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.
TonyN,
You don’t seem to appreciate why your Physicist friend found your comment somewhat tedious
“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.”
If you, or he, were to take your next walking holiday in the Northern parts of Australia you’d both be well advised to not just walk around ponds, except they are called them dams or billabongs here, but take much larger detours away from any sections of water, as we certainly do have, not alligators, but large ferocious amphibians called crocodiles!
Now you seem to be fixated on the notion that I should have allowed you an extra option of “don’t know” in my multiple choice test. In practice, you aren’t normally allowed that option either. You may not know if there are any crocodiles in the creek. Or if, you do, you may not know if they are of the more dangerous species. And, you may not know how deep it is.
You may have a long walk to the nearest bridge, but is your lack of knowledge going to keep you safe? I don’t think so. Better take that walk to the bridge!
Your friend is probably used to thinking in analogies because that is the way Physicists think. Its a way of making a difficult problem easier. Even thinking about atoms as balls, or light as waves, are analogy. You might want to count up how many analogies Richard Feynmann uses in this talk which illustrates how he thinks about Physical problems:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/richard_feynman.html
TonyN
Thanks for another incisive article about “alligators, fire insurance, ignorance, and risk”.
[It is quite obvious that the “alligator/crocodile analogy” is basically flawed: in alligator or crocodile country there have been many real incidents of attacks on humans, but the postulated threat to our society from global warming remains a fictitious specter conjured up by the virtual world of GIGO computer models and sold to the public by Hollywood movies and politicized IPCC reports.]
Your physicist friend’s reluctance to accept “reservations expressed by sceptics who are not physicists” begs the question: does he accept reservations expressed by sceptics who are physicists?
Stephen Schneider’s (and the PNAS editors’) “black list” of scientists is frightening (but appears to me to be a last-ditch defensive move as the tide has turned against AGW-alarmism).
As background I found the cited references to statements by John Christy particularly interesting. Here are a few:
AND…
Christy’s alternative view proposal to make the Fifth Assessment Report more scientific (and less political), which he made at the IPCC Lead Author’s Meeting in Honolulu Hawaii) states:
In order to arrive at a “true Scientific Assessment” rather than a political “document designed for uniformity and consensus”, Christy suggested a novel “Wikipedia” approach (rather than issuing a voluminous report every six years that, like the most recent AR4, is out-of-date as soon as it is released).
We can only hope that Christy’s straightforward and positive approach will be reflected in a “new, more transparent IPCC”, enabling it over time to regain its mantle of gold standard scientific organization on our planet’s climate, which it has lost due to the malfeasance and dishonesty of those scientists, which dominated the IPCC whom Christy calls the “establishment”.
Max
Peter M:
I’m considering submitting a paper to PNAS on “The Significance of Billabongs in the Anthropogenic Climate Change Consensus”.
Your Feynman example confirms what I said about the value of analogy in explanation. I would be very surprised if you can find any arguments form analogy in his published research.
Peter M is right about the dangers of crocodile attack in certain places – someone going for a dip in a remote river in northern Queensland might be well advised not to; this is a known risk. In other places, e.g., Hampstead Ponds in northern London, well, the risk is somewhat less.
While looking for stuff about alligator/croc attacks today on the internet, I found some information about the bunyip. This Australian water creature is basically a mythical beast, although historically there are definitely people who claimed to have actually seen one. It is also reputed to be extremely dangerous, with a taste for human flesh.
Do dangerous bunyips really exist? TonyN’s answer is the correct one – we don’t know. But I could argue that if there is the chance, however small, however remote, that dangerous bunyips do exist, stringent anti-bunyip precautions should be taken anywhere in Australia where there is a substantial body of water, just in case. And since there is considerable confusion about the exact size and appearance of these creatures, even small private swimming pools should be out of bounds, until a Health and Safety bunyip expert has visited and given it the all clear. Also public swimming pools should be required to take out expensive bunyip insurance policies, lest a bunyip appear and start to eat the swimmers.
I think this is what the Precautionary Principle would dictate, anyway. After all, no-one can offer proof that dangerous bunyips don’t exist. Am I right?
