In 2007, Scott Armstrong proposed a ten-year wager to Al Gore -- no warming (Armstrong's prediction) vs. warming (Gore's prediction). Gore declined, saying he doesn't gamble. And there was no wager, so that was the end of it. Kidding! What happened was that it became a minor myth picked up by the likes of Intrade and followed on http://www.theclimatebet.com/. Denialists like to claim that Gore is "losing the bet," a claim that interested me because of the number of lies packed into a simple declarative sentence. I will delve into this at greater length later, but here is a thumbnail sketch of the fallacies involved that sentence:
1. There was no bet, as Gore declined the offer.
2. Gore hasn't given an estimate for future warming, so the denialists chose 0.03C per year, which they claim is the "linear trend" predicted by the third IPCC report.
3. The trend predicted by the IPCC is not linear.
4. The trend is not 0.03C per year. The third IPCC report predicted a warming trend of 0.15C-0.30C/decade over the next several decades. Not only does the "bet" ignore the time frame (see #6), but rather than chose the middle of the range, the deniers have chosen to pretend the higher end of the estimate, the maximum possible, is the "projection" of the IPCC report.
5. The "bet" was proposed in 2007, when the fourth IPCC report came out -- but the denialists went to the out-of-date report for their estimates of warming. (The fourth report does not change things much -- it estimates warming of about 0.2C in coming decades.
6. It's a ten-year bet, yet denialists are tracking meaningless figures like who "won" the year or even who "won" the month (of course, short-term variations caused by solar activity, ENSO, and the like make it impossible to translate a prediction of 0.2C/decade averaged over several decades to a prediction for one decade, let alone a single month or year. Scott Armstrong himself has warned the denialists that this makes no sense, but they persist.
7. Even with these cherry-picked conditions, Gore has "won" six of the last seven months. Intrade gives him a 75% chance to "win" the year. Coincidentally, http://www.theclimatebet.com/ stopped posting updates on the status of the "bet" . . . exactly six months ago.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Why is conservatism unable to come to grips with climate change? Part two.
At the end of part one I posed this question:
Part of the problem, as I described in part one, is the extinction of the responsible conservative. But the problem runs deeper than that.
We're going to try and have some empathy for the conservative viewpoint in this post, which is a bit of a departure for this blog. Imagine you are a conservative in the 1960s. The environmental movement is just getting off the ground. Joni Mitchell is singing about paradise and parking lots*, and Rachel Carlson has savagely indicted DDT in Silent Spring.
As environmentalism becomes established, two opposing narratives take shape: on the environmental side, there is an argument that our industrial society in its present form is unsustainable, because it is in the process of degrading our environment past the point at which it will sustain our modern lifestyle -- or even our lives. On the other hand you have conservatives (and many on the political left, as well) who defend the status quo by denying the impact of human activities on the environment, praising the wealth-generating faculty of capitalism and predicting that restrictions on it will hobble development.
Recall that this is before global warming takes shape as a political issue, although not before it takes shape as a scientific theory, a process that was already well underway, having begun with Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier's description of the greenhouse effect in 1824 (parenthetically, we note that given that elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations can be measured directly, and the gas' origin demonstrated conclusively via radioisotope studies, the science necessary to prove the theory of AGW has been established for almost two hundred years.)
It's easy to see how conservatives would tend to drift to the status-quo side of the argument: environmentalism represented (and continues to represent) a challenge to an absolutist argument for the morality of unrestricted capitalism. And it is hard to miss an undertone of hostility to unrestricted capitalism (and to the established order generally) in the writings and speeches of environmental activists -- there is sometimes evident a certain glee at the prospect of a civilization-shaking cataclysm, and the warnings of disaster, the vivid pictures painted of the consequences of "peak oil," for example -- can come off as less salutary advice and more wish fulfillment.
Hard-core leftism is a frustrated ideology in the West, and it has had to watch capitalism, whose demise it has often predicted, go from strength to strength, as the moneyed interests that serve it have, far from suffering the fruits of their (very real) crimes against the poor, prospered greatly by their association with it.
So there is a certain amount of frustration there, which gets expressed in predictions of climate disaster, much as we find in the Biblical screeds, written by people hunted and persecuted by the Roman regime on behalf of the poor and voiceless, in which the meek inherit the earth and the rich struggle to squeeze themselves through tight spaces.
But now, today, we have the reality of anthropogenic global warming to deal with: a potentially catastrophic disruption of the climate and the food webs that keep us alive, and the primary way to address it is by re-making a large swathe of our economy. So on this particular issue, the hard left was right. And many conservatives are not handling that well.
A similar "cosmology event," on a much smaller scale, afflicted liberalism when the surge significantly decreased violence in Iraq. Deaths of Iraqis and deaths of American and allied soldiers both precipitously declined. This was exactly what conservatives had predicted, and liberals had scoffed at. More troops? More troops will only feed the violence! Yet eventually one had to admit, if one was honest, that the surge had been a very conspicuous success.
Obviously one did not have to change one's mind about the rationale for the war or the prospects of ultimate success or the morality and practicality of sacrificing thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of billions of dollars fighting an insurgency our own invasion created. But on the narrow point of whether the surge was a good idea, if you were reality based, you had to concede that. But it was hard.
It is similarly hard for the conservatives to concede that the people they have been apt to dismiss as sore losers and over-dramatic doomsayers seem to have nailed this one, as the scientists, after sifting the evidence, have soberly laid out a picture that is worse than anything we imagined.
But it's past time for them to get over it, and deal with reality. They are not now standing against a leftist environmental movement, but against science and scientists, and against reasonable people of all stripes, including people like Bill Gates, Margaret Thatcher, and the editors of the Economist, to name a few people and institutions that cannot easily be mistaken for pawns of the coming World Socialist Order.
It's time conservatives re-directed their ideological vitriol into battles over how best to solve this problem, and not over whether the crushing body of evidence for AGW is sufficient to accept the reality of the problem. It is. And we must. A political movement can err in its solutions for our problems, but to hide from the problems themselves, to deny their very existence when that existence becomes awkward to their self-image, betrays a fatal unseriousness that disqualifies its followers from positions of trust.
