David Brin: Distinguishing Climate "Deniers" From "Skeptics"
davidbrin.blogspot.com
davidbrin.blogspot.com
The tipping point was the tired dogma of the Fox-Limbaugh conspiracy. If they say something that's wrong, it's wrong because it's wrong, not because of who said it. The so-called "conspiracy" of "Saudi princes", "Russian oil interests" and other "petro-moguls" is just populist claptrap basically.
It's far easier to kill the messenger. As Homer Simpson said "let's go burn down the observatory so this never happens again" (after the meteor strike).
Not that I'm saying Fox isn't or can't be biased but to dismiss everything they ever broadcast just because it's Fox is a far more untenable and ludicrous position.
The bias here is even more obvious when a comparison is made between those skeptical of HGCC to the tobacco proponents of years gone past.
Apart from the obvious emotional connotations this attempts to conjure let me put it this way: the Roman Catholic Church was wrong and Galileo was right. But that doesn't automatically make Catholics wrong in any subsequent dispute.
The biggest fallout from the CRU email hack was how it shone a light on what is basically a subversion of the scientific process: prestigious journals failing to enforce their standards (Nature requires publication of raw data but published AGW articles without it and ignored requests by third parties for Nature to procure it from the authors), blacklisting of journals that publish climate-skeptic works (mcCarthyism basically), failure of the peer review process, selective sampling, obstructionism and deliberate efforts to defeat FOI requests.
This alone should be serious cause for concern from anbody regardless of their position as global policy and billions of dollars are being committed to what is at best a questionable scientific process.
The onus isn't on skeptics to prove AGWists wrong. AGWists have postulated an hypothesis and the burden on them is to prove it. Creationists fall victim to similar fallacies.
In an ideal world, this is true. In reality, one must distinguish signal from noise and usually it's easier to just throw out most of the noise and lose a little signal too.
Yes, quite so, this is a key reason why the human brain works the way it does (relying heavily on archetypes and models, for example).
This is called prejudice, it's a method of cognitive efficiency which we have discovered through harsh trials to be a human predilection worthy of significant scrutiny. In modern times we have recognized the risks and costs of unexamined prejudice and have come to the conclusion that in a great many cases it's best to re-evaluate prejudices with extreme criticality and rationality as often and as deeply as human cognitive limits allow. Precisely because, like any shortcut, they have many modes of failure, some of which have dramatically greater downsides than others (up to and including centuries of unimaginably widespread human tragedy).
Given the risks in this realm (climate science, the theory of immediate catastrophic climate change due to human activities that generally form the very foundations of modern industrial economies, and nothing less than the very future of human civilization on Earth) a straining up to the limits of everyone's cognitive abilities rather than a casual reliance on prejudicial and tribal tendencies of the R-complex lizard brain is, was, and continues to be warranted.
Or, to sum up: when the future of humanity is on the line you better get your goddamn science right, no matter how much work it takes.
It's amazing that a person can make the claim that it's ridiculous that there could be any widespread foul play amongst mainstream climate scientists - what are you, some kind of conspiracy nut? Then in the same piece, the person will turn around and point out that it's incredibly obvious that there must be widespread foul play and collusion between oil producers, Saudi Princes, the Republican Party, and Fox News.
How do they do that with a straight face? Climate science is a much smaller, much more unified community with only a few major journals and a generally accepted and favorable political position. Industry, politics, media, and foreign governments have widely different and diverging goals. So they claim it's impossible that the small, similarly backgrounded group with similar goals colludes and you'd be a conspiracy nut for even suggesting that it might be possible. And at the same time, they claim it's incredibly obvious that the large, not unified, competing goals groups are colluding. How the heck do they do that with a straight face?
Actually I referred to the CRU in particular. You know, the source of the emails.
Pointing to share ownership (7%?) by Saudi princes as proof of anything is the scientific equivalent of the boogeyman.
> Climate science is a much smaller, much more unified community
Some might argue that it's easier to collude the smaller the group gets.
My main point is that the so-called Climategate emails demonstrate a failure of the scientific process. Lack of transparency is a huge problem that everyone should be concerned about regardless of their position.
If there is no such reciprocal obligation, I'd be interested in knowing why not, because both of those are documented in the "Climategate" emails and subsequent follow-on investigation. (e.g. The data that Jones threatened to destroy rather than allow to get hit with a Freedom of Information request was indeed requested and is, indeed, beyond recovery.)
For example: evolution. I hope we can all agree that evolution and natural selection form a stunningly successful model of the diversity found in the natural world. This is the position of virtually every biologist and is really only opposed by fundamentalist crazies. Despite this, there have been many mistakes in the history of evolution (for example, the Piltdown Man) that have served to weaken its public credible. However, despite these errors there was never anything fundamentally wrong with the underlying theory.
Scientists make mistakes, for both good reasons and bad. But to use a few isolated incidents to cast aspersions on an entire field suggests that you have already come to a conclusion and are looking for evidence, however tenuous, to support it. Your criticisms are at their heart intellectually vacuous and are not sufficient to cast down decades of research by thousands of very smart, dedicated people.
Refusing to publish data, actively obstructing efforts to get that data, selective sampling and black-box "massaging" of raw data essentially invalidate any conclusion drawn from that data.
