Can Science be Saved?

KARL POPPER AND GORDON TULLOCH ON THE INSTITUTIONAL ASPECT OF SCIENCE [DRAFT]

This story starts with a review of Eric Winsberg, Philosophy and Climate Science (2018) and then proceeds to take issue with his “consensus” view of science.

“my view is that philosophers do better to paint a picture in which we urge trust in the consensus of the scientific community, based on features of that community’s social organization ,” (Winsberg p. 161)

The critique introduces Laframboise on the production of the IPCC Assessment Reports, the Wegman review of Michael Mann’s hockey stick graph, and the institutional approach that Karl Popper advocated to complement his work on the logic of science

Defending the merchants of alarmism.

This appears to be the first book of its kind, promising a thorough and rigorous investigation of the philosophical and methodological issues that arise in the problematic and controversial field of climate science. It is long overdue because the scholars in the history and philosophy of science have by and large neglected this particular science. The two outstanding exceptions are Philip Kitcher and more recently Eric Winsberg, Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida.

Philip Kitcher recently retired from Columbia College NY. With Evelyn Fox Keller he wrote The Seasons Alter that portrays a dystopian future in a warming world that probably represents Peak Alarmism. Any advance on a pandemic that kills billions of people?

In a similar vein but less flamboyant mode Eric Winsberg’s Philosophy and Climate Science is a sustained defence of the methods and conclusions of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and those who share its mission to promote alarm about the future of the planet. Consequently this book is not a solution to the apathy of the philosophers and scholars in the social studies of science in the face of the shortcomings in the mainstream of climate science but instead it is part of the problem. This book cannot be recommended even at a remainder price unless you are looking for yet another example of the failure of the academic “dogs” to bark a warning.

A striking feature of the book is Winsberg’s quite remarkable display of cherry picking of evidence, selective treatment of contested issues his benign view of the credibility of the IPCC and the institutional organization and funding of climate science. He is a two-fisted partisan in the climate debate and this stance is on display from the opening chapter with carefully selected items of information to paint a picture of dangerous warming. He fatuously disparages “climate deniers” (229) as though the considerable number of eminent climate scientists who are not alarmed about the warming trend cannot be taken seriously.. The book begins with some particularly tendentious and misleading data to convince the uninformed and the unwary that serious anthropogenic warming is happening.

He refers to the number of recent years that are the “warmest on record”, the retreat of Arctic ice, the extreme weather events of recent times including a record drought in Australia, and the acceleration of rising sea levels. Given the uncontroversial view that the earth has warmed over the last two centuries and even more since the little Ice Age it stands to reason that recent years are likely to be warmer than earlier ones. the Antarctic ice is growing? The record shows that there has not been a trend to more extreme weather lately (possibly the reverse). The claim about the record recent drought in Australia is simply fake news. The latest report on sea levels by Dr Judith Curry shows no acceleration (possibly a slowing down).

Apparently there is “well funded” opposition to genuine climate science (215) and he cites The Merchants of Doubt (2010) by Oreskes and Conway with their account of Big Oil and others who back the “climate deniers.” But it seems that Exxon Mobil stopped funding climate dissidents around 2005 when they went green like the other oil. Winsberg reports “by all accounts their [Oreskes and Conway’s] claims are true” ( ). Strangely no other accounts are cited. Of course other people and organizations are funding a handful of organisations like the Heartand Institute to challenge the orthodoxy. The Heartland Institute has an annual budget in the order of seven million dollars so it is hardly “well funded” in comparison with the tens of billions poured into mainstream climate research and development projects. Seven million dollars is not even in the same league with the contributions to environmental activists from the great philanthropic foundations. Between 2011 and 2015, the top 20 charitable donors alone gave $556 million to green activists, notably the Sierra Club, which received 49 million (not its only income, of course). The donors are a roll call of the great foundations – Rockefeller, Pew, Hewlett, Packard, Skoll, Bloomberg, Ford and many more. A consortium of the foundations hired a firm of consultants to produce a report “Design to Win: Philanthropy’s Role in the Fight Against Global Warming”. The aim was to triple funding from $210 million in 2007 to $600 million per annum over the next decade. How many Heartland Institutes costing 7 million each could be funded with 600 million dollars? They may have failed to reach that target; still, it is a David versus Goliath contest and the reverse of the picture painted by the likes of Oreskes and uncritically recycled by Winsberg.

