Consensus and Controversy
The Scottish Science, Climate & Energy Forum, scef.org.uk, showcases a brilliant new study by Emil A.Røyrvik constrasting and comparing the intellectual approach to learning and understanding between academia and the applied sciences in industry. The study focuses on the global warming controversy pinpointing perennial flaws in the reasoning process of academics with little, if any, experience of the real world.
The Debate on Man-made global warming
Author Emil A.Røyrvik
What marks this paper out from others** on the debate is that it treats the subject seriously and does not start from the premise that Sceptics or “contrarians” are either wrong, or ill-informed or deluded**. The paper is well worth reading as in online.
However, I think this papers touches on a much broader subject. It starts with the question:
“how was it that so much of academia was so deluded by global warming when there simply wasn’t the evidence to support their view?”
And I don’t mean this as a “yah boo” bit of anti-academic bashing, but as a serious question, because forget global warming, if academia has some kind of systemic failing which makes it prone to this kind of delusions, then we ought to know because there could be an awful lot of other things which academia is telling us is the “undeniable truth” which is like global warming, only based on misconceptions by academics and poor judgement of the evidence.
So this paper is very interesting for me, because it frames the question in terms of the culture of academia: “If this supposedly rigorous area of academia is based on false “consensus”, if there are clear religious overtones and the the whole subject is then exaggerated by public reporting, with the help of prominent academics … how much could other things we think of as “settled knowledge” be based on a false academic consensus exaggerated by public reporting?”
Perhaps there are whole fields of thought and knowledge which are being denied progress because the culture within academia cannot or will not understand them. And let us start with the normal view of academia when confronted with those who question their judgement on issues: “your just a conspiracy theorist”**. Before Global Warming and research into British History, I would have readily accepted that anyone who questions the “academic consensus” was a crank. Now, whilst I appreciate that some issues are full of cranks, I realise that this idea that the “them” outside academia are all cranks, is just an excuse for not taking seriously many problems with current academic thought.
Let me give a few examples:
- The Celts.
Not a single ancient writer puts any “Kelt” in Scotland, Ireland or Wales. There is only one reference throughout all literature to a single instance of a Keltic race in the UK and that was a single “recent” leader in the “nearest shores” (i.e. Kent). How academia turned a Kentish leader into an anti-English cultural identity is one big question. - The Scottish clearances.
When I was doing my archaeology course, I picked the clearances as a “straightforward” essay. But I couldn’t help checking my facts and went to look for population data. Much to my surprise I found that the population of the highlands increased through the period of the clearances. Indeed, the number of cases cited was extremely small and where there was a death – it went to court and by and large the landlords in Scotland treated their tenants far better than e.g. we find in Victorian slum clearances. (The big drops in population was the famines on the 1690s which were probably climate related and post 1850s emigration) - Post Normal Science.
Post normal science is … best described as doing science without facts. It is like “Post normal Football” … which is football as we know it … but played without any posts. So how do you know which team won? It is all judged on merit. That doesn’t sound too bad – Gymnastics is based on merit, until you find out who is doing the judging. The judges are the commentators who don’t like the traditional game where their “best” team isn’t treated “fairly” by the “normative” requirements of having hard and fast decision criteria like getting the ball in the net. It is a way for those with an opinion to be able to assert their opinion about teams as “valid” without the need to prove it by fixing up hard and fast criteria like football goals. - Global Warming
If global warming were a game of football. The global warming team would be the “poor” public employees (Hansen got $1million in addition to his public pay). The score for the global warming team would be judged by those say eco-zealot pundits like the BBC. The sceptics would not be allowed on the field until they had proved beyond all doubt that no-one what-so-ever has ever paid them a penny. They would then be asked to pay for their own ball, goals, the kit, hire of the ground … and for the wages of “impartial” team on the other side. Even then – the goal would be put up on stilts so high it would melt in the sun. - Big Bang Theory, wave particle duality, etc.
There are a host of theories in science which don’t really stand up to scrutiny if you start from the evidence. The big bang is not a theory but an idea of what happened at a point in time when we cannot know what happened. Wave-particle cobbles together two very different concepts, and provides no prediction of when either will apply. It is therefore not science as science requires firm predictions which can be tested. These are less “science” than “an answer” which cannot be contradicted by the (lack of) evidence. But they all gain a public kudos way beyond their credibility based on the evidence.
