Speaking of science and (un)certainty...
Oct. 18th, 2004 10:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinSo you're reading some politically contentious stuff about a scientific issue, and some of the contributors to the debate, people with whom you're not inclined to agree, are raising what seem to be serious, possibly interesting scientific objections to everything you thought you knew about the issue. And while it's tempting to just reject what they're saying on ideological grounds, being a skeptical post-Enlightenment child you figure you ought to be able to consider their claims on the merits. But everything's terribly heated, you're a busy person, and you don't have the time or mental energy to sift through all the claims and counterclaims. So it would be nice if somebody more diligent than yourself would sit down and try to figure out precisely what these people are saying and whether it makes any sense.
When it comes to the global warming debate, Tim Lambert is that guy (he also writes about gun control a lot, but I'm not as personally interested in that). Lately, he seems to have some friends.
When I first heard about Ross McKitrick's work challenging the "hockey stick" increase in global temperatures in the 20th century, I thought he might have something—or, at least, that he would raise issues worth debating about, and that everyone would come away wiser. What I didn't expect was how astoundingly bad his arguments would turn out to be. We're talking stuff like confusing degrees and radians, averaging in missing data as if it represented zero degrees, insisting that taking the root mean square of temperatures (which aren't even in an absolute temperature scale, so they can be negative) is no worse than a weighted mean because there is no such thing as average temperature, behavior like that.
This guy seems to be an intellectual heavy hitter among the Tech Central Station crowd, and one of the people largely responsible for convincing many smart conservative- and libertarian-leaning techies who really ought to know better that the entire modern science of climatology is a deliberate, politically-motivated fraud.
Oh, yeah, and Sallie Baliunas seems to find him convincing.
Time was, I thought political anti-environmentalist advocates hit the mark at least some of the time. They've written potent critiques of the kind of end-of-the-world hysteria that environmental advocacy groups use to raise funding. But they were dead wrong when they jumped on the fake 1990s ozone controversy, and in this debate I similarly see no trace of intellectual respectability.
When it comes to the global warming debate, Tim Lambert is that guy (he also writes about gun control a lot, but I'm not as personally interested in that). Lately, he seems to have some friends.
When I first heard about Ross McKitrick's work challenging the "hockey stick" increase in global temperatures in the 20th century, I thought he might have something—or, at least, that he would raise issues worth debating about, and that everyone would come away wiser. What I didn't expect was how astoundingly bad his arguments would turn out to be. We're talking stuff like confusing degrees and radians, averaging in missing data as if it represented zero degrees, insisting that taking the root mean square of temperatures (which aren't even in an absolute temperature scale, so they can be negative) is no worse than a weighted mean because there is no such thing as average temperature, behavior like that.
This guy seems to be an intellectual heavy hitter among the Tech Central Station crowd, and one of the people largely responsible for convincing many smart conservative- and libertarian-leaning techies who really ought to know better that the entire modern science of climatology is a deliberate, politically-motivated fraud.
Oh, yeah, and Sallie Baliunas seems to find him convincing.
Time was, I thought political anti-environmentalist advocates hit the mark at least some of the time. They've written potent critiques of the kind of end-of-the-world hysteria that environmental advocacy groups use to raise funding. But they were dead wrong when they jumped on the fake 1990s ozone controversy, and in this debate I similarly see no trace of intellectual respectability.
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no subject
Date: 2004-10-19 05:11 am (UTC)