Some Implications of the Global Warming Kerfuffle

Posted on December 5, 2009
Filed Under General Rationing Issues, Healthcare economics |

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The recent public release of hundreds of private e-mails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, Director of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), has created a hot time for global warming mavens everywhere. The e-mails depict Jones and several other internationally prominent global warming experts discussing how to “tweak” climate change data (to hide such embarrassing climatic phenomena as the Medieval warming period,  “the little ice age” that followed it, and the global cooling we’ve been seeing over the past decade, so their famous hockey stick graph would look more like a hockey stick, and less like the profile of a mountain range), “controlling” the peer-review process so that only the “right” peers would be doing the reviewing, and sharing electronic high-fives when a noted global warming skeptic died.

Then just a few days later, the CRU was forced to admit (thanks to Britain’s Freedom of Information act) that they had destroyed all the raw temperature data upon which their elaborate computer models are based. The destruction of this data utterly precludes other scientists from checking, and attempting to reproduce, the critical predictive model upon which the theory of man-made global warming largely rests. Oops.

This inconvenient truth renders their climate change model a black box, a sorcerer’s rune. It places the rest of us in the position of having to “just trust” the global warming experts, whose work we are about to make the basis of a fundamental change in our economy, our way of life, and our foundational political philosophy. Such trust will undoubtedly be a little more difficult to come by than it might have been just a few weeks ago, in view of what the new e-mails tell us about the experts’ faithful adherence to unbiased scientific behaviors.

DrRich believes that this recent global warming kerfuffle is a big deal. DrRich happens to believe in climate change - in fact, he is convinced the climate has been changing ever since there has been a climate. Furthermore, he is certain that modern society has created new variables that are likely contributing to climate change. However, whenever somebody in authority or in a position of prominence insists that the rest of us not look behind the curtain, that they have the answer and it’s imperative that we just follow them immediately, and not take the time - because time is of the essence - to check the facts for ourselves, DrRich has learned to dig in his heels. For, would-be Wizards of Oz are ALWAYS up to no good. (We have seen this behavior many times recently - TARP, the stimulus bill, and the healthcare reform bills immediately come to mind - and DrRich submits that the results have not been entirely beneficial.)

So the desperation on the part of the global warming experts revealed by these purloined e-mails - the unwillingness to let the evidence speak for itself, the anxious efforts to control the process - makes DrRich want to slow down, take another look at the data, and figure out what it is these guys don’t want us to see. That’s just the way DrRich reacts to such behavior.

But at the same time, DrRich wishes to correct an impression which some loud-mouths on the right-wing are attempting to create, namely, that this kind of behavior on the part of respected scientists is an egregious corruption of the entire scientific process, and that every scientist in the world should be screaming for the heads of the miscreants, and indeed, must do so, to salvage the legitimacy of science itself.

Nah. This is pretty much SOP.

This is how scientists have always behaved, and it’s not unique to the global warming crowd. DrRich is a student of history, and realizes that scientific progress - or any kind of progress - is not a smooth endeavor. It moves in fits and starts, and in the process there will be blood.

It works like this: A new theory is conceptualized to explain some phenomenon, usually by a whippersnapper of one variety or another. The entrenched experts, whose careers (and in some cases, whose immortal souls) are based on the old conception, find the new theory to be absurdly wrong (or in some cases heretical), and probably dangerous. Since preserving the “truth” is the highest calling of all, the experts engage in every device they can muster (from “controlling” the peer-review process to burning heretics at the stake) to see that the truth prevails. Deus lo volt!

This process sounds primitive and unkind, but actually it is quite practical, since most of the new theories thought up by whippersnappers are, in fact, garbage. In order to break through the imposing barriers constructed by the experts, the novices really have to believe in what they are espousing, and their new theory, ultimately, has to actually offer some substantial improvement over the currently accepted one. The whippersnapper, if very lucky, finally becomes the foundation of a new generation of experts - and the process begins all over again. Hence, science progresses.

More commonly, the whippersnapper will break under the pressure and abandon the heresy and relegate him/herself to the accepted ways, or will fade into sad obscurity, or, perhaps, will persist in advancing his/her insufficiently convincing ideas and be burned for it. For the process is geared toward the gradual discovery of truth, and not toward the nurturing and vindication of whippersnappers. And indeed, the truth always prevails - and often it does so within just a few generations.

In the short term, of course, this process can look very messy and unfair. It is subject to great bias. In fact, we reward scientific experts with money, prestige, titles, honors, and free weekends in Vegas just to make sure they’ll do everything they can to preserve the status quo. We do this so that when the paradigm actually shifts, it shifts because the merits of the new paradigm are sufficient to overcome all the bias - and not because of a whim. This process keeps science - and society - from being whipsawed this way and that.

And so, what we’re seeing with the global warming e-mails is not some brand new corruption of the scientific process, but the scientific process itself - albeit more starkly than is usually seen by the public (and, truth to tell, employing techniques that are somewhat more egregious than DrRich has seen in modern times). For the experts to behave in a grossly biased fashion to preserve their exulted positions, and for them to implement their biases using techniques that most observers would consider at least unfair if not unethical or illegal, is not entirely new, or even particularly alarming. That’s how the system has arranged it, for the long-term (multi-generational) stability of the system.

What does any of this have to do with healthcare, or more specifically, with healthcare rationing?

