I have some important work to do today, and so I’m going to put my interaction with WUWT on hold for a bit. However, I see here an opportunity to ask a question I have been pondering for quite some time. Please help me out by answering the question and discussing it. Of course other things within site policy are fair game too.
As of late, we have seen climate skepticism portrayed in many derogatory ways. The juvenile sliming by Stephan Lewandowsky, Mike Marriott, and John Cook is a good example: they tried to use science as a bully pulpit to paint climate skeptics as crazy people, much like what happened with politcal dissent in Soviet Russia. In the Soviet Union, a systematic political abuse of psychiatry took place and was based on the interpretation of political dissent as a psychiatric problem.
Except, Lew and company were caught out, and called out by Frontiers.
Why did this happen? Well, I think part of it has to do with the loose-knit nature of climate skepticism. While the climate debate is often along political lines, climate skepticism is something that crosses those lines. I find that skepticism can be just as strong with some people on the left side of the political spectrum once they allow themselves to be open to the facts, rather than just accepting agitprop fed to them.
There’s no official position or representative body for climate skepticism. While players like Dr. Mann and the criminal actor Peter Glieck would like to argue that the Heartland Institute, “Big Oil, Big Coal”, and the #Kochmachine are the unifying forces behind climate skepticsm, nothing could be further from the truth. Mostly, climate skepticism is about a personal journey, not one that came from an organization.
I’m a good example. I used to be fully engaged with the idea that we had to do something about CO2, and Dr. James Hansen in 1988 was the impetus for that. I remember vividly watching his testimony on the sat feed at the TV station and thinking to myself that this really is serious. It wasn’t until later that I realized his science was so weak he and his sponsor had to resort to stagecraft by turning off the air conditioner and opening windows to make people sweat. It was the original sin of noble cause corruption. Now with my own work on the surfacestations project and what I’ve learned about climate sensitivity via the WUWT experience, and witnessing the IPPC and its foibles and how Climategate showed dissension behind the scenes, I no longer see climate change as the threat I once did back in 1988.
But, that’s my journey, others may differ.
People like Lewandowsky were able to make their claims stick because with climate skepticsm, it is all about that personal journey, there’s no organization, no policy statement, no cohesiveness of opinion that anyone can point to and say “this is what climate skeptics endorse”. While there’s strength in that heterogeneity, there’s also a weakness in that it allows people like Lewandowsky to brand climate skeptics as he sees fit.
So after some years of thinking about this, I’d like to ask this simple question:
Is it time for an “official” climate skeptics organization, one that produces a policy statement, issues press releases, and provides educational guidance?
In the UK, The Global Warming Policy Foundation provides much of that, and they have been successful in those areas, but it is UK centric.
So please answer the poll and let me know.
I voted no, primarily for the same reason as many other commets, the sceptics are too heterogenous to form an efficient campaign organisation.
The othe important reason is that the sceptics would never be put on equal footing with an orgnaisation perceived to be instrumental in orchestrating vital change. Our successes erode the support for the AGW machine but also reduce our own significance as the IPCC “lukewarms”. First the technical part, the implications and the mitigation crowd.are more die-hard fans of the changes they advocate so if they comes around to the facts or fight a rearguard action until their money and influence is taken away will be a test of their integrity..
Local organisations like the NIPCC in the US and the GWPF in the UK is another matter, with the right people and pushing the right story they can have an influence individual scientists or bloggers can’t achieve.
johanna correctly says: “There is absolutely no shortage of data around the blogs that addresses pretty much any issue that people want to research.”
The problem is that it is not organized in one “go to” place like skeptical science.
Or one place to find the dirt on any opponent like source watch.
The lazy journalist can simply check two or three sites and get, believable, easily understandable false science.
thanks
In a few years you won’t need one because most likely temperatures will continue to fall. Skepticism is growing by the day the longer the weather continues “normal” the more skeptics will arise. Even die hard warmists will one day be skeptics or even deniers hahah
I would question the word “official.” If something is official then it tends to close down opposing views. The strength of the sceptical movement has been allowing people to express doubts, and alternative explanations, of the climate. Some of these will be mistaken and others will be modified but the important point is that we embrace the idea that scientific views should only be accepted if they are the most convincing explanation of the facts at a particular time.
I can see the use of having a “centre of excellence.” Indeed we have several of these already generally based around the various blogs. But let those spokesmen within the centre be there by merit and the conclusions of the centre be continually modified as demanded by emerging evidence. And let there always be debate.
