Elevated from a comment by Doug Proctor November 14, 2013 at 10:00 am
I’ve been thinking about what makes the warmist-skeptic fight go on and on. What I have noted is the constant difference in how each side places its emphasis, and that this shows up in its speech. Specifically, the skeptics use declarative, as in “this will”, “this shall” or “this does”, and, of course, its negative equals. The warmists use conditionals, i.e. words like “could” or “should” or “may” or “might” that indicate undefined probabilities and, in truth, possibilities, things that are determinable only after the fact.
The use of conditionals after 25 years is remarkable (here I make a declarative statement). Despite all the models and claims of correlation/matching of observation, we still have no “does”, “shall” or “will” in the IPCC or other CAGW programme. The dangers and fears are in the distant future, discussed only as emerging from the present, but still only becoming obvious in some, never-close-to-today, tomorrow.
This is not an academic situation. The human world acts on what it thinks, and it thinks through words. If the words are confusing, its thoughts are confused and its actions are not necessarily the best. The Mainstream Media (MSM) is particularly prone to confusion from the way they are instructed, and prone to confusing the readership by the way they combine emotional response with a misunderstanding of what the use of conditionals in a discussion means. The MSM think conditionals represent scientific caution, but what they represent is scientific uncertainty. The extent to which they are used represents the consideration of the likelihood that what they think “will” come, actually comes.
From what I see, there are four different types of (Un)Certainty involved in the CAGW narrative: 1) Computational, 2) Emotional and 3) Representational and 4) Ideological. (There may be more, or more subtle versions of these, but these 4 are probably close to the general breakdown.)
The IPCC 95% type is Computational Certainty, that is the outcome as proposed by models is consistent with input data and mathematical relationships between identified factors. McKibben’s certainty is based in Computational Certainty, as in “Do The Math”. It could also be labelled “Intellectual” Certainty, as it is based on the idea that nature is deterministic enough, and we are smart enough and knowledgeable enough to figure out what is going on in a usefully predictive way. The application of the argument by ignorance is applicable to this form of certainty: if we can’t think there is another way, then it must be the way we say. While naively reasonable, and a reflection of the arguments Sherlock Holmes was claimed to use in solving crimes, how it is used by the IPCC adherents is actually a perverse misuse of what Holmes did: Holmes used the concept to bring to the table non-current, usually non-obvious solutions, which would be then investigated closely. The IPCC cabal use it to dismiss the non-current and non-obvious).
The second type, the Emotional Certainty, is what roots Gore, the IPCC Summary and the 97% Consensus concept. With Emotional Certainty, the statements say that we are personally comfortable with the work done and where it ended – with the understanding that not everything could be done, but we believe to be the most important parts were covered. Outside the workers themselves, this comfort derives from authority, the trust in credibility of certain socially recognized individuals or groups. The MSM in particular seizes on this particular form of Certainty (regardless of how they, themselves, perceive it). Anyone connected with the IPCC is credible, therefore I am comfortable with what they say. Personal investigation in this regard is unnecessary, and indeed is a “skeptical” activity for those still not convinced, as it suggests a “better” understanding can exist outside what one gleans from just the Summary remarks. The notable history of a President misleading America about the reasons for going to war, or a Bernie Madoff misleading investors as to what was happening to their money makes no impact on the credibility of other parties: that was then, this is now (and these ones).
Ideological Certainty is what drives the eco-green. Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Maurice Strong, David Suzuki, Friends of the Earth, the Waterkeepers, opponents of the XL Keystone pipeline: the arguments for CAGW are mere backups for other, anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist, pro-nature beliefs. This is not to say that those other beliefs are not valid, only that the principle position is not CO2-based warming per se. With Ideological Certainty, the certainty is that continuing the path we are on, the status quo, will cause socio- and environmental damage that is unacceptable (and may be catastrophic). The devil is in the general, not the detail: if we continue to consume and destroy – and fossil fuels are a fundamental part in this activity – the bad things will happen. Arguments about actual temperature sensitivity are not relevant. Whether we will experience 4 degrees or 1 degree warming by 2100, our societies are still on the road to ruin. It is this movement that must be stopped.
The fourth type of Certainty is Representational, in which what is projected is compared to what, at an initial state, is observed. This is where the skeptical position focuses. The skeptic wants to know the detail of what IS to happen and so looks to what HAS happened as a true indication (by pattern or observation) of how closely a predicted outcome has been matched by actual outcome. He does this so that he may respond – as he would say – “appropriately”.
