[ExI] climategate again

[Damien Broderick]

Peter Watts on the topic (I found the link on Charlie Stross's blog):

http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=886

Because As We All Know, The Green Party Runs the World.

... I like to reserve these pixels for cool stuff, cutting edges that 
may or may not pan out, findings of interest (and frequently, of 
contention). Anthropogenic Climate Change hasn’t qualified for years; 
the science is settled, the effect is real, and the only uncertainty 
among the folks who actually know their shit is whether we’re in for a 
bad ride or a downright catastrophic one. The “debate”, such as it is, 
is political and entirely dishonest at its heart. Climate-change 
skeptics like to portray themselves as a feisty rebel alliance speaking 
truth to power, up against a colossal green propaganda machine calling 
all the shots— a little like the way Glen Beck and Bill O’Reilly like to 
portray US Christians as an endangered species. Anyone familiar with the 
Bush administration’s environmental censorship of NASA, the EPA, and its 
own military knows how ridiculous that is. I have better things to do 
than research every objection raised by (as Bruce Sterling calls them) 
shortsighted sociopathic morons who don’t want to lose any money. (I 
would recommend How to Talk to a Climate Change Skeptic, however, to 
anyone who does want to fit a couple of denialists in between the 
Jehovah’s Witnesses and Birthers lined up on their stoops. It addresses 
all the usual canards, from warming-stopped-in-1998 right out to 
global-warming-on-Pluto.)

I also generally avoid going on about stuff that’s already getting a lot 
of press elsewhere; if you saw it on slashdot, boingboing, or the NY 
Times I’ll be giving it a pass unless it’s really central to my current 
interests, simply because the blogosphere will already be writhing with 
opinions on the subject and mine has probably been better put by someone 
with better insight.

Now.  In what can hardly be a coincidence, just a few weeks before the 
Copenhagen summit the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East 
Anglia got hacked. The sixty-odd megabytes of confidential e-mails that 
ended up littering the whole damn internet either a) blew the lid off a 
global conspiracy to fake the global warming crisis, or b) lay there in 
a big sludgy pile of boring communications about birthdays, conference 
meet-ups, and whether or not Poindexter over at Cal State was going to 
be allowed into the tree fort this year. Judging by the criteria I 
described at the top of the post, I should just stick my fingers in my 
ears and hum loudly until the current shitstorm abates.

But I’m not going to. Not this time.

I haven’t read all 62MB. I’ve read hardly any of it, in fact. I’m 
familiar with the money shots: the “Nature trick” used to “hide the 
decline” (and sorry folks, anybody who’s ever run a residual analysis 
knows there’s nothing nefarious about the word “trick” in this context. 
Besides, climatologists need hookers same as Republicans). I’ve read the 
e-mail-deletion thread, seen quotes that decry evil denialists and call 
for the censure of skeptic-friendly journal editors. The very conditions 
under which these e-mails were released makes it entirely plausible that 
some of them were forged; but at least some of the more controversial 
bits have been verified as legitimate by their authors. I don’t have 
much to say about any of that; maybe it’s all real, maybe it’s been 
spiked, none of it compromises the overwhelming weight of evidence in 
favor of anthropogenic climate change. Whatever.

No, what I want to address here is the attitude of the scientists, and 
how that relates to the way science actually works.

I keep running into recurring commentary on the snarkiness of the 
scientists behind these e-mails. They’re really entrenched, people seem 
surprised to note. Got a real siege mentality going on, speak unkindly 
of the skeptics, take all kinds of cheap shots unbecoming of the lab 
coat. These people can be downright assholes.

No shit, Sherlock. I was a scientist myself for the longest time, and 
the people I’d gladly drop into a vat of nitric acid start with the Pope 
and go all the way down to anyone who voted for Stephen Harper’s 
conservatives.

The apologists have stepped up, pointed out that these were private 
conversations and we shouldn’t expect them to carry the same veneer of 
civility that one would expect in a public presentation. “Science 
doesn’t work because we’re all nice,” remarked one widely-quoted NASA 
climatologist. “Newton may have been an ass, but the theory of gravity 
still works.”