The Problem with Models

A significant part of the book is concerned with the principles and practice of model building that is central to the effort to specify the role of CO2 and to provide projections of future developments. This is Winsberg’s home ground because he previously wrote Science in the Age of Computer Simulation and he has many publications in the field. He provides an introduction to the vocabulary and the concepts in the business with emphasis on the size and complexity of the computer programs, the difficulty of interpreting the output and some of the philosophical issues that arise.

Not enough is said to explain their remarkable lack of success in projecting the trends in warming after the pause at the turn of the millennium. Roy Spencer produced the most dramatic picture of the failure showing that almost all of 92 computer models over-estimated the warming trend compared with the most reliable measurements both on the ground and in the troposphere. During the pause in warming the projections deviated more each year from the actual temperature and by about 2005 only four or five of the projections were even close to the measured temperature and the situation deteriorated every year.

The Australian Garth Paltridge provided a much more helpful account of the modelling exercise in The Climate Caper (date). He noted that the model builders are reluctant to give up hope that detailed forecasts can be achieved, perhaps with more data and the next generation of computers for number-crunching. Trillions of dollars worldwide are riding on the predictions of the IPCC and the modelling exercise may be too big to be allowed to fail any time soon.

He reported that the twenty or so models favoured by the IPCC calculate global-average temperatures that range several degrees about the observed value of 15 degrees C.” (p 21) A team at the ANU looked at the predictions for current (measured) rainfall in Australia based on the several IPCC models and the range extended from 200 mm per year less than the actual, to 1000 mm per year more. About half predicted more rainfall for Australia later in the century and half predicted less. The average was an increase of about 8 mm per annum but the model used to develop Australia’s climate policy by the Rudd Government predicted 100 mm less rainfall. Where rigorous standards are applied that model might have been regarded as an outlier and discarded.

Consensus rules in climate science and Paltridge explained why so many of the models converge towards the same broad story of warming, albeit at different rates, The models are so complex that they use the biggest computers in the world and months or years of work may be required complete a trial and there is overwhelming pressure not to run sensitivity tests using alternative models with different tuneable parameters. The “tuneable parameters” are knobs that the operators can twiddle to get the model to fit the data in hand but that process does not guarantee that the model is actually capturing reality, as revealed by the failure in the projections.

Some outstanding climate scientists such as Richard Lindzen who are not hostages of the modelling industry have argued that the macro-modelling approach is the wrong way to go on the basis of scientific first principles. This is rather along the lines of critique that classical and Austrian economists mount against Keynesian macro modelling in economics. That fundamental criticism is supported by a long-running project on forecasting methods and principles conducted by J Scott Armstrong in the US and Kesten Green in Australia. For decades, they have studied the success of various forecasting methods in many fields, including climate science, and they concluded in a paper, “Global warming forecasts by scientists versus scientific forecasts.

“The forecasts in the IPCC Report were not the outcome of scientific procedures. In effect, they were the opinions of scientists transformed by mathematics and obscured by complex writing. Research on forecasting has shown that experts’ predictions are not useful in situations involving uncertainty and complexity. We have been unable to identify any scientific forecasts of global warming. Claims that the Earth will get warmer have no more credence than saying that it will get colder.”

Faced with the difficulty of validating models by the conventional criteria of scientific merit, Winsberg referred to one of his colleagues, Wendy Parker, who explained in a published paper that “the most successful modelling approaches incorporate several computational models that rely on assumptions that contradict one another.” She concedes that this could erode confidence in the work (as indeed it should) but “distinctive methods and standards of justification are in play.” This suggests that POMO has officially arrived in climate science! Winsberg also conceded that it is difficult to explain the new standards of justification that are in play and he virtually threw up his hands and offloaded the criteria for evaluation and validation to the consensus in the field. He wrote “my view is that philosophers do better to paint a picture in which we urge trust in the consensus of the scientific community, based on features of that community’s social organization , than to try to provide a normative framework from which we can demonstrate the reliability (or its absence) of such-and-such modelling result” (161, my italics)

The Social Organisation of Climate Science

Many features of the social organization of the IPCC and the community of climate scientists have come to light that tend to undermine trust in the consensus that emerges from it. Notable sources include Donna Laframboise’s study of the governance of the IPCC, the Wegman committee’s investigation of Michael Mann’s “hockey stick”, the revelations in the emails released from the University of East Anglia and the work of Armstrong and Green noted above.

