Tuesday
Apr062010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Henninger in the WSJ
Apr 6, 2010 Climate: other Greens Daniel Henninger has an interesting op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, looking at post-modern science, the precautionary principle and how scientists are going to get themselves out of the pickle they are in.
Reader Comments (41)
I've just realised why the whole precautionary principle annoys me so much - it's " 'elf and safety gone mad" - on a global scale!
Very pertinent - the associated podcast is worth watching too.
An excellent article, but who takes notice of the WSJ these days?
I suspect most 'hard' scientists do not see themselves as associated with the climate alarmism peddled by the IPCC. The claims of a scientific consensus reflect the PR skills within that odious body, the takeover by political activists of the UK Met Office (just imagine!), and the compliance of tiny committees within such organisations as the Royal Societies of Edinburgh and London. But I think the article is correct in surmising that the general public do deem them so associated. I think further that it would be a good thing if more scientists did more in the way of publicly disassociating themselves. The furious reaction of many chemists to a brazenly pro-alarmist editorial in a newsletter of the American Chemical Society last year is an example of what may be necessary. It is no doubt tiresome to turn away from research to respond to hotheads in the media and in those aforementioned committees, but it may be desirable for social, political, and intellectual reasons.
Here is another good summary piece, somewhat more political, castigating in particular the US media for being supine in the face of the PR onslaught based on sloppy science:
'The mainstream press has largely forgotten its function, and these days it flacks where it used to report. It is this that explains why fewer and fewer Americans subscribe to newspapers and magazines and watch the television networks listed above. And this explains why the internet has been such a boon. But, this fact notwithstanding, we are in a pickle – for, to date anyway, none of the operations on the internet that report the news have the resources requisite for pursuing such a story. We are, in fact, dependent on the foreign press.
Witness Der Spiegel – a German imitator of what Time was like when we still had newsmagazines in the United States. In its current issue, one can find a lengthy and devastating survey of the state of climate science entitled Climate Catastrophe: A Superstorm for Global Warming Research. It is a must-read: meticulous, cautious, and intelligently skeptical. Its authors do not claim that there is no such thing as global warming. They suspect that something of the sort may be taking place. What they insist on, however, are the limits of our current knowledge, the attempt by a politicized profession to pull a con, and the economic and social dangers associated with making radical shifts in public policy on the basis of unfounded speculation.'
Source: http://biggovernment.com/prahe/2010/04/05/global-warming-r-i-p/
via: http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/
Excellent article. Glad it's in the WSJ. Should get wider readership.
Your link takes me to an article written in December 2009, is that the one you intended to link to?
Invocation of the precautionary principle by politicians in the absence of conclusive science does not seem to me to contaminate (or necessarily misrepresent) the science. It may confuse the thinking public on what is, and what is not, well understood.
Accordingly, the folks at risk here are the politicians. But then they are always at risk and we never thought much of them anyway, did we?
'Invocation of the precautionary principle by politicians in the absence of conclusive science does not seem to me to contaminate (or necessarily misrepresent) the science.'
What it definitely does do is lead to vast, and probably/potentially unnecessary expenditure/taxation taking us down manifold dead-end technological streets! Even the Germans now widely accept that wind turbines, for instance, have been a dreadful waste of money and have achieved negligible (if any) CO2 reduction. Wasted money/wasted time/wasted effort and not a single political scalp to show for it (yet!).
Yep, and it's not just Global Warmmongering. What will happen when the general population learns that much of what's been preached to it about diet for decades is ill-founded? When it learns that the accepted dangers of low-level radiation are based entirely on guesswork? The lack of response to the Swine Flu alarm-mongering in Britain this winter may be the harbinger of more people coming to assume that Public Science = Public Lies. And The Royal Society is very guilty in all this - sometimes I could weep.
I took Henninger's issue to be the decay of scientific credibility due to misrepresentation of science by politicians.
Untoward consequences of the insane misuse of science via the "precautionary principle" should be laid at the door of the politicians, not the scientists.
