“What is Truth?” Pilate is reputed to have asked Jesus at the latter’s trial in long-ago Jerusalem. Yet it is a question of neuralgic importance today. For we live in an era of angry competing claims, where everyone asserts that their particular fact-set is equal to anyone else’s. Opinions are simply hurled against each other, like children throwing stones. No learning, no judgement is possible at all. How can we, that tiny group of intelligent people who must somehow carry Civilisation forward find some sieve to winnow truth from opinion? Professor David Spiegelhalter may have some answers.
Spiegelhalter is a statistician. Fans of Covid-19 may recall him popping up on telly a lot during that pandemic. Look out for him during the next one. Yet his list of criteria (derived from the work of Bradford-Hill and Doll) may be applied to any scientific hypothesis. as a first step to get sort out wheat from chaff. . We decided to apply it to global warming today, so here goes:
Direct Evidence
1 The effect is so great that it cannot be explained by any random variable: The planet is undeniably heating up fast and this has become statistically significant
2 There is a close causal proximity between cause and effect We’ve been pumping out enormous quantities of fossil fuel gases since about 1840
3 The “dose” causes a response and it is reversible This comes from medical science, but if the “dose” is waste gas, then compare the fossil fuel emission pattern curve with that of temperature That it is indeed from coal, oil etc is demonstrated the well-known changes in C12 C13 and C14 ratios in the atmosphere
Evidence of mechanism
4 There is a plausible mechanism, explicable from known science, which explains the effect Carbon dioxide and methane are known to trap heat. Quite a lot of it.
Parallel Evidence
5 The effect fits in with what we know from other studies Consider what has happened in the atmospheres of Mars and Venus by comparison to Earth.
6 The same effect is found when the study is repeated Many peer reviewed papers have validated the early evidence; none have found against.
7 The effect is observable in very different studies and phenomena Studies as diverse as ice core samples, temperature measurements in oceans, land and atmosphere and the rising intensity of weather patterns only confirm the predictions of the first discoveries
The above list could be applied to any study of economics, social science, marketing or politics as well as the hard sciences, In fact Bradford Hill and Doll derived it from their pioneering work on the link between cigarettes and cancer. Any fairground huckster or well-funded corporate journalist can make claims. We hope the above will help you, gentle reader, to be a little more confident as to the veracity of those.
[1] Spiegelhalter, D: The Art Of Statistics Penguin 2019
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