Note: This will be the top post for a day or two, new posts will appear below this one.
Readers may recall my original post, Nature’s ugly decision: ‘Deniers’ enters the scientific literature. followed by Dr. Paul Bain Responds to Critics of Use of “Denier” Term (with thanks to Jo Nova, be sure to bookmark and visit her site) Dr. Robert G. Brown of Duke University, commenting as rgbatduke, made a response that was commented on by several here in that thread. As commenter REP put it in the update: It is eloquent, insightful and worthy of consideration. I would say, it is likely the best response I’ve ever seen on the use of the “denier” term, not to mention the CAGW issue in general. Thus, I’ve elevated it a full post. Please share the link to this post widely. – Anthony
Dr. Robert G. Brown writes:
The tragic thing about the thoughtless use of a stereotype (denier) 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.
Mike Dubrasich says:
June 22, 2012 at 7:44 pm
Rosco is right. The use of the term is not about science, it is about fascism.
The users are the fascists, the fascists of science perhaps, but fascists nonetheless.
They are jackbooted thugs who seek dominion over their fellow man, through violent means including propaganda tricks like vilifying anyone who opposes them.
It’s an old trick , one we all know, one that has left a trail of horror and suffering beyond measure.
It’s not mere smarminess; it’s a cold-blooded attempt to brand free people in preparation for ruthless actions against them.
Let those who bandy the term “denier” deny that.
____________________
Indeed Sir, we have already seen some number of calls for violence from the warmist camp against those who question them (us).
It is an astonishing sight to watch them as they passionately justify their actions as necessary to the cause.
Tyranny requires a contingent of minions.
Bernd Felsche and eyesonu,
Well said. The greatest credit goes to those who are first to step out in front of the crowd and lead the crowd in a new direction. CAGW and AGW are old and busted narratives. They are not true. They are based on misinformation and mendacious alarmism.
Kudos to Dr. Brown. He is one of the few who has the courage to point out that the “carbon” scare is baseless. With his example and the example of others like him, the tide will turn. It is already beginning.
Some beautiful writing. However, regarding this statement about Climate, “It is, quite literally, the most difficult problem in mathematical physics we have ever attempted to solve or understand!”
I disagree.
The most difficult problem stares us in the face every morning, when we look in the mirror.
The only thing harder to predict than the weather is humans.
Climate Science should indeed feel shame for reducing meteorology to a sort of pseudoscience, however they are rank amateurs, compared to psychologists.
Psychologists put themselves forward as scientists, able to predict human behavior, and they never get it right. Time has shown they are amazingingly wrong, and furthermore psychologists often sadly have had harmful effects on the very people they intended to help, (if they truly were altruistic, and not merely into psychology for the grants and fat paychecks.)
Not one of the drugs prescribed to my mother, in the 1960’s, is legal any longer, for they were all shown to be harmful. If ever there should have been a “doctor” sued for malpractice, it was those so-called “scientists,” for what they did to my mother, (and also my childhood.) However, psychologists seem strangely immune to malpractice lawsuits.
True scientists and true doctors went to a great deal of trouble to demonstrate that the entire concept of manic-depressive behavior was full of flaws. The result? The term “manic-depressive” was no longer used. However the term “bi-polar” was used to continue a scam that profited off ordinary women’s mood-swings.
Sound familiar? A bit like the term “Global Warming” being debunked, due to the hard work of true scientists, only to be replaced by the term “Climate Change?” The same game with a different name? I can only suppose some can’t afford to lose the profits of a scam, even when they are proven to be false profits.
Oddly, this low sort of money-grubbing behavior is the easiest side of human nature to predict. Once people sink to that low level, other people see right through them. Even an uneducated rube rolls his eyes, watching how some Climate Scientists behave.
What is completely impossible to predict, in humans, are those occasions when they amaze you, and make it seem possible that the statement, “There is a little bit of God in every man,” might be a truth.
Over and over histories and biographies show us men and mankind rising from the most oppressed and obscure places and, despite all odds, doing great deeds of kindness, defeating greed with generosity, fear with bravery, and lust with purity.
Look for the nation of Spain in an atlas of 1475, and it didn’t even exist. A quarter century later, according to the Pope, Spain had rights to half the world. Or look at the weak nation of England in 1600, and attempt to see how the sun would never set on its empire, at a later date. Or look at the thirteen colonies in 1775, and try to imagine they could even fend for themselves, let alone shock and awe anyone else. Or look at the scattered Navajo clans drifting across the northern reaches of New Spain in 1800, and attempt to dream they’d ever be America’s most populous Native American tribe, owning lands larger than West Virginia.
