Bishop Hill Houston, we may have a sceptic problem
Nov 4, 2013 Climate: Sceptics ;)
I get a mention in an article in Chemistry World. Written by Philip Ball, the piece considers why (in the author's opinion) so many chemists are sceptics and concludes that its because we all have a contrarian streak.
If I were asked to make gross generalisations about the character of different fields of science, I would suggest that physicists are idealistic, biologists are conservative, and chemists are best described by that useful rustic Americanism, ‘ornery’. None of these are negative judgements – they all have pros as well as cons. But there does seem to be a contrarian streak that runs through the chemically trained, from William Crookes and Henry Armstrong to James Lovelock, Kary Mullis, Martin Fleischmann and of course the king of them all, Linus Pauling (who I’d have put money on being some kind of climate sceptic). This is part of what makes chemistry fun, but it is not without its complications.
It then wonders if the prevalence of scepticism could be "serious".
It's all a bit silly, and the author doesn't seem to have the faintest idea of what the global warming debate is about, but it might be worth a look.
Reader Comments (80)
My degree is in biological sciences, my wife's degree is in physics. While not denying that I am conservative or that my wife is idealistic, but we are both somewhat sceptical about climate change.
(And I'm definitely 'ornery.)
Yep. I've noticed that just from among my limited acquaintance of sceptics some chemical training is almost de rigueur.
I'd add to that august list, me, your good self, Prof. Jonathan Jones, Ruth Dixon, Barry Woods and at least two 'lurkers'. Apologies to any others I have missed out.
My feeling is that Chemistry is one the most practical/experimental sciences there is. Either the liquid turns from red to blue or it doesn't. And though theoretical chemistry can be used to guide our bench work, it isn't a substitute for it. Nor an especially good predictor of what the pesky molecules are going to actually do when we start to poke and prod them.
But climatology is the exact opposite. All theory and very limited experiment/observation. Theory is king and its considered rather grubby to look out of the window and notice the 'pause'. Even more so to acknowledge that when theory and data disagree the problem is with the theory.
Chemists are experienced in getting down and dirty with Mother Nature (and blowing themselves up - preferably with noxious odours attached). The other 'sciences' prefer to take a lofty idealised theoretical view of her secrets..and definitely no practicals! It is the chemists who are the realists. She is more complex than we know.
On Jeff's Reader Background thread there are 40 PhD sceptics. Of these, 12 are in chemistry, more than any other field.
Latimer, here is what one of them says:
"I always preferred the lab over the desk. In Chemistry, you have to test your hypotheses in the lab before you file for the patent (or the Nobel Prize!). Computer experiments are fun, but they do not yield data"
I object to being labelled "idealistic". I prefer "realistic".
I think the difference between the sciences is to do with real world achievement. In academe you can propose a theory and gain plaudits if that theory seems sound. The more theories proposed the better. The test of time is not if they are proved correct but if they’re not proved wrong. Basically, pure science is educated guessing. In the world of applied science you are measured by how many demonstrable successes you make not how many different ideas you come up with. One really useful discovery is better than thousands that come to nothing. The pursuit of knowledge is not enough in applied science.
Climate science wandered out of pure science without changing its focus and as such is not suitable for the purpose it’s being used for. I doubt few politicians reading the first IPCC report realised that by the fifth, there would be less things the scientists would be certain of.
My background is high temperature physical chemistry including the thermodynamics and control of complex systems. I ran large plant involving heat transfer to and from ghgs. We started ghg physics' research long before Climate Science.
However, steelmaking, aluminium smelting etc., are completely off the radar of the scientifically-retarded schmucks who infest Climate Alchemy and imagine only they are qualified to assess the science. Anyone with strong physical chemistry knows IPCC science is broken: only they and their ilk should control that discipline.
Chemists, physicists , applied mathematicians and even biologists, should have one thing in common. They should know and work by the scientific method. This is scepticism. Unfortunately the IPCC and the established field of climate science has moved away from the scientific method, to the politicisation of science.
Well we can state with near 100% certainty that Feynmann would be a cAGW sceptic!!! And I fail to see how any serious scientist could fail to be sceptical about, well, everything.