Joseph King, writing an introduction to “A Memoir of David King” said, “There are dangers, however, that must not go unheeded. All reforms tend to become stereotyped into sectarianism. The “plea” becomes a creed, and dogma becomes legalism. Every plea ought to be held in solution and tested, ever and anon, by the essence of truth; and so all foreign growths be precipitated and, in due time and order, removed.” His remarks were about religion and this is about science but I am convinced that the same spirit should prevail.
I voted “yes” on Anthony’s poll. (And unlike most at Bishophill blog.) But why?
First, a more centralized leadership – like in the UK, I believe – is not incompatible with guerrilla-style dissent.
Second, as in the UK a few years back, the US is facing a change election this year (the opposition Republicans are likely to capture the Senate, and thus be able to kill AGW-dumb funding – but only IF properly organized to do so). In the UK, the Global Warming Policy Foundation was founded in the wake of climategate, less than one year before the government of the UK changed. And maybe, with the next US presidential election, there will be two change elections in a row, if one thinks out to 2016.
In the US federal budget, global warming related research spending is SECOND only to medical research. This is INSANE. Now is the time for this measure – because it is important to think how to reorganize the failed, centralized, government funded parasitic AGW establishment that the US government created in the first place – in 1992, when Al Gore became Vice President, and “climate science” funding exploded 10 times its previous size.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science has a perch in Washington, DC DESIGNED to lobby for more federal monies. This means they’ve recently endorsed retro-alarmism of the 2005 to 2007 variety, not anything realistic after 18 years of a climate temperature “plateau.” In other words, they are lobbying for a “science future” using all the failed rhetoric of many years past.
Third, because of this, it is increasingly important to prep science and administrative leadership to not just supplant and defund the old AGW-alarmist spouting idiots, it is important to think of how to supercede the IPCC/UNs increasing irrelevance to the real environmental problems we do face. We need people ready to head the federal machinery to put it to new, clearer, anti-orthodox, anti-AGW alarmist purposes. For example, what would a Bjorn Lomborg styled-Copenhagen Consensus Centre look like for the US?
It could generate a new list of post-AGW-alarmist agendas, suitable for the entire world – not just the US. In other words, the long hijacked scientific talent and vast charitable funding domains (eg, think of the Bill Gates Foundation’s mega-billions), need leadership to solve real problems – not the pseudo-problem of man-made global warming.
If this New Agenda is not carefully developed and leadership not nurtured, then the same old anti-human and anti-industrial Paul Ehrlich-style (eg, think John Holdren, his co-author – President Obama’s science advisor – think of the AR5 WG3 report!) enviro-Nazisim will continue to waste tens of billions of dollars annually – while other solvable problems go neglected.
Finally, let me remind my Algosphere brethren that time has shown that there is no real AGW-debate. Neither Marcel Croc nor other open-minded people, at least among those open to rethinking AGW-alarmism, have been able to show that there is any substantive one.
The serious choice is indeed binary: are you for AGW-alarmism or for sound science? There is no middle ground.
Therefore, in the US at least, there is a crying need to prepare for the Post-Al Gorical era of sound, skeptical science!
And that’s why I voted “yes” in Anthony’s poll. (ORIGINALLY posted at Bishophill, Andrew Montfort’s blog.)
The GWPF is set up as an authorative, expert body that can gain ready access to the media. Thus it offers science, as well as policy, based input to the debate that helps to counter the official view.
It seems to be, as an outsider, that in the US you don’t have this. Marc Morano often gets reported, and occasionally other sceptics, but none have scientific authority behind them.
There is so much that could be offered up to the media from the sceptical side (just think NIPCC for a start) but we need an organisation to do it.
There is validity in concerns that any sceptical organisation would suffer the consequences of internal splinter-groups and varying opinions. That would be seized upon by alarmists as them being ‘divided’, ‘at odds’ and ‘not in agreement’, thus any central message is discredited.
Rather than being an opinion-based think tank, perhaps any organisation could concentrate on presenting the facts? eg…
* Disastrous performance of IPCC computer models
* Totally unpredicted and unexplained Pause
* Failure to agree climate sensitivity
* Lack of positive feedbacks at the required level to drive warming
* Historical record shows (literally) nothing weather / climate related is outside existing parameters
* Blatant data tampering
* Failure of C02 to credibly explain warming when compared to solar-based evidence
That’s just a few examples, there are plenty more. These could be a central resource that is the starter point for a sceptical fight back. Currently all the above are available, but they’re spread across a wide range of sceptical blogs.
