The End Of Alarmism Transcript

John Robson:

Hi everybody. Here at the Climate Discussion Nexus, we obviously spend a lot of time thinking about climate alarmism. About the details, and the big picture. And to be frank, part of the latter is wondering how it is that so many intelligent and dedicated people can seem so determined to get the details wrong.

And here it would be easy to say ah they’re engaged in some kind of hoax… just as many alarmists say that their critics are engaged in some kind of hoax. But one of life’s great problems is that not everybody agrees with our opinion even after we tell it to them.

It’s a problem in our personal lives, it’s a problem in our professional lives and it’s a problem in public policy. And there must be some better way to handle it than to trade jeers “yeah you’re in the pocket of Big Oil” or “yeah you’re a WEF plant” or, worse, to go back and forth with, “I know you are but what am I?”

Of course, I think the warmists have got most of it badly wrong, and I think they do some very strange things with evidence. But while I was working on a video on the “Holocene Climatic Optimum” this fall, I got to thinking about alarmism as a case study in how scientific theories work and also how they fail. And about how this one caught on so fast and became so popular and yet, dominant as it may now appear, I think that it’s actually about to collapse.

So this is a CDN Backgrounder video on Anthropogenic Global Warming as a scientific theory or “paradigm”, its initial promise and its increasingly obvious weaknesses.

A key focus of that “Holocene Climatic Optimum” video was how climate alarmists are determined to erase past warming periods, starting with the Medieval Warm Period and working their way back. And this enterprise has an increasingly contrived feel, but it also has a certain logic. And I want to start with the logic instead of getting into that spiral where people talk past one another then give in to frustration and declare that the others are fools, rogues or both.

While I was pondering these questions I happened, for an unrelated talk, to be rereading a splendid book that I first encountered at university and, unusually, first encountered as a textbook at university. It’s Thomas Kuhn’s seminal 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and it offers a lot of insight into how people think, not just about science but about everything from the Cold War to the minimum wage. And also therefore, about how intelligent and well-meaning people can adopt and defend such different visions that they shake their heads, or even their fists, at one another and at one another’s use of facts.

Don’t worry. When I talk about the internal consistency of conflicting ideas there’s no retreat into relativism here. People may disagree about the truth, and it may be hard to find, but there is truth or there’d be nothing to disagree about. So what I want to try to do here is to explain how people can be so wrong without being either fools or knaves… and how they can suddenly have the scales fall from their eyes.

Including on this crucial climate alarmist research project of disposing of the Medieval Warm Period then going backward to tackle previous warmings, either proving they never happened or showing that CO2 caused them. And again, I want to explain why I think that project was necessary to their theory, and why it looked highly promising and reasonable at first, before I get into why it quickly came to look so contrived that I think that a revolt is actually brewing within the field, as well as the among the public, against the whole business.

Narrator:

In his landmark book Kuhn challenged the then-dominant 20^th-century view of science involving a slow steady accumulation of sound knowledge and effective technique as empirical inquiry beats back narrow-minded superstition and builds ever higher on unshakable foundations.

In its place, he proposed an alternative picture in which a given scientific field is dominated for some time by one comprehensive vision, for which his term “paradigm” caught on, even became trendy. This prevailing “paradigm” tells practitioners what kinds of entities exist and how they interact and therefore what kinds of problems are interesting or even legitimate, and which are not “real science”. And within that shared framework scientists work successfully for years, often for generations, applying widely accepted assumptions to a broad range of mostly fairly minor questions, cracking puzzle after puzzle in what looks like a slow steady march toward greater certainty.

As Kuhn wrote, “Few people who are not actually practitioners of a mature science realize how much mop-up work of this sort a paradigm leaves to be done or quite how fascinating such work can prove in the execution…. Mopping-up operations are what engage most scientists throughout their careers. They constitute what I am here calling normal science.”

John Robson:

And this “normal science” is mostly plain sailing, in the lab and in the classroom, training the next generation while moving from success to success despite the occasional stubborn holdout problem. But then, gradually, frustratingly intractable puzzles start to accumulate, and they yield only to trite or contrived solutions. And then suddenly, a small or even large scientific field is swept by a whole new “paradigm” that overturns fundamental assumptions and creates a whole new research agenda.

