UPDATE: Dr. Robert G. Brown of Duke University, the commenter rgbatduke, made a response that was commented on by several here. It is eloquent, insightful and worthy of consideration. See below.
Dr. Paul Bain, the lead and corresponding author of the letter Promoting Pro-Environmental Action In Climate Change Deniers in Nature Climate Change which was first discussed at WUWT here: Nature’s ugly decision: ‘Deniers’ enters the scientific literature and later here: Lord Leach of Fairford weighs in on Nature’s ‘denier’ gaffe has been busy responding to critics. Wattsupwiththat asked permission to reprint the e-mail he was sending. He has asked us, instead, to post the following statement:
Thank you for your email and the courtesy of requesting permission to post my email to one of your commenters who contacted me by email about the paper. My response is on the record already on Judith Curry’s blog, and the responses to that have pointed to some necessary clarifications (e.g., including the term “anthropogenic” where necessary), and areas where further explanation seems useful. So rather than rehash some of the same debates by posting the original email, I think it would be more productive to post the following which includes clarifications/extensions (many of which I also make in Judith Curry’s blog, but spread across different comments)…
Comments about the use of the “denier” label are a fair criticism. We were focused on the main readership of this journal – climate scientists who read Nature journals, most of whom hold the view that anthropogenic climate change is real. It should also be noted that describing skepticism as denial is a term increasingly used in the social science literature on climate change (e.g. in Global Environmental Change, Journal of Environmental Psychology, Routledge Handbook of Climate Change and Society), and is used informally by some within the climate science community. So we were using a term that is known, used, and understood in the target audience, but which we thought involved a stronger negative stereotype (e.g. being anti-environmental, contrarian) than skeptic. My thought was this would highlight the contrast with the data, which suggests that you need not believe in AGW to support pro-environmental action, especially when it had certain types of (non-climate) outcomes (demonstrating a non-contrarian position). So in my mind we were ultimately challenging such “denier” stereotypes. But because we were focused on our target audience, it is true that I naively didn’t pay enough attention to the effect the label would have on other audiences, notably skeptics. Although I hope this helps explain our rationale for using the term, I regret the negative effects it has had and I intend to use alternative labels in the future.
Beyond the negative reaction to “denier”, what has been interesting in many skeptics’ responses (in emails and on blogs) is that our research is propaganda designed to change (or “re-educate”) their mind about whether AGW is real, and I’ve received many long emails about the state of climate science and how AGW has been disproven (or the lack of findings to prove it, including Joanne Nova’s email to me which she posted/linked in your blog). Actually, the paper is not about changing anyone’s mind on whether anthropogenic climate change is real. There are also skeptics insisting that the issue is ONLY about the state of the science – whether AGW is real – but on this point I disagree. I am approaching this as a social/societal problem rather than as an “AGW reality” problem. That is, two sizeable groups have different views on a social issue with major policy implications – how do you find a workable solution that at least partly satisfies the most people?
Some climate scientists who endorse AGW seem to have assumed that the way to promote action is to convince skeptics that in fact AGW is occurring, and this has not been effective. Similarly, I don’t think skeptics will convince those who endorse AGW that they are wrong anytime soon. But the social/policy issue remains whether you believe in AGW or not. So if policies are going to be put in place (as many governments are proposing), what kinds of outcomes would make it at least barely acceptable for the most people? For our skeptic samples, actions that promoted warmth and economic/technological development were the outcomes of taking action that mattered to them (even if they thought taking action would have no effect on the climate). So our studies showed that these dimensions mattered for skeptics to support action taken in the name of addressing anthropogenic climate change. The might also be other positive outcomes of taking action we didn’t study where some common ground might be found, such as reducing pollution or reliance on foreign oil. Overall, the findings suggest that if there was closer attention to the social consequences of policies, rather than continuing with seemingly intractable debates on the reality of AGW, then we might get to a point where there could be agreement on some action – some might think the action is pointless with regard to the climate (but many other people think it will), but if it produces some other good outcomes it might be ok. Hence, if governments were able to design policies that plausibly achieved these “non-climate” goals, then this might achieve an acceptable overall outcome that satisfies the most people (although admittedly not everybody will agree).
This is the message of our paper, and I hope readers of your blog will be able to accept my regret about the label and focus on the main message. Some have described this message as naïve, but a real-world example (noted by one of our reviewers) illustrates the general point: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/science/earth/19fossil.html?pagewanted=all
Kind regards
Paul.
For those interested in getting up to speed, the HTML page for the article is here and the .pdf version with the cited works page, can be downloaded from the options box to the right of the article. The discussion at Judith Curry’s blog is here and Dr. Bain is commenting under the screen name “Paul”. He is more likely to respond to comments there than here.
UPDATE:
Dr. Robert G. Brown of Duke University, the commenter rgbatduke, made a response that was commented on by several here. It is eloquent, insightful and worthy of consideration. Dr Bain and Dr. Brown are approaching this from different perspectives.
It is pointless to point this out as I doubt Paul will read it (but I’ll do it anyway).
