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How Bias Heats Up the Warming Debate
I argued last week that the way to combat
confirmation bias—the tendency to behave like a defense attorney rather than
a judge when assessing a theory in science—is to avoid monopoly.
So long as there are competing scientific
centers, some will prick the bubbles of theory reinforcement in which other
scientists live. For constructive critics, this is the problem with modern
climate science.
They don't think it's a conspiracy theory, but
a monopoly that clings to one hypothesis (that carbon dioxide will cause
dangerous global warming) and brooks less and less dissent.
Again and again, climate skeptics are told
they should respect the consensus, an admonition wholly against the tradition
of science.
Last month saw two media announcements of
preliminary new papers on climate. One, by a team led by physicist Richard
Muller of the University of California, Berkeley, concluded "the carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than
anything else we've tried" for the (modest) 0.8 Celsius-degree rise in
global average temperatures over land during the past half-century—less, if
ocean is included.
He may be right, but such curve-fitting
reasoning is an example of confirmation bias. The other, by a team led by the
meteorologist Anthony Watts, a skeptical gadfly, confirmed its view that the
Muller team's numbers are too high—because "reported 1979-2008 U.S.
temperature trends are spuriously doubled" by bad thermometer siting and
unjustified "adjustments."Much published research on the impact of
climate change consists of confirmation bias by if-then modeling, but critics
also see an increasing confusion between model outputs and observations.
For example, in estimating how much warming is
expected, the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change uses three methods, two based entirely on model simulations.
The late novelist Michael Crichton, in his
prescient 2003 lecture criticizing climate research, said: "To an
outsider, the most significant innovation in the global-warming controversy
is the overt reliance that is being placed on models.... No longer are models
judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world—increasingly,
models provide the data. As if they were themselves a reality."It isn't
just models, but the interpretation of real data, too.
The rise and fall in both temperature and
carbon dioxide, evident in Antarctic ice cores, was at first thought to be
evidence of carbon dioxide driving climate change. Then it emerged that the
temperature had begun rising centuries earlier than carbon dioxide. Rather
than abandon the theory, scientists fell back on the notion that the data
jibed with the possibility that rising carbon dioxide levels were reinforcing
the warming trend in what's called a positive feedback loop. Maybe—but
there's still no empirical evidence that this was a significant effect
compared with a continuation of whatever first caused the warming.
The reporting of climate in the media is full
of confirmation bias. Hot summers (in the U.S.) or wet ones (in the U.K.) are
invoked as support for climate alarmism, whereas cold winters are dismissed
as weather.
Yale University's Dan Kahan and colleagues
polled 1,500 Americans and found that, as they learned more about science,
both believers and nonbelievers in dangerous climate change "become more
skillful in seeking out and making sense of—or if necessary explaining
away—empirical evidence relating to their groups' positions on climate change
and other issues."As one practicing scientist wrote anonymously to a
blog in 2009: "honestly, if you know anything about my generation, we
will do or say whatever it is we think we're supposed to do or say. There is
no conspiracy, just a slightly cozy, unthinking myopia. Don't rock the
boat."Bring on the gadflies.The final column of three on the topic of
confirmation bias.
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Comments:
When the U.N. discovered that environ-mania could give them an excuse to extort more money from the U.S., they went for it. The U.S. offered grants for studies. Climate studies became a big industry giving a whole new meaning to “political science”. Now Obama is spending his extra trillion a year on carbon reduction.
If it was his money that would be fine, but it’s
our money and he is destroying our economy using the global warming hoax as his
excuse. Congress is no help. The EPA is shutting down our coal-fired
electricity generating plants and our electric bills will increase 5 -fold. It’s time to quit the U.N.,fire
Obama and the Senate and send all packing.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party
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