The Money Behind The Climate Denial Movement (2013)
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
The underlying study and the article also lump all of these organizations into a “climate change denial” movement. That’s totally false. The official position of organizations like Heritage Foundation is not to deny that climate change is happening. Their position is, basically, the potential risks of climate change are overstated and extreme solutions are not worth the cost. That is not a climate denialism position, it’s a costs-and-benefits analysis. The IPCC’s own estimates of the business as usual scenario show modest economic impacts even under a business as usual scenario out to 2100. (Large in absolute terms but relatively small in terms of the total world GDP.)
Is that the impact that occurs up to 2100, or the total future impact that will be unavoidable if we do business as usual until 2100? This sounds a lot like you are saying "if we continue business as usual, the world won't be destroyed before 2100", which might well mean "but it's completely impossible to escape complete destruction until 2150 then".
> The Representative Concentration Pathways 8.5 scenario (RCP8.5), a very high emissions scenario examined by climate scientists, has the Earth’s atmosphere reaching around 1,100ppm by the year 2100. But this would require the world to massively expand coal use and eschew any climate mitigation over the rest of this century.
Also, it’s clearly a “tenable position for life” because temperatures were that high as recently as 55 million years ago, and mammals survived: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150914-when-global-warming-...
The question is can we keep industrial scale food production going? Can we get people enough clean water?
Name another species that can create its own energy, create new materials and cure diseases.
The ones who have contributed the least to climate change will almost certainly suffer the most -- this isn't a matter of whether or not our species will survive, it's a matter of injustice.
Furthermore your claim on "clouds will never form" is plainly wrong, and more likely than not, the opposite of what actually happens in a 8° hotter earth.
Climate change is happening, no real doubt about that, but the mindless apocalyptic claims that are parroted around need to stop, because not only are they wrong, but they also decrease the credibility of actual legitimate claims.
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WGIIAR5-Chap...
> For most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers (medium evidence, high agreement). Changes in population, age, income, technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation, governance, and many other aspects of socioeconomic development will have an impact on the supply and demand of economic goods and services that is large relative to the impact of climate change.
There also have been several points in time where the earth was experiencing mass extinctions and survived those just fine.
Seems to be a very counterproductive way of discussing this.
This is a flat-out false representation. The Heritage Foundation has sown the seeds of denialism many times.
https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/how-the-scientif...
https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/congress-should-... (section titled "climate change realities")
https://www.desmogblog.com/heritage-foundation
Some of the problematic articles are from years ago, you say. Well, where is the retraction? The damage of denialism (and their credibility) has already been done... Redemption would not be trivial.
[1] https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/how-fossil-f...
Stating that the risk of climate change is overstated is denying the risk of climate change. I don't see how you can interpret it any differently. In your own words they are denying the risk of climate change.
Saying that climate change is happening, but that it is not a risk, is the same thing as saying that climate change is not happening. They're just moving goal posts and being mealy mouthed.
Thats what they mean.
I personally think a carbon fee is the best solution but I had to go back and retype tax as fee as that well has been so thoroughly poisoned by people that the average Republican voter think the free market solution is actually a cunning plan to introduce communism.
Plenty of people reject nuclear power. It's not just "the left wing of the climate change movement". "Until 2012, no U.S. nuclear power plant had been authorized to begin construction since the year before TMI."[1]
> rejecting market solutions like carbon taxes
Who's doing that? I've never heard of this. Is this a universally and deeply held opinion among "the left"? Most people I know are in the "let's do something if it's going to work" boat. The other side isn't even at the "let's do something" point yet.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#Eff...
So you classify any form of dissent as "denying"?
1. The earth is warming rapidly.
2. Human CO2 emissions are a primary cause.
3. There will be very significant impacts across the world this century if we don't take serious action. The lives of hundreds of millions of people (if not more) will be radically altered.
4. We have the ability and responsibility to take action and significantly reduce and mitigate future damage.
These points seem pretty non-negotiable to me.
We can also look at the more modest predictions of a 2 to 3 foot sea-level increase. That would still throw the lives of dozens of millions of people into complete chaos. Not to mention the disruption to the economic systems in these coastal areas, and those that flow through those areas.
And this isn't even discussing the actual temperature increases, agricultural issues, floods / droughts, and so on.
Not now, but the official position of, say, the Heritage Foundation has always been the most do-nothing position that they might hope much of the public would accept. As the evidence mounts they have to back off a bit. Let's take a quick trip back in time:
Heritage Foundation in 2010: https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/how-the-scientif...
First sentence of abstract: "The only consensus over the threat of climate change that seems to exist these days is that there is no consensus." (This was not true then any more than it is now, of course.)
Heritage Foundation in 2001: https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/warming-the-trut...
