Nor, however, do I have a blind faith in rationality. What may seem like the rational decision today may be hindsight’s disastrous error. I always try to look for a picture larger than many of those claiming to do the same. Which is why I like the work of Marvin Harris, William Catton, and Richard Heinberg. I am looking forward to Heinberg’s next book, “The End of Growth.” The first few chapters are available on-line.

Maybe even scientists are prone to this at some level. I think that most scientists that are climate-change deniers are not climate scientists, and there’s been discussion over at the Panda’s Thumb about the large number of engineers who are creationists. The body of human knowledge has grown exponentially over time and various fields have subdivided into ever more specialties. Could C.P. Snow’s two culture dynamic be playing out in subdivisions of science? That when subgroups start thinking of other subgroups as “them” rather than “us”, communication problems start? And you’ve pointed out before how the internet can enable this fractionation—people gravitate towards sites which tend to reflect their attitudes to begin with. And cable news similarly encourages segregation and differentiation of groups.

Who the messenger is (or perceived to be) can be as or more important than the message itself. A friend once told me they didn’t believe in climate change because they didn’t like Al Gore (which I read as “he’s from a different social/political class”)

@10 yes this eventually goes to sci comm techniques, but I’m also trying to understand denialism. I think to do so we have to overcome misconceptions about it. one of the biggest is that it’s an education problem–the deficit model.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6031

The top climate sceptics devote a considerable amount of time and study to the subject, so there comes a point when the professional/amateur distinction becomes meaningless.

Time, study and effort are necessary to reach comprehensive understanding, but are not sufficient. Thats why there are schools and exams, to challenge and then test for understanding of the subject matter. Beyond that, the feedback and challenges that are important to achieve mastery come from the community. One must convince the experts that one’s ideas are correct, providing evidence and making arguments that can’t be refuted. They are skeptical of you, and you must work hard to convince them you are correct—that’s the standard.

Thats not to say that there have been notable amateurs, but they had to earn the respect of the professionals by learning to play at their level.

Also, there are many parts of climate science that overlap with other areas of physics and statistics, in which it is quite possible for the physicists and statisticians to know a lot more about it than the climate scientists!

More likely are physicists who might understand the underlying principles of spectroscopy and fluid dynamics, but who haven’t actually written something like a line-by-line plane-parallel radiative transfer model that incorporates thermal and pressure broadening and multiple scattering from aerosols, or a detailed global circulation model that handles convection properly, and don’t know all the myriads of issues, which are physical in origin, all of which must be taken into account in (to say nothing of numerical stability and roundoff issues, and algorithm times).

Sure, a physicist can learn all that stuff, but during the years they take to master it, they undergo the process of becoming a climate scientist to some degree. But the proof of the pudding is in the tasting—when they’re finished, they must convince others that they’ve got it right.

A basic practical knowledge of scientific method is more than sufficient.

No, a basic practical knowledge of scientific method is certainly necessary, but not sufficient. A comprehensive knowledge of the recent (and preferably older) history of measurements, theories, debates, etc. is necessary—to know what has already been tried and whether or not it was successful. No specialist will want to sit around and listen to somebody make claims which were raised and dismissed 20 years ago. They want to hear and discuss new data, ideas, approaches etc. To join the club one must first catch up with the crowd. And a thorough understanding of the subject matter is necessary, and the individual is not the judge of that, the peer group and the scientific community is.

Given the difficulty sceptics have getting published, funded, or careers advanced, publication record is probably not a good metric to use to judge sceptical expertise, anyway.

History will be the judge, and that history is the publication record. And to reiterate, the real skeptics are the experts that need to be convinced by the publication.

It doesn’t require a deep knowledge of climate to recognise and be confident about evident mathematical errors …

au contraire, a real expert is someone who knows when a math “error” is a rough estimate who’s actual value doesn’t affect the conclusion, because they are keenly aware of other lines of evidence that support the conclusion.

That’s “suck” as in “It won’t be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically,” is it?

Or is that “suck” as in “I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation – apparently linear as well. As far as I can see, this renders the station counts totally meaningless. It also means that we cannot say exactly how the gridded data is arrived at from a statistical perspective – since we’re using an off-the-shelf product that isn’t documented sufficiently to say that. Why this wasn’t coded up in Fortran I don’t know – time pressures perhaps? Was too much effort expended on homogenisation, that there wasn’t enough time to write a gridding procedure? Of course, it’s too late for me to fix it too. Meh.”

Oh, but of course. The former is a sceptical paper that if published as is, could really do some damage. It is also an ugly paper to review because it is rather mathematical, with a lot of Box-Jenkins stuff in it. That’s terrible – writing a paper with actual maths in it. Those sceptics! Whereas the latter example is perfectly reasonable high quality peer-reviewed climate science. Everybody does their work like that, secretly, they just don’t like to admit it.

More quality climate science:
“..well that was, erhhh.. ‘interesting’. The IDL gridding program calculates whether or not a station contributes to a cell, using.. graphics. Yes, it plots the station sphere of influence then checks for the colour white in the output. So there is no guarantee that the station number files, which are produced *independently* by anomdtb, will reflect what actually happened!!”

Good method! – You locate grid cells close to a weather station by plotting a circle on a little map, and then scanning the map to find filled pixels. A classic! It’s the climate science ‘colouring in book’ method! Best hope you don’t have many stations near the international date line…

Or is that just being ‘picky’?

It’s not just climate science, of course. Here’s an amusing example from another area – some scientist apparently complaining about not being made a luminary, or something. Sometimes in science, it all depends on whether your work is currently in fashion.

My thanks, TTT. Your comments always manage to make me smile.

You are right. The only high-profile scientists who dispute mainstream global warming theory are arrogant dilettantes speaking beyond their area of expertise; they tend to be physicists like Freeman Dyson and Jerry Pournelle, exhibiting the cross-disciplinary arrogance that I find all too typical of their field. They may understand the scientific method, but if they don’t understand climate science in and of itself, their opinion is worthless and who cares what they say?

Stephen Hawking is very alarmed by global warming, but I don’t believe in it just because he told me to. It’s nice to see he’s right, but it doesn’t really matter. It is quite telling to see the depths to which “sceptics” will stoop to try to attain any scientific authority, even if it has no pertinence to the field at all. It is the very nadir of argument-from-celebrity. I”ve even had people tell me they don’t believe in global warming because Michael Crichton was a MEDICAL DOCTOR and that means he must be smart!

Given the difficulty sceptics have getting published, funded, or careers advanced

Maybe they shouldn’t suck so much?

This is just the old “Expelled” argument all over again. The careerist and financial benefits of upsetting an established order and proving everybody else wrong completely dwarf any benefits from being the latest in an indistinguishable chorus of yes-men. Their problem is they have nothing real to say. You can’t build a legitimate scientific career just by pointing out someone else’s alleged data errors–you have to make an affirmative case. And as is one of the indispensible criteria of denialists, they have no affirmative case. They just pick, and pick, and pick, and pick, and then complain when that isn’t enough to make them a luminary in their field. Since they tend to cry all the way onto Fox News and potboiler bookshelves, I don’t think we need to feel to sorry for them, btw.