The answer to your question is in your article.
Guest opinion by David Hoffer
Carol, in your recent CNN opinion piece, the headline was “Why are we still debating climate change?”. The very first statement in the article that followed was “There is no debate”.
The answer to your question is actually right in your own article. I’ll get to that in a bit, please bear with me. I wanted to touch on your claim that there is no debate first. I’d like you to consider the following statement, which I provide with no intent of malice whatsoever, only as a means of making a point.
Carol Costello is stupid. There is no debate.
Now what would you think if you saw this in print, followed by a long explanation as to what is wrong with people who don’t agree, and a refusal to examine any facts related to the accusation? I imagine you’d be miffed. I imagine also that any examination of the facts would prove me wrong, I seriously doubt that such a statement would stand up to any fair debate of the matter. Which brings me to a question Carol:
If the facts supporting Climate Change are so obvious, should not debating the facts of the matter strengthen those facts? Just as you would be eager to prove that you are not, in fact, stupid, should you not be equally as eager to prove your opinion by engaging in factual debate?
While you ponder that, and keeping in mind that I did say the answer to your question is in your article and I would get to that, let’s examine the only fact upon which your argument rests, which is that there is a consensus among 97% of scientists. Well Carol, I read that study. Did you? I’m guessing not.
Carol, that study was done by Margaret Zimerman, who sent the survey to 10,257 Earth Scientists. Of those, 3,146 responded. Of those, Ms. Zimmerman excluded all but 77. That fact alone should have your journalistic instincts on high alert. But it gets worse. The two questions which lead to the 97% finding were:
Q1: “When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?” 76 of 79 (96.2%) answered “risen.”
Q2: “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?” 75 of 77 (97.4%) answered “yes.”
The problem here Carol is that they should have gotten 100% to both questions. The earth has been warming since the Little Ice Age which was 400 years ago. So obviously the answer to the first question would be “risen” even if human influence was zero. As for the second question, you may be surprised to learn that all but a tiny fraction of skeptics agree that rising temperatures are, in part, due to human activity. You see Carol, the debate about climate change is not a simple matter of “yes” or “no”. It is much more nuanced than that. There are questions relating to order of magnitude of change, endangerment related to any change that does occur, and in regard to strategies of mitigation versus adaptation. That study did nothing to determine consensus opinion on any of the central matters of the climate debate. It is not only contrived, but nearly meaningless. But I digress.
You go on to quote studies categorizing the population. I said I’d show you the answer to your headline question in your own article. Well, here it is. Your article goes on to quote results from Anthony Leiserowitz, who categorizes the population as follows:
- Alarmed (16%)
- Concerned (27%)
- Cautious (23%)
- Disengaged (5%)
- Doubtful (12%)
- Dismissive (15%)
Well that hardly seems like a consensus. In fact you go on to claim that the Dismissives are a powerful, well funded, well organized lobby group who are muddying the debate. Well Carol, if the facts are so powerfully on one side of the debate, why begin your opinion piece by categorically insisting that there is no debate? If there is no debate, how is it that only 16% of the citizenry are alarmed? Why, by the definitions in your own article, do 82% of the people think that climate change is something that won’t, for various reasons, have a direct effect on their lives?
But most importantly Carol, if you want to change their minds, would not an open and honest debate of the facts be your most powerful weapon? Are you going to let me accuse you of being stupid, or would you like to prove me wrong?
Lastly Carol, you sum up your article on this statement:
“The good news is, those uninformed minority voices are being quieted by nature and by those who have powerful voices.”
Well Carol, on that second point, I will allow that you are correct. Powerful voices (like yours) are eager to stifle the debate. Oddly, your own article points out the importance of having one if you want the facts as you see them to prevail. Will you use your powerful voice to that end? Or shall we call you stupid, insist there is no debating the matter, and call it a day?
But more importantly Carol, the first part of your statement is wrong. It is a simple matter to see that when one looks at the data, all the predictions of the “consensus” science have failed. Arctic ice retreat has stopped, and Antarctic ice has hit record levels. On a global basis, hurricanes and tornadoes have declined in both frequency and severity. According to the temperature records kept by the “consensus” scientist themselves, the earth hasn’t warmed in close to two decades, despite ever rising levels of CO2. Nature in fact is taking sides in this debate, and not the side you seem to think.
Even the United Nations IPCC, which is consensus climate science central for the world, now admits in their recent report (IPCC AR5) that the climate models themselves are wrong. It is their expert opinion that sensitivity to CO2 lies well below the model estimates. What are the models based upon Carol, if not the science? And if the best scientists in the world, in their capacity as advisors to the United Nations and world governments alike, are collectively stating that the models and the science the models are built on are in doubt, does that not deserve public debate?
Even among the “consensus” scientists themselves Carol, there is now considerable doubt about the science. Does that not give you pause to reconsider your position?
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More on the Doran Zimmerman and the other 97% survey Anderegge at;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/18/what-else-did-the-97-of-scientists-say/.
