Facts won't change your mind about anything

[Sam_Stone]

@wolfpup

One should perhaps ask oneself how motivated reasoning fits here when there is, in fact, no uncertainty at all about the climate forcing of CO2.

Yes, there is. Don’t confuse models and interpolations as ‘facts’, no matter how strong you think they are.

There is no uncertainty at all about where the sudden and massive post-industrial CO2 spike came from,

Yes, there is. Again, our estimate of how much CO2 is released by industry vs other sources may be very good and based on very robust models, but that doesn’t make it a fact. It makes it a hypothesis backed by strong evidence.

and there is broad agreement about the range of consequences under different continuing emissions scenarios, and all have serious implications across a broad spectrum of negative impacts.

For ‘ranges of consequences’ that include “Not much will happen” to “It will be pretty bad”. Once you start making specific claims, the broad consensus collapses.

Have you read the IPCC reports? Every conclusion is couched in uncertainty. Various effects are listed as ‘very likely’, ‘somewhat likely’, etc. You won’t find many aspects of global warming stated as cold hard fact, other than things like the absorption of energy in a CO2 molecule, etc.

The vast preponderance of “motivated reasoning” going on in this subject area seems to be on the part of those with direct and indirect connections to the fossil fuel industry or who otherwise perceive their well-being to be threatened by unpalatable facts.

Nonsense. Once you get past the basic science of global warming, it all becomes very speculative, and both sides engage in motivated reasoning. The leap from “Global warming is happening” to “We need a carbon tax of X amount in America” requires a huge number of assumptions and unprovable suppositions, and it requires ignoring things like the discount rate on money and the likelihood of unilateral carbon restrictions stimulating more carbon consumption in China and elsewhere due to lower prices for fossil fuels and a lower social cost of carbon.

I can give you a perfect example of how the pro-AGW side uses motivated reasoning: When anti-AGW people claim that there has been an 18 year ‘pause’ in warming, the AGW side is quick to school them on the nature of the statistics, the amount of variance in the signal, etc. You tell them that it takes several decades for the ‘signal’ of AGW to rise out of the noise of annual variance, so a ‘pause’ proves nothing. And you’d be correct to do so.

And yet, just last week NASA put out a headline saying that this year was the hottest year on record, and this has been dutifully parroted without question by the AGW side and most news organizations. And yet, the ‘hottest year’ beat last year by .01 degrees, which is a change almost an order of magnitude smaller than the measurement error and known variance. In other words, the real headline should have been, “This year’s temperature is statistically no different than last year’s.”

Any bets what the headline would have read if it had turned out that this year was .01 degree cooler? I doubt it would be “The global temperature for 2014 falls from record high.” And if an anti-AGW source put out such a headline, the AGW side would leap all over them for shoddy science and a misunderstanding of variance.

There is, to be sure, a whole continuum of denialism in what is a very complex field of science, some of the claims more nuanced than others, targeting and exaggerating such uncertainties as do exist. For example exaggerating uncertainties about climate sensitivity, and falsely claiming that it’s allegedly lower than the consensus IPCC estimates, or falsely claiming that consequences of AGW are largely unknown and suggesting that they may even be beneficial.

Now you’re the one engaged in motivated reasoning. The IPCC says that warming below 2.5 degrees may be beneficial to the planet overall, and that value is within the range of estimates for future warming. Unlikely, but possible. For you to flatly deny that it could happen is, well, unscientific. Are you some kind of IPCC denier?

And claiming that the future consequences of AGW are largely unknown is not ‘false’, because the opposite, that we know exactly what is going to happen, is not a fact - it’s a hypothesis based on models of multiple complex adaptive systems. I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all to question the accuracy of those predictions and our ability to predict the future with such a high degree of specificity.

Getting back to motivated reasoning, I’ve said before that if global warming turned out to be caused by government action and the only way to stop it would be to shrink the size of governments around the world, both sides in the debate would flip. The left would be arguing that global warming is not real, and the current anti-AGW people would be touting it as settled science.

For an example of such a flip, just look at how nuclear energy is treated by the right and left. There, the left continues to scare-monger and continues to ignore research that shows how safe nuclear reactors are, while the right accepts the science and considers opponents on the left to be ‘deniers’.

We all pick and choose which science we want to believe, and that choice has a lot to do with whether the results line up with our ideology or our pocketbook. Even when we try hard not to, this happens.

Richard Feynman documented a great example of this, which is not political and hence perhaps a better example for debate:

@Richard Feynman

We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn’t they discover the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of–this history–because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong–and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don’t have that kind of a disease.

The motivation this time is that people assumed that a great scientist like Millikan wouldn’t make such a large mistake, so when they found much bigger numbers than Millikan’s results, they went back to the drawing board and changed the experiment or just through out the data assuming it was an outlier.

You can imagine in a world were everyone is told that global warming is ‘settled science’, that scientific results that contradict it might get more scrutiny than ones that don’t, and that could be biasing the field. There are many other ways that motivated reasoning can subtly shift results.

Refuting these claims is a bit more complex than refuting the simplistic idiotic ones, and the complexity provides the motivated-reasoning skeptics with the priceless opportunity to cast doubt among scientific illiterates, if not on the basic science of AGW, then doubt on the specific quantified magnitude thereof, which for the PR goals of the fossil fuel industry is just about as good.

Or, you know, ignoring or minimizing the complex systems aspect of the problem could be motivated reasoning on the part of climate scientists, much as how economists are very reluctant to accept the conclusions of complexity theory when applied to economics, because it might imply that economists have no control over the future direction of the economy. This despite their models have a horrendous track record with prediction, and their suggested economic interventions seem to rarely have the results they anticipated.

Indeed a reticent acknowledgement of the reality of AGW with a misleading emphasis on alleged uncertainties, along with fatalistic assertions about the inevitability of continuing oil use forever, is pretty much the contemporary PR-approved position of the major players in the oil industry.

Perhaps it’s motivated reasoning on your part to assume that the anti-AGW side is largely controlled by oil companies. For that matter, since every major oil company I can think of is engaged in alternate energy research, your claim that they assume that fossil fuels will truck on forever is clearly false.

Your language also gives away your bias: A ‘misleading’ emphasis on ‘alleged’ uncertainties. Given that there ARE major uncertainties, where you put your emphasis probably says a lot about which side of the overall debate you’re already on, and how well it lines up with the things you’d like government to be doing anyway.

I’m familiar with some of the audiophile nonsense and mildly amused by it, but I don’t see that it has much to do with the topic.

It has everything to do with the original topic. It just doesn’t have anything to do with the Global Warming Debate Hijack that so many threads seem to devolve into these days.

The motivated reasoning comes in after you’ve laid out thousands of dollars for copper wire electrically identical to the lamp cord sold at Home Depot for .30 per foot. No one wants to look stupid, so you’ll defend your choice to the death. Arguments against it, such as double blind tests that have never shown an audible difference between any two reasonable speaker wires (or even between a high-dollar speaker wire and a rusty clothes hanger), are summarily rejected with specious, unprovable arguments such as the supposition that the formal nature of a ‘test’ somehow causes the ears and brain to clam up and not hear what they otherwise could.

Although lots of things like frequency response can be scientifically quantified, the audio hobby is not science and its values are intrinsically subjective. Nor are audiophiles scientists, and their discussion boards are not scientific journals; many are probably not scientifically trained and may have all kinds of wacky beliefs – sort of like climate change denialists. It’s a very poor analogy to the processes that govern scientific inquiry.

We’re not just talking about scientific inquiry. We’re talking about participants in debates who have been presented ‘facts’ that upset their already-held conclusions.