Projections of human behaviour not easily amenable to
prediction (e.g. evolution of political systems).
Chaotic components of complex systems.
Inadequate models, incomplete or competing conceptual
frameworks, lack of agreement on model structure,
ambiguous system boundaries or definitions, significant
processes or relationships wrongly specified or not
considered.
Missing, inaccurate or non-representative data,
inappropriate spatial or temporal resolution,
poorly known or changing model parameters.
Images from IPCC report
Is there a controversy in the
science?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
said it was "firmly" standing by findings that a rise in
the use of greenhouse gases was a factor. It was
responding to a row over the reliability of data from
East Anglia University's Climatic Research Unit.
Leaked e-mail exchanges prompted claims that data
had been manipulated. Last month, hundreds of
messages between scientists at the unit and their
peers around the world were put on the internet
along with other documents.
-BBC News
Quote 1
“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of
warming at the moment and it is a travesty
that we can’t,” Dr. Trenberth wrote.
Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the National
Center for Atmospheric Research, was
discussing gaps in understanding of recent
variations in temperature with other
scientists.
Quote 2
“"I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science
journal] trick of adding in the real temps to
each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981
onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide
the decline."
Some skeptics asserted Friday that the
correspondence revealed an effort to withhold
scientific information. “This is not a smoking
gun; this is a mushroom cloud,” said Patrick J.
Michaels, a climatologist who has long faulted
evidence pointing to human-driven warming
and is criticized in the documents.
Some of the correspondence portrays the
scientists as feeling under siege by the
skeptics’ camp and worried that any stray
comment or data glitch could be turned
against them.
A scientist responds
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/12/f
ebrile_nitwits_and_the_hacked.php?utm_sou
rce=mostactive&utm_medium=link
Main points
1. Emails were obtained illegally. It is probably not a
coincidence it was immediately before the international
meeting in Copenhagen.
2. Despite their illegality, all the attention has focused on
the climate scientists, who didn’t do anything illegal.
3. There appear to only be two particularly damning
emails out of the hundreds (or thousands), both of
which are interpreted out of context.
4. There is no ambiguity in human-induced global
warming, despite these emails.
5. Scientists are people, and everyone has faults.
Climatologists, in particular, are under immense public
scrutiny.
Scientific Integrity
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you
are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful
about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to
fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a
conventional way after that.
I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not
lying, but bending over backwards to show how you are
maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a
scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly
to other scientists, and I think to laymen.
-R. Feynman, Cargo Cult Science
Scientific Integrity
Despite the fact that a majority of people (including a majority of
scientists) acknowledges that the “skeptics” do not have
integrity (scientific or otherwise), the scientists are expected
to.
‘Frankly, I found it very disappointing to read a leading climate
scientist writing that he used a “trick” to “hide” a putative
decline in temperatures or was keeping contradictory
research from getting a proper hearing. Yes, the climatedenier community, funded by big oil, has published all sorts
of bogus science for years — and the world never made a
fuss. That, though, is no excuse for serious climatologists not
adhering to the highest scientific standards at all times.’
- T. Friedman; December 9, 2009
Image source: New York Times
So I have just one wish for you--the good luck to
be somewhere where you are free to maintain the
kind of integrity I have described, and where you
do not feel forced by a need to maintain your
position in the organization, or financial support, or
so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that
freedom.
- R. Feynman, Cargo Cult Science
Jim Hanson
N. Oreskes
Is there uncertainty in scientific
community about the concept of
human-induced global warming?
Image source: Wikimedia Commons, courtesy of Sage Ross.
Is there a controversy in the
science?
N. Oreskes
Oreskes
•
•
•
•
What are the main points that she makes?
What is her evidence?
What is the uncertainty?
Do you trust her results?
N. Oreskes
Who are the people who reject
climate change? What is their
strategy?
Oreskes video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T4UF_Rmli
o&NR=1
N. Oreskes (Fall 2007 talk at UW)
What is the strategy?
The petroleum industry is following the
playbook of the tobacco industry, who have
perfected the method of “manufacturing
uncertainty”.
Image source: Microsoft Clip Art
From Michales & Monforton;
America Journal of Public Health, 2005
"For almost half a century, the tobacco companies hired scientists to dispute first, that
smokers were at greater risk of dying of lung cancer; second, the role of tobacco use in
heart disease and other illnesses; and finally, the evidence that environmental tobacco
smoke increased disease risk in nonsmokers," they wrote. "In each case, the scientific
community eventually reached the consensus that tobacco smoke caused these
conditions. Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence and the smoking-related deaths
of millions of smokers, the tobacco industry was able to wage a campaign that
successfully delayed regulation and victim compensation for decades.”
The Tobacco Strategy
•
•
•
•
Science was uncertain
Concerns were exaggerated
Technology will solve the problem
No need for government interference
But in the twenty-first century the alternative to
government action is not individual liberty; it
is corporate power. And the role of large
corporations in this story has been mostly
negative, a tale of self-interested obfuscation
and short-sited delay.
-Weart
This message of scientific uncertainty has been reinforced by the
public relations campaigns of certain corporations with a large
stake in the issue. The most well known example is
ExxonMobil, which in 2004 ran a highly visible advertising
campaign on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Its
carefully worded advertisements —written and formatted to
look like newspaper columns and called op-ed pieces by
ExxonMobil —suggested that climate science was far too
uncertain to warrant action on it.
N. Oreskes
“Extremism of all types is a vice”
“They did not make a political
argument on political grounds.
Rather, they disguised a political
argument as a scientific one, and
camoflagued a political debate as
a scientific debate. And in the
process, they greatly distorted the
facts about climate science, they
confused the American people,
and they delayed political action
one of the most pressing political
issues of our time.”
Image source: Wikimedia Commons, courtesy of Sage Ross.
Uncertainty
Scientists, therefore, are used to dealing with
doubt and uncertainty. All scientific knowledge is
uncertain. This experience with doubt and
uncertainty is important. I believe that it is of very
great value, and one that extends beyond the
sciences. I believe that to solve any problem that
has never been solved before, you have to leave
the door to the unknown ajar. You have to permit
the possibility that you do not have it exactly right.
Otherwise, if you have made up your mind already,
you might not solve it.
- R. Feynman, The Uncertainty of Science
Human-induced greenhouse warming
Hypothesis (1896)
Hypothesis
(1938)
Beginnings of a
Scientific
Theory (1960)
Image: Wikipedia
Arrhenius
Image: Wikipedia
Callender
Image: Wikipedia
Keeling
Science of the future
Problem based
Interdisciplinary
Problems of society, not problems of science
(such as, How do we maintain a habitable
Earth?)
Emphasis on predictive power of science
This notion that “science” is something that belongs in
a separate compartment of its own, apart from
everyday life, is one that I should like to challenge.
We live in a scientific age; yet we assume that
knowledge is the prerogative of only a small number
of human beings… This is not true. The materials of
science are the materials of life itself. Science is the
reality of living, it is the what, the how, and the why
in everything in our experience.
-Rachel Carson, 1952