Note: if the name below is familiar to you it is because of this article from Monday. This will be a sticky post for a day or two, new stories will appear below this one– Anthony
Guest essay by Jonathan Abbott
Please allow me to recount the details of my personal path to CAGW scepticism. I have never previously found myself at odds with the scientific mainstream and at times it feels quite odd. Perhaps others here have similar experiences? I am curious to know how fellow-readers came to their current views. If some have gone from genuine scepticism to accepting CAGW, I would find that especially fascinating.
My own story begins at school in England in the early 80s. Between playing with Bunsen burners and iron filings, I remember being told that some scientists predicted that we would soon enter a new ice age. This sounded quite exciting but I never really thought it would happen; I was too young then to have seen any significant change in the world around me and it all seemed rather far-fetched. A nuclear war seemed far more likely. Soon enough the whole scare melted away.
I grew up into a graduate engineer with an interest in most branches of science but especially physics. I read the usual books by Sagan, Feynman and later Dawkins (whose The Ancestor’s Tale I simply can’t recommend highly enough). I also dipped into philosophy via Bertrand Russell. I like to think this reading helped build upon the basic capabilities for critical thinking my education had provided.
I suppose it was in the early 90s that I first noticed predictions of global warming and the associated dire warnings of calamities to come. Some of these emanated from the Met Office and so I knew should be treated with a pinch of salt but other sources included NASA, which I then personally still very much respected; despite the space shuttle evidently being the wrong concept poorly executed, their basic scientific expertise seemed unquestionable. In general I was looking forward to the warmer climate predicted for the UK, and assumed that the overall effects for the globe wouldn’t necessarily all be bad.
Now, being English I knew all about the vagaries of the weather, but the warnings about CAGW always seemed to be made in the most certain terms. Was it really possible to predict the climate so assuredly? The global climate must be an extremely complex system, and very chaotic. I had recently heard about financial institutions that were spending vast sums of money and picking the very best maths and programming graduates, but still were unable to predict the movements of financial markets with any confidence. Predicting changes to the climate must be at least as difficult, surely? I bet myself climate scientists weren’t being recruited with the sort of signing-on bonuses dangled by Wall Street. I also thought back to the ice age scare, which was not presented as an absolute certainty. Why the unequivocal certainty now that we would only see warming, and to dangerous levels? It all started to sound implausible.
The whole thing also seemed uncertain on the simple grounds of common sense. Could mankind really force such a fundamental change in our environment, and so quickly? I understood that ice ages could come and go with extreme rapidity, and that following the scare of my childhood, no one seriously claimed to be able to predict them. So in terms of previous natural variability, CAGW was demonstrably minor in scale. It seemed obvious that if natural variability suddenly switched to a period of cooling, there would be no CAGW no matter what the effect of mankind on the atmosphere. Even more fundamentally, how could anyone really be certain that the warming then taking place wasn’t just natural variability anyway? The reports I read assured me it wasn’t, but rarely in enough detail to allow me to decide whether I agreed with the data or not.
The other thing that really got me thinking was seeing the sort of people that would appear on television, proselyting about the coming tragedy that it would imminently become too late to prevent. Whether from charities, pressure groups or the UN, I knew I had heard their strident and political use of language, and their determination to be part of the Great Crusade to Save the World before. These were the CND campaigners, class war agitators and useful fools for communism in a new guise. I suddenly realised that after the end of the Cold War, rather than slinking off in embarrassed fashion to do something useful, they had latched onto a new cause. The suggested remedies I heard them espouse were always socialist in approach, requiring the installation of supra-national bodies, always taking a top-down approach and furiously spending other peoples’ money. They were clearly eager participants in an endless bureaucratic jamboree.
Now don’t get me wrong: a scientific theory is correct or not regardless of who supports it. But recognising the most vocal proponents of CAGW for what they were set alarm bells ringing, and made me want to investigate further. I had always been somewhat sympathetic towards Friends of the Earth but much less so towards Greenpeace, by that time obviously a front for luddite socialism and basically shamanistic in outlook. I had deep personal concerns about the environment, having seen reports of terrible industrial pollution in developing countries and the former Eastern Bloc. I had also sailed across the Atlantic twice in a small yacht, and seen for myself floating plastic debris hundreds of miles from land. (I also saw an ‘eco warrior’ yacht in Antigua, lived on by a crusading hippy and daubed with environmental slogans. It was poorly maintained and leaked far more oil into the water than any other boat present.)
