Let me tell you a story. A big, powerful institution commissioned a report into something important. But the authors ended up writing something that the institution’s leaders couldn’t accept. They found it unpalatable. It went against their orthodox dogmas. So, they suppressed it. It never saw the light of day. It’s the report they didn’t want you to read.Nice story. But does that mean the report is true? Couldn’t they be smarter than the authors of the report? Is “Commissioned to write a report by a big powerful institution” a qualification you would respect in any other context? Maybe they didn’t want you to read the report because it was just a bit rubbish?
The past couple of weeks has seen two classic texts from the ever-popular genre of Suppressed Reports. There was the World Health Organization study on cocaine that concluded that it isn’t all that harmful. And then there was the Environmental Protection Agency report that was sceptical of global warming. They didn’t want you to read either, so we’re told.
I’m not saying these reports are wrong. I haven’t read either. But it’s odd that their "suppression" has granted them the kind of uncritical attention that they would never have had if they’d just been published normally. How many global warming skeptics take what the Environmental Protection Agency says seriously? Yet when they deliberately don’t say something, they’re all ears. It’s like Catholics taking the Pope’s word as infallible, but only when he doesn’t want them to. It’s the argument from authority in reverse.
8 comments:
"The argument from authority in reverse"
Yeah, exactly.
Regardless of how much attention the report is getting, it is still pretty clear evidence that the science underlying what is happening is far from settled.
so when people see a naked political power grab dressed up like a climate bill and supported by the useful idiots, they will naturally gravitate towards the contrarians.
I haven't read the WHO study, but I read through parts of the EPA "comment" (not report). It is self-contradicting (claiming variously that global warming isn't happening, isn't a problem, and isn't caused by humans), heavily plagerized from already debunked sources, and written quickly by an unqualified person.
What should the EPA have done? To release the comment with their name on it (even as an unofficial comment) would be to give it far too much credit. To release it with a proper rebuttal would take too much time (this was done right before the real report was due, remember). Forbidding its release made sense, although it unfortunately generated a Streisand effect backlash from an uninformed media.
Anonymous: "it is still pretty clear evidence that the science underlying what is happening is far from settled."
Not really. OK, the fact that someone is disputing the science shows that it's not as settled as, say, the theory of gravity, which no-one disputes. But we already knew that.
The question is whether it's settled enough to justify acting upon it, given the potential consequences if we don't. And the fact that someone in the EPA disputes the science doesn't change that, because the great majority of people in that same organization don't.
You can either trust the EPA as an organization, and go with their consensus, or think the EPA are idiots, in which case the fact that one of them happens to dispute global warming is irrelevant, since he's probably an idiot too.
You can either trust the EPA as an organization, and go with their consensus, or think the EPA are idiots, in which case the fact that one of them happens to dispute global warming is irrelevant, since he's probably an idiot too.
No, on the contrary, to have someone inside the EPA openly disputing the primary thrust of their arguments in an officially sanctioned EPA paper would be a "dream gift" to every AGW-denier, and would be hungrily accepted as such by them. "The truth is finally getting out, even from people on the inside who are risking their jobs to tell us what's really going on!" That should really be obvious: A "truth-telling whistle-blower amid a bunch of useful-idiot liberals" is exactly what the AGW deniers would love to have.
NASA's Gavin Schmidt has a debunking of the "suppressed" comment (with a link to a PDF of the draft, for those who want to read the original) at RealClimate.org: Bubkes.
"You can either trust the EPA as an organization, and go with their consensus, or think the EPA are idiots": or, more rationally, assume them to be just another empire-building bureaucracy?
OK true. You can also throw up your hands and ignore them. That might be the most rational thing to do. but my discussion assumed that you were interested in what the EPA said.
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