Climate science deniers on the Left, captured for viewing

Larry Kummer, Editor

11 years ago

Summary: One of the more disturbing themes of the FM website (judging from the comments) describes the similar nature of the Left and Right in America. Our culture and ruling elites have shaped us. The result is an easily manipulated people, a delight for our leaders — and quite unlike the unruly cantankerous Americans of the past. Today we have another example, good liberals talking quite like their enemies. Too sad to be entertaining.

Study the reaction on the Left to this article. Although it accurately reflects the current consensus of climate scientists about the pause in warming of the Earth’s surface (consensus for several years), Leftists denounce it — denying the science and denouncing the author.

“A Pause, Not an End, to Warming“, Richard A. Muller (Prof Physics at Berkeley, head of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, NY Times op-ed, 25 September 2013 — See his Wikipedia entry and his website (includinghis CV). Excerpt:

Most of us hope that global warming actually has stopped. … Perhaps the negative feedback of cloud cover has kicked in, dampening global warming, or the ocean absorption of atmospheric heat is playing a new and more decisive role.

Alas, I think such optimism is premature. The current pause is consistent with numerous prior pauses. When walking up stairs in a tall building, it is a mistake to interpret a landing as the end of the climb. The slow rate of warming of the recent past is consistent with the kind of variability that some of us predicted nearly a decade ago.

Instead of learning (asking for supporting citations) or agreeing, the Left continues their denial of the data and the science. Read the comments in this post at Brad DeLong’s “Reality-based” website (Delong is a Prof Economics, Berkeley). They exactly mirror the tactics Leftists denounce when used by “deniers”.

They mock eminent scientist, in this case a Professor of Physics at a major university, the head of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project.
They ignore the the publications of climate science agencies (e.g., the UK MET Office) and the many peer-reviewed articles discussing the “pause” (also a “hiatus”) — using those exact words. The comments seem unaware of all this. One mentions a blog post to support their denials.
They ignore the eminent climate scientists who have discussed the pause (e.g. Phil Jones of the UK Climate Research Unit, who saw this even back in 2010).

Delong strongly moderates comments, so their themes seldom conflict with his views. He and his commenters seem oblivious that they precisely mirror the tactics they condemn when used by conservatives. This is part of a larger trend on the Left, abandoning the climate sciences in favor of alarmist amateurs writing at ThinkProgress and Skeptical Science. An extreme example of this is the “IPCC is too conservative” meme (examples in Scientific America’s blog and Skeptical Science).

Comments about Prof Muller’s article

Delong: “I think he gets it somewhat wrong. … There may have been a slowdown in the pace — or there may not have been. The data are much too noisy to see.”

guthrie: “what kind of idiot draws a line from the top of one outlier, to the 5 year running mean? Is he inumerate {sic}?”

dan p: “For a physicist, Muller is remarkably uninquisitive about the well-understood physics of global warming…”

sanjait: “I’ll add though, Muller seems perfectly worthy of derision.”

srb: “You are much too kind to Muller. He is not trying hard to be informative, because “trying hard” would require some kind of effort on how to interpret data responsibly.”

Jeffrey Davis: “Following WW2, ordinary Germans could (somewhat) plausibly claim to know nothing of the camps. Today, trained scientists cannot claim to not know when they’ve cherry picked data. Seeing a trained scientist do that makes me ill.”

Dave: “Anyone interested in the truth would not have said what this guy said.”

bahko: “Muller is a flake. Is he really that dumb? Or is he trying to sell more books by generating more controversy?”

Min: “Why is there any such debate? Take a look at the graph. Where is the pause? Where? There is nothing to debate.”

See this post to read climate scientists talking and writing about the pause. This post has longer excerpts. Both short and long excerpts show that Muller accurately represents the trend of climate science.

Conclusions

These comments’ symmetry with behaviors on the Right should not surprise, since both Left and Right draw from the same pool of American society. Our emotional and defective analytical skills allow our easy management by the 1%.

These comments could be from any thread celebrating irrationalism: creationism, denying global warming, advocating against vaccines, denouncing water fluoridation. All Americans should denounce these behaviors, even when they are in support of your views.