So I was quite passionate about the environment, but my focus was on keeping it clean and safe for all life to live in. I wanted people to stop overfishing and manage fish stocks sensibly, I wanted agricultural land to produce the best long-term yields possible, to provide enough food without encroaching on wilderness and wild spaces. I wanted people everywhere to have clean air to breathe and water to drink. I had hoped that the CAGW crusade would somehow also lead to more urgent progress in fighting pollution, and the other environmental issues I cared about. If anything it did the reverse. Why the absolute fixation on reducing CO2 emissions, why was it taken for granted that this was the only way to proceed? Where was the public debate about the balance between prevention and mitigation? The CAGW protagonists always came up with solutions that were anti-industrial, anti-development and always, always required more public money. Where was the encouragement for inventors and entrepreneurs to discover and develop new technologies? And most of all, why oh why not spend some of the huge sums of money thrown at CO2 instead on getting effective pollution controls enacted in developing countries?
It had become quite clear to me that the BBC and similar media organisations would never even discuss whether the science underpinning CAGW was really robust. It had simply become a truism. An occasional doubting voice would be offered a sliver of airtime in the interests of supposed impartiality, but a proponent of CAGW would always be allowed the (much longer) last word. But, if NASA kept having to adjust their course calculations as the Voyager probes entered the outer reaches of the solar system (an utterly trivial problem compared to the complexities of the global climate), how could the science possibly be settled as claimed? Surely the great joy of science is in admitting ignorance, in taking a finely honed theory and sharpening it still further, or even better in realising a fundamental mistake and stepping aside onto a new path? The claimed certainty itself seemed unscientific.
Then in 2007 I saw a trailer on television for the forthcoming documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. I watched it excitedly, for here finally were people publicly addressing the science and the data, but drawing alternative conclusions to the mainstream. There was none of the usual hand-waving and appeals to trust the experts, who magically seemed to be the only doubt-free scientists in recorded history. The backlash against the program told its own story too, being mainly outraged appeals to authority and conscience.
Having recently become a regular user of the internet, I started digging around looking for more information and so, soon after he started it, I found Warren Meyer’s excellent web site climate-skeptic.com. Oh, the joy! Here were links to data I could see and evaluate myself; here was critical dissection of reports and papers accepted elsewhere without demur. From there, I moved onto WUWT, Bishop Hill, Climate Audit and all the other sites that have become part of my daily round of the internet whenever I have access. However late to the party compared with many regulars at WUWT, I could now see fully both sides of the argument.
When the Climategate emails were released, some further scales fell from my eyes. I had hitherto assumed that most of the most prominent scientists supporting CAGW were well intentioned but wrong, akin to those opposing the theory of continental drift. I have taken part in many lengthy email exchanges concerning technically complex projects, and instantly recognised familiar methods used by those playing the political and bureaucratic game, for whom the data is infinitely malleable in order to reach a pre-determined goal. I had fought against this kind of factual distortion myself.
Now at this point, I am sure some (perhaps many?) readers are thinking, ‘Great, an inside view of how someone becomes a believer in a conspiracy theory, perhaps I’ll base a research paper on this idiot’. My response is that like most people I have at times stumbled upon the real conspiracy theory nuts lurking on the internet. But on WUWT and other CAGW-sceptic sites criticism of the position of the website founder isn’t just tolerated but often encouraged. ‘Prove us wrong! Please! It would be fascinating!’ There are many articles and views published on WUWT that I treat with suspicion, or even downright disagree with, but it is all stimulating and usually well argued. Plus, I am an experienced professional engineer and know what real science looks like, and when people are misusing it as a smokescreen. Neil Armstrong was a great man, and most certainly did land on the moon. Right or wrong, WUWT is a site that considers real scientific issues.
So I now find myself wondering where we go from here. The global climate will continue to change, as it has always done, and although I tend to expect some cooling I am pretty agnostic about it. Nature will assuredly do its own thing. The CAGW scare is in the process of burning out, but I do not expect an outright or imminent collapse. I hope to see the deliberate manipulators of data punished, but doubt very much it will ever come to that. Whatever happens next, it will undoubtedly be interesting, and stimulate much discussion and widely varying viewpoints. This is good news, because it means that we are back to doing science.
