In groupthink, organizations value consensus more than free thought. The emphasis on consensus leads to group polarization, in which a group’s positions become more extreme than any individual would come up with. Alarmist climate science is a textbook example of groupthink in action.
Guest post by Paul MacRae
A while ago, I received an email from a friend who asked:
How can many, many respected, competitive, independent science folks be so wrong about [global warming] (if your [skeptical] premise is correct). I don’t think it could be a conspiracy, or incompetence. … Has there ever been another case when so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?
The answer to the second part of my friend’s question—“Has there ever been another case where so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?”—is easy. Yes, there are many such cases, both within and outside climate science. In fact, the graveyard of science is littered with the bones of theories that were once thought “certain” (e.g., that the continents can’t “drift,” that Newton’s laws were immutable, and hundreds if not thousands of others).
Science progresses by the overturning of theories once thought “certain.”
And so, Carl Sagan has written:
“Even a succession of professional scientists—including famous astronomers who had made other discoveries that are confirmed and now justly celebrated—can make serious, even profound errors in pattern recognition.”[1]
There is no reason to believe that climate scientists (alarmist or skeptic) are exempt from this possibility.
That leaves the first question, which is how so many “respected, competitive, independent science folks [could] be so wrong” about the causes and dangers of global warming, assuming they are wrong. And here, I confess that after five years of research into climate fears, this question still baffles me.
Climate certainty is baffling
It is not baffling that so many scientists believe humanity might be to blame for global warming. If carbon dioxide causes warming, additional CO2 should produce additional warming. But it’s baffling that alarmist climate scientists are so certain that additional carbon dioxide will produce a climate disaster, even though there is little empirical evidence to support this view, and much evidence against it, including a decade of non-warming. This dogmatism makes it clear, at least to those outside the alarmist climate paradigm, that something is very wrong with the state of “consensus” climate science.
There are many possible reasons for this scientific blindness, including sheer financial and career self-interest: scientists who don’t accept the alarmist paradigm will lose research grants and career doors will be closed to them. But one psychological diagnosis fits alarmist climate science like a glove: groupthink. With groupthink, we get the best explanation of “how can many, many respected, competitive, independent science folks be so wrong.”
Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus.
For example, regarding Symptom 1, overestimation of the group’s power and morality: leading consensus climate spokespeople like Al Gore, James Hansen, and Stephen Schneider have stated outright that they feel it’s acceptable and even moral to exaggerate global-warming claims to gain public support, even if they have to violate the broader scientific principle of adherence to truth at all costs (http://www.paulmacrae.com/?p=51 has examples.) Consensus climate science also overestimates the power of humanity to override climate change, whether human-caused or natural, just as government planners overestimated the U.S.’s ability to win the Vietnam War.
Regarding Symptom 2, closed-mindedness, there are many cases of the alarmist climate paradigm ignoring or suppressing evidence that challenges the AGW hypothesis. The Climategate emails, for example, discuss refusing publication to known skeptics and even firing an editor favorable to skeptics.
Regarding Symptom 3, pressure toward uniformity: within alarmist climate science there is a “shared illusion of unanimity” (i.e., a belief in total consensus) about the majority view when this total or near-total consensus has no basis in reality. For example, the Oregon Petition against the anthropogenic warming theory has 31,000 signatories, over 9,000 of them with PhDs.
Climate scientists who dare to deviate from the consensus are censured as “deniers”—a choice of terminology that can only be described as odious. And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change explicitly aims for “consensus” in its reports—it does not publish minority reports, and yet it is impossible that its alleged more than “2,000 scientists” could completely agree on a subject as complicated as climate.
Group polarization
Janis notes one other form of dysfunctional group dynamic that arises out of groupthink and that, in turn, helps create even more groupthink:
The tendency for the collective judgments arising out of group discussions to become polarized, sometimes shifting toward extreme conservatism and sometimes toward riskier forms of action than the individual members would otherwise be prepared to take.[7]
This dynamic is commonly referred to as “group polarization.”
As a process, “when like-minded people find themselves speaking only with one another, they get into a cycle of ideological reinforcement where they end up endorsing positions far more extreme than the ones they started with.”[8] [emphasis added]
And because these positions are so extreme, they are held with extreme ferocity against all criticisms.
Examples of alarmist climate groupthink
Groupthink is common in academic disciplines. For example, philosopher Walter Kaufmann, a world-renowned editor of Nietzsche’s works, identifies groupthink in his discipline as follows:
There is a deep reluctance to stick out one’s neck: there is safety in numbers, in belonging to a group, in employing a common method, and in not developing a position of one’s own that would bring one into open conflict with more people than would be likely to be pleased.[9]
Similarly, in the 2009 Climategate emails, CRU director Phil Jones shows this “deep reluctance to stick out one’s neck” in writing (July 5, 2005):
“The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998.”
Keith Briffa laments (Sept. 22, 1999):
“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the temperature proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. … I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.”
Elsewhere, Briffa notes (April 29, 2007):
“I tried hard to balance the needs of the science and the IPCC, which were not always the same. I worried that you might think I gave the impression of not supporting you well enough while trying to report on the issues and uncertainties.”
