Alright, F it, keep in mind this was my first big paper in college so i think it's pretty crappy (I think I got a B on it)
Debunking the Myth of Consensus Science
It was November 5, 2005; Al Gore, riding on the huge publicity that his “controversial” documentary An Inconvenient Truth was generating right before its initial release at Sundance Film Festival (the movie would later go on to win at the Oscars), was being interviewed on the Today Show. That whole week they were going to dedicate to “going green” and Al Gore’s interview (it was on a Monday) was sort of the kickoff for the week. Gore had some very stern words for the world, including: “The reason the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize [is because] the thousands of scientists that make up that group have over 20 years created a very strong scientific consensus, that is as strong a consensus as you’ll ever see in science, that the climate crisis is real,” he said. “Human beings are responsible for it, the results [of it] would be very bad for the United States and all human beings, and there is time to solve it” (Celizic). Now I’m not going to argue whether or not Global Warming is real or if it’s caused by man. What I want to do is point out the flaw in this specific part of Mr. Gore’s argument (it’s not just Gore who has used this particular argument before).
Before I begin, I want to answer these two questions: What is scientific consensus? What causes scientific consensus? Knowing the answer to these two questions will prove to be extremely important when reading this thing, because if you don’t know the answers to those, this essay will fly over your head. In his book Explaining Scientific Consensus: The Case of Mendelian Genetics, Kyung-Man Kim defines scientific consensus as “the resolution of an issue of fundamental epistemological importance manifested in the successive transformations of the structure of an evolving network of scientific allies and enemies within a specific period of time” (Kim 20). In short, Kim is saying that scientific consensus is the resolution of a scientific issue (pertaining to new knowledge) through scientists changing “sides” on the issue, depending on their information.
What causes this consensus? Kim, citing the work of Robert Merton and his associates, theorizes that “the Mertonians view scientific elites as a small group of scientists who generate and maintain consensus in the scientific community. Because of their significant contributions to science, the elites can exercise legitimate cognitive authority over average and below-average scientists” (Kim 6). Also, “Because they are the most significant contributors to scientific progress—and, therefore, exercise so-called legitimate authority in evaluating knowledge claims—only scientific “stars” play an important role in establishing and maintaining scientific consensus” (Kim 5). Basically, scientific consensus is established by only the “elites” in science, because whatever they decide, they can exercise their “cognitive authority” and the average and below-average scientists will agree with them.
In that same interview with the Today Show, Gore was questioned about John Christy, who was a member of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with whom Gore shared his Nobel Prize, recently wrote an op-ed piece in ‘The Wall Street Journal’ in which he criticized Gore’s dire predictions of the impact of global warming. ‘I'm sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see,’ Christy wrote. Gore said that part of the problem of telling the story of climate change is journalism’s determination to give equal time to people who have opposing viewpoints. He said that Christy is no longer part of the IPCC. ‘He is way outside the scientific consensus,” Gore said. “It’s the old ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ approach,’ Gore said. ‘There are still people who believe the earth is flat. [But] you don’t search out for someone who believes the earth is flat and give them equal time.’ “(Celizic) Again Gore used the “consensus” argument. This time, however, he compared it to believing the earth is flat. Admittedly, Gore does bring up a good point.
The late Michael Crichton, the author who is most well known for the book Jurassic Park, gave a speech titled Aliens Cause Global Warming at Caltech in 2003 in which he argued that science has nothing to do with consensus. His argument was that science requires only one person to be correct, as long as they have verifiable data in the real world. Then he went on to provide a few examples of when the “consensus” opinion of scientists was proven to be incorrect; continental drift, smallpox, germ theory, and a whole list of others. He concludes his argument by saying that: “Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away.”
Both of these men bring up great points. The basic question behind their arguments is: just when does the “consensus” opinion become knowledge? There are two prominent theories of just this topic; Avezier Tucker’s theory of the knowledge hypothesis, and Miriam Solomon’s theory of social empiricism. Tucker, a professor at the Australian National University, theorized that a consensus becomes knowledge on three conditions: that the individuals who hold the shared consensus are “(1) uncoerced, (2) uniquely heterogenous, and (3) sufficiently large” (Tucker 504). At first glance, the first condition seems to conflict with Kim’s theory, but Tucker clarifies that the only type coercion he is talking about is ‘unwilling acquiescence’ (forced coercion) and he wasn’t too worried about peer pressure, bribery, or other forms of coercion. Tucker’s hypothesis was correct in that when those three factors are fulfilled the consensus usually becomes knowledge, but he provides no “grey area” in case the science supports a completely different view than that of the consensus. Any one of Crichton’s examples could be used here to describe the point more effectively.
