Al Gore has been attacked again in an article by William Broad in the SMH.
The first thing to note is that this article comes from the New York Times, but is an abbreviated and badly truncated version. The original has about 770 more words. It brings the issue back into some balance towards the end in a section that the SMH has seen fit to prune.
This article has been thoroughly debunked at RealClimate by Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt at Gristmill by Dave Roberts and Andrew Dessler and at Deltoid by Tim Lambert. Dave Roberts describes the article as possibly:
the worst, sloppiest, most dishonest piece of reporting I’ve ever seen in the NYT. It’s got all the hallmarks of a vintage Gore hit piece: half-truths, outright falsehoods, unsubstantiated quotes, and a heaping dose of innuendo.
So the job of debunking the article has been very thoroughly done. I’ll restrict myself to two comments.
First, whereas Broad says that Gore is being doubted and questioned by mainstream scientists, he actually cites a string of sceptics or deniers (Quiggin has taken to calling them delusionists). In fact Kevin Vranes and Roger Pielke Jr are not climate scientists at all.
Second, when anyone gives the upper limit of 58 centimetres as the forecast rise in sea-level by 2100 citing the IPCC they have blown their credibility. The IPCC gave 58cm as the upper limit from such things as glacial melting and thermal expansion, but specifically excluding melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets because they are too hard to quantify. On the 7.30 Report Dr Barrie Pittock who used to head the CSIRO and is a leading contributor to the IPCC put prospective melting at between 50 centimetres and 1.5 metres by 2100. As a rule of thumb, he said, a metre will see the coastline retreat by 100m.
The 7.30 Report cited a study done for the insurance industry that found 700,000 building at risk nationwide, nearly 250,000 of them in Queensland, including much of the Gold Coast.
All that Gore did was indicate what would happen if the Greenland ice sheet melted, or half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica without stating a time frame, namely a rise of 6 metres or 20 feet. The following night on the 7.30 Report NASA scientist James Hansen said that the last time both ice sheets melted the sea rose at the rate of a metre every 20 years.
The question is raised as to why do the denialists do it? I liked Uncle Milton’s comment on John Quiggin’s post on Channel Four’s program The Great Global Warming Swindle.
GW denialists exist for the same reason that people exist who believe that: the moon landings were a hoax; Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed were murdered by the British secret service; AIDS is not caused by the HIV virus; no planes flew into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon on September 11 2001 (they were instead bombed by the United States government); Elvis Presley is still alive; and so on.
Some people choose to believe what they want to believe, regardless of the evidence. In fact, the more evidence that is presented that shows them to be wrong, the stronger their beliefs become.
Just as it is impossible to persuade Mr Mohammed Al Fayed that his son was not murdered by the secret service (any and all evidence to the contrary being part of the conspiracy) the more scientific evidence is presented of the existence of human-induced global warming, the more GW denialists believe that GW science is merely a political conspiracy, or the product of scientists conforming to peer pressure, etc.
Since these types of beliefs are impossible to falsify, they can be maintained for as long as the believers have the energy or interest to maintain them.
It is quite irresponsible journalism to print this stuff. Broad partly covers himself by giving Al Gore a response and printing a wholesome endorsement from Michael Oppenheimer at Princeton. But the impression is left that Gore has overcooked his case and is an alarmist. Moreover mainstream science is questioning his facts. And so the meme is repeated.
I’ll give the last word to Nexus 6 whose patience is being severely tested by ‘wingnut central’ aka the Oz editorial writer:
I gotta admit, though, these crazies have got some staying power. They’re like the Terminator; no matter how much you kick their arse, blow them up and rain destruction on them (using such weapons as logic, good science and an association with reality), they still keep on coming.
its pure rearguardism, what else. they would rather starve to death than admit they are completely and humiliatingly wrong.
like bush and the war on terror, it seems the right is now completely incapable of perceiving reality, they are simply slaves to their inhuman and monstrous ideology.
it’s sad really. everything they touch turns to dust.
“Climate change denialists: why do they do it?”