The essence of the scientific process is reproducability. Anything that isn't reproducible or at least testable is worthless. Anything built on it is worthless.
It's like some physicist somewhere announcing to the world "I've proven the existence of the Higgs Boson" and then refusing to tell you how he did it.
What it's actually like is doing the 10 to the x repeat of Newton seeing and Apple dropping an from a tree, the apple landing on the foot of a research assistant standing under the tree.
The scientist says, "Ooops, I should have told my research assistant to get out from under the tree."
While Cletus, Sarah Palin, and a few in denial friends go running off to Fox News and announce "I saw Jesus cancel gravity. It's a sign from God."
But when you intentionally and systematically subvert ethics and the scientific method, that's not "a mistake". That's evil.
Does anyone have to open up a lecture about geologic features on Mars with preliminary statement...
"At one point during the Mars data gathering process a probe was programmed wrong with incorrect Imperial/Metric conversions, a probe crashed, and therefore none of the measurements we give of anything on the Mars surface can ever be trusted again."
No.
You have an agenda. Your agenda is to attempt to make facts and opinions carry the same weight in a political debate.
Never gonna happen, cletus.
You attempted to make an analogy between the deliberate destruction of raw data and the metric-Imperial mismatch that caused the failure of the Mars Orbiter mission somehow impugning all data on Mars.
Not equivalent. Not even close. If you don't get that you're either blinded by zealotry or simply lack the capacity to formulate or evaluate logic.
What it's actually like is doing the 10 to the x repeat of Newton seeing and Apple dropping an from a tree, the apple landing on the foot of a research assistant standing under the tree.
The scientist says, "Ooops, I should have told my research assistant to get out from under the tree."
While Cletus, Sarah Palin, and a few in denial friends go running off to Fox News and announce "I saw Jesus cancel gravity. It's a sign from God."
Another tip: your final, ungrammatical paragraph is nothing but an ad hominem attack, and a snarky unsupported one at that. Cheap digs like that won't help you make allies, they just piss people off.
That's like say English language always has proper grammar and spelling. Or that politicians in a democracy always work for the good of the people.
Instead, we should criticize ideas, not people, and point to favorable facts. For example, you could suggest that the Mars example is disanalgous in at least two respects: one, the Mars example involves an honest error rather than actual attempt to defraud, two, the interesting debate in global warming isn't on prospective measurements (which we can do accurately, like you can accurately measure the topology of Mars) but on whether we are drawing the right conclusions from data which has been sliced, diced, and remixed from an error-filled patchwork collection of proxies such as, e.g., a few dozens specimens of a particular type of tree in Russia taken in the 1970s which people believe accurately measure the global climate in 1400 AD.
Check that last line out, incidentally: most listeners are going to perceive it to be mocking because it makes the enterprise sound like something which is being built on foundations of sand. However, it is very difficult to be called a crank for mockery of that nature, because to do that people would have to know paleoclimatology better than you do, and it would take an awfully dab hand at explanation to make paleoclimatology sound like something other than a bad joke.
Name calling is the tool of children and the irrational
Not to mention the embarrassing fact of how many Americans truly believe dinosaurs and cavemen were on the Earth at the same time about 6,500 years ago.
And that's the case even if the climate change argument were a weak one (and it isn't) since the remedies have so many ancillary benefits. In truth, most (though not all) offered solutions should appeal to both deniers and skeptics for reasons having nothing to do with climate.
Yet meaningful action seems impossible.
So we come to this:
If the weight on one side of the teeter-totter is overwhelming,
And yet the teeter-totter won't budge leaving good solutions in the air and stagnation firmly rooted...
Then we must consider that the teeter-totter is broken and/or a new fulcrum is needed.
I'm not trying to be mysterious here. It just seems a good analogy.
In which case, the solution isn't piling on more good arguments...
It's to find out what's wrong with the teeter-totter and get to fixing it.
"we need more efficiency and sustainability, desperately, in order to regain energy independence, improve productivity, erase the huge leverage of hostile foreign petro-powers, reduce pollution, secure our defense, prevent ocean acidification, and ease a vampiric drain on our economy."
I could quibble with some of his colorful language (eg, how desperately?), but the principle seems sound: we would benefit from greater energy efficiency and improvements in alternative energy sources regardless of their effect on global warming. Is there anyone here (either side) who disagrees with this? If so, why?
To an intelligent person who understands the basic principles of the greenhouse effect, the real questions are "How much?" and "How fast?"
My understanding of climate science is that we don't yet have accurate enough models to make anything more than wild estimates of the economic costs of climate change.
Once we do have such data, nobody will care about what David Brin said.
Care to elaborate what your understanding of climate science is?
The first question should be 'is this happening' - skepticism is the default position of science. The onus is to prove a hypothesis, not to disprove it.
I honestly don't ever think I will know whether man-made large scale climate change is happening or not - the IPCC, University of East Anglia, Auckland University, and Al Gore have all made very public mistakes and in some cases have been shown to deliberately manipulate data - all within the last 2 years. Meanwhile I keep hearing other credible sources (the Oxford spokesperson on the BBC) still state that the link between man and climate is still not considered proven. Given these two facts, it's very hard for someone without scientific training to identify the credible sources from the incredible ones, and until I can do so, I remain skeptical as I should.