Michael Crichton Part two.
I say it is hugely relevant. Once you abandon strict adherence to what
science tells us, once you start arranging the truth in a press conference,
then anything is possible. In one context, maybe you will get some
mobilization against nuclear war. But in another context, you get
Lysenkoism. In another, you get Nazi euthanasia. The danger is always there,
if you subvert science to political ends.
That is why it is so important for the future of science that the line
between what science can say with certainty, and what it cannot, be drawn
clearly-and defended.
What happened to Nuclear Winter? As the media glare faded, its robust
scenario appeared less persuasive; John Maddox, editor of Nature, repeatedly
criticized its claims; within a year, Stephen Schneider, one of the leading
figures in the climate model, began to speak of "nuclear autumn." It just
didn't have the same ring.
A final media embarrassment came in 1991, when Carl Sagan predicted on
Nightline that Kuwaiti oil fires would produce a nuclear winter effect,
causing a "year without a summer," and endangering crops around the world.
Sagan stressed this outcome was so likely that "it should affect the war
plans." None of it happened.
What, then, can we say were the lessons of Nuclear Winter? I believe the
lesson was that with a catchy name, a strong policy position and an
aggressive media campaign, nobody will dare to criticize the science, and in
short order, a terminally weak thesis will be established as fact. After
that, any criticism becomes beside the point. The war is already over
without a shot being fired. That was the lesson, and we had a textbook
application soon afterward, with second hand smoke.
In 1993, the EPA announced that second-hand smoke was "responsible for
approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths each year in nonsmoking adults," and
that it " impairs the respiratory health of hundreds of thousands of
people." In a 1994 pamphlet the EPA said that the eleven studies it based
its decision on were not by themselves conclusive, and that they
collectively assigned second-hand smoke a risk factor of 1.19. (For
reference, a risk factor below 3.0 is too small for action by the EPA. or
for publication in the New England Journal of Medicine, for example.)
Furthermore, since there was no statistical association at the 95%
confidence limits, the EPA lowered the limit to 90%. They then classified
second-hand smoke as a Group-A Carcinogen.
This was openly fraudulent science, but it formed the basis for bans on
smoking in restaurants, offices, and airports. California banned public
smoking in 1995. Soon, no claim was too extreme. By 1998, the Christian
Science Monitor was saying that "Second-hand smoke is the nation's
third-leading preventable cause of death." The American Cancer Society
announced that 53,000 people died each year of second-hand smoke. The
evidence for this claim is nonexistent.
In 1998, a Federal judge held that the EPA had acted improperly, had
"committed to a conclusion before research had begun", and had "disregarded
information and made findings on selective information." The reaction of
Carol Browner, head of the EPA was: "We stand by our science; there's wide
agreement. The American people certainly recognize that exposure to second
hand smoke brings a whole host of health problems." Again, note how the
claim of consensus trumps science. In this case, it isn't even a consensus
of scientists that Browner evokes! It's the consensus of the American
people.
Meanwhile, ever-larger studies failed to confirm any association. A large,
seven-country WHO study in 1998 found no association. Nor have
well-controlled subsequent studies, to my knowledge. Yet we now read, for
example, that second-hand smoke is a cause of breast cancer. At this point
you can say pretty much anything you want about second-hand smoke.
As with nuclear winter, bad science is used to promote what most people
would consider good policy. I certainly think it is. I don't want people
smoking around me. So who will speak out against banning second-hand smoke?
Nobody, and if you do, you'll be branded a shill of RJ Reynolds. A big
tobacco flunky. But the truth is that we now have a social policy supported
by the grossest of superstitions. And we've given the EPA a bad lesson in
how to behave in the future. We've told them that cheating is the way to
succeed.
As the twentieth century drew to a close, the connection between hard
scientific fact and public policy became increasingly elastic. In part this
was possible because of the complacency of the scientific profession; in
part because of the lack of good science education among the public; in
part, because of the rise of specialized advocacy groups which have been
enormously effective in getting publicity and shaping policy; and in great
part because of the decline of the media as an independent assessor of fact.
The deterioration of the American media is dire loss for our country. When
distinguished institutions like the New York Times can no longer
differentiate between factual content and editorial opinion, but rather mix
both freely on their front page, then who will hold anyone to a higher
standard?