Cui Bono? Big Oil and Allied, corporations who function as psychopaths, that’s who. They only have eyes for their bottom lines and will protect them uber alles. Nothing personal.
“I gotta admit, though, these crazies have got some staying power. They’re like the Terminator; no matter how much you kick their arse, blow them up and rain destruction on them (using such weapons as logic, good science and an association with reality), they still keep on coming.”
Yes they do, like Big Tobacco’s “scientists”, who have been at it over 50 years. If you pay them money(peanuts compared to Oil Cartel profits) these “scientists” will sit in a room(or give a lecture or press grab or present a non peer-reviewed paper) and argue the toss like John Cleese in the famous contrarian skit.
Sometimes only a cliche says it best. Sorry.
“…. who pays the piper, calls the tune.”
I was puzzled for a while because it seems to me that the most vociferous ‘deniers’ in the media and blogosphere are not scientists (or even people with any scientific background) but are politically or economically right-wing / libertarian pundits. Why wouldn’t they accept the science and argue about what our response to it should be since that’s the area they know more about?
My take is that these people have a genuine fear that climate change will give governments an excuse to exert much more control in the economic sphere and that this will be a very bad thing. Thus being disingenuous about the science is justifiable as they’re just protecting society from over-reaching governments. They think that once they admit the scientific debate is lost, the political consequences flow automatically.
I wouldn’t be so worried if I was them. Governments are only now even accepting there’s a problem and they’re acting very tentatively indeed. In Australia, (and the US, Canada, etc) the climate policies of both major parties can be expected to have a minimal impact on both emissions and industry / economy, so I’m not quite sure what they’re worried about.
‘Climate change denialists: why do they do it?’
They like the attention. It sells papers. What other way to get readers to look at you than to rally against the so-called orthodoxy. Doesn’t matter if you wrong. Why bother with detail, nuance or style? Bolt is a good example.
Climate denialists are a mixed bunch, and no doubt have varying reasons for their point of view.
However, I think that the prevaiing angle is that there’s something risky and “lefty” in agreeing with the “tree-huggers” etc, so that one response is a kind of knee-jerk reaction against the mention of global warming.
I worry more about the climate change “fence-sitters”- among whom our Prime Minister is the finest exponent. John Howard very cleverly parrots the spiel of the corporate mining lobby. It goes like this:
“Yes, climate change is happening, but gradually, and anyway, Australia can’t make any difference to it. (By the way, we don’t say GLOBAL WARMING, because that doesn’t sound as nice and bland as ‘climate change’).
“But, of course, climate change is serious enough that we must have nuclear power, and especially more uranium mining, as quickly as possible.”
Then we have the Howard puppets, like Tim Flannery, wobbling about on his strings. He thinks that climate change is so bad that everyone else but Australia must have nuclear power – and it’s Australia’s moral duty to sell and sell and sell – uranium to them (not for the money, of course!)
Sorry, but that statement is completely wrong.
Like a 25yo’s belief that he is immortal, one of the strands of the GW denialist’s personality is a naivety that says things always turn out OK in the end.
The song that runs thru their heads on an endless loop is “All things bright and beautiful.”
Quite so, Wbb.
And lets get real: Climate change denialism is also a simpler phenomenon of paid whores publishing material they know to be baseless rubbish, for industry money.
As David mentioned there is economic liberalism. But looking at the denialist commentary in the media I think there is much more to it than that. First there is anti-left zealotry which is one of the key components of the ideology of the modern right. Most people who consider themselves to be of the left support action, in many cases very substantial action, in response to climate change. For many years now commentators of the Australian right has been convinced and laboured to convince others that progressives are a fifth column out to take down our nation/culture/civilization. Climate change, they reason, must be a plot to achieve just that. Their dislike of government intervention in the economy serves only to confirm this. Anyone who doubts this thesis need look no further than Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair who have done much to try and portray the environmentalist for whom global warming is the new religion rather than, say, the climate scientist, as the public face of climate change.
The right see the left as not only dangerous but vast, an establishment even. In response they have glorified the figure of the skeptic or contrarian. What better way to be contrarian than to disagree with the leftist establishment AND the internationalist establishment (UN) AND the scientific establishment.
