> Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back—providing aid and comfort to the enemy.
In recent years people seem to be more and more comfortable with this war metaphor, not as a matter for concern and reflection, but as a subject of pride. Well, of course we have to win the battle of ideas; it's a culture war after all!
When you think in this way, the goal of argument isn't to find what's true, but to win. And if you have to advance some shaky ideas on your side or ignore some inconvenient facts on theirs, well, it's all in the service of a greater truth anyway, right?
But how can you fight a war in the service of truth when truth is its first casualty?
Indeed, and climate scientists got nowhere for decades being terrible at politics and good at data, which leads us to our current still-probabilistically-hugely-likely (despite this apparent political problem) dire predicament.
The author's claim is this, and if true there is merit to listening --- Indeed there is rarely merit to not listening. Science is all about observation and probability. EDIT: although clever political framing can skew naive readers away from truths, which is one of the article's meta topics. ---
"I believe climate change is real and that human emissions of greenhouse gases risk justifying action, including a carbon tax. But my research led me to a conclusion that many climate campaigners find unacceptable: There is scant evidence to indicate that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought have become more frequent or intense in the U.S. or globally. In fact we are in an era of good fortune when it comes to extreme weather. This is a topic I’ve studied and published on as much as anyone over two decades. My conclusion might be wrong, but I think I’ve earned the right to share this research without risk to my career."
A discipline is scientific if it is possible to challenge it, if it can be proven wrong (it doesn't mean it will, but there is a way to prove it wrong).
If the discipline is using political pressure to prevent anyone from doing so, it cannot be called science anymore. A political movement would be a more appropriate term.
And more generally, my profession (finance) is making extensive use of mathematical models to model something too complex to be understood perfectly (financial markets / the economy). But we know our models suck, because we could do experiment on them, we can test them against reality. We know we can build models or investment strategies that do great in back-testing but fall apart as soon as they go live (I have seen that so many times first hand). I give very little credibility to someone who comes up with a complex mathematical model that pretends it will predict the climate in 30 years, knowing that we will only know if his model was reliable in 30 years, we have no way to test it now. Therefore it cannot be falsified and therefore I don't think it is science.
> A discipline is scientific if it is possible to challenge it, if it can be proven wrong (it doesn't mean it will, but there is a way to prove it wrong).
Thank you for that. I feel relieved (and on HN, a little bit personally vindicated) for seeing this.
In the past I've posted 'about taking the climate change alarmism with a grain of salt.' I've had people attack me personally for that. I've had people write to me on here about 'Mad Max' scenarios, and that climate change could lead people to resort to nuclear war.
The fact is that greenhouse gas emissions leading to long-term temperature rise is what is science. The alarmism, Mad Max scenarios, and the idea that technological progress will not be able to help us adapt (or what is especially heretical, reap the rewards of new resources: countries are already beginning to squabble over these, yet even mentioning they exist garners immediate scorn for expressing such a blasphemous idea--it does not garner informed debate!) is what is politics.
That said, I agree with the author we should take action against climate change: we have a long history of basically screwing up our environment on earth, we should try to tread more carefully in the future.
The whole thing also reminds me of what some criticized the War on Poverty for: the industry has become a movement of individuals whose careers and institutions have, perhaps, become more important than the underlying cause of the movement itself.
Trying to express these ideas reminds me of this quote:
> All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Any prediction requires us to wait to see what really happens. I don't think it's fair to say that 30 years is too long to wait and that it's therefore not falsifiable. Science has made claims in the past that took much longer than that to prove false, but we still accept them as falsifiable and that they were valid science at the time.
There is real science being done, and there is journalism, doing a generally poor job of reporting the science. And then there is politics.
If you let the journalism blind you to the science, then you're going to be misinformed. Read the IPCC reports cover to cover, and then follow up with the references if you don't think there is real science being done.