Develop a single fact-based go-to resource that specifically undermines multiple pillars of support for AGW theory. Show their claims are falsifiable – and falsify them, and any credibility the theory still has will evaporate.
Look how Lord Monckton humiliates warmists most damagingly just by setting out observed facts. C3 do a similar job. David Evans has repeatedly made a superb case by surgically dismantling alarmist claims. WUWT’s superb regulars often reduce alarmist rational to rank stupidity with calm, analytical posts. Too many others to mention do likewise.
Facts win the case. Set them out, liberate them onto one resource. There is no need to bang the table when facts are on our side! It really is as simple as that.
A terrific idea Anthony, and fwiw I voted yes.
Anthony. Overall conclusion here seems to be that cats can’t be herd. Nor heard it seems. But, last time I checked, cats are agile and share affinity for game. What better place than the World Taxpayer Associations? Their purpose seems both compatible and inclusive:
“The taxpayers’ movement has grown out of the desire of citizens to protect themselves from ever-expanding, unlimited government. This movement works towards a society with lower taxes and more individual freedom. It wishes to stimulate efficiency and economy in the public sector. It supports legislation to limit tax burdens, prevent unjust harassment by tax collectors, and provide clear information about government taxation and expenditures.”
D. Cohen says@April 19, 2014 at 10:18 am has it right.
United the enemies of the AGW scam would present a single target.
This is one situation where unity does not maximise strength.
My story. I am a retiring Australian farmer. Every day of my working life I have paid attention to the weather, because it profoundly affects what I do and how successful my work is. I have observed over time that the weathermen have beccome more reliable with their short term forecasts, but their longer term forecasts still do not inspire confidence.
My grandfather’s diary shows that 100 years ago he was searching for a cycle in local weather records which might be useful for forecasting. He found none, and I don’t think that in Australia there are any that are useful.
AGW? We have known all my life that CO2 is a “greenhouse gas”, with its increase in effect diminishing as the level in the atmoshere rises.
In 1986 the Hawke government, which I could see while many couldn’t was a subscriber to Marxist doctrine, removed the board of scientists who ran our quite marvellous CSIRO and replaced them with party hacks, with the national president of the Labor Party as chairman. He was the first non scientist to hold that position. Previously the CSIRO had been an absolutely non partisan organisation.
The only possible explanation for this was that they intended to direct our science to suit their political aims, by abusing science to corrupt democracy. So December 1986 was the date I became a sceptic, before I knew where this bogus science would turn up.
The first identifiable example of this corruption was a full front page headline in our newspapers: “Cows Australia’s biggest source of greenhouse gases”. They told us that a CSIRO scientist named Galbally working in Tasmania had discovered this.
Now I never believed that Dr Galbally, a scientist, ever said any such thing. What had happened was that the CSIRO’s now Marxist publicity machine had seized some of Dr Galbally’s Tasmanian research figures and extrapolated them across Australia. It was a monstrous lie.
But, at that time nobody had researched Australia’s other sources of greenhouse gases, nor even how much greenhouse gas would have been released from an acre of Tasmanian land if no livestock had grazed on it. So this lie stood for a very long time, and was taught to our schoolteachers and in our schools. Agriculture is now a long way down the list of emitters, but that lie is remembered by many.
For what purpose this lie? In Australia agriculture was the last sector of the national economy still dominated by small business capitalism. The last of the truly free enterprise economy, where the owners made the business decisions. The purpose of that lie was to convince the wider electorate that the farmers were villains in society, who must be put out of business.
I find it grotesque that people who cannot reliably tell me what the weather will be more than a week out are telling us what it will be in a hundred years.
I know that weather and climate are exactly the same thing, viewed in different time frames. If you want to build a climate database, you must start with 365 consecutive days’ worth of weather data. So why the lie that they are separate things?
I see so many lies being told that even the sound science is tainted.
I see that the most energetic promoters are politicians, not scientists.
I know that while computer models can be useful, a computer model can only tell us what it has been told. I know also that if a person using a computer model is not the person who wrote the model, then that person is quite unable to tell if the result is sound. And if more than one person wrote the model its integrity must always be suspect.
