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.
I’m another engineer, aeronautical and mechanical, with a career in the aerospace and engineering/construction industries. I’ve always tended to approach new theories with skepticism. I think it may have started by my reading Martin Gardner’s “Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science”, back when I was still a young man. He also had a regular column in Scientific American, back when it was still a respected magazine. Later on, I became a reader of Skeptical Inquirer, before they too joined the dark side. I then Stumbled on Steven Milloy’s Junk Science blog, He covered a lot of science issues, including among other things, the issues of DDT safety, dangers of passive smoke, and last but not least, the issue of man-caused global warming. His site covered, and probably still does, all the temperature data published by the usual sources. But I picked up on the controversy brewing over the Hockey Stick Issue and that led me to start reading Climate Audit, where I first encountered Lucia Liljegren and Judith Curry as very informed commenters, and who are among my favorite bloggers today. I also found WUWT, and was particularly interested in the temperature station project. I made some attempt at balance, going to Real Climate and Open Mind at times.
So there really wasn’t a turning point regarding CAGW for me, I was skeptic from the moment I heard of it. I’ve always accepted the CO2 must produce some atmospheric warming, but have never been convinced that it was likely to reach a serious level, and the belief has been reinforced as temperature data has confirmed that the IPCC predictions were seriously biased high, as suggested by my coffee mug from Lucia’s Blackboard site a few years ago.
I always start at Bishop Hill’s site each morning, because he’s had a head start, and then I progress through WUWT, the Blackboard, Climate Etc., and Climate Audit.
Just for the record, I’m also skeptical of:
Benefits of organically grown food
Intelligent design
Speeds faster than light
Alien abductions or visits (but not about life elsewhere in the universe)
The Cubs or the Astros prospects for contending again.
As a retired particle physicist living in Greece I had the tendency to attribute to “scientific” claims from other disciplines the dignity of being as true as possible with their existing methods and data. Up until the appearance of Al Gore’s and Hansen’s much publicized enormous changes in sea level I had no existential problems with AGW one way or another.
When the six meters claim in sea level rise was taken up by the media, I was caught. This is because my summer cottage is about 10 meters high from the shore and there exist properties and houses about two meters height from the shore in front of mine. I became curious whether I would suddenly have a shore front property. Mind you this is at a sea lake which had been used by the Corinthians as a naval harbor and part of the quays they had built are still seen more or less at the same sea level, even though there have been devastating earthquakes over these 2400 years.
So I started reading the physics justification in AR4 , the IPCC bible. Only this chapter was 800 pages or so in pdf. The result was that I was walking around pulling my hair at all the shortcuts, assumptions, wrong use of models as data etc. (I had been working with fitting models to data all through my active working life).
Then started my internet search for more information and data, finding the small lighthouses in the wilderness that were trying to introduce science to magical thinking.
@dbstealey says:
July 25, 2013 at 12:53 pm
Well said!
I can’t imagine where you find the patience to respond to the trolls, but thanks for doing so, and doing it well.
Steven Mosher says:
July 25, 2013 at 1:06 pm
“Everyone who has followed the Climategate email dump has seen the documented evidence of fraud and malfeasance, from threatening journals for publishing scientific papers that disputed the runaway global warming narrative, to the outright fabrication of published papers for the purpose of propagandizing climate science, to actually getting scientists fired for disputing theis ideology. ”
Sadly the first person to read all the mails ( 1, 2 and working on 3) and publish a book on them(CG1), disagrees with your assessment.
—
But then, Mr. Mosher, you have proven to us often enough that you really don’t understand science. This is the reason that you also don’t understand how egregiously Jones, Mann and the entire cabal have damaged the ethos and the profession.
Ideally science should be neutral, dispassionate, calm, and carried out by responsible, socially and ethically aware individuals in pursuit of knowledge and general goodwill. In theory, anyway.
