By Kevin Meyer
The climate change world is in a bit of a tizzy this week over the resignation of Dr. Ivar Giaever, a nobel laureate physicist currently teaching at my alma mater, from the American Physical Society. What is his beef?
Being told, by a scientific society no less, that questioning is no longer acceptable. I thought that's what science is all about.
Well, Mr. Vice President [Al Gore], meet Ivar Giaever, a 1973 physics Nobel Laureate who resigned last week from the American Physical Society in protest over the group's insistence that evidence of man-made global warming is "incontrovertible."
In an email to the society, Mr. Giaever—who works at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute—wrote that "The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me . . . that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this 'warming' period."
Mr. Giaever was an American Physical Society fellow, an honor bestowed on "only half of one percent" of the members, according to a spokesman.
Pretty smart guy. He's not the only one.
He follows in the footsteps of University of California at Santa Barbara Emeritus Professor of Physics Harold Lewis, a former APS fellow who resigned in 2010, calling global warming "the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist."
Other dissenters include Stanford University physicist and Nobelist Robert B. Laughlin, deceased green revolution icon and Nobelist Norman Borlaug, Princeton physicist William Happer and World Federation of Scientists President Antonino Zichichi. Our point is not that all of these men agree on climate change, much less mankind's contribution to it, only that to one degree or another they maintain an open mind about warming or what to do about it.
That last statement is the critical part. Whether or not climate change, especially human-triggered climate change, is a reality is not the point. Regardless of whether it is or not most of us probably agree that it is good policy to do what we can to lessen the environmental impact of human activity.
One of the least savory traits of climate-change advocates is how they've tried to bully anyone who keeps an open mind. This is true of many political projects, but it is or ought to be anathema to the scientific method.
The point is that we should never stop questioning – or try to prevent questioning – even when a large majority of very smart people believe a concept should be considered fact. Examples?
- The Earth is flat.
- The Earth is at the center of the universe.
- You must have an MRP system to adequately manage manufacturing operations.
- U.S. companies cannot compete with low labor cost countries like China.
In most cases the opinion of a group of smart people probably is fact. Luckily in some cases there were some strong-willed individuals, equally ostracized, who continued to question presumed fact.
Never stop questioning.
Alison Cummins says
And if I insist that it’s important to keep an open mind, that the earth likely is flat (hey, it looks flat to me), that the pictures from space were faked and that astronomy is “pseudoscientific fraud,” does that make me an open-minded scientist? Or a denialist?
If you’re going to make comparisons like these you need to be able to show how to distinguish between scientific open-mindedness and pseudoscientific denialism. There is a difference.
Pete says
If your readers would like to hear from someone actually engaged in collecting and interpreting climate data over a very long period, “Storms of My Grandchildren” by James Hansen (Columbia University, NASA) is an informative book. Not the easiest book to read. Yes, this is the guy the Bush administration tried to muzzle. About that open minded discussion …
Kevin says
Alison,
You’re partly right – someone that today, after we can literally fly around the earth – that claimed the earth is flat would be considered a nut. But there’s a bit of a difference between that and multiple Nobel laureates who claim a 1 degree change in temperature over 100 years cannot be “incontrovertible.” In fact, if multiple Nobel laureates even today claimed the earth “might not be round” I’d probably listen and not assume they were nuts.
I personally believe humans probably have had an impact, and we need to change. But am I willing to claim “incontrovertible” conclusions based on data that required extremely precise measuring techniques decades before they were invented, or else projection thereof? Let alone say they had no right to question? Sorry, no.
Bill Waddell says
Allison,
Yours is the standard response of the politicaly correct, environmental extreme gang: You are right simply because you know you are right, and anyone who disagrees lacks your principles and intellect. No rebuttal of Dr Giaever’s facts and logic – instead assassinate his character by branding him a ‘pseudoscientific denialist’.
That tactic actually lends credibility to Dr Giaever – sends a strong message that the good doctor might be onto something, else you could have and would have eloquently proven his facts wrong.