These are only the subjects where I personally have a high degree of knowledge – as in have either done a degree or researched the area in depth. Note, I’m not saying that the Celts were really aliens from out of space, or any other non-sense. I’m just saying that if you put the evidence on these assertions (not the statements of academics) before a court of law, they would not support the assertion.
In all these areas: “an answer” which was given some time (possibly lost in the history of the subject) becomes “the answer” which cannot be disputed. It becomes an answer that only “a crank” would question. And as we saw on global warming, a consensus then develops that the answer is “undeniable” which means that no one can seriously question it or do any research. So, e.g. one cannot e.g. dispute the existence of the Celts in “celtic Britain” … because it is now such an indisputable fact that it cannot be questioned. But because this assertion is totally unsupported, the result is that most sensible academics, steer well clear of the “celtic” debate leaving it up to SNP activists to fabricate a history of Scotland which is only vaguely supported by academics and not at all by the evidence.
And, like global warming, there is also a political imperative to maintain the myth. The myth of the “celtic” identity is favoured by parties like the SNP because everyone but the English are considered “Celts”. So, it is really a way of falsely legitimising anti-English sentiment by creating a false identify of the celtic “us” against the repressive English “them”. As such, this celtic myth is really quite contemptible and is akin to the Nazi attempts to derive the Germanic people’s racial origins from the “Arian” race. They both come from the same antiquarian racist stable, but no one today would question the “undeniability of the Ariane race”. So why do we just accept the non-English origin of the “celtic” peoples?
From global warming to the celtic myth that fuels SNP anti-English sentiment, academic myths can directly impact public policy.
That is why it is important to understand whether academia imposes a certain culture which predisposes those in it to certain “consensus” answers which fit the culture rather than the evidence. Once that “consensus” develops, it then becomes a requirement to get funding or Kudos to either accept the consensus … or at least keep quiet and try to ignore it.
But this culture in what is supposedly “science” has a very quasi-religious nature. As the report puts it:
“Carbon dioxide is quite literally the “smoking gun” (Archer and Rahmstorf 2010: 11) of the play, metaphorically represented as something like the (Lord of The Rings’) Sauron in the saga of global warming, and believed to play the major role in causing anthropogenic global warming – with all its possible detrimental consequences. Yet CO2 is also a major actant in photosynthesis and the life – giving production of oxygen. With CO2 at the centrepiece of the play, inhabiting this radically double – edged position of being both the gas of life and death, global warming as eschatological tales of humanity’s end – times, and its embedded counter narrative of secular (or rather quasi-religious) earthly resurrection and salvation through heroic deeds and technological measures, the drama of global warming attains the level of meaning that myths are made of.”
More clues as to this “culture of academia” is given in the four myths of climate science quoted from Hulme:
(which I suggest would read largely the same for any academic subject):
- Lamenting Eden – or the fall from a natural state of grace akin to the “Nobel Savage” idea of the Celts
- Presaging Apocalypse – or taking trends in the known, extrapolating them into the unknown so that any change, no matter how small will ultimately be enormous and (if it occurred) profound. And then focussing on the least known and most unreliable point at the end point of the trend.
- Constructing Babel – a belief that there is no limits to human understanding or our ability to control, so we will inevitably destroy the world and cannot be trusted.
- Celebrating Jubilee – that sins should be forgiven. I would instead use the idea academics feel that “for every action there is a reaction” and as such “for every sin there is a punishment” or to turn it around “things happen for a reason”. Academics do not believe things happen “by accident”, so e.g. they do not really believe in “natural variability”.
Note how all these are rooted in our human instincts for nostalgia, fear, pride and justice.” Many have a vision of humanity as intrinsically harmful and that there exists a common good in controlling humanity. These ideas could also be applied to the idea of “celtic origins” as they are to global warming. So, e.g. because Irish and Scots feel a common identity now as a repressed people … that identity must have existed in ancient history.
There is a degree of arrogance that “they do know” even when they clearly don’t. Indeed, when Robert Wilson of St.Andrews University was finally pinned down and forced to admit that CO2 could not be conclusively linked to 20th century warming, his final question (or perhaps it was an answer) was this:
If it wasn’t CO2 what else could have caused the 20th Century warming?
In commercial companies, if you don’t know, you learn to say you don’t know rather than waffling an answer, because good quality information is essential for business decisions. But, in academia, the emphasis is on “having something to say”, because you’re judged not by how good your information is to make decisions, but how much “knowledge you have” on in numerical terms how many papers you produce. So, in academia, not having some kind of an answer to a questions is seen as the ultimate disgrace. Whereas in commerce, saying you know the answer when it is wrong is the ultimate disgrace.
