Climate change skepticism is growing in the US, says a Gallup news release:
Although a majority of Americans believe the seriousness of global warming is either correctly portrayed in the news or underestimated, a record-high 41 per cent now say it is exaggerated. The represents the highest level of public skepticism about mainstream reporting on global warming seen in more than a decade of Gallup polling on the subject. As recently as 2006, significantly more Americans thought the news underestimated the seriousness of global warming than said it exaggerated it, 38 per cent to 30 per cent. Now, according to Gallup’s 2009 environment survey, more Americans say the problem is exaggerated rather than underestimed, 41 per cent v 28 per cent…

On Lateline on Wednesday, the ABC’s Lisa Millar is immune to the denialism epidemic:
Will Steffen, it seems that the science is saying that what we thought was heppening is definitely happening and it’s happening a while lot faster than anyone thought…

The evidence? Just about anything, says Steffen:
There’s a global pattern. Now these events vary from region to region, but in fact there is good evidence now that they are increasing. In many parts of the world, they’re manifested as flooding events. In our part of the world, we see drying trends.

So let’s see. That’s one argument ad populum (“global warming is wrong because a lot of people are skeptical about it”), selective quoting (the actual Gallup report says the bottom line is “Americans generally believe global warming is real. That sets the U.S. public apart from the global-warming skeptics who assembled this week in New York City to try to debunk the science behind climate change”), poor statistical interpretation (the Gallup poll has a confidence limit of ±3% which means that a rise from 38% to 41% is either within or very close to their margin of error — to be fair to The Australian, this was not exactly highlighted by the Gallup report, just added as an endnote), a rhetorical exaggeration (a 3% increase in skepticism about the severity of global warming becomes a “denialism epidemic”), inconsistent application of data (the proportion of people reporting that “global warming will pose a serious threat to you or your way of life in your lifetime” is at its second-highest level ever, 38% v 25% in 1997, but this is not an “epidemic of concern”), a non-sequitur (scientific evidence has to take into account the results of a Gallup poll of beliefs among 1,012 telephone interviewees in the US), a creationist-level fallacy (if a physical effect causes different outcomes in different circumstances, then that is evidence against the existence of the physical effect^[1]), and another creationist-level fallacy (what a scientist gets to say in 10 seconds of air time is the sum total of the evidence).

Not a bad effort for a handful of paragraphs of direct quotation^[2].

[1]  This argument that could be used to prove that cyclones can’t be air currents because they rotate clockwise in the southern hemisphere and anticlockwise in the north.
[2] The editorial team should apply for jobs at the Discovery Institute.

Rosenbaum frames the debate as one between Consensus and Dissent—Consensus being the belief among most climate scientists that humans are causing global warming by pumping out industrial quantities of carbon dioxide, and Dissent being the belief among a much smaller number of qualified scientists that humans and carbon dioxide have very little to do with climate. The main thrust of Rosenbaum’s argument is that dissenting voices need to be heard in the mass media. I agree with that naturally, and I agree with him that the Columbia Journalism Review has not kept to its own philosophy very well on this particular matter, but Rosenbaum makes no attempt to decide what counts as reasonable Dissent, for of course the mass media are under no moral imperative to publish every voice of Dissent. But what really interested me was Rosenbaum’s flamboyant display of Thomas S. Kuhn in defence of global warming dissent.

Indeed, the century’s foremost historian of science, Thomas Kuhn, believed,…that science often proceeds by major unexpected shifts: Just when an old consensus congealed, new dissenting, contradictory reports heralded a “paradigm shift” that often ended up tossing the old “consensus” into the junk bin.

So far so good. In fact, it goes without saying that at some point every successful scientific theory started out as a minority position and every successful scientific theory consigned an older consensus theory to the dustbin. But then Rosenbaum bites off more than he can chew.

If it hadn’t been for the lone dissenting voice of that crazy guy in the Swiss patent office with his papers on “relativity,” we still might believe the “consensus” that Newtonian mechanics explained a deterministic universe. And what about Ignaz Semmelweis and his lone crusade against the “consensus” that doctors need not wash their hands before going from an infected to an uninfected patient? Or the nutty counterintuitive dissenting idea of vaccination? The consensus was wrong. In fact, science proceeds by overturning consensus.

