Bishop Hill Black: consensus doesn't matter
Feb 6, 2012 BBC Climate: other A number of readers have emailed me pointing to Richard Black's latest offering, which seems to carry a rather different tone to what has gone before. He is discussing scientific consensus and whether such a thing is of any importance.
A couple of years back, at one of the UNFCCC meetings in Bonn, I had a long chat with Viscount Monckton. As a scholar of Classics, he was able to detail with Classical derivation the reasons why consensus matters far less than simply being right.
And he is surely correct; after all, in more recent times, Galileo, Darwin, Einstein and Hawking are among those whose work broke with the consensus, yet turned out to be correct.
But if the presence of a consensus is irrelevant, so, logically, is its absence; which makes the continued use by sceptics' groups of the "consensus is cracking" meme a bit mystifying.
After all, how many times can you say it's cracking before people start asking "so why hasn't it cracked, then?"
In both cases - consensus and breaking consensus - it's surely the evidence that should count, not the number of people you can get to sign your letter.
Reader Comments (71)
"Monckton .. was able to detail with Classical derivation the reasons why consensus matters far less than simply being right."
Is Black saying that he wouldn't have been taken in, if only he'd had a Classical education?
I'm not sure skeptics do say the consensus is cracking. I rather think skeptics note simply a) consensus is a political concept and isn't interesting or relevant in science, and b) consensus on one set of issues (the world has warmed in the last 150 years, man probably has something to do with it) is being passed off by warmists as consensus that climate change is worth the very large cost of a response, which is a far more controversial and complex issue.
Maybe the BBC have already shifted their pension fund millions into something else.
Richard Black disappoints. - gavin
The opinion of Prof. Kelly is deeply worrying to warmistas. When I knew him his day job was as an accomplished mathematical modeller of complex semiconductor systems. Therefore he has some knowledge and depth in matters numerical. I can understand why RB is padding carefully around, looking for weaknesses, trying to find inconstancies, but talking from personal experience, he's going to have to try better than this.
As Feynman said, if the world doesn't react the way the model predicts then its the model that's wrong.
I'm intrigued as to how this will play out.
SDCS.
It would appear that the warmists are worried that their championing of "the concensus" as the ultimate arbiter could backfire on them if it can be shown that a concensus rejects CAGW, therefore they are beginning to back away from the concept.
This is interesting as it suggests that they might have information which suggests that their support is slipping away.
The most interesting points in the Black article are probably the remarks from Cambridge Engineerining Professor Michael Kelly:
"in Central England from about 1699 to 1729 it went up by nearly 2C - and nobody said that was carbon dioxide."
"money is better spent on aid to Africa than on a dash to renewables"
"current climate models are not trustworthy - in particular, because they project an acceleration of warming whereas over the last 17 years we have seen a deceleration"
Sir Digby
"As Feynman said, if the world doesn't react the way the model predicts then its the model that's wrong."
It is indeed in this sense the climate models are actually useful - they are simply showing that the underlying assumptions are wrong.
Black finds "the continued use by sceptics' groups of the "consensus is cracking" meme a bit mystifying". Probably because most sceptics don't use it. On the contrary, I (and I think most sceptics) rather welcome the warmists' reliance on consensus. It's easy to demonstrate how it undermines their assertions: science’s escape from the authority of consensus was a major achievement of the Enlightenment. As Thomas Huxley (whose debate with Bishop Wilberforce established the pre-eminence of Darwin’s theory of evolution) said:
PS to TomO: "Y2K ... a fizzled out non-topic". Groan - not that again: see this.
I've limited time right now but two comments jump out at me.
Steve McIntyre:
That's right. But the bad science in the IPCC Third Assessment Report - the hockey stick and all that went with it, with the Bish being Boswell to your Johnson - should have been admitted corrected. This one example shows that there's strong false belief or something worse at work. I think "the consensus is cracking" has become shorthand for a breakthrough in that regard.
Paul Matthews:
I agree that Kelly's comments and Black's reporting of them are highly significant - though I think the positive and intelligent citation of Christoper Monckton is also highly signficant. Some characters in the climate debate are demonised more than others. Monckton isn't to everyone's taste - heck, he isn't always to my own taste - but for Black to use and agree with him intelligently is a big step.
As for Kelly, the phrase that bothers me is "money is better spent on aid to Africa than on a dash to renewables". Almost anything is better than a dash to renewables but African economists like Dambisa Moyo warn us that trillions of aid since WWII has been anything from useless to harmful. Moyo's mentor Paul Collier has a more nuanced view, where the right aid at the right time (especially at the end of conflict) can do much good but other types are destructive. Kelly's dead right to approach the cost-benefit analysis question but this is much too broad brush.
Black, Harrabin and Monbiot are slipperyer than a water snake covered in soap. Be aware.
Good the consensus thing can be scrapped then...
But, one also needs to consider what evidence one is going to lump together when one is positing a weight of evidence in favour of something. Example:
1) Site temperature records - all well and good. May need a bit of tweaking to fill in missing data, station moves etc. Better have a ROBUST means of doing this otherwise bias or uncertainty are likely.