Then we come to the question of the polls. The commentators never mention how the issues of climate change polls, but there can be no doubt that they know. The most recent result had no less than 93% believing that climate change was a problem. These results terrify these people. Their â??the left vs the peopleâ?? world view cannot be sustained in the face of to many issues on which the moderate left and the people agree. Hence these issues tend to illicit the most venomous and hysterical comments. Thereâ??s Iraq, Industrial Relations, David Hicks, the ABC and of course there is climate change.
What is it with all of you AGW true believers?
Why do you feel so threatened when a few humble bloggers and other skeptics say that you are all unnecessarily in panic merchant mode?
Maybe the sky is not actually about to fall?
I would seem to me that your panic is more akin to the desire of the Spanish inquisition to maintain the purity of the faith and denounce we humble heretics. Who pose the simple question; where is the actual evidence that makes the case in a manner that is consistent with the scientific method?
Just keep in mind that one can make a religious argument by an invocation of faith may work for matters of religion….
Oh hang on a minute the global warming thing is the cornerstone of the new green religion…
See this proves my point. “Humble heretics” up against the big bad establishment. No mention of public opinion.
This does to. Never mind the fact that most scientists agree with the AGW thesis, must be the work of the greens and their new religion.
Al Gore’s involvement is problematic too. He necessarily lends a partisan flavour to the topic. So while he has been extremely effective in raising mass awareness, he has also caused quite a few reactionaries to dig in harder.
On the other hand the non-partisan Flannery didn’t escape political criticism here either. Having done more than any other individual to raise the issue in this country he now cops criticism for being both a Howard lackey and a leftist stooge.
Iain Hall: just because people you don’t like believe something doesn’t automatically make it wrong.
Chris, Iain Hall’s comment is such a perfect example of the point that you were making that I’d think, if I didn’t know better, that you were one and the same person.
Iain Hall: just because people you don’t like believe something doesn’t automatically make it wrong.
Oh come on Robert you can do better than this.
And for the record I don’t dislike AGW advocates I just think that they are wrong.
All levity to one side the problem for those in the AGW camp is that some of their most prominent advocates like Gore and Flannery are either hypocrites who jet around the planet and have electricity bills that would shame a third world country or they are alarmists who want to peddle worst case scenarios that are so ridiculous, like claims of a 100m sea level rise, that the more sober and sincere advocates loose all credibility as well.
Can someone please point me to sustantive evidence of a model about AGW that has accurately predicted past events in weather patterns? Surely, any model worth anything must be able to be tested against actual past outcomes. If you cannot how can we use those same models as an accurate predictor of the future? I haven’t been able to find one and until I can the belief with certainty isn’t there.
Certainly, Keegan.
Oops, link no worky.
Here you go.
Thank you FDB (or is it Marg?). I have read that. I don’t doubt the temerature rise but the models that place the blame upon human activity are the ones that I haven’t been able to find ground-proof evidence for. Can you help with that?
Iain How can you add to global warming if there isn’t any?
Well Ian Hall you may not dislike those who agree with the AGW thesis but you certainly seem to subscribe to the paranoid notion that they are a threat to Western Civilization. You did write:
Elsewhere you have claimed that the left indulges in â??excuse making and acquiescing to totalitarianismâ??.
Now perhaps I have misjudged you. Perhaps these are just criticisms leveled at the far left, but given that you also say: “to the majority of those who identify themselves as â??leftiesâ?? the enemy is the United States and capitalism” I sincerely doubt it.
I have a relative who use to work for a tobacco company. While he was there, he picked up the industry propaganda regarding the effects of tobacco. He also appears to have picked up his AGW denialism there as well. I would wager that most denialists get their anti-AGW opinions from their workplace, and that there is some economic advantage to holding those opinions. It is almost a given that if you work for the oil, coal or mining industry, you would have anti-environmental attitudes.
Chris
Thanks for taking the trouble to read what I have written and posting links to the pieces in question.