I try to tell people the same thing. I have been involved with RF modeling scientists as a supporting software developer. I also learned that models tend to stink and it's only through painful reality-based tuning that they start to do okay in very limited domains. Long-range claims based upon climate modeling seem to far outstrip the current state of the art. Given the complexity of the problem, it's not at all surprising - but most lay people (even the technology-savvy) don't seem to see the probable gap between reality and the models.
On the other hand, the claim in the following quotation is logically flawed. 'True' and 'no evidence' are, importantly, not opposites:
'I was right to question the IPCC’s 2007 report, which included a graph purporting to show that disaster costs were rising due to global temperature increases. The graph was later revealed to have been based on invented and inaccurate information, as I documented in my book “The Climate Fix.” The insurance industry scientist Robert-Muir Wood of Risk Management Solutions had smuggled the graph into the IPCC report. He explained in a public debate with me in London in 2010 that he had included the graph and misreferenced it because he expected future research to show a relationship between increasing disaster costs and rising temperatures.
When his research was eventually published in 2008, well after the IPCC report, it concluded the opposite: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and normalized catastrophe losses.” Whoops.'
What is the logic flaw? No evidence to support a position is enough to exclude it. Even though you are right, it doesn't mean it is proven false. It does mean no evidence of it being true.
I think you're mistakenly interpreting that quotation as claiming that there is no relationship between temperature increase and catastrophe losses. But it instead makes narrower claims, such as: he was right to question the report; the graph was based on inaccurate information; the later data didn't show a relationship between temperature increase and catastrophe losses.
If he'd written something like "Because there is no relationship between temperature increase and catastrophes, as proven by the insufficient evidence to support that, I was right to question the report", then you'd be right. But he didn't say that. I think he's only saying that he was right to question the report because that graph was inaccurate and invented, and because later data showed there was insufficient evidence for the relationship it was supposed to show. If reports shouldn't contain inaccurate and invented data, especially invented data that isn't similar to empirical data, then he was right to question it.
Ah, the messy intersection of politics, journalism, and science. It looks (from one side) like an example of journalism constructing a narrative and suppressing evidence that doesn't fit. Obviously this doesn't help the cause beyond the short term.
I think that's too simple a reading. There is a whole industry of people whose job it is to create doubt about science so as to prevent action that might harm those who pay them. It started with decades of denial that cigarettes could possibly cause harm, but went from there:
I'm glad that a guy with a political science degree is interested in scientific topics. But I think he'd be a little more sensitive to the broader problem of non-experts jumping in to an area that has become highly politicized, and where industry has such a strong short-term incentive to undermine the appearance of scientific consensus.
Even if opposing viewpoints are likely incorrect, there is some risk to omitting sections of the climate change discussion. There are many "things you can't say" about climate change.
And yet I constantly see those "things you can't say" being said in the public mainstream media. Like the Wall St. Journal. The claim that dissent is being suppressed rings hollow to me. Just because that dissent is in opposition to a lot of other voices-- should it be given equal weight or "volume" in our discourse, or proportionate weight?
> There is scant evidence to indicate that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought have become more frequent or intense in the U.S. or globally. In fact we are in an era of good fortune when it comes to extreme weather.
Try telling that to the residents of California or Gatlinburg, TN.
OK, anecdotes do not constitute data. So here's some data:
Look at the number of acres burned, which is the metric that matters. The upward trend over the past few decades is unmistakable even without fancy statistical tests. And that's just what I was able to find in five minutes on a ridiculously slow internet connection.
It's hard to tell the difference between "there is scant evidence" and "there wasn't any evidence where I happened to look for it."
Sorry, but where is wildfire in "hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought"?
This kind of dismissal of a no-doubt nuanced opinion on a scientific issue based on "what you found in five minutes on the internet" brings literally nothing to the conversation.
How can we be sure what caused the increase in fires? We seem to change our approach to fire prevention and management constantly. Some strategies employed by the Forest Service and other state and federal authorities in the past have almost certainly been counterproductive, such as aggressively fighting small fires that would otherwise have prevented the accumulation of undergrowth that is now making larger fires much more dangerous.
