Legal Eagle is worried about the effect of being “outed” as a climate skeptic after appearing on the recent episode of Insight featuring a discussion between a skeptical audience and the late Professor Stephen Schneider:
Why would I be scared? When someone says the words “climate sceptic”, the instant stereotype which springs to most people’s minds is that of a right-wing Holocaust-denying lunatic who is immune to reason. And I assure you, I am none of those things. But once you “out” yourself as a sceptic, you get tarred with that brush. I worry that my colleagues, my friends and my students might judge me, because I didn’t really get to put my views across properly (in fact, I don’t speak until half way through, presuming they even put my bit in!). I don’t like the term “climate sceptic”, to be honest; I prefer to think of myself as a climate agnostic. I haven’t made up my mind yet.
I don’t know Legal Eagle personally, but given her thoughtful writings on other issues I’m perfectly prepared to accept that she is not a “right-wing Holocaust-denying lunatic who is immune to reason”. But, in the context of 2010, it is very hard for me to accept climate skepticism of the kind she espouses in her post (I have not seen her appearance on Insight) as the views of somebody who has underlying assumptions about the world anything vaguely resembling my own, and who has made any serious attempt at understanding the issue. It may not be immunity to reason, but at the very least it’s a pretty profound piece of intellectual laziness.
In my view, there are three levels of intellectual laziness in evidence:
* The laziness in understanding how science works, and how climate science has gotten to its current point.
* The laziness in failing to grasp the consequences of the science being right.
* The laziness in failing to understand proposed policy responses to climate change.
The Science
There are several fundamental misunderstandings in LE’s post about the nature of climate science, and science in general. According to LE:
First, I believe that a level of scepticism is essential to proper, rigorous scientific method, and thus people ought to maintain scepticism about any scientific hypotheses. Einstein himself said, ‘No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.’ …
Secondly, I get really worried when people say you can’t question something and that the science is ‘settled’. Just because there’s a broad consensus about something doesn’t mean that it’s right: sometimes the 1% of scientists who put forward an unpopular hypothesis with which 99% of scientists disagree happen to be right. Think of Alfred Wegener, whose theory of continental drift was rejected by most scientists at the time. Or think of Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, who were in a minority of those who believed peptic ulcers were caused by a bacterial infection, and who turned out to be right. If we didn’t allow people to question the status quo, we’d never make scientific progress.
The story of the heroic lone scientist who questions the status quo is one that’s excited the imagination since the historians got a hold of Copernicus and Galileo. But to claim that we should do nothing about greenhouse gas emissions on the basis that one might show up and turn our understanding of the topic upside down is a complete nonsense.
The first thing to note is that while science never promises complete certainty, that hasn’t stopped us acting on the basis of what we have. At the risk of confusing anecdote with proof (something LE’s post is riddled with), the story of John Snow and the Broad Street Pump demonstrates that while science is forever incomplete, there is no excuse for not acting on the best scientific evidence available at the time.
The second is to note that while Einstein’s theory of relativity might have been susceptible to “one disconfirmatory experiment”, it has very little to do with the current state of climate science. General relativity is a theory whose highly precise mathematical predictions differ measurably from classical physics only in extreme situations (by terrestrial standards). Therefore, experiments that can prove or disprove it are (in the main) very substantial endeavours – some of them, in fact, have involved space probes and were not conducted until well after Einstein’s death.
The contrast with climate science could not be more vast. Our current understanding of climate science rests firstly on fairly straightforward classical themodynamics, whose precepts are tested in high-school physics classes every day and stand about as much chance of experimental refutation as the observation that objects tend to fall downwards.
The second body of knowledge that contributes to climate science is a far more complex one. It is the accumulated knowledge of thousands of overlapping and replicated experiments and natural experiments, all contributing to our picture of past climates (in historic, prehistoric, and geological timescales) and the levels of things we believe contribute to the climate, as well as empirical studies of the the complex interactions of the atmosphere, the biosphere, the ocean, and other gas “sources” and “sinks”. The combination of these and nineteeth-century thermodynamics are then combined to make computable models of the climate. We can then validate the models using the data from the past, and make estimates about the future.
It is absolutely certain that some of these thousands of experiments are inaccurate, and there is vigorous debate in scientific journals in a variety of fields about which experiments and data are best. However, none of those experiments have thrown up data that seriously calls into question the public policy implications of the current state of climate science, and it would be virtually impossible for any single experiment to do so in 2010. A good example is the case of Phil Jones and the urban heat island effect. In this case, skeptics found a paper with sloppy work in it. But even if the paper was discredited, its key conclusion – that the Earth has been warming over the past century, and such warming is not primarily the result of the so-called “urban heat island effect” – concurs with several other studies using a variety of methodologies that suggest exactly the same thing.
This profusion of overlapping evidence is why, for instance, Ian Plimer set himself an impossible task in his 2009 book, and why he failed miserably at it.
It might also be instructive, at this point, to go back to Barry Marshall and Robin Warren who received a Nobel Prize for their work on discovering the bacteria responsible for most stomach ulcers. Let’s note again – they got a Nobel Prize for their work. Do you get a Nobel Prize for doing something routine? Not bloody likely. Marshall and Warren got a Nobel because overturning the consensus in an area with such profound consequences simply doesn’t happen very often, and the more research that’s been done in an area, the less likely it is to happen.
Furthermore, they conducted actual empirical science to demonstrate their point. In 1982, they published a journal article mentioning the bacteria concerned and their belief that it caused ulcers. This wasn’t well received, so they did another experiment – Marshall swallowed a culture of the bacteria and developed the disease on cue, which was then published in a 1984 article in a peer-reviewed journal. The contrast with the professional skeptics – who don’t do any original work of their own let alone try and publish – should be clear.
And yet, Legal Eagle’s position seems to me to be that we should all wait just in case that, if treated with sufficient politeness, climate skeptic scientists will produce the wonder paper that shows us that the mountain of science to the contrary is wrong. I can’t rule out the possibility that that might happen. But to think it plausible displays a wilful ignorance of a very considerable magnitude.
The Consequences
According to Legal Eagle:
There is also a perception that, if you’re a sceptic, then you must not care about the environment. This is false in many cases. There was a feeling among many of the environmentally-minded people in the audience that the focus on carbon emissions as the primary environmental “issue” of our time took the focus off other equally important issues which were perhaps more immediate, such as deforestation.
I agree that there are many other important environmental issues. But it is in my view impossible to be an environmentalist and not have climate change at the top of your environmental priority list. If we do not mitigate the worst of climate change, every other environmental issue we face is going to pale into insignificance.
There are any number of sources which explain this, but I’ll just point to the IPCC synthesis report, which notes that a 5 degree rise would produce (among other catastrophes) “significant” extinctions, which the graphic further defines as “more than 40% around the globe”. We can have all the World Heritage Areas and Marine Parks we like, but it’s not going to be worth a hill of beans if 40% of the world’s species disappear.
Not to mention the mass inundation of coastlines that is the inevitable result of continued unmitigated warming, nor the mass ocean extinctions that would result from ocean acidification that is the inevitable companion of continued CO2 level rises.
If that doesn’t constitute the greatest global environmental disaster since the introduction of agriculture, I don’t know what would.
All of this information is widely available to the lay reader, and thanks to the wonders of the Internet all it requires is the preparedness to spend a bit of time reading it.
As such, the only way I can square a sincere environmentalism with not regarding greenhouse gas emissions as the most important environmental issue we face is profound and wilful ignorance.
Mitigation and inequality
Legal Eagle is concerned about the consequences for inequality of climate change mitigation policies:
When an issue gets politicised like that I get very worried. I must confess that I don’t really understand why the Left has decided that it will swallow climate change policy whole (which is distinguishable from the question of science). I know that one of the ideas of climate change policy is the idea that we should consume less and be a less capitalist society (which clearly fits into many leftist ideas). But surely another concern of left-wing people should be the perpetuation of the class system and the deepening of the divide between rich and poor.
It’s a valid concern, until you bother to gain an understanding of what detailed proposals for climate change mitigation actually entail, and what the economists who propose them think about the consequences.
The CPRS, and the proposals from the Garnaut Review use some of the proceeds from the carbon charge to compensate low-income households. Whatever results from the negotiations in the next parliament will certainly do the same. In fact, there’s no reason why low income households can’t be overcompensated and end up better off than they are now. Indeed, the CPRS did this to a small degree. In any case, the effects of carbon charging on inequality will be essentially lost in the noise created by other factors affecting economic growth and income and wealth distribution.
While the economists pull out their econometric models to explain how this works, the gist of the reasons why it’s possible are pretty straightforward. One merely needs to understand that a) energy makes up a considerably smaller component of the household budget and Australian economy than is regularly assumed, b) the portion of that that is increased by the CPRS is even smaller, c) carbon pricing will start very low and gradually increase, and d) if the Australian economy continues its growth path of the last century, the effects of the CPRS will be dwarfed in the long run by the effects of economic growth, the redistribution of which then becomes a – you guessed it – political question.
While information about this hasn’t appeared as widely in the mass media as on some of the other topics in this post, it has been readily available for anyone that cared to find out – for instance, in Chapter 17 of the CPRS White Paper, or chapter 16 of the Garnaut Review.
I’d also note that the Greens’ current proposal on carbon pricing – an interim scheme based on the Garnaut Review proposals – which would would undoubtedly include the kind of compensation mechanisms Garnaut and the CPRS proposed.
A triad of wrong – but why?
There are undoubtedly many things on which Legal Eagle is undoubtedly an expert on, and I am a complete ignoramus. But on this particular occasion, she has chosen to publicly parade profound ignorance, in the cause of promoting inaction, on a topic where inaction runs the risk of – indeed, may already have guaranteed – civilization-threatening negative consequences. I am genuinely puzzled as to why a seemingly intelligent person who professes a political outlook broadly similar to my own would do so.
I can’t speak for Legal Eagle’s friends, colleagues and students, but I for one will continue to look more than a little askance at somebody who declares that they’re both a progressive and a cilmate skeptic.
Postscript: As expected, this has generated a bit of a reaction, and I’d ask people to continue to keep it civil, and I’d like to thank Kim for continuing to monitor the post while I was temporarily waylaid.
Legal Eagle has responded in comments and with an update on her post. As she points out, she is not the same person as Skepticlawyer, so please don’t confuse the two.
PPS: On the substance of LE’s reponse, it’s worth noting that equality is obviously a massive concern for anybody who professes any kind of left-wing/progressive/you-name-it sympathies. But there are two responses to this:
a) as I’ve noted, proposed responses to climate change can and do take inequality concerns into account – indeed, as they currently exist they would impose the financial burden on the wealthier half of Australian society. Similarly, any global agreement on climate change mitigation should (and, as a practical matter, will) put the financial burden where it should be, on the wealthy nations. China and India – who aren’t under any significant domestic pressure to act, won’t play ball otherwise.
b) as others have pointed out, the people who are predicted to suffer the most from climate change are the poorest of the global poor.
Yes, there’s room for such positions to be critiqued in a quite sophisticated way. But that’s not what I saw in the original post.
Secondly, LE has found my concluding paragraph less than civil – after declining to substantively respond to the other 2000-odd words before that that explained at great length as to why I found her position grossly and obviously flawed. As such, I do not understand how she could possibly be prepared to show what I regard as gross ignorance in public. As such, I have to wonder what else is going on to bring somebody not only to those views, but to the point where they are confident enough in them to parade them in public. I rechecked my dictionary definition of askance, and found it to mean “with suspicion, mistrust, or disapproval”. Mistrust is not appropriate here, but I do very strongly disapprove, and am just a little suspicious of the thought processes that led to the post.
Robert, this post strays dangerously close to constructing check-box politics (‘in order to be x, you must not only believe y, but rank it more highly than q or p’). I accept climate change, but rank liberty as more important than the environment. It is perfectly possible, I think, for a progressive person to accept climate science and rank equality more highly.
Yes, political views can be characterised as baskets of ideas, but it strikes me as very strange to argue that the things in those baskets must all be ranked in the same order in order for one’s views to be considered ‘progressive’ or ‘libertarian’ or whatever.
Robert, if my views broadly accord with yours in all but this…why do I suddenly become someone whom you look askance at? Isn’t that a problem?
I think one of the problems with the left is an inability to deal with dissent and different views. I sometimes feel that to be a true leftie, you have to believe firmly a particular raft of views, and if you don’t, well then, you’re no true leftie. Which is just as much a fallacy as the “No true scotsman” fallacy. It actually turns people away from the left. Think of the likes of Keith Windschuttle.
Thinking on SL’s comment – what I rate very, very highly in our society is equality, and a lack of a class stratification. I really don’t like the suggestions of people like Monbiot, which seem like they want to create a feudal society all over again.
Pretty much a dead giveaway of a statement.
Liberty is a human construct and infinitely interpretable, i.e. ideological.
The environment is a fact far more extensive, external and significant than the merely human and therefore quite obviously qualitatively “more important” than “liberty”.
Philomena – just to clarify – Skepticlawyer is the libertarian on our site, but she is *not* a climate sceptic. I am the generally more left wing one, and I *am* a climate agnostic. We like to keep people on their toes.