Thanks, Peter, for the reminder about Richard Feynmann. He made excellent use of analogy as a way of helping non-physicists to appreciate (if not understand) abstruse scientific concepts. What he wasn’t doing, of course, was using analogy to assist a line of argument. That is nearly always risky; and especially so if it gives your opponent a weapon to turn back on you. Er … perhaps like a hand grenade with a slow burning fuse – steady, Robin, an analogy.
Bob Watson’s use of fire insurance is an excellent example. His problem is that the householder’s decision about whether or nor to take out fire insurance is wholly different from the decision about taking action in the hope of avoiding dangerous climate change. For example, if I buy fire insurance and my house burns down, I can claim the cost of rebuilding from the insurer. But, if the UK Government invests massively in renewables (as it seems determined to do) and we still experience damaging climate change, where does the Government go for compensation? The answer’s obvious. Ah, Watson might respond, but I was referring to a decision to be made by all nations, not one. Well, apart from being a poor parallel with one householder, the problem with that is that all nations plainly have no intention of taking action (see this) and there’s no way of making them do so, so the concept is wholly meaningless.
Another weakness is that, whereas the risks associated with house fires are well established from a mass of real data, that’s not remotely the case with climate change where the possibility of it’s happening at all is only theoretical – thus, as Tony has pointed out, “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”.
I could go on – but the point is surely clear: it’s an analogy that gives Watson’s critics multiple opportunities to demonstrate the weakness of his position. I doubt if that was his intention.
It’s nearly always best to avoid using analogy in debate.
Thanks, Alex – that’s one of the best posts I’ve seen here.
Robin,
I think your main objection to the use of analogy is due to its effectiveness rather its lack of!
All,
I have raised the argument before that humans are reactive. They’ll see crocodiles attack and from then on will take precautions and make an assessment of risk.
Its possible to think of lots of other similar examples of course .. Road Accidents, Flu pandemics etc.
How would you suggest that we should assess risk when the learning and correcting process may take thousands of year? Do we just assume it to be zero until we see something actually happen from which we can learn?
PeterM:
As I’ve shown the fire insurance analogy is indeed effective. The problem (for you) is that it’s effective in demonstrating the weakness of your position.
Robin,
I don’t have a position per se. I just go with mainstream science!
If you think my argument on the need for insurance, in the wider sense of the term, supports your position then I suggest you read and study it again!
PeterM:
As for your question about what “we” should do, you’re back in dreamland. Get used to the idea that there is no “we” to make a decision. Instead there are a number of disparate and hard nosed governments that make the decisions they think are in their nation’s (or their own) best interests. That’s the real world. And that’s why I await with interest your answer to your answer to the question you put to TonyN – here.
As for your #9, Peter, I suggest you read my #5 – carefully this time.
Max and Robin,
On June the 2nd, Max said “The problem doesn’t exist until you can demonstrate conclusively that it does.” All climate deniers suffer from this basic delusion. In fact that’s why they are called deniers!
The scientific world are advising us all not to cross the creek because they do believe that crocodiles are lurking there.
So you guys are saying ” The problem doesn’t exist until…..” ?
Crocodiles aren’t the smartest of creatures but even they aren’t taken in by that argument!
PeterM:
There are two separate issues here – and you get both wrong.
First, you appear to think that a mythical entity called “the scientific world” is telling the rest of the world that, unless it reduces it’s emissions of GHGs, it will experience dangerous, even catastrophic, climate change. But that quite simply isn’t true.
Secondly, it’s utterly pointless bleating on about “us all” – as I point out at #10, there is no “we” that can decide whether or not to take action. And that’s why I await with interest your answer to your answer to the question you put to TonyN – here.
Peter: that last sentence should have read “… I await with interest your answer to the question …” etc.
PeterM
Yep. It’s correct that
I have crossed many creeks in Switzerland (where no one has ever demonstrated conclusively that an alligator problem exists).
In Florida (where it has been conclusively demonstrated that alligators do exist in and around creeks) I would not do so.
In Australia (where it has also been conclusively demonstrated that crocodiles do exist in and around creeks – or whatever they may be called there) I would also not do so.
Get the drift? Just a bit of basic logic.
