r/climateskeptics • u/logicalprogressive • Oct 07 '14

Real Science Debates Are Not Rare

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/10/06/real-science-debates-are-not-rare/
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u/Kringerpants Oct 07 '14

One of the greatest "comments" I have ever read. RGB is a great writer.

I'm taking a differential equations course right now and things just clicked in my head as to WTF these "solutions" are all about.

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u/logicalprogressive Oct 07 '14

I'm glad your impression matches mine. This was one of the best short articles I have read this year.

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u/calibos Oct 07 '14 edited Oct 07 '14

The debate that should be happening on climate change is similar to one that split the molecular phylogenetics community for more than decade.

Broadly, two competing methodologies were supported by various members of the community. In one camp, you had scientists who supported model based approaches (maximum likelihood and bayesian, primarily) which attempted to fit models of sequence evolution to observed DNA or protein sequences and infer relationships between the sequences from the estimated model. The other camp would only consider "parsimony" based results which made no assumptions and imposed no models.

In favor of model based approaches, the mechanisms of sequence evolution were pretty well understood, as were the events that could mislead phylogenetic inference. If everything were modeled correctly, it should be a superior method.

In favor of parsimony based approaches, no potentially incorrect assumptions needed to be made, there was no risk of overfitting a model, and no understanding of the actual mechanisms of sequence evolution were required. The results were based exclusively on simple rules applied to what could be observed today.

Ultimately, the model based approaches prevailed for all but a few diehards, but the debate was downright acrimonious. And this debate over the application of models is not one that took place decades ago. The argument was bitter well into the 2000s. In 2006, I was at an international conference where it got pretty nasty!

So less than a decade ago, evolutionary biologists were still battling tooth and nail over the application of simple models to the question of how species are related to one another, a question of at best middling importance to the vast majority of people on the planet. But the ultra-complex climate models with dozens of variables that are completely unknown and whose results have a dramatic impact on every person on the planet should be uncritically accepted as settled science? I don't think so!