Policy research in the Beltway offers numerous attractions, among them the opportunity to exchange views and engage in back-and-forth challenges with other experts, in settings both formal and informal. Such activities are more than merely fun: Intellectual atrophy is the inexorable result of living in an echo chamber, an effect that can be avoided through a disciplined approach to serious work and a consistent effort to confront opposing arguments.
Dianna Ingram | Bergman Group
So I was pleased indeed to participate last week on a panel discussing “Science, Politics, and the 2016 Election,” held at George Washington University (GWU) before an audience of about 200 policy types, faculty, students, and a few souls seeking a respite from the sidewalk slush. The central issue — how can rigorous scientific analysis be encouraged and then used to shape policy debates? — is important, subtle, and difficult. It is a topic directly relevant to a major dimension of my own work, to wit, the relationship of climate policy analytics to climate modeling and the evidence on such climate phenomena as tropical cyclones.
Moreover, the other participants as a group were certain to harbor an outlook sharply different from mine on the degree to which scientific research conducted or funded by government can be predicted to be objective. It is unfortunate that the discussion did not address that fundamental question explicitly: If one believes, as I do, that government bureaus, decisionmakers, and scientists are not merely disinterested truth seekers devoid of any agendas of their own, but instead are an interest group, we should ask how scientific analysis conducted or funded by an agency headed by political appointees buffeted by political pressures can be viewed ex ante as any more authoritative than that originating from, say, the petroleum industry.
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But addressed explicitly or not, it was clear that the other panelists simply did not consider this even to be a relevant question; their underlying assumption is that the bureaucracy is not an interest group, and that government- and government-funded researchers try to do research as objectively as possible. That this conceit is the same as that harbored by journalists — their assumptions and biases do not affect their reporting because they are professionals — is an amusing footnote that does not diminish the impressive backgrounds of the other participants.
And impressive they are. The moderator was Jeffrey Mervis, a senior correspondent at Science. There was Rush Holt, a former research physicist, a former congressman, and now CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). There was Dahlia Sokolov, the minority staff director for the Research and Technology Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. There was Al Teich, now a professor at GWU, and formerly the director of science and policy programs at the AAAS. Perhaps less impressive, there was little old me.
And, finally, piloting the intellectual caboose was the ineffable Allison Macfarlane, now a professor at GWU, and the former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an amazing fact given her performance at the event. At some point the topic of climate policy emerged, and Ms. Macfarlane made her view clear that reductions in “carbon” emissions are necessary.
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Now, as an aside, the term “carbon” (or “carbon pollution”) is political propaganda, a rhetorical device designed to assume the answer to the underlying policy question even as it demonstrates the user’s moral superiority to him/herself, to the given audience, and to the larger community of the right-thinking. Carbon dioxide, a colorless, odorless greenhouse gas, is not “carbon,” which is soot, or particulates in the language of environmental policy. Not only is carbon dioxide not carbon, it is not a “pollutant,” as some minimum atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is necessary for life itself.
Because water vapor and clouds are responsible for 65–85 percent of the radiative properties of the troposphere, I should have asked Ms. Macfarlane whether water vapor also is a “pollutant”; that discussion would have been amusing. Ocean evaporation certainly is a natural process, but so are volcanic eruptions, and no one denies that the massive amounts of particulates and toxins emitted by volcanoes are pollutants. In contrast to “carbon” or “carbon pollution,” the phrase “greenhouse gases” has the virtue of scientific accuracy without, again, assuming the answer to the underlying policy question.
In any event, I asked Ms. Macfarlane precisely why reductions in “carbon” emissions are necessary. It was obvious that she has never been asked anything so impertinent — she is wholly unused to having her assumptions challenged — and so her rather stumbling answer was that increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide (she then used that phrase in place of “carbon”) are creating dangerous climate effects that already are visible. The ensuing back-and-forth was as follows, almost verbatim:
Yours truly: What actual evidence supports the “dangerous climate effects” assertion?
Ms. Macfarlane: I am not going to get into a discussion on this issue. It has been settled science for years, supported by an overwhelming consensus of scientists. I am not going to discuss it.
[Scattered applause in the audience.]
Yours truly: Please give me one piece of evidence in support of your assertion that dangerous climate effects already are visible. Just one.
Ms. Macfarlane: Polar ice, sea levels, storms, ocean acidification. I am not going to get into a discussion on this issue because there is a scientific consensus.
[More scattered applause in the audience.]
Wow. Note that this brief exchange followed a general consensus (!) on the panel that analyses driven by evidence are vastly preferable to mere ideology. That principle was endorsed vigorously by Ms. Macfarlane, who supposedly is a scientist and who, therefore, presumably understands that “consensus science” is a contradiction in terms — received wisdom always is subject to refutation — and that the pursuit of scientific “truth” is not majoritarian. No matter.
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When someone says that an issue is unworthy of discussion because of a supposed overwhelming consensus that just happens to support her position, then clearly that someone either knows little about the topic or is being dishonest. Or both. It is a modern form of know-nothingism masquerading as scientific objectivity, the purpose of which is to classify those offering certain arguments and asking certain questions as knuckle draggers deserving only of excommunication from polite society.
And when it comes to the evidence on the effects of increasing greenhouse concentrations on climate phenomena, Ms. Macfarlane’s ignorance is blatant. (Here is a detailed summary of the evidence that I prepared in advance of the Paris COP-21 meeting last December.)
Recall that she mentioned polar ice, sea levels, storms, and ocean acidification. With respect to polar ice, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reports that the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extents now do not differ from their respective 1981–2010 averages as a matter of statistical significance. (The 2015–2016 Arctic data are near the bottom of the statistical confidence interval, while the 2015–2016 Antarctic data are near the 1981–2010 average.)
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The data on sea levels are more ambiguous: Sea levels have been rising at a more-or-less constant rate (about 3.3 mm per year) since the early 1990s despite increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. And even that observation rather begs the question, because the end of the little ice age around 1850 has yielded off-and-on warming, and thus some ice melt and thermal expansion of ocean water.
How much of the observed increase in sea levels is natural versus anthropogenic is something that no one knows, notwithstanding Ms. Macfarlane’s confident assertions of a “scientific consensus.” (The evidence is clear that the anthropogenic temperature effect is not zero.) An example: The University of Colorado data show a close correlation between changes in sea levels and the El Niño–Southern Oscillation.
With respect to “storms,” it is not clear whether Ms. Macfarlane has tornadoes or tropical cyclones or both in mind. But it matters not: Tornado counts and intensities have declined since the mid-1950s, and the numbers and accumulated energy of tropical cyclones in particular are near their lowest levels since satellite measurements began in the early 1970s, despite increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases.
Finally, the reduction in the alkalinity of ocean water attendant upon increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide is the subject of much speculation, but little systematic evidence (see chapter 10 here) thus far. Perhaps disaster looms; and perhaps an associated buffering effect of increasing carbonate sediments will make “ocean acidification” a minor issue. No one knows, and for Ms. Macfarlane to suggest that there exists some sort of “scientific consensus” on this question is simply dishonest.
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As an amusing postscript: After the event, having interrupted me at least twice, and figuratively telling me to shut up by refusing to engage on the relevant empirical question, Ms. Macfarlane then accused me of being “rude.” And so it is clear that a “rude” individual is anyone who challenges her assumptions. Wow again.
Impressive though the panel was as a whole, it really was rather shabby for the scientists — who surely know better — to have sat there in silence while Ms. Macfarlane peddled her snake oil about a “scientific consensus.” Are they worried about being excluded from the right cocktail parties? If so, that is a display of moral cowardice unworthy of serious intellectuals.
At one point, I asked Ms. Macfarlane about the evidence on the recent temperature record, that is, the climate sensitivity of the atmosphere. She obviously knows nothing about it, but Rush Holt (the AAAS CEO), playing to the audience, jumped in with the snarky comment that it is “either big or huge.” That is not what the peer-reviewed literature tells us, and even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has adjusted its estimate downward. Does Holt not know this? Or was he simply talking out of a hat?
I would have advised the moderator, Jeffrey Mervis, to focus on somewhat different topics, ones that might have made the scientists a bit less comfortable: the blatant corruption of the peer-review process, particularly in climate science; the reality that much of what is published in very prominent peer-reviewed journals simply cannot be replicated; how journal editors — mere mortals with biases of their own — can be constrained from favoring some findings over others in the publication process; the efforts of some politicians — Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) is a prominent example — to criminalize dissent from climate orthodoxy through the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act statutes.
Do you, dear readers, remember during the George W. Bush administration that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism”? I do. That was then; the politicized climate debate is now.
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Most important, it would have been very useful to examine explicitly the rest of the panel’s inherent belief that the federal science bureaucracy is not an interest group, as noted earlier. Rush Holt’s faith in this was very clear, as he argued that the scientific community enhanced the quality and scientific integrity of the Iran nuclear negotiations, an amazing example of trees/forest myopia. Does Holt believe that Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz would have contradicted Secretary of State John Kerry or President Obama — or would have resigned — had the evidence called for it? Holt argued also that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) should have been allowed to study “gun violence,” as if gun crime and defensive uses of guns are communicable diseases. Does he not understand that CDC wanted to examine this topic precisely so that they could politicize it?
More generally, AAAS essentially is the lobbying arm of the U.S. science establishment; more money is its reason d’etre. Can Rush Holt possibly believe that this is consistent with research “objectivity”?
The larger point is that the scientists on the panel are bright and honest — with one blatant exception — but they are not adept at thinking through the implications of political incentives. If science is to affect policymaking, an inherently political undertaking, research conducted or funded by government cannot be separated from politics. That is an eternal truth with respect to which the question “How can objective science be used to inform policymaking?” is blind.
Benjamin Zycher is the John G. Searle scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.