No. I don’t think he’s got it right. I don’t think most of these people do.

Science doesn’t work despite scientists being asses. Science works, to 
at least some extent, because scientists are asses. Bickering and 
backstabbing are essential elements of the process. Haven’t any of these 
guys ever heard of “peer review”?

There’s this myth in wide circulation: rational, emotionless Vulcans in 
white coats, plumbing the secrets of the universe, their Scientific 
Methods unsullied by bias or emotionalism. Most people know it’s a myth, 
of course; they subscribe to a more nuanced view in which scientists are 
as petty and vain and human as anyone (and as egotistical as any 
therapist or financier), people who use scientific methodology to tamp 
down their human imperfections and manage some approximation of objectivity.

But that’s a myth too. The fact is, we are all humans; and humans come 
with dogma as standard equipment. We can no more shake off our biases 
than Liz Cheney could pay a compliment to Barack Obama. The best we can 
do— the best science can do— is make sure that at least, we get to 
choose among competing biases.

That’s how science works. It’s not a hippie love-in; it’s rugby. Every 
time you put out a paper, the guy you pissed off at last year’s Houston 
conference is gonna be laying in wait. Every time you think you’ve made 
a breakthrough, that asshole supervisor who told you you needed more 
data will be standing ready to shoot it down. You want to know how the 
Human Genome Project finished so far ahead of schedule? Because it was 
the Human Genome projects, two competing teams locked in bitter rivalry, 
one led by J. Craig Venter, one by Francis Collins — and from what I 
hear, those guys did not like each other at all.

This is how it works: you put your model out there in the coliseum, and 
a bunch of guys in white coats kick the shit out of it. If it’s still 
alive when the dust clears, your brainchild receives conditional 
acceptance. It does not get rejected. This time.

Yes, there are mafias. There are those spared the kicking because they 
have connections. There are established cliques who decide what appears 
in Science, who gets to give a spoken presentation and who gets kicked 
down to the poster sessions with the kiddies. I know a couple of people 
who will probably never get credit for the work they’ve done, for the 
insights they’ve produced. But the insights themselves prevail. Even if 
the establishment shoots the messenger, so long as the message is valid 
it will work its way into the heart of the enemy’s camp. First it will 
be ridiculed. Then it will be accepted as true, but irrelevant. Finally, 
it will be embraced as canon, and what’s more everyone will know that it 
was always so embraced, and it was Our Glorious Leader who had the idea. 
The credit may not go to those who deserve it; but the field will have 
moved forward.

Science is so powerful that it drags us kicking and screaming towards 
the truth despite our best efforts to avoid it. And it does that at 
least partly fueled by our pettiness and our rivalries. Science is 
alchemy: it turns shit into gold. Keep that in mind the next time some 
blogger decries the ill manners of a bunch of climate scientists under 
continual siege by forces with vastly deeper pockets and much louder 
megaphones.

As for me, I’ll follow the blogs with interest and see how this all 
shakes out. But even if someone, somewhere, proves that a handful of 
climatologists deliberately fudged their findings — well, I’ll be there 
with everyone else calling to have the bastards run out of town, but it 
won’t matter much in terms of the overall weight of the data.  I went 
running through Toronto the other day on a 17°C November afternoon. 
Canada’s west coast is currently underwater. Sea level continues its 
3mm/yr creep up the coasts of the world, the western Siberian permafrost 
turns to slush. Swathes of California and Australia are pretty much 
permanent firestorm zones these days. The glaciers retreat, the Arctic 
ice cap shrinks, a myriad migratory species still show up at their 
northern destinations weeks before they’re supposed to. The pine beetle 
furthers its westward invasion, leaving dead forests in its wake— the 
winters, you see, are no longer cold enough to hit that lethal reset 
button that once kept their numbers in check.

I could go on, but you get my drift. And if the Climate-Change Hoax 
Machine is powerful enough to do all that, you know what?

They deserve to win.
This entry was written by Peter Watts , posted on Sunday November 22 
2009at 08:11 pm , filed under climate, scilitics .
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