Defending the Merchants of Alarmism

This appears to be the first book of its kind, promising a thorough and rigorous investigation of the philosophical and methodological issues that arise in the problematic and controversial field of climate science. It is long overdue because the scholars in the history and philosophy of science have by and large neglected this particular science. The two outstanding exceptions are Philip Kitcher and more recently Eric Winsberg, Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida.

Philip Kitcher recently retired from Columbia College with a claim to the title of the premier philosopher of science of his generation, due to his list of publications and the chairs that he has occupied. With Evelyn Fox Keller he wrote The Seasons Alter, which portrays a dystopian future in a warming world that probably represents Peak Alarmism. Any advance on a pandemic that kills billions of people?

In a less flamboyant mode Eric Winsberg’s Philosophy and Climate Science is a sustained defence of the methods and conclusions of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and those who share its mission to promote alarm about the future of the planet. Consequently, this book is not a solution to the apathy of the philosophers in the face of the shortcomings in the mainstream of climate science but instead it is part of the problem of the failure of the academic “dogs” to bark a warning.

Winsberg is a two-fisted partisan in the climate war. He fatuously disparages “climate deniers” as though the considerable number of eminent climate scientists who are not alarmed about the warming trend cannot be taken seriously. The book begins with some particularly tendentious and misleading data to convince the uninformed and the unwary that serious anthropogenic warming is happening. For example, he refers to the number of recent years that are the “warmest on record”, the retreat of Arctic ice, the extreme weather events of recent times including a record drought in Australia, and the acceleration of rising sea levels. Given the uncontroversial view that the earth has warmed over the last two centuries and even more since the Little Ice Age it stands to reason that recent years are likely to be warmer than earlier ones. The Danish Meteorological Institute reported this year that Arctic ice has been stable for a decade. The public record cited in the last IPCC report indicates that there has not been a trend to more extreme weather in recent years. The reports of increasing damage reflect the larger number of people exposed to forest fires and the greater value of modern infrastructure. Reports of a record recent drought in Australia are simply fake news. The latest report on sea levels by Dr Judith Curry shows no acceleration and possibly a slowing down.

Winsberg deplores the “well-funded” opposition to genuine climate science, citing The Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway (2010) who claimed to expose Big Oil, especially Exxon Mobil and others who backed the “climate science deniers”. But Rupert Darwall in The Age of Global Warming described how Exxon Mobil stopped funding climate dissidents around 2005 when it went green like the other oil companies. But still Winsberg describes the Oreskes and Conway claims as “well documented” and “by all accounts their claims are true” without citing any other sources.

The Heartland Institute, a leading opposition group, has an annual budget in the order of seven million dollars. That hardly counts as “well funded” opposition compared with the tens of billions in government funding for mainstream climate R&D or even with the support for environmental activists from the great philanthropic foundations. The really big money is going to the green “merchants of alarm” as Matthew Nisbett described in Wires Climate Change, July-August 2018. Between 2011 and 2015 the top twenty charitable donors alone gave $556 million to green activists, notably the Sierra Club, which received $49 million (not its only income by any means). The donors are a roll call of the great foundations—Rockefeller, Pew, Hewlett Packard, Skoll, Bloomberg, Ford and many more.

A significant part of the book is concerned with the principles and practice of the model building that is central to the effort to specify the role of carbon dioxide and to provide projections of future developments. This is Winsberg’s home ground because he previously wrote Science in the Age of Computer Simulation and he has many publications in the field. He provides an introduction to the vocabulary and the concepts in the business with emphasis on the size and complexity of the computer programs, the difficulty of interpreting the output and some of the philosophical issues that arise.

He says little about their remarkable lack of success in projecting the trends in warming after the pause at the turn of the millennium. The Australian scientist Garth Paltridge provided a much more helpful account of the modelling exercise in The Climate Caper (2009). He reported that the twenty or so models favoured by the IPCC calculate global-average temperatures that range several degrees around the observed value of 15 degrees Celsius. A team at the ANU looked at the predictions for current (measured) rainfall in Australia based on the several IPCC models and the range extended from 200 mm per year less than the actual, to 1000 mm per year more. About half predicted more rainfall for Australia later in the century and half predicted less. The average was an increase of about 8 mm per annum but the model used to develop Australia’s climate policy by the Rudd government predicted 100 mm less. Where rigorous standards are applied that model might have been regarded as an outlier and discarded.

