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Keith Kloor, blogging on the session  at Collide-a-Scape, included a sobering assessment of the scientist-journalist tensions over global warming from Tom Rosensteil, a panelist and long-time journalist who now heads up Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism: If you’re waiting for the press to persuade the public, you’re going to lose. The press doesn’t see that as its job.

scientists have  a great opportunity, and responsibility, to tell their own story more directly, as some are doing occasionally through Dot Earth “ Post Cards” and The Times’ Scientist at Work blog.

Naomi Oreskes, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, and co-author of “Merchants of Doubt“: Of Mavericks and Mules Gavin Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Realclimate.org: Between Sound Bites and the Scientific Paper: Communicating in the Hinterland Thomas Lessl, a scholar at the University of Georgia focused on the cultural history of science: Reforming Scientific Communication About Anthropogenic Climate Change

I focused on two words in the title of the session — diversity and denial. The diversity of lines of inquiry in climate science has a two-pronged impact. It helps build a robust overall picture of a growing human influence on a complex system. But for many of the most important  pixel points in that picture, there is robust, durable and un-manufactured debate. That debate can then be exploited by naysayers eager to cast doubt on the enterprise, when in fact — as I’ve written here before — it’s simply the (sometimes ugly) way that science progresses.

My denial, I said, lay in my longstanding presumption, like that of many scientists and journalists, that better communication of information will tend to change people’s perceptions, priorities and behavior. This attitude, in my view, crested for climate scientists in the wake of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In his talk, Thomas Lessl said much of this attitude is rooted in what he and some other social science scholars call “scientism,” the idea — rooted in the 19th century — that scientific inquiry is a “distinctive mode of inquiry that promises to bring clarity to all human endeavors.” [5:45 p.m. | Updated Chris Mooney sent an e-mail noting how the discussion below resonates with "Do Scientists Understand the Public," a report he wrote last year for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and explored here.]

Scientism, though it is good at promoting the recognition that scientific knowledge is the only kind of knowledge, also promotes communication behavior that is bad for the scientific ethos. By this I mean that it turns such communication into combat. By presuming that scientific understanding is the only criterion that matters, scientism inclines public actors to treat resistant audiences as an enemy: If the public doesn’t get the science, shame on the public. If the public rejects a scientific claim, it is either because they don’t get it or because they operate upon some sinister motive.

Scientific knowledge cannot take the place of prudence in public affairs.

Prudence, according to Robert Harriman, “is the mode of reasoning about contingent matters in order to select the best course of action. Contingent events cannot be known with certainty, and actions are intelligible only with regard to some idea of what is good.”

Scientism tends to suppose a one-size-fits-all notion of truth telling. But in the public sphere, people don’t think that way. They bring to the table a variety of truth standards: moral judgment, common-sense judgment, a variety of metaphysical perspectives, and ideological frameworks. The scientists who communicate about climate change may regard these standards as wrong-headed or at best irrelevant, but scientists don’t get to decide this in a democratic debate. When scientists become public actors, they have stepped outside of science, and they are obliged to honor the rules of communication and thought that govern the rest of the world. This might be different, if climate change was just about determining the causes of climate change, but it never is. Getting from the acceptance of ACC to acceptance of the kinds of emissions-reducing policies that are being advocated takes us from one domain of knowing into another.

One might object by saying that the formation of public policy depends upon first establishing the scientific bases of ACC, and that the first question can be considered independently of the second. Of course that is right, but that is an abstract academic distinction that does not hold in public debates. In public debates a different set of norms and assumptions apply: motive is not to be casually set aside as a nonfactor. Just because scientists customarily bracket off scientific topics from their policy implications does not mean that lay people do this—or even that they should be compelled to do so. When scientists talk about one thing, they seem to imply the other. But which is the motive force? Are they advocating for ACC because they subscribe to a political worldview that supports legal curtailments upon free enterprise? Or do they support such a political worldview because they are convinced of ACC? The fact that they speak as scientists may mean to other scientists that they reason from evidence alone. But the public does not necessarily share this assumption. If scientists don’t respect this fact about their audiences, they are bound to get in trouble. [Read the rest.]

The idea that increased energy efficiency can increase energy consumption at the macro-economic level strikes many as a new idea, or paradoxical, but it was first observed in 1865 by British economist William Stanley Jevons, who pointed out that Watt's more efficient steam engine and other technical improvements that increased the efficiency of coal consumption actually increased rather than decreased demand for coal. More efficient engines, Jevons argued, would increase future coal consumption by lowering the effective price of energy, thus spurring greater demand and opening up useful and profitable new ways to utilize coal. Jevons was proven right, and the reality of what is today known as "Jevons Paradox" has long been uncontroversial among economists.