I have engaged with many lefties over the time that I have been blogging and almost without exception at least expressed a sneering disdain for the USA and quite often-outright disgust or hatred. There is nothing paranoid about my statement
As it is the hard left & Greens who have been driving much of the AGW hysteria I don’t think that my suggestion that the subtext of the more extreme advocates is the creation of a social system that is profoundly anti-industrial and anti-capitalist is that far off the mark.
Now unless you can substantiate your suggestion that my understanding of the AGW advocates is actually wrong I will happily stand by my opinion.
Ian: To explain myself a little better, your argument seems to be that
* Deep Greens believe that global warming is real
* Deep Greens have some kooky ideas.
* Therefore global warming is a kooky idea.
It’s flawed logic.
It’s flawed logic.
Robert what has some very flawed logic is the “science” of the AGW theory.
The majority of the theory is based on the sketchiest data that is extrapolated to the nth degree. The incontrovertible fact that many green alarmists seek to propagate some rather ridiculous ideas like the previously mentioned 100 m sea level rise just makes the weakness of the theory more clear to me.
Iain, can you give a reference to the 100m sea level rise statement by Greens?
I find it curious, because I understand that if all the ice melted then the sea will rise by about 80m. I can’t think where the other 20m would come from.
Are you sure this isn’t another denialist exaggeration in the reporting (ie a lie)?
Iain, the last time a similar amount of carbon went up into the air was 55m years ago. At that time the temperature went up 5C around the equator and 8C in the more temperate regions. The time taken for the planet to get back to the temperature prior to this event was 200,000 years.
This time we are putting the carbon up there 30 times as fast. Are you sure there is nothing to be concerned about?
In this sense Bob Carter is quite wrong. What is happening now probably has no precedent in the history of the planet, except possibly before the biggest exinction of all 251m years ago.
I suggest you might think about it in terms of unacceptable risk and the precautionary principle.
The onus is on you to prove that there is no connection and or no concern about graphs like the one in this article and that there is no connection with this graph when the known physics as attested by scientists everywhere says that there is.
One of the most interesting people quoted in that terrible article is Roger Pielke Jr. He’s not an “environmental scientist”, he’s just some sort of media star who gets calls from journalists who need a quote.
The guy doesn’t even publish.
RPJ is a political scientist, though he does publish.
There is of course a Roger Pielke Snr who is a climate scientist, and whose views are not easily captured in a neat label.
It seems that Jnr may be trading on the halo of his dad’s reputation in terms of climate expertise.
that statement seems to be proof that we don’t have anything to worry about. either the massive warming won’t happen since they carbon is already in the atmosphere and we haven’t seen 5C of warming or it will be inevitable because the carbon won’t leave the atmosphere fast enough.
Don’t worry about the likes of Iain Hall. He’s an attention seeking imbecile.
He refuses to acknowledge the easily testable scientific data that shows a clear correlation between anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations and rising temperatures.
Here’s a graph that even an idiot can follow.
You live and learn.
On the Science Show today, I think towards the end of this item, Robyn Williams said that next week he was going to talk to a scientist (not a greenie) about the possibility of the sea level rising 100m. I’ll be all ears and a transcript should be available.
drscroogemcduck I googled a bit on that 55m year thing and it gets more complicated.
I originally read about it in Lovelock’s book. He refers to work done by Harry Elderfield but I can’t find his stuff or much about it. The ’30 times faster’ bit comes from the work of James Zachos, which is briefly summarised here. (The 4.5 billion is wrong; it should be trillion or gigatons or something. It’s also not clear whether carbon is just carbon or CO2 or CO2 equivalent – probably just carbon.)
From this article the concern is about what we are in the process of doing over a 300 year period.
There is a good summary of the palaeocene-eocene thermal maximum (PETM) event of 55m years ago at Wikipedia. It seems that the temperature went up, but the levels of carbon in the atmosphere are less certain. Wikipedia says 2-3,000 ppm but another article suggests that the CO2 may have only been 500-1,000, not enough in itself to cause the warming.
If you just get back to our situation and CO2, it’s now at 380 ppm and the lower boundary of the danger zone is considered to be 450 ppm to avoid the possibility of nasty tipping points and abrupt climate change. That gives us about 35 years if we don’t increase our rate of increase.