And it’s often generational as well. If youthful rebels outperform the old guard, then new practitioners are drawn to the new vision and you get what is clearly, in retrospect, a “revolution”, and not a slow and steady accumulation.

Narrator:

Obvious examples include Newtonian then Einsteinian physics, the “chemical revolution” of the 18^th century with its discovery of elements, compounds then the periodic table, or Darwin in biology. And, for that matter, widespread acceptance of Kuhn’s own vision in his field of the history of science.

John Robson:

And then there’s the transformation of the field once quaintly called meteorology around 40 years ago, including James Hansen’s famous 1988 testimony to a U.S. Senate subcommittee claiming dangerous man-made changes in climate were happening all around us. And in this new paradigm, instead of the old view of weather as a complex business with such subtle and manifold causes that no comprehensive theory had emerged, many mostly-younger researchers had a classic “Eureka” moment.

Temperature, they said, is driven almost exclusively by “greenhouse gases”, particularly man-made CO2. And, though it wasn’t axiomatically necessary, they also said that the resulting rising temperature meant ominously worse weather. And then these researchers logically set out to explore the implications of this hugely exciting new vision, to test it in practice and to see just how far it could take them.

And so far, nothing was fishy. It’s exactly how science works. Including a classic example of Kuhn’s “normal science,” this process of cleaning up things that might have been uncontroversial or irrelevant in the older understanding but in the new paradigm were suddenly problematic. For instance, it being warmer 800 years ago with lower atmospheric CO2. And it’s critical to understand that, in trying to fit data into a theory, they’re not cheating. It’s how humans think, and it’s the only way we can think. Where it gets tricky is judging which “paradigm” to stick with and how far to stick with it, and which to ditch and when.

As Goethe once said, “every fact is already a theory.” Without provisional assumptions about what the world is like, what sorts of things it contains, and how they interact, we can’t think at all. You get only the “blooming, buzzing confusion” that William James famously said confronts infants before they start forming hypotheses about a three-dimensional world containing other sentient beings who make sounds that convey information, and that kind of stuff.

And to illustrate how this process works, Kuhn cites an experiment in which people were shown playing cards in rapid succession and asked to identify them.

Most of them did it easily, of course. But there was a catch: this special deck included a few weird cards, like a red six of spades and black four of hearts. And revealingly, he writes, “the anomalous cards were almost always identified, without apparent hesitation or puzzlement, as normal. The black four of hearts might, for example, be identified as the four of either spades or hearts. Without any awareness of trouble, it was immediately fitted to one of the conceptual categories prepared by prior experience.”

But people do have heads on top. So, as the exposure times got longer, the subjects got more uneasy. “Exposed, for example, to the red six of spades, some would say: That’s the six of spades, but there’s something wrong with it – the black has a red border.” And at some point, often suddenly, they’d go hey, that’s a red six of spades. And once they’d adjusted their paradigm to include off-colour cards, they could no longer be misled, though Kuhn adds that some people never did adjust. “And the subject who then failed often experienced acute personal distress. One of them exclaimed: ‘I can’t make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn’t even look like a card that time. I don’t know what color it is now or whether it’s a spade or heart. I’m not even sure now what a spade looks like. My God!’”

And it can also happen to scientists.

It’s not just climate. It’s how the mind works. Hence Francis Bacon’s famous dictum, which Kuhn quotes, “Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.” If you’re on the wrong path, you can change direction. But if you’re wandering in circles, you just wander. And for that reason of course, this experiment that Kuhn cites could only be done on people who were familiar with playing cards. If you show them to a previously uncontacted tribe, or some sect that shuns all games, a Jack of Diamonds would just be blooming, buzzing confusion.

OK, OK, you cry. Say something about climate or we’re rushing for the exit. But I am saying something about climate, because you see, the man-made global warming theory that swept the field 40 years ago was a classic paradigm shift, opening up a massive new research program of “normal science” to apply its startling and apparently compelling new insight to all manner of specific problems.

