This particular realization started by clicking on an article discussing how fact-checking has become irrelevant in today’s politics.
The Limits of Fact-Checking: Calling Trump (and others) out for their lies doesn’t seem to make a difference. What’s going on? (Politico here).

Trump is exhibited as the primary example: the more his comments are rated as lies, even pants-on-fire lies, the more popular he becomes. But other politicians, including Hillary, are also cited for saying false things and refusing to renounce them.

A further analysis by Michael Kinsley ( here) suggests that a candidate or an elected leader and his followers know they are playing a game, and winning depends on having the more compelling narrative, never mind the “truth.” In fact, these falsehoods are not even concerned with any “truth,” they are just making up stuff that sounds good to an audience. In other words, they are not lying, they are bullshitting. Insiders know it and are OK with it, while much of the public is naive and therefore gullible.

As it happens Harry Frankfurt of Princeton gets to the heart of the matter in his provocative essay, On Bullshit, he says:

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.

Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game.

The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Now the parallel with climatism is obvious. The Paris COP was striking in the sheer volume of claims that were stated as truths without any attempt to provide proof or even admit the need for any. Climatism is now unconnected to facts, evidence or logical argument. It explains why both political and climate fact-checkers are widely ignored.

Frankfurt warns:

The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.
This is the crux of the distinction between him and the liar.

I believe Science Matters because actual scientific understanding does inform us about the future and what we need to do to prepare. But in the present environment, bullshitting is the order of the day, and we live in the twilight of Post-Truth discourse.

More from Frankfurt:

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These “anti-realist” doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry.

For more on the degradation of objective truth (AKA the Revenge of the Humanities) see:

https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2015/11/05/objection-asserting-facts-not-in-evidence/

https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2015/07/06/warmists-and-rococo-marxists/

 

 

 

One thing revealed by the recent US Senate hearing was the importance of the two basic arguments forming the alarmist position:

1. “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” (Obama tweet)

2. “There are multiple lines of evidence that show the climate system is changing.” (Dept. of the Environment, Australia)

These two zingers must be met by equally brief, pointed replies.

97% Agreement

I concede that most climate scientists think there is a problem, but 97% of all scientists is an exaggeration.

The first claim of 97% came from a survey sample of 77 climate scientists who said “Yes” to 2 statements: “It has warmed since 1850.”; “Human activity has contributed to the warming.” That survey questionnaire was deliberately not sent to those known to be skeptical: scientists not employed by government or universities; astronomers; solar scientists; physicists; meteorologists.

More inclusive surveys with more pointed questions show much more diverse opinions. Most scientists agree it has warmed since 1850, the end of the Little Ice Age. Geologists have evidence that the earth was warmer than now during the Medieval Warm Period, more warm during the Roman Warm Period, warmer still in the Minoan period. So the overall trend is a cooling over the last 11,500 years.

Most agree that human land use, such as making dams, farming, building cities, airports and highways, all affect the climate in those locations. The idea that rising CO2 is causing dangerous warming is controversial, with dissenters a large minority.

Multiple Lines of Evidence Climate is Changing

All of the measures are “glass half-empty, glass half-full.” And no one has evidence separating human and natural climate changes.  (Quotes below from Australia Dept. of Environment here)

Example 1: Air Temperatures
Air temperatures have increased globally, by around 0.85 degrees Celsius since 1880, with most of the warming occurring since the 1970s. All three major global surface temperature records show that the Earth’s atmosphere has warmed since 1880.

This is true and unsurprising emerging from the Little Ice Age. Over the last 150 years there has been a steady increase overlaid with a sine wave of 30-year warming and cooling periods.  From 1979 to 1998 the warming coincided with the rising rate of CO2, but the correlation is not seen in the periods before and since those two decades.

Example 2: Sea Levels
Global sea levels have risen at an average rate of 1.8 millimetres per year over 1961 to 2003. This rate risen to around 3.2 millimetres per year from 1993 to 2012.

Sea levels have been rising with the Little Ice Age recovery, and tidal guages show no increase in the rate in recent years. The 3.2 mm comes from the GRACE satellite system which is still being calibrated and not yet reliable, according to researchers.

Example 3: Extreme Weather
Extreme weather events include heatwaves, bushfires, tropical cyclones, cold snaps, extreme rainfall and droughts.  There is increasing evidence that the frequency and intensity of many extreme weather events  are changing.

The number and strength of extreme weather events by any statistical measure have been unusually benign in recent decades. The IPCC concluded that no causal link is proven between warming and extreme weather

Example 4: Rainfall Patterns
Rainfall patterns are changing around the world. Research shows the global water cycle is intensifying with a warming climate, which means wet areas are likely to get wetter and dry regions are likely to be drier in response to climate change.