* I cannot tell a lie: Big Yellow Taxi didn't drop until 1970. Just go with the vibe, OK?
Why did global warming became, along with healthcare, the major lighting rod for conservative mythmaking? After all, if anyone ought to understand that preserving our environment for our children and the generations to come is a moral imperative, it's a conservative. If anyone should understand that radical change to an environment that has sustained us for ten thousand years of human civilization is likely to do severe harm, it's a conservative. If anyone should respect the opinions of the vast majority of working scientists and national and international scientific federations, it's those authority-loving conservatives.
Part of the problem, as I described in part one, is the extinction of the responsible conservative. But the problem runs deeper than that.
We're going to try and have some empathy for the conservative viewpoint in this post, which is a bit of a departure for this blog. Imagine you are a conservative in the 1960s. The environmental movement is just getting off the ground. Joni Mitchell is singing about paradise and parking lots*, and Rachel Carlson has savagely indicted DDT in Silent Spring.
As environmentalism becomes established, two opposing narratives take shape: on the environmental side, there is an argument that our industrial society in its present form is unsustainable, because it is in the process of degrading our environment past the point at which it will sustain our modern lifestyle -- or even our lives. On the other hand you have conservatives (and many on the political left, as well) who defend the status quo by denying the impact of human activities on the environment, praising the wealth-generating faculty of capitalism and predicting that restrictions on it will hobble development.
Recall that this is before global warming takes shape as a political issue, although not before it takes shape as a scientific theory, a process that was already well underway, having begun with Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier's description of the greenhouse effect in 1824 (parenthetically, we note that given that elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations can be measured directly, and the gas' origin demonstrated conclusively via radioisotope studies, the science necessary to prove the theory of AGW has been established for almost two hundred years.)
It's easy to see how conservatives would tend to drift to the status-quo side of the argument: environmentalism represented (and continues to represent) a challenge to an absolutist argument for the morality of unrestricted capitalism. And it is hard to miss an undertone of hostility to unrestricted capitalism (and to the established order generally) in the writings and speeches of environmental activists -- there is sometimes evident a certain glee at the prospect of a civilization-shaking cataclysm, and the warnings of disaster, the vivid pictures painted of the consequences of "peak oil," for example -- can come off as less salutary advice and more wish fulfillment.
Hard-core leftism is a frustrated ideology in the West, and it has had to watch capitalism, whose demise it has often predicted, go from strength to strength, as the moneyed interests that serve it have, far from suffering the fruits of their (very real) crimes against the poor, prospered greatly by their association with it.
So there is a certain amount of frustration there, which gets expressed in predictions of climate disaster, much as we find in the Biblical screeds, written by people hunted and persecuted by the Roman regime on behalf of the poor and voiceless, in which the meek inherit the earth and the rich struggle to squeeze themselves through tight spaces.
But now, today, we have the reality of anthropogenic global warming to deal with: a potentially catastrophic disruption of the climate and the food webs that keep us alive, and the primary way to address it is by re-making a large swathe of our economy. So on this particular issue, the hard left was right. And many conservatives are not handling that well.
A similar "cosmology event," on a much smaller scale, afflicted liberalism when the surge significantly decreased violence in Iraq. Deaths of Iraqis and deaths of American and allied soldiers both precipitously declined. This was exactly what conservatives had predicted, and liberals had scoffed at. More troops? More troops will only feed the violence! Yet eventually one had to admit, if one was honest, that the surge had been a very conspicuous success.
Obviously one did not have to change one's mind about the rationale for the war or the prospects of ultimate success or the morality and practicality of sacrificing thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of billions of dollars fighting an insurgency our own invasion created. But on the narrow point of whether the surge was a good idea, if you were reality based, you had to concede that. But it was hard.
It is similarly hard for the conservatives to concede that the people they have been apt to dismiss as sore losers and over-dramatic doomsayers seem to have nailed this one, as the scientists, after sifting the evidence, have soberly laid out a picture that is worse than anything we imagined.
But it's past time for them to get over it, and deal with reality. They are not now standing against a leftist environmental movement, but against science and scientists, and against reasonable people of all stripes, including people like Bill Gates, Margaret Thatcher, and the editors of the Economist, to name a few people and institutions that cannot easily be mistaken for pawns of the coming World Socialist Order.
It's time conservatives re-directed their ideological vitriol into battles over how best to solve this problem, and not over whether the crushing body of evidence for AGW is sufficient to accept the reality of the problem. It is. And we must. A political movement can err in its solutions for our problems, but to hide from the problems themselves, to deny their very existence when that existence becomes awkward to their self-image, betrays a fatal unseriousness that disqualifies its followers from positions of trust.
* I cannot tell a lie: Big Yellow Taxi didn't drop until 1970. Just go with the vibe, OK?
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Minor myths: Record warming is explained by short-term trends
With March 2010 temps, like January's, having shattered the satellite records, and Intraders now giving 4-to-1 odds that 2010 will be the warmest year on record, deniers are polishing up their excuses. A favorite tactic is to blame short-term variations such as ENSO and the solar cycle. Since the solar cycle is close to its nadir, it's ENSO that gets the blame for the current warming. For example, responding to my invitation to take advantage of the Intrade odds, a denier writes:
Over on WUWT, the zombies overwhelming chose this meme to help them to cope with March's record-breaking warmth. In the first ten comments on "March UAH Global Temperature Update" no fewer than seven mention El Nino, for example:
Of course, the fact that the current El Nino affects temperatures globally is not a myth. Is it responsible for the record-breaking warmth? Here the story gets slightly more complex. The response I gave to the poster above is still valid:
But I think it's also useful to consider the general problem of long-term warming, records, and short-term trends. Are records the best way to measure the progress of global warming? No, they are not. Precisely because they are affected by many sources of short-term variability, records tell you little about trends, and they occur unpredictably. Better techniques are to look at long-term weighed averages, like these:
Note that even with the five-year weighed average, there are periods of cooling that temporarily interrupt the long-term warming trend. Another method of looking at global warming arguably superior to surface temperatures, is ocean heat content. Most of the earth's radiation imbalance goes into the oceans, and the trend is clear:
So why pay attention to records at all? Because although they are not the best way to gauge the progress of global warming, they are one way to show that it is happening, and show it in a way that is very easy to grasp for the layperson (a group in which I include myself).
