Debunking Global Warming, Part 3: The Myths of Consensus

Michael Crichton also chews up and spits out the entire idea of "scientific consensus", and I make the point--mostly by citing others who have made the point before me--that the so-called "scientific consensus", even if it had any actual value, is not so obvious and clear cut as the High Priests and Priestesses of the First Church of Climate Change would have you believe.


First, just a note that the academic and reasoned refutation/clarification of Crichton’s State of Fear by Gavin Schmidt comes up as an advertised link, via Google AdWords, and is the only AdWord on the search term Michael Crichton as of this writing. Which could perhaps suggest that others are aware that the typical strategy of: discredit the messenger, call him a hack, and—if a scientist or meteorologists, threaten to strip his or her credentials—may hurt more than it helps the First Church of the Global Warming.

So. Just a little more on Michael Crichton. While numerous scientists and even more non-scientist environmental “advocates” have attacked Crichton for his views of Global Warming and environmental alarmism, and have bemoaned that a “hack science fiction writer” would actually be testifying before the United States Senate (although its fine and makes sense to have Hollywood actors and actresses testifying in support of liberal causes they know less about than Crichton does regarding the issues are talking about), it’s interesting that they neglect what Crichton specifically said in his testimony. His central point is that science is becoming highly politicized, and that independent verification of assertions is critical for the long-term credibility of the conclusions being presented to the public by the “scientific community”.

What right-wing, anti-environmental screed does Crichton open his testimony to the Senate with? Try this:

In essence, science is nothing more than a method of inquiry. The method says an assertion is valid-and merits universal acceptance-only if it can be independently verified. The impersonal rigor of the method means it is utterly apolitical. A truth in science is verifiable whether you are black or white, male or female, old or young. It's verifiable whether you like the results of a study, or you don't.

Thus, when adhered to, the scientific method can transcend politics. And the converse may also be true: when politics takes precedent over content, it is often because the primacy of independent verification has been overwhelmed by competing interests.

What is so objectionable about that, one could be forgiven for wondering, to Global Warming advocates?

Well, it goes on, and it becomes clear what they don’t like, and why they don’t quote it, or link to it, when they criticize:

Verification may take several forms. I come from medicine, where the gold standard is the randomized double-blind study, which has been the paradigm of medical research since the 1940s.

In that vein, let me tell you a story. It's 1991, I am flying home from Germany, sitting next to a man who is almost in tears, he is so upset. He's a physician involved in an FDA study of a new drug. It's a double-blind study involving four separate teams---one plans the study, another administers the drug to patients, a third assesses the effect on patients, and a fourth analyzes results. The teams do not know each other, and are prohibited from personal contact of any sort, on peril of contaminating the results. This man had been sitting in the Frankfurt airport, innocently chatting with another man, when they discovered to their mutual horror they are on two different teams studying the same drug. They were required to report their encounter to the FDA. And my companion was now waiting to see if the FDA would declare their multi-year, multi-million dollar study invalid because of this chance contact.

For a person with a medical background, accustomed to this degree of rigor in research, the protocols of climate science appear considerably more relaxed. In climate science, it's permissible for raw data to be "touched," or modified, by many hands. Gaps in temperature and proxy records are filled in. Suspect values are deleted because a scientist deems them erroneous. A researcher may elect to use parts of existing records, ignoring other parts. But the fact that the data has been modified in so many ways inevitably raises the question of whether the results of a given study are wholly or partially caused by the modifications themselves.

In saying this, I am not casting aspersions on the motives or fair-mindedness of climate scientists. Rather, what is at issue is whether the methodology of climate science is sufficiently rigorous to yield a reliable result. At the very least we should want the reassurance of independent verification by another lab, in which they make their own decisions about how to handle the data, and yet arrive at a similar result.

One can see why Climate Change advocates don’t want to have to meet anything approaching that kind of rigor in their science: they can’t. There is a reason why Global Warming advocates don’t want to meet that sort of standard in regards to their science, just as there is a reason why homeopathic remedies don’t want to be subject to control and review by the FDA. Simply put, neither homeopathic remedies, or Global Warming believers, could make the sort of claims they do if subjected to the standard of clinical trials and double-blind studies.

Read the whole thing and you, too, will understand why the Global Warming crowd apparently thought it best not to draw any attention to what Crichton actually said in his Senate testimony.

The Argument of Consensus

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Crichton makes a most excellent argument against the entire idea of consensus as science in Aliens Cause Global Warming. I mentioned previously that Naomi Oreskes attempts to refute his contention that consensus is not only not science, but is pernicious and hostile to science, by selectively arguing against his use of eugenics as an example of consensus science at work. But Crichton cites consensus as science on a number of issues having nothing to do with eugenics, and the results of using consensus, rather than science, were uniformly, demonstrably negative. Crichton writes:

In past centuries, the greatest killer of women was fever following childbirth . One woman in six died of this fever. In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them. The consensus said no. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compelling evidence. The consensus said no. In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management. The consensus said he was a Jew, ignored him, and dismissed him from his post. There was in fact no agreement on puerperal fever until the start of the twentieth century. Thus the consensus took one hundred and twenty five years to arrive at the right conclusion despite the efforts of the prominent "skeptics" around the world, skeptics who were demeaned and ignored. And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women.