Solomon’s theory, on the other hand, is that there are two types of influences (‘decision vectors’) that affect scientists; empirical (based on observation and experience) and non-empirical (any other type of influence). Solomon believes that if there are several rival theories, these empirical ‘decision vectors’ should be distributed among the theories. A consensus is justified when one theory (among a few rival theories) has all of the empirical success (all of one’s empirical ‘decision vectors’ are pointing to that theory). She also argues that throughout history, some consensuses emerge when non-empirical ‘decision vectors’ are accidentally merged with empirical ‘decision vectors’, thus, these consensuses are not justified. This gives Solomon a grey area to where if a consensus is proved wrong by science, she can point to these non-empirical ‘decision vectors’ (Boaz 2). Also, Solomon’s conditions here for a “true consensus” just don’t exist in the real world. But what we can infer from this is that the more empirical success vs. non-empirical success in a theory, the more justified the consensus.
In other words, by combining these two theories together, one can posit that consensus is accepted as knowledge when it satisfies Tucker’s three conditions, and it matches with Solomon’s theory. For an example, let’s go back to Gore’s quote about the “flat earth” people. The “earth is round” idea has been around since Pythagoras and Ancient Greece. It is a completely uncoerced, unbiased viewpoint (condition 1). Scientists of different races, genders, cultures, etc. all believe that the earth is round (condition 2). Third, the group of scientists that agree with the statement that the Earth is round is an extremely large group (condition 3). Now, to satisfy Solomon’s conditions, all of the empirical success has to fit into the Earth is round theory. No theory is perfectly airtight like her theory might suggest, but this one is pretty darn close. The fact that there is hardly any non-empirical success and nearly all of the empirical success in the “Round Earth” theory suggests that the consensus is justified.
Global warming, on the other hand, is a different story. It is an uncoerced consensus (condition 1), there are people all over the world that believe that global warming is real and is manmade (condition 2), and there is a relatively large group of scientists who believe in the theory (although that number changes every day) to satisfy condition 3. Finally, there is still plenty of empirical success not favoring the Global Warming theory, and too much non-empirical evidence for one to say that global warming is a truly justified consensus like the “Round Earth” theory. Thus, the jury is still out on this “consensus” argument.
I was able to find two other very recent instances where the empirical success was unable to justify the consensus. One was a report on secondhand smoke published in the British Medical Journal in 2003. It is considered as one of the longest and most comprehensive studies on secondhand smoke. The report found that secondhand smoke had much smaller effects upon heart disease and lung cancer was “considerably weaker than at first believed” (Enstrom 1057). Four years later, and the president of The Heartland Institute, Joseph Bast, wrote an article in the periodical Health Care News claiming that there still was no consensus that secondhand smoke is a health hazard. Even so, the people who were claiming consensus have been pushing to get policies changed (cigarette taxes, public smoking bans, etc.) without enough concrete evidence (empirical success) to justify it.
Yet another example of an unjustified consensus was in the theory that excess fat is bad for you. In 1988, the Surgeon General proclaimed that fatty foods were just as bad for you as smoking, even though there was hardly any data to back him up (Tierney).
The secondhand smoke controversy and the ‘fat is bad’ controversy happened the same way. A new theory, with hardly any data to back scientists up, caught on and pretty soon everyone was caught in what Tierney called a “information cascade.” Basically what happens in a cascade is a new hypothesis catches on, and pretty soon word of it is spreading around. The “elites”, as mentioned above in Kim’s theory, catch word of it, and listen to everyone else without examining the data, because they assume everyone else can’t be wrong (Tierney). Once the “elites” catch on (like the Surgeon General) and favor a certain way, then the rest of the scientific community usually follows suit.
This phenomena has also happened in global warming; although not to the extent of secondhand smoke or ‘fat is bad’, at least not yet. Scientists, with a lack of hard data, caught on to this idea that the Earth is heating up, and we caused it, and even with a lack of hard data (computers that “predict” the future being their main evidence of what could happen) somebody up high (Gore) caught on and pretty soon everyone else has followed suit.
I find it fascinating that for these 3 very important, recent issues, there really aren’t enough empirical vectors to justify consensus being turned into knowledge, much less changing public policy. I suppose that’s a topic for a different time though.
For my final argument, I’d like you to consider what exactly the words “consensus” and “science” mean. According to dictionary.com:
con⋅sen⋅sus –noun, plural -sus⋅es.
1. majority of opinion: The consensus of the group was that they should meet twice a month.
sci⋅ence –noun
1. a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws: the mathematical sciences.
As you can see, consensus deals with opinions, while science deals with facts or truths. In fact, the term “consensus science” is actually kind of an oxymoron. I also agree with Mr. Crichton when he said “Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results.”
In conclusion, I don’t believe Al Gore has any right to claim the consensus argument because there isn’t enough justification for the consensus in the first place. Not only that, but the term “consensus science” itself is an oxymoron, “the majority of opinion of a branch of knowledge dealing with a body of facts.” How can there be an opinion on facts? Facts are facts. Finally, I’d argue that Al Gore is about as justified to say, “I invented the Internet,” than for him to argue anything about there being a justified consensus on global warming. Oh, wait…