Simply put, if months and years are repeatedly found to be hotter than any comparable period earlier in the record, and we rule out chance variation (as is easy to do in the case of warming temperatures, and I showed here) then we can be confident that temperatures are warming, on average.
So how does one respond to the allegation that short-term effects like ENSO are responsible for records falling? Superficially, the argument has a lot to recommend it. 2010 would not be looking like a record-breaker were we in a La Nina event. 2005 and 1998, prior record-holders, were both El Nino events. So the correlation is real. What's the causality?
Imagine a warming trend of 0.2 C per decade. This is superimposed on a short-term variability, whose magnitude we can guesstimate by looking at the month-to-month variability in the GISTEMP anomaly.
Let's look at the records for January in the 50s, for example:
1950: -24
1951: -32
1952: 15
1953: 15
1954: 23
1955: 27
1956: -18
1957: -10
1958: 41
1959: 8
The maximum variation from year to year is 0.73 C (+0.41 to -0.32). But those years are pretty far apart, and it's never a bad idea to eliminate outliers when you can. So let's take the next most extreme pair, +0.27C; -0.24 C. Those values are closer to their neighbors than our outliers. So we can estimate the short-term variability at about 0.5 C. The cause of that variability doesn't matter; for our purposes, it's just random noise.
Now, my hypothesis: Even with a strong warming trend, record-breaking months and years will overwhelmingly occur when the short-term random variation is positive. If this hypothesis is valid, then we cannot discount record warming because it occurs in an El Nino year or a year of high solar activity or what have you.
At first blush, that may seem counterintuitive. Suppose the 1998 El Nino represented a positive random value of 0.4C (out of a possible 0.5C). In two decades, global warming will have made up that 0.4C and will break the record without the help of El Nino. And so it will -- the 1998 record. The trouble is, over the course of those two decades, many more El Nino years will have occurred, and set new records. No matter how far you look into the future, years with short-term warming will always be the record-setters.
Consider the warmest year in the 50s; 1958, +0.41C. Without even looking it up, you could guess it was an El Nino year, as indeed it was: the 1958 El Nino peaked at 1.7, compared to the current one which peaked at 1.8. At the time, it was tied for the warmest January on record, a record it held until 1981. How does it compare to temperatures in the last 10 years?
2001: 48
2002: 83
2003: 77
2004: 60
2005: 87
2006: 58
2007: 108
2008: 38
2009: 67
2010: 88
Recall that the 50s record was 41. Nine out of ten of the last ten years beat the all-time warmest January from the 50s -- a record that stood until 1981.
But here's the key question -- how many of those were the all-time warmest January when they occurred? Only three of them: 2002 (83); 2005 (87), and; 2007 (108). Two out of the three (2005 and 2007) were El Nino months, and the third (2002) was neutral (but occured at the peak of the solar cycle, the other major short-term influence on surface temperatures).
To see why this is so, look at 1998 again. We said 1998 was +0.4 C on the 0-0.5C random variation scale. If every year that followed was +0.0 C, the record (assuming our +0.2C decadal trend) would fall in 21 years. But that's the thing about short-term variation -- it doesn't remain constant; it varies. At some point in that 21 year span, another +0.4 C year or +0.35 C year or +0.45 C year will happen, and because of the underlying warming, it will break the record and reset the clock on outrunning short-term variation.
No matter how much global warming we experience, the record-breaking years will also be the ones in which the short-term trends are positive too. Long-term warming + short-term warming will always be > long-term warming + short-term cooling. Warming will no more produce an all-time warmest year with a strong La Nina than a man can grow taller than the top of his hat. But short-term warming and cooling cycles that have been in place since records began should not suddenly cause record-breaking temperatures. Hence the near-continuous crash of temperature records to the ground does illustrate global warming -- and the fact that it occurs when short-term cycles are also positive is logically necessary, and changes nothing.
When Intrade offers an ENSO-adjusted version of that trade . . . let me know.
Over on WUWT, the zombies overwhelming chose this meme to help them to cope with March's record-breaking warmth. In the first ten comments on "March UAH Global Temperature Update" no fewer than seven mention El Nino, for example:
Ho hum.
The El Nino is pumping energy into the troposphere whilst the low level of solar activity causes the atmosphere to contract which slows down energy loss to space.
A purely temporary combination and nothing to do with CO2.
Of course, the fact that the current El Nino affects temperatures globally is not a myth. Is it responsible for the record-breaking warmth? Here the story gets slightly more complex. The response I gave to the poster above is still valid:
We've had many El Nino years -- this one is nothing special. Why, in the absence of global warming, should this year be the warmest in 130 years, warmer than any of the last ten El Ninos? At best, there's a 9% chance of that. Yet, Intrade's odds on the hottest year ever are at 60%. Funny, that.
But I think it's also useful to consider the general problem of long-term warming, records, and short-term trends. Are records the best way to measure the progress of global warming? No, they are not. Precisely because they are affected by many sources of short-term variability, records tell you little about trends, and they occur unpredictably. Better techniques are to look at long-term weighed averages, like these:
Note that even with the five-year weighed average, there are periods of cooling that temporarily interrupt the long-term warming trend. Another method of looking at global warming arguably superior to surface temperatures, is ocean heat content. Most of the earth's radiation imbalance goes into the oceans, and the trend is clear:
So why pay attention to records at all? Because although they are not the best way to gauge the progress of global warming, they are one way to show that it is happening, and show it in a way that is very easy to grasp for the layperson (a group in which I include myself).
Simply put, if months and years are repeatedly found to be hotter than any comparable period earlier in the record, and we rule out chance variation (as is easy to do in the case of warming temperatures, and I showed here) then we can be confident that temperatures are warming, on average.
So how does one respond to the allegation that short-term effects like ENSO are responsible for records falling? Superficially, the argument has a lot to recommend it. 2010 would not be looking like a record-breaker were we in a La Nina event. 2005 and 1998, prior record-holders, were both El Nino events. So the correlation is real. What's the causality?
