When a science oriented blog takes up things like “Leave no trace of your electronic correspondence” it makes one wonder. This might be a response to the CRU email message release but, in any case, it goes away from basic values of science research. The topic might bring to mind the famous missing minutes in the Nixon White House tapes.

The essay suggests that letters “were like mini-contracts” and voice conversations were not. That is a question as verbal contracts are just as valid as written ones. The difference is that written ones have more certainty and less confusion.

Now whatever you have to say to someone, you can rest assured that your correspondence will never come back to bite you.

Gullibility is also at issue here. Whenever someone makes a lock, someone else figures out how to defeat it. Thinking you can buy confidentiality as a magic bullet is a mistake that has been made many times over the years. The best way to avoid having communications “come back to bite you” is to never engage in communications that are dishonest or despicable.

Of course, as has been seen with some political figures, there are those who will create things for you in order to try to make them bite. That’s another issue.

When is it education and when is it training? The problem of defining a proper schooling for a medical doctors came up in a story about one med school that allowed some of its students to bypass pre-med university courses in the hard sciences. David Gorski has a good discussion of the implications in “Hard science” and medical school

What bothers me about Muller and Kase’s thesis is, as I have said before, the way that it seems to view science as an obstacle to getting into medical school and becoming a doctor, as opposed to being a necessary prerequisite to being able to put the flood of information taught in medical school into context. The humanistic part of medicine is very important to being an effective, but if those humanistic elements are not also wedded to a firm understanding of the science of clinical practice, we risk producing a generation of physicians who are very good at holding their patients’ hands and offering encouragement to them but not so good at actually treating their medical problems.

One way to look at this is that med schools are regressing to an equivalence with chiropractic schools in eliminating calculus and hard science as prerequisites. That reinforces Gorski’s fear about the spread of alternative medicine and the abandonment of science in developing effective therapies.

Science informs what is good medicine, and physicians should have a sufficient grounding in the scientific method to be able to recognize what is and is not good scientific and clinical evidence for a therapy.

One of the problems is that of training versus education. It takes training to acquire the skills a physician must have yet it takes education for them to evaluate to extend and extrapolate and evaluate those skills and the reasons for them. Training is easy to teach and to test and those are very attractive attributes. Education is a matter of values and viewpoints and ways of understanding that make it more difficult to teach and to test. The question for medicine, as well as for many other professions, is that of a proper balance.

The ScienceBlogs network has suffered a loss of authors. The immediate stimulus was their running a PepsiCo Food Frontiers nutrition blog. That offended other bloggers sense of superiority in independence from crass commercial things. Virginia Heffernan describes the mess.

But the bloggers’ eek-a-mouse posturing wasn’t the most striking part of the affair. Instead, it was the weird vindictiveness of many of the most prominent blogs. The stilted and seething tone of some of the defection posts sent me into the ScienceBlogs archives, where I expected to find original insights into science by writers who stress that they are part of, in the blogger Dave Munger’s words, “the most influential science blogging network in the world.” And while I found interesting stuff here and there, I also discovered that ScienceBlogs has become preoccupied with trivia, name-calling and saber rattling. Maybe that’s why the ScienceBlogs ship started to sink.
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Under cover of intellectual rigor, the science bloggers — or many of the most visible ones, anyway — prosecute agendas so charged with bigotry that it doesn’t take a pun-happy French critic or a rapier-witted Cambridge atheist to call this whole ScienceBlogs enterprise what it is, or has become: class-war claptrap.

The blog network was flying under false colors. Like much of the climate alarmism ‘science,’ its components were ideological and not scientific. When someone with a financial stake in the content started to participate it was too much for the ideologues. The result is a revealing of the hubris and arrogance of people who insist on living where the light of reality is quite dim.

There is a push for accountability that motivates the need for easily measured and valued results. In education it is the problem of teacher pay for performance. In science, it is the matter of government funded research.

The idea is very attractive as nobody wants to pay for results they can’t see. The problem is that attractive ideas may simplify complex situations and that can create problems. Bob Carter hits it in The phenomena of disinvitation and the brotherhood of silence as a stimulus behind much of the climate research bias.