One has to thank Philip Ball for such an acute observation and Paul Matthews for pointing to some convincing, though not conclusive, data to back it up. What impressed me less was the description of Andrew Montford as a merchant of doubt. What a dreadful phrase that is. Good chemist, bad chemist. We'd all draw our lines in a different place, no doubt, but I call this Ball firmly out of court for that. And the link is to Wikipedia's view of Andrew, not the man's own here. Oh dear. Even chemists are not all good, as that heroic one Primo Levi found to his cost.
This is probably also why most Engineers such as myself are sceptics. You tend not to get employed too often if the aircrafts wings fall off - Boeings current shinaigigans with batteries notwithstanding.
Either the liquid turns from red to blue or it doesn't.
I wonder about this actually. My chief memory of the way science was taught at school - and in my case this was a private school persistently in the top 20 or 30 academically - is that it was taught badly.
If you added solution A to solution B and it turned from red to blue, great. But if it turned from red to green or yellow, we were instructed to write that it had turned to blue just the same, regardless of the fact that it had not. The actual observation was discarded in favour of what the received wisdom said the result should be. Discrepancies between observation and theory were explained away rather than explained.
Physics was no better. We would be given light of three colours and told that if shone onto the same space they combined to make white light. When we tried to verify this experimentally the light was in fact green, or red, or something else, but not white. Again this was explained away. The equipment was not properly set up, you see, but if it were, the blended light would be white. Mathematical models proved it, apparently.
Incuriousness was encouraged. We would be set those problems in which there is a circuit diagram, various bulbs and a battery. You were supposed to say which bulbs lit up when this, that or the other battery was connected. I used to wonder aloud why all the bulbs did not light up instantaneously. After all, if a bulb is at the end of a cul de sac, the electrons don't know that when they set off down it. Why would all the bulbs not light up until the electrons are stopped?
This question was so dumb and facile, apparently, that it was unworthy of an answer. Eventually, at university, a Natural Science undergraduate mate of mine explained it to me simply, elegantly and completely (by analogy using water pumps and water wheels, as it happens). I now wonder whether the teachers understood the subject well enough to be able to answer the question. There were some things you just accepted without question or perhaps understanding.
I am probably of much the same generation as most climate psyentists. I'm sure the failed experiments I did were aberrations and that if done properly they supported the model. But if today's cli-sci people's scientific education was similar to mine, they perhaps now exhibit a habit acquired at an impressionable age of finding out out what the answer's supposed to be, conforming the observations to that, and ignoring both contrary data and awkward questions.
Started off with a Chemistry degree before switching to psychology, and yes, there is a lot of cynicism amongst chemists, simply because I suspect they know just how non-deterministic simple things are. Textbook might say that if to add A and B and heat under reflux for an hour you will get C, not if you are having a bad day in the organic lab you don't.
Physicists are or may be idealist but they are reductionist. Where the problem collapses to the reduced question it produces great results. Where it doesn't, it results in failure. At this juncture, their idealism interferes with moving on to a different approach.
Perhaps one of the things that make us chemists so skepticle is that when we run experiments, there is rarely one simple thing that happens. When I did my dissertation more than 30 years ago I studied one simply reaction (which occurred ar planned) and then was followed by 10 other reactions that turned out to be more interesting. We are used to kinetics which can be zeroth order, first order and second order. Change the temperature a little and you might get what you want faster but then some other reaction comes along and changes things entirely. A small impurity has a big affect. The thought that something as complex as the climate is going to be dominated by some linear ( or logrithmic) simple thermostat with co2 concentration seems way too over simplistic when other gasses dominate the greenhouse gases on the "water planet" and those gases have a whole range of phases and aerosols that change the energy balance entirely.
The other things that chemists do well is experiment, model and debate. The field advanced rapidly in the 20th century by doing these things. People are expected to argue their position vigorously. People don't build a consensus, they run better experiments. If the model doesn't fit the experiments, you change the model. If the data doesn't tell you what you need, you change or improve the experiment. When we look at climate science, we see a system where the noise is an order of magnitude higher than the signal, we see competing pathways, we see a lot of unexplained history with a short period of time where one thing correlates with another and we know that we cannot assign cause and effect unless we can explain all that other history.
