Consensus

Everyone's talking about it today! Interestingly, Buckley seems to almost come around on this one:

The environmentalist alarum is strongly backed by evidence, but there are scientists who believe that the data of the last few years, indeed of the last century, attest to cyclical variations that make their way irrespective of the increase in fossil-fuel consumption. Professor Robert Jastrow, a distinguished astrophysicist, is skeptical in the matter. Yet recent reports of measurements done in the Antarctic have not been fully absorbed by the non-believers, and they aren't likely to ignore as simply inconsequential the increase in greenhouse gases, whatever dispute there may be about their exact effect.

We note with pleasure that a prominent voice on the right is starting to sound reasonable...might we be witnessing a tipping point? Logically, Exxon-Mobil™ TCS writers won't stand down on the consensus issue anytime soon:

Dr. Benny Peiser of England's John Moores University attempted to duplicate Oreskes' work. Peiser found 1,117 abstracts using the same search technique. Of these, only 13 explicitly endorsed the 'consensus view.' However, 34 of the abstracts rejected or questioned the view that human activities are the main driving force of "the observed warming over the last 50 years."

So let's take a look at Benny Peiser's webpage on the subject of his rejected letter [go to the page to read his original letter in full]:

Aside from the purely technical matter of Oreskes' factual errors, does SCIENCE really want to stand behind her bizarre claim of a complete scientific consensus on global warming? Are you not aware that most observers know only too well that there is absolutely *no* consensus within the scientific community about global warming science?

He sounds a bit peeved about Science magazine not publishing his letter. Instead, Science went with what Roger Pielke of Prometheus wrote:

But so what? If that number is 1% or 40%, it does not make any difference whatsoever from the standpoint of policy action. Of course, one has to be careful, because people tend to read into the phrase "policy action" a particular course of action that they themselves advocate. But in the IPCC, one can find statements to use in arguing for or against support of the Kyoto Protocol. The same is true for any other specific course of policy action on climate change. The IPCC maintains that its assessments do not advocate any single course of action.

So in addition to arguing about the science of climate change as a proxy for political debate on climate policy, we now can add arguments about the notion of consensus itself. These proxy debates are both a distraction from progress on climate change and a reflection of the tendency of all involved to politicize climate science. The actions that we take on climate change should be robust to (i) the diversity of scientific perspectives, and thus also to (ii) the diversity of perspectives of the nature of the consensus. A consensus is a measure of a central tendency and, as such, it necessarily has a distribution of perspectives around that central measure (1). On climate change, almost all of this distribution is well within the bounds of legitimate scientific debate and reflected within the full text of the IPCC reports. Our policies should not be optimized to reflect a single measure of the central tendency or, worse yet, caricatures of that measure, but instead they should be robust enough to accommodate the distribution of perspectives around that central measure, thus providing a buffer against the possibility that we might learn more in the future (2).

Quite a smackdown, I'd say! And today, we have more Prometheus goodness on the subject of consensus, from guest poster Andrew Dessler:

Thus, at its heart, the “scientific uncertainty” argument is not about science at all, but about a judgment about whether it is worse to under or overreact to climate change. Further, the argument is worded so as to imply that the “criminal trial” standard should be applied to GHGs — that GHGs are innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. We believe that a strong argument can be made that this standard is inappropriate and that overwhelming evidence is not necessary in order for us to begin taking action on climate change. We have enough evidence now.

Indeed. On a related note, the polar bear may soon be on the endangered species list! Whoa. I'm sure we'll hear what Exxon Mobil's brightest minds have to say about the bears soon. And the beat goes on...