Source: Cato Institute, YouTube
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xe5VeMYD7Y
Date: 13/11/2013
Event: Richard Lindzen: "Is Science Progressing?"
Credit: Cato Institute
People:
[This is the last part of a talk, "Is Science Progressing?", given by Richard Lindzen at the Cato Institute.]
Richard Lindzen: The real issue is not "Yes or no?", "Do you believe in climate change?", "Is it warming?", "Is it cooling?" - it's always based on "How much?" and also - and this is equally important - "How relevant?" When you start saying that hurricanes or sea-level rise, or whatever you think about the data, are signs, based on X, Y or Z, well, they depend on so many factors - plate tectonics and so on, that you could reasonably ask: what model shows these definitive signs of anything? And you find the models are all over the place, with that as well as anything else.
Well, this brings me to the last, and perhaps in some ways the most important part of my talk. How did we get to this point, where the science ceased to be interested in the fascinating question of accounting for the remarkable history of the Earth's climate, for an understanding of how the climate actually works, and instead devoted itself to supporting a component of political correctness? Perhaps one should take a broader view - what's going on?
And here the question arises - and one being looked at by various people - how is science really faring? Has anything happened that in fact rendered things like climate science vulnerable to corruption? With respect to corruption, I won't even bother dwelling of the specifics. Climategate made clear that you had the suppression of different views, the intimidation of editors, the falsification of data. Despite claims that the perpetrators have been exonerated, the emails are available for anyone to look at - they will speak for themselves. My personal feeling is that the writers of the emails were more the beneficiaries of the ultimate corruption and defending their status that arose from the corruption, rather than the sources of it - that's a separate issue.
Um, let's go back to the science itself. I would say from 1820 until 1965 was for science a Golden Age - theory, empirical testing and exploration, and the applications of this were all proceeding apace. There is a growing feeling. however, that progress may have stalled. One of the things that really needs study is whether that is in fact true. It's difficult to assign any slowing down to a particular cause, and, you know, although for instance in theoretical physics we still have the standard model from 1960, although molecular biology is still working with the work of 1960, roughly - Helix 50's. There may be reasons for that - maybe the problems are hard or that the solution was correct and there was nothing much else to do.
Still there is a feeling that something has changed, and what I would propose is what has changed are things that do indicate the incentive structure of science - and should have had a detrimental effect, and I think what has to be looked at is if this is actually playing out. One of the things I've already mentioned is the replacement of gratitude with fear. There is little question - I mean the incentive structure is radically different. Gratitude is essentially demanding more contributions, and this requires unique talents. Fear calls for the perpetuation of fear - this is less demanding of talent. Fear, on the whole, seems more effective than gratitude and there has been immense growth in government support of science, but this too has tilted the incentive structure - now I can go into details of this - I mean, the role of Sputnik and expanding it and setting an example for the importance of fear and so on were probably not unimportant. Um there was, of course, as I mentioned the cutbacks in science during Vietnam, but you began to see with Nixon and so on the the rhetoric of science was, you know, the Cold War, the war on cancer, catching up with the Russians and I think it left science sort of hooked on fear and this essentially, with the end of the Cold War, led to an intensive search or, broadly, for other sources of fear to maintain the support, with the disappearance of one of the major aspects.
Now there were also other incentives, the growth due to a variety of things - the spurring of science as a result of Sputnik, the baby boom, led to vastly greater bureaucracy, more regulations and so on. At M.I.T., for example, the number of faculties is not terribly different from 1960, number of students is not terribly different - we're talking 20, 30% - number of administrators, almost a factor of 10 more. This has had a number of important consequences. The growth of administration at the University and in research centers has led to an immense emphasis on grant overhead. I don't know if all of - I suppose all of you are familiar with this, you know - if you're applying for $100,000 you have to tag on $60,000 for the overhead, the university, this is the salary for the administration.
It's all sorts of things going on but as the administration has grown, it's a more important constituent of any university and that has some surprising impact. First of all, you know it makes grants much more important. I mean, when you - when I mentioned, as a young person, you went to lunch you talked shop. Today, you talk about grants, where funds are available, but some of the surprising results are the de-emphasis of theory. Theory, you know, requires minimal expenses - experiments, observations require major expenses and have major overhead, so you have this peculiar imbalance arising in science.
The growth of the funding is accompanied by the growth of the funding agencies, and this has led to a very significant increase in their importance in directing science and in turf battles. I mean, when I first got money from NASA, for instance, headquarters was of no importance - they were just shuffling the paper for stuff done by the laboratories and today and for many years headquarters calls the shots. At NSF when I started there was one program officer for meteorology who was on the permanent staff and there were two rotators - they didn't call the shots, they were there to facilitate science. But with the growth you had a much greater permanent staff - each had its turf to defend and this in a subtle way changed the whole scientific paradigm.
It changed it from the one where you had the dialectic opposition of theory and observation - and remember this is a bit different in observational sciences and in experimental sciences - but now you had this replaced by simulation and program. With programs like - and there's one, TOGA-COARE, to look at the tropical Pacific - it's not to test a theory, it's not to find anything new, it's just studying things. And instead of theory, you run a computer model and see if you can adjust it to simulate what you saw. Now the difference, as I mention, is that the traditional scientific paradigm was convergent, that is to say each contradiction that you resolved improved things. The current paradigm is not convergent, nor is it designed to be.
Now, other things have changed as well. Physics and math no longer have the prestige they once had, and undoubtedly quality may have suffered. As with fear, all the above should lead to perpetuation rather than problem-solving. And I would suggest that one of the things Cato could do, and with that I'll end my talk, is study this. Is this, in fact, the consequence of what are self-evidently changes, major changes in the incentive structure? And I think if one can study this, one either can determine what is wrong with science, and in the process what has made climate science itself so vulnerable, or maybe we will discover that science has robustness which is not obvious in this picture.