But this is what tenure is for in the sciences. You might not want to do something like this before you get tenure, but afterward is a different story. You couldn’t be fired from an academic job because of this, at least not if there was no evidence of fraud, misconduct, or incompetence in how you got your results. If you turned out to be right, you’d be very famous.
Scientists come up with controversial theories and don’t lose their jobs for it all the time. Most scientists don’t agree with modified Newtonian dynamics, but the guy who proposed the theory still has a job. He got a job with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton after proposing this theory. Joseph Weber claimed to detect gravitational waves, but other scientists couldn’t replicate his results. His claims were ultimately rejected, but he didn’t lose his job. I got to meet him when he was a professor (probably professor emeritus) at the University of Maryland in 1996.
Because oil revenue is one of the biggest revenue streams for terrorism both directly and indirectly.
Because the most powerful leader of the free world doesn’t believe his own bullshit and even manages to brag about increased oil production even though he had nothing to do with it.
As is appropriate. If you disagree with everyone else you need really good data to back it up, and you had better be ready to have everyone else try to prove you wrong.
Papers that agree with the consensus either don’t get published or don’t get referenced. You need to either extend the consensus or refute it to get the citations. A friend of mine, to his chagrin, demonstrated that some widely accepted finding in his area of physics was incorrect. He did not suffer - except the finding was not important enough for a dissertation, and he had to work around it. On the other hand the cold fusion people demonstrated that the consensus was wrong - except they didn’t.
Not fitting a hypothesis to all the data is about the first thing you learn. Machine learning methods start with a training set, and then get confirmed on a full data set. You don’t set the coefficients on the full set.
For climate change this is done by making predictions, and the success of the predictions will determine how much credence should be put in the hypothesis. So far, in my understanding, they have been excessively conservative for the most part.
The Creationists, remember, had a hypothesis that explained all the data. But it made predictions which got repeatedly invalidated. Evolution made predictions which got confirmed. Testing the hypothesis is what is important, not how the hypothesis gets generated.
I have to say that reporting that there is no ‘hoax’ or a conspiracy and then making the whole thing the result of a bias is not much different.
This indeed ignores that back in the 50’s the bias was based on what the evidence told many in those days, that yes CO2 releases will undeniably warm the earth, but there is little to worry as the CO2 will be absorbed by all the natural sinks and we will not increase our emissions to ridiculous levels, as it turned out in the previous decades it was found first that the rate of emissions was really way over what was expected, it was found also that the absorption bands of CO2 were not really well understood until Plass came along. And then the sinks were found to be not as effective as expected.
There was indeed a lot of research and experiments done to overcome that bias that nature was going to take care of the problem.
The problem now is to see many ignoring all those experiments and research that makes the consensus now.
Daring to step in with an analogy from the world of genetics…
There was this idea, dubbed the Central Dogma*, that dominated genetics and molecular biology for a few decades. As my academic adviser put it plainly, disagreeing with this Central Dogma was no way for a young geneticists to have a research career.
Yes, scientists compete for funding by grant writing. Absolutely they do. But too often ideas which clashed with the orthodoxy were not funded. It was the Central Dogma. Capital D.
But tenets of the Central Dogma were disproven by those who found other means of funding. One of the most powerful genetic engineering tools, CRISPR-Cas9 flies directly in the face of the Central Dogma.
To put it mildly, CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing will revolutionize research and medicine. It’s a sort of Holy Grail that genetic engineers sought for years. Splice in (or out) a gene at precisely the location you want.
And CRISPR-Cas9 only came to the research papers in 2013. Nine months later more than 1500 other research papers had been published on how to refine and expand upon the technique. Revolutionary. And it never would have come to light if we didn’t fund research that bucked the accumulated wisdom of the masses. How much sooner might it have been discovered if funding wasn’t restricted to the orthodoxy?
So, how does that relate to Climate Change research?
The current orthodoxy is that Anthropogenic Global Warming is confirmed. Anyone proposing otherwise is a crackpot not to be taken seriously. And we should charge full speed ahead with massive social changes based upon conclusions drawn from the AGW theory.
I hope they are right and we aren’t wasting time by failing to look at something important waiting in the wings. Maybe nothing is there. Maybe there is something. But protecting the dogma is no valid reason to deny funding to do research. Fund or deny based upon the idea and the validity of the experiment to confirm or disprove that idea. Nothing more. Nothing less.
That is what Francis Crick called it himself. This was not a name given by the opponents in an intent to disparage the idea.
