Monday, August 14, 2017

Why isn't Lady Science marching for science? The view from San Diego

There were many, many marches on April 22, 2017. All for science. And yet, Lady Science was not present, nor was Mother Nature - despite the hopes and wishes splashed on the posters that the marchers carried. 

Slogans claimed a partisanship of which Lady Science and Mother Nature are unaware. We, humans, may wish that the universe or nature or Terra (Earth) has positive goals and good vibrations, but what with crashing black holes, cataclysmic events in the universe and on earth, the appearance and disappearance of species, continents, polar ice caps, and the like over billions of years, we should quickly realize our anthropomorphisms, personifications and projections of our human needs and wants onto the material world is just that - wishful thinking, a very human enterprise.

"I'm with her," "Climate Justice" or "The Oceans are Rising and so are we" are words and emotions that we, as humans, may care deeply about. 

But Mother Nature and Lady Science don't care at all - except in our fantasies about what these personae ought to be.

Put even more bluntly, science and nature are about what is and not what ought to be. That is an illogical leap of faith that may be supported by religious, humanistic and other ideological values, but not by logic or the practice of science.  Yes, we humans get motivated by values - but these are grounded in religious and other ideological systems.

March for Science, San Diego / At the Civic Center
Science is about method, not about imposing human values

Neither Lady Science, nor Mother Nature, give a whit about the climate or climate change. Those that think they do may also believe that God is a man with a long white beard or that he or she walked in the Garden of Eden. These are wishes and wants personified and anthropomorphized.

As all scientists, and non-scientists, know, science is about method, about empirical description and testing hypotheses. It is not about what ought to be, but what is.

The imposition of what ought to be, what should be done, is a matter of values - values from our religion, our secular humanism, our codes of conduct, our visions inscribed in 3D sci-fi movies, but not found within the domain of the scientific method. 

And yet, there are those who are marching in the belief that science wants something to be done -- to do X, Y or Z. That is an example of emotional attachment, but not of critical thinking.

The 97% error

One too often hears that 97% of scientists agree that climate change is real. I would imagine that the percent is really 100%, especially since climate change has been affecting earth for billions of years. There are no denialists of this understanding of climate change.

A cautionary note:  Any analysis that enters into the climate change picture in recent history (rather than geological time) is subject to ad hominem attacks, especially by those who fear the worst and are alarmed more by refrigeration than by terrorism. The perspective taken here is one of climate realism (not alarmism).  The 'threat' analysis by Dr. Judith Curry, a climatologist with considerable research and publications, is instructive for those who understand the uncertainty in climate modeling:  Discussion of climate threat and risk that connote impending damage and that such is quantifiable and avoidable "mislead the public debate on climate change — any damages from human caused climate change are not imminent, we cannot quantify the risk owing to deep uncertainties, and any conceivable policy for reducing CO2 emissions will have little impact on the hypothesized damages in the 21st century."

Back to the 97% error .  .  . 

Unfortunately most who recite the 97% mantra are unaware that the number is the result of bad statistics.  

John Cook of the Global Change Institute in Australia, created this number from his review of published scientific papers, "over 97 percent [of papers surveyed] endorsed the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause.”

Alex Epstein analyzes Cook's argument:  “'Main cause' means “over 50 percent. But the vast majority of papers don’t say that human beings are the main cause of recent warming. In fact, one analysis showed that less than 2 percent of papers actually said that. How did Cook get to 97 percent, then? First, he added papers that explicitly said there was man-made warming but didn’t say how much. Then, he added papers that didn’t even say there was man-made warming, but he thought it was implied."

There are numerous articles refuting the claim that such a majority of scientists believe that climate change (as global warming) is dangerous - that it is occurring and by how much is a matter of climate scientific investigation, Here we enter into the split between social science, polling data and physical science. The divide between these two perspectives is immense.

Faculty preparing to join the main group at the Civic Center
Are there 'alternative facts'?

