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Myth of the Genius Solitary Scientist is Dangerous

posted by martyb on Wednesday November 22 2017, @11:54AM   
from the whom-do-you-trust...-and-why? dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Danger, Will Robinson!

Given that collaboration [in science] is the norm, you may be asking yourself the eternal question: Who cares? How does the image of a lone scientist hero cause any danger to me?

The problem arises when there is a debate about a scientific topic. Following this structure, debate is a necessary and encouraged part of the scientific process. This debate happens before the idea is released to anyone outside of a few scientists and, while it can become heated at times, takes place with great respect between proponents of different viewpoints.

The danger can come when scientific results are released to the public. Our society now provides a platform for anyone to comment, regardless of his or her education, experience or even knowledge of the topic at hand.

While this is an excellent method of disseminating knowledge, it can also provide a platform for any opinion—regardless of the weight of data behind it—to be equal to that released in more traditional scientific ways.

Particularly in today's largely populist climate, people are looking to see the lone scientist hero overthrow the perceived dominance of facts coming from academia.

And herein lies the problem. In this situation, the opinion of a lone commenter may be considered on equal footing with that of tens or hundreds of people who have made the subject their life's work to ensure their interpretations are correct.

Everybody is entitled to their own scientific opinion, but everybody is not entitled to their own scientific facts?

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Original Submission

• Re:How about (Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Thursday November 23 2017, @07:58PM

  by khallow (3766) on Thursday November 23 2017, @07:58PM (#600787) Journal

  Those who have the time and inclination to make that kind of difficult study have taken a look at the data, did their analysis, and understood it, and some 97% of those people have reached a consensus [thelogicofscience.com] [thelogicofscience.com] that yes, the climate is changing and yes, there will be disastrous consequences if we do not take steps to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

  Let's read that link rather than just say stuff.

  Even if you have never paid any real attention to the climate change “debate,” you have probably seen someone say that, “97% of climatologists agree that we are causing climate change.” This is a number that I have personally cited on numerous occasions, and it is a number that is highly contested by the climate change deniers. Indeed, I rarely mention the consensus without people responding by adamantly proclaiming that the 97% number is a myth, and the study that produced it (Cook et al. 2013) has been debunked. Therefore, in this post, I want to deal with the consensus on climate change from several angles. First, I want to focus on the prominent Cook et al. study and explain what the authors actually did, what they found, and why their study was robust. I also want to deal with some of the common criticisms of their study. Finally, I want to look at several other lines of evidence that show that there is a strong consensus on global climate change.

  So what exactly is supposed to be wrong with the Cook study? For starters, it classifies research incorrectly [populartechnology.net]. There are numerous interviews with researchers who complain that their work was misintepreted or excluded. This was explored further [populartechnology.net] to find a considerable portion of the overall papers in the field had been excluded.
  
  And if you glance at the "updates" from my first link, you see also that John Cook failed to disclose a conflict of interest, namely that the paper was done to provide talking points for climate change propaganda.
  
  It severely overstates the case. Almost no one explicitly supported climate change theory in their papers. As someone else chose [wattsupwiththat.com] to interpret this data:

  The new paper by the leading climatologist Dr David Legates and his colleagues, published in the respected Science and Education journal, now in its 21st year of publication, reveals that Cook had not considered whether scientists and their published papers had said climate change was “dangerous”.
  
  The consensus Cook considered was the standard definition: that Man had caused most post-1950 warming. Even on this weaker definition the true consensus among published scientific papers is now demonstrated to be not 97.1%, as Cook had claimed, but only 0.3%.

  Also

  Dr William Briggs, “Statistician to the Stars”, said: “In any survey such as Cook’s, it is essential to define the survey question very clearly. Yet Cook used three distinct definitions of climate consensus interchangeably. Also, he arbitrarily excluded about 8000 of the 12,000 papers in his sample on the unacceptable ground that they had expressed no opinion on the climate consensus. These artifices let him reach the unjustifiable conclusion that there was a 97.1% consensus when there was not.
  
  “In fact, Cook’s paper provides the clearest available statistical evidence that there is scarcely any explicit support among scientists for the consensus that the IPCC, politicians, bureaucrats, academics and the media have so long and so falsely proclaimed. That was not the outcome Cook had hoped for, and it was not the outcome he had stated in his paper, but it was the outcome he had really found.”

  Let us note here that there are probably more such scientists in agreement that global warming is largely man-made. I am part of that. It is deceptive to portray that as consensus on the rest of the climate change baggage such as the need for urgent mitigation efforts. A straw man argument is the fundamental basis of this paper.
  
  Finally, the methodology of the research was deeply flawed [blogspot.co.uk].

  Cook enlisted a small group of environmental activists to rate the claims made by the selected papers. Cook claims that the ratings were done independently, but the raters freely discussed their work. There are systematic differences between the raters. Reading the same abstracts, the raters reached remarkably different conclusions – and some raters all too often erred in the same direction. Cook’s hand-picked raters disagreed what a paper was about 33% of the time. In 63% of cases, they disagreed about the message of a paper with the authors of that paper.
  
  The paper’s reviewers did not pick up on these things. The editor even praised the authors for the “excellent data quality” even though neither he nor the referees had had the opportunity to check the data. Then again, that same editor thinks that climate change is like the rise of Nazi Germany. Two years after publication, Cook admitted that data quality is indeed low.

  [...]

  The time stamps also reveal something far more serious. After collecting data for 8 weeks, there were 4 weeks of data analysis, followed by 3 more weeks of data collection. The same people collected and analysed the data. After more analysis, the paper classification scheme was changed and yet more data collected.
  
  Cook thus broke a key rule of scientific data collection: Observations should never follow from the conclusions. Medical tests are double-blind for good reason. You cannot change how to collect data, and how much, after having seen the results.
  
  Cook’s team may, perhaps unwittingly, have worked towards a given conclusion. And indeed, the observations are different, significantly and materially, between the three phases of data collection. The entire study should therefore be dismissed.

  So your link starts with defending extensively a piece of known bad science. And you linked it why? This is yet another reason why I think the climate change mitigation side is broken. They would rather defend bad science than come with scientifically valid defenses of their beliefs.

  Parent

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