The tragic thing about the thoughtless use of a stereotype is that it reveals that you really think of people in terms of its projected meaning. In particular, even in your response you seem to equate the term “skeptic” with “denier of AGW”.
This is silly. On WUWT most of the skeptics do not “deny” AGW, certainly not the scientists or professional weather people (I myself am a physicist) and honestly, most of the non-scientist skeptics have learned better than that. What they challenge is the catastrophic label and the alleged magnitude of the projected warming on a doubling of CO_2. They challenge this on rather solid empirical grounds and with physical arguments and data analysis that is every bit as scientifically valid as that used to support larger estimates, often obtaining numbers that are in better agreement with observation. For this honest doubt and skepticism that the highly complex global climate models are correct you have the temerity to socially stigmatize them in a scientific journal with a catch-all term that implies that they are as morally reprehensible as those that “deny” that the Nazi Holocaust of genocide against the Jews?
For shame.
Seriously, for shame. You should openly apologize for the use of the term, in Nature, and explain why it was wrong. But you won’t, will you… although I will try to explain why you should.
By your use of this term, you directly imply that I am a “denier”, as I am highly skeptical of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (not just “anthropogenic global warming”, which is plausible if not measurable, although there are honest grounds to doubt even this associated with the details of the Carbon Cycle that remain unresolved by model or experiment). Since I am a theoretical physicist, I find this enormously offensive. I might as well label you an idiot for using it, when you’ve never met me, have no idea of my competence or the strength of my arguments for or against any aspect of climate dynamics (because on this list I argue both points of view as the science demands and am just as vigorous in smacking down bullshit physics used to challenge some aspect of CAGW as I am to question the physics or statistical analysis or modelling used to “prove” it). But honestly, you probably aren’t an idiot (are you?) and no useful purpose is served by ad hominem or emotionally loaded human descriptors in a rational discussion of an objective scientific question, is there.
Please understand that by creating a catch-all label like this, you quite literally are moving the entire discussion outside of the realm of science, where evidence and arguments are considered and weighed independent of the humans that advance them, where our desire to see one or another result proven are (or should be) irrelevant, where people weigh the difficulty of the problem being addressed as an important contributor (in a Bayesian sense) to how much we should believe any answer proposed — so far, into the realm where people do not think at all! They simply use a dismissive label such as “denier” and hence avoid any direct confrontation with the issues being challenged.
The issue of difficulty is key. Let me tell you in a few short words why I am a skeptic. First of all, if one examines the complete geological record of global temperature variation on planet Earth (as best as we can reconstruct it) not just over the last 200 years but over the last 25 million years, over the last billion years — one learns that there is absolutely nothing remarkable about today’s temperatures! Seriously. Not one human being on the planet would look at that complete record — or even the complete record of temperatures during the Holocene, or the Pliestocene — and stab down their finger at the present and go “Oh no!”. Quite the contrary. It isn’t the warmest. It isn’t close to the warmest. It isn’t the warmest in the last 2 or 3 thousand years. It isn’t warming the fastest. It isn’t doing anything that can be resolved from the natural statistical variation of the data. Indeed, now that Mann’s utterly fallacious hockey stick reconstruction has been re-reconstructed with the LIA and MWP restored, it isn’t even remarkable in the last thousand years!
Furthermore, examination of this record over the last 5 million years reveals a sobering fact. We are in an ice age, where the Earth spends 80 to 90% of its geological time in the grip of vast ice sheets that cover the polar latitudes well down into what is currently the temperate zone. We are at the (probable) end of the Holocene, the interglacial in which humans emerged all the way from tribal hunter-gatherers to modern civilization. The Earth’s climate is manifestly, empirically bistable, with a warm phase and cold phase, and the cold phase is both more likely and more stable. As a physicist who has extensively studied bistable open systems, this empirical result clearly visible in the data has profound implications. The fact that the LIA was the coldest point in the entire Holocene (which has been systematically cooling from the Holocene Optimum on) is also worrisome. Decades are irrelevant on the scale of these changes. Centuries are barely relevant. We are nowhere near the warmest, but the coldest century in the last 10,000 years ended a mere 300 years ago, and corresponded almost perfectly with the Maunder minimum in solar activity.
There is absolutely no evidence in this historical record of a third stable warm phase that might be associated with a “tipping point” and hence “catastrophe” (in the specific mathematical sense of catastrophe, a first order phase transition to a new stable phase). It has been far warmer in the past without tipping into this phase. If anything, we are geologically approaching the point where the Earth is likely to tip the other way, into the phase that we know is there — the cold phase. A cold phase transition, which the historical record indicates can occur quite rapidly with large secular temperature changes on a decadal time scale, would truly be a catastrophe. Even if “catastrophic” AGW is correct and we do warm another 3 C over the next century, if it stabilized the Earth in warm phase and prevented or delayed the Earth’s transition into cold phase it would be worth it because the cold phase transition would kill billions of people, quite rapidly, as crops failed throughout the temperate breadbasket of the world.