Am I missing something? I sincerely hope so!
Well, average temp in some areas of the Antarctic has risen 5 degrees in the last fifty years. Thats not a projection, thats a measurement. 2.5% across all the whole Antarctic.
Thats 5 times / 2.5 times the average global rate. You do the sums.
Look …it would be nice to have denialists included in the debate, but Im afraid there just isnt time to waste on them.
A couple of things are just plain wrong with the Broad article. First, Kevin Vranes has not published any peer-reviewed articles on climate change, yet heâ??s quoted as a climatologist. Hereâ??s a link to his published articles.
http://tinyurl.com/2lhaqc
Vranesâ?? motto should be: â??Iâ??m not a real climatologist, but I play one on my blog.â??
Then you have Roger Pielke Jr., who in the Spring of 2006, pocketed a couple of thousand dollars writing for Regulation Magazine which is put out by the Cato Institute. Cato takes in millions from Exxon Mobil to fund contrarians like Roger Pielke Jr. and give them a high media profile.
Hereâ??s Rogerâ??s Regulation article: http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv29n1/v29n1.html
And just months ago, Roger Pielke Jr. testified at a congressional hearing that President Bush does not distort science. This opinion stands in stark contrast to testimony and newspaper reports finding a history of scientific suppression by the Bush administration.
The Associated Press revealed that it was Republicans who had invited Pielke to come and speak.
http://www.timesreporter.com/index.php?ID=63687&r=4
Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado who was invited by GOP lawmakers, said â??the reality is that science and politics are intermixed.â??
Alex why is it that when ever you try to counter what I may say about this topic that your first response is the personal attack?
Somehow I suspect that you have never forgiven me for refusing to bow to your feminist dogma about domestic violence but that is getting off topic.
The graph you refer to relies on two sets of proxy data; one from a comparison of Oxygen isotopes to give an approximation of the temperature in the past and the other from Ice cores to provide a measure of CO2 in paleoclimates. I considered the matter of oxygen isotopes here and have long considered the Ice core data is rather dubious because the gas samples are in fact very small so a couple of squiggly lines for dodgy data sets have some correlation? You trust Wiki as a definitive source? Oh come on anyone can create a Wiki post why some one I know even wrote one about Moi ; you will have to do better than that.
I will post in a minute on the general issue, but want to first address the specific issues that Brian raises a few posts above:
- firstly, 450ppm is NOT considered to be the “lower boundary of the danger zone” at all. Many people in fact consider it to be the boundary above which we dare not step. At 450 ppm, the likelihood of overstepping the tipping points into the complete melt of Greenland and West Antarctic, the melt of the tundra and the destruction of the Amazon becomes too great to contemplate.
- secondly, having raised the question of whether carbon or carbon dioxide is being discussed, you then compare a figure of carbon dioxide, CO2, (380 ppm) with a figure of carbon dioxide equivalent, CO2e, (450 ppm). CO2e is the measure of the climate forcing equivalent to CO2 concentrations, and includes methane, fluorocarbons and the various other greenhouse gases. The current CO2e is reckoned by some to be in the vicinity of 420 ppm or higher already.
- thirdly, how long have we got? You calculate your 35 years based on, I assume, a rate of 2 ppm increases continuing for 35 years, then stopping abruptly to be zero at 2042. This is a bizarre suggestion. Even without the CO2e issue discussed in my second point. To keep us below 450 ppm, we’d have to start the process of cutting emissions right now in order to be able to reach a level close enough to natural equilibrium soon enough. Of course, there’s also the point that business as usual will not see us continuing with 2 ppm annual rises. It’ll see us reaching rises of 4 ppm by the time we get to 2042, with little doubt. If we put off action until then, we’ll be so far over 450 ppm that there’s little chance of avoiding runaway climate change.
I also just wanted to make a quick point on the original thrust of this post, which has, as per usual, been hijacked into yet another pointless debate on whether climate change is real.