"The human influence on global climate change is small and will be slow to develop." (This was not mainstream science then any more than it is now, of course.)
Heritage Foundation in 1998: https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/no-evidence-...
Title: "No evidence for global warming".
Heritage Foundation in 1992: https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/guide-the-global...
"Question #1: Is the Earth warming as a result of human-caused greenhouse gases or because of natural phenomena? [...] The existing scientific evidence does not give clear answers to these questions."
> An introductory preface to the SAR written by IPCC chairman Bolin and his co-chairs John T. Houghton and L. Gylvan Meira Filho highlighted "that observations suggest 'a discernible human influence on global climate', one of the key findings of this report, adds an important new dimension to discussion of the climate issue."[12]
It wasn’t until 2001 that IPCC took a definitive position that human influence would be the dominant effect on warming going forward: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/07/WG1_TAR_SPM.... (pages 9-11). In that same report, the IPCC took a much milder view on whether human influence had been the dominant contributor to date. They assert that a human “signal” is detectable, but do not assert that the warming to date had primarily resulted from human activity. They also note no impact on, for example, the extent of sea ice. The 2001 Heritage article you posted is probably an optimistic reading of the 2001 IPCC report, but not an unreasonable one.
Of course they’re not going to be out front embracing the impact of climate change. But being slow to accept the evidence as it rolls in is not denialism.
https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/how-the-scientif...
Or the "Climate Change Realities" section from this 2013 article [1]. Let me quote a sentence from it:
> Although there is a near unanimous consensus that the earth has warmed, no consensus exists regarding climate sensitivity, the role CO2 plays with respect to climate change, whether global warming is a problem or a benefit, or how current temperatures fit into the broader climate context.
No consensus on the role of CO2, or whether global warming is a problem or benefit... Words fail me.
[1] https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/congress-should-...
Is CO2 responsible for about 50% of warming since 1850? Or 100%? or more than 100%, but natural variations have masked part of the warming we would have seen?
> whether global warming is a problem or a benefit
Is the warming we've had since 1850 primarily a problem or a benefit (hint: most lay people would say problem, but it has been overwhelmingly beneficial).
The people I know who dismiss climate activism and its acknowledgement don't disagree with the science. They resent people who use climate change as a proxy for another agenda that is unrelated and inconsistent with the needs of reducing human impact on the planet (beyond reducing birth rates in wealthy countries). These activists, whose insistence that everything is connected and systemic, are not interested in solving problems, rather they use this conflation of all things to muddy the waters and place themselves at the centre of it, conveniently gate keeping what policy options are acceptable to talk about.
Climate changes, it's a fact, and humans are impacting it, that is not seriously controversial. What is controversial is freighting the solutions with a destructive, class war agenda designed to leverage a crisis, spread poverty, and centralize governance.
Conservatives are invited to put themselves at the heart of tackling climate change, by proposing policies which can reduce carbon emissions at a fast enough rate without overturning the economic system. I personally think that is the most credible way of tackling the issue.
But first they have to stop denying warming is happening, stop denying the pre-eminent role of greenhouse gases from human civilization, and then propose mechanisms which are credible to tackle the problem.
Such a position does exist in conservative movements, for instance you can see it in the British Conservative party, but it is unusual in the English-speaking world. Most English-speaking conservative leaders have reduced themselves to bringing snowballs into Parliament, or calling climate change a Chinese hoax.
I believe that they can see that reducing carbon emissions is entirely incompatible with their usual line of thoughts and policies. They need either to renounce to their ideology, or deny/minimize climate change.
Competition from China and EU showing it's possible and profitable and voters dying out might flip them surprisingly quickly.
In my experience, it's more a question that whenever action is proposed, they simply claim as an axiom that it those proposing action actually have another agenda.
"You want to introduce tax on carbon emissions? You clearly want big government to control our lives and destroy American industry".
This kind of paranoid thinking is problematic in introducing effective measures.
If we agree on reducing carbon emissions, and using policy tools to do it, there are a lot of solutions that don't require trusting that a carbon tax will be used for anything but general revenue.
Without limits on what the money is used for, it's the same as a progressive VAT/consumption tax, which isn't a necessarily terrible idea if it replaced the current VATs, income and other burdens, but when it's just another largess fund for connected believers, it's a nonconstructive shibboleth for an identity politics agenda.
Someone wrote here the other day on Scissor ideas that some differences of opinion can only be reconciled through power, and it's a seductive idea, but we all know what the alternative to discourse looks like, so I think it's more valuable to support ideas that contribute to preserving it as the means for reconciliation.
There are indeed. Carbon fee and dividend is perhaps the most popular proposal in the world. Under this system the revenue is immediately returned to the general populace, equally on a per-person basis.
Why are you assuming any other kind?
