Eat Shit; 110,000,000,000 Flies Can't Be Wrong

The oldest trick in the Dud Logic Toolbook is confusing correlation and causality. The climate is changing: check. Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are rising: check. Mankind dumps a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere: check. Ice core studies show high carbon dioxide levels in previous periods of rapid climate change: check. Therefore mankind's carbon dioxide emissions are responsible for climate change: hold on a moment.

There is nothing in that dodgy multi-part non-syllogism to justify drawing that conclusion. So to concentrate our resources on reducing our CO2 emissions may be barking up the wrong tree or, just possibly, barking up no tree at all. A good idea to do something rather than to do nothing? Yes. Better still to consider the worst-case scenario (as they say)? Yes again.

What we should be doing, therefore, is planning for damage limitation, because if climate change is nothing, or little, to do with us, and everything, or mostly, to do with nature, then all hell is going to break loose and we had better be prepared. Save the Earth? No. The Earth will be fine. It has shrugged off bigger species than us in the past. Wehat we mean is: Save Our Own Skins. And reducing CO2 may, of course, help; but let's not persuade ourselves that it's a cure or even a cause.

Writing in The Times today, Mary Ann Sieghart addresses herself to this question but floats elegantly around the point. She accuses the complacent of "denial", but announces in a rather de haut en bas tone:

You see, there comes a point at which you have to admit that 95 per cent of the world's scientists can't be wrong.

This betrays such a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is that it's almost shocking to find it the pages of a great national newspaper.

It's not just that science is emphatically not a democratic process. More crucially, it's that most of what Thomas Kuhn called "paradigm shift" has occurred, at least initially, against the received opinion of far more than 95 per cent of scientists. And, most crucially, that's how paradigm shift science has to occur, because the prevailing paradigm ("malaria is caused by bad air") is, by definition, what the great majority of scientists believe.

The Ibsenesque notion of the solitary scientist battling against mass prejudice is Romantic and unrepresentative of most scientific progress. But neither evolution by natural selection, nor the "deep time" against which it took place; neither Newtonian nor Einsteinian mechanics; neither heliocentricity nor electromagnetism nor the wave/particle duality of light: none of these represented the prevailing paradigm — or, to put it another way, all were cases where 95 per cent of scientists were most emphatically wrong.

This is, of course, because reality is often ambiguous. Copernican heliocentricity was opposed by natural philosophers who said "Well, it certainly looks as though the sun goes around the Earth," to which the best reply was "So what would it look like if the opposite were true?"

But the difference between scientists and politicians is that politics is the art of the possible, whereas science is the understanding of the actual. Which is why scientists, once persuaded, are happy to say "We were wrong".

Richard Dawkins tells of the "elder statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford" who firmly and persistently maintained that the Golgi Apparatus -- a part of cellular micro-anatomy -- was an artefact. "One Monday, the [visiting lecturer] was an American cell biologist who presented completely convincing evidence that the Golgi Apparatus was real. At the end of the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said -- with passion -- 'My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.'" [1]

Can we imagine any politician, anywhere, ever, saying such a thing?

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1. Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. London, Bantam 2006, 283-4)

Technorati Tags: global warming, media, science, society

Comments

[View from the Solent]

Sadly, 'the pages of a great national newspaper' should have been 'the pages of a once-great national newspaper'. That is just one article of many, on various topics, that would not have made The Times' pages even a decade ago. Even more sadly, there is no replacement as a daily paper of record.

[Kit]

Lobster Blogster,
Just to correct you "the rate of change is now higher than ever before" is not quite true as the rate of temperature increase was higher in the 1930's. Prior to that the proxy records (tree-rings, ice-cores,...) are just not accurate enough to make such a claim.

Ice-core studies show that carbon-dioxide levels lag temperature changes which is hardly compelling evidence: un-check.

[Lobster Blogster]

Whoa, hold on just one sec. I thought that one fact about global warming was that the rate of change is now higher than ever before. Granted that this doesn't mean that it was humans that caused it, but it is a good enough phenomenon to at least start asking the question why. Its at least plausible that if you take your fuel supply which has been buried for hundreds of thousands of years, burn it for 150 years, and let the resulting carbon dioxide float of into the atmosphere, then you may just have turned the whole planet into a man-made greenhouse.

Having said that, its worth mentioning that the doomsayers seem to neglect to mention that there may well also be a man-made way to fix the problem too. As a species humans seem to have invented plenty of ways to pump pollutants into the atmosphere: given the right incentive I expect they will find ways to suck them out again too.