And so, in this elastic anything-goes world where science-or non-science-is
the hand maiden of questionable public policy, we arrive at last at global
warming. It is not my purpose here to rehash the details of this most
magnificent of the demons haunting the world. I would just remind you of the
now-familiar pattern by which these things are established. Evidentiary
uncertainties are glossed over in the unseemly rush for an overarching
policy, and for grants to support the policy by delivering findings that are
desired by the patron. Next, the isolation of those scientists who won't get
with the program, and the characterization of those scientists as outsiders
and "skeptics" in quotation marks-suspect individuals with suspect motives,
industry flunkies, reactionaries, or simply anti-environmental nut-cases. In
short order, debate ends, even though prominent scientists are uncomfortable
about how things are being done.
When did "skeptic" become a dirty word in science? When did a skeptic
require quotation marks around it?
To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global warming
controversy is the overt reliance that is being placed on models. Back in
the days of nuclear winter, computer models were invoked to add weight to a
conclusion: "These results are derived with the help of a computer model."
But now, large-scale computer models are seen as generating data in
themselves. No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from
the real world-increasingly, models provide the data. As if they were
themselves a reality. And indeed they are, when we are projecting forward.
There can be no observational data about the year 2100. There are only model
runs.
This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well.
Richard Feynmann called it a disease. I fear he is right. Because only if
you spend a lot of time looking at a computer screen can you arrive at the
complex point where the global warming debate now stands.
Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to
believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make
financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their
minds?
Stepping back, I have to say the arrogance of the model-makers is
breathtaking. There have been, in every century, scientists who say they
know it all. Since climate may be a chaotic system-no one is sure-these
predictions are inherently doubtful, to be polite. But more to the point,
even if the models get the science spot-on, they can never get the
sociology. To predict anything about the world a hundred years from now is
simply absurd.
Look: If I was selling stock in a company that I told you would be
profitable in 2100, would you buy it? Or would you think the idea was so
crazy that it must be a scam?
Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about
people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people
get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horseshit? Horse
pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later,
with so many more people riding horses?
But of course, within a few years, nobody rode horses except for sport. And
in 2000, France was getting 80% its power from an energy source that was
unknown in 1900. Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Japan were getting more
than 30% from this source, unknown in 1900. Remember, people in 1900 didn't
know what an atom was. They didn't know its structure. They also didn't know
what a radio was, or an airport, or a movie, or a television, or a computer,
or a cell phone, or a jet, an antibiotic, a rocket, a satellite, an MRI,
ICU, IUD, IBM, IRA, ERA, EEG, EPA, IRS, DOD, PCP, HTML, internet.
interferon, instant replay, remote sensing, remote control, speed dialing,
gene therapy, gene splicing, genes, spot welding, heat-seeking, bipolar,
prozac, leotards, lap dancing, email, tape recorder, CDs, airbags, plastic
explosive, plastic, robots, cars, liposuction, transduction,
superconduction, dish antennas, step aerobics, smoothies, twelve-step,
ultrasound, nylon, rayon, teflon, fiber optics, carpal tunnel, laser
surgery, laparoscopy, corneal transplant, kidney transplant, AIDS. None of
this would have meant anything to a person in the year 1900. They wouldn't
know what you are talking about.
Now. You tell me you can predict the world of 2100. Tell me it's even worth
thinking about. Our models just carry the present into the future. They're
bound to be wrong. Everybody who gives a moment's thought knows it.
I remind you that in the lifetime of most scientists now living, we have
already had an example of dire predictions set aside by new technology. I
refer to the green revolution. In 1960, Paul Ehrlich said, "The battle to
feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines-hundreds
of millions of people are going to starve to death." Ten years later, he
predicted four billion people would die during the 1980s, including 65
million Americans. The mass starvation that was predicted never occurred,
and it now seems it isn't ever going to happen. Nor is the population
explosion going to reach the numbers predicted even ten years ago. In 1990,
climate modelers anticipated a world population of 11 billion by 2100.
Today, some people think the correct number will be 7 billion and falling.
But nobody knows for sure.
But it is impossible to ignore how closely the history of global warming
fits on the previous template for nuclear winter. Just as the earliest
studies of nuclear winter stated that the uncertainties were so great that
probabilities could never be known, so, too the first pronouncements on
global warming argued strong limits on what could be determined with
certainty about climate change. The 1995 IPCC draft report said, "Any claims
of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain
controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the
climate system are reduced." It also said, "No study to date has positively
attributed all or part of observed climate changes to anthropogenic causes."
Those statements were removed, and in their place appeared: "The balance of
evidence suggests a discernable human influence on climate."