I thought Henninger was suggesting that the scientists bore the burden of the consequences of what the politicians do - and I'm not sure I agree.
Many scientists made a comfortable living off the Cold War. If we want to ensure that the Global Warming farrago doesn't replace it as the main teat to suck on, we'd better suggest a less damaging but usefully remunerative teat for them. Any ideas, anyone?
The hero of Ayn Rand's Anthem [re]invents the battery and incandescent lighting. He takes his discoveries to the "Council of the Scholars" (i.e., the senior figures in science). But "what is not thought by all men cannot be true". It's a nice take on politically driven 'consensus science'.
I think Henninger has it about right. Except that he's explicitly describing climatology as a hard science, which it isn't. It just sells itself as one. I liken climatology to astrology - the other "science" that just loves to plot graphs and extrapolate predictions of future events accordingly.
I don't absolve climatologists of the burden of responsibility for doing what they're paid to do. These are not dispassionate scientists producing the best work they can, and witnessing the nuances of that work being abused by politicians. Climatologists, if they had been the true scientists that we (the people) had expected them to be, would not be the high-priests of prophecies of socio-environmental catastrophe that they have shown themselves to be, time over. They would not have, as climate scientists HAVE, prostituted themselves and their scientific integrities on the promises of grants and alternative energies sponsorship. They have embraced the concept of giving their sponsors what they wanted and they have, wherever they could, delivered on those promises, at the expense of science and scientific method.
The RealClimate website would never have been born, if these scientists were the a-political and dispassionate seekers of truth that we (the people) have been allowed to believe they were. They are a self-governed (and poorly at that) new science, allowed to run amok by their university parents, who have turned a blind eye to their activities in return for a share of their lucrative money-making schemes.
Hard sciences, in the meantime, are also guilty of complacency. They are guilty of not, at least until late, reigning in public perceptions about the distinctions between the strengths of their sciences in comparison with that of climatology. The public's perception - its suspicion - of their work is the price they will pay, and their only real chance of re-establishing their perceived credibility will be to reject the methodologies of climate science and assert with substance that they ARE the hard sciences that climatology is not - that they are specifically different from climate science.
/insert 2c to continue..
SimonH says: "The RealClimate website would never have been born, if these scientists were the a-political and dispassionate seekers of truth that we (the people) have been allowed to believe they were. "
I just got banned from the RealClimate website because I attempted to post referrals to CRU emails confirming Phil Jones' discussions about methods of evading FOI requests and pressuring science journals to suppress skeptics' papers. See posts #228 through #256 in the CRU Inquiry discussion. RealClimate is not interested in truth, only in reinforcement.
Once again Phillip Bratby has made an insightful observation -- who reads the WSJ? Apparently the Bishop does, but few of the rest of us. I gave up on WSJ twenty years ago when I started to read FT, which I have also stopped reading about five years ago.
However, it is an interesting article but misleading. It disproves its own thesis in its own presentation. He lists many examples of where this has happened before. We are merely watching another Lysenko drama play out on the public stage. Most scientists, the vast majority of us, do not subscribe to Voodoo Science and in time will bring back the scientific method as it should be.
There is a very nice discussion of the precautionary principle and global warming in general by Wilfred Beckerman, the only person who, in my student days, could make national income accounting seem exciting. Strangely it appears to be available from Greenpeace USA. Just google for Wilfred Beckerman and precautionary principle and you'll get his 1997 lecture. It hardly seems to have date at all , except when he stats that in a decades time we will know much more about climate....
The precautionary principle is completely meaningless and empty.
The argument is that you should do (or not do) something to avoid a risk.
The problem is that doing (or not doing) anything in life involves risk.
- If I press another key on the keyboard, there is a risk that I may get a freak electrical shock and die. Therefore I should stop typing?
- If I don't press another key on the keyboard, and continue to express my views, I may turn my anger inwards, get clinically depressed, over eat as a result, and die prematurely as a result. Therefore I shouldn't stop typing?
- If we don't vet every parent in the country, who takes kids to a school sports event, then some may abuse children.