When your only rebuttal is name-calling, your position is very shaky indeed.
Alison Cummins says
Bill,
I didn’t call anyone any names. I stated that pseudoscientific denialists can exist and I asked Kevin how he tells the difference between denialism and legitimate open-minded questioning. I didn’t answer the question myself or state any conclusions wrt anyone in particular.
You are calling me names, not responding to my question. I’m surprised.
Alison Cummins says
Kevin,
Everyone has the right to question. Nobody has the right to be taken seriously by people who know what they’re talking about unless they’ve earned it.
“Multiple Nobel Laureates” — The folks you mention are not weighing in on their own fields of expertise.* Given what little I know about Linus Pauling, just knowing that someone is really smart and used to be a star in an unrelated field is not enough to convince me that an entire field of scientific inquiry with a consensus accepted by a large majority is entirely a fraud, or even likely to be.
For me to take someone’s questions seriously I will want to know if their work has done anything to advance that particular field of inquiry. Spouting about more informed people being frauds and bullies is pretty much standard crank talk and a warning to me that the person is likely a denialist. Real scientists don’t do that. Real scientists make predictions and show the numbers.
Of course everyone can question. But not all questions are equally well-supported. It’s hard for non-experts to know which questions are legitimate and which ones are are not, which is why I’m always interested in how other people go about making their determinations.
__________________
* Ivar Giaever: Solid state physics. Resigned age 82.
Harold Lewis: high energy physics, superconducting materials, solid state physics and plasmas. Resigned age 87.
Robert B. Laughlin: not an AGW dissenter.
Norman Borlaug: an agronomist. At age 93 he said he didn’t know whether the world was warming or not.
William Happer: optics and spectrometry. (Now we’re getting somewhere, but he’s still not a climatologist.) Not a nobelist either. Not sure how old he is, but probably testified to the US Senate Environment and Public Works committee in his seventies.
Antonino Zichichi: nuclear physics. Appears to be a crank. Was 79 when quoted as saying that global warming models are “incoherent and invalid.”
Out of the six dissenters mentioned, one is not a dissenter and only one appears to have a background in a relevant field.
Being old and being right are absolutely not incompatible, but these folks are not currently at the top of their game and are largely outsiders to current climatology research.
I’d take Happer seriously, but from my brief glance at Wikipedia it’s not clear that the others are contributing anything to the advancement of climatology. I’d also want to know how Happer’s views fit in with the consensus and why the consensus rejects them (if it does).
Ethelred says
Pseudoscientific Denialist. Cool title, I wonder if there are any openings for one of those positions on Monster.com. Of course, that’s what the “concrete heads” call the lean thinkers, too innit? They’ll show reams of spreadsheet data so thick you could shovel it, and claim that the lean “stuff” is pseudoscience and that you are illogical for pushing it. And, don’t we sometimes push the same attitude on those who don’t readily buy-in to our lean utopian ideals also? Honestly? Anyway, I gotta go add that title to my resume. (“It says here that you are a certified Pseudoscientific Denialist, and, ah….well, just what is that, exactly?)
John Buzolic says
I couldn’t be bothered with the climate change debate. As a lean thinker I believe polution is waste and waste is to be eliminated (carbon emissions included) I see no reason to argue about who did what to the climate because a clean environment and a stable climate are by-products of my lean ideals.
Companies that deny climate change as a justification to continue their antiquated practices are just lazy.
Kevin says
John,
Excellent point – waste is waste and we should always work to minimize it.
Alison,
You’re right, a Nobel doesn’t exactly mean smarts, competence or performance even in the field of their Nobel… Krugman and a recent president of ours come to mind. And last time I checked Al Gore doesn’t have a degree in climatology. So I guess I agree with your point since I’ve never been able take any of them seriously.
Where is the line between “denialist” and “questioner”? It seems to be in the eye of the person defending the position being questioned – in effect a limp defense in itself. I don’t deny global warming or even human-caused global warming – it could very well be the case. In fact it most likely is. But I see enough problems in evidence, including falsified evidence, to make me still question the relevance of minute statistical changes. Is questioning data really that dangerous to you?