Even before I was born… I hatched a plan, some American friends of mine had ideas. We were wild in the streets. So, the moral of the story is?
My journey towards catastrophic climate scepticism took a circuitous path.
I was born a rebel, cursed or blessed with an independent streak. Even at kindergarten I resisted the massed singing and collectivised story-telling that were so much of a part of mid-twentieth century public education.
Fortunately, I was taken in hand by Sister Francis, who recognised a kindred spirit and fed my hunger for critical thinking. Even today, the smell of milk and cookies in the morning transports me back to those times: the generous embrace, the crisply starched linen, the warm fragrance of coal tar soap.
Interestingly, for years I ignored the siren call of the climate catastrophists, figuring it was just another scare cooked up by ex-hippie communists with an agenda. Then, in 2007, I watched The Great Global Warming Swindle. From the outset I was struck by a nagging feeling that the narrator was telling less than he knew, and was focusing in an obsessive way on the welfare of the working poor.
So I embarked on a course of critical enquiry, which boiled down to: the planet is going to fry, and man-made CO2 is the culprit. Intuitively, this made sense, but further reading revealed some disturbing facts, of which two struck me as crucial:
1. Al Gore was getting fat. Clearly, this man was consuming more than his fair share of resources while preaching austerity to the masses.
2. The top-ranked climate scientists were either terminally follicley challenged or, like a stubborn anti-cyclone, suffering from a permanent bad hair day. Meanwhile, sceptic scientists were almost to a man sleek and well groomed. If the top of the skull is a pointer to the internal workings, sceptical climate scientists were better disciplined and organised than their warmist brethren.
These impressions were supported by empirical evidence that eventually became a game-changer. My readings of the morning newspaper showed me that some parts of planet Earth were by no means warm.
Something wasn’t right. I remembered Bertrand Russell’s aphorism to the effect that fools are full of certainty while wise men are wracked by doubt. For a time, I was almost convinced. Now, I am not so sure.
For most people, uncertainty can be an uncomfortable state of mind. It frustrates the impulse towards decisive action and leads at best to a sort of quietism, cultivating one’s own garden while ignoring the concerns of the wider world.
But I accept uncertainty and am also happy to look the world in the eye. While tomorrow may bring disaster, it may also lead to the shining path, or things may stay the same. The only real drawback to uncertainty is that I’m never quite sure of my own mind.
Lots of us became skeptics for chance reasons when we ran into some devastating bit of data that falsified alarmist claims, in my case that was John Daly’s post of a temperature chart of a cooling South Pole. Yet becoming a competent and activist skeptic took longer, motivation for which being the astonishingly psychotic behavior of anybody I questioned about it who wasn’t already a skeptic….
Today’s death threat to you all appears in all it’s glory here by hyperactive Phys.org commenter VendicarE who is fond of tacking “tard” onto user names in order to make his point, seemingly immune to Phys.org policy, a site owned by a green energy consulting firm:
“VendicarE
“Are Anthony Watts and Marc Morano and Tom Nelson and Steve Goddard smart enough to be guilty of climate crimes? I think so.” – NikkieTard
They should be executed for the crime of treason against nature an man.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-global-storage-percent-oregon-watershed.html#jCp
I believe this now myself. We can no longer ignore the possibility that DC is nothing more than a cesspool of 24/7/365 deal-making, backstabbing and blackmail.
Historically there were lots of rumors of Hoover supplying information to several Presidents, and so many inexplicable things that were ignored by the media like FDR’s crippled status and JFK’s horrendous health and incessant screwing around. These were completely kept out of the press and the only believable reason is that they had stuff on key reporters and publishers, which would be a simple matter for the FBI to gather and use.
Then we have that little matter of thousands of FBI files that the Clintons had in their possession since the early days of that administration. It is the best explanation for acquittal of a President being tried for perjury in the Senate while he is on videotape committing perjury as President.
Here in the present the FBI and spook agencies have technology that dwarfs their previous ability by orders of magnitude and have the added benefit of a Constitutional privacy mulligan due to 9/11 and terrorists concerns. So just like human nature experiments where you drop a wallet on the ground and see if someone takes it ( they do ), what happens when the Justice department and intelligence handover to the President information that embarrasses his enemies? Will he leave the wallet alone? Not a chance.