Part of the ideology is to see liberty and environment as dichotomous.
Hannah’s Dad – that’s SL, not ME! I value equality most. I think that’s the essence of my position. I’d prefer to mitigate the effects and have an egalitarian society than to have a society where only the very rich can afford air travel, cars etc.
What I thought when reading LE’s post was that with the idea of the lone scientist working outside the paradigm or against the consensus is that the historical examples were of the lone scientist having evidence on his (and it’s generally a he) side. But with climate science, the evidence is astoundingly one-sided, in favour of the AGW consensus.
“stand about as much chance of experimental refutation as the observation that objects tend to fall downwards.”
‘Downwards’ is contingent on local gravity, which simultaneously dictates what falling means. Objects can only ‘fall’ ‘downwards’, because it’s just two ways of saying the same thing – gravity attracts.
Legal Eagle: “Which is just as much a fallacy as the “No true scotsman” fallacy. It actually turns people away from the left. Think of the likes of Keith Windschuttle.”
If leftist intolerance is driving valuable comrades like Windschuttle out of the fold, then I say hooray for intolerance.
I agree that the divide between rich and poor should be important to left-wing people; what I don’t understand is why this is limited to paying a power bill, rather than, say, food security and the effects of natural disasters. Claiming that a power bill makes up less of the household budget than commonly assumed does not mean that it is not a major expense for many people (especially those of us who can’t get natural gas despite living 15 minutes from a gas plant!); denying that household expenses are a more immediate problem for many people than future environmental change helps no-one. The offsets that you mention in the next paragraph are important and should be a highly promoted part of any future carbon deal. (I understand that they were part of the late CPRS, but read about it absolutely nowhere in mass media!)
Both SL & LE’s comments seem to me to be confused, which is something I think Philomena is also gesturing to.
“Climate science” as such is not predicated on equality or liberty – it’s a body of work which reflects or seeks to capture changes to the world. As such, “climate science” has no implications for political ideology or compromises between liberty and equality or other ideological/philosophical values.
It may be that some hold the position that “liberty” is intrinsic to whether or not climate science is adjudged true or not, in that supposedly a consensus discourages these mythical skeptical researchers from publishing their refutations, or whatever. Rob has shown quite comprehensively why this is wrong.
Climate change policy is another order of things, but it seems meaningless to me to counterpose the science itself with a bunch of value positions drawn from the political realm.
Skip – and here I was naively thinking the Left was supposed to be all about tolerance. Too often it’s only about tolerance…AS LONG AS YOU THINK EXACTLY LIKE ME.
There’s always a certain brutishness and coarseness to climate sceptics or agnostics, I think.
Can anyone name one such person – with evidence – who has ever otherwise shown the slightest sense of inter species empathy or identification that does not involve forms of selfish bodily self-gratification.
No, cute cats, caged birds, or glassed fish are not permissible examples.
/crickets
@11 – LE, I don’t understand how one can “tolerate” a judgement which is wrong. If Rob is right that your position on the science has no coherent basis, it’s surely a matter of your refuting his view, not of asking him to tolerate it.
Kim, I’m not concerned about the science so much as I’m talking about the rhetoric. The rhetoric is that if you even so much as slightly doubt the status quo, and doubt that urgent action should be taken now to combat climate change NOW, you must be (a) a fascist (b) an unintelligent person and (c) someone who should be looked at askance. To be honest, it turns me off big time, and makes me think that proper dissenting arguments might not be considered. I’m concerned about the process of argument and debate as much as anything else.
“/crickets”
Meme fail.
LE, what kind of tolerance are you after? What kind of intolerance robbed the left of the wit and wisdom of Windschuttle? I give you permission to build your Climate-Skeptic Mosque wherever you like, but I insist on sleeping through your call to prayer.
Kim, if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge I want to sell you.
@16 – SL, there’s a distinction between the values held by those doing the science and the science itself – something that so-called ‘skeptics’ are always trying to poke holes in, but without great success. It is possible, though I think unsustainable, to agree that the findings of climate science are accurate and disagree that anything should be done (essentially Lomborg’s position before his recent change of heart). But the science itself, it seems to me, does not as a matter of logic have any implications for “liberty” and “equality”.
How dare anyone question my lying bullshit? It was my lying hand that signed the paper, after all.
@18 – Be civil!
@Legal Eagle
You’re a climate skeptic? You’re not sure if it exists or not?
agnostic, not skeptic, sorry.
@16 I agree. Most of the right pretend that there is no problem because there is no right wing or libertarian solution to it. Libertarianism literally has nothing to say on how to solve the problem of climate change, and therefore pretends it doesn’t exist in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.
I think it’s telling that only the left of politics can advocate market-based solutions like pricing externalities when market failures take place, when there is a risk those externalities could decimate the environment, and therefore the economy. The right of politics would rather ‘business as usual’ its way into economic collapse.
It’s perverse, in a way, that the right has become so anti-capitalist…
As for AGW vs. denialism, all of science is basically an argument to best explanation based on empirical research.
So where is the body of empirical peer reviewed denialist science? Where are the denialist alternatives to the laws of thermodynamics?
Ultimately, I remain a skeptic of denialism.
It seems to me that LE is confusing two issues. One is whether climate change is real and the other is a concern about how tackling the issue will effect poor people.
Surely, it would be more logical to say that science has no doubt that climate is happening and it’s caused by humans, therefore we must do something about it. Secondly, we have to work to ensure that the poorest aren’t hurt by these changes.
LE’s argument also ignores the fact that the changes wrought by climate change will effect the poorest of the poor first and they’ll suffer the most from it. We’re already seeing that.
Arguing that I’m sceptical about climate change because I’m worried about the effects on it on poor people is simply illogical.
SL is correct. Climate science does have political and economic and therefore concomitant practical implications. Which is why people of a certain ideological suasion like to elevate other secondary considerations, such as the conveniently empty notion of liberty, above it.
There is actually an incredibly significant distinction between the positions that:
a) one is concerned about the way that particular scientific understandings are rhetorically translated into political discourse, and the way that policy responses are developed from this discourse
and
b) one does not accept that the scientific understandings are well founded.
I don’t think it’s good enough to say that because you think a) you’ll just sort of tack on b) in an act of anti-snobbery.
I started writing a longer piece but life is short – the legaleagle article is disturbing in that it’s essentially poorly reasoned rubbishyet comes from someone who is no doubt educated and reasonably bright. How did it come to this, that what is a fairly mainstream piece of science, discussed in science circles for decades (I’m a scientist who has heard these discussions for decades) – has become the punching bag of people who otherwise would have no opinion on mainstream science at all.
and this…
“I’m concerned about the process of argument and debate as much as anything else.”
for goodness sakes, what does this statement say about someone’s connection with others.
And of course the science isn’t settled. There remain areas of uncertainty, active dispute and ongoing research in climate science.
The matters canvassed by tabloid contrarianism, however, are not sites of genuine scientific dispute.
@25 Fine, of course the right conflates the two things. It’s only natural for the right to do this because for the right it is a problem with no solution.
The core of right wing thought is the belief that maximising short term profits should come before the long term economic impact of doing this, or the social, environmental, political, or cultural costs of doing so.
And in this debate, it has demonstrated itself to place the interests of business as usual for resource using rent seekers who externalise costs over the interests of all other business and households.
The right pretends there’s no problem so that environmental cost externalising rent seekers pay lower taxes, while all other households and businesses pay the costs, and pay some of those costs through higher taxes. Any course of action to the contrary is an anathema to the modern right of politics.
Threfore it can have no solutions, and therefore the only course of action is to pretend that there’s no problem.
Great post, Robert. And this paragraph is what absolutely infuriates me. The information is there, it’s manifold, it’s easy to read and understand, and there are still ignorant people with this stick-in-the-mud “prove it to me” attitude.
And yet when you do try to prove it to deniers, they immediately try to disengage with the science. Climate change becomes about politics, about left/right, about personalities. Anything but the horrifying, inevitable truth.
Even LegalEagle’s defence is not based around science – because, obviously, she doesn’t know anything about the science and hasn’t bothered informing herself, instead choosing to disagree with over 90% of climate scientists, every national scientific body on Earth, every government, the notoriously timid and careful UN, and pages and pages of data & peer-reviewed research clearly demonstrating the effect, in favour of carbon-polluting multinationals, the lobbyists they fund (the literal same ones who said smoking didn’t give you cancer), right wing think tanks, non-climate scientists and weathermen.
Her defense is about her right to believe in arrant nonsense;, how being told she is ignorant, retrogade, holding an opinion no more valid than anti-vaccination, homeopathy’s efficacy etc makes her feel angry and hurt.
Well, I’m happy for people to believe whatever they like, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else, and I literally cannot think of a belief that’s more destructive to all life than climate change denial.
If you’re gonna hold an opinion so completely at odds with all the facts as we know them, the vast majority of qualified opinion, and in the face of such an urgent, incredibly dire threat – where the costs of action are trifling compared to the cost staggering costs of inaction – then damn straight you better take the time to educate yourself, bring some facts to the argument, and be prepared to defend yourself.
Complaining about how it makes you feel and bringing up a bushel of anecdata is not enough, when the lives of literally billions of people, trillions of animals – indeed all life as we know it on earth is at stake.
And deniers have the temerity to complain that people get mad when they talk about left/right identity politics nonsense.
Deniers have a right to be ignorant, and they have a right to be ignored. If being labeled a denier makes you feel angry, marginalised, ridiculed, disliked etc, then feel free to educate yourself.
skepticlawyer,
If you don’t consider the scientifically supported conclusion of catastrophic consequences for civilisation as reason enough to limit liberty, do you place any limits on the value of liberty?
skepticlawyer@1 – why rank the issues at all, can you not simply be a passionate advocate for both?
I’m a pretty passionate environmentalist/conservationist but the idea that I should need to rank it, as an issue, higher or lower than social justice and equality seems absurd to me – the two issues are inseperable.
Indeed, I think climate change is first and foremost an issue of social justice. The inequalities as a result of climate change will manifest [are manifesting] earlier than the mass extinction issue.
LE, what are you dissenting from? That’s what I simply don’t get.
And if you’re concerned about the poorest of the poor, think about how climate change is already effecting the lives of Pacific Islanders. They seem to have no doubt about what’s happening and they want us to do something about because they’re losing their homes. Attitudes like yours are already hurting poor people horribly.
I’d put this sort of thing down to just a lack of basic science (especially physics) education. Even so called well educated people more often lack even the most basic training (and as for maths and stats … oh well).
The basic science is amazingly simple, worked out in the early 1800′s. More CO2 (and the others) means more energy trapped. High school science (you can do the experiment yourself with some very simple equipment, LE should do it with their kids).
If they don’t accept that, then I often wonder what they accept, do they believe in electricity? Or gravity? What about radiation?
More ever, every ‘skeptic’ seem to be quite happy to accept the calculations that show that without GG gases the Earth would be a frozen snowball. So, in principle, the link between GG gases and heat capture is accepted. So why the reluctance in accepting that if we increase them then temperatures will go up?
Some cognitive dissonence going here I suspect.
“Complaining about how it makes you feel and bringing up a bushel of anecdata is not enough, when the lives of literally billions of people, trillions of animals – indeed all life as we know it on earth is at stake.”
PatrickG@31 Some people predicate their whole world view and all new permutations and movements therein on how all these things make them feel.
Oh, the narcissism.
And yes, great post Robert.
Those
, can start by reading The Scientific Case for Modern Anthropogenic Global Warming by
John W. Farley at
http://monthlyreview.org/080728farley.php
I think that’s pretty close to the mark.
Legal Eagle wrote:
Andrew Norton made a similar argument a couple of years ago when he briefly sided with the Tony Windsor-like “precautionary principle” argument for action on climate change. It apparently isn’t about the science, it’s about how damn rude those scientists are with their carbon and doomsaying and such.
Here’s a free clue: climate science isn’t about you LE.
It’s nothing personal. It isn’t a personal affront to your feelings on liberty.
It just is.
If your objections were limited to the (frankly wacky) schemes promoted to mitigate climate science you’d have some defensible intellectual ground to stand on. Nobody really wants to force people to live in 3rd world hovels and burn cow dung for cooking fuel and give up their personal transport for walking everywhere. However, the longer the “climate skeptic” position continues to obfuscate the arguments about the best way to mitigate climate change, the more likely the extreme dystopian outcomes are likely to be.
Those scientist guys aren’t doing this for the lulz.
Legal Eagle, I found your post especially interesting because you spoke about the equity ramifications of climate policy. I don’t think that’s something that has been heavily addressed in the popular media and it needs to be.
Rob Merkel spoke of the income offsets of the CPRS and how low income people would end up better off. Any climate response that doesn’t deal with this issue directly is unlikely to strike the right balance, as concerns about an effective response lead many to ignore the possibility that taxation could be regressive.
I find it particularly worrying how Robert said the tax would offset the current carbon price, while admitting that the price of carbon will be increased over time. Will there continue to be offsets for low income earners as the price of carbon goes up? Maybe. But any policy setting where a government needs to act pro-actively to avoid the regressive fallout of any change in the carbon price is a concern. This is clearly an area where people like LE are needed to champion the cause of equality.