However two early formative experiences caused me to come to the view that this doesn’t always occur. One was within religion, the other within science itself. I started out with the ambition in life to firstly to become a minister of religion, fell out with religion by the age of 18, and then after a stint in social welfare fell into science, trained as scientist but then fell out with the science establishment, and went into industry by the age of 23. To cut to the chase and not bore you with details, both experiences in religion and science showed me quite conclusively and deeply that there are individuals who are attracted to both religion and science not because of a pursuit of knowledge and what is likely to be true, but in order to advance their own self interests, and who also aren’t capable of determining and judging what is true and proper, nor are they socially and ethically aware and responsible enough to deal with the issues they are involved with. They are not able to examine or confront their internal deep prejudices, nor do they divorce these from their social context or vocation; rather, they use their vocation largely to advance their own personal political and social prejudices. Some are not the slightest bit able or interested in what is likely to be externally true, they are only able to adjust their ideas, beliefs, and data to match their particular social context, interests and agendas.
These early experiences caused me to become somewhat distrustful firstly, of general human nature, and its ability to remain objective, especially in the context of a social group and where moral arguments are used to advance a cause, which also sometimes includes from within the realm of science, especially where such science is uncertain and has political and social ramifications. Science is carried out by flawed human beings, and there will be always be those who are attracted to social causes for personal political reasons and self interest, and who aren’t ethically and socially aware enough to be able to deal with the uncertainties and their own responsibilities.
Science has a good track record in the long run, but it does go off-course occasionally, sometimes for decades, and usually where the subject matter gets politics involved. Because of its close association with politics and its need for funding and its high social standing, it sometimes gets too close to the opportunistic politics of the day and compromised.
(The best example I can think of is ‘social darwinism’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where bogus science was used to advanced petty political agendas, racism, and other social prejudices which had little to nothing to do with reality. Social darwinism had some influence for example on the development and progress of World War 1, and also World War 2, where many within European academia and politics viewed the conquest of other nations as a ‘right’ thing to do by nature, with the ‘strong’ races taking their place over the ‘weak’, and so on. Laws of ‘progress through destruction’, ‘providence’, ‘extermination of the weak’, and so on. Hitler, for example, was an avowed, dedicated Social Darwinist (although he preferred to call it the science of ‘racial hygiene’, and such like), and so were many of the generals (particularly german generals, where Social Darwinism had taken a strong hold) who were also accused of amplifying and causing World War 1. And this sort of thing went on within academia and politics for decades, and led many within the social sciences to view Darwinism in general with deep distrust and suspicion in the mid-late 20th century, with some justification, since it was used and perverted for personal self interest at great social cost. And I might add, that it was the politicisation and perversion of Darwinism to ‘Social Darwinism’, that was the issue here, not ‘Darwinism’ itself, much like the perversion of climate science for political purposes, not climate science itself, which is the issue.
The second best example I can think of, is how climate change and environmentalism in general has also become politicised and compromised, which seems to be a major social bane of the 21st century, as social Darwinism also was in the early 20th. It took 2 world wars to get rid of the perverted ‘social darwinism’, and shows just how strong this human tendency to use apparently moral and ‘scientifically justified’ social causes to advance personal political agendas, can be. And it took thousands of years to deal with the perversion of religion, which still of course, goes on, but that is another, long, long story).
Just a few thoughts, but science has been wrong before, my hope is that it will eventually come round, it has in the past anyway.
OK. Maybe it matters what tipped us off. People love personal stories. History & perhaps even science are best explicated as gossip.
Paul Ehrlich & his fellow travelers were my college profs. At age 19 I thought I knew what science was & felt that what they were purveying wasn’t. I was not alone in this. My fellow undergrads of both sexes & most ethnicities instinctively knew that the prophets of doom were political advocates wrapping themselves in the flag of their scientific credentials in order to advance their ideological agendas. Population bomb advocates, peak oil adherents, Earth Day organizers celebrating Lenin’s birthday, were of a piece with creationists & their later running dog ID advocates.
I graduated in Human Biology & History, then pursued graduate study at Oxford in the History of Science, so to the extent that geology & climate are historical sciences, I had some relevant background to form opinions both on the imminent return of the glaciers warned about in the ’70s & their supposed catastrophic melting in the ’90s. In between, in the ’80s, as a natural science & national defense journalist, I was exposed yet again to the old academic Marxism drug in the new bottle of Nuclear Winter.
