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June 23, 2006

Rooting for Global Warming

"Back off, man! I'm a scientist."

Bill Murray, Ghostbusters

I hope that anthropogenic global warming is occurring. That probably sounds like an odd admission, but let me explain my logic. Science has never been a popular discipline. In a day and age where modern society owes its very existence to the hard work of scientists and engineers who have done the research, testing and design work necessary to puzzle out the physical laws of our universe, we still see many people who think that man has never landed on the moon, that the patterns of the stars can foretell the future, or that Pepsi tastes better than Coke. It is as if there is some willful desire on the part of many people to intentionally turn their backs on what has advanced human society to this point. If it were just Luddites, it would be one thing, but far too many people seem interested in reaping the fruits of modern society while simultaneously pretending that our current position is due to mystic forces of some kind rather than a logical consequence of hard work and compiled knowledge. Such people view scientists with the kind of tolerance generally given to Republicans in Cambridge: somebody probably has to believe that sort of thing, but why do they insist on rubbing our noses in it?

In 1991, a rookie first baseman named Jeff Bagwell came up with the Houston Astros. That year sabrmetrician Bill James released The Bill James Handbook, a compilation of baseball statistics from the previous season with a section in the back devoted to projections of how hitters might be expected to do in the 1991 season. Bagwell's projection showed him to hit .315, if he played. No one else in the National League was projected to hit .315 or better in 1991. Writer Peter Gammons noted that discrepancy and commented on it in a review of the Handbook, wondering if James really thought a rookie was going to win the National League batting title. James believed no such thing; the projections were based on each player's unique circumstances, and no effort had been made to compare them to one another to see who was 'projected' to win a batting title or a home run title. As projections, while they would likely be reasonably accurate as a group, there would undoubtedly be outliers, and those were the probable sources for league leaders. But Gammons is a well-known writer in the baseball world, and so his comment got a lot of press. Suddenly the validity of James' projections was riding on that rookie.

Sabrmetrics is the study of baseball statistics. If the sciences are a ghetto, sabrmetrics is the most run-down tenement in the ghetto, with all the windows broken and crack dealers actually wandering into the building to conduct their business. In other words, sabrmetrics gets no respect whatsoever (although that is slowly changing as the science demonstrates its worth). Bill James has spent much of his adult life creating and defending sabrmetrics as a valid discipline. In 1991, that discipline suddenly had its fate linked to Jeff Bagwell, thanks to James' projections and Gammons' review. It didn't matter how well the projections did as a group any longer. All anyone was going to remember was that James 'predicted' Jeff Bagwell to win a batting title when, in fact, he hit .212 in limited action and was sent back to the minors after a month of struggles. Gammons' comment, while valid (rookies don't win batting titles as a rule), had given skeptics of sabrmetrics a great deal of ammunition if Bagwell didn't come through.

As Red Sox fans know well (Bagwell was a member of the Astros because Sox GM Lou Gorman dealt him there for reliever Larry Andersen, a deal that will live in infamy. At least we got cash for the Babe), Bagwell was a phenomenon as a rookie (and went on to a near-Hall of Fame career). He didn't win a batting title but he hit well enough that people noted that James had predicted that he was going to be good. Sabrmetrics got a small boost, but more importantly, it didn't get a devastating failure.

We have been told for years that the consensus of scientists is that anthropogenic global warming is occurring. While skeptics have been quick to trot out comparisons to Galileo and Copernicus, the fact is that scientific consensus is correct a lot more than it's wrong. This ongoing appeal to authority has tied science to global warming as surely as Peter Gammons tied Jeff Bagwell to sabrmetrics. In the event global warming turns out to be incorrect, then, the mystics will be handed a rather significant load of ammunition in their quest to marginalize what is one of the most important disciplines in human society. I am not suggesting that scientists will be burned at the stake or that libraries will be sacked, but critical thinking and rationalism will have to defend themselves against the 'global warming scare' for decades to come. Imagine what the intelligent design folk would do with the news anthropogenic global warming turned out to be a bad hypothesis? So I am of the opinion that we'll all be better off if the scientists are correct about this, because we've placed a rather large stack of chips on that particular bet. While global warming may well be as dangerous as the alarmists fear, I suspect that we can adapt to it more effectively than people currently believe.