At 8:58 AM oh 26 July, Blade had written:
Hardly an “experiment.” The one time in my life when I got prank’d this way by a group of kids (walking through a residential section of a small resort town early one night, spotted the wallet on the sidewalk, reached down to pick it up, had it jerked away through the hedge by the length of fishing line invisible in the dark, with the children up on the porch giggling), my thoughts upon initially sighting the item were those of worry and irritation.
“Oh, damn. There goes the evening. I’m going to be spending the next two or three hours in the police station filling out found property forms. Boy, I hope this guy’s address is in here somewhere….”
I expect I’m peculiar. What most people would instantly interpret as an opportunity for unearned value at the expense of somebody else, I pessimistically saw as just another goddam responsibility imposed upon me by circumstances.
When the youngsters on the porch yanked it through the bushes and snickered at me, my only feelings were those of surprise and then relief.
Just another one of life’s practical jokes, and no duty to waste time and effort (and perhaps even risk arrest) interacting with the humorless thugs of government.
Briefly, what just floored me is that Alarmist “science” has not produced one reasonably well confirmed physical hypothesis that goes beyond Arrhenius’ work and that can be used to explain and predict some important part of the “forcings and feedbacks” that determine the effects of rising CO2 on the climate.
To make things worse, they have no plans for new and better regimes of measurement that could support serious empirical science. No plans. How lame can you get?
Dear Anthony,
Not only is is very kind of you to do all this WUWT work…but you have the nose, good man. Making this a sticky post was an inspiration. I respect your excellent work, in attracting people who……think thoughtfully about……forget the “about.”
My story is too long to type right now. In short: Green leftist as a kid to….wait, I don’t call myself a skeptic. I’m certainly adverse to the blatant, obvious, disgusting, oozing pro-pro-love for big-government will save us thingy. I saw the tripa di brodo was too thin way back in 1995. I saw the wall of the nonsense being shored up brick by brick, power-grabber by power-grabber joining in to the flavor of the day……Climate, is tutti frutti…someday the flavor will change, but then another struggle will ensue.
I’m a resistor. I’m not skeptical; that’s not my nature. I”m a resistor of nonsense being thrust upon me by gosh encrusted nefarious egotists, that’s all. Again, I thank you for your hard work. STT
As I have mentioned here before, my wake-up call was Climategate 1.0. Before then, I just considered Man-Made-Global-Warming to be “The Al Gore Thing”
Oh, I read about it and frankly, in a strange sort of curious way, looked forward to a lot of the predictions. Especially the Arctic ice disappearing and huge swaths of Greenland, northern Canada, and Siberia becoming habitable. I thought of all the great advantages of opening up the Arctic to mining, trade, and general settlement. I figured, really somewhat idly, that Global-Warming would probably be good actually once it really got rolling as humans are quite ingenious at taking advantage of any environment. Hell, land rush in Greenland; open waters in the Arctic; what’s not to like?
Then I read about Climategate in the Wall Street Journal. I followed the story closely as I am an engineer and have had plenty of experience dealing with over-educated welfare cases – and please understand – some of my best friends are PhDs and I have worked with my share of totally awesome highly educated people – but I have had my fill of phoney pseudo-scientist types in love with themselves and in love with their ideas. Sorry. I am an engineer and have a job to do.
To me at first, reading about Climategate, it was just bums getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Funny – I mean I roared with laughter; at first.
Somehow I ended up on WUWT and read Mosher and Fuller’s book. God it was like some 19th century Russian novel with all those characters! Then and only then I started wising up. Read more books. Looking up at my bookcase as I write this I can count 15 books; I read papers; I measured UHI; and of course, read blogs.
Couple of things since:
1) I figured the media would be all over it. What a story. Nope. Crickets.
2) Official whitewashes were conducted covering up the most egregious criminal behavior
3) US Gvt still thinks it’s a problem, or is pretending to think it is a problem
4) Windmills and solar are bogus gimmicks – sad really; like Easter Island moas, evidence of a rotting, decaying, degenerate society
5) Europeans love AGW, windmills and solar
6) Horizontal drilling and fracking have and continue to revolutionize energy production
6a) Little publicity of this with Obama and Eurocrats still blathering on about wind and solar
7) As time goes on and Arctic ice refuses to disappear; temperatures refuse to rise with CO2; earth greens evermore due to added CO2, climate models predict nothing of value – in fact they are so wrong that they aren’t even wrong – just meaningless; one has to ask these questions, “who believes in CAGW; and why do they believe in it when a cursory survey of the facts disproves it?”