Let’s suppose, for a moment, that climatologists are supposed to buy into the premise that AGW is a Fact. So what? First, if the data is falsifiable then it won’t matter who is getting the funding. Either those who buy in will find that the data is inconsistent with the hypothesis, or those who don’t buy in will find that it is. Second, you can’t seriously believe that there is no funding out there for anti-AGW researches. Koch alone could support every researcher in the world for the rest of their careers (not to mention Mobil and the other public petrochemical giants.)
Well then, it’s sure a good thing I didn’t say that, isn’t it? I said there is likely to be some bias in the literature, and “The question is how big an effect would it be, and whether it’s big enough to change the basic conclusions.”
Try reading what I actually write, and not what the caricature of me in your head is writing.
Or more realistically, estimates are that there’s about a 12% per decade chance of a coronal mass ejection event that will destroy our power grid and a lot of our electrical devices. That seems like at least as big a risk to our society and economy as global warming, and the risk mitigation would be a fraction of the cost, yet no one’s talking about that. I wonder why?
It is still what you imply with the example you showed, sure, you did say “some” but as always what you tell us has very little nuance as a lesson. In reality your point was indeed the caricature of what the history of the science and what needs to be done is.
Not to mention that you then avoid dealing with the objections and examples I mentioned that show that you are essentially 50 or so years late.
Well, IMHO the same power companies that attempt to stop the deployment of solar power also do not want to spend much for that mitigation.
There is also the reality that many conservatives would not like what the solution involves too in this case, it involves a lot of mandatory regulations and this is based on the dragging observed so far; there are a lot of solutions being tested right now, but as it is so common the pace of those new regulations and deployment of the solutions is glacially slow.
Well, after the scientists found many flaws in his research by the time they finished with him there was nothing left but the feathers.
It had to be the almost serendipitous research of people like Plass to figure out that there was a lot that was missed in the past and their experimental results by Plass and others was what did overturn the “Central Dogma”.
Callendar was an engineer specializing in steam and power generation, his research was essentially not funded by the ones that you think had a dogma to protect. Plass was worried first about shooting down commie planes with the new heath seeking missiles and it was important to figure out what actually CO2 did in different layers of the atmosphere with the heat.
The point is that research was funded before by other entities, and scientists actually did found issues that did blow away the “dogma”, of course, as I point many times before, it can be hard to go against an idea; but science does not follow dogma, it follows evidence.
Thanks to the the evidence the ideas of Callendar, Plass and others eventually carried the day and virtually all scientific groups agree with that nowadays.
What I do think is that contrarians should find is actually an example of a revolution that overturned decades of scientific research after another revolution took place already, chances are that the only opportunity for the contrarians is to accept that climate science couldonly be slightly wrong nowadays, but not as wrong as the contrarians attempt to make it be for the simple fact that a lot of what they demand (like regarding what to fund) were also things that tool place decades ago.
It is thanks to the historical perspective that I can say that the contrarians of this issue are indeed landing in the same column as creationists.
The lengthy essay you wrote, while a thoughtful and clear expression of your own doubts about the science, contains two fundamental underlying flaws and is easily dismissed on that basis alone.
The first flaw is that you seem to be under the impression the climate science is so dogmatic that findings that disagree with the consensus on AGW cannot be published, or that they’re career-enders for their proponents. Nothing could be further from the truth, since such alleged findings are published all the time. And these people still have jobs, usually with major academic institutions, and in many cases are better known (and better funded) than their less flamboyant colleagues who simply quietly and incrementally advance the mainstream science.
To cite some examples, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas have published numerous papers that advocate various theories skeptical of different aspects of AGW. When Michael Mann published his groundbreaking thousand-year temperature reconstruction and produced for the first time the famous “hockey stick” graph of modern temperature rise, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick published a paper (in the prestigious journal Nature, even) criticizing his data and his statistical methods. They even implied, by inference, and later, directly in their blogs, that his methodology of applying decentered principal component analysis was so biased that it would produce a “hockey stick” out of completely random data. Roy Spencer writes denialist papers all the time, backing them up with a personal blog. Fredrik Ljungqvist wrote several papers alleging that the Medieval Warm Period was substantially warmer than the present day. Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric physicist at MIT, wrote a paper suggesting that, while AGW was real, it was nothing to worry about because natural factors would limit temperature rise. S. Fred Singer is a well-known scientist who has started advocacy groups and published materials skeptical of climate science. I could go on and on with examples.