It does strike me as worrying though that this is lumped into the same post as a post about the science of climate change. You admit yourself that you don’t know enough about climatology to say one way or another if the data is real. You then look at the possibly ugly policy ramifications of acting on climate change and decide that we must doubt the science.
Isn’t that a bit convenient? If you want to doubt the science, get an engineering degree, just like Barry Marshall got a medicine degree. If you don’t like the policy ideas suggested by the crazy lefty climate cult then suggest your own, and explain how they will respond effectively to the scientific facts. Doing both makes you seem like you are questioning the science not because you think it’s not true, but because you don’t want it to be true.
There’s a lot of epistemological confusion in the arguments. Science, politics and the media are different realms of knowledge and truths, with different regimes of legitimization. I am not sure how anyone can be “climate skeptic” or a “climate agnostic” who isn’t doing climate research. Please point to the flaws in the literature and offer your alternative research. But that’s a whole different thing from taking issue with media reportage and its hyperbole and shallowness, or with the contradictions opening up in political positions on the politics of decarbonizing the economy. In a socio-political world that has been colonized by media, (surely Baudrillard’s hyperreal simulacra coming into being) so that we can hardly tell where the screen ends and the real world begins, we might have indignant arguments about political truths and demand to be named as both “left” and “climate skeptic” as if that is important, but in the real world, the planet will continue to warm and change the material conditions for the life upon it. It’s the epistemological materiality of climate change that is irrefutable and irresistible.
@26 –
Yes, it does, but that’s not inherent in the science itself.
MH @ 42 is right – there’s a lot of domain confusion.
If you actually separate out the various statements analytically, LE’s position (@14) simply doesn’t make sense.
Being concerned about rhetoric around an issue does not provide an argument for doubting the veracity of the scientific statements made.
There is a recent pseudo-scientific dogma that complements the “Anti Global Warming” quite succinctly.
This is the “Expanding Earth” thesis first explained to my brother who was studying Geology at the University of Wollongong some 15 years ago. It purports to explain how the mineral and hydrocarbon reserves of the planet will be continually replenished by factors that conveniently ignore accepted geological time-scales
If you research the current load of Climate Skeptics you will doubtless find members of the Expanding Earth cadre.
AmishThrasher @23: pretend that there is no problem because there is no right wing or libertarian solution to it.
Philosophically I don’t think the right has any problem with the science, only with the politics. It’s just they’ve become trapped in their internal politics and been unable to escape the contradiction between their philosophy and practice.
To me, the intellectual right and especially the libertarians should be unconditionally in favour of restricting people’s right to harm others. It’s the cliche “your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins”. There’s no relevance to science here, otherwise they’d be opposed to momentum as a result of that cliche…
So the libertarian argument is about what the most effective means to implement the necessary restriction is. Libertarians value liberty more than equality, fairness more than ease of implementation, and regard the state as the only legitimate coercive agent. So their solutions will be biased in those directions, presumably ending up with an individual, tradeable emission permit enforced by the threat of death from the state.
The right wing will presumably favour the market over the state and the creation of new property rights over rationing. So they would be expected to prefer tradeable emission rights with a state-operated market in same, enforced by fines for excess emissions.
Unfortunately the practice of the right, and especially of the libertarians, is to start with “me being rich is good and must be preserved at all costs”. The philosphy is secondary, and amounts to a cover for the core belief. This also explains their frequent recorse to the “sack-cloth and ashes” argument against the left – anyone willing to countenance a drop in their own wealth is clearly not on the right.
anonymous, LE is not championing the cause of equality at all, she’s just another member of the white, educated, middle class evoking the needs of the poor and disadvantaged, as a way of justifying her own ignorant stance. It’s no more noble that those she decries in her post, in fact her view is considerable less noble because “trying to mitigate the effects” [of climate change] as she prefers, will leave many more people, much more vulnerable to the whims of the ‘elites’.
Just for any science deniers I’d like to repeat to put your finger in front of a CO2 laser – this will conclusively support your made up science that CO2 is IR inactive.
I’ve offered many places but get no-where – and denier sites it’s just deleted
http://galahs.blogspot.com/2010/04/carbon-dioxide-laser.html
On the assumption that I’ll get no takers, I do find deniers more than intellectually lazy. They’re fraudsters willing to lie and present made up crap. I’m not sure why – various reasons including notoriety.
And the victim card is pathetic, as well as intellectually lazy, but played so often by these peddlers of made up stuff. Creationists and Young Earthers play the same crud.
Right on FB, I fail to see how anyone can decry climate change action for its effect on the poor, unless they somehow manage to ignore the residents of:
a) the Mekong, Nile, Niger, Red River, and Ganges (aka, 90% of Bangladesh) deltas.
b) The huge proportion of the world’s poor that depends on regular glacial meltwaters from the Himalayas and the Andes in particular
c) The millions of people eking out an existence in various forms of Sahel or marginal land around the world
d) The majority of the world’s poor using fish as their main source of protein, fish that will disappear as the oceans continue to acidify.
Climate action is done with a disregard for the poor? Christ, the costs of inaction will dwarf any possible price that action could exact. The IPCC makes this very clear, but once again we come back to ignorance.
“The intellectual laziness”? Really?
How many of the people who write on these blogs actually have the skill and knowledge to interpret the data from which it is concluded that AGW is a real problem? By contrast, how many of them just take it on faith because smart people told them it was a problem?
I don’t think I’m particularly intellectually lazy but I only have so much time to spend on any one subject. I have to work for a living in a job which requires me to think intensely (just like LE, I note). I have to raise a son and be a husband. I have to be a scout leader and I have to be a brother and a friend. I have to balance all of those things with the need to take some time to pursue my own interests (including interacting with good people such as the contributors to these sites on matters of policy and politics).
So no, I’m not going to take the time fully to comprehend the theory of AGW. And yes, as a right of centre person, I am going to treat with some skepticism any theory which demands responses basically more palatable to the left than the right. I don’t think I’m being lazy. I think I’ve made choices about the things to which I can devote my brain.
As I said over at skepticlawyer, I am ultimately pragmatic and think that the risk of AGW to which apparently qualified and credible people attest must be treated seriously, but that is not to forgive the crusaders who demand that no-one question whether AGW is actually a risk.
Particular arguments against dealing with AGW may be intellectually lazy, but there is no more intellectually lazy (indeed intellectually bankrupt) position than one which bullies those who dissent or dare to question (for example by calling them intellectually lazy).
@45 – It’d be really good if people could avoid personalising the discussion.
Thanks!
@48: Nick, all those things you do in your life are made possible by a vast web of human activity that is maintained by the material conditions of life on the planet. Unfortunately, one can’t start from a politics of right or left and then decide whether one accepts reality or not.
And yes, as a right of centre person, I am going to treat with some skepticism any theory which demands responses basically more palatable to the left than the right.
This seems confusing twice over. The prototypically left-wing policy response to AGW is a consumption tax. Most left-wingers think the costs of this should be offset, and a simple way to do this is through the income tax system. Now changing the tax base from income to consumption taxes is hardly a move that’s “basically more palatable to the left than the right”, unless I’m completely misremembering how debates about the GST introduction went.
But I think the ‘demand’ here is the real giveaway. Someone who really had the courage of their convictions about liberty, non-interference of govt etc, would say that it doesn’t matter whether AGW is happening or not, it is wrong to use coercive means to stop it. If you accept that AGW demands governmental action to alleviate it, then you’ve accepted a lot of the left-wing view of the matter. The only issue left is an in-house debate between people who accept the legitimacy of broad governmental action to alleviate social ills, and who disagree about whether this is one of the occasions where government action is called for. That seems like a technical debate best left to experts, and we know what the experts say on this one.
So LE is now “fair game”, Mr Merkel? Thank you for making her point for her… AND for presuming to determine what the definition of progressive is for all of us.
Oddly enough it was Tony Abbott who got to the crux of the issue on the box the other night when he said something along the lines of “We spend lots of money on defense because we think there may be a small risk that we will be attacked – We should also spend money on climate action because there is a risk that it may result in very damaging outcomes.”
The core of the scientific method is agnosticism. Sure, there are some things in climate science that we can be pretty confident about (such as CO2 having a greenhouse effect.) However, when it comes to the modeling there has to be real uncertainty. It is uncertain partly because there is a lot of positive feedbacks in response to various changes that make it inherently hard to model. (Think warming reduces snow cover which more heat absorption which increases temperature which…) My readings over the years also indicate that climate is extremely complex with all sorts of minor things having significant effects. (See for example, ,a href=”http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090716141138.htm”> this one
So when someone says that their model predicts that such and such a level of CO2 will result in.. I am an agnostic. An agnostic that finds it touching that the more public skeptics all seem to assume that the model is overstating the effect.
The real power of the public skeptics does not come from their power to convince us that the science is flawed but their power to convince us that climate action is going to destroy the economy as we know it and make our lives much much harder than they are now.
There is an element of truth in this economic argument if we are talking about a 100% solution using today’s technology. However, if we are talking about what we might achieve over the next 10 yrs the story is very different. For example, my rough calcs suggest that we could reduce our total emissions by 30% by converting all our coal fired to combined cycle gas turbines (CCGT)at a per capita cost of less than 50 cents/day – including the cost of power used by industry as well as households.
It is a bit hard to argue end of the economic world as we know it when we are talking about 50 cents/day. When we have done that we can get on with doing other things where the impact on individuals can be predicted.
Trouble is Kevin Rudd and too many other climate action supporters linked climate action to a convoluted ETS system and were unable to tell the voters how it would affect them and how much it was going to cost. So it was easy for skeptics to run a very effective scare campaign.
Time for a strategic rethink?
Kim, how about “libertarianism as practiced is generally about rich people looking for rationales to justify staying rich”. I haven’t seen an intellectual argument for the self-proclaimed beliefs of these people that hangs together, so it’s quite hard to to put it that way.
FWIW, philosophically I’m one of the people who call libertarians statists because their point of divergence from their anarchist roots is their contradictory love of the coercive power of the state. So seeing them as philosphically coherent is quite hard, let alone when it comes to their actual behaviour.
Nick, for what it’s worth as a left of center person I’d actually really like it if AGW wasn’t a problem.
You know why?
Because as far as I’m concerned it’s consumed, and will consume, a whole lot of money, time and energy that could have been usefully spent on other things.
Personally, it means the part of my spare time that I devote to politics gets devoted to arguing the case for action on this, rather than other things.
It means picking fights with fellow lefties on things like nuclear energy.
And it means having to waste time arguing with you over this rather than, say, Tony Abbott’s charming views on the homeless.
Kim @ 49, what do you mean?
Nick Ferrett:
This is a little illogical. AGW demands reduction of GHGs. That’s pretty much it. The how is irrelevant to the science. And if you think pricing carbon is a left wing position, you have a remarkably strange notion of the left-vs-right (economic) dichotomy.
I’ve read the posts put by those above in response to LE, and having read LE’s article, I wonder if LE will move from being an agnostic to … accepter of the general consensus of AGW.
Because, really, you people have put things far more eloquently than I could, and have seen more things than I have in her article.
Which leads to another question – when do you move from being an ‘CC agnostic’ (whatever that actually means)?
Has she read all of your responses, or clicked off after her last post?
And not just about her, but all those who could put the facts together (ie educated, loads of time compared to people working 3 shift jobs) but continue to not do so. And over some leftwing thing?
I agree with a poster above. Climate Change has nothing to do with anthropocentric polemic thinking. The seas will rise and affect rightwingers and leftwingers and nowingers equally.
But I am ultimately disappointed again that a ‘denialist”sceptic’ whatever has yet again not put much of a convincing arguement that the polar ice caps are NOT melting. (no no no, they are resting!), or the myriad of other effects from our shit.
That’s right. Our crap we put out has consequences. You don’t crap on someones livingroom floor than deny there’s a smell. Which is what I observe sceptics doing.
Do our best to come up with solutions so we don’t phuck things up for the planet as much as we are. Cheers.
I note that over at SkepticLawyer the denialist dialogue has predictably turned to the crying over victimhood trope.
My heart bleeds for the poor denier: staunchly supported by every right wing political party in the world; buoyed by funds from coal companies, oil companies, steel companies; their pet cranks plastered in news bulletins, editorials and interviews far in excess of the proportion of their views – let alone their validity; gussied up by a phalanx of professional PR companies; promulgated by legions of lobbyists; their luddite and fanciful views currently reflected by most climate change policy by most governments in most of the world.
Poor denier. Truly, they are Christ-like in their martyrdom and courage for their cause. They are latter day Gallileo’s or Copernicus’s.
And of course, how could they possibly be attacked for views that will kill billions of people, that are destroying our oceans and barrier reef? They’re hurt feelings are definitely the most important thing about this debate.
Spare me. History will regard these people as the equivalent of Good Germans at best, and holocaust deniers at worse. Some of them may very well be alive when this happens. I look forward to the excuses they will offer their descendants, about how they felt belittled and attacked for not wanting to do anything.
LE will not change her mind.