To these academic experiences, I added my own personal exposure to the climate of Northeast Oregon in the 1950s to ’80s, as felt it as a farm boy & adult. Well did I recall the astonishingly bitter winters of 1968 for its cold & 1977 for its dryness. When the PDO was discovered by a Pacific NW fisheries researcher in 1997, the truth of his work came home with at least a nodding acquaintance of recognition. I was struck with the force not only of clear scientific fact, but personal knowledge explained.
So naturally I was skeptical of the initial claims of man-made global warming, when rising CO2 just happened accidentally to correspond with (probably) rising average planetary temperature from roughly 1977-95. Of course before & after that period, the correlation was negative.
Still, I gave “consensus science” a fair shake. Show me the evidence. There wasn’t any. The “settled science” was based upon, “What else could it be but CO2?” This anti-scientifc punt was no different from ID advocates arguing “What else could it be?” but God in the case of some bacterial flagella?
I could go on, but have already IMO become too personal. Valuable though this confessional thread may be, this is a valuable science blog & though it frequently has posted autobiography, IMO it’s best when it sticks to science.
Sudden images and music fills the brain; whether from “Robin and the Seven Hoods” or from “Guys and Dolls”, the effect is still amusing. Speaking of “Guys and Dolls”, TCM has it scheduled for 3:15PM EST Friday.
Gonna testify, testify…
I’m just plain rebellious. Son of depression era parents, meaning I got to hear about the thirties and forties whenever found wanting. Yeah, my Father learned a lot by the time I was 25. Father was a chemist and whenever challenged or in doubt, he resorted to facts; hard provable facts. Any hope of succeeding in a discussion meant that one had bring hard provable facts and evidence.
A proper rebel stands the ground they choose to stand, not because any others choose it, but for their own reasons. Intuition is workable, but requires verification and/or validation once data is available.
Yes, I remember the ice age flare up. Duh! Unless we return to the climate of the dinosaurs, we’re in a cycle that returns to ice age conditions. Belief? Nah. However since I’m on the furry side, I played to the audience as I’m ready for the cooling. I also prefer cool weather.
Somewhen back then I read an article (I think Science News, but it could have been Scientific American) about CO2 and where was it’s influence. I do not remember the author; all I do remember is the author complaining about how so much CO2 was being released and the temperature should be climbing, but wasn’t. Where did all of the CO2 go? As I remember the article, they claimed the ocean must be absorbing it.
Back in the seventies I was considered a tree hugger as I was a fully-fledged outdoor nut. Basically an environmentalist in that I collected refuse or detritus when I could while fishing, camping, backpacking, hunting, rock collecting, or whatever. Naturalist was the term back then. Somewhere in the nineteen nineties, the environmentalists moved to my left; not only to my left but far to my left. The bizarre point is that almost none of them understand nature. Being part Native American, I grit my teeth whenever I hear the eco-loons talking about returning to nature like the original Americans. Most of these same people blench or get aggressive when they find out that I hunt. So much for back to nature, so long as nature conveniently kills, cleans, cuts and wraps their food for them. Backtracking for a minute, I stopped contributing to Sierra Club when I got their ‘camping cook book’ one year in the mid-seventies. Many of the recipes are somewhat bizarre for campers and absolutely absurd for backpacking. For example; recipes that require fresh lobster, bottled red or white wine, truffles and many other elitist foods.
One by one I stopped contributing to environmentalist organizations as they went over to the dark side in that they mostly want funding for self-support, lobbying or pillorying.
Along came the CO2 warming alarms and I read what came my way, mostly Science News as I’d long since dropped NatGeo and SciAm. Nothing that I read seemed to provide any credible information or evidence. I came to a very simple point of view; what is the cure? At that time and still to this day, no one has proposed a genuine cure for their proposed problem.
