« The value of communication in science | Main | Reality vs Truthy Sciencey Fiction »
October 30, 2006
Peiser again
by Sylvia S Tognetti
You may recall Benny Peiser, who once tried to dispute the conclusion of Naomi Oreskes that there is a scientific consensus that recent global warming is primarily caused by humans. Her conclusion was based on a review of abstracts of 928 papers that came up in a search. Using slight differences in search terms, Peiser came up with an additional 34 abstracts for papers that he claimed contradicted her findings, and made a splash in the headlines. These were all posted and reviewed on Tim Lambert's blog about a year and a half ago - my comments on a few of them are here. The only one that questioned the consensus was a non-peer reviewed article published by the Association of American Petroleum Geologists. It took awhile before Peiser conceded he was wrong - I first spotted an admission of error in a comment he made on the Prometheus blog but see Tim Lambert's most recent post for a full chronology with all of the relevant links. Apparently, a few weeks ago, in response to an inquiry from MediaWatch, Peiser conceded that only the one paper identified in the blog review supported the conclusion in his so-called "study" and claimed to "no longer maintain this particular criticism."
But Peiser still maintains the belief that "the majority consensus is far from unanimous" in spite of having conceded that his "study" was 97% wrong, Another remark in his letter to Media Watch demonstrates that he lacks the capacity to distinguish uncertainty that pertains to whether global warming is human induced, from uncertainty about the possible impacts. There is a big difference between understanding changes in average temperature, and understanding how these changes are experienced in different places, which involve interaction among site specific conditions and randomly timed events as well as human decisions and behavior - reality-based or not - all of which increases the uncertainties not in the scientific literature but in our daily lives. None of this has stopped it from being cited in yet another newspaper column to question this well-established scientific consensus - this time by Andrew Bolt - who dismisses all of this as criticism of a nuance, and makes several other errors of fact with reference to Gore, all debunked by Lambert.
The only reason anyone falls for this is an image of science as a crystal ball that provides certainty about the future. When scientists, journalists and even bloggers avoid discussion of unavoidable uncertainties to avoid confusing people, we create more of it, and to borrow the words of Andrew Revkin, are "handing red meat" to the so-called skeptics. In a talk given at a conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists, he concluded:
When new findings are offered, he says, the tendency of journalists has been to seize on "every one of those little punctuation marks and make it into God's truth." However, the plural of anecdote is not data.
"[T]he mousetrap is all ready for us to screw up," Revkin warns the audience. It is "very important" for good environmental journalists to also be global warming skeptics of a sort.... If they want readers to take them seriously, they should report on the clashes and conflicts that make science so entertaining.
Posted by Sylvia S Tognetti at October 30, 2006 9:35 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.postnormaltimes.net/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/130