There are values that just don't scale well without trade offs against things like human dignity (loaded, but important), and applying the sentiments behind equity to vastly heterogeneous global interests is one of them.
While I (and my more reactionary and working class friends) understand that carbon taxes presumably compensate The People for the consequences of what was formerly an environmental externality - the use of climate as just a pretext for redistribution signals what gets perceived as an underlying dishonesty and illegitimate elitism that makes it difficult to legitimize the rationale, or outcomes.
For example, basic income funded by indirect taxation is an interesting solution to a specific set of problems around technology and globalization, but it requires a level of trust that has been damaged by freighting climate with these other agendas. Still doable, but to honestly discuss the options requires frank talk about limits and boundaries to its application.
I've got opinions like anyone and I'm not always entirely above point scoring either, so it's going to take real work for people to do it.
Having read things like Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, and watching Scott Alexander's influence, the question of what the fundamental irreconcilable difference of interest may be is the most pressing question. How do we reconcile interests and coexist with people whose most basic beliefs we experience as alien? Some would just say, "win," even independent of political persuasion, but I'd argue there is immensely valuable work to be done to find ways to do better.
So short version, returning carbon tax money to the general populace means general revenue, for general spending, which is not something conservatives tend to trust.
Bring up the idea of taxing carbon - making manufacturing actually pay for the disposal cost of the CO2 they generate and suddenly people pop up talking about: "There are values that just don't scale well without trade offs against things like human dignity".
There's talk of "the use of climate as just a pretext for redistribution signals" and away we go.
This stuff has nothing to do with "is it a good idea to apply market pricing when it comes to dumping waste into the atmosphere?
"it requires a level of trust that has been damaged by freighting climate with these other agendas"
You know who has been doing the freighting? The industries who will do absolutely anything to avoid a rational debate about how we apply a cost to their polluting ways.
> How do we reconcile interests and coexist with people whose most basic beliefs we experience as alien?
Who are these people who basically don't believe the scientific evidence that we are destroying the ecology we rely on?
> which is not something conservatives tend to trust.
Fine - I await with interest conservatives actual proposals for reducing CO2 emissions. But I can't afford to wait too long.
If you stop at "they resent people", I totally agree. The rest of your statement is just one source of resentment.
People hate being preached at, scolded, criticized. And it's not about intent. It's about how the message is received. Something I was very late to realize and have struggled to adapt. (This reply is a good example of my failings.)
--
On the left, someone might be jazzed about a specific narrow local issue, and then try to tie it back to a larger issue. Which is totally legitimate, intellectually, because everything's connected. But it's a terrible persuasion strategy.
I can't speak first hand to conservative activism, having not participated. Though I've read they're more top-down.
What if preservation of the environment is simply incompatible with some political/economic ideology? how are you supposed to propose solutions without challenging the culprit ideology?
The people who have a "class war agenda" are precisely the people trying to reduce the spread of poverty. You may disagree with their methods, but claiming their agenda is "designed to spread poverty" is both false and disingenuous.
Otherwise your points were quite good.
Hold it right there.
Anthropogenic climate change (not just that the earth is warming, but that we are responsible) is a scientific hypothesis. Like all hypotheses, it cannot be proven true, only disproven by contradictory evidence.
Doubt is a critical element in testing any hypothesis. Success by doubters in poking experimental holes in hypotheses is how science moves forward.
When a hole is poked into a widely-held hypotheses, that's the stuff of scientific revolutions. Also, groupthink is a real thing and has exerted a powerful hold over scientists of every generation. For these reasons, widely-held hypotheses should be viewed with some skepticism anyway.
Every scientific hypothesis is "up for debate," and the day that isn't true is the day science dies, replaced by yet another form of tyrannical religion.
It's disturbing to see this kind of talk coming from Smithsonian.
The other side is where scientific debate is happening, the other side injects sponsored misinformation for the public consumption.
The Smithsonian article feeds into that misperception by suggesting that there are "settled" scientific questions.
You could say that in its own way the Smithsonian article has injected misinformation for public consumption. Unfortunately, it is not alone in thinking the ends justify the means when it comes to the question of climate change.
Were someone to perform a study or experiment, any experiment, that cast genuine doubt on the consensus we could have a debate. Few would be naive enough to claim science is perfect or infallible. Models are imperfect, climate is a massive, complex thing with colossal hysteresis. So, Mr X does an experiment that shows that we're mistaken, and mistaken despite the endless stream of record weather events, species loss, arctic melt and so on. Then people can analyse, discuss, try to replicate and so on.
Not remotely what is happening, is it? Endless trope, but obvious sounding to the layman pieces that prove the planet was warmer xx million years ago, the climate is always changing isn't it, or a few mammals survived the K-T extinction, so humans will clearly be perfectly fine now.
