“Climate science is the worst example to try to explain and defend the scientific method. But will Andrew Dessler seriously reconsider his unrealistic view of climate science in theory and practice? Climategate exposed the bias that has continued to this day.”
The romantic view of government sees wise, selfless rulers implementing policy to better the common good. Never mind that many alleged market failures are government-related on close inspection, and ‘government failure’ (the political process as described by Public Choice economics) must be weighed against ‘market failure’.
Enter climate experts relying on global climate modeling. Enter Andrew Dessler, atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University, who doubles as a climate alarmist/campaigner. “Angry Andy” has no appetite for critics of his view of settled science and impending doom short of Big Government (Big Climate Brother). [1] He knows what’s best wants to save us from ourselves–and with an Amway look in his eye.
Andrew Dessler has fooled himself. In an attempt to capture the common sense, moral high ground, he presents the following description of good science without seriously seeing how climatology has sabotaged itself for “the cause.” [2] His bio states:
I spent 2000 as a Senior Policy Analyst in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (photo). While there, I became aware of a profound lack of understanding among policymakers and the general public about how science works and how to interpret the conflicting claims one often hears in policy debates. Based on that experience, I wrote a book that uses examples from the climate change arena to explain how science is used and misused in the policy arena.
He recently revisited this theme at Climate Brink with How Science Works in Three Steps.
Arguments over any scientific topic — climate change, vaccines, you name it — revolve around competing claims. For climate change, the claims are: Is the Earth warming? Are humans to blame? What will the impacts be? Over the last 150 years, the scientific community has developed a remarkably robust method for sorting out which claims are true and which aren’t. That method is what I want to walk through.
Comment: Dessler is being vague with his qualitative questions. Jumping from the human influence to “impacts” (highly negative to him) is subtle deceit.
So how does science generate knowledge? If you ask a high schooler, they’ll give you the version they learned in ninth grade: an individual scientist forms a hypothesis, runs an experiment, and draws a conclusion. That’s more or less what happens at the individual level, though in practice it’s more iterative — you design, test, and refine all at once, landing on a slightly different idea each time until you reach a conclusion about whatever hypothesis you’ve ended up with.
Comment: Dessler again hides the weenie. Climate models are far from objective when it comes to “design, test, and refine.” Models are causality deficient and not testable as is CO2 science performed under other-things-equal conditions (the greenhouse).
But this isn’t science. It’s only step one. Any individual scientist can make mistakes — scientists are human. Maybe there’s a bug in the code, maybe there’s an error in the experiment. Just because someone ran an experiment and reached a conclusion doesn’t mean it’s right, and scientists don’t treat a single result as settled truth.
Comment: Experiments? This scientific method is beyond climate models, what Dessler conveniently hides (more deceit). And what about the Climategate scientists who were the cream of the IPCC crop? Experiments under the scientific method are controlled, just the opposite of the gravy train of climate ‘science’.
Step two is peer review, the first layer of quality control. The scientist writes up what they did and submits it to a journal, which sends the paper to other experts in the field. Those experts judge whether the methods are sound, whether it properly references prior work, and whether the conclusions actually follow from the data. Ask any scientist and they’ll tell you peer review is miserable — the comments come back brutal, often harsh, and you have to revise and resubmit, sometimes multiple times, before an editor finally accepts the paper.
Comment: Peer review? Back to Climategate. “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow, even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” – —Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, July 8, 2004.
Peer review catches an immense amount of bad science, but it can’t catch all of it. Reviewers get sloppy or overworked, they miss obvious mistakes, and they can’t catch hidden errors — a bug in the code, a misread instrument. So a peer-reviewed paper making it into a journal doesn’t mean the paper is right. Nobody treats a single paper as the final word.
Comment: Inherent biases of researchers with a “cause” and retractions and new-replacing-old explains a lot of climate alarm. Why has ‘peer review’ failed on a variety of population and resource issues since the Paul Ehrlich heyday in the 1960s? Neo-Malthusianism has passed the review test in such publications as Science and Nature from the beginning.
That’s where step three comes in: the crucible of science. Important results get retested by the broader community. If you publish something interesting, it gets dissected. Sometimes people try to reproduce your work directly but more often they test its implications. If someone claims X is true, and that implies that Y is also true, then scientists will go check Y. If a claim survives this gauntlet long enough, it becomes accepted. That’s how we generate knowledge.
Let me give an example: the ozone hole. In 1985 — and I doubt many people watching were around then, but I remember it well — Joe Farman and his colleagues published observations from Antarctica showing that a huge chunk of ozone was disappearing every year.
Comment: Okay, give us some examples from the mainstream climate science literature. The predictions from the 1980s to the present. Oops, can’t go there. More deceit from the-fix-is-in Dessler.