As we enter into a new era of healthcare, where medical decisions will be taken out of the hands of imperfect physicians and entrusted to panels of experts, who will analyze the available data and construct the guidelines of behavior by which all physicians will henceforth be judged, we ought to keep this model of scientific progress in mind.

Not only is bias something which will be difficult to eliminate from the scientific process, bias (being an integral part of human nature) is an integral part of that process.

Today we have a healthcare system in which competing interests, and their competing biases, battle for prominence. The process is very much like our political process with its own competing biases - messy, ugly and often unfair, but with long-term results that are generally reasonably favorable. Or at least, the damage is generally contained.

We are headed toward a healthcare system in which only one great interest - that of our government, with its overwhelming bias toward cutting the cost of healthcare - will predominate.

A great fallacy under which many of us labor is that the government has no strong biases, and that a process overseen by the government will be inherently far more “fair” than a process that incorporates the biases of for-profit enterprises. But in truth, the government is the biggest, meanest, special interest of all.

For those who have looked at history (Exhibit “A”) and think they have seen even one example of a government which has total control over any human enterprise and still behaves fairly, DrRich offers as Exhibit “B” the behavior of the global warming climatologists. These experts, who rely for their existence on government sponsored grants (and also industry-sponsored grants, but only if the industry’s bias on global warming aligns with that of the world’s governments), have displayed all of the reprehensible behaviors we commonly attribute to researchers who are supported mainly by profit-mongering industries. Further, because the bias of the global warming experts so nicely aligns with the historical bias of government - to accrue ever more power over the endeavors of the people - that bias has become largely sacrosanct. Its scientific viewpoint is “settled,” fully accepted by worldwide government agencies and the mass media, and no new scientific evidence to the contrary is admissible. Competing viewpoints are, in fact, heretical. And even when gross evidence of academic misbehavior is revealed, as it is now, that evidence is excused, paved over and ignored. For there is no other “truth” to consider; only the approved agenda can be advanced.

When we allow government and its agencies to have the final say over medical decisions, and permit all dissenting medical biases to become forcibly silenced, then those medical decisions will be made with all the robust, open-minded, free, give-and-take exchange of ideas we are seeing from the global warming experts today. And medical progress will become as sclerotic as the progress enjoyed by would-be astronomers during the pre-Rensaissance Popes, another era in which only a single set of biases was allowed.

The scientific process will always be biased. Where we invite serious damage is where we admit only one form of bias, and forcibly stifle all the rest. It’s bad for climate science, and it will be bad for healthcare.

Comments

5 Responses to “Some Implications of the Global Warming Kerfuffle”

  1. ruralcounsel on December 2nd, 2009 8:15 am

    Generally, I think your view on this AGW concept is rational and realistic. When it became clear that the “cures” were worse than the disease, and that they were very expensive and rapidly shifted political and economic power, everyone should have been more sceptical.

    I am not, however, quite so cynical about how the modern day scientific process proceeds.

    I do think that this climate change brouhaha is not typical, unless one is willing to look back at some of the more egregious incidents of bias and ego hijacking logic and reason.

    Admittedly, there are often vigorous debates about various theories, and polarization into various schools and camps. But the supposed goal is to out-think the opposition, and provide some devastating evidence that invalidates their theory, not to gag them. The point is to win the chess game, not jail the opponent. In those pre-Renaissance days, at least one could excuse bad science because of the religious interference. What is our excuse now?

    If we are to congratulate ourselves on having a civilized society that has made progress in our rationality, it is unacceptable to hold ourselves to such a low standard. But perhaps this expects too much from a species whose institutions have really not evolved since the time of the Spanish Inquisition.

    I fear that writing off the CRU folks’ behavior as just standard operating procedure lets them off the hook way too easily. How do we deter such intellectually dishonest behavior in the future?

  2. DrRich on December 2nd, 2009 8:32 am

    rural,

    There’s a fair amount of tongue-in-cheek in my description of the “standard” scientific process. I agree that the climate guys have gone way over the top here, and should not be forgiven. Actually, I think they all deserve the academic death penalty.

    On the other hand, as a former whippersnapper who spent the first dozen or so years of his academic career flailing against entrenched experts (and who was finally vindicated but by then was too bloodied up to enjoy it much), the tactics the global warming guys have displayed here do seem distressingly familiar.

    Rich

  3. Greg Molter on December 3rd, 2009 1:01 am

    Read the Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Khune. He clearly describes the process as outlined Dr Rich in great detail. The whole process, from the Nobel peace prize to Al Gore a year ago, to the recent events discussed above are just the shifting paradigm occuring in front of our eyes.

  4. Mike K on December 6th, 2009 1:43 pm

    Two very similar events in the recent past would be the discovery of the AIDS virus, well described in “Science Fictions,” by Crewdson, and The Human Genome Project, described in Craig Venter’s biography or in “The Genome Wars.” Both stories show lots of inflated egos and chicanery in biological science.

    Another example is the role of Freud and psychoanalysis although Freud still has his adherents today.

  5. TMLutas on December 9th, 2009 2:19 pm

    One of the assumptions most people have is that there *are* whippersnappers. So far as I can tell, the climate science people have largely purged them from the field by means fair and foul. The challenges seem to be largely coming from experts in other fields, mathematics, statistics, geology, solar scientists. Climate scientists’ misuse of other fields in the quest to knock down challenges seems to be what has drawn the majority of hostile scrutiny. That process seems to be a little different. It’s more a fight between competing establishments with each side viewing the other as whippersnappers.

    Overall an excellent post. I like it.

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