I know that the models are “reverse engineered”.
I know that statistics is a very inexact science, and a study of weather/climate is wholly based on statistics. Only a genius can maintain a competent understanding of it.
I close with the note that superimposing the last 25 years’ temperature data graph and the CO2 level graph shows that whatever effect increasing CO2 has is lost in the noise. There are other far greater factors affecting climate change which are still not well understood.
I spot an omission in my comment. In the 5th paragraph should be: ..i don’t think that in OUR PART OF Australia there are any…
As a non-credentialed observer, my perspective suggests (perhaps wrongly) that the CAGW house of cards is teetering just short of full blown collapse. Now is not the time to add what will be easily painted as a “skeptical-contrarian” “official” voice which will inevitably provide complicit media a ripe target for diversionary, obfuscatory political attack.
What is currently emanating from “skeptical”, traditional science is getting the job DONE.
Dance with the dame what brung you.
It would benefit from 2 separate organisations, one purely devoted to the scientific sceptical position and critique of CAGW science. The other being an economic/technology based organisation devoted to identifying the optimal approach to dealing with the solutions offered to the supposed CAGW.
I’m unsure. I think “skepticism” in this or any other sense is mostly a personal journey.
I have been organizing my thoughts and typing out notes related to ideas I have on climate science organizing, but I need another day or two to fill in details, flesh out the ideas and finish reading the many comments as well as visit family. I voted yes because I don’t think it would hurt, it would be an additional thing. But what I am proposing can complement the new organization or stand on its own with an option of integrating with WUWT. I hope that you dear WUWT regulars will think of what I hope to post in a day or two as an eloquent solution or idea.
Since I think about climate science, or rather the perversion of the science, pretty much from the moment I get up in the morning to the time I go to bed at night, I might as well spend my time and energy working to solve the problem because I can’t get away from it any way. The sooner this battle is won the sooner I can get on with real world problems to solve and other interests.
A couple or so years ago I decided to put aside my climate science research, perhaps for good. I spent several hours working on what I had been working on before my climate science research began, and then I decided to take a break. And I kid you not, I sat down with my family to watch the news, and I don’t think even a full minute went by before climate change nonsense was flung my way via the CBC news, thus ending any thought of giving it a rest. I think I doubled down instead.
What I will be posting in a day or so will be only a few of the ideas I have been formulating over these past few years related to my specialty of computer science and software development.
ggm
P.S. I have a feeling, developed by my current observations, that the most recent IPCC report was so over the top alarmist that it has undermined its intent. I notice a remarked absence of the term climate change in the most recent media reporting, news papers and TV within the regional area where I live. It still seems to be in full blown alarmist mode in the UK and Australia though. I feel sorry for the people that live in those regions. My region is south western Canada. I think the fact of a 17 plus years global warming pause message is reaching more people. This extended cold winter in Canada must have also had an effect. CTV hilariously continuously hyping a report that the polar vortex is caused by climate change caused by global warming is most likely not being believed by their regular viewers. Low participation of earth hour power reduction is also probably a factor.
As just a layperson interested in the science, I think one of the most beneficial moves would be for someone like you or a group of you to put together a slide show or something similar, even just a bookloot that explains the skeptic side and the facts to back up this position. Al Gore is able to get his message out this way, but we don’t seem to have anywhere for a person like me to get a consolidated message without going to different blogs, websites, etc.
I’ll vote no, it is not time for a central organization. It can be controlled and/or discredited. But a number of hubs for interaction? That sounds good. Reminds me of this site, NIPCC, …
(Response #1)
But safeguards could be installed. For instance, any policy pronouncements or PR efforts by Climate Contrarian Central (CCC), as I hereby dub it, could require the approval of ¾ of an unpaid or minimally paid board of overseers. The board could consist of the blog owners of the current 24 or 36 top-rated contrarian blogs. Plus 12 (say) leading skeptical scientists (who’d nominate their successors in the event of their death or disablement). Plus 12 (say) leading skeptical authors or journalists (e.g., Laurence Solomon).
Such a board could hardly get polluted by warmist infiltration in the foreseeable future. It would not get corrupted by go-along / get-along careerism, etc., either. (There’s no career path for people on our side who take the “right” contrarian positions—nor is there ever likely to be so.)
