Politics disguised as science: a 12-point checklist for when to doubt a scientific consensus

Politics disguised as science: a 12-point checklist for when to doubt a scientific ‘consensus’

Dr. Patrick Moore wrote today on Twitter about an “Excellent piece on how to distinguish good science from bad politics. Don’t know how I missed it.” He’s referring to the 2017 article by Jay Richards “Politics Disguised as Science: When to Doubt a Scientific ‘Consensus’” with the subtitle “Anyone who has studied the history of science knows that scientists are not immune to the non-rational dynamics of the herd.” Here’s a condensed version of Jay Richard’s excellent article with a 12-point checklist of signs to guide us when considering whether to doubt a scientific “consensus,” using climate change as a test study:

1. When different claims get bundled together. With global warming, there’s the claim that our planet, on average, is getting warmer. There’s also the claim that human emissions are the main cause of it, that it’s going to be catastrophic, and that we have to transform civilization to deal with it. These are all different assertions with different bases of evidence.

There’s a lot more agreement about (1) a modest warming trend since about 1850 than there is about (2) the cause of that trend. There’s even less agreement about (3) the dangers of that trend, or of (4) what to do about it. But these four propositions are frequently bundled together so that if you doubt one, you’re labeled a climate change “skeptic” or “denier.” That’s just plain intellectually dishonest.

2. When ad hominem attacks against dissenters predominate. When it comes to climate change, ad hominems are all but ubiquitous. They are even smuggled into the way the debate is described. The common label “denier” is one example.

3. When scientists are pressured to toe the party line. Tenure, job promotions, government grants, media accolades, social respectability, Wikipedia entries, and vanity can do what gulags do, only more subtly. Scientists are under pressure to toe the orthodox party line on climate change and receive many benefits for doing so. That’s another reason for suspicion.

4. When publishing and peer review in the discipline is cliquish. Nerds who follow the climate debate blogosphere have known for years about the cliquish nature of publishing and peer review in climate science (see here, for example).

5. When dissenting opinions are excluded from the relevant peer-reviewed literature not because of weak evidence or bad arguments but as part of a strategy to marginalize dissent. Besides mere cliquishness, the “peer review” process in climate science has, in some cases, been consciously, deliberately subverted to prevent dissenting views from being published.

6.When the actual peer-reviewed literature is misrepresented. We’ve been told for years that the peer-reviewed literature is virtually unanimous in its support for human-induced climate change. In fact, there are plenty of dissenting papers in the literature, and this despite mounting evidence that the peer-review deck was stacked against them.

7. When consensus is declared hurriedly or before it even exists. In 1992, former Vice President Al Gore reassured his listeners, “Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled.” In the real 1992, however, Gallup “reported that 53% of scientists actively involved in global climate research did not believe global warming had occurred; 30% weren’t sure, and only 17% believed global warming had begun. Even a Greenpeace poll showed 47% of climatologists didn’t think a runaway greenhouse effect was imminent; only 36% thought it possible and a mere 13% thought it probable.” Seventeen years later, in 2009, Gore apparently determined that he needed to revise his own revisionist history, asserting that the scientific debate over human-induced climate change had raged until as late as 1999, but now there was true consensus.

8. When the subject matter seems, by its nature, to resist consensus. It makes sense that chemists over time may come to unanimous conclusions about the results of some chemical reaction since they can replicate the results over and over in their own labs. They can see the connection between the conditions and their effects. It’s easily testable. But many of the things under consideration in climate science are not like that. The evidence is scattered and hard to keep track of; it’s often indirect, embedded in history and requiring all sorts of assumptions. You can’t rerun past climate to test it, as you can with chemistry experiments. And the headline-grabbing conclusions of climate scientists are based on complex computer models that climate scientists themselves concede do not accurately model the underlying reality, and receive their input, not from the data, but from the scientists interpreting the data. This isn’t the sort of scientific endeavor on which a wide, well-established consensus is easily rendered.

9. When “scientists say” or “science says” is a common locution. In Newsweek‘s April 28, 1975, issue, science editor Peter Gwynne claimed that “scientists are almost unanimous” that global cooling was underway. Now we are told, “Scientists say global warming will lead to the extinction of plant and animal species, the flooding of coastal areas from rising seas, more extreme weather, more drought, and diseases spreading more widely.” “Scientists say” is hopelessly ambiguous. Your mind should immediately wonder: “Which ones?”

“Science,” after all, is an abstract noun. It can’t say anything. Whenever you see that locution used to imply a consensus, it should trigger your baloney detector.

10. When it is being used to justify dramatic political or economic policies. Imagine hundreds of world leaders and nongovernmental organizations, science groups, and United Nations functionaries gathered for a meeting heralded as the most important conference since World War II, in which “the future of the world is being decided.” These officials seem to agree that institutions of “global governance” need to be established to reorder the world economy and massively restrict energy resources. Large numbers of them applaud wildly when socialist dictators denounce capitalism. Strange philosophical and metaphysical activism surrounds the gathering. And we are told by our president that all of this is based, not on fiction, but on science—that is, a scientific consensus that human activities, particularly greenhouse gas emissions, are leading to catastrophic climate change.

We don’t have to imagine that scenario, of course. It happened in Copenhagen, in December 2009. Now, none of this disproves the hypothesis of catastrophic, human-induced climate change. But it does describe an atmosphere that would be highly conducive to misrepresentation.

11. When the “consensus” is maintained by an army of water-carrying journalists who defend it with uncritical and partisan zeal and seem intent on helping certain scientists with their messaging rather than reporting on the field as objectively as possible. Do I really need to elaborate on this point?

12. When we keep being told that there’s a scientific consensus. A scientific consensus should be based on scientific evidence. But a consensus is not itself the evidence. And with really well-established scientific theories, you never hear about consensus. No one talks about the consensus that the planets orbit the sun, that the hydrogen molecule is lighter than the oxygen molecule, that salt is sodium chloride, that light travels about 186,000 miles per second in a vacuum, that bacteria sometimes cause illness, or that blood carries oxygen to our organs. The very fact that we hear so much about a consensus on catastrophic, human-induced climate change is perhaps enough by itself to justify suspicion.

Bottom Line: To adapt that old legal aphorism, when you’ve got decisive scientific evidence on your side, you argue the evidence. When you’ve got great arguments, you make the arguments. When you don’t have decisive evidence or great arguments, you claim consensus.

Mark Perry, "Politics disguised as science: a 12-point checklist for when to doubt a scientific ‘consensus’," American Enterprise Institute, October 5, 2019, https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/politics-disguised-as-science-a-12-point-checklist-for-when-to-doubt-a-scientific-consensus/