Book Review - Science as a Contact Sport

By BJ Bjornson

Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth's Climate is Stephen Schneider�s personal journey through the Climate Change wars starting way back in the early 70�s up to 2009. For anyone who wants a view into how the scientific consensus developed, and how the IPCC process developed, this a pretty good read. As far as the actual science of Climate Change, on the other hand, it is a bit on the light side. This isn�t a book that lays out the case for a warming Earth, but instead takes you on a personal tour of the process surrounding the beginnings of the warnings about said warming up until the preparations for the (ultimately disappointing) Copenhagen climate conference. James Hrynyshyn has already done a pretty good review of the book back in December, so I�ll borrow from his post.

Schneider was one of the first climatologists to understand the need to communicate what his research was showing with the general public. He appears in documentaries back in the 1980s, and is second only to Jim Hansen when it comes to battle scars. I doubt there's anyone better positioned to tell the inside story of how science is hammered out.

I read this book a few weeks ago, before the purloined emails found their way onto a Russian server, which helps explains why I used words like "banal" to describe the correspondence that so many climate change pseudoskeptics find so shocking.
It also helped that I have spent several years actually working along actual scientists.

So the notion that they can sometimes be arrogant, hypersensitive, snarky and impatient with their critics did not exactly comes as a surprise. Schneider's book, however, provides some rare insight into the challenges that face climatologists who are being asked to do much more than just scientific research.

The IPCC process, for example, demands much of the volunteer army that produces the reports we use as the definitive, albeit politically watered down, word on the state of climate science. Here's what Schneider has to say about his introduction to that particular realm:

The way some IPCC detractors tell it, the IPCC is a loose cannon of radicals, which is nonsense -- it is much more a debating club dominated by conservative empirical scientists. It took several assessments just to get them to mention surprises, let alone formal subjective probabilistic treatment of uncertainties.

Schneider revisits the war between empiricists, who tend to scoff at the modelers and whom they accuse of violating the core tenets of science. The modelers, on the other hand, can't understand what's wrong with using the only tool at their disposal to predict the future, which is, after all, what anticipating climate change is all about.

There is more at the link, but the main point is the quote Hrynyshyn uses to close out his review:

Science doesn't work despite scientists being asses. Science works, to at least some extent, because scientists are asses. Bickering and backstabbing are essential elements of the process. Haven't any of these guys ever heard of "peer review"?

Schneider�s book also provides more than a few examples of the above, including some he was probably personally responsible for, and it is one of the biggest lessons one should take from the book, that scientists are the kind of fiercely competitive folks who would love to make their name by proving that everybody else is wrong about something.