In praise of argument February 6, 2010 at 7:15 am
Jonathan Hopkin has an excellent piece on the current climate change research debacle:
My argument is basically that the incriminating emails probably don’t significantly undermine the findings of Phil Jones and his team, and the whole story has been overblown – scientific research is always imperfect, and there are always issues about the reliability of data. And, sometimes, academics behave badly over email. Amazing but true.
He’s right, but then he understands how science is done, as this passage demonstrates:
The truth is that the world of scholarly research is a world which revolves around argument and disagreement: present a paper at a conference and, if it is at all interesting, hands will go up as other researchers seek to challenge and scrutinize your findings. The main reason for this is probably vanity – asking a tricky question and putting another scholar on the spot wins you respect and standing. But the fortunate side effect is that poor research has a good chance of being revealed as such.
In other words, science as she is practiced does not involve mining little nuggets of truth. It is a fermenting brew, with lots of people stirring the mixture, adding ingredients, trying to throw a batch out and start again. Only years later – in some cases decades later – does it settle down enough that we have some chance of seeing what we have really got.
Note too the use of `interesting’ in the above. Being wrong isn’t the main scientific sin. Being boring is. Fortunately many scientists have low standards (although perhaps not quite as low as economists), so they take an interest in quite a lot of ideas. But it is certainly career enhancing to produce something that a lot of people find interesting, even if it turns out to be wrong. Those wrong ideas are useful in part because opposing them often helps to create a less wrong idea.
I think it is extremely probable – but not certain – that current climate science is correct. We have a big problem, and we need to do more to fix it, even while acknowledging that we do not know quite how big it is. It would be a tragedy if a failure to understand how science happens were to be the reason we don’t do enough.
