I do not take it as gospel, but allow me to explain how and why by replying to your other post where you refer to my paper. As to your pursuit objection, I do not claim that consensus is the most important part of doing science, not at all. As a matter of fact, I actually have published joint work on the pursuitworthiness of theories, that might be, given your comment, of interest to you. Here is the reference: (2012) ‘The Rationality of Scientific Reasoning in the Context of Pursuit: Drawing Appropriate Distinctions’, Philosophica, 86, pp. 51-82. (with Dunja Seselja and Christian Strasser) If you are unable to access it, send me a mail (you can find my address in the link of the original post above).
Comment on Distinguishing the academic from the interface consensus by LaszloKosolosky
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Comment on Distinguishing the academic from the interface consensus by Faustino
Dave, quite so – see my replies to Laszlo.
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Comment on Distinguishing the academic from the interface consensus by Faustino
Thanks, I’ll be away and offline for several days, but will follow up on return. That was my quick initial response, driven in part by the fact that almost all of the authors of social science papers referenced by Judith have accepted that the consensus is 100% correct. My later posts are more considered.
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Comment on Distinguishing the academic from the interface consensus by Wagathon
The Sun also sets…
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Comment on Distinguishing the academic from the interface consensus by Rob Ellison
We find that the air temperature anomaly (the deviation from the 1961–1990 mean) is significantly and positively correlated with changes in RS. We estimate that the global RS in 2008 (that is, the flux integrated over the Earth’s land surface over 2008) was 98±12 Pg C and that it increased by 0.1 Pg C yr-1 between 1989 and 2008, implying a global RS response to air temperature (Q10) of 1.5.
Previous studies have highlighted the occurrence and intensity of El Niño–Southern Oscillation as important drivers of the interannual variability of the atmospheric CO2 growth rate, but the underlying biogeophysical mechanisms governing such connections remain unclear. Here we show a strong and persistent coupling (r2 ≈ 0.50) between interannual variations of the CO2 growth rate and tropical land–surface air temperature during 1959 to 2011, with a 1 °C tropical temperature anomaly leading to a 3.5 ± 0.6 Petagrams of carbon per year (PgC/y) CO2 growth-rate anomaly on average.
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/32/13061.abstract
A new stomatal proxy-based record of CO concentrations ([CO2]), based on Betula nana (dwarf birch)leaves from the Hässeldala Port sedimentary sequence in south-eastern Sweden, is presented. The recordis of high chronological resolution and spans most of Greenland Interstadial 1 (GI-1a to 1c, Allerød pollenzone), Greenland Stadial 1 (GS-1, Younger Dryas pollen zone) and the very beginning of the Holocene(Preboreal pollen zone). The record clearly demonstrates that i) [CO2] were significantly higher than usually reported for the Last Termination and ii) the overall pattern of CO2 evolution through the studied time period is fairly dynamic, with significant abrupt fluctuations in [CO2] when the climate moved from interstadial to stadial state and vice versa. A new loss-on-ignition chemical record (used here as a proxyfor temperature) lends independent support to the Hässeldala Port [CO2] record.
It seems quite clear that CO2 flux to the atmosphere changes with temperature. The distinction between natural and anthropogenic warming in the last century therefore has clear implications for atmospheric CO2 content. The question there is how much the modern solar grand maxima – including amplification mechanisms – drove 20th century warming and how much will be reversed in the 21st century.
People are making fundamental changes to multiply coupled, complex, dynamic nonlinear systems with emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, sulphides, black carbon and tropospheric ozone precursors. Along with losses of soil carbon in agricultural soils and degradation of ecosystems.
The science is far from simple and the prognosis far from obvious. The planet is in a cool regime for 20 to 40 years from 1998. These regimes are the result of internal and emergent reorganization of the climate system. Shifts between regimes are abrupt.
Abrupt climate change is technically a chaotic bifurcation in a complex, dynamic system – equivalently a phase transition, a catastrophe (in the sense of René Thom), or a tipping point. These are all terms that are used in relation to the theory of deterministic chaos that originated with the work of Edward Lorenz in the 1960’s. Lorenz started his convection model calculation in the middle of a run by inputting values truncated to three decimal places in place of the original six. By all that was known – it should not have made much of a difference. The rest is history in the discovery of chaos theory as the third great idea – along with relativity and quantum mechanics – of 20th century physics. It has applications in ecology, physiology, economics, electronics, weather, climate, planetary orbits and much else. In climate it is driving a new math of networked systems.
