If you are going to suggest that academic climate research is not up to scratch, you need to do more than post links to pages that link to non-academic articles. Saying “you can find lots on google scholar” is not that same as actually pointing to the alleged sub-standard research.
For a long time I too was somewhat skeptical about global warming. I recognized the risk that researchers would exaggerate the problem in order to obtain more funding.
What I chose to do to resolve the matter was to deep dive into a few often-raised skeptic arguments using my knowledge of physics as a starting point, and learning whatever I needed to learn along the way (it took a while). The result was that the academic researchers won 6-0 6-0 6-0 in three sets (to use a tennis score analogy). Most striking to me was the dishonesty and lack of substance on the “skeptic” side. There was just no “there” there.
The topics I looked into were: accuracy of the climate temperature record, alleged natural causes explaining the recent heating, the alleged saturation of the atmospheric CO2 infra-red wavelengths, and the claim that the CO2 that is emitted by man is absorbed very quickly.
In retrospect I became aware that my ‘skepticism’ was fulled in large part by deliberate misinformation campaigns in the grand tradition of tobacco, asbestos, HFCs, DDT etc. The same techniques, and even many of the same PR firms are involved. As one tobacco executive said “Our product is doubt”.
An article about assessing the soundness of the academic mainstream would benefit from also discussing the ways in which the message from, and even the research done in, academia is corrupted and distorted by commercial interests. Economics is a case in point, but it is a big issue also in drug research and other aspects of medicine.
Another thing I have noticed in looking into various areas of academic research is just how much research in every field I looked at is inconclusive, inconsequential, flawed or subtly biased (look up “desk drawer bias” for example).
Edit: fixed a few typos.
Edit: good article by the way, very well reasoned.
If you are going to suggest that academic climate research is not up to scratch, you need to do more than post links to pages that link to non-academic articles. Saying “you can find lots on google scholar” is not that same as actually pointing to the alleged sub-standard research.
I agree that I should have argued and referenced that part better. What I wanted to point out is that there is a whole cottage industry of research purporting to show that climate change is supposedly influencing one thing or another, a very large part of which appears to advance hypotheses so far-fetched and weakly substantiated that they seem like obvious products of the tendency to involve this super-fashionable topic into one’s research whenever possible, for reasons of both status- and career-advancement.
Even if one accepts that the standard view on climate change has been decisively proven and the issue shown to be a pressing problem, I still don’t think how one could escape this conclusion.
My daughter works in molecular biology, and she has noted that every paper / grant application is full of hope and promise of a cure to cancer or some other dread disease. Sometimes this hope and promise is significantly exaggerated.
It is very depressing, even in fields where the science is absolutely rock-solid, to read the nonsense that comes from the periphery. Read Deepak Chopra on Quantum Mechanics for example.
You wrote “what I chose to do to resolve the matter was to deep dive into three often-raised skeptic arguments using my knowledge of physics as a starting point” and “deliberate misinformation campaigns in the grand tradition of tobacco [etc.]”.
Less Wrong is not the place for a comprehensive argument about catastrophic AGW, but I’d like to make a general Less-Wrong-ish point about your analysis here. It is perceptive to notice that millions of dollars are spent on a shoddy PR effort by the other side. It is also perceptive to notice that many of the other side’s most popular arguments aren’t technically very strong. It’s even actively helpful to debunk unreasonable popular arguments even if you only do it for those which are popular on the other side. However, remember that it’s sadly common that regardless of their technical merits, big politicized controversies tend to grow big shoddy PR efforts associated with all factions. And even medium-sized controversies tend to attract some loud clueless supporters on both sides. Thus, it’s not a very useful heuristic to consider significant PR spending, or the popularity of flaky arguments, as particularly useful evidence against the underlying factual position.