Sitting as a juror, one can listen to attorneys for the defense and the prosecution argue a different set of 'facts' - sometimes they simply mean that one witness is more believable than the another, or that each side takes on experts who argue their own theory of causation or that the defendant is insane or not, and the like. A different world of events and responsibility is painted by opposing attorneys. We accept this advocacy model of 'facts' because that is what lawyers do in our legal system. And then the jury gets to vote on which set of facts are determinative for their collective verdict. A consensus as it were.

But is this what we expect of the scientific process and scientific facts?

Poster / No Alternative Facts in Science
Let us take an instructive example.

Ulcers are caused by stress. Or so said medical science prior to 1986. Then a scientist, Barry Marshall, argued that it was a bacterium for the large majority of ulcers - Helicobacter pylori. And he won a Nobel Prize in 2005 for his argument or theory or, if we prefer, fact. 

Medical science as well as all branches of science proceeds by leaps and bounds - with alternative facts becoming the new 'truth.'

Here is an interesting comment by Barry Marshall, the proponent of the bacterium cause for ulcers:

"There's a saying, 'Science is not a democracy.' It doesn't matter how many millions of people there are on the other side. There's one right, and it's perfectly possible for all the rest to be wrong. And ultimately all those guys were proved wrong, and they either retired or they came over the side of Helicobacter .  .   .  David Graham said, "The great thing about Marshall's theory is that if he's wrong, it's going to be so easy to disprove." The point he was making was that if it's a good hypothesis, you can test it. And ours was very testable; you just had to give people antibiotics and see if they got better. And they did. So everybody who was trying to prove us wrong, if they were good scientists, they just changed sides."

So, what about climate science?  Are we in the 'stress causes ulcers' or 'bacterium causes ulcers' arc of scientific knowledge?

Would you bet your life on 'humans cause the large proportion of climate change' or on 'humans may contribute a small percentage of climate change'?  

Some considerations before you make your wager:

1.  Our knowledge of how much climate will change is based on computer models - none of which have been correct over the years.  The models are said to run 'hot' - and need to be scaled back to observation data.

2.  The list of failed climate predictions is long. Failure of scientific predictions in general has an even longer list. Are these predictions 'facts'? Here is a typical surprise - but is the surprise an 'alternative fact' or are the predictions 'alternative facts'?  When does something become a 'fact'? (Which is critically important in the climate science debate since the impacts are predicted to the end of the century.)

From CNN: 

Where have all the hurricanes gone?  Sept. 14, 2013

"Call it a meteorological mystery: Forecasters warned that there would be at least six Atlantic hurricanes this season, but so far we've seen only one."
"It's the first year in recent memory that every major hurricane forecast has busted after pointing to 'above normal activity.'" 
3.  The data continues to be debated or, perhaps, finagled in questionable ways to hype global warming:  Australia Weather Bureau Caught Tampering With Climate Numbers, August 2, 2017.

4.  Red Teaming?  Given the intense debate over the nature and extent of climate change, especially in relation to human activity, and the trillions of dollars poised to be spent in corrective measures which may be unnecessary or poorly considered, the better approach may not be one of pitting a 'consensus' vs. 'alternative facts,' but of having an independent analysis that challenges the official dogma. That's called Red Teaming.  Red Teaming has proven useful in various endeavors and such would force pro and con to debate the science in an neutral forum.

Posters / I'm with her and Make America Scientific Again
The Anxiety and the Politics
The participants in the March for Science appear to be caught up in anti-President Trump hysteria than seeking science.  The politicization of science may be good for partisanship, but it does little for the merits of the climate science debate. 

There's another aspect of this marching. I suspect that many fear that even if their facts are not quite right, but even if there's a far-out but potential risk of catastrophic damage from anthropogenic caused climate change, it's worth spending trillions of dollars as an insurance policy.