- If we do vet every parent in the country, some entirely innocent parents may choose not to help out with school sports events, and kids may then get fat and die young.
- If we don't stop using fossil fuels, the ice melts, polar bears die, and crops fail
- If we do stop using fossil fuels, we go bankrupt and put our economy back 200 years. Then we all die of poverty.
All these, and everything else involves risk, making choices can't be based on a precautionary principle. If we follow the precautionary principle, we would both be paralysed by inaction, and be pressed into urgent action on every issue.
The only way to make such decisions is to measure and rigorously assess risks and consequences.
The difficulty with most arguments of the post modern variety is they run into the barber paradox. That barber, you recall is the man who shaves everyone who does not shave himself, but we have trouble with whether he shaves himself.
The argument that all my ideas are not objectively based but simply reflect my circumstances, and that truth is subjective, is that it cannot account for its own alleged truth.
Like most things deriving from Hegel, its a load of horse manure.
Something that has been conveniently dropped from most invocations of the precautionary principle is that any implementations thereof should be cost effective in relation to the blocked activity.
michel,
We could learn a thing or three from post-modernism, Hegel, Heidegger, Gadamer, Kuhn, Feyerabend and others.
I could write a dissertation on so-called objective science. I think it is safe to say these climate scientists are not the only scientists fudging numbers/gate-keeping/etc.
I tend to agree with Nietzsche at times like these: There are no facts, only interpretations.
As long as humans are involved, no science is objective. However, I am not saying that we cannot get near objectivity. Science needs to be checked every single day. We can't assume too much.
I would say one of the reasons for the Mass Media's complete failure to challenge climate science is the hollowing out of investigating and news teams in successive rounds of cuts and purges over the last decade or so. Fleet Street is now only just capable of printing press releases from Warmist groups, they haven't got the time, inclination or intelligence to question them.
The same applies to the blatant lies peddled by health lobby groups.
We should act - 'cause the science is settled
We should act - 'cause even if science is not settled, for the precautionary principle.
I think the warmists devised the precautionary principle specifically to fry everyone's brains.
"It is depressing to note that being alive increases the risk of death"
- from Norman and Streiner, Biostatistics The Bare Essentials
The precautionary principle is an excellent political response to any problem. The politician takes action following the precautionary principle. If the problem is then not manifest, or reduces, the action under the precautionary principle clearly cured it and so the politician was correct. If the problem continues then it demonstrates the original problem was real and the politician took the correct, decisive action but the cure was not sufficient so even more action is required. Either way, the politician can spin the result to make them look good and there does not even have to exist a causal link between the problem and the solution - serendipity is good enough.
Contrast this with how oil companies have to manage risk. You are going to drill an oil well. You have a choice of several possible wells to drill, each has a risk or uncertainty attached and each opportunity varies both in the cost of drilling and the quantity of oil reserves that might be discovered if the predictions are correct. Note that the majority of oil wells drilled are dry holes ie no hydrocarbons are discovered and yet despite this oil companies make money and generally avoid bankruptcy. How do they do this? Well they follow some very simple basic principles:
(a) Don't put all your eggs in one basket ie diversify risk so a failure cannot bankrupt you
(b) Compare the available opportunities so as you only drill the best
(c) Ensure that any opportunity you drill has a potential to make you money.
The latter point (c) is called the expected monetary value or EMV. For example, if the best opportunity you have is to drill a well on the following opportunity:
10% chance of success
Cost of well = $20,000,000
Size of possible reserves if successful 5,000,000 barrels
Value of 1 barrel (allowing for cost of development etc) = $20
Value of success = 10% x 5,000,000 x $20 = +$10,000,000
Cost of failure = 90% x $20,000,000 = -$18,000,000
EMV = +$10,000,000 - $18,000,000 = -$8,000,000
The EMV is negative therefore you do not drill. You walk away, even if this is your best opportunity. Do nothing is more effective than drilling. Drilling on opportunities like this will eventually bankrupt you.
