It is Gore, how could I let it ride?

I have to give props to the Drudge Report for this one (and if I had a clue how to do trackbacks, I would.

Anyone seen the Gore flick?  Here is an interesting take.  I for one feel there is far too little fact and far too many hypothesis (note: I didn't say "theory" as those who had even some science know that a "theory" actually has been repeatedly proven correct) floating around to feel there is a consensus view on what our correct course of action should be.

That said, it appears that the markets (or the oil barons in the Middle East) may do what years of environmental activism never could - force man to find alternatives to that extremely efficient fuel source we call petroleum.

Comments

[Matt]

Here's how I see the whole thing...

The most honest answer about "global warming" (When I say "global warming" I mean the phenomenon of humans altering the climate by way of Co2 emmissions) is simply "we don't know". There are respected scientists with solid evidence on both sides of the argument.

That being said, I see that we have two options.

1) We can wait and see what happens. The biggest problem with this plan is that if the "alarmists" happen to be right, we might not figure it out with enough certainty before its too late to do anything about it. I'm not saying that they are right. I'm just suggesting that they could be correct.

2) Begin to take a common sense approach to reducing the amount of Co2 we put into the air. I'm not suggesting that we outlaw cars and start shutting down factories, but I think that there isn't anyone in the world who can argue that the reduction our Co2 production would have a negative impact on the envrionment. Let's educate consumers, provide economic incintives to coporations, and encourage research into the subject.

[Jared]

Here's a link to an interesting Terry Gross interview with Gore: http://mywebpages.comcast.net/duncanblack/gore.html

Now, I realize that I'm no expert on the subject, and I haven't done my homework, yadda yadda.

BUT...Terry Gross is an outstanding interviewer and always does her homework. I tend to trust her statements. Here are some lines that catch me:

"A scientist there [The University of California at San Diego] named Dr. Naomi Oreskes published in Science magazine a study of every peer-reviewed journal article on global warming from the previous 10 years, and then in her random sample of 928 articles, she found that no articles disagreed with the scientific consensus on global warming. Then another study on articles on global warming that were published in the previous 14 years in the press, specifically published in The New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times and Wall Street Journal found that more than half of those stories gave equal weight to the scientific consensus and to the view that human beings played no role in global warming."

Now, just a few days after hearing this interview, I heard another interview for which I can't find the transcript because I don't remember enough specifically to google for. But the second interview was about the mismatch between the goals of the free press and the goals of science.

The free press's goal, the interviewee claimed, is to present a "fair and balanced" look at differing opinons. The interviewee went on for several minutes about issues that were covered in the press and why it is so important to give equal air to both sides of many debates (politics, religion, etc, etc, etc.)

The interviewee then went on to talk about the goal of science: to discover truths about the world we live in that are supported by rational argument. The interviewee went on to explain that science isn't balanced at all - it's intentionally biased towards those hypotheses that can be rationally proven. The whole point of a peer reviewed journal is to interject intentional bias towards rational truth.

One major problem for modern democracy, according to the interviewee, is that the scientific issues of our age that need to effect the political process are sufficiently complicated that one needs to understand them very well to 'grok' them.

The goal of the free press is to remove bias, therefore they present equal airtime to advocates and detractors of global warning theory. Another example the interviewee gave of this phenomenon was the intelligent design movement. The goal of the press is to present a balanced view, so they give equal time to each side of the discussion.

The result is (again according to the interviewee) that a society who depends primarily on the free press for information about policy decisions will naturally fail to grok complicated scientific principles - even when the scientific evidence is very clearly weighted one direction or another.

I'm not sure how much I buy the conversation, but the two interviews in dialog with each other in my head has been very interesting.

[Matt]

Interviewee says, by way of Jared:
"...science isn't balanced at all - it's intentionally biased towards those hypotheses that can be rationally proven. The whole point of a peer reviewed journal is to interject intentional bias towards rational truth."

Matt says: I'm not sure if I agree with the use of the term "bias" here. When one is "biased" it implies an intentional choice of one side/realm/ideology over another. I would agrue that Science's emphasis on rational truth is an a priori fact, not a selective bias. To say science is biased towards rational truth as opposed to irrational ideas is like saying that French class is "biased" towards the French language as opposed to German.

I know that this is largely a semantic argument, but the distinction is important, particularly in the realm of the discssion surrounding Intelligent Design as the supporters of ID constantly drone on about how "science is 'biased' against us"

The reason Science as a whole tends to reject intelligent design from the get-go is the fact that rejects the key principal of the scientific method....the need for an empirically provable hypothesis.

Well...that and the fact that ID supporters say that they are trying to win a "scientific debate", and they are going about it in the most un-scientific of ways...a public policy struggle, but that's another post.

[Bill]

Because I enjoy being a thorn in your side, Matt, I thought I'd continue to debate semantics with you.