Imagine a warming trend of 0.2 C per decade. This is superimposed on a short-term variability, whose magnitude we can guesstimate by looking at the month-to-month variability in the GISTEMP anomaly.
Let's look at the records for January in the 50s, for example:
1950: -24
1951: -32
1952: 15
1953: 15
1954: 23
1955: 27
1956: -18
1957: -10
1958: 41
1959: 8
The maximum variation from year to year is 0.73 C (+0.41 to -0.32). But those years are pretty far apart, and it's never a bad idea to eliminate outliers when you can. So let's take the next most extreme pair, +0.27C; -0.24 C. Those values are closer to their neighbors than our outliers. So we can estimate the short-term variability at about 0.5 C. The cause of that variability doesn't matter; for our purposes, it's just random noise.
Now, my hypothesis: Even with a strong warming trend, record-breaking months and years will overwhelmingly occur when the short-term random variation is positive. If this hypothesis is valid, then we cannot discount record warming because it occurs in an El Nino year or a year of high solar activity or what have you.
At first blush, that may seem counterintuitive. Suppose the 1998 El Nino represented a positive random value of 0.4C (out of a possible 0.5C). In two decades, global warming will have made up that 0.4C and will break the record without the help of El Nino. And so it will -- the 1998 record. The trouble is, over the course of those two decades, many more El Nino years will have occurred, and set new records. No matter how far you look into the future, years with short-term warming will always be the record-setters.
Consider the warmest year in the 50s; 1958, +0.41C. Without even looking it up, you could guess it was an El Nino year, as indeed it was: the 1958 El Nino peaked at 1.7, compared to the current one which peaked at 1.8. At the time, it was tied for the warmest January on record, a record it held until 1981. How does it compare to temperatures in the last 10 years?
2001: 48
2002: 83
2003: 77
2004: 60
2005: 87
2006: 58
2007: 108
2008: 38
2009: 67
2010: 88
Recall that the 50s record was 41. Nine out of ten of the last ten years beat the all-time warmest January from the 50s -- a record that stood until 1981.
But here's the key question -- how many of those were the all-time warmest January when they occurred? Only three of them: 2002 (83); 2005 (87), and; 2007 (108). Two out of the three (2005 and 2007) were El Nino months, and the third (2002) was neutral (but occured at the peak of the solar cycle, the other major short-term influence on surface temperatures).
To see why this is so, look at 1998 again. We said 1998 was +0.4 C on the 0-0.5C random variation scale. If every year that followed was +0.0 C, the record (assuming our +0.2C decadal trend) would fall in 21 years. But that's the thing about short-term variation -- it doesn't remain constant; it varies. At some point in that 21 year span, another +0.4 C year or +0.35 C year or +0.45 C year will happen, and because of the underlying warming, it will break the record and reset the clock on outrunning short-term variation.
No matter how much global warming we experience, the record-breaking years will also be the ones in which the short-term trends are positive too. Long-term warming + short-term warming will always be > long-term warming + short-term cooling. Warming will no more produce an all-time warmest year with a strong La Nina than a man can grow taller than the top of his hat. But short-term warming and cooling cycles that have been in place since records began should not suddenly cause record-breaking temperatures. Hence the near-continuous crash of temperature records to the ground does illustrate global warming -- and the fact that it occurs when short-term cycles are also positive is logically necessary, and changes nothing.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
March 2010 the hottest March in the satellite record
Intrade punters who are giving 3-to-1 odds that 2010 will be the hottest year on record are looking smarter all the time. Both the RSS and UAH analyses have March, like January, as the hottest month in the last 32 years -- which likely makes it the hottest in the last millennium.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Idiot of the week: John McCain
John McCain used to be the kind of republican you could imagine as president. He was a guy you disagreed with rather than deplored; a guy who could take unpopular positions that riled his own party and talk straight (yes, there was at one point a basis in fact for that meme) about the country's problems.
Today he's a shell of his former self. Perhaps he got too close to the top job, and the quest for that little extra something that would put him over the finish line, his integrity was fatally wounded. Regardless, his obstructionism and hyperpartisanship are just sad.
Sunday McCain proclaimed “I never considered myself a maverick.” In honor of what we hope is the final and ultimate McCain flip-flop, here is the Daily Show's pitch-perfect skewering of the McCain in 2008: "Reformed Maverick"
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Among the climate "skeptics"
Fascinated by the world changing before our eyes, and fearful of what it portends for the 21st century, in 2009 I became a climate-news junkie. By 2010, my case was advanced. In early February, frustrated with the glacial pace of updates on Real Climate and DotEarth, I ventured into the face-paced, wildly popular climate blog, specializing in denial: Watts Up With That, or as it is known to its friends, WUWT.
I lasted two weeks. Toward the end, Anthony Watts himself, seemingly disappointed in the counterarguments of his highly prolific and overwhelmingly like-minded commentators, took a personal interest in my comments, "replying" using brackets in the body of my messages, deleting comments on flimsy pretexts, and eventually, incensed with my skepticism of his skepticism, unceremoniously announced "into the troll bin with you." But not before I enjoyed a revelatory look at one of the most fast-growing and important subcultures in the broader right-wing populist upwelling that followed the election of Obama: climate change deniers.
The deniers were in full cry when I frequented WUWT; still giddy over the identification of two errors in the IPCC's 3,000-page climate report, and the politically embarrassing and scientifically irrelevant release of the CRU's hacked e-mails. They were running high on the hog on a wave of ignorant, hyperbolic articles in the right-wing press, especially in Britain. Posts lovingly celebrating each article as a news event unto itself were interspersed with pointers to various articles in scientific journals, invariably highlighting only the elements (sometimes as little as a single sentence) which seemed to reinforce denial, while ignoring the body of the paper (which often, whether by generosity or ignorance on Mr. Watt's part, strengthened the case for AGW). This two basic categories were broken up with various "guest posts" by amateur sciencers like Steve Goddard or Willis E, which were never without a generous leavening of mistakes in statistics and misunderstand of basic scientific concepts like external validity and the null hypothesis.