It's as ridiculous to cite an increase in forest fire severity and frequency as proof of ACC as it is to cite a few particularly bad snowstorms to deny it. Deniers will legitimately cry foul when you use the same bogus rhetorical tools that you forbid to your opponents.
Are you number of acres is the metric that matters because if we looked at the total number of fired we'd see they have dropped 75% since the 1960s? I don't know which metric is more important, and I'm not sure you do either. But it is a useful link because it shows how easy it is to take good data, and tell whatever story you want with it.
The key point here is that you and I should be able to openly debate acres burned vs total number of fires without me trying to track you down and get you fired, or you having me banned from HN.
The sad problem with climate change is that otherwise sensible people are willing to put intellectual honesty aside in the name of "we desperately need to convince everyone that a disaster is coming so they'll be scared into preventing it". Saying something that might calm people down and fear less is heretical, no matter if it's true or not.
You ignore here the army of lobbyists who are paid to put intellectual honesty aside in the name of convincing everyone not to worry because that protects hundreds of billions in revenue.
it wasn't the people who accept global warming as a reality who started politicizing this. It's unfair to blame them for getting political in response.
> No Category 3, 4 or 5 hurricane has made landfall in the U.S. since Hurricane Wilma in 2005
That is true, but highly misleading. Yes, Sandy was a Cat 2 when she made landfall in the U.S., but she was a Cat 3 before that, and she was the largest (in terms of area) Atlantic hurricane in recorded history. She was also (and this is the part that really matters) the second costliest hurricane in U.S. history, second only to Katrina, and dwarfing the #3 slot (Ike, in 2008) by a factor of 2.
Look at the top comments on that article and you can easily see why people want to avoid him. He may believe in climate change, but his work is being used to justify climate change denial.
That's like trying to convince people to vaccinate their children, but then giving a bullhorn to a guy standing outside the clinic screaming about possible negative side effects.
Obviously I support his right to publish his findings, but he's misconstruing attempts to stop the spread of misinformation (as in his work is being used to justify misinformation) as censorship.
From Wikipedia on Piekle [1]:
"Any conceivable emissions reductions policies, even if successful, cannot have a perceptible impact on the climate for many decades", and from this he concludes that, "In coming decades the only policies that can effectively be used to manage the immediate effects of climate variability and change will be adaptive."
This sort of do-nothing fatalism is enormously disingenuous and dangerous, and his WSJ op-ed badly understates his criticism as mainly about current weather effects.
The fact that Pielke's dad was also a high-profile climate change denier can't help, given the fact these sort of "decades to take effect!" arguments have themselves now been made for decades as part of a typical corporate/politically-motivated FUD campaign.
Big oil WANTS carbon tax as this would create predictability and stability albeit at a cost. What big oil doesn't want is unpredictable policy - policy that Washington think tanks want to put in place. Right wingers are terrified of progressive policies and this Pielkle fella is not doing the world any favors by advocating for useless policies such as a carbon tax. He may have good intentions and may be factually correct in his observations about lack of clear evidence but this doesn't change the fact that his work is being used to hinder climate progress.
Is there anything untrue in that quote? Don't we accept that stopping carbon emissions now won't do anything to the climate for at least a few decades? He clearly says "manage the immediate effects". Are you disagreeing and saying that reducing carbon emissions now can effectively manage the effects in the next few decades?
Saying that accepted truth is "dangerous" is what religions do. We don't have to fool ourselves into believing things are worse than they really are. It's OK if climate change won't really end civilization within our lifetimes - or ever.
"Although it is too soon to tell how the Trump administration will engage the scientific community"
I'm gonna go out here on a limb and say Trump hasn't done a good job so far. He's claimed that vaccines cause autism. Something that's been debunked over and over. Skeptism about vaccines has made things much more difficult for immunocompromised kids. My friend's kid had cancer and the low rates of vaccination in town made things much more dicey for them.
The second is Trump has claimed that China is responsible for making up global warming.
Right now you've got the house committee on science tweeting out brietbart links.