It is also part of a much wider pattern of science degradation that has developed since the 1980s. The change has been caused in part by the insistence of politicians that taxpayers’ money must be used in support of scientific research that is “useful” or “in the national interest”.

In other words, climate alarmists need to provide some socially relevant measurable outcome in order to maintain the research grant funding. Any questions concerning their science attacks this resource and must be countered. That is what leads to pathological behaviors to demean, isolate, and impugn those who don’t get with the program. It is a matter of survival, after all.

Warmest on record! Cheaper than nuclear! Professor says, science says, report affirms, — headlines like these seem popular. More than anything else, they illustrate a gullibility based on a seductive affirmation of a desire rather than a truthful report of reality. Rod Adams describes a case in Gullible Reporting By New York Times On the Cost of Solar Electricity Versus Nuclear Electricity.

The paper is seductively titled Solar and Nuclear Costs — The Historic Crossover: Solar Energy is Now the Better Buy. The paper’s cover has a dramatic and colorful graph that shows ever increasing costs for nuclear and ever decreasing costs for solar.

Everyone wants free energy, or at least energy that has no environmental impact. Sometimes that desire gets a bit out of hand. This was just one example.

Technology’s disasters share long trail of hubris says Borenstein. Climategate and the Need For Greater Scientific Openness is the story at Slashdot to see a disaster in action.

One is an example of the other.

The ‘technology disaster’ being considered isn’t, of course, climate change but rather about those bit evil, greedy, careless oil companies and the idea that “Unfortunately, safety costs money, so it’s usually not a priority.”

The common thread – which the new presidential oil spill commission will be looking for – often is technological arrogance and hubris. It’s the belief by those in charge that they’re the experts, that they know what they’re doing is safe. Add to that the human weaknesses of avoidance, greed and sloppiness, say academics who study disasters.

Those human weaknesses are given example in the climate brouhaha.

The Guardian follows up on the recent news that CRU climate scientists were cleared of scientific misconduct with an article that focuses on how the controversy could have been avoided, and public trust retained, had the scientists made more of an effort to be open about their research.

Much of that controversy centers on the messages about “hide the decline” and ‘We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?’

Engineering disasters happen because there is sometimes overreach in trying to build something new. It is a matter of estimating what is not known and missing the estimates. The arrogance, greed, and ignorance of human costs is not in the engineering realm but rather by those who purchase the design, cut corners building it due to buyer pressures, or use what is built outside of its design realm. That contrasts to climate research where the pressure is to obtain public grant funding by pleasing the political constituency.

Reality has a way of defeating hubris. Those who actually build things and stake their reputation on the result are humbled by reality, sometimes to suicide, That is engineering, not research. It is researchers who can pontificate about how great their efforts are until someone starts wondering about how that research fits reality. That is much of the story of the climate scandal. The researchers showed hubris in avoiding questions and in squashing unpleasant dissent. The efforts to maintain this hubris, the whitewash reports by friends and colleagues, are raising more questions than they answer in an attempt to maintain the self image.

What PhysOrg illustrates is also hubris. It is in the focus on the “disaster” side of learning and blaming that on a hubris that could better be seen if the author looked in the mirror, the one that shows him and the climate scandal researchers and much of the academic community standing in plain view in the reflection.

Down with Doom: How the World Keeps Defying the Predictions of Pessimists is the tale of a student from the 1970s who found that many of the prophets of doom were false prophets. Things just didn’t turn out the way that the doomsayers feared

Not only are human beings wealthier, they are also healthier, wiser, happier, more tolerant, less violent, more equal. Check it out – the data is clear.

The problem is that when you question the doomsayer, whether it be regarding human caused climate change or other doom and gloom, the response is not rational nor honest.

Like others who have tried to draw attention to improving living standards – notably Julian Simon and Bjorn Lomborg – I am beginning to be subjected to a sustained campaign of vilification by the pessimists. They distort my argument, impugn my motives and attack me for saying things I never said. They say I think the world is perfect when I could not be clearer that I advocate progress precisely because we should be ambitious to put right so much that is still wrong. They say that I am a conservative, when it is the reactionary mistrust of change that I am attacking. They say that I am defending the rich, when it is the enrichment of the poor that I argue for. They say that I am complacent, when the opposite is true. I knew this would happen, and I take it as a back-handed compliment, but the ferocity is still startling. They are desperate to shut down the debate rather than have it.