I think Chris’s first post has been the closest to the truth thus far, interestingly parallelled by Ian Hall, following the traditional Andrew Bolt line of argument.
As so often with the right wing hacks, they highlight their greatest fears by attributing certain goals to those they hate. In the case of climate change, being conservative and having benefited substantially from the status quo, they attack climate scientists and activists for attempting to tear down the status quo.
That, I believe, is the basic reason why climate sceptics still exist. They are deeply deeply afraid that, if climate change is real, their way of life will have to stop, their fundamental construction of reality will be challenged. In the good old fashioned tradition of cognitive dissonance, they’d rather pretend it’s not happening than face that prospect…
AGW denialists/delusionists should be banned from LP. It sounds anti-democratic, but so what? We ban personal abusers, don’t we?
Perhaps there should be a discussion devoted to revising LP policy.
tim, I was happy to let the debate sidetrack for a while, because it illustrates the issue raised in the post, to which I hope to return. Your last paragraph is very close to the mark. I’d express it differently but I’d be saying much the same thing.
As to your first comment, third point, of course we need to start immediately and yes the annual increase is likely to double over the next thirty years. I’ve just been reading Woodside’s projections of energy needs and they are banking on it.
Angela Merkel said the other day that we are 5 minutes after midnight in taking action. I think she’s right.
There is confusion in the literature about carbon, CO2 and CO2e. Also the starting point for temperature change, where we variously have last century, ‘before industrialisation’ which can mean 1850, 1750 or the 1750-1850 average, the last 50 years, the 20th century average, the last three decades, 1950-1980 and ‘now’. But ‘now’ is most likely the 1980-2000 average in climate scientist speak. I’m sure climate scientists take all this in their stride, but it becomes mangled in the secondary reporting and confusing for lay persons like myself. If you want to have a go at a guest post on this, let me know.
Yes, and the CO2e has problems because some of the other gases have a linear relationship with temperature change compared with CO2 which is logarithmic and persist for different time periods.
All of which makes people like Iain laugh because of the uncertainties. But the time for coherent, planet-wide decisions was yesterday and you have to run with the information you’ve got and vary things as you go.
I’ve just read that the Tugun desalination has 300 people building the plant and 120 designers designing it at the same time. It’s what you have to do when you are in a jam and have the responsibility, rather than sitting in an armchair and taking pot shots.
See y’all tonight.
Maggie, thanks for your comment. It was stuck in spam for nearly four hours because of the three links and my slackness in not clearing the spam first thing this morning.
What you say reflects badly on the motivation and/or competence of Broad as author of the article.
Well, Iain, if you’re simply going to argue from a position of incredulity, then there’s no point engaging.
I suppose you’re a creationist, Iain? After all, you’re using precisely the same intellectually dishonest tactics anti-evolutionists use.
No Tim we Skeptics are not deeply afraid at all it is just that many of us have pretty good bullshit detectors that have been ringing more loudly every time the likes of Robin Willims says on the science show that the oceans are going to rise by 100m or when the likes of Al Gore rants on about cuttiing carbon emmissions whilst being a very frequent flyer indeed.
On top of that the science is anything but settled but what is clear is that so many â??true believersâ?? like Silkworm are so afraid of a contary viewpoint that they want to ban desenting voices If ever there was an exampe of the religious being afraid of any doubt this poster is a perfect exempler. Consider the stats in this thread of the 42 comments here as I write apart from my six the majority support the notion of the post . so do less than one eigth of the comments pose such a threat if that they should be excluded from discussion ?
You see it is people like Lefty E who do the AGW case a great disservice; in the same way that he would deny being in the pay of the communists whilst holding a Marxist viewpoint most of the people who are unconvinced that the AGW case has been definitively made are not â??paid whoresâ?? at all. This is just a baseless attempt to smear. Many more honest commentators in the Pro AGW camp at least try to base their argument in the science and accept that the essence of science is a healthy skepticism and the notion that noting is immutable or immune to further question and inquiry. Sadly the likes of Lefty E and Silkworm are just making a religious argument based on the green faith, whilst the chant â??silence the hereticsâ?? runs like a tape loop in their heads.
