Michael Tobis wrote:
> 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?
>
Maybe it's a bit of a petty niggle, but surely it's better to think of
consensus as a by-product. We are *pursuing* the truth, and consensus is
a measure of how close we think we are to the truth.
Note that (of course) the purpose of the meeting was not actually to
undertake new research so as to bring better understanding of the truth.
Rather, it developed a position statement that everyone could sign up
to. That's a useful output of science but certainly not the actual goal,
and trying to find a wording that is vague enough to encompass all the
perspectives is more of a political process than a scientific one.
>
> e.g., am I failing to understand Alastair's arguments, or is he simply
> wrong from the get-go?
No comment :-)
> 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.
I agree on all points.
It's a difficult line to tread, both presenting the "consensus" as it
is, while not circling the wagons to the extent that future progress is
impeded. The probabilistic stuff (not just climate sensitivity, although
this is perhaps the most prominent example) brings this most sharply
into focus because there is no possibility that the "correct" answer is
actually a probability distribution. In fact the truth is a single
number and the probabilistic description is an indication of our current
ignorance, thus necessarily subject to future change. This context makes
it abundantly clear why any attempt to directly equate consensus with
truth is doomed from the outset.
James
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