Confusionist Judith Curry goes 'wicked' and mangles the work of Martin Weitzman
November 17, 2010

Climate change can be categorized as a "wicked problem."[Note] Wicked problems are difficult or impossible to solve, there is no opportunity to devise an overall solution by trial and error, and there is no real test of the efficacy of a solution to the wicked problem. Efforts to solve the wicked problem may reveal or create other problems....

Xu, Crittenden et al. [Note] argue that "gigaton problems require gigaton solutions." The wickedness of the climate problem precludes a gigaton solution (either technological or political).

Judith Curry abandoned science this year. She asserted I was "directly involved in Climategate"; James Annan explained "(S)He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense"; William Connolley eviscerated a recent paper on Antarctic sea ice (here), which notes, "The main problem with the paper is the uncritical use of invalid data"; and Bart Verheggen explained, "Her unfounded allegations are insulting for the whole profession.

One way humans make decisions, when there's insufficient data, is by looking at the behavior of those who hold different positions. When I look at this kind of behavior - which isn't designed to engage, advance human knowledge, or do anything except drive a heretic out into the darkness, it really doesn't do a lot to improve my confidence in the people who are engaging in that kind of behavior.

In otherwards, warmists need to start acting more like Galileo and less like Urban VIII.

Finally, there's my discomfort conceptually with the ways that they are attempting to drive "certainty" into climate arguments. Complex modeling tools are very useful in Mediocrestan, but - as the folks who brought us the recent financial Troubles have shown - not all that useful outside of it.

Things that happen inside "bounded reality" can be readily modeled and duplicated in a lab setting. Things outside simply can't.

That's the essence of Rittel and Webber's claim, and that's the perfect definition of a "wicked problem". We've been saying AGW is a 'wicked problem' here for a long time.

Now because the models are weak, the problem is wicked, and the warmists are jerks, does that mean we just shrug? No, I think certainly not.

I can think of a bunch of sound reasons to minimize your emissions and to make that an area of emphasis - reduced dependence on ME oil, more secure infrastructure, local air pollution, etc. etc. Even just plain saving money.

Here's Taleb on the issue:

1) Climate Change. I am hyper-conservative ecologically (meaning super-Green). My position on the climate is to avoid releasing pollutants in the atmosphere, on the basis of ignorance, regardless of current expert opinion (climate experts, like banking risk managers, have failed us in the past in foreseeing long term damages and I cannot accept certainty in a certain class of nonlinear models). This is an extension of my general idea that one does not need rationalization with the use of complicated models (by fallible experts) to the edict: "do not disturb a complex system" since we do not know the consequences of our actions owing to complicated causal webs. (Incidentally, this ideas also makes me anti-war). I explicitly explained the need to "leave the planet the way we got it"

. Instead, I was presented as a "climate-change denier" (Lucy Mangan), and my environmental views summarized by "Climate change is not man-made" (Nicholas Watts). A minimum of homework on the part of your staff would have revealed that I am one of the authors of the recent King of Sweden's Bonham declaration on attitude to climate change.

I agree both when he says "climate experts, like banking risk managers, have failed us in the past in foreseeing long term damages and I cannot accept certainty in a certain class of nonlinear models" and that it's a good idea to "leave the planet the way we got it."

I'm going to resolve to stop kicking at the anthill that makes up the Warmist controversy and start focusing on interesting policy and technology options.

Meanwhile, I'll suggest that others do what we've managed to do with some success - buy a NGV car if your commute permits it, and get PV solar for your house; with light subsidies it a break-even today, and as I think energy costs are headed up, it'll be very valuable later on.
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"I don't recall us being recruited under a climate change label at all," said Stacy Huff, an executive for the Coronado Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America, which was enlisted to help the project. Mr. Huff describes himself as "somewhat skeptical" about global warming.

Mr. Huff said the project workers emphasized conservation for future generations when they recruited his group. The message resonated, and the scouts went door to door in low-income neighborhoods to deliver and install weatherization kits.

"It is in our DNA to leave a place better than we found it," he said.

You don't need to believe in, or even care about, climate change to agree that we need to change our patterns of energy use.

Back in '06 I wrote:

From my point of view, there are three reasons energy is worth some serious investment:

1. Slow the rate of carbon emissions, in the off chance that they will have an impact on global warming.

2. Slow the rate of investment in jihad by the oil-rich Arab states, who have been the principal financiers of the spread of the core religious ideology that - when combined with alienation and anomie - leads to recruits who blow themselves and others up.

3. Shelter our domestic energy infrastructure from disruption - whether through embargo, terrorism, or system disruption caused by error or chance.

This program is a great example of what I talked about in that post - "The 3% Solution" to our energy issues.

Go read the NYT article, find a warmist and share it with them.
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Go read the NYT article, find a warmist and share it with them.
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This array suggested a bigger, underlying dysfunction, and Ioannidis thought he knew what it was. "The studies were biased," he says. "Sometimes they were overtly biased. Sometimes it was difficult to see the bias, but it was there." Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results - and, lo and behold, they were getting them. We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it's easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously. "At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded," says Ioannidis. "There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded."

