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Is it possible to debate climate change with true believers? See the replies to Thursday’s post. Comments welcomed!

Larry Kummer, Editor

Summary: The comments in reply to the posts on the FM website often provide valuable information.  Sometimes new information and insights.  Sometimes revealing the tactics and thinking of factions in our society.  The posts about global warming produce especially interesting replies, showing how the lay true believers defend their faith.  Here we have some instructive and entertaining examples.  This is the third in a series; at the end are links to other chapters.

Contents

This post examines comments in reply to the previous chapter in this series: Good news! Global temperatures have stabilized, at least for now.

  1. Hoyticus asks an important question
  2. Pro-AGW comments often invent assertions which they can easily refute
  3.  Pro-AGW comments usually consider scientists to be authorities, unless they disagree with AGW orthodoxy. Then they’re cranks.
  4. Pro-AGW comments usually show little understanding of the scientific method
  5. Pro-AGW comments often display no signs of having read the skeptics’ work and have almost blind faith in computer models
  6.  Other chapters in this series
  7. For more information:  posts debating climate change issues

(1)  About debating climate change

Hoyticus posted a comment asking an important question:

How do you convince hardcore greens to read {articles like} this and reconsider their beliefs?

For a test we have the thousand or so comments to the 118 posts on the FM website about climate science.  No matter how mild the analysis, no matter how eminent the scientists quoted, the true believers reject anything casting doubt on their beliefs.  This suggests three possible theories.

Summing up my experience,  in November 2008 I listed the 7 common rebuttals of warmistas (laypeople with religious-like belief in global warming).  We can see some of these at work in the comments to Friday’s post.

  1. Pro-AGW comments often invent assertions which they can easily refute.
  2. Pro-AGW comments often display no signs of having read the skeptics’ work.
  3. Pro-AGW comments usually show little understanding of the scientific method.
  4. Pro-AGW comments usually show little or no awareness of the authoritative reports on this issue.
  5. Pro-AGW comments usually consider scientists to be authorities, unless they disagree with AGW orthodoxy.  Then they’re cranks.
  6. Pro-AGW comments usually show little or no knowledge of the long struggle to force some climate scientists to release data and methods.
  7. They illustrate the pro-AGW faith in computer models.
  8. They illustrate the irrationality of the “precautionary principle” as commonly used.

(2)  Pro-AGW comments often invent assertions which they can easily refute

“The data you present simply does not suggest what you claim it does. The ‘leveling off’ you note is simply not inconsistent with a warming model, none of which claim warming is a simple, linear pathway.”

Several people gave this rebuttal, of the general type most frequently seen from warmistas on the FM website.  Quite daft, as the I made no claims about future temperatures.  As seen in the title: “Good news!  Global temperatures have stabilized, at least for now.”  The post gives a long quotes from the conclusions of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project about recent temperature trends, and shows graphs of the various long-term datasets.

(3)  Pro-AGW comments usually consider scientists to be authorities, unless they disagree with AGW orthodoxy.  Then they’re cranks.

“You interpret the fact that a trough is at the same level as a past peak as evidence of stabilization. It isn’t.  … That is why serious people look at longer term trends and do multiple comparison rather than cherry pick data. … You are cherry picking data. And cherry picking scholars.”

That post quoted (without comment):

To true believers scientists such as these are authorities — not to be questioned — only when they agree with AGW dogma.  Disagreement means they’re not “serious people”, and dismissed without the need for rebuttal.  The comment about “cherry picking” scholars assumes by faith (without the need for proof) that there are others scholars who disagree.  Amen.

(4)  Pro-AGW comments usually show little understanding of the scientific method

“You are cherry picking data.”
— emailed rebuttal

“Lets not try and cherry pick data. Hansen has been very clear on warming. … What the writer here failed to say, is that 2011 was still the 11th warmest year on record – and it was the warmest La Nina Year ever recorded”
— Peter Mizla

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
— Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride

Science is to a large extent a recursive process: collecting data, applying it to theories, revising theories.  New data drives the process.  Applying new data is the opposite of cherry picking, especially when done so while showing the full dataset.

Cherry-picking .. is selecting statistics that support a particular thesis and drawing attention to those numbers, while ignoring other figures that might lead to a different conclusion. The amount of available data makes all the difference; the more numbers to choose among, the more certain one is to find some potentially useful “cherries, ” ripe for the picking.
— More Damned Lies and Statistics: How Numbers Confuse Public Issues by Joel Best (Professor of Sociology, U DE), University of California Press (2004)

There was no cherry picking here.

(a)  The previous post (first chapter of this series) was What do we know about our past climate, and its causes?, which accurately described trend of the past two centuries:  “Earth has been warming since the early 19th century {due to} a combination of natural and anthropogenic causes — with the strength of anthropogenic factors increasing dramatically since WWII.”

(b)  For context the second post included four graphs, all showing the longer-term warming (from 1950, 1980, and two from 1978).