In 2011 Donna Laframboise published an exhaustive and damning review of the procedures used to assemble the fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC. In The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert she pointed out that it is a political body, created by that most political organization, the United Nations. Rupert Darwall charted the role of the UN in the politics of climate change in two landmark works The Age of Global Warming (date) and Green Tyranny ().

Laframboise described the process in a nutshell. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change convened in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and sold the idea that greenhouse gasses are The Problem. 154 nations signed up in principle and later enrolled in the Kyoto Protocol. The UNFCCC had a brief to reduce human emissions and failing to do so would be “nothing less than criminal irresponsibility”.

The IPCC was created to recruit scientists to support the agenda. Observe the steps: Step one was the political decision that a greenhouse gas treaty was a worthy and achievable goal. Step two was the recognition that before such a treaty could be negotiated, certain documents representing a common understanding were required. Step was to enlisting scientists to help produce such documents.

Laframboise pointed out that the UN did not wait for climate science to mature. Political operators in the organization decided on the solution to a problem that legitimate climate scientists never depicted in alarming terms. The shortest version of the IPCC Climate Bible appeared in 1990 and the findings were tentative. Yet in the next two years the UN convinced a majority of the world’s governments to sign a framework document that essentially started the “war on CO2,”

The IPCC is the spearhead of the politically-driven scare campaign to support the “war” and it produces regular Assessment Reports to maintain the climate of alarm. Each report has a small summary volume for politicians and journalists; This is the report that recently warned that the Barrier Reef may disappear in our lifetime if we not mend our coal-burning ways. Longer reports are produced at the same time and some of the chapters in them contain proper science but it they are scarcely mentioned in the media and they are very little read.

Large numbers of scientists contribute material in the lead-up to the final report writing that is in the hands of a small team of lead authors overseen by two coordinating lead authors. Scientists in the lowest tier are contributing authors and they are generally excluded from meetings of the other authors. They provide raw material on specific and limited topics to be incorporated, re-worked and cited by the lead authors under the direction of the coordinating authors. Additional material, published and occasionally unpublished, can be used at the discretion of the senior authors.

The coordinating lead authors are overwhelmingly the really key figures and Laframboise found that some of them are incredibly unlikely figures in terms of experience, qualifications (doctorates not completed) and background (climate activists). Claims were made about the use of peer-reviewed literature, and a count of the 18,531 references in the 2007 report found that 5,587 (one third) were not peer reviewed including drafts of scientific papers, Greenpeace documents and even press released! In defence it was claimed that the process of internal review would ensure that only “high quality” information in the “grey” literature would be used in the reports.

Scientists outside the inner circle do not agree with that claim. They are routinely snubbed when they challenge the work in progress and outraged at the misrepresentation of the findings in their fields of expertise. A chapter describes the way that leading hurricane expert Chris Landsea was sidelined by Kevin Trenbath who was in charge of the relevant chapter in the Climate Bible. Another chapter follows the story about pseudo-scientific data on hurricanes that became part of the Climate Bible. Another chapter describes one of the most scandalous beatups on the IPCC record, the allegation that warming will massively increase the prevalence of malaria. Among other defects in the argument, malaria is not especially a warm climate illness.

The chapter “Extinction Fiction” charts the abuse of pseudo-scientific findings to predict alarming species losses. One of the two key papers was written by Chris Thomas and 14 co-authors. Daniel Botkin, a leading figures in the field described it “the worst paper I have ever read in a major scientific journal” and the journal that published it was obliged to print not one or two but three critical appraisals of the original paper. Laframboise’s book is essential reading for anyone who is not fully aware of the corruption of the UN climate program and especially the IPCC.

