Summary: Yesterday’s post gave an example of conservative propaganda, pleasant myths embraced by believers. Today we do the same, but for the Left. Both sides are Americans, with the same vulnerabilities — exploited by our ruling elites to keep us divided and ineffectual. I believe that reform is impossible while we remain so credulous. That’s a choice that keeps us weak.
Timendi causa est nescire.
— Ignorance is the cause of fear. A useful dynamic, exploited by rulers throughout history.
To prepare for your family gatherings, let’s rehearse a conversation about climate change. John Rennie (science writer, former Editor of Scientific American; see Wikipedia) provides a helpful script: “7 ways to shut down a climate change denier“, Salon, 18 December 2013 — “Comprehensive rebuttals to contrarians’ pseudo-scientific explanations why global warming is just a myth”.
This was originally published at Scientific American on 30 December 2009. Showing how the debate has changed, the original title was the slightly less incendiary and condescending “Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense — Evidence for human interference with Earth’s climate continues to accumulate.”
Sample responses are follow each item.
What follows is only a partial list of the contrarians’ bad arguments and some brief rebuttals of them.
Claim 1: Anthropogenic CO2 can’t be changing climate, because CO2 is only a trace gas in the atmosphere and the amount produced by humans is dwarfed by the amount from volcanoes and other natural sources.Water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas, so changes in CO2 are irrelevant.
Rennie, thanks for the info. But this is not a view of “the contrarians”. For example, it is not a belief of prominent climate scientists condemned as “deniers” (e.g., Judith Curry, Roger Pielke Sr), or found on the major “skeptic” websites. The people who believe that are in the far corner of the room, with the creationists, conspiracy nuts, communists, and radical libertarians.
Claim 2: The alleged “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past 1,600 years has been disproved. It doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of a “medieval warm period” around 1000 A.D. that was hotter than today is. Therefore, global warming is a myth.
.
Willful Ignorance
… A 2006 National Research Council {NRC} review of the evidence concluded “with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries”—which is the section of the graph most relevant to current climate trends.
… But hypothetically, even if the hockey stick was busted… What of it? The case for anthropogenic global warming originally came from studies of climate mechanics, not from reconstructions of past temperatures seeking a cause. Warnings about current warming trends came out years before Mann’s hockey stick graph.
Even if the world were incontrovertibly warmer 1,000 years ago, it would not change the fact that the recent rapid rise in CO2 explains the current episode of warming more credibly than any natural factor does — and that no natural factor seems poised to offset further warming in the years ahead.
The 2006 NRC report’s conclusion is a consensus viewpoint of both climate scientists and those on the major “climate skeptic” websites, that the world has been warming since the end of the Little Ice Age (whatever its geographic scope).
The questions actually discussed by skeptics concern other issues, such as the duration of anthropogenic CO2 releases (e.g., size of remaining economically exploitable fossil fuel deposits, speed of conversion to alternatives), and the magnitude of the climate’s sensitivity to CO2 (aka transient climate response, TCR).
Claim 3: Global warming stopped a decade ago; Earth has been cooling since then.
Now we move into climate activist propaganda.
Warming “paused” almost 14 – 17 years ago by most of the major climate datasets.
That’s a pause in the sense of “no statistically significant warming” (i.e., smaller than the error bars).
We will not know if warming stopped (rather than paused) until 2030 (perhaps longer).
There is a brief period of cooling in some of the global temperature datasets, but not statistically significant. See details here.
Claim 4: The sun or cosmic rays are much more likely to be the real causes of global warming. After all, Mars is warming up, too.
There are scientists who believe this (to varying degrees); they have published a large body of research. There is research suggesting a historical correlations between solar activity and Earth’s climate (see these posts, and the articles listed in sections 6 and 7 here). They’re a minority of climate scientists (even among solar scientists), and will remain that until they have a more convincing casual mechanism.
Despite romantic myths, mainstream consensus theories are usually right. But not always.
Claim 5:
Climatologists conspire to hide the truth about global warming by locking away their data.
Their so-called “consensus” on global warming is scientifically irrelevant because science isn’t settled by popularity.
The first part of this claim is quite accurate. Many climate scientists were guilty of refusling to release data and methods, in violation of the policies of most journals and governments. Much progress has been made, but only after complaints (formal and informal) and freedom of information acts.
In response to a request for supporting data, Philip Jones, a prominent researcher {U of East Anglia} said “We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”
– From the testimony of Stephen McIntyre before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce (the July 2006 hearings which produced the Wegman Report).
The second part of this claim is likewise true. On the other hand, consensus opinion of relevant scientists is a useful guide to public policy (i.e., why we have the IPCC). On the other hand, the area of consensus is often exaggerated by climate activists — as Rennie does with the views of skeptics. That’s a common effect of politicization.
Claim 6: Climatologists have a vested interest in raising the alarm because it brings them money and prestige.
This claim is quite correct. Conflicts of interest are part of most professions. That’s why they have standards of behavior, review boards, and procedures to manage these conflicts. These conflicts can bias results even unconsciously. Which is why health care researchers, for example, use double-blind studies.
Claim 7: Technological fixes, such as inventing energy sources that don’t produce CO2 or geoengineering the climate, would be more affordable, prudent ways to address climate change than reducing our carbon footprint.
There are people who believe this, but its hardly an opinion subject to easy disproof. Interestingly, Rennie gives two supporting links. The first to Bjørn Lomborg — which goes to “not found”.
The second makes an argument quite different than Rennie implies: “The Flawed Logic of the Cap-and-Trade Debate“, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Yale360, 19 May 2009 — “Two prominent — and iconoclastic — environmentalists argue that current efforts to tax or cap carbon emissions are doomed to failure and that the answer lies not in making dirty energy expensive but in making clean energy cheap.”
Excerpt:
The truth is, however, that neither of these approaches will lead to significant reductions in carbon emissions, and for a basic reason: Both Hansen and those he criticizes focus on pollution regulation and pricing to make fossil fuels more expensive, rather than on innovation to make clean energy cheap.
This approach ignores the history of technological breakthroughs, which has primarily been driven by public investment. And public investment in clean energy is what is needed today, because no effort to achieve deep reductions in carbon emissions, domestic or international, will succeed as long as low-carbon energy technologies cost vastly more than current fossil fuel-based energy.
Concluding our holiday party discussion with Rennie
Rennie knows a great deal about climate science. His article suggests that he does not want you to know much about climate science; only that which supports his political position.
Let’s hope Rennie sticks to debating the weirdos in the corner, or at least people uninformed about climate change. I suspect he’ll react poorly to anyone challenging his misrepresentations. I recommend that you smile at his attempt to convert you, and change the subject to something less political.
Fear-mongering propaganda
For More Information
(a) Reference Pages about climate on the FM sites:
