Scientific Heresy-Climate Change
Scientific Heresy-Climate Change
Matt Ridley
Scientic Heresy
Matt Ridley
Angus Millar Lecture of the Royal Society of the Arts
Edinburgh, 31 October 2011
I
T is a great honour to be asked to deliver the Angus Millar lecture. I have no
idea whether Angus Millar ever saw himself as a heretic, but I have a soft
spot for heresy. One of my ancestral relations, Nicholas Ridley the Oxford
martyr, was burned at the stake for heresy.
My topic today is scientic heresy. When are scientic heretics right and
when are they mad? How do you tell the difference between science and pseu-
doscience?
Let us run through some issues, starting with the easy ones.
- Astronomy is a science; astrology is a pseudoscience.
- Evolution is science; creationism is pseudoscience.
- Molecular biology is science; homeopathy is pseudoscience.
- Vaccination is science; the MMR scare is pseudoscience.
- Oxygen is science; phlogiston was pseudoscience.
- Chemistry is science; alchemy was pseudoscience.
Are you with me so far? A few more examples. That the earl of Oxford
wrote Shakespeare is pseudoscience. So are the beliefs that Elvis is still alive,
Diana was killed by MI5, JFK was killed by the CIA, 9/11 was an inside job. So
are ghosts, UFOs, telepathy, the Loch Ness monster and pretty well everything
to do with the paranormal. Sorry to say that on Halloween, but thats my
opinion.
Three more controversial ones. In my view, most of what Freud said was
pseudoscience. So is quite a lot, though not all, of the argument for organic
farming. So, in a sense by denition, is religious faith. It explicitly claims
that there are truths that can be found by other means than observation and
experiment.
Now comes one that gave me an epiphany: crop circles. It was blindingly
obvious to me that crop circles were likely to be man-made when I rst starting
investigating this phenomenon. I made some myself to prove it was easy to do.
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This was long before Doug Bower and Dave Chorley fessed up to having started
the whole craze after a night at the pub. Every other explanation ley lines,
alien spacecraft, plasma vortices, ball lightning was balderdash. The entire
eld of cereology was pseudoscience, as the slightest brush with its bizarre
practitioners easily demonstrated.
Imagine my surprise then when I found I was the heretic and that serious
journalists working not for tabloids but for Science magazine, and for a Channel
4 documentary team, swallowed the argument of the cereologists that it was
highly implausible that crop circles were all man-made.
So I learnt lesson number 1: the stunning gullibility of the media. Put an
ologyafter your pseudoscience and you can get journalists to be your propa-
gandists.
A Channel 4 team did the obvious thing they got a group of students to
make some crop circles and then asked the cereologist if they were genuineor
hoaxed, i.e. man made. He assured them they could not have been made
by people. So they told him they had been made the night before. The man
was poleaxed. It made great television. Yet the producer, who later became a
government minister under Tony Blair, ended the segment of the programme by
taking the cereologists side: of course, not all crop circles are hoaxes. What?
The same happened when Doug and Dave owned up; everybody just went on
believing. They still do.
Lesson number 2: debunking is like water off a ducks back to pseudo-
science.
In medicine, I began to realize, the distinction between science and pseu-
doscience is not always easy. This is beautifully illustrated in an extraordinary
novel by Rebecca Abrams, called Touching Distance, based on the real story of
an eighteenth century medical heretic, Alec Gordon of Aberdeen.
Gordon was a true pioneer of the idea that childbed fever was spread by
medical folk like himself and that hygiene was the solution to it. He hit upon
this discovery long before Semelweiss and Lister. But he was ignored. Yet
Abrams novel does not paint him purely as a rational hero, but as a awed
human being, a neglectful husband and a crank with some odd ideas such as a
dangerous obsession with bleeding his sick patients. He was a pseudoscientist
one minute and scientist the next.
Lesson number 3. We can all be both. Newton was an alchemist.
