Spero Consulting

Noth­ing.

For a num­ber of rea­sons that we have already expressed, we are highly skep­ti­cal of var­i­ous hypothe­ses and the­o­ries that attribute his­tor­i­cal changes (increases) in tem­per­a­tures to human devel­op­ment and extrap­o­late con­tin­ued changes (again, read increases) in tem­per­a­tures to people.

We’d pre­fer that cli­ma­tol­o­gists get a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the effects on earthly tem­per­a­tures of solar flares, sunspots, and solar winds as well as the cyclic vari­a­tions in the earth’s axis (tilt) before pre­scrib­ing actions to try to mit­i­gate the effects of using the air con­di­tion­ing or dri­ving the Suburban.

To us, the whole thing smacks of anti-​humanism and reminds us of the first Star Trek movie. (You know: the one where V-​ger wants to elim­i­nate the carbon-​based units (peo­ple) that (who) are infest­ing (oper­at­ing) the star­ship, Enter­prise – the one in which the main char­ac­ters look kind of old, rather than the sub­se­quent ones in which they look very old.)

But that’s not why we are writ­ing today. No, we’re try­ing to make a larger point.

Skep­ti­cism: what is it good for?

Dur­ing the past week, there has been much press cov­er­age of the con­tents of var­i­ous e-​mails among aca­d­e­mic believ­ers in “global warming.”

The e-​mails illus­trate that both mes­sage writ­ers and receivers have their own agen­das, and they won’t nec­es­sar­ily let facts stand in the way of their sto­ries and recommendations.

Thus, the “researchers” come across as biased, petty, vin­dic­tive, reflex­ive, schem­ing, and closed-​minded to empir­i­cal results that don’t sup­port their positions.

We’re sure the above char­ac­ter­i­za­tion is true, but we won­der what dis­tin­guishes those global warm­ing pro­po­nents from researchers in any other field?

Our answer: noth­ing but the topic. Show us a group of carbon-​based units push­ing (sup­ply­ing evi­dence to sup­port) a par­tic­u­lar hypoth­e­sis (per­spec­tive or view­point), and we’ll show you a biased, petty, vin­dic­tive, reflex­ive, schem­ing, and closed-​minded lot.

Do we expect (or demand) “sci­en­tists,” “researchers,” or aca­d­e­mics to be any­thing else?

No, we expect them to be fallen and human – just like us. (Per­haps, on aver­age, not as good-​looking, but oth­er­wise, not much dif­fer­ent.) We’d go as far to argue that any­one who claims oth­er­wise – that they are only seek­ing the truth – is either a liar or doesn’t accom­plish much: the for­mer because any research design involves any num­ber of sub­jec­tive choices and assump­tions that (by def­i­n­i­tion) depend upon the person’s biases and per­spec­tive and the lat­ter because no mat­ter how one tries to gen­er­al­ize the prob­lem to remove such choices and assump­tions, it is impos­si­ble. How­ever, that gen­er­al­iza­tion process tends to take a lot of time and energy to (attempt to) do.

By the way, we def­i­nitely believe that truth exists, but we don’t think that humans are per­fect arbiters of it; we’re not that pre­sump­tu­ous so we’ll leave that role to God.

Our point is that not only should one be skep­ti­cal of global warm­ing “research” results but one should be skep­ti­cal of all research. His­tor­i­cally, much that was thought to be known has been dis­carded: phlo­gis­ton and caloric the­ory anyone? Medical research, social sci­ence research? Ever hear of errors in those fields? No? Then you don’t pay much attention.

To be clear, we are not argu­ing that all such research and inves­ti­ga­tion is worth­less – just most of it. The prob­lem is that one can­not be sure what is worth­less and what is not until the project is com­pleted, or, in fact, some­times not for many years afterwards.

So, we have no prob­lem with the prover­bial equiv­a­lent of mil­lions of blind mon­keys ran­domly pound­ing away on their key­boards – each one try­ing to write a mas­ter­piece in their field of study.

Just remem­ber that regard­less of the ran­dom out­comes, each of those “mon­keys” has its own biases and prej­u­dices, and there is a very good chance those very human and inher­ent fac­tors affect how the “mon­keys” view their own out­put and the out­put of others.

P.S. We recall being at an aca­d­e­mic sem­i­nar where a very silly regres­sion “model” was pre­sented: one of many such ses­sions that we attended dur­ing our aca­d­e­mic career. The vari­ables of inter­est clearly depended upon one another. We explained that OLS (ordi­nary least squared) regres­sion was inap­pro­pri­ate model because there was no inde­pen­dent vari­able and the inter-​relationships must be con­sid­ered when attempt­ing to mea­sure the effect of one vari­able on another. All the vari­ables were endoge­nous. The pre­sen­ter replied that oth­ers had used the same (flawed) method on the same topic; so, they were just fol­low­ing a well-​established line-​of-​research. There’s no way to argue with the level of disin­ge­nu­ity and stu­pid­ity. (Mon­key see, mon­key do.) Sit­u­a­tions like that, along with sim­i­lar exam­ples in the cor­po­rate world, were the impe­tus for our firm’s motto, thought before calculation.