The skeptic recognizes that responses are, and should be, proportional to the triggering event: a minor problem should not have elicited a large preventative measure if a small one would have sufficed. Energy – emotional, physical, social – is liimited and should be used wisely and sparingly if possible. To determine the details and hence the level of action that is appropriate, of course, one needs facts. And facts are not determined in policy summaries but in the field and the laboratory. Facts are not nailed down by consensus, i.e. group opinion, but by falsifiable testing. The skeptic, in his hunt for facts, is forced to read and question. Arguably having this desire for Representational Certainty is where the various skeptics or luke-warmers like Pielke, Lindzen, Watts and ourselves come in.
It should be noted that not all anti-CAGW narrative is driven simply by a desire for Representational Certainty before we act. Ideology, emotion and a narrow but intense trust in intellectual work also drive some skeptics. Certainly CFACT, Morano, the GWPF are seen in the eyes of warmists to be not just attacking the facts of the CAGW story, but the spirit: the obstructionism against CO2 reduction is perceived as anti-regulatory, pro-free market, pro-energy industry sentiments. Which, to some extent, is true. But all of us determine the course of our lives and support on the basis of multiple pulls and pushes, motivating factors that shift through time.
What makes the CAGW fight persist, IMHO, is that we argue about “Certainty” as if we are dealing with the same thing and each side is either foolish, perverse, or a paid shill not to recognize what each side holds. What I am saying in the above essay, is that we are not dealing with the same thing. I have listed four different aspects that lead to the decisions we make on supporting or not supporting CO2-related initiatives. The technical, dictionary-defined words are the same, but we argue because we are not using the same mental vocabulary.
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UPDATE: Maurizio Morabito (omnologos) observes:
Calvin and Hobbes explain why Climate Change alarmists are almost invariably rabid about it
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This will change somes minds, it should anyway.
Money, Religion (Or Ideology if that gives the vapors), and Religiously Instituted ‘Obey, Sinner!’ governance.
We are not using the same mental vocabulary talking about lots of things. Many words that once had common and widely accepted meaning have now been redefined within certain political and social groups. Often, the meaning is inverted. For example, the new “liberals” oppose liberty to the extent that a whole group of people who still think liberty is important is now forced to adopt a new name. They call themselves “libertarians”.
Same with “progressives”, who fight tooth and nail against all progress.
“Nutritious” food is anything but.
I often feel I can no longer use many common words, lest I be misunderstood.
But the CAGW movement has used this terminology to cause so much destruction over the last two decades…
I’d like to point out one – which is the countless academics, scientists, professionals and other persons whose careers took major hits for not supporting AGW. Trashed, harassed, and even fired in many instances, how do they get whole again ?
Please, I ask for a moment of silence for those who became collateral damage to a movement based on a false concept and marketed via deception. Whatever AGW was when this all started, it became an agenda driven religious-like cult movement that has left a trail of damage worldwide.
A Cat would never be a warmunist!
The latest conditional bombshell (heard on BCC radio last night):
“Up to 30% of species in the world’s oceans could be at risk from extinction by the end of the century from potentially increased acidifiaction.”
Parse out the conditionals at your leisure.
“A cat would never be a warmist!”
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
Mark Twain
Some people seem to be “wired” to look at almost everything from the perspective of “feeling”and reason is not considered.
These people will NEVER be convinced by logic.Their language is emotion and the only way to “reason” with them is to speak in emotional terms.
“Logical” people have to learn this “new “language to win ANY arguement with them.
What makes the warmist-skeptic fight go on and on?
1. It’s a political doctrine and an integrated past of UN Agenda 21 now executed by the the EU and the USA aimed to enforce measures and regulations that will strangle our economies, our prosperity, our jobs, of freedom and our futures, a policy that already kills people by the thousands if we are honest and look at the effects of the bio ethanol scam hiking food prices triggering the food riots in NA and the Middle East which is now burning. The Palm oil scam diving our last remaining primates into the zoo. etc. etc.