First, I will take your definition of bias as "an intentional choice of one side/realm/ideology over another" and look at it. Is that not what science is? Is "science" not based in the philosophical ideas encapsulated in the Enlightenment mindset? Do practicioners and theorists of science (more commonly called scientists) not actively (and often with authority) set the origins and limits of scientific enquiry?

And second, I would question your use of "intentional". What exactly is an unintentional choice of one ideology(etc.) over another?

[Matt]

Fair enough.

I think you are right about the use of the word "intentional"...I would take it out if I re-wrote the comment.

I've got to think some more about the use of the word 'bias'. I still don't think that science is 'biased' towards emperical truth in the common sense use of the word...when something is true about a subject in an a priori sense can that truth be biased?

See my French class being biased against German argument....

[Bill]

Oh, right. Your French class argument.

Remind me again, what constitutes the French language? Is it words that French people speak? Do you mean Parisians or Provincials, people from Normandy or the Rhine Valley? Is French what is in the Oxford Dictionary or what the people of former French colonies speak? What about Medieval French?

Whoever teaches French to students has a distinct bias about what the lessons involve, and from one class to another, French has the potential to look very different. Normally, it doesn't, but people with power, influence, and authority set the rules of so-called "standard" French.

Is a French class biased against German? No, but it is biased.

[Bill]

Oh, and Jordan, I read the article you pointed out, and noted especially this sentence:

Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change.

Here's what I think.

When I stay up really late and watch the informercials that promise a cream will keep my gray hairs at bay and grow only healthy brown hairs, they always verify their claims with "hundreds of experts". Even when these "experts" are specialists in hair change. However, chemists, biologists, internists... etc. have all contributed to the growing body of scientific research that says that my hair will in fact go gray. Each may indeed be a specialist, but they've been listening to each other for quite a while and linking their research together to make one big find: The fact that I am getting older is giving me gray hair.

Piece together what most scientists are saying, and you get this: the world is changing very rapidly in a manner in which no one is certain about the outcome; no one is sure that the world has ever changed like this before. Caution and conservatism might indeed be the best roads to follow, regardless of which political party advises them.

I mention conservatism just because the irony of this debate is this: most times, we hear that conservatives are just that, conservative, and liberals are wasteful spenders. But when it comes to the environment, liberals are the ones saying "Woah! Slow down! Maybe we should think about this before we've gone over the cliff." And the conservatives are the ones saying "There is no cliff; bigger, better, faster, more!"

Which is the more wasteful? The ones spending the money? Or the ones spending everything else?

[matt]

Beware: This gets sorta heavy....

So really the question that we are dealing with here is 'Is science biased towards the idea of the existence of empirical truth?'

Before I respond, I'm going to try and explain what I think we mean when we say 'empricical truth'.

Empirical Truth: The idea that some or all of the truth about our universe can be comprehensively explained in a quantitaive, empirical, and repeatable manner.

Based on that definintion, I would say that to call science 'biased' towards notions of emperical truth is a gross understatement. Bias is not nearly strong enough a word/concept to describe science's relationship to these notions. Words like 'fundamental' and 'framework' come to mind. If you remove our Enlightenment-era notions of empirical truth....you have no science.

The question then becomes a matter of degree. How much of our universe can be captured by these truths? I would suggest that there is a fairly significant number of scientists out there that would argue that our entire universe is emprically describeable, and if given enough time (and a finite universe) we could figure it all out.

I think most folks (myself included) have a much more moderated view of this. I think that a great deal of our world can be captured and described by science, but there will likely always be things that escape us....

This whole discussion reminds me of an interesting period in the history of Mathematics....

There was a time in the early 20th century when several mathematicians (they were called 'formalists') thought they were extremely close to completely understanding the foundations of mathematics. They were moving towards an attempt to describe every mathematical truth from a well-defined system of axioms and rules.

The Magum Opus of this period was Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead's Principia Mathematica. Go to the Wikipedia to read more...

Then came an auspicous logican named Kurt Godel. His famous incompleteness theorems blew the whole mess out of the water. Which says:

For any consistent formal system that proves basic arithmetical truths, it is possible to construct an arithmetical statement that is true 1 but not provable in the theory. That is, any consistent theory of a certain expressive strength is incomplete.

Which is a lot to get your head around, but the point is that no matter how carefully we construct our formal system, we can ALWAYS create a truth that our system cannot account for.

Now if this were math class, it would normally take us into a discussion of what a 'formal system' is, but I don't think we want to go there lest Jordan's head essplode. However, I do think that some of the beauty of Godel's work can be appreciated without all of the surrounding formalism.

So how does this anecdote apply?

I think that Godel managed to point out in a very formal way that there will always be things beyond our ablity to codify, empericize, and analyze, and the same idea can be extended to science's relationship to the "truth".

Science does an awfully good job providing us some answers do some awfully important questions, but I think that there will likely always be aspects of our world beyond that "empirical truth" will no suffice to describe.