Research

Dean Esmay has an interesting piece on media perceptions of scientific research.

Science is like the military - the media just doesn't seem to get the basic precepts underlying the discipline:

If in the 1990s you had done a review of studies on low-fat diets, you would have found that almost all of them contained statements like, "Low-fat diets may be associated with lowered risk of unfavorable serum lipids. Our study of seems consistent with that hypothesis in that..."

Studies containing such highly qualified statements would regularly be pointed to as "proof" that high-fat diets make you fat and kill you and low-fat diets make you thin and save your life.

Now, is that because the studies were bogus? If you think so then you simply don't know enough about science.

Real scientists very, very rarely draw sweeping conclusions. The most important thing they publish is data, not vague general statements. In point of fact there was a lot of value in most of those studies that "supported" the low-fat diet hypothesis. That the hypothesis itself became steadily shakier with time didn't make the studies wrong or bad. It means the researchers were testing the hypothesis, and providing valuable data while doing so. Eventually most of the field came to the same conclusion: "You know what? Despite all our testing, we just can't validate this hypothesis. We thought maybe we could but we just can't."

And the conventional wisdom changed.

The conventional wisdom he's talking about regards global warming, actually:

When it comes to global warming there are three facts that I'm often amazed don't get more attention:

1) Most climate scientists are fairly certain that the Earth's average temperature has been higher any number of times in the past than it is now, and

2) Most climate scientists will affirm that atmospheric CO2 levels have been much higher at times in the past than they are now.

3) There's not much evidence that CO2 levels and average atmospheric temperature are more than marginally correlated.

And one of the bigger bombshells of the last year was when the most commonly cited study on atmospheric temperature trends over the last millenium to demonstrate a sharp recent increase in global temperatures was shown to be mathematically flawed.

My own opinion, for whatever it's worth: Lomberg is right on the most important matter: trying to "fix" global warming by spending trillions of dollars would be inhumane and irresponsible. For the costs associated with such questionable nostrums as the Kyoto protocol, we could do far more to provide clean air and water for most of the world's population, and do far more for extinct species preservation and nature conservation. The Earth has been much hotter (and had much higher CO2 levels) in the past, and the notion that we can control the temperature of the Earth the way we control the thermostat in our homes is absurd.

And in any case, panic over rising ocean levels and global catastrophes isn't just unfounded in science: it's pseudoscientific hysteria.

There's more.

Posted by Mitch at December 13, 2004 04:27 AM | TrackBack