Hey Abbot!!!

I started this blog for just this type of post. I received this via email from Loren Ibsen and hope it is just the first of many. Enjoy:


So the founder of the Weather
Channel, John Coleman, says CAGW is a scam. Maybe he's right, maybe wrong, but nonetheless I hear the consensus crumbling. I predict 2008 is the year. When it does happen, it will be the Glacier Calving Heard Round the World.

I will keep harping on "The Consensus" because I am concerned that we are losing one of Western Civilization's great contributions to the world: the scientific method. It's part of the broader "assault on reason", if you will. The thing that scares me is how ready people are to sell our birthright for a mess of outrage.

Because there is always the need to anticipate and prevent misunderstanding (where that misunderstanding is honest), let me state that I am not saying warming and/or climate change aren't happening, nor that humans have no impact. My position, with which I hope you will agree, can best be expressed as the following equation:
Improper Methodology + Correct Answer = BAD SCIENCE.
To elaborate:
What we are seeing now has made me realize that we are not immune from the mass hysteria that has driven extreme religious movements through history. It is especially incumbent upon the believers, and those whose preexisting policy preferences predispose (PPPP) them to accept the theory to be rigorous in not only the work, but in insisting that dissenters be allowed to respond.

Proponents should be required to show their work and properly archive their data so that others may properly review it. This has been an accepted part of peer review and the scientific process as long as I can remember. At least, that was the ideal as it was taught to me in grade school so many years ago. Why is it not so now? Why can a major proponent refuse to share information (collected on the government dime) with a skeptical scientist on the grounds that he "knows" the scientist is just going to try to poke holes in the work?

That is the whole point of science. Nothing is ever proven, only falsified, and work that withstands or adapts in light of methodical scrutiny is seen (or traditionally has been) as stronger for it.

Cheap rhetorical tricks abound. It is human nature that this be so. And, yes, it goes on on both sides of this debate. One side call the other "deniers", a despicable attempt to demonize the opposition by evoking comparison to Holocaust denial, while the other refers to the "warm-mongers." (That is, I do, but mostly to needle the True Believers.) This is to be expected on the political side, but we should all insist that science be above that. There really are larger issues at stake here. Anyone who professes to be concerned about the Bush administration's politicization of science must be concerned about the state of global warming science, if the protestations are more than mere angling for partisan advantage.

Science requires that we revisit prior hypotheses and predictions to scrutinize them for errors when they fail to act as expected. For example, when we are told that CAGW will lead to more and bigger tropical storms, the relevant experts who say nay are shunted aside. When the prediction fails to hold, we are told not that the hypothesis has been modified, but that the prediction was only ever for bigger storms, not more. The record is flushed down the memory hole. Meanwhile, every named drizzle has been touted as "proof". Then, when the most recent hurricane season turns out to be the weakest in 30 years, we are told that any one season is not predictive (true, just as it was when the data "favored" the believers). To add insult to injury, the resulting droughts from the lack of rainfall (no storms, remember?) are then blamed on climate change.

I keep thinking that an homage to Abbott and Costello is in order (when is that ever untrue?). I haven't worked it out yet, but the idea would be something like this:
....
Costello: so, tell me how this works again.
Abbott: look, dummy: Global warming is on first, global cooling is on second, and climate change is on third.
C: wait, I'm already confused. I thought global cooling came first.
A: that was the old lineup. Try to keep up. Now global warming leads to
global cooling. If the runner gets by those two, it's up to climate change to mop up.
C: so if I drink water from a plastic bottle, I'm heading for global warming?
A: at first. Keep it up and the ice in greenland will all fall into the ocean (stage whisper) ...in about a thousand years.... Then you get cooling.
C: but I thought we had cooling right now.
A: who told you that? Haven't you been listening? (aside: boy, the state of education today!)
C: no, no. I heard that Antartic ice cover set a record this past winter.
A: but Arctic ice was at a record low this summer.
C: so ice was low in the summer?
A: global warming!
C: and high in the winter?
A: global cooling!
C: it seems like you have an answer for everything, all right.
A,C (together): CLIMATE CHANGE!
C: hoo-boy!
....
(work in progress. All rights reserved. The one exception is that I will hand over the concept free of any restriction to Rush Limbaugh should he see it as good material for a skit. There, I said it: RUSH LIMBAUGH! Feel free to disengage your critical apparatus and brush off your ad hominems. Go on, DO IT! Prove me right about everything I just wrote.)

In summation:
1. Yay for science, reason, the classical tradition, the Enlightenment and rigorous skeptical inquiry.
2. Boo for mystical thinking, obscurantism, substitution of policy preferences for science, and the spirit of Lysenko.