Living in denial
whoops, paywalled.
This is better (a good summation of the LE and Nick argument for skepticism of climate change)
Appeal to consequences as a logical fallacy
Reminds me kind of how Louis Pasteur must have felt with his new fandangled science of microbiology. Fancy taking the liberty away from surgeons to operate with unwashed hands and to ask the general population to ‘clean up’ their act.
Interesting the ethical and legal questions in the related field of immunisation, particularly in relation to the issue ofexemption and herd immunity. The provided link says the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on several occasions that state vaccination requirements are permissible, writing that “the very concept of ordered liberty precludes allowing every person to make his own standards on matters of conduct in which the society as a whole has important interests.”
@53 – I’m not sure that the comment about LE’s perceived class, etc, is entirely relevant, at least insofar as it implies that her stated concern for the disadvantaged is under question.
For the record, I thought LE was getting some pretty tough treatment in this post, until I actually went and read her post.
Speaking as someone who comes from some place well below middle-class I’m kind of tired of this particularly brand of class-warrior who evokes the needs of the disadvantaged, the brown-skinned and the uneducated, as a way of justifying what is a truly ignorant stance. I make no apologies for drawing attention to the hypocrisy of an elite decrying the attitudes of other elites.
Nick Ferret, my elderly mother, who is herself agnostic on the subject of climate change, came with me to a talk by Prof. Schneider and although her formal education ended before she completed year 10, she didn’t seem to have any trouble understanding the science that was being presented there. She didn’t suddenly become a ‘believer’, as far as I know she still remains agnostic on the subject, but her agnosticism is more a matter of thinking that she does not need to really know one way or the other. See, she’s an agnostic who thinks it’s better to act now – she doesn’t think the actions are really that hard, and she understands the broader risks if the worst predictions do turn out to be true. It’s a little like knowing you don’t need to believe in God as a motivation to act with decency and kindness. That to me is climate change agnosticism, not some half-baked, misguided class warfare that provides you with a convenient excuse to do stuff all.
yes well after a few excellent posts above, I have only two questions:
1) Legal Eagle, you’ve been paying attention, has anyone changed your mind about this at all?
2) when where and why did climate science become so-called left-wing?
AmishThrasher @23:
Not strictly accurate. Given the well established complexity of the problem pretty much no-one has a single solution to “solving the problem of climate change” but libertarians as well as others unlike LE who suspect there is no problem, think that it can’t hurt and might help if we made people pay the actual cost of the energy they consume.
We “guessed” – and have had it mostly confirmed – that when people have to pay for exactly the water they use rather than charging a town-wide flat rate, that consumption tends to go down overall. This is within the practical boundaries of the minimum needed to survive at the low-income end and being able afford to waste at will at the high-income end. LE and Pearson are I think a lot more realistic than Robert about the potential danger posed to people like me at the low-income end of the scale. It is indeed possible that I will be compensated for the personal cost of any climate migitation measures taken by the government of the day whether I deserve it or not … but I’m not going to hold my breath.
REGARDLESS of the measure/s finally chosen to achieve it, I suspect that this goal of price correction is the absolute best either side can hope for in terms of AGW mitigation. If there is climate change, natural market forces will disincentivise high-carbon consuming energy production. If there is no climate change we still pay the real price of the energy that we choose to consume. Pascal’s wager perhaps, but that didn’t disincentivise religious belief.
“Libertarianism literally has nothing to say on how to solve the problem of climate change”
I disagree.
AmishThrasher @23+30 mounts an excellent argument as to the difficulties that beset neo-liberals and/or libertarians when confronted with the problem of climate change. If you are opposed to the state as a matter of political philosophical preference and are confronted with a problem that demands a communal, ie, society wide response which will inevitably engage the state then you have no solution to offer. Having no solution to offer leads to denial or, when seeking cover by equivocation, then “agnosticism”.
The alternative, acknowledging the reality of the science and being compelled to take action on the name of common humanity, clearly means abandoning deeply held beliefs about individualism and freedom. But that is what happens to ideologues when confronted by reality. Neo-liberal ideologues and libertarians are getting a taste of what happened to socialists as the grim reality of actually existing socialism became undeniable.
Ideology meets reality. No room for agnosticism here.
Exactly patrickg and EV. A similar point was in last week’s Nature
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7310/full/4661042a.html
I don’t think this is lost on the deniers and those that welcome climate change. These rightwingers are just nasty. I do think it’s as simple as that.
I was gonna write this at comment position 2, but then thought better of it. However I think it needs to be said:
That’s right, all our very human economic, political, social structures mean precisely jack shit to the big old impersonal Universe. Heat the atmosphere up with CO2 and we’ll boil, just like if that Earth-crossing asteroid is spotted too late, oh well, too bad.
There’s quite a few things we can do about the former, though, we’ve had the necessary information for 20 years.
Legal Eagle writes,
I think this about sums it up. It’s equivalent to,
“I think the sun will rise tomorrow, you stupid bastard.”
“You used rude words, so obviously the sun will not rise tomorrow.”
You pose this as a “Left” issue, which is rank nonsense. I believe in conscription, protectionism, compulsory English education for all those who want permanent residency, reasonably free firearms possession, and so on. This makes me “Right” in politics.
But I grew up in the country, every Sunday we all felt a chill of fear as the bushfire sirens were tested. We all went through drought and flood. That makes you aware of the environment and its limits in a way missing for city-slickers living life behind the safety of their keyboard in their air-conditioned offices.
Conservation is conservative.
By all means, keep sticking your fingers in your ears and saying, “la la la I can’t hear you!” The world will change for the better without your help.
Outing oneself as a climate sceptic was always going to be controversial, and writing a blog post about it ahead of the tv program was a good way of creating traffic. The discussion has now been, rather predictably, polarised along the left-right political divide; at least two or three blogs are buzzing with action, and there’s probably more on Twitter and Facebook. If I were a sceptic, I’d say ‘good PR work’.
My impression of LE’s post, which I also read today, was that the heart of the matter, the clear articulation of the conviction fuelling LE’s position was almost completely missing. I occasionally read LE’s blog posts, and have noticed that she comes across as a thoughtful person, and so I would liked to have been taken by the hand to discover her unique world of climate change agnosticism, it sounds like a rather exotic position. I wanted to also respect her demand to be heard without judgment, but I was disappointed. The piece that was offered lacked central argument; it couldn’t quite decide whether it was about science, equality, rhetoric, politics or liberty (liberty being a late suggestion from a fellow co-blogger). I wish LE had spent more time refining her post so that she could not only present the matters of fact with more rigour, but also so that she would really uncover for her readers (and herself, I suspect) the essence of the matter as she saw it. I wanted her to make me think, I was prepared to consider that there was an original take on this subject. Unfortunately, fifty dollars per month wasn’t it.
Pity the discourse over at LE and SL is now reduced to ‘civility’ and which side is more capable of it.
It would be really good if the implied usage of the word laziness had a wick on it to stick up something.
LE has canvassed the less civil LP comments on her blog, but not the ones containing legitimate queries or concerns.
For example, points made by Fine @25 and Martin E @27.
Kim, I’m not concerned about the science so much as I’m talking about the rhetoric. The rhetoric is that if you even so much as slightly doubt the status quo, and doubt that urgent action should be taken now to combat climate change NOW, you must be (a) a fascist (b) an unintelligent person and (c) someone who should be looked at askance. To be honest, it turns me off big time, and makes me think that proper dissenting arguments might not be considered. I’m concerned about the process of argument and debate as much as anything else.
Legal Eagle: the rhetoric I’m hearing from you is: “I do not agree with what Robert and other believers in AGW say, especially when they disagree with my views. So I will stereotype them as hair-trigger intolerant and insulting.” Would you say that is a fair appraisal of your paragraph?
And it is insulting. Some of us do have friends or family that are skeptical of global warming. Yet we do not disown or cut them off as per your stereotype.
Many posters here have hit the nail on the head, and I don’t want to repeat their arguments. I only want to draw our attention to some of the language being used. We shouldn’t be addressing the deniers as skeptics. “Skepticism” is a term that the deniers have taken for themselves, because it gives them an air of scientific respectability, but they are not true skeptics. They are contrarians or denialists. Contrarians do not have scientific respectability.
At heart, the denialists are inactivists. Being in denial of the science is simply a lazy way of denying the need for action. Inactivists often use their denial of the science as a way of derailing any discussion of mitigation. This was the purpose of the so-called “climategate” scandal. “Climategate” was timed to derail the Copenhagen talks. Now that the “climategate” scientists have been exonerated, it’s time to get the global discussions back on track.
Tatyana, LE doesn’t write for you, in case you hadn’t noticed. One of the great flaws of contemporary criticism of all kinds is the anger directed at a writer or scholar who has ‘failed’ to write what the critic wanted. If the critic wants something different, they should contribute something of their own. Don’t carp, create. It can be a very useful experience, you know.
My greatest disappointment with the piece was LE regurgitating uncritically the contrarian spin that simply describing their rhetorical techniques accurately as “denialism” is tantamount to calling the contrarians “Nazis”.
There were old-earth/evolution/vaccination/antibiotics- denialists long before there were Holocaust deniers, there have been moon-landing/Roswell/9-11/birther-denialists since.
Denialism is a tactic, not an ideology. It’s about how one engages in a debate when one has no data.
Half correct.
I, for one, don’t have the technical knowledge to form conclusions.
However, the consensus of trained, published and honoured scientists is so overwhelmingly supportive of AGW, I’d be a fool to accept the contrary conclusions of a few mostly crankish deniers.
Steve McQueen denied conventional oncologists and instead went on a regime of apricot kernels. He was probably dead whatever happened. But by choosing the latter course he gave encouragement to a bunch of charlatans and set a bad example for other credulous folk.
That also is what climate deniers do.
We shouldn’t be addressing the deniers as skeptics. “Skepticism” is a term that the deniers have taken for themselves, because it gives them an air of scientific respectability, but they are not true skeptics. They are contrarians or denialists. Contrarians do not have scientific respectability.
This is laziness. This is saying that we won’t make the effort to persuade those who disagree with us – because that would require us to respect them in order to engage them.
How do we refer civilly to such people as want to ignore the evidence of AGW but simultaneously want to take part in a discussion the terms of which they reject? My preference is to talk of them as cranks. An online dictionary of etymology captures the flavor:
The word agnostic doesn’t fit with the adopted position in relation to the subject matter either. Coined by TH Huxley (1825-1895) and now understood to mean “”one who professes that the existence of a First Cause and the essential nature of things are not and cannot be known.” However, Huxley’s own comment about his coinage of the word adds a significant dimension:
Except applying the term to scientific knowledge does a disservice to rational dialogue. Science, verifiable, falsifiable, experimentally replicable and empirical is not enshrouded in mystery like the history of religion. Being an agnostic about one body of science without being similarly ‘agnostic’ about others leaves the agnostic smeared with the charge of inconsistency at least and hypocrit at worst.
Similarly, such people do disservice to skeptics who, in classical thought at least, being unconvinced of the knowability of things, had the good sense to impose silence on themselves partly out of respect for those who were intent on furthering knowledge.
You cannot be a scientific agnostic or a noisy sceptic without self negation. You can, however, be an entirely credible crank endlessly and mechanically repeating the same argument over and over.
LE – in the post in question is functioning as a ‘concern troll’
@77 I agree – it is long past the time when one can legitimately claim ‘skepticism’ – typically claimed as a badge of honour (see concern troll) wrt to climate science. There is no justification at all for this fake skepticism unless one denies completely more or less all other science. Cherry picking is all that the deniers engage in.
@81 the effort has already been made over and over again – it should be clear by now that any educated person who claims the mantle of ‘climate skeptic’ has another agenda besides understanding the science.
MODERATOR NOTE: Any comment which confuses the identity of “Legal Eagle” and “SkepticLawyer” as if they are the same person will from now on be summarily deleted.
Talk about intellectual laziness.
PeterTB@81:
I know. I know.
That’s a shame. I still want Legal Eagle to explain why she thinks AGW believers call people “fascist” at the slightest provocation.
No, SL, you’re correct, LE doesn’t write for me, but she writes for a public who might expect her to present a coherent argument, particularly on a controversial topic. As mentioned, I detected a lack of central focus in the piece, as have many others here in different ways, but I certainly expressed no anger. When you write a blog, you receive comments. That can be a useful useful experience too.
http://www.skeptics.com.au/latest/announcements/australian-skeptics-position-on-climate-change-sceptics/
Thanks you akn for the etymology of crank. How accurate to describe this brand of denialism. Thanks Tog for excellent article regarding those who use denailism and the persecution they claim.
My take is that LE is a contrarian rather than a sceptic or agnostic. It is the very fact that AGW is so broadly supported that seems to make her doubt it and wish to speak out (agnostics, on the other hand, typically keep quiet, as they feel they have nothing to say).
Notwithstanding Robert’s “looking askance”, I would have thought that contrarianism – challenging the status quo and conventional wisdom – is key to being progressive. Conversely, those of us who simply accept the scientific consensus are being conservative.
Surely the word ‘progressive’, if it means anything means progressing to a desired goal or goals through incremental change.