Edward Wegman at George Mason University VA headed an ad hoc committee convened by the Chairman of two US House committees to review the science behind Michael Mann’s hockey stick graph. Mann’s work in the late 1990s was a major feature of the Third IPPC Assessment report in 2001 where it created a sensation. The hockey stick shape of the warming curve eliminated the Medieval Warm Period and gave the impression that the current warming was unprecedented in modern times. After sustained and devastating criticism, notably in the Wegman report, the IPPC discretely parked the hockey stick in the archives to be forgotten although it was a major propaganda weapon for some time and some diehard alarmists have stuck with it.

Noting the crippling defects in the statistical analysis of the data used by Mann and his associates at the East Sussex , the committee stated the community of paleoclimatologists appeared to be out of touch with developments in the relevant field of statistical analysis. In addition the scientists in the field were “tightly coupled” as revealed by a network analysis of the connections between the members in the community. Clearly more work is required on the network connections in the climate science community because close associations in relatively closed groups obviously have the capacity to undermine the rigor of refereeing for the peer reviewed literature. The emails released from the East Anglia etc clearly demonstrated the downside of the “close coupling” described in the Wegman report.

Enter Popper and Tulloch

All the indicators and symptoms of the problems in the quality of climate science call for a master theorist to create a framework for a Grand Narrative. Gordon Tullock provided this in a neglected masterpiece, The Organization of Inquiry (1966) . To provide context for the work it is essential to understand the transformation of science since 1945. Previously the communities of scientists were quite small, with modest funding from diverse sources.. The Manhattan project to develop the atomic bomb signalled the emergence of Big Science funded by Big Government.

Karl Popper in his unpublished lectures in the early 1950s predicted bad things for science in the service of politicians. He saw too much money chasing too few ideas, the publication explosion (good buried under bad) and the distortion of incentives for scientists by the pressure to obtain grants for fashionable and the politically “hot” topics. Richard Lindzen, probably the doyen of genuine climate scientists, put some meat on the bones of Popper’s concern when he recently described the impact of the 15-fold increase of funding for climate research during the Clinton/Gore administration. That was too much money for a small backwater of science, as Lindzen described climate science at the time, and the funding promoted a proliferation of studies by all manner of investigators without appropriate training or genuine interest in serious climate science.

Popper was also alarmed by the phenomenon of normal science and normal (uncritical) scientists described by by T S Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Some of his concerns were shared by a man with a very different vantage point - the Oval Office in the White House in Washington DC. In his farewell speech at the end of his term President Eisenhower warned “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money is ever present.” He noted the “equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite” (Eisenhower, 1961).

Both of those possibilities became real when the governments of the western world were driven by the United Nations to embrace radical environmentalism under the influence of the worldwide green movement. New international forums and agencies proliferated, driven by a new class of political entrepreneurs like Maurice Strong. They played up the challenge of climate change, and created additional vehicles for this particular issue, notably the IPCC.

Turning to Gordon Tullock (1922-2014). Climate science was not yet on the radar when he wrote in the early 1960s and he thought the natural sciences were good shape. His scenario for the decline of a scientific discipline drew on his experience of the social sciences including parts of economics. He was a colleague of James Buchanan in the Virginia School of public choice studies and he was unlucky not to share the Nobel Prize with Buchanan, probably because he was temperamentally a contrarian and he was easily distracted. In addition to seminal work on economics he wrote a book about the social life of insects and he engaged in long-running correspondence with Karl Popper, trying to persuade him to take up some of Tullock’s ideas in quantum physics.