Economists have long observed that increasing the productivity of any single factor of production -- whether labor, capital, or energy -- increases demand for all of those factors. This is one of the basic dynamics of economic growth. Luddites who feared there would be fewer jobs with the emergence of weaving looms were proved wrong by lower price for woven clothing and demand that has skyrocketed (and continued to increase) ever since. And today, no economist would posit that an X% improvement in labor productivity would lead directly to an X% reduction in employment. In fact, the opposite is widely expected: labor productivity is a chief driver of economic growth and thus increases in employment overall. There is no evidence, the report points out, that energy is any different, as per capita energy consumption everywhere on earth continues to rise, even as economies become more efficient each year.

There is no question that the diagrams and accompanying text in the IPCC TAR, AR4 and WMO 1999 are misleading.  I was misled.  Upon considering the material presented in these reports, it did not occur to me that recent paleo data was not consistent with the historical record.  The one statement in AR4 (put in after McIntyre’s insistence as a reviewer) that mentions the divergence problem is weak tea.

It is obvious that there has been deletion of adverse data in figures shown IPCC AR3 and AR4, and the 1999 WMO document.  Not only is this misleading, but it is dishonest (I agree with Muller on this one).  The authors defend themselves by stating that there has been no attempt to hide the divergence problem in the literature, and that the relevant paper was referenced.  I infer then that there is something in the IPCC process or the authors’ interpretation of the IPCC process  (i.e. don’t dilute the message) that corrupted the scientists into deleting the adverse data in these diagrams.

McIntyre’s analysis is sufficiently well documented that it is difficult to imagine that his analysis is incorrect in any significant way.  If his analysis is incorrect, it should be refuted.  I would like to know what the heck Mann, Briffa, Jones et al. were thinking when they did this and why they did this, and how they can defend this, although the emails provide pretty strong clues.  Does the IPCC regard this as acceptable?  I sure don’t.

paleoproxies are outside the arena of my personal research expertise, and I find my eyes glaze over when I start reading about bristlecones, etc.  However, two things this week have changed my mind, and I have decided to take on one aspect of this issue: the infamous “hide the decline.” The first thing that contributed to my mind change was this post at Bishop Hill entitled “Will Sir John condemn hide the decline?”, related to Sir John Beddington’s statement:  It is time the scientific community became proactive in challenging misuse of scientific evidence.

The second thing was this youtube clip of physicist Richard Muller (Director of the Berkeley Earth Project), where he discusses “hide the decline” and vehemently refers to this as “dishonest,” and says “you are not allowed to do this,” and further states that he intends not to read further papers by these authors (note “hide the decline” appears around minute 31 into the clip).  While most of his research is in physics, Muller has also published important papers on paleoclimate, including a controversial paper that supported McIntyre and McKitrick’s analysis.

In the entire news bulletin, almost nothing was mentioned about the areas where the earthquake was most severe and the tsunami most devastating (i.e. the Sendai area). There was hardly any footage, no on-the-spot reporting, no casualty figures, nothing about how victims are putting up. OK, to be fair there were a few seconds showing people queuing up to get food and drinking water at one shop. Not a word about 10,000 people missing from Minamisanriku. Not even about rescue teams struggling to get to the worst areas. Amazingly, not a word too was said about the nuclear plants with overheating cores, or the hurried evacuations (that I learnt about online), at first 3 km radius, then 10 km, and now 20 km. . .  suggesting that the situation is probably out of control and may be becoming critical. To CNA, it is apparently not news. What was news was how horrid it was that middle-class Singaporeans were stuck at the airport unable to go on holiday.

I asked him, “If paradigms are really incommensurable, how is history of science possible? Wouldn’t we be merely interpreting the past in the light of the present? Wouldn’t the past be inaccessible to us? Wouldn’t it be ‘incommensurable?’ ” [8] ¶He started moaning. He put his head in his hands and was muttering, “He’s trying to kill me. He’s trying to kill me.” ¶And then I added, “…except for someone who imagines himself to be God.” ¶It was at this point that Kuhn threw the ashtray at me.

I call Kuhn’s reply “The Ashtray Argument.” If someone says something you don’t like, you throw something at him. Preferably something large, heavy, and with sharp edges. Perhaps we were engaged in a debate on the nature of language, meaning and truth. But maybe we just wanted to kill each other.

That's the problem with relativism: Who's to say who's right and who's wrong? Somehow I'm not surprised to hear Kuhn was an ashtray-hurler. In the end, what other argument could he make?