Conversely climate change denial is deeply regressive because it fixates on a world that no longer exists and has to ignore or deny reality in order to do so.
Labelling such deniers as contrarians and therefore somehow progressive seems like a peversion of language to me.
@14
This is crazy. Sure there may be over zealous statements by a small minority at various times. But the sceptic effort is lead by people who use combative, derogatory and conspiratorial rhetoric regularly. I really think you need to go back and look at you arguments around the science as well. I assume that given you legal background you’re a bit out of you depth in the whole area of scientific disputation.
FYI, I don’t know if Larva prodders know or care, but it seems like most LP posts are being reproduced in full at the follow site. That doesn’t seem very cool to me.
http://www.blogotariat.com/node/201502
Like Tatyana, I was disappointed not just by intellectual laziness being defended or excused in LE’s post, but at least as much by the intellectual laziness inherent in it.
It’s just a grab-bag of the usual denialist/inactivist whinges. Thankfully with the rhetoric toned down a little, but still…
I too was hoping to hear a thoughtful argument to help me better understand or engage with climate sceptics. All I got was a bunch of carping about how all the many and varied previous attempts to understand or engage weren’t good enough… for some reason… any reason at all really, as long as the sceptic is exhonerated completely.
Not cool at all, patrickg@91. They didn’t even mention Robert’s name!
Ok, so what if we are willing to accept there is a problem (that seems obvious, the climate is not as it was, there is climate change) but aren’t convinced that we have a whole picture here, that we are missing something?
We know that the earth’s climate has not always been like this, and it changes without our interference in significant ways in relatively short time periods, could we be speeding up an already existing cycle? or is this genuinely unprecedented, that the shift will permanently knock out any climate cycle the earth was running in?
Does it mean we ignore a possible answer? NO, of course not, we should try everything, and I dare say an environment with less man-made carbon would probably be a better one anyway, but I don’t think we have reached a whole picture yet.
Do you pick my argument appart because it doesn’t exactly match your view of the problem? I hope there is more understanding here then this, I don’t like the outright deniers, but we still need to be carefull.
And they didn’t even fix up the double ‘undoubtedly’ in the penultimate para!
PinkyOz:
“Do you pick my argument appart because it doesn’t exactly match your view of the problem?”
You have made nothing even resembling an argument, so where would I start?
While I think those are very interesting scientific questions, I’m not sure what relevance they have to informing currently-needed policy decisions.
We know that climate changes in the past have been at a level which, were they to be repeated, would be catastrophic in terms of mass species extinctions, inundations of arable coastal fringes and desertification of other arable land leading to crop shortages, all of it threatening the stability of our current social systems – how long does respect for law and order last when people are starving? So whether we are currently accelerating a normal cyclic swing or generating unprecedented change, does it matter in terms of what our response needs to be? What we need to be doing right now is cutting carbon emissions.
The question is how do we do this without falling into chaos and making life even harder for those in poverty and the developing nations.
“I haven’t made up my mind yet”. With science you don’t have to make up your mind – the evidence does it for you. It’s a brutal binary proposition – either the evidence is there or it isn’t. It’s not about judgement or nuance or wishful thinking. It is or it isn’t.
I don’t understand the science of climate change (I don’t understand how the internet works either but here I am at LP) – though I understand that the science of carbon and other gasses trapping heat in the atmosphere is not that complicated – and I do understand political nuttiness.
To be a “climate sceptic” is to be a conspiracy theorist – to believe that thousands of scientists around the world have a secret political agenda and are engaged in a massive conspiracy.
Why Now?
Clearly GWA avoidance is facing up to an end game in the coming weeks and months. The secret agenda operators are in the process of being bypassed and their power dissipated. This will lead to a flurry repositioning, hence LE’s attempted public rebadging as “………climate agnostic…….” ie fence sitter rather than obstructive beligerant.
The Einstein argument is a total red herring. While the theorising process for pure mathematical physics is the same as for climate science, ultimate consequence is entirely different. Marshal and Warren observed that conventional treatment failed to eliminate peptic ulcers and looked further. They were reacting to the everyday consequences of a failure of understanding. Climate science is entirely consistent with Marshal and Warren’s initiative.
In the global sense the establishment is the “business as usual fossil fuel” industry who command, by far, the greater body of professional and scientific energy. In this sense it is the climate scientists who equate to the Marshals and Warrens. It is the relatively tiny body of Climate Scientists who are alerting us to the “establishment” failure to react to ever more obvious environmental turmoil, and the intense dangers that lay ahead.
And just as with Marshal and Warren’s vindication did not result in the collapse of the Pharmaceutical industry, recognition of CO2′s climate impact will not result in economic collapse anywhere either. Quite the contrary, we are headed into a new energy age and a world far better than before. As long as we take affirmative action….Urgently.
FDB
Ok, maybe I am being a little unclear, so let’s try again. The argument is we seriously don’t know what were dealing with here. We know it’s effecting climate, and that we (Humans) might be a contributing factor, but we are not sure about what we are looking at, and what response makes sense.
Is LE wrong to take the line she does? Well, I just don’t know, but there is a certain denial of the situation that I don’t like. But we can’t say with full confidence she is out rightly wrong, and we should give her at least the benefit of the doubt, and allow her the time to get across the information and read the arguments, she’s undecided not reticent.
tigtog
It might, if it is something larger then us that we really can’t mitigate, carbon abatement may be a waste of resources. It could be money we spend on relocation, research into food sources that survive in new conditions, water management and storage etc… But your dead right too, if we are onto a winner and do nothing we have wasted an opportunity there is no way that anyone could control the political situation. It might require what would be referred to as a raft of policy initiatives to deal with likely outcomes, carbon abatement being one.
I do think that a hell of a lot of the argument on threads like this would be unnecessary if skeptics or agnostics or deniers, whatever, were forced to attach numbers to their notions. L. Eagle doesn’t think that man-made global warming is proven: fine, but what does that mean? 99%? 95%? 50% 5%? As is is, her speculations are without economic consequences. If I think there’s a 5% chance of losing $100, I’ll willingly pay $4 to avoid it; if I just innumerately think I haven’t made up my mind yet about whether I’m going to lose $100 or not, I just sit there woolgathering until something hits me upside of the head.
To put it in legal terms, L. Eagle may think that the case for mmgw hasn’t been made beyond reasonable doubt; what about the lower level of balance of probabilities? What about the lower level still of reasonableness? Without some concept of measurement, we’re just wittering.
With science you don’t have to make up your mind – the evidence does it for you. It’s a brutal binary proposition – either the evidence is there or it isn’t.
No, much science involves judgement and weighing up how much significance a piece of evidence has for reaching a conclusion. But that’s why scientists publish the data and their interpretations so that the arguments are out in the open.
ChrisB hits on an important point – you don’t even need to accept the scientific warnings at face value. You only need to conclude that there is a decent chance they are correct, and take precautionary action. We do this ever day with insurance.
“Climate sceptics” are literally gambling everything that the scientists are wrong.
Of course, not accepting the science at face value raises all the questions posed above, including “what other scientific evidence don’t you accept?”
ChrisB
A good point. The IPCC put the odds against AGW at 10% didn’t they. Or has this been updated?
You would also need to quantify the amount of global warming that you are arguing against: eg 10% probability that AGW is less than 4 degrees by 2100.
Ginja # 98: “To be a “climate sceptic” is to be a conspiracy theorist – to believe that thousands of scientists around the world have a secret political agenda and are engaged in a massive conspiracy.”
Now see, strictly speaking, this claim isn’t true. It’s possible for a professional culture — even a scientific one — to engage in self-reinforcing and self-editing behaviors that build up a platform of confirmation bias. It’s also possible for a profession to self-select its members for mutual re-inforcement of a world view. Not saying that either of these things is the case with climate scientists; but if one were to be suspicious of their findings and motives, belief in a conspiracy wouldn’t be necessary. The progress of scientific thought was held up for centuries because ancient astronomers just presumed that the heavenly bodies must travel in paths that were perfect circles and spheres, because, well, they were *perfect.* No conspiracy necessary.
btw as a youngster I listened to many highly educated people, people who were smart enough to know better, gravely pronouncing that Marxism was the equivalent of “settled science.” Hell, some of them insisted that it WAS science. You’d be surprised what you can persuade yourself is true, especially if it agrees with your a priori policy preferences. Just ask Richard Perle. Or Dick Cheney. Or Paul Wolfowitz. Or Douglas Feith…
I also find it odd that LE says she would accept the scientific evidence if only people were more polite.
It’s an interesting theory of scientific discovery.
JPZ said:
In theory your reasoning is correct, but practice it would require a conspiracy because the thing the scientists are basing their inferences on are multiple independently collected data about things as different as energy budgets, surface temperatures, flowering times, compostion of vegetation, ice mass balances and so forth. For all these independent data to be reconciled and marshalled to support one conclusion would require a multinational and multidisciplinary effort at data manipulation in something like real-time embracing not only lead scientists but those doing the collection and processing.
Affirmation bias simply can’t explain that. At least some scientists would be getting contrary data and publishing it, unless for some reason, they were in on it. One only has to revisit the early-late 1970s to see how the consensus was established about matters like CO2 senistivity to make affirmation bias most unlikely in the field. Schneider and Rasool actually changed their position over this between the early 1970s and the late 1970s, basedd on their developing research.
Allow me to connect the dots. When you call someone a skeptic, you are really calling them a denier; when you call someone a denier, you are really calling them a holocaust denier; when you call someone a holocaust denier, you are really calling them a nazi; when you call someone a nazi, you are really calling them a fascist.
Damn! Here I am now, but there ain’t a single fish still swimming in this barrel.
One doesn’t have to be a climate change sceptic in order to be sceptical that rushing to cut carbon emissions is necessary right now, or to refuse to take on board the general idea that it’s hubristic for humans to pit themselves against the brute forces of nature. The history of humanity has been one of struggle with nature. I note that no-one in this thread has taken Merkel to task for his remark that climate change “constitute(s) the greatest global environmental disaster since the introduction of agriculture, I don’t know what would”. Environmental disaster for *whom*? Yes, agriculture changed the environment and built civilizations. In doing so it lifted us up, made us more conscious and alive, removed us decisively from the animal kingdom. I think that’s a great thing.
I agree with Legal Eagle that there’s a truly horrible atmosphere around the whole argument about the climate. Many people do feel uncomfortable about challenging the consensus view that we’re facing planetary disaster if we don’t do something right now (and maybe even if we do, according to Clive Hamilton). And that’s quite separate from the whole issue of scepticism about the science itself. My view is that as I’m a lay person I’m not entitled to take issue with the science , I must assume that there is real evidence that the climate is warming. But I disagree that “the science” can tell us what we must do about it. (And I dislike the way in which many of the contributors here claim to have a full understanding of the science(because apparently, they aren’t very clever and not’intellectually lazy’). The reality is, that the climate is a chaotic system and the science is too complex for even most trained scientists in other disciplines to be able to sensibly claim anywhere near a full understanding of.)
But back to the separate question of what we should do.
The availability of relatively cheap, carbon emitting energy sources has liberated a large portion of the planet from the horrible grind of relying on carbohydrate energy to move things around. However, even in there’s still a substantial portion of the world’s population which is not even electrified. These are the people with the low carbon footprint and they’re poor because of it, very poor. And yes, if the climate warms dramatically over the next century they will suffer most, unless by that time they’re as wealthy as us. To become wealthier they are going to *have* to build cheap coal fueled power stations – there is no way that it can happen otherwise because the alternatives are still too expensive.
The most sensible policy as far as I can see is for the wealthy nations to drmatically increase funding for R&D (including pure research), rather than making us all poorer and slowing development by transitioning to the expensive alternative of renewable energy right now. (I think Lomborg has proposed something similar to this).
There’s a debate this Thursday in Melbourne (Dan O’Connell Hotel, 7pm) which will certainly involve some of these issues. Full details here: <a href The Monthly Argument . The main speakers will be John Daley (Grattan Institute) and Alan Moran (IPA), and there will be a panel consisting of Arthur Dent (aka Albert Langer), Matthew (Zero carbon, Australia), Austin Williams (UK architect and author of a book called “The Enemies of Progress”, and Cam Walker (FoE).
Martin B @29 said:
I grasp what you claim here but the formulation here is misleading or open to abuse. If by “the Science” one means to describe the entire corpus of knowledge about the system components and their interaction to produce climate then yes. The Science isn’t settled.
If one means no more by “the science” than that rising atmospheric inventories of Co2 derive from human agency (most especially combustion of fossil biomass for chemical energy, landclearing etc) and are the principle driver of a warming trend documented over the last 130 years and that this is likely to continue and be marked by an increase in extreme weather events and lead to a decline in terrestrial and marine biodiversity, disruption to agriculture and human settlement, sea level rises, glacial masses and so forth over the next few hundred years then this is entirely settled.
How to respond to the challenges of the post-industrial climate anomaly is of course not settled either.
The best of Legal Eagle.
That’s true Zarquon@102, but in the end, at least as far as evidence-based policy is concerned, the role of science is not to provide absolute truth. No system of thought can reliably do that.
