Unsettled Science

It's never quite settled

I posted the announcement of the new global warming-related article yesterday because it is the first attempt I’ve personally encountered to semi-quantitatively answer the rather basic question, “How much of the atmospheric CO2 is derived from fossil fuel burning, and how much is derived from non-human natural sources?”.  The way the scientific work was done seemed, in academic science-speak, “elegant”.  In applied science-speak, the approach seemed to me to be “workmanlike”.

Anyway, I found reader responses to the article as interesting as the scientific paper itself.  Some of them are posted publicly beneath the article announcement on this site.

One reader emailed me directly to comment that,

“Thanks for sharing. This is certainly an interesting piece of work which is most likely a grand deception. I went to the link and skimmed through the analysis, but not being a physicist, a chemist or a climatologist, I definitely cannot follow the math nor the logic of the math. That being said, I would look forward to a peer-reviewed analysis of the argument being made. Maybe, this one analysis is so good it will refute the work and findings of the latest IPCC report that relies on over 14,000 peer-reviewed papers, but I don't think so.”

Reading that strain of thought, I’d like to remind readers that science is not a democratic process where the scientific truth about an aspect of reality is determined by the number of votes (e.g., “14,000 peer-reviewed papers”) for a particular working hypothesis.  It really, really is possible for an overwhelming majority of very well-meaning and entirely serious people – even highly credentialed and experienced scientists -- to agree with each other, yet still be materially wrong about their joint scientific observations and/or the meaning of same.  If you want a very recent and realtime example of this, reflect on the degree of ‘appropriateness’ of the dominant scientific, medical, industrial, and governmental responses to COVID19’s emergence.

I, like probably all other people with at least a moderate amount of experience and knowledge of the scientific process, visualize the course of scientific progress on any subject or problem like this:

Scientific understanding appears to be asymptotic – never quite gets to complete accuracy.  Global warming skeptics think humankind is somewhere near point A on the curve in its understanding of the matter, while the purported majority (e.g., IPCC) feels human understanding is closer to point B.  Basic graph from https://uxdesign.cc/how-long-does-it-take-to-form-a-habit-281efa0285c2

Anyway, with regard to yesterday’s announcement of the Health Physics preprint related to the global warming question:  the authors of the paper quite clearly think the science is still very much unsettled on this matter, the informed opinions of many others not to the contrary.  Judging by the history of science, the authors could be correct about this.