2. There is no Open Process, IPCC works in a vacuum and can’t be influenced
3. There is NO Open Debate
4. The MSM is biased in it’s reporting, in many cases no contrary opinion are tolerated
5. All debunked arguments continue to be recycled
6. The climate models stink and the various data sets, surface stations etc are tampered with, read Lies & FRAUD.
7. The introduction of climate change policy in the USA (and before that the EU) has been taken out of the democratic process and now is introduced and enforced by Presidential Decree
8. All that the warmists have left is to take perfectly normal weather events and blow them out of propostion like they recently did with the Typhoon that hit the Philippines.
8. The authorian trend will now continue in Warsaw.
Forget all about the story above because it is utter BS.
And then there is the passive co-conspiracy of those that are neither warmist nor skeptics (the large majority).
AGW.
As with all doomer porn, always in the future tense, never the present.
Wait until the earth gets cold!!!
The main reason the fight is still on is because many of those with political power are shoving rules and regulations down our throats when we know they aren’t necessary. This makes everything cost more and costs jobs. Rather than just the believers going primative they want us all to suffer. But make no mistake, rich people and the political leaders will not suffer from higher costs, though they are apparently suffering now in Australia because the voters saiud enough is enough.
Get completely rid of the green rules and regulations and subsidies and defund all climate studies and the problem will miraculously disappear. This seems to be where Abbott is going and all the power in the world to him.
The attack on the English language is intentional. It is a much larger issue than CAGW, but, then, any skeptic worth their salt already knew this. For the ideologues posing as scientists, this is as useful as the conditional words. They refuse to make their meanings clear because if they spoke plainly they know they’d be rejected as people trying to resurrect Stalinist Marxism.
The conditionals also serve another purpose, when one uses words such as “would”, “could”, “should”…etc, the implicit statement is that you’re open to other possibilities. It gives an air of moderation. Of course, we all know that an alarmist is anything but open to other possibilities, they are 100% certain of their unstated positions and goals. And, of course, they’re anything but moderate. They are extremists of the worst kind always parading panic and hyperbole to advance their misanthropic causes.
Consider their insistence of a consensus. The damned thing has never been defined! (again with the ambiguity) but, they insist 97-98% all agree …… on something which has never been clearly stated. How stupid is that? How much more stupid is it that people accept that babbling nonsense? Well, they accept it because they want it to be real, and in a leftist mind, desire is equal to reality. It’s why they can get away with constantly altering empirical data. And, get away with it, they did.
I’m a criminal investigator, not a scientist. But my training and nature compel me to question any proffered theory, especially when it effects my pocket book. This is why I’ve never bought into the CAGW. I’ve always wondered,’ where is the evidence’? What is the mechanism? Haven’t we been warming ever since the last ice age, etc. Then when I did a little research and started to read WUWT, I began to see more clearly the absence of proof for CAGW and the ever increasing data showing the opposite: Things like the absence of warming in 17 years, the increasing ice in the Antarctic, the upswing in Arctic ice, and much other informative and even entertaining information from articles written by Anthony and other real scientists on this blog.I admire the rational thinking and argumentation. The marshaling of facts and drawing to solid conclusions. The absence of name calling and histrionics. The empiricism, if you will, the thoughtful contemplation of evidence. ‘ Following where the evidence leads’ is an expression in my line of work. I can’t necessarily assume that ‘ the butler did it’ when the evidence leads elswhere. Lol. lMy doubtin the CAGW theory increased after outed emails being exchanged between some the the leading scientists supporting AGW. These emails showed these AGW scientists’ mendacious and duplicitous nature in hiding information from the public and presenting false information to the world about Global warming or as they currently put it ‘climate change’. The revelation of their efforts to malign and discredit scientists who disagreed with them didn’t enhance their credibility in my eyes. . They commited crimes of omission and commission in my view.
I guess that the above falls within a demand for representeational certainty. But my questioning, and cynicism of the Warmists, I must admit, is also emotional and ideological. I happen to be a conservative minded person. I am reflexively suspicious of policy, theory, etc offered by the left. Now I am open to being dissuaded by being shown proof of CAGW. But all I’ve seen are broken hockey sticks, faulty computer models and ….no warming.
A bit too much linguistic reductionism for me. reminds me of those who think they can solve Palestine coflict lingustically. in this case, with AGW, I’m with Hume: ‘reason is a slave to the passion’
Reminds me of Edward deBono’s lucid primer on the subject:
“Four ways to be right, five ways to be wrong, five ways to understand”
a good short read for anyone who wonders why two sides never agree very well. Illuminating examples of how people think.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1211068.Practical_Thinking
R. de Haan should have done this post – It was quick, simple and straight to the point of how this all is about.
A major divide is over who/what you worship. e.g.