It may be “too much information [about AGW]” for Less Wrong, but I feel I should support my point in this particular controversy at least a little, so… E.g., look at the behavior of Pachauri himself in the “Glaciergate” glaciers-melting-by-2035 case. I can’t read the guy’s mind, and indeed find some of his behavior quite odd, so for all I know it is not “deliberate.” But accidental or not, it looks rather like an episode in a misinformation campaign in the sorry tradition of big-money innumerate scare-environmentalism. Also, Judith Curry just wrote a blog post which mentions, among other things, the amount of money sloshing around in various AGW-PR-related organizations associated with anti-IPCC positions. For comparison, a rather angry critic I don’t know much about (but one who should, at a minimum, be constrained by British libel law) ties the Glaciergate factoid to grants of $500K and $3M, and Greenpeace USA seems to have an annual budget of around $30M.
big politicized controversies tend to grow big shoddy PR efforts associated with all factions
I should have said that I tried to find the best arguments I could, and then deep dive into those. More from someone else in the link below. If someone can point me to some actual credible sceptical arguments I would be interested.
I certainly agree AGW is a highly politicized issue and there are plenty of people trying to profit from it. Any time money is involved that will be the case. One should not assume that all the anti money spent on anti AGW money goes through the think tanks mentioned.
The whole Glaciergate thing was indeed a disgrace.
I don’t get too worked up about AGW because I think it is just one of the many things that are likely to sink us.
An article about assessing the soundness of the academic mainstream would benefit from also discussing the ways in which the message from, and even the research done in, academia is corrupted and distorted by commercial interests. Economics is a case in point, but it is a big issue also in drug research and other aspects of medicine.
That would fall under the “venal” part of considering the ideological/venal factors involved. I agree that I should have cited the example of drug research; the main reason I didn’t do so is that I’m not confident that my impressions about this area are accurate enough.
One fascinating question about the problem of venal influences, about which I might write more in the future, is when and under what exact conditions researchers are likely to fall under them and get away with it, considering that the present system is overall very good at discovering and punishing crude and obvious corruption and fraud. As I wrote in another comment, sometimes such influences are masked by scams such as setting up phony front organizations for funding, but even that tends to be discovered eventually and tarnish the reputations of the researchers involved. What seems to be the worst problem is when the beneficiaries of biased research enjoy such status in the eyes of the public and such legal and customary position in society that they don’t even need to hide anything when establishing a perverse symbiosis that results in biased research.
In retrospect I became aware that my ‘skepticism’ was fulled in large part by deliberate misinformation campaigns in the grand tradition of tobacco, asbestos, HFCs, DDT etc. The same tecyhniques, and even many of the same PR firms are involved. As one tobacco executive said “Our product is doubt”.
RW has a three-way chart (tobacco, creationism, climate change) so you can learn to spot this sort of argument:
Hmm. So if someday I find that some scientists make conclusions that don’t follow and these conclusions are used to make harmful policy decisions, I must not point out that certain scientific problems are unsolved or gather other scientists to write petitions, because that would make me match the RW pattern of “denialist”. Also apparently I must not say that correlation isn’t causation, because that’s “minimizing the relevance of statistical data”.
If that’s the only bit that actually matters for identifying “denialists”, then you can delete everything else from the article. Or put many other things in, e.g. “denialists often have two eyes and a nose”.
Speaking of which, smoking, asbestos, and pesticides are good examples of the venal interest heuristic where the most respected people on the academic side are pretty damn correct.
Speaking of which, smoking, asbestos, and pesticides are good examples of the venal interest heuristic where the most respected people on the academic side are pretty damn correct.
I don’t think this is an accurate analysis. Venal interests are relevant when they have ways of influencing researchers in ways that won’t make it look like immediately obvious fraud and crude malfeasance, which the modern academic system is indeed very good at stamping out.
If a researcher benefits from affiliation with some individuals or institutions and in turn produces research benefiting these parties, thus forming a suspiciously convenient symbiotic relationship, it will work in practice only if this relationship is somehow obscured. Sometimes it is obscured by channeling funding through neutral-looking third parties and similar swindles, but again, this is difficult to pull off in a way that won’t raise all sorts of red flags in the present system. A far more serious and common problem, in my opinion, is when the relationship is completely in the open—often even boasted about—because the institutions involved have such high status and exalted image that they’re normally perceived as worthy of highest trust and confidence in their objectivity and benevolence.
