From “a scientist who believes in the scientific method”
Daniel Botkin is professor emeritus in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He says that he is “a scientist who believes in the scientific method and in what facts tell us.” WSJ:
Some colleagues who share some of my doubts argue that the only way to get our society to change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe, and that therefore it is all right and even necessary for scientists to exaggerate. They tell me that my belief in open and honest assessment is naïve. “Wolves deceive their prey, don’t they?” one said to me recently. Therefore, biologically, he said, we are justified in exaggerating to get society to change.
The climate modelers who developed the computer programs that are being used to forecast climate change used to readily admit that the models were crude and not very realistic, but were the best that could be done with available computers and programming methods. They said our options were to either believe those crude models or believe the opinions of experienced, data-focused scientists. Having done a great deal of computer modeling myself, I appreciated their acknowledgment of the limits of their methods. But I hear no such statements today. Oddly, the forecasts of computer models have become our new reality, while facts such as the few extinctions of the past 2.5 million years are pushed aside, as if they were not our reality.
A recent article in the well-respected journal American Scientist explained why the glacier on Mt. Kilimanjaro could not be melting from global warming. Simply from an intellectual point of view it was fascinating–especially the author’s Sherlock Holmes approach to figuring out what was causing the glacier to melt. That it couldn’t be global warming directly (i.e., the result of air around the glacier warming) was made clear by the fact that the air temperature at the altitude of the glacier is below freezing. This means that only direct radiant heat from sunlight could be warming and melting the glacier. The author also studied the shape of the glacier and deduced that its melting pattern was consistent with radiant heat but not air temperature. Although acknowledged by many scientists, the paper is scorned by the true believers in global warming.
Hey, man, truth is just a human construct. Get with the program. Professor Alan Sokal wrote a beautiful paper showing that physics isn’t about “truth” but about power relationships in our repressive society.
October 25th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
“Wolves deceive their prey, don’t they?” one said to me recently. Therefore, biologically, he said, we are justified in exaggerating to get society to change. As Thomas Kuhn once noted ” Normal scientific activity, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicted on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Much of the success of the enterprise derives from the community’s willingness to defend that assumption, if necessary at at considerable cost. Normal science, for example, often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive to its basic commitments.”
If the critical scientist is not drawn back into the fold, he/she will be forced to join another more congenial community, or in some spectacular instances to create a new one.
Now, some might say that global warming/climate change is a paradigm shift or scientific revolution. But with big Al and the cunning wolf pack i just see a slick, snake oil salesman and a clever side show, but no real scientific/philosophical debate. What we are seeing is Planck’s dictum: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Welcome to the Al Gore et al indoctrination program.