Global rainfall varies about 5% from one year to another, so if it is drier in one place, it is wetter somewhere else. The IPCC working group said there is currently no way of predicting which places will get more or less rainfall long term.

The other notions of ocean acidification, Arctic Ice melting, etc. are likewise inconclusive and subject to interpretation, as other posts here and elsewhere point out.

Conclusion:

We simply do not know our climate system well enough to predict what will happen. Our ignorance should not be an excuse for fear and irrational actions.

Future periods are likely to be colder as well as warmer, and cold is the greater threat to human life and prosperity. To prepare for the future we should invest in robust infrastructure and ensuring reliable affordable energy. We should also focus on real and present environmental problems such as actual air pollution which kills thousands of people every day.

 

George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a masterpiece of a simple story suggesting so many realities of societies. Among many things, it shows how a basic dichotomy mobilizes people (or creatures) for social or political action. The image above expresses the heart of the story whereby some animals took power over the others out of fear of humans.

Consider another dichotomy:    Producers Good, Parasites Bad.

People who are astounded by Donald Trump’s candidacy are overlooking how widely and deeply felt is this distinction between those who produce and those who take, and not only in the Tea Party but far beyond. The power arises from the emotional investment in the branding, no matter how illogical or mistaken it may be. Those who don’t feel it, don’t “get it.” Add in the envy of someone so rich he can say anything unbounded by Political Correctness, and Trump becomes a force to be reckoned with. It remains to be seen whether his followers are voters beyond being fans.

As for Climate Change, it seems to me at its heart lie two intertwined dichotomies:
                            Carbon Pollution Bad, Clean Air Good
                         Runaway Warming Bad, Stable Climate Good

The first notion is that carbon dioxide is a pollutant making the air dirty. Since CO2 is neither visible nor toxic (plants depend on it), it requires a second assertion that more CO2 causes runaway warming upsetting the stability of our climate system. That is, by adding CO2 from burning fossil fuels, we are destabilizing the climate system and bad things will happen as a result. Interestingly, at demonstrations the negative side is quite explicit, but the affirmative side requires some interpretation.

Some of us are astounded that sentient carbon-based life forms could be so disparaging of their own composition, but there is more than a whiff of anti-humanity in this movement. And the idea that we humans can fix the climate in a favorable state boggles the mind.

How all this plays out can be seen in an excellent interview with Bill Gates. Of course, he is a very lucid person and a genuine philanthropist of the first order. He has educated himself deeply on the history of energy as shown by this:

Share of Fuels in the Global Energy Mix Across Modern History

Gates goes on to say this:

What’s amazing is how our intense energy usage is one and the same as modern civilization. That is, for all the great things that happened in terms of human lifestyle, life span, and growing food before 1800, civilization didn’t change dramatically until we started using coal in the U.K. in the 1800s. Coal replaced wood. But the wave of wood to coal is about a 50- or 60-year wave.

If it was just about economics, if we had no global warming to think about, the slowly-but-surely pace of these transitions would be okay. If you look at one of these forecasts, they all say about the same thing: What you look at is a picture that’s pretty gradual, with natural gas continuing to gain at the expense of both coal and oil. But, you know, 1-percent-a year-type change. If you look at that from a greenhouse-gas point of view—if you look at forecasts—every single year we’ll be emitting more greenhouse gases than the previous year.

The title of the article is We Need an Energy Miracle because Bill Gates is one who worries about global warming. He has accepted at face value the dichotomies of climate change, and so those blinders shape his investment plans and priorities.

He actually has a lot in common with Bjorn Lomborg, who supports the Gates energy innovation initiative. But Lomborg sees things more clearly (here responding to comments by Arnold Swartzenegger):

Power generation, traffic and industry – which is mostly fossil fuel driven and likely what you were thinking about – in total cause 854,000 air pollution deaths. Added to the 560,000 deaths from indoor air pollution caused by coal, this constitute only 20% of total air pollution deaths or about 3,900 deaths each day.

This matters for two reasons. First, it is disingenuous to link the world’s biggest environmental problem of air pollution to climate. It is a question of poverty (most indoor air pollution) and lack of technology (scrubbing pollution from smokestacks and catalytic converters) – not about global warming and CO₂. Second, costs and benefits matter.[vi] Tackling indoor air pollution turns out to be very cheap and effective, whereas tackling outdoor air pollution is more expensive and less effective. Your favorite policy of cutting CO₂ is of course even more costly and has a tiny effect even in a hundred years.