All of the above (there are many more examples in the Climategate emails) reveal scientific groupthink, which puts the needs and desires of a peer group—the desire for “consensus”—ahead of the scientific facts. We would, undoubtedly, find other examples of alarmist groupthink if we could examine the emails of other promoters of climate alarmism, like James Hansen’s Goddard Institute.
This groupthink isn’t at all surprising. After all, alarmist climate scientists attend several conferences a year with like-minded people (the views of outright “deniers” are not welcome, as the CRU emails clearly reveal). In the absence of real debate or dissent they easily persuade themselves that human beings are the main reason the planet is warming and it’s going to be a catastrophe. Why? Because everyone else seems to think so and, in groupthink, consensus is highly valued. The same principles operates strongly, of course, in religion.
The ‘hockey stick’ and groupthink
Climate alarmists will, of course, angrily dispute that climate science groupthink is as strong as claimed here. However, groupthink is clearly identified in the 2006 Wegman report into the Michael Mann hockey stick controversy.
As most WUWT readers will know, the Wegman report was commissioned by the U.S. House Science Committee after Mann refused to release all the data leading to the hockey stick conclusions, conclusions that eliminated the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age in order to show today’s warming as unprecedented. In fact, as mathematician Steve McIntyre discovered after years of FOI requests, the calculations in Mann’s paper had not been checked by the paper’s peer reviewers and were, in fact, wrong.
The National Academy of Sciences committee, led by Dr. Edward Wegman, an expert on statistics, identified one of the reasons why Mann’s paper was so sloppily peer-reviewed as follows:
There is a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis. However, our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.[10] [emphasis added]
Wegman noted that the Mann paper became prominent because it “fit some policy agendas.”[11]
The Wegman Report also observed:
As statisticians, we were struck by the isolation of communities such as the paleoclimate community that rely heavily on statistical methods, yet do not seem to be interacting with the mainstream statistical community. The public policy implications of this debate are financially staggering and yet apparently no independent statistical expertise was sought or used.[12] [emphasis added]
In other words, alarmist climate scientists are part of an exclusive group that talks mainly with itself and avoids groups that don’t share the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis and alarmist political agenda. Overall, Wegman is describing with great precision a science community whose conclusions have been distorted and polarized by groupthink.
Recognizing groupthink
After the Climategate emails, some consensus climate scientists began to recognize the dangers of groupthink within their discipline. So, Georgia Tech climatologist Judith Curry wrote in 2009:
In my opinion, there are two broader issues raised by these emails that are impeding the public credibility of climate research: lack of transparency in climate data, and “tribalism” in some segments of the climate research community that is impeding peer review and the assessment process.[13]
Similarly, IPCC contributor Mike Hulme wrote:
It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.[14] [emphasis added]
In short, it is clear that groupthink—a later, more scientific word for “tribalism”—is strongly at work within alarmist climate science, however much the affected scientists refuse to recognize it. As a result of tribalism (groupthink), alarmist climate science makes assertions that are often extreme (polarized), including the explicit or implicit endorsement of claims that global warming will lead to “oblivion,” “thermageddon,” mass extinctions, and the like. Indeed, one of the ironies of climate science is that extremist AGW believers like Gore, Hansen and Schneider have succeeded in persuading the media and public that those who don’t make grandiose claims, the skeptics, are the extremists.
Group polarization offers a rational explanation for extreme alarmist claims, given that the empirical scientific evidence is simply not strong enough to merit such confidence. It is likely that even intelligent, highly educated scientists have been caught in what has been called the “madness of crowds.” Indeed, writing in the Times Higher Education magazine, British philosopher Martin Cohen makes this connection explicit:
Is belief in global-warming science another example of the “madness of crowds”? That strange but powerful social phenomenon, first described by Charles Mackay in 1841, turns a widely shared prejudice into an irresistible “authority”. Could it [belief in human-caused, catastrophic global warming] indeed represent the final triumph of irrationality?[16]
There is strong psychological evidence that alarmist fears of climate change are far more the result of groupthink and the group polarization process than scientific evidence and, yes, this alarmist groupthink has indeed led to the triumph of irrationality over reason.
Paul MacRae is the author of False Alarm: Global Warming—Facts Versus Fears. His blog is at paulmacrae.com. More on this subject: http://www.paulmacrae.com/?p=51
Notes
1. Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996, p. 49.
2. Irvin L. Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982, p. 3.
3. Janis, p. vii.
4. Janis, p. 9.
5. Janis, p. 247.
6. Janis, pp. 174-175.
7. Janis, p. 5.
8. Andrew Potter, “The newspaper is dying—hooray for democracy.” Maclean’s, April 7, 2008, p. 17.
9. Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990 (1958), p. 51.
10. Edward Wegman, et al., “Ad Hoc Committee Report on the ‘Hockey Stick’ Global Climate Reconstruction.” U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce, 2006, p. 65.