Sound familiar? What is surprising is that the phenomena goes way back, it is a common facet of human civilization. With modern values and communications, skepticism and transparency tend to put pressure on the veracity of these prophets of doom. That pressure creates a strain which seems to show as a more strident expression.

John takes note (More on the Kagan Partial Birth Abortion Scandal)of an interpretation of Kagan’s role in the partial birth abortion fracas by William Saletan at Slate. Saletan looks beyond the scandal to the problem of the courts and their acceptance of science.

Saletan cites our analysis of the scandal, but argues that Kagan was just doing her job as a White House political operative. The real lesson, he says, is that courts should stop being naive about the provenance of “scientific” reports. I think he has a point

Saletan concludes:

All of us should be embarrassed that a sentence written by a White House aide now stands enshrined in the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, erroneously credited with scientific authorship and rigor. Kagan should be most chastened of all. She fooled the nation’s highest judges. As one of them, she had better make sure they aren’t fooled again.

The politicization of science was a recent campaign issue. For the most part, it was a trumped up charge with a deceitful base. What that charge tends to do, though, is to diminish cases such as Kagan’s ‘reframing’ of the summary statements of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists which were then used by SCOTUS in creating law via the judiciary.

Such a tangled web tends to entrap us all.

You’d think environmental protection would be all about reducing pollutants. Mark Tapscott describes how EPA rejects Texas program that reduced emissions, increased productivity.

The federal government must regulate sensibly and consider the practical implications of its actions. The inflexibility of EPA’s regulatory mandate will cost Texas thousands of jobs,” Olson said.

It is innovation in the states in areas like this where the federalist ideas in U.S. governance can contribute most. It is examples like this, though, that show the balance shifting towards a more centralized governance. Keeping a proper balance may not be easy but it may be necessary.

In a description that has eerie parallels to the climate change debate, Robert VerBruggen takes on the More Handguns, Less Crime — or More? debate. He concludes:

The more-guns-less-crime theory is more than plausible, and it retains the support of many academics. In the end, however, it has become a distraction. In addition to being virtually impossible to prove in a meaningful way, it has placed the burden of proof where it does not belong.

Gun-rights supporters shouldn’t have to prove anything. They are on the side of freedom. Gun controllers, by contrast, want to restrict freedom, and thus must prove that their policies provide benefits that are worth that freedom. Whether the topic is RTC, handgun bans, buyback programs, assault-weapon restrictions, or registries, there is simply no evidence whatsoever indicating that to be the case. That’s one thing that Lott and the debate he inspired have proven — whatever the merits of the claim that gun control actually increases crime.

There are the stakes – individual freedoms – and then there is the nature of the debate – “In addition to being virtually impossible to prove in a meaningful way, it has placed the burden of proof where it does not belong.“. In other words, the data are cloudy and difficult to turn into meaningful information, the debate is shoved into distractions, and the reasons involve desires for control over other people. Gun control, health, waste, energy, … so many modern debates have the same pattern.

The article title, Climate scientists decry ‘political assaults’, describes the response. That alone should be enough to raise a bit of skepticism. What follows in the text highlights key points. First is that of the ‘vox populi’ where a bunch of scientists sign a letter proclaiming something as if having a bunch of them get together on the issue makes them right. Second is the army of straw men typified by the use of the word “denier” and the letter’s analogies to issues such as creationism as if those who question AGW are in the same camp and of the same ilk.

Sen. James M. Inhofe is picked out for the political allegations. The Virginia DA inquiry into professor Mann could be used as an example of an assault. Then the loaded phrase “McCarthy-like tactics” is put forth.

“The debate has become polarized,” warned the editorial, and as a result “the scientific enterprise and the whole of society are in danger of losing their crucial rational relationship.”

Perhaps a look in the mirror might help reduce the polarization. There is little disagreement in between the fringes that recent years have seen temperature changes on the order of about one degree over a person’s lifetime. Those questioning the impact or significance of this measure and those questioning the quality of the measure are engaging in proper science, not denying established fact. But those engaging in appropriate scientific skepticism are being plastered with labels, accused of behavior they did not commit, and being shoved out of the public debate.