All science can do is to guide us to adopt policies that are more likely to effectively and efficiently address probelms that we have identified. It gives us a non-arbitrary and more reliable basis for action than anything else could promise.
Regardless of the level of confidence that can be invested in conclusions of the science, what the naysayers need to do is to explain why we should not base policy on the best relevant science available, and outline what objections there might be if we decided to base policy on some other arbitrary or cultural criteria (“I don’t like big government”) and while a handful of people benefited from this, humanity as a whole suffered a catastrophe.
It is true that acting rationally on the best evidence available is not a guarantee that things will turn out well. When bad stuff happens in these circumstances, we are inclined to feel sorry for those who acted as well as those who suffered.
On the other hand, when someone behaves with reckless indifference to evidence and reason and then the entirely predictable disaster happens, our attitudes tend to be very different.
We don’t need science to be able to tell us when and where and at what scale disaster will happen ten or 15 years out, (though this would be nice). We do however, need to pay attention to its recommendations when framing policy, and not reject their intellectual force as a way of avoding the culutral implications. That is the policy of the naysayers, who long ago accepted that nothing short of an all-out assault on the integrity of science and scientists would suffice to underpin their cultural claims. It is testimony to the weakness of their position that having spent years cherrypicking to pretend there was room to doubt the salience of the evidence, they have retreated to POMO defences: the right to have my own opinion/just becasue I disagree you reject me
Sad …
Incurious and Unread @104. The 10% figure is the probability that global climate of recent decades has not been affected by anthropogenic activity. AFAIK that figure hasn’t been updated, & given the signal-noise ratio probably won’t change much without another 5-10 years’ worth of data.
OTOH the probability of future climate not being affected by anthropogenic activity is much smaller. The greenhouse properties of CO2, methane et al are firmly established scientific facts, and essentially beyond rational dispute. Increased concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere will change the global energy balance, with the most plausible consequence being a net warming.
Somehow all the AGW doubters in the world have been unable to come up with an alternative predicted consequence that cannot be readily dismissed as implausible.
“I fear the consequences of climate change thus deny climate change”
“I fear death thus I deny mortality with eternal afterlife”
I think these 2 modes of thinking are much the same. Is there anything to gain in engaging with those afflicted? (Other than Insight getting crappy argument going for cheap TV entertainment – it was funny when Phython did the “that’s not an argument, that’s contradiction” sketch, but Insight drags it out, old material, new Monckton wannabes and it ain’t funny)
I used to think it may be profitable to ease the fears of climate change action. I think it would be fantastic not to pollute our water table with coal seam gas, dig up mercury and other heavy metals and radioactive elements along with coal, or energy security avoiding the need for silly-buggers in the Middle East, or the 10-30,000 deaths that US EPA estimates arise yearly from coal burning and vehicle emissions in USA alone .. and one can go on and on and on before getting to CO2 warming as demonstrated by Tyndall in 1859. The cost to the economy to address this is, according to any reputable economist and the reports of Stern and Garnaut is small and will be certainly less than no action at all. In fact, there’s a reasonable expectation that this may indeed prime the economy in getting a post-coal high tech economies swinging.
But the fear remains in those convinced it’ll ruin them (they may claim it will ruin the poor even, feign compassion, but no-one with the sole exception of themselves is fooled). And with that fear they’ll make up any magic not to go there. Engaging them will inevitably end up with one saying “FFS look, here’s a 1st year undergrad atmospheric physics textbook” and then it’s tears and the victim card.
Am I wrong? (I hope I am)
Unfortunately the reverse is also true: the formulation that “the science is settled” is also misleading and open to abuse.
The important questions relevant to broad policy setting are as settled as science gets.
The entire body of science is not settled and we continue to learn new and intersting things.
I personally dislike the formulation of the “science is settled” for precisely the same reasons as above: science is not like that and most reasonably educated people know that. The existence of uncertainty and controversy ofn the fringes of knowledge, however does not mean that everything is up for dispute or that any ‘side of the sargument’ is as good as any other.
wbb’s list above strongly underlines how much of the claim to “skepticism” (really here the right to naysay without cultural cost) really does derive from cultural claims, or as one other said above, is an appeal to consequences as a rationale for rejecting a claim. I recall one of the sillier POMO feminsists some years ago (I wish I could recall her name) claim that if something were a really ugly idea, it had to be untrue. This is in that category.
Even if one accepted all of the LE quoted claims above, that would not change the physics concerning radiative forcing and climate.
It’s of course not the case that Clive Hamilton (whom I don’t count on a list of people I like) favours a police state. Nor is it true that the Green movement is authoritarian and wants “to force everyone to behave and believe in a particular way”. There may well be individual Greens who have such a perspective, but overwhelmingly in my experience, Greens favour establishing new cultural norms, which is a long way from forcing anyone to do anything. A CO2 price is an incentive to avoid using CO2 intensive goods and services. Nobody is forced to avoid them.
LE apparently likes the term “re-educated”, presumably because of the allusion to the culture of the Iron/bamboo curtain which combined with the “barrel of a gun” reference is is really a variant of Godwins(Greens = Stalinism) but apart from the snark, is a single piece of evidence for this adduced. None that I can see, Apparently, scepticism does not entail any self-reflection.
And so it goes — who she hates, false dilemmas/strawmen about pandas, and the catch-all appeal to uncertainty “who knows if an important point might have been missed?”.
Impoprtant points, if that is what they are, get raised and addressed. “You might have got this wrong” is not an important point and doesn’t suggest one.
This really is intellectual laziness but it’s more than that. It’s cultural resistance wrapped in the insubstantial garments of personal autonomy with handwaving and angst as tactics. No sir, she isn’t happy with any of it because it seems to be increasing the standing of ideas, mores and persons to whom she objects. She doesn’t really know whether she is intellectually compelled to accept the science, but really, she’d rather not and can’t people let her have that without making her feel bad?
She is willing to sign a cultural non-aggression pact even with flat-earthers. You can’t say fairer than that.
I would neither sign a non-aggression pact with flat earthers nor respect anyone else who would.
JPZ 105,
What you are describing there is precisely what the fossil fuel industry have achieved. Over the years
Oil will last for hundreds of years if not thousands.
If it ever runs out there will be something to take its place.
The atmosphere and oceans are inexhaustible in their ability to absorb waste.
Oil will always be a cheap source of energy.
Coal can be clean.
…and the new energy mantra is
Nuclear energy is safe.
Nuclear energy does not contaminate.
Nuclear fuels are inexhaustible.
Nuclear waste? What waste, where.
Chernobyl? Minor problem, just another bad day in Russia.
…..So who has the biggest vested interest?
A cluster of multi trillion dollar industries? or a climate scientist on a salary?
Martin B said:
It is. I would say that the basic science attending the post-industrial climate anomaly is settled. Sometimes ellipsis creeps in as people assume that this is what is meant.
I wrote four years ago that human institutions would prove utterly incapable of developing a systematic program of effective measures in response to climate change. This thread would have been a useful bit of supporting evidence about the reasons why.
I nominate LE as chair of the ALP citizens’ assembly. Agenda item 1: ask for an extension of time to discuss the terms of reference.
I think this post was written in haste and in anger. It simply misses the point. LE’s take on the science, I think, was that of Stephen Schneider: “on the preponderance of evidence climate change is occurring”.
The three major points I took away from her piece were as follows:
1. If you express skepticism about AGW and/or the policy approach advocated you are labeled as something inherently nefarious.
2. AGW policy will hurt poor people and there is a correlation between socio-economic situation and AGW stance. What Noel Pearson calls the ‘heartland’ of AGW activism tend to be socio-economically secure. They don’t understand what their policies will do to people for whom $50 is a lot of money.
3. The climate change science has become politicized to the extent that it is very difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends. The IPCC has had numerous problems with this and it is this body which is the ultimate authority on this science.
This last is the major point. SCIENCE IS NOT SUPPOSED TO PAY HEED TO THE DICTATES OF INSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY. You appear to have forgotten that.
For the record I’m an environmentalist. I think AGW is something that requires action. I think the action thus far coming from government is a catalogue of boneheaded twaddle.
Liberty is a human construct and infinitely interpretable, i.e. ideological.
That’s amusing. So a man who has been chained to a wall in a dungeon for three decades can interpret this as liberty if he has the right ideological construct? Oh okay. Cheers.
Climate change policy is another order of things, but it seems meaningless to me to counterpose the science itself with a bunch of value positions drawn from the political realm.
I am not an AGW ‘skeptic’ yet I have been abused here because I had the temerity to remind someone that anthropogenic global warming is an hypothesis not a fact. It’s an hypothesis for which there is a lot of evidence. It would be foolish to ignore this evidence, sure.
But it ain’t a fact. Understand the difference?
Robert,
I think you’ve missed one important point that LegalEagle raised, and it’s right at the start of the first quote:
How is it consistent with either progressive values or the scientific process to aggressively drive someone who holds an alternative view point to the point of fear?
The harm of stereotypes is a constant theme throughout progressive politics and yet when it comes to climate change the stereotype of “denier” is readily thrown at someone based on a single opinion regardless of how nuanced it is, or the basis on which it is formed. That fact that all sorts of incorrect assumptions about a person’s motivations or values are made to point that they become concerned about their professional or personal welfare is concerning.
Taking action on climate change is primarily based on having trust in the climate scientists and their scientific process. However, having such significant hostility shown towards people of opposing view points demonstrates behaviour that, if exhibited in the scientific circle(s) that do the science, is corruptive to the scientific process. This in turn erodes the trust that people unfamiliar with the specifics are able to have in the conclusions from that process.
A third point I am struggling to understand too, is how someone who believes that the collective action of humanity is needed to save the planet, can think that calling people intellectually lazy or deniers is going to help build the political consensus needed to solve the problem?
(For the record I support most climate change actions proposed, and although I’m rather skeptical about the ability of a market based solution to produce outcomes efficiently I support it as a good first step)
I wrote four years ago that human institutions would prove utterly incapable of developing a systematic program of effective measures in response to climate change.
You are so right KL. And nothing that has happened in the intervening period has given any indication of that situation changing.
Welcome fellow “denier”. Wear the label with pride.
You don’t need a systematic solution. You need new technology. Government departments and politicians are not known to be inventive.
Aiden,
“But it ain’t a fact”
I think that this statement fails in at least 4 of the 5 following tests.
1. something that actually exists; reality; truth: Your fears have no basis in fact.
2. something known to exist or to have happened: Space travel is now a fact.
3. a truth known by actual experience or observation; something known to be true: Scientists gather facts about plant growth.
4. something said to be true or supposed to have happened: The facts given by the witness are highly questionable.
5. Law . Often, facts. an actual or alleged event or circumstance, as distinguished from its legal effect or consequence. Compare question of fact, question of law.
The only way that global warming may not be called fact absolutely is in a court of law where legal definition may draw a doubt to the cross examination ” can you state uncategorically that global warming is proven 100% to be true?”. This may require a “no” response from some scientists.
LE may get a murderer acquited of charges, but if the muderer did in fact kill then it is actual fact that they are a murderer, just not under the law.
Even climate denialists quickly resort to “well its happened in the past, therefore it is a natural cycle”. ie global warming is “fact”.
Yeah, right!!
Adrien said:
The word “skepticism” has acquired a lot more cultural baggage as a result of this matter than was the case before 1993. It’s now code for people who really are nefarious, in part because they have debauched the language by their resort to the term.
On the offchance that what you meant by “express[ing] skepticism” was expressing non-specified concern about the integrity of the science unconnected with the desire to maintain business-as-usual policies, then it’s unfortunate if people label you nefarious. You must be aware of the context however. Those who favour b-a-u appear in a variety of guises.
It’s hard to know what to make of this. AGW will hurt poor people whereas well conceived mitigation will not. Yet it’s an old-fashioned wedge tactic for elites to defend themselves by affecting concern for the poor. Every factory owner defending the right to impose dickensian work practices appealed to the rights of the poor to warrant continued exploitation. Perhaps you really do care about those for whom $50 is a lot of money, but if you do, then your focus should be on how to effect mitigation without harming the poor i.e. how to transfer the burden to those for whiom $50 is not a lot of money rather than moaning about the former so that the latter can get off scott-free.
That’s simply not true. The assessment reports summarise the science. News media comment on them, sometimes in a careless way and sometimes in ways that frame the matter to the advantage of those pushing business as usual from a cultrual perspective. If you can’t be bothered distinguishing the former from the latter, it is unfair for you to blame the IPCC.
This is a slander of the IPCC. The Assessment reports were a summary by working groups of the assembled science in each of the areas informing the climate anomaly. Institutional authority paid heed to the dictates of science, not the other way around. Nobody there was telling the scientists what data to bring to the table and what it had to mean. This is the most oft-repeated meme of the naysayer culture warriors, and it is part and parcel of tainting science so as to create space for the kind of evidence-free policy which would protect the value of fossil assets.
You say that you don’t deny the need for acvtion on AGW, and what can one do but accept that, but your selection of claims marks you out as advocating the b-a-u position.
How those two things coexist is hard to follow.
