In Conflicts of Interest Roger Pielke illuminates the murky battle ground of science politicization. It is important to recognize that the chase of chemical risk assessment (and climate change and many others) putatively scientific debates are real pr…

As to the variance about the mean of the mainstream, your “guess” may well be as good as mine, but at least one historian/philosopher of science has actually looked into this with some care, and has concluded it is relatively well defined. See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26065-2004Dec25.html, http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=80; http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=86.

Personally, I can’t distinguish Oreskes’s definition of mainstream from RealClimate’s definition. Of course, as I’ve pointed out numerous times, none of this proves that the mainstream view is correct. Nor does it prove there isn’t some vast leftwing conspiracy, of which I am an unwitting part. But it is really stretching it to suggest that there IS no mainstream. As I’ve said before, I don’t agree with the mainstream on everything — in particular on the subject of “abrupt climate change”. But I don’t try to claim that there isn’t a mainstream view of this subject. Nor do I present my own view as equal in stature or credibility to those mainstream views. If I did, I would rightly be called to task, because I have not articulated my views very well, least of all in a peer-reviewed setting. It would be nice if everyone had the same forbearance.

I certainly would not argue that a mainstream position(s) on anthropogenic climate change cannot be found. It would not be that difficult (and has been done to some degree) to interview the thousands working on the problem and work up the statistics. But I would argue that:

a) RC has not done that, yet still makes the implicit assumption that, “we know what the mainstream is, we are certainly in the mainstream, and so we’re posting mainstream views on climate change.” (My quotes, not theirs.) I think this is a specious assumption.

b) My guess is that the confidence limits around the mainstream “mean” would be huge, perhaps so large to diminish the notion of there being an identifiable hard and fast “mainstream.” To go further, even if there is a precisely defined mainstream in one aspect of the very broad, complex and multidisciplinary science of climatology, certainly there is none in other aspects. (Failure at finding a cure notwithstanding, HIV as a natural phenomenon doesn’t even come to climatology in complexity.)

All this is not to say that it is inappropriate to try to find a squishy middle of consensus, but perhaps it isn’t the job of climatologists themselves to do it. We don’t allow intellectual self-policing in publishing research results (hence peer review), so why would we allow a researcher to claim that their own views are “mainstream” when what might be at stake is “credibility” in the consequences debate?

Is there? The notion of where the mainstream exists is itself entirely subjective. My subjective notion of the “mainstream” is bimodal:

1) of most of the atmospheric scientists and climatologists I know holding the attitude, “this might be bad, ummm, probably might be bad, but, uh, well I guess we really aren’t sure yet, but hey, maybe it’d be better to worry rather than not, but hey, let’s keep researching and publishing and discussing this and geez, well, we’ll just tell the politicians what’s going on….”

and

2) of everybody else in somewhat related fields outside of atmospheric science and climatology (paleo-x, ecology, forestry, etc.; researchers that therefore have credibility with the general public and decision-making community, but of whom I consider to be possibly talking out of school) being much more willing to say, “this is a huge problem and we have to deal with it right now.”

And I expect my reading of the “mainstream” to be entirely different from my peers’ reading. That’s what makes Roger’s read-between-the-lines point about RealClimate’s claim on objectivity. To wit: RC is claiming that it knows where the mainstream is and can represent it faithfully. (You need look no further than the URL to see that, but it’s also in bold on the right frame on the main page.) I’m not in any way trying to attack Eric personally, but this notion is intellectually dishonest. You can’t lay claim to the mainstream and to being an honest broker/distributor of the mainstream with any more credibility than a political commentator can lay claim to representing the “silent majority of America.”

Good comments. Soon I’ll provide (what I hope is) a more substantive response to some of these issues in a post on the main site. But let me quickly say that I don’t see much meaningful distinction between formally organized advisory bodies and less formally organized bodies. The relevant common characteristic is the goal to explain science or its significance to the public or decision makers. And no I’m not much of a postmodernist (some of my philosopher friends actually complain that I am too modernist). As far as my philisophical grounding for thinking about science in society, I find much to agree with in Philip Kitcher’s excellent book Science, Truth and Democracy (2001, Oxford) and more generally, I am a student of American pragmatism (see, e.g., Pragmatism: A Reader, L. Menand, 1997, Vintage). I do see a continuum here, but it is not between science-politics, it is between issue advocacy-honest brokering. Here at Prometheus we are unabashed issue advocates for a few things, such as Mode 2 science and the importance of “honest brokers.” On a few other efforts at our policy center we are experimenting with honest brokering, such as in our SPARC research project. But more on all of this soon. Thanks again!

Now, I am sure it is fashionable (and undoubtedly correct) in STS circles to consider the NAS itself unable to separate science from policy, and I don’t have the arrogance, I hope, to suggest that we at RealClimate are “like the NAS.” But surely you must agree there is something of a continuum here, and that there really does exist something called “science”, which studies the natural world and makes discoveries about the “real world”, and which we can agree on at least in a theoretical sense. Surely you must not be arguing from the extreme, Feyeraband branch of postmodernism, which holds that science is indistinct from religion in its ability to tell us about the world.

So I continue to wonder: what makes what we are doing so clearly categorizable in your mind? You have referred to your “empirical” evidence about RealClimate. But if I may turn this around on you: isn’t your “empirical evidence” just dismissable as “advocacy in the guise of science” — i.e. what you claim RealClimate to be?

An aside to this thread… You say that
“RealClimate’s [has a] commitment to the primacy of mainstream, peer-reviewed knowledge….” I want to make it clear from my perspective at least, that I don’t hold mainstream, peer-reviewed knowledge on any pedestal. Indeed, I have serious concerns about some of it, in particular the way that the topic of “abrupt climate change” is discussed. In my view, the “mainstream” is far too sure of itself on this topic, and very much out on an intellectual limb at the moment. But that doesn’t
change the fact that there IS a mainstream, and surely it is valid to try to communicate what the mainstream is saying. Nor does it change the fact that the mainstream is a sensible place to look, if you are a layperson or a policymaker trying to make decisions on behalf of society.