Matt Ridley recently ran a three-column Wall Street Journal series on the topic of scientific confirmation bias, culminating with an article titled “How Bias Heats Up the [Global] Warming Debate”.
Here, he cited the example of two media announcements of preliminary new papers on climate, one authored by a team led by physicist Richard Muller of UC Berkeley which concluded that, “the carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried” for what Ridley refers to as a modest 0.8 Celsius-degree rise in global average temperatures over land during the past half-century, and less if ocean is included. He points out that while this may be right, “such curve-fitting reasoning is an example of confirmation bias.”
For comparison, Ridley refers to a team led by meteorologist Anthony Watts, (whom he approvingly refers to as a “skeptical gadfly”), which indicates that the Muller team’s numbers are too high because their reported 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are “spuriously doubled” (a term applied by the Watts team). Their conclusions are based upon bad thermometer siting and unjustified post-recording adjustments.
Ridley doesn’t suggest that claims presented by either of those papers are dishonest, nor do either of the two teams make such accusations regarding the other. Still, since I am quite familiar with their huge multi-year effort involving hundreds of volunteers, it is my opinion that the Watts team’s very conscientious research does provide a solid basis for challenging the Muller team’s findings. So am I biased? You bet!
There is a lot of talk about confirmation bias. I read the best term for why this happens “Our brains are lazy”. We simply do not want to research things and learn. So we follow what our brains first learn because that is painless, requiring no changes in behaviour, or we follow what fits with our current world view (all our friends are green). However, unless we can come up with a cure for “lazy brain”, it seems likely that humans will continue down whatever path they first heard or that which fits with their life philosophies to whatever ruin that may cause. Retraining human brains probably dwarfs all other causes combined in complexity. So the information wars continue as always.
No amount of spin can rationalize that the CO2 increase caused the temperature increase to 2001 but that 25% additional CO2 increase had no effect on average global temperature after 2001.