Perhaps only a minority of researchers were succumbing to this bias, but their distorted findings were having an outsize effect on published research. To get funding and tenured positions, and often merely to stay afloat, researchers have to get their work published in well-regarded journals, where rejection rates can climb above 90 percent. Not surprisingly, the studies that tend to make the grade are those with eye-catching findings. But while coming up with eye-catching theories is relatively easy, getting reality to bear them out is another matter. The great majority collapse under the weight of contradictory data when studied rigorously. Imagine, though, that five different research teams test an interesting theory that's making the rounds, and four of the groups correctly prove the idea false, while the one less cautious group incorrectly "proves" it true through some combination of error, fluke, and clever selection of data. Guess whose findings your doctor ends up reading about in the journal, and you end up hearing about on the evening news? Researchers can sometimes win attention by refuting a prominent finding, which can help to at least raise doubts about results, but in general it is far more rewarding to add a new insight or exciting-sounding twist to existing research than to retest its basic premises...after all, simply re-proving someone else's results is unlikely to get you published, and attempting to undermine the work of respected colleagues can have ugly professional repercussions.

[Emphasis added]

Thomas Kuhn talked about this: when he talked about "normal science" and said that ""No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomenon; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all."

A pretty good description of what Ioannidis is demonstrating about healthcare research. One wonders where else that problem might apply...
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Burying our heads in the sand would leave future generations at the mercy of potentially dangerous changes in our climate. The only sure way to mitigate these threats is to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions dramatically over the next few decades. But even if we don't reduce emissions, the reality of adapting to climate change will require responses from government at all levels.

Challenges to policy proposals for how to deal with this problem should be welcome -- indeed, a good-faith debate is essential for wise public policymaking.

But the attacks against the science must stop. They are not good-faith questioning of scientific research. They are anti-science.

At the climate skeptical Watt's Up With That blog, Professor of Physics Hal Lewis:

... a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind...simply to bring the subject into the open.

5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members' interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.

Here's where I struggle with the whole AGW issue. I think it's certainly possible - maybe even likely that AGW is real. I'd support, unforced, a bunch of low-cost, high-impact policy changes that would have an impact on atmospheric carbon and (incidentally) the domestic economy and national security.

But every time I turn around, the folks promoting radical action in the face of climate change based on "incontrovertible" science can't show processes that actually support - you know, through open inquiry - an absolute consensus that would support remaking the world economy (coincidentally, remaking it in ways that those making the arguments are predisposed to support for ideological reasons...).

And, sadly, Professor Lewis will never get a platform to tell his story remotely comparable to Professor Mann.

But we can tilt the balance a little bit here in the blogs.
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Instead we run computer models.

Now in a century, to be sure, we'll be able to validate (or invalidate) the predictive power of those models.

Until then, they are exercises in quant 'science', which is likely to be as successful as quant 'finance' was for LTCM, Bear Stearns, Lehman, et alia in the last decade.

Both work well in limited domains (what Taleb calls 'mediocrestan') and fail catastrophically outside them.

In my view, science is empirically reproduceable. Feynman said (I think it's in the Lectures) "The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific 'truth'." Anything that isn't empirically reproduceable - isn't really science.

When AGW advocates start running reproduceable experiments, let us all know. For now, I'd even settle for reproduceable base data.

That's pretty much all I have on this. You're welcome to respond, advocate, cavort, or whatever in response.
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Why is fact-checking Lomborg awful? Because you ...ewww ... have to read him?

Sorry, Sharon, but that's just unworthy of anyone who would claim to be 'NEWSWEEK's science editor.' Or if not, it tells me something about Newsweek.

Look, I don't think Lomborg has a chokehold on truth in this complex issue. Nor do I think Steve McIntyre - or Phil Jones - does.

But I do think that the story is clear - that Jones et alia undermined the necessary process of science - through error cascade, groupthink, or deliberate policy - enough to move AGW into the 'possible but unproven' category.

What we need is constructive, transparent, respectful discussion that tries to sift the facts from the claims.

In her review, she makes reasonable claims that three of Lomborg's claims are not supported by his citations. That's serious. It would be more serious if she'd taken the time to map out Lomborg's arguments and claim that - as a hypothetical - he makes 15 major claims and 10 minor claims and that of the 5 major claims that were checked, 4 of them were unsupported by his footnotes.

As it is, we have a science writer who is apparently virulently anti-Lomborg (see lede) citing a media critic's anecdotal claims that several of Lomborg's claims aren't supported by his citations.

Lomborg responded on his website (pdf)...it's worth checking out. If reading him doesn't curdle your stomach, as it appears to do to Ms. Begley.

Update: Just read the Lomborg reply, and it's pretty scathing about Friel's claims. The fact that Begley doesn't address the direct hits Lomborg seems to make further undermines not his credibility, but hers.

Instapundit visitors - check out the good news on climate research...
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