Now let us try to analyze the modern era bearing in mind the evidence of an utterly unremarkable present. To begin with, we need a model that predicts the swings of glaciation and interglacials. Lacking this, we cannot predict the temperature that we should have outside for any given baseline concentration of CO_2, nor can we resolve variations in this baseline due to things other than CO_2 from that due to CO_2. We don’t have any such thing. We don’t have anything close to this. We cannot predict, or explain after the fact, the huge (by comparison with the present) secular variations in temperature observed over the last 20,000 years, let alone the last 5 million or 25 million or billion. We do not understand the forces that set the baseline “thermostat” for the Earth before any modulation due to anthropogenic CO_2, and hence we have no idea if those forces are naturally warming or cooling the Earth as a trend that has to be accounted for before assigning the “anthropogenic” component of any warming.
This is a hard problem. Not settled science, not well understood, not understood. There are theories and models (and as a theorist, I just love to tell stories) but there aren’t any particularly successful theories or models and there is a lot of competition between the stories (none of which agree with or predict the empirical data particularly well, at best agreeing with some gross features but not others). One part of the difficulty is that the Earth is a highly multivariate and chaotic driven/open system with complex nonlinear coupling between all of its many drivers, and with anything but a regular surface. If one tried to actually write “the” partial differential equation for the global climate system, it would be a set of coupled Navier-Stokes equations with unbelievably nasty nonlinear coupling terms — if one can actually include the physics of the water and carbon cycles in the N-S equations at all. It is, quite literally, the most difficult problem in mathematical physics we have ever attempted to solve or understand! Global Climate Models are children’s toys in comparison to the actual underlying complexity, especially when (as noted) the major drivers setting the baseline behavior are not well understood or quantitatively available.
The truth of this is revealed in the lack of skill in the GCMs. They utterly failed to predict the last 13 or 14 years of flat to descending global temperatures, for example, although naturally one can go back and tweak parameters and make them fit it now, after the fact. And every year that passes without significant warming should be rigorously lowering the climate sensitivity and projected AGW, making the probability of the “C” increasinginly remote.
These are all (in my opinion) good reasons to be skeptical of the often egregious claims of CAGW. Another reason is the exact opposite of the reason you used “denier” in your article. The actual scientific question has long since been co-opted by the social and political one. The real reason you used the term is revealed even in your response — we all “should” be doing this and that whether or not there is a real risk of “catastrophe”. In particular, we “should” be using less fossil fuel, working to preserve the environment, and so on.
The problem with this “end justifies the means” argument — where the means involved is the abhorrent use of a pejorative descriptor to devalue the arguers of alternative points of view rather than their arguments at the political and social level — is that it is as close to absolute evil in social and public discourse as it is possible to get. I strongly suggest that you read Feynman’s rather famous “Cargo Cult” talk:
http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm
In particular, I quote:
For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a
friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology
and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the
applications of this work were. “Well,” I said, “there aren’t any.”
He said, “Yes, but then we won’t get support for more research of
this kind.” I think that’s kind of dishonest. If you’re
representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to
the layman what you’re doing–and if they don’t want to support you
under those circumstances, then that’s their decision.
One example of the principle is this: If you’ve made up your mind
to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should
always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only
publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look
good. We must publish both kinds of results.
I say that’s also important in giving certain types of government
advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether
drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it
would be better in some other state. If you don’t publish such a
result, it seems to me you’re not giving scientific advice. You’re
being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the
government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument
in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don’t publish
it at all. That’s not giving scientific advice.
Time for a bit of soul-searching, Dr. Bain. Have you come even close to living up to the standards laid out by Richard Feynman? Is this sort of honesty apparent anywhere in the global climate debate? Did the “Hockey Team” embrace this sort of honesty in the infamous Climategate emails? Do the IPCC reports ever seem to present the counter arguments, or do they carefully avoid showing pictures of the 20,000 year thermal record, preferring instead Mann’s hockey stick because it increases the alarmism (and hence political impact of the report)? Does the term “denier” have any place in any scientific paper ever published given Feynman’s rather simple criterion for scientific honesty?
And finally, how dare you presume to make choices for me, for my relatives, for my friends, for all of the people of the world, but concealing information from them so that they make a choice to allocate resources the way you think they should be allocated, just like the dishonest astronomer of his example. Yes, the price of honesty might be that people don’t choose to support your work. Tough. It is their money, and their choice!
Sadly, it is all too likely that this is precisely what is at stake in climate research. If there is no threat of catastrophe — and as I said, prior to the hockey stick nobody had the slightest bit of luck convincing anyone that the sky was falling because global climate today is geologically unremarkable in every single way except that we happen to be living in it instead of analyzing it in a geological record — then there is little incentive to fund the enormous amount of work being done on climate science. There is even less incentive to spend trillions of dollars of other people’s money (and some of our own) to ameliorate a “threat” that might well be pure moonshine, quite possibly ignoring an even greater threat of movement in the exact opposite direction to the one the IPCC anticipates.
Why am I a skeptic? Because I recognize the true degree of our ignorance in addressing this supremely difficult problem, while at the same time as a mere citizen I weigh civilization and its benefits against draconian energy austerity on the basis of no actual evidence that global climate is in any way behaving unusually on a geological time scale.
