But they shouldn’t. What they are doing, though they may not be aware of it, is falling for the logical fallacy sometimes known as argumentum ad verecundiam (‘argument to respect’) and sometimes as ipse dixit (‘he himself said it’). This is the grown-up version of a debating technique popularly used in playgrounds by eight-year old boys: ‘My dad says Father Christmas does exist and my dad knows because he’s been to the North Pole, so there’ – the implication being, of course, that ‘My dad’s’ wisdom and authority is so manifestly great it brooks no opposition.
The correct response to the ‘My dad says’ line is – if only you but knew it when you were eight years old – ‘Well, poo to what your Dad says. What does he know about anything anyway?’ It is also the broadly correct response to the use of argumentum ad verecundiam. Sure, it’s quite likely that scientists of the IPCC and the Royal Society have a better grasp of the science of global warming than, say, your dad. Or even my son’s dad. But likelihood is not the same thing as certainty. No person or institution, however apparently wise, reverend and distinguished, has a monopoly on infallible truth.
Mind you, if you tried to explain this to the person at the party, I doubt they’d be persuaded to change their mind. In fact, I know they wouldn’t because I tried it once during a heated discussion at a Christmas drinks party with a fellow blogger (who has since become a very loyal friend and ally) named Will Heaven. Heaven considered it plain absurd that I dared to quibble with ‘the vast majority’ of the world’s most distinguished scientists. ‘Oh yeah. Use the Appeal to Authority, why don’t you?’ I sneered. ‘Of course I’m appealing to authority. What’s wrong with that?’ replied Will.
Had I been more clever, I would have raised the subject of Post-Normal Science (PNS). You probably haven’t heard of PNS. I hadn’t myself until very recently but you’ll find it extremely useful for warding off climate change evil. If the Warmists are Voldemort – and they are – and you are Harry Potter (or Hermione or Ron, if you prefer) then PNS is your Defence Against the Dark Arts. So read this bit carefully. It might just save your life.
So. Post-Normal Science: a concept you won’t have heard of, invented by two men you’ve never heard of either – Jerome Ravetz and Silvio Funtowicz. Yet it has proved so secretly influential and so mightily important, that it has affected the course of the whole world. Without it, the whole AGW scare might never have happened.
Before there was Post-Normal Science, there must have been Normal Science, right? Right. Normal Science is the process I mentioned earlier, described by Thomas Kuhn in that influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – the one where older theories are replaced by newer, better theories, and so on ad infinitum.
Normal Science presupposes that scientists are motivated, above all else, by their selfless pursuit of objective truth. Of course, in real life it rarely quite works out that way, as Thomas Spratt pointed out as early as 1667 in his History of the Royal Society:
For whosoever has fix’d on his Cause, before he has experimented; can hardly avoid fitting his Experiment, and his Observations, to his own Cause, which he had before imagin’d; rather than the cause of the truth of the Experiment it self.
In other words, scientists are prone to ignoring inconvenient results. They also need to earn a living, just like the rest of us, and the direction their research takes is inevitably influenced by the funding available. If you want to research grey squirrels and your potential paymasters are only interested in red squirrels, well, tough. Unless you want to starve, red squirrels it is.
This was what President Eisenhower warned about over fifty years ago in his ‘Farewell Address to the Nation’ (January 1961):
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
Here Ike predicted more or less exactly what has come to pass with the massive government-funded climate-change industry, on which thousands of scientists depend for their livelihoods. Are they all fiddling the data so as to keep their jobs? Of course they’re not. As David Michaels noted in a 2008 article in the Washington Post about medical research, the corrupting process is usually much more subtle. It’s not so much that the research itself is shoddy, as that the questions it seeks to answer are skewed in a particular direction, so that evidence that suits your desired end is talked up – and that which doesn’t suit is conveniently ignored.
Of course scientists don’t like to admit this. Recently, my ‘climate scepticism’ was challenged on a BBC documentary by our friend Sir Paul Nurse, who was presenting a programme that asked why the public was losing its faith in scientists. One reason, I suggested, was the lack of integrity shown by many climate scientists, which might well be the result of the ‘funding effect’. Sir Paul chastely insisted that neither he nor any scientist he knew was so base as to have the integrity of his research distorted by funding. ‘So when the European Union alone spends more than five Manhattan Projects on the global warming industry, you don’t think it’s going to have a corrupting effect?’ I asked. Sir Paul remained adamant it hadn’t. Perhaps, scientists in his field – genetics – don’t get out much, or at least don’t get to hang out with many climate scientists. Just as there are rewards for scientists whose research proves the ‘right’ things for their employers, so a dire fate can await those who reach the ‘wrong’ conclusions. Galileo suffered for this at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church; so too did the Soviet geneticists murdered under Stalin. Their modern-day counterparts would include almost any scientist whose research tends towards climate-change scepticism. And also James Enstrom and Geoffrey Kabat.