That's not debate, that's the tobacco bullshit distraction and obfuscation playbook.
So please, someone, anyone, find some evidence we're all mistaken, then a real debate can commence on the science of the remarkable study with new findings.
Edit: Actually it strikes me that would be a genuinely fascinating debate to read or participate in. How were we mistaken? How could we possibly miss that effect? Why, what are the implications, etc. Rather than the frustration of hearing weak, irrelevant or facile arguments in a new coat of paint over and over.
Actually, I disagree. There's a lot of that happening. You just aren't exposed to it.
You say you'd be genuinely fascinated by a debate about how scientists could be mistaken. OK, let's find out if you mean it. The last debate we had here on this got derailed into a discussion of Conservative party policy. Let's keep it on science this time.
To start, let me say that I'm not a climate skeptic ... yet. I'm not actually sure what I am at the moment. Let's say I'm actually a science skeptic. I think groupthink, bias, corruption and outright incompetence in science is far more widespread than people intuit, and it can distort entire subfields of science. People are starting to realise this in fields like psychology due to the replication crisis but there are problems in many other fields. Now, I wasn't surprised to discover in this comments section that the article was fake propaganda (i.e. "all spending on conservative think tanks for any reason" is "funding denial"). In the past year or so I've dug into climate change skepticism to figure out what they think and why.
Here's what modern climate change skepticism looks like: lots and lots of blogs, with very long entries, consisting of large quantities of data analysis and graphs. If it's professionally funded it sure doesn't look like that. It looks like smart people who know maths and science writing about a field they understand but are outsiders in. They reveal a lot of things from the raw data that are deeply troubling and which I've never read about in the media. I feel strongly I should have read about them there because the concerns are reasonable. I've been able to check some of these claims for myself and found them to be true.
Most troubling to me has been the massive extent to which the global temperature record is now synthetic. Timeseries that once showed the world getting cooler have been fed into ever-more complex algorithms that radically change the entire datasets and any conclusions drawn from them. This article on a skeptic website is one that I double checked for myself:
https://realclimatescience.com/61-fake-data/
It makes a checkable claim - that one of the very few global temperature datasets, the one published by NOAA, comes in "raw" and "adjusted" forms, and that in the adjusted form nearly 60% of all claimed measurements from weather stations are in fact not real measurements at all but the output of a computer model. Additionally the quantity of simulated measurements has shot up massively over time: older temperature data is much less synthetic than the rest of algorithms.
I think here on HN we all know how slippery software can be, so learning this was quite a shock. I couldn't quite believe it in fact but the datasets are public files anyone can download, so I downloaded them and wrote some quick Python scripts to check. The scientists aren't hiding anything: the measurements that are "estimated" using their algorithms are marked with an E in the dataset, just as the skeptic blog claimed, and sure enough, calculating the ratios showed that 1970 for instance only 9% of values were the result of a computer model, but in 2018 it was over 40% and this year is even higher.
Look at this graph to get a sense of the growth of the issue:
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Pe...
And worse, if you take away the output of the models, global warming disappears entirely.
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/US...
Now, NOAA have an explanation for this sort of thing: this sort of heavy adjustment is required because weather stations move around, come and go, readings are taken at different times of day, etc. So the data needs processing and cleaning before it's used. That's fine. I can buy that, at least to some extent. But this did make me curious about the code that's doing this adjustment, not least because I kept encountering climate blogs written by apparently rigorous authors who said certain artifacts made them suspect a software bug was introduced at some point.
So I downloaded NOAA's code to assess the quality of the software - software that appears to be required for the world to show any warming trend at all. I'm a software developer and always have been so I'm confident I can take part in this area of climatology, at least in a trivial way. I'd assumed that given the huge sums spent on research and incredible costs being thrown around for tackling climate change, the software in question would be under heavy development and written to the highest possible standards.
Unfortunately it's not. Global temperature data is the output of programs that look like every programmers worst nightmare: large piles of FORTRAN that trace directly back to 1985, that's been patched every few years in unauditable ways. All variables are global. As you would expect, they all have cryptic names. Functions start with explanations of which global variables are used and which aren't. Version control doesn't exist. There are occasional comments at the top of a function summarising that a change was made, so that's at least something, but are they comprehensive? There are no unit tests. None of it was written by professional software engineers. The algorithms and code are both extremely complicated. Much of it is undocumented. Not surprisingly, there is evidence in the comments of bugs being fixed only after going undetected for decades.