Im not for banning myself – just for ignoring.
Ian Hall you claimed that â??it is the hard left & Greens who have been driving much of the AGW hysteria.â?? I find this suggestion hard to believe. As I mentioned previously 93% of people now believe global warming is a problem, yet no more than 10% of people seem willing to vote for the Greens. On other issues (eg drugs) the Greens has failed to get the community on side. I simply donâ??t see how they could create such widespread support for the idea of AGW.
The 93% figure is also an important one to note when it comes to questions of silencing climate change denialists. There is absolutely no reason to, they have lost the public debate about as comprehensively as it is possible to lose a public debate.
Also the whole freedom of speech thing…
And here are your paid whores and oil industry pimps. Note that I used the word “also”. Denialism also includes those who simply fear the type of economic changes facing up to reality will bring.
Imagine, uncommodified raw fuel sources like solar and wind! The horror!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2004230,00.html
Definitely don’t ban the sceptics from posting here or anywhere else! Most obviously, there’s the whole freedom of speech thing. But secondly, sceptics play an important role in ensuring that the rest of us get our arguments as solid as possible.
At a purely scientific level, the few peer reviewed sceptic articles that have appeared have triggered new rounds of research to investigate the issues. The most famous of these was the whole question of whether tropospheric cooling debunked the whole global warming theory. Further research showed that, in fact, given where the CO2e was accumulating, it was part of the very same phenomenon.
However, what I would like to see is appropriate treatment of sceptics at all levels of media – both mainstream and LP-type. What I mean by this is that:
- non-peer reviewed material must never be treated as equivalent to peer reviewed;
- there must be full disclosure in every case where funding is relevant (for example, every time someone publishes something from the IPA or the Lavoisier Group, like good old Ray Evans, it should be made clear that they are funded directly by coal, uranium, oil and gas corporations); and
- when using the dreaded term ‘balance’ to justify running stories that deny anthropogenic warming, the balance should be weighted to the proportion of credible scientists represented by the respective view.
That should settle the issue…
Brian, thanks very much for the invite. If I get the opportunity to pull something together, I’ll let you know.
tim, I’m with you on the value of sceptics as long as they have decent science to back them.
I’d like to ask Iain, though, whether he supports all the assertions made in Broad’s article and whether, using science, he can refute all the criticisms of it in the four posts I linked to. It’s the Broad kind of denialism, and the sources he quotes, that I was on about.
Via Tim Lambert, Ray Pierrehumbert at RealClimate put an earlier Broad article through the wringer and found it seriously wanting. So the guy’s got form, although it seems that he’s a co-Pulitzer Prize winner and hence presumably capable of good journalism.
Here are two quotes from raypierre I found interesting:
And points out that if you don’t act alarmed when you call emergency there’s a good chance they won’t take any notice of you.
Start with this fact, look at climate observations over the last 30 years, then extend back in time to the last 50, the last 150, the last 1,000 and back in phases to the Pleistocene (1.8m to 11,550 years ago), realising that the data is less complete in it’s coverage and less direct, sometimes using proxies.
I don’t know how you can do this without becoming a bit alarmed.
To take up one point in the Broad article, Easterbrook flashed a slide showing temperature trends for the last 15,000 years. Why did he chose 15,000 years instead of 11,550 years representing the Holocene interglacial? Answer: It had some really big wobbles in it in the 8-15,000 section that suited his argument. In other words, cherry picking.
The interesting story is that from 8,000 years ago you hit a really sweet spot that really suits the large primate homo sapiens, without large variations but gradually cooling. But then it suddenly takes off. The AGW scientists provide a coherent explanation for this, in fact the only coherent explanation. Can we really afford to be relaxed and comfortable?
Climate change denialists: why do they do it?
I prefer: “Climate Change Proponents: Why do they do it?”
Let me try to explain why we do it in a few succinct sentences.
1: Because the scientific debate has been hijacked by the “social justice and equity lobby”, the extremist environmental (the Gaia crew) and the far left “we want a revolution now” cult.
2: Because there is valid science to suggest alternatives to the current warming (solar, cosmic, orbital etc etc etc etc) which are NOT in the models!
