Not sure what this is worth, but it struck me.
The gulf between people who believe in climate change and those who don't is so wide that at first it seemed to me that the two sides must be reasoning according to different rules. But on reflection, that's not quite it.
People who believe that climate change is real reason something like this: scientists have observed many phenomena that are well-explained if we assume climate change is real, but would be too much of a coincidence otherwise. And so it's reasonable to believe in climate change; it's the best explanation.
Climate change skeptics reason something like this: we have observed many reports of alleged phenomena that supposedly point to climate change. These reports would be well-explained if we assume that a cabal of anti-capitalist scientists has conspired to lie, cherry-pick data and generally misrepresent things, but would be too much of a coincidence otherwise.
That's a bit simple, but you get the idea. The form of the reasoning isn't so different, but people who think climate change is real trust that overall, climate scientists aren't cooking the books; people who don't believe in climate change focus on the reports themselves rather than what they report, and see evidence of an intellectual conspiracy.
Of course, for the climate skeptic's reasoning to work, climate change must be much less antecedently probable than the existence of a massive, powerful, cross-national, cross-linguistic, cross-disciplinary cabal.
I'd guess there's a broader difference: people who take science seriously are likely to be suspicious of conspiracy theories for a simple reason: massive conspiracies call for a lot of moving parts. People being what they are, it's way too easy for sand to get in the gears.
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6 comments:
Part of the trouble with really simple pictures like this is that it inevitable paints groups of people as monolithic, without important differences between them. Is a massive international conspiracy really the best representation of the "climate skeptics?" Why not say that climate scientists are susceptible to group-think, dogma, and hasty conclusions?
I've seen this quite a lot in my department among the high-energy physicists. There's enormous excitement about the potential discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC. There's not just excitement, but a good deal of dogma that it will in fact be found. We had one seminar speaker predict that within a year the Higgs would be found. (That was over a year ago now.) Theorists I know working in this field are strong believers. But, I don't think the confidence can be justified: not only do some theories of the Higgs mechanism place it out of the experimental window of the LHC, there are grand-unified theories that predict there is no physics to see until much higher energies. When I suggest that we may not be able to see the Higgs or that it might not even exist, this inspires some rather rabid reactions from them. The truth is that we are moving into the darkness and only have a few clues as to what to expect.
As dangerous as the so-called "climate skeptics" are, it's definitely true that the "climate believers" are full of their own dogma. I remember once seeing a BBC piece showing the projected fresh water supplies around the globe. This was carried to (as I recall) something like 100 years in the future. Can that projection possibly be serious? Are things really *that* well and precisely understood? Or are the models being taken further than they should be for some other reason?
You're right. What I said is too simple. And I can hardly argue with you when you say that there are fads and examples of groupthink in science. That said, there's something interesting here that I'd like to understand better.
The case for global warming is broad-based and draws from lines of evidence that are pretty diverse. It's a classic case of multiple converging lines of evidence. Belief that the Higgs boson is just around the corner -- as you point out -- isn't like that. So what's interesting here -- it's like the evolution case, I think -- is that there's a large group of people who dismiss wide swaths of expertise wholesale. It may well not be fair to say that they all believe in a conspiracy theory. And it may also not be fair to say that none of them have interesting objections. But when this sort of thing happens (vaccination avoidance is perhaps another case) I'll have to admit that I find myself looking for diagnoses rather than rationales.
Thanks for your thoughts! Much appreciated.
By and by, you might be interested in this Scientific American piece about Judith Curry. She's a well-known climate scientist who has been critical of climate science, how it has been handled politically, and actively engages the community of "skeptics." What she has been doing is trying to get things right, and be clear about what's really known and what's not known. As a result, she's something of a pariah among climate scientists and is selectively cited by "skeptics":
"Climate skeptics have seized on Curry’s statements to cast doubt on the basic science of climate change. So it is important to emphasize that nothing she encountered led her to question the science; she still has no doubt that the planet is warming, that human-generated greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, are in large part to blame, or that the plausible worst-case scenario could be catastrophic....
...The uncertainty lies in both the data about past climate and the models that project future climate. Curry asserts that scientists haven’t adequately dealt with the uncertainty in their calculations and don’t even know with precision what’s arguably the most basic number in the field: the climate forcing from CO2—that is, the amount of warming a doubling of CO2 alone would cause without any amplifying or mitigating effects from melting ice, increased water vapor or any of a dozen other factors."
It bothers me that a scientist critically and honestly engaging the justification and limits of climate models is viewed as a maverick (or a 'heretic' as Scientific American calls her). Whether her particular views on this or that matter are right is beyond my competence to judge, but she is doing what she ought to be doing by participating in public dialog, contributing her own scientific expertise. Perhaps my sympathy for her is motivated by political naivety, though.
Do you have a take on this?
Not familiar with the case, but I share your worry. I'd suppose that part of the explanation is a worry about giving aid and comfort to the enemy, so to speak. But I agree that this isn't a good enough reason.
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