And I have come to the conclusion that it is all political propaganda benefiting a tiny minority of opinion makers. Belief in CAGW is simply a decision some people make as a rational pursuit of their narrow self interest and some do quite will thank you (refer to John Holdren for example), and the lot of them travel the globe, make a ton of money, et al. It is a cottage industry for a certain breed of charlatan.
MSM pumps it up just like they pump up celebrity gossip tidbits. Nothing is real. Once one educates oneself and looks back, it is like looking back on some sort of mass religious hallucination.
dbstealey says:
July 26, 2013 at 4:00 pm
It was the first time I’ve seen a Supreme Court decision upheald by a 1 to 8 vote.
Normally a single vote wouldn’t have been sufficient in a 9-judge court.
Maybe Roberts thinks he’s king of the court. The Executive Branch has the same problem.
Blade,
I dare say that no-one over here had a clue that she was a warmie or lukewarmer or whatever until very recently when leftists started parroting this propaganda.
= = =
Thatcher’s role was crudely documented in “The Global Warming Swindle.”
If you’re interested in getting up to speed, check out Maggie’s 34 minute sermon to the U.N. in 1989:
http://youtu.be/VnAzoDtwCBg
You may be surprised.
M Courtney:
I believe you are trying too hard to lump people into specific categories thereby turning individuals into generalizations.
Instead, consider listing the many attributes and allow people to recognize their individual traits, reasons and what caused them to either get off or just plain jump the CAGW religion fence into the free thinkers, (yes, many people were certainly free thinkers from the start).
While it may be that there are people who joined the hard science side because of only one reason, many of us will be able to tick off a number of traits.
e.g. “Old fart, as in born before 1963; or they’ve always have been mature for their age, as in a thirty year old who loves big band music, jazz, rock and roll, muscle cars and plain old levis’.”
e.g. “New age rebel who doesn’t trust the establishment”
As for myself; I intimated above but did not state specifically:
— I’ve voted liberal for most of my life, with the last election being my first for voting mostly republican.
— I’ve never joined greenpeace(NOT) as I’ve never believed in their ideas of environment.
— I have joined; Sierra Club, Audubon Society, Trout Unlimited, Smithsonian, Nat Geo, Quail Unlimited, Recreational Fishing Alliance, Coastal Conservation Association (CCA), Philadelphia and New Orleans Zoos, New Orleans Aquarium and so on. Some I just can not afford any more or live too far away to enjoy, others like Sierra Club, Audubon, TU, Smithsonian, Nat Geo I no longer support since science, research and conservation is not their purpose anymore.
— I am definitively free market
— I am definitively small government
— I have always been a person who could perform more work in a day than many people could in a week. Some of ‘those’ folks are so narrow in perspective and require other people to take responsibility and make all decisions, that accepting a week’s worth of work is blindly generous.
— As such, I despise people who believe that my work is their work and we all share equally in the communal output. I share, to a fault, freely with people that I believe deserve it. Whether by their need, their friendship, their assistance, their trustworthiness, their age, gender, whatever. But it is my decision to share, not some overlord.
— Even in the socialist and communist organizations their is a hierarchy where the people with the greatest burden and need are the least compensated. My Grandmother would have starved in Poland if it wasn’t for her personal garden and root cellar.
— I am definitively older and belong in the old crowd.
— Male
— White? What is white? I primarily have Scottish, Irish, Ukrainian and Native American (Chippewa) ancestry. I have Scottish/English ancestor colonists in America during the 1700’s while both of my Father’s parents were born in Poland (Ukraine technically). My Grandfather immigrated to the USA before WWI, joined the army and served as a cook.
— Salary? I’m a retired governmental flunky, good health benefits, marginal retirement income with part of it based on Social Security. I paid into Social Security for over forty years; I do not accept someone calling it an ‘entitlement’ as if I was a non contributor. Especially since the Federal Government decided that SS would be a major part of our retirement package. So, I am not wealthy.
— I’ve worked many jobs from laborer at U.S. Steel to ‘Business Systems Analyst’; I’ve done data and database analysis, financial analysis, programming (FOCUS, SQL, COBOL, CICS, BASIC, C, C++, Visual Basic, and spreadsheet design in Lotus, Symphony, Excel, TSO Calc, BAL Assembly…). Yes, I built models, mostly financial and production/productivity models. So when someone say’s ‘computer modeled’, my hackles and blood pressure rise. No! I do not trust models unless all inputs, variables, algorithms, code and output are available for inspection.