Finally, things that are well understood in chemistry would be boring as a research topic. Climate science is not boring.
i) sweeping generalisations are pointless and usually wrong. I'm a soft scientist and I hope a sceptic.
ii) since when has scepticism been a badge of dishonour? The point about science is scepticism. Without which science can't progress (the alternative to scepticism being uncritical acceptance of whatever someone else tells you).
By the way, speaking of sweeping generalisations... how many climatologists does it take to change a light bulb? (multiple choice)
a) All of them; they have to reach a consensus
b) Unknown, but they will only replace perfectly good light bulbs and replace them with toxic ones
c) Hey! Climate change is too serious for humour
d) An unspecified number, but they will only recommend that the light bulb be changed, it is up to governments to enact policies to do the actual work.
There is a certain fallacy in this article's initial description. In 2007, close to 30% of chemists were found to be sceptical in a survey. That may be but it depends on the questions asked and their framing. If you asked 1000 climate scientists questions regarding the IPCC's attribution argument but broken up into its constituent parts, and not asked questions but sat down and had a discussion to elicit their full considered answer, the response may be surprising and may even qualify for another 30% 'sceptic' count too. The element of surprise in finding a high proportion of sceptical chemists lies solely in otherwise accepting the 3% sceptics figure as being meaningful and buying it. In fact, Dennis Bray and Von Storch performed exactly such experiments, though again, the limitations of survey-taking apply to their results as well as their questionnaire consisted of dozens of questions and anyone would be compelling to rush through them out of tedium (and thus may not represent 'true opinion'). They found, for example, that authors of IPCC reports were willing to question the conclusions of previous IPCC reports and more accepting of the version they were a part of.
Max Roberts says
'not if you are having a bad day in the organic lab you don't'
Its a long time ago, but I'm struggling to remember any non-bad days in the organic lab?
As an undergraduate ours was presided over by a fearsomely capable and ferocious professor. Her malign stare did nothing to help my already shaky practical skills.
And so instead of 60g of beautiful pure white crystals with a definite melting point, three days of my effort usually produced some sort of brown gloop nestling in some smoke-blackened glassware. And an embarrassing few minutes explaining my ineptitude to She Who Must Be Feared.
jit asks:
'how many climatologists does it take to change a light bulb? (multiple choice)?'
You are not allowed a lightbulb!
They are the work of the Climate Devils (BigOilConspiracyDeniers branch). Mother Gaia will drown in her own tears and the Planet will Die if you use one.
Jit:
This reminded me of Matt Briggs putting paid to another hoary one yesterday:
So simple, so obviously true but I can recall specific conversations where I lacked that riposte and my adversaries left smirking. Sorry for the interrupt.
My degree is in medicine and unscientifically speaking I would say that in my world matters are evenly split. Although the BMJ editorial board is warmist.
Nope, Don't have any double-blind, peer-review to justify these statements.
So don't ask.
Ta.
No professional scientist or engineer can accept Houghton/Sagan's claims (black body surface IR, level, grey body atmosphere (it's semi-transparent). Most experienced chemists are in this group. Too many physicists claim the grey body assumption. Engineers make systems work with the real science..
PS the fact that Davey and Cameron, age 47 going on 13 1/2, were indoctrinated in the IPCC fraud before Hansen et al's 1988 Congress coup proves that this fake science was created for long-term political purposes. The onset of Real World cooling, mentioned by John Major a couple of weeks ago, has clearly shaken them rigid, as should be the case.
Latimer Alder hits the nail on the head. Chemists are used to doing experiments that may fail in less than day. Used to doing experiments with positive and negative controls. Used to doing lots of experiments that may fail.
There are probably more than a few so called climate scientists who have never had an experiment fail, not least because the experiment is either impossible or takes 50 years. Controls? Hardly.
I find being afflicted with reality tends to produce a certain degree of caution and humility.