Max
So they do, but based on a hypothetical model of crocodile behaviour because nobody’s actually seen one!
Until then, it’s just a bunyip or, to use a local analogy, a Loch Ness monster. AFAIK, nobody avoids Loch Ness for fear of being drowned and/or eaten, although presumably it remains a risk.
Max,
Have you ever read how close the world came to accidental nuclear war in the 20th century? There was one particular incident where a Soviet radar officer in the early 80’s followed his own personal judgement and overrode his automated alarm system which was indicating a US missile attack.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
There may well have been other undocumented similar incidents on both sides.
The point is that world survived unscathed and probably by sheer luck. It is just absurd to claim that the situation was risk free.
Yet, if you apply the sort of logic that has been suggested here along the lines of
“The problem doesn’t exist until you can demonstrate conclusively that it does.”
then risk free is exactly what it was.
and what about this piece of muddled thinking from Robin?
” that’s not remotely the case with climate change where the possibility of it’s happening at all is only theoretical” Yes, Just like accidental nuclear war!
Furthermore, I would expect that as World tensions have reduced, then the risk has also reduced. But its difficult to put a number on that. But, only an idiot would claim it to be zero. Or even worse: because we don’t exactly know what the risk is then we may as well assume it to be zero!
Just to anticipate another idiotic argument: Is anyone here saying that because it didn’t, in fact, happen then this must prove that there was indeed no risk?
PeterM:
Precisely why (re climate change) is “the possibility of it’s happening at all is only theoretical” muddled thinking? A clear, precise answer please.
And then an answer to this question please.
Thanks
TonyN,
I hope you don’t think I’m getting at you but I was just curious about your phrase “I was sauntering along one of our local beeches with a physicist.”
It could be perfectly correct if, say, you and the said physicist were walking along the trunk of a fallen tree. But,if you mean a shoreline then you might want to fix it up:-)
I suppose, Peter, that being very clever and an excellent walker helps when you’re sauntering along a beech. I’m less sure about “very tall” though.
Anyone can mock my spelling – I’m used to it, but how about a volunteer proofreader on this blog to stop it happening?
PeterM
Again you use an inappropriate analogy demonstrating that (unfortunately) your logic is muddled.
The threat of a nuclear war during the Cold War years was REAL. Nuclear weapons were REAL. There were REAL major stockpiles on both sides with REAL high-tech delivery systems in place. Their impact on the earth and unfortunate humans at explosion had been experimentally determined to be deadly and REAL (not to mention the actual use of early primitive nuclear bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended WWII, killing many thousands of Japanese but arguably saving many times that many civilians and combatants from both sides in the process).
To compare this REAL threat with the computer-generated VIRTUAL threat from AGW is not only silly, it is totally absurd.
Forget these silly analogies, Peter. They really do make you look silly.
Max
I think you’ve already got several! Anyway, it wouldn’t be so much fun without the odd typo. A commenter on another forum I read managed to create a memorable phrase simply by failing to hit the space bar hard enough, describing his efforts to seek comfort on ‘an all day bender’ but without the first space.
We dined out it for months.
Six munts ago I cudnt evun spell climitologist, and now I are one!
Max,
You’ll have to tell us about Arrenhius and his “GIGO” computer models sometime. Maybe he’d bought a dud abacus with one of the beads missing?
Robin,
I did ask the question of on the calculation of risk of possible events, but which have never previously occurred. Like accidental nuclear war. Like human induced climate change.
Actuarial science is statistically based and as you have often pointed out with threat of possible climate change, and accidental nuclear war too don’t forget, cannot be used to assess future risk.
So how do we do it? Do we just assume it is zero?
Can the possibility of anything happening which has never previously happened be dismissed as “only theoretical”? Isn’t Einstein’s work on Relativity only a theory too?
I’m not sure if anyone sounded any warnings about the possibility of European airspace being closed for extended periods but, if they had, then what would have been the answer? This has never happened before and its only a theoretical possibility?
Science does give us the ability with climate change of being able to predict what will happen if CO2 and other GHG’s are allowed to rise out of control. To dismiss it in a casual fashion as ‘only theoretical’ does show muddled thinking.