But it is the comment threads that are the true heart of WUWT; each of the 5-10 posts a day attracts dozens to hundreds of comments. Often the "guest" bloggers are among the most prolific commentators. But whatever the subject, the post is little more than an excuse to rehash old grievances, to denounce and condemn, and to celebrate the closeness and emotional support of the denier tribe. Attempt to talk climate science, as the rare dissident attempts, and in short order you can learn volumes about the nature of denial.
Deniers conceive of the obligations of evidence and argument as entirely a one-way street. Scientists have a duty to provide "overwhelming" evidence; any uncertainty disqualifies the science as a basis of action; any erroneous prediction (even if off by a small margin) or confessed inability to predict, completely disqualifies the scientific theory that produced it. In contrast, they held up an ideal of skepticism that it would argue for nothing except the falsehood of other's work, prove nothing, provide evidence for nothing.
So while they exalt people like Copernicus, Galileo and Einstein who challenged the "consensus," they completely ignored the method by which the challenge was carried out: by advancing an alternative hypothesis which better accounted for the facts. The climate "skeptics" approach to falsifying AGW is a carbon copy of the "rapid response" model of political campaigning; allege falsehoods, presume corruption, attack any detail that can be alleged to be false as (further) evidence that the other side is dishonest or at least unforgivably sloppy. It's as if (to accept their analogy) Einstein overturned Newton not with mathematics and close argument, but by denouncing inertia as a leftist plot to advance a world socialist state.
That they should produce such a hypothesis, or, having produced it, that it should be subject to the same kinds of tests they apply to others, drives "skeptics" nuts.
"Skeptical science" a pro-science global warming blog, has it half right: they identify the defining characteristic of the deniers as the refusal to look at the whole picture. They will instead focus in on one error or uncertainty, and never hold themselves responsible for looking at the body of the evidence. If one paper taken by itself cast doubt on some aspect of climate change, while twenty papers provide further empirical confirmation of it, they have no qualms about crowing over the single study and completely refusing to engage with all the others.
But they also, I found, refuse to focus on individual problems, instead holding in reserve a mass of objections and suspicions which constitute their "exit strategy" when an argument is hopelessly lost.
To that end, they rarely will consent to consider in isolation the basic principles of the theory of AGW:
1. The world is warming
2. The primary cause of that warming is anthropogenic GHGs, especially carbon dioxide
One might thing that self-identified "skeptics" could not possibly avoid addressing these basic points. But they do. To accomplish it, they use various weasel words that let them, under pressure "explode" the debate to include a vast number of related ideas, all of which they reject:
Words like runaway and catastrophic are not just ways of erecting straw man arguments; they are a way to evade ever having to accept reality as to plain vanilla global warming.
Talking to deniers, you realize how much scientific thought depends on a kind of intellectual integrity that will hash out a single point in a complex argument, come to agreement, and remember that agreement going forward. Deniers eschew this, and so conversations with them become maddeningly circular: show them the world is warming, and they demand you proven humans are the cause; some them humans are the cause, and they demand you show that warming will be detrimental; show them it will be detrimental, and they will revert to "You haven't proven to me that it is happening."
Deniers have no intellectual space in which their concerns can be addressed one at a time; and since they uncritically embrace and collect every "skeptical" argument they come across (remember; it's the "believers" job to prove the arguments false, not their to examine them critically) they have dozens of them. No one can address them all at one go; and if you try and address a few key arguments, invariably they will claim "it doesn't matter" and reel off a few more. The next time you talk to them, they won't remember the solid evidence produced that CO2 causes warming and the increase in CO2 is caused by burning fossil fuels; they will only remember that you failed to persuade them.
It is a near-perfect defense mechanism; the first article of faith is that everything must be proven to them to their satisfaction; by refusing to focus on one thing at a time and come to an agreement, rather (like a politician) immediately sliding over to their next talking point, they make the effort to "persuade" them a labor of Sisyphus.
Climate deniers have a rage and paranoia that is social in origin but autocatalysing. Imagine you are a climate skeptic. It is perfectly clear to you that humans don't affect the climate; the idea is absurd. Al Gore comes out with that movie. You're angry! How dare he! Nature and Science publish articles on global warming – and what is worse, they aren't even arguing for global warming, they assert it as an established fact. Seen through the lens of your confirmation bias, this is not evidence that the science of AGW is clear and the evidence overwhelming; it's evidence that debate is being suppressed; that skeptics like you are being silenced.
WUWT is thick with denunciations of the New York Times, the Guardian, Scientific American, NASA, the Nobel committee and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Not all at the same time, of course; the list of organizations that accept the reality of AGW is so long and so illustrious it might give the most tone-deaf denier pause. But over and over again, the formula recurs, with only the names changing: Organization X is so obviously corrupt, so desperate to deny the truth; their latest statement/article/scientific study/Nobel prize is no more than the pathetic death rattle of the AGW conspiracy.
The attitude of deniers to the hypothesis of a pro-AGW "conspiracy" is complex, and navigates between the Scylla of absurdity and the Charybdis of the need to ignore evidence. The less sophisticated deniers will unembarrassedly posit a vast conspiracy of the scientific and political elites all over the world to suppress the truth about "global warming." Those with a little more savvy recognize how stupid this sounds; but the more knowledge they have, the more deniers realize that there are large amounts of evidence supporting global warming which it is difficult to deal with without invoking a conspiracy. Probably the most deft approach is to posit, not a conspiracy, but a vast failure of scientific self-correction; an unplanned effect of peer pressure and political expediency determining what science gets funded and published, and pushing weak-willed climate scientists to genuflect before the theory of AGW whether they believe in it or not.
While it addresses the two big problems with anti-AGW conspiracy theory, the "peer pressure" approach is not wildly popular. It is an article of faith among the lay deniers that people like Al Gore and Michael Mann are not merely misguided, but evil; that they and other "alarmists" self-consciously deceive in order to profit from "greening."
This pushes the skeptical community back towards the silliness of the conspiracy model; but they will not part with their villains, who are critical to the movement's persecution complex.