(c)  The scientists quoted carefully put recent trends in a larger context (links in the original post):

“Thus, although the current global warming graphs (Figs. 2, 3 and the upper part of Fig. 7) are suggestive of a slowdown in global warming, this apparent slowdown may largely disappear as a few more years of data are added.”
— James Hanson, NASA

“The world has warmed since the start of the current warming spell that started around 1980 and each decade has been warmer than the previous one.”
— David Whitehouse (former Science correspondence of the BBC, PhD Astrophysics from U Manchester, with the Global Warming Policy Foundation)

“Some people draw a line segment covering the period 1998 to 2010 and argue that we confirm no temperature change in that period. However, if you did that same exercise back in 1995, and drew a horizontal line through the data for 1980 to 1995, you might have falsely concluded that global warming had stopped back then. This exercise simply shows that the decadal fluctuations are too large to allow us to make decisive conclusions about long term trends based on close examination of periods as short as 13 to 15 years.”
— From the conclusions of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project

(5)  Pro-AGW comments often display no signs of having read the skeptics’ work and have almost blind faith in computer models

The following are excerpts from Peter Mizla‘s comment.  All of these topics have been extensively debated, even in the general media.  But true believers suffer from confirmation bias (see Wikipedia), necessary to protect their faith from contrary evidence and logic.

(a)  Melting sea ice

Mizla: “There could be 85% less ice in the arctic  by 2020 or even earlier in Late Summer-compared to 30 years ago.”

Arctic sea ice extent has decreased but Antarctic has not.  This suggests factors at work other than rising CO2, probably changing wind patterns and soot deposition. For more about this see:

(b)  Effects of rising CO2

Mizla: “Hansen has been very clear on warming. We are still 0.8 degrees C above the PI {preindustrial} era. C02 levels are nearing 400 ppm, the highest in early 20 million years. We still have lots of warming in the pipeline. … What it it be like in the early 2030s when we see the effects of C02 at 393 ppm? By then actual C02 will be near 450 ppm – and the ability to stop a 2 degree C rise from the PI era will be impossible.”

{Update} First, do people citing these number understand them? PPM means parts per million.  Today CO2 is 0.0387% of the atmosphere by volume.  That’s .000397 of the Earth’s atmosphere:  a tiny trace gas.  The projected increases are a high rate of growth but small in absolute terms.  The forecasted increase results largely from amplification through increased water vapor.

Second, a major uncertainty in the climate sciences concerns the effects of various factors.  Some natural, such as solar cycles.  Many anthropogenic, as described in “Climate change: The need to consider human forcings besides greenhouse gases“, Roger Pielke Sr et al, Eos, 10 November 2009:

{We shouldn’t} neglect the diversity of other, important first-order human climate forcings that also can have adverse effects on the climate system. … These forcings are spatially heterogeneous and include the effect

  • of aerosols on clouds and associated precipitation [e.g., Rosenfeld et al., 2008],
  • the influence of aerosol deposition (e.g., black carbon (soot) [Flanner et al. 2007] and reactive nitrogen [Galloway et al., 2004]), and
  • the role of changes in land use/land cover [e.g., Takata et al., 2009].

Among their effects is their role in altering atmospheric and ocean circulation features away from what they would be in the natural climate system [NRC, 2005]. As with CO2, the lengths of time that they affect the climate are estimated to be on multidecadal time scales and longer.

Today’s models are built with the available data and theories, both still inadequate given the size and difficulty of the problem (hence their poor forecasting ability, both in time and on a regional level).  Before panicking we should remember that these alarming forecasts result from these lightly tested models, and that already some scientists’ forecasts to the general public (more extreme than they dare write in peer-reviewed articles) have proven false.  Here’s one of the too many examples:

(c)  Increased incidence and magnitude of extreme weather

Mizla: ” the extreme weather anomalies we are seeing today are from 25 years ago when CO2 was in the 360s.”

What extreme weather?  This has become a favorite narrative of the news media, since much of the world has only brief weather records — so new records are set daily, somewhere.  Most studies find few indications of increased incidence or magnitude of extreme weather.  For example, see these reports about hurricanes and global warming, tropical cyclone activity, and US tornado activity.

The most famous recent event attributed to global warming was the 2010 heat wave in Russia.  The major investigations found long-term climate trends had little or no effect.  See the NOAA investigation, and the comprehensive assessment published in the 19 March 2011 issue of Geophysical Research Letters (open version here).

Update:  another climate disruption myth — about the US blizzards in 2010

At the time the news media feeds us big guessing about the weather is climate change:narrative:  “We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change“, New York Times, 27 February 2010.  Years later scientists tell the true story (but we’re no longer listening): “Attribution of the Extreme U.S. East Coast Snowstorm Activity of 2010“, Siegfried Schubert, Journal of Climate, in press — Slides about the study here.

(6) Other chapters in this series

  1. What we know about our past climate, and its causes
  2. Good news!  Global temperatures have stabilized, at least for now.
  3. Is it possible to debate climate change with true believers? See the replies to Thursday’s post.  Comments welcomed!
  4. What can climate scientists tell about the drivers of future warming?
  5. What can climate scientists tell us about the drivers of future warming?  – part two of two
  6. The slow solar cycle is getting a lot of attention. What are its effect on us?
  7. What we’re learning about climate, and recommendations

(7)  For more information:  posts debating climate change issues

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