How can we know that we are not wrong?
This essay is stimulated by the book chapter, “The scientific consensus on climate change: how do we know we’re not wrong?”, by Naomi Oreskes [1].
My first quibble is over the title and its implication, because we can never truly know that we are not wrong about something.
Second point: there are plenty of good reasons for doubting the contemporary consensus that human activities are the chief or prime cause of global warming and climate change.
The chapter is more than 30 pages long, with more than five of those pages listing sources. All of the discussion focuses on the published opinions, interpretations, and conclusions of various researchers and other experts; and the conclusion states, “To deny that global warming is real is to deny that humans have become geological agents, changing the most basic physical processes of the earth, and therefore to deny that we bear responsibility for adverse changes that are taking place around us.”
It is regrettable that some of the argument is simply ad hominem, dismissing the views of “Frederick Seitz (who for many years challenged the scientific evidence of the harms of tobacco along with the threat of climate change) . . . (Seitz was a solid-state physicist.)” and the opinion of Michael Crichton because “they do no new scientific research”.
By contrast, publications supporting the majority consensus are argued to be reliable because getting published in respected scientific journals requires running the gauntlet of expert reviewers and editors.
This overlooks what I regard as the major argument for establishing something like a Science Court: namely, that everything is currently stacked against any unorthodox views, non- or anti-mainstream ones. That attitude very much includes the views and beliefs of journal reviewers and editors, and of the legal system which relies on “expert” witnesses on technical issues. The standard, routine practice is to judge anomalous claims on the basis of contemporary mainstream consensuses.
As Bernard Barber pointed out in his historical review of “Resistance by scientists to scientific discovery” [2], scientists (as well as other researchers and scholars, of course) sometimes find themselves in the situation of making unorthodox discoveries and being ignored or dismissed or suppressed or denigrated, while on other occasions and on other topics they join the majority consensus in not paying serious attention to claims of unorthodox discoveries.
That fact of the history of science is not generally known or appreciated, including within the scientific community. So when previously applauded, even highly distinguished scientists find themselves intellectually excommunicated for non-mainstream views, they are shocked, surprised, and often fail to realize that the same thing has happened and continues to happen on other topics to other scientists. One recent example is that of Peter Duisburg concerning HIV [3]. Then again, Thomas Gold was regarded as most insightful in astrophysics, with very significant discoveries to his credit, yet he was treated as a crank when he ventured highly original and unorthodox ideas about the origin of life on Earth as well as the origin of oil deposits.
Oreskes has evidently not had the experience of trying to publish views that are not to the liking of the mainstream consensus. She also seems not to have seen the devastating comment about consensus in science made by Michael Crichton in a published talk [3a]: professional consensus is only cited as supposedly authoritative and decisive when the matters are not so clear as to have brought unanimity within the specialist community. No one cites as a professional consensus that E=mc2, or that the Sun is 93 million miles from the Earth: those facts are so indisputable that everyone simply agrees, there are no maverick experts dissenting over those matters.
The insistence and that a contemporary scientific consensus be accepted and relied on as a basis for public policy represents faith in scientism, making an infallible religion of science. That is not a proper understanding of how science works. Scientism claims certainty where there is none [4].
Of course, it is more probable that a majority consensus has it right than that maverick dissenters have it right. But on very important, highly consequential public issues, we should seek to avoid the hard cases that admittedly “make bad laws”, as the saying goes, but which do occasionally come about. One fairly well-recognized instance Is that of eugenics theory, under which tens of thousands of Americans were forcibly sterilized during the 20th century [5].
Elsewhere [6], Oreskes has belittled the significance of the eugenics episode as illustrating the danger of accepting a consensus as the basis for public policies and actions, arguing that there was not actually a true consensus over eugenics theory:
In some cases where it is alleged in hindsight that scientists “got it wrong,” we find on closer examination that there was, in fact, no consensus among scientists on the matter at hand. Eugenics is a case in point.
That attempted belittling is meaningless and irrelevant, since the fact of the matter is that society, including the legal system, acted on the basis of what was taken to be a properly scientific consensus, actions that harmed a large number of people.
It is precisely the purpose of the much-needed Science Court [7] to make the general public, the media, and policy-makers even aware of it when a presumed consensus fails to acknowledge the presence of maverick expert dissenters.