Perhaps Oreskes didn’t want to tackle this particular example of consensus science because it would be more difficult to point to the advantages of ignoring demonstrable scientific results, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of women over more than a century, the way she argued that eugenics was somehow important to the eventual science of genetics (which is a wholly specious and unhistorical argument that I may come back to deconstruct at a later date).

Oserkes also didn’t address a few of Crichton’s other examples (or even acknowledge they existed, or provide a link to the original article that she was “refuting”). For example:

Probably every schoolchild notices that South America and Africa seem to fit together rather snugly, and Alfred Wegener proposed, in 1912, that the continents had in fact drifted apart. The consensus sneered at continental drift for fifty years. The theory was most vigorously denied by the great names of geology-until 1961, when it began to seem as if the sea floors were spreading. The result: it took the consensus fifty years to acknowledge what any schoolchild sees . . .

Jenner and smallpox, Pasteur and germ theory. Saccharine, margarine, repressed memory, fiber and colon cancer, hormone replacement therapy…the list of consensus errors goes on and on.

Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

Of course, when you read stuff like this, you understand why critics like Oserkes do not quote or link to the original text, and why protests against Crichton’s senate testimony never address what he actually said when he testified. These are tough, cogent arguments that could possibly provoke skepticism even in some present day True Believers.

But the fact that consensus is not science, and that the consequences of so-called “consensus science” are usually negative, doesn’t really touch on another problem with the Global Warming consensus, one that Naomi Oserkes also argues for most vigorously: that there is, in fact, a large majority consensus that believes in anthropogenic climate change.

Tim Edison, writing in The Collegiate Times, amongst several other points, makes the point that the “consensus” is less something less than overwhelming. David Ridenour, writing in 1997, makes the point that claims for consensus were, at the very least, premature. He writes:

A survey of over 400 German, American and Canadian climate researchers conducted by Dennis Bray of the Meteorologisches Institut der Universitat Hamburg and Hans von Storch of GKSS Forschungszentrum and reported in the United Nations Climate Change Bulletin, for example, found that only 10% of the researchers surveyed "strongly agreed" with the statement "We can say for certain that global warming is a process already underway." Further, 35% of those surveyed either disagreed with the statement or were undecided. Perhaps even more interesting, 67% of the researchers either disagreed or were uncertain about the proposition that climate change will occur so suddenly that a lack of preparation would devastate certain parts of the world -- the underlying assumption on which the talks in Kyoto, Japan were based. Close to half of the researchers -- 48% -- indicated that they don't have faith in the forecasts of the global climate models, the strongest argument in favor of quick, decisive, international action to counter the threat of global warming. Another 20% expressed uncertainty about these models.

Another survey, conducted by American Viewpoint for Citizens for a Sound Economy, found that, by a margin of 44% to 17%, state climatologists believe that global warming is largely a natural phenomenon. The survey further found that 58% of the climatologists disagreed with President Clinton's assertion that "the overwhelming balance of evidence and scientific opinion is that it is no longer a theory, but now fact, that global warming is for real," while only 36% agreed with the assertion. Thirty-six of the nation's 48 official state climatologists participated in the survey.

Those words were written almost ten years ago. Certainly, those numbers could have changed in favor of Global Warming advocacy. But activists were claiming consensus back then, in the face of those numbers, and the way to address contention over the claim of consensus has, generally, been to simply deny that there is any contention. And also, not coincidentally, to attempt to ostracize those who don’t fall in line with the consensus and (of course) threaten their credentials, reputations and livelihoods in order to prevent them from speaking out in a public manner. After all, what better way to build a consensus than to make sure that those who don’t go along with the consensus view cannot get grants, get jobs, build careers, keep their credentials, or get papers published. I’m just saying.

Thomas Sowell has also recently done a good job of deconstructing the Scientific Consensus myth regarding Global Warming. A reasonably objective history of scientific consensus can be found on Wikipedia, and it’s worth noting that it makes the point that few actual surveys have been taken to establish the validity of the consensus claim, although the claim of scientific consensus has been made very often. The most recent establishment of the consensus view that anthropogenic Global Warming is real and happening now was accomplished by reviewing the abstracts of published papers an extrapolating from that the percentage of scientists that believe in the Great Global Warming, and the published policy positions of a number of advocacy groups that included numerous scientist and climatologists in their ranks, rather than actual surveys of climatologists and scientists, preferably anonymous in order to avoid weighting responses with fear of reprisal. I wonder why there aren’t more surveys regarding the actual consensus view of Global Warming, considering how often we are told it exists. Yet, like many things in the First Church of Climate Change, this is apparently an article of faith. Of the actual surveys of scientists and climatologists, there is no pro-Global Warming consensus, and there are precious few recent surveys in regards to the scientific consensus on Global warming at all. The opinion of consensus is drawn by analysis of published papers by folks like Naomi Oreskes, a geologist and science historian who is a 100% true believer in anthropogenic catastrophic climate change, rather than from independent surveys of climatologists and scientists. Odd, that.

Next: That Second Red Flag and Revisionist Histories and Ice Ages . . .