Like antisepsis, many scientic truths began as heresies and fought long
battles for acceptance against entrenched establishment wisdom that now ap-
pears irrational: continental drift, for example. Barry Marshall was not just
ignored but vilied when he rst argued that stomach ulcers are caused by a
particular bacterium. Antacid drugs were very protable for the drug industry.
Eventually he won the Nobel prize.
Just this month Daniel Shechtman won the Nobel prize for quasicrystals,
having spent much of his career being vilied and exiled as a crank. I was
thrown out of my research group. They said I brought shame on them with
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what I was saying.
Thats lesson number 4: the heretic is sometimes right.
What sustains pseudoscience is conrmation bias. We look for and wel-
come the evidence that ts our pet theory; we ignore or question the evidence
that contradicts it. We all do this all the time. Its not, as we often assume,
something that only our opponents indulge in. I do it, you do it, it takes a
superhuman effort not to do it. That is what keeps myths alive, sustains con-
spiracy theories and keeps whole populations in thrall to strange superstitions.
Bertrand Russell pointed this out many years ago: If a man is offered a
fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the
evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand,
he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his
instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.
Lesson number 5: keep a sharp eye out for conrmation bias in yourself
and others.
There have been some very good books on this recently. Michael Shermers
The Believing Brain, Dan Gardners Future Babble and Tim Harfords Adapt are
explorations of the power of conrmation bias. And what I nd most unsettling
of all is Gardners conclusion that knowledge is no defence against it; indeed,
the more you know, the more you fall for conrmation bias. Expertise gives
you the tools to seek out the conrmations you need to buttress your beliefs.
Experts are worse at forecasting the future than non-experts. Philip Tetlock
did the denitive experiment. He gathered a sample of 284 experts political
scientists, economists and journalists and harvested 27,450 different specic
judgments from them about the future then waited to see if they came true.
The results were terrible. The experts were no better than a dart-throwing
chimpanzee.
Heres what the Club of Rome said on the rear cover of the massive best-
seller Limits to Growth in 1972:
Will this be the world that your grandchildren will thank you for?
A world where industrial production has sunk to zero. Where pop-
ulation has suffered a catastrophic decline. Where the air, sea and
land are polluted beyond redemption. Where civilization is a dis-
tant memory. This is the world that the computer forecasts.
Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts, said Richard Feynman.
Lesson 6. Never rely on the consensus of experts about the future. Experts are
worth listening to about the past, but not the future. Futurology is pseudo-
science.
U
Sing these six lessons, I am now going to plunge into an issue on which
almost all the experts are not only condent they can predict the future,
but absolutely certain their opponents are pseudoscientists. It is an issue on
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which I am now a heretic. I think the establishment view is infested with
pseudoscience. The issue is climate change.
Now before you all rush for the exits, and I know it is traditional to walk out
on speakers who do not toe the line on climate at the RSA I saw it happen to
Bjorn Lomborg last year when he gave the Prince Philip lecture let me be quite
clear. I am not a denier. I fully accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse
gas, the climate has been warming and that man is very likely to be at least
partly responsible. When a study was published recently saying that 98% of
scientists believe in global warming, I looked at the questions they had been
asked and realized I was in the 98%, too, by that denition, though I never use
the word believe about myself. Likewise the recent study from Berkeley, which
concluded that the land surface of the continents has indeed been warming at
about the rate people thought, changed nothing.
So whats the problem? The problem is that you can accept all the basic
tenets of greenhouse physics and still conclude that the threat of a dangerously
large warming is so improbable as to be negligible, while the threat of real
harm from climate-mitigation policies is already so high as to be worrying, that
the cure is proving far worse than the disease is ever likely to be. Or as I put it
once, we may be putting a tourniquet round our necks to stop a nosebleed.
I also think the climate debate is a massive distraction from much more
urgent environmental problems like invasive species and overshing.