Those “pro-nature” require subservience of progeny and wealth to keeping nature sacrosanct and thus demand mitigation of anthropogenic climate change.
Those pro stewardship, evaluate actions in terms of a prudent return on effort before their Creator, and thus adapting to climate change while caring for the poor, widow and orphan. e.g. see The Cornwall Alliance
This is reflected in the pragmatic perspective that mitigation costs 100:1 more than adaptation.
As Christopher Lord Monckton observes, “If the If the cost of the premium exceeds the cost of the risk, don’t insure”
This quote explains why the alarmist cult will never be persuaded by scientific facts and evidence:
My research suggests the fight between the warmists and the skeptics rages on because the members of both camps are persistently guilty of the same logical error. The error is to draw a conclusion from an equivocation. By logical rule, one cannot draw a proper conclusion from an equivocation. However, one CAN draw an improper conclusion. By drawing improper conclusions from equivocations, warmists and skeptics draw opposing conclusions from equivocations that are thought by one side or the other to be true but that are logically unproved.
An “equivocation” is an argument in which a term changes meanings in the midst of this argument. That a term changes meaning yields an argument that looks like a syllogism but isn’t. Thus, while the conclusion of a syllogism is true, the conclusion of an equivocation is unproved but seems to people who are deceived by it to be true.
The equivocation fallacy is supported by the existence in the language of global warming climatology of terms that are “polysemic,” that is, that have more than one meaning. Among the polysemic terms are “predict,” “forecast,” “model,” “science,” “scientist” and “scientific.” Through the use of these terms, skeptics join warmists in glossing over errors in the structure of global warming climatology that prevent logically proper conclusions from being drawn from arguments. Thus, the fight between the two sides never ends.
SOB, reason without emotion can be a very dangerous thing, and vice versa. Neither of them have a particularly good track record in isolation.
Personally, I find exactly the same sort of conviction amongst reasonable, emotionally balanced, respectable people on both sides of the fence (and also of course from the occasional irrational bigot on eitherside).
When something is basically uncertain, as in the existence, nature or affiliation of our various Gods, people do tend to take opposing sides and even extreme positions, each in utterly similar ways, and each believing themselves to be rational and correct.
It would make far more sense just to adopt the truly rational: ‘I actually don’t really know just yet..’, but an appetite for vigorous controversy and opposition seems to be inherent in human nature, and often with far more productive, diverse efforts and outcomes, when not actually hideously destructive (for the Lilliputians, in their terrible sectarian controversy over which end of the egg to break when eating one’s breakfast).
But nature will have the last say of course. (And we may die and simply rot. Who knows?)
Keith Kloor at least recognizes a dichotomy and Anthony Watts’ high profile: The New Normal: Climate Ambulance Chasing
James Sexton: “The conditionals also serve another purpose, when one uses words such as “would”, “could”, “should”…etc, the implicit statement is that you’re open to other possibilities.”
If you’re determined to dialogue with such folks, just take the contradictory “would not,” “could not,” “should not” and proceed quite plainly without remark. Same thing as what they’ve said, but they pop a gasket trying to get around it.
The second type, the Emotional Certainty, is what roots Gore, the IPCC Summary and the 97% Consensus concept.
Herein lies the root of the continued arguing. When emotion, not reason, is the basis for a position on any subject, no amount of rational counter arguments have any effect. Thus, the emotional effect of typhoon Haiynen’s death toll is used to bolster CAGW claims while rational statements that the data doesn’t support any such claims are ignored.
I suspect the only way to make headway against the warmist argument is by touting the emotional effect of expected human suffering as a consequence of the warmists’ agenda. Point out that people will suffer when they cannot afford to heat their homes in winter. Point out that people will starve when food production becomes limited by use of livestock to work the land once there is no fuel for tractors. Help people see that any suffering that MIGHT result from continued CO2 emission will be far less than the guaranteed much greater suffering that will result from stifling energy production.
Pleas based upon scientific fact or expected depression of the economy make rational sense but have no effect on the outcome of the ongoing argument. Perhaps only expected human suffering will.
SR