Another element of denial that is difficult to explain rationally, and pushes them towards tinfoil-hat thinking, is their belief that the theory of AGW is not just false, but clearly and obviously false; anyone can see it is grossly defective. Again, rationally speaking, a much better tack to take would be that climate theory is extremely complex and difficult, and people have come to mistaken conclusions about it. It is easy to see how this would dovetail with the peer pressure theory. But, again, the movement seems to derive some of its emotional charge from its emperor-has-no-clothes meme; as a fundamentally political approach, denial likes to offer its believers a clear, black and white distinction: we are right and they are wrong. Open the door to complexity, and you have the very problem that is crippling legitimate scientists' ability to respond to the slanderous attacks on them and their work: "Given the evidence in hand, we are likely correct, and the alternative position is less likely to be correct" is lousy polemic. Deniers flirt with reason and argument, but in their discussions among themselves, they fall back on tribal identification, and in claiming that they are obviously correct, beyond dispute, they are really appealing to their audience's gut feeling that those nasty leftists are up to no good.
-- Ray Ladbury
I lasted two weeks. Toward the end, Anthony Watts himself, seemingly disappointed in the counterarguments of his highly prolific and overwhelmingly like-minded commentators, took a personal interest in my comments, "replying" using brackets in the body of my messages, deleting comments on flimsy pretexts, and eventually, incensed with my skepticism of his skepticism, unceremoniously announced "into the troll bin with you." But not before I enjoyed a revelatory look at one of the most fast-growing and important subcultures in the broader right-wing populist upwelling that followed the election of Obama: climate change deniers.
The deniers were in full cry when I frequented WUWT; still giddy over the identification of two errors in the IPCC's 3,000-page climate report, and the politically embarrassing and scientifically irrelevant release of the CRU's hacked e-mails. They were running high on the hog on a wave of ignorant, hyperbolic articles in the right-wing press, especially in Britain. Posts lovingly celebrating each article as a news event unto itself were interspersed with pointers to various articles in scientific journals, invariably highlighting only the elements (sometimes as little as a single sentence) which seemed to reinforce denial, while ignoring the body of the paper (which often, whether by generosity or ignorance on Mr. Watt's part, strengthened the case for AGW). This two basic categories were broken up with various "guest posts" by amateur sciencers like Steve Goddard or Willis E, which were never without a generous leavening of mistakes in statistics and misunderstand of basic scientific concepts like external validity and the null hypothesis.
But it is the comment threads that are the true heart of WUWT; each of the 5-10 posts a day attracts dozens to hundreds of comments. Often the "guest" bloggers are among the most prolific commentators. But whatever the subject, the post is little more than an excuse to rehash old grievances, to denounce and condemn, and to celebrate the closeness and emotional support of the denier tribe. Attempt to talk climate science, as the rare dissident attempts, and in short order you can learn volumes about the nature of denial.
Deniers conceive of the obligations of evidence and argument as entirely a one-way street. Scientists have a duty to provide "overwhelming" evidence; any uncertainty disqualifies the science as a basis of action; any erroneous prediction (even if off by a small margin) or confessed inability to predict, completely disqualifies the scientific theory that produced it. In contrast, they held up an ideal of skepticism that it would argue for nothing except the falsehood of other's work, prove nothing, provide evidence for nothing.
So while they exalt people like Copernicus, Galileo and Einstein who challenged the "consensus," they completely ignored the method by which the challenge was carried out: by advancing an alternative hypothesis which better accounted for the facts. The climate "skeptics" approach to falsifying AGW is a carbon copy of the "rapid response" model of political campaigning; allege falsehoods, presume corruption, attack any detail that can be alleged to be false as (further) evidence that the other side is dishonest or at least unforgivably sloppy. It's as if (to accept their analogy) Einstein overturned Newton not with mathematics and close argument, but by denouncing inertia as a leftist plot to advance a world socialist state.
That they should produce such a hypothesis, or, having produced it, that it should be subject to the same kinds of tests they apply to others, drives "skeptics" nuts.
"Skeptical science" a pro-science global warming blog, has it half right: they identify the defining characteristic of the deniers as the refusal to look at the whole picture. They will instead focus in on one error or uncertainty, and never hold themselves responsible for looking at the body of the evidence. If one paper taken by itself cast doubt on some aspect of climate change, while twenty papers provide further empirical confirmation of it, they have no qualms about crowing over the single study and completely refusing to engage with all the others.
But they also, I found, refuse to focus on individual problems, instead holding in reserve a mass of objections and suspicions which constitute their "exit strategy" when an argument is hopelessly lost.
To that end, they rarely will consent to consider in isolation the basic principles of the theory of AGW:
1. The world is warming
2. The primary cause of that warming is anthropogenic GHGs, especially carbon dioxide
One might thing that self-identified "skeptics" could not possibly avoid addressing these basic points. But they do. To accomplish it, they use various weasel words that let them, under pressure "explode" the debate to include a vast number of related ideas, all of which they reject:
You haven't proven runaway catastrophic global warming.
Words like runaway and catastrophic are not just ways of erecting straw man arguments; they are a way to evade ever having to accept reality as to plain vanilla global warming.
Talking to deniers, you realize how much scientific thought depends on a kind of intellectual integrity that will hash out a single point in a complex argument, come to agreement, and remember that agreement going forward. Deniers eschew this, and so conversations with them become maddeningly circular: show them the world is warming, and they demand you proven humans are the cause; some them humans are the cause, and they demand you show that warming will be detrimental; show them it will be detrimental, and they will revert to "You haven't proven to me that it is happening."
Deniers have no intellectual space in which their concerns can be addressed one at a time; and since they uncritically embrace and collect every "skeptical" argument they come across (remember; it's the "believers" job to prove the arguments false, not their to examine them critically) they have dozens of them. No one can address them all at one go; and if you try and address a few key arguments, invariably they will claim "it doesn't matter" and reel off a few more. The next time you talk to them, they won't remember the solid evidence produced that CO2 causes warming and the increase in CO2 is caused by burning fossil fuels; they will only remember that you failed to persuade them.
It is a near-perfect defense mechanism; the first article of faith is that everything must be proven to them to their satisfaction; by refusing to focus on one thing at a time and come to an agreement, rather (like a politician) immediately sliding over to their next talking point, they make the effort to "persuade" them a labor of Sisyphus.
