derived CO2, all of their data was subsequently first filtered through their own prejudices even before any manipulations of the raw data took place. They did not intend fraud but slowly drifted into it under the influence of their certainty.
Yaacov Lozowick describes a similar construct which involves a particular constructed world view of the Middle East.
The Facts Can't Be the Facts Because They're Not the Right Facts
AKUS, a reader and commenter here on Ruminations, has a column at CiFWatch called The Brainwashing of Britain. Reading it and its comments sent me to the Guardian version of Tom Gross` recent Wall Street Journal report from the West Bank. From time to time CiF publishes such pieces, to convince its editors that they are, in fact, open-minded and balanced purveyors of fine punditry. This one is a report Gross wrote which claims that there are some dramatically positive new developments on the West Bank, some of them the result of Netanyahu's policies.
Not a thesis that can be accepted by many readers of CiF, who reject it categorically for not fitting the facts they feel comfortable with. No matter that the whole point of the column is to say that there are changes in those facts.
Go to Yaacov's site to see first hand evidence of how resistant homo sapiens can be to the introduction of new data that brings into question what people already "know" to be true. See Barry Rubin's deceptively simple and clear explanation for The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What's It Really About and Why Does it Continue? The conflict is really not that difficult to understand and the state of war could end tomorrow if the Arabs so desired. Unfortunately the paradigm shift needed for the West to understand is apparently impossible for most people to make.
After taking some time away from the news in August, I returned to the information fray and wrote of The Narcissistic Over-Investment in Ideas:
For the last week I stayed out of range of the internet, newspapers, and television. It was a cleansing experience, but now I have re-engaged in the real world and one of the things that has leaped out at me is how little reality matters to those who develop a powerful emotional attachment to their own weltanschauung.
Even for those with normal levels of narcissism, the probability of falling into an over-investment in one's own ideas is ubiquitous. The maxim that "scientific paradigms change one death at a time" is a recognition that even those (scientists) who are expected to be most dispassionate about their beliefs are subject to the all too human failing of growing wedded to inaccurate or incorrect theories simply because they have invested so much time and energy into them that they are unable to countenance the possibility that they are in error. Those who have more than the usual quanta of narcissistic pathology are far more liable to embrace, and persist in their embrace of, nonsensical ideas than those who lack such a passionate attachment.
When the dust settles on AGW and Climategate, lives and reputations will have been destroyed. The current distortions in the media-constructed weltanschauung will continue to take lives in the Middle East for the foreseeable future. Our Narcissism seizes upon our ideas and makes their grasp upon us nearly impossible to release. Facts rarely change beliefs.
We live at a time when the best and the worst are "full of passionate intensity" and we do not seem able to find a consensus on which is which:
TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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