It is the scientists who signed on to the letter that are illustrating a loss in the “crucial rational relationship,” not those they complain about. That relationship requires a different response than letters with more pages of signatures than pages of rhetoric. What is required of a scientist to foment a “crucial rational relationship” is to undertake the role of teacher. Instead of complaining in letters, the need to step forward to answer questions with solid data, clear explanation of the process used to arrive at conclusions, and sound logic in explaining the steps between those conclusions and the implications they see.

When those who complain about skeptics in such a way as in this letter start to undertake their role to teach and educate rather than complain and defend, then science will be evident.

Michael Ruse says Intelligent design is an oxymoron and makes a good case.

ID is theology – very bad theology. As soon as you bring God into the world on a daily creative basis, then the theodicy problem – the problem of evil – rears its ugly head.

The basis of science is to find a means to understand how things work. There is a fundamental dissonance between this search and the ascribing of the effort at some arbitrary point to deus ex machina (wikipedia). That technique is sometimes useful in fiction and, perhaps, religion, but not in science. Evolution is science, creationism, a.k.a. intelligent design, is not.

Don Boys illustrates the problem in his assertion that Almost a Thousand Major Scientists Dissent from Darwin!. He builds a straw man, calls it evolution, then burns it at the stake. It is a typical example of how some folks solve dissonance between reality and their personal views.

The key in this one is to note that Boys’ argument is about random mutation, not evolution. That is the straw man. The “Thousand Major Scientists” is an example of trying to use the ‘vox populi’ fallacy for comfort and authority. Then there is the ad hominem: “We creationists will continue to remind evolutionists that their lie about “change” has been exposed.” The assertions about “lies” and the claims that a certain group is for “the advancement of atheism” due to their views on this topic are also keys that should be used to qualify the screed. Evolution is science. Creationism is religion. The two do not mix well.

When you want to refute a theory or an hypothesis, you really need to make sure you understand it and that you respond to what it is, not what you want it to be. You cannot select out some particular aspect to isolate it and build your straw man to tear down as it proves your point.

What the anti-evolutionists need to do is to show how everything from the breeding of animals to the creation of genetically modified crops to drug resistant diseases can be explained in a measurable and useful way without evolutionary theory. Then they might have something.

Leo has a good example of what is wrong in many policy debates. In Iceland volcano gives warming world chance to debunk climate sceptic myths it appears he just can’t help himself in his departure from facts and reason towards ridicule and logical fallacies.

Consider the assertion “Climate sceptics’ favourite theory…”, this is a straw man plus. It selects a current event, ascribes it to a group as indicative of that group and then sets up a false premise in order to bash that group.

Ridicule shows in many phrases such as “barrel-aged climate sceptic canard” and “lanced this festering boil” and “put this hoary old chestnut to bed”. None of these address the issue but rather all address the people Leo calls “sceptics.” This is the ad hominem fallacy.

By choosing just one volcano to counter questions about the long term that include many, the story devolves into a “reduction to the absurd” logical fallacy,

Then there is the “debunked sceptic arguments” which shows the win/lose paradigm that is also a straw man. A skeptic isn’t presenting an argument that can be debunked, by definition a skeptic is asking questions about someone else’s argument that need answering.

When you create your own race of people and assign them certain attributes and then give them positions and arguments to suit your feelings, you are not engaging in any productive debate.

Willis Eschenbach puts some perspective on the matter in Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics … and Graphs at Watts Up With That. His point is that all of the global climate change fuss is over changes in mean annual temperature changes of a degree or so over a person’s lifespan and this is insignificant when compared to variations in temperature we normally experience. He makes the point by plotting average monthly temperatures for each year of record.

The key is the scale of the graphs. Graphs of annual temperature means usually show a temperature anomaly range of four degrees or so. Graphs of monthly average temperature means show a temperature range of sixty degrees. Climate change is a quarter of the range on the annual graphs but less than two percent on the monthly. That means any trend in the climate is exaggerated by ten times or more in an annual mean versus a monthly mean.

It should be noted that plotting monthly means puts a lot more data on the graph as well. This tends to emphasize patterns that do exist, such as seasonal variations. Long term climate change is given a reference with these seasonal variations that does not exist in annual means graphs.

