In Response to the Article: "Why Splicing Modern Climate Data onto Proxy Data is Unethical and Unscientific"
The long standing "unethical" practice of scientific inference.
The article by Dr. Matthew Wielicki, on his sub-stack site is an interesting cautionary statement about paleo-climate proxies. Since I am not a paid reader of his article, I could not respond directly on his site. The next best thing I could do is express my opinion and concern I came away with from reading the article here.
The reason, I am expending some effort to respond, even if it is to clarify my own thinking, is two fold:
First is a selfish reason, as I have used proxy data, and, in particular, paleo-climate related proxy data in my professional career. The data was used to de-risk multi-million dollar projects. The practice, I believe ,was employed industry wide. If I were in ethical breach, I am confident the army of lawyers in our corporation would have let me know; specially, if I was at risk of being hauled off to the gulag.
Secondly, in my interaction with the academic sphere, academics who use proxy data to illuminate the past as well as help understand the present, have not had their ethical motives challenged and brought to justice, as far as I am aware.
I am not challenging the description of complexities inherent in most, if not all, proxy data. This is a well known issue. If one particular proxy was used to determine the fate of the universe, of course, the madman who would do such a thing should be hunted down and force into the gulag that I potentially would have been sent to. However, proxies are not used in a vacuum. As Dr. Wielicki must be fully aware, there is whole body of geological inference that: ties one proxy to many others, which, in turn are tied to sea changes, that are tied to orbital considerations, that are tied to the the evidence of erosion, that are tied to desertification, and so on, and so on. This places the paleo evidence within a far more nuanced understanding, that, to me, is very different from an unscientific practice. As a matter of fact, to not use this information for any scientific inference of climate would be strange. Of course, if the scientific understanding is falsified, some part, or, the entire body of work will have to be revised. That is as it should be, if what we are discussing is a part of the scientific process.
Another troubling aspect of the article, that I felt at odds with, is the idea that the present is understood in divine detail because we have great thermometers (just being facetious). It is actually not that simple. For example, a rectal thermometer, used as it should be, would not tell us a lot about the global climate. A million thermometers placed in redundant splendor in every airport in the world would certainly warp our understand of the global climate. I am not saying we do not have a good handle on what our current crop of magnificent instruments can tell us in great accuracy about some local variable measured (such as: temperature, pressure, the chemical composition of a particular cow fart), it is the jump, to thinking, we have a strong handle on global climate because we are rewarded with this over abundance of accurate data. All this data has their confounding variables as well. I grant that we may have the critical variables nailed, though, that is not for certain, and, it not my opinion. We may have complex models with an embarrassing amount of variables to match our data. This does not in anyway indicate our understanding of weather let alone climate. In all disciplines of science, how to deal with complex systems is, in my opinion, and, the opinion of many others, much smarter than myself, is still very much an open question. Climate, as I have pointed out, is the quintessential example of an extremely non-linear complex system. An extremely simplified model of weather, with only three variables, was instrumental in launching the study of chaos theory. The study of which, as far as I know, is far from being completed. All this, just to point out our current state of knowledge is nowhere near comprehensive. Therefore, the past history is essential for perspective and guidance.
A fundamental principle of geology is “the present is the key to the past”. This principle, though not absolute, has been instrumental in guiding our exploration of geology. A potential corollary of this principle “the past is the foundation for understanding of the present“ is an indispensable principle as well. An obvious example, is, if we did not use fossil proxies appropriate to indicate paleo global location, the whole subject of plate tectonics would have been much more difficult to put together. That would have done irreparable damage to our understanding of many aspects of geology.
A well integrated view of the past all the way to the present has been, and, still is, one of the most important guide posts of geological research. The climate history is no exception. If you un-anchor the current time from its roots in the past, specially because of our current limited state of understanding, is potentially more “unscientific”. I would not use the word “unethical” within this context, as I believe that most who pursue science recognizes the chance that a particular interpretation maybe wrong. Once the errors are found, lessons are learned and corrections, if possible, are made, or concepts are abandoned. At no points in a working scientific process, as described, does ethics become compromised. It is only from the introduction of ideologies and corruption of paid for pseudo-science that one might make the observation of ethical breach. In this sense much of the, so called, consensus science, might be prone to ethical pitfalls. Given the data and current understanding, the only things one is left with, is, to determine the degree of ambiguity one can attribute to one conclusion or anther. Without the perspective of as much data as possible, one cannot address that issue with any confidence.