For us to have a conversation and come to an agreement about the meaning of some word without having to refer to some outside authority like a dictionary, we would of necessity have to be satisfied that our agreement was genuine and not just a polite acknowledgement of each others' right to their opinion, can you agree with that? If so, then let's see if we can agree on the meaning of the word 'know' because that may be the crux of the matter. When I use the word 'know' I mean more than the capacity to apprehend some aspect of the world through language or some other represenational symbolism. Included in the word 'know' is the direct sensorial perception of some aspect of the world. For example, I sense the floor that my feet are now resting upon. I 'know' the floor is really there, I can sense it. Perhaps I don't 'know' what the floor is made of, who put it there, and other incidental facts one could know through the usual symbolism such as language as in a story someone tells me. Nevertheless, the reality I need to 'know' is that the floor, or whatever you may wish to call the solid - relative to my body - flat and level surface supported by more structure then the earth, is really there and reliably capable of supporting me. This is true and useful knowledge that goes directly from the floor itself to my knowing about it - via sensation - that has nothing to do with my interpretive system.

Now I am interested in 'knowing' my feet in the same way that my feet and the whole body they are connected to 'know' the floor. I sense my feet sensing the floor. My feet are as real as the floor and I know they are there, sensing the floor because I can sense them. Furthermore, now I 'know' that it is 'I' sensing my feet, sensing the floor. Do you see where I am going with this line of thought? I am including in the word 'know' more meaning than it is commonly given by everyday language. Perhaps it sounds as if I want to expand on the Cartesian formula of cogito ergo sum, and in truth I prefer to say I sense therefore I am. It is my sensations of the world first and foremost that my awareness, such as it is, is actively engaged with reality. Now, any healthy normal animal senses the world but we can't 'know' if they experience reality as we do since we can't have a conversation with them to arrive at agreement. But we humans can have this conversation and possibly agree that we can 'know' the world through sensation. We can even know what is 'I' through sensation. In fact, there is no other way to know 'I' except through sensation. Thought is symbolic representation, not direct sensing, so even though the thoughtful modality of regarding the world may be a far more reliable modality than sensation in predicting what might happen next, its very capacity for such accurate prediction is its biggest weakness, which is its capacity for error

Sensation cannot be 'wrong' unless it is used to predict outcomes. Thought can be wrong for both predicting outcomes and for 'knowing' reality. Sensation alone can 'know' reality even though it is relatively unreliable, useless even, for making predictions.

If we prioritize our interests by placing predictability over pure knowing through sensation, then of course we will not value the 'knowledge' to be gained through sensation. But if we can switch the priorities - out of sheer curiosity perhaps - then we can enter a realm of knowledge through sensation that is unbelievably spectacular. Our bodies are 'made of' reality, and by methodically exercising our nascent capacity for self sensing, we can connect our knowing 'I' to reality directly. We will not be able to 'know' what it is that we are experiencing in the way we might wish, which is to be able to predict what will happen next or to represent to ourselves symbolically what we might experience when we turn our attention to that sensation. But we can arrive at a depth and breadth of 'knowing' that is utterly unprecedented in our lives by operating that modality.

One of the impressions that comes from a sustained practice of self sensing is a clearer feeling for what "I" is and why we have a word for that self referential phenomenon, seemingly located somewhere behind our eyes and between our ears. The thing we call "I" or "me" depending on the context, turns out to be a moving point, a convergence vector for a variety of images, feelings and sensations. It is a reference point into which certain impressions flow and out of which certain impulses to act diverge and which may or may not animate certain muscle groups into action. Following this tricky exercize in attention and sensation, we can quickly see for ourselves that attention is more like a focused beam and awareness is more like a diffuse cloud, but both are composed of energy, and like all energy they vibrate, they oscillate with a certain frequency. That's it for now.

I loved the writer's efforts to find a fixed definition of “Incommensurability;” there was of course never a concrete meaning behind the word. Smoke and mirrors.

So when I hear scientists say, “The data speak for themselves,” I cringe. Data never speak. And data generally and most often are politically and socially inflected. They have import for people’s lives. To ignore that is to ignore the social and cultural dimensions within which this science is taking place.

I do think that there is a process by which, for example, the connection between cigarette smoking and cancer for decades had a scientific consensus that this was an issue, then a social process begins, and then it becomes accepted.

The interesting thing with climate change, I find, is that positioning on climate change is strikingly predictable based on someone’s political leanings. One-third of Republicans and three-quarters of Democrats think that climate change is real. That to me speaks to the political, ideological and cultural dimensions of this debate.

It’s interesting because it wasn’t always so. In 1997 with the Kyoto treaty, with the development of regulations that would impact economic and political interests, sides started to be drawn. We’ve reached the stage today that climate change has become part of the culture wars, the same as health care, abortion, gun control and evolution.