Conclusion
It is likely that future periods will be both colder and warmer than the present. Preparing for that means investing in robust infrastructure and in reliable affordable energy.

I agree with Lomborg. It’s important to make an energy transition and take the time to do it right. So far we are wasting time and money on the illusion that we can ensure favorable weather by reducing fossil fuel emissions.

In recent weeks climate activists have turned to the courts to advance their cause. An assembly of international supreme court judges discussed issuing a ruling to establish consensus science as legal fact. The UN proposed agreement for Paris COP includes an International Climate Tribunal “to oversee, control and sanction the fulfilment [sic] of and compliance with the obligations” under the agreement. A letter was sent to US justice officials appealing for RICO law to be used to silence dissenters from consensus climate science. And a plan hatched long ago was activated to catch Exxon in a tobacco-style litigation. More on the latter is here.

Noting these events, Judith Curry had a discussion about the role of the courts regarding climate science. It seems to me that any legal proceeding would bog down at the first testimony by a consensus witness, since any opposing counsel brighter than a fence post should repeatedly object: “Objection, asserting facts not in evidence.” (Probably wishful thinking on my part.)

A separate event yesterday attracted my attention to the topic of climate evidence. At his swearing-in as Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau appointed a Minister of the Environment and Climate Change portfolio. In his general comments, not specific to that department, he said his government would deliver “evidence-based policy”. Naturally I am wondering what that could mean regarding climate policies.

What does “Evidence-Based” mean?

Robert Sutton has written extensively on the notion of evidence-based management, and says this in the Harvard Business Review here.

We’ve just suggested no less than six substitutes that managers, like doctors, often use for the best evidence—obsolete knowledge, personal experience, specialist skills, hype, dogma, and mindless mimicry of top performers—so perhaps it’s apparent why evidence-based decision making is so rare. At the same time, it should be clear that relying on any of these six is not the best way to think about or decide among alternative practices.

Sutton talks about some of the elements that make up an evidence-based approach. For example,

Start with an Answerable Question:
The decision-making process used at Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine starts with a crucial first step—the situation confronting the practitioner must be framed as an answerable question. That makes it clear how to compile relevant evidence.

Demand Evidence:
When people in the organization see senior executives spending the time and mental energy to unpack the underlying assumptions that form the foundation for some proposed policy, practice, or intervention, they absorb a new cultural norm.

Treat the organization as an unfinished prototype.
For some questions in some businesses, the best evidence is to be found at home—in the company’s own data and experience rather than in the broader-based research of scholars. Companies that want to promote more evidence-based management should get in the habit of running trial programs, pilot studies, and small experiments, and thinking about the inferences that can be drawn from them

Embrace the attitude of wisdom.
Something else, something broader, is more important than any single guideline for reaping the benefits of evidence-based management: the attitude people have toward business knowledge. At least since Plato’s time, people have appreciated that true wisdom does not come from the sheer accumulation of knowledge, but from a healthy respect for and curiosity about the vast realms of knowledge still unconquered.

The approach is summarized here.

Five Principles of EBM

1. Face the hard facts, and build a culture in which people
are encouraged to tell the truth, even if it is unpleasant.
2. Be committed to “fact based” decision making — which
means being committed to getting the best evidence and
using it to guide actions.
3. Treat your organization as an unfinished prototype —
encourage experimentation and learning by doing.
4. Look for the risks and drawbacks in what people recommend
— even the best medicine has side effects.
5. Avoid basing decisions on untested but strongly held beliefs,
what you have done in the past, or on uncritical “benchmarking”
of what winners do.

The Medical Paradigm of Evidence

Throughout this essay you will see references to medical decision making, since the evidence-based idea originated in this arena. The practice of medicine is where the notion took root: treatment choices should be based upon the data of historical results. And in the courts, it was often medical cases where protocols developed for making the case for or against a medicine, treatment or environmental condition causing damage to someone.

I used above the classical image of Justice being blind in weighing evidence, the idea being that the defendant’s wealth or social status has no bearing on the decision of guilt or innocence. Medical science goes one step further to eliminate bias: double-blind randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are the gold standard for evidence.

Rules for Scientific Evidence in Court

A court of law is first and foremost an evidence-based proceeding, and detailed rules are applied when submitting and accepting anything as evidence for the purpose of reaching a decision. Without going into the complexities (I am not a lawyer), it is instructive to see how courts do handle scientific evidence as a background for what a climate case might entail.

Much of the following information comes from Nathan Schachtman here.

