Climate scientists behaving badly? Part 6: Conclusion

One of the consequences of the epistemic corruption of the climate issue is that by criticising the failings in epistemic duty of these scientists I will be seen as having taken a side. But there are no sides on factual issues: there are just the facts. Once we see a factual question in terms of sides to belong to, as if it were a matter of politics or war, we have allowed our vision to be distorted—usually by an ideological approach to value.

On the first order issue of the facts of the climate I do not feel obliged to take a position. Both hawks and skeptics offer evidence and arguments. The evidence is sometimes murky and the inferences subtle. Both sides can exploit our ignorance of the complex statistical techniques needed for analysing the data; either may use them to reveal the truth or torture the evidence till it says what they want, and we can’t tell the difference. Even where methodology is not complex, it is very hard for us laymen to weigh the relative significance of the points and counterpoints. For example, we have records of increasing temperature readings from measuring stations, significant numbers of which are poorly maintained and sited, such as being sited next to air conditioning outlets. Clearly there is a problem with that data, but it is a further empirical question to determine to what extent the data is degraded by the faults and whether that degrading merely weakens or substantially defeats the claim of warming based on it. And this is about the simplest example. The whole issue is riddled with such imponderables for anyone who is not going to learn a great deal more about climate science than most of us can or should. For these reasons, laymen should not hold strong opinions about the first order facts at issue. Insofar as we must have some opinion, we must. attend not only to the first order claims and counterclaims but also to the epistemic character of those making the claims, to the epistemic character of the environs within which they are working, to question of the reliability of expert testimony and finally, to the epistemic character of the public debate. Here I have been concerned with epistemic character, but I note before moving on that expert testimony is considerably less reliable than we might hope, and especially unreliable about complex systems (see Tetlock  Expert Political Judgement).

The evidence I have summarised is, I believe, sufficient to conclude that climate science has fallen prey to a corruption of its epistemic character. Not only did the individuals fail in various epistemic duties; they did not regard their faults as vices, but rather, as virtues, and knew that their activities were quite acceptable with the field. The individuals concerned are eminent in the field and the institution is a central one within climate science. The same faults have been manifested by other climate scientists in other circumstances. So this is not a matter of individual human foible and weakness. The epistemic virtues of science, when practised, are sufficient to protect science from those. No. The defects are sufficiently severe and pervasive to have resulted in epistemic corruption.

Since the East Anglian CRU emails were first revealed another source of evidence for that conclusion has been reported. It has now turned out that many of the headline grabbing[1] claims in the IPCC’s 2007 report were false: the prediction that Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035, [2] that 40% of the Amazon rainforest will be lost,[3] that African crop yields will be halved by 2020, [4] [5] that sea levels are  rising quickly and that extreme weather events are more frequent.[6]

Let me be clear about the problem from our perspective here. It is not that these claims were false. That would not matter at all if the basing of the claims had been sound. We might simply have had a lot of misleading evidence. Nor would it matter if they were true. The problem is that these claims had no basis in the refereed literature (clearly a double standard: hawks have repeatedly rejected any skeptical criticism that is not published in the refereed literature), in some cases no basis in any literature at all, and that what basis they had was at best dubious and at worst spurious. No science of sound epistemic character would tolerate such claims made in its name.

When we consider the epistemic character of the public debate I think we have to conclude that it has been corrupted by the corruption in climate science. It is, for example, quite extraordinary that the IPCC should be publishing the 2007 report about which its own expert reviewer, Andrew Lacis, should comment:

There is no scientific merit to be found in the Executive Summary. The presentation sounds like something put together by Greenpeace activists and their legal department. The points being made are made arbitrarily with legal sounding caveats without having established any foundation or basis in fact. The Executive Summary seems to be a political statement that is only designed to annoy greenhouse skeptics. Wasn't the IPCC Assessment Report intended to be a scientific document that would merit solid backing from the climate science community – instead of forcing many climate scientists into having to agree with greenhouse skeptic criticisms that this is indeed a report with a clear and obvious political agenda. Attribution can not happen until understanding has been clearly demonstrated. Once the facts of climate change have been established and understood, attribution will become self-evident to all. The Executive Summary as it stands is beyond redemption and should simply be deleted.[7]

The public debate has been further poisoned by the intolerance and bigotry of ideological activists, who follow a policy of shutting down debate and disagreement as part of a general strategy to coerce belief. The activists have been aided and abetted by epistemic corruption in some parts of the media. The corruption in the media is evident from the attitude expressed by David Adams of the Guardian when he said that ‘I used to think skeptics were bad and mad but now the bad people (lobbyists for fossil fuel industries) had gone, leaving only the mad.’ Later at the same event, he said ‘The meaning of skeptic is very specific.  It’s not taxi drivers or people who don’t want to pay higher electricity bills.  It’s someone who knows better and takes a contrary view for pathological reasons’.[8]  If he has redefined ‘skeptic’ in this way there is no more reason to take what he says seriously than we should take Humpty Dumpty seriously when he talks about glory. The redefinition is simply a device by which intolerance evades gainsaying. For this environmental correspondent there is no room for disagreement, no room for doubt. There is just submission to the required belief.

And this takes me on to the final point I want to make. Much of the debate is not well understood in terms of scientific disagreement. What we see is something quite different. All the passions of faith are mobilised. Belief in global warming is a creed to be affirmed: denial is heresy: heretics are anathematized.

Faith has its own epistemic character, a character that answers to those needs in us it satisfies. We value community and harmony in belief. We use belief to signal our allegiance and moral worthiness. Disagreement undermines community and harmony and is experienced by believers as painful and threatening. Denial is taken as proof of disloyalty and moral turpitude. Disagreement and denial, however, are at the heart of science. Science doesn’t simply tolerate disagreement: science institutionalises disagreement. As a consequence, the epistemic characters of faith and science are opposed to one another.

Whether faith has a proper role in life, and whether therefore its epistemic character is epistemically virtuous, is not a question I can address here. In my opinion,  science is superior to faith in the natural realm, and by that I don’t mean only superior to religious faith, for in speaking of faith I am not speaking of any specific content of belief, but of a way of believing, a way that appears to be easy and comfortable for us.  I mean that science is superior because the epistemic character of faith is not virtuous in the natural realm. Beliefs about the natural facts should not be creeds.  Insofar as we need to know the facts about the climate, faith has erupted where it does not belong and its epistemic character has corrupted the epistemic integrity of science.