Climate deniers have a rage and paranoia that is social in origin but autocatalysing. Imagine you are a climate skeptic. It is perfectly clear to you that humans don't affect the climate; the idea is absurd. Al Gore comes out with that movie. You're angry! How dare he! Nature and Science publish articles on global warming – and what is worse, they aren't even arguing for global warming, they assert it as an established fact. Seen through the lens of your confirmation bias, this is not evidence that the science of AGW is clear and the evidence overwhelming; it's evidence that debate is being suppressed; that skeptics like you are being silenced.
WUWT is thick with denunciations of the New York Times, the Guardian, Scientific American, NASA, the Nobel committee and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Not all at the same time, of course; the list of organizations that accept the reality of AGW is so long and so illustrious it might give the most tone-deaf denier pause. But over and over again, the formula recurs, with only the names changing: Organization X is so obviously corrupt, so desperate to deny the truth; their latest statement/article/scientific study/Nobel prize is no more than the pathetic death rattle of the AGW conspiracy.
The attitude of deniers to the hypothesis of a pro-AGW "conspiracy" is complex, and navigates between the Scylla of absurdity and the Charybdis of the need to ignore evidence. The less sophisticated deniers will unembarrassedly posit a vast conspiracy of the scientific and political elites all over the world to suppress the truth about "global warming." Those with a little more savvy recognize how stupid this sounds; but the more knowledge they have, the more deniers realize that there are large amounts of evidence supporting global warming which it is difficult to deal with without invoking a conspiracy. Probably the most deft approach is to posit, not a conspiracy, but a vast failure of scientific self-correction; an unplanned effect of peer pressure and political expediency determining what science gets funded and published, and pushing weak-willed climate scientists to genuflect before the theory of AGW whether they believe in it or not.
While it addresses the two big problems with anti-AGW conspiracy theory, the "peer pressure" approach is not wildly popular. It is an article of faith among the lay deniers that people like Al Gore and Michael Mann are not merely misguided, but evil; that they and other "alarmists" self-consciously deceive in order to profit from "greening."
This pushes the skeptical community back towards the silliness of the conspiracy model; but they will not part with their villains, who are critical to the movement's persecution complex.
Another element of denial that is difficult to explain rationally, and pushes them towards tinfoil-hat thinking, is their belief that the theory of AGW is not just false, but clearly and obviously false; anyone can see it is grossly defective. Again, rationally speaking, a much better tack to take would be that climate theory is extremely complex and difficult, and people have come to mistaken conclusions about it. It is easy to see how this would dovetail with the peer pressure theory. But, again, the movement seems to derive some of its emotional charge from its emperor-has-no-clothes meme; as a fundamentally political approach, denial likes to offer its believers a clear, black and white distinction: we are right and they are wrong. Open the door to complexity, and you have the very problem that is crippling legitimate scientists' ability to respond to the slanderous attacks on them and their work: "Given the evidence in hand, we are likely correct, and the alternative position is less likely to be correct" is lousy polemic. Deniers flirt with reason and argument, but in their discussions among themselves, they fall back on tribal identification, and in claiming that they are obviously correct, beyond dispute, they are really appealing to their audience's gut feeling that those nasty leftists are up to no good.
" What is WUWT other than a support group for stupid?"
-- Ray Ladbury
Among the climate "skeptics"
GAGUT as revealed by GOD fundamentally is the understanding of everything that GOD permits us to understand and that hence includes the understanding of how to solve the Arctic Sea ice thinning problem, . . .
-- one of Watt's more coherent commenters
Fascinated by the world changing before our eyes, and fearful of what it portends for the 21st century, in 2009 I became a climate-news junkie. By 2010, my case was advanced. In early February, frustrated with the glacial pace of updates on Real Climate and DotEarth, I ventured into the face-paced, wildly popular climate blog, specializing in denial: Watts Up With That, or as it is known to its friends, WUWT.
I lasted two weeks. Toward the end, Anthony Watts himself, seemingly disappointed in the counterarguments of his highly prolific and overwhelmingly like-minded commentators, took a personal interest in my comments, "replying" using brackets in the body of my messages, deleting comments on flimsy pretexts, and eventually, incensed with my skepticism of his skepticism, unceremoniously announced "into the troll bin with you." But not before I enjoyed a revelatory look at one of the most fast-growing and important subcultures in the broader right-wing populist upwelling that followed the election of Obama: climate change deniers.
The deniers were in full cry when I frequented WUWT; still giddy over the identification of two errors in the IPCC's 3,000-page climate report, and the politically embarrassing and scientifically irrelevant release of the CRU's hacked e-mails. They were running high on the hog on a wave of ignorant, hyperbolic articles in the right-wing press, especially in Britain. Posts lovingly celebrating each article as a news event unto itself were interspersed with pointers to various articles in scientific journals, invariably highlighting only the elements (sometimes as little as a single sentence) which seemed to reinforce denial, while ignoring the body of the paper (which often, whether by generosity or ignorance on Mr. Watt's part, strengthened the case for AGW). This two basic categories were broken up with various "guest posts" by amateur sciencers like Steve Goddard or Willis E, which were never without a generous leavening of mistakes in statistics and misunderstand of basic scientific concepts like external validity and the null hypothesis.
But it is the comment threads that are the true heart of WUWT; each of the 5-10 posts a day attracts dozens to hundreds of comments. Often the "guest" bloggers are among the most prolific commentators. But whatever the subject, the post is little more than an excuse to rehash old grievances, to denounce and condemn, and to celebrate the closeness and emotional support of the denier tribe. Attempt to talk climate science, as the rare dissident attempts, and in short order you can learn volumes about the nature of denial.
Deniers conceive of the obligations of evidence and argument as entirely a one-way street. Scientists have a duty to provide "overwhelming" evidence; any uncertainty disqualifies the science as a basis of action; any erroneous prediction (even if off by a small margin) or confessed inability to predict, completely disqualifies the scientific theory that produced it. In contrast, they held up an ideal of skepticism that it would argue for nothing except the falsehood of other's work, prove nothing, provide evidence for nothing.