The key will be funding. Will he continue to fund science? Science in many ways is the new manufacturing. Research universities are among the largest employers in the Midwest. It's not all white collar jobs. There are many different types of jobs that work towards creating knowledge.
Readit News
> Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back—providing aid and comfort to the enemy.
In recent years people seem to be more and more comfortable with this war metaphor, not as a matter for concern and reflection, but as a subject of pride. Well, of course we have to win the battle of ideas; it's a culture war after all!
When you think in this way, the goal of argument isn't to find what's true, but to win. And if you have to advance some shaky ideas on your side or ignore some inconvenient facts on theirs, well, it's all in the service of a greater truth anyway, right?
But how can you fight a war in the service of truth when truth is its first casualty?
"I believe climate change is real and that human emissions of greenhouse gases risk justifying action, including a carbon tax. But my research led me to a conclusion that many climate campaigners find unacceptable: There is scant evidence to indicate that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought have become more frequent or intense in the U.S. or globally. In fact we are in an era of good fortune when it comes to extreme weather. This is a topic I’ve studied and published on as much as anyone over two decades. My conclusion might be wrong, but I think I’ve earned the right to share this research without risk to my career."
I agree with Popper's definition of science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
A discipline is scientific if it is possible to challenge it, if it can be proven wrong (it doesn't mean it will, but there is a way to prove it wrong).
If the discipline is using political pressure to prevent anyone from doing so, it cannot be called science anymore. A political movement would be a more appropriate term.
And more generally, my profession (finance) is making extensive use of mathematical models to model something too complex to be understood perfectly (financial markets / the economy). But we know our models suck, because we could do experiment on them, we can test them against reality. We know we can build models or investment strategies that do great in back-testing but fall apart as soon as they go live (I have seen that so many times first hand). I give very little credibility to someone who comes up with a complex mathematical model that pretends it will predict the climate in 30 years, knowing that we will only know if his model was reliable in 30 years, we have no way to test it now. Therefore it cannot be falsified and therefore I don't think it is science.
> A discipline is scientific if it is possible to challenge it, if it can be proven wrong (it doesn't mean it will, but there is a way to prove it wrong).
Thank you for that. I feel relieved (and on HN, a little bit personally vindicated) for seeing this.
In the past I've posted 'about taking the climate change alarmism with a grain of salt.' I've had people attack me personally for that. I've had people write to me on here about 'Mad Max' scenarios, and that climate change could lead people to resort to nuclear war.
The fact is that greenhouse gas emissions leading to long-term temperature rise is what is science. The alarmism, Mad Max scenarios, and the idea that technological progress will not be able to help us adapt (or what is especially heretical, reap the rewards of new resources: countries are already beginning to squabble over these, yet even mentioning they exist garners immediate scorn for expressing such a blasphemous idea--it does not garner informed debate!) is what is politics.
That said, I agree with the author we should take action against climate change: we have a long history of basically screwing up our environment on earth, we should try to tread more carefully in the future.
The whole thing also reminds me of what some criticized the War on Poverty for: the industry has become a movement of individuals whose careers and institutions have, perhaps, become more important than the underlying cause of the movement itself.
Trying to express these ideas reminds me of this quote:
> All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
If you let the journalism blind you to the science, then you're going to be misinformed. Read the IPCC reports cover to cover, and then follow up with the references if you don't think there is real science being done.
'I was right to question the IPCC’s 2007 report, which included a graph purporting to show that disaster costs were rising due to global temperature increases. The graph was later revealed to have been based on invented and inaccurate information, as I documented in my book “The Climate Fix.” The insurance industry scientist Robert-Muir Wood of Risk Management Solutions had smuggled the graph into the IPCC report. He explained in a public debate with me in London in 2010 that he had included the graph and misreferenced it because he expected future research to show a relationship between increasing disaster costs and rising temperatures.
When his research was eventually published in 2008, well after the IPCC report, it concluded the opposite: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and normalized catastrophe losses.” Whoops.'