This sort of thinking is too prevalent. It makes me sick that thgis sort of rubbish get's air time. It so ridiculously stupid.
All scientists are/should be sceptic otherwise you just cannot be a 'good' scientist.
Lay people just don't seem to be able to grasp this concept.
Philip Ball has form when it comes to climate 'sceptics'.
http://philipball.blogspot.co.uk/2007_03_01_archive.html
The editorial position of Chemistry World is the opposite of a third of its readers, as the editorial indicates. I found this on their web page:
http://ecochemex.com/download-the-business-case-for-green-chemistry/
Richard Drake:
I've always thought science was self-correcting and that put it above other forms of enquiry. It should be immune to fashion, political expediency, popularity, fame, and other stimulants I can't think of now - add funding to the list I suppose. The self-correcting nature of science ought to mean that however off-track the science is, it will sooner-or-later be pushed back towards the "true" vector. (As you say, this correction might take place at time unknown in the future). One slight problem might be that we try to look harder for problems in a particular direction, and finding them, push the science that way. If you take a look at Steven Goddard's recent post on temperature data "corrections" you'll see what I mean - a cynic (not a sceptic) would be likely to ascribe nefariousness to the pro-narrative nature of the "corrections". Hence the science might tend to show as "worse than we thought."
I am not sure if the premise of the article is true across the board or not. But, anecdotally, I do not accept the CAGW meme due to the lack of real evidence. I also happen to be a chemist and a chemical engineer.
And the lack of understanding of the chemistry of "ocean acidification" appals me. I saw (online) Jane Lubchenco of NOAA testify before Congress about the effects of acidity on marine organisms. She also did demonstratons to illustrate her points. I will credit her with "illustration" instead of "prove" because what she did was actually inane. She used sticks of chalk to represent marine animal shells and vinegar to represent an acidified ocean! And as she made these various concentrations of vinegar, her body language indicated she had little familiarity with lab equipment, even though she was just using flasks and beakers. Any chemists familiar with carbonate/bicarbonate equilibria knows how bogus this was.
I deny having a contrarian streak!
Alan Bates
(BSc in Chemistry. Industrial Chemist - Retired)
oeman50: the occupation by inferior scientists of the upper echelons of UK, US, Australian and NZ science is one of the most appalling aspects of this period of societal decline. When our Chief Scientist, Walport, an immunologist, claims IPCC science is perfectly fine when he doesn't have the qualifications to make that judgement, is a good example of this incompetence. And as for his predecessor who trained as an economist, Gawd help us.
Just as an aside, even the Tyndall experiment has been misinterpreted because no-one except Nasif Nahle has tried to do an experiment to investigate the effect of the container of the gas; thermalisation is heterogeneous.
I do find it somewhat amusing these continued attempts to pigeonhole sceptics.
Does it not occur to them that anyone able to read and with an inquiring mind could find out for themselves that Climate 'science' is suspect?
One only has to read Steve McIntyres excellent posts to be aware of the many and varied ways in which the Climate 'scientists' attempt to manipulate the 'science'.
And wasn't it a Physicist who came up with that memorable criticism -
"It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist."
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/16/hal-lewis-my-resignation-from-the-american-physical-society/
As a chemical engineer I'm not just Ornery I'm the very embodiment of a bloody minded stubborn old goat. Show me or get lost.
The field of application of chemical engineering is broad and, as I learned in chem eng 101, the definition of a member of the profession is someone who talks about engineering to a chemist, chemistry to an engineer and politics to another chemical engineer.
Disproving the converse, I am no chemist, yet am ornery nonetheless.
Mike: the definition of a metallurgist is someone who can tell the difference between a platinum blonde and a common ore.
My cousin and sometimes hillwalking buddy, Duncan, is a qualified bio-chemist (PHd) and he is an ardent warmist. When we are in the Lake District in heavy snow he gestures sadly at the (beautiful) landscape and laments the depredations of man. He is a good mountain buddy so I say little at the risk of alienating him. So not all chemists are sceptics.
Peter Crawford
I feel sorry for Duncan. I have frequently looked at the Lakes landscape — on one occasion from the top of Helvellyn — and felt thankful for something that man could not despoil, try as he might.