I mostly agree, but I think there’s a continuous scale here, not a general rule. The situation of pesticide companies and pharmaceutical companies is very similar, and both have used similar tactics to try and corrupt the science around them, but pharmaceutical companies have been much more effective—probably by spending much more money.
I don’t think the amount of money is relevant in this particular comparison. Far more important is the ability of the corrupting special interest to assume the forms and establish the social and legal status enabling it to present itself as a legitimate patron of scholarship, association with which won’t be detrimental to the researchers’ reputation. Money clearly doesn’t hurt in this endeavor, but I think that it’s far from being the most important factor.
Can you spell this out some more, focusing on this example? I’m looking for criteria which can be applied in advance to predict the degree of success of special interest propaganda.
Does the social and legal status and legitimacy of pharmaceuticals, as against pesticides, simply reflect the greater prestige of doctors over farmers?
Does the social and legal status and legitimacy of pharmaceuticals, as against pesticides, simply reflect the greater prestige of doctors over farmers?
In this case, I think that’s a correct hypothesis. The medical profession—and by extension all the related professions in its orbit, to varying extents—certainly enjoys such a high-status public perception that people will be biased towards interpreting its official claims and acts as coming from benevolent and objective expertise, even when a completely analogous situation in some ordinary industry or profession would be met with suspicion. Thus, it seems eminently plausible that in medical and related research people can let themselves be influenced by much more venal interest than usual, thinly disguised and rationalized as neutral and objective expertise and beneficial cooperation.
In my opinion, however, this is not where the worst problem lies. As long as the beneficiaries of biased research are easy to identify, one at least has a straightforward way to start making sense of the situation. A much worse problem is when the perverse incentives have a more complex and impersonal bureaucratic structure, in which ostensibly there are no private profits and venal interests, merely people working according to strict standards of professional ethics and expertise, but in reality this impeccable bureaucratic facade hides an awful hierarchy of patronage and the output is horrible nonsense with the effective purpose of rationalizing and excusing actions out of touch with reality. In these situations, venal interests effectively blend with ideological ones, and with all their elaborate and impressive bureaucratic facade, they are very difficult to recognize and analyze correctly.
You are right. However it is worth noting the powerful forces that are arrayed against any researcher who threatens powerful economic interests.
Given how much research is funded by the government, it is very possible for those with the right connections to punish those who do not sing the right song.
The story of trans fats is a good case in point, well documented in Gary Taubes’s book. Good Calories Bad Calories.
If you are going to suggest that academic climate research is not up to scratch, you need to do more than post links to pages that link to non-academic articles. Saying “you can find lots on google scholar” is not that same as actually pointing to the alleged sub-standard research.
For a long time I too was somewhat skeptical about global warming. I recognized the risk that researchers would exaggerate the problem in order to obtain more funding.
What I chose to do to resolve the matter was to deep dive into a few often-raised skeptic arguments using my knowledge of physics as a starting point, and learning whatever I needed to learn along the way (it took a while). The result was that the academic researchers won 6-0 6-0 6-0 in three sets (to use a tennis score analogy). Most striking to me was the dishonesty and lack of substance on the “skeptic” side. There was just no “there” there.
The topics I looked into were: accuracy of the climate temperature record, alleged natural causes explaining the recent heating, the alleged saturation of the atmospheric CO2 infra-red wavelengths, and the claim that the CO2 that is emitted by man is absorbed very quickly.
In retrospect I became aware that my ‘skepticism’ was fulled in large part by deliberate misinformation campaigns in the grand tradition of tobacco, asbestos, HFCs, DDT etc. The same techniques, and even many of the same PR firms are involved. As one tobacco executive said “Our product is doubt”.
An article about assessing the soundness of the academic mainstream would benefit from also discussing the ways in which the message from, and even the research done in, academia is corrupted and distorted by commercial interests. Economics is a case in point, but it is a big issue also in drug research and other aspects of medicine.
Another thing I have noticed in looking into various areas of academic research is just how much research in every field I looked at is inconclusive, inconsequential, flawed or subtly biased (look up “desk drawer bias” for example).
Edit: fixed a few typos.
