Blog The NonSequitor has a post on the use and misuse of anecdotes in discussions of climate change. It is an interesting, well-reasoned piece that I largely agree with. However, I think the post sort of misses the point of the politics of climate change – to get anything done on this issue requires thinking very carefully about how to communicate findings and ideas with the public. While I agree, in principle, that arguing against climate change or climate change science by picking at an imperfect anecdote (i.e. Al Gore making it seem like 20 meters of sea level rise is impending) does not really address the underlying science, or the soundness of the underlying argument, the assumption that John Casey is making in this post is that science and truth are driving political decision-making. They do not.
The simple difference between politics and science: in science, there are problems and solutions (or at least means of coming to a solution). In politics, there are issues and interests that require debate, consideration and compromise. Science and data are just fodder for that process – they always have been. Scientists fundamentally fail to recognize this when they engage the political process, and tend to become frustrated when what seems self-evident to them ends up debated, and when obvious solutions get watered down or buried. Folks, we are not doing science when we engage in policy – we are doing politics. And that means accepting that people will, in fact, “weak man” your arguments by finding one imperfect anecdote and using it against the whole argument. Yes, it’s intellectually dishonest. It is also reality.
Politics does not deal in truth, it deals in tactics. And that means we have to be tactically aware of what we are doing when we lay out examples and anecdotes. It also means that we have to be aggressive in addressing efforts to “weak man” the evidence for climate change, instead of dismissing such efforts as not requiring attention (see the IPCC’s botched handling of the misrepresented melt rate of the Himalayan Glaciers). It is good to know the fallacious arguments being used against the science – but only if we are willing to address those arguments.
Hey Thanks for your thoughtful consideration of my post. I’d just like to add one thing if you don’t mind. I’m not assuming what you take me to be assuming. I’m arguing that media meta commenters (in this case Dana Milbank) *ought* not to weak man. One expects, but doesn’t deserve, weak men out of the advocates. When they weak man, moreover (and this was my point), it’s not the fault of the weak-mannned.
You make a valid point there, as it is not the fault of the weak-manned. To be fair, my post is not as much about your post (which I liked), as much as it is an expression of worry over how people might use your point as a means of dismissing the tactics of many of those who argue against climate change as intellectually dishonest, and therefore not worth engaging (not your point). I am very, very concerned when I see people (again, not you) doing this, as it completely misses how politics really works.
The funny thing (at least to a lot of people) is that I don’t really wish we lived in a world where scientific methods and data were used in a more direct manner without political intervention. The problem with any group of people who think they have truth on their side is the rapid slide into absolutism that usually follows. Good scientists don’t suffer from this, as they are always ready to admit what they do and don’t know, and the limits of what their data and experiments tell them . . . but we are not surrounded by exclusively good scientists.
I suspect that one of the reasons we never had a European-style slide into fascism (often buttressed by some sort of “scientific” theory of the social managed by technocrats) is because our political process really doesn’t allow for technocrats to operate in an unchecked manner (no matter what people might shout about the EPA or any other executive branch agency) – basically, we deny people that foundation of truth from which absolutist statements can be made. I suppose the American Studies major in me (buried after all these long years) still believes that the messy, ugly political process through which we work does have some value . . . even when it is frustrating as hell. Or, as I once told one of my European colleagues right after the 2006 midterm elections, “hey, we’re America. We get it right . . . eventually.” I hope that eventually doesn’t come too late to do anything effective on climate change, though . . .
I sympathise with your point that wrong-headed political anecdotes from people like Al Gore don’t negate the science. And also I agree that science and politics are different arenas and their methods don’t mix. But I think that from the political viewpoint you underestimate the significance, both for and against, of exaggerated climate scare stories.
For most people out there, worried about their planet, worried about their taxes and livelihoods, they don’t know anything about the science. What they know is Al Gore’s movie, and the stories on TV and in the newspapers about dying polar bears, Atlantic hurricanes, heatwaves, droughts, floods, famines, mass extinctions, refugees, plagues, spreading deserts, and entire nations slowly sinking below the oceans. This is what they understand by “global warming”. This *is* the science, to them.
This has two consequences:
First, by exaggerating the threat to get a higher priority for action, you short-circuit the political process which is about balancing all the competing priorities. Like development, for instance. You can wind up mis-allocating resources that would have been better spent on something else.
Secondly, you open your political position to being totally discredited when people realise the anecdotes are exaggerated or false. It is no use performing a bait-and-switch at that point, and replacing the anecdotes with the science, because it wasn’t the science you sold it on. And the unexaggerated science (at least arguably) doesn’t support the political urgency.
There are a lot of ‘sceptics’ out there that actually agree with the science, but are getting angry about all the false predictions of imminent catastrophe being used to sell it politically. They are particularly angry about the fact that all these stories are being cloaked in the authority and reputation of science and scientists – which they can see in years to come doing science a lot of damage too.
You can’t have it both ways. Either we are all required to stick to scientific accuracy, in which case you need to stop with all the scare stories, or you’re allowed to use dodgy anecdotes not backed up by science to support your political case, in which case the sceptics are allowed to do it too.
And of course you’ll lose either way. You can’t explain the real science to the public and politicians, and the sceptics have by now penetrated a lot of the dodgy arguments and are able to expose them as such in terms the public can understand.
The Dana Milbank article about the weather-is-not-climate argument is a case in point. You and I both know that weather is not climate, and short-term local weather extremes are normal and not a sign of anything. But advocates for AGW-action, much to the sceptics annoyance, have nevertheless used every one they can find to further sell the idea to the public. (And some scientists have taken part in that.) We tried pointing out that they didn’t mean anything and got ignored. So in a fit of irony, whenever we saw an extreme cold weather event being ignored by the media, we highlighted it, and said “if those other stories are evidence of warming, then it must be cooling now, right?”
And of course, predictably, we got told off for confusing weather with climate, and trying to mislead the public.
However, politically, (and probably unintentionally,) the tactic worked. First, all the people conditioned by the AGW-action campaign to connect weather to climate change saw all this cold weather and started to doubt, and second, the chorus of “weather-is-not-climate” via the media finally broke the barrier and entered the public consciousness at last, and that of course neutralised the scare stories. When people start to joke about all the global warming they have to shovel off their driveway in the winter, it kills credibility.
It is quite true that discrediting the weak arguments like this does not mean the strong arguments are thereby falsified. The problem is that most of the advocates for action don’t seem to *have* any strong arguments. Sceptics have asked to see them in the past, and either got the run-around, or more weak arguments, or assertions of unquestionable scientific peer-reviewed authority, or insults. The bits that we have managed to disentangle show evidence of appalling lack of quality control and carelessness. All the stuff about evading freedom of information legislation and hiding the data makes it look even worse. It’s a big problem.
You can’t just shrug and say “that’s politics” any more.
So I would suggest that the best thing you could do to support action on AGW is first to push a big effort to purge yourselves of all the damaging weak arguments and bad practices, and then devote some time and effort to making the strong and scientific arguments more open and comprehensible to the public and getting them out there. Never mind about doing more research – scientific education and outreach are your top priorities now.
Sounds like a job for the IPCC, don’t you think?
😉