Harvard Professor: When it Comes to Climate Alarmism, Scientists Should be More Like Religious Adherents

_{Barry Arrington

January 7, 2015

Intelligent Design}

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The 95 percent confidence limit reflects a long tradition in the history of science that valorizes skepticism as an antidote to religious faith.

But when it comes to climate alarmism, it is time to dump that standard.

Comments

hattip to commenter Gary at WMBriggs blog
"Oreskes was a lead author on a 1994 paper in Science titled “Verification, Validation, and Confirmation of Numerical Models in the Earth Sciences” that concluded with this paragraph:"
Finally we must admit that a model may confirm our biases and support incorrect intuitions. Therefore, models are most useful when they are used to challenge existing formulations, rather than to validate or verify them. Any scientist who is asked to use a model to verify or validate a predetermined result should be suspicious.
"Read the whole paper and marvel." http://www.likbez.com/AV/CS/Pre01-oreskes.pdf
DATCG_{January 8, 2015
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Graham: Climate change is thought to be responsible for disturbing the polar-vortex, resulting in the unusual intrusion of (cold) polar air much further south than normal. Boy that thought-to-be stuff is some amazing science. Just like that amorphous "climate change" being tested for "responsible" or not. OK so this political theater of "climate science" has one thing rather amazingly unique: as the only area where empiricism has been virtually entirely driven by "computer models". You know it really is funny that there are hardcore leftists out there that hate computers and harbor disdain for the whole modern technology enterprise, but they surely love this 'science' which came out of that enterprise. Do they get the irony here? Not a whit. They will get in their trucks and vans in Houston or Austin and trek over to the Kerrville festival. For days of singing and speaking about the folly of hydrocarbons and motor vehicles. And getting angry when I point out that horse and wagon dependency would make such a camping trip to their 'home base' economically impossible. I was just wondering BTW, if the amazing predictive powers behind the "climate change" movement also predicted the "polar vortex" behavior after all. Sure would be handy if it did and kind of funny if it did not. Do we have that scenario documented? If those computer models predicted climate change did they lay out this polar vortex scenario? Also what about those excessive hurricane predictions? One hurricane in six years, that's climate change?groovamos_{January 7, 2015
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Maybe you're just a bad gardener.AVS_{January 7, 2015
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Joe: Climate scientists dont agree with you.Graham2_{January 7, 2015
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No AVS, global warming chilled my garden to death. I got to keep the memories of planting, tending to it and watching it show promise only to kak out in August.Joe_{January 7, 2015
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Graham, The climate changes because weather patterns change due to several factors- the Sun's output, the earth's orbit, axial tilt, precession, volcanic output and ocean currents being the major factors. We are very minor players with our major contribution coming from urban heat islands (and dreaded plastic and styrofoam).Joe_{January 7, 2015
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The local looneybin let's you keep a garden little Joey? Wow, that's mighty nice of them.AVS_{January 7, 2015
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So hot we saw summer snow Joe: Climate change is thought to be responsible for disturbing the polar-vortex, resulting in the unusual intrusion of (cold) polar air much further south than normal.Graham2_{January 7, 2015
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The year just concluded is about to be declared the hottest one on record...
So hot we saw summer snow for the first time since the 19th century. And so hot our garden failed due to below normal temperatures- not one heat wave and abnormally chilly nights.
We know that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, we know that its concentration in the atmosphere has increased by about 40 percent since the industrial revolution, and we know the mechanism by which it warms the planet.
Umm, 40% of parts per million, which we know is not only very insignificant but also overwhelmed by other, more potent so-called greenhouse gases. It's like saying adding a fart to a sunroom will make it warmer (methane being a greenhouse gas).Joe_{January 7, 2015
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Graham2, why even 10%? Why not just take it on faith. If it is that important, just believe. Believe. Did you even read the title given to this post?ppolish_{January 7, 2015
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You are missing the point. The article is suggesting that science tends to be over-cautious: eg: the standard required for accepting the experimental evidence for the existence of the Higgs particle was 5 standard-deviations or some such, which is equivalent to 99.999% confidence or similar. The article goes on to say that this should be relaxed if the consequences of an error are serious: eg: in the case of climate change the standard may need to be lowered to 90% (why not 50% 10%?) because the cost of an error is so great.Graham2_{January 7, 2015
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I read most of the article--as much as I could stomach. Pure tripe. Here's an example: Even as scientists consciously rejected religion as a basis of natural knowledge, they held on to certain cultural presumptions about what kind of person had access to reliable knowledge. What does this mean? It's just nonsense. It was religious people who brought about, in the Christian West, what we know as science. The opposition she posits is just nonsense. And is she aware that as long ago as 300 A.D. St. Augustine cautioned against the use of the Bible as a source of scientific/natural knowledge. Then there is this: ypically, scientists apply a 95 percent confidence limit, meaning that they will accept a causal claim only if they can show that the odds of the relationship’s occurring by chance are no more than one in 20. But it also means that if there’s more than even a scant 5 percent possibility that an event occurred by chance, scientists will reject the causal claim. It’s like not gambling in Las Vegas even though you had a nearly 95 percent chance of winning. The second sentence doesn't necessarily follow from the first sentence. But, what's worse is this: she is basically saying that if we run some statistical analysis correlating two things, that if the odds are greater than 1 in 20 that something occurred by chance, then the results won't be accepted. Well, turn it around. If the odds of something happening by chance are less than 1 in 20, then the correlation is acceptable. The odds of the genetic code---that is, any three nucleotides 'coding' for a particular amino acid---are around 1 in 40. It would seem that we shouldn't consider this identification of a sequence of three nucleotides being associated with a particular amino acid as something that "happened by chance." We should accept that the sequence and the amino acid were associated in some way other than by chance. But how could you have "life" via random processes if this is so?PaV_{January 7, 2015
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Did you read the article you linked to ?Graham2_{January 7, 2015
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