Think about it. If the ‘cure’ is to ‘reduce’ CO2 emissions, it is not a cure. If the cure is to end CO2 emissions, it is not a cure. Instead almost all of the proposed cures seek to fund someone’s particular chosen industry with a ‘minimal’ pass at CO2 redemption. “Necessity is the mother of invention” is a truism in science. Another related truism is “A solution looking for a problem”; meaning funding, mostly public, is being given to solutions and then people are trying to apply those existing solutions to a new problem. If CO2 warming was/is such a severe problem, necessity would drive the solution; until CO2 warming is such a problem, there will not be sufficient necessity to drive innovation.
Another way of saying this harks back to Shakespeare;
Meaning if they’re well fed and content they’re not truly worried or urgently seeking answers.
Late nineties, early two thousands:
I’m one of those nuts who has far more hobbies and interests than a person should. As I sit typing, I am surrounded by; optics (for constructing telescopes), fly tying equipment and supplies, orchids to be de-flasked and potted, tools including a digital caliper (does that say engineer type?), watches and watch parts, rocks (most are self-collected, some polished, most are rough), wood carving tools, electronic gear (as in diodes, soldering iron, resistors, chips…), microscope (I had three, but my son took two a few weeks back), books on guitars, lutherie, geology, orchids, optics, fly fishing and tying and reloading. What do I mean by surrounded? Everything I just described is within three feet, most within two feet.
My interests are far and wide and lead wherever my curiosity wanders. Somewhere around 2005-2007, someone on a geology forum I belong to came in whining about the impending CAGW disasters. One of the forum’s basic rules are that topics can be brought up so long as they are geology related and can be physically proved, preferably with supporting documentation. So the panic attack was shut down and one person suggested several sites for any panicky people to visit. Yes, one of them was WUWT. Most geologists that I know don’t buy the CAGW myth of impending disaster from warmth. There is far too much geological and fossil data to fall for warm is bad, CO2 is evil memo from the alarmists.
When I first showed up at WUWT it was as a visitor and for several years I was a lurker. I ranged from WUWT to visit many of the other sites and eventually went from lurking through the sites once a week to visiting daily and offering comments.
Normally, I avoid offering genuinely technical comments as there are very few topics discussed here where my technical knowledge offers advantage.
I have, in my career, served time as a Manager of Budget and Financial Analysis of a fairly large organization. Nearly three quarters of a $B budget expenses plus revenue per year, 88,000 employees, several hundred retail outlets, blah blah… Budget Managers get to read, hear and often see just about every claim in or out of the book. Doubletalk, snow jobs, BS, lies, whatever set my teeth grinding. I still flinch if someone offer’s a compliment, buttering never means good things to the one buttered. I am good at taking apart supposed arguments; but even there, WUWT has a great many commenters far better at it than I.
Testify, testify…
PS: Many of the same usual suspects implicated in the Nuclear Winter fraud resurfaced in CACCA. No surprise, when you interviewed them in person or on the phone, they were far more circumspect than in their public pronunciamentos.
It has been interesting reading the stories above. I am no engineer, merely a “semi-pro” meteorologist (meaning I can understand and interpret weather data and cause/effect but without the official educational background). I started keeping weather observations at age 9. I remember the Time Magazine cover in the summer of 1988 showing a blazing sun over a parched, cracked landscape. I was introduced to Hansen and a couple years later, hockey sticks. I never thought anything that drastic would occur…it may warm a little but not that much and not continually. For every summer of 1988 there was a December 1989 to offset it. It all evens out. As the years passed and I heard things about there will be winters without snow one day, I experienced 1995-96 and 2002-03 which certainly were NOT snowless. Why is that? But I supported efforts to reduce pollution as a nature lover and I guess at worst could be called a passive supporter of “muted global warming” though I thought early on the sun drove most of temperature changes, not CO2. About 7-8 years ago I started finding sites like this which stated there was no warming and my views became neutral.