And a board like that would be unlikely to diverge dangerously from the contrarian consensus, such as it is. So it would not open all contrarians to attacks by warmists on unrepresentative some position it might take.
On the contrary, I can see an upside. Such a board would have scotched Heartland’s unfortunate Unibomber billboard. Fair or not, that misstep WAS used to tar all contrarians. So merely not having an official CCC will not spare us from guilt-by-association attacks.
I voted “NO”. An official organization can be spied on, infiltrated, and taken over by a “Manchurian Candidate”, who would go out of their way to discredit climate skepticism. Skeptics are independant by nature… otherwise they wouldn’t be skeptics. They come from many different political/religious/social backgrounds, and have different takes on what’s wrong with the CAGW worldview. I believe that we should continue attacking on multiple fronts, which gives the warmists a hard time. And an organization would divert us from productive work on our cause, to internal politics. Do not want.
(Response #2)
Our decentralization is also a weakness. We’re already having a tail pinned on us because of our diversity. Consider this statement by the Village Lewnatic, which he couldn’t get away with if a Contrarian Climate Central were in existence and had made a formal statement on those matters, such as I suggest below:
These claims were presumably made in contexts that render them non-contradictory. (Note that Loo failed to observe Willis’s rule about quoting what you’re rebutting, because doing so would have exposed those contexts and undermined his claim.) The fleshed-out, in-context versions included conditions or qualifiers and were, I presume, something like this:
(a) temperatures cannot be measured reliably, except by satellite. To date, they have not been measured very well or very consistently, and the adjustments needed to compensate for these uncertainties have probably made things worse, not better.
(b) there is definitely no warming over the past dozen years, and less warming than predicted over the past 17 years.
(c) the warming up to 1950 isn’t caused by humans, and much of the warming since then is likely due to oscillations in the PDO.
(d) we are doing ourselves a favor by warming the planet, by a degree or two, IF we are doing so, and the proposed positive feedbacks that would warm the climate more than this are implausible.
I voted yes, I’m also skeptical of gun control and am glad there is an NRA to fight gun control. If there was no NRA we would have effectively lost the 2nd Amendment long ago. There are many other good things that have been lost and a big reason they were lost is because there was no effective organized opposition.
Our right to honest weather and climate reporting shall not be infringed!
The truth is winning… so NO. Too much downside in creating a target to take shots at.
Another truth is… by AGW numbers… the great sacrifices demanded would have little to no effect. I could support an organization that did nothing more than promote that truth.
I see that the relative number of ‘no’ comments versus the number of ‘yes’ comments is opposite to relative number of ‘no’ votes versus the number of ‘yes’ votes.
That may have some interesting implications.
John
“…his science was so week…”
I should have stopped reading right there. But I didn’t, and now I’m more stupid than I was when I first stumbled upon this worthless article.
An official skeptical organization is impossible, because skeptics are so diverse. And it risks being taken over by the fringe elements such as Principia. The last thing skeptics need is an official mouthpiece spouting crackpot theories about there being no greenhouse effect.
The battle is being waged in the media, while side skirmishes occur on the Internet on sites like this and Skeptical Science. If you contrast the approaches of the two extremes, SkS has a core group of apostles who meet behind the curtain and direct their activities. They recognized that they needed an information product that they could push to the media, so they conducted their (highly problematic) “Consensus Project” which they then promoted with slick marketing, PR, and it’s own website. Because MSM have been so dessimated by the Internet, news outlets pick up stories from the PRWire and play them almost endlessly. This site publishes good information, but it never goes farther than here. It is written for a skeptical audience and works well here. If good content can be developed that sounds unbiased and scholarly and it is put on PRWire, media outlets will pick it up. The message must be reasonable and centrist so as not to offend those who innocently believe in warmist theories, such as those millions of children who have been fed CAGW theory in k-12 education. The data is there. It needs to be packaged and presented well. (For example, information on “non-warming” and how long it has occurred, corroboration of “non-warming” from IPCC, etc.) University PR departments are packaging CAGW studies and putting them out. SkS and the Big Green groups all have PR operations. Al Gore is all about PR. Articles need to be written and published, and then PR needs to disseminate and link back. I don’t think an anti-CAGW organization is needed. That would be like building a great big battleship for the enemy to aim at. An ongoing PR campaign is what is needed. A humorous, hip, anti-warming site that is sarcastic and snarky might appeal to younger, up and coming skeptics. The comments on this site are where the fun happens.