[dbstealey says:
February 26, 2014 at 9:57 am
Dan Tauke,
You make a good point. Most folks here don’t claim that there is no greenhouse effect, or that humans are not adding CO2 to the atmosphere. What we are pointing out is that neither of those things matter in the slightest.
The net effect of more CO2 is beneficial. Despite asking numerous times, no one has ever been able to identify any global damage or harm due to the rise in CO2. Therefore, CO2 is ipso facto ‘harmless’.
It is also beneficial. The rise in CO2 has brought about a very measurable greening of the planet. More food is being produced [which the “greens” do not like; they would clearly prefer mass starvation in order to ‘save the planet’.]
If Carol Costello understood the least bit about science, she would know that the effect of CO2 is logarithmic. That means there is a diminishing effect as CO2 rises. That is where the analogy of ‘adding more coats of paint to a window’ comes from: after the first coat [≈20 ppm CO2], subsequent coats do not cause any noticeable warming.
The whole “carbon” scare is built upon the false notion that a rise in CO2 is linear. ]
Thanks for reminding me of the diminishing returns on C02 (and the subsequent feedbacks), it is easy to forget. Do the models include this or not? Diminishing returns are very frequent in business predictive models so it would be hard to believe they wouldn’t exist in climate models for many variables. Or do they assume that for the first 100-200 years (maybe 500ppm to 2000ppm?) it is relatively linear?
Great article by the author, btw, if I didn’t mention. Well done.
This letter should be in the CNN opinion section! To get it there, you would first need to dumb it down to their level, though.
Re: brian choptain, February 26, 2014 at 10:21 am
1) Polar bears; not in danger. That is a myth. Regardless of Churchill population conditions, the 25 separate populations of polar bears are, by and large, on the increase and have been for 30 years.
2) Science makes no judgement on the value of jobs mitigating warming vs. working at McDonalds. That is an economic judgement. Remove it from the discussion of GW or forfeit the argument entirely.
3) Continued same global temperature = permanent continued melting = you really really really need to learn some science before you begin having these discussions. For a hint; look up “equilibrium” and see how that might apply to a massive system in permanent cyclical flux.
4) How do you reconcile minimum ice extent in ’12 with 50% recovery in ’13 and increasing trend in antarctic sea ice?
Don’t make it so easy.
policycritic
Try these:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/10/an-oopsie-in-the-doranzimmerman-97-consensus-claim/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/20/the-97-consensus-myth-busted-by-a-real-survey/
she looks pretty – ’nuff said – don’t waste time with mindless talking heads – simplify and listen to our Warrior President and national cognoscenti for truth.
Thanks, davidmhoffer.
Carol also needs to take a lesson in logic.
“Trust certainly plays a part.
According to Gordon Gauchat, an associate professor of sociology from the University of Wisconsin, just 42% of adults in the U.S. have a great deal of confidence (PDF) in the scientific community.
It’s easy to understand why. Most Americans can’t even name a living scientist.
So if 40% of U.S. adults have no confidence in the scientific community because they cannot “even” name one, does the fact that Gallop said in 2012, “Americans’ confidence in television news is at a new low by one percentage point, with 21% of adults expressing a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in it. ”
Your field has half the confidence of the scientists, because we cannot even name a living TV talking head?
The lady, bless her little heart, is from Minerva, Ohio where the low temperature is about to go into the low single digits (F) or even to minus 1. (about -17 degrees C). I wonder if she still has relatives in the region? I wonder if the homes are heated with wind and solar power?
Reply to policycritic
http://www.polarbearsinternational.org/news-room/scientists-and-explorers-blog/watching-sea-ice
There is a graph showing the amount of ice in Hudson bay in July. You can note the wild swings in ice conditions each year. But one thing to see is the year Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991 which resulted in cooling the earth. The bears born that year were called Pinatubo bears because more of them survived and were heavier. Each year polar bears that go into Churchill and do not leave are driven out by natural resource officers are put in polar bear jail outside town and are not given food or they are taken by helicopter further north. When captured they are weighed and checked for age and health.
As a skeptic, I, like most, accept IN PRINCIPLE, THEORETICALLY, that human activity can affect climate. The question is, how much – and how? Is it only CO2 emissions, or things like land use (which has been shown to have local effects – planting trees can increase precipitation locally, as the Israelis have found)?
My observation, from everything I have read here at WUWT, CFACT, Cimate Depot, Bishop Hill, JoNova, Tim Ball, and books on the subject by people ranging from A.W. Montford to Vaclav Klaus to Roy Spencer to . . . (well, I could list dozens more sources I’ve consulted) is that whatever effect there is, is nugatory, inseparable from the variation and noise in other factors affecting climate, i.e., statistically indistinguishable from zero. When the greenhouse effect of water vapor varies from tens to hundreds of times that of carbon dioxide, how can one say with eny certainty what the effect of the CO2 is? It’s a mathematical impossibility.
