If you sense that NSF or NIH have a view on something, it’s best not to fight city hall

Saturday, January 7th, 2023

Stephen Hsu gives an example of how politics constrains the scientific process:

This individual is one of the most highly decorated, well-known climate simulators in the world. To give you his history, he did a PhD in general relativity in the UK and then decided he wanted to do something else, because he realized that even though general relativity was interesting, he didn’t feel like he was going to have a lot of impact on society. So he got involved in meteorology and climate modeling and became one of the most well known climate modelers in the world in terms of prizes and commendations. He’s been a co-author on all the IPCC reports going back multiple decades. So he’s a very well-known guy. But he was one of the authors of a paper in which he made the point that climate models are still far from perfect.

To do a really good job, you need to have a small basic cell size, which captures the size of the features being modeled inside the simulation. The best size is actually scaled down quite a bit because of all kinds of nonlinear phenomena: turbulence, convection, transport of heat, moisture, and everything that goes into the making of weather and climate.

And so he made this point that we’re nowhere near actually being able to properly simulate the physics of these very important features. It turns out that the transport of water vapor, which is related to the formation of clouds, is important. And it turns out high clouds reflect sunlight, and have the opposite sign effect on climate change compared to low clouds, which trap infrared radiation. So whether moisture in the atmosphere or additional carbon in the atmosphere causes more high cloud formation versus more low cloud formation is incredibly important, and it carries the whole day in these models.

In no way are these microphysics of cloud formation being modeled right now. And anybody who knows anything knows this. And the people who really understand physics and do climate modeling know this.

So he wrote a paper saying that governments are going to spend billions, maybe trillions of dollars on policy changes or geothermal engineering. If you’re trying to fix the climate change problem, can you at least spend a billion dollars on the supercomputers that we would need to really do a more definitive job forecasting climate change?

And so that paper he wrote was controversial because people in the community maybe knew he was right, but they didn’t want him talking about this. But as a scientist, I fully support what he’s trying to do. It’s intellectually honest. He’s asking for resources to be spent where they really will make a difference, not in some completely speculative area where we’re not quite sure what the consequences will be. This is clearly going to improve climate modeling and is clearly necessary to do accurate climate modeling. But the anecdote gives you a sense of how fraught science is when there are large scale social consequences. There are polarized interest groups interacting with science.

[…]

It was controversial because, in a way, he was airing some well known dirty laundry that all the experts knew about. But many of them would say it’s better to hide laundry for the greater good, because a bad guy—somebody who’s very anti-CO2 emissions reduction— could seize on this guy’s article and say “Look, the leading guy in your field says that you can’t actually do the simulations he wants, and yet you’re trying to shove some very precise policy goal down my throat. This guy’s revealing those numbers have literally no basis.” That would be an extreme version of the counter-utilization of my colleague’s work.

[…]

In my lifetime, the way science is conducted has changed radically, because now it’s accepted—particularly by younger scientists—that we are allowed to make ad hominem attacks on people based on what could be their entirely sincere scientific belief. That was not acceptable 20 or 30 years ago. If you walked into a department, even if it had something to do with the environment or human genetics or something like that, people were allowed to have their contrary opinion as long as the arguments they made were rational and supported by data. There was not a sense that you’re allowed to impute bad moral character to somebody based on some analytical argument that they’re making. It was not socially acceptable to do that. Now people are in danger of losing their jobs.

[…]

I could list a bunch of factors that I think contributed, and one of them is that scientists are under a lot of pressure to get money to fund their labs and pay their graduate students. If you sense that NSF or NIH have a view on something, it’s best not to fight city hall. It’s like fighting the Fed—you’re going to lose. So that enforces a certain kind of conformism.

[…]

As far as how science relates to the outside world, here’s the problem: for some people, when science agrees with their cherished political belief, they say “Hey, you know what? This is the Vulcan Science Academy, man. These guys know what they’re doing. They debated it, they looked at all the evidence, that’s a peer-reviewed paper, my friend—it was reviewed by peers. They’re real scientists.” When they like the results, they’re going to say that.

When they don’t like it, they say, “Oh, come on, those guys know they have to come to that conclusion or they’re going to lose their NIH grant. These scientists are paid a lot of money now and they’re just feathering their own nests, man. They don’t care about the truth. And by the way, papers in this field don’t replicate. Apparently, if you do a study where you look back at the most prominent papers over the last 10 years, and you check to see whether subsequent papers which were better powered, had better technology, and more sample size actually replicated, the replication rate was like 50 percent. So, you can throw half the papers that are published in top journals in the trash.”

Comments

  1. Altitude Zero says:

    Sad, but not surprising to anyone who has been involved in science in any way in the last 30 years.

  2. Bruce says:

    Steve Sailer says when you move the IQ bell curve a little for different groups, the tail ends move a lot. Smarties and dumbies get much smarter or dumber as the bell curve moves a little.

    Scientists aren’t all that ballsy. Tail end left of the testosterone curve. So as testosterone decreases they lose a lot.

  3. Gavin Longmuir says:

    President Eisenhower warned about the baleful effect of government funding on scientific research in his 1961 Farewell Address — immediately following his warning on the Military-Industrial Complex.

    To some extent, the situation is self-correcting. Academics, just like politicians, now have very little credibility — because of their own obvious lies and self-serving behavior.

  4. Albion says:

    Years ago I saw ads in some UK national newspaper for scientists/researchers. IIRC, every single one said words to the effect that “You will demonstrate the effects of climate change” (though back then it was probably ‘global warming’ as these word-fashions come and go)

    In short, the task was laid out for the applicant, whatever branch of the sciences they were in.

  5. Jim says:

    Bruce: “Steve Sailer says when you move the IQ bell curve a little for different groups, the tail ends move a lot. Smarties and dumbies get much smarter or dumber as the bell curve moves a little.

    “Scientists aren’t all that ballsy. Tail end left of the testosterone curve. So as testosterone decreases they lose a lot.”

    Total annihilation.

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