Or look at the fallen state of California in October, 2006. It was an obviously doomed state, determined to sink to total ruin. And then look at one lone individual of that state, named A. Watts, deciding, “I think I’ll start a website.” What hope could a lone soul like that have of countering the massive weight of blithering, bureaucratic idiots?
The answer, according to those who judge humans by their low behavior, is, “none.” This answer is wrong, but sadly it makes up the morbid shadows where the so-called “science” of both Psychology and Climate Science spends all its time trudging.
They who base their world-view on shadows will see all the dark they trust vanish, when a single soul exposes their dark to a mere candle’s light.
Reblogged this on TaJnB | TheAverageJoeNewsBlogg and commented:
Editor’s Note: Anyone fed up with the lack of scientific evidence for alarmist anthropogenic global warming are now targets for being labeled a “denier”, like a “holocaust denier”.
Thank you Dr. Brown! Well said!
That piece was sublime. Just sublime. Thank you.
Personally, the “Denier” label dosen’t bother me, but my background has no connection to what the Nazis did to the Jews beyond having known an Italian POW that was in Dachau. What I mean is the term doen’t invoke the emotional response from me that it is obviously meant to invoke. I don’t think the term effectively connects denying that atrocity of WW2 with honestly questioning Hansen’s and Mann’s conclusions. I expect such “button pushing” from the MSM. The atrocity is that it was prominent in what is supposed to a nonemotional scientific journal. (PS Was the article “peer-reviewed”?)
There is evidence for temperature rises in the geological past of similar rates upward to what we are seeing now. They were extinction events. If civilizations had existed at the time they would have been civilization destroying events.
Piffle. Again, I refer you to Bob Carter’s presentations. Or the openly accepted curves of Holocene temperatures or the ending of the ice age, when fluctuations of multiple degrees occurred on decadal timescales. I refer you to the fact that it isn’t the rate of change of temperature that is important — even though the rate of change over the 30+ years of reliable global temperature measurement is modest indeed — it is the temperature itself, and for the bulk of the last 200 million years the temperature on Earth was considerably warmer, on average, than it is right now.
We are in an ice age. In a narrow, fragile, cooling interglacial in an ice age. We have four or five degrees centigrade to go just to get back to the temperatures that prevailed 3 million years ago before the ice age began. The entire interval of forty or fifty years where you find the temperature increase “alarming” wouldn’t even register in most of the proxies for geological temperature — they can’t show temperature increases on anything as fine as a decadal timescale. We can only manage it within the last 20 Ky or so because we have access to relatively pristine, unmixed ice core data, and even that gets all muddy and questionable as you go back in time.
It is precisely this that I was referring to when I pointed out that the only difference between the climate record of the last 500 years and that of the 500 years before it or the last 10,000 years before it is that we are living now, and every experience is a peak experience in our lifetimes. Is it stormier? Not objectively, but it is after Al Gore gets through with it and is never corrected on the news. Is it wetter or drier? It is always wetter or drier somewhere, so sure, but it isn’t on average, not in any statistically significant way. Yet we hear nothing but “climate change” whenever there is a drought. The Younger Dryas — there was a drought. The drought in the US in the 1600s that wiped out a number of colonies (especially in NC and VA) — there was a drought — seven years long with almost no rain! But there was no significant anthropogenic CO_2, and not many people lived through it and recorded it. The Dust Bowl — yet another drought. Drought killed millions of people in India in the middle of the last century — before CO_2 induced “climate change”. But if there is anything like a drought today, with every news camera in the world ready to beam it straight into our minds, that is due to climate change and Our Fault.
You like evidence? Then I suggest you look at some actual evidence. It has been warmer — much warmer. There has been as much or more CO_2 in the air. It has warmed — and cooled — more rapidly. There isn’t a shred of evidence for a significantly warmer third stable phase for the Earth — not in the geological record — to which the climate can devolve through a “tipping point”. There is ample evidence of a much colder second phase that is in fact the dominant phase, much more likely and stable than the current interglacial.
Finally, none of the empirical evidence directly supports a contention that the Earth’s temperature will increase by more than 1-2 C over the rest of the century, and even this is a stretch. The only “evidence” that this will happen comes from Global Climate Models that are beaten by random chance when it comes to predicting temperature changes on a global basis, and that utterly failed fifteen years ago to predict the current stagnation in temperature in the face of CO_2 increase.
