Washington Post Planet Panel: Science is a work in progress, but well supported
Dr. Bernard Finel (ASP Senior Fellow): The broader meaning is that any enterprise involving thousands of individuals will include people of various qualities and attributes. There will be some who are kind-hearted and wholly transparent, and others who are spiteful and secretive. In any large enterprise, there will also be errors of judgment, fact and typography. The Washington Post prints corrections on a regular basis. Should that cause the public to be more skeptical about the underlying quality of the paper? Consider the IPCC report in which the false statement about the Himalayan glaciers of published. In that document alone there were literally tens of thousands of statements of fact. Even if several dozen were wrong — which isn’t the case as far as we know — it would still be a tremendously high-quality product. A failure to achieve perfect is not synonymous with an untrustworthy source.
The question isn’t ultimately whether climate scientists are all good people, or whether their work is perfect or infallible. Rather, the issue, as in all scientific endeavors, is which theory best explains the available data? While skeptics of the dominant consensus are doing a valuable service by pointing out ambiguous data or weak arguments, there is no compelling alternative to the core consensus — which is simply that greenhouse gases contribute to climate change and that human activity contributes to greenhouse gas concentrations in the environment. There are criticisms of various parts of the argument, and certainly active debates on many micro-foundational issues such as the reflectivity of clouds and the absorption capacity of various carbon systems, but there the skeptics have been unable to produce a coherent alternative that explains the data as well as the dominant consensus — which is precisely why the consensus is dominant.
Some will argue that because many are proposing policy responses that climate science should be held to a higher standard, that in effect we must wait until there are no doubts and no ambiguities before proceeding. But the reality is that we don’t apply this standard to any other policy decision. There is, for example, much more evidence to support the notion of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) than there is to support the notion that population-centric counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine can be successful. Yet, the United States is currently investing over a $100 billion in year on population-centric COIN in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is more evidence in support of AGW than there is support of the idea that locking up non-violent drug offenders reduces drug abuse, yet the United States keeps roughly 400,000 non-violent drug offenders incarcerated. The evidence on AGW is stronger than that on the health effects of second hand smoke, yet bans on public smoking are becoming ubiquitous.
Climate science is a work a progress, but is already a potent and well-supported theoretical framework. We should remain vigilant, but excessive skepticism is not warranted despite the unfortunate string of well-publicized glitches in the process.
