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| Recent scare stories | | Date Created: Sep 03, 2006, 12:07 PM |
Following the Global Warming juggernaut is an interesting exercise in scientific paradigms (particularly those in relatively new and immature sciences), politicized science, and media bias. A recent paper by Patrick J. Michaels (Cato Inst. and prof at Virginia Polytech) called, "Is the Sky Really Falling? A Review of Recent Global Warming Scare Stories" showed me a connection between government sponsored science (which is inherently politicized) and MSM (mainstream media) reporting. It's not just that it's a liberal dogma issue and the MSM is heavily liberally biased. It's because scientists have to sell their research findings to get funded just as the media have to sell "news" stories. Supporting the scientific paradigm and generating Global Warming scare stories gets you more grant money and the scare stories sell movies, newspapers, and magazines. Real science is interested in how things work, not what might sell.
The reality is that the globe is getting slightly and slowly warmer at the moment. Atmospheric CO2 is also on the increase. What is not known is cause and effect, the mechanisms on a global level, and whether computer predictive models are accurate enough to be relied on. The very real doubt in any one of these issues is enough to reject the liberal-environmentalist agenda, but that's been the history of that messianic agenda. The premisses are wrong or seriously in question, the solution is totalitarian government control, the solution will not solve the problem, unintended consequences abound, and we would be better off doing nothing and continuing to study or better yet look for ways to adapt and take advantage of warming rather than trying to prevent it. Humans have always been better at adapting than in predicting or controlling the future.
Politicized Global Warming science acts more like religious belief than science.
Here's the first paragraph and the conclusion of the article. The main text is rather dense. Real science is also hard. But the case is made that the articles the media uses to hype Global Warming scare stories are poor science to begin with and then are selectively distorted by the media again, not to mention those with a political agenda.
"In the last two years, a remarkable amount of
disturbing news has been published concerning
global warming, largely concentrating on melt-
ing of polar ice, tropical storms and hurricanes,
and mass extinctions. The sheer volume of these
stories appears to be moving the American polit-
ical process toward some type of policy restrict-
ing emissions of carbon dioxide.
...
It is apparent that many recent stories on
melting of high-latitude ice, hurricanes, and
extinctions are riddled with self-inconsisten-
cies, are inconsistent with other findings, and
are reported—as much by scientists them-
selves as by reporters—in extreme or mislead-
ing fashions that do not accurately portray
the actual research.
This begs for an explanation. Perhaps it is
simply the way science always has been, but
that the dramatic policy implications of
global warming compel some people (includ-
ing this author) to examine the refereed liter-
ature with more scrutiny than would nor-
mally be applied. The alternative is that
recently the peer review process has begun to
allow the publication of papers that should
have been dramatically modified before
being accepted.
If the latter is true, then another explana-
tion is required. One hypothesis would be that
“public choice” [i.e. politicized] dynamics is now entering into
science. But this would seem to require uneth-
ical behavior on the part of a wide scientific
community. Under this model, the review
process becomes less stringent if a paper pro-
motes the economic well-being of the reviewer,
and more stringent if it does not.
“Well-being” here means professional
advancement and reward. It is a fact that in
the United States the taxpayer outlay for so-
called global change science is now in excess
of $4 billion annually. Universities reward
their faculty on the amount and quality of
research that they produce, which, in climate
science, requires considerable taxpayer fund-
ing. If the funding stream is threatened by
findings downplaying the significance of cli-
mate change, the public choice model would
predict rather vociferous review. If it is
enhanced, this model would predict a glow-
ing, positive review.
Whether public choice dynamics is indeed
responsible for the current rather sloppy state
of global warming science is a testable hypoth-
esis, but beyond the scope of this paper.
It can be tested by noting that adding new
information to a forecast has an equal proba-
bility of changing the forecast in either a posi-
tive or a negative direction. It would be inter-
esting to undertake a comprehensive analysis
of the recent scientific literature on climate
change to see whether results are significantly
biasing our view of the future into one that is
almost always “worse than we thought” and
rarely “not as bad as we thought.”
Whether or not this bias exists, the recent
tidal wave of global warming papers on polar
ice, hurricanes, and extinctions has included
an incredible number of omissions and
inconsistencies. It is to be hoped that this
paper will help to set the record straight on
these aspects of climate change." |
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