Some outstanding climate scientists such as Richard Lindzen who are not hostages of the modelling industry have argued that the macro-modelling approach is the wrong way to go on the basis of scientific first principles. That fundamental criticism is supported by a long-running project on forecasting methods and principles conducted by J. Scott Armstrong in the US and Kesten Green in Australia. For decades they have studied the success of various forecasting methods in many fields including climate science and they concluded in a paper on the 2007 IPCC report:

The forecasts in the IPCC Report were not the outcome of scientific procedures. In effect, they were the opinions of scientists transformed by mathematics and obscured by complex writing … Claims that the Earth will get warmer have no more credence than saying that it will get colder.

Faced with the difficulty of validating models by the conventional criteria of scientific merit, Winsberg referred to one of his colleagues, Wendy Parker, who explained in a published paper that “the most successful modelling approaches incorporate several computational models that rely on assumptions that contradict one another”. She conceded that this could erode confidence in the work but “distinctive methods and standards of justification are in play”. This suggests that postmodernism has officially arrived in climate science! Winsberg also conceded that it is difficult to explain the new standards of justification that are in play and he virtually threw up his hands and offloaded the criteria for evaluation and validation to the consensus in the field. Remarkably, he wrote:

my view is that philosophers do better to paint a picture in which we urge trust in the consensus of the scientific community, based on features of that community’s social organization, than to try to provide a normative framework from which we can demonstrate the reliability (or its absence) of such-and-such modelling result.

Many features of the social organisation of the IPCC and the community of climate scientists have come to light that tend to undermine trust in the consensus that emerges from it. Notable sources include Donna Laframboise’s study of the governance of the IPCC, the Wegman committee’s investigation of Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” and the revelations in the emails released from the University of East Anglia.

In 2011 Donna Laframboise published The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert. She pointed out that the IPCC is a political body, created by that most political organisation, the United Nations. Rupert Darwall has charted the role of the UN in the politics of climate change in two landmark works, The Age of Global Warming (2013) and Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex (2018).

Laframboise described the process in a nutshell. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change convened in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro to sell the idea that greenhouse gasses are The Problem. One hundred and fifty-four nations signed up in principle and later enrolled in the Kyoto Protocol. The UNFCCC had a brief to reduce human emissions and failing to do so would be “nothing less than criminal irresponsibility”.

Observe the steps: First was the political decision that a greenhouse gas treaty was a worthy and achievable goal. Second was the recognition that before such a treaty could be negotiated, certain documents representing a common understanding were required. The next step was to enlist scientists to help produce such documents, and the IPCC was created for that purpose.

Laframboise pointed out that the UN did not wait for climate science to mature. The shortest version of the IPCC Climate Bible appeared in 1990 and the findings were tentative. Yet in the next two years the UN persuaded most of the world’s governments to sign a framework document that essentially started the “war on carbon dioxide”.

The IPCC produces regular Assessment Reports to maintain the climate of alarm. Each report has a small summary volume for politicians and journalists. This is the report that recently warned that the Barrier Reef may disappear in our lifetime if we do not mend our coal-burning ways. Longer reports are produced at the same time and some of the chapters in them contain proper science but they are scarcely mentioned in the media and are read by few.

The contents of the summary report are under the strict control of the political operators in the IPCC and scientists in an inner circle who share the IPCC mission. Scientists outside the inner circle are routinely snubbed when they challenge the work in progress and they are outraged at the misrepresentation of the findings in their fields of expertise. For example Laframboise described how a leading hurricane expert, Chris Landsea, was sidelined by Kevin Trenbath, who was in charge of the relevant chapter in the Climate Bible. Another chapter follows the story about pseudo-scientific data on hurricanes that became part of the Climate Bible. Another chapter describes one of the most scandalous beat-ups on the IPCC record, the allegation that warming will massively increase the prevalence of malaria. Among other defects in the argument, malaria is not especially a warm-climate illness.

Laframboise’s book and The Climate Caper by Paltridge are essential reading for anyone who is not fully aware of the problems with models and the extent of unscientific bias and political direction in the UN climate program and especially the IPCC.

Michael Mann’s revision of the climate record created a sensation when it was the leading feature of the IPCC Third Assessment Report in 2001. He produced a “hockey stick” graph that eliminated the Medieval Warm Period and gave the impression that the current warming was unprecedented in historical times. His analysis of the records, especially proxy information from tree rings of a particular species of pine, came under sustained attack that prompted the chairs of two US House committees to organise a review.

