The Heartland Institute: Undermining Science in the Name of the "Scientific Method"

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I must confess, Iโ€™m less and less motivated these days to write posts debunking climate change skeptics and deniers. Their minds donโ€™t change, and fighting over climate science may just make us polarizedโ€”especially since mounting evidence suggests the climate divide is really more about values than science to begin with, and science is simply the preferred weapon in a clash over different views of how society (and especially the relationship between the government and the market) should beย structured.

Sometimes, though, you just canโ€™t resist blasting away. This is one of thoseย times.

The Heartland Institute is having yet another conference to undermine climate science, and this time, they are flying it under this banner: โ€œRestoring the Scientific Method.โ€ Itโ€™s like they think they are now Francis Bacon (at left) or something.ย Hereโ€™s how they describe the conference, which will be set in Washington, D.C., at the end ofย June:ย 

The theme of the conference, โ€œRestoring the Scientific Method,โ€ acknowledges the fact that claims of scientific certainty and predictions of climate catastrophes are based on โ€œpost-normal science,โ€ which substitutes claims of consensus for the scientific method. This choice has had terrible consequences for science and society. Abandoning the scientific method led to the โ€œClimategateโ€ scandal and the errors and abuses of peer review by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Theย scientists speakingย at this conference, and the hundreds more who are expected to attend, are committed to restoring the scientific method. This means abandoning the failed hypothesis of man-made climate change, and using real science and sound economics to improve our understanding of the planetโ€™s ever-changing climate.ย 

One hardly knows where to begin with this. Heartland gives no account of what it actually means by the โ€œscientific methodโ€โ€“and defining the scientific method is notoriously difficult anyway, as scholars of science studies know all too well. I also am not really sure what Heartland means by โ€œpost-normal science,โ€ but their definition does not seem consistent with what the scholars who came up with the conceptย actually had in mind.

But these are minor matters, merely the sort of things that academics write books about. Set them aside, because itโ€™s obvious where this is allย heading.

Heartland is having a conference to define climate change skepticism as the right โ€œscience,โ€ and the work of the IPCC and the National Academy of Sciences as the โ€œwrongโ€ science, or not science at all. The argument is couched as a matter of scientific methodology, but really, it boils down to โ€œmy expert is better than your expertโ€โ€”along with a good dose of โ€œyour expert is biased andย corrupt.โ€

But the thing is, we can tell from this mere snippet that Heartlandโ€™s โ€œscientific methodโ€ is unreliable. Itโ€™s screaming from theย page.

If the scientific mindset means anything at all, it means trying to control oneโ€™s biases by never being too sure of oneโ€™s preconceptions. Thatโ€™s why Bacon, one of the pioneers of modern science, warned us to be wary of the โ€œidols of the mindโ€œโ€“a series of prejudices that sound a lot like what psychologists now recognize as textbook cognitiveย biases.

Anyone who can call human-caused global warming a โ€œfailed hypothesisโ€ isnโ€™t paying very close attention to Baconian warnings. A very very large number of scientists see it as a very serious โ€œhypothesisโ€ indeed, so calling it โ€œfailedโ€ sounds awfullyย hubristic.ย 

Meanwhile, Heartland also claims these mainstream scientists are making a claim to โ€œscientific certaintyโ€ when they arenโ€™t. Scientific certainty is literally an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. We may try to approach it but we never get there, and the IPCC has never said the science of climate isย โ€œcertain.โ€

Heartland is thus misrepresenting its opponentsโ€“ironically claiming that they possessย โ€œcertaintyโ€ when really, itโ€™s Heartland thatโ€™s willing to blithely to toss aside the idea that humans are causing global warming, despite the weight of expert opinion. If thatโ€™s not unwarranted certainty, I donโ€™t know whatย is.

So yeah, the scientific method is notoriously hard to defineโ€“but sometimes we can know it from its absence. If youโ€™re convinced youโ€™re right and the bulk of mainstream scientists, expert bodies, and scientific societies are wrong on climate changeโ€ฆwell, youโ€™re not exactly making Francis Baconย proud.

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