These issues of presentation do not change the fundamental problem of data quality, sparse data, and the methods for determining a statistical aggregate to analyze over time. The question about just what is meant by ‘average temperature’ is not well defined and that tends to confuse the picture as well.

When people start asserting that the science is settled or going on about the physics or whatnot, it is a good clue that a skeptic’s view is needed. Diet is one of those. The simplistic view is that weight is simply a matter of energy in versus energy out. New Studies Eat Into Diet Math describes how this simple arithmetic model is perhaps too simplistic.

the 3,500-calorie rule of thumb gets things very wrong over the long term, and has led health analysts astray. Much bigger dietary changes are needed to gain or shed pounds than the formula suggests.

Whether the topic is human body chemistry or climate or any other complex system, simplistic models seldom function well for representing reality over more than very restricted conditions. The use of such models in trying to regulate public health or other behavior should be suspect.

Dr. Sowell laments.

When we see children in elementary schools out carrying signs in demonstrations, we are seeing the kind of mindless groupthink that causes adults to sign petitions they don’t understand or— worse yet— follow leaders they don’t understand, whether to the White House, the Kremlin or Jonestown.

A philosopher once said that the most important knowledge is knowledge of one’s own ignorance. That is the knowledge that too many of our schools and colleges are failing to teach our young people.

Artificial stupidity? Artificial may be the wrong word. Studious stupidity may be a bit closer to the truth.

The problem with much of the climate change alarmism is one of matching what has been measured to what is attributed to that measure. The Reference Frame takes note in A toad of truth: golden toads not killed by GW

The very idea that global warming causes any of these things is utterly ludicrous. If you want to kill a toad, you must give it a poison or shoot it or something like that. You can’t do it by raising the temperature by half a degree. There exists a long list of 690+ consequences of global warming, with links to the media.

Things just don’t match up. You can’t reliably find the temperature in your yard to within a fraction of a degree much less its average temperature much less any impact on the flora and fauna due to that sort of change. Yet, we hear often and repeated nearly every day about some unusual, usually disastrous, event being caused by human caused climate change. That is the fundamental conundrum.

Climate research isn’t the only field suffering from misplaced expectations and outcomes. Johb Timmer says We’re so good at medical studies that most of them are wrong at ars technica and describes inherent problems encountered when trying to make conclusions about phenomena that has many inputs and much complexity.

The consensus seems to be that we simply can’t rely on the researchers to do it. As Shaffer noted, experimentalists who produce the raw data want it to generate results, and the statisticians do what they can to help them find them. The problems with this are well recognized within the statistics community, but they’re loath to engage in the sort of self-criticism that could make a difference. (The attitude, as Young described it, is “We’re both living in glass houses, we both have bricks.”)
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in the mean time, Shaffer seemed to suggest that we simply have to recognize the problem and communicate it with the public, so that people don’t leap to health conclusions each time a new population study gets published. Medical researchers recognize the value of replication, and they don’t start writing prescriptions based on the latest gene expression study—they wait for the individual genes to be validated. As we wait for any sort of reform to arrive, caution, and explaining to the public the reasons for this caution, seems like the best we can do.

At least in medicine there is whiplash as there are many different studies that reach conflicting conclusions. That is a contrast to the monolithic climate research output. Which is better?

It is an AP report at PhysOrg. Study: Warming to bring stronger hurricanes. The picture is a house with the roof ripped off by Hurricane Charley. The warning is dire: global warming will cause more disastrous hurricanes and the science is settled. “Outside experts praised the work.”

They just can’t help it. Scientists who worry about the public image of science should take heed.

The qualifiers are in the story if you look for them. — “But they say there’s not enough evidence yet to tell whether that effect has already begun.” — “The evidence is not strong enough that we could make some kind of statement” along those lines, Knutson said.

Then there’s the attempt to minimize and rationalize criticisms.

Lately, the IPCC series of reports on warming has been criticized for errors. Emanuel said the international climate panel gave “an accurate summary of science that existed at that point.”

The defense runs deep. They just can’t help it. Global Warming. Doom. Gloom. Disaster, Consensus. All from a single report. Does a scientists need to worry about his profession?