‘Technically, an abrupt climate change occurs when the climate system is forced to cross some threshold, triggering a transition to a new state at a rate determined by the climate system itself and faster than the cause. Chaotic processes in the climate system may allow the cause of such an abrupt climate change to be undetectably small…
Modern climate records include abrupt changes that are smaller and briefer than in paleoclimate records but show that abrupt climate change is not restricted to the distant past.’ (NAS, 2002)
In the words of Michael Ghil (2013) the ‘global climate system is composed of a number of subsystems – atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere – each of which has distinct characteristic times, from days and weeks to centuries and millennia. Each subsystem, moreover, has its own internal variability, all other things being constant, over a fairly broad range of time scales. These ranges overlap between one subsystem and another. The interactions between the subsystems thus give rise to climate variability on all time scales.’
The US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) defined abrupt climate change as a new climate paradigm. A paradigm in the scientific sense is a theory that explains observations. A new science paradigm is one that better explains data – in this case climate data – than the old theory. The new theory says that climate change occurs as discrete jumps in the system. Climate is more like a kaleidoscope – shake it up and a new pattern emerges – than a control knob with a linear gain. The theory of abrupt climate change is the most modern – and powerful – in climate science and has profound implications for the evolution of climate this century and beyond. The new theory suggests that global warming is not guaranteed and that climate surprises are inevitable.
The theory suggests that the system is pushed by greenhouse gas changes and warming – as well as solar intensity and Earth orbital eccentricities – past a threshold at which stage the components start to interact chaotically in multiple and changing negative and positive feedbacks – as tremendous energies cascade through powerful subsystems. Some of these changes have a regularity within broad limits and the planet responds with a broad regularity in changes of ice, cloud, Atlantic thermohaline circulation and ocean and atmospheric circulation.
Things are not so simple as some caustically insist. The world is likely not warming for decades – and the next climate shift may not be to yet warmer conditions as the planet passes the threshold of Bond Event Zero. But the systems are wild and unpredictable – the consequences of making fundamental changes to these systems cannot be known.
The rational policy responses include fast mitigation of black carbon, methane, nitrous oxide, sulphides, tropospheric ozone precursors as well as social and economic development policies that lead to an increase in welfare and decrease population pressures. As well as encouraging energy research and development.
As for the post – I find this stuff unreadable. Academic waffle divorced from Earth sciences and so ethereal it can have no impact at all on the visceral fables of the zeitgeist. It is the difference between Bishop Berkeley and Samuel Johnson. Musing of insubstantiality and kicking a rock. We remember how silly Berkley seems in the light of Johnson’s refutation. The only hope is that reality likewise will assert itself and the only guarantee is that both sides will misconstrue it for as long as possible.
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Comment on Distinguishing the academic from the interface consensus by LaszloKosolosky
Dear Faustino,
I am happy to reply, as I’m learning new things as I go along.
In response to your concern on uncertainties being looked over: That is exactly the reason why we came up with an account of consensus formation, called meta-consensus or a social account of consensus formation (see second part of the paper). This is an account that allows for the uncertainties to be addressed in full, and opens up the possibility (in combination with the ideas on interface consensus) to address other questions like which measures should be taken given the evidence we have available to us. So I think we are in agreement on this, as I do not take the goal based consensus approach (see paper for more details on this).
In response to your communication remark: Again I agree. Also here we think our approach brings something new to the fore in being able to share these disagreements with the public, as valuable dissent is not lost along the way (see the comments we raise in opposition to Beatty & Moore’s approach in the paper).
In response to your gospel remark: I guess we have a misunderstanding here, this is philosophical language being used. What I present in the quote you use is an ideal scenario (which is not the case) on the continuum from consensus to plurality. So you have to read it more as a utopia, like if we would agree on something in full (all people would agree and all mechanisms/causal relations would be fairly obvious) then policy-making would be fairly evident as there is but one sensible ‘storyline’ to follow. What is important here is thus the ‘would’ in the position, I never subscribe to this position, as a matter of fact I show the opposite, that the situation is often very complex (again, I only show it for the NIH, but I can expand the argument for climate science as well). Hope this is clear.
In response to the role of scientists: I agree that policy making is not the scientist’s role, not only for the reasons you mention, but also because the job does not match up with the scientist’s expertise. Rather, I am thinking about including a special type of expertise at the interface level, which would be interactional expertise (defined in the work of Collins & Evans), where a person is an expert in the sense that he or she is able to understand the scientific debates in a particular field, but is not an expert in the sense that he or she contributes themselves to the debate (by publishing original work, et cetera). This special type of negotiators would have their expertise in communicating scientific evidence to the public, and hence other professions could be those kind of experts here, such as, sociologists of science, historians of science, and, if I may, philosophers of science. Of course, there will always be exceptions, but this would confirm the rule. Anyway, I’m doing new research on this as we speak, so thanks for bringing it up.