11. Wegman, et al., p. 29.
12. Wegman, et al., p. 51.
13. Judith Curry, “On the credibility of climate research.” Climate Audit blog, Nov. 22, 2009.
14. Andrew Revkin, “A climate scientist who engages skeptics.” Dot.Earth, Nov. 27, 2009.
15. Steve Fuller, Kuhn vs. Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science. Cambridge: Icon Books, 2006 (2003), p. 105.
16. Martin Cohen, “Beyond debate?” Times Higher Education, Dec. 10, 2009.
Smokey says:
May 1, 2012 at 8:59 pm
The goal is an unelected, unaccountable government ruling over the American people, just like the EU does in Europe.
=========
You are 1000% correct on that assumption, Smokey.
~Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
re: “The answer to the second part of my friend’s question—“Has there ever been another case where so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?”—is easy. Yes, … (e.g., that the continents can’t “drift,” that Newton’s laws were immutable, and hundreds if not thousands of others).”
Not really.
There was never a continents can’t drift theory, with hundreds of thousands of scholarly papers on the subject like there is on climate change. Continental drift wasn’t known, and then it was. A large body of scientific research wasn’t overturned.
And while Newton’s laws were not compatible with Maxwell’s equations, so it was known that there was some problem, this is not like climate science.
Climate science isn’t a fundamental law of physics, it’s a study of the application of the fundamental laws of physics on the earth’s system. It’s not going to be right or wrong, it’s going to be accurate to within a margin of error.
So I don’t think that either of these is the easy yes you were looking for. Climate science is as old as the theory of Evolution. It’s been well studied and well argued over. It’s still being researched, but the basic tenets aren’t going to be overthrown at this late stage any more than those of Evolution are.
sharkhearted,
You’ve been away too long! Glad to see you’re back.☺
There are some 76 recorded public alarm phenomenon since 1790, 26 of these are directly analogous with AGW. Google Armstrong and Green for their excellent research paper and conclusions.
Smokey says:May 1, 2012 at 8:59 pm
Smokey, I’m not sure that is the #1 goal these days, but have you been to China or Vietnam lately? Truly vibrant examples of capitalism at work. A bureaucratic and redtape nightmare, but not much different to Australia in that regard!
The Vietnamese have always surprised me with their admiration of the USA. I guess it is not so surprising in the south, but the calm tolerance and acceptance of the older generation who saw their countrymen die in millions, and are still searching for their missing, is humbling. The younger generation just seem to like things US and western.
China too surprises me: I was in a small town in Hubei province not long ago and had only Chinese channels on the TV while I did some computer work. The first show I saw was a commentary on the naval war in the Pacific in WWII – lots of black and white film, of aircraft carriers and heavy naval ships, some film I could recognise and some I’d never seen, (quite a lot of onboard film from Japanese ships), culminating in film and animations of the sinking of the Yamamato (I could recognise that!)….. Seemed to be a full commentary of the Pacific Naval battles – and seemed to me it would only show the US in a good light to the average citizen. (IMHO – note I could not understand a word).
Then (on a different channel) an overdubbed episode of “Making the Cut” or something like that. US military Special forces? Again, it made the US military look pretty damn impressive, to me and probably to the average Chinese citizen. Next visit I caught a bit of a movie about brave Chinese locals saving a brave downed American: “Flying Tiger” in WWII.
And in my field, much to my surprise, bigger operations in China much prefer to buy quality branded American (and some European) equipment to buying the much cheaper locally made stuff.
All very uplifting, but you are I think correct to worry re China. I don’t think Vietnam is showing many signs of wanting to politically manipulate their neighbours, but China, I’m not so sure about.
I fear they may well emulate the USA they admire so much, and meddle on an extensive and worldwide basis, perhaps more with an eye to economics and influence rather than ideology.
Jim Masterson says:
May 1, 2012 at 10:06 am
“You’re invoking the precautionary principle.”
Yes I am. With almost all the science saying we are going to get warming, most of it saying in the range of 2-4.5 degrees Celsius, the precautionary principle should not even be used, we should be using the logical principle. There is only a couple of papers which have nearly all been disproved, that state there will be a 1 degree Celsius warming.
RACookPE1978 says:
May 1, 2012 at 11:20 am
“Activity = More CO2 in atmosphere”
Short term studies have shown extra CO2 is good, but there are lots of studies that show increased pest attacks and decreased root allocation. This resent study shows even more problems. (http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=123798&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click) And let’s not forget that the scientific community is saying that increased CO2 will drive up temperatures, so even if extra CO2 was good, you have to consider the extra warming which has been shown to kill off plants.
“Activity = Control of Energy and CO2 by Decree, Fear of CAGW Crisis
Result = Death of millions from malnutrition”
Can you show one study that even remotely states that?
“Activity = Increases in the world’s temperature by 1 degree, of 2 degree, of 3 degree.
Activity = Increase of Temp’s of 4 degrees, of 5 degrees, of 6 degrees.”
I don’t have time to explain the implications of global warming, I’ll let National geographic do it for me http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rdLu7wiZOE&feature=relmfu
Henry Clark says:
May 1, 2012 at 7:22 pm
“Earth has had thousands of ppm CO2 in the atmosphere before.”
