Politicized Science: Harold Lewis Resigns from APS

Harold Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has written a scathing letter of resignation to the American Physical Society protesting its collusion in what he calls the global warming scam, “…the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist.”  The letter is a symptom of what happens when scientific hypothesis is conflated with ideological certainty.  There’s certainly enough of the latter to go around on both ends of the ideological spectrum.  However, the letter is overwrought and its conclusions are insupportable based on the evidence it cites. 

That evidence includes the Climategate documents, which are ugly enough in their own right, but hardly support a blanket accusation of charlatanism against the thousands of scientists working in the field of climate science.  Lewis also cites climate scientist Michael Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph, long the subject of finger pointing on the right.  Mann tends to be his own worst enemy, vilifying anyone who opposes him as a “pseudo-scientist,” and claiming in the pages of Scientific American, hardly a paragon of scientific disinterestedness, that they are motivated by the prospect of “petroleum dollars,” even as he surfs along on the massive wave of cash that tends to flow in the direction of anyone who confirms the received wisdom about global warming.  That said, the idea that the book Lewis cites by A. W. Montfort or anything else I’ve seen “proves” that the “hockey stick” is an illusion is simply not supported by the facts.  Numerous other researchers have confirmed the substance of Mann’s findings, citing compelling evidence that is out there for anyone who cares to look at it.  Anyone who thinks the “hockey stick” is fiction needs to lay their confirmation bias aside for a few minutes and Google the facts.

The fact that, as in the many other instances documented by Bjorn Lomborg in his “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” environmental scientists have grossly exaggerated the level of certainty that the evidence will bear regarding the severity, effects, and potential outcomes of global warming does not warrant the conclusion, stated with equally irrational certainty on the political right, that the phenomenon doesn’t exist, or doesn’t represent a potential danger.  There are now more than 6 billion of us floating along on a fragile little spaceship that happens to be the only spaceship we have.  It would be wise to refrain from gratuitously damaging it as long as we still need it to survive.

It would also be wise for climatologists to refrain from claiming that they are certain about future outcomes it’s impossible to be certain about.  Such predicted outcomes are based on the results of mathematical models.  No mathematical model is perfect, and that is certainly true of mathematical models designed to predict the behavior of systems as complicated as the earth’s climate, which has billions of degrees of freedom and for which we have nothing like sufficient accurate data to support deterministic conclusions.  Climate models are subject to all the weaknesses that the great systems analyst Peter Maybeck cited for mathematical models in general.  In the first place, such models are approximations, not perfect reflections of reality.  Secondly, climate is affected by disturbances which we can neither control nor model deterministically.  Finally, we have nothing close to perfect and complete data about the system we are trying to model.

That said, it would be just as wrong to dismiss the results of climate models as totally baseless and fallacious as it is to claim deterministic certainty for their predictions.  The best ones are stochastic, or probabilistic models that account for the uncertainties cited above using systematic approaches that minimize their effects in ways that can be shown to be mathematically optimal, such as the Kalman filter.   So-called ensemble forecasts are examples of how uncertainties in initial conditions can be handled in large climate computer codes.  In such models, ensembles of initial conditions are chosen, each representing a plausible initial state of the atmosphere given our estimates of the uncertainties based on observation and analysis.  The trajectories of many such ensembles are then followed to create a projection of likely outcomes.  It often happens that many of those outcomes are grouped in close proximity to each other.  Some of the trajectories may diverge markedly from the rest, and there is no guarantee that they don’t actually represent the correct outcomes, but probability will favor the conclusion that the real outcome will fall near the most likely point.  Such models do not and cannot predict certain outcomes.  They do, however, have what computational physicists call “skill,” the ability to predict outcomes with a reasonable level of confidence that those outcomes will be correct.

Such stochastic models are not crude and unreliable, nor can their results be dismissed with a wave of the hand.  The outcomes they predict may not come to pass, but given the potential consequences, it would be foolhardy to ignore the danger, or, as Professor Lewis has done, dismiss that danger as “pseudo-science.”  

It may be that, given the bunker mentality of the ideologues on the left and right, it has become virtually impossible to really do something about the problem.  The rapid expansion of coal-fired generating capacity in China alone lends credence to the conclusion that we will continue to burn fossil fuels until they are finally exhausted.  Obvious solutions such as the rapid expansion of nuclear generating capacity are blocked by the very “environmentalists” who claim that global warming is the paramount environmental threat to mankind.  Under the circumstances, it would be well for governments to consider contingencies for dealing with global warming if the worst of our fears are realized.

Author: Helian

I am Doug Drake, and I live in Maryland, not far from Washington, DC. I am a graduate of West Point, and I hold a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from the University of Wisconsin. My blog reflects my enduring fascination with human nature and human morality. View all posts by Helian