I remember swinging to the skeptical side. I am a finance/business guy and in the spring of 2007 I was looking at monthly weather summaries at a US weather station with a comparison to normal and thought “those numbers don’t look right.” When I added the 30 year raw data for what was then 1971-2000 comparison, I discovered that what was stated was “normal” was not the arithmetic average, each month was understated by 1 degree F, more or less. Why is that? I asked around and couldn’t get a good answer and left it alone for a year or two before coming back. By now I knew about poorly placed stations, UHI impacts, and the fact that many scientific grants are written not for the science but for the audience – those who were in charge of doling out the cash to academics whose careers depended on it (I was once working in academic administration). Politics and the green industry. It all started to come together in my head cementing the inevitable conclusion that “all this global warming stuff is BS”.
Climategate. The past 17 years of a cooling trend despite ever rising CO2 levels. Main stream media faults, not reporting any of the unusual to unprecedented wintry conditions in the southern hemisphere but endlessly harping about a string of low 90F temperatures here as 100% global warming caused by my car exhaust. The evidence keeps piling up like the snowstorms in my backyard. So now I am an ardent skeptic (I like to call it realist) and there’s no going back unless I actually see those snowless winters, coastal cities being inundated by rising sea levels, and the last polar bear dying.
There is no settled science. If it was then the earth is flat, Christopher Columbus would have sailed off the edge of it, and all of us “round earthers” would have been burned to the stake as heretics.
PPS: Stanford, now a hotbed of CACCA, was at the turn of the last century a bastion of eugenics. “Nuff said.
“Time Magazine cover” ….may have been Newsweek, I can’t remember that for sure. It was 25 yrs ago and I was 13!
Anthony,
I support that request to make this a sticky post. Why? Because it shows how similar are the journeys many of us have made, at different times with different starting points and triggers for investigating further. More importantly, these stories are significant for the future, to illustrate how people can mislead inadvertently or intentionally, how we need to remain vigilant to insist on truth and accuracy, always remaining both positive and sceptical. We need to learn from this CAGW global farce, and we need to ensure the next generation understands how it started, where it has gone, what it is costing us still, the damage it is still doing, and the opportunities for pulling more people out of poverty and early death, that have been so wasted.
Long before Climategate, there was Deming’s convincing testimony about “getting rid of the Medieval Warm Period”, which as a history student I knew to be a real phenomenon. That didn’t clinch it for me because at that point I had already decided, again based upon history & paleoclimatology, such as my knowledge of the Eemian interglacial & Holocene Optimum, that CACCA was BS.
Climategate merely confirmed my worst suspicions.
My apologies for adding another useless bit of info about myself.
Back in my mid twenties when many of my age were talking about going back to simpler times, I sought and received permission to plant an acre of wheat. When ripe, I harvested the wheat with a scythe, by hand. Afterwards I sought to thresh and winnow the wheat, also by hand.
I can’t call it successful, as I was doing it to see how much effort was really required and I did not seek quantity information. I suspect that it might have been similar to earlier hand harvest efforts; as I learned it is a very wasteful process to bang seed heads knocking the seeds out and then rubbing the seeds to break up the chaff shell. Following that with tossing the wheat into the air with a woven tray to try and use the wind in blowing off the chaff. A very unsuccessful choking exercise on a hot humid windless SE Pennsylvania July day/week.
I don’t recommend returning to simpler times.
At least I wasn’t stupid enough to try preparing the ground by hand, instead I used a tractor to plow and disc the soil in preparation; (plus I couldn’t find, let alone borrow a plow and horse).
I’ve got a technical background. As far as I was concerned, Stefan-Boltzmann Law combined with the fact that CO2’s effects are logarithmic are sufficient between the two of them to set aside CAGW alarmism as gross exaggeration. I’m more convinced of that now than I ever was, but I have an additional reason for being a skeptic.
I’ve spent 30 years in sales and marketing of highly technical products. When a vendor has a weak product, they write their documentation to obscure the deficiencies. The techniques are pretty standard, and one gets pretty good at spotting them. If you don’t you wind up recommending sub-standard products to your clients, and soon you’re out of clients. One of the first documents on climate that I read in depth was IPCC AR4 WG1 (the scientific basis). I wasn’t very far into the document when I concluded that it was written using the same standard marketing techniques to hide the deficiencies in the product, in this case the science that underpins the UN recommendations. The more I dug into what they said, and the actual science, the more I was convinced that the documents was a charade to spin a story to the unsuspecting.
