Matt Ridley on Pseudo-Science

Bishop Hill provides the text of Matt Ridley’s excellent speech, “Scientific heresy”, a lecture at the Royal Society of Arts in Edinburgh:

Does it matter?  Suppose I am right that much of what passes for mainstream climate science is now infested with pseudoscience, buttressed by a bad case of confirmation-bias, reliant on wishful thinking, given a free pass by biased reporting and dogmatically intolerant of dissent.  So what?
After all there’s pseudoscience and confirmation-bias among the climate heretics too.
Well, here’s why it matters.  The alarmists have been handed power over our lives; the heretics have not.  Remember, Britain’s unilateral Climate Act is officially expected to cost the hard-pressed UK economy £18.3 billion a year for the next 39 years and achieve an unmeasurably small change in carbon dioxide levels.
At least sceptics do not cover the hills of Scotland with useless, expensive, duke-subsidising wind turbines whose manufacture causes pollution in Inner Mongolia and which kill rare raptors such as this griffon vulture.
At least crop circle believers cannot almost double your electricity bills and increase fuel poverty while driving jobs to Asia, to support their fetish.
At least creationists have not persuaded the BBC that balanced reporting is no longer necessary.
At least homæopaths have not made expensive condensing boilers, which shut down in cold weather, compulsory, as John Prescott did in 2005.
At least astrologers have not driven millions of people into real hunger, perhaps killing 192,000 last year according to one conservative estimate, by diverting 5% of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel.
That’s why it matters.  We’ve been asked to take some very painful cures.  So we need to be sure the patient has a brain tumour rather than a nosebleed.

UPDATE:  meanwhile, at Real Science, Steve Goddard notes that the world must have ended eleven years ago: 

San Jose Mercury News (CA) - June 30, 1989 – 3F General News
GRIM FORECAST
A senior environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown, says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.  Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of “eco-refugees,” threatening political chaos, said Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program.  He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect...

Confusing Cause & Effect

Matt Ridley writes “When Scientists Confuse Cause and Effect”, in the Wall Street Journal: 

Scientists like to remind us not to confuse cause and effect.  But they’re not immune from making that mistake themselves.  [...] 

Whole districts of Freudian theory are confused about cause and effect.  [...]  Nor is medicine immune.  Some years ago epidemiologists found that women taking hormone replacement therapy had fewer heart attacks, but controlled trials found that HRT caused more heart attacks.  It turned out that the women taking HRT in the epidemiological study were from higher socio-economic classes, so they ate and exercised better.  Class caused both HRT and fewer heart attacks. 

Even climate science has encountered cause-effect confusion.  When in 1999 Antarctic ice cores revealed carbon-dioxide concentrations and temperature marching in lockstep over 400,000 years, many [...] found this a convincing argument for attributing past climate change to carbon dioxide.  (About 95% of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is natural, coming from the exhalations of living things.  In the past, carbon-dioxide levels rose as the earth warmed at the end of ice ages and fell as it cooled at the end of interglacial periods.) 

Then four years later came clear evidence from finer-grained analysis of ice cores that temperature changes preceded carbon-dioxide changes by at least 800 years.  Effects cannot precede their causes by eight centuries, so temperatures must drive carbon dioxide, chiefly by warming the sea and causing carbon dioxide dissolved in water to “out-gas” into the air. 

Climate scientists fell back on a “feedback” hypothesis, arguing that an initial change, probably caused by variations in the earth’s orbit that affect the warmth of the sun, was then amplified by changes in carbon-dioxide levels.  But this made the attribution argument circular and left the reversal of the trend after a period of warming (when amplification should be at its strongest) still harder to explain.  If carbon dioxide is still driving the temperature upward but it falls instead, then other factors must be stronger than expected.