The more the CRU Climategate scandal unfolds, the more likely it is to do some serious damage to the Anthropogenic Global Warming scientific bandwagon.

Not only has the word "gate" been securely attached to it, it has been likened to Vietnam, and clearly it is the biggest blow the Global Warmists (yes that is a term now) have suffered yet.

I'm thinking that it might be analogous to yet another burst bubble, although it's probably too early to tell whether it really has burst. The sort of massive collapse that characterized burst bubbles involves more than criticism and condemnation from skeptics; and a legitimate concern might be that the resultant collapse in public trust might extend beyond the global warming bandwagon.

By any standard, though AGW is a classic bandwagon. Bandwagon thinking comes and goes, but the global warming bandwagon has been one of the most relentless ones I have ever seen. I've seen a lot of fads, but these have usually been cultural or political; nothing quite like the strange, very forced interplay between science and politics at the heart of what is called "Global Warming." Or the more recent term "Climate Change" (calculated to sound more palatable to skeptics, for who would not agree that climates are subject to change?)

My problem with bandwagon thinking is twofold. First, there is nothing logical about a bandwagon, whether from a scientific perspective or not:

Logical fallacies are types of arguments that are invalid. Once you know the logical fallacies, you can recognize them in arguments constantly. Knowing these can really help to decipher what is true and is what is pure baloney.

The first logical fallacy I wanted to do is a clear example of just how ridiculous these arguments can be. The argument basically says lots of people agree with what I am saying, therefore I am right. The number of people who agree with something has no bearing on whether or not it is true. For thousands of years people believed the Earth was flat; that didn't make it true.

You hear this fallacy used in advertisements a lot. They try to convince you that because other people use their product, it works. Just think of how many times you have heard the line "the trend that is sweeping the nation." This says nothing about the product being advertised except that it is widely used. Don't believe in or use something just because it's popular. Look for the evidence.

The second problem I have with bandwagons is personal. I don't like them. Not liking them is also a logical problem, as I freely admit. Because, just as bandwagons can be wrong and misguided (like the Prohibition bandwagon), they can also be absolutely right (like the microbe bandwagon). So ideally, just as I should not allow the existence of a bandwagon to compel me to adopt an idea, nor should it deter me from adopting it. Easy to say, but harder to implement.

So, I am an admitted skeptic, and I probably err on the side of skepticism too often. But OTOH, my skeptical and contrarian outlook is fueled when I read that popularity can lead to inaccuracy. Yes, even in science, where skepticism is supposed to be built in.

Here's an abstract from a study titled "Large-Scale Assessment of the Effect of Popularity on the Reliability of Research":

Based on theoretical reasoning it has been suggested that the reliability of findings published in the scientific literature decreases with the popularity of a research field. Here we provide empirical support for this prediction. We evaluate published statements on protein interactions with data from high-throughput experiments. We find evidence for two distinctive effects. First, with increasing popularity of the interaction partners, individual statements in the literature become more erroneous. Second, the overall evidence on an interaction becomes increasingly distorted by multiple independent testing. We therefore argue that for increasing the reliability of research it is essential to assess the negative effects of popularity and develop approaches to diminish these effects.

Fascinatingly, less controversial scientific bandwagons are subject to the vagaries of political whim, as the vaccines-cause-autism meme in the last election cycle showed:

No matter who wins in Pennsylvania today, the next President of the United States will support research into the growing evidence of some link between vaccines and autism.

Senator John McCain has already expressed his belief that vaccines and the mercury containing preservative thimerosal could be implicated in what he has rightly termed an "autism epidemic."

Senator Hillary Clinton, in response to a questionnaire from the autism activist group A-CHAMP, wrote that she was "Committed to make investments to find the causes of autism, including possible environmental causes like vaccines." And when asked if she would support a study of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated children, she said: "Yes. We don't know what, if any, kind of link there is between vaccines and autism - but we should find out."

I can well remember how slow the AIDS bandwagon was to develop. Many activists on the left and the right were skeptical, and many continued to be skeptical, because there are some unexplained holes in the theory. (There are always holes in theories.) This ultimately led to officially implemented, government-sponsored AIDS skepticism in certain countries, and (so the mainstream AIDS bandwagon community argues) to many deaths:

...from 2000 to 2005 South Africa implemented policies based on the belief that HIV does not cause Aids, and declined to roll out adequate antiretroviral therapy. It has been estimated in two separate studies that around 350,000 people died unnecessarily in South African during this period.

Similarly, notwithstanding the skeptics, I suspect there must be some relationship between cholesterol and heart disease, because I find it hard to believe that the world's cardiology community is driven by a bogus bandwagon at the behest of Big Pharma. I may be wrong, but if that were to turn out to be the case, I don't know whether I would ever trust a medical doctor again. (But what bandwagon could I join? Some homeopathic/natural herbalist bandwagon?)

For better or for worse, bandwagons seem to be an inescapable part of science, probably because scientists are people, and bandwagon thinking is an inescapable part of human behavior.

And much as I might not like it, a good argument can be made that bandwagons actually help advance science:

This paper analyzes the development of a scientific bandwagon in cancer research using a social worlds perspective and qualitative methods. It shows that a "standardized" package of oncogene theory and recombinant DNA technologies served as a highly transportable interface among many different laboratories and lines of research. That is, the package promoted intersections among different social worlds which, in turn, facilitated the rapid development of oncogene research and the larger molecular biological cancer research bandwagon. The paper proposes the bandwagon as one process by which conceptual shifts in science occur and shows that the process of such change is inseparable from both the local and broad scale organization of work and technical infrastructures.

I say this in full awareness of medicine's tonsillectomy bandwagon in the earlier 20th Century. Or the even more egregious lobotomy bandwagon in the 1950s. But if a doctor scrubs before surgery in obeisance to the microbe theory bandwagon, I would argue that's a good thing.

Who would want to be operated on by a contrarian doctor who refused to wash his hands?

And while this may reflect my anti-bandwagon bias, I'm not entirely sure I would trust a doctor who belonged to the green "sustainable healthcare" bandwagon that's catching on. I'm not even sure I would trust my heathcare to a doctor who belonged to the outdoor clothesline bandwagon, for example.

...the original reason clothes lines fell into disfavor: they connote poverty.

Many subdivisions and home associations ban outdoor clotheslines for the same reason they ban sofas on the front porch and Dodge Chargers on cinder blocks. Who can forget the maze of clotheslines blotting the landscape in turn of the century immigrant ghettos in the US--none with clothes you would wear or steal?

But with new awareness of carbon footprints, the clothes drier is now seen as a juice guzzler like big freezers and refrigerators. Especially because clothes will dry by themselves if you are only patient.

So as clotheslines are destigmatized more families will be hanging their clean laundry in public. And it won't always be possible to tell if the reasons are environmental or economic. Especially with college kids, who also tend to have the sofa on the porch.

But maybe shouldn't be such a bandwagon skeptic. I'm probably at risk of becoming a crank.