Guest post by Dr. Tim Ball
A common fallback position when losing an argument is to assault your adversary personally. Known as ad hominem, it involves “attacking an opponent’s motives or character rather than the policy or position they maintain.”
In climate science, those who employ this rhetorical tactic attack individuals who ask probing scientific questions. The attacks indicate that they know how inadequate their science is. It often works because of a deliberate campaign to exploit basic sensitivities: fear the sky is falling, guilt about not protecting the environment, guilt about the damage already done, fear and embarrassment of showing ignorance.
People who challenge the claims of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are often labeled “global warming skeptics”. Skeptics do not deny that warming occurred in modern times, but, sensibly, questioned the cause. The IPCC said it was due to human production of CO2. This is driven by a political agenda, not science, so any opposition is considered troublesome and requires silencing.
The IPCC claim is an unproven hypothesis. Science advances by proposing hypotheses that other scientists challenge in their proper role as skeptics. The word skeptic has markedly different public and scientific connotation; negative for the former and positive for the latter. Scientists act as skeptics by trying to disprove the hypothesis. Global warming skeptics are acting appropriately.
The IPCC hypothesis was untested. Professor Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said that consensus was claimed before the research even began. The IPCC tried to prove the hypothesis, putting them in the untenable position of eliminating, ignoring, or manipulating anything that showed the hypothesis was wrong. They had to shoot the skeptics who were the messengers of the problems.
Evidence showing that the hypothesis was wrong continued to emerge. But the IPCC and the vast majority of mainstream media simply ignored it. IPCC projections were wrong because the hypothesis was wrong. That the skeptics were correct was verified as CO2 levels continued to rise, while temperatures leveled and declined. But instead of amending the science, as is proper science, alarmists simply changed the terminology. They stopped talking about global warming and started talking about climate change. Leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit for 2004 explained:
Asher Minns, Communication and Centre Manager at the Tyndall Centre: “In my experience, global warming freezing is already a bit of a public relations problem with the media.”
Bo Kjellén, former Chief Climate Negotiator, Sweden; senior research fellow, Stockholm Environment Institute: “I agree with Nick that climate change might be a better labeling than global warming.”
Climate change was an ideal label because activist scientists could use it to explain any weather event; hotter, colder, wetter, drier, it was all climate change. The public would not know that such events are normal, so alarmists would have an endless supply of frightening examples. The public also does not know that climate change in general is normal. It has often occurred more quickly and with greater magnitude than most people are aware. Current conditions are well within normal.
Those who knew how much climate changes naturally were those previously called global warming skeptics. They now became climate change deniers with all the holocaust connotations of that word. The fallacy is that they were anything but deniers. Indeed, they spend their careers educating people about the amount of climate change that has and is occurring.
Next time you witness personal attacks on scientists, call the attacker to answer for this despicable tactic. Ask them to address the outstanding science questions only. A hand wave toward the IPCC in response is insufficient.
Soon, when someone calls a person a global warming skeptic or climate change denier, informed observers will come to see it as conclusive proof that the abuser knows nothing about climate or scientific method. Then, the attacker, not the scientist being attacked, will be shunned
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In Science, theories are tested against their predictions.
When the predictions FAIL, theories are normally revised, re-evaluated, reconsidered, re-examined, recalculated, or just plain re-jected.
The principal forces keeping the AGW alarmism theory from being seriously re-examined are those of political correctness.
A refreshing cogent state indeed! Thank you for sharing your words of wisdom with us. It’s helpful. For the past several years I have been outspoken against the tide of pure ignorance of the general public in California. People say they have opinions, and I routinely say that they do not in fact have opinions, they parrot the opinions of others. They spread misinformation in much the same way as the folks who believed in witches. The outcome of the “witches” was to be hanged to prove their innocence. If they lived, they were a witch and then killed. If they dies, well, a small price to pay to rid the word of witches.
Today, people in poverty are being killed… and for no good reason. You all here know what I mean. Enough said.
Mario
I’ve always thought the ‘climate change denier’ label was most absurd. The only climate change deniers are the global warming activists that imply or teach that the climate would be stable if not for human activity. These people are logically, denying natural climate change.
By flipping the label to the skeptics that do believe (as if belief is required rather than a simple observation of facts) in natural climate change, the activists are removing the label from being applied to them.
The reality is the only climate change deniers around are the people that think the climate would not be changing without human involvement.
The more accurate word is heretic or blasphemer, but they are not suitable for a secular belief system.
most global warming sceptics are proud of the names they are calling us .to me it is like being back in my school days when I was called names which I cannot say on this post. the old saying sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me fits very well in the age we now live in
Their ignorance is even more evident when they call you a “climate denier”!
Right on!
C’mon… Maybe you guys had reasons to complain before, but you guys throw everything and the kitchen sink at your rivals now.