Such hubris that so-called "scientists" think that what humanity does to the earth will in the long run be any more than a fleabite!
BTW that whole "IPCC Believer vs Skeptic" game, is a false dichotomy rhetorical trick. that enables the speaker to assert "there are 2 sides, and the other side is EVIL so if you are nice you must support the same beliefs as me."
- The truth is any complex issue has a broad spectrum of belief across the many aspects
(... & none of them are dichotomies either cos "I don't know" is always a perfectly valid answer top any aspect)
- Furthermore everyone has to be a sceptic about some IPCC aspect or other, cos some have changed over time.
@Peter Crawford show cousin Duncan that some famous Lake District beauty spots used to be heavily polluted industrial mining landscapes. ..so he should be happy modern man has improved.
Jit @ zero climatologists
Merely - a normal energy corp is required to employ Green Lightbulb Changing corp, BigGreeHedgeFund starts Green Lightbulb Changing corp which hires 1 contractor to change the bulb
...and as a result YOU pay at 3 times the old cost directly
...PLUS the same amount in EXTRA TAXES to pay 5 EA guys that have to employed somewhere along the way
@shub where's that survey ?
.. I didn't find it but I did find this Myth of cooling towers is symptomatic of global warming information shortage
No misinformation allowed, but we assert that we are 100% sure that we must war against CO2 ?If in 2007 2/3 of people wrongly thought cooling towers emit CO2 , then how valid would it be if 2/3 of people have faith in IPCC science ?
It happens that the first book focused on chemistry was the Skeptical Chemist (by Robert Boyle, 1661). (In the book Boyle debunked various unverifiable 'beliefs' that were masquerading as 'science' at the time).
Ahh, the Money Quote near the end:
The "understanding of climate, (began) with Svante Arrhenius’s intuition of the greenhouse effect in 1896".
intuition
/ɪntjʊˈɪʃ(ə)n/
noun: intuition
1.
the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning.
"we shall allow our intuition to guide us"
@Shub sorry I am stupid ..yes the 2007 survey (original)is mentioned at the top of the article
but why reference an old survey when same mag did a newer one January 2010 ?
* The requested article is premium content, available to SCI members and institutional subscribers only.
- I quote directly :
- In what common modern science field is it common to omit known data, if it doesn't fit your narrative ?
.... Cli-sci
@Marion: I met Hal Lewis nigh on 40 years ago and he was the most impressive physicist I have ever come across.
So Andrew Montford is a "merchant of doubt"?
Given that a merchant is "one whose occupation is the wholesale purchase and retail sale of goods for profit" and given that this certainly is not how the good Bishop is gainfully employed and given the negative connotations associated with the term, I'd have to label this as a libelous slur by Philip Ball.
This was my take:
A week in the Lake District a couple of decades ago was one of my all-time favorite vacation trips.
A day of fell-walking provided good exercise and gorgeous views of nature, but the best part was retiring to the despoilation of a pub!
Carrick: brilliant. Worthy of an outing on both pages.
Perhaps the explanation for this 'paradox' is that chemistry is one of the few remaining academic disciplines where delusion and fabrication are detrimental to one's career prospects.
ZT said:
It happens that the first book focused on chemistry was the Skeptical Chemist (by Robert Boyle, 1661). (In the book Boyle debunked various unverifiable 'beliefs' that were masquerading as 'science' at the time).
I also gained a chemistry degree. That was many years ago and I afterwards moved into a different field so my knowledge of chemistry is now very rusty. However, I do understand the scientific method. One of my old chemistry teachers often referred to the title of Boyle's book because he wanted us to know that progress in science can only be achieved by questioning things, and certainly not by jumping to conclusions.
Now you can win a Nobel Prize and become President of the Royal Society without understanding that basic point!
A serious question : Does anyone think that Mr Ball has considered the consequences of his words? Is he an advocate of communist/socialist repression; of thought, word and deed; or is he just gullible, uninformed or just plain stupid. Because what's good for the goose...can we infer that Mr Ball has some sort of social science qualification on the basis of his utterences.