Vox Stultus

So, Ezra Klein is going to make news better. He’s going to do that by assiduously avoiding the sort of problems that plague data analysis, leading to incorrect conclusions because of politics.  Great news for libertarians, right?  After all, we’re slaves to neither tradition nor feelings — libertarians, moreso than any other political orientation, are concerned with being right.

Unfortunately, Ezra’s inaugural post demonstrates why the experiment’s not going to work: like the people he criticizes, Ezra does not understand or properly apply epistemology, especially not scientific epistemology, and particularly does not seem to understand the distortion created by politics — the very problem he alleges to solve.

This will make sense to anyone who’s ever read the work of a serious climate change denialist. It’s filled with facts and figures, graphs and charts, studies and citations. Much of the data is wrong or irrelevant. But it feels convincing. It’s a terrific performance of scientific inquiry. And climate-change skeptics who immerse themselves in it end up far more confident that global warming is a hoax than people who haven’t spent much time studying the issue. More information, in this context, doesn’t help skeptics discover the best evidence. Instead, it sends them searching for evidence that seems to prove them right. And in the age of the internet, such evidence is never very far away.
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But that’s not true on issues, like climate change, where action is needed quickly to prevent a disaster that will happen slowly. There, the reckoning will be for future generations to face. And it’s not true when American politics becomes so warped by gerrymandering, big money, and congressional dysfunction that voters can’t figure out who to blame for the state of the country.

Every skeptic reading this understands you could replace “skeptic” with “alarmist” in that first paragraph and it would be just as true, if not more so.  One doubts that Ezra, or his crew at Vox, is aware of this, or indeed has any valid measure by which to define which evidence is “best.”   Ezra simply assumes the “best evidence” is unknown to skeptics, as though we aren’t constantly assaulted by AGW promotion in the media.  In this, Ezra merely demonstrates that alarmists are much less likely to be aware of skeptic arguments/evidence than vice-versa — and more critically for his endeavor, that Vox itself is unaware of the very sort of blind spot Vox purports to address.

The scientific consensus is that AGW is real, at least in the very limited sense that Man has a significant effect on the climate and temperatures have increased  (this is the takeaway from the several oft-mischaracterized “97%” studies). But “hoax” is nothing more than a strawman, because virtually all “serious denialists” agree with that consensus too, as Ezra would know had he bothered to do any real research before commencing his self-righteous namecalling in the name of truth.

More problematically for the vaunted validity of Vox, the scientific consensus also says that AGW will be mild and net beneficial, not disastrous.  IPCC scenarios now include a mere 0.5 degree increase by 2100 (that’s right, the world’s primary climate change organization now accepts that there may not be any significant global warming this century), and find mild warming most likely.  And estimates will probably continue to fall given the failures of the models.  As Ridley points out, centuries of evidence demonstrate that warmth is generally a boon to mankind.  “Disaster” may be a political consensus among certain scientists and scientific organizations,  but it has very little empirical heft — heavily promoted but wildly speculative impact studies from government scientists notwithstanding.

Speaking of which, as Ezra points out one can always find data to support an AGW opinion — there’s no shortage of studies that claim AGW will have a severe negative impact. So how, then, do we judge truth from falsity?   Perhaps Ezra should have reviewed Tetlock’s 2005 work — these kinds of predictions have always had a terrible track record.  Or he could have simply sampled Steve Goddard’s Twitter feed, which documents hundreds, if not thousands, of failed predictions of climate-related disaster from as early as the 19th century and as late as the 21st, as well as raising serious questions about the state of the reported data.  I have to wonder if Ezra’s even aware of how earlier IPCC predictions have fared.  The scientific method says theories are tested by evidence — one reason why most AGW skeptics are fans of this Feynman quote:

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.

In sum, Ezra espouses some fine ideals but promptly fails to live up to them, leading to the inevitable conclusion Vox’s ostensibly divorced-from-politics, no-agenda, this-is-the-real-truth coverage is really just another front in the left’s broad “shut up” campaign.  One might not expect the average pundit to understand that four sequential updates to USHCN data that all increase the warming trend should raise red flags, or to be familiar with the litany of failed climate predictions, or to know that alarmists get tens of billions in funding (including bizarre “science” like this NSF grant for $700,000 to produce a play about global warming) while most prominent skeptics get virtually no funding (the NIPCC‘s entire nontaxpayer-funded outlay could probably fit easily into the IPCC’s travel budget — or that of Sierra or Greenpeace, for that matter), or to be aware that forecasting scientists say that there is no scientific basis for reliably estimating future climate, or to be familiar with the problems with peer review, or to know that crop yields have skyrocketed during this allegedly unprecedented warming.   On the other hand, one does expect someone claiming to be data-driven to have more interest in data.

When raising lofty standards, one must ensure one is not also hoisting oneself by that same petard.