Disagreement among climate change scientists

Hello again – so glad that you have joined me here on ze blog!

The Wall Street Journal is reporting this morning about a number of e-mails that were hacked out of East Anglia University in the U.K. East Anglia is a clearing house for much of the climate change research being conducted all around the world. These e-mails, some dating back to 1996, demonstrate a lot less consensus on the climate change issue than we are led to believe exists by traditional media.

This is a fascinating thing that deserves some exploration on our part.

One of my favorite sources for climate change research is a book called “The Skeptical Environmentalist” by Bjorn Lomborg. Mr. Lomborg was one of the co-founders of Greenpeace who ended up leaving the organization because he felt that the organization began to treat humans as a disease that need to be eradicated from the planet, rather than as a part of the planetary ecosystem. His book, which to my knowledge has not been updated for almost ten years, reviews much of the environmental studies and the reporting of those studies that has been done for the last 30+ years. Mr. Lomborg basically debunks the severity of every single alarmist environmental issue that you read about – except for one. That one exception is global warming which he says is overwhelmingly been proven, despite dissension in the research.

So why do I feel this story is so interesting and worth talking about? Because it is representative of the fact that scientists, those bastions of objectivity, are proven to suffer from emotional dysfunctions like bias, hidden agendas and general immaturity, just like everyone else. This is important for us as investors because people who talk numbers, scientists or financial analysts, have the whiff of unbiased purveyors of information. My own opinion is that those who retreat to numbers-based fields are actually more immature and less emotionally capable than the rest of us and more likely to do stupid things to get their numbers-based research to look like scientific truth.

I am not advocating a wholesale rejection of numbers-based data. No, I would never do that because numbers-based research can be more objective than non numbers-based research can. Instead, I am advocating caution. It is no surprise to most people that numbers are manipulated to support arguments. However, I think it would be a shock to people at just how often it really occurs. In my estimation, most of financial analysis-type data (~60-70%) suffers from bias of one form or another. And even in science, as we are seeing with the latest news of climate change science’s massive omissions of contrary viewpoints, bias runs rampant.

The sad thing is that there is very, very strong evidence of global warming and with humans as the primary cause of that warming. But the emotional entanglements of the consensus climate change scientists may cause an unraveling of the strength of belief in the affirmative data. Ouch!

[Parenthetically, one of my problems with science is that it focuses all of its attention on that which is endlessly replicable. So science largely ignores that which is truly unique and outstanding…those singular events in a life. Because of the strength of belief in science, many of us rationalize some of the truly extraordinary, yet scientifically inexplicable, events of our lives.]

Ironically one of science’s biggest biases is against soft, non-quantitative research. “Attack that which you are naturally uncomfortable with” does not turn a blind eye to scientists. In the end, today’s WSJ story is yet further evidence that qualitative, intuitive approaches will always remain valid as long as we are evaluating that soft, non-quantitative thing known as humanity.

Jason