I started to like George Monbiot a bit when I read his latest Guardian column on nuclear power. He has apparently changed his beliefs based on lots of work, digging into the evidence and checking sources. You certainly can’t accuse him of being the type of lazy journalist who doesn’t check his facts. And here he is saying: I thought nuclear power was bad, but now I don’t think it is bad any more, because I have done some research.
But something bothered me about why he thought nuclear power was okay. It’s as if he is right for the wrong reasons. In his correspondence with the anti-nuclear campaigner:
I’m struck by the fact that none of the attachments you’ve sent me is a peer-reviewed article. [...] I’m looking for peer-reviewed papers or high-level reports
In the analysis of her evidence:
As my article explains, the Yablukov book has little scientific standing and has not been peer-reviewed
From the article itself:
Its publication seems to have arisen from a confusion about whether the Annals was a book publisher or a scientific journal. The academy has given me this statement: “In no sense did Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences or the New York Academy of Sciences commission this work; nor by its publication do we intend to independently validate the claims made in the translation or in the original publications cited in the work. The translated volume has not been peer-reviewed by the New York Academy of Sciences, or by anyone else.”
I can see why a journalist wants to be able to point to proper papers in proper scientific journals, but it’s all argument from authority. There’s very little engagement with the details of the argument. What are the scientists saying? What are the environmentalists saying? Why is the group that is right, right? Why is the group that is wrong, wrong?
And then this, at which I went from thinking, “maybe Monbiot is not so bad after all” to “oh, yes he is”:
Failing to provide sources, refuting data with anecdote, cherry-picking studies, scorning the scientific consensus, invoking a cover-up to explain it: all this is horribly familiar. These are the habits of climate change deniers, against which the green movement has struggled valiantly, calling science to its aid. It is distressing to discover that when the facts don’t suit them, members of this movement resort to the follies they have denounced.
Those who refute the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, (deniers, if you like), are not correct because they have more peer reviewed papers published in respected scientific journals. They are correct because they have analysed the data and methods of climate scientists and found flaws in the work. You can tell they are correct by understanding the arguments. For example, you can learn what principal component analysis is and how it works and see why its incorrect use in producing the hockey stick graph gave the results that it did. And it’s quite possible to explain this to a general audience.
This is exactly what Monbiot’s “climate change deniers” have done. They have not failed to provide sources (in fact they are more open than the climate scientists, and in many cases their original work is their source, whether it is peer-reviewed or not), they do not rely on anecdote, they do scorn the scientific consensus (consensus is meaningless) and they don’t invoke “cover-ups”.
Peer-review is not the be-all-and-end-all. It’s perfectly possible for groupthink to set in. Scientists often get attached to their theories and defend them too much. The consensus is often overturned. Without understanding the details, the UN’s report into Chernobyl might be just as flawed as its report into climate change.
If Monbiot dropped all the argument from authority and wrote about, for example, why the UN report on Chernobyl is more correct than the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences book, then he would have a better case.
He actually does this occasionally:
A devastating review in the journal Radiation Protection Dosimetry points out that the book achieves its figure by the remarkable method of assuming that all increased deaths from a wide range of diseases – including many which have no known association with radiation – were caused by the accident(15). There is no basis for this assumption, not least because screening in many countries improved dramatically after the disaster and, since 1986, there have been massive changes in the former eastern bloc. The study makes no attempt to correlate exposure to radiation with the incidence of disease(16).
That’s the kind of analysis which can get to the truth. If Monbiot could do this consistently, and apply the same kind of thinking to the global warming debate, he might come up with the right answer there, as well.