Re: [asa] Creation Care

David,
 
I understand that you do not completely grasp all the data and issues surrounding climate science. Neither do I. There are many unanswered questions in my own mind about it. I think it is human nature to doubt things that we do not understand. So I want to point out a couple of things relevant here:
 
The US government has spent many millions of dollars funding climate change research. I wish I had a more exact figure on this, but I bet it would be startling.
There are thousands of journals articles in tens of peer-reviewed journals where specialists who are most familiar with the generation and quality of the data have placed their arguments into the public record.
There is essentially a complete concensus among the specialists that human activity, esp. the burning of fossil fuels, is dramatically altering Earth's atmosphere and climate, and that alteration will lead to devastating effects, including the extinction of many species and the destruction of human habitat.
 
Given all of this, the rest of us have a choice - do we trust what the specialists are saying, or not?
 
You say there is no argument from authority. But do you believe that so many of those specialists are simply turning a blind eye to some critically important fact? Do you think that the specialists have not considered all of these objections you raise, as well as many others that you and I don't even yet imagine?
 
We have spent an incredible amount of funding on this, and the answer comes back very clearly - this is a problem.
 
Note that here I'm concerned with climate science - climate policy inputs a whole new set of variables where there is no concensus.
 
Best,
Charles
 
 
_______________________________
Charles W. Carrigan, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Geology
Olivet Nazarene Univ., Dept. of Physical Sciences
One University Ave.
Bourbonnais, IL 60914
PH: (815) 939-5346
FX: (815) 939-5071
ccarriga@olivet.edu
http://geology.olivet.edu/
 
"To a naturalist nothing is indifferent;
the humble moss that creeps upon the stone
is equally interesting as the lofty pine which so beautifully adorns the valley or the mountain:
but to a naturalist who is reading in the face of the rocks the annals of a former world,
the mossy covering which obstructs his view,
and renders indistinguishable the different species of stone,
is no less than a serious subject of regret."
          - James Hutton
_______________________________

>>> "David Opderbeck" <dopderbeck@gmail.com> 1/19/2007 8:08 AM >>>

Strikingly similar to the "evolution controversy".
 
Charles, in some ways I think you're right, and that's unfortunate I think. Our gut reaction is to shy away from questioning the consensus because we don't want to get caught with our pants down around our ankles (like many of us did when we first had to face the facts about YEC).
 
At the same time, though, the argument from "consensus" bothers me deeply. At the end of the day, it's just an argument from authority, which is no argument at all. I'm not willing to commit to a radical greenhouse gas policy only because climatologists have reached a consensus about a warming trend. First, I need to understand exactly what the consensus really reflects. Then, I need to understand the basis for the consenus. Then, I need to understand the social and economic implications, which requires input from other disciplines.
 
In this regard, I think it is fair to point out that climatology is a relatively young science, that weather systems are dynamic and notoriously hard to predict over the long term, and that the computing power simply doesn't yet exist to model climate change in any realistic detail. Thus, while the science so far strongly supports a human-caused warming trend, it can't yet say with any degree of accuracy how rapid or extensive that trend will be over a century or more. Do even climatologists dispute this?
 
It's also fair to point out, I think, that, while there is a non-trivial volume of climate modeling literature, comparatively speaking, the literature remains thin compared to other established disciplines. I read about one literature review that surveyed 900 or so journal articles, which I took to be the corpus of major work in the field. It would be interesting to see how many authors and academic institutions are represented in those 900 articles, how many of those articles present truly new models or approaches to modeling, how extensively the models have been cross-checked through work in other disciplines, etc. It's not a trivial amount, I'm sure, but it doesn't approach the volume of work that's been done, say, on biological evolution.
 
Finally, I think it's fair to point out that there are politics involved in this science. This isn't to suggest that the people publishing in this field are purposefully misrepresenting results or engaging in any kind of unethical activity. It is to suggest, however, that the politics might influence funding opportunities, doctoral and post-doc work, research choices, departmental hiring and tenure decisions, and peer review, perhaps in subtle ways. Maybe this sounds like some kind of attack on the scientists working in this field, but it shouldn't sound that way. Everyone, everywhere, in every occupation, is influenced to some degree by social and political pressure. With a highly charged political hot potato like warming, it defies experience to believe that the science is pristinely objective.
 