Bill Waddell says
Allison,
In fact your implication that the dctor is a “pseudoscientific denialist” was rather clear – glad to see you are wisely backing away from it.
“these folks are not currently at the top of their game and are largely outsiders to current climatology research” … as evidenced by what? The fact that they do not agree with the politically correct crowd?
What exactly is a “climatologist”? I clicked around at random on Wikipedia’s list of climatologists
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Climatologists
and could not find a single one with a degree in “climatology”. How does a degree in geography make one a ‘climatologist’, but a degree in physics make one a ‘pseudo-scientific denialist’?
Is a conviction in the reality of global warming is the primary criteria for separating the ‘climatologists’ from the ‘pseudoscientific denialists’.
Alison Cummins says
Questioning pointlessly, yes, it is dangerous. It’s a waste! Sometimes a really awful waste.
It’s the difference between choosing thoughtfully among options for cancer treatment that have been developed over decades by people who know lots about cancer and lots about people with cancer, and, say, Reiki.
I’m keeping an open mind, how scientific! Anything at all could be true, how wonderful! I’m going to decide that my neighbour can cure my cancer by holding her hands six inches away from my body. I’d much rather believe that than accept chemotherapy.
Dying needlessly is a waste. Questioning whether medicine supported by a broad consensus of specialists works any better than wishful thinking is an example of a really dumb kind of questioning. Of course any given consensus-approved treatment might turn out to be more or less effective than originally thought, with more or fewer side effects, for a greater or smaller range of conditions. And you might be lucky or unlucky. But taking your oncologist seriously is still a better bet than deciding to be a brave and independent maverick and treating yourself with Nobel-prize winner recommended vitamin C.
Experts don’t know everything, but they often know a lot. The rest of us are left trying to make decisions with insufficient information. We all want to be independent thinkers, but that doesn’t mean that everyone’s opinion is equally valid. Evolution really does have much better support from biology than intelligent design does – it’s not just an esthetic decision. People deciding to go with ID aren’t being creative, they’re being indoctrinated. They think they’re being brave and mavericky but they are just being sheep. The emotional thrill of being different from the mainstream may not be the best and smartest guide to fact.
So how do we tell when we’re being brave and independent, and when we’re being duped?
Kevin says
Sort of like acupuncture, once thought ridiculous by the consensus of the mainstream – but now even reimbursed by insurance because it creates positive outcomes documented by science even if it is not understood by science?
You seem to believe it must be one extreme or another – a wildly open mind to every minute possibility, or a sheeple acceptance of whatever “consensus experts” deem to be true. Most of us exist in the middle – making appropriate decisions based on expert opinion, but also keeping an open mind and always questioning. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. I don’t deny experts – but don’t deny my ability to question either.
I have a very solid graduate level science and statistics background. And that teaches me to question, especially when data used to create statistical analysis were gathered before sufficiently accurate instrumentation was developed – hence adding another layer of projection uncertainty. Although my gut, combined with direct inference by driving in smoggy LA (but far less smoggy than a decade ago!), tells me that humans are not exactly doing good for the environment, I’m curious – questioning – how issues with data are dealt with. When I see very smart people, far smarter than me, questioning the same thing it makes me even more curious. It doesn’t mean I’m in denial. Just questioning.
Alison Cummins says
No, acupuncture is covered for by insurance because consumers want it in their plans, but if you look at the evidence (there’s rather a lot of it) it doesn’t actually work.
Being open-minded about acupuncture thirty or forty years ago – made sense given what we knew. Being open minded about it now means you’re either ignorant (most people are, which is what the sellers of acupuncture count on) or willfully blind to the evidence. Consumers want scientists to be open-minded about acupuncture, but the problem is they have been. They’ve been open-minded, done the research, it doesn’t work. Medicine is moving on and consumers haven’t caught up. They think it’s the scientists who are being close-minded but it’s the opposite.
So basically, you don’t have a system for sifting out wasteful questions from productive ones. Ok.