For shame.
rgb
These Malthusian nut-jobs are the modern day equivalent of sandwich placard carrying doomsayers. It’s pretty hard to stomach being called names by childish folks that should be on a psychiatrists couch instead of trying to tell us what to do. This was a purposeful act, so your non-apology is not accepted Dr. Bain.
Just what part of your climate models have failed, and your CAGW hypothesis has been debunked, do you not understand?
There is still a lack of understanding by CAGW proponents of the position of most skeptics. Whether it is intentional or not is debatable. The use of the word “denial” is, in my opinion, an intentional effort to cast anyone not in the CAGW camp in as bad a light as possible. What do they think skeptics are in denial about? I have always felt that it is the CAGW proponents who are in denial. They deny that climate changes, that there are problems with the Hockey Stick, that no amplification is evident, that the models are wrong, that sea level rise is not accelerating, and a host of other things. Paul Bain simply fabricated a study full of confirmation biases to heap more ridicule on anyone not in his CAGW camp. What he did was propaganda, not science of any type.
Ian W says: @ur momisugly June 21, 2012 at 4:24 am
…..it is more important for climate scientists to get that huge grant into “AGW that MIGHT be contributing to what MIGHT be catastrophic AGW than to ACTUALLLY save those children and mothers that are ACTUALLY dying as you read this. I think it is this putting of weasel words and the team and funding for what might be ahead of solving disasters that are actually happening that is most upsetting….
_____________________________
I agree with you. The “Social Justice Activists” are SAYING they are all about what is good for humanity, but in every instance I can think of the result is DEATH. From the early socialist experiment of the Pilgrims in the Plymouth Colony where the governor of the colony, William Bradford, reported that the colonists went hungry for years, because they refused to work in the fields. to the present day North Korea.
Governor William Bradford at least was not corrupt. “…in 1623 Bradford abolished socialism. He gave each household a parcel of land and told them they could keep what they produced, or trade it away as they saw fit. In other words, he replaced socialism with a free market, and that was the end of famines…”
You would thing after four hundred years of experimenting with “Socialism” and having it fail each time people would finally give up. If the pilgrims, a religious group, couldn’t make it work you would think it should have been tossed into the dustbin of history right then and there. The problem is “Socialism is very seductive to a variety of people for different reasons and therefore is a great weapon for would be dictators.
That the United Nations is again pushing a form of “socialism” (with them in control of course) shows they have a hidden agenda, the destruction of freedom and the subjugation of the masses, because “Socialism” the holding of property in common, never works without some sort of force to make people work. I rather be bribed with a pay check than threatened with a Labor Camp.
H.L. Mencken had it right “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”
” Graeme W says: June 20, 2012 at 8:00 pm
The simplest one is to promote energy efficiency in a cost-effective way. That is, find ways that save people money through reducing their energy consumption.”
That makes perfect sense unless that isn’t the goal. If you can stay warm/cool, get to work and back, have a nice lawn etc etc etc but it costs you less most people would be in favor of that. The problem is that those promoting AGW do NOT want everyone to get hundreds of dollars in extra cash yearly. They want the government to collect hundreds from everyone every year.
The goal is not to improve efficiency. It is to justify new taxation.
It is pointless to point this out as I doubt Paul will read it (but I’ll do it anyway).
The tragic thing about the thoughtless use of a stereotype is that it reveals that you really think of people in terms of its projected meaning. In particular, even in your response you seem to equate the term “skeptic” with “denier of AGW”.
This is silly. On WUWT most of the skeptics do not “deny” AGW, certainly not the scientists or professional weather people (I myself am a physicist) and honestly, most of the non-scientist skeptics have learned better than that. What they challenge is the catastrophic label and the alleged magnitude of the projected warming on a doubling of CO_2. They challenge this on rather solid empirical grounds and with physical arguments and data analysis that is every bit as scientifically valid as that used to support larger estimates, often obtaining numbers that are in better agreement with observation. For this honest doubt and skepticism that the highly complex global climate models are correct you have the temerity to socially stigmatize them in a scientific journal with a catch-all term that implies that they are as morally reprehensible as those that “deny” that the Nazi Holocaust of genocide against the Jews?
For shame.
Seriously, for shame. You should openly apologize for the use of the term, in Nature, and explain why it was wrong. But you won’t, will you… although I will try to explain why you should.
By your use of this term, you directly imply that I am a “denier”, as I am highly skeptical of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (not just “anthropogenic global warming”, which is plausible if not measurable, although there are honest grounds to doubt even this associated with the details of the Carbon Cycle that remain unresolved by model or experiment). Since I am a theoretical physicist, I find this enormously offensive. I might as well label you an idiot for using it, when you’ve never met me, have no idea of my competence or the strength of my arguments for or against any aspect of climate dynamics (because on this list I argue both points of view as the science demands and am just as vigorous in smacking down bullshit physics used to challenge some aspect of CAGW as I am to question the physics or statistical analysis or modelling used to “prove” it). But honestly, you probably aren’t an idiot (are you?) and no useful purpose is served by ad hominem or emotionally loaded human descriptors in a rational discussion of an objective scientific question, is there.
