Conversion

Post date: Aug 1, 2012 9:04:27 PM

In a recent editorial in the New York Times, Richard Muller, a professor at UC Berkeley, announced that, after an extensive analysis of old and new temperature data, he has decided that climate change is real, and probably anthropogenic. The media, both Old and New, are loudly proclaiming what a triumph this is for science, and how this will finally let us begin acting responsibly about global CO2 emissions. Puh-leez.

We have already known for decades that climate is changing, that people are causing this, and that we're doing so principally through the emission of greenhouse gasses, of which CO2 is the most important. You can find abundant analysis on the Internet about why this isn't new scientifically, about why this isn't so much about Muller changing his mind as it is about Muller trying to promote himself and circumvent peer-review. But that doesn't really interest me.

Muller closes his editorial with:

"Science is that narrow realm of knowledge that, in principle, is universally accepted. I embarked on this analysis to answer questions that, to my mind, had not been answered. I hope that the Berkeley Earth analysis will help settle the scientific debate regarding global warming and its human causes. Then comes the difficult part: agreeing across the political and diplomatic spectrum about what can and should be done."

This is pretty nonsensical, and, to me, cuts to the heart of what's wrong with the climate change debate. Science is not the narrow realm of knowledge that is universally accepted. Certainly some parts of scientific knowledge are universally accepted. But what any scientist is working on at any given moment is not universally accepted. That is by definition why it is still possible to do original research on a topic. The body of knowledge that is universally accepted is truth. Don't believe me? Just ask Richard Rorty, who would write something about how truth is just what people choose not to argue about at any given moment. Scientists have agreed about anthropogenic climate change for decades, so it has been scientifically true for decades.

Of course, that doesn't mean that every single person has to agree to climate change being true in order for it to be true. But normal scientists agree that it's true. So Muller vacillating back and forth doesn't affect normal scientific activity, the "true-ness" of anthropogenic climate change, or any political action (or inaction) that may stem from this science.

In fact, just two days after Muller's self-aggrandizing announcement, another self-important scientist has come out with new (not really, and also not peer-reviewed) data showing systematic biases in NOAA's climate data. And none of this has any impact on the truth of climate change.

I think that all parties involved should read this great paper by Naomi Oreskes (2005, subscription probably required). She writes that "at best, [science] produces a robust consensus based on a process of inquiry that allows for continued scrutiny, re-examination, and revision." But not proof. What's especially interesting in that paper - and relevant to this current brouhaha - is the section on finally measuring, once and for all, the TRUE temperature of the planet. Of course, the project in question wouldn't really measure the temperature of the planet, but rather the temperature of the planet surface. Of course, the project wouldn't really measure that, either, but rather, by measuring the temperature of the ocean, or rather, measuring its density, which is to say not actually measuring the density of the ocean but rather the speed at which sound travels through the ocean, anyway, from that one could infer the temperature of the water that the sound traveled through, and then maybe something about global oceanic temperature, and then maybe something about global temperature in general... Anyway, this plan to settle the climate change debate by measuring how fast sound travels through the ocean never happened. And thousands of scientists still know that climate change is true, even without the data from the project to measure the temperature of the planet's oceans by pulsing sound through it.

Similarly, climate change is true with or without Muller's data and analysis.

I don't want to dwell on the hubris that must be necessary for someone to claim that his work could finally settle a scientific issue that relies on data from tens of thousands of published studies and experiments. I want to highlight two things. First, just how impossible it would be for one new study to prove or disprove the scientific truth of recent rapid anthropogenic climate change. And second, how irrelevant any one scientist's "conversion" from "skeptic" to "believer". This "conversion" is irrelevant because it relies on a misconception of how science should inform policy.

Oreskes writes "Many scientists have concluded that their task is to provide the proof that society needs. The difficulty is this: proof does not play the role in science that most people think it does, and therefore it cannot play the role in policy that skeptics demand." Muller is operating under the assumption that once he himself, colossus of reasoning that he is, has shown society the proof of climate change, only then will society be able to figure out what to do about it. That's implicit in how he ends his editorial: "Then comes the difficult part..." As if the entire process of agreeing about what to do must wait until Muller has finished calculating the correlation between CO2 concentration and temperature. But of course, people aren't arguing about what to do about climate change because they're unsure whether it's real or not. They're arguing about it because doing something will be more difficult than not doing something. (I am aware that people may also be arguing about it, at this point, because they can make money by doing so, but let's leave that point aside for now.) As Oreskes points out, "scientific proof is rarely what is at stake in a contested environmental or health issue." Scientists who continue to struggle to generate and refine proof of the human basis of rapid recent climate change, in the hopes that their work will finally get everyone on the planet to agree that climate change is real, are misplacing their efforts. "Natural science can play a role by providing informed opinions about the plausible consequences of our actions (or inactions), and by monitoring the effects of our choices," Oreskes writes. "But there is no need to wait for proof, no need to demand it, and no basis to expect it."

Now that I have that out in the open, I can talk a little bit about Muller's science itself. What I love is that he seems to think that his one way of measuring temperature is better than the many ways that we measured temperature to help us figure out that climate change is true. So that part is funny to me. Essentially, I see a scientist saying "your previous work only used 20% of rural, terrestrial temperature monitoring stations, but we used all of them, although we didn't use ocean temperatures, or satellite measurements, or proxy measurements... so our new method is better!" Wow. And then the other part that I love is that he says he's now convinced that CO2 and volcanoes are definitely responsible for this observed warming, because of a statistical correlation. Just. Wow. I'm pretty sure that correlation implies nothing about causation, but then, I'm not a physicist, so I probably wouldn't understand his fancy statistics. Again, I find it funny that despite empirical and computer simulation experiments establishing the mechanistic basis of CO2 as an agent of global warming, he claims that now it's true because he found a statistical relationship between CO2 and temperature.

Of course, it's hard for me to critique his science, because he hasn't actually published it yet. But I'm looking forward to doing so, if he ever actually gets his work published.

I think that it behooves all scientists to stop trying to do the one study or experiment that will finally prove to the public that something that is scientifically true - climate change, evolution, over-fishing, BPA disrupting endocrine function - warrants political action. I'm not sure how scientists can best show the public that we have well-informed opinions about the consequences of our behavior. But our opinions aren't awaiting some new brilliant scientific breakthrough. With climate change, as with many other things, we already know too well what we should do. We just don't want to do it.