To make the correct decision you have to be able to do two things:
(a) Correctly assess the risk
(b) Be able to assign a monetary value to both outcomes.
Oil companies reliably assess risk because they continually propose opportunities, risk them and then drill them. By comparing the actual outcomes with the predictions the accuracy of risk assessment can be established.
The problem with the precautionary principle applied to action to prevent dangerous AGW is huge:
(a) The true chance/risk of the hypothesis being true or false is not known
(b) The cost of action vs inaction is not known
(c) Climate models are untested ie they have not made reliable future forecasts or predictions that have been tested (this is to me the most important weakness of AGW theory - where is the testable hypothesis or prediction?)
Allowing a politician to proceed with a course of action on the basis of the precautionary principle may be benign (if the course of action does not incur any significant cost) but in the case of AGW the cost of such an action may be staggeringly expensive and may result in impoverishing rather than benefitting future generations. There is no evidence to suggest that, even if the theory of AGW were true, that doing nothing may not actually leave future generations better off than following the precautionary principle, which could prove to be ruinously expensive.
As long as humans are involved, no science is objective. However, I am not saying that we cannot get near objectivity. Science needs to be checked every single day. We can't assume too much.
Nicely put, Kevin. This is precisely why we need scientific debate. And real peer-review.
Actually there is nothing wrong with the precautionary principle provided you are 95% sure that you are correct. You don't have to be 100% in science, only in mathematics (and sometimes not even then).
Barber Paradox
No man in the village has a beard and no one shaves himself. The barber shaves everyone who does not shave himself.
My mother came up with two solutions which demonstrate the paradox is usually not set properly (i.e. ersatz philosophers are in general sexist and xenophobic) (1) The barber is a woman or (2) the barber doesn't live in the village You could also suppose that the barber is (3) an eunuch. or (4) an alien (though in the latter case you can also suppose that the moon is made of green cheese).
"As long as humans are involved, no science is objective"
:-)
I just found this quotation from one Bill James, a statistical analyst. He was commenting on (US) college football rankings, but the comment seems just as applicable to climate modelling:
“There is a perception among the people who are in charge of this monkey that if you just turn the rankings over to a computer, the computer will figure those things out. The reality is that it can't. It is very difficult to objectively measure anything if you don't know what it is you are measuring.”
Re RT:
"Actually there is nothing wrong with the precautionary principle provided you are 95% sure that you are correct."
This is not true. If the cost of following the precautionary principle is 20 times bigger than the loss from doing nothing then we have:
Follow precautionary principle 5% chance of being wrong x $20 = Cost of $1
Ignore precautionary principle 95% chance of being wrong x $1 = Cost of $0.95
If, when risk weighted, the precautionary principle costs more than the no action case, then you should not be following the precautionary principle.
The precautionary principle is bogus. The problem with it is that it excuses people from actually putting hard numbers to both cases and hard numbers to the probabilities of the different outcomes. People who advocate the precautionary principle are advocating action no matter what the cost. In banking, mining, oil industry, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, in fact most industries such an action is likely to lead to bankruptcy. Easy to do when its not your money...which is how politicians think of it. If the advocate of such a policy were told they had to risk their house or their entire assets on the decision they might behave a little more rationally.
I think 'hard' science is in trouble. I was amazed at the lack of coverage of the complaints by senior stem cell scientists that peer review was being used to rig publications infavour of particular research groups. I caught this story on the today program a few weeks ago but there seems to have been no significant fallout from it.
Rob said,
A couple of weeks ago there was a post here commenting on an entry on James Delingpole's blog about an editorial, and article, by The Economist about climate change. The editorial makes very explicitly the point that "the uncertainty is all the more reason to act now" or words to that effect.
Since then there have been two further editions of The Economist, and in neither of them did they publish one single letter referring to that editorial or that article. That is rather unusual and it made me wonder what was going on.
I can only guess that they got far more letters heavily criticising than supporting their position, probably with technical and logical arguments that they didn't know how to address, so they decided to just quietly drop the matter.