So one is ultimately forced to the historical and archeological records. Working backwards, there has been cooling since 2002 and no warming since. 1996, despite a 15 percent increase in atmospheric CO2 since 1996. The peak of temps in the 1990s was considerably less than the peek in the 1930s even with 30 percent more CO2 in the air – in other words, we have 80 years of net cooling (after the minor ups and downs since then) while CO2 increased by 40 percent. And this is before we consider prior warming periods with low CO2 and cold periods with high CO2.
Therefore, since statistical insignificance is for practical purposes equivalence to zero, and since the historical and archeological records demonstrate a convincing lack of both correlation and causation between them, I do not accept that man’s activities or CO2 have any recognizable effect on climate, and I am quite firm in that conclusion. Therefore,I think a hard line against assertions of human-caused climate change is warranted, and I will not give ground to the notion that man is disrupting or changing climate at all, unless and until someone comes forth with solid empirical proof of it.
Well said, David Hoffer.
Stupid is as stupid does…
This entire thread is silly. . . who cares what Carol Costello thinks . . . and no matter how thoroughly we debunk her argument, it won’t make any difference to anyone! Really do you care what she thinks?
As I see it, skeptics debating within any blog, such as WUWT, are debating (more likely agreeing) amongst themselves. . . literally in a vacuum. WUWT bloggers become a mutual admiration society whose voice is unheard and has zero impact. The debate is not happening here! So what to do?
Let’s get proactive on the actual battleground. . . take our objections into the foreground. Here are some suggestions involving what I’ll call “WUWT action teams”.
(1) Advocate the adoption of Model Verification and Validation standards like those currently in place within the AIAA computation fluids mechanics (CFD) and the ASM computational solid mechanics (CSM) communities. Advocate for standards that impose uncertainty quantification methods for determining model parameter uncertainty , and a output prediction uncertainty.
(2) Establish data standards for both land and ocean based temperature measurements. (Note: Anthony has identified systematic problems with land measurement. . . but WUWT should establish a study committee to design measurement protocols that better fit the need for global temperature measurement . . . i.e. answer the question of what should be measured and HOW).
(3) WUWT has many energetic members who seemingly succeed in critiquing papers written by Climate alarmists. . . but these members need to be cogent, intellectually clear, and resolute in presenting their theories and analysis within the scientific literature. Whether we like it or not. . . the debate exists within the scientific literature. . . . not CNN and not WUWT!!
Dan Backman
WOW, David!
Best piece of writing I’ve read here at WUWT or anywhere in a long time.
To the point, lighthearted, … And ABSOLUTELY true.
THANKS.
Ira Glickstein
gnomish says: February 26, 2014 at 10:47 am
j.jewett said ” Same for the word for slave in Arabic. ”
the word for slave, in arabic, is ‘abu’. it’s the same word for the color ‘black’.
******************
Thanks for the correction. Read what I said in two places so I quoted it.
Steamboat Jack
Ms Carol is apparently a feminist, so there are only 3 possible outcomes:
– David Hoffer will be prepared for a public lynch as a misogynist and a kitten eater
– David Hoffer will be accused for spreading hate and rape culture
– the whole WUWT, women included, will be recognised as a patriarchy hub and bickered by truly stupid feminist wannabes from now on
I liked the Carol Costello is stupid argument for it’s brevity and straight to the point approach.
I’ve noted some incredible similarities between feminism and a climate hoax. They both flourish in reality-free environments, and they both suck at statistics.
I happen to think Carol is stupid given what she has written, but if I may paraphrase Willis in another open letter here, she is so damned attractive men will lie to her. Maybe that is her problem.
I can think of 6 million reasons.
“Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.” ― H.L. Mencken.
To paraphrase Groucho Marx, ” She may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you. She really is an idiot”.
DanMet’al says:
February 26, 2014 at 12:25 pm
A whole bunch of people who never post come here to read the posts. Mr. Hoffer has given them an excellent opportunity to educate themselves.
Joe Bastardi says:
February 26, 2014 at 9:50 am
Respectively, Sir, I would like to say that your style is unique. That is a good thing. Your posts are always worth reading. I look forward to the day that you comment on one of my posts.
To Marty:
You asked about the Drexel study. A thread on WUWT that
dealt with this is:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/23/claim-dark-money-conspiracy-star-deniers-are-scripted-performers/
Enjoy reading!
One thing these people have been incredibly successful at is convincing the sheeple that there is this “well funded effort from big oil” that backs the dissent.
Forget the debate about climate, CO2, and everything else.
Challenge these people to prove that one statement. My friends have given me that same line…and when I ask them to back it up, they never can, and they never do.
Every single article I see mentions this well-funded effort. We joke about it here, asking where the checks are, but seriously, this is something that instantly proves to someone that they are simply parroting what they’ve heard that helps to reinforce their ill-formed beliefs.
It’s a question that you don’t have to be a scientist to answer, and it pulls the first peg out of the tower that everything else they parrot is built on. Challenge them to show you the funding.
I think two of the most well known “skeptics” are probably Anthony and McIntyre. If there was even a wisp of smoke from a dollar bill in either of their pockets, you can bet your ass that would be front page news on every pro-warming piece of media out there.
Jim