The paper “Some comments on the possible causes for climate change” emerged on my radar this morning (via the excellent arXiv blog). Papers on arXiv are not peer reviewed (they are ‘endorsed’ but that’s just a minimal filtering system to avoid spam). No peer review, for the scientific establishment, equates to “potential crap”, while I treat it as I treat blogs: with my brain turned on and with high skepticism of ‘truths’.

Skepticism that has been increasing rather rapidly on the entire issue of climate change… and I think it’s time for me to put down a flag and say what I have to say out loud.

First of all, I’m not an expert in paleoclimatics, nor in environmental sciences, nor in atmospheric chemistry, nor in any type of biology, or any type of science that would have anything to do with climate change directly. But there one thing that I know a few things about that might be useful in this context: data integration and social network dynamics.

One thing that strikes me about the entire climate change debate is how “objective” scientific data is perceived by the general public and how issues like the effect of data integration on its perceived overall quality is completely ignored.

Say I take two datasets of temperature analysis, one taken from ice drilling in Antartica and another taken from tree rings growth samples from various sites around the world, each with their own 5-pages-long footnotes on the scientific hypothesis that make such data valid and the error ranges that have to be taken into consideration. These temperatures are not measured with thermometers sent back in time with time machines, but with measuring one thing (say, concentration of a gas in air bubbles trapped in deep, untouched ice, or thickness of growth rings in very old trees from different locations) and extrapolating a functional relationship between temperature and the measured result. The papers that present these datasets go on and on about the high error margins that such ’second order’ datasets might contain.

But then these data points are taken, passed on to graphic designers or scientific journalists, who strip them of all these warnings, error margins, stick them all together in a time line, add a footnote for fancy, peer reviewed citation, put Al Core on an elevator on stage and voila’, you’re ready to believe it as fact.

Not only a fact, but an “inconvenient truth“. But, to me, it shows more how wonderfully clever and sophisticated political machines can become, rather than how scientifically established the whole thing is.

The funny thing is that I find myself resonating with the political message and the resulting policies that fear of irreversible climate change entails. But does the end justify the means? If we allow science to be used and so heavily influenced by funding, can we really be certain of the outcome of their research?

Peer review doesn’t work when an entire field labels dissenters as “paid by the oil companies”, double blind testing doesn’t work when scientists have a natural tendency to work on the same things and create a niche for themselves and cite their own previous papers to boost the validity of their claims, data quality is not an objective and perpetual property of a dataset and data visualization is far from being an exact science (see Tufte’s books on information visualization for a copious and clever examples of how easy it is to mislead with maps and charts, even without altering the underlying data).

Climate change is a political machine and the only absolute truth about it is that climate has *always* changed and let’s hope it continues to do it because the only planets which climates don’t change are dead.

Now, what climate change is helping is to promote the needs to a more healthy understanding of environmental issues, especially focused on sustainable development in regard to energy use. But my cynical side thinks that gas prices have done more for the environment and for focusing attention to energy waste than paleoclimatics ever did.

Terrorism and fundamentalism worry me, no matter the political agenda they promote, because they break down the very ability to constuctively criticize, question, evolve a message and maintain its fitness.

We could be talking about radical Islamic doctrines or radical environmental practices. Think about it: the more people agree on something, the less people are doing the thinking.

Don’t buy ideas wholesale, especially when they come from politicians and they present scientific data as absolute truth, and delegate to others all the thinking just because their agendas ‘feels right’ and lie in the right place

When we allow the end to justify the means, we not only sacrifice a moral compass, but we fail to flex those watchful and critic mental muscles, which will then be poor and withered when the tide will turn and we’ll have to swim against it once again.