Please understand that by creating a catch-all label like this, you quite literally are moving the entire discussion outside of the realm of science, where evidence and arguments are considered and weighed independent of the humans that advance them, where our desire to see one or another result proven are (or should be) irrelevant, where people weigh the difficulty of the problem being addressed as an important contributor (in a Bayesian sense) to how much we should believe any answer proposed — so far, into the realm where people do not think at all! They simply use a dismissive label such as “denier” and hence avoid any direct confrontation with the issues being challenged.
The issue of difficulty is key. Let me tell you in a few short words why I am a skeptic. First of all, if one examines the complete geological record of global temperature variation on planet Earth (as best as we can reconstruct it) not just over the last 200 years but over the last 25 million years, over the last billion years — one learns that there is absolutely nothing remarkable about today’s temperatures! Seriously. Not one human being on the planet would look at that complete record — or even the complete record of temperatures during the Holocene, or the Pliestocene — and stab down their finger at the present and go “Oh no!”. Quite the contrary. It isn’t the warmest. It isn’t close to the warmest. It isn’t the warmest in the last 2 or 3 thousand years. It isn’t warming the fastest. It isn’t doing anything that can be resolved from the natural statistical variation of the data. Indeed, now that Mann’s utterly fallacious hockey stick reconstruction has been re-reconstructed with the LIA and MWP restored, it isn’t even remarkable in the last thousand years!
Furthermore, examination of this record over the last 5 million years reveals a sobering fact. We are in an ice age, where the Earth spends 80 to 90% of its geological time in the grip of vast ice sheets that cover the polar latitudes well down into what is currently the temperate zone. We are at the (probable) end of the Holocene, the interglacial in which humans emerged all the way from tribal hunter-gatherers to modern civilization. The Earth’s climate is manifestly, empirically bistable, with a warm phase and cold phase, and the cold phase is both more likely and more stable. As a physicist who has extensively studied bistable open systems, this empirical result clearly visible in the data has profound implications. The fact that the LIA was the coldest point in the entire Holocene (which has been systematically cooling from the Holocene Optimum on) is also worrisome. Decades are irrelevant on the scale of these changes. Centuries are barely relevant. We are nowhere near the warmest, but the coldest century in the last 10,000 years ended a mere 300 years ago, and corresponded almost perfectly with the Maunder minimum in solar activity.
There is absolutely no evidence in this historical record of a third stable warm phase that might be associated with a “tipping point” and hence “catastrophe” (in the specific mathematical sense of catastrophe, a first order phase transition to a new stable phase). It has been far warmer in the past without tipping into this phase. If anything, we are geologically approaching the point where the Earth is likely to tip the other way, into the phase that we know is there — the cold phase. A cold phase transition, which the historical record indicates can occur quite rapidly with large secular temperature changes on a decadal time scale, would truly be a catastrophe. Even if “catastrophic” AGW is correct and we do warm another 3 C over the next century, if it stabilized the Earth in warm phase and prevented or delayed the Earth’s transition into cold phase it would be worth it because the cold phase transition would kill billions of people, quite rapidly, as crops failed throughout the temperate breadbasket of the world.
Now let us try to analyze the modern era bearing in mind the evidence of an utterly unremarkable present. To begin with, we need a model that predicts the swings of glaciation and interglacials. Lacking this, we cannot predict the temperature that we should have outside for any given baseline concentration of CO_2, nor can we resolve variations in this baseline due to things other than CO_2 from that due to CO_2. We don’t have any such thing. We don’t have anything close to this. We cannot predict, or explain after the fact, the huge (by comparison with the present) secular variations in temperature observed over the last 20,000 years, let alone the last 5 million or 25 million or billion. We do not understand the forces that set the baseline “thermostat” for the Earth before any modulation due to anthropogenic CO_2, and hence we have no idea if those forces are naturally warming or cooling the Earth as a trend that has to be accounted for before assigning the “anthropogenic” component of any warming.
This is a hard problem. Not settled science, not well understood, not understood. There are theories and models (and as a theorist, I just love to tell stories) but there aren’t any particularly successful theories or models and there is a lot of competition between the stories (none of which agree with or predict the empirical data particularly well, at best agreeing with some gross features but not others). One part of the difficulty is that the Earth is a highly multivariate and chaotic driven/open system with complex nonlinear coupling between all of its many drivers, and with anything but a regular surface. If one tried to actually write “the” partial differential equation for the global climate system, it would be a set of coupled Navier-Stokes equations with unbelievably nasty nonlinear coupling terms — if one can actually include the physics of the water and carbon cycles in the N-S equations at all. It is, quite literally, the most difficult problem in mathematical physics we have ever attempted to solve or understand! Global Climate Models are children’s toys in comparison to the actual underlying complexity, especially when (as noted) the major drivers setting the baseline behavior are not well understood or quantitatively available.