I see from this statement you have very little understanding of past climate. Over the last half billion years the sun has increased its heating power by 4% and I believe has gotten 30% brighter. If CO2 was 280ppm half a billion years ago, the Earth would have been a frozen waste land, but CO2 was 8000ppm at that time. So they did a study and found that throughout this half billion years of climate history, you have to add up the suns output and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to get the temperature of the planet. This is why they call CO2 the control knob governing the temperature of the Earth. These studies “I think” also disprove the cosmic ray claim. Below you will find the paper that look at CO2 over the last half billion years and the paper that correlated it with the suns output.
(http://tinyurl.com/6u65g8l http://droyer.web.wesleyan.edu/GSA_Today.pdf)
(http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/Phanerozoic_Forcing.gif http://droyer.web.wesleyan.edu/PhanCO2%28GCA%29.pdf)
“http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ArcticIce/Images/arctic_temp_trends_rt.gif”
You need to look at the big picture not little ones
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8236797.stm
“There are pages upon pages more that could be written to better show matters, including more fully why future temperature rise even as a global average would be under 1 degree”
You may be able to type pages and pages but why not reference the papers that show a 1 degree warming from a doubling of CO2, because you are only going to find a couple. Most disproved.
“Not “messing with the earth” is a belief of some environmentalists.”
You want to reduce the amount of sun hitting the Earth and you don’t think that is messing with it? How could you know the long term consequences of that. Also what if it is bad and we have to stop? The CO2 you want to keep on pumping into the air will still be there and the Earth will still be warming. If the scientific community is right we need to reduce CO2 and use geoengineering as a last resort.
“Study after study has shown major rise in plant growth and water usage efficiency occurs under elevated CO2”
Lots of bad things happen to plants due to warmer weather, migrations of bugs and root allocation from increased CO2. Let’s keep on looking at science to answer these questions.
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=123798&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click
“Severe CO2 reduction would be geoengineering”
You are looking at CO2 as only beneficial, science says CO2 will raise temperatures by 3 degrees Celsius. Either way we just want CO2 to be at natural levels.
“But CO2 emissions relate to far more than electricity generation anyway. In fact, producing iron and cement are among major sources.”
If electricity becomes much cheaper due to reduced coal costs in producing it, electric cars will be cheaper to run than petrol cars. All activities that use lots of electricity will not be producing CO2 because they will be using solar power. The limited number of activities that do produce CO2, we are just going to have to try and reduce them and get the people that do these activities to planet trees to reduce their carbon foot print.
[Moderator’s Note: this discussion is getting way-off the topic of this thread. Take it to a more appropriate forum. -REP]
Groupthink at the individual level, whether of the religious faith, collectivist, true believer, or any other such group idea, seems close to the trance state written about by the hypnotist Dave Elman back in the 1940s and 50s. He defined a trance state as the suspension of the critical faculty with the adaption of selective thinking. That seems to fit what is happening with some contemporary scientists.
Michael Whittemore, your irrelevant spamming is not winning you any points, but is clogging up this thread. Please go away.
johanna says:
May 2, 2012 at 1:13 am
Why don’t you point out the irrelevances of it then.
Michael Whittemore says:
May 1, 2012 at 10:06 pm
“There is only a couple of papers which have nearly all been disproved, that state there will be a 1 degree Celsius warming.”
No, aside there being a lot more than two papers as discussed later in this comment, one of the basic aspects of the overall picture is that already a 280 ppm (pre-industrial) –> ~ 393 ppm CO2 rise has been seen, a rise of 40%. Even attributing all temperature rise since the Little Ice Age to CO2 (incorrectly) would not remotely validate inflated climate sensitivity claims. More to the point, such as http://www.freeimagehosting.net/newuploads/319xq.jpg highlights how far less than the total 20th century temperature rise was reasonable to attribute to humans as opposed to nature. The prior graph is up to 1980 A.D. in that example since using ice core data but such as UAH satellite data like http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/ shows the limited amount since then.
Part of the problem with claims like 6 degrees Celsius from CO2 doubling is that we are already 40% of the way to doubling from pre-industrial levels while at most only a small fraction of a degree Celsius temperature rise has occurred as net from human emissions. The whole 0.6 degrees or so rise over the 20th century can not be attributed to humans alone, like the graph highlights.
Michael Whittemore says:
May 1, 2012 at 10:06 pm
“You are looking at CO2 as only beneficial, science says CO2 will raise temperatures by 3 degrees Celsius.”
“Science” does not say such as CO2 going from 1.4x of pre-industrial levels to 2x of pre-industrial levels would cause 3 degrees Celsius rise, when observations rather show that CO2 going from 1.0x of pre-industrial levels to 1.4x of pre-industrial levels (now) did not cause 1/10th of that in net effect of human emissions beyond what can be attributed to natural factors. You’ll probably say delayed effects from ocean warming, but historical observations place limits on those too.