If you give up the idea that CO_2 is necessarily the Devil in a new world religion, and open up your mind to the possibility that there might be other confounding explanations that at least contributed to the relatively rapid temperature increase in the 80s and 90s (such as two back-to–back solar maxima that peaked out the 20th century and by some measures, the last 9000 years) and consider the further possibility that the stabilization of the UAH lower troposphere temperature might — only might — reflect the fact that solar cycle 24 is the lowest in a century, that there has been a climatologically significant shift in both planetary albedo and stratospheric water vapor concentration, and that things might be a bit more complicated than the existing climate models allow for, then perhaps you could restore your scientific objectivity to the extent that your can permit yourself to doubt the CAGW conclusion and meditate for just a bit on the terrible costs associated with it either way — costs that are not possible, but certain if we panic and spend trillions of dollars to avoid a disaster that is itself far from certain.
I repeat — predicting the global climate a mere decade from now is the most difficult problem in mathematical physics the world has ever undertaken, and we can’t do it yet! Yet we are blithely making hundred-billion-dollar down payments on the outcomes of toy models that don’t work for as little as ten years into the future. If you disagree — show me all the model computations that were done in the 90s that predicted that the lower troposphere temperature in 2012 would be a few tenths of a degree C above the 30+ year mean (or that even agreed!). I’m not talking about whether or not it is warming or cooling or things like that which are a function of cherrypicked starting or ending points for a trend fit — I’m talking about predictions compared to current temperatures.
Now make the GCMs predict the last 20,000 years of temperatures, or hell, just the last 2000. Hmmm, hard problem.
It is also interesting how you don’t actually address much of what I say. Indeed, you seem to want to support the idea that I’m a “denier”, or am somehow being dishonest. Is your next ploy going to be to accuse me of being paid off by giant oil companies?
So let me ask you straight up, Mr. Lazy “Teen-ager”: What do you think of the use of the term “denier” in a reasoned debate on climate change in a major scientific journal? Is it justified? What is the purpose of using a derogatory term intended to stifle debate and devalue the debater, to render them unworthy of even being heard before one hears them, in a forum that is supposed to be almost religiously objective? Is this your idea of good science? Is it your reasoned opinion that it is not possible to be reasonable and be skeptical of CAGW?
I’d like to hear it straight out from you. Do you think that anyone that disagrees with your obvious beliefs on the matter ought to be dismissed without a hearing because there is no possible doubt that your beliefs are correct? That would certainly show us all where you stand, would it not?
rgb
Robert,
have you found any high value climate sensitivity papers among the multitude which actually include albedo as anything but an assumed constant?
“What they challenge is the catastrophic label and the alleged magnitude of the projected warming on a doubling of CO_2”
Actually, not only do I deny that AGW exists at all, but I also content that doubling CO2 will have no detectable effect on our climate, as no gas can warm the atmosphere.
It is during the night that CO2 will help the atmosphere cool as it and water vapor convert atmospheric heat to IR to be lost to space. During the day any IR absorbed is almost instantly re-emitted, very little is converted to heat, so that’s meaningless—and IR sent downward WILL NOT be absorbed or cause any heating of the surface or subsequently the atmosphere.
LazyTeenager says:
June 22, 2012 at 6:30 pm
“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.”
————–
no actual evidence —– is code for —— I am ignoring the evidence I don’t like.
There is evidence for temperature rises in the geological past of similar rates upward to what we are seeing now. They were extinction events. If civilizations had existed at the time they would have been civilization destroying events.
For shame that you close your eyes whenever evidence appears.
It’s not skepticism. It’s prejudice.
===========================================================
WTF!!!!!
So, what you just said is that past extinction events would have been Man’s fault if Man had been here so let’s not cause another one that Man hadn’t caused in the first place?!?! And prejudice is to blame?!???!
Have you been smoking to much CO2?
Greg House at 8:15 pm: Dr. Brown responded at 7:52 pm and confirmed my assertion in a lengthy and thoughtful response.
Dr Brown said: “The problem with this … 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.”
While I of course accept his right to this (somewhat rococo) point of view, I would have thought that expressions such as “absolute evil in social and public discourse” are a little excessive as applying to something not much more significant than a “you called me a nasty name” children’s playground row.
Wouldn’t it be better just to ignore the silly labels and get on with the mission?
Thank you Dr. Brown. I feel a lot better about being a skeptic. Your explanation of the logic behind our skeptical conclusions was perfectly stated. You just became one of my heroes.