The truth of this is revealed in the lack of skill in the GCMs. They utterly failed to predict the last 13 or 14 years of flat to descending global temperatures, for example, although naturally one can go back and tweak parameters and make them fit it now, after the fact. And every year that passes without significant warming should be rigorously lowering the climate sensitivity and projected AGW, making the probability of the “C” increasinginly remote.
These are all (in my opinion) good reasons to be skeptical of the often egregious claims of CAGW. Another reason is the exact opposite of the reason you used “denier” in your article. The actual scientific question has long since been co-opted by the social and political one. The real reason you used the term is revealed even in your response — we all “should” be doing this and that whether or not there is a real risk of “catastrophe”. In particular, we “should” be using less fossil fuel, working to preserve the environment, and so on.
The problem with this “end justifies the means” argument — where the means involved is the abhorrent use of a pejorative descriptor to devalue the arguers of alternative points of view rather than their arguments at the political and social level — is that it is as close to absolute evil in social and public discourse as it is possible to get. I strongly suggest that you read Feynman’s rather famous “Cargo Cult” talk:
http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm
In particular, I quote:
For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a
friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology
and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the
applications of this work were. “Well,” I said, “there aren’t any.”
He said, “Yes, but then we won’t get support for more research of
this kind.” I think that’s kind of dishonest. If you’re
representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to
the layman what you’re doing–and if they don’t want to support you
under those circumstances, then that’s their decision.
One example of the principle is this: If you’ve made up your mind
to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should
always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only
publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look
good. We must publish both kinds of results.
I say that’s also important in giving certain types of government
advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether
drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it
would be better in some other state. If you don’t publish such a
result, it seems to me you’re not giving scientific advice. You’re
being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the
government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument
in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don’t publish
it at all. That’s not giving scientific advice.
Time for a bit of soul-searching, Dr. Bain. Have you come even close to living up to the standards laid out by Richard Feynman? Is this sort of honesty apparent anywhere in the global climate debate? Did the “Hockey Team” embrace this sort of honesty in the infamous Climategate emails? Do the IPCC reports ever seem to present the counter arguments, or do they carefully avoid showing pictures of the 20,000 year thermal record, preferring instead Mann’s hockey stick because it increases the alarmism (and hence political impact of the report)? Does the term “denier” have any place in any scientific paper ever published given Feynman’s rather simple criterion for scientific honesty?
And finally, how dare you presume to make choices for me, for my relatives, for my friends, for all of the people of the world, but concealing information from them so that they make a choice to allocate resources the way you think they should be allocated, just like the dishonest astronomer of his example. Yes, the price of honesty might be that people don’t choose to support your work. Tough. It is their money, and their choice!
Sadly, it is all too likely that this is precisely what is at stake in climate research. If there is no threat of catastrophe — and as I said, prior to the hockey stick nobody had the slightest bit of luck convincing anyone that the sky was falling because global climate today is geologically unremarkable in every single way except that we happen to be living in it instead of analyzing it in a geological record — then there is little incentive to fund the enormous amount of work being done on climate science. There is even less incentive to spend trillions of dollars of other people’s money (and some of our own) to ameliorate a “threat” that might well be pure moonshine, quite possibly ignoring an even greater threat of movement in the exact opposite direction to the one the IPCC anticipates.
Why am I a skeptic? Because I recognize the true degree of our ignorance in addressing this supremely difficult problem, while at the same time as a mere citizen I weigh civilization and its benefits against draconian energy austerity on the basis of no actual evidence that global climate is in any way behaving unusually on a geological time scale.
For shame.
rgb
This comment may be too simple for such a distinguished fourm, but doesn’t ‘denier’ also apply to the AGW crowd who deny that natural causes also affect the global climate?
Are the climate scientists 100% sure that global warming will be as their climate models project?
Are they only 90% sure?
Is it more like 50% sure?
As soon as one invokes any important degree of uncertainty, now one has to start using empirical evidence to see if it actually happening. That is just sensible.
That is what being a skeptic means to me.
I don’t deny anything. I’m taking the sensible approach which the pro-AGW people have somehow self-talked themselves into believing is really a non-sensible approach.
” That is, two sizeable groups have different views on a social issue with major policy implications – how do you find a workable solution that at least partly satisfies the most people? ”
First, do no harm … The AGW proponents have to rely on strong positive feedbacks in their models and the “precautionary principle” in their social “issue” to identify a problem in need of a solution. Instead of finding problems, lets work on solutions for the problems we can identify and measure. Building a solution for a problem that cannot be measured, means it cannot be managed, and that is a social problem.
dylan cram says: @ur momisugly June 21, 2012 at 6:57 am
….Terrorism. If I am a denier, then they are terrorists.
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Time to report Jim Hansen and Mike Mann to Janet Napolitano. Doesn’t the USA now have a Gulag for Terroists?
rgb – your post is excellent and will be useful. thx
Jean Parisot says: @ur momisugly June 21, 2012 at 8:56 am
rgb – your post is excellent and will be useful. thx
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I agree. I am keeping a copy of the link so I can use it as a reference. rgb, does a very nice job of explaining just how uncertain the “Science” is and how the orthodoxy could be 100% wrong with very nasty consequences.