Bret Stephens took up this and other questions in questions from readers of the New York Times. Particularly telling is his response to this insuring for the future:

"How much [insurance[? Homeowners will buy fire insurance, but they’ll also weigh the price in light of their overall needs. We need to hedge against prospective risks. We need to provide for current needs. The climate-advocacy community sometimes conveys the impression that all of this is not just necessary, but relatively straightforward and affordable. I wish it were that simple.

"A decade ago we were plowing money into ethanol subsidies as one response to climate change. But that turned out to be not just environmentally destructive but was also arguably responsible for the spike in food prices that soon followed, as farmers turned away from cultivating corn for human consumption to cultivating it for ethanol production. Another example: The New York Times recently reported on the massive increase in smog over London. The cause?

"Let me quote from the story:

“The British government provided financial incentives to encourage a shift to diesel engines because laboratory tests suggested that would cut harmful emissions and combat climate change. Yet, it turned out that diesel cars emit on average five times as much emissions in real-world driving conditions as in the tests, according to a British Department for Transport study.”

"In other words, to say we want to take out insurance for climate change is perfectly sensible. But whether we know we’re buying the right insurance, at the right price, is less clear, and it behooves us to look closely at the fine print before we sign on."

Posters at the Civic Center / Dump Trump, Global Warming is Real, and Trump/Pruitt, Extinction Level Event
Poster at Water Park, County Administration Building / If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate (Trump)
How should we prioritize our societal problems?
Should we be more concerned about social problems confronting us in the immediate future or those a century from now?  Ought we not pay attention to what is in front of us?

Just outside the science event, scattered along the streets, there were the homeless. Looking to get by or just looking. How strange to March for Science .  .  .  how about more immediate help?

Homeless in San Diego - Not on the march route

Most survey respondents, when asked in 2014 about what problems need attention, rank the problem of environment/pollution low when presented with the range of societal concerns. Three years later, the ranking of the environment/pollution is still low.

 From the monthly Gallup poll:
"What do you think is the most important problem facing the country today?"  [2017]


If you are looking for an answer to these societal concerns, you can look to the government (local, state and federal) or you can March for X, Y and Z. Or, you can meditate on the inability of humankind to solve these problems. One can think of King Canute in the 12th century being asked that he hold back the waves. And now we are asked to control the global climate. 

Humility may be the key to such worries and demands.

12 comments:

  1. I very much enjoyed reading this blog! However I differ in the complete belief that there is no reciprocation of vibrancy in the maintaining of Earth. I include animals in this chain and they have feelings of happiness and sadness living in good/bad conditions.

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  2. I second Michelle's comment in the sense that I consider humans, animals and other life forms part of nature. So in a sense, if life needs the environment conditions to improve for life to continue, that is mother nature crying for change. I particularly enjoy the last section, "How Should We Prioritize our Societal Problems?" The table has very interesting information and I would love to read a more in depth analysis on how to determine our most urgent problems.

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  3. I do agree with the sentiment that mother nature doesn't care. Though, I disagree with the statement that climate change is not an imperative issue. Changes that we have observed in climate recently, usually would have taken hundreds of thousands of years to propagate. One need to look no further than Venus to see the effects of greenhouse gases on climate.

    - Adam Negrete

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  4. This blog was very interesting in the sense of how it introduces lady science and mother nature as something more than just science. "Science is more than method, not about imposing human values", this quote stood out the most to me because it basically means that science comes from the ideology of the people and the way we try to fix things. We live on earth therefore we should try and take care of it in every way possible nature wise as well as with any societal issue.