This is where I think the fundamental difference lies between academia and sceptics. They feel compelled to answer the question: “what caused the 20th century warming”. They then produce models which have almost no substantial theoretical or evidential base except they roughly match the 20th century and they then proclaim the world will warm by such and such. Sceptics who predominantly engineers and similarly commercially orientated users of science, don’t see the need to answer the question academics feel compelled to answer, and instead we ask the question: “is there evidence of a problem we need to solve”. And, we know through experience that many problems are really failures of equipment or personnel, hence the focus on the temperature record. And we also know that even if no one understands the climate, we do have good information on trends such as severe weather; but when we look at these we find nothing to concern us unduly. There is no problem to solve!
So they do know what caused 20th century warming just as they do know that the name of the ancient Scots were “Celts” (even though no text refers to them as such and the Romans Called the Scots Caledonians). But academics don’t have the confidence to accept there are holes in their knowledge. So they quite literally “paper over the cracks”.
Then we come to he public service morality which plays a dominant part in academia.The public service mentality is not Apolitical. Everyone knows the Guardian is heavily read by academia. There is no way in the world the Guardian can be described as apolitical any more than the Sun. There is a political culture in academia which is similar to that in the NHS and similar to that in the civil service. This culture colours their viewpoint. So. e.g. the “Clearances”, I would suggest, are bad because they go against this public service mentality. The reality is that most people were more than happy to leave the “idyllic” countryside where you lived your life in cow-shit and move to the towns and cities where they had cobbled streets and wages. But to see the “clearances” as being the enrichment of people’s lives through the “industrial revolution” would require academics to admit that free enterprise did for the people of Scotland what none of the academic social thinkers could achieve.
So, instead of the people of Scotland prospering through free-enterprise, the period is portrayed in academia as the oppression of the noble savage “Celts” against their repressive landlords. That landlords and tenants were from the same ethnic origin did not matter – because it ruined the myth. The whole narrative of the clearances is framed in a modern “good versus bad” as would be applied to modern evictions. No attempt is made to see the situation from the viewpoint of those at the time when landlords commonly evicted people throughout the UK.The fact that landlords were providing schools and places or worship which brought in the social commentators that reported on these innocent “noble savages”. And, it doesn’t stop there. The politically active in academia continue to portray the past as a reflection of their moral narrative, projecting their modern views onto the past. So, for example, there is now subjects of “Gender archaeology” (i.e. male, female, gay, bi-sexual)- even when there is evidence people did not think of themselves in that way in the past.
But clearly this moral dimension extends even into the supposedly morally neutral area of science:
“When people [academics] diagnose the responsibility for climate change (to human action) and propose responses it is often infused with moral connotations, and it “echoes the theological language of sin and repentance” “
The report makes it clear that there is a cultural driver for these views which as I said, think is a “public service” morality which could equally be written of the UK civil service or BBC:
“Merton outlined what he termed the four sets of institutional imperatives that comprise the ethos of modern science. These four were communism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized scepticism. Communalism in the sense that scientific results are publicly shared by the entire scientific community; Universalism , in the sense that claims to truth are evaluated in terms of universal and impersonal criteria, independent of terms such as race, class, gender, religion and nationality; Disinterestedness , understood in the sense that scientists should act for the common good of science, rather than for personal gain; Originality in research contributions; and Scepticism (Organized Scepticism) through rigorous, systematic and critical scrutiny of all scientific claims by the scientific community. This last norm is achieved through peer-review and open publication. Merton and followers consider these principles to be both goals and methods of science and that they are binding to scientists.”
This “public service” culture in science, is the same in public-funded academia, in the civil service and e.g. in media such as the BBC and Guardian, so it is not surprising that these are also the institutions that have been most vociferous in promoting global warming alarmism. Sceptics are predominantly commercial outwith government. It is therefore highly likely that the two cultures impose some kind of predisposition to each view which seems to suggest that global warming alarmism is a consequence of the public service culture. And in this regard, it is very illuminating that the outspoken “lone wolf” Neil Craig has many times asked:
“Can anybody at all promoting the warmist “scientific consensus” name a single one out of the millions of scientists, worldwide, who aren’t paid by the state, who support the catastrophic warming claims?”
To receive a deafening silence which he himself has had to answer:
… “That would be no, not a single one then!” (link)
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