What is clear, however, is that on this issue, science and policy have
become inextricably mixed to the point where it will be difficult, if not
impossible, to separate them out. It is possible for an outside observer to
ask serious questions about the conduct of investigations into global
warming, such as whether we are taking appropriate steps to improve the
quality of our observational data records, whether we are systematically
obtaining the information that will clarify existing uncertainties, whether
we have any organized disinterested mechanism to direct research in this
contentious area.
The answer to all these questions is no. We don't.
In trying to think about how these questions can be resolved, it occurs to
me that in the progression from SETI to nuclear winter to second-hand smoke
to global warming, we have one clear message, and that is that we can expect
more and more problems of public policy dealing with technical issues in the
future-problems of ever greater seriousness, where people care passionately
on all sides.
And at the moment we have no mechanism to get good answers. So I will
propose one.
Just as we have established a tradition of double-blinded research to
determine drug efficacy, we must institute double-blinded research in other
policy areas as well. Certainly the increased use of computer models, such
as GCMs, cries out for the separation of those who make the models from
those who verify them. The fact is that the present structure of science is
entrepreneurial, with individual investigative teams vying for funding from
organizations that all too often have a clear stake in the outcome of the
research-or appear to, which may be just as bad. This is not healthy for
science.
Sooner or later, we must form an independent research institute in this
country. It must be funded by industry, by government, and by private
philanthropy, both individuals and trusts. The money must be pooled, so that
investigators do not know who is paying them. The institute must fund more
than one team to do research in a particular area, and the verification of
results will be a foregone requirement: teams will know their results will
be checked by other groups. In many cases, those who decide how to gather
the data will not gather it, and those who gather the data will not analyze
it. If we were to address the land temperature records with such rigor, we
would be well on our way to an understanding of exactly how much faith we
can place in global warming, and therefore with what seriousness we must address
this.
I believe that as we come to the end of this litany, some of you may be
saying, well what is the big deal, really. So we made a few mistakes. So a
few scientists have overstated their cases and have egg on their faces. So
what?
Well, I'll tell you.
In recent years, much has been said about the post-modernist claims about
science to the effect that science is just another form of raw power,
tricked out in special claims for truth-seeking and objectivity that really
have no basis in fact. Science, we are told, is no better than any other
undertaking. These ideas anger many scientists, and they anger me. But
recent events have made me wonder if they are correct. We can take as an
example the scientific reception accorded a Danish statistician, Bjorn
Lomborg, who wrote a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist.
The scientific community responded in a way that can only be described as
disgraceful. In professional literature, it was complained he had no
standing because he was not an earth scientist. His publisher, Cambridge
University Press, was attacked with cries that the editor should be fired,
and that all right-thinking scientists should shun the press. The past
president of the AAAS wondered aloud how Cambridge could have ever
"published a book that so clearly could never have passed peer review." (But
of course, the manuscript did pass peer review by three earth scientists on
both sides of the Atlantic, and all recommended publication.) But what are
scientists doing attacking a press? Is this the new McCarthyism-coming from
scientists?
Worst of all was the behavior of the Scientific American, which seemed
intent on proving the post-modernist point that it was all about power, not
facts. The Scientific American attacked Lomborg for eleven pages, yet only
came up with nine factual errors despite their assertion that the book was
"rife with careless mistakes." It was a poor display, featuring vicious ad
hominem attacks, including comparing him to a Holocaust denier. The issue was
captioned: "Science defends itself against the Skeptical Environmentalist."
Really. Science has to defend itself? Is this what we have come to?
When Lomborg asked for space to rebut his critics, he was given only a page
and a half. When he said it wasn't enough, he put the critics' essays on his
web page and answered them in detail. Scientific American threatened
copyright infringement and made him take the pages down.
Further attacks since, have made it clear what is going on. Lomborg is
charged with heresy. That's why none of his critics needs to substantiate
their attacks in any detail. That's why the facts don't matter. That's why
they can attack him in the most vicious personal terms. He's a heretic.
Of course, any scientist can be charged as Galileo was charged. I just never
thought I'd see the Scientific American in the role of Mother Church.
Is this what science has become? I hope not. But it is what it will become,
unless there is a concerted effort by leading scientists to aggressively
separate science from policy. The late Philip Handler, former president of
the National Academy of Sciences, said that "Scientists best serve public
policy by living within the ethics of science, not those of politics. If the
scientific community will not unfrock the charlatans, the public will not
discern the difference-- science and the nation will suffer." Personally, I
don't worry about the nation. But I do worry about science.
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