George Will Officially Loses His Mind

So the promised column is up, and it is everything one could hope for from a writer who has too long caused trees to die in vain.

Carl Zimmer, with more zeal than I, has already dissected the poor, stricken old fellow.  Read what he has to say.  Andrew Revkin, directly attacked* by George Will completes the job, in a column that reveals, brutally, how total is Mr. Will’s fail at this point.  (Many others by now — but that’s the glory of the intertubes).  The moral, for all Will readers (and  his editors — about which more below) is that it helps to know something about what you are writing before you write it.

I don’t have much to add on the debunking front (or perhaps, given Mr. Will’s catastrophic attempt to reveal the secret conspiracy behind the scientific consensus on global warming, this might all be better called rebunking….but I digress) but there is one point that may not have been hit hard enough in all of this.

That is, what Will’s first botched column revealed, his second confirmed, and that the defense offered by his editor, Fred Hiatt capped, is that neither George nor those publishing him understand how the human enterprise captured under the broad label of science actually works.

George’s ignorance is on full display throughout, of course — and it is not just of science but of basic science journalism.  Carl has already pointed out the glaring flaw revealed in this passage — the reliance on a single blog post for a claim that lies at the heart of Will’s hope to deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change:

Citing data from the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, as interpreted on Jan. 1 by Daily Tech, a technology and science news bloghe column said that since September “the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began.”

I’m sorry, but I’ll don my hat has an educator of science journalists here.  We teach from the second class in our year long session one very important rule:  web research is not reporting.  Certainly, cherry picking blog posts does not constitute reading and comprehending the scientific literature.  It’s fine — required, nowadays, to use the blogosphere as a path towards stories and to specific claims.

But you can’t — we tell our students at MIT — base your account of some idea or discovery or even a single observation on what some blog tells you.  You have to call the researcher, get his or her account.  You have to check that account:  where has it or will it be published?  What does the community, by which we mean other researchers who know and understand this research, think of the result?  If the result seems to challenge seemingly robust prior results, how strong is the new measurement, and how certain is the interpretation proposed?

To get a handle on this last point, leap out of politically (not scientifically) charged areas like the study of anthropogenic climate change.  Sixteen years after Einstein had worked out the special theory of relativity, which eliminated the concept the ether as the medium within which light waves travelled, word came of an experiment that seemed to have detected an ether “wind” — the effect produced by the motion of the earth through an ether.  Einstein responded with perhaps his most quoted aphorism:  Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist er nicht — Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not!

Einstein was, of course, correct, and the reported experiment was wrong.  The moral of the story, in this context, is that while it is true that a single contrary result is enough to demolish established theory — that result had better damn well hold up.

Even more, the better-established a body of theory cum observation may be, the more certain that demolishing counter-claim needs to be in order to be taken seriously.  That is:  one misinterpreted measurement of an inappropriately chosen proxy for global climate change is not quite enough.**

All of this is, I think pretty obvious, and at this point, rather old news. (After Barack Obama, I’d have to say that the one person who owes a debt of thanks to my man Rush is George Will, who can thank He Whose Displacement Could Accounts for Sea Level Rise for knocking all this climate foolishness out of mind.)  But I’d like to add one last brick to the blogospheric peine forte et dure with which we seek to get the bow-tied one to plead to his sins.

That is that neither he nor his nominal master, Fred Hiatt, understand how scientists actually work.  I don’t mean that they don’t understand specific disciplines, or that they have no grasp of statistical reasoning, or that they could not get their heads round an error bar* if their lives depended on it — though I’m pretty sure that they don’t and couldn’t.

No, what I mean is that they don’t get the internal logic of scientific thinking.  They don’t get the habits of mind; the fundamental presumptions that underly any scientific statement.  They think — and they are not at all alone here — that science offers its makers and its users some kind of a choice.  They are wrong.

Will gives his game away in the very first line of his column.   He writes:

Few phenomena generate as much heat as disputes about current orthodoxies concerning global warming.

Hiatt says, in effect, exactly the same thing:

It may well be that he is drawing inferences from data that most scientists reject — so, you know, fine, I welcome anyone to make that point. But don’t make it by suggesting that George Will shouldn’t be allowed to make the contrary point. Debate him.”

Tricky, tricky, tricky.

Will first.  When he uses the word “orthodoxies,” he is leveling a specific charge — knowingly, I would argue, given that Will famously prides himself on the wealth and precision of his language.  An orthodoxy asserts a claim of faith, and a demand for ritual observances of a particular forms as laid down in a revealed text.  Famously, orthodox faith is subject to reformation, with, in this context Will as Luther, nailing his thesis to the door of the Climate Cathedral.

Except, of course, that science is not revelation, not an article of faith.   This does not mean that the consensus of climate scientists is correct — just that the arguments being advanced are not based on pre-existing claims of faith.

Will knows this, but the science is giving him an answer he dislikes.  So he is forced to try to turn the discussion from an analysis of the data and its implications into one in which he posits competing world views.  But it doesn’t work, because of the difference between domains that contain orthodoxies and reformations, and those that subject claims to the repeated test of experience.

Hiatt is a little more sophisticated than Will in this game dodging racket.  But he comes to the same point:  it’s o.k. to make a claim of science that actual scientists know is wrong, because that is the starting point for debate.

No!  Not in science.  You don’t debate what you know is wrong.  You debate over what you don’t know or are trying to figure out.  The ether was a useful concept for a while; then it became clear that it was an impediment, and finally actual, closely monitored experiments suggested its non-existence, a conclusion that was confirmed when new theory arrived to account for those observations and much else besides.  After that, people (mostly) stopped using the older, discredited concept even as a heuristic tool. That’s what you do.

The ether is actually a good example.  By the 20s there were still a few scientists who found it hard to give up ether-language.  Lorentz, for one, and Michelson himself.  The fact that a few, genuinely great scientists in this case, hung onto a now superceded idea would not validate a George Will column defending the common sense notion of a medium through which even light waves must wave against the relativistic orthodoxy.  To take a related example of those who tried something similar in 1921, check out this link, on which I will not comment further, lest I Godwinize myself.

Why so many words, to borrow a line from my man Albert, when I can remind y’all of perhaps the most famous example in the 20th century of what happens when you choose your science based on what you want, rather than on what  you know.  Does George Will really want to go down this road?

That’s where this habit of mind leads, ya know.

*Being attacked by George Will at this point in his career reminds me of one of the most wonderful insults every levelled in against a political opponent.  I mean, when the best you can muster is that your critics are guilty of “meretricious journalism in the service of dubious certitudes,” you achieve the bite referenced by the great Labor Party disputant, Denis Healey,  who famously said that being scolded by the Tory Sir Geoffrey Howe was like being “savaged by a dead sheep.”

**IE:  total sea ice is inappropriate because, as the article at the other end of the link discusses, Artic and Antarctic sea ice respond quite differently to climate change.  You have to look at each system in its own context to understand what is going on.  H/t Andy Revkin.

Image:  Hans Sebald Beham, “The Weather Peasant –‘It Doesn’t Matter,'” before 1550.

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