Climate incentive, climate invective

Clive James has made another of his intermittent forays into the climate debate. In the course of a review of Brian Cox's Science Britannica programme he had this to say:

Fronting Science Britannica on BBC Two, Professor Cox visited the Royal Society and Bletchley Park in his quest for examples of the scientific method. Finally he dropped in on the Royal Institution, where he and the editor of Nature puzzled together, but not very hard, over how there has come to be an “overwhelming scientific consensus” favouring the concept of dangerous man-made global warming.

Neither of them asked what kind of scientific consensus it was if, say, Freeman Dyson of the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies declined to join it. Isn’t the overwhelming scientific consensus really just a consensus between climate scientists, and therefore no more impressive than the undoubted fact that one hundred percent of gymnasium attendants believe that regular exercise is vital to longevity?

I think James is mistaken actually. The overwhelming scientific consensus is, as shown by Cook et al, nothing more noteworthy than the everyday observations that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that increasing concentrations will make the planet warmer; the "dangerous" bit is unwarranted extrapolation. And as readers at BH are aware, the Royal Society heard a vigorous debate last week over the strength of aerosols' influence on the climate, something that is critical to determining to what extent global warming is "dangerous".

Nevertheless James' remarks seem to have provoked the ire of the usual suspects:

Simon Singh: Sad to see Clive James buying into climate contrarians' propaganda

Jim Al-Khalili: Shame his clever prose wasted on drivel

Tamsin (who I would not classify as a suspect, usual or otherwise) meanwhile seems to have done a bit of a reanalysis of the article and concluded that James has decided that climate scientists have ulterior motives. This looks as though it's going to result in a letter of protest direct to James and possibly an open letter too.

It's all a bit absurd if you ask me. James has observed, not unreasonably, that there are eminent people who think that the global warming thing is overdone. In similarly uncontroversial terms he has drawn attention to the fact that people, including even scientists, respond to economic incentives. That scientists have an economic incentive to find evidence in favour of global warming being a problem is undeniable. Every single man jack of the climatological community is engaged in that field because they have weighed the financial and non-financial benefits against alternative employments and have decided that climate science is what they want to do. While Tamsin says that climate scientists could get better-paid employment elsewhere, we know in fact that every climate scientist thinks the non-financial benefits of their field outweigh the financial disadvantages.

This doesn't mean that global warming is a scam or that climatologists are all crooks; just that they do have an incentive. This is why Clive James is right to apply at least some kind of a discount to their opinions and to take heed, at least to some extent, of the "contrarian voices"; the ones at which the Simon Singhs of this world hurl their invective and which others strive so hard to silence.

Comments

[Franz Hoffman]

In medicine we have a system called "evidence based medicine". You have 4 levels of validity starting with level1, which means that there are many randomized controlled studies existing for a therapy.
Lowest level is 4b, the opinion of experts.
This level is ironically called "eminence based medicine".
I think "eminence based science" could be a correct classification for the unproven "95% consensus".
No, it is even below that level.
And, remember the Hockey Stick? Wasn't there a nearly 100% consensus of the so called experts?