I think it has to do with what's already been said here: the issue of AGW is simply too complex and technical for those liberal arts graduates that tend to fill such newspapers. There was a point - maybe around 2003 - when to question the consensus view was simply "not done", and even the supposedly "intellectual" press - like the FT and The Economist - did not want to be put in their position. Now, maybe, they are getting some inkling that the whole story was far more complicated than they thought - but they can hardly back out of it now without lookikng totally ridiculous. My guess is that they're confused about what to think as far as AGW is concerned.
Peter B: "they can hardly back out of it now without looking totally ridiculous"
I concur. It's actually difficult to imagine what they could do, at this point, to stop or reverse their ridiculous image. Mainstream media's reputation as "sceptical journalism" - an investigative and analytical collective - is in tatters.
Climategate saw the "hockey team" busted, but the media's response ever since (rapidly approaching half a year now, folks) has seen the MSM busted, their incompetence laid more bare daily.
I think Arthur Dent is correct: This article - however good - is actually 4 months old. This is probably why it manages to discuss the post modern politicisation of science without mentioning the concept of "post-normal" science which only gained traction after xmas with Ravetz's essays over at WUWT.
RT:
While having at shave at Mary's barber shop consider the following: How do you know you are 95% right? Statistics? Have you checked for a Unit Root? Probably not. If there one, your population is non-stationary and OLS is bogus. You can try a polynomial regression, but explaining what it means is "funky" as VS put it so nicely.
May I point out that both the Theory of Relativity central to cosmology and the Standard Model of Quantum Mechanics are admittedly wrong. Both work in their respective fields sorta,kinda, okay. But the Standard Model does not explain gravity, and the Theory of Relativity does not explain quantum mechanics. Presently, much effort is going into string theory and M theory, both of which predict that there are more than three spatial dimensions -- as many at 11, I believe.
The precautionary principle is bogus. The problem with it is that it excuses people from actually putting hard numbers to both cases and hard numbers to the probabilities of the different outcomes.
Well put, my friend, ThinkingScientist.
There are other problems with this "precautionary principle".
It assumes some controlling body can evaluate each and every situation and enforce its decisions.
In the case of say a new prescription medicine in an advanced country then its a good assumption - a medical panel will check the new drug.
But it don't work in many other situations. What about a new street-drug like miaow-miaow ?
Or what about an international "problem" like the world's climates? Game theory may be a better guide to real behaviour. Can we trust Italy to enforce the Karbon-ordnung? What will happen in rural Brazil?
The "precautionary principle" really assumes everyone on the planet is reading the Guardian while happily queueing for his fuel ration book.
The problem with the precautionary principle is that it is politicians who must implement it.
They are presented with a problem (eg.global warming) and they are basically left with 2 options:
1. Do Nothing.
2. Do Something.
Arguments can be made for either option but from the politicians point of view they only have one option and that is to do something. Campaigning for re-election is easier if you can claim "I did something" and the further into the future the impacts from what you did are the better. Even if you are still a politician when the impacts are felt it doesn't matter because by then there will be something else you claim "I did something" about.
A Post Modern Perspective on Science
Needs repeating....
We know that gravity determines the orbital tracks of planets over colossal distances and immense passages of time - but how do they feel about this?
So-called "climate studies" are by definition not an experimental discipline, but exercises in hindsight classification akin to botany. Like botanists confronting adaptive evolution by mutations, climatologists have precisely zero means of extrapolating trends, of forecasting anything whatever. In founding Chaos Theory, Edward Lorenz in 1964 made this mathematically and physically explicit: Complex dynamic systems such as Earth's atmosphere function as non-linear "strange attractors" subject to sensitive dependence on initial conditions (the Butterfly Effect).
Allied with Benoit Mandelbrot's Fractal Geometry, whereby phenomena exhibit self-similarity on every scale, Chaos Theory simply makes nonsense of Climate Cultists' pretensions to "settled" gloom-and-doom, invoking an asinine Precautionary Principle to effect that literally wrecking industrial/technological civilization by peculating Statist intervention is preferable to dealing with inevitable minor crises as they may arise.