TimC;
I would have thought that expressions such as “absolute evil in social and public discourse” are a little excessive >>>>
The strategy of labelling contrary opinion in the manner that Dr Brown is protesting has been used many times before in history, and has presaged the darkest chapters in the history of man’s inhumanity to man. Those who ignore the lessons of history are condemned to repeat it. Sadly, should there be enough of those, the rest of us are condemned to repeat it with them.
Thank you Dr. Brown for a civilized retort. There is however a more accurate, though less civilized retort. It is: We know the AGW crowd for what they are. They may have been scientists but by promoting conclusions reached from secret data they no longer merit that term. They seek money and power and nothing else. It really is that simple.
What an elegantly explicated response. Thank you, Dr. Brown.
As a skeptic, I question not only the C in CAGW, but also the G in AGW. Certainly, UHI and land-use changes have probably resulted in localized heating, but that’s a long way from a global effect.
Dr. Brown, I suggest you maintain a lower profile or stay behind an anomous nick since people are getting let go for speaking out. We need more scientists to speak out but there are great personal risks in doing so for now.
Perhaps I’m a Polyanna, but I think that those risks are highly exaggerated. Besides, if I get fired I’ll just have to make money instead. Since I’ve got a startup company going that I really should be working on full time, the end result would probably be to force me to get rich quicker (assuming I’m lucky enough to succeed). And in the meantime — what is the virtue of my words if I do not speak them in my own name? Do you think I’m ashamed of them, or fearful? They are my honest beliefs, and I think that they are not entirely without foundation (which is why I articulate them).
I wasn’t kidding — I’m only interested in the truth here, not an “anti-CAGW” agenda or “pro-CAGW” agenda. If you look around on the threads on this list, I spend more actual time bashing bad anti-GHE or anti-CAGW science than I do bashing specific problems with the CAGW argument. I’m not a warmist, luke-warmist, coldist, or anything-ist. I’m happy to be convinced of anything but I won’t be convinced by bullshit statistics or bad physics. And I’m moderately proficient at statistics, especially certain kinds of modelling, and moderately proficient at physics (good enough to teach it without lecture notes and write textbooks in it). Oh, and calculus, and I’m a computer geek, and a few other things. So I don’t think I actually qualify as an idiot, and after reading Taleb’s Black Swan book (which I highly recommend) recently I hope not to be a sucker.
And that’s what a whole lot of this debate is all about. It has been exaggerated beyond all reasonable measure, causing a lot of people to take sucker bets on the future. The NC sea rise issue recently discussed as a classic example.
Sea level rise is currently measured to be at most 3 mm/year, and historical measurements show that the sea level oscillates on a multi-decadal timescale with long term behavior that is remarkably consistent and nearly periodic (surely with a non-flat fourier transform with some peaks). If anything, the rate of increase is decreasing. 3 mm/year, extrapolated for 88 years, works out to a sea level increase of just over ten inches by the year 2100, assuming that the rate does not decrease as it historically has done see previous remark about fairly reliable measurements over the last 100 years.
Yet a bill was being pushed trying to get NC to plan for a thirty nine inch increase in sea level by the year 2000. Since the current rate is only at most 3 mm/year, and there is no good reason to think it will suddenly change, this is an increase of well over a centimeter per year over most of that interval. Why? Because some model predicts it!
This, my friends, is a sucker bet. First of all, even at a centimeter a year there is still plenty of time before it rises enough to be a problem — four inches or so in a decade. Yet we are asked to spend money and time now, when there literally isn’t a hint of a problem in the (beloved of lazy “teenagers” who probably aren’t) empirical data.
Why?
Follow the money and one can probably find out. But more importantly, it reflects a “follow the mindshare” problem — we have lost all contact with common sense when people who know better than to trust the weather prediction in their newspaper a week in advance are trusting a weather prediction for 100 years from now enough to invest enormous amounts of money that could just as easily be spent later, when it actually “rains” and the sea level begins to rise. Or it doesn’t. In which case we can be glad we didn’t panic and waste all of that money doing nothing useful.
But every single investment like this that does get made makes it more difficult to turn away from the sucker bet. To do so requires admitting that you were a sucker. If they’d gotten the public to buy into this one, what would have been next? California style regulation of power plants? Doubling of the costs of NC electricity? One cannot be certain that the ongoing depression in California is due to the fact that energy costs almost twice what it should there, largely because they are forced to build large, expensive renewable generating facilities and pay their “Carbon Taxes”, but it certainly does seem plausible. The world is cruel to suckers.