Edward Wegman at George Mason University headed an ad hoc committee to investigate the methods of analysis used to obtain Mann’s results. The report identified crippling defects in the analysis of the data used by Mann and his associates and suggested that the community of paleoclimatologists appeared to be out of touch with developments in the relevant field of statistics. Eventually the IPCC discreetly parked the hockey stick in the archives to be forgotten although it had been a major propaganda weapon in their 2001 Assessment Report and some diehard alarmists have stuck with it.

All the indicators and symptoms of the problems in the quality of climate science call for a master theorist to create a framework for a rigorous investigation. Gordon Tullock provided this in a neglected masterpiece, The Organization of Inquiry (1966). To provide context for the work it is essential to understand the transformation of science since 1945. Previously the communities of scientists were quite small, with modest funding from diverse sources. The Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb signalled the emergence of Big Science funded by Big Government.

Karl Popper in his unpublished lectures in the early 1950s predicted bad things for science in the service of politicians. He saw too much money chasing too few ideas, the publication explosion (good buried under bad) and the distortion of incentives for scientists by the pressure to obtain grants for fashionable topics. Richard Lindzen, probably the doyen of genuine climate scientists, put some meat on the bones of Popper’s concern when he recently described the impact of the fifteen-fold increase in funding for climate research during the Clinton administration. That was too much money for a small backwater of science and the injection of money generated a proliferation of studies by all manner of investigators in practically every discipline of climate science, and academic rigor was the consequent victim.

Climate science was not yet on the radar when Gordon Tullock wrote in the 1960s, and he thought the natural sciences were good shape. His scenario for the decline of a scientific discipline drew on his experience of the social sciences, including parts of economics.

After he met Popper at a Volker Fund (free enterprise) conference at Emory University he put aside the work that became The Politics of Bureaucracy and wrote The Organization of Enquiry. He took the social/institutional approach advocated by Popper in The Poverty of Historicism to explain the development or lack of scientific and industrial progress in terms of the institutional context. Contemplating the factors that could stop progress, Popper suggested closing down or controlling laboratories for research and anything that impeded the free trade of criticism and ideas in the scientific community.

Tullock sketched a scenario with a haunting resemblance to the progress of climate science and probably other fields as well, judging from the famous warning issued in 2015 by Richard Horton in his capacity as editor-in-chief of Lancet: “Science has taken a turn towards darkness”. He was referring to small sample sizes, invalid analyses, conflicts of interest, and obsession with fashionable trends.

The scenario involves a combination of personal and institutional factors. The personal factor is the rise of the normal scientist who does science for a living, working under the direction of the laboratory manager without necessarily having any sense of vocation or passion to find the truth. The institutional factors include the rise of Big Science driven by Big Government, the imperative to publish in order to maintain tenure and research grants, and the politicisation of intellectual life.

At the individual level Tullock identified three forms of curiosity. First, the pure curiosity of the scientist engaged in a quest for the truth. Second, the practical curiosity of the person obsessed with making things work better. Third, the “induced curiosity” of the researcher who does not necessarily have a passion for research but takes on science as a job. Tullock noted that the truth-seeker and the practical problem-solver must pay close attention to reality to align their ideas with it. This demands constant testing and critical evaluation; in contrast, the researcher who is not so motivated can be happy with results that are merely publishable regardless of quality.

Tullock developed the scenario to consider what could happen if peer-reviewers are too closely associated with the authors either personally or by membership of a school of thought. He was working before natural science was seriously politicised and of course in the polarised world of climate science nowadays the membership of the correct school of thought or at least acceptance of it has become a professional imperative for most people in the field.

Tullock observed that the end of that slippery slope of declining standards is the situation in which there is a widespread belief that the function of the researcher is to support a particular position. At this point:

Simply presenting a rationalization for some position chosen on other grounds may be acceptable as an objective of research, and the principal criterion in judging journals may become their points of view … The concern with reality that unites the sciences, then, may be absent in this area, and the whole thing may be reduced to a pseudo-science like genetics in Lysenko’s Russia.

Readers can decide for themselves how far various fields have gone down that path, bearing in mind Horton’s warning in the Lancet. To conclude with a reference to Winsberg’s suggestion quoted at the head of this review—to trust the scientific consensus based on the organisation of the community. This means referring questions of scientific credibility to a consortium of politically-correct grant-seekers, environmental fundamentalists and UN officials dedicated to the transformation of the economies of the Western world. That is not what one might have expected from a scholar in the Queen of the Sciences!

Philosophy and Climate Science
by Eric Winsberg
Cambridge University Press, 2018, 282 pages, $39.95

Rafe Champion is a Sydney writer.