When I discuss with a warmist the facts, I tend to stick to the science. But the techniques of obfuscation and misdirection are obvious to anyone who comes from a technical marketing background, and for those of us who do, they scream loudly that there is something to hide, and it takes very little digging to see that the science simply doesn’t support the hype.
It was around ’98 when I first heard about GW. It was by a pool analogy with a spigot & a drain with humans turning on an extra spigot to raise the water level which represented atmospheric CO2 levels. This did not sound right to me, because that would mean that any temperary extra CO2 put into the atmosphere in the past would raise the CO2 level permanately. Nature must have a way to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels if they get to high. How could scientists know about a natural process that is not currently active since CO2 levels are still low? This was my first though about CAGW without understanding anything.
Next I heard about the projections to 2100. How could they know what the climate would be like in 100 years when there could be natural processes that are not active yet? I still had not done any research into CAGW by this point. Most people I knew just believed what they heard.
It was after the AL Gore movie came out that I had decided that I needed to look into this crap. It took me a few years of stumbling around before I started to be able to sort through all the junk out there to find a few sites that had better information. Armed with more knowledge I then went looking for more views only to find out I didn’t know nearly enough yet. When Climategate hit I finally had a better group of sites to look at then I had first found & enough knowledge to be able to keep up with what was being said.
I have never believed everything I read, but I think I have a better informed opinion now then I did 15 years ago when I first heard about CAGW. You can’t form your own opinion overnight & there is always more to learn. Although I do think CAGW is wrong I no longer care as much about proving its wrong. That will only happen over time as all the alarmist predictions keep failing to come true. I am now more interested in stopping them from destroying the world economy through carbon taxes.
The largest driver of my skepticism was the astonishing arrogance, rudeness and unscientific attitudes displayed at various warmist sites and the kind of Catch22 these same folks created around the few viable alternatives to fossil fuels. Lomborg’s first book helped as did Wildavsky’s earlier questions about Climate and other Environmental scares in “But Is It True”. I would add that the near hysterical reactions to Lomborg’s book also made me question the motives of his critics. Steve McIntyre’s site was incredibly helpful in showing that many authors were simply overstating their results or not allowing their results to be replicated. Then I started reading original articles that highlighted some supposed global warming effect and asking polite questions of the authors. I was always amazed at how confident they were about results that could just as easily be explained by chance.
At 9:36 PM on 25 July, bernie1815 had written:
Yeah, I noticed that happening long before the Web began to function as a venue. On Usenet, the AGW people went bugnuts whenever their contentions were challenged.
As an undergraduate, as a medical student, in clinical training and in medical practice, I’d encountered a plethora of people who stood in their professions on the basis of solid fact, and none of them displayed “arrogance” of any kind.
That was reserved for the Liberal Arts professoriate in college, and the “squishy sciences” types throughout.
Instructors in the science met the criticisms of the callow with equanimity. Their attitude seemed always to go something like: “Well, that’s the way it is. If you find out any different, you’ll let me know, won’tcha?”
Their ego investment was entirely confined to what they knew they could prove, and then only to the extent that instrumental accuracy had been appropriately qualified. They lived to find uncertainties, the teensy crannies between the solid rocks of well-tested fact.
From the beginning, I got none of this from the credentialed klutzes peddling the catastrophic man-made global warming myth. They were so obviously guys who knew that they’d built their careers and reputations on errors and illusions.
Think of Hans Cristian Anderson’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” but with the honest little boy getting shouted down by the Imperial court, all the guilds in the capitol (especially the Academy of Wizardry), the town crier, the clergy, the army, and – of course! – all the tax collectors.
For me it was pretty simple. I didn’t pay any attention to the whole AGW theory. Then one day I took a look at the data wanting to see how fast oceans were raising. When I saw that the sea level was raising at pretty much the same speed now as in 100 years ago, I started studying the other claims in a skeptic way as well. Climategate was the final nail in the coffin.
Jonathan Abbott said, “it means that we are back to doing science.”
As we are LIKELY entering a cool down soon we need real science.