So just as much as I’m interested in learning the science and critically examining the arguments on all sides, I’m interested in not being taken for a ride, especially not a ride in untimely haste. In twenty years, one won’t have to subsidize solar generation of electricity, because Moore’s Law will have dropped the price of solar panels and the associated support hardware to where photovoltaic-generated electricity on individual rooftops, backfed into the grid when there is a surplus, will produce a sound ROI on a decadal timescale even for ordinary citizens. One doesn’t have to panic in the meantime, this is nearly certain if the history of the semiconductor industry is any basis at all for a prediction. In fifty years we will IMO be well on the downhill slope for CO_2 production without doing anything but pursuing our local economic best interest — fossil fuels may or may not be the devil, but they are difficult to obtain and expensive and cannot sustain a steady-state civilization.
In the meantime, even the proponents of CAGW agree that the “Carbon Trading” measures currently undertaken won’t make the slightest bit of difference in global temperatures by the end of the century. To make a difference one would pretty much have to end civilization as we know it now, and they know that that will be a very tough sell. Yet they persist in selling it, and selling it as if it is an emergency — give us your money, lots of it, it is an emergency.
I smell — as do many others — another sucker bet.
And if we really took the CAGW threat from CO_2 seriously, and don’t want to end human civilization, why aren’t we building the hell out of nuclear power plants? No CO_2, plenty of fuel and low costs for at least the next century, long enough to smoothly and painlessly transition largely to solar and hope for thermonuclear fusion and the golden age of man. Is it because it isn’t about the CO_2 at all?
If not, the EPA and DOE can easily convince me. Start building nukes, fast. Thorium nukes for a preference (harder to make bombs). Everywhere. Regulate the hell out of them, but build them. Show us that you take the risk seriously, and that you don’t just want to shut down civilization by making energy too expensive to use.
What, no takers?
A sucker bet.
rgb
LazyTeenager spouted (at June 22, 2012 at 6:13 pm)
“…Personally I am happy to insult all of you because a real skeptic follows the evidence no matter if it’s like able or not. I’m convinced that no matter how much evidence piles up the great majority of you are too stubborn to change your minds and are therefore pretend skeptics…”
Wow.
“…Personally I am happy to insult all of you…”
Proves you’ve lost the battle. Rather than discuss the science and the data, you feel a need to insult your critics. If the “D” word doesn’t work, you’ll be like Dr. Bain and try to find an “alternative label”.
“…a real skeptic follows the evidence no matter if it’s like able or not…”
And, a real scientist isn’t afraid to show the results of their experiments, no matter if it’s likable or not. They’re glad to show their data to other scientists, even those outside their field – that way the science advances.
“…I’m convinced that no matter how much evidence piles up the great majority of you are too stubborn to change your minds…”
You’re right there, the evidence HAS been piling up – Yamal, strip-bark bristlecone pines, upside-down Tiljander, Himalayan glaciers, altered temperature datasets – and each one shows why we’re right NOT to change our minds. We’re still waiting for REAL evidence.
“…pretend skeptics…”
This must be one of the “alternative labels” that some are looking for. Let’s see if this one sticks.
Thank you Dr. Brown for a civilized retort. There is however a more accurate, though less civilized retort. It is: We know the AGW crowd for what they are. They may have been scientists but by promoting conclusions reached from secret data they no longer merit that term. They seek money and power and nothing else. It really is that simple.
Not all of them. Maybe not even most of them. You do them, and science, a disservice by assuming that they are necessarily dishonest in their beliefs. I have no difficulty whatsoever in thinking that many of my colleagues believe in AGW in the very best of faith, and I sincerely hope that they accord to me a similar respect for my sincerity in doubting it. It is this common civility that is lacking in the debate as represented by the name-calling term “denier”.
Yes, there may be some specific scientists who have been and continue to be less than honest, but their biggest problem is that they are not being honest with themselves, they are allowing a desire to pursue a conclusion they believe in honestly enough to overwhelm their objectivity when it comes to doing the science. This sort of thing is sadly apparent when every “correction” made to GISS seems to lower past temperatures (where it is difficult to imagine an objective basis for doing so or an unbiased alteration that wouldn’t increase or decrease past temperatures by about the same amount) and not infrequently raises contemporary ones, as if we are somehow overestimating the UHI effect in ever-growing cities and airports.
But in the long run this won’t matter. Objectively, they are either correct or they aren’t. Objectively, the future will either play out as they predict or it won’t. They are betting a lot — their careers, their reputations, their honor — on their beliefs, and if it doesn’t hurry up and warm some more quite soon they are going to lose.