Proper epidemiological methodology begins with published study results which demonstrate an association between a drug and an unfortunate effect. Once an association has been found, a judgment as whether a real causal relationship between exposure to a drug and a particular birth defect really exists must be made. This judgment requires a critical analysis of the relevant literature applying proper epidemiologic principles and methods. It must be determined whether the observed results are due to a real association or merely the result of chance. Appropriate scientific studies must be analyzed for the possibility that the apparent associations were the result of chance, confounding or bias. It must also be considered whether the results have been replicated.

Step 1: Establish an association between two variables.
Proper epidemiologic method requires surveying the pertinent published studies that investigate whether there is an association between the medication use and the claimed harm. The expert witnesses must, however, do more than write a bibliography; they must assess any putative associations for “chance, confounding or bias”:

Step 2: Rule out chance as an explanation
The appropriate and generally accepted methodology for accomplishing this step of evaluating a putative association is to consider whether the association is statistically significant at the conventional level.
“Generally accepted methodology considers statistically significant replication of study results in different populations because apparent associations may reflect flaws in methodology.”

Step 3: Rule out bias or confounding factors.
The studies must be structured to analyze and reject other factors or influences, such as non-random sampling, additional intervening variables such as demographic or socio-economic differences.

Step 4: Infer Causation by Applying Accepted Causative Factors
Most often legal proceedings follow the Bradford Hill factors, which are delineated here.

What aspects of that association should we especially consider before deciding that the most likely interpretation of it is causation?

(1) Strength. First upon my list I would put the strength of the association.

(2) Consistency: Next on my list of features to be specially considered I would place the consistency of the observed association. Has it been repeatedly observed by different persons, in different places, circumstances and times?

(3) Specificity: One reason, needless to say, is the specificity of the association, the third characteristic which invariably we must consider. If as here, the association is limited to specific workers and to particular sites and types of disease and there is no association between the work and other modes of dying, then clearly that is a strong argument in favor of causation.

(4) Temporality: My fourth characteristic is the temporal relationship of the association – which is the cart and which is the horse? This is a question which might be particularly relevant with diseases of slow development. Does a particular diet lead to disease or do the early stages of the disease lead to those particular dietetic habits?

(5) Biological gradient: Fifthly, if the association is one which can reveal a biological gradient, or dose-response curve, then we should look most carefully for such evidence.

(6) Plausibility: It will be helpful if the causation we suspect is biologically plausible. But this is a feature I am convinced we cannot demand. What is biologically plausible depends upon the biological knowledge of the day.

(7) Coherence: On the other hand the cause-and-effect interpretation of our data should not seriously conflict with the generally known facts of the natural history and biology of the disease – in the expression of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon-General it should have coherence.

(8) Experiment: Occasionally it is possible to appeal to experimental, or semi-experimental, evidence. For example, because of an observed association some preventive action is taken. Does it in fact prevent? The dust in the workshop is reduced, lubricating oils are changed, persons stop smoking cigarettes. Is the frequency of the associated events affected? Here the strongest support for the causation hypothesis may be revealed.

(9) Analogy: In some circumstances it would be fair to judge by analogy. With the effects of thalidomide and rubella before us we would surely be ready to accept slighter but similar evidence with another drug or another viral disease in pregnancy.

None of my nine viewpoints can bring indisputable evidence for or against the cause-and-effect hypothesis and none can be required as a sine qua non. What they can do, with greater or less strength, is to help us to make up our minds on the fundamental question – is there any other way of explaining the set of facts before us, is there any other answer equally, or more, likely than cause and effect?

How Does This Apply to Climate Policy?

The legal methodology above is used to decide the causal relationship between two variables. Clearly, in Climate Science the starting question is: Do rising fossil fuel emissions cause temperatures to rise? Those who have been following the issue know that there are many arguments underneath: Are temperatures always rising along with CO2? Has chance been eliminated? Are not natural factors confounding the association? And so on.

But that question is only the beginning when considering an evidence-based climate policy. Daniel Roberts has provided a simple, comprehensive framework of questions, showing that answers to each one impact upon the others.

When governments speak of evidence-based policies, they usually mean allocating scarce public funds to programs that have shown value for money. Cost and benefit analysis is inescapable, along with definitions of outcomes, outputs, service activities, and the metrics to assess performance for the sake of funding priorities. Is that what PM Trudeau has in mind? Will that discipline be applied regarding climate change?

Summary

If I had used a term like “evidence-based” in a schoolboy essay, I would have gotten a red circle with a GG alongside (“Glittering Generality”). I wonder if today’s teachers are as discerning and demanding of rigor, or do they let it go if it is politically correct? Justin Trudeau was formerly a schoolteacher, so I guess we will find out.

For an analysis of the association between fossil fuel emissions and Global Mean Temperature see 2018 Update: Fossil Fuels ≠ Global Warming