So while they exalt people like Copernicus, Galileo and Einstein who challenged the "consensus," they completely ignored the method by which the challenge was carried out: by advancing an alternative hypothesis which better accounted for the facts. The climate "skeptics" approach to falsifying AGW is a carbon copy of the "rapid response" model of political campaigning; allege falsehoods, presume corruption, attack any detail that can be alleged to be false as (further) evidence that the other side is dishonest or at least unforgivably sloppy. It's as if (to accept their analogy) Einstein overturned Newton not with mathematics and close argument, but by denouncing inertia as a leftist plot to advance a world socialist state.
That they should produce such a hypothesis, or, having produced it, that it should be subject to the same kinds of tests they apply to others, drives "skeptics" nuts.
"Skeptical science" a pro-science global warming blog, has it half right: they identify the defining characteristic of the deniers as the refusal to look at the whole picture. They will instead focus in on one error or uncertainty, and never hold themselves responsible for looking at the body of the evidence. If one paper taken by itself cast doubt on some aspect of climate change, while twenty papers provide further empirical confirmation of it, they have no qualms about crowing over the single study and completely refusing to engage with all the others.
But they also, I found, refuse to focus on individual problems, instead holding in reserve a mass of objections and suspicions which constitute their "exit strategy" when an argument is hopelessly lost.
To that end, they rarely will consent to consider in isolation the basic principles of the theory of AGW:
1. The world is warming
2. The primary cause of that warming is anthropogenic GHGs, especially carbon dioxide
One might thing that self-identified "skeptics" could not possibly avoid addressing these basic points. But they do. To accomplish it, they use various weasel words that let them, under pressure "explode" the debate to include a vast number of related ideas, all of which they reject:
You haven't proven runaway catastrophic global warming.
Words like runaway and catastrophic are not just ways of erecting straw man arguments; they are a way to evade ever having to accept reality as to plain vanilla global warming.
Talking to deniers, you realize how much scientific thought depends on a kind of intellectual integrity that will hash out a single point in a complex argument, come to agreement, and remember that agreement going forward. Deniers eschew this, and so conversations with them become maddeningly circular: show them the world is warming, and they demand you proven humans are the cause; some them humans are the cause, and they demand you show that warming will be detrimental; show them it will be detrimental, and they will revert to "You haven't proven to me that it is happening."
Deniers have no intellectual space in which their concerns can be addressed one at a time; and since they uncritically embrace and collect every "skeptical" argument they come across (remember; it's the "believers" job to prove the arguments false, not their to examine them critically) they have dozens of them. No one can address them all at one go; and if you try and address a few key arguments, invariably they will claim "it doesn't matter" and reel off a few more. The next time you talk to them, they won't remember the solid evidence produced that CO2 causes warming and the increase in CO2 is caused by burning fossil fuels; they will only remember that you failed to persuade them.
It is a near-perfect defense mechanism; the first article of faith is that everything must be proven to them to their satisfaction; by refusing to focus on one thing at a time and come to an agreement, rather (like a politician) immediately sliding over to their next talking point, they make the effort to "persuade" them a labor of Sisyphus.
Climate deniers have a rage and paranoia that is social in origin but autocatalysing. Imagine you are a climate skeptic. It is perfectly clear to you that humans don't affect the climate; the idea is absurd. Al Gore comes out with that movie. You're angry! How dare he! Nature and Science publish articles on global warming – and what is worse, they aren't even arguing for global warming, they assert it as an established fact. Seen through the lens of your confirmation bias, this is not evidence that the science of AGW is clear and the evidence overwhelming; it's evidence that debate is being suppressed; that skeptics like you are being silenced.
WUWT is thick with denunciations of the New York Times, the Guardian, Scientific American, NASA, the Nobel committee and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Not all at the same time, of course; the list of organizations that accept the reality of AGW is so long and so illustrious it might give the most tone-deaf denier pause. But over and over again, the formula recurs, with only the names changing: Organization X is so obviously corrupt, so desperate to deny the truth; their latest statement/article/scientific study/Nobel prize is no more than the pathetic death rattle of the AGW conspiracy.
The attitude of deniers to the hypothesis of a pro-AGW "conspiracy" is complex, and navigates between the Scylla of absurdity and the Charybdis of the need to ignore evidence. The less sophisticated deniers will unembarrassedly posit a vast conspiracy of the scientific and political elites all over the world to suppress the truth about "global warming." Those with a little more savvy recognize how stupid this sounds; but the more knowledge they have, the more deniers realize that there are large amounts of evidence supporting global warming which it is difficult to deal with without invoking a conspiracy. Probably the most deft approach is to posit, not a conspiracy, but a vast failure of scientific self-correction; an unplanned effect of peer pressure and political expediency determining what science gets funded and published, and pushing weak-willed climate scientists to genuflect before the theory of AGW whether they believe in it or not.
While it addresses the two big problems with anti-AGW conspiracy theory, the "peer pressure" approach is not wildly popular. It is an article of faith among the lay deniers that people like Al Gore and Michael Mann are not merely misguided, but evil; that they and other "alarmists" self-consciously deceive in order to profit from "greening."
This pushes the skeptical community back towards the silliness of the conspiracy model; but they will not part with their villains, who are critical to the movement's persecution complex.
Another element of denial that is difficult to explain rationally, and pushes them towards tinfoil-hat thinking, is their belief that the theory of AGW is not just false, but clearly and obviously false; anyone can see it is grossly defective. Again, rationally speaking, a much better tack to take would be that climate theory is extremely complex and difficult, and people have come to mistaken conclusions about it. It is easy to see how this would dovetail with the peer pressure theory. But, again, the movement seems to derive some of its emotional charge from its emperor-has-no-clothes meme; as a fundamentally political approach, denial likes to offer its believers a clear, black and white distinction: we are right and they are wrong. Open the door to complexity, and you have the very problem that is crippling legitimate scientists' ability to respond to the slanderous attacks on them and their work: "Given the evidence in hand, we are likely correct, and the alternative position is less likely to be correct" is lousy polemic. Deniers flirt with reason and argument, but in their discussions among themselves, they fall back on tribal identification, and in claiming that they are obviously correct, beyond dispute, they are really appealing to their audience's gut feeling that those nasty leftists are up to no good.
" What is WUWT other than a support group for stupid?"
-- Ray Ladbury
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