And it probably will, for a short while. We seem to be passing into El Nino, which typically warms, and we are approaching the wimpy peak of solar cycle 24 (such as it is).
No, the place I have trouble with isn’t (most of) the actual scientists or their publications, it is the IPCC. The scientists in private and in print are a lot more cautious about their conclusions than the AR reports have ever been. There is a lot of well-documented insight in WUWT threads as to just how unbiased language and conclusions have consistently been deleted in favor of biased ones, sometimes to the horror of the very authors of the papers used in the reports. The politicization of the science, its subordination to a secondary goal, that’s the shocking departure from the path of scientific honesty described by Feynman. But I sometimes think that it has happened almost in spite of many of even the supporters of the CAGW hypothesis — those wise enough to recognize the real probable scientific uncertainty of many of the legs upon which it stands — where they are somehow talked out of expressing their actual reservations in the AR reports, where they are less reserved in private and in the literature. Where the public, needless to say, can’t hear them.
rgb
“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.” Was this written as intended? Or do I just have an aversion to shivering?
Just a slight correction to an otherwise excellent post, Dr. Brown: You mention that “Sea level rise is currently measured to be at most 3 mm/year, …” when in fact tide gauges ubiquitously struggle to measure half that rise almost everywhere. You would be correct in saying “Sea-Level rise is currently adjusted in multiple ways to report (not measure) a 3mm annual rise.”
I KNOW you are aware of this too – just helps to say it once per hour to whomever will deign to show a desire to become educated!
Robert Brown,
Bravo, Sir!
The ‘Denier’ meme was a deliberate choice by those who wished to attack Lomborg (in a review in Nature, it should be noted, so the journal has ‘form’) and then quite deliberately chosen by activists who thought using the term ‘sceptic’ pejoratively (it should be a badge of honour for any scientist!) was not strong enough.
I discuss the beginning of this in my book ‘Science and Public Policy’:
‘Pimm and Harvey also resorted to the tactic of likening Lomborg to a
Holocaust denier in pointing to the virtual nature of most of the species
supposedly becoming extinct annually:
‘ “The text employs the strategy of those who, for example, argue that gay men
aren’t dying of AIDS,that Jews weren’t singled out by the Nazis for extermina-
tion,and so on.‘Name those who have died!’demands a hypothetical critic,who
then scorns the discrepancy between those few we know by name and the
unnamed millions we infer.”
‘This is a fallacious argument. While any individual would be hard-pressed
to name more than a few Holocaust victims, the identities of the over-
whelming majority of them areknown, or were known by those who sur-
vived.They had lives,families,birth records,bank accounts,friends,and so
on.There is copious evidence that they existed and that they suffered at the
hands ofthe Nazis.With claims by Norman Myers or Edward Wilson that
40000 species supposedly become extinct every year, we have no strong
evidence that they exist, or that they have ever existed, or ceased to exist,
outside a mathematical model relating species and area.
‘What was more disconcerting was that IPCC Chairman Rajendra
Pachauri later likened Bjorn Lomborg to Adoph Hitler in the Danish news-
paper Jyllandsposten on 21 April 2004.’
LazyTeenager says:
June 22, 2012 at 6:13 pm
I’m convinced that no matter how much evidence piles up the great majority
==============
So you are acting on your beliefs, not on the evidence.
There is only one test in science that has any validity. Reliably predict something that is hard to predict. The biggest prediction of climate science, accelerated warming with continued emissions scored a big fat F.
As we have learned, only two climate models show any better skill than any coin you have in your pocket. Hundreds of millions of dollars poured down the drain on meaningless navel gazing.
Millions of people are dying each year from ignorance, poverty, dirty water, dirty air, cancer, malaria, TB, HIV, etc., etc., etc., because the funds have dried up. If you are not studying climate science, there is no money.
How many people die each year from global warming? Tens of thousands of people are being killed needlessly each year by global warming research. Not by global warming itself, but by global warming research.
The money we should be spending to prevent the easily preventable deaths is instead begin squandered on climate research. History will mark this diversion of funds as a crime against humanity and future generations will wonder how we could have been so stupid, so driven by fear and greed that we allowed it.
LazyTeenager says:
June 22, 2012 at 6:30 pm
There is evidence for temperature rises in the geological past of similar rates upward to what we are seeing now. They were extinction events.”
I guess you shouldn’t have left the SUV running… several thousand years ago.