With friends like this, climate scientists need no additional enemies

From Should You Trust Climate Science? Maybe the Eclipse Is a Clue by Justin Gillis.

I am deeply skeptical of the anthropogenic global climate warming hypothesis, not because it is wrong but because we don't know enough to know that it is right. Indeed, the anthropogenic global climate warming hypothesis panic mongers themselves are skeptical of their own claim, using it now as a mote-and-bailey fallacy tactic of argumentation. They have evolved their strong but weakly evidenced claim of anthropogenic global climate warming hypothesis to the far more anodyne but easily defended claim "global climate change" and in speech to the virtually meaningless "climate change." No one disagrees that there is climate change. No one.

Climate is a complex, non-linear, chaotic, dynamic system. It is inherent that it changes, locally and globally. Climate change is the bailey in their argument. It is easily argued, indeed almost tautologically correct.

The radical, and not easily argued anthropogenic global climate warming hypothesis is the mote. They start with that position which is weak and as soon as their argument is attacked, retreat to the anemic "climate change" bailey which is both defensible and virtually meaningless.

But this isn't about whether anthropogenic global climate warming hypothesis is correct. Gillis is an example of the journalist advocate who is seeking to help make the case for the anthropogenic global climate warming hypothesis but doing so in such a shoddy and ham-fisted way that he brings discredit not only to himself but to the hypothesis he seeks to defend.

Thanks to the work of scientists, people will know exactly what time to expect the eclipse. In less entertaining but more important ways, we respond to scientific predictions all the time, even though we have no independent capacity to verify the calculations. We tend to trust scientists.

For years now, atmospheric scientists have been handing us a set of predictions about the likely consequences of our emissions of industrial gases. These forecasts are critically important, because this group of experts sees grave risks to our civilization. And yet, when it comes to reacting to the warnings of climate science, we have done little.

If the science were brand new, that might make sense, but climate scientists have been making predictions since the end of the 19th century. This is the acid test of any scientific theory: Does it make predictions that ultimately come true?

This is simply embarrassing in addition to being ignorant, wrong and condescending. No climate scientist would commit the non sequitur that Gillis does of lumping two different science fields together to harvest the creditability in one for the benefit of the other. This is a simplistic appeal to authority fallacy.

Astronomy and astronomical forecasting is a complicated field but it is deterministic. The reason that Egyptians and Babylonians were able to forecast eclipses five thousand years ago is that there are stable formulae and periodicities that can indeed be validated through observation. Eclipses occur and they can be predicted accurately and based on a causative model.

In contrast, climate science is a complex field. There are multiple constituent systems which are chaotic, non-linear, dynamic, with multiple incompletely known and little-understood feedback mechanisms. The field is still relatively nascent, the data sets are patchy, incomplete, inconsistent with one another, and subject to significant measurement errors. The most reliable data (though still incomplete and patchy) is of recent origin, measured in decades in a field where effects are measured in centuries. Journalists (and advocates) are using such short time frames for reporting (a year) that the margin of error of measurement is greater than the reported change.

Gillis has made a category error by comparing a field characterized by deterministic processes with a field characterized by complex processes. He has also, in the process made a False Analogy.

The ruinous piece continues.

By the 1960s and ’70s, climate scientists were making more detailed predictions. They said that as the surface of the Earth warmed, the temperature in the highest reaches of the atmosphere would fall. That is exactly what happened.

This is known as cherry-picking or biased sampling. Of course climate scientists have made some accurate forecasts. But you don't get to pick and choose successes. You have to look at the totality of forecasts. If I flip a coin one hundred times and I say I can predict accurately all tosses by looking in a black box and I get 50 calls correct - that does not mean I have any insight as to what causes the outcome nor does it mean I am reliable at forecasting. You have to count the missed calls as well.

Gillis is not functioning as a journalist. By presenting only successes and not failures he is demonstrating a behavior anathema to the scientific method. What else were climate scientists forecasting in the 1960s and 1970s? Global cooling and a coming ice age. Not all climate scientists and not all within the same time frame, but it was a common forecast. You have to take the good with the bad in terms of forecast accuracy and Gillis betrays his reader by failing to do so.