2) Global temperature records - mmm OK then. Hope the prior tweaking is consistent and not introducing bias or uncertainty too much. Better have a ROBUST means to aggregate all oft he site data in a global figure. Still a little dubious to use a singel figure to capture a global situation. Better stick with satellite data - but it not ver historical.
3) Proxy records. mmm OK then. Better be very sure of the relationship between, say, CO2, temp, tree rings, clam shells, O18, etc... quite a bit of danger of seeing what one wants to see in it.
4) Other studies. err.. OK then. Better be pretty sure how migration patterns, leaf size, arctic ice packs, sea level (or whatever is under consideration) changes with all its effectors before pronouncing that what you've seen is consistent with a change in global temperature. It is quite a stretch to link these "meta-data" (e.g. polarbear range and global temp data) as the relationship is highly likely (TM IPCC) to be complex.
5) Publicity from vested interests...oh give me a break!
(that's enough "data". Ed.)
As pointed out, the height of the CAGW angst was around 2006/7...reasons for this, if we accept it was as much a political arguement as a scientific one, was because that was also the height of BSD (BushDerangementSyndrome). It was used by the political elite to set themselves up as moral crusaders as compared to the 'texas cowboy'. Since thier own The One has been installed CAGW became less of an issue, in fact, it got thrown under the bus.
..or even BDS..doh!
Black: we are at war with eurasia. We have always been at war with eurasia.
Lets not start going soft on the propagandist that is Richard Black. He has abused his position of trust for years by deciding to take a position on global warming that has prevented him from being impartial. Once a snake oil salesman, always a snake oil salesman.
Black's latest maunderings give me an image of an isolated and confused soldier who is suffering the dawning realisation that the battle is suddenly lost.
His problem appears to be his need to find a pathway upon which to extricate himself from a dark and lonely place which he blundered into when he was utterly unaware of his own ignorance and hubris.
In science consensus is irrelevant
In politics consensus is very important.
Those wishing to sell solar panels or wind farms, those wishing for a simpler more primitive life, those wishing to dish coal in favour of gas or nuclear power, Those who wish to portray themselves as original thinkers and many others have a political wish to promote AGW theory,
They have therefore promoted a consensus that everyone wise agrees to this.
Those who simply wish to acquire status to themselves have joined in as the "sceptic" is portrayed as either evil or thick- by the aforementioned cabal.
Once the consequences of AGW amelioration sink in, the political consensus for its reduction will considerably diminish, and the number of proponents will rapidly diminish- as was said by someone else, in a few years it will be a joke.
This is not backtracking.
It's a failed attempt at rhetorical point-scoring. And not over any issue of substance at all; this is merely petty nit-picking.
He is trying to call out his opponents over what he perceives as an inconsistency in our debating. In effect: "You said we shouldn't talk about consensus, but now you're doing it." It's childish, petty and ill-mannered. Even if his claim were right, it would still be the logical error tu quoque.
But it's even worse than he thinks.
There would be an inconsistency in pointing out that consensus doesn't affect reality, and in pointing out that 'the consensus is crumbling' if you were arguing that the second instance does affect reality. Of course it doesn't. What it does do is affect the debate, not the reality. Some people find the claimed consensus persuasive in its own right, regardless of it's lack of merit. That makes it worth repudiating that claim, when it can honestly be repudiated. By analogy, if you claim your magic 8 ball always supports your argument, it's perfectly acceptable to both point out the irrelevancy of the magic 8 ball and that it doesn't always support your claim.
The next fallacy is ascribing the views of some members of a group to every member of that group.
If I applied the same egregious practice to Richard, I'd be berating him for the warmist view that there is a gigantic ocean under the Antarctic ice-cap that was going to cause the cap to slide off into the Antarctic Ocean. (When I first decided I should learn about the Global Warming debate, I took out the three books that were all my library had on the topic. That was the premise of the first book, a warmist tome.) Or repudiate his warmist disbelief in the conservation of matter. (That was the second book.)
Richard did not intend this to be a backtracking or a softening of stance. What he intended it to be was an argument.
What it is really, is a mistake.
With Richard Black you get exactly what you would expect from a non-scientist trying to write on scientific issues ie absolute certainty of opinion about an extremely complex issue. As a physics graduate it was always this certainty about AGW that troubled me. It is extremely difficult to model even very basic systems (three body problem anyone?) so how can anyone claim to have modelled something as complex as global climate with absolute certainty. Especially when it is well known that major factors such as cloud cover etc have been assigned arbitrary parameters.
Now, thankfully, the whole edifice is crashing down around the ears of the serial liars.
Classic confusion from Black. He is correct that consensus is irrelevant in science .... although its an interesting change of tack from everything he has always said. But consensus is crucial in politics and it is the claim of consensus which has been used to make political gain which is what skeptics object to. Of course its important that it is 'cracking' because it means that the claim of consensus, although irrelevant in a scientific context, cannot now be used (or more correctly misused) in the political realm.
Of course, Black can't see this .. he is just trying to turn the inconvenient fact that the lack of consensus is now being exposed into an argument to support his undying dogma.