The number of errors in this one paragraph is extraordinary. First of all, I don’t think anyone believes that we would still consider Newtonian theory the gold standard of physics. By the time Einstein wrote his paper on special relativity in 1905, classical physics was already in deep trouble. Newtonian physics was at odds with Maxwell’s equations and the Michelson-Morley experiment and thermodynamics was so at odds with the observed spectrum of black-body radiation that physicists called the problem “The Ultraviolet Catastrophe.” Special relativity would have arrived without Einstein, and Einstein agreed, saying, “There is no doubt, that the special theory of relativity, if we regard its development in retrospect, was ripe for discovery in 1905.” Rosenbaum is also incorrect in implying that special relativity undermined the determinism of Newton. For a start, relativity is actually much older than Einstein. It goes back to Galileo and is often referred to as “Galilean relativity” and this is why Einstein called his theory “special” relativity to distinguish it from the prevailing theory. Even more importantly, special relativity is just as deterministic as the Galilean relativity it replaced. Most scientists consider special relativity to be a classical theory of physics because it deals in precise points in space and time and is utterly absolutist. Einstein did not  demolish absolutism but substituted one absolute term (length of space and time) for another (the speed of light). And even then, special relativity still represents space and time in absolute objective terms. The death of naïve determinism came not from relativity but from quantum theory and chaos theory.

Now all of this goes to show that Rosenbaum is not particularly knowledgeable about the history of science. But of all his mistakes, the worst is in misrepresenting Kuhn, who never made a statement as sweeping as that science proceeds by overturning consensus. Kuhn himself was appalled that his work was continually misused by the postmodern movement to imply such a thing.

Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition.

As Kuhn pointed out, “frameworks must be lived with and explored before they can be broken.”

Even more importantly, what Rosenbaum fails to appreciate is that, just as in journalism, overturning consensus is not a goal in itself. What really matters is the quality of the consensus view versus the quality of the dissenting view. In Einstein’s time there were dozens of competing theories proposed to explain the increasingly glaring problems with classical mechanics; some of them were quite unfeasible, for instance the attempt to redefine the properties of the luminiferous æther which resulted in the proposition that æther was a massless, frictionless, perfectly compressible fluid that moved at different velocities to propagate different wavelengths of light. Needless to say, this view did not please many scientists. Likewise, just because there are dissenters from the global warming consensus does not mean that their views deserve widespread attention. (There are respected scientists who are informed global warming skeptics such as Freeman Dyson, but I leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out why these prominent, scientifically-astute skeptics are rarely found in the company of those who generate media time for the anti-warming platform.)

What it all depends on is evidence and argumentation, which Rosenbaum seems not to give the slightest indication of addressing. He’s aware of the problem…

But which arguments? It’s a fascinating subject that I’ve spent some time considering. My last two books…were, in part anyway, efforts to decide which of the myriad arguments about and dissenting visions of each of these figures was worth pursuing. For instance, with Hitler, after investigating, I wanted to refute the myth (often used in a heavy-handed way by anti-Semites) that Hitler was part Jewish. The risk is that in giving attention to the argument, one can spread it even while refuting it. But to ignore it was worse.

But having decided that it’s a fascinating subject, Rosenbaum has concludes the best solution is to ignore the problem.

But I’d argue that journalists should be on the side of vigorous argument, not deciding for readers what is truth and then not exposing them to certain arguments.

Except that journalists and editors make decisions every day about what arguments to report and not report. And even if they report on an argument, they decide how much space to give and how much prominence. And I can’t see how you can be in favour of “vigorous argument” if you make no decisions about what is vigorous and what is frivolous. In the end, Rosenbaum is all about Consensus versus Dissent, not the quality of the consensus or the dissent views. And he has drawn on Kuhn (erroneously as it turns out) to promote the uncritical reporting of Dissent. I think it speaks to his blindness on this matter that he refers to vaccination as one of the Fruits of Dissent without seeming to understand that it is the anti-vaccinators who are today’s Dissenters and who thrive on the undeserved attention of the media and the courtroom.