Deceit, manipulation, propaganda are Warmists' necessary stock-in-trade-- absent any replicable, i.e. verifiable experiment, crude models fabricate whatever pre-conceived scenarios their designers choose, invariably those attracting maximum grant monies to a progressively discreditable exercise [intended]. Aloof from consequences, doltish officialdom goes its way rejoicing as benighted constituencies fall to wrack and ruin. As stark choices loom, the urgent question is becoming "Whose side are you on?"
For those of you who ask "Who reads the Wall Street Journal?", I submit to you that I do. It is the only newspaper in the US actually making money right now and for good reason.
Don Henninger makes the most telling statement towards the end of the article: "One hopes civil engineers never build bridges under this theory." Scientists are not the only professionals with learned judgement on the subject of Mother Nature. Engineers are just as rigorously educated as in any pure science field but we have have to deal with the real world where mistakes have consequences. Ask any engineer you know about this whole squabble and that person more than likely will shake their head in disbelief and for good reason. Suppose Boeing or Airbus used the same flimsy logic expounded by the climate science community to build their airliners? Would you get on one?
@Tom,
Thanks for the link :-)
For anyone who missed it, it's all about the Sokal affair:
He could easily do it again today with New Scientist - a UK-based lightweight science magazine.
What we can learn from the history of the tradition that starts with Hegel and runs through Heidegger is that if you start with harmless nonsense, you will end up with dangerous uber-nonsense. If this then gets out of a few Continental philosophy departments, you will have a true pile of horse manure in the middle of your legislatures. In the corridors of the philosophy departments it did little damage. In the middle of the debating chamber, it will putrefy and infect the country.
And so we arrive at the idea that there can be such a thing as a post Modern or post normal science, that is one to which the usual standards of proof do not apply, though whether the usual standards of proof apply to the proposition that there is such a thing is not stated.
In the same way, we arrive at the belief that there is such a thing as the precautionary principle, which will justify doing anything at all, and whether the principle itself will justify or refute its adoption is also not stated.
Where we get to the barber paradox is exactly here, how do we validate the adoption of the precautionary principle?
Kuhn isn't about this stuff, he showed that the rational progress of scientific knowledge and the validation of hypotheses proceeds in a messier and more complicated way than previous accounts had assumed. Kuhn does not argue that there is such a thing as post modern science, he simply points out that verification and falsification in the light of evidence offer more choices than you might have thought, and that advances in scientific knowledge have proceeded with more bumps and hiccups than you might have realized.
The British empirical tradition had this spot on, if you like, its 100 year old philosophy. Moore asked, when British Hegelians said that time was unreal, did they mean that they could not say whether they had shaved before or after breakfast? Russell rightly remarked of the Hegelian dialectic, that it was the art of deriving a conclusion which did not follow, from two false and mutually inconsistent premisses.
We need to call nonsense when we see it, and when nonsense is trotted out selectively in aid of bad science, this is even more imperative.
It's far far worse than you think.
The 'precautionary fallacy' (as I prefer to call it) has and is currently killing millions of people in the third world, largely thanks to powerful Green lobbying.
Examples: a country needs a hydro-electric plant to pump clean water?
If there is any risk to the eco-system it can't be built.
How do we know if there will be a risk?
We must conduct study after study after study.
Meantime people die in droves of malaria and typhoid.
Green opposition to genetically engineered crops is the classic one.
"We don't know the risks" (but we do - there are none) so they can never be used. Period.
And so people starve or go blind and die (investigate 'Golden rice').
I won't even mention the "precautionary" Green-led ban on DDT and the millions of unnecessary deaths in Africa from malaria.
The Greens, the Disciples of the God Precaution, will go down a the biggest mass killers in history.
This will derail the Enlightment project. All science, its human worth, and the moral principles underopinning it will be called into serious question or dismissed by ordinary people. Eventually, we will be back to gods, witches, demons and popes.