So material skeptical of the science is out there, much of it in established journals. I don’t know how you could claim that it isn’t unless you don’t read the journals or follow some of the controversies that arise. The real question is, how can we be so certain of the scientific consensus on AGW when there is published dissent?
And the answer to that is short and sweet. Because all of it has been shown to be complete bullshit, and often intentional scientific fraud. To review my previous examples: Soon and Baliunas have pretty much made a career out of publishing denialist garbage, one paper some time ago being so bad that its ill-advised acceptance created a major scandal at the journal and forced the resignation of key members of the editorial board. And I stress this again: the scandal arose, not because the paper went against the mainstream, but because it was so God-awful bad in its data and methodology, and its conclusion was unsubstantiated and wrong.
McIntyre and McKitrick’s criticism of the Mann paper turned out to have uncovered a minor error but nothing more. In doing a review of two thousand year temperature chronologies the National Academy of Sciences completely vindicated his results, and others (most notably Wahl and Amman) replicated them using different temperature proxies and different statistical methods. McIntyre and McKitrick, a math prof and a retired mining engineer, respectively, have since been exposed as shrill denialists mostly plying their discreditable trade on their personal blogs.
And it just goes on. Roy Spencer turns out to be a self-professed libertarian extremist who sees his climate skepticism as a crusade against the evil spectre of government regulation, and the denialist aspects of his papers have, as one might expect, been duly discredited. Fredrik Ljungqvist turns out not to be a climate scientist at all but a recent history graduate with a specialty in medieval kingship, who for some reason developed an obsession with proving exceptional warmth during the MWP and tried to back it up with what turned out to be very badly biased proxies, largely taken from known MWP hot spots. Richard Lindzen is a born contrarian whose one serious theory of limiting feedbacks has now been completely discredited. S. Fred Singer is a former shill for the tobacco industry now turned to climate change denial, and his various pronouncements have been debunked, and his original “Oregon Petition” exposed as largely an orchestrated fraud.
So that’s the bottom line: dissenting material does get published, and time after time it invariably turns out to be fatally flawed. The reality is that anyone who could credibly show that anthropogenic global warming was not going to be a serious problem, and back it up with solid evidence, would not only get published, he’d be first in line for the Nobel Prize.
The second underlying flaw in your assessment is that you don’t seem to grasp the magnitude of the body of evidence. This is not a single “famous paper” syndrome that others are predisposed to support, as in your example, nor is it ten, or a hundred, or even a thousand papers. The body of evidence comes from literally tens of thousands of papers from tens of thousands of scientists that are the result of some 40 years of targeted, intensive research to establish the impacts of natural and anthropogenic contributions to climate, drawing on many different, independent lines of evidence. If there is credible dissenting information out there you can be sure that the oil and coal companies have a major interest in seeing it. There’s a reason that such “evidence” only appears on Internet blogs, right-wing popular media, and late-night talk radio.
People like the story of one scientist going against the established orthodoxy and being proven right. But, usually when there is an established opinion in science these days, that’s because there is a lot of data to support it. For every Einstein who overturns the established opinions, there are probably at least 10 others who try to do something similar, only to be proven wrong.
I wonder why too. We should at the very least be stocking up on transformers and going to smaller, independent, smart grids to protect ourselves. Has the US military done anything to harden themselves against this threat? (Does Canada have a military Sam?)
Actual Communist governments did and do tend not to have a lot of environmental regulations. Ever been to Beijing and seen the smog there? I have. The Soviet Union didn’t have a very good record on environmental issues, either.
If we were discussing, say, whether the universe has 35 of 92 dimensions*, scientific orthodoxy is the go-to thing. Of course, “The Big Bang” was orignially a disparaging term for Lemaitre’s theory.
However, AGW/CC is no longer puerly a scientific endeavor. No government has a “Chromium-Vanadium Steel tensile strength” office. There is no UN-F1 particle office. It has become a highly politicised where science is no longer the only, and dare I say, not even the most important one. AGW fear made environmentalist pressure governments to support corn-ethanol which ended up being , at best, as AGWing as oil and made some well-connected people very rich. Nobody’s carreer is in danger if they publish an unorthodox theory of Hittite laringeals.
I think this is the biggest problema. It’s no longer science, because even if right the posible soultion are no evident, not without pain, not many politicians really want to implement them, and people hate them
News to all the scientists that are Republican. (Or were republicans, after death treats and constant criticisms, most are going as independents just because they dared to look at the evidence)
It remains a science, it is only denial to drag the possible solutions to be also dependent on political sides.