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  5. This article stood out to me because it addresses the struggle some have with living a desired lifestyle and making it work with society and the world, either due to the lack of resources, or as stated “wishful thinking.” I see it often also, people claiming a belief of one thing but living a different lifestyle, one that may even conflict with their self promoted belief. For example, Feminism is a belief meaning equality for all sexes, and yet Feminism has as many derogatory phrases and misconceptions as every other targeted subculture. I think people are trying to get in where they fit in, and scientific facts, reasoning and statistics is a comfort blanket for American Culture, despite the fact that they are often either incorrect and/or ignored anyway. The truth of the matter is, even with supported scientific facts, people still come out of it primarily with one of two reactions. They are either needing further study and investigation and disregard the idea all together. In blog this is shown through global warming and mother nature, but this concept is everywhere. Another real life example is Harm Reduction Treatment. This modality has been proven scientifically to be the best way to address addiction and end in positive desire results, and yet our judicial system continues to use abstinence and social based philosophies that essentially, have been proven to be less effective, however, we all know its less expensive. And again, how ironic how when budget cuts happen, humanities is the first thing to go. This is a direct result of capitalism. The act of enhancing Mother Nature and humanity is being treated like a business opportunity, no longer motivated by love, teamwork, intellect, unity or even science. That being said, I love the idea of prioritizing our scientific solutions. If we had done that from the beginning, humanity would probably not be in the big mess it is in now. If we do not address the immediate issues, we may not get that future we all cant stop talking about or preparing for. (Sorry this is so long*)

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  6. Many people don't see the damage they do to earth by driving their everyday vehicle, producing large amounts of emission using their greenhouse. They all blame each other but don't realize they're the cause why Mother Nature is falling.

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  7. What really caught my attention in this blog was how we prioritize our societal problems, through economic/environmental problems. it's crazy to think how the majority of the problems that we currently face today is usually right in front of us, yet in the statistics from the survey, it states, "three years later, the ranking of the environment/pollution is still low." This conveys how the problems that are a major issue to the environment/society still hasn't been brought up to our attention.

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  8. So after reading this passage, I say that there is no way to correct, change and mainly stop mother nature when it occurs or when its going to occur. There is always going to be some type of science that is made towards mother nature such as data. So much data can be collected along with predication but do we know if it will really happen? No, so what we do is get prepared for the possible predictions that it can happen. Just in case it does then your already ready with water, possible shelter if needed ect..

    I feel that every state will have its trashed streets and homeless population. When it comes to homeless I do think it is something they choose. There is HELP and some just choose not to take it. Some of them have told me themselves they like that lifestyle. Trashed streets are because of the people who don't know how to clean up after themselves including homeless people. If there were more people who cared about the environment then there would be less trashed streets.

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  9. I feel as humans we forget sometimes theres animals, plants and much more living things in this world. We fail to keep that in mind. YES! mother nature is here but we need to help as well by doing things that are common & easy to do. But just being present there is helpful to any protest and makes certain people be aware of all the love around.

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  10. The blog has valuable information which helps us get a vision on how the future will be heavily effected by present day ideology. Hatred against politicians and ignorance about our surrounding environment will further fade the chances for a better world.
    -Roberto Martinez

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  11. I agree that "Mother Nature" is a personification given by humans because it makes nature and everything that happens in nature more tangible. It gives us a reason to justify natural phenomenon. However, that doesn't mean climate change isn't an issue. Climate change does have very real effects on life as it exists on this planet. Some species will adapt as they have done continuously over time, but some species, like humans, may actually become extinct due to unlivable conditions. They are still marching for the sake of bringing light to the issue of climate change because it will change the outlook for future generations. It is human nature to continue the human race, and the march does come from a good moral place. As this blog says though, mother nature doesn't care one way or the other. Lady Science is just that: science. Science is a presentation of the facts of natural phenomenon. These natural phenomenon will happen no matter what we humans do, and in some way or another, the environment will respond to human activity. Bad or Good.

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  12. I really enjoyed reading this article. There's one thing that I disagreed with. Even though most of us can agree that Trump is one of the worst presidents we've ever had, he has nothing to do with climate change, so the signs depicting that are false. I strongly agree however that we need to take drastic steps to improve our environment and our lives as humans. If we as individuals do something everyday to benefit the environment while constantly remaining environmentally conscious we will see slow improvement of the environment day by day. Me being a vegan already helps that because the dairy industry is incredibly harmful to our environment.

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