I was not always such a lukewarmer. In the mid 2000s one image in par-
ticular played a big role in making me abandon my doubts about dangerous
man-made climate change: the hockey stick. It clearly showed that something
unprecedented was happening. I can remember where I rst saw it at a con-
ference and how I thought: aha, now there at last is some really clear data
showing that todays temperatures are unprecedented in both magnitude and
rate of change and it has been published in Nature magazine.
Yet it has been utterly debunked by the work of Steve McIntyre and Ross
McKitrick. I urge you to read Andrew Montfords careful and highly readable
book The Hockey Stick Illusion. Here is not the place to go into detail, but
briey the problem is both mathematical and empirical. The graph relies heav-
ily on some awed data strip-bark tree rings from bristlecone pines and on a
particular method of principal component analysis, called short centering, that
heavily weights any hockey-stick shaped sample at the expense of any other
sample. When I say heavily I mean 390 times.
This had a big impact on me. This was the moment somebody told me
they had made the crop circle the night before. For, apart from the hockey
stick, there is no evidence that climate is changing dangerously or faster than
in the past, when it changed naturally. It was warmer in the Middle Ages and
medieval climate change in Greenland was much faster.
Stalagmites, tree lines and ice cores all conrm that it was signicantly
warmer 7000 years ago. Evidence from Greenland suggests that the Arctic
ocean was probably ice free for part of the late summer at that time. Sea level
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is rising at the unthreatening rate about a foot per century and decelerating.
Greenland is losing ice at the rate of about 150 gigatonnes a year, which is 0.6%
per century. There has been no signicant warming in Antarctica, with the
exception of the peninsula. Methane has largely stopped increasing. Tropical
storm intensity and frequency have gone down, not up, in the last 20 years.
Your probability of dying as a result of a drought, a ood or a storm is 98%
lower globally than it was in the 1920s. Malaria has retreated not expanded as
the world has warmed.
And so on. Ive looked and looked but I cannot nd one piece of data
as opposed to a model that shows either unprecedented change or change is
that is anywhere close to causing real harm.
No doubt, there will be plenty of people thinking what about x? Well, if
you have an x that persuades you that rapid and dangerous climate change
is on the way, tell me about it. When I asked a senior government scientist
this question, he replied with the PaleoceneEocene Thermal Maximum. That
is to say, a poorly understood hot episode, 55 million years ago, of uncertain
duration, uncertain magnitude and uncertain cause.
Meanwhile, I see conrmation bias everywhere in the climate debate. Hur-
ricane Katrina, Mount Kilimanjaro, the extinction of golden toads all cited
wrongly as evidence of climate change. A snowy December, the BBC lectures
us, is just weather; a ood in Pakistan or a drought in Texas is the sort of
weather we can expect more of. A theory so exible it can rationalize any
outcome is a pseudoscientic theory.
To see conrmation bias in action, you only have to read the Climategate
emails, documents that have undermined my faith in this countrys scientic
institutions. It is bad enough that the emails unambiguously showed scien-
tists plotting to cherry-pick data, subvert peer review, bully editors and evade
freedom of information requests. Whats worse, to a science groupie like me,
is that so much of the rest of the scientic community seemed OK with that.
They essentially shrugged their shoulders and said, Yeah, big deal, boys will be
boys.
Nor is there even any theoretical support for a dangerous future. The cen-
tral issue is sensitivity: the amount of warming that you can expect from a
doubling of carbon dioxide levels. On this, there is something close to consen-
sus at rst. It is 1.2 degrees centigrade. Heres how the IPCC put it in its
latest report.
In the idealised situation that the climate response to a doubling of atmo-
spheric CO
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consisted of a uniform temperature change only, with no feed-
backs operating. . . the global warming from GCMs would be around 1.2
C.
Paragraph 8.6.2.3.
Now the paragraph goes on to argue that large, net positive feedbacks,
mostly from water vapour, are likely to amplify this. But whereas there is
good consensus about the 1.2
C per decade
somewhat less if you believe the satellite thermometers (the blue and purple
lines).
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So we are on track for 1.2