Through this process, a consensus emerged. And it’s worth being clear that this consensus is organic. There’s no vote, no poll, no meeting where it gets decided. Scientists go to conferences, talk to one another, and independently arrived at the same answer. It’s the ultimate free market of ideas. After the consensus was established, the peer-reviewed literature doesn’t even mention the rival theories — it simply takes chlorine chemistry as given. That’s what a consensus looks like. It doesn’t mean every single scientist agrees, but it does mean there’s no longer any legitimate debate.
Comment: And what does this have to do with the alarmist conclusion of physical climate science? The rest of the story please.
So where can you see what scientists actually think? It’s all in the peer-reviewed literature, which contains the entire historical record of the argument: the discovery, the competing theories, the debate, the testing, and finally the community coalescing around one answer. But there’s a lot of room for misrepresentation. You can dig up an old paper claiming the ozone hole was caused by dynamics and wave it around as if there still was a debate about the cause of the ozone hole — without mentioning that the idea was disproven long ago and that even its own authors no longer believe it.
Comment: And regarding CO2 as a major negative and threat to the future of human flourishing? That is the debate.
There’s a bigger problem, though: the peer-reviewed literature is written in a language I call “nerd.” It’s extremely hard to read — honestly, some of it is hard for me to follow. It takes graduate students years to work through the literature in a single field, so we can’t expect policymakers or ordinary people to do it.
Comment: And look at the ruined reputation of climate science, based on climate models and polluted by activists (such as Dessler) who look to politics and government first.
This is where scientific assessments come in. The most famous is the IPCC — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The job of an assessment is to read and summarize the peer-reviewed literature, synthesizing what’s settled, what’s been disproven, and what remains genuinely debated.
Comment: Sorry, but the IPCC is thoroughly politicized. As Dessler said about the IPCC Climategate gang back in 2009: “There is no doubt that these emails are embarrassing and a public-relations disaster for science.”
To ensure the assessments accurately summarize the peer-reviewed literature, assessments are written by large teams, which are far less prone to bias than individuals and which dilute the influence of any one scientist with an axe to grind. The teams are deliberately assembled to avoid stacking the deck, and the reports themselves go through multiple rounds of peer review. That rigorous process is exactly why you can trust them and why people consider the IPCC to be the gold standard of what we know about the climate system. An assessment produced through a different process may well not be credible.
Comment: “… why people consider the IPCC to be the gold standard of what we know about the climate system. An assessment produced through a different process may well not be credible.” Sorry, but outside of The Tribe (a term used by Judith Curry), consensus is not science. Qualitative relationships do not mean climate alarm–that is where the bias, tribe, and cause come in.
You can even watch the consensus evolve across assessments. Take the attribution of warming. The 1990 IPCC report said the observed warming was broadly consistent with model predictions but also comparable to natural variability — in other words, we don’t know whether humans are responsible. By 1995, it concluded that the balance of evidence suggested a discernible human influence — a sentence only a committee could write, and one that barely commits to anything. By 2001, most of the warming over the previous 50 years was judged “likely” due to greenhouse gases; by 2007, “very likely”; by 2013, “extremely likely.” The 2023 report says essentially the same as 2013 — there’s not much stronger language available.
Comment: That aside, is the human influence good or bad? Deep Ecology’s guilty-until-proven-innocent does not cut it. A simple task such as dividing the warming into max and min increases and by month would be a good start to estimate benefits and costs. Focus on that, Professor Dessler. Data trumps models, right? Government is hardly the institution of effective change.
So, to wrap up: science is our ultimate tool for deciphering the universe — the most successful method we’ve ever developed for determining what’s true and what isn’t. Our understanding is written into the peer-reviewed literature, so if you want to know what scientists think, that’s where to look. And for those of us who don’t speak nerd, scientific assessments are the Rosetta Stone — they translate nerd into English.
Comment: And the skeptics of climate alarm and forced energy transformation agree and ask for climate science to follow the scientific method, as done in the separate field of CO2 Science.
Summary
Dessler has fooled himself in his romantic view of climate science, which is one of the worst if not the worst offender of the scientific method. My major points are restated (and Dessler is invited to respond, implicitly or explicitly):
Climate science is the worst example to try to explain and defend the scientific method. But will Andrew Dessler seriously reconsider his unrealistic view of climate science in theory and practice? Climategate exposed bias that has continued to this day.
It is time for humility and a start-over. Climate alarmism is old, largely falsified, and rightfully demoted in the public eye. Realism and depoliticization can bring physical climate science back to the realm of respected science.
[1] Consider these quotations from Dessler’s past:
“Fossil fuels are shredding our democracy.”
“If you’re pushing fossil fuels at this point, you’re anti-human.”
I find the path we’re on now — the rich world survives (if lucky), but abandons everyone else — to be morally problematic.
Hey assholes. We’ve been telling you for decades that this was going to happen if we didn’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions. You didn’t listen and now it’s all happening. We hope you’re happy. Enjoy the heatwaves, intense rainfall, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and many other things, you fucking morons.
[2] This infamous term was used by Michael Mann in a Climategate email (May 30, 2008): “I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but it’s not helping the cause, or her professional credibility.”