To continue the thread from Fixing Blame about the role of bloggers in the current series of scandals, see this post in which Roger cites a significant essay:

Jerry Ravetz, a giant among scholars in the history and philosophy of science and someone who I am happy to call a friend and colleague, has written a thoughtful essay on the remarkable events that have unfolded in climate science of recent months. . .

Jerry's article is thoughtful and worth your time. Jerry sends another strong message as well with his choice of venues where he chose to publish the essay.

That venue, the What's Up With That? blog, has been persistently raking the muck spewed by politicized science and activists for some time. Ravetz observes:

Politics will doubtless survive, for it is not a fiduciary institution; but for science the dangers are real. Climategate is particularly significant because it cannot be blamed on the well-known malign influences from outside science, be they greedy corporations or an unscrupulous State. This scandal, and the resulting crisis, was created by people within science who can be presumed to have been acting with the best of intentions. In the event of a serious discrediting of the global-warming claims, public outrage would therefore be directed at the community of science itself, and (from within that community) at its leaders who were either ignorant or complicit until the scandal was blown open.

As I stated earlier, I fault journalism since it is supposedly a fiduciary institution, or claims to be.

We can begin to see what went seriously wrong when we examine what the leading practitioners of this ‘evangelical science’ of global warming (thanks to Angela Wilkinson) took to be the plain and urgent truth in their case. This was not merely that there are signs of exceptional disturbance in the ecosphere due to human influence, nor even that the climate might well be changing more rapidly now than for a very long time. Rather, they propounded, as a proven fact, Anthropogenic Carbon-based Global Warming. There is little room for uncertainty in this thesis; it effectively needs hockey-stick behaviour in all indicators of global temperature, so that it is all due to industrialisation. Its iconic image is the steadily rising graph of CO2 concentrations over the past fifty years at the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii (with the implicit assumption that CO2 had always previously been at or below that starting level). Since CO2 has long been known to be a greenhouse gas, with scientific theories quantifying its effects, the scientific case for this dangerous trend could seem to be overwhelmingly simple, direct, and conclusive.

I agree that this is what happened, but one can still argue that Anthropogenic Carbon-based Global Warming is occurring without a need for hockey-stick behaviour since climate is so complex with many masking cycles of atmospheric and ocean currents (such as the PDO, AMO, ENSO etc.).

In retrospect, we can ask why this particular, really rather extreme view of the prospect, became the official one. It seems that several causes conspired. First, the early opposition to any claim of climate change was only partly scientific; the tactics of the opposing special interests were such as to induce the proponents to adopt a simple, forcefully argued position. Then, once the position was adopted, its proponents became invested in it, and attached to it, in all sorts of ways, institutional and personal. And I suspect that a simplified, even simplistic claim, was more comfortable for these scientists than one where complexity and uncertainty were acknowledged. It is not merely a case of the politicians and public needing a simple, unequivocal message.

I don't find this argument to be compelling. The devil didn't make them do it. Every theory has detractors, and it's a good thing that this is so.

Now, as Kuhn saw, this ‘normal’ science has been enormously successful in enabling our unprecedented understanding and control of the world around us. But his analysis related to the sciences of the laboratory, and by extension the technologies that could reproduce stable and controllable external conditions for their working. Where the systems under study are complicated, complex or poorly understood, that ‘textbook’ style of investigation becomes less, sometimes much less, effective. The near-meltdown of the world’s financial system can be blamed partly on naïvely reductionist economics and misapplied simplistic statistics. The temptation among ‘normal’ scientists is to work as if their material is as simple as in the lab. If nothing else, that is the path to a steady stream of publications, on which a scientific career now so critically depends. The most obvious effect of this style is the proliferation of computer simulations, which give the appearance of solved puzzles even when neither data nor theory provide much support for the precision of their numerical outputs. Under such circumstances, a refined appreciation of uncertainty in results is inhibited, and even awareness of quality of workmanship can be atrophied.

There's merit in this argument if I understand it rightly. Normal economics and normal science are really not appropriate for large scale complex systems. The precision of naive models is mistaken for accuracy. This is a serious error made worse by what professionals could only call amateurish workmanship in one off computer simulations that are adequate for investigative purposes, as thought exercises, but not as the basis of policy.

We found ourselves in another crusading ‘War’, like those on (non-alcoholic) Drugs and ‘Terror’. This new War, on Carbon, was equally simplistic, and equally prone to corruption and failure. Global warming science became the core element of this major worldwide campaign to save the planet. Any weakening of the scientific case would have amounted to a betrayal of the good cause, as well as a disruption of the growing research effort. All critics, even those who were full members of the scientific peer community, had to be derided and dismissed. As we learned from the CRU e-mails, they were not considered to be entitled to the normal courtesies of scientific sharing and debate. Requests for information were stalled, and as one witty blogger has put it, ‘peer review’ was replaced by ‘pal review’.

As I see it this is an example of the “Concorde fallacy”.

Escalation of commitment occurs when people or organizations who have committed resources to a project are inclined to “throw good money after bad” and maintain or increase their commitment to the project, even when its marginal costs exceed marginal benefits (Teger 1980, Camerer and Weber 1999). Escalation of commitment is very similar to the sunk-cost effect. Most research is focused on individual decision making. The main explanation for observed escalation is self-justification (Brockner 1992). The idea of self-justification is that people do not like to admit that their past decisions were incorrect and, therefore, are trying to reaffirm the correctness of those earlier decisions. . .

One might expect that irrational behavior would be corrected in groups. However, many studies suggest that groups make riskier decisions than the mean of decisions made by individuals. In fact, escalation of commitment is found in group decision making (Bazerman et al. 1984). Members of a group strive for unanimity. A typical goal for political decisions within small-scale societies is to reach consensus (Boehm 1996). Once unanimity is reached, the easiest way to protect it is to stay committed to the group’s decision (Bazerman et al. 1984, Janis 1972). Thus, when the group is faced with a negative feedback, members will not suggest abandoning the earlier course of action, because this might disrupt the existing unanimity.

We can dress up these events in adult clothing but what we really have here is school yard clubbishness. The issue wasn't about science, it was about the comfort of hard won consensus and justification of resources already squandered. This was all plainly obvious and widely discussed. The only reason it festered for so long was that journalists as well as politicians went along with it for their own selfish interests. It is naive to expect better from politicians since that's who and what they are, but I really do expect more from journalists. I suppose that I'll just have to get over it. It's blogs that are now the fiduciary institutions.

I can't help but insert an aggy aside here. Dairymen are the very finest graziers for good reason: they get a report card every day about the quality of their grazing management - the dip stick in the milk tank and the component analysis from their commercial customers. If they don't do well, they don't get paid well. Blogs have the same sort of daily performance pressure and immediate feedback so there are structural reasons to expect that they will do better on balance. . . or die.