After he met Popper at a Volker Fund (free enterprise) conference at Emory University he put aside the work that became The Politics of Bureaucracy and wrote The Organization of Enquiry. He took the social/institutional approach advocated by Popper in The Poverty of Historicism, written in New Zealand during the war as a companion to The Open Society and Its Enemies. The idea was to explain the development or lack of scientific and industrial progress in terms of the institutional context rather than psychological factors (advocated by Comte and Mill) or the manifestation of a historical tendency. Contemplating the factors that could stop the progress of science Popper suggested closing down or controlling laboratories for research and anything that impeded the free exchange of criticism and ideas in the scientific community. “Scientific method itself has social aspects. Science, and more especially scientific progress, are the results not of isolated efforts but of the free competition of thought. For science needs ever more competition between hypotheses and ever more rigorous tests.” He went on to suggest that competing hypotheses need personal representation, advocates, “and even a public.” He might have suggested ‘an informed public’ because the public at present is so misinformed about the weather that politicians are easily driven by public opinion to embrace disastrous policies.

Tullock sketched a scenario that has a haunting resemblance to the progress of climate science and probably other fields as well, judging from the famous warning issued by Richard Horton in his capacity as editor-in-chief of The Lancet. “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may be simply untrue…Science has taken a turn towards darkness” with reference to small sample sizes, invalid analyses, conflicts of interest and obsession with fashionable trends (Horton 2015).

The scenario involves a combination of personal and institutional factors. The personal factor is the rise of the normal scientist who does science for a living, working under the direction of the laboratory manager without necessarily having any sense of vocation or passion to find the truth. The institutional factors include the rise of Big Science driven by Big Government, the imperative to publish perish to maintain tenure and research grants and the politicisation of intellectual life.

At the individual level he identified three forms of curiosity. First the pure curiosity of the scientist engaged in a compulsive or or obsessive quest for the truth,. Second the equally driving practical curiosity of the person obsessed with making things work better. Third, the “induced curiosity” of the researcher who does not necessarily have a passion for research or the truth but takes on science as a job. The most obvious examples are academic staff who have to “publish or perish” to obtain tenure and promotion, and the large numbers of scientists who work “nine to five” in public and private research laboratories. Of course outstanding work can be produced by academics seeking promotion and even by nine to five scientists but Tullock’s analysis addressed some tendencies which could emerge in a system where more and more of the workers have “induced” curiosity and less and less (in proportion) harbour a burning commitment to the quest.

Tullock noted that the dedicated truth seeker and also the practical problem-solver must pay close attention to reality to align their ideas with it. This demands constant testing and critical evaluation but in contrast, the researcher who is not so motivated can be happy with results that are merely publishable Tullock suggested that for these scientists concern with the real world could become secondary to other matters and if the investigators could maintain their reputations and their jobs by reporting fictional discoveries that would serve the purpose.

The peer review process is designed to maintain standards and he developed the scenario further to consider what would happen if the reviewers are too closely associated with the authors either personally or by membership of a school of thought. He was working before natural science was seriously politicized and of course in the radically polarized world of climate science nowadays the membership of the correct school of thought has become a professional imperative for most investigators.

He observed the politicization of the social sciences because he and Buchanan had both suffered from it (denied funding by the left-trending Rockefeller Foundation) and he observed that the end of the that slippery slope of declining standards is the situation where there is a widespread belief in the field that the function of the researcher is to support a particular position. At this point “Simply presenting a rationalization for some position chosen on other grounds may be acceptable as an objective of research, and the principal criterion in judging journals may become their points of view…The concern with reality that unites the sciences, then, may be absent in this area, and the whole thing may be reduced to a pseudo-science like genetics in Lysenko’s Russia”.

Readers can decide for themselves how far various fields have gone down that path, bearing in mind Horton’s warming in The Lancet. To conclude with a reminder of Winsberg’s suggestion quoted at the head of this review –to trust the scientific consensus based on the organization of the community. This means referring questions of scientific credibility to a consortium of politically correct grant-seekers, environmental fundamentalists and UN officials dedicated to the transformation of the economies of the western world. That is not really what one might have expected from a scholar in the Queen of the Sciences!

Missing from the references Lindzen, Curry, Spencer, Christy.

Missing from Index Curry, Lindzen, Laframboise, Mann, Gore.

Index Christy and Spencer 13-14 re discredited work.

Who is in and out in the philosophical story? No Popper Lakatos, passing reference to Kuhn.

No reference to big science and the Eisenhower warning.