WSJ: Just because climate science involves physics doesn’t mean its conclusions are as certain as gravity or a round Earth
WSJ: Just because climate science involves physics doesn’t mean its conclusions are as certain as gravity or a round Earth
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/08/wsj-just-because-climate-science.html
Jamie Whyte: Science Says So, Suckers!
Just because climate science involves physics doesn’t mean its conclusions are as certain as gravity.
By
JAMIE WHYTE
“Gravity exists. The world is round. Climate change is happening.”
WSJ.COM 8/14/13: So tweeted Barack Obama’s advocacy group Organizing for Action on Monday, adding the hashtag #ScienceSaysSo. Had the hashtag read #ThePresidentSaysSo, no one would have bought the bogus appeal to authority. But many will buy the appeal to scientific authority.
Few nowadays defer to the traditional authority figures of old—parents, priests or politicians. But many are inclined to take scientists’ word for things. If scientists say that anthropogenic climate change is happening, well, then anthropogenic climate change is happening. (Mr. Obama’s tweeters must mean anthropogenic climate change, since no one denies that the climate is changing, as it always does.)
Deference to scientists is sometimes warranted. But the general deference to science suggested by President Obama and other campaigners is absurd. It underestimates the variety of science and the incentives scientists have to exaggerate the credibility of their theories.
People often talk about science as if it were a single discipline with a single method, “the scientific method,” so that all scientifically acquired beliefs are equally likely to be true. Since all of Team Obama’s threesome—gravity, the spherical Earth and climate change—are scientific, you should be no less certain about reality of anthropogenic climate change than about the reality of gravity.
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This vision of science is wrong. Scientific inquiry encompasses a great variety of disciplines with different methods, some of which are more reliable than others. Particle physics, evolutionary biology, epidemiology, climatology and behavioral economics, to take but five examples, concern different phenomena, use different methods and produce results of very different credibility. Deference is due to some scientists but not to all.
The physics of medium-sized objects moving at velocities well below the speed of light has been experimentally tested and successfully applied in technology to such an extent that it is beyond reasonable doubt. Anyone who drives a car across an ancient bridge has reason to defer to physicists.
The climate models upon which the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis is based have no such record of success. This is not their fault. They are new and they make predictions about …