If he'd written something like "Because there is no relationship between temperature increase and catastrophes, as proven by the insufficient evidence to support that, I was right to question the report", then you'd be right. But he didn't say that. I think he's only saying that he was right to question the report because that graph was inaccurate and invented, and because later data showed there was insufficient evidence for the relationship it was supposed to show. If reports shouldn't contain inaccurate and invented data, especially invented data that isn't similar to empirical data, then he was right to question it.
https://www.amazon.com/Doubt-Their-Product-Industrys-Threate...
I'm glad that a guy with a political science degree is interested in scientific topics. But I think he'd be a little more sensitive to the broader problem of non-experts jumping in to an area that has become highly politicized, and where industry has such a strong short-term incentive to undermine the appearance of scientific consensus.
Try telling that to the residents of California or Gatlinburg, TN.
OK, anecdotes do not constitute data. So here's some data:
https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_stats_totalFires.html
Look at the number of acres burned, which is the metric that matters. The upward trend over the past few decades is unmistakable even without fancy statistical tests. And that's just what I was able to find in five minutes on a ridiculously slow internet connection.
It's hard to tell the difference between "there is scant evidence" and "there wasn't any evidence where I happened to look for it."
[UPDATE:] Here is some evidence that the author is being deliberately deceptive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13099156
This kind of dismissal of a no-doubt nuanced opinion on a scientific issue based on "what you found in five minutes on the internet" brings literally nothing to the conversation.
It's as ridiculous to cite an increase in forest fire severity and frequency as proof of ACC as it is to cite a few particularly bad snowstorms to deny it. Deniers will legitimately cry foul when you use the same bogus rhetorical tools that you forbid to your opponents.
The key point here is that you and I should be able to openly debate acres burned vs total number of fires without me trying to track you down and get you fired, or you having me banned from HN.
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/adai/papers/Dai-drought_WIRES201...
So I think it's fair to say that while the evidence may be debatable, it is not "scant".
it wasn't the people who accept global warming as a reality who started politicizing this. It's unfair to blame them for getting political in response.
That is true, but highly misleading. Yes, Sandy was a Cat 2 when she made landfall in the U.S., but she was a Cat 3 before that, and she was the largest (in terms of area) Atlantic hurricane in recorded history. She was also (and this is the part that really matters) the second costliest hurricane in U.S. history, second only to Katrina, and dwarfing the #3 slot (Ike, in 2008) by a factor of 2.
That's like trying to convince people to vaccinate their children, but then giving a bullhorn to a guy standing outside the clinic screaming about possible negative side effects.
Obviously I support his right to publish his findings, but he's misconstruing attempts to stop the spread of misinformation (as in his work is being used to justify misinformation) as censorship.
No one is suggesting suppression or censorship. But we should be free to exclude, dismiss, and ignore information we find harmful or irrelevant.
Dead Comment
This sort of do-nothing fatalism is enormously disingenuous and dangerous, and his WSJ op-ed badly understates his criticism as mainly about current weather effects.
The fact that Pielke's dad was also a high-profile climate change denier can't help, given the fact these sort of "decades to take effect!" arguments have themselves now been made for decades as part of a typical corporate/politically-motivated FUD campaign.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_A._Pielke,_Jr.
Saying that accepted truth is "dangerous" is what religions do. We don't have to fool ourselves into believing things are worse than they really are. It's OK if climate change won't really end civilization within our lifetimes - or ever.
I'm gonna go out here on a limb and say Trump hasn't done a good job so far. He's claimed that vaccines cause autism. Something that's been debunked over and over. Skeptism about vaccines has made things much more difficult for immunocompromised kids. My friend's kid had cancer and the low rates of vaccination in town made things much more dicey for them.
The second is Trump has claimed that China is responsible for making up global warming.
Right now you've got the house committee on science tweeting out brietbart links.
The key will be funding. Will he continue to fund science? Science in many ways is the new manufacturing. Research universities are among the largest employers in the Midwest. It's not all white collar jobs. There are many different types of jobs that work towards creating knowledge.
I think it's pretty dishonest to pretend it's still a "wait and see" kinda thing.