Climate scientists politicised by default?

Comment in response to Roger Pielke Jr. accusing Realclimate of becoming 'pathologically politicised':

If I may have a go at articulating why I think you're wrong? First-off, let me see if I've got your argument correct. You say Realclimate have politicised the science, and this is shown because they attack anyone who questions that the science of climate change is certain, like Sen. Inhofe, Fox News etc.

First point: there is probably scientific illiteracy right across the political spectrum - but the truth is, it tends to be right-leaning thinkers who question climate science. If you're interested, I've written about how this affectively hides most left-of-centre scientific illiteracy from climate arguments.

This means that one can imply Realclimate as 'taking a political position' by default. But I think you muddy the picture then: this most emphatically does not mean Realclimate writers are politicizing science. By your reasoning, the only way Realclimate could become politically neutral would be to "even themselves out" by arguing with left-of-centre climate skeptics. Obviously, that's ridiculous: Realclimate cannot be held responsible for who decides to question the science, and it's certainly false to assign them to a political position "by default" in the way you seem to be doing.

Second: the uncertainty meme is a huge problem. You may have picked up on all the recent noise about scientists as lords of certainty in the UK: a picture has been painted of scientists as authoritarian figures, using a mythical scientific certainty to impose their will on the world. I think it's entirely reasonable of Realclimate and others to point out - this utterly misrepresents the science. I cannot imagine that people making these claims have actually - for example - read the IPCC's uncertainty guidance notes.

You'll have seen Realclimate's last post on uncertainty too - I won't attempt to restate all the great points made there. What I'd love to read from you is a more detailed piece on exactly how you think climate scientists are treating uncertainty incorrectly. I can't help but conclude that, as Brad Delong points out, most skeptics appear to have forgotten "uncertainty has two tails." Certainly, there's no scientific contradiction between understanding the range of uncertainties whilst still claiming we know enough to act. In citing that press call, you seem to be saying this is problematic?

I also note your choice of Copenhagen read - James Scott's Seeing like a State. This book is kind of my PhD bible. I wonder what connections you see between Scott's / Hayek's radical uncertainty thesis ("everything is just too complex for state political action to succeed") and scientific uncertainty? For me, they're two very different animals. One could be 99% certain that climate change posed a dire threat to humanity, and still be 100% skeptical about political action having a hope of solving the problem. Interestingly, this isn't a position one comes across very often.

Comments

And your thoughts on the

And your thoughts on the content of the Climategate emails and other files.......?

wv: siding evidence - hahaha.

Climategate

I imagine my thoughts on Swifthack are probably quite predictable. Even if the CRU turned out to have been an Al Qaida training camp, its work is one tiny part of the climate science. Even if all climate models evaporated and all paleo studies were suddenly magicked out of existence, we'd still have the physics of CO2 forcing and a vast pile of empirical evidence from the real world showing the climate's changing. For the basics, it's really not rocket science. It also won't matter what the inquiry finds, will it?

You're nothing if not good at

You're nothing if not good at deadpan comedy Dan.

The fact that one of the four main climate records is now shown to have been completely hosed and manipulated is "one tiny part of the climate science" is pretty funny, even for you, and especially given that NASA seem to be equally shy in releasing their data.

Never mind the other issues too, like the destruction / "loss" of data, the conspiracy to ostracise sceptics from "peer reviewed" literature, or the brazen attempts to avoid FOIA requests - even to the point of proposing destroying the data rather than release it.

Oh, and I saw this email (amongst many others) and thought of you:

"Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted."

No faux knee-jerk outrage this time?

Back to sleep then.

Swifthack

Hey Danny. I've got a larger post brewing about all the detail of this stuff, but just a quick point: you may recall, when you jokingly suggested Michael Mann should be beaten with his own hockey stick, I got pretty upset. You said I'd had a humour fail. I still have a humour fail when it comes to this subject. I didn't - and don't - think that even joking about using violence is tolerable in online discussions. Or rather, the internet's a broad church - but I don't want to take part in such discussions, and its certainly not a good way to discuss scientific issues. I've seen similar on other blogs - a recent example when someone linked to a Lindzen paper that claimed the only evidence for the greenhouse effect came from computer models. I can quite see why the commenter got exasperated, but that never justifies threatening people. Even if it's meant in jest, it can come across as bullying. So I'm not sure why you saw that and thought of me? Maybe I've done something similar in a fit of rage one time? Don't remember doing so, but do please correct me.

Right, I'll get back to my bovine soma-work in the Matrix then. It's good to know there's some clear-sighted Neos out there fighting the good fight.

Found it

Actually, I found myself making a joke-reference to violence:

p.s. in the unlikely event this ever gets read: if anyone ever quotes this out of context, I will find out where you live and burn your house down. Just so's you know.

Apologies: it seemed funny at the time, but that would be hypocritical. I'll try and refrain in future.

For what it's worth, the

For what it's worth, the position you don't come across very often is pretty much mine. It's a lonely, pessimistic place to be. Sob.

Alone

Nick - I probably think the same thing, but am trying not to believe it. Here's my current prediction: in twenty or thirty year's time, we will probably have abjectly failed to curb co2 emissions, given that current solutions include technologies that haven't actually been tested on a large scale. At best, the rate of increase will have levelled out. As oil suppliles dwindle, presented with the choice of burning more coal or leaving it in the ground, we will have started burning more coal. At this point, God will be laughing his ass off. He likes presenting us with these choices he knows we'll have to fail; its in our nature. (I enjoy being an atheist angry at God.)

The effects of warming will either a) be impossible to ignore, and so those ideologically opposed to AGW will have been forced more solidly into a position that says: the warming is not human-caused. Or, it's human-made, but its due to de-vegetation, and increasing co2 will actually improve that situation. At any rate, something that means we can still burn coal. So we'll probably continue to increase atmospheric co2 up to the 21st century, at which point all bets are off. At the very least, major land icesheets will be on their way into the ocean by now, and we'll have bequethed collosal sea-level rises to people in the coming 2-300 years. Once Greenland starts going, it's a car-crash in slow motion - we can't do a fart about it. Actually, farting will make it worse - more methane. Or b) we're not warming. The anti-AGW people have all turned out to be correct: co2 is, in fact, not a greenhouse gas at all, and somehow we got the physics of it completely wrong for the past two hundred years, all those satellites measuring the change in IR radiation were measuring wrong, and all those natural changes that seemed to corroborate the theory were a temporary variation. Phew. Thank God for that.

Often, there's an argument that the case for AGW is *a bit* right, but not enough to worry about right now. The question then becomes: OK, so what amount of co2 is too much? Are you saying we can carry on up to 1000ppm, or what? Or shall we carry on right up to point where we start actually suffocating ourselves? This would clearly be another good tack for anyone wanting to oppose action now or in the near future: "I have a better model that says 1500ppm is the safe point. That's well into the 21st century, or even later - chill out."

Or perhaps: we warm the world just enough to put off the next ice age. Humankind in x thousand years will thank us for saving them from being driven to the equator by mile-high ice sheets reaching down to London. Yay for co2!