Edit: good article by the way, very well reasoned.
waveman:
I agree that I should have argued and referenced that part better. What I wanted to point out is that there is a whole cottage industry of research purporting to show that climate change is supposedly influencing one thing or another, a very large part of which appears to advance hypotheses so far-fetched and weakly substantiated that they seem like obvious products of the tendency to involve this super-fashionable topic into one’s research whenever possible, for reasons of both status- and career-advancement.
Even if one accepts that the standard view on climate change has been decisively proven and the issue shown to be a pressing problem, I still don’t think how one could escape this conclusion.
Yes.
My daughter works in molecular biology, and she has noted that every paper / grant application is full of hope and promise of a cure to cancer or some other dread disease. Sometimes this hope and promise is significantly exaggerated.
It is very depressing, even in fields where the science is absolutely rock-solid, to read the nonsense that comes from the periphery. Read Deepak Chopra on Quantum Mechanics for example.
You wrote “what I chose to do to resolve the matter was to deep dive into three often-raised skeptic arguments using my knowledge of physics as a starting point” and “deliberate misinformation campaigns in the grand tradition of tobacco [etc.]”.
Less Wrong is not the place for a comprehensive argument about catastrophic AGW, but I’d like to make a general Less-Wrong-ish point about your analysis here. It is perceptive to notice that millions of dollars are spent on a shoddy PR effort by the other side. It is also perceptive to notice that many of the other side’s most popular arguments aren’t technically very strong. It’s even actively helpful to debunk unreasonable popular arguments even if you only do it for those which are popular on the other side. However, remember that it’s sadly common that regardless of their technical merits, big politicized controversies tend to grow big shoddy PR efforts associated with all factions. And even medium-sized controversies tend to attract some loud clueless supporters on both sides. Thus, it’s not a very useful heuristic to consider significant PR spending, or the popularity of flaky arguments, as particularly useful evidence against the underlying factual position.
It may be “too much information [about AGW]” for Less Wrong, but I feel I should support my point in this particular controversy at least a little, so… E.g., look at the behavior of Pachauri himself in the “Glaciergate” glaciers-melting-by-2035 case. I can’t read the guy’s mind, and indeed find some of his behavior quite odd, so for all I know it is not “deliberate.” But accidental or not, it looks rather like an episode in a misinformation campaign in the sorry tradition of big-money innumerate scare-environmentalism. Also, Judith Curry just wrote a blog post which mentions, among other things, the amount of money sloshing around in various AGW-PR-related organizations associated with anti-IPCC positions. For comparison, a rather angry critic I don’t know much about (but one who should, at a minimum, be constrained by British libel law) ties the Glaciergate factoid to grants of $500K and $3M, and Greenpeace USA seems to have an annual budget of around $30M.
I should have said that I tried to find the best arguments I could, and then deep dive into those. More from someone else in the link below. If someone can point me to some actual credible sceptical arguments I would be interested.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/4ba/some_heuristics_for_evaluating_the_soundness_of/3k1e
I certainly agree AGW is a highly politicized issue and there are plenty of people trying to profit from it. Any time money is involved that will be the case. One should not assume that all the anti money spent on anti AGW money goes through the think tanks mentioned.
The whole Glaciergate thing was indeed a disgrace.
I don’t get too worked up about AGW because I think it is just one of the many things that are likely to sink us.
Also, to comment on this:
That would fall under the “venal” part of considering the ideological/venal factors involved. I agree that I should have cited the example of drug research; the main reason I didn’t do so is that I’m not confident that my impressions about this area are accurate enough.
One fascinating question about the problem of venal influences, about which I might write more in the future, is when and under what exact conditions researchers are likely to fall under them and get away with it, considering that the present system is overall very good at discovering and punishing crude and obvious corruption and fraud. As I wrote in another comment, sometimes such influences are masked by scams such as setting up phony front organizations for funding, but even that tends to be discovered eventually and tarnish the reputations of the researchers involved. What seems to be the worst problem is when the beneficiaries of biased research enjoy such status in the eyes of the public and such legal and customary position in society that they don’t even need to hide anything when establishing a perverse symbiosis that results in biased research.
