All too many people don't seem to understand how science works. Science isn't an ideology or a philosophy; it's a tool, a method of examining facts and evidence, and deriving knowledge from those facts: Knowledge about how various systems and processes work. For the scientific method to work properly, that means that all evidence must be examined, and alternative systems, processes, and possibilities must be explored.
Where there are political aspects to a subject that is supposedly a matter of science, like the human effects on inevitable climate change, all that seems to go out the window.
This brings us to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). This is supposed to be an elite organization; being asked to join is supposed to be a big deal. About 2,000 people are members, compared to roughly 2 million people engaged in some kind of scientific inquiry in the United States. The problem seems to be that the NAS is more of a political organization than a scientific one. Francis Menton, writing at the Manhattan Contrarian, has some details.
I last wrote about the NAS in February of this year, in a post titled “Would You Trust The National Academies Of Science To Tell You How Science Works?” The occasion for that post was that something called the Federal Judicial Center had just issued a new edition of its Federal Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. Recognizing that this subject went outside the core of its own expertise, the FJC had called on the NAS to take the main role in the drafting. In the new edition, a chapter from prior editions of the Manual titled “How Science Works” had been taken over by new authors, and substantially re-written and greatly expanded (from 18 to 61 pages). In the process, the new authors had inserted a series of howlers that not only did not fairly describe how science works, but actually got the whole process wrong by 180 degrees. I cited several examples in the February post, but this is the one that goes closest to the heart of the craziness: “While the often-stated maxim that correlation does not imply causation is true, in fact, correlation is the only means that we have of establishing causation in science.” That statement is just flatly wrong. Instead, the process for establishing causation in science operates through the falsification of alternative (“null”) hypotheses of causation. I do not know how anyone could even think to call themselves a “scientist” without basic understanding of that logical process.
That's rather a long quote, but it's necessary to make the main point. This is supposed to be an organization of the scientific elite, but this statement, implying that correlation does indeed mean causation, is something that should make any freshman college student in the sciences start scratching his head.
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But the real stunner comes in the NAS's statements about anthropogenic climate change:
Now, just last week, the National Academies have released their latest embarrassment, taking this fundamental fallacy and expanding and running with it. The event at issue was the release of a new Report called “Attribution of Extreme Weather Events and Their Impacts.” Here is the July 15 press release from NASEM, and here is another link to the body of the Report itself. The Report runs to some 175 pages, plus appendices.
And:
The very first line of the “Summary”reveals that they knew the conclusion before they started:
“Earth system changes driven by rising greenhouse gas concentrations from human activities are affecting characteristics of extreme weather and climate events, such as frequency and intensity.”
That’s nice. And how exactly do you know it? Here are the two fundamental questions that need to be addressed: (1) What are the alternative hypotheses that you have considered, and how have those been ruled out as the causes of the recent extreme weather events? And (2) what has been your consideration of the evidence, if any, that might contradict or undermine the hypothesis that “human activities” and increased greenhouse gas concentrations are the cause of these extreme weather events?
Now, Francis Menton - I highly recommend his commentary, by the way - appears to be questioning the NAS report on the basis of bad science, and that's an excellent point: This is bad science. This isn't the examination of data to form a hypothesis and then testing the hypothesis; this is forming a conclusion and then cherry-picking data to support it. That's not science. That's propagandizing.
It doesn't make any sense if you look at it through the lens of the scientific method. However, if you look at it through a political lens, it starts to make more sense.
There's no place for politics in science. Oh, sure, scientists have political opinions, just like anyone else, but the scientific method doesn't allow for political opinions to drive the scrupulous examination of facts. And yet, that appears to be just what the NAS is doing here. And the sad thing is that there is plenty of evidence to examine where global climate is concerned: Billions of years of history, data on a scale that is, well, planetary. But the NAS appears to already have their minds made up, and they appear to be basing their conclusion on correlation: As humans increase their numbers and their technology, the climate has been warming. Both of those things are true. But the extent to which human activities can affect something as vast and chaotic as the global climate, which operates with cycles and systems that are, in some cases, measured in thousands of years- that's the question - and it's a question to which the NAS seems to have already decided, without examining any evidence to the contrary.