There are many who distrust the peer-review process and distrust scientists. So that can be step one. I think a lot of people will be uncomfortable accepting a scientific conclusion if it necessarily leads to outcomes they find objectionable. People will be hesitant to accept the notion of climate change if that leads directly towards ideas that are at variance with values that they hold dear.

do you trust the scientific process? Do you trust scientists? The faith-and-reason debate has been around for centuries. I just read a book that I thought was prescient, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” about this suspicion people have about intellectuals who are working on issues that are inaccessible, opaque to them, yielding conclusions that alter the way we structure our society, the way we live our lives.

There’s a certain helpless frustration people have: Who are these cultural elites, these intellectual elites who can make these conclusions in the ivory tower of academia or other scientific institutions and tell me how to live my life?

And we can’t leave out power. There are certain powerful interests out there that will not accept the conclusions this will yield to, therefore they will not accept the definition of the problem if they are not going to accept the solutions that follow it. I’m speaking of certain industry sectors that stand to lose in a carbon-constrained world.

Also, if you can’t define solutions on climate change and you’re asking me to accept it, you’re asking me to accept basically a pretty dismal reality that I refuse to accept. And many climate proponents fall into this when they give these horrific, apocalyptic predictions of cities under water and ice ages and things like that. That tends to get people to dig their heels in even harder.

Some people look at this as just a move for more government, more government bureaucracy. And I think importantly fear or resist the idea of world government. Carbon dioxide is part of the economy of every country on earth. This is a global cooperation challenge the likes of which we have never seen before.

Do you trust the message and do you trust the messenger? If I am inclined to resist the notion of global cooperation — which is a nice way to put what others may see as a one-world government — and if the scientific body that came to that conclusion represents that entity, I will be less inclined to believe it. People will accept a message from someone that they think shares their values and beliefs. And for a lot of people, environmentalists are not that kind of person. There’s a segment of the population that sees environmentalists as socialists, trying to control people’s lives.

In our society today, I think people have more faith in economic institutions than they do in scientific institutions. Scientists can talk until they are blue in the face about climate change. But if businesses are paying money to address this issue, then people will say: It must be true, because they wouldn’t be throwing their money away.

what I’m laying out is that this is very much a value- and culture-based debate. And to ignore that – you will never resolve it and you will end up in what I have described a logic schism, where the two sides talk about completely different things, completely different issues, demonizing the other, only looking for things that confirm their opinion. And we get nowhere.

The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.

We're not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that's highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about.

Consider a person who has heard about a scientific discovery that deeply challenges her belief in divine creation—a new hominid, say, that confirms our evolutionary origins. What happens next, explains political scientist Charles Taber of Stony Brook University, is a subconscious negative response to the new information—and that response, in turn, guides the type of memories and associations formed in the conscious mind. "They retrieve thoughts that are consistent with their previous beliefs," says Taber, "and that will lead them to build an argument and challenge what they're hearing."

when we think we're reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we're being scientists, but we're actually being lawyers (PDF). Our "reasoning" is a means to a predetermined end—winning our "case"—and is shot through with biases. They include "confirmation bias," in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and "disconfirmation bias," in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.

Although there was widespread acceptance that climate change was occurring, Democrats were much more likely to ascribe it to human causes (margins ranged from 20 to 50 percent). Independents were somewhere in the middle. Among those who claimed to understand the topic well, the gap actually increased.

Republicans with a high degree of confidence in their knowledge of the climate were more likely to dismiss the scientific community's opinion; the highly confident Democrats were more likely to embrace it. The authors caution, however, that "The survey answers thus reflect self-confidence, which has an untested relation to knowledge."

The people working with Gallup data performed the same analysis, and found precisely the same thing: the more registered Republicans and those who describe themselves as conservatives thought they knew about anthropogenic climate change, the less likely they were to accept the evidence for it. For Democrats and independents, the opposite was true (same for self-styled moderates and liberals). This group also did a slightly different check, and broke out opinions on global warming based on education and political leanings. For Democrats and independents, increased education boosted their readiness to accept the scientific community's conclusions. For self-styled conservatives, education had almost no effect (it gave a slight boost in registered Republicans).

Because this group had temporal data, they could track the progression of this liberal/conservative gap. It existed back in the first year they had data, 2001, but the gap was relatively stable until about 2008. At that point, acceptance among conservatives plunged, leading to the current gap of over 40 percentage points (up from less than 20) between these groups.