This is the largest personal data dump I’ve ever made outside of a resume’.
With the rather notorious rogues like Lewpy, Gleick thief, Cooked and Nuttticelli drooling over all of the rich personal insights of everyone skeptical; perhaps Anthony could do something to prevent copying; at least try and prevent the unpleasant creeps with perhaps criminal intentions from easily getting this info? Is there a way?
Maybe Copyrighted Material; all rights to WUWT?
After seeing Margaret; I remember I forgot to list a trait/belief.
— I am definitely a lukewarmer, very low down on the lukewarm scale; like one thirtieth (Wild As_ number) the lukewarming of atmospheric H2O.
Blade says at July 26, 2013 at 8:31 pm… that as a US citizen you do not know that Maggie Thatcher started the whole cAGW thing as a political movement.
Well, she did. Even the right-wing columnist Christopher Booker concedes that, although he makes excuses about a death-bed conversion.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7823477/Was-Margaret-Thatcher-the-first-climate-sceptic.html
Post-war British history is dominated by the conflict between the working class (organised as Union and the Labour Party they fund) and the establishment classes (Tories). In the 1970s this conflict led to the NUM (coal miners) bringing down Ted Heath’s inept Tory government. In the 1980s Thatcher’s Tories defeated “the enemy within” by closing the coal industry.
This was bad for the economy and for UK independence. But she had a science degree and the rest of the political and media establishment didn’t. Thus she found a scientific justification for her policy.
Some may want to say she was right and the unions were at fault but that is not relevant to why she subsequently leapt on CO2 as evil.
dbstealey,
I’ll quote the full paragraph which contains the portion of a sentence you cut out.
Abbott is comparing IPCC projections (he calls them ‘predictions’) to ice ages – he is not endorsing the IPCC view. He also indicates that it is by no means sure that CO2 has caused any of the warming over the instrumental record, and later says he casually anticipates future cooling.
He also suggests that AGW is a dud theory.
There is implication that he may think that increased CO2 should cause some warming, but the stronger implication is what I suggested, and I framed my question thus hoping to get an unequivocal response. I’ll defer to his answer, should he reply.
@ur momisugly Power Grab — You are very welcome!
********************************************
Re: Lady Margaret Thatcher [emphasis mine]
No longer able to defend herself, she deserves to have the ENTIRE record made known:
“… however, that there was a dramatic twist to her story. In 2003, towards the end of her last book, Statecraft, in a passage headed “Hot Air and Global Warming”, she issued what amounts to an almost complete recantation of her earlier views.
She cited the 2.5C rise in temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period as having had almost entirely beneficial effects. She pointed out that the dangers of a world getting colder are far worse than those of a CO2-enriched world growing warmer. She recognised how distortions of the science had been used to mask an anti-capitalist, Left-wing political agenda which posed a serious threat to the progress and prosperity of mankind.
In other words, long before it became fashionable, Lady Thatcher was converted to the view of those who, on both scientific and political grounds, are profoundly sceptical of the climate change ideology… .”
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7823477/Was-Margaret-Thatcher-the-first-climate-sceptic.html
***************
Mr. Courtney, please tell your dad that he is missed. I hope all is well with him. Tell him to not be a stranger. And, my dear ally in the Battle for Truth in Science, I urge you to read Milton Friedman’s books. Unless your devotion to socialism amounts to being your religion, his lucid, thoughtful, logical, intelligent, explanations will open your eyes to the truth about free market capitalism.
At 12:40 AM on 27 July, Janice Moore enjoins:
Ouch. Extolling a Chicago School “freshwater Keynesian” monetarist (who helped to invent payroll tax withholding in order to more invidiously implement a flagrantly unconstitutional unapportioned direct federal exaction on wages and salaries). To quote a recent extract from David A. Stockman’s The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America:
You’d be far better (and more lucidly, honestly, and rigorously) informed by reading the books and other writings of Austrian School economist Murray Rothbard, particularly with regard to both the nature and causes of America’s Great Depression (which Friedman hideously misinterpreted) and monetary policy in general (Friedman’s entirely unjustified claim to fame). Returning to Stockman’s assessment:
And thus we get to Ben S. Bernanke (Friedman’s “most famous disciple”) perpetrating all the monetarist malfeasances imaginable, including “Quantitative Easing Infinity.”