For starters, it was quite easy to show that in the late 20^th century temperature and CO2 were both rising, and to suggest causal mechanisms and to predict consequences. But having cried “Eureka” on this point, to show that CO2 really is “The Thermostat that Controls Earth’s Temperature”, they then had to show equally exciting results in the past.

The capstone of this new venture, of course, was Michael Mann’s apparent achievement in “mopping up” the Medieval Warm Period, and with it the subsequent Little Ice Age, this result which so delighted the IPCC and launched him to academic stardom.

And of course it might seem impertinent for the IPCC, or anyone else, suddenly to say oh no none of that famous stuff like the Vikings farming Greenland as it warmed and then dying out when the cold came back ever happened. And in fact it struck me that way at the time, being a trained historian. But of course all scientific revolutions do have a certain impertinence to them, and if it works out it’s boldness not arrogance.

So here it’s crucial to grasp that Mann’s “hockey stick” didn’t come from nowhere. It had to be there if the entire theory were not to perish within a few decades of coming to prominence because it fell apart over the first major climate change prior to our own time, if temperatures rose around 1000 AD but CO2 didn’t.

And of course I don’t have to tell you that we at CDN, like many others, are not impressed by this finding. Or by his handling of data, especially those tree-ring temperature proxies, and indeed the handling of tree-ring temperature proxies by a lot of other people involved in the same “normal science” enterprise, in Kuhn’s sense if not necessarily that of proper research protocols. But the point here is to understand it before condemning it, to recognize that it was a legitimately exciting research project, both intrinsically and for the career rewards that it would bring to the successful young researcher.

Narrator:

The Medieval Warm period was the most obvious and important “anomaly” for the new man-made-CO2 warming-catastrophe paradigm because it was the most recent so it rather stood out. Moreover, Mann had apparently delivered a massively impressive “two-fer” because his hockey stick also demolished the equally problematic Little Ice Age that supposedly followed the Medieval Warm Period. If there were no warming to explain around 1000 AD, then there was no cooling to explain to get temperatures back down to where it was around 1850. So no Renaissance-era drop in CO2 was required to support the theory.

John Robson:

But as so often in “normal science”, as in life, clearing one problem away only reveals others crying out for attention. And in this case, those other problems were earlier cold periods, for instance the Dark Ages or the early Iron Age, and also the intervening  earlier warm periods from the Roman, the Minoan and especially the elephant within the Holocene Interglacial that began with the most recent retreat of the glaciers some 14,000 years ago. That was the Holocene Climatic Optimum. And so naturally the alarmists went after it, which as noted above is what got me thinking about this whole aspect of the issue.

Narrator:

Various famous reconstructions of the Holocene exist, and of longer historical periods, that were problematic for AGW theorists. It was far from obvious in charts like this one that temperature and CO2 had anything to do with one another, let alone that the latter was driving the former. But reality is complicated, so there were plenty of promising ways to fix the “Holocene Temperature Conundrum” that temperature and CO2 don’t seem to correlate for most of the last 14,000 years. One would be showing that the temperature readings were wrong; another that the CO2 readings were; and yet another that some identifiable external “forcing” had temporarily overridden and thus obscured the key relationship during the period in question.

John Robson:

And the term “conundrum” is revealing here because this failure to correlate wasn’t controversial or a subject for “normal science” under the older paradigm. Only with this new and exciting understanding was there a puzzle here to solve, a challenge to researchers, and they responded to it. For instance, someone claimed regarding one of our videos that a particular 2021 paper by “Bova, S., Rosenthal, Y., Liu, Z., & Herbert, T. D.” “resolves the ‘Holocene temperature conundrum’”. And the same Dr. Liu and some colleagues had coined that term back in 2014, so he’d spent 11 years trying to crack the puzzle that if you compare temperature and atmospheric CO2 throughout the period they only move in the same direction for a few hundred years out of 15,000.

Thus this “Holocene Temperature Conundrum” became an important thing for them to “mop up”. And indeed various understandable if increasingly unconvincing efforts to slay it have been so persistent that Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit was tracking them nearly 20 years ago. Now, I call them understandable because it’s what “normal science” does. But I also call them “increasingly unconvincing” because one expects initial efforts in a field to be tentative. But if they’re fumbling or kludging past a certain point, it does get fishy.