The program can be found here if you're curious:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v3/software/52i/
This is NOAAs code. I mentioned there are only a few global datasets. One of the others comes from the notorious CRU at the University of East Anglia. When they got hacked their code leaked, and it's even worse. The CRU datasets are totally unreproducible: they appear to have asked a scientist to spend a few months on it at some point, and he wrote extensive notes about how frustrated he got:
http://di2.nu/foia/HARRY_READ_ME-20.html
Their code was much the same as above but apparently, much worse documented, and it seems to have suffered from undetected integer overflow bugs.
That's about where I've got up to. So I'd say the skeptics have got me listening in at least one basic way: all global warming theories are rooted in data that comes from a tiny number of people, processed using code that can't possibly have been reviewed by professionals, and those scientists have adjusted the raw data so much that temperature datasets that used to show average cooling (in the USA) now show rapid warming. That needs addressing just on the grounds of basic scientific integrity.
First, are you claiming that weather scientists and forecasters are part of a vast global conspiracy? Seriously? These guys aren't even climate scientists, they are just building more accurate sensor networks and forecasting models. And if you look at the forecasting models running on todays supercomputers they are devastatingly accurate compared to 2 decades ago. So one can guess they are getting it more right, than wrong.
It think to biggest issue here is "normal" people don't understand math or stats.
I work with weather data sets in building simulation, which involves sensors and sensor fusion. First, there is no sensor that doesn't involve algorithms, statistics, or some sort of "data cleaning". Unless you are talking about a glass thermometer visually inspected... and if thats the only "data" you'll accept then we are talking serious luddite tendencies here.
All weather data needs cleaning. There are data drops than need interpolation, sensor stats checks to detect erroneous readings, multi-sensor fusion to make more accurate values. Get real.
Second, if temperature declines across the continental US, as a fast skim of the first link claims to show, that in no way disproves an increase in global temperature. For decades the prediction has always been some areas will get warmer, some might get colder, just as some will dry and others get wetter. Europe has bloody obviously been warming, unmissably so, across the last 40 years. So neither are necessarily in contradiction with global heating.
It might be reasonable for NOAA to bring formal rigour to their software, but MilSpec or Nuclear safety level programming costs. If they're in from the start Unit Tests need not, if they're added after they cost too. That would have budgetary implications. I have no idea how viable funding for a project to improve the software would be - though throughout the software industry rewrites have an ignominious track record. And via a funding source you inexplicably appear to trust least of all. Personally I am much, much more leery of industry research and funding. But that's our previous discussion. :p
Still, having found what you believe are questionable adjustments, you can't just dump the lot and say "dada, see nothing to see, the raw graph shows the opposite!" because we haven't established that all the applied adjustments are incorrect, or actually any of them, yet. You yourself gave a couple of valid reasons why adjustment may be necessary for accuracy, there are many others. For unmanned remote stations, calibration curves may need to change or be refitted as sensors age.
You do neatly identify the point down these rabbit holes where I see bad faith, or intent to mislead - or very poor practice if I wish to be charitable. It's the throwing out of absolutely everything to prove a point and curve on a graph - despite acknowledging there could be multiple good reasons to adjust, or showing that any are mistaken. It's a very simple - to the layman - presentation of "adjusted == fraud", here's the raw, see I can show black is clearly white. It sounds superficially convincing until you dig, even a little.
To close, and expand:
+ You can't just scream "FAKE DATA" and remove the lot, or MCAS would have resulted in all Boeings having no wings (shite analogy, but hey)
+ You audit the data going back
+ you establish which adjustments are questionable and why, and make a credible case as to what the problem is, and the case for discarding.
+ you accept others - for, as you mention, a station that had to move etc. Or is the premise that no adjustment is ever permissible?
+ you present a graph with the suspicious entries only, along with the processed entries with the suspicious removed, you also show the combined curve of all adjusted entries - suspicious and not. Now you can get a feel for extent of error.
+ what you very probably should never do unless your intent is to mislead, is simply present 100% raw data on a graph, as we've already established there are very valid reasons to need to adjust some data.
Were they playing it that way I might have much more time for some of these blogs. Mainly I find they are doing, at some point, the sleight of hand of proving 1=0 we used to amuse ourselves with in maths class.
That really is all I have time for this evening. :)
I can't sum up every possible argument in a HN post, only show that there are problematic signs worthy of further and deeper inspection. That is, skepticism isn't some weird cranky idea. At least some of it is based, at heart, in the question of whether there are mistakes in algorithms or software. That's a totally normal question to ask about any data analysis.
For instance, let's take your audit point. You audit the data going back. In the USA this is somewhat possible. For the HadCRUT dataset it's not, because they lost/destroyed the original raw data, and their computations to clean it up are not reproducible, as the notes about "Harry's" attempts showed quite clearly. That is already a major problem; in effect we're being asked to take the correctness of CRU's data adjustments on faith.
