[Update: Fausta has a wonderfully titled linkfest on the curerent state of AGW: Global Warming failure linkfest blizzard]
The scientific method was invented, and is now our greatest tool, to differentiate our wished and feared fantasies about our world from the reality of our world. We pride ourselves on being more rational than our predecessors, and in many ways we are, but there are limits to our rationality and those limits are not as far from our current behavior as most believe.
Questions about climate change and the human contribution to any such changes would seem to be ideal candidates for investigation via the scientific method. Our ability to manipulate large quantities of data have been increasing exponentially and our data sets have been expanding at a remarkable rate. Separating the signal of climate change from the noise of weather, and parsing the portion of such change that is contributed by man's impact on the natural environment should be worthwhile and attainable endeavors. Unfortunately, as has become obvious, the entire structure of climate investigation has become corrupted and politicized by the usual suspects, large amounts of money and large investments of ego.
The corruption (using the term in its multiple meanings) at the heart of the AGW structure has been seeping into the zeitgeist since the leaking of the CRU e-mails and the slow disintegration of the IPCC report under the scrutiny of skeptical observers. Walter Russel Mead continues to believe that there is a scientific underpinning to the AGW theory, but his belief is being strained by reality:
DC Post Runs With Climategate; NY Times Still in Tank
Meanwhile, out in the real world, the multifaceted credibility collapse that is Climategate majestically and inexorably unfolds. The IPCC and its increasingly embattled chair have taken another major blow; closer examination of IPCC’s claim that North African food production would fall 50 percent in the next decade reveals that there was no scientific evidence for the claim, that the IPCC itself had solid evidence against it, and that Dr. Pachauri was instrumental in publicizing the false but attention-getting statement. The core temperature data that the IPCC used to establish the degree of global warming to date and on which it based its predictions for the future, is coming under tougher scrutiny. As if this wasn’t enough, Professor Phil Jones, the director of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University, the source for much of the core climate data and the author of some of the most damaging e-mails revealed when stolen emails from climate scientists were made public, answered questions from the BBC. His answers to some of these questions will give climate skeptics even more ammunition. Examples:
BBC – Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming? Jones: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods. BBC: When scientists say “the debate on climate change is over”, what exactly do they mean – and what don’t they mean? Jones: It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well.
What? There is no statistically significant evidence of global warming for the last fourteen years, and the debate over global warming is not over in the opinion of “the vast majority of climate scientists?” And this is what a defender of global warming now says? [Bolding added-SW]
WRM's post focuses on the failure of the "paper of record" to inform its readers that the AGW edifice is crumbling, which is one of the areas where the limits of rationality can be found. When the perceptual apparatus, the news media, fails to "see", the body politic is partially or completely blind. It is impossible to rationally evaluate what exists but is not seen.
Eliezer_Yudkowsky blogs at less wrong, (a blog "devoted to refining the art of human rationality- the art of thinking) and in a post discussing AGW inadvertently illustrated another area in which the limits of rationality can be found:
So far as I can tell, the position of human-caused global warming (anthropogenic global warming aka AGW) has the ball. I get the impression there's a lot of evidence piled up, a lot of people trying and failing to poke holes, and so I have no reason to play contrarian here. It's now heavily politicized science, which means that I take the assertions with a grain of skepticism and worry - well, to be honest I don't spend a whole lot of time worrying about it, because (a) there are worse global catastrophic risks and (b) lots of other people are worrying about AGW already, so there are much better places to invest the next marginal minute of worry.
But if I pretend for a moment to live in the mainstream mental universe in which there is nothing scarier to worry about than global warming, and a 6 °C (11 °F) rise in global temperatures by 2100 seems like a top issue for the care and feeding of humanity's future...
Then I must shake a disapproving finger at anyone who claims the state of evidence on AGW is indefinite.
Sure, if we waited until 2100 to see how much global temperatures increased and how high the seas rose, we would have definite proof. We would have definite proof in 2100, however, and that sounds just a little bit way the hell too late. If there are cost-effective things we can do to mitigate global warming - and by this I don't mean ethanol-from-corn or cap-and-trade, more along the lines of standardizing on a liquid fluoride thorium reactor design and building 10,000 of them - if there's something we can do about AGW, we need to do it now, not in a hundred years.
Yudkowsky us absolutely correct that if AWG exists, and if it represents an existential threat to human life on planet Earth then no amount of attention and no imposed ministrations, no matter how draconian, would be unobjectionalbe; if the basic premise fails, however, the entire structure collapses, and there, Eliezer Yudkowsky has found the limits of his rationality. He does not propose to do any kind of cost:benefit analysis. (For example, how many people would die if the global temperature rises 6 degrees in he next hundred years versus how many would die if we effectively diminish the earth's carrying capacity in order to minimize or reverse the presumed effects of AGW?) Further, if as seems to be the case, the basic data upon which the entire AGW argument rests is corrupted data then the house of cards collapses, lives and billions of dollars have been wasted, and the IPCC's reputation, among others, will have been thoroughly demolished.
(As just one example of corrupted data, a great deal, maybe all, of the measured warming may be the result of urbanization; some temperature gauges once residing in open fields are now surrounded by concrete, which causes the local, microenvironment to be significantly warmed.)
When the data are corrupt or we simply measure the wrong numbers because we literally do not see or appreciate the significant variables, our rationality is less than worthless since we can arrive at serious errors while being convinced that those who disagree with us are not just wrong but evil. The AGW proponents were so convicted of their correctness and the righteousness of tier cause (with good reason; if the Earth were truly in the balance, all stops must be pulled) that they advocated criminalizing AGW "denial." Their rationality led them a long way from reality and serves as a useful reminder that we should all be a bit more cautious about the limits of our own rationality.
Perhaps once the AGW structure collapses we can resume scientific investigation into the drivers of climate and eventually arrive at a relatively rational appreciation of this incredibly complex subject.
NB: In today's Boston Globe, Kerry Emanuel, director of the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, asserts that Climate changes are proven fact:
But when the dust settles, what we are left with is the evidence. And, in spite of all its complexity and uncertainties, we should not lose track of the simple fact that theory, actual observations of the planet, and complex models - however imperfect each is in isolation - all point to ongoing, potentially dangerous human alteration of climate.
Note that Emanuel's article must be read with several major caveats. If the data upon which the theory rests are corrupt, the theory is worthless. The actual observations of the planet which attain the level of precision and reliability needed to compare the present to the past contain a great deal of uncertainty, with far too short a baseline to discern trends yet, and climate scientists have admitted that their models have only very recently begun to control for the most important drivers of climate (water vapor, solar output, cloud cover) and continue to discover large climate influences from novel directions (eg, the importance of the oceans as heat engines via el nino and la nina) which have not yet been incorporated into any of the models. We are a very long way from understanding climate well enough to drive public policy and those scientists who profess otherwise are not behaving in a scientific manner.
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