And let me be very clear here, to backtrack a little, the existence of conundra is not fatal to theories. Indeed, some people scorn the troglodytes who resisted Einstein’s theory of relativity at the macro end of physics and the contemporaneous paradigm shift at the micro end to quantum theory. But as Einstein himself objected, in the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, those two appeared, and still appear, to be incompatible. But that didn’t stop anyone from using them, including to create a working nuclear bomb.

In fact, the whole point of normal science is to resolve conundrums big and small, one by one. And who doesn’t admire the researcher who eats and sleeps in the lab, battles through failure after failure, and finally emerges unshaven and haggard shouting “Eureka” only to realize it’s 6 am not 6 pm? But past a key point, that kind of enthusiasm crosses over into zealotry, and cleverness turns into contrivance or even trickery.

To call stubbornness or excessive ingenuity in interpreting data “fraud” isn’t quite right. But it is true that sufficiently tendentious handling of data is culpably unscientific, including on the Medieval Warm Period, brushing aside so many other, and better, proxy data, from speleothems to glacial moraines, that do show a significant warming around 1000 AD from Peru to New Zealand to China to Alaska, and then a cooling around 1400, apparently unrelated to CO2. Moreover, in the case of this particular paradigm, this kind of tricky handling of evidence showed up early, within 15 years, and that’s a warning sign.

As Kuhn explains of an earlier revolution, in astronomy, the Ptolemaic system dating back to classical times really was very fruitful in solving useful puzzles for a long time, with a great deal of “normal science” systematically clearing up anomalies like, say, “precession of the equinoxes”. But, by the late Middle Ages it was looking, again, fishy, because:

Narrator:

“as time went on, a man looking at the net result of the normal research effort of many astronomers could observe that astronomy’s complexity was increasing far more rapidly than its accuracy and that a discrepancy corrected in one place was likely to show up in another.”

Eventually it reached the point that Copernicus himself said the Ptolemaic system had become a “monster”.

John Robson:

And while I know things move faster nowadays, I do want to stress here that the CO2/man-made greenhouse-gas theory of anthropogenic warming is getting monstrously ugly in its approach to data after only a few years, rather than decades or centuries. Indeed while I was working on the Holocene video, I’d begun wondering what the alarmists hoped to do with past “interglacials” within the two-pole Pleistocene “ice age” that began around 2.58 million years ago. Because the last four all seem to have been warmer than our current Holocene without a rise in man-made CO2 or any other kind.

Instead it seems they made a more ambitious leap… and did not nail the landing. A major study just claimed to have demonstrated this link between atmospheric CO2 and temperature not just for 14,000 years, or 2.8 million, but nearly 500 million. And it was hailed as a massive triumph of “normal science” in this new paradigm, though it wasn’t usually framed that way.

But unfortunately, as we have discussed elsewhere, this study suffered two massive flaws. First, the reconstructions of both temperature and CO2 were unconvincing, and they were unconvincing in ways that suggested that the researchers knew what they were looking for and were determined to find it come hellish conditions or low CO2. And second, even so, the study actually showed no correlation at all throughout the entire Mesozoic, the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous, a period of nearly 200 million years. So they got a whole stack of red sixes of spades, and couldn’t see them.

Now with this point you may be thinking, if it’s that bad why haven’t they all bailed? Aren’t they just faking it? Aren’t they liars? And again, I say no. But to try to understand why and how people defend a theory that is in fact coming apart at the seams, I want to go a little bit further into epistemology, quoting another book I read right after I read Kuhn, and partly because he recommended it. Willard van Orman Quine’s book From a Logical Point of View.

OK, call me a geek. But the fact is, this passage changed my life, so here we go.

Narrator:

“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges…. total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. Truth values have to be redistributed over some of our statements. Reevaluation of some statements entails reevaluation of others, because of their logical interconnections – the logical laws being in turn simply certain further statements of the system, certain further elements of the field…. But the total field is so underdetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to reevaluate in the light of any single contrary experience.”

John Robson:

Indeed, any scientific paradigm that’s robust enough to yield a research program will be able to adapt to unexpected data or it would shatter at the first apparent difficulty. But again, there comes a point, there must come a point, where the adjustments are too artificial, too frequent, and too prone to create monsters rather than clarity.