So let's focus on the NOAA dataset. A large amount of it is synthetic, more and more over time. You say we can't just scream "fake data" and remove it, and I agree we can't because that would at this point erase most of the official US temperature record. But ... seriously? You don't find it at all concerning that in the past humanity was apparently capable of measuring temperature with thousands of weather stations across the USA, and now we've apparently lost that ability just when we need it most - forced to rely on 'estimates' generated by computer simulation? The foundation of science is fitting theories to match the data, but here, the data is being generated by the theories. I think anyone who cares about science should care at least about that.
Now, which adjustments are questionable and why - that's a great question and is pretty much where I'm up to in my own research. There are two main strands of alteration: TOB adjustment, and the PHA.
TOB is "time of observation bias". PHA is the pair-wise homogenisation algorithm. There are other adjustments made too: more and more algorithms have been added over time, but those seem to be the two big ones. PHA seems to be involved in the 'estimation' process to fill out or adjust the reported weather station readings.
This graph shows the affect of them split out:
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/US...
As you can see the adjustments have little/no impact today. But they rewrite the past significantly: raw data pre-adjustment doesn't show any warming in the 20th century, the 1940s in particular were as hot as today. TOB adjustment was developed first and pushes down the temperatures in the past, then PHA+extras (what this graph labels "final") was developed later and pushes it down further.
This can be interpreted in a few different ways. One way is that climatologists found that in the past people were consistently bad at measuring temperature accurately, so they process the data to remove the failures and the data is now accurate. Another less charitable interpretation is that the algorithms have the effect of fitting data to match the theory, a form of scientific malpractice that is not unknown in history. To figure out what's going on requires much more analysis.
Note that nothing here requires an evil conspiracy. Climatologists were faced with a huge problem in the 1970s: basic chemical theory said CO2 is a greenhouse gas, we're burning lots of fossil fuels, so the world should be getting warmer. At least if you assume the climate is quite simple. But the raw data didn't show that. It was also messy, filled with glitches and could obviously benefit from some cleaning up before usage. So scientists started trying out various analyses and adjustments, but ultimately they're not comparing against a ground truth. They don't know what the data "should" be except through climate theory, so it would be very easy to end up trying lots of algorithms and ending up selecting the ones that result in "obviously correct" outcomes. Meanwhile the number of people involved in this is very small, they're all colleagues, their income depends on the belief their understanding of the climate is always growing, and it's unclear how you could ever resolve the apparent contradiction between chemical theory and raw thermometer data in a field like climatology. It's not like you can experiment on the Earth.
In other words, there's a big grey area between cleaning up the data and adjusting the data to fit the theory. Did they go into that zone, and if so, did they cross the invisible line? It's subjective, but not obviously impossible.
Anyway back to the analysis. So far I only found an analysis of TOB adjustment. It can be found in the second half of this rather long blog post:
https://realclimatescience.com/erasing-americas-hot-past/
Start reading from "I have new tools". The quick summary is: some weather stations used to be read in the morning and others the afternoon, and this was suspected to need fixing. The author analyses Minnesota because it has a balanced mix of AM/PM stations, and shows the PM stations are indeed consistently reporting about 0.5 C of difference to the AM stations. But then he analyses their coordinates and finds that this is because the PM stations are on average a degree of latitude further south, and that average temperature increases about 1C per degree of latitude, so you would expect such a difference based on location alone. In other words, correcting for location eliminates any difference that could be caused by TOB.
I'm still in the process of checking these claims. I didn't reproduce the graphs yet like I did for the claim of synthetic data. The claim 1 degree of latitude = 1 degree C of warmth appears backed up by this source:
https://www.physics.byu.edu/faculty/christensen/Physics%2013...
So it sounds plausible. If no TOB is observable in Minnesota, why did NOAA scientists conclude it was a necessary adjustment to make everywhere? It's also kind of suspect that this would matter, since random noise should get washed out by the averaging and long term trend analysis.
BTW, you ask do I accept that data has to be adjusted because stations moved. I certainly did at first, when I started looking into this. The deeper I look the more I'm starting to question this. Station moves and upgrades can certainly introduce artifacts into the reading of a single station, but, scientists only really care about global averages. For this to require correction at all would require the effect of moves to be highly correlated.
Final notes on the science.
what you very probably should never do unless your intent is to mislead, is simply present 100% raw data on a graph
That's not the science I was taught! One of the pillars of science is providing your raw data. If there is uncertainty in the measurement that's what error bars are for, and the various statistical techniques for handling uncertainty. Picking data points and excluding others that don't fit the theory is literally "bad science 101".
Also, if climatologists have such severe concerns over the integrity of their raw data that they need to interpolate or synthesise nearly half of all readings, they should be screaming at the top of their voice that nobody should do anything until the global weather station network is in a better shape and that should be their top funding priority. Are they doing this? If so I've never seen any reference to it. We should be seeing more measurements and better data over time, not a decline in the number of trustworthy weather stations (which is what's happening, hence the rise in synthetic data).