Michael Whittemore says:
May 1, 2012 at 10:06 pm
“Short term studies have shown extra CO2 is good, but there are lots of studies that show increased pest attacks and decreased root allocation. This resent study shows even more problems.”
Not choosing nitrogen-poor soil and rather adding artificial nitrogen-containing fertilizer would be a totally different situation.
That can be contrasted to, for example, my example which you skipped over:
“Two field experiments were done, with the objective of quantifying the response of a short-duration rice (Oryza sativa) variety (BG-300) to elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide, in the low elevation, subhumid zone of Sri Lanka. Grain yields of rice crops grown under elevated CO2 were 24 % and 39 % greater than the respective ambient treatments in the maha (January – March 2001) and yala (May – August, 2001) seasons.”
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118887984/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
Commercial greenhouse operators sometimes spend serious money to elevate CO2 concentrations because it works in the real world (and yes you do add more artificial fertilizer if needed to sustain growth, with extra biomass naturally requiring more nitrogen input if a particular site has nitrogen-poor soil).
Michael Whittemore says:
May 1, 2012 at 10:06 pm
“And let’s not forget that the scientific community is saying that increased CO2 will drive up temperatures, so even if extra CO2 was good, you have to consider the extra warming which has been shown to kill off plants.”
With “global” warming being predominately arctic and near-arctic warming, there was greater biomass, the opposite of plants being killed off, in warm periods like the Holocene Climate Optimum and Eocene.
Michael Whittemore says:
May 1, 2012 at 10:06 pm
“>>“Earth has had thousands of ppm CO2 in the atmosphere before.”
I see from this statement you have very little understanding of past climate. Over the last half billion years the sun has increased its heating power by 4% and I believe has gotten 30% brighter.”
No, 30% brighter would be approximately the figure for solar brightness now versus 4 billion years ago, many times different than just a half billion years ago compared to now. Also, a half billion years ago is your figure, as CO2 was at thousands of ppm more recently than that.
In the past few hundred million years, the sun’s brightness increasing over time is only what would in itself cause approximately a linear rise rate of 1.7 K per 550 million years. For instance, such is implicitly mentioned within the caption of figure 1 of Shaviv, 2005:
http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~shaviv/articles/sensitivity.pdf
For example, if the sun’s brightness in such terms was now like it was 150 million years ago, the temperature would be on the order of 0.5 K degrees cooler than now, all else being equal. That’s not a big difference.
CO2 was thousands of ppm around that far back.
An example far further back, four billion years ago, regarding the faint early sun paradox:
“Professor Minik Rosing, from the Natural History Museum of Denmark, and Christian Bjerrum, from the Department of Geography and Geology at University of Copenhagen, together with American colleagues from Stanford University in California have discovered the reason for “the missing ice age” back then, thereby solving the Sun paradox, which has haunted scientific circles for more than 40 years. Professor Minik Rosing explains: “What prevented an ice age back then was not high CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, but the fact that the cloud layer was much thinner than it is today. In addition to this, Earth’s surface was covered by water. This meant that the Sun’s rays could warm the oceans unobstructed, which in turn could layer the heat, thereby preventing Earth’s watery surface from freezing into ice.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100331141415.htm
(Clouds raise Earth’s albedo, Earth’s reflectivity; low-altitude clouds cause net cooling and high-altitude clouds net warming, but the overall effect was more warmth than would be the case if there were more clouds back then).
Michael Whittemore says:
May 1, 2012 at 10:06 pm
“So they did a study and found that throughout this half billion years of climate history, you have to add up the suns output and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to get the temperature of the planet. This is why they call CO2 the control knob governing the temperature of the Earth. These studies “I think” also disprove the cosmic ray claim. Below you will find the paper that look at CO2 over the last half billion years and the paper that correlated it with the suns output.
(http://tinyurl.com/6u65g8l http://droyer.web.wesleyan.edu/GSA_Today.pdf)”
Other studies have gotten different results and conclusions. I do not only mean such as Dr. Shaviv’s http://cfa.atmos.washington.edu/2003Q4/211/articles_optional/CelestialDriver.pdf but also, for instance: Dr. Rothman of MIT: http://www.pnas.org/content/99/7/4167.full.pdf
There is some partial correlation of CO2 with temperatures, as to be expected regardless of how small a radiative forcing effect results from CO2 because one factor in CO2 levels is outgassing from the oceans when such are warmed, if warmed by any cause (not having to be predominately CO2 as a cause). Although more complicated than this analogy, even if one warms a glass of milk, it will outgas dissolved gases (nitrogen, oxygen, etc). Much correlation is not always seen, though. On short timescales, the oceans have centuries of lag time to warm to their depths. On very long time scales, weathering and magmatic processes particularly also affect CO2 levels.
Michael Whittemore says:
May 1, 2012 at 10:06 pm
“This is why they call CO2 the control knob governing the temperature of the Earth.”