And that prompted me to look for some more examples. Here we go…

The blog Contratimes contains a long article in favour of Dissent. It starts with Mark Twain and ends with Thomas Kuhn. This writer, one Bill Gnade, at least gets Kuhn right thank goodness. And his point is perfectly valid: consensus does not demonstrate truth. But he makes little effort to discuss the evidentiary value of consensus versus dissent and ends up using Twain and Kuhn simply to praise himself for being a dissenter as if that was a cardinal virtue. I also note in another of Gnade’s articles that he uses (without naming it) semiotics to argue that there are such things as “racist facts” and that any attempt to define racism in a way that doesn’t suit him can be dismissed because “dictionaries only list how words are used and not how they must be used.” In other words, we channel Saussare to defend “racist facts” in public discourse.

And there’s more. I stumbled upon the website for Channel 4′s provocative documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. Whatever one thinks of global warming, this particular documentary is misleading and deceptive and promotes an alternative theory to anthropogenic global warming that is just not really “vigorous.” And what do you find on its website? A list of four recommended books: three anti-global warming polemics and…The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn.

I will keep reporting as I find instances of postmodernism being used to undermine evidence in a way that supports powerful interests.

Now I have nothing against the WSJ printing or Arts and Letters Daily recommending well-researched and argued articles that express doubt in current global warming models, but this piece was by any reasonable definition, an utter load of cobblers. Kieran states that global warming is the scientific equivalent of the “yellow journalism” that epitomised the editorial policies of Hearst’s shock-and-bile tabloids of the 1920s and 1930s.

Just as it is far easier to publish stories without verifying the sources; so is it much more convenient to practice yellow science than the real thing.

Now, what made me laugh at this accusation was that it was appeared in an op-ed that contains not a single verified source. Not one. Not a single reference. Not a single named source. Not a damn thing. (And besides, Kieran is simply wrong. I would challenge him—or anyone else—to find a single published scientific research paper on climate change that lists fewer than twenty references.) Not that it stops Kieran from, well, pulling stuff out of his own fundament.

Hearst made only a fraction of his estimated $140 million in net worth from yellow journalism. Global warming, on the other hand, has provided an estimated $50 billion in research grants to those willing to practice yellow science.

Note the bizarre comparison (Hearst’s personal profits from journalism in presumably 1920-1930 dollars compared to an “estimated” number of research grants over an unspecified time frame and distributed to an unspecified number of researchers; it’s the sort of comparison that only makes sense if you have a severe cognitive deficit—although it would explain the number of climate scientists who, like Hearst’s descendants, have appeared on the Forbes 400 List). And where exactly does he get the $50 billion from? Who knows? He’s not telling. This is, by his own definition, “irreparably disgraced journalism” and the sort of thing that has meant “[j]ournalists have lost the respectability of their profession, and the public has lost real journalism.” Apparently Kieran’s rule of yellow journalism is non-recursive.

Thus it was clear to me that the WSJ had lost all semblance of self-respect when it published Kieran’s superhuman chutzpah; now it turns out that the WSJ has not just lost its self-respect but its sanity. The WSJ this week published an editorial about the new Batman movie and how the heroic character of Batman demonstrates all the exemplary moral qualities of…you won’t believe this, so take a deep breath now… President George W. Bush. Here’s a taste:

Why is it then that left-wingers feel free to make their films direct and realistic, whereas Hollywood conservatives have to put on a mask in order to speak what they know to be the truth? Why is it, indeed, that the conservative values that power our defense — values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right — only appear in fantasy or comic-inspired films like “300,” “Lord of the Rings,” “Narnia,” “Spiderman 3″ and now “The Dark Knight”?

That’s right, folks, the editorial committee of the Wall Street Journal thinks that Spartan morality (like, you know, leaving weak babies outside overnight to die of exposure) is a laudable conservative value. It also strikes me that self-sacrifice has hardly been a defining feature of the Bush administration. Sacrificing soldiers and prisoners and foreigners, sure, but self-sacrifice? That’s for chumps, boy. Just ask Scooter Libby.

I can’t write this up any better than Michael Cohen did, so please follow the link for Cohen’s glorious and oft-times hilarious takedown. However, I cannot resist quoting this:

You know what’s odd about this, I had this crazy, wacky, left-wing notion that we prosecute violent soldiers and cruel interrogators because they are . . . you know, violent and cruel. But reading the WSJ has diabused me of this notion; in fact I hate these cruel and violent people to cover up for some terrible inadequacy in my own life, like my silly notion that people should abide by the rule of law and treat everyone with respect and dignity. There it is again, the left wing media brainwashing me again . . . damn you Phil Donahue!