Thank you wbb @111 for reading LE and sharing so that I don’t have to. It’s the best argument against the magic thinking was just to list it.
That’s a shame. I still want Legal Eagle to explain why she thinks AGW believers call people “fascist” at the slightest provocation.
There’s the whole “denier” term for a start, which is a slur meant to equate AGW skeptics with nazis.
mods: please close ital at: [whiom $50 is not a lot of money]
If you could correct the typo in the “whiom”, that would be nice too.
Ta
Mod: italic fixed. Didn’t see the typo
Feral Abacus @113
You’re right. Thanks for the correction.
Another example of how poor a forum blogs can be for considering/re-considering positions on contentious topics?
LE seems even more entrenched in her ‘agnosticism’ at the end of this.
“LE seems even more entrenched in her ‘agnosticism’ at the end of this.”
That her ‘agnosticism’ was ever entrenched was the very problem. Agnosticism CANNOT be entrenched. To be agnostic, one must be susceptible to influence in either direction equally. Anything someone does to shift their attention more favourably to evidence from one side or the other immediately disqualifies them from claiming the title, or that of ‘sceptic’.
‘There’s the whole “denier” term for a start, which is a slur meant to equate AGW skeptics with nazis.’
This seems to me to be very typical of the whole AGW discourse. Calling someone a ‘denier’ when they deny the persuasiveness of scientific data is an innocuous exercise; it’s convenient to call them something, and ‘denier’ is pretty apt. It’s not a metaphor meant to equate them to something else. It’s the deniers, who then expressed furious “Oh so now I’m a Nazi am I cos you reckon I’m like the people who denied the Holocaust”, who have invested everyday language with all kinds of emotional associations.
The denialists have looked for every opportunity to mislead, manipulate and misrepresent events and the scientific data – ‘Climategate’, anyone? – in as immoral a fashion as can be imagined. Having said that, there’s no point getting upset about it. It’s just what scorpions do to frogs.
While LE’s post sometimes gets a bit carried away about the expectation of criticism from the left at her declaration of climate skepticism there are parts of her post that do merit serious discussion. For example, when she says:
This statement highlights two issues. Firstly there are some AGW supporters who are too careless about the effect of what they want to do on people who are closer to the margin both in Australia and the less developed world. At times an impression is given that what is important is punishing polluters and it doesn’t really matter how much collateral damage it causes.
Secondly, it highlights the willingness of the anti climate action to exaggerate the potential economic cost to the community and individuals. For example, it is not clear where this magic %50/month comes from.
If we assume that we are going to put a price on carbon high enough to drive investment in renewable power AND this price is applied to other sources of emissions such as fuel the $50/month may be about right.
However, if we take the intellectual effort to consider alternatives such as “putting a price on clean” or use regulation rather than increasing the price of fuel the $50 would only rise to something like $8/month by 2015.
It is worth noting too that the burden to the poor on the cost of reducing emissions could be reduced further if the costs were paid by reversing the tax concessions Howard made to the rich.
The power of the skeptics arises more from their economic scare campaigns, not their questioning of climate science. Serious climate action is far more likely to happen if more intellectual effort is put into seeking ways of achieving climate objectives in a way that minimizes negative impacts on the less well off.
John D @135:
Could you please provide evidence for this sweeping assertion?
Bil B – AGW is not a fact according to your definitions. It is an hypotheses about observed phenomena for which the evidence is substantial but not conclusive. We, for example, do not have a record of the sun’s irradiation cycles. It could be that that’s responsible for warming since c.1850. We should not rely on that possibility for excuses to do nothing however.
The AGW lobby have no-one but themselves to blame for this shitfight. Where the fuck is Maggie Thatcher when you need her?
Yeah, but this is the whole problem, John D. LE’s post is rich with emotion and hypotheticals but completely empty on facts. She confesses to her worries, but has not sought, or does not bother to explicate where these worries come from, and where she gets her figures – beyond citing Clive bloody Hamilton of all people, hardly representative of the field itself.
Furthermore, her problems with the solutions to climate change do not alter the facts of climate change. Or rather should not. Mystifyingly, it seems they do.
In the end, her whole post comes down to billions of lives and dollars on one hand, proven science, and peer-reviewed research vs “I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Clive Hamilton is a jerk, and despite not having done even the most cursory research and subsequently bandying my opinion about as it if means anything, I am put out that people are calling me ignorant, retrogade and gullible” on the other.
Adrien – BilB’s mistake was to engage at all with the idea of scientific ‘facts’.
Gravity is not a fact. It’s a theory we have come to use, which pretty reliably accounts for the available evidence (or ‘facts’).
In science, a theory is a much greater thing than a fact.
Fran – It’s hard to know what to make of this.
What I’m saying is that people are a product of their socio-economic environment and that the correlation between such and views on AGW says something about the ‘science’.
I know the difference between a skeptic and someone who is totally batshit, I’m a Catallaxy regular and I’ve been to Graeme Bird.
There’s a range of personalities across the spectrum. LE’s post demonstrates that the stereotypes don’t apply and that there’s a diminished tolerance for dissent amongst people concerned about AGW.
As someone who reckons the environment is the #1 issue of the 21st century I’m most concerned about the bad policy ideas and total degradation of Enlightenment standards of reason that this issue has precipitated upon us. I don’t think either side has a monopoly.
Am wounded.
My masterful expose of rapscallion scepticist apologetics, 136, has been passed over?
But as Copernicus or Gallileo was said to have said, as to th earth’s cosmological revolutions, before the very Inquisition;
“Still it turns”.
In science, a theory is a much greater thing than a fact.
Evolution is a fact. Natural selection is a theory used to explain that fact. Which is greater?
When the facts behind gravity are worked out I suspect we’ll gain access to the stars. That is not a theory. That’s an Art Wanker a speculatin’.
May I suggest the following rhetorical assertion in favour of AGW action:
AGW is a theory. We use it to explain the fact that the Earth has been warming up since about 1850. We know that carbon based gases like methane and various carbon oxides can reflect heat. We believe that the increase in the Earth’s temperature over the last 160 years or so is likely caused by the rapid increase in production of carbon gases caused by industrialization. According to computer models, we are likely to face dire consequences if industrialization continues to produce carbon gases.
Shall we discuss what can, if anything, be done?
Yes it’s all the fault of the AGW ‘lobby’. I see what you’re doing there, reducing scientic consesus to just another competing interest.
“Evolution is a fact. Natural selection is a theory used to explain that fact. Which is greater?”
In science – the theory.
In agriculture – the fact.
You getting me yet?
All ‘facts’ of any significane in science depend on the veracity of many theories on which their understanding depends and so in that sense there is never really a ‘fact’ in science that is unambiguously true indpependent of theory.
#114 Dave McRae: “Engaging them will inevitably end up with one saying “FFS look, here’s a 1st year undergrad atmospheric physics textbook” and then it’s tears and the victim card.”
Somehow I get the feeling that if I was trying to win an argument with you about history, and I handed you a creationist history textbook and said ‘FFS look, this textbook was certified by the Texas State Board of Education!’ you wouldn’t find that overly compelling. Textbooks, I am sure you’re aware, can easily become political footballs.
Climate science is very new (in the long view of things), and sadly it is highly politicized in its infancy, and if you don’t think that’s cause for concern, well you should. Some aspects of learning get politicized for the weirdest reasons, all the time: the history of the ancient Chaldeans isn’t terribly controversial (at least for now), but aspects of the history of the ancient Egyptians are. Go figure. And also, Cui bono?
Fran Barlow @ #107: I don’t think it’s as clear-cut as you make it out to be. There’s a lot of moving parts, and a lot of different food-chains, and institutional hypnosis can be an amazing thing. (Again, not saying this is the case here, just laying out the grounds for wariness.) For instance it’s my understanding that a lot of climate science is based on computer modeling; of course, your output depends on your input, and how you built the model in the first place can bias what you think you’re looking for. It’s like that old joke, “recursion, n.: see recursion.”
Comment # 30 here is interesting, though of course anecdotal. Here’s the relevant bit, so you don’t have to click if you don’t care to (the rest of the thread is about something else anyway)…
“Number 2 son, currently an undergrad science major basically tells me you can’t get a research grant unless you buy into… AGW. University and government money flows one direction…”
Doesn’t prove anything as anecdotes never do, but then again I’ve heard this sort of thing many times. Again not to claim this is necessarily the case with climate science, just, as Flann O’Brien put it, “There’s more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than, er, you ever thought of.” And again, climate science is very, very new.
btw It seems to me your thinking at #127 is kind of fraught with problems, but life is short, I’ll see if I can come back to it another day. Cheers…
You getting me yet?
Um, no. Evolution is a fact in science. We know species evolve. Gravity is a theory because we know stuff falls down etc but we don’t know why or how exactly.
That AGW is a theory does not in any way render it optional. If the theory proves correct and we do nothing it could be very bad. It’s much harder to argue against AGW put that way. Are you getting me yet?
I see what you’re doing there, reducing scientific consensus to just another competing interest.
Would you please quote me to show that that ridiculous summation has some kind of basis or withdraw that comment. It really is terribly unhelpful.
I don’t reduce everything to competition. I also agree with the spirit of Peter Kropotkin’s argument on nature viz co-operation.
Scientific consensus is a bollocks concept. Hitler used it against Einstein. He hired 100 German scientists to disprove relativity. None of them did, of course. But as Einstein said: it’d take only one.
Dude, aside from the Godwin, have you actually read the post? It directly addresses the incorrect Einstein analogy.
Adrien, think man.
In agriculture, what matters is the fact of evolution [species evolve, so I'll use the best stock I have to breed the next generation].
In science, what matters is the theory of natural selection [species evolve because of x, y and z, and this has explanatory power e and predictive power p].
In engineering, what matters is the fact of things-falling-downwards [I will build my structure with foundations, and a low centre of mass].
In science, what matters is the theory of gravity [mass seems to attract mass, so large bodies seem to suck smaller bodies towards them... err... not so well understood really!].
Well, we know there’s a fossil record that shows a bunch fossils in different geological strata, which are different from the living organisms we can see today. We know that genetically, organisms display various similarities and differences which are geographically distributed in particular ways, ditto taxonomically, that genetic variation can occur in individuals, that the interaction of genetic characteristics with environmental factors can influence reproductive success, and so on and so forth.
We infer from these facts that species evolve. There are alternative accounts of the facts, but we generally prefer evolutionary theory over the alternative accounts because Occam’s Razor overwhelmingly favours it.
Evolution is no more or less a scientific ‘fact’ than AGW. If you’re going to call evolution a ‘fact’, then consistency would suggest you use the same terminology with respect to AGW. On the other hand, I’d prefer to call both of them theories which are well supported by scientific research.
BTW, in scientific usage, there’s a distinction between a hypothesis and a theory. A hypothesis is regarded as somewhat tentative, a theory as comparatively well established. In that sense, both evolution and AGW are theories.
The other relevant similarity between evolution and AGW is that resistance to both theories tends to be ideological rather than scientific.
Adrien@149 – if the connotations of the words ‘lobby group’ are not clear to you, there is nothing that I can say that could be more helpful, apart from as Kim said, read the post…
j_p_z @ 147.
A much posited assertion amongst the ‘sceptics’. And wrong.
Try almost 150 years.
Tim – that species evolve is, I would argue, more in the realm of fact. We have empirical knowledge of genetic traits shifting over time within a species, which (unless one denies the evidence completely) means that evolution (in some form or other) MUST be occurring. Hence it’s a fact, which requires a theory to explain it.
Kim – The post mentions Einstein’s theory of general relativity as an example of something much more complicated then AGW that has been subjected to experiment and verified. It doesn’t speak of the use by Hitler of ‘scientific consensus’ to disprove it.
And I’m not sure I agree that AGW is ‘simply thermodynamics’. The phenomena is fundamentally grounded in Newtonian physics but the dynamics are quite complicated. Hence the existence of so many models.
.
FDB – I don’t see how evolution matters less in science than natural selection. The one is supposed to explain the other. I also have no idea how this pertains to the status of AGW as a theory.
.
Adrian – There is an AGW lobby. As in a collection of agents advocating for AGW policy in various political courts. There is global warming the phenomenon. And there is AGW the theory that explains that phenomenon.The former competes in the political arena. The middle happens irrespective of human desires (or because of them). The latter is a consequence of our economic activity. The distinction is significant.
I have criticized the AGW lobby. I did not reduce everything to competition. Please see Kropotkin, Prince Peter for enlightenment as to my political disposition.
Tim – You mentions genes. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find the conclusive evidence. Species evolve: fact.
“FDB – I don’t see how evolution matters less in science than natural selection.”
Okay.
Science is about trying to answer questions.
Evolution isn’t in question.
QED.
Actually evolution has been directly observed, making it both fact and theory.
Nylonase is an bacteria that has evolved to consume Nylon (which is a synthetic polymer as we all know).
FDB – Okay I get you.
And are you saying that this continuing questioning of AGW is invalid? Well on the whole, yeah. Most of the stuff written about AGW is by people who don’t know and don’t care they don’t know because they’re advocating a worldview based on attitudes to capitalism.