Hope I have answered your comments.
Regards,
Laszlo
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Comment on Distinguishing the academic from the interface consensus by kim
It’s very difficult for outsiders to see that the so-called ‘consensus’ has been warped by a failure of peer review in climate science. Of course, there is much more to the evil dynamic than perverse peer review, but it causes many to stumble right out of the block, because they see peer review and consensus forming work in their own field.
Our delightful correspondent, Laszlo, suffers from this.
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Comment on Distinguishing the academic from the interface consensus by Eddy Turbulence
One reason the c word continues to rear its ugly head is that AGW is speculation is on what climate will be like in the future, which cannot be validated until such time occurs – keeping even even the most rigorous model output part of unvalidated prediction not validated theory.
What we do know from observations is that temperature trends of the satellite era are all less than what was predicted by Hansen in 1988.
And we know that since 2001, all temperature trends are less than those predicted by the IPCC4.
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Comment on Distinguishing the academic from the interface consensus by LaszloKosolosky
I agree about the groupthink worry, as this is a big issue in any consensus approach, especially the ‘black box’ approaches that focus on consensus as a goal and not a procedure. In other forthcoming work, I show that our social account of consensus is actually best equiped to deal with groupthink, given the other alternatives. In this paper we apply it to the Challenger spaceshuttle explosion, but it might be a good idea to apply it to climate science as well, although it will require more work as you pointed out yourself. In any case, here is the reference, but I have to warn you it is in Dutch. We are thinking about publishing it in English, but we’ll have to sort it our first with the copywright issues: (in press) ‘Groepsbeslissingen: kwaliteit, autoriteit en vertrouwen’, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie (with Tim Baartmans)
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Comment on Greening the world’s deserts by Nick Stokes (@nstokesvic)
“That’s 35 Megatons/km2.” Oops – early morning here. 35 ktons/km2. So it would take irrigating 8000 km2 to produce 250 Mtons/yr.
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Comment on Distinguishing the academic from the interface consensus by kim
As Don has already pointed out, who deems the deemers. Laszlo, in his ideal world, finds them easily.
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Comment on Distinguishing the academic from the interface consensus by LaszloKosolosky
Don’t fully agree here, at least part of the struggle is epistemic, as we showed in the case of the NIH for adequacy concerns and contestability concerns, which are both regarded as epistemic worries. Both are part of the epistemic toolbox consensus conferences have at their disposal, and at these conferences there is (or at least should be) a struggle between establishing consensus and acknowledging plurality.
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Comment on Greening the world’s deserts by kim
Thanks, Nick. I wondered how deep you were irrigating, but not being particularly numerate I let it slide. Nice to know I can catch a couple of orders of magnitude, though.
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Comment on Distinguishing the academic from the interface consensus by LaszloKosolosky
Thank you Joshua for your interest in my work. And of course thank you Judith.
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Comment on Greening the world’s deserts by kim
Heh, you see? It took three.
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Comment on Distinguishing the academic from the interface consensus by LaszloKosolosky
You make an excellent point here, and although we do not engage with it in the paper, there is some interesting work on exactly this influence by Justin Biddle and Julian Reiss, both philosophers of science.
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Comment on Distinguishing the academic from the interface consensus by Theo Goodwin
“which are both regarded as epistemic worries.”
Circular reasoning.
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Comment on Distinguishing the academic from the interface consensus by Steven Mosher
Bennett’s recommendations ?
Anything Goes?
perhaps you meant Dennett.
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Comment on Distinguishing the academic from the interface consensus by Srink
This is a very good post, judith, and a rather nice article by laszlo. However, one issue is whether an academic/ technical consensus must necessarily converge to the truth: we certainly hope so but is hardly assured. In any case, the issues with climate science and the potential existence of an interface consensus here are, all things considered, still on relatively short time scales, i.e. unsustainable in the long term. The notion of a meta consensus is somewhat trickier though, it’s unclear to me that it is necessary that it be established formally, and I can’t think of a particular example in other fields of science.
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Comment on Distinguishing the academic from the interface consensus by LaszloKosolosky
I will have a look at it as soon as I find the time, but I can already try to answer your point here shortly. I think trust is indeed an important factor here, as is integrity. I am currently putting together a grant proposal that connects both of these topics to this issue. I have some co-authored work on trust, although it is very formal, it captures the difference between distrust and mistrust, which I think solves part of the break-down problem you mention. Climate science is not discussed in the paper, but the argument can be extended with some extra work. Here is the reference:‘The semantics of untrustworthiness’, Topoi, 2014, TOPO-D-13-00035R2 (with Giuseppe Primiero)
And thanks for the link!
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