It’s not that Murray Rothbard was without his lumps and bumps, but when it comes to everything really important about what Milton Friedman actually instantiated as a theorist in economics, Rothbard was (and remains) by far the better-grounded man when it comes to keeping his assessments and assertions congruent with reality.
I was just a casual subscriber to an online sceptical magazine, with no real thoughts on AGW, when I received a bulk email from Michael Schermer, or at least someone at his offices, that drew back the curtains. The email detailed his dramatic turnaround from skeptic to alarmist in a published letter. It was very reasonable, if you consider his saying that watching ManBearPig’s movie changed his worldview; but the use of inappropriate capitals to emphasise some words as sarcastic was very strange (this WONDERFUL movie has SO convinced me etc.). I believed then that there was pressure on people to accept a view rather than have scientists do their job.
Did anyone else receive that email?
great thread.
having no scientific education in anything remotely related to “climate sciences”, i had no idea whether the CAGW claims had any vailidity at all but, as i’ve found my own sources of news online since the mid-90s, i was aware there were sceptics trying to be heard. like many others, i thought well, true or not, it won’t hurt to clean up the environment.
then along came The Great Global Warming Swindle WHICH WAS LIKE A BREATH OF FRESH AIR (that Martin Durkin has never been commissioned to do a followup speaks volumes about the MSM’s role in the swindle!); then i found WUWT, CA, Joanne Nova, Bishop Hill et al.
then came Climategate. once BBC’s Paul Hudson authenticated the emails & was gagged by the Beeb, it was all over for CAGW for me, and time to try to get my head around at least a little of the science.
oh, and it is so much nicer being a part of the sceptical community.
I asked myself:
Why do the proponents of cAGW wish to conceal their data and their methods?
Why does the completely irrelevant “consensus” argument keep getting trotted out?
Why do they seem to shy away from open debate?
Of all the accessible data, papers describing methods, online resources for modeling, code etc, which ‘concealed’ information are you referring to other than proprietary information?
Because people keep saying there isn’t one. If it is ‘irrelevant’, why does it get challenged?
Feel free to take up any of the points i responded to, but you’ll have to have some patience for my replies, and keep checking upthread, as there is a policy, apparently, to delay admission of my posts (I still have one pending 4 comments above yours). I’m all for open debate if the format is suitable.
dbstealey is so good at reading my mind, it is getting eerie.
It is basic physics that adding CO2 to the atmosphere should cause some warming. For me, the principle uncertainty arises from the question of feedbacks and all the other unknown factors such as cloud cover, etc etc. We are just nowhere near the level of understanding of the climate system as a whole that we would need to be to start making accurate predictions. I think this makes me a ‘mainstream sceptic’.
By the way, the post by Brendan H at 8.35pm is very well written and extremely funny.
First contact with cAWG: The Bastard Operator From Hell 11
Enough said.
Wow! So many interesting and worthwhile comments! I’m an environmentalist, in the sense that we do live on a finite planet, and need to take care of all the natural systems that in fact support us, a species of animal with perhaps too much power to harm those systems. I started my route to climate scepticism when a teacher colleague invited me to watch ‘An inconvenient truth’ in her class, and I found at least six scientific errors on the first viewing (I know there are many more). That led me to start reading the real scientific literature (Google Scholar is wonderful), and it became clear that in fact there is no ‘consensus’. I was anyway predisposed to consider the idea of ‘consensus’ in science as a complete non-starter by my reading of the works of Sir Karl Popper about how science works.
Some contributors to this thread associate critical thinking with the political right; here I disagree. I am fully capable of critical thinking and reasoning in general, and I also believe that with the development of technology and energy use, and the extension of democratic, egualitarian thinking and attitudes, we can achieve a situation where all humans enjoy a life free of basic cares, with the basics of food, health, home, education, and gender equality guaranteed. I may be called ‘socialist’, ‘communist’, or whatever, but really, what is the problem with such an ideal?
It seems to me that the AGW scare is a device to keep the poorer / developing countries from developing their potential. Sorry, don’t have time right now to document this, but read ‘clean water’, ‘infant deaths from curable diseases’, ‘enough energy to transform a primitive life’ (no offence, simply descriptive), ‘resources for an education that really can transform a country’, and much more.