Here’s how much it actually is a so-called “control knob” (or not!):
Past 200 to 11000 years ago (Greenland ice core temperatures but the arctic and near-arctic regions warming more than tropical regions in every warm period as previously discussed so not a bad sample):
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
with data from
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/isotopes/gisp2_temp_accum_alley2000.txt
and
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/epica_domec/edc-co2.txt
Why CO2 and temperatures correlate much on medium timescales but not all is discussed in
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/11/does-co2-correlate-with-temperature-history-a-look-at-multiple-timescales-in-the-context-of-the-shakun-et-al-paper/
Michael Whittemore says:
May 1, 2012 at 10:06 pm
“You need to look at the big picture not little ones
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8236797.stm”
First of all, such is skipping over the fact that http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ArcticIce/Images/arctic_temp_trends_rt.gif shows the late 1930s had as high temperatures in the arctic as the late 20th century, with a huge temperature decline after the former, which only fits such being dominated by natural variation (including solar activity, GCR variation, the PDO, etc.); human emissions increased over the whole period, including Asian industrialization and all else.
Secondly, I can do better than just the past 2000 years. Instead of comparing to 2000 years ago, I can compare to 8000 years ago, like http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/11/does-co2-correlate-with-temperature-history-a-look-at-multiple-timescales-in-the-context-of-the-shakun-et-al-paper/ highlighted in part, including a link to http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nerc.html on it being warmer then than now.
I could add studies on amounts of biomass in the fossil record at high latitudes, a meter or two (IIRC) higher sea level seen even in a study in Australia, and other indirect further illustrators of how temperatures then were more than now. But there would not be much point. I have never even encountered any CAGW-type environmentalist type honest enough to admit to being wrong about anything or change their views, so I really only argue for the benefit of an audience, and, since this page is no longer on the front page, no longer current, there is not much of an outside audience of readers left now.
Still, quickly going on:
Michael Whittemore says:
May 1, 2012 at 10:06 pm
“Also what if it is bad and we have to stop?”
The residence time of stratospheric particulates is typically a few months, for the relevant sub-micron size.
Michael Whittemore says:
May 1, 2012 at 10:06 pm
“Lots of bad things happen to plants due to warmer weather, migrations of bugs and root allocation from increased CO2.”
That warm climates have more insect life and bugs than cold and arctic zones does not remotely reverse the overall fact that the former has more life, more biomass growth in general including plants, even after some losses to insects. I can’t at all respect the honesty level of the CAGW movement trying to give people the opposite impression.
Michael Whittemore says:
May 1, 2012 at 10:06 pm
“You may be able to type pages and pages but why not reference the papers that show a 1 degree warming from a doubling of CO2, because you are only going to find a couple.”
A lot more than a couple. As Dr. Spencer notes, as have others:
“Now, you might be surprised to learn that the amount of warming directly caused by the extra CO2 is, by itself, relatively weak. It has been calculated theoretically that, if there are no other changes in the climate system, a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration would cause less than 1 deg C of surface warming (about 1 deg. F). This is NOT a controversial statement…it is well understood by climate scientists. (As of 2008, we were about 40% to 45% of the way toward a doubling of atmospheric CO2.)
BUT…everything this else in the climate system probably WON’T stay the same! For instance, clouds, water vapor, and precipitation systems can all be expected to respond to the warming tendency in some way, which could either amplify or reduce the manmade warming. These other changes are called “feedbacks,” and the sum of all the feedbacks in the climate system determines what is called ‘climate sensitivity’.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/global-warming-101/
Any paper, any observation that shows net negative feedback overall in the climate system is in utter contrast to there being more than 1 degree Celsius of temperature rise from doubling CO2. To claim more temperature rise depends, among other things, on claiming net positive feedback overriding all negative feedbacks combined. Incidentally, cloud formation can be an example of negative feedback, such as a day with (reflective, shading) clouds overhead being cooler than a day with a cloudless sky typically (with the difference for low altitude versus high altitude clouds on net cooling versus warming noted before). Historical observations also can counter the claims of high warming from CO2.
For some illustrations, not at all a comprehensive list (since I don’t even get paid a cent for this, like almost all the skeptics here and elsewhere, contrary to the dishonest CAGW-side claims of billions of bucks being handed out for skepticism) but some quick examples:
How much CO2 really contributes to global warming? Spectroscopic studies and modelling of the influence of H2O, CO2 and CH4 on our climate.
http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2011/EGU2011-4505-1.pdf
On the determination of climate feedbacks from ERBE data
http://www.drroyspencer.com/Lindzen-and-Choi-GRL-2009.pdf
On Climate Response to Changes in the Cosmic Ray Flux and Radiative Budget
http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/%7Eshaviv/articles/2004JA010866.pdf
Does the earth have an adaptive infrared iris?