RW has a three-way chart (tobacco, creationism, climate change) so you can learn to spot this sort of argument:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/A_comparative_guide_to_science_denial
Work in progress, please feel free to extend.
Hmm. So if someday I find that some scientists make conclusions that don’t follow and these conclusions are used to make harmful policy decisions, I must not point out that certain scientific problems are unsolved or gather other scientists to write petitions, because that would make me match the RW pattern of “denialist”. Also apparently I must not say that correlation isn’t causation, because that’s “minimizing the relevance of statistical data”.
You failed to read the bit with the smoking gun of us knowing who’s paying for the pseudoscience in all three cases.
If that’s the only bit that actually matters for identifying “denialists”, then you can delete everything else from the article. Or put many other things in, e.g. “denialists often have two eyes and a nose”.
The question is: What else fits that pattern? Are there legitimate scientific movements that your filter catches?
Speaking of which, smoking, asbestos, and pesticides are good examples of the venal interest heuristic where the most respected people on the academic side are pretty damn correct.
Manfred:
I don’t think this is an accurate analysis. Venal interests are relevant when they have ways of influencing researchers in ways that won’t make it look like immediately obvious fraud and crude malfeasance, which the modern academic system is indeed very good at stamping out.
If a researcher benefits from affiliation with some individuals or institutions and in turn produces research benefiting these parties, thus forming a suspiciously convenient symbiotic relationship, it will work in practice only if this relationship is somehow obscured. Sometimes it is obscured by channeling funding through neutral-looking third parties and similar swindles, but again, this is difficult to pull off in a way that won’t raise all sorts of red flags in the present system. A far more serious and common problem, in my opinion, is when the relationship is completely in the open—often even boasted about—because the institutions involved have such high status and exalted image that they’re normally perceived as worthy of highest trust and confidence in their objectivity and benevolence.
I mostly agree, but I think there’s a continuous scale here, not a general rule. The situation of pesticide companies and pharmaceutical companies is very similar, and both have used similar tactics to try and corrupt the science around them, but pharmaceutical companies have been much more effective—probably by spending much more money.
I don’t think the amount of money is relevant in this particular comparison. Far more important is the ability of the corrupting special interest to assume the forms and establish the social and legal status enabling it to present itself as a legitimate patron of scholarship, association with which won’t be detrimental to the researchers’ reputation. Money clearly doesn’t hurt in this endeavor, but I think that it’s far from being the most important factor.
Can you spell this out some more, focusing on this example? I’m looking for criteria which can be applied in advance to predict the degree of success of special interest propaganda.
Does the social and legal status and legitimacy of pharmaceuticals, as against pesticides, simply reflect the greater prestige of doctors over farmers?
torekp:
In this case, I think that’s a correct hypothesis. The medical profession—and by extension all the related professions in its orbit, to varying extents—certainly enjoys such a high-status public perception that people will be biased towards interpreting its official claims and acts as coming from benevolent and objective expertise, even when a completely analogous situation in some ordinary industry or profession would be met with suspicion. Thus, it seems eminently plausible that in medical and related research people can let themselves be influenced by much more venal interest than usual, thinly disguised and rationalized as neutral and objective expertise and beneficial cooperation.
In my opinion, however, this is not where the worst problem lies. As long as the beneficiaries of biased research are easy to identify, one at least has a straightforward way to start making sense of the situation. A much worse problem is when the perverse incentives have a more complex and impersonal bureaucratic structure, in which ostensibly there are no private profits and venal interests, merely people working according to strict standards of professional ethics and expertise, but in reality this impeccable bureaucratic facade hides an awful hierarchy of patronage and the output is horrible nonsense with the effective purpose of rationalizing and excusing actions out of touch with reality. In these situations, venal interests effectively blend with ideological ones, and with all their elaborate and impressive bureaucratic facade, they are very difficult to recognize and analyze correctly.
You are right. However it is worth noting the powerful forces that are arrayed against any researcher who threatens powerful economic interests.
Given how much research is funded by the government, it is very possible for those with the right connections to punish those who do not sing the right song.
The story of trans fats is a good case in point, well documented in Gary Taubes’s book. Good Calories Bad Calories.