If Great Britain (my homeland) raised itself on the basis of coal, why deny that way to other countries like India and China?
Regards to all contributors.
Peter
When I was a little lad – more than sixty years ago I would often read my fathers newspapers. There often appeared some one paneled cartoons where a hobo looking bearded character was carrying a sign around “The End of the World is nigh”. There would be someone ready to ridicule the sign carrier. The sign carrier was never fazed – he had a determination and a belief to rely on.
Later I became an engineer. Worked in many countries, First Second and Third world. I saw many different political and religious systems and beliefs and amazingly there was always some character carrying a sign around “The End of the World is Nigh”.
Times have changed. The era of communication and information has arrived. The man with the sign has taken to the new spread the word methods.
One thing I always have noticed with the men who carry the sign. They also have a little coin collection bag with them. The modern men need a bigger coin collection bag to pay for their more expensive signs.
The communications and information age may have arrived however the basic understanding of physics, mathematics, electrical and atomic theory and chemistry have not improved the minds of the masses.
AGW, Malthusian principles, sudden ice age, etc, etc. To my mind pushed by bearded men with the familiar cartoon sign.
I once worked in Egypt. I made the acquaintance of an archeologist who had been hired by a religious organization. His brief was to interpret some ancient Egyptian temples and monuments and tie them into a documentary script that had already been written by the religious organizations scriptwriters. I asked him whether or not if the work he was doing was ethical. His answer? “It pays the bills”. As a bonus he received a free trip to Egypt where he also put in some time on his own research.
Just thought I’d add – another brit born engineer here. Started off neutral (though I’ve always been
sceptical of doomsday-sayers). Started digging and found out just how thin the science from the IPCC was.
Zen moments: Finding WUWT, getting banned from C.I.F and trying to follow and understand one of skepticalsciences’ rebuttals.
I’m just a dumb ol’ engineer who heard “…AGW……….yada…CO2….buzz” in the background and being aware of UHI and the effects of land use changes, sorta nodded my head but didn’t pay much attention. Then they put the ‘C’ in AGW and started talking taxes and that got my attention. I’m old enough to have been there and done that with Ehrlich and Sagen and taxes solely to control behavior are a big red flag. And good ol’ Al Gore came out with his horror film and my ears really perked up.
The first things I thought about were taught as basic education in my grade school days. The earth had been much warmer than the present and the oceans never boiled off. The Vikings settled and left Greenland and they haven’t moved back to speak of. Where I lived had been a shallow sea and there was a layer of limestone beneath us 20 to 40 meters thick. There had also been several glaciations over the same area. What’s to be alarmed about? There’s plenty of time to move if you’re going to get wet or buried under ice.
I started looking into CO2-based CAGW starting with Pielke Sr.’s blog (he was still allowing comments then) and I visited Real Climate once on purpose and -very briefly – a few more times by accident. I was also reading Climate Audit and Revkin’s blog, Dot Earth. It was becoming readily apparent that CAGW was politically driven and not really supported by the science or even a good grade school education.
I stumbled onto WUWT along about the time of “How Not To Measure Temperature #50-something” and soon became hooked by the nice mix of science, political discussion, and the “puzzling things in life” that Anthony presents. I like how WUWT explores how little we really know about climate and is a leader in pointing out studies that add to what little knowledge of climate we have. And I think the comments are the best feature of all; lightly censored, all viewpoints allowed, lot’s of wit and good humor displayed, and the scientific cat fights that errupt from time to time.
The way I see it, humans have an effect on local and regional climate through land use changes, but I’m not certain if those effects add up to an effect on global climate. The average global temperature sounds nice and keeps a lot of people off of the dole, but it doesn’t mean much of anything. I can’t foretell the future, but based on the past, my bet would be on a slide into another glaciation or two or three or a dozen times before the oceans would ever boil away. And it’s always wise to keep tabs on the weather, keep one eye one the sky for the stray asteroid, and be ready to move quickly at the first rumble of an earthquake or volcanic action. Now those are catastrophes to believe in.
After reading many of the comments on this post, has anyone noticed how often the year 2007 is mentioned as a pivotal year? The year they switched from an alarmist to a skeptic. It seems to come up frequently. When the AR4 was released in 2007, it really opened the floodgates of skepticism.