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20000081750_2000118209.pdf
CO2-induced global warming
http://www.int-res.com/articles/cr/10/c010p069.pdf
Testing an astronomically-based decadal-scale empirical harmonic climate model versus the IPCC (2007) general circulation climate models
http://www.fel.duke.edu/~scafetta/pdf/Scafetta_models_comparison_ATP.pdf
On the observational determination of climate sensitivity and its implications.
www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/236-Lindzen-Choi-2011.pdf
Empirical evidence for a celestial origin of the climate oscillations and its implications.
http://www.fel.duke.edu/~scafetta/pdf/scafetta-JSTP2.pdf
How natural is the recent centennial warming?
http://www.eike-klima-energie.eu/uploads/media/How_natural.pdf
There is also:
http://www.space.dtu.dk/upload/institutter/space/forskning/05_afdelinger/sun-climate/full_text_publications/svensmark_2007cosmoclimatology.pdf
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/SvensmarkPaper.pdf
http://www.sciencebits.com/OnClimateSensitivity
And even my http://www.freeimagehosting.net/newuploads/319xq.jpg graph is in utter contrast in implications to high temperature rise from CO2 … Loethle temperature data and Dye 3 Be-10 cosmic ray flux data from Beer et al. 1994.
I don’t agree with everything said in all of the previously linked papers, but that’s a sample anyway, most of those pretty good. There is an attempt at “rebuttal” against almost any CAGW-inconvenient climate paper, but sciencebits.com covers some examples of invalid tactics utilized.
[Moderator’s Note: this discussion is getting way-off the topic of this thread. Take it to a more appropriate forum. -REP]
Michael Whittemore says:
May 1, 2012 at 10:06 pm
You are looking at CO2 as only beneficial, science says CO2 will raise temperatures by 3 degrees Celsius. Either way we just want CO2 to be at natural levels.
Michael, whenever I’ve asked for the science that Carbon Dioxide is capable of raising the Earth’s temperature, it’s never forthcoming. This might or might not bother you, it bothered me and when I explored this aspect I found only obfuscation. I continued to investigate and found something very interesting, the physics of the ‘greenhouse gas energy budget’ cartoon, is completely made up of fictional fisics. Such as, for example, the AGW claim that visible light heats land and oceans and that the claim that the real direct heat from the Sun which is long wave, thermal infrared, doesn’t even reach the surface and plays no part in heating said land and oceans. This is impossible in the real world.
The bottom line is that the claimed 33°C warming is a sleight of hand, because this comic cartoon energy budget has excised completely the Water Cycle, which cools the Earth, think deserts.
All the ‘science’ produced to bolster that sleight of hand is therefore, it cannot be anything else, irrelevant, because the basic premise that ‘greenhouse gases raise the Earth’s temperature’ doesn’t actually exist.
[Moderator’s Note: this discussion is getting way-off the topic of this thread. Take it to a more appropriate forum. -REP]
Cripes, we are being double-spammed.
So much for the topic.
Apologies to moderators for letting it get off-topic. I will post no more in this thread (though, Myrrh, see http://www.drroyspencer.com/global-warming-101/ from a fellow skeptic for an example of what you may want to argue instead differently, in another thread anyway).
[REPLY: Thank you for our consideration. On-topic comments are always welcome, of course. -REP]
How can many, many respected, competitive, independent science folks be so wrong about [global warming] (if your [skeptical] premise is correct). I don’t think it could be a conspiracy, or incompetence. … Has there ever been another case when so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?
The conspiracy has been proved – and well covered in the various aspects of this on WUWT – incompetence is the missing element, but there are two sides to this.
The first is readily seen in the work of those like Singer and Spencer, without any proof that CO2 can do what they claim they continue to pontificate as if the proof exists, and, without any grasp of the relevant applied science in the real world they argue for a fisics in their fictional world where, for example, ‘backradiation’ is given as the means for this claimed ability of carbon dioxide to raise Earth’s temperature, quite regardless that this ‘backradiation’ breaks the 2nd Law and is never seen to exist in any real world industries. They think they know better than the experts in particular fields. Incompetence and arrogance.
This peculiar manufactured fisics of AGW was brought into the education system deliberately, so now a generation has been educated to think the real world works according to the AGW created fictional fisics. We now have an equally incompetent number of younger scientists working on ‘climate change’ who also have no idea of what they’re talking about, and their studies and experiments show this, and, that population is bolstered by scientists in all other fields taking this AGWScience Fiction as if real world physics, which if it doesn’t affect them they have no particular interest in inquiring further but so add to the ‘consensus’ by not questioning it.
The consensus thus, has grown out of incompetence and ignorance. Sure, there may well be a huge number of people who promote CAGW with religious zeal, but the majority of people simply take it on trust. Why shouldn’t they?
We expect competence from those claiming to be experts and most of the time trust in that is not misplaced; our bridges don’t collapse, our illnesses are cured, the engines don’t fall out of our cars after being serviced. When we get to know of incompetence or even deliberate malpractice we stop trusting. What we have in ‘climate change’ is a continual cover up of the malpractice because this is our natural reaction. The majority, scientists and lay, never get to hear about it or get to hear only the whitewashed version.
The consensus is mainly illusion created out of ignorance and trust in the ‘incompetence of scientists who should know better’, by default as it were.
>>
Eric Adler says:
April 30, 2012 at 6:27 pm
Also, despite the fact that people who don’t accept evolution, are ridiculed by scientists, there are many people in the US who are smart enough to know it is a fraud.
