It’s interesting to me that you’re “a philosophical skeptic.” Science is constructed to be objectively skeptical. I co-published a short paper in “Free Inquiry” in 2004 that discusses the difference, titled “Science is Not Philosophy.” If you’re interested in a pdf copy, let me know.

Academic scientsts take no oath of allegience to support the professional positions of other academic scientists. Fact-and-theory-based contention is the order of the day, normally.

Some years ago, I remember finding an book on Michel Serres, a philosopher at Stanford, written by another philosopher at Stanford. It wasn’t a hagiography but it expressed open admiration of him and his philosophy, as such. This sort of book does not get written by scentists about scientists. That is, books about the science of other scientists are admiring only to the extent the science itself has withstood the test of falsifying inquiry, and (apart from personal attributes) admiring of the scientist to the extent that s/he adhered to the scientific method. The reputation of past scientists can crash if it is discovered they falsified their results.

This sort of later fact-based judgment does not fall upon philosophers or theologians. The judgment criteria are different, resting only upon inner logic and coherence, and whether the expression is supple and eloquent. Relational consistency of external fact and internal theory (i.e., objectivity) does not enter at all.

The point, so easy to miss apparently, is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and thus far, it seems we have nothing of the sort. That they keep pushing it as “settled” or “inconclusive” is propaganda at best.

Mark

Pat,

You’re reading too much into my words. I wrote:

But back in the real world, the original work is literally meaningless, but because it resembles a whole body of work which is also meaningless, nobody on the inside of the ivory tower is going to be anything other than supportive when some rogue Canadian statistician calls them on it.

What I meant was that an ivory tower of climate scientists has been built and occupied. I have the greatest respect for academics in a wide range of disciplines, such as Ross McKitrick, Chris Essex, Sallie Baliunas, Willie Soon, Doug Hoyt, Richard Lindzen, Pat Michaels, Ian Castles, David Henderson, George Taylor, Lubos Motl… (and I’d like to apologize to all the others who have been so kind to correspond with me for not mentioning them by name but I must go on)

If anything the building contractors for the Ivory Tower are the IPCC. I think in the normal course of events, MBH98 would have been widely ignored as an aberration had it not been for being the poster child of global warming in the TAR. As Steve has already related, the IPCC has institutionalized misconduct by refusing to properly audit the papers submitted to it.

I’m not anti-academic, and I’d like to make that clear.

I am a philosophical skeptic, which means that that which proceeds from a person’s mouth or pen or keyboard in explanation of a phenomenon will by subject to checking, testing, and proper inquiry especially to those who claim expertise. Since I am not an academic, I have not taken the oath of allegiance to other academics to not question them when they make outlandish claims based on flimsy support.

Almost every academic I’ve met (and my father was a college lecturer) has any number of wild, speculative ideas based on nothing more than hunches that are discussed with other academics who also have even more bizarre ideas. It goes with the territory of creativity that at any one time, a creative person will have 100 ideas of which 99 will be flat out wrong.

If the process of peer-review meant anything, it is supposed to block those 99 from seeing the light of day, but unfortunately what it does is filter rather poorly, and lets bad ideas that should have stayed in the Senior Common Room out to cause immense damage (for example, the notion of “global mean temperature”) that cannot be withdrawn. These memes cause damage and panic to the body politic.

A likely critical problem with dendroclimatology is that it is a small field. The few practioners — how may are there. . . maybe a couple of dozen?* — have all developed and used the same methods and have accessed the same data. They have all reviewed one another’s papers and found them worthy. That means they have all committed to the same methodological routines and have accepted the same reality as normalcy. In that case, an attack on the methods of one is an attack on the methods of all.

Most of the rest of science includes a much larger number of people and many more diverse methods. The criticisms are not bound by a narrow range of methods, the population is large enough to permit wide competition, and that population is able (at least in principle) to express critical evaluation without any personal entanglements.

Just last year I published a paper that overthrew one of the central explanatory paradigms in my field (I hope definitively). That paradigm was — and perhaps still is — supported by virtually all the academic heavy-weights. I had no trouble publishing the paper in a first rank specialist journal and suffered no specially severe reviewer slings and arrows; nor editorial obstacles. The point is that Steve’s experience in climate science is, in my experience, just not typical of science practice.

I value and enjoy your comments, John, and understand your bitterness and suspicion. I feel it myself. But I cannot let go by in silence your unqualified damning of academic scientists and of the practice of science. It’s not as you portray it. Soapbox mode OFF.

*The June 2006 7th International Conference on Dendro*chron*ology mentions a participant list of 334 people. Of these only 75 mention an interest in climate and only 15 mention dendroclimate.

The problem is that the Hockey Team creates automated cherry-picking algorithms, which as we’ve seen from Dave Stockwell’s reconstruction, result in looking like something like climate variation, but in fact have no information in them at all.

Then the belief engine kicks in: the data appears “robust” and fits the instrumental record with apparent high scores. Nobody at the journal questions it because they usually are ignorant of spurious correlations themselves. The “scientist” gets invited into the IPCC process…and so on.

But back in the real world, the original work is literally meaningless, but because it resembles a whole body of work which is also meaningless, nobody on the inside of the ivory tower is going to be anything other than supportive when some rogue Canadian statistician calls them on it.

In this same line let me offer a rationale for selecting (I won’t say "cherry picking") one set of data series over another. Suppose we know that ring width or density is a function of temperature and other variables:
Y(i,t) = f( X(i,t), Z1(i,t)…Zk(i,t)) where i denotes the particular series and t the time.
When we ran our regression (during our initial research in about the relationship of this species to various environmental variables) we could not reject the equality of coefficients from one series to another, even at the 10% level. And we, hence, have concluded (now “know”) the relationship Y = f(X).
We want to use Y as a proxy for X (sorry to those who want to see a T for temperature, but during my novitiate I was badly beaten every time I used “i’, “j’, “k’, “n’ or “t’ as a variable name) but some of our series (call this index set i1) do not correlate well with X while others (set i2) does. Now remember we “know” the partial correlation (holding the other variable constants) between Y and X is strong. That’s what we tested. We figured that the variation in the Z’s is confounding the correlation between the Y and the X for set i1, and we go with i2.
I have just selected a set of series based on correlation. Is this cherry picking? On the surface yes, but it essence no. I think the test is that the moment the cherry picking issue is raised, the research says, “Oh yes, I see it can look like that, but here are the background relationships and tests. See the incredibly stable partial correlations across all of the series? So we are not really selecting on correlation but rather lack of variation of the Z’s”. (For all you wild econometric fans: we are selecting on high multicollinearity in the Y to Z relationship.) Don’t see something like that … then I guess cherry picking would be a maximum likelihood estimate of behavior.
BTW, the fact that the set i2 correlates well for one period does not guarantee it is good out of sample unless there is reason — and opposed to wish — to infer that the Z’s will not be confounding for the i2 set of series in the out-of-sample period just as they were for the i1 set of series in the sample period.