Dr. Tim, I sure hope you are exactly right about ‘soon’. But the ‘climate’ of ad hominem is the rhetoric of politics, and it’s the politicians who reward the climate club with their tenure. So in essence it is not about science, and what’s more, explicitly so. Hence the remarks of some UN apparatchik at Cancun: “it’s not about climate, but about wealth redistribution”.
I used to discuss the whole thing with people who went on about “Global Warming”. I’d show them temperature charts, discuss the “adjustments” to older temperature data, demonstrate that actual records show warmer times 1000 and 2000 years ago as well as cooler times, show them that there have been worries about Arctic melting in the past, etc.
Lately, people I encounter are just not open to discussion. I’m seeing a complete refusal to look at any evidence, and a blind belief in humanity’s destructive influence on the planet. The attempts to reframe the discussion have largely been successful. Which is, actually, sad. A whole generation’s understanding of Science has been severely damaged as the result of a relatively small group of very well financed activists.
And, let’s face it, this is not likely to get better very soon. The disconnect from reality is growing. It’s impossible to correlate CO2 levels to temperature for the last 16 years, there is no “accelerating sea level rise”, so instead we hear the decidedly unscientific excuse that “this is the warmest decade EVERRRRR”. The gap between Science and Belief simply grows wider.
I know that a lot of “climate change researchers” earnestly believe the Climate Change narrative, and that’s even sadder. They will not easily realize they have been manipulated by a small team of dedicated anti-Science people, because they can’t comprehend that as anything other than a “conspiracy theory”.
I have always maintained that the term “climate change denier” is a clear case of the psychological phenomenon known as projection. As Dr. Ball pointed out, those who have been skeptical of IPCC dogma, have always attempted to emphasize the continual natural variability of the long term climate, while the alarmists have just as persistently maintained that, absent humanity’s profligate use of fossil fuels and the rising levels of atmospheric CO2 it supposedly creates, there is no way to explain the present day climate. To my mind that is the ultimate in “climate change denial”.
@Brian: Maybe you have an explanation for us? Could you explain yourself?
@Will Nitschke: Your use of adverbs makes it unclear who you are suggesting is a heretic or blasphemer. Please enlighten us with some wisdom sir.
As if to confirm Tim Ball’s column, the Vancouver Sun daily dose of global warming agitprop used King Tides to offer some UBC Oceanographer a “global warming” tribune:
“Oceanographer Susan Allen said that in coming years, the flooding seen in parts of Metro Vancouver’s waterfront could occur outside a “coincidence” like Monday’s heavy wind and rain that combined with the so-called king tides, which are nearing the end of their month-long peak in British Columbia.
“In the future we won’t have to have quite so high a tide at the time of a storm surge to get exactly what we had today because the water will be a little higher,” Allen said. “The important thing is “and.”
“If you get global warming and a big tide and a storm surge then we (have) problems.”
Darn, what the good oceanographer forgets to tell, is that in the past 100 years of “unprecedented” global warming, sea level rise in Vancouver has been about 1.2 in! Considering that “King tides, also known as a perigean spring tide, are formed twice a year when the gravitational pull of the sun and moon reinforce each other. Usual water levels at high tide are 3.4 metres to 4.3 metres in the Vancouver area, but a king tide can reach five metres, as it did (almost 5.5 m) at 9 a.m. Monday.”, the Moon still wins!
Perhaps Susan can mount a research project on the influence of global warming on Lunar Mare and get a grant? LOL At least the Vancouver Sun reporters would gobble this one just like the gobble the self serving alarmism from SFU and UBC.
http://www.eos.ubc.ca/about/faculty/S.Allen.html
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/metro/Metro+Vancouver+storm+surge+climate+change+preview+expert+says/7709174/story.html#ixzz2FTVn8Z8z
As a follow up, it is hilarious to read the photograph comments: “Massive waves hit the seawall as storms surges on West Vancouver’s Ambleside beach area at high tide, flooding the local John Lawson Park, on December 17, 2012.” and watching the size of waves versus people, barely 2 feet high swell on the photograph. Of course what they forget to mention is that it is the stray logs crashing on sea walls that did the damage…http://www.vancouversun.com/news/metro/Delta+prepared+floods+from+high+tides+winds+this+morning/7709174/story.html?tab=PHOT
Ah alarmism and journalists…
Ball:
“attacking an opponent’s motives or character rather than the policy or position they maintain.”
“This is driven by a political agenda, not science,”
Hmm. Looks like you are attacking their motives.
Personally as a libertarian, I find it odd that people would try to connect my belief in AGW to my politics.
@Mosher: It’s hard not to attack your belief even though you are brilliant. The belief you have is shared by many who are only politically motivated… so unfortunately, people are getting sick and tired of the attacks we face through the economically harmful policies created in an attempt to curb CO2. Science has been struck a sad blow by most of the CAGW meme.
