Re: Global Warning/Climate Change
Posted: Sat Sep 16, 2017 1:57 pm
I think this is a valid concern - and scientists clearly can be wrong. I also think that the earliest IPCC reports suffered from trying to force scientists to reach a single concensus on each finding.PeterG wrote:Yes, this clearly applies to people who do not agree with me.ken_sylvania wrote:In his classic 1972 book, “Groupthink,” Irving L. Janis, the Yale psychologist, explained how panels of experts could make colossal mistakes. People on these panels, he said, are forever worrying about their personal relevance and effectiveness, and feel that if they deviate too far from the consensus, they will not be given a serious role. They self-censor personal doubts about the emerging group consensus if they cannot express these doubts in a formal way that conforms with apparent assumptions held by the group.
It is far better to record the mainstream views that exist, the evidence for each, and our level of confidence, which is what the IPCC process now requires. And dissenting evidence should also be shown. Back to Climategate - one of the big controversies was that the East Anglia group exchanged emails saying that two papers skeptical of climate change were poor quality and should be excluded.
A literature review really does need to include all relevant published literature. So far, it really seems like it does.In one of the more controversial exchanges, UEA scientists sharply criticized the quality of two papers that question the uniqueness of recent global warming (S. McIntyre and R. McKitrick Energy Environ. 14, 751–771; 2003 and W. Soon and S. Baliunas Clim. Res. 23, 89–110; 2003) and vowed to keep at least the first paper out of the upcoming Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one another in (supposed) privacy, however, what matters is how they acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers.