16 ms·

The Unstoppable Momentum of Outdated Science

210 points by zmaten 6y ago

zqfm 6y ago
Maybe off the wall, but my first thought is certificate revocation. Could there be (or is there already) a semi-centralized database of research that should no longer be cited? With maybe a dependency graph of research that maybe needs to be revisited?
- quercusa 6y ago
  There's something quite like this in US law. If you are citing a case in a legal brief, you need to make sure it hasn't been overturned along the way, so you 'Shepardize' it. From Wikipedia [0]: Shepard's Citations is a citator used in United States legal research that provides a list of all the authorities citing a particular case, statute, or other legal authority. The verb Shepardizing refers to the process of consulting Shepard's to see if a case has been overturned, reaffirmed, questioned, or cited by later cases. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard%27s_Citations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard%27s_Citations
  - em-bee 6y ago
    this sounds like a good approach. right now every citation is an endoresement, and the choice is to support a publication or to ignore it. there should be a way to make a negative citation, that allows you to declare that the referenced publication is contradicting. as a result there would be two citation counts for each publication. like upvotes and downvotes. i believe contradicting citations do happen now, but the fact that they are contradicting can't be seen from the citation count.
    - d110af5ccf 6y ago
      > right now every citation is an endoresement This is a valid point, but it's important to note that it only applies when using aggregate citation counts as a rough proxy for importance within a field. That's useful for prioritizing what to read but not for assessing the validity of any given result (of which there are often quite a few, at least in the life sciences). Within a given paper, it's not at all uncommon for the authors to explicitly call out some detail from another study as being incorrect in their view. That doesn't mean that they necessarily agree or disagree with the rest of the cited work though. What I'm getting at here is that negative citations would likely be far too coarse to be useful in practice. It's relatively rare that a paper outright disagrees with an entire work.
  - jmnicholson 6y ago
    We're effectively bringing shepardizing to science at scite (scite.ai). Here's a piece I published on the topic recently: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259023852100062X?dgcid=author https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259023852...
    - timlod 6y ago
      Hi! I checked out scite and really like the product- however, I can't seem to find relevant papers in my field (ML&AI), ie., I searched for the batchnorm paper, which there has been a lot of 'reevaluation' of- but it's not available. I suppose at this point you don't have access to (some of) the big AI journals/conferences. Is this something on the horizon?
- probably_wrong 6y ago
  I've thinking how to make this idea work, but the more I think about it the less I think it's viable. First, you would be centralizing the ability to "cancel" papers. One bad member of the board could wreak havok. Simultaneously, people in charge of the database would be constantly bombarded by pleas (not all of them honest) to revoke this and that researcher's paper. So it would be bad for both sides. You could get away with something like Retraction Watch, but you'll always be behind - you could keep track of which papers were retracted (which is already a lot of work), but not every paper that needs to be revised is retracted. I guess figuring out a perfect system for deciding which ideas are right is hard.
  - worldsayshi 6y ago
    You point out the flaws of one potential implementation of such system and reject the whole concept? I think it's conceivable that there is an implementation of such concept that would work better than not having it. Example off the top of my head: Don't have one board decide which papers are cancelled. Have multiple. Have git repos with lists of cancelled papers. Have a process for finding which papers are flawed due to citing cancelled papers from a particular paper. Have browser extensions that tells you if the paper you're opening is carrying such flaws. Allow user of such extension to pick which board they trust. Have the extension link to a discussion about why the paper is cancelled. Give ability to challenge such claim in the open. Etc etc. I'm sure many more such ideas can be found. The problem is probably rather funding of such system or if whoever funds it would have the right incentives to begin with.
- ahelwer 6y ago
  Science's decentralized nature is a strength, not a weakness. Do you really think such a database would be immune to coercion from, say, Monsanto or Chevron?
- heyitsguay 6y ago
  Maybe instead of a centralized repository, individuals could be given the ability to create their own partial sets of recommendations that could be aggregated by a user. Instead of trying to globally solve trust and designation of expertise, you explicitly define the group of people whom you designate experts and whose assessments you trust.
- eecc 6y ago
  WOT signed endorsements. Back when I had time I drafted a P2P application to share papers and execute peer review via GPG based digital signatures. Signed metadata - at least that was the plan - allowed communities to endorse, retract, flag spam in a distributed opt-in manner. It's rotting on GitHub, never managed to drum up enough interest...
  - sam_lowry_ 6y ago
    Sounds like a great idea. WOT did not work for general public, but scientists are very different.
    - mjevans 6y ago
      Things that work for the general public need to be far less technical and way more automatic; from an end user experience perspective. WoT could work exceedingly well for a decentralized replacement of Facebook... though at that point there's also the issue of competing against a walled garden with moats and most of the population already inside.
  - CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
    I’ve been toying with a similar idea but as a means of crowdsourcing a current best understanding of what science suggest. Primarily to weed through all the wild nutrition recommendations floating around into sensible advice based on what can actually be supported. I’m sure the idea extends to other areas. In my mind it would be some reddit/Wikipedia kind of thing where advice and understanding would be debated using some formal language elements based on rdf or whatever to build up a knowledge graph usable inside applications.
- SubiculumCode 6y ago
  building that in Zotero would be great. I all ready like that they flag retracted papers.
  - domenicrosati 6y ago
    Done https://github.com/scitedotai/scite-zotero-plugin https://github.com/scitedotai/scite-zotero-plugin
    - SubiculumCode 6y ago
      you sir/madam, are awesome.
- dougmccune 6y ago
  This is part of what https://scite.ai/ https://scite.ai/ is doing. They categorize citations as supporting, detracting, or neutral. The theory being you want to know if you’re citing something debunked. Scite also flags citations of retracted papers (and a Twitter bot that tweets when a new paper is published that cites a retracted study). And I think they have zotero integration (?) I have no affiliation other than I have met the founder and think the product is cool.
philipkglass 6y ago
The graph shows emissions trajectories projected by the most commonly used climate scenarios (called SSP5-8.5 and RCP8.5, with labels on the right vertical axis), along with other scenario trajectories. Actual emissions to date (dark purple curve) and those of near-term energy outlooks (labeled as EIA, BP and ExxonMobil) all can be found at the very low end of the scenario range, and far below the most commonly used scenarios. RCP 8.5 was intended as the highest-emissions scenario, not the most likely scenario. "RCP 8.5—A scenario of comparatively high greenhouse gas emissions (2011)" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-011-0149-y https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-011-0149-y This paper summarizes the main characteristics of the RCP8.5 scenario. The RCP8.5 combines assumptions about high population and relatively slow income growth with modest rates of technological change and energy intensity improvements, leading in the long term to high energy demand and GHG emissions in absence of climate change policies. Compared to the total set of Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), RCP8.5 thus corresponds to the pathway with the highest greenhouse gas emissions. Even 10 years ago, when this paper was published, it was apparent that technology and energy intensity were improving more than the RCP 8.5 scenario posited. I don't know if RCP 8.5 has since been misused as a most common scenario, but the original post quoted above doesn't quantify that either.
- incompatible 6y ago
  Looking a CO2 measurements, I don't see much sign that the rate of increase is slowing down: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/ https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/. Do the current models assume it will accelerate even faster?
  - pdonis 6y ago
    The article is talking about annual CO2 emissions, not total CO2 levels. CO2 levels and their rate of increase are a lagging indicator; it takes many years for a reduction in emissions to show up in CO2 levels. The models all assume that CO2 emissions will continue to increase; the main difference in the assumptions is how fast emissions are assumed to increase.
- 6y ago
marshmallow_12 6y ago
It's been a long time since i've read anything so well written that was so devoid of any pertinent points. I'm only reading that page, but the only thing i've come away with is that breast cancer research is flawed, somehow, by what seems to be the most egregious lack of anything that approaches professional standards on the part of researchers. Oh, and a graph with different lines drawn on it with a large space between some of them.
- momirlan 6y ago
  go to bed before you burn too many neurons
  - marshmallow_12 6y ago
    how do you burn neurons and why should i care about them?
  - weakfish 6y ago
    Please keep this sort of antagonizing off of HN.
williesleg 6y ago
Global warming?
ravenstine 6y ago
This reminds me of a talk I watched about research into human pheromones. The speaker talked about how literature and studies on pheromones all lead back to 1 or 2 old studies that were basically considered bunk, but researchers kept citing it, and other researchers would also cite the other studies that linked back to the original low-quality studies. His point was that the whole field of research into human pheromones needs to blow away all the literature up to this point and start over because the whole thing is so tainted, and few are willing to actually make sense of what's true or false with what currently exists because so much of it is self-referential. It wouldn't surprise me in the least that there are other areas of science that border on needing to start from scratch. EDIT: I believe it may have been this talk, but I don't have time to scan the whole thing just yet. It looks like he begins talking about the problematic research after ~17 minutes. It's still worth watching none the less: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLENtzBbXdY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLENtzBbXdY
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- H_Pylori 6y ago
  I call it "The founder effect" of bad studies. Essentially the first few studies set the tone for the rest of the field, and it's very hard to correct the course due to the momentum. I'm glad people are starting to notice.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  It would surprise me if there were any areas of science that were not heavily citing falsified papers. We are perhaps fortunate that most cited papers are not read.
  - nraynaud 6y ago
    Mathematics and the non ml part of computer science should be ok, I guess. Everything that doesn’t involve data, maybe ? I’m making this on the fly.
carrolldunham 6y ago
before you spend 5 minutes searching for the real emissions line on the graph, it looks like a slight bolding of one of the labelled lines that ends in about 2018
- ncmncm 6y ago
  The blue one with the dip around 2009?
kjrose 6y ago
From my time working within an academic environment, I can attest this is absolutely true. Especially since the gatekeepers (older professors, etc) have a general interest to see these older articles cited more and referenced. It's not malicious, it's just a fact of how these things work. It's also why the general public's knowledge of how science works needs to be adjusted. Science is not a "100% correct" or "100% not correct" thing, and unfortunately I've seen too many institutions and individuals use that myth to try and push an agenda. It's a combination of institutional momentum, combined with the fact that a specific narrative is politically expedient. The unfortunate thing is bad decisions, made off of bad science, regardless of the reasons external to the science, generally lead to bad outcomes.
- soperj 6y ago
  >It's not malicious, it's just a fact of how these things work While I agree it's not malicious, I'd say the reason it works this way is that there is a financial incentive to have it work this way.
  - sn41 6y ago
    It is not finance. There are a lot of motivations which are based on ego or prestige. Scholarship is unfortunately often based on competition - but the standards of winning are different from that of oil tycoons. Boiling everything down to finance will not lead to accurate understanding of how academia works.
    - alexashka 6y ago
      > Boiling everything down to finance will not lead to accurate understanding of how academia works Why not? Given that only people with the 'correct' views get tenure to begin with, it doesn't surprise me at all that while there is plenty of ego and prestige, I'd classify it as bickering among priests. Point remains, only people who are indoctrinated and interested in advancing the interests of the church get to be priests to begin with.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
ChuckMcM 6y ago
This is a good read, although somewhat depressing. When you have a topic that has been weaponized politically, as climate change has, people who use that weapon actively work against information they perceive would make the weapon less effective. The author sums it up as follows: ---- from the article: According to Rayner, in such a context we should expect to see reactions to uncomfortable knowledge that include: denial -- (that scenarios are off track), dismissal -- (the scenarios are off track, but it doesn’t matter), diversion -- (the scenarios are off track, but saying so advances the agenda of those opposed to action) and, displacement -- (the scenarios are off track but there are perhaps compensating errors elsewhere within scenario assumptions). ---- end include. Not enough people understand that science is expected to be wrong, and to converge over time to the correct answer. That is is okay to say "We used to think this, but these studies/experiments have shown that understanding to be incorrect. Now we believe this." That is how science works. And sadly when it is politicized, it becomes much harder to have conversations about it.
- bigiain 6y ago
  The entire opening of the article discussing 2020 papers erroneously using skin cancer data in breast cancer research papers which was a known error for at least 13 years - makes the point very strongly that " ... but these studies/experiments have shown that understanding to be incorrect. Now we believe this." happens much slower than perhaps people expect. I understand science "is expected to be wrong" sometimes, but I'm still somewhat boggled that there's 13 years worth of (presumably) peer reviewed papers making claims about breast cancer using "wrong science" that was proven wrong in 2007... (I wonder what _else_ all those peer reviewers let slide or didn't know when reviewing other papers?)
  - dayiel 6y ago
    Actually, the cell line issue might not be so bad or rather all cell line work is much worse than you all imagine. No cell lines actually resemble the real tissue in gene expression if you say, do an rna screen and see what actuallg gets expressed. They are changed by line establishing process, use of various media, number of passages aka how long they’ve been in culture from thawing a line till the test (cant be too little or too much, requires line to recover after being frozen), person who’se culturing (some people tend to starve cells and passage full plates and have different parameters of work even despite some labwide protocols), adherence to the plate and growing in flat monoculture, getting plates out too much or watching them too lonv under the microscope. Some effects are temporary and not so serious. Some effects are rather serious. Like the fact that flat surface cell lines will never be a good proxy for the actual tumor growing in 3d in the actual human. That’s why people experimenting with spheres, multucultures with other cells, organelle cultures, animal models, and eventually all the clues from all the models add up to something that could be a theory of some mechanism. And then in most cases when applied to humans in real life it might not work or be harmful. Now, the skin cell in cell media was likely arrayed and had features similar to breast cancer cells so it might have been okay to use for this super imperfect approximation. Not sure if this particular instance. In vitro is only a part of it and peer reviewed journals differ in their authority ratings, with big boss journals like cell requiring you do deliver crazy amounts of different models to make any statement. Reading those papers is like reading house ads, scientists kind of learn to cut through bs
leephillips 6y ago
It happens in theoretical physics, too. Papers using the debunked “minimum energy production principle” still occasionally appear. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.pc.31.100180.003051?journalCode=physchem https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.pc.31....
TaupeRanger 6y ago
How many times do we have to rediscover Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' and write articles about ideas that were well understood 60 years ago?
- Shugarl 6y ago
  Because there will always be people who just happened to never come across those ideas.
  - TaupeRanger 6y ago
    I didn't ask "why", I asked how many times.
    - awwaiid 6y ago
      7
- herodotus 6y ago
  Kuhn never argued about the misuse of data. He instead argued that the scientific understanding of the data lead to models that became increasingly complex. So much so, that scientists realized it was time to try a new way of understanding the underlying data. The new models were the "revolution".
  - TaupeRanger 6y ago
    Kuhn spent a great deal of time talking about the behavior of (usually older), establishment scientists clinging to outdated science, which is part of the problem here.
roca 6y ago
In this case it kind of seems like what you'd want to happen is happening: we've been warned about the dangers of climate change under "business as usual" scenarios, so we're not carrying on "business as usual", but reducing our CO2 emissions. So the question then is quite fundamental: what does it mean to describe a "business as usual" scenario that extrapolates from today? Does that mean carrying on doing what we're currently doing, or does it mean to stop caring about CO2 emissions and go back to "business as usual" ten years ago?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Now we must imagine what the impact on policies would be to prematurely say we managed to cut emissions more effectively than predicted.
  - Sebb767 6y ago
    But what's the alternative? Ignoring the fact that our data is based on wrong assumptions? Act as if nothing has changed? Sure, this is not good in the short time. But this is already a smoking gun for climate change deniers; if we were to put this under the rug for another decade, it would become a smoking nuke. And imagine the impact of that.
    - bopbeepboop 6y ago
      They would be right to question advocacy groups that have been misleading the public about climate change for multiple decades. The main point of conservatives has been, for over a decade, that the alarmism is overstated and behavioral corrections would eventually adjust us to the point climate change stabilized. Without the extremist “green new deal” interventions. That seems to be true - and activists don’t like it, so they’re just pretending it’s not. Who would respect activists lying for power and profit?
    - rbanffy 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ncmncm 6y ago
The article is probably right about the bare facts, but it seems much like one of those that insist that Y2K was a big nothing, and that the Population Bomb fizzled. In each case, there was a warning that was followed by a phenomenal amount of hard work in back rooms to head off disaster. Disaster was headed off successfully, and then the people who had warned about it were criticized for their failed prediction. In the case of population, we were very, very lucky that the Green Revolution turned out to be possible. There was no reason, beforehand, to expect such an idea to work well enough. (The Green Revolution, with its dependence on fossil-fueled fertilization, has ironically contributed to the present crisis.) Would CO2 emissions have continued on one of the higher curves, without enormous investment in solar and wind power systems, and in more efficient usage? Counterfactuals are hard to prove, but I don't see any reason to think not. What I notice about the graph is how lines below current and projected emissions, that identify behavior needed to prevent readily predictable disaster, are omitted. That current climate research must compare improved methods using the same reference numbers that previous papers used, despite those numbers being now obsolete, seems like a small problem compared to others faced in that field, such as the still unpredictable behavior of cloud cover in different scenarios, or of ocean currents.
- andi999 6y ago
  Exactly. It is like your physician telling you if you keep drinking your liver will die. And a year later you proclaim: this guy is so unscientific, I stopped drinking, how come he didn't predict that.
jimbokun 6y ago
> diversion (the scenarios are off track, but saying so advances the agenda of those opposed to action) This seems the basis for much of so called “cancel culture”.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
nine_k 6y ago
When something becomes widely known as a proxy to measure an effect, it ceases to be a useful measure, because people begin to consciously influence it. It's a well-known thing. When scientific results become a proxy to the correctness of a political agenda (which is often a business interest in disguise), they become less and less scientific. It's a perfect catch-22. Same sadly applies to the internal tools of science: impact index, citation index, discovery of a novel effect, etc. There is a lot of incentives to game these metrics, and gaming them is, well, not unheard of. In applied research there is more of a reality check: if the device based on your research obviously does not work, it cannot be produced and sold, so you want your research to reflect reality as best you can. But more subtle things, like public policy, lack this immediate feedback loop. So there is a large hazard for a researcher, when asked: "what is the value of 2 × 2 ?" to ask back: "are we selling or buying?" and find a plausible "right" answer that supports a desired case. But, unlike in elementary arithmetics, nobody knows a certain right answer in many areas of natural science, so an honest mistake is hard to tell from a... less honest one. There must be a colossal pressure to exploit this in a situation of a high-stakes political choice. I have no idea how to solve these problems. But at least the public should be aware that these problems exist.
- XargonEnder 6y ago
  I agree with you and I want to add one more layer. I program analytics for a living. I often find that people fudge numbers without even being conscious of it. If I know my boss wants the numbers on this report to be high, I'll unconsciously choose an algorithm that gives higher numbers than one that gives lower numbers. Even if both algorithms are "reasonable".
scythe 6y ago
>diversion -- (the scenarios are off track, but saying so advances the agenda of those opposed to action) and, It is probably worthwhile to note: while the above might actually be a defensive response to these data, the argument is not necessarily valid -- the fact that emissions have been overestimated does not necessarily weaken the case for action. In particular, changes in temperature and precipitation continue to be observed even consistent with "wrong" models[1], and as such the sensitivity of the climate to these lower levels of emissions is not "good news". 1: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-models-are-getting-future-warming-projections-right/ https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-mo...
uxcolumbo 6y ago
Isn’t it better to act as if those edge cases are going to happen, so we can prevent the worst from happening. Yes, scientific integrity is important, but if the message gets out to the general public, that those climate change models are based on outdated research, wouldn’t that make us procrastinate and not get off the fossil fuel based economy sooner? Our biosphere degradation isn’t just about Ghg emissions, but pollution in general caused by our fossil fuel powered economy.
- momirlan 6y ago
  Pst, the "general public" are listening !
cynoclast 6y ago
Like to this day we have electrons flowing out of the 'negative' terminal because of a mistake.
bawolff 6y ago
> Evidence indicates the scenarios of the future to 2100... Your 100 year out model is off? Colour me shocked!
dfilppi 6y ago
Why would research take imagined futures into consideration?
stijlist 6y ago
The text says one thing, but the graph they display to support their argument does not say what I thought it said. The purple line is supposed to be our "real" emissions, and the impression you get from the image and text is that our real emissions are much lower than the projected emissions. But if you actually look at the values of the purple line vs the other lines now, in 2020/2021, the values are almost exactly the same. I don't understand how to reconcile that with the text. https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8645a4d3-0412-4bfb-a72c-c02b5e904e64_1736x1073.png https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q...
- ylem 6y ago
  Great! So it's not just me! As I understand the paper, their main point seems to be that as you extrapolate out in time, you need to not just handle the physics of CO2 that is already in the atmosphere, but predict say how much populations will grow, as well as how much GDP will grow, and how CO2 emissions will be effected by that. So, say if there is an economic recession, then there will be less CO2 produced than if you predicted just say steady growth. This seems to be a case where I could see different assumptions (some reasonable) leading to different results--it's a far cry from say the breast cancer-vs skin-cancer mistake that he leads with
- Ono-Sendai 6y ago
  I think the point is that the actual emission are on the low side of the IPCC scenario bounds, and are tracking to exit completely the IPCC scenario bounds around 2021. Full paper in PDF format here btw: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abcdd2/pdf https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abcdd2/...
- skybrian 6y ago
  I don’t understand the graph at all. Which line is the purple line? Is it labeled? It seems like real emissions should end at or before 2020 and none of them do that. They all seem to be projections of some sort?
ylem 6y ago
While this seems to give the impression that science is not functioning, I don't see this as the case. I will give an example from my field. Before Covid struck, I was at a conference in Japan. There was a talk about an interesting superconductor. Someone repeated some of the earlier measurements and determined that they were misinterpreted--that the measurement technique led to heating the material and thus the misinterpretation of the results and that the material wasn't so interesting after all. I think this was say 15-20 years after the original measurement. During the Q&A session, someone asked the original author what he thought. He stood up and said that the new measurement was correct. To me, that says science is working--it may work slowly, but over time, it does correct. Sure, there are people that take a long time convince (and sometimes they are never convinced), but science itself eventually corrects--but the challenge of new measurements that contradict the current consensus is that it's not that each one is correct--some are just measurement errors. For example, there was the case of a recent experiment that seemed to show faster than light travel of neutrinos. The authors presented it with the idea that there was a glitch somewhere that they couldn't find. After a flurry of papers (some with exotic new theories), they eventually were able to find the electronics glitch. It would have been exciting if they were correct--but they weren't--and science again worked.
- antonvs 6y ago
  Agreed (10 days late, but still.) These kinds of issues are issues with how human societies function. Scientific methods can't eliminate that, but they can help manage it. In fact that's largely the point.
julienchastang 6y ago
Note that Roger A. Pielke Jr. is a political science professor not an atmospheric scientist and has, in the past, been involved in a number of climate science controversies. The analogy to outdated breast cancer research feels like a straw man. Anyway, I cannot claim that he is wrong, but I would regard this piece with some skepticism.
- vixen99 6y ago
  Somehow, 'feels like' and 'some skepticism' doesn't add up too much of a critique. He says Evidence indicates the scenarios of the future to 2100 that are at the focus of much of climate research have already diverged from the real world and thus offer a poor basis for projecting policy-relevant variables like economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions. The question is: is he right or wrong and if the latter, why? We're spending trillions of dollars & affecting people's lives on a massive scale - on betting he's wrong. The issue at least needs discussion. One other point: How would atmospheric scientists be especially competent to assess 'key variables in climate scenarios compared with data from the real world'? Would they really want to skip their core science to put economic hats on to study how 'population, economic growth, energy intensity of economic growth and carbon intensity of energy consumption' relate to these key variables? Pielke's competence is in this field and climate policy generally. Some of his publications: https://rogerpielkejr.com/pielkeonclimatechange/ https://rogerpielkejr.com/pielkeonclimatechange/
  - bachmeier 6y ago
    > Somehow, 'feels like' and 'some skepticism' doesn't add up too much of a critique. This is not helpful. Pielke has been heavily involved in one side (and only one side) of the political debate on this topic. It's dishonest to pretend that information isn't relevant in the context of a post like this. He's not a neutral academic that decided to look at the evidence and was shocked to see issues. > How would atmospheric scientists be especially competent to assess 'key variables in climate scenarios compared with data from the real world'? Would they really want to skip their core science to put economic hats on to study how 'population, economic growth, energy intensity of economic growth and carbon intensity of energy consumption' relate to these key variables? Pielke's competence is in this field and climate policy generally. While technically this is correct, it's deeply misleading (or whatever is the next step above that). Economists study those issues and have their own journals for publishing those results. Pielke, on the other hand, is trained as a political scientist. Trying to make it sound like he's the only one with the qualifications is, as they used to say, not cool.
perrygeo 6y ago
The emission scenarios were developed decades ago and are proving to be over-estimates. The author interprets that as outdated science which is a rather pessimistic view. I interpret it differently: Scientists make a spread of climate predictions and their potential consequences. Those listening mustered significant market/public/government pressure and ... it worked. We pushed the outcome towards the low end of the predictions. This is good news and demonstrates the efficacy of political action based on science. If those predictions are correct, between RCP2.6 and RCP4.5 is not a bad place to be. Climate change is still locked in but life on earth has a chance of adapting to it without major upheaval. RCP8.5 otoh, if it were to happen, we'd be screwed.
- psychiatrist24 6y ago
  What exactly was done because of pressure? More solar cells and wind mills? Have those even crossed the point where they produced more energy than what was used in their production yet? In my country, they are shutting down nuclear power plants, relying on coal instead. Electric cars are still a rarity, and global car use seems to be rising still. I find your line of reasoning maddening. While it is possible that pressure had an effect, it can be used to prove almost everything. It rained after rain dances, so rain dances work!
  - adrianN 6y ago
    > Have those even crossed the point where they produced more energy than what was used in their production yet Yes, payback time is quite short.
  - brabel 6y ago
    Counter anecdote: South Australia had almost 100% of its energy from coal burning just a few years ago... Today, it's nearly entirely solar-powered: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-25/all-sa-power-from-solar-for-first-time/12810366 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-25/all-sa-power-from-sol... Another one: in Norway, most cars being sold right now are electric: https://www.voanews.com/europe/norway-says-more-50-new-cars-are-electric https://www.voanews.com/europe/norway-says-more-50-new-cars-... These are huge local achievements, but it shows that at least in some parts of the world, things have changed very rapidly in the right direction.
pdm55 6y ago
I'm not sure where this line of thought is headed. I once had to work with the Hela cell line, coating it in alginate polysaccharide. I thought to myself,"How can I test if the functioning of the cells have been altered by the coating?" A little book research convinced me that any tests would be useless, as a cancer cell has basically shut down all functions except those required for growth. So I just worked on trying to improve the coating, and continued staring through the micrscope at the somewhat terrifying malignant growth. As regards, climate studies. Where have we heard the term "peak" something-or-other before. Ah yes, "peak oil". Well that didn't happen: we found more oil, we substituted gas, ... "Peak CO2": I nearly choked on my morning biscuit. Please tell China and India and Africa to stop developing and remain underdeveloped. Come on man, are you on drugs? Maybe, when a few billion have been displaced from their homes and invaded our comfortable lifestyles, we all might decide to stop driving and generating power with coal, oil and gas. I remember the time at uni 20 years when the power failed. The cafeteria went dark, the fridges didn't work, the heated food display cabinets didn't function, the cash registers were useless and the cashiers had to write down amounts with pen and paper. When our grandchildren have to make the hard decision to drastically reduce power consumption in a last ditch effort to reduce CO2, they will be turning off the switches in fully-automated societies. Will societies cope with that scenario?
- Clewza313 6y ago
  "Peak oil" simply means the year when the maximum amount of oil is extracted; the implication is (was) that if demand > supply when this happened, this would cause a spike in prices. As it happens, it's pretty likely we did hit peak oil in 2019, before COVID reshuffled everything and oil prices hit historic lows in 2020. Same for "peak CO2": energy consumption is growing and will continue to do so, but if we're swapping out coal and gas for solar and wind, the amount of CO2 generated can still decline overall.
- adrianN 6y ago
  We know how to generate essentially limitless amounts of energy without producing CO2. There is no need to turn off switches, we just need to build enough solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, power-to-gas reactors, and, if we like, nuclear power plants.
lolc 6y ago
Of course we'd like researchers to always start from the best premises. But the process is such that if you want to update your premises, you have twenty competing theories to choose from, all in the process of getting validated. Do you move and where do you move? When I read this article I immediately felt with the author how these people should update their models. How long can it take? But then again, how do I know the author's choice studies are the good ones? If I were to talks to somebody in the field, they'd note that those studies are "promising" or "concerning". But maybe they won't change what they're doing just yet. Inertia? Yes. Bad? Oh, where's hindsight when you need it the most! The book The Golem by Collins and Pinch discusses historical examples of the scientific process for things we take for granted today. They show how shaky the confirming experiments were. How they could've easily gone the other way, and how some positive early results were based on selecting favourable data.
kitsune_ 6y ago
There is so much wrong with this article... Where to begin...
- yccs27 6y ago
  Please do begin somewhere, if there really is something factually wrong.
est 6y ago
Some what offtopic, but I think there will be a limit when human have generated so much knowledge, that our offsprings might in one day never been able to catch up, e.g. having to learn to a very old age to get the cutting edge stuff.
- FeepingCreature 6y ago
  See also: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/ However, our world is not a fable, so there is no reason, a priori, to expect life extension to be a problem that is beyond the asymptotic limit. A more critical issue is that fluid intelligence declines with age. It is for this reason that transhumanists sometimes say that no human has yet reached the boundary of human competence. Once we can accumulate knowledge for a century with no degradation in mental flexibility, we will start to see the true capability of the human neural architecture. Of course, by that time it's also likely that AI will vastly outpace us...
- alexgmcm 6y ago
  We develop better abstractions and tools though. I can write programs without needing to know how the CPU chip works, an engineer can build a new device without having to understand every detail of the new cutting edge materials science etc. As such we can still effectively divide the labour between people, and people can start from further along the track than before. I mean, most people learn calculus but they don't have to spend years deriving and proving it.
tim333 6y ago
The one that amazes me is the "How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat" stuff (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12480733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12480733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26126183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26126183) I mean it dates back to >In 1965, Mr. Hickson enlisted the Harvard researchers to write a review that would debunk the anti-sugar studies. He paid them a total of $6,500, the equivalent of $49,000 today. and before but I think the 50+ year old bad research still refuses to die
hannob 6y ago
This discussion has been going on for a while. Though it's important to understand what exactly this is about. Based on current trends the most pessimistic climate scenarios (most notably RCP 8.5) seem unlikely, mostly due to its large use of coal and better development of renewables than what was expected. Important to note: These scenarios became unlikely because human behavior and technology have developed in a different direction from what was projected. It's not about physical predictions being wrong. There is a big caveat in all of this: There is still a lot of uncertainty in the understanding of the climate system and feedback loops. This may very well mean that a) RCP 8.5 is unlikely, because humanity will never use that much coal, but b) it could still be just as bad in terms of warming, because climate effects are worse than we thought.
xibalba 6y ago
Having done some modeling myself, I am always stupefied and rankled when I read and hear the certitude with which people, mostly in the media, make claims about future climate scenarios. I am not at all surprised by Burgess' results. This is an extremely complex system being modeled, with the inputs to the model also being modeled... Also, is it just me or does this article bend over backwards to avoid the simple, obvious lede?: climate change scenario estimates are too high and it's even possible CO2 emissions are in decline.
- topkai22 6y ago
  It’s the right move rhetorically- the issue is too emotional and tied up with identity, at least in the US. This article delivers a message that could be treated as supporting climate denialism in a package that lets people on both of the issue read it without emotional triggers. I’d love to have seen my take away though- current and past investments in regulation and technology have had an effect on carbon emissions. Future investments in regulation changes and technology may reduce it more. The flattening of the emissions curve didn’t just happen by itself.
lstmemery 6y ago
I'm not sure if I understand this graph. The cone seems to represent "no climate policy". Why should we be surprised that we are currently trending out of the "no climate policy" cone since we are implementing climate policy? Taking a second look, that plot is only CO2 from energy and the the plot y scale has a discontinuity. If we need to get to net 0 emissions and the rate of CO2 production is still increasing that would suggest we are still a far ways off from the goal. I just checked and the IPCC 5th assessment was made in 2014. The 6th assessment is scheduled for 2022. Does anyone know if the baselines get updated with each IPCC assessment?

210 points by zmaten 6y ago

zqfm 6y ago

Maybe off the wall, but my first thought is certificate revocation. Could there be (or is there already) a semi-centralized database of research that should no longer be cited? With maybe a dependency graph of research that maybe needs to be revisited?

quercusa 6y ago
There's something quite like this in US law. If you are citing a case in a legal brief, you need to make sure it hasn't been overturned along the way, so you 'Shepardize' it. From Wikipedia [0]: Shepard's Citations is a citator used in United States legal research that provides a list of all the authorities citing a particular case, statute, or other legal authority. The verb Shepardizing refers to the process of consulting Shepard's to see if a case has been overturned, reaffirmed, questioned, or cited by later cases. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard%27s_Citations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard%27s_Citations
- em-bee 6y ago
  this sounds like a good approach. right now every citation is an endoresement, and the choice is to support a publication or to ignore it. there should be a way to make a negative citation, that allows you to declare that the referenced publication is contradicting. as a result there would be two citation counts for each publication. like upvotes and downvotes. i believe contradicting citations do happen now, but the fact that they are contradicting can't be seen from the citation count.
  - d110af5ccf 6y ago
    > right now every citation is an endoresement This is a valid point, but it's important to note that it only applies when using aggregate citation counts as a rough proxy for importance within a field. That's useful for prioritizing what to read but not for assessing the validity of any given result (of which there are often quite a few, at least in the life sciences). Within a given paper, it's not at all uncommon for the authors to explicitly call out some detail from another study as being incorrect in their view. That doesn't mean that they necessarily agree or disagree with the rest of the cited work though. What I'm getting at here is that negative citations would likely be far too coarse to be useful in practice. It's relatively rare that a paper outright disagrees with an entire work.
- jmnicholson 6y ago
  We're effectively bringing shepardizing to science at scite (scite.ai). Here's a piece I published on the topic recently: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259023852100062X?dgcid=author https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259023852...
  - timlod 6y ago
    Hi! I checked out scite and really like the product- however, I can't seem to find relevant papers in my field (ML&AI), ie., I searched for the batchnorm paper, which there has been a lot of 'reevaluation' of- but it's not available. I suppose at this point you don't have access to (some of) the big AI journals/conferences. Is this something on the horizon?
probably_wrong 6y ago
I've thinking how to make this idea work, but the more I think about it the less I think it's viable. First, you would be centralizing the ability to "cancel" papers. One bad member of the board could wreak havok. Simultaneously, people in charge of the database would be constantly bombarded by pleas (not all of them honest) to revoke this and that researcher's paper. So it would be bad for both sides. You could get away with something like Retraction Watch, but you'll always be behind - you could keep track of which papers were retracted (which is already a lot of work), but not every paper that needs to be revised is retracted. I guess figuring out a perfect system for deciding which ideas are right is hard.
- worldsayshi 6y ago
  You point out the flaws of one potential implementation of such system and reject the whole concept? I think it's conceivable that there is an implementation of such concept that would work better than not having it. Example off the top of my head: Don't have one board decide which papers are cancelled. Have multiple. Have git repos with lists of cancelled papers. Have a process for finding which papers are flawed due to citing cancelled papers from a particular paper. Have browser extensions that tells you if the paper you're opening is carrying such flaws. Allow user of such extension to pick which board they trust. Have the extension link to a discussion about why the paper is cancelled. Give ability to challenge such claim in the open. Etc etc. I'm sure many more such ideas can be found. The problem is probably rather funding of such system or if whoever funds it would have the right incentives to begin with.
ahelwer 6y ago
Science's decentralized nature is a strength, not a weakness. Do you really think such a database would be immune to coercion from, say, Monsanto or Chevron?
heyitsguay 6y ago
Maybe instead of a centralized repository, individuals could be given the ability to create their own partial sets of recommendations that could be aggregated by a user. Instead of trying to globally solve trust and designation of expertise, you explicitly define the group of people whom you designate experts and whose assessments you trust.
eecc 6y ago
WOT signed endorsements. Back when I had time I drafted a P2P application to share papers and execute peer review via GPG based digital signatures. Signed metadata - at least that was the plan - allowed communities to endorse, retract, flag spam in a distributed opt-in manner. It's rotting on GitHub, never managed to drum up enough interest...
- sam_lowry_ 6y ago
  Sounds like a great idea. WOT did not work for general public, but scientists are very different.
  - mjevans 6y ago
    Things that work for the general public need to be far less technical and way more automatic; from an end user experience perspective. WoT could work exceedingly well for a decentralized replacement of Facebook... though at that point there's also the issue of competing against a walled garden with moats and most of the population already inside.
- CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
  I’ve been toying with a similar idea but as a means of crowdsourcing a current best understanding of what science suggest. Primarily to weed through all the wild nutrition recommendations floating around into sensible advice based on what can actually be supported. I’m sure the idea extends to other areas. In my mind it would be some reddit/Wikipedia kind of thing where advice and understanding would be debated using some formal language elements based on rdf or whatever to build up a knowledge graph usable inside applications.
SubiculumCode 6y ago
building that in Zotero would be great. I all ready like that they flag retracted papers.
- domenicrosati 6y ago
  Done https://github.com/scitedotai/scite-zotero-plugin https://github.com/scitedotai/scite-zotero-plugin
  - SubiculumCode 6y ago
    you sir/madam, are awesome.
dougmccune 6y ago
This is part of what https://scite.ai/ https://scite.ai/ is doing. They categorize citations as supporting, detracting, or neutral. The theory being you want to know if you’re citing something debunked. Scite also flags citations of retracted papers (and a Twitter bot that tweets when a new paper is published that cites a retracted study). And I think they have zotero integration (?) I have no affiliation other than I have met the founder and think the product is cool.

philipkglass 6y ago

The graph shows emissions trajectories projected by the most commonly used climate scenarios (called SSP5-8.5 and RCP8.5, with labels on the right vertical axis), along with other scenario trajectories. Actual emissions to date (dark purple curve) and those of near-term energy outlooks (labeled as EIA, BP and ExxonMobil) all can be found at the very low end of the scenario range, and far below the most commonly used scenarios. RCP 8.5 was intended as the highest-emissions scenario, not the most likely scenario. "RCP 8.5—A scenario of comparatively high greenhouse gas emissions (2011)" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-011-0149-y https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-011-0149-y This paper summarizes the main characteristics of the RCP8.5 scenario. The RCP8.5 combines assumptions about high population and relatively slow income growth with modest rates of technological change and energy intensity improvements, leading in the long term to high energy demand and GHG emissions in absence of climate change policies. Compared to the total set of Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), RCP8.5 thus corresponds to the pathway with the highest greenhouse gas emissions. Even 10 years ago, when this paper was published, it was apparent that technology and energy intensity were improving more than the RCP 8.5 scenario posited. I don't know if RCP 8.5 has since been misused as a most common scenario, but the original post quoted above doesn't quantify that either.

incompatible 6y ago
Looking a CO2 measurements, I don't see much sign that the rate of increase is slowing down: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/ https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/. Do the current models assume it will accelerate even faster?
- pdonis 6y ago
  The article is talking about annual CO2 emissions, not total CO2 levels. CO2 levels and their rate of increase are a lagging indicator; it takes many years for a reduction in emissions to show up in CO2 levels. The models all assume that CO2 emissions will continue to increase; the main difference in the assumptions is how fast emissions are assumed to increase.
6y ago

marshmallow_12 6y ago

It's been a long time since i've read anything so well written that was so devoid of any pertinent points. I'm only reading that page, but the only thing i've come away with is that breast cancer research is flawed, somehow, by what seems to be the most egregious lack of anything that approaches professional standards on the part of researchers. Oh, and a graph with different lines drawn on it with a large space between some of them.

momirlan 6y ago
go to bed before you burn too many neurons
- marshmallow_12 6y ago
  how do you burn neurons and why should i care about them?
- weakfish 6y ago
  Please keep this sort of antagonizing off of HN.

williesleg 6y ago

Global warming?

ravenstine 6y ago

This reminds me of a talk I watched about research into human pheromones. The speaker talked about how literature and studies on pheromones all lead back to 1 or 2 old studies that were basically considered bunk, but researchers kept citing it, and other researchers would also cite the other studies that linked back to the original low-quality studies. His point was that the whole field of research into human pheromones needs to blow away all the literature up to this point and start over because the whole thing is so tainted, and few are willing to actually make sense of what's true or false with what currently exists because so much of it is self-referential. It wouldn't surprise me in the least that there are other areas of science that border on needing to start from scratch. EDIT: I believe it may have been this talk, but I don't have time to scan the whole thing just yet. It looks like he begins talking about the problematic research after ~17 minutes. It's still worth watching none the less: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLENtzBbXdY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLENtzBbXdY

deleted 6y ago
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H_Pylori 6y ago
I call it "The founder effect" of bad studies. Essentially the first few studies set the tone for the rest of the field, and it's very hard to correct the course due to the momentum. I'm glad people are starting to notice.
ncmncm 6y ago
It would surprise me if there were any areas of science that were not heavily citing falsified papers. We are perhaps fortunate that most cited papers are not read.
- nraynaud 6y ago
  Mathematics and the non ml part of computer science should be ok, I guess. Everything that doesn’t involve data, maybe ? I’m making this on the fly.

carrolldunham 6y ago

before you spend 5 minutes searching for the real emissions line on the graph, it looks like a slight bolding of one of the labelled lines that ends in about 2018

ncmncm 6y ago
The blue one with the dip around 2009?

kjrose 6y ago

From my time working within an academic environment, I can attest this is absolutely true. Especially since the gatekeepers (older professors, etc) have a general interest to see these older articles cited more and referenced. It's not malicious, it's just a fact of how these things work. It's also why the general public's knowledge of how science works needs to be adjusted. Science is not a "100% correct" or "100% not correct" thing, and unfortunately I've seen too many institutions and individuals use that myth to try and push an agenda. It's a combination of institutional momentum, combined with the fact that a specific narrative is politically expedient. The unfortunate thing is bad decisions, made off of bad science, regardless of the reasons external to the science, generally lead to bad outcomes.

soperj 6y ago
>It's not malicious, it's just a fact of how these things work While I agree it's not malicious, I'd say the reason it works this way is that there is a financial incentive to have it work this way.
- sn41 6y ago
  It is not finance. There are a lot of motivations which are based on ego or prestige. Scholarship is unfortunately often based on competition - but the standards of winning are different from that of oil tycoons. Boiling everything down to finance will not lead to accurate understanding of how academia works.
  - alexashka 6y ago
    > Boiling everything down to finance will not lead to accurate understanding of how academia works Why not? Given that only people with the 'correct' views get tenure to begin with, it doesn't surprise me at all that while there is plenty of ego and prestige, I'd classify it as bickering among priests. Point remains, only people who are indoctrinated and interested in advancing the interests of the church get to be priests to begin with.
marcus_holmes 6y ago

ChuckMcM 6y ago

This is a good read, although somewhat depressing. When you have a topic that has been weaponized politically, as climate change has, people who use that weapon actively work against information they perceive would make the weapon less effective. The author sums it up as follows: ---- from the article: According to Rayner, in such a context we should expect to see reactions to uncomfortable knowledge that include: denial -- (that scenarios are off track), dismissal -- (the scenarios are off track, but it doesn’t matter), diversion -- (the scenarios are off track, but saying so advances the agenda of those opposed to action) and, displacement -- (the scenarios are off track but there are perhaps compensating errors elsewhere within scenario assumptions). ---- end include. Not enough people understand that science is expected to be wrong, and to converge over time to the correct answer. That is is okay to say "We used to think this, but these studies/experiments have shown that understanding to be incorrect. Now we believe this." That is how science works. And sadly when it is politicized, it becomes much harder to have conversations about it.

bigiain 6y ago
The entire opening of the article discussing 2020 papers erroneously using skin cancer data in breast cancer research papers which was a known error for at least 13 years - makes the point very strongly that " ... but these studies/experiments have shown that understanding to be incorrect. Now we believe this." happens much slower than perhaps people expect. I understand science "is expected to be wrong" sometimes, but I'm still somewhat boggled that there's 13 years worth of (presumably) peer reviewed papers making claims about breast cancer using "wrong science" that was proven wrong in 2007... (I wonder what _else_ all those peer reviewers let slide or didn't know when reviewing other papers?)
- dayiel 6y ago
  Actually, the cell line issue might not be so bad or rather all cell line work is much worse than you all imagine. No cell lines actually resemble the real tissue in gene expression if you say, do an rna screen and see what actuallg gets expressed. They are changed by line establishing process, use of various media, number of passages aka how long they’ve been in culture from thawing a line till the test (cant be too little or too much, requires line to recover after being frozen), person who’se culturing (some people tend to starve cells and passage full plates and have different parameters of work even despite some labwide protocols), adherence to the plate and growing in flat monoculture, getting plates out too much or watching them too lonv under the microscope. Some effects are temporary and not so serious. Some effects are rather serious. Like the fact that flat surface cell lines will never be a good proxy for the actual tumor growing in 3d in the actual human. That’s why people experimenting with spheres, multucultures with other cells, organelle cultures, animal models, and eventually all the clues from all the models add up to something that could be a theory of some mechanism. And then in most cases when applied to humans in real life it might not work or be harmful. Now, the skin cell in cell media was likely arrayed and had features similar to breast cancer cells so it might have been okay to use for this super imperfect approximation. Not sure if this particular instance. In vitro is only a part of it and peer reviewed journals differ in their authority ratings, with big boss journals like cell requiring you do deliver crazy amounts of different models to make any statement. Reading those papers is like reading house ads, scientists kind of learn to cut through bs

leephillips 6y ago

It happens in theoretical physics, too. Papers using the debunked “minimum energy production principle” still occasionally appear. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.pc.31.100180.003051?journalCode=physchem https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.pc.31....

TaupeRanger 6y ago

How many times do we have to rediscover Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' and write articles about ideas that were well understood 60 years ago?

Shugarl 6y ago
Because there will always be people who just happened to never come across those ideas.
- TaupeRanger 6y ago
  I didn't ask "why", I asked how many times.
  - awwaiid 6y ago
    7
herodotus 6y ago
Kuhn never argued about the misuse of data. He instead argued that the scientific understanding of the data lead to models that became increasingly complex. So much so, that scientists realized it was time to try a new way of understanding the underlying data. The new models were the "revolution".
- TaupeRanger 6y ago
  Kuhn spent a great deal of time talking about the behavior of (usually older), establishment scientists clinging to outdated science, which is part of the problem here.

roca 6y ago

In this case it kind of seems like what you'd want to happen is happening: we've been warned about the dangers of climate change under "business as usual" scenarios, so we're not carrying on "business as usual", but reducing our CO2 emissions. So the question then is quite fundamental: what does it mean to describe a "business as usual" scenario that extrapolates from today? Does that mean carrying on doing what we're currently doing, or does it mean to stop caring about CO2 emissions and go back to "business as usual" ten years ago?

deleted 6y ago
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rbanffy 6y ago
Now we must imagine what the impact on policies would be to prematurely say we managed to cut emissions more effectively than predicted.
- Sebb767 6y ago
  But what's the alternative? Ignoring the fact that our data is based on wrong assumptions? Act as if nothing has changed? Sure, this is not good in the short time. But this is already a smoking gun for climate change deniers; if we were to put this under the rug for another decade, it would become a smoking nuke. And imagine the impact of that.
  - bopbeepboop 6y ago
    They would be right to question advocacy groups that have been misleading the public about climate change for multiple decades. The main point of conservatives has been, for over a decade, that the alarmism is overstated and behavioral corrections would eventually adjust us to the point climate change stabilized. Without the extremist “green new deal” interventions. That seems to be true - and activists don’t like it, so they’re just pretending it’s not. Who would respect activists lying for power and profit?
  - rbanffy 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

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ncmncm 6y ago

The article is probably right about the bare facts, but it seems much like one of those that insist that Y2K was a big nothing, and that the Population Bomb fizzled. In each case, there was a warning that was followed by a phenomenal amount of hard work in back rooms to head off disaster. Disaster was headed off successfully, and then the people who had warned about it were criticized for their failed prediction. In the case of population, we were very, very lucky that the Green Revolution turned out to be possible. There was no reason, beforehand, to expect such an idea to work well enough. (The Green Revolution, with its dependence on fossil-fueled fertilization, has ironically contributed to the present crisis.) Would CO2 emissions have continued on one of the higher curves, without enormous investment in solar and wind power systems, and in more efficient usage? Counterfactuals are hard to prove, but I don't see any reason to think not. What I notice about the graph is how lines below current and projected emissions, that identify behavior needed to prevent readily predictable disaster, are omitted. That current climate research must compare improved methods using the same reference numbers that previous papers used, despite those numbers being now obsolete, seems like a small problem compared to others faced in that field, such as the still unpredictable behavior of cloud cover in different scenarios, or of ocean currents.

andi999 6y ago
Exactly. It is like your physician telling you if you keep drinking your liver will die. And a year later you proclaim: this guy is so unscientific, I stopped drinking, how come he didn't predict that.

jimbokun 6y ago

> diversion (the scenarios are off track, but saying so advances the agenda of those opposed to action) This seems the basis for much of so called “cancel culture”.

deleted 6y ago
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nine_k 6y ago

When something becomes widely known as a proxy to measure an effect, it ceases to be a useful measure, because people begin to consciously influence it. It's a well-known thing. When scientific results become a proxy to the correctness of a political agenda (which is often a business interest in disguise), they become less and less scientific. It's a perfect catch-22. Same sadly applies to the internal tools of science: impact index, citation index, discovery of a novel effect, etc. There is a lot of incentives to game these metrics, and gaming them is, well, not unheard of. In applied research there is more of a reality check: if the device based on your research obviously does not work, it cannot be produced and sold, so you want your research to reflect reality as best you can. But more subtle things, like public policy, lack this immediate feedback loop. So there is a large hazard for a researcher, when asked: "what is the value of 2 × 2 ?" to ask back: "are we selling or buying?" and find a plausible "right" answer that supports a desired case. But, unlike in elementary arithmetics, nobody knows a certain right answer in many areas of natural science, so an honest mistake is hard to tell from a... less honest one. There must be a colossal pressure to exploit this in a situation of a high-stakes political choice. I have no idea how to solve these problems. But at least the public should be aware that these problems exist.

XargonEnder 6y ago
I agree with you and I want to add one more layer. I program analytics for a living. I often find that people fudge numbers without even being conscious of it. If I know my boss wants the numbers on this report to be high, I'll unconsciously choose an algorithm that gives higher numbers than one that gives lower numbers. Even if both algorithms are "reasonable".

scythe 6y ago

>diversion -- (the scenarios are off track, but saying so advances the agenda of those opposed to action) and, It is probably worthwhile to note: while the above might actually be a defensive response to these data, the argument is not necessarily valid -- the fact that emissions have been overestimated does not necessarily weaken the case for action. In particular, changes in temperature and precipitation continue to be observed even consistent with "wrong" models[1], and as such the sensitivity of the climate to these lower levels of emissions is not "good news". 1: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-models-are-getting-future-warming-projections-right/ https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-mo...

uxcolumbo 6y ago

Isn’t it better to act as if those edge cases are going to happen, so we can prevent the worst from happening. Yes, scientific integrity is important, but if the message gets out to the general public, that those climate change models are based on outdated research, wouldn’t that make us procrastinate and not get off the fossil fuel based economy sooner? Our biosphere degradation isn’t just about Ghg emissions, but pollution in general caused by our fossil fuel powered economy.

momirlan 6y ago
Pst, the "general public" are listening !

cynoclast 6y ago

Like to this day we have electrons flowing out of the 'negative' terminal because of a mistake.

bawolff 6y ago

> Evidence indicates the scenarios of the future to 2100... Your 100 year out model is off? Colour me shocked!

dfilppi 6y ago

Why would research take imagined futures into consideration?

stijlist 6y ago

The text says one thing, but the graph they display to support their argument does not say what I thought it said. The purple line is supposed to be our "real" emissions, and the impression you get from the image and text is that our real emissions are much lower than the projected emissions. But if you actually look at the values of the purple line vs the other lines now, in 2020/2021, the values are almost exactly the same. I don't understand how to reconcile that with the text. https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8645a4d3-0412-4bfb-a72c-c02b5e904e64_1736x1073.png https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q...

ylem 6y ago
Great! So it's not just me! As I understand the paper, their main point seems to be that as you extrapolate out in time, you need to not just handle the physics of CO2 that is already in the atmosphere, but predict say how much populations will grow, as well as how much GDP will grow, and how CO2 emissions will be effected by that. So, say if there is an economic recession, then there will be less CO2 produced than if you predicted just say steady growth. This seems to be a case where I could see different assumptions (some reasonable) leading to different results--it's a far cry from say the breast cancer-vs skin-cancer mistake that he leads with
Ono-Sendai 6y ago
I think the point is that the actual emission are on the low side of the IPCC scenario bounds, and are tracking to exit completely the IPCC scenario bounds around 2021. Full paper in PDF format here btw: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abcdd2/pdf https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abcdd2/...
skybrian 6y ago
I don’t understand the graph at all. Which line is the purple line? Is it labeled? It seems like real emissions should end at or before 2020 and none of them do that. They all seem to be projections of some sort?

ylem 6y ago

While this seems to give the impression that science is not functioning, I don't see this as the case. I will give an example from my field. Before Covid struck, I was at a conference in Japan. There was a talk about an interesting superconductor. Someone repeated some of the earlier measurements and determined that they were misinterpreted--that the measurement technique led to heating the material and thus the misinterpretation of the results and that the material wasn't so interesting after all. I think this was say 15-20 years after the original measurement. During the Q&A session, someone asked the original author what he thought. He stood up and said that the new measurement was correct. To me, that says science is working--it may work slowly, but over time, it does correct. Sure, there are people that take a long time convince (and sometimes they are never convinced), but science itself eventually corrects--but the challenge of new measurements that contradict the current consensus is that it's not that each one is correct--some are just measurement errors. For example, there was the case of a recent experiment that seemed to show faster than light travel of neutrinos. The authors presented it with the idea that there was a glitch somewhere that they couldn't find. After a flurry of papers (some with exotic new theories), they eventually were able to find the electronics glitch. It would have been exciting if they were correct--but they weren't--and science again worked.

antonvs 6y ago
Agreed (10 days late, but still.) These kinds of issues are issues with how human societies function. Scientific methods can't eliminate that, but they can help manage it. In fact that's largely the point.

julienchastang 6y ago

Note that Roger A. Pielke Jr. is a political science professor not an atmospheric scientist and has, in the past, been involved in a number of climate science controversies. The analogy to outdated breast cancer research feels like a straw man. Anyway, I cannot claim that he is wrong, but I would regard this piece with some skepticism.

vixen99 6y ago
Somehow, 'feels like' and 'some skepticism' doesn't add up too much of a critique. He says Evidence indicates the scenarios of the future to 2100 that are at the focus of much of climate research have already diverged from the real world and thus offer a poor basis for projecting policy-relevant variables like economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions. The question is: is he right or wrong and if the latter, why? We're spending trillions of dollars & affecting people's lives on a massive scale - on betting he's wrong. The issue at least needs discussion. One other point: How would atmospheric scientists be especially competent to assess 'key variables in climate scenarios compared with data from the real world'? Would they really want to skip their core science to put economic hats on to study how 'population, economic growth, energy intensity of economic growth and carbon intensity of energy consumption' relate to these key variables? Pielke's competence is in this field and climate policy generally. Some of his publications: https://rogerpielkejr.com/pielkeonclimatechange/ https://rogerpielkejr.com/pielkeonclimatechange/
- bachmeier 6y ago
  > Somehow, 'feels like' and 'some skepticism' doesn't add up too much of a critique. This is not helpful. Pielke has been heavily involved in one side (and only one side) of the political debate on this topic. It's dishonest to pretend that information isn't relevant in the context of a post like this. He's not a neutral academic that decided to look at the evidence and was shocked to see issues. > How would atmospheric scientists be especially competent to assess 'key variables in climate scenarios compared with data from the real world'? Would they really want to skip their core science to put economic hats on to study how 'population, economic growth, energy intensity of economic growth and carbon intensity of energy consumption' relate to these key variables? Pielke's competence is in this field and climate policy generally. While technically this is correct, it's deeply misleading (or whatever is the next step above that). Economists study those issues and have their own journals for publishing those results. Pielke, on the other hand, is trained as a political scientist. Trying to make it sound like he's the only one with the qualifications is, as they used to say, not cool.

