Soccer Dad

The warming consensus

In a recent editorial, Climate of denial, the editors of the Washington Post tell us not to read too much into the hacked e-mails of climate researchers.

Whatever else comes out about the stolen documents, they have become examples of how not to react to climate-change deniers. You need not dig very far into the stolen documents to discover why climate researchers shouldn't overstate an already strong case. One discusses how scientists can't account for a recent, measured lack of warming -- a fact that climate-change deniers use to ignore the massive body of evidence that global warming could be a dire threat. Really, it demonstrates that the Earth's systems are extremely difficult to predict in detail.

The editors of the Post use the term "deniers" to describe those who are skeptical of the wild claims of the global warming alarmists; it's an excellent strategy for dismissing real concerns about the overblown claims of the alarmists.

But the Post's editors suggest a truth, that they refuse to acknowledge. The decade long halt to the warming trend, which, by the editors' own acknowledgment, can't be accounted for by the alarmists, is a major problem with the climate change "science."

Scientific inquiry involves gathering evidence and making observations that, put together, have predictive value. The halt in warming was not predicted. So to emphasize the halt in warming isn't to deny a "massive body of evidence" but to demonstrate that that "massive body of evidence" was not analyzed correctly.

Think about it. Man made global is a phenomenon that is five or six decades old. Now we've had a break in warming for one decade. That's over 10 percent of the warming era. If man made global warming was incontrovertible scientific fact, how could the models have failed to anticipate such a significant break in the action?

In a recent column, What they really believe - this op-ed was fisked effectively here and here - writes:

Yes, the opponents of any tax on carbon to stimulate alternatives to oil must believe all these things because that is the only way their arguments make any sense. Let me explain why by first explaining how I look at this issue.

Actually, it's the other way around. The people who believe in man made global warming, believe it because they wish to impose huge taxes on society, give governments even more authority, and because they see it as a way to extend their influence and wealth.

In a brilliant essay, Aliens cause global warming the late Michael Crichton wrote:

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

The editors of the Post and Thomas Friedman and like-minded individuals hide behind the consensus of science to affirm their apocalyptic belief. The problem is that science is - among other things - predictive. A significant hiatus in a process declared by consensus to be inexorable, stands as a pretty strong indication that the process was discovered by consensus, not science.