To roll back to your parent: "let me say that I'm not a climate skeptic ... yet"
I suspect it's unlikely, or that you would be convinced, but I make just one recommendation. If you haven't read or watched the movie of "Merchants of Doubt", you should as it's both a very revealing and very depressing read. The book has more depth, but the movie is more insightful as you get body language. Via interviews with the notable criminals, and TV clips. Like the fellow with a bloody big grin telling that he couldn't touch Hansen on the science, so took to discrediting him personally and had a good laugh about it. Or Heartland or CATO Institute's, I forget which, entirely scam inverse IPCC report - identical match on look and feel even to number of pages. Except says the opposite. With nary a science degree between the lot of them. Send it to every US representative, claim it's truth.
It's tobacco 2.0, and not limited to climate. Every method, every technique, every claim. From the same PR agencies and bullshit institutes, the same people who claimed there's no link between smoking and health now on TV claiming there's no warming. Then again that there is warming and it's a great thing, we should have more of it! etc. You might even understand why, on balance, I am more leery of industry than academia.
Check it out. Thankfully Europe is not nearly so scary yet. Even in the US leaning UK.
So, specifics:
Moving is probably the lesser cases for data adjustment of what springs to mind. There'll be transcription errors, calibration errors affecting a particular station or sensor, methodology and more general systemic errors, such as sea temperature readings as we discover the ship might have an effect on some methods, or that US Navy logs truncated some historic readings, IIRC rounding down to whole degrees only. I tried to find a link to the Navy story, but that seems thoroughly buried by denial results.
I come back to the very tedious simple question. What is in it for the Met Office to fraudulently and inaccurately rig their dataset? Their entire reputation, and the majority of income, depends on accurate weather and climate forecasts. What matters for their future is that they match with reality, otherwise they lose contracts to those who can match reality. They've made a few famous mistakes over their decades of forecasting too. So no, not perfect.
Then the multiple leaked internal oil company reports, not for public consumption. They have been accurately, surprisingly accurately, predicting effects since the 1950s. Even they have overshot some of the predictions - yet whilst they are claiming rising temperatures, I don't hear claims Exxon and BP are in the pocket of the great global climate conspiracy.
> One of the pillars of science is providing your raw data
Absolutely. Providing raw data set so others can audit and replicate, or find faults. Not presenting as the definitive raw graph to show a gullible public it's not happening at all.
Some things don't need adjusting, others require everything be. Weather recording will be somewhere in between. My only work exposure to sensors via software was liquid pressure sensors many decades ago, and entirely unrelated to climate. Every single reading bar none needed adjusting to fit the unique calibration of that particular sensor. Re-calibration was needed regularly. It was a pain in the ass, as that was a manual "send out an engineer" recalibration.
The blog overlays raw results to show there is no climate effect. Are you seriously claiming they have adequately invalidated every adjustment? Why isn't there a paper to read about in Nature? Presuming they haven't invalidated every last one, that's misleading in the extreme.
I'm perfectly comfortable that someone may find reason to suspect or exclude some data, and some adjustments. In fact I would expect it in every sizeable dataset. All? That better have some compelling basis. There's none. Just claims of fabrication.
So reading from your start point: There looks like reason for suspicion of one localised set of results. Except immediately after he's talking of disproving the hockey stick. Time to stop reading. No point digging for context, or looking to original source.
This is astonishingly well worn ground, and Muller, the instigator of that particular conspiracy theory, famously 100% recanted and has since set up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Earth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy
I'm out.
I did not present the raw and adjusted data to show "there is no climate effect". They were presented to show that the observed climate effect in the 20th century is the result of adjustments to the raw data. This isn't the same argument at all: it merely sets up the next questions of what are these adjustments, why do they have such big effect and are we really sure they're correct, and why does NOAA report simulations as if they were actual measurements? Questions which are then investigated in turn. The answer may turn out to be "the code is correct, the algorithms are justified, the adjusted/synthetic data is more reliable", in which case, no problem. But given the low quality of the process these are questions absolutely worth asking.
Also these analyses aren't the old ones you're referring to from the 90s about medieval times, or even "Climategate" (which wasn't about any specific scientific claims anyway, but the process by which they were being made). This particular strand only focuses on the 20th century, and are recent analyses triggered by the rapid jump in synthetic data points being reported as temperature readings.
So reading from your start point: There looks like reason for suspicion of one localised set of results. Except immediately after he's talking of disproving the hockey stick. Time to stop reading. No point digging for context, or looking to original source.
Again I think you subtly misunderstood the argument.
