NYT blog post on experts and the climate change consensus
Gary Gutting just posted a well-reasoned article about how to think about the expert consensus in the climate debate. He begins by noting that logical claims based on authority only have standing if there is a recognized means of determining who is an expert and who isn’t (see also Chapter 14 in Turning Numbers into Knowledge).
For climate, the experts can easily be identified:
“All creditable parties to this debate recognize a group of experts designated as ‘climate scientists,’ whom they cite in either support or opposition to their claims about global warming. In contrast to enterprises such as astrology or homeopathy, there is no serious objection to the very project of climate science. The only questions are about the conclusions this project supports about global warming.”
His concluding paragraph sums up the implications for his line of argument:
“…once we have accepted the authority of a particular scientific discipline, we cannot consistently reject its conclusions. To adapt Schopenhauer’s famous remark about causality, science is not a taxi-cab that we can get in and out of whenever we like. Once we board the train of climate science, there is no alternative to taking it wherever it may go.”
Another way to make this argument when confronted by a climate denier is to ask them “do you feel qualified to dispute the latest developments in quantum physics or thermodynamics? If not, what makes you think you are qualified to debate the latest climate science?” For someone who is actually qualified to make judgments about the fields to which you refer you can ask them about how likely it is that someone from another field could accurately critique his/her field even if that person is qualified in another scientific field. The answer in all but the rarest of cases is “not bloody likely”.
Another angle on this line of argument is to use the peer reviewed literature compiled on Skeptical Science. Virtually every argument that the deniers make is analyzed and debunked there, so when someone pesters me with their denialism I say “there’s an app for that!” and pull out Skeptical Science. When I can quickly pull up the critique of their claim and explain its implications it often has an impact.