Kevin says
Alison you may want to uh… question… your views on acupuncture. Unless you want to go against the positive evidence from the NIH, Harvard, Cleveland Clinic, and Mayo Clinic. Or perhaps that’s not “expert consensus” at the level you require.
http://nccam.nih.gov/health/acupuncture/
“According to the NIH Consensus Statement on Acupuncture, promising results have emerged, showing efficacy of acupuncture, for example, in adult postoperative and chemotherapy nausea and vomiting and in postoperative dental pain. There are other situations–such as addiction, stroke rehabilitation, headache, menstrual cramps, tennis elbow, fibromyalgia, myofascial pain, osteoarthritis, low-back pain, carpal tunnel syndrome, and asthma–in which acupuncture may be useful as an adjunct treatment or an acceptable alternative or be included in a comprehensive management program. An NCCAM-funded study recently showed that acupuncture provides pain relief, improves function for people with osteoarthritis of the knee, and serves as an effective complement to standard care. Further research is likely to uncover additional areas where acupuncture interventions will be useful.”
http://my.clevelandclinic.org/services/acupuncture/hic_acupuncture.aspx
http://www.mayoclinic.org/acupuncture/
http://cw.uhs.harvard.edu/services/acupuncture.html
But in terms of waste we obviously aren’t going to convince each other of the value of questioning. I continue to be stunned that people can be so arrogant as to assume there’s no value in questioning and we should just accept so-called expert opinions, even when there are experts opposed to it (oh, sorry, denialists). A very dangerous position in my view. So I’m going to take your advice and cut off discussion – it’s a waste as you say.
Ethelred says
Just because there is a “consensus” of a majority, or even 100%–does that make something true?
Remember also, that the burden of proof is always on the positive, which means that the burden of proof in the climate debate is always on those who take the position that the climate is changing, the change will accelerate, and that it is our fault. Those who do not accept this position are under no burden to prove the negative. Ever.
Jim Fernandez says
In continuous improvement and Lean, questioning is a vital part of the process. The only reason we are looking at global warming and climate change is because someone questioned the current situation. So please let’s keep questioning.
My family doctor suggested I may have cancer. I went to a specialist to determine if I had cancer. He went to Gemba to determine that I had cancer. Then I went to another specialist to treat my cancer. He went to Gemba to treat my cancer. Now my cancer is gone.
We thought maybe we had a climate problem. We went to a specialist (a Climatologist) to confirm the climate was changing. He went to Gemba and determined that the climate had changed. We then asked, was the change big enough to worry about?
Here’s where I have a problem. What kind of specialist can answer the question of how much change is too much? Where is Gemba for that question? OK suppose a “specialist” decides that the change is too much. Who do we go to find out why we have this change and can we stop the change? Where is Gemba on these two questions? What kind of specialist can answer these two questions? Certainly not a climatologist. And certainly not Al Gore. I don’t think we have answered these two questions.
Dean says
Where to start?
Questioning is good. It is part of critical thinking, of challenging the status quo, and of moving forward as a civilization. We absolutely can’t stop. Maybe that old saw should be changed from “Grow or die” to “Question or die.”
But you make it sound like the APS rebuked Mr. Giaever for questioning AGW. They did not. He resigned in protest of the Society’s official statement on climate change (and its “incontrovertible” evidence) , with which he disagrees. It may be a minor semantic quibble but the distinction, subtle as it is, bears noting.
Second, it is really hard to find information about this resignation. A Google news search on his name turns up a couple dozen hits, almost all of which are blogs and opinion pieces, most by anti-AGW folks. The closest I could find to a straight-up news report is at the International Business Times, here:
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/214181/20110915/ivar-giaever-global-warming-climate-change-al-gore-ipcc-hoax-dissent-nobel-prize-winner-physicist-re.htm
What strikes me from this article is the following quote from Giaever: “I am Norwegian, should I really worry about a little bit of warming? I am unfortunately becoming an old man. We have heard many similar warnings about the acid rain 30 years ago and the ozone hole 10 years ago or deforestation but the humanity is still around. The ozone hole width has peaked in 1993,” he continued.