You are quite a gentleman in how you respond. I hope that can rub on of me… still, I disagree that there is good evidence that CO2 is driving climate to an extent that can even be measured… I could be wrong, but I am waiting to see something compelling and honest that sheds light on the hypothesis.
A Climate Change Denier! Is that all? How about questioning climate science being like advocating paedophilia, abetting mesothelioma and pushing drugs to teenagers?
No, this was not in the blogosphere. This was on the tax funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation Science Show. If Ad hominem attacks are a sign of losing the argument on logic, then the global warming movement led by front organisations such as the ABC must be in the death throws:
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/12/maurice-newman-fights-back-no-slur-is-to-vicious-for-robyn-williams-and-the-abc/
If Hansen et al had not so mutilated the land temperature record, we might actually have some idea what has really happened to the temperature.
If Mann was not a total ignoramus when it comes to dendrochronogly and statistics, the hockey shist would never have existed.
If Al Gore lived as he preached
If McKibben didn’t weep
If Jones knew what a spreadsheet was
If…………………
If…………………
And they blame us for being skeptics ??????
The very people that are the CAGW priests, are the ones that change so many people to being skeptics by their BLATANT data manipulation and/or hypocracy.
The assumption that the global warming hypothesis was a correct in magnitude was a particular problem in the longer term. Climate is incredibly varied, so short-term here were plenty of examples that could fit the theory. Now the “consensus” are left with ever more obscure explanations, such as the recent cold winters here in Britain are a result of global warming.
The scientific way to sort out the wheat from the chaff in complex theories, is to look at predictive ability of the theories. That is to predict novel events or trends from the theory that cannot be explained by simple extrapolation of existing trends. A bold theory makes itself vulnerable to being falsified. An established theory is one that still stands despite being vulnerable and but having successfully made predictions. Now the odd failed prediction does not falsify a theory – climate is chaotic after all. But consistent failure does.
The collapse into dogma is shown by a failure to confront the failures, nor to improve the quality of the predictions. Instead it is to move on to other areas, rely on ex-post explanations and think of any reason to shut out the critics. The best way is to think of the critics as a lower order of person. Climatologists are far from unique in this, and are far from being the nastiest.
Mosher: the science is settled and AGW is falsified, period. It’s only about motive: money, power, politics and has nothing whatever to do with science.
Because the lower atmosphere is near black body in the main GHG bands and the Earth’s surface is near a black body over a much wider range, the two radiation fields cancel each other out at radiative equilibrium. That means there can be very little, if any, CO2-AGW.
The main IR emitted from the surface to be absorbed in the lower atmosphere is in water vapour sidebands. The climate models exaggerate warming by at least 5.8 times, hence imaginary positive feedback. They do so by wrongly using the two-stream approximation to calculate heat absorption when only net energy can do thermodynamic work.
They justify this by imagining pyrgeometers measure a net energy flow. But a pyrgeometer reading is always an artefact of the shielding behind the detector; it measures the temperature radiation field in its view angle no matter what the real net energy flux between the Earth and the lower atmosphere.
This is a 50 year long major experimental mistake originating from meteorology which teaches ‘DLR’ or ‘back radiation’. This does not exist as an energy flux and they had better get used to accepting this truth.
Steven Mosher said:
December 18, 2012 at 11:04 pm
Ball:
“attacking an opponent’s motives or character rather than the policy or position they maintain.”
“This is driven by a political agenda, not science,”
Hmm. Looks like you are attacking their motives.
——————————————————————-
Hmm. Looks like he is describing their actions.
@Steven Mosher ..
that’s the problem when you try to associate science with a “belief” .. science is not a “belief”, it is observable fact for which no “belief” system exists.
Steve Mosher what you believe or what I believe fortunately has no bearing or influence on what the truth is. Facts are facts let them be discussed not beliefs.
Steven Mosher says:December 18, 2012 at 11:04 pm
“I find it odd that people would try to connect my belief in AGW to my politics.”
Mr. Mosher: A “belief in AGW” means one concurs with the IPCC’s program. A study of Maurice Strong’s writings and speeches prior to and including the Stockholm, Villach, and first Rio Conferences reveals that the politics came first. AGW in the world of the UN was always meant to be a pretext to a political philosophy of redistributing wealth under the meme of “social justice” or in Strong’s parlance, “environmental justice.” The IPCC’s entire purpose was not to discover the condition of the climate, but to put a convincing scientific argument behind the pretext so as to convince compliance in the scheme. During the more than 40 years of the movement, the projections and scenarios simply did not match direct observations. The tortured explanations attempting to keep focus on the projections rather than the observations became absurd and strengthened the skeptics.