Both groups also come to similar conclusions about why this gap has developed. The piece in The Sociological Quarterly is appropriately sociological, suggesting that modernizing forces have compelled most societies to deal with the "negative consequences of industrial capitalism," such as pollution. Climate change, for these authors, is a case where the elites of conservative politics have convinced their followers to protect capitalism from any negative associations.

The UNH group takes a more nuanced, psychological view of matters. "'Biased assimilation' has been demonstrated in experiments that find people reject information about the existence of a problem if they object to its possible solutions," they note, before later stating that many appear to be "basing their beliefs about science and physical reality on what they thought would be the political implications if human-caused climate change were true."

neither group offers a satisfying solution. The sociologists simply warn that the culture wars have reached potentially dangerous proportions when it comes to climate science, while the group from New Hampshire suggests we might have to wait until an unambiguous consequence, like the loss of Arctic ice in the summer, for some segments of society to come around.

Jeffrey Sachs, an advisor to the United Nations and director of Columbia University's Earth Institute, is one such expert. In books and countless speeches and television appearances, he has argued that poor countries are poor because they are hot, infertile, malaria-infested, and often landlocked; these factors, however, make it hard for them to be productive without an initial large investment to help them deal with such endemic problems. But they cannot pay for the investments precisely because they are poor -- they are in what economists call a "poverty trap." Until something is done about these problems, neither free markets nor democracy will do very much for them.

But then there are others, equally vocal, who believe that all of Sachs's answers are wrong. William Easterly, who battles Sachs from New York University at the other end of Manhattan, has become one of the most influential aid critics in his books, The Elusive Quest for Growth and The White Man's Burden. Dambisa Moyo, an economist who worked at Goldman Sachs and the World Bank, has joined her voice to Easterly's with her recent book, Dead Aid. Both argue that aid does more bad than good. It prevents people from searching for their own solutions, while corrupting and undermining local institutions and creating a self-perpetuating lobby of aid agencies.

The best bet for poor countries, they argue, is to rely on one simple idea: When markets are free and the incentives are right, people can find ways to solve their problems. They do not need handouts from foreigners or their own governments.

According to Easterly, there is no such thing as a poverty trap.

To find out whether there are in fact poverty traps, and, if so, where they are and how to help the poor get out of them, we need to better understand the concrete problems they face. Some aid programs help more than others, but which ones? Finding out required us to step out of the office and look more carefully at the world. In 2003, we founded what became the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, or J-PAL. A key part of our mission is to research by using randomized control trials -- similar to experiments used in medicine to test the effectiveness of a drug -- to understand what works and what doesn't in the real-world fight against poverty. In practical terms, that meant we'd have to start understanding how the poor really live their lives.

European politicians have their own blind spots at the interface of science and policy.  For instance, several years ago former German environment minister Sigmar Gabriel claimed rather implausibly that: "You can build 100 coal-fired power plants and don't have to have higher CO2 emissions."  His explanation was that Germany participates in emissions trading and this would necessarily limit carbon dioxide no matter how much was produced. Obviously, emissions trading cannot make the impossible possible.

We should expect policy makers to face difficulties when it comes to governance when it involves considerations of science, technology, and innovation for the simple reason that they are just like everyone else -- mostly ignorant about mostly everything.

in 2010, the US NSF reported that 28% of Americans and 34% of Europeans believed that the sun goes around the earth.  Similarly, 30% of Americans and 41% of Europeans believe that radioactivity results only from human activities.  It should not be so surprising when we learn that policy makers may share such perspectives.

A popular view is that more education about science and technology will lead to better decisions.  While education is, of course, important to a healthy democracy, it will never result in a populace (or their representatives) with expertise in everything.  

Achieving such heroic levels of expertise is not realistic for anyone.  Instead, we must rely on specialized experts to inform decision making. Just as you and I often need to consult with experts when dealing with our health, home repairs, finances, and other tasks, so too do policy makers need to tap into expertise in order to make good decisions.

it should be far less worrisome that the public or policy makers do not understand this or that information that experts may know well.  What should be of more concern is that policy makers appear to lack an understanding of how they can tap into expertise to inform decision making.  This situation is akin to flying blind. Specialized expertise typically does not compel particular decisions, but it does help to make decisions more informed.  This distinction lies behind Winston Churchill's oft-cited advice that science should be "on tap, but not on top." Effective governance does not depend upon philosopher kings in governments or in the populace, but rather on the use of effective mechanisms for bringing expertise into the political process.

It is the responsibility - even the special expertise - of policy makers to know how to use the instruments of government to bring experts into the process of governance. The troubling aspect of the statements and actions by the Gummers, Gabriels, and Bachmanns of the political world lies not in their lack of knowledge about science, but in their lack of knowledge about government.