3: Because there are many unexplained anomalies with the science i.e. if CO2 is the cause, how is it possible that CO2 has been up to 10 times the current levels with no runaway effect?
4: Because the computer models (upon which the doomsday PREDICTIONS are based) are shoddy and have not yet predicted the actual climate accurately either now or in the past without severe fudging (i.e. the Hadley predictions). There are even comments in the GISS model warning against reducing the resolution!
5: Because there have been so many LIES told i.e. the deliberate and calculated removal the the Mediaeval Warm Period and Little Ice Ages from the now discredited Hockey Stick!
For these and a thousand other reasons scientists are questioning the “we are all going to die” bull being peddled as science!
(Prof) Jon Jenkins
Powerfully argued observations Jon but I’m afraid they will be wasted here.
However I’m sure this crusader for the real truth about AGW will be happy to entertain them.
PS: Good luck with the comb over!
Jon Jenkins, geological time, four and a half billion years of it, has witnessed many variations in biospheric temperatures. As you are trained scientist, why do you not address the amount and content of the man made carbon waste that has been pumped into the biosphere since the 200 odd years since the onset of the Industraial Revolution? Some scientists consider this event a significant variable. Or is this man made waste just a minor aberration and therefore scientifically irrelevant?
Wonder what Lysenko would have made of your 5 succinct sentences? Btw, there are two in point four, but this is no doubt just another minor aberration. I keep forgetting that you are a trained scientist.
Prof Jenkins, I’d appreciate it if you could expand a little on point 3, when CO2 was 10 times present levels. What event(s) are you referring to?
Jon,
1. There is no serious scientific debate about the consensus. Naomi Oreskes looked at a sample of 928 papers on global climate change and found that none of them disputed the consensus (warming is happening and we are largely responsible).
2. Factors such as solar and orbital forcing are in the models. Cosmic rays are just speculation, but in any event have not changed in the last 50 years, so cannot explain recent warming.
3. CO2 was last 10 times current levels 400 million years ago when the sun was cooler.
4. Computer models have predicted climate accurately. Most famously, in 1988 James Hansen presented his projections to Congress and his scenario B (the one he said was most likely) has been very close to the warming that has occurred since then.
5. The Hockey Stick has not been discredited. There have been some politically motivated attacks on it, but the researchers were vindicated by a National Academies of Science report published last year. The new IPCC report includes the Hockey Stick as well as other reconstructions that give similar results.
Please try to inform yourself better about these issues.
Dearie me…
A few points:
1. I know enough natural scientists well enough to know that, as a group, they are temperementally one of the least radical, most cautious and most conflict-avoiding of all the professions. The most recent IPCC scientific assessment reflects this (as well as the political factors militating towards a more conservative assessment of the scope of the problem).
2. Perhaps the most significant “social justice and equity lobby” in the climate change policy debate is the one which is concerned about the effects of strong climate change response policies on coal and energy workers, their families and communities. To their credit they have not sought to call the science into question or downplay the environmental risks involved, but they are hardly going to be playing up the urgency of the problem beyond what sound science suggests.
3. The most frequently recommended policy responses (i.e. emissions trading schemes, carbon taxes, and arguably even carbon credits schemes) are all from the toolkit of mainstream neoclassical economics, and are not favoured by the ‘far left â??we want a revolution nowâ?? cult’.
How foolish can we be?
To seriously believe all the hype that man is causing a climate disaster that will destroy the planet is not only basically stupid, it is extremely arrogant.
We insignificant humans do not have the power to destroy this planet. Never did.
We also do not have the ability to change the current climate trends, or even to accurately forecast what is going to happen over the next 10 let alone 100 years.
Letâ??s hope things will get warmer, rather than colder. We donâ??t need another ice age.
Forget all the junk science by so-called experts that are all in on the multi-billion dollar â??climate research scamâ??.
Forget all the disaster reports being sold by environmental activists via the sensationalist media.
Forget all the self-righteous calls for action by power-hungry politicians.
Use your common sense. Itâ??s all a hoax.