Astroblog

The Australian is Anti-Science, it's a conclusion I'm reluctant to draw, but the accumulated evidence drives me to it.

Science must not become a slave to its own orthodoxies, begins this editorial in todays Australian. Mmmm, Science as Orthodoxy, now where have I heard that before? It's the standard tactic used by Intelligent Design Creationists, HIV deniers and anti-vaccination folks. This isn't a good start, not helped by the anti-IPCC rant from some Polish politician given space on the same page. Look, the IPCC report is the distillation of over 15 years of research, compiled by over a thousand international scientists, it's not orthodoxy, it is evidence, carefully collected, intensely studied evidence.

But on the other hand there is a growing chorus of murmurs against the received orthodoxy of climate change.

Ah, just like the creationists, there is always a claim of growing opposition (which somehow is never identified with actual people), but in fact many climate skeptics have ceased their skepticism, or have switched to economic arguments, instead of denying the reality of global warming (there is a good article in Nature on this, but it is subscription only).

While the recent IPCC report was held up as the last word on the subject, many scientists have pointed out that the 90 per cent certainty ascribed to the reports findings is in scientific terms not very certain at all.

That is a meaningless statement. Who are these "many scientists?", ones who don't know statistics from a hole in the ground. Firstly, its not "certainty", we are looking at confidence interval. For many of the IPCC average values, there is a 5% chance the real could be lower, and a 5% chance it could be higher (but not all, several figures are 95%, ie value +/- 2.5%). This is quite good and policy makers would be foolish in the extreme not to take action. Even if the figures are lower, it is still pretty bad for us (look at the ranges given in the IPCC figures, the world heats up even at the lowest ranges). This is a standard creationist tactic. If you data has error bars, it must be in error (sheesh). Basically, what we really have is very good estimates with very narrow error margins, and the editor is trying to spin this as "uncertainty". Next tactic, non-sequiturs

For example, at the Danish National Space Centre in 2005 an experiment successfully linked cosmic rays to the formation of clouds. .... At the same time it provides a more satisfactory explanation for contradictory Antarctic temperature trends that cannot be explained by conventional greenhouse global warming models.

Yes, this is all very well and good, a nice interesting contribution to long term climate. But it doesn't explain the Antarctic data (which aren't contradictory) because cosmic ray levels haven't changed significantly, they are not relevant to the warming we are currently experiencing.

For while there are many valid reasons to cut unhealthy smog-creating carbon emissions, there are also many reasons to be skeptical about the near-religious fervour with which the simplistic carbon-equals-warming equation is too often defended

It's like the near-religious fervour with which scientists defend the fact that Earth is an oblate spheroid, or gravity, it's a fact of physics you can't get way from. An editor may have their own opinions, but they don't get to have their own facts.

It was skepticism that led Copernicus to challenge contemporary orthodoxy and assert that the Earth is not the centre of the universe.

Well, chalk up ignorance of history as well, but trying to hijack the Copernican movement backfires. Galileo had significant problems convincing people of his ideas as many were not prepared to look at the evidence, in some cases refusing to look through his telescope to see things for themselves. In the global warming arena, scientists have produced massive amounts of evidence, only to be ignored by political leaders and editors of the Australian. The position of scientists is not the orthodoxy, the orthodoxy is that of the politicians who claim that humans aren't changing climate. The editors response to the massive amount of evidence appears to be sticking their fingers in their ears and saying "nayh-nayh can't hear you".

The fact is that our climate is infinitely complex.

No, it is finitely complex, very very complex, but finitely so. Here the editor is trying a "scientists can never know" tactic. Our models may be crude, but when several different models give the same predictions, and the predictions have been closely tracked by real temperature rises, you better take them seriously.

And scientists are often woefully out of their depth in the real world.

Funny, when I was making my kids lunches this morning, I was sure I was in the real world, and not doing too bad a job of making the lunches. Scientists do just fine in the real world dear editor, the computer you typed your missive on, the mobile phone you use, the car you drive are all products of scientists producing real world solutions to real world problems.

History is littered with lives and regimes that were wrecked when science was allowed to drive policy with no thought to humanity.

Yeah, like the campaign to eliminate small pox, that certainly wrecked a lot of lives and not a few regimes, and the campaign to bring clean drinking water to everyone, and the weather satellites that give people decent warning of approaching storms, the "slip slop slap" campaign to prevent suncancer did in a few regimes too. Stopping production of CFC's before the ozone layer disappeared has caused untold misery and wrecked several regimes.

That was sarcasm if you didn't realise. Science drive policy, we wish. It has never happened, and is unlikely to happen. Oh sure, bad and/or foolish people will co-opt science to support their irrational campaign du jour (like the campaign of forced sterilization for "mental defectives" in the United States in the 20's and 30's, it was a political movement that coopted science, not a science driven policy). The argument that Scientists have done bad /foolish things in the past, therefore we should ignore the weight of evidence before us now, is not a logical one. The editor can't come up with real counter arguments to the evidence arrayed by scientists, so now resorts to ad-hominems.

It is only by tempering science with economics and the market, which is the most efficient arbiter of humanity's wants and needs, that smart climate policy can be made.

Yeah, right. That worked so well with fish stocks, you know the ones scientists said needed to be harvested at lower levels to be sustainable. The politicians and economists ignored them, the fish stocks crashed, and so far haven't recovered.

The same song was sung over CFC's and ozone depletion, giving in to alarmist scientists would ruin us, claimed industry and economists. Then the NASA images of the ozone hole came out, and suddenly CFC's were replaced and the economy hasn't collapsed.

Mysterious murmurings of unnamed "scientists", non sequiturs, rants about "evil" scientists, all tactics I know and loath from the creationists, HIV deniers and anti-vax people. If this was some tabloid journal I would expect this, but this is the National broadsheet newspaper, we really should expect better.

On the other hand, the Australian has a history of letting Intelligent design creationism romp all over its pages, and has published appalling pieces of nonsense about global warming. I've written about this before.

So one is left to conclude that the Australian (or rather its editors), is anti-science. A very sad fate for the premier national newspaper. At a time when we need our citizens to be scientifically literate, especially as we try to sort out effective response to global warming, we have The Australian peddling nonsense to them.