How objective science really works
March 13th, 2010
Throughout the debate on world climate there’s been a narrative put forward, mostly by those concerned about carbon. The story goes that climate scientists, and really scientists in general, are a kind of intellectual priesthood. Robed in white lab coats, they work selflessly to uncover nature’s truths. They collaborate willingly and collegially. Their work is revealed, for the benefit of all humankind, in highbrow journals where peers judge each offering based on merit and scientific rigour and disclosure of data.
You won’t be surprised to hear that this is a myth. Of course Climategate blew the lid off the scientific process behind international global-warming protagonism. But there was every evidence before that scandal that, as became literal last December, there was something rotten in the scientific state of Denmark. I have written here before that the timeline in the mid to late 1980’s was far too short to develop a confident scientific consensus on climate. Then there was, as many others have observed, the way scientists behaved in the climate debate, the vitriol, personal attacks; attempts to publicly censure people like Bjorn Lomborg and others. I think it fair to say that most of the vitriol came from one side, but let that be for others to judge. In any case, it all belies the purist, white-coat myth that particularly the warmists sought to use to their advantage.
Let me take the rest of this space to show, with examples from my very small corner of the scientific world, that the types of disputes seen in climate science may be the rule rather than the exception. This should send a sobering message to policy makers, and the public, when contemplating the transfer of vast sums of money based on scientific models and interpretation. It is particularly timely because reports suggest another round of scientific pugilism over climate, and yet more evidence of peer review shenanigans in today’s National Post.
The first example goes back to my days as a budding palaeontologist in the early 1980’s. At the time I was working on trilobites. There was in those days a group of “Young Turk” trilobitologists who showed scarcely concealed disdain for the older generation who came up in the late ’50s, early ’60s. They never hesitated to mock, criticize and generally run down the old boys and try to seek new adherents for their “avant garde” clique. Remember these are grown men studying dirt-sucking bugs that went extinct hundreds of millions of years ago. The ring leader was an ex-pat Dane who was twisted a few turns too tight. He was last seen wandering the Gulf Islands of British Columbia.
Another example was my first exposure to a colleague who later became a close collaborator of mine. He took it up a notch. I was minding my own business at a conference display one day when in stormed my later friend. A stream of screams entered the room with him. “He lied! He lied!”, he exclaimed, kicking one of the poster boards. Seems he’d had a disagreement with another geologist’s interpretation of - wait for it - limestone recrystallization.
Lastly I go to an example oddly like the climate debate. This concerns “sequence stratigraphy”, a method of interpreting how sediments fill ocean basins that developed in the 1970s. Firstly, this method had the misfortune of having been thought up by geo-scientists at Exxon. Reaction from some parts of industry and academia were interesting. Some companies simply rejected the Exxon model because it was from Exxon. Others adopted it but pretended they had actually thought of it all themselves.
Many academics seemed resentful at a new way of thinking that originated in industry, not academia. The criticism of some, like Miall from the University of Toronto, echoes parts of the climate debate. He and others suggested that Exxon’s conclusions were merely “driven by models”, that their papers were not reviewed critically enough and that the work was not testable because much of the original data was unpublished due to corporate confidentiality. They berated all those who jumped on the Exxon “bandwagon”, accusing them of being duped by its organizational prestige. He even criticized Exxon for having presentations that were too nicely drafted (compared to those of academics) so their arguments would be more persuasive.
The debate continues. Ironically, as an old-Exxonian myself, I was firmly “on the bandwagon”, rather than a “denier”. But I can attest to much of the internal confidential data that Exxon’s opponents questioned - in fact I and my colleagues published some of it.
When we published the long-requested data, how was it received? Well, one of the “skeptics” called it “the worst paper ever published in (journal X)”, even though we refuted his criticisms point by point. We had our work called (in print) “unscientific”, “bizarre” and “Exxonian”. Naturally, we all wear this now as a badge of honour.
So this is the pure, virginal, objective world of science. All scientists clearly are driven only by the most high-minded, morally pristine motives. That’s been my experience.
