What Is And What Isn't Scientific

When is "consensus" not all its cracked up to be? Why, when you have only a single study that "proves" the contention you want proved, and you feel that further study will udermine that. From the BBC: 'No Sun link' to climate change

A new scientific study concludes that changes in the Sun's output cannot be causing modern-day climate change.

It shows that for the last 20 years, the Sun's output has declined, yet temperatures on Earth have risen.

It also shows that modern temperatures are not determined by the Sun's effect on cosmic rays, as has been claimed.

Writing in the Royal Society's journal Proceedings A, the researchers say cosmic rays may have affected climate in the past, but not the present.

"This should settle the debate," said Mike Lockwood, from the UK's Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, who carried out the new analysis together with Claus Froehlich from the World Radiation Center in Switzerland.[emphasis added]

Any scientist who would say about a single study that contradicts other, more numerous, peer reviewed work, "This should settle the debate" is immediately suspect if only from the standpoint of the sheer ignorance of the scientific method it displays. Debates of this sort are never settled. They are constantly checked and re-checked, other scientists attempt to duplicate the findings, criticize the methodology, see how it fits the existing literature on the subject, etc. etc. etc. You do not get to publish your research findings and then declare the topic forever closed, as if God himself has spoken on the matter. What garbage.

The effort is, of course, a political one. Making such categorical statements give the politicians working the political front lines of the AGW hysteria ammunition to fire at people who still have the temerity to question orthodoxy. You can see the same process at work in the studies linking hurricane formation with Global Warming. The study by Kerry Emanuel purporting to show such a linkage was deemed (by Emanuel himself no less) as the "final" word on the subject. Funny thing was, it was wrong, and very obviously wrong. (I covered this here, here and here. I myself poke a hole in Emanuel's claims here.)

The thing is, it doesn't matter that Emanuel's work has been proven false. His claim to perpetual canonical status is floating around out there and it gets recited back by journalists as the "final" answer to the question still. This not only does violence to the scientific method, it also predicates public policy debates upon falsehoods. So this isn't an arcane question that only the late Karl Popper could have cared about. It is a question about what the idea of free inquiry requires and what our public policy debates should demand.