On Apr 3, 2:46 am, James Annan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> I was rather alarmed to see the opening statement of the ice sheet group:
>
> "Polar ice experts from Europe and the United States, meeting *to pursue
> greater scientific consensus*"
>
> (my emphasis)
>
> http://www.jsg.utexas.edu/news/rels/032807.html
What's wrong with *pursuing* consensus? Isn't that a summary of the
whole process of science?
> I hope it was just clumsy wording,
I'll poke 'em here on the Texas side and see if I can get a read on
it.
> but unfortunately climate scientists
> are so embattled that they do sometimes seem to strive rather harder to
> agree with each other than to debate their differences. Of course it is
> the latter that actually helps to progress knowledge.
Right, but the goal is the actual knowledge, right?
> I note that it was explicitly on the grounds that the "consensus"
> disagreed with me that a Nature editor refused to consider our comment
> to the effect that the method used in recent paper was faulty (and
> biased in a strongly alarmist direction). I agree with her judgement
> that the method is widely used, but IMO that makes it more, not less,
> important that its failings are openly discussed.
I'm fairly confident I'd disagree with the reviewer in this particular
case, but it's a difficult call. Progress requires disagreement, but
quality requires filtering.
e.g., am I failing to understand Alastair's arguments, or is he simply
wrong from the get-go? On what basis do I find his assertion that
"But the real problem is that the climate
models were first conceived based on the idea that if solar radiation
increased, then the outgoing radiation would increase to match it."
not worth considering in great detail?
I am sufficiently confident that his whole argument founders on this
fallacy that I don't intend to refer to chapter and verse of the
source code to try to make a detailed argument.
Choosing whom to listen to and when is not a trivial matter. Some of
us think that if James Annan says something it's worth sitting up and
taking notice of, but apparently the reviewer is not among them. I
would still be willing to attribute this to a false negative inherent
in the process rather than an organized bias toward stubbornness.
None of this, I think, argues against that idea that science is a
process of emerging consensus. It's the failure of social trust that
is making the lines of communication between science and policy
difficult here.
By the way, I agree with you that applying the word "crisis" to
climate is problematic at best; if anything it is a remarkably slow-
motion crisis on policy time scales. I would tend to vote in the
negative on substance, though in practice I might have cast my vote on
the affirmative side because the question's semantics are distinct
from its semiotics. You have to decide how mouch weight to give to
each game in any circumstance. When you assert "it's not a crisis" you
are likely to be heard as saying "nothing needs to be done", a
position with which I wholeheartedly disagree.
I think the blame is being put in the wrong place here, though.
Schmidt et al. may have been foolish in accepting the debate on those
terms, but the question was cleverly framed to skew against any
greenhouse gas policy within the polemic/political context. I suspect
this was deliberate and malign.
In any case, I think we need to get serious about what we mean by
"consensus"; dropping the whole idea under unfair pressure from the
likes of Crichton is a bizarre and excessive response. Somehow science
needs to be able to reach conclusions, and not just debate endlessly.
mt
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