perrygeo 6y ago

The emission scenarios were developed decades ago and are proving to be over-estimates. The author interprets that as outdated science which is a rather pessimistic view. I interpret it differently: Scientists make a spread of climate predictions and their potential consequences. Those listening mustered significant market/public/government pressure and ... it worked. We pushed the outcome towards the low end of the predictions. This is good news and demonstrates the efficacy of political action based on science. If those predictions are correct, between RCP2.6 and RCP4.5 is not a bad place to be. Climate change is still locked in but life on earth has a chance of adapting to it without major upheaval. RCP8.5 otoh, if it were to happen, we'd be screwed.

psychiatrist24 6y ago
What exactly was done because of pressure? More solar cells and wind mills? Have those even crossed the point where they produced more energy than what was used in their production yet? In my country, they are shutting down nuclear power plants, relying on coal instead. Electric cars are still a rarity, and global car use seems to be rising still. I find your line of reasoning maddening. While it is possible that pressure had an effect, it can be used to prove almost everything. It rained after rain dances, so rain dances work!
- adrianN 6y ago
  > Have those even crossed the point where they produced more energy than what was used in their production yet Yes, payback time is quite short.
- brabel 6y ago
  Counter anecdote: South Australia had almost 100% of its energy from coal burning just a few years ago... Today, it's nearly entirely solar-powered: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-25/all-sa-power-from-solar-for-first-time/12810366 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-25/all-sa-power-from-sol... Another one: in Norway, most cars being sold right now are electric: https://www.voanews.com/europe/norway-says-more-50-new-cars-are-electric https://www.voanews.com/europe/norway-says-more-50-new-cars-... These are huge local achievements, but it shows that at least in some parts of the world, things have changed very rapidly in the right direction.

pdm55 6y ago

I'm not sure where this line of thought is headed. I once had to work with the Hela cell line, coating it in alginate polysaccharide. I thought to myself,"How can I test if the functioning of the cells have been altered by the coating?" A little book research convinced me that any tests would be useless, as a cancer cell has basically shut down all functions except those required for growth. So I just worked on trying to improve the coating, and continued staring through the micrscope at the somewhat terrifying malignant growth. As regards, climate studies. Where have we heard the term "peak" something-or-other before. Ah yes, "peak oil". Well that didn't happen: we found more oil, we substituted gas, ... "Peak CO2": I nearly choked on my morning biscuit. Please tell China and India and Africa to stop developing and remain underdeveloped. Come on man, are you on drugs? Maybe, when a few billion have been displaced from their homes and invaded our comfortable lifestyles, we all might decide to stop driving and generating power with coal, oil and gas. I remember the time at uni 20 years when the power failed. The cafeteria went dark, the fridges didn't work, the heated food display cabinets didn't function, the cash registers were useless and the cashiers had to write down amounts with pen and paper. When our grandchildren have to make the hard decision to drastically reduce power consumption in a last ditch effort to reduce CO2, they will be turning off the switches in fully-automated societies. Will societies cope with that scenario?

Clewza313 6y ago
"Peak oil" simply means the year when the maximum amount of oil is extracted; the implication is (was) that if demand > supply when this happened, this would cause a spike in prices. As it happens, it's pretty likely we did hit peak oil in 2019, before COVID reshuffled everything and oil prices hit historic lows in 2020. Same for "peak CO2": energy consumption is growing and will continue to do so, but if we're swapping out coal and gas for solar and wind, the amount of CO2 generated can still decline overall.
adrianN 6y ago
We know how to generate essentially limitless amounts of energy without producing CO2. There is no need to turn off switches, we just need to build enough solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, power-to-gas reactors, and, if we like, nuclear power plants.

lolc 6y ago

Of course we'd like researchers to always start from the best premises. But the process is such that if you want to update your premises, you have twenty competing theories to choose from, all in the process of getting validated. Do you move and where do you move? When I read this article I immediately felt with the author how these people should update their models. How long can it take? But then again, how do I know the author's choice studies are the good ones? If I were to talks to somebody in the field, they'd note that those studies are "promising" or "concerning". But maybe they won't change what they're doing just yet. Inertia? Yes. Bad? Oh, where's hindsight when you need it the most! The book The Golem by Collins and Pinch discusses historical examples of the scientific process for things we take for granted today. They show how shaky the confirming experiments were. How they could've easily gone the other way, and how some positive early results were based on selecting favourable data.

kitsune_ 6y ago

There is so much wrong with this article... Where to begin...

yccs27 6y ago
Please do begin somewhere, if there really is something factually wrong.

est 6y ago

Some what offtopic, but I think there will be a limit when human have generated so much knowledge, that our offsprings might in one day never been able to catch up, e.g. having to learn to a very old age to get the cutting edge stuff.

FeepingCreature 6y ago
See also: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/ However, our world is not a fable, so there is no reason, a priori, to expect life extension to be a problem that is beyond the asymptotic limit. A more critical issue is that fluid intelligence declines with age. It is for this reason that transhumanists sometimes say that no human has yet reached the boundary of human competence. Once we can accumulate knowledge for a century with no degradation in mental flexibility, we will start to see the true capability of the human neural architecture. Of course, by that time it's also likely that AI will vastly outpace us...
alexgmcm 6y ago
We develop better abstractions and tools though. I can write programs without needing to know how the CPU chip works, an engineer can build a new device without having to understand every detail of the new cutting edge materials science etc. As such we can still effectively divide the labour between people, and people can start from further along the track than before. I mean, most people learn calculus but they don't have to spend years deriving and proving it.

tim333 6y ago

The one that amazes me is the "How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat" stuff (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12480733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12480733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26126183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26126183) I mean it dates back to >In 1965, Mr. Hickson enlisted the Harvard researchers to write a review that would debunk the anti-sugar studies. He paid them a total of $6,500, the equivalent of $49,000 today. and before but I think the 50+ year old bad research still refuses to die

hannob 6y ago

This discussion has been going on for a while. Though it's important to understand what exactly this is about. Based on current trends the most pessimistic climate scenarios (most notably RCP 8.5) seem unlikely, mostly due to its large use of coal and better development of renewables than what was expected. Important to note: These scenarios became unlikely because human behavior and technology have developed in a different direction from what was projected. It's not about physical predictions being wrong. There is a big caveat in all of this: There is still a lot of uncertainty in the understanding of the climate system and feedback loops. This may very well mean that a) RCP 8.5 is unlikely, because humanity will never use that much coal, but b) it could still be just as bad in terms of warming, because climate effects are worse than we thought.

xibalba 6y ago

Having done some modeling myself, I am always stupefied and rankled when I read and hear the certitude with which people, mostly in the media, make claims about future climate scenarios. I am not at all surprised by Burgess' results. This is an extremely complex system being modeled, with the inputs to the model also being modeled... Also, is it just me or does this article bend over backwards to avoid the simple, obvious lede?: climate change scenario estimates are too high and it's even possible CO2 emissions are in decline.

topkai22 6y ago
It’s the right move rhetorically- the issue is too emotional and tied up with identity, at least in the US. This article delivers a message that could be treated as supporting climate denialism in a package that lets people on both of the issue read it without emotional triggers. I’d love to have seen my take away though- current and past investments in regulation and technology have had an effect on carbon emissions. Future investments in regulation changes and technology may reduce it more. The flattening of the emissions curve didn’t just happen by itself.

lstmemery 6y ago

I'm not sure if I understand this graph. The cone seems to represent "no climate policy". Why should we be surprised that we are currently trending out of the "no climate policy" cone since we are implementing climate policy? Taking a second look, that plot is only CO2 from energy and the the plot y scale has a discontinuity. If we need to get to net 0 emissions and the rate of CO2 production is still increasing that would suggest we are still a far ways off from the goal. I just checked and the IPCC 5th assessment was made in 2014. The 6th assessment is scheduled for 2022. Does anyone know if the baselines get updated with each IPCC assessment?