James and Geoffrey who? Yes, quite. If they’d been the men who proved that passive smoking really exists, there would no doubt be official statues of them in every square. But they didn’t. In fact their research demonstrated just the opposite, which is why their work has been vilified or suppressed by the publicly funded medical establishment ever since.
And the crazy thing is, they never set out to be the poster boys for smokers’ liberty. Quite the opposite. They both hated smoking. That’s why when they began to look into the effects of secondary smoke inhalation, they were full of bright hopes that their research would help nail this great social evil once and for all. And in this, they had the full support of their main sponsors, the American Cancer Society and the Tobacco Related Disease Research Program.
Enstrom and Kabat analysed thirty years of American Cancer Society data (1959 to 1989) that had tracked no fewer than 118,000 Californians and was the world’s first major long-term investigation into the effects of passive smoking. But as their study progressed, Enstrom and Kabat began to realise something rather awkward: they weren’t going to deliver the results their sponsors wanted. As they discovered, exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (i.e. second-hand smoke or ‘passive smoking’), no matter how intense or prolonged, creates no significantly increased risk of heart disease or lung cancer.
From being the heroes of the health lobby, Enstrom and Kabat became its number one villains. The American Cancer Society and the Tobacco Related Disease Research Program dropped them like a hot potato. The only way Enstrom and Kabat could afford to complete their research was – irony of ironies – with the backi
ng of the cigarette industry. Of course, this gave their critics the ammunition they needed not to take their work seriously. After all, it was clearly biased: it had been funded by Big Tobacco.
So Enstrom and Kabat didn’t get a Nobel Prize for services to the lungs of smokers’ families, nor did they get marble busts of themselves on either side of the portico of the World Health Organization. But it would be nice to think their efforts produced something far more rewarding: the warm glow you get when you know you’ve done the Right Thing.
Mind you, for scientists of Enstrom and Kabat’s generation, it would have been unthinkable to do otherwise. To manipulate scientific evidence to particular ends could hardly be called proper – or indeed ‘normal’ – science at all. Why, it would be so unorthodox you’d have to call it something else entirely different. You’d have to call it…well, we’ll come to that in a minute.
In December 2009, shortly after the Climategate scandal broke, the BBC made an uncharacteristically fair and balanced attempt at examining some of these issues on its Radio 4 debating programme, The Moral Maze.
‘Can science ever be truly morally neutral?’ the programme asked.
The leaking of e-mails from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit has raised the issue of where should we draw the line between science and campaigning. In a complex world of competing interests, it’s vital that we have an independent and rational method to judge and inform policies. But is it naïve to expect scientists to put their personal views aside when dealing with such an important issue? Do we rely too much on scientific evidence to shape policy and is it driving out political and moral debate in society?
Among the expert witnesses called to testify on the programme was Lewis Wolpert, Emeritus Professor in Cell and Developmental Biology at University College, London. Professor Wolpert (born 1929) was quite adamant about a scientist’s proper role. ‘Science is value-free,’ he has often said. ‘I regard it as ethically unacceptable and impractical to censor any aspect of trying to understand the nature of our world.’
But surely there must be exceptions, Professor Wolpert was asked on the programme. Suppose a scientist were to discover something as deadly as the atom bomb or some new secret whose effects on mankind were most likely to be deleterious; surely then he would have a duty to suppress it for the good of humanity? Not at all, Wolpert replied. It is not for the scientist to make moral judgements. His function is to serve only the truth.
Now consider this statement from a Discover magazine interview with the late Stephen Schneider (1945–2010), founder and editor of the journal Climatic Change, IPCC lead author and Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change at Stanford University. Schneider was one of the foremost cheerleaders for the AGW scare, apparently having forgotten that back in the 1970s, during his tender formative years, he was one of the leading advocates for the perils of global cooling.
At first Schneider appears to be in full agreement with Professor Wolpert:
On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but – which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts.
But then he qualifies his statement:
On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.
Er, right, Professor Schneider. So when, back in 1987, Time magazine rang and asked you for a quote for its ‘The Heat Is On’ cover story, and you said ‘Humans are altering the earth’s surface and changing the atmosphere at such a rate that we have become a competitor with natural forces that maintain our climate. What is new is the potential irreversibility of the changes that are now taking place’ – which hat were you wearing? Your ‘science’ hat? Or your ‘human being’ hat? And did you ever go to the trouble of pointing out the distinction to the journalist, who presumably rang you for scientific expertise rather than for your propagandising skills at offering up ‘scary scenarios’?