To cite an example that isn’t even scientific, let alone climatic, consider how many people saw world politics in the 1930s as involving ridiculous quarrels in unpronounceable places (for instance Neville Chamberlain’s now infamous dismissal of Hitler’s aggression against Czechoslovakia as a “quarrel in a far away country, between people of whom we know nothing”), or else to see it as the virtuous left against the evil right. But then, when Hitler and Stalin made a deal to dismember Poland, and then Hitler attacked France and Britain, most people rather suddenly adopted a dramatic new paradigm in which the liberal golden mean stood against totalitarianism.

This massive intellectual as well as policy revolution, indeed an intellectual revolution driving a policy revolution, then prevailed at least until the Vietnam War, leaving those who did not adapt stranded amid tortuous rationalizations. In fact, even Chamberlain changed his mind.

Which brings me to why Anthropogenic Global Warming is not fraud, but is disintegrating surprisingly early. The kind of weird data manipulation that you get, including Mann’s tree ring legerdemain, and the often ferocious air of certainty from random online commentators to scientists like, well, Michael Mann, brings us to one final observation from Kuhn, about the temperament necessary to do science, and deal with the fact that uncertainties remain and some anomalies resist repeated attacks.

Narrator:

“Though history is unlikely to record their names, some men have undoubtedly been driven to desert science because of their inability to tolerate crisis. Like artists, creative scientists must occasionally be able to live in a world out of joint – elsewhere I have described that necessity as ‘the essential tension’ implicit in scientific research…. what we previously called the puzzles that institute normal science exist only because no paradigm that provides a basis for scientific research ever completely resolves all its problems.”

John Robson:

Unfortunately, climate science has been hijacked, from within and from without, by people who lack that critical temperament and instead insist intolerantly that this one science has resolved all current and indeed all possible problems, that 97% or 99.8% or some such absurd number agree about everything and always will.

So, let us close, on this vexed question of how to debate between conflicting paradigms and know when one has passed its sell date, by quoting something from yet another historian, John Lukacs, in At the End of an Age.

In his youth, Lukacs recalls, he had first embraced naïve objectivity, something akin to the pre-Kuhn vision of science, and then gone over to radical relativism that undermines all thought. But finally he resolved that conundrum by concluding the following.

Narrator:

“it is possible (and there exist, fortunately, examples of it) for a historian or a scientist or, indeed, for any thinking man to present evidences, from a proper employment of sources, that are contrary to his prejudices, or to his politics, or indeed to the inclinations of his mind. Whenever this happens, it manifests in his decision to present (which usually means: not to exclude) evidences not supporting his ideas or theses. Something – not merely by the external material evidence, but something internal and spiritual – compels him to do so. I prefer not to name this kind of intellectual (and moral) probity ‘objective’ (or even ‘detached’). ‘Objectivity’ is a method: I prefer the word honesty, which is something else (and more) than a method: within it there resides at least a modicum of humility (and in history, being the knowledge that human beings have of other human beings, even a spark of understanding, of a human empathy).”

John Robson:

In our headlong rush to celebrate those brave rebels who challenged scientific orthodoxy over the years, there’s a key point that often gets overlooked. In science, as elsewhere, for every supposed crank ultimately vindicated, hundreds or even thousands were just as wrong as they seemed. And the Anthropogenic Global Warming crowd, despite a pretty good run over the past 40 years, are very much in danger of turning out to have been cranks.

When the theory was first produced, and I do want to be fair, the young rebels understandably felt something akin to Keats’ words on first reading Chapman’s Homer:

Narrator:

“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific – and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”

John Robson:

Indeed. And at first they swept all before them. But very quickly, too quickly, they started running into problems their “normal science” couldn’t mop up, and surprisingly quickly they started hiding it under the rug instead of coming clean.

To avoid becoming cranks, to salvage their paradigm and their reputations, they must do a better job of handling data, and of handling criticism. And I don’t think they can, not because they’re exhausted but because their theory is.

For the Climate Discussion Nexus, I’m John Robson, and I know a red six of spades when I see one.