10 thoughts on “Science Is About Evidence”

    1. I used to be a long time participant in the BAUT forums (kilopi poster). One day, I stated my opinion that the human caused climate change movement was the biggest scientific fraud of the last 100 years, if not of all human history. For writing such heresy, I was suspended for 30 days. No one is allowed to state opinions that differ from the human caused climate change religion. I never went back.

        1. Lysenkoism would probably be in second place. Interesting how it was also politically driven.

          As for 3rd place, it’s a tough call. I’d rank the MMR vaccine controversy very high, perhaps 3rd place due to the number of children’s lives lost and impacted by it.

          Of course, any and all claims to “scientific socialism” would rank very high except they were never science.

    2. I used to read his blog regularly, but the constant politics and the total lack of skepticism with AGW claims ran me off. I wish people like him would realize how much their political biases ruin their credibility across the board.

  1. Actually, no subscription is required for Wall Street Journal articles. All you have to do is to use your favorite search engine on the title of the article and click the link.

    As for the “hockey stick” graph, it was effectively critiqued by Steven McIntyre, a Canadian businessman with a mathematical interest in climatology. He showed that the graph depended heavily on unreliable data, especially samples of tree rings from bristlecone pine trees, the growth patterns of which were often not responding to temperature at all. It also depended on a type of statistical filter that overweighted any samples showing sharp rises in the 20th century.

    Tree ring evidence shows that trees grew more in some years than in others. However, there are a lot of factors that can influence the growth of trees and their rings such as rainfall, sunshine and available nutrients. I see little evidence that temperature is the primary driving factor in tree growth. Has anyone done long term controlled studies of tree growth to isolate which factors are the most important?

  2. On the subject of “proxies”, I wonder if this is a proxy for this business of scientific consensus and deniers and all that jazz.

    We can’t really even discuss anthropogenic warming without getting into a ‘tiz ‘taint contest, even here on Rand’s fine Web site. But could we search for a scientific model for how scientific consensus works?

    I picked up a yellowing paperback of Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki and at least read parts of it.

    We all heard about this Norwegian dude with these theories of how cultural contact and migration took place by intercontinental sea voyages in pre-Henry the Navigator times, and that Kon Tiki was this balsa wood raft (how did that work, I used balsa in building lightweight operating aircraft models, and it is spongy to say the least?).

    What I didn’t know is that for all of Mr. Heyerdahl capturing the public imagination and the interest of National Geographic is that he was largely a “popular press” anthropologist, far outside of the scholarly consensus and that his voyages didn’t do a thing to change the minds of the right-thinking people.

    The story begins with a young Thor Heyerdahl settling in Tahiti to study the plants and animals and to make inferences of where they may have come from in relation to ocean currents and prevailing winds. We think of the great oceans as big pots of water, but mighty rivers run through them in the form of the ocean currents. He observed that in Tahiti, the winds and currents trended from east to west and that crews of small craft had the darndest time making any headway due east.

    WW-II intervened where the story goes he served in the resistance back in northern Norway. After the war, however, he had this Big Idea that everyone Had it All Wrong, that the Polynesians didn’t originate (at least directly) in SE Asia but rather crossed the Pacific from Peru or other places in the Americas.

    He writes about this part of the saga in Kon Tiki, and it is sort of a combination of a bad Jules Verne novel and a Monty Python sketch of a (Norwegian, in this case) explorer with a Big Idea. Not a person was interested in his book manuscript on the theory, but when he came up with the crazy idea of sailing/drifting in a balsa raft across thousands of miles of the Pacific, he got five other dudes to want to spend the next 4 months with him sleeping side by side in a shack on top of the raft along with the necessary financial support. And now you know The Rest of the Story.

    So I gather that the late Thor Heyerdahl is viewed as a latter-day adventurer in the heroic tradition of Byrd, Scott, Admundson, and Hillary, but to the scholarly community, he is still regarded as a crank, hardly removed from the Von Daniken fellow, having a good run in the popular press but not a scientist or a scholar of any repute?

    The overwhelming scholarly consensus is that the Polynesians must have sailed eastward from Southeast Asia and the idea they came from South America is nutty. But you don’t hear rants about “Polynesian origins denialists” because how the Polynesians “got there” or much of anything about the Polynesians apart from Notre Dame football isn’t of all that interest to anybody. Except that the Polynesians are going to be drowned out by Climate Change, and you hear about that on the evening news show.

    So, maybe we can’t talk openly and publically about Climate Change and The Temperature Record, without, like, getting sued by someone, but maybe we can talk about Polynesian Origins to understand how science works or doesn’t work.

    The overwhelming consensus is that people sailed from eastward in open boats, but the winds and especially the currents go westward at those latitudes (did the early Polynesians even have centerboards to allow sailing upwind let alone upcurrent, or is the prevailing theory that they were strong and paddled really, really hard?).

    But then there are some emerging gaps in The Consensus: Kennewick Man, a 9000 year old Native American, only people thought we was Caucasian and now they think he was Samoan? Or Ainu? The presence of the X Mitochondial haplotype among North Africans, South Americans, and Polynesians (I think the Mormons are trying to get mileage out of that one, but Heyerdahl was trying to establish there were numerous transoceanic cultural contacts pre 1492).

    So maybe the textbook ethnography we learned in school, of “The (Native Americans)”, “The Polynesians” is all wrong. There is some suggestion (Kennewick Man, the earliest contact between the Spanish and the peoples of the Americas, the earliest European sailer contact with the Pacific Islands, mDNA studies) that there may have been multiple waves of migration, current day Indians/Native Americans/First Nations as well as Polynesians may be just the surviving members of just one of multiple groups, maybe the Polynesians are SE Asians, but they first got to the NE coast of the Americas by the easterly ocean currents, migrated down to South America, and got to the South Pacific on the westerly ocean currents?

    So what am I saying? Maybe Climate Change denialists are cranks and the Consensus is always right, but there are other unsettled questions (Polynesian Origins, American First Nation Origins) for which their is an unyielding consensus, for which there are cranks, for which there are openings for the cranks based on new scientific findings. But these are questions that are not talked about all . . . the . . . time . . . on . . . the . . . evening . . . news.

    Someone care to fill us in on the Consensus regarding Polynesian Origins and why Thor Heyerdahl was nutty, or maybe simply, (ducks) Norwegian?

    1. But these are questions that are not talked about all . . . the . . . time . . . on . . . the . . . evening . . . news.

      On those questions, as on most scientific questions, the general public is happy to let the scientists thrash it out. But on climate change, evolution, the role of HIV in AIDS, the safety of vaccines and power lines and GMO foods, etc., there are bunches of laypeople who’ve convinced themselves that they know better, and can see through the scientists’ conspiracy.

      1. In other words, laypeople have interests in these subjects which they don’t have in theories of Polynesian origins.

        And that’s quite a logical mess there in a single paragraph. I see argument from authority (“scientists”), fallacy of the single cause (“laypeople who’ve convinced themselves that they know better” are blamed for the list), the use of the ambiguous phrase “climate change” instead of a more accurate phrase (such as “anthropogenic global warming”), grouping concern about climate research in with what most of us would consider far less scientifically valid concerns (such as “evolution” and “power lines”), and using what Wikpiedia calls the “thought terminating cliche” (use of the word, “conspiracy”).

        This is an example of why we can’t take you seriously, Jim. Your arguments are so logically degenerate here that there are fallacies embedded in the fallacies. Now, maybe you just are incapable of thinking in a logical way, but I think you can do better.

        My view on this is that we do have counterexamples where the consensus was wrong and was manufactured. Lysenkoism is the most notable example of Communist pseudo-science dogma achieved via a forced consensus. But one doesn’t need the threat of the gulag to create a similar effect.

        The thing I keep hearing about is an enduring funding bias. Written reports on research, even research which is unrelated to climatology, is being encouraged to take on pro-AGW stances by funding sources. That dynamic alone is sufficient to create a false consensus.

        In addition, we have notable politicization of key bottlenecks in climatology, particularly, the aggregation of temperature proxy data before the era of modern instrumentation (the “paleoclimate” data). For example, the Goddard Institute of Space Studies and the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit were both highly politicized and the primary purveyors of aggregation interpretations of historic and pre-historic climate-related data.

        Why is that important? Because there’s not enough high quality data available to calibrate climate modeling. One has to use the various proxies in order to fill in most of the historic period (before the early 19th century) and the vast prehistoric period. This allows for a profound bias by the funders of climatology. They can influence how paleoclimate data is interpreted. That in turn can cause climate models to be calibrated to bad data. And that in turn would lead to what we actually see, a deviation towards less aggressive AGW effects than are predicted by the models.

        There’s also the grotesque confirmation bias of “extreme weather”. That such dysfunctional scientific research is given so much credence indicates that there is a serious problem in the offing.

        This is the primary reason I advocate a “wait and see” strategy, a combination of collecting high quality climate and weather events data now with a reevaluation of the research in a few decades. At that point, if there is a genuine AGW effect with harmful effects, then we’ll have a much stronger case for doing anything about it than we do now. It’ll also be enough time for us to determine if there will be a near future decline in the use of fossil fuels.

Comments are closed.