The undisputed fact is that science — what the scientific community tells the rest of society — is not always true, does not always represent Nature's reality. That is understood by all serious students and scholars of scientific activity, historians and philosophers and sociologists of science, including Naomi Oreskes herself. The trouble is that they acknowledge that undisputed fact only as an abstract generality and possibility, while in specific instances (human-caused climate change, say) that happens to coincide with personal beliefs or conflicts of interest, any given individual will attempt to dismiss maverick dissenters, as Oreskes tries to do in the case of eugenics.
In reality, the only potentially decisive way to settle a dispute over a matter of science is to examine the actual evidence, the facts of the matter.
That is also the only way to test whether what one believes is genuinely based on the truth of the matter. So I have suggested that a statement of belief should be accompanied by a specification of the potential evidence that would suffice to change one's belief.
I believe that there are as yet unidentified animals in Loch Ness, Scotland, the so-called Loch Ness Monsters, more familiarly Nessies. I could change my belief over that if some plausible alternative explanation could be established for the film taken in 1960 by Tim Dinsdale, publicly available now on the internet [7a], which shows a large, living, creature moving rapidly through the water.
I believe that Peter Duesberg and other so-called AIDS denialists are correct, that HIV did not cause AIDS; I could change that belief only if there were published electron micrographs of a pure sample of HIV virions, showing nothing but virions and extracted direct from someone with AIDS.
I am also not convinced that human activities, chiefly through the release of greenhouse gases, are the prime cause of climate change and global warming [8]. I could change that belief if it were explained to me why carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases should determine global temperatures now when geological data over the whole history of the Earth reveals no correlation between levels of carbon dioxide and global temperatures [8a].
For instance, the temperature ranges now (in the Quaternary) are not grossly different from those in the pre-Cambrian, but the levels of CO2 are something like10-20 times lower now.
As Steven Koonin has shown [9], using the data from the official IPCXC reports, climate-change science is anything but settled.
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[1] Chapter 2 in Climate Modelling, E.A. Lloyd, E. Winsberg (eds.), Springer, 2018; https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-65058-6
[2] Bernard Barber, “Resistance by scientists to scientific discovery”, Science 134 (1961) 596-602r
[3] Henry H. Bauer, Dogmatism in Science and Medicine: How dominant theories monopolize research and stifle the search for truth, McFarland, 2012, pp. 36-7, 51-2, and more (see index)
Also Jeanne Lenzer, “Peter's Principles”, Discover, June 2008
[3a] Michael Crichton, “Aliens cause global warming”, Caltech Michelin Lecture, January 17, 2003; http://www.s8int.com/crichton.html
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1300661/posts
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/09/aliens-cause-global-warming-a-caltech-lecture-by-michael-crichton/
[4] Henry H. Bauer, “Shamans of scientism: conjuring certainty where there is none”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 28 (2014) 491-504
[5] Philip R. Reilly, “Eugenics and involuntary sterilization: 1907–2015”, Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, 16 (2015): 351-68; doi:10.1146/annurev-genom-090314-024930;
Cera R. Lawrence, Oregon State Board of Eugenics, 3 May 2012; https://hpsrepository.asu.edu/handle/10776/5663
[6] Naomi Oreskes, Why Trust Science?, Princeton University Press, 2019); Afterword, pp. 245-55
[7] Henry H. Bauer, “Covid-19 mistakes underscore the need for a Science Court”; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/covid-19-mistakes-underscore-the
Needed: a specifically dedicated SCIENCE Court — Laws (and the legal system) should be compatible with the realities of nature; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/needed-a-specifically-dedicated-science
[7a] https://www.themanwhofilmednessie.com/tims-nessie-film.html
[8] “A politically liberal global-warming skeptic?”;
https://scimedskeptic.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/a-politically-liberal-global-warming-skeptic/
[8a] This is the second graph at “Climate-change facts: Temperature is not determined by carbon dioxide”, https://scimedskeptic.wordpress.com/2017/05/02/climate-change-facts-temperature-is-not-determined-by-carbon-dioxide; from Nahle Nasif, “Cycles of global climate change”, Biology Cabinet Journal Online, #295 (2007); primary sources of data are listed there
[9] S. E. Koonin, Unsettled: What climate science tells us, what it doesn’t, and why it matters, BenBella Books, 2024 (updated and expanded ed., 1st ed. was 2021).