It is arguable that the most damaging effect of the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming crowd is the damage they have done and are doing to the reputation and public view of Science.
It will take decades for science to recover.
Welcome to the rebels side.
Steve Van Dorne (aka Ox AO .. i don’t know why i used my game name for this site.)
It was the run up to Kyoto that made me realize something was seriously wrong. All these people running around saying CC will be a catastrophe, yet their solution wouldn’t make a measurable improvement, and in all likelyhood make the problem worse. A prediction that proved correct.
Prior to that point I thought the theory likely correct, although the consequences exagerrated. Since then I have got to the point that I think the Forcings theory is wrong, and factors that affect the phase changes of water and their effect, primarily on albedo, is the major driver of climate change, at least at decade to millennia scales over the Holocene.
The journey from gullibility to scepticism can take a long time. But it only takes one step.
This is the piece I would have written. It resonates so strongly! Thanks, Jonathan.
Two engineering degrees related to the Earth Sciences.
Got involved in the early environmental movement in 1970. We just wanted to clean up the water, air and soil. We and our successors largely succeeded in the Developed World.
Manager of Oilsands, responsible for our share of Syncrude and two other projects, 1984-1991.
Chairman of the Syncrude Technical Committee, member of the Management Committee, etc.
Heard about the alleged global warming crisis in 1984 or 1985 and felt a responsibility to learn more – have followed it ever since.
Skeptic since the very beginning, based on the absence of a credible scientific argument. Also, far too much bluster by the warmists – all smoke and no fire.
Stated in an APEGA article published in 2002 at http://www.apegga.org/Members/Publications/peggs/WEB11_02/kyoto_pt.htm that
1. Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming – the alleged warming crisis does not exist.
8. The ultimate agenda of pro-Kyoto advocates is to eliminate fossil fuels, but this would result in a catastrophic shortfall in global energy supply – the wasteful, inefficient energy solutions proposed by Kyoto advocates simply cannot replace fossil fuels.
So far, so good.
Wrote articles for the National Post, Globe and Mail , La Presse, Calgary Herald, etc. circa 2002, deriding global warming alarmism.
Got one threat from a guy who blamed me for the flooding of Prague. Agreed with him. Told him to FO or I’d do it again. 🙂
Predicted imminent global cooling, starting by 2020 to 2030, in an article in the Calgary Herald, also published in 2002. Hope NOT.
Discovered the close relationship between dCO2/dt and temperature in late 2007 and in January 2008 published a paper at:
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog/carbon_dioxide_in_not_the_primary_cause_of_global_warming_the_future_can_no/
Concluded that dCO2/dt varies ~contemporaneously with Lower Tropospheric (LT) temperature and its integral CO2 lags LT temperature by ~9 months.
Summarized as follows:
“The IPCC’s position that increased CO2 is the primary cause of global warming is not supported by the temperature data. In fact, strong evidence exists that disproves the IPCC’s scientific position. This UPDATED paper and Excel spreadsheet show that variations in atmospheric CO2 concentration lag (occur after) variations in Earth’s Surface Temperature by ~9 months. The IPCC states that increasing atmospheric CO2 is the primary cause of global warming – in effect, the IPCC states that the future is causing the past. The IPCC’s core scientific conclusion is illogical and false.”
See Murry Salby’s work since about 2011, which is similar.
Current concerns: Global cooling, crop failures, energy shortfalls and excessive costs, the global economy, runaway money printing.
For me it was very simple
Stefan-Boltzmann Law is obviously omitted it. Some friends and myself calculated it many years back from their own figures. That was the start then it took me a few years after that to realize we are still in the Quaternary ice age and at extremely low levels of CO2 for the earth. At that point I went from laughing at the hoax to realizing their actions are criminal.
CAGW is very similar to the Dihydrogen Monoxide scare. It is directed at people that doesn’t know much about science.
I had never had the time to give the man made global warming issue any thought until I saw “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, in which my fellow ex-physics student Piers Corbyn appeared. I started to research the issue for myself and reaslised what a swindle it really was. It was politics, not science.