It is amazing how Dr Bain still doesn’t ‘get it’ in full. A quick retraction of the paper with republication WITHOUT the word ‘denier’ is the bare minimum at this stage.
The results of the work are nullified by the mere fact that Dr Bain, everybody else in his team of co-authors, the peer reviewers, and the editors, obviously don’t know enough about skeptics, not even the basic idea that to use ‘denier’, as Keith Kloor has said, is like promoting a diet by using ‘fatso’.
Bain is a worthy example of the Dunning-Kruger effect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
He supports a group of people who are attempting to force radical change on Western society because of their belief in a mythical threat. These same people, through numerous environmental organisations, seek to clean every picogram of ‘pollution’ from earth’s atmosphere.
He chooses to illustrate the point of his paper:
This is the message of our paper … … Some have described this message as naïve, but a real-world example (noted by one of our reviewers) illustrates the general point: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/science/earth/19fossil.html?pagewanted=all
… with a photograph of people voluntarily eating in a room lit by candles.
Bain, you dimwit, if you’d paid more attention to science at school you’d know why candles burn with a yellow flame! (hint for the dimwitted: it isn’t CO2)
Dale Hartz – “but doesn’t ‘denier’ also apply to the AGW crowd who deny that natural causes also affect the global climate?”
You can add to that; the AGW crowd’s denying of manipulating data, denying of selective graphing, denying of collusion, denying of failed models, and most importantly denying that Mother Nature has shown them to be wrong about AGW.
The AGW crowd is in such denial, that they must continually morph their arguments and claims. Remember when AGW was merely about the claimed impact of man-made CO2 on global temperatures? Whereas we now have the U.N. using AGW to level the playing field between nations (aka social economic engineering) under control of Elitists for power and profit. As discussed here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/18/finally-somebody-comes-right-out-and-says-it-climate-world-governance-is-a-match-made-in-green-heaven/).
rgb – your post is excellent and will be useful. thx
You are welcome. If I had my druthers, I’d read Feynman’s Cargo Cult address out loud at the OPENING of the next AR global climate meeting, or at least selected parts of it. I’d also invite Bob Carter to give the plenary address. Finally, I’d whack them with Koutsayannis and the discovery of scaling laws in climate fluctuations, and McKittrick, showing that the GCMs underperform a random walk at predicting actual surface temperatures.
I’d then point out that half of the presentations to be given are “given global warming of X, what are the (negative) consequences” where what they should be focussing on is what is the probability distribution of X, and what are the Bayesian priors of that assignment of probabilities. We could then work through it by the (Bayesian) numbers — how uncertain are the Bayesian priors? How does that uncertainty translate through to the presumed precision in the prediction of X?
One basic problem with the entire issue is that the error estimation sucks. Everybody claims far more precision than they’ve really got, in part because they have almost no precision in what they claim. This is especially egregious when looking at geological data and e.g. tree ring data, where there is a high degree of multivariate uncertainty. We not only have y-axis uncertainty, and (usually ignored) t-axis uncertainty, we have a multivariate ellipsoid of uncertainty in the hyperplane of confounding variables and ignored parametric variables orthogonal to t, making the true uncertainties much larger than they are claimed. This is immediately apparent in the tree ring data — the true uncertainties are large enough that tree rings are basically meaningless as proxies of global temperature (in my opinion). Furthermore, this is almost instantly observable — all one has to do is go into an actual forest and core a large selection of trees and compare ring widths to temperature over a century, let alone five or six centuries. Sometimes they are correlated, sure. Sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they are anticorrelated.
This was actually acknowledged in one of the more humorous exchanges in the Climategate emails, where one of the hockey team members acknowledged ruefully that tree rings failed his kid in a science fair experiment in his own back yard, IIRC. That’s why even the CURRENT version of the hockey stick (the one with the MWP and LIA somewhat restored) presents the error estimates in very light grey so that one doesn’t notice that they are almost as large as the variance of the curve itself, and are (to be frank) probably too small by a factor of two or three as it is, given the methodology. After all we haven’t a clue as to what sea surface temperatures or (for the most part) tropical temperatures were doing in the covered interval, and the ocean covers 70% of the globe and doesn’t always move in lockstep with continental interiors or polar extremes. Basically, the error estimates are bullshit, selected so that the results appear “significant” — it would be very interesting indeed to see them justified, especially after the long process of cherrypi– uh, I mean “selecting” the data to be actually included in the reconstructions.
There is only one unbiased way to select data for inclusion in a statistical reconstruction. Roll dice. Weight it geographically, sure, but roll the damn dice. Or do a jackknife on all of the data. That’s what I do mentally whenever I look at the actual tree ring data, and I’m sure is what McIntyre did when he first glanced at the problem. Anybody used to actually working with statistical models can fairly quic
rgb
…kly estimate probable error ranges and whether or not one has any prayer of getting an R-value that suggests that even a linear trend is meaningful, let alone a complex nonlinear functional form.
rgb
I’m not sure why there’s any controversy about using the word “denialist”. It’s not just that people use it pejoratively, it’s that the word carries a definition with it that is pejorative. The very word “denialist” means that one is denying a proven truth. It therefore contains within the very word the assumption that the denier is wrong on the facts. The use of the word “believer”, on the other hand, contains no such assumption. One can easily believe in something that is also true. But if one is a denialist, there’s simply no way that one can be denying something that is false. No one is called a denialist who says that 2+2 does not equal 5. You are only a denialist if you claim that 2+2 does not equal 4. The word only refers to people who claim that something which is clearly true, is actually false. And thus it isn’t an impartial description of someone and their world view, but prejudges the world, and the view that it is supposed to merely be describing.
