Climate Change: Where Did All the Cranky Scientists Go?

I wrote about wage gaps recently and now I want to write about climate change. Apparently I am going through the change. These are not macro issues per se. But they are as important as the Indiana Pacer’s playoff chances and therefore I am sticking my head out with full realization that my health is in jeopardy.

Before we get started let’s make something clear. I am not challenging climate change. I think it is real. I am not challenging all those climate change scientists. They know a lot more about climate change than I will ever know – and there are a lot of them.

But I am wondering out loud about their choice of information distribution. Their choices about how to communicate this information cast suspicions on the policy implications of their work. Recall that we used to think the earth was flat. I wonder if there were a few “scientists” around at that time who challenged the prevailing view? What did reporters at CNN say about those guys? I also remember when Hwang Woo-Suk reported that he had cloned a dog he named Snuppy.  A highly regarded professor at Seoul National University, his work was published in the best journals as state of the art stem cell research. It was not until one of his colleagues discovered some funny business that we found out the truth. He had really cloned Nancy Pelosi. Ha ha. Just kidding.  Remember all the buzz about cold fusion? It was going to save us all from electricity costs. Hmmm – maybe not, at least not for a couple hundred years.

Two points. 1. Science doesn’t always have it right even though a lot of highly regarded scientists agree. 2. Science is ongoing and it is skeptical. If you have been sentenced to any college courses about science they will always tell you that everything we know and learn derives from using the scientific method. No not the rhythm method Charlie – the scientific method. There is a lot of common sense in that statement. It basically says that you “don’t know nuttin” until you subject your ideas to the data. If your idea passes the empirical test – then scientists say – you failed to reject your hypothesis. Notice the wording – it DOES NOT say that you proved your point. It does say that you didn’t reject your idea this time and you get to pretend like it is true – at least until the next test of it comes around. That’s my dear friends is science.

Notice the conservative or skeptical approach to knowledge taken by scientists. The data confirms you this time fella – but we are not going to really trust this idea until we test it again. And again. And again. Even Einstein’s theories changed over time as scientists found that previous versions could not pass new tests. When I was a youthful maco-scientist and sent my path breaking articles to the academic journals, I knew that I would get an earful back. As other economists pored over my results they found weaknesses and they were quite clear and vocal about them.

Science is ALWAYS skeptical. And this gets me back to climate change. I spent the day finding and then pouring over the latest report: IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/WG1AR5_SPM_FINAL.pdf

This shows you how boring my life is that I would take a perfectly good sunny afternoon and sit in my office and read this long and tedious report. Okay I did sip a little JD. The full report is not available and won’t be until later in the year. What I looked at was the Summary for Policymakers (33 pages of very small print). But give me a little credit for going through the report. I doubt that any of our policymakers or anyone in the press did that. And I am guessing even fewer people will actually read the full report when it comes out. Why? Because those scientists published a special version of the report in a press release that was two pages in length and had no real scientific terminology. It did have words like

A new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows

that global emissions of greenhouse gases have risen to unprecedented levels despite a growing number of policies to reduce climate change. Emissions grew more quickly between 2000 and 2010 than in each of the three previous decades.

According to the Working Group III contribution to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, it would be possible, using a wide array of technological measures and changes in behaviour, to limit the increase in global mean temperature to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. However, only major institutional and technological change will give a better than even chance that global warming will not exceed this threshold.

These words are not science-skeptical and they give very little clue about disagreements of any kind in the analysis. They did explain that 31 teams from across the globe worked on the report. In fact, this press release is nothing but ringing an alarm bell and endorsing public policy. I am not sure what these scientists know about public policy but they didn’t explain that either. Clearly most of the press didn’t care. They were ready to spread the religion.

What is missing in the 2 page press release, sadly, is also missing in the longer report for policy makers. The longer report does have a lot of scientific jargon. But it doesn’t have a scientific attitude. It is skeptical about nothing. I would love to get some of the round-earth-ers together – people who thought some results of the flat-earth consensus were weaker than others. There must be some scientists inside this IPCC group who agreed with some general principles and conclusions but who saw some weaknesses in the models.

Some of these caveats come out but they are dispensed with as soon as they are mentioned. The recent 15 year hiatus in global warming is attributed to deep water or some such thing. I was a kid 15 years ago. That’s a lot of time to dismiss because it flies in the face of other facts. Real scientists love it when things fly in the face of their assumptions. Sherlock Holmes would find the smallest clue and that would take him to the killer. These were the same clues missed by other detectives. It is also interesting that many global climate change models work for the world – but somehow don’t explain specific regions.  If I had an economic model that explained Indiana’s spending but the model could not explain spending of Hooisers who live in Indianapolis, you might wonder about that model. Climate change scientists admit this but then move on as if it were an afterthought. They sweep it under the rug.  In economics we would call that an aggregation problem. It clearly bears further investigation. What would Sherlock do with that? 

And speaking about models, the real test of models is how they predict the future.  It is nice if a model can explain the past but the future is the real litmus test. This report admits that previous forecasts using similar models that were used to predict the last 15 years are totally off – we got cooling instead of warming. So we are supposed to believe the predictions of the newer models for the next 15 years. If I predicted stocks wrong for the last 15 years – few of you would let me invest your money today.

Of course, the easiest test of models is to see how they “predict” the past. These are trial runs. How did our model do? Scientists look at model errors to ascertain how much to trust its results or validity. Students who take statistics courses learn about model errors, and t tests and R squares,and such things which help us be very quantitative about the accuracy and validity of models. But in all 33 pages of this Summary for Policymakers there are no such statistics. Are policymakers devoid of statistical understanding? Instead these learned scientists use terms like “high, medium, or low confidence”  to give credence to their long string of individual results. Two footnotes on page 3 explain the meaning of these terms and I can tell you that the assigned meanings have more to do with camaraderie of scientists than statistics. To be a “likely” outcome of the model, the assessed probability of occurrence would be between 66-100%. 66% is likely? Is 66% enough to support major changes in the way we live?

I am not a climate change scientist. But I do know good scientific principles. The press release says that it will take “substantial investments” to mitigate the worst of climate change. They estimate a reduction of world output of about .06% -- a very small number. Then they conclude this “the underlying estimates do not take into account economic benefits of reduced climate change.” I wonder where they got those figures?And I wonder where the scientists are who take a more Sherlock Holmes approach to the finding of this august body.  

If policymakers are to know how to deal with climate change – they need more precision about the nature, degree, and timing of climate change. What they get in this report is only half the story. Where are the scientists who are brave enough to tell the full story and reveal the weaknesses in these models? Where are the caveats? Where are the probabilities that the model makes errors? Where is the real science? Perhaps they are right about urgency. A more scientific communication might sway some of us in that direction. Until then we will wonder what the full story is.