Of course all of the above sounds like the criticisms ID folks raise against evolutionary science. I guess there's an extent to which I have some sympathy for those criticisms on the sociological level. Consensus should always be subject to challenge. Even scientists with the best motives are influenced by social and political factors. Where warming is different from ID/evolutionary science, I think, is in the extent of the conclusions that legitimately can be drawn from the science to date and in the breadth of the consensus. The volume of work done, the cross-disciplinarity, the correlation with predictions and observations, all are far more extensive in evolutionary science than in the science of climate change at this point in the respective research programs. At the end of the day, it seems like apples and oranges to me.
 
 
 

On 1/18/07, Charles Carrigan <CCarriga@olivet.edu> wrote:
>
>
> Strikingly similar to the "evolution controversy".
>
> Best,
> Charles
>
> _______________________________
> Charles W. Carrigan, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor of Geology
> Olivet Nazarene Univ., Dept. of Physical Sciences
> One University Ave.
> Bourbonnais, IL 60914
> PH: (815) 939-5346
> FX: (815) 939-5071
> ccarriga@olivet.edu
> http://geology.olivet.edu/
>
> "To a naturalist nothing is indifferent;
> the humble moss that creeps upon the stone
> is equally interesting as the lofty pine which so beautifully adorns the valley or the mountain:
> but to a naturalist who is reading in the face of the rocks the annals of a former world,
> the mossy covering which obstructs his view,
> and renders indistinguishable the different species of stone,
> is no less than a serious subject of regret."
> - James Hutton
> _______________________________
>
>
> >>> "Randy Isaac" < randyisaac@adelphia.net> 1/18/2007 9:05 PM >>>
>
>
> Dave,
> One of the questions I particularly wanted to investigate was the source and extent of the controversy and uncertainty. As we all know, the key to good science is to know what you know and know what you don't know. Folks outside any particular specialty often don't understand what is known and what isn't. In climatology, the factors are so vast and complex that it is very easy to believe that we know very little. What I found is that the "controversy" and "uncertainty" within the scientific community of climatology is vast indeed--but not regarding the big picture of global warming trends, anthropogenic influences, likely consequences of action or inaction, etc. The uncertainties lie in the range of specific impacts and detailed factors. The source of the idea that climate models are very inaccurate and highly untrustworthy seems to be those who are outside the professional community and who amplify various uncertainties, extrapolating them to the point where we can't really trust what the scientists say.
> In other words, the scientific literature has no significant controversy. One review I found in Science scanned 928 papers on the topic and found 75% explicitly or implicitly in agreement and 25% that didn't address that issue and none with a contrarian view. Another review analyzed 2,000 papers and found 2 that disagreed with the consensus perspective. That means that contrarian views are being expressed elsewhere and not in the professional scientific literature. No one has published a model that substantively differs from Jim Hansen's climate modelling, for example. Quantitative details differ but the conclusions aren't significantly different. In other words, people outside the professional community seem to have taken differences and uncertainties of details and extrapolated to a "controversy" which isn't really going on inside the community. There are also some scientists who have published alternative scenarios--like a strong solar effect, which I discussed with some of the folks--and have received a lot of publicity outside the scientific community while the mainstream folks have published corrections to the erroneous assumptions in those papers. I don't consider that a "real controversy."
>
> If anyone is interested, I can provide a few more details in coming days.
>
> Randy
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>
> From: David Opderbeck
> To: Randy Isaac
> Cc: asa@calvin.edu
> Sent: Thursday, January 18, 2007 7:28 PM
> Subject: Re: [asa] Creation Care
>
>
> To my surprise, for example, the global warming issue is quite clear with no controversy in the community of scientific expertise in the field. I found that global warming is significant and is primarily due to anthropogenic sources.
>
> Based on what I've read and also not being an expert by any stretch, I'm inclined to agree that warming is a real problem with anthropegenic sources. I don't know how you can say, however, that the issue is "quite clear with no controversy in the community of scientific expertise in the field." What I've seen suggests the question is clear as mud, particularly when it comes to the extent of human causation and the projected rate, trends and effects of warming, and further that every position in the scientific community is significantly affected by politics. Why are you saying it's so easy to brush off every criticism?
>
>

-- 
David W. Opderbeck
Web:  http://www.davidopderbeck.com
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