Before we get on to Post-Normal Science – and we’re nearly there, now: close enough to smell the putrescence – I’d just like to dwell briefly on some of Schneider’s phrases.
Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.
Mm. Nice; reasonable; undogmatic; thoughtful.
We are not just scientists but human beings as well.
Yes! Yes! Not one of those horrid people in a white coat, with mad staring eyes and wild hair and crazy labs full of bubbling test tubes spewing evil-smelling gases – but a warm, lovable kind of guy who probably washes the dishes, writes nice thank-you letters and remembers his wedding anniversary and other nice, caring human-being kinds of things.
Like most people we’d like to make the world a better place.
Phew! And yay! You are so our kind of scientist, Stephen. Not one of those world-destroying types, like you find in some labs. But one of the good ones, who really cares. We love you Stephen Schneider!
No, not really. I’m just trying to point up something I’ve noticed quite a bit among advocates of the AGW agenda. Never mind whether it’s nice Jonathon Porritt, with his Etonian charm, or nice Rajendra Pachauri, with his straggly yogi’s hair, or nice George Monbiot with his soft-spoken otherworldliness, or nice Al Gore with his frayed lovable air of some portly, slightly battered, once incredibly expensive teddy bear bought for one of the Rockefeller kids in the 1930s. They’re all very good at presenting themselves as men who – above all else – really, really care. They’re doing what they do for the good of the world. They have no underlying agenda. They’re not dogmatists. Theirs is quite simply the position that any reasonable person would wish to adopt. The nice position.
I got this sensation again when reading one of the guest posts on Watts Up With That? (WUWT). It was a very long, rambling, and slightly obscure post by a determinedly nice-and-reasonable-sounding fellow named Jerry Ravetz, whose name vaguely rang a bell, though I couldn’t remember why at first.
Anyway, the commenters at WUWT couldn’t get enough of him. ‘Great read!!! Wonderful analysis!!!’ said one. ‘Stunning, a tour de force,’ said another. ‘This is the best article on the subject I have ever read,’ said a third. By which stage, I was starting to worry.
You see, I’d always had bags of respect for the insight and intelligence and superior understanding of the people who comment at WUWT. (It was one of them, you’ll remember, that came up with the name ‘Climategate’.) Yet here they were applauding what struck me as a classic exercise in pseudo-academic obfuscation. This guy, whoever he was, was taking an awfully long time to say very little, and not very clearly at that.
No need for a point-by-point breakdown here. (If you’ve the time and the patience you can try it yourself, but it’ll be like wrestling an eel.) Suffice to say that the truth suddenly dawned when I came to the comment by ScientistForTruth:
I’m amazed. Looking at the ecstatic comments, I think most of you are about as happy as the Trojans who wheeled the horse, a gift from heaven they thought, within their walls and got drunk, only to find that night that their city had been infiltrated and lost after years of battle. Beware! Ravetz is a very bright guy and very perceptive but Ravetz and Hulme have done their utmost to dispatch ‘normal’ science. Now their ideas will destroy you.
Strong words. But ScientistForT
ruth was right. A few weeks earlier, I remembered reading his essay on Post-Normal Science (PNS). It’s by far the most thorough and intelligent demolition of PNS anyone has written and I recommend it hugely.
Here’s how the author sets out his stall:
What has become of science? We thought that science was about the pursuit of truth. Then we became perplexed at how quickly scientists have prostituted themselves in the service of political agendas. We have seen the unedifying spectacle of scientists refusing to share their data, fiddling their results, and resorting to ad hominem attacks on those who have exposed their work to be fraudulent. We have seen the Royal Society becoming a shamelessly crude advocacy society. We have seen President Obama choosing notorious climate alarmists and liars to be his personal advisors. We have seen the peer-review process and journal editors colluding to prevent publication of results that do not serve the politically-correct agenda, and scientists refusing to consider results that demolish their pet theories. What is going on here?
What is going on is that science is no longer what we thought it was. It is now a tool in the hands of socialists, and the smart money is flowing into the pockets of ‘scientists’ who will serve their agenda. Follow the money. Whilst traditional physics and chemistry departments are closing in British universities, and there is a shortage of science teachers, there is an abundance of cash being poured into departments that will serve socialist ends, and no shortage of acolytes desirous to use this as a route to power. Once there was modern science, which was hard work; now we have post-modern science, where the quest for real, absolute truth is out-dated, and ‘science’ is a wax nose that can be twisted in any direction to underpin the latest lying narrative in the pursuit of power. Except they didn’t call it ‘postmodern’ science because then we might smell a rat. They called it PNS (post-normal science) and hoped we wouldn’t notice.
Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future Page 11