In other words, it’s a highly charged politicized description by definition, and can’t be made otherwise, because of the actual meaning of the word. There is no neutral meaning to the word, and no amount of apologetics can change that. If believer is to be used to describe one side of the aisle, the opposite side should be “non-believer”, rather than “denialist”. Or “skeptic”.
Downdraft says:
June 21, 2012 at 7:45 am
“There is still a lack of understanding by CAGW proponents of the position of most skeptics. Whether it is intentional or not is debatable.”
Downdraft, for years they have been mischaracterizing us as paid shills of Big Oils, and have no intention of stopping that. By now, they all believe the mischaracterization.
They will understand us progressively LESS; not MORE, because they are neither interested in understanding our motives, nor our arguments.
And I am, by now, no more inclined to try to educate any one of them, as it is a fruitless endeavour. They have chosen their fate – to go down in history as crooks and fr*uds.
There are a lot of very good comments regarding Bain and the ‘Believers’ tactics. There is little I could add that hasn’t been covered here at WUWT and Judith Curry’s site.
Could Bain be viewed as a ‘Pied Piper’ for those supporting the ’cause’.
Could he be viewed as trolling along and blowing his flute in knowing that the ‘believers’ will stroll along in support and admiration. He hopes that a skeptic will join in simply because the ‘believers’ are doing so. He has gone over the edge and we now have an opportunity to see who his followers will be.
How many will continue to dance to Bain’s music or blow their flute after his dive over the edge? It appears that many are skeptical of his magic. Others will continue to believe in his magic and will collectively go down with him. Some are probably quietly moaning as they have been publicly exposed and are choking now on what they previously swallowed.
I don’t like his music but he can blow his flute if he wants. It’s his flute. He can massage his message but we can see where he’s coming from. He has exposed himself and further stained Nature Climate Change. There has been a lot of hands involved in creating such a slimey mess.
His letter seems like a long, thoughtful version of this:
“I’m not talking about the black people here today, who are all fine, upstanding citizens. The problem is with those n****rs.”
This completely ignores the fact that the issue was raised by those who had no conclusive proof of the existence of a need for action. The continued use of the phrase “those who believe in AGW” leads me to repeatedly assert that this proposed need for political action for a non-problem is no different than any other request for political action from religious groups.
If the pope started leading a crusade saying that Jesus Christ was returning and we must take action now to save humanity, most people, even many Catholics would likely laugh at the notion that political action must be taken on such faith-based interpretations of the future. In the armchair scientist reality we have today we have a population of citizens that consider themselves enlightened because they watch the Discovery Channel. They are hypnotized into believing they can rationally determine scientific reality because television tells them all they need to know. Combine this with a cabal of scientists who managed to manipulate their own peer-review circle to suit their needs in telling all of those enlightened people that the debate was over; We essentially have a new religion telling politics what it should be doing, I cannot see how the rational mind can being to argue with me on that point.
But social studies people don’t seem to want to cover that interesting aspect of this debate, now do they? They take it as a given that this issue is meaningful in the first place, not some imagined doomsday that has no empirical facts to back it up. How is sociology pulling it’s weight if it is not asking the question, “are you just delusional?” I seem to recall more scientific sociologists questioning belief, why does this author pre-emptively decide that AGW is a valid political issue, and not simply a new religious belief?
Believer:
“I knew how easy it was to make people believe a lie, but I didn’t expect the same people, confronted with the lie, would choose it over the truth. … No amount of logic can shatter a faith consciously based on a lie.” – M. Lamar Keene The Psychic Mafia 1976
Only three words to describe Bain’s response.
Patronising
Self-serving
Without empirical evidence supporting claims…
Without empirical evidence explaining divergences from the hypothesis…
I think it’s safe to label CAGW’ers – “Climate Psychics”
If ‘Denier’ means immoral skepticism then I am perfectly happy to be branded as a societal malcontent, heretic or religious apostate. And whenever the term is trotted out it is of far more worth to hear their arguments for what moral faux pas is incurred by seeking answers patiently.
“That is, two sizeable groups have different views on a social issue with major policy implications – how do you find a workable solution that at least partly satisfies the most people?”
Democracy perhaps. But this is the Fallacy of Bipartisanship, in which one side has a problem they want to solve by dictating the lives of the subjects, and the other has a problem with that solution. Compromise in such affairs means only that one party gets half of what it wants while the other gets half of what it doesn’t. It is with near certain regularity that when someone starts agonizing over compromise it means that they know they’re on the losing end of popularity polls.