The article states …
Moreover, I’m not sure we should expect a homogeneous response to
something as diverse as science. When people use the term
“anti-science”, I want to know what definition of science they’ve
based their concept of anti on. Who’d be simplistic enough to be “pro”
the whole of science? What sort of shallow, shampoo advert “science
bit” approach to the complexities of modernity are they living by?
People clearly possess different opinions of what “science” actually is. Is it a methodology for finding truth? Or is it a set of ideologies? Our culture appears to be undergoing a transition from the former to the latter answer – a side effect of this being that as discrimination generationally declines on the basis of things like sex and race, it appears to be on the incline with regards to ideology.
When it comes to the global warming debate, a lot of confusion arises because of the way in which we’ve been educated about science. Very few of us have actually dug into the details of scientific modeling, big data and inferential statistics (etc) sufficient to get a gut-feeling for how easy it is for these ad hoc models to be wrong. Nate Silver poignantly gives a mention to a critic of the global warming models in his recent book, The Signal and the Noise, who suggests that the global warming models are probably wrong simply because the number of variables involved is just so large.
I would personally add that it seems a bit odd to me that many people would express so much confidence in the models for 50 - 100 year climate projections – and yet scientists still cannot make accurate predictions about the number of sunspots in the next solar cycle. When one digs even further into the actual solar models, it would appear that we basically do not understand many of the sun’s features. Very basic questions – like why are sunspots black, given that we’re supposed to be looking into much hotter regions of the sun? – would seem to require answers involving invisible entities like magnetic fields.
Why does the solar wind fail to appreciably decelerate even as it passes the Earth’s orbit? Nobody knows for sure yet.
And why is the Sun’s atmosphere – its corona – apparently 100x hotter than its surface? How does that heat pass through the surface without heating it up? Again, nobody knows for sure. But, solar scientists think that magnetic fields might have something to do with it. But, is that even a falsifiable theory? Probably not, actually.
So, when climate modelers suggest that we should possess some great confidence about the future climate, based upon their models, it’s probably wise to realize that they are specialists who – like all other specialists – are accepting a great number of assumptions as facts, in order to do their highly complex computations. Those computations would not actually be possible if those assumptions were not made.
But, at the end of the day, the assumptions still exist. And for those of us who are trying to make sense of all of it, we very rightly should take into consideration that a great number of mysteries remain when we decide on our own level of confidence. These sorts of things can be decided on the basis of the limitations of the models alone, without the need to consider the influences of corporations and all of that.
