Religiosity and GCC: Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition

In actuality, there is very little disagreement...This is one of the strongest of scientific consensus views in the history of science," Gore said. "We live in a world where what used to be called propaganda now has a major role to play in shaping public opinion." -- Al Gore in The Telegraph

"The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society ... The conclusions in this statement reflect the scientific consensus
represented by, for example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the Joint National Academies’ statement". -- AAAS report

"My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

In the modern world, science and society often interact in a perverse way. We live in a technological society, and technology causes political problems. The politicians and the public expect science to provide answers to the problems. Scientific experts are paid and encouraged to provide answers. The public does not have much use for a scientist who says, “Sorry, but we don’t know”. The public prefers to listen to scientists who give confident answers to questions and make confident predictions of what will happen as a result of human activities. So it happens that the experts who talk publicly about politically contentious questions tend to speak more clearly than they think. They make confident predictions about the future, and end up believing their own predictions. Their predictions become dogmas which they do not question. The public is led to believe that the fashionable scientific dogmas are true, and it may sometimes happen that they are wrong. That is why heretics who question the dogmas are needed."
-- Freeman Dyson, Heretical Thoughts About Science and Society.

"There is more RELIGION in men's SCIENCE than there is SCIENCE in their RELIGION" -- Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

Science is not about consensus -- consensus is politics. Science is also not about believing anything -- unless you mean believing something that might be true or not and then experimenting to see what happens. (As Dyson goes on to explain). Science is about determining a formula (or model) that others can reproduce at will. Over time, after the model is verified again and again, inductive logic takes over and we accept the model as being useful enough for us to use everyday. Later on, some new model might come along that is more refined. It takes the place of the old model.

But I'm not arguing Global Warming, or Global Climate Change, or whatever it's current appellation. What concerns me is that so many people are willing to take the consensus of scientists and form public policy around it. Then they bash dissenters as basically being either unqualified to make a scientific opinion, a crackpot, or paid off by some vast conspiracy. To these folks, the trade-off seems clear: this is the future of the planet we are talking about! Even if there's only a small chance that GCC might be catastrophic, why gamble with our future? Why take that risk? I hope to answer that question.

Let's assume that GCC is real and deadly. Taking the word of scientific consensus, we change massive parts of our global economy to meet the threat and, sure enough, nothing bad happens.

Aside from the fact that, due to human nature, many will argue it was never going to happen anyway, what have we accomplished? Yes, we have saved millions of lives. We have avoided massive numbers of refugees and the destruction of coastal cities. But we have also, for the first time, let a new group of people decide by consensus what the policy should be for the rest of the population. Are we sure we want to do this?

"I am not a climatologist, but I do know how to research my own questions when I'm interested enough to find out why one expert I've never heard of clashes with thousands of other experts on a subject I have followed for 30 of my 50yrs." -- commenter on Slashdot regarding Dyson's essay.

"Every cleric must obey the Pope [And by extension the church, Ed], even if he commands what is wrong, for no one can judge him. The only exception was if the command involved heresy or tended to the destruction of the church" -- Pope Innocent IV

"Q. Do you here suppose the teachers individually infallible, or that they are free personally from all sin and error?
A. By no means; philosophically speaking, if all the bishops of the Church, scattered over all the nations of the earth, all men of learning and probity, who have never seen one another,—who have had no means of combining to teach any particular doctrine,—and who have had no motive for such, do actually teach the very same truths, then we maintain, by all laws of human evidence or moral certainty, that their combined testimony to the existence of any doctrine infallibly proves its truth." -- A Doctrinal Catechism

"Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong." -- Fredrich August von Hayek (No relation to Salma).

Is Al Gore politician, or preacher?

We've went through a time in our history where groups of clergy ran a great part of western civilization. While I know that it's popular to demonize them today, at the time they were the smartest people the world had to offer. They made decisions mostly on what they thought to be a higher cause. And significantly, there was consensus.

Things didn't work out too well for folks that disagreed in those days. They were called heretics, amoral. They were told to get with the program. They were not accepted by society. Dissent was not tolerated. What we found was that even though the church was created to take care of spiritual needs, once it got into politics it became just another political player, jockeying for power and playing hardball with the rest of the rulers.

I don't think scientists are going to start a new Inquisition any time soon. I rather worry that contrarian research will not be funded, that heretical voices will not be heard, and that public policy will become more and more intertwined with the politics of science.

Once a politician takes a political stance on an issue of science, and scientists join in, we've got very bad problems. Can you be a good Democrat and still be a GCC skeptic? Can you be a Republican and be a GCC enthusiast? (The Republicans have made an attempt to capture both sides of this issue. A smart move). Where does science end and politics begin? Why is there a political panel (IPCC) making scientific announcements about what needs to change politically? Did it occur to anybody that this was a bad idea?

If GCC science turns out to be incomplete or need modification, as almost every other science in it's earliest days has done, , how are they ever going to make the politics follow along with the science? I mean, politics is about power, plain and simple. If the science decides in the year 2020 that the world is turning into a Dairy Queen, or worst yet, that man-made pollution is actually stabilizing the climate, how could the politics ever change to support that? Science is about logic and theory: if next year the theory changes, the science changes. Politics isn't like that at all. Politics is about power, consensus, positioning, leverage, triangulation. Politics is not science and it has it's own rules that do not conform to science.

So are we saying that we are developing a new dogma of science, that, like the church, is just always going to be right? Science really wants to lock in with one party or another, one position or another? Do we have it all figured out now? Nothing is going to change?

History has shown that we should never give up our responsibilities as voters. Simply because one claims to be more informed than somebody else does not give him or her a greater say over public policy. It would be better for doomsday to come, full of fire and water, sun and ozone, misery and death, and the world be free than to give up our freedoms to any non-elected group and be safe, no matter what their pedigree, their wisdom, or their track record.

It's bad science. It's bad politics. It's just bad, bad, bad.

The interesting part of GCC debate, in my opinion, is not the science at all. It's the role of science and scientists in politics. At the extreme, my thesis is that scientists have taken the role of priests for millions of citizens, self-ordained and full of hellfire and brimstone. Dissenters are punished. Citizens who question and probe are ignored and shunned. How they ever decided they wanted into politics is beyond me, but they're here now. Welcome to the party, guys. When the backlash comes, and surely it must (as it did for the church), you're not going to like it much.

I might be wrong. After all, it's a topic I am emotional about and I am exaggerating to make a point. Isn't it great that I can be wrong without there being such major implications? Shouldn't we want science to stay like that as much as possible? Don't we want science to be nimble, not political or religious?