This quote, in my mind, has completely shattered Giaever’s credibility on the subject. He completely neglects the fact that acid rain and the ozone hole are not major issues today precisely because we heeded the warnings and took action. They didn’t just go away on their own!
(Note: this quote is apparently from a Wall St Journal article, although it is unclear whether it is the opinion piece to which Kevin links, or a different article.)
Bill Waddell says
Dean,
You are sadly misinformed if you believe that the alleged causes of acid rain and the hole in the ozone have been reduced, therby solving the problem. There are more of those pollutants being pumped into the air then ever – only they are being pumped into Chinese air instead of American and western European air, creating the illusion of environmental improvement in Al Gore and Greenpeace’s backyards.
Inasmuchas the planet is taking on more of those pollutants then ever before, if the acid rain and ozne hole problems are gone, it is plain that those pollutants were not the cause in the first place.
The good professor is not nearly as senile as you make him out to be. He just doesn’t speak in politically correct langauge.
Rick Bohan says
Allison…
Congratulations! You’re an official member of the “Got insults tossed at you by Bill Waddell because you didn’t immediately bow to one or another of his pet crank ideas” Club.
An old curmudgeon resigns from some guild or other because the rest of the world didn’t listen to his “earth revolves around the sun” clap trap and Kevin/Bill are all verklempt. (Not kicked out…resigned. So much for Bill and Kevin’s “Where’s the justice?” whining.) Never mind that the guy hasn’t done any work in the field. Never mind that he was a long time employee of GE (though I’m sure Kevin/Bill will try to convince us that has nothing…nothing at all to do with the good prof’s views.)
Next we can expect Kevin/Bill to get up in arms when some doc resigns from the AMA because he/she can’t get any traction for his/her opinions on reflexology.
Bill Waddell says
Ah Rick,
All rant and insult – but it’s all you have left after so many environmental “facts” have been disproven, so many climate change “experts’ have been discredited, and your champion of hope and change has wasted so much money on the cause for nothing. The liberal frustration is really coming out now. It must be painful to see so many of your silly theories go up in smoke over the last few years.
Robert Adsett says
Bill,
The evidence I’ve does indeed show that ozone depleting chemicals in the atmosphere have indeed reduced in concentration since the implementation of the Montreal Protocol and that tracks the reduction in ozone depletion. The evidence on the latter appears to be preliminary but that is to be expected.
On the acid rain issue, that is largely a more local problem, regional rather than global. It’s a problem because sulphur compounds are absorbed into rainwater making it more acidic than it would normally be. That very absorption though limits its spread making it a regional issue. Locally, my understanding is that lakes have recovered or are recovering from the damage caused by acid rain because of the restrictions imposed on sulphur emissions. I had heard that acid rain was becoming a problem in China and if so they will need similar restrictions to deal with the issues.
There are similar arguments that can be made around lead in gasoline, paint and piping also asbestos in insulation and brake linings.
In all cases the results can only be confirmed over time, often long periods of time. So the effects can still be seen well after countermeasure have been taken because the time constants are so long.
If you have evidence that CFC levels in the atmosphere have not decreased as regulations have stiffened and sulphurous gases have not decreased in North America and Europe as regulations on those emissions have tightened I would like to see it.
Robert
Robert Adsett says
I will add this, I could be in favour of a Pollution Added Tax that taxed based on the amount of pollutants released into the environment during creation of a product or service regardless of the origin of the product. That would reduce any economic benefit of lax regulations by making explicit some of the cost of environmental degradation.
The problem is that unless you reduce the effort to only cover a few pollutants you have a paperwork boondoggle that does nobody any good.
Maybe if you can find sentinel chemicals you would have a chance. Until then we deal with what we can, doing what is right because it is right and encouraging others to do the same even if it is only locally.
And yes, exporting the problem is no solution but neither is pretending nothing can be done.
We are stewards of this Earth.
Robert