Blogging about the Science of Climate Change

There is a fascinating team blog on the issue of climate change called RealClimate:


Climate scientists? That, they are. Every single one of them. And they use this blog to push their views about the climate. I have only read through a few of their many posts, but, from what I can tell, they seem intent on convincing readers that their own research findings and the research findings reported by other scientists have already established the fact that global warming is mainly caused by human CO2 emissions and that computer models really can predict the future of a complex system like the climate. They even offer a number of helpful links, like this one to "How to talk to a Climate Skeptic," which reminds me of Ann Coulter's book entitled "How to talk to a Liberal (if you must)."

That scientists would promote their own research agendas in this way (i.e., on a blog rather than in a journal) gives me the creeps. From their point of view, I assume, they are simply performing a useful public service by correcting faulty arguments about climate change made by those who lack expertise in a complicated subject matter. But from my point of view, they appear to be doing much more than that. In particular, they appear to be promoting a left-wing environmental agenda, and their preferred method is to immediately slap down anyone who disagrees with them. In that sense, they seem a lot like a rapid response team that political campaigns often employ to deal with charges leveled against them by competing campaigns. My concern is that this climate blog actively promotes the politicization of science and does little to inform a confused public. One need only read through the enormous number of comments that accompany each post to see that what they are mainly doing is preaching to the converted.

Publicizing and explaining science can be done in a way that benefits everyone (and benefits science as well). For example, non-scientists often promote treatments for Autism that give false hope to parents who are desperate for anything that will finally help their child to be normal. In response, scientists conduct well-designed studies to answer the simple question of whether the promoted treatment is better than (or, possibly, worse than) no treatment at all. The results invariably show that the new-fangled treatments being pushed by well meaning people who lack scientific expertise are not useful. The behavioral scientists who conduct this research often go out of their way to promote their findings in any way they can. And that's good for everyone. It's good for science, too, because it helps to underscore the point that the scientific method is often the only way to get at the truth of the matter.

At the RealClimate blog, they may have started out this way, but now that the debate over anthropogenic global warming is playing out in scientific journals, they have resorted to tactics that I believe are not good for science. These bloggers constitute a rapid response team, not to charlatans pushing ideas for their own personal gain, but to scientists who publish results and analyses (in peer-reviewed journals) that the bloggers don't like. As I see it, this is qualitatively different from bringing science to the attention of the public in an effort to correct faulty claims made by non-scientists. Debates between scientists should take place within the confines of scientific journals, not on blogs. It does science no good (at least not in the long term) for research scientists to promote their own personal research agendas in this way. But I guess it is a sign of the times.

Perhaps the only way in which this sort of thing may be instructive is that it allows the public to see first hand how scientists who stake their reputations on a particular point of view become incapable of allowing new evidence to influence their thinking (so they quickly slap it down instead). This is not a new phenomenon:

The classic description of the scientific method begins with devising a hypothesis. The problem with starting with a hypothesis, however, is that bias and self-delusion can arise due to an emotional attachment to the hypothesis, as honestly described by Chamberlin in 1897:

The moment one has offered an original explanation for a phenomenon which seems satisfactory, that moment affection for [one’s] intellectual child springs into existence, and as the explanation grows into a definite theory [one’s] parental affections cluster about [the] offspring and it grows more and more dear …. There springs up also unwittingly a pressing of the theory to make it fit the facts and a pressing of the facts to make them fit the theory…1

The temptation to misinterpret results that contradict the desired hypothesis is probably irresistible. This mistake occurs repeatedly in the history of science. Some examples were collected by Langmuir,2 who correctly called them "Pathological Science."

Peer-review of research can help avoid these mistakes, so long as the reviewers are not in the thrall of the same hypothesis. But if there is a shared enthrallment among the reviewers in a commonly believed hypothesis, then innovation becomes difficult because alternative hypotheses are not seriously considered, and sometimes not even permitted.

Scientists are only human, after all, and there are many examples of "shared enthrallment" that can be identified. I don't know if the current state of affairs with regard to anthropogenic global warming falls into that category, but it looks that way now that scientists are promoting their own personal research agendas and arguing against other scientists on blogs.

Of course, the RealClimate bloggers obviously see matters in a different light. That is, so far as I can tell, they sincerely believe that they are performing a useful public service, just as behavioral scientists do when they debunk false claims made by non-scientists. But they seem to be doing far more than that, and I would similarly criticize behavioral scientists who favor Treatment A for autism when they start to use team blogs to pounce on published science that appears to favor Treatment B. Debates like that are best reserved for scientific journals (in my possibly outdated view).

If scientists insist on using blogs to promote their own research on climate science when that research is challenged by other scientists, then my own feeling is that they should also provide more information about where they stand on a larger set of political issues. Are these climate bloggers neocons, for example? Did they vote for Bush? Or do they instead think that he is the worst president ever? How do they feel about the death penalty, abortion rights, affirmative action, raising taxes on the wealthy, universal health care, abandoning the innocent people of Iraq to the wolves of al Qaeda, and so on? I don't know, and they don't say. And that's my problem.

From their point of view, I assume that the RealClimate bloggers want to avoid politicizing the issue. After all, as they see it, they are just scientists engaged in a well-intentioned effort to objectively inform the public about a looming environmental catastrophe. But the real issue concerns their own objectivity. Mainstream media reporters, for example, try to be objective, and they experience themselves as being in search of the truth. However, what comes out of their brains and into their stories is centered squarely on mainstream liberal thinking. This explains why Democrats believe that the news is unbiased, Independents believe that it is quite biased in the liberal direction, and Republicans believe that it is extremely biased in the liberal direction. Reporters probably do not even realize that they are processing all information through a left wing filter before they write their stories, and Chamberlin noted that the same thing can happen to scientists (and he made this observation way back in 1897).

Science shows that the death penalty deters murder. But I don't want the scientists who conduct this research to start promoting their own research agendas on a blog in the name of science when other scientists challenge their conclusions. Blogs are great when the issue is "science vs. non-science." They are not so great (in my view, anyway) when the issue becomes "science vs. science."

If death penalty advocates did adopt the "rapid response team" blogging approach, wouldn't you want to know if they are radical conservatives on other issues? If you, yourself, lean left and oppose the death penalty, would that be an irrelevant consideration to you? That is, would you read the pro-death-penalty blog and say "hey, these guys are scientists with specialized information that I lack..who am I to question what they say?" No, you wouldn't, because you instinctively know that the political inclinations of a scientist may be relevant to his or her research-based conclusions.

As it turns out, some people who have discovered a deterrent effect of the death penalty actually lean left and oppose capital punishment. To me, that makes their results a bit more believable. And it illustrates why I wish the influential RealClimate bloggers would write about a broader range of political issues as well. If they are right-wing neocons who think that George Bush is the greatest president ever (except, perhaps, for his lack of activism on the global warming issue), that would be informative. In fact, in my view, it would make their claims more believable even though I would still not fully approve of what they are doing. But if they are down-the-line liberal extremists who think that George Bush is the worst president ever and that he is every bit as evil as the al Qaeda terrorists he constantly "lies" about, well, I'd be less sure that they have managed to avoid the grips of "pathological science."