The scientists told us that the Arctic would warm especially fast. They told us to expect heavier rainstorms. They told us heat waves would soar. They told us that the oceans would rise. All of those things have come to pass.

Again, you can't be occasionally right in your forecasts, you have to be predictably right. We have always had cycles of Arctic warming and freezing, cycles of rainstorms and droughts and ocean rising and falling. And indeed, cycles at much greater extremes than we currently see. It is no insult to climate scientists to point out that many of their predictions have not borne out. The Arctic is not ice free as it was claimed it would be. Many of the droughts and storms are known to be associated with the El Nino cycles and not with some larger system of climate change, etc.

Gillis is providing a kindergarten-simple description of science which is appropriate for five-year olds but is in no way accurate.

Considering this most basic test of a scientific theory, the test of prediction, climate science has established its validity.

To be a credible and stable science we need at least three elements - empirical validation of the data (does the phenomenon exist, is it really happening?), a testable hypothesis of causation (a detailed and testable identification of the mechanisms which cause the outcomes), and confirmed forecasts with no counterfactuals (the forecasted outcome happens and there are no failed forecasts and no unpredicted outcomes) or forecasts that fall within a probablistic range (not every forecast has to be accurate but accuracy has to be beyond a specified level for a population of forecasts).

It is no insult to climate scientists that they have not met this standard yet. It is a complex system and a relatively nascent field, the data sets incomplete and major subsystems are added every few years. There is no shame in failure as long as the field continues laying a groundwork for greater comprehension in the future.

But for Gillis to even pretend that occasional accurate forecasts in the midst of repeated other failures is a sufficient basis to establish validity is ludicrous. While his degree is in journalism, he is supposed to be a science writer. It would seem impossible that he could believe what he has written which leaves only the possibility that he is doing ideological or faith-based shilling, not science reporting.

We trust scientific expertise on many issues; it is, after all, the best advice we can get. Yet on climate change, we have largely ignored the scientists’ work. While it is true that we have started to spend money to clean up our emissions, the global response is in no way commensurate with the risks outlined by the experts. Why?

Why? Because the science is not settled (and it never is). Claiming a large risk is no justification for action. That is another fallacy - appeal to fear.

Trying to scare people into action is not a scientific basis for decision-making. It is a rhetorical device used by advocates and it is a technique relied upon when you don't have better arguments. There is a panoply of local and global problems we face of which possible global warming is only one. The effects are distant in the future, our knowledge incomplete, our models have known biases, our forecasting has at best been mixed and certainly the more extreme forecasts have failed to eventuate.

We have limited resources. Money diverted to undertake actions now for uncertain effect in the future is money that cannot be used to ameliorate more tangible current problems that we understand better (with greater confidence) and with more positive near-term consequences. Priorities based on consequences, robustness of knowledge and statistical confidence in forecast are the norm. With anthropogenic global climate warming, our knowledge is partial and evolving, the possible outcomes include beneficial attributes (longer growing seasons for example), and our forecasting record is at best mixed.

Again, this is pretty basic knowledge for any scientist and certainly for a science writer. But Gillis does not appear, in fact, to be a science writer. He seems to be an ideological or faith-based adherent who writes.

That's just the science side of things. The fact is that through email leaks and data leaks we know that the patchy data sets are routinely being adjusted to yield desired outcomes, that the extreme claims have failed to occur, that there is plenty of correspondence demonstrating collusion to suppress contradictory data, that there are coordinated efforts to coerce independent research voices to leave the field and that there are all sorts of incentives (monetary and social) for advocates to advance a fear-based agenda.

Since we are dealing in faith-based matters and not science, let's call this article what it is - an abomination. It is larded with appeals to authority, non sequiturs, false analogies, category errors, biased sampling, appeals to fear, and is structured as a one-sided argument. It would be bad enough were it only an opinion piece but it is proffered as straight reporting. No wonder there is such high public skepticism of newspapers and journalists. With "reporting" like this, it is no surprise that only 8% of the public have a great deal of trust/confidence in news organizations.