Alligators, fire insurance, ignorance, and risk

A while ago, I was sauntering along one of our local beaches with a physicist. There are three outstanding things about this guy, he is very clever, very tall, and an excellent walker with whom I’ve spent many days in the mountains, winter and summer, and in all kinds of conditions.

We were talking about climate change and he told me that he had recently read a book by Professor David McKay on the subject of alternative energy generation which, not surprisingly, had done nothing to convince him that there might be a few problems with the orthodox view of AGW. His attitude was that, as a physicist, reading a book by another physicist, he was inclined to accept what this told him rather than any of the reservations expressed by sceptics who were not physicists. To a certain extent I could see his point and was happy to treat it with respect. But what happened next did surprise me.

As he trotted out the well-tried and tested mantras of warmist dogma, I offered alternative views that raised doubts. Finally he turned to me and said, “Look, there seems to be a risk, and what I think is that if you go out for a walk and you get to the edge of a pond that might have alligators in it, then you walk round the edge of it rather than go through the middle”. He wasn’t too happy when I asked if he often got his feet wet by walking through ponds, whether there were likely to be alligators in them or not.

This supposed ‘killer argument’ involving alligators had sprung up on the net a few weeks earlier and spread rapidly. I hadn’t expected to hear it used by someone whose views are usually well informed and carefully expressed.

Although well-chosen analogies can be very helpful when trying to explain something that is complex, they seldom seem to work well in argument.  It is not surprising that ‘Faulty Analogy’ has its own place in the long list of rhetorical fallacies loved by students of rhetoric and logic. Here is a definition:

This fallacy consists in assuming that because two things are alike in one or more respects, they necessarily are alike in some more important respects, while failing to recognise the insignificance of their similarities and/or the significance of their dissimilarities.

The ‘alligators in the pond’ analogy had a pretty short life – quite rightly because it was ludicrous – but warmists still seem to think that this kind of persuasion will gain converts. Perhaps it has something to do with their oft-repeated belief that the only reason that climate scepticism is growing among the public is because advocates of global warming are not explaining things properly.

Last Monday evening, a BBC Panorama report about the climate debate used an analogy that has proved far more durable than ‘alligators in the pond’, in spite of it being equally fallacious. Professor Bob Watson, one time IPCC chairman and all-round cheerleader for climate Armageddon, helped wind up the programme on a suitably evangelical note by saying:

What risks are we willing to take? The average homeowner probably has fire insurance. They don’t expect a fire in their home [but] they’re still willing to take out fire insurance because they don’t want the risk, and there’s probably a much better chance of us seeing the middle to the upper end of that temperature projection [from the IPCC] than of a single person saying they’ll have a fire in their home tomorrow morning.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00swp0k/Panorama_Whats_Up_With_the_Weather/

The expression on his face while he said this was that of a man who was generously sharing a great and irrefutable truth with the audience.

Next morning I was not surprised to find that there were references to this parable of the burning house on another thread at this blog. I therefor put up the following comment:

The fire insurance analogy, although it sounds very plausible, is in fact a very poor one.

Fire premiums are determined by actuarial analysis based on abundant historical evidence of the extent of the risk, and also cost determined by competition between insurers. This is not the case with the threat of AGW where politicians have granted the IPCC a virtual monopoly of ‘actuarial analysis’ and the same politicians are in a position to determine the supposed ‘premium’ on the basis of whichever economists they choose to listen to; a process that is also included in the IPCC’s remit. Competition, either between ‘actuaries’ or ‘insurers’, plays no part in this process.

We simply do not know the extent of the risk or the likely cost of indemnity. No reputable insurer would offer a policy on this basis and the analogy has no application to the climate debate other than to demonstrate the weakness of the arguments by which it is now being sustained.

http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blog/?p=274&cp=6#comment-63328

This unleashed a barrage of questions from Harmless Sky’s star warmist contributor: would I say what degree of risk I think is posed by AGW? This was strange, because the last sentence of my comment makes it clear that I don’t think that there is an answer to that question. The inquiries about my opinion culminated in the following comment:

Your answer is nothing at all, isn’t it? You think the risk is zero (or the chances of the IPCC being essentially correct in their estimation.) Am I being unfair in suggesting that? I don’t think so.
If you don’t think it is zero, maybe you could tick one of the following:

a) Less than 5% b) between 5% and 20% c) between 20% and 50%. d) between 50% and 90% e) greater than 90%

http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blog/?p=274&cp=6#comment-63530

Now there’s something rather obvious missing from that range of options, and its omission highlights one of the great divides in the climate debate. Sceptics are often willing enough to admit that they ‘don’t know’. For warmists such an admission seems to be an impossibility, and one that is becoming increasingly damaging to their cause.

Here is what John Christy had to say when he recently appeared before the review panel that is supposedly investigating the practices of the IPCC:

A fundamental problem with the entire issue here is that climate science is not a classic, experimental science. As an emerging science of a complex, chaotic climate system, it is plagued by uncertainty and ambiguity in both observations and theory. Lacking classic, laboratory results, it easily becomes hostage to opinion, groupthink, arguments-from-authority, overstatement of confidence, and even Hollywood movies.

When climate scientists are placed in the limelight because this issue can generate compelling disaster scenarios, we simply don’t want to say, “We just don’t know.”
And
In February of this year, Nature magazine asked me for a brief discussion about the IPCC and a way forward. My main concern there was to define a process that would let the world know that our ignorance of much of the climate system is simply enormous and we have much to do. Mother Nature has a tremendous number of degrees of freedom up her sleeves, many of which we don’t even know about or account for.

http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/christyjr_iac_100615.pdf

Another point that I raised in my comment about the fire insurance analogy was that it exhibited weak thinking on the part of warmists. A kind of desperation seems to be driving them to ever-greater extremes in the implausible rhetoric and propaganda that they are prepared to employ. There has been a superb example this week.

The American National Academy of Sciences has published a paper in its journal that purports to analyse the ‘distribution of credibility of dissenting researchers relative to agreeing researchers’ in the climate debate. Evidently the criterion used is the publication records of the dissenters: they don’t figure nearly so prominently in the peer reviewed literature as those who cleave to the orthodoxy and, in the eyes of the authors, this proves that they are not very good scientists.

Of course silly bits of research do get published from time to time, but you don’t expect them to turn up in one of the world’s leading science journals, or to be co-authored by someone of the stature of Stephen Schneider, who has been a  leading figures in climate science for over thirty years. But what is more remarkable is that neither PNAS nor Schneider seem to have anticipated the extent to which this exercise would backfire. There were immediate accusations of creating a blacklist of researchers exhibiting politically unacceptable tendencies, with all the antipathy that is likely to engender, but worse, it has drawn renewed attention to the growing controversy over the way in which peer review is applied and the problems that sceptical researchers face over funding. Far from discrediting those who appear on the list, which was the obvious object of the exercise, it has made martyrs of them, and once again spotlighted the very worrying culture within the climate science community that Climategate first laid bare.

How could Schneider and the editors at PNAS be so blind to the pitfall of publishing a crass political attack on what they clearly see as their adversaries under the guise of scientific research?  They are not thinking straight any more than Watson was when he trotted out a facile and obviously fallacious analogy at the end of the Panorama programme. Such actions are the cause of scepticism, not a remedy for it.

I do not know what risk, if any, anthropogenic climate change poses. What worries me is that, so long as the task of finding out is left in the hands of the IPCC – an organisation that is obsessed with persuading the world that it knows all the answers while downplaying uncertainties – we are very unlikely to find out.

_____________________________

H/T to tempterrain  who, unwittingly, provided the idea for this post.