[Update a few minutes later]
A lot more links and thoughts on the Pope’s anti-human anti-poor encyclical.
Category Archives: Science And Society
Science, Uncertainty And Advocacy
Judith Curry is attending an interesting conference in the UK, and has some formal comments:
Some people regard any engagement of a scientist with the policy process as advocacy – I disagree. The way I look at it is that advocacy involves forceful persuasion, which is consistent with the legal definition of advocacy.
In the code of ethics for lawyers, where forceful persuasion is part of their job description, they are ethically bound only not to state something that they know to be false. Lawyers are under no compunction to introduce evidence that hurts their case – that’s the other side’s job.
Unlike lawyers, scientists are supposed to search for truth, and scientific norms encourage disclosure of sources and magnitude of uncertainty. Now if you are a scientist advocating for a specific issue, uncertainty will get in the way of your forceful persuasion.
In principle, scientists can ethically and effectively advocate for an issue, provided that their statements are honest and they disclose uncertainties. In practice, too many scientists, and worse yet professional societies, are conducting their advocacy for emissions reductions in a manner that is not responsible in context of the norms of science.
Much of climate “science” abandoned science years ago, going back to Schneider.
The Pope’s Climate Encyclical
Trying to get through it in order to critique it, but it’s long and turgid. Really needs editing.
[Update a while later]
Anyway, the editors at National Review waded through it.
“Gun-Free” Zones
…are an easy target for killers. It’s an evergreen theme, the empirical evidence is overwhelming, it’s completely logical, yet every time this happens those who want the government to run our lives use it as a call to disarm us.
Mark Steyn’s Latest
Go read it. You know you want to:
As for my basing a large part of my career on attacking Mann, I do sometimes marvel at the way people who profess to be saving the planet can be so fantastically parochial. In 2001, I wrote about the then-newish hockey stick in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph and Canada’s National Post, and some five years later in The Australian. But, as far as I recall, until November 2009 I had never ever mentioned Michael E Mann’s name in print. That was the month Climategate broke, of course, and I alluded to him a handful of times in the ensuing weeks. (Mann knows all this because I responded to his discovery requests almost a year-and-a-half ago, since when he’s refused to respond to mine.) And after that handful of times, I never mentioned him again until a 2012 blog post for which he’s suing me.
So now I mention him somewhat more often.
The same is true of me, in fact. If this does go to trial, Professor Mann is going to be very disappointed to discover how little attention I paid him up until I wrote that blog post.
Federal Dietary Guidelines
…are based on “pseudoscience.”
I think that’s being kind. They’re based on junk science. And they’re deadly:
The confluence of self-interest, institutional inertia, and scientific incompetence has led us to where we are today. The federal government has massively increased spending on nutrition and obesity research over the past few decades, and now spends over $2 billion of taxpayer’s money per year. Unfortunately, the people that control that funding are the same researchers that use these anecdotal methods, train the next generation of researchers, and control the publication of scientific papers. As such, new methods and innovative research is stifled. The same researchers are getting funded to do the same research year after year after year. This inertia and self-interest are exacerbated by the exorbitant amount of grant funding established researchers receive. As with many things in life, follow the money.
Say, isn’t there another field of science with profound public-policy implications that operates under the same incentives and pressures?
Another All-Beef Diet
Of course, despite the results, she gets “warned” by “nutritionists.”
A New Book From Mark Steyn
Noted without comment.
The Court “Victory” For The EPA
This doesn’t sound like a huge legal victory for the administration. It only postpones an actual ruling until later this summer.
Climate-Change Communications
The strategy of hyping certainty and a scientific consensus and dismissing decadal variability is a bad move for communicating a very complex, wicked problem such as climate change. Apart from the ‘meaningful’ issue, its an issue of trust – hyping certainty and a premature consensus does not help the issue of public trust in the science.
This new paper is especially interesting in context of the Karl et al paper, that ‘disappears’ the hiatus. I suspect that the main take home message for the public (those paying attention, anyways) is that the data is really really uncertain and there is plenty of opportunity for scientists to ‘cherry pick’ methods to get desired results.
Apart from the issue of how IPCC leaders communicate the science to the public, this paper also has important implications for journalists. The paper has a vindication of sorts for David Rose, who asked hard hitting questions about the pause at the Stockholm press conference.
It’s a good, and necessary first step.