<<
Although Paul MacRae’s post on groupthink is interesting, I don’t think it explains all that’s going on. Generally, the individuals who support evolution theory also tend to support AGW. And those individuals that oppose evolution theory also seem to oppose AGW. There’s a third group, like myself, who support evolution theory and oppose AGW. (I suppose there’s a fourth group that supports AGW and opposes evolution theory.)
I remember back in the days of 300 baud/1200 baud modems, we only had UseNet groups. I was a member of the CompuServe forums then.
On one forum, there were a group of us who would correct any misconceptions about evolution theory. So a theist would appear– fresh out of an anti-evolution sales meeting–and provide the usual attacks: Evolution is only a theory; Evolution violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics; and so on. We would correct his misconceptions and after a while he would go away–probably more frustrated than convinced.
Then around the mid-1990’s, a new group of believers appeared. They were espousing this new theory of “Global Warming.” I’d had studied enough paleontology to know that past climates were both much warmer and much colder than present. Their comments didn’t ring true. Also, they sounded exactly like the anti-evolutionary theists that we had been debating–naive comments about scientific theories and laws.
I, of course, pointed out these facts and expected my colleagues (partners in crime) to follow suit. They didn’t. In fact, they seemed to completely support everything these new GW supporters had to say.
So in a very short time, I went from one of the in crowd to an outsider. I’m a group transvestite.
Jim
Alexander Feht says:
May 1, 2012 at 4:03 pm
Gunga Din says:
When we remember we are each one of the “everybody”, it makes it easier to not think of others as “cattle”.
I didn’t think of anybody as “cattle,” and rather agree with Will Rogers’ observation. The expression I used was “cattle farm intellectual” — it refers to people who think that using foul language in public is some form of a cute self-expression. There are many cattle farmers who are gentlemen, and there are many self-appointed “intellectuals” with too much free time on their hands who are not.
====================================
If I aimed my comment at you in error, my humble apolgogies.
Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis and commented:
Paul MacRae writes a very informative article, that Anthony posts. Well worth reading. Groupthink is obviously a problem in politics.
I challenge the statement that “the best and the brightest in the world’s financial sphere” caused the recession by making dumb loans.
Certainly there were people out of control, like the mortgage department of Washington Mutual.
But the root cause was political.
For a long time, through both political stripes, the US government coerced lenders into lowering standards, enticed borrowers into taking on more than they could afford, and ran a ponzi-like scheme of increasing numbers in its massive agencies like Fannie Mae.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/30/why-climate-science-is-a-textbook-example-of-
groupthink/#comment-973925
Keith Sketchley says:
May 5, 2012 at 12:19 pm
For a long time, through both political stripes, the US government coerced lenders into
lowering standards, enticed borrowers into taking on more than they could afford, and ran a ponzi
-like scheme of increasing numbers in its massive agencies like Fannie Mae.
Because, the banking cartel controls the government handling of their interests, and their interests are to create booms and busts from which they mop up all the properties mortgaged as well as any monies already repaid, it’s a win/win for them, plus, they’ve already sold on their interests to the mortgages so have covered the original debt, and, because they create money out of debt they have in place an amazing system whereby they can lend out ten times the debt on a mortgage, money which isn’t there, which they don’t have. The ponzi scheme was the other banks buying from the original mortgage owner bank and then claiming that as a percentage of money they could then times by x amount and loan out as well as selling on the mortgage to the next bank which did their own multiplications to create money out of nothing. What other business can create money out of nothing? No wonder they own as much as they do and are set to buy up the world, it’s monopoly money with practically unlimited printing.
The Federal Reserve is a private company owned by the banking cartel, they print money and sell this to the US government which then pays the cartel interest which they get from taxes – the IRS is a private company of the cartel solely employed to collect the interest, all taxes go to pay the interest. It’s always blame the victim consensus..
@ur momisugly polistra
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April 30, 2012 at 4:05 pm
The question by the “anonymous friend” isn’t the important one. Anyone who has worked in or around any branch of science or scholarship knows of many bad theories that were, or still are, held by the majority of paid professionals despite being transparently wrong. That’s NORMAL.
The important question is why this one theory about CO2 acquired the status of a worldwide religion and took over ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING for twenty years. No other belief of any sort, right or wrong, political or religious, has ever gained such TOTAL AND COMPLETE worldwide POWER. Not Christianity, not Islam, not Communism, not Fascism. Those were all regional, moderate and arguable compared to the CO2 theory.
============================
I think one reason the AGW myth acquired such status was that most of the mass media have had essentially one voice for a couple of decades. The Internet, more often than not, has the effect of making the world smaller due to the quickness and ease of communication. Of course, the people who crafted the myth were probably aware that weather is one of the things most people talk about regularly. And in history, didn’t the ruling classes use weather to reinforce their power–unless it totally took them by surprise and destroyed them without warning, of course!
If you want a worldwide government, create a scary myth about something that concerns everyone in the world. Weather fills the bill! Then tell everyone you alone have the solution to the problem. Tell them if they put you in charge, their troubles are over. It’s a no-brainer.
/sarc off