This issue isn’t really about science, it’s about free speech and its stifling by people who are locked in a war with other people doing their own stifling. The first casualty of war is…
What I’m trying to say is don’t fight. Ye don’t have to fight all the time. Especially if by doing so you will lose.
Can you dig it?
Adrien@21
It has been done. Nothing new about people celebrating and rationalising their or others lack of liberty and calling it freedom.
Equally horrifying and incomprehensible to you then would be that some have thought that the main aim of government is individual and collective liberty.
…”in the words of Jesus, the aim of mankind is ‘To have life and to have it more abundantly’ and the State must be directed to this clear end.” Baruch de Spinoza Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
Spinoza, a scientist, supported individual liberty primarily because he thought this would make the crucial medium of mutual aid needed for the development of human awareness, the state, more secure.
#154: “Try almost 150 years.”
150 years is new, you silly goose.
And computer modelling is a lot more new. Almost as if to say, — how shall I put this? — very new.
Try again.
Just in the spirit of accuracy, no snark, @161, Spinoza got it wrong.
“in the words of Jesus, the aim of mankind is ‘To have life and to have it more abundantly’” (Spinoza)
Those aren’t the actual words of Jesus. Jesus said, “*I am come that* they might have life, etc etc” So it is the aim of Jesus to give mankind life more abundantly; that’s not the same thing as what, as it were, “the aim of mankind” is (which Jesus talks about in other places.)
Just sayin’.
Sitting in Environmental Science at college in 1978, we discussed the likely impact of acification of the planet’s ocean due to increasing uptake of CO2 from the atmosphere. Climate change as a measureable problem has been part of the scientific scenery for a long long time.
Having said that, I will point out that I find some of the philosophical underpinings of LE’s argument sophistic. But I am no philosopher. Nor a true follower of Voltaire.
But equally I find much of what has passed for comment on this post, even too the blog post itself, has something of the tone of a witch-hunt. I am darkly amused that her over blown point concerning the painting of skeptics as nazis has come close to be made good by the rising tone of some comments.
Not strictly true Japerz, though truer than you may think. The concept of an “Ice Age” (and thus, by extension, climate change) dates back to educated observation during the mid 18th century in Europe.
Now, initially, the idea of glaciers advancing and retreating over time excited no real controversy, until it was discovered that these events were alleged to have taken place in geological time. Now, as every schoolboy knows, in the nineteenth century geological time ran head-on into the the dogmas of churchmen whose bible-based timetables didn’t account for hundreds of thousands of years, let alone millions of years. Thus climate change science and obscurantism collided.
Fast forward a couple of centuries and nothing much has changed, really. Obscurantists are still into denial, just different kinds of denial.
(PS, I’d like to thank all those obscurantists out there for being so downright entertaining.)
On the other hand, it does appear that natural (i.e., non-human) climate change has dwarfed anything that humanity has achieved so far or is likely to achieve with current practices. So, humans may be authors of some sort of catastrophe, but it is likely to be minor league compared with what natural processes are likely to cook (or to freeze) up.
I wish someone would form a government so we could stop all this crap about science and talk about the things that matter …
Katz — heh heh. But here’s the kicker: did the 18th century glacier observers use their observations to predict the future, and then on the strength of their wacky predictions, demand that everyone on the planet hand over their economies to a little clique of ‘enlightened’ philosophes, to be re-ordered for their own good?*
Nope, I reckon they were still too busy guillotining their aristocracies in the name of Fraternite.
But now at last, nous sommes ici, eh? In a brave, and I repeat, new, world.
Laissez les bons temps rouler!
* — why, that racket sounds awfully familiar. One is almost tempted to say it sounds like the racket of a, hmm what am I looking for here, a… religion. Right?
“Hypocrite lecteur — mon semblable — mon frere!”
150 years is new, you silly goose.
And computer modelling is a lot more new
It’s irrelevant how
fuckingnew it is. It a question of how reliable it is. That’s something that deniers have no idea about.FDB @155 and Adrien @157 – yes, I’ll grant you that incidences of evolution such as you describe have been observed. However, I’m sure you’ll agree that there’s more to evolutionary biology than that – Creationists would dismiss those examples as mere ‘microevolution’ (they’d be wrong to dismiss them, of course). The grander aspects of evolutionary theory, i.e., as an explanation for the emergence of entire new classes of organism with unrecognisably different characteristics from the species from which they evolved, and the repeated huge transformations of the Earth’s biota that are apparent in the fossil record, for example, not only have not been directly observed, but are incapable of direct observation, as the processes are so slow that they vastly exceed the lifetimes of human civilisations. They can only be inferred from other observable facts. The small-scale instances of evolution you cite are certainly facts, but they are not proof that evolution on the grander scale has occurred – they are merely supporting evidence for it.
To my knowledge, harmless amateur naturalists never guillotined anyone, Japerz.
But interestingly, while these harmless folk were speculating productively about the reasons for the deposition of rogue boulders where no glacier had been for a very long time, further down the valley the authorities were still burning witches.
but they are not proof that evolution on the grander scale has occurred – they are merely supporting evidence for it
There’s no “merely” about it – supporting evidence is all you ever get.
Tim – The small-scale instances of evolution you cite are certainly facts, but they are not proof that evolution on the grander scale has occurred – they are merely supporting evidence for it.
Okay I ain’t gonna get into punctuated equilibrium. That is a theory.
This is OT yeah? Let’s drop it.
@162 –
Err, comments policy, civility, etc.
Philomena – Equally horrifying and incomprehensible to you then would be that some have thought that the main aim of government is individual and collective liberty.
How can I be horrified by something if I can’t comprehend it, at least a bit?
The purpose of government for collective liberty, on which I imagine you differ somewhat from me, is as old as government. The purpose of government to preserve individual liberty is somewhat younger and more problematic. We tend to preserve individual liberty by putting restrictions on government.
And, yes, from time immemorial people have taken their liberty on the backs of enslaved or oppressed others; and yes people often talk of freedom when they describe their love of imprisonment. How you can possibly characterize me as such I shouldn’t wonder.
I know who Baruch Spinoza was, he was a moral philosopher and a metaphysician not a contributor much to science as we understand it.
Bernice #164 – Raise a glass.
Zarquon:
Yep.
Adrien, I weighed in on this earlier because the comparison with evolution is something that (IMHO poorly-informed) AGW skeptics have brought up in conversation with me before, and it highlights for me the cultural drivers of some of these debates. I find it interesting that in Australia the science of evolutionary biology isn’t up for general debate, but the science of AGW is, whereas in the USA, both are. Given that the science is the same on both issues in both countries, it’s clear that the distinction is cultural. To me that says something about the cultural boundaries of what is considered open to individual opinion, and what isn’t, which are not necessarily related to how well established (or otherwise) a theory may be in scientific terms.
But agreed, it’s getting OT now.
Tim – Cultural and economic. Australia is deeply invested in energy resources. AGW is highly inconvenient for many of us.
j_p_z @ 162;
You think insults will mask your ignorance? Good luck with that.
You were saying that climate science was “very very new”.
At least you’ve learnt something today.
I know who Baruch Spinoza was, he was a moral philosopher and a metaphysician not a contributor much to science as we understand it.
No, evidently not, as you (not we) wrongly understand science, Adrien.
Spinoza was one of the most original and consequential figures in world history. At the very least he was a key figure in the creation of modernity uniting previously separate or compartmetnalised ideas in political theory, the scientific revolution, theology, and philosophy.
It was Spinoza who showed that freedom and liberty can only be understood philosophically not by recourse to the type of example your proferred up thread.
“You think insults will mask your ignorance?”
You think “silly goose” is an insult? Ah, innocence!
“At least you’ve learnt something today.”
Yes, certainly; but not the thing you think you’ve taught me.
OK Kim, I’ll back on out of it now…
Australia is deeply invested in energy resources. AGW is highly inconvenient for many of us.
At last, we get to the real nub, the kernel, the meat, the…
j_p_z @ 180
Yes, best not to embarrass yourself any further.
Computer climate models are not reliable in predicting future climate.
As Roger Pielke Snr says “The IPCC global climate model multi-decadal simulations are inaccurately called “projections” or “predictions”. They are truthfully “sensitivity experiments”.”
Models to date have not been accurate in predicting future climate even in the short term and are not a reliable means for setting any kind of climate policy.
I hear you Bernice @164 re witch hunt. I would be fine and I’m sure most here would be completely happy if LE chose to remain ignorant.
But then LE flogs this ignorance as authority on TV for profit (cash or notoriety whatever). Admittedly a 3rd rate yabfest ironically called Insight that hires clueless dolts as subject matter experts. Will LE even read a text book on atmospheric physics? No, the “debate” is between .. ahh .. Dara O’Briain says it best in this comedy sketch
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIaV8swc-fo
(the notion that all opinions are equal .. my arse ..a professor of dentistry for 40 years does not argue with some idjit that removes his teeth with string and a door)
Again, totally fine if LE or any denier wants to remain ignorant and cannot be arsed to reference a few texts. But when they seek to pull the quids or fame flogging their made up drool as science I think that’s fair game to be called out upon, and kid gloves are not needed. The money grabbing media tarts are not precious even if they claim it.
And BTW – why is OK for deniers to be aggressive, rude, accuse scientists of genocide, unquestionably endlessly recycle crap and cry when they cannot – but if a scientist, or pro-science writer does any of this it’s oh so horrid? Not that they do often at all – it came up when one scientist/blogger asked if ‘is unfairly criticizing those pushing for action on climate change and thus delaying action morally equivalent to killing people’? he mused “It’s not all that obvious to me that it isn’t.” and the nutjobs went wild http://mind.ofdan.ca/?p=2155
Could the scientifically endowed by qualifications in a science they deem themselves as worthy answer me a question please!? With all the floods going on across Australia of recent days,and rain being part of the h2o cycle,and the other matter of the released carbon dioxide prior to these rains and the rains having some effects in the matters of atmospheric travelling CO2,could someone ,if they have the time, to allocate per cubic measurement which way they see the CO2 travelling.Before rains,during rains and the eventual drying period.Given Pakistan,parts of Africa and early record low temperatures in the U.S.A. How are accurate means of measuring released CO2 across these cycles found!?That is both a site,and what to look for!?After all,I do not deny I am a Global Coolist..point the way please!?
I’d be fascinated to know what sort of proof LE would expect, but I don’t expect climate change action – or debates thereon, however heated – to pause while all the creatures of the forest gather around and explain why they think what they think as LE pats them on the head and assures them of their right to hold a different opinion from her.
SL@1: being part of a world that sustains agriculture, outdoor recreation is central to the concept of liberty, as I experience it and as others have defined it (Mont Pelerin was pretty damn pristine back in the day). The liberty of some to create AGW, however inadvertently, impinges on the liberty of all. It is a nonsense to defend the liberty of some over the liberty of all and claim that you believe in liberty per se, much less that you assert that liberty over other important and non-competing things.
Jarrah@68: bravo.
Yobbo@129: a skeptic is open to persuasion and will accept a logical argument based on facts. A denier will scoff at reasoned science and agitprop alike.
Models to date have not been accurate in predicting future climate even in the short term
Don’t be disingenuous. They’re not designed for short-term prediction.
I think there is some truth here when it comes to bits of the media and some of the political activists, but brother, this is a thread centred around a post by a member of the Keating Wing of the Greens. If he and his kind isn’t amenable to your particular multidisciplinary ideas on how to address the very idea of AGW then why bother? Why lump them all in with the strawmen? Leave that type of argument to the poor fowls.
You’re making a much better case here than any old chicken that’s had its tail feathers plucked, btw. Not every contrarian chook forces people to _think_. Plenty of ‘em rely on boilerplate.
Kim Stanley Robinson on this topic:
http://whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com/climate_change/time-to-end-the-multigenerational-ponzi-scheme
d
p.a.travers, I have this idea that one day you may discover the enter key…
The floods are expected to spur significant vegetation growth, so there should be some appreciable short-term additional uptake of carbon from the atmosphere. How much of that gets permanently sequestered? In the grand scheme of things, not very much at all. Nobody will be attempting to quantify this in anything remotely approaching the scales you’re wanting to know about. However, you can observe the effect on a continental scale from the Mauna Loa CO2 measurements (since 1957, from memory). There’s a seasonal dip May – Oct as trees grow in the northern hemisphere.
j-p-z: interesting that you mentioned the necons. There is a slightly more sophisticated version of a conspiracy theory adopted by neocons: that a “New Class” with an “adversarial culture” is objectively working to undermine their society – I say objective because some people are supposed to be unaware of what they are doing. It simply strikes me as a slightly classier version of a conspiracy theory. Deeply anti-intellectual, too.
Zarquon: I don’t disagree with that too much. But there’s probably a 2% chance that the scientists are wrong about climate change. Technically, deciding whether the scientists are right requires judgement – but any reason person could make that judgement (reasonable seems to exclude most of the Coalition party room).
I’d add that as someone with largely old-Labor instincts I hate the implications of global warming. I love smokestacks and factories and the union jobs that go with them. But the science is the science.
…meant reasonable person.
…I meant objectively, too. Ok so I’ve had a beer tonight.
On that note, this thread is closed.