The argument made wasn't "maybe there's something wrong with the data in Minnesota". That state was just used as an example because it has a good balance of AM/PM stations in the years when the adjustment is the biggest. The argument was that a key adjustment made to the data doesn't appear to be justified in for that state because the difference has an alternative explanation, yet despite decades of adjustments this was never detected? And by extension, maybe all cases where TOB adjustment is applied have these sorts of problems. To know whether TOB adjustment is fundamentally flawed would require more research, and the other adjustments even more, but there is smoke.
Your comparison to liquid pressure sensors doesn't help because in those cases you could measure the ground truth and adjust the sensor to match a pre-calibrated sensor. There's no way to know the ground truth for what temperature really was in Minnesota in the 1930s - all we have are the recorded measurements from those days, by people who thought they already had calibrated sensors. That's why we have to be very careful when playing with the data: we have nothing to calibrate against. The results of any adjustment are uncheckable except via reference to internal consistency and other explanations.
Now your position seems to be that there's really no way to investigate these models climatologists use that you will ever accept, because if the outcome is anything other than "yep, everything is basically correct +- minor changes" then you'd write it off automatically.
I understand that position: life is short, after all. But you shouldn't trash or write off people who are still investigating. As makomk points out elsewhere in this thread, a peer reviewer paper got published in Nature that promoted the current consensus view, but it turned out to be misusing data and maths to make the conclusions sound way more certain than they were. Found by a blogger who has been critical of climate science for a long time. The system doesn't always self correct and outsiders have different incentives to government-funded scientists.
As for the Met Office, of course they aren't directly incentivised to give wrong results. But we know they did before because for years temperature datasets showed a "pause" in warming nobody could explain. That data has now been erased and the latest temperature datasets show no pause ever happened. Where were the mass investigations into that? Look, if the Met Offfice reported wildly different results to the "consensus" then they'd be picking a fight with the rest of the climate establishment, which would be a huge deal for them and put their entire reputation at risk, which is very important to them. In the past I've witnessed the effects of someone claiming there's a consensus of experts supporting their view, in a case when I was deeply involved and knew flat out there wasn't. The effects were terrifying; hundreds of people slowly lost their minds and came to believe things that were clearly nonsense. There actually was no consensus about such ridiculous ideas, just a few people claiming repeatedly there was and a whole lot of social pressure / selective editing on community news channels to make it look like more people agreed with them than really did. It's very easy to see signs of the same things happening here. That's why I want more outsiders and outside scrutiny.
You yourself come across as someone with a genuine curiosity, which is why I've persisted. Yet seem sceptical mainly of government, but not so much of an entirely anonymous and unaccountable blog post. I find that surprising. Particularly when so many of the USA's "independent" voices and are shown to be industry backed.
> The system doesn't always self correct and outsiders have different incentives to government-funded scientists.
That's not in dispute, and applies to all fields. That does not imply fraud. Fraud requires additional evidence than finding an error or ten. That does not imply government funded is the least ethical or least accurate of all. How long were the major security flaws in OpenSSH? How often do we read of a zero day that turns out to have been there for ages, merely unnoticed?
Unqualified political lobbyists have different incentives too - the think tanks, PR agencies and free market institutes who shouldn't be permitted to express opinion, or spin fake alternatives, on active scientific research at all. If you want an outsider who has a vested interest to pollute our quest for knowledge, for the sake of an election or quick buck, they are it. Quite often they are committing deliberate intentional fraud.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/10/vested-i...
I'm going to once again recommend a read or watch of Merchants of Doubt, even if you remain totally unconvinced by then end of it.
Incentives generally apply more in industry where profit encourages the suppression of an inconvenient study, or to engage in fraud to pass emissions tests. The history here is also very well worn, in many industries that adopted the tobacco model, so there's no point replaying it.
I step back here. We both claim to want the same thing: More accurate science and better identification and correction of flaws. There will always be flaws and retractions - that's part of the process. Neither can we introduce rigour into hundred year old measurements if we find some issue much later. Nor can we guarantee that any endeavour involving humans remains free of intentional fraud.
Focusing on government science as constant bugbear weakens your message markedly as in my experience they also have fewer incentives to falsify than industry and politics. Particularly when it is in government interest to downplay the climate crisis as they have done for the last 40 years. Institutes and lobbyists have no incentive or even legal requirement to be truthful. Doesn't mean I find government, any government, entirely trustworthy. Even so the things they fund can be surprisingly successful, and can aim for best practice. I am sceptical of all sources, I am dismissive of political sources, and most sceptical of industry sources. You are never likely to persuade a European to adopt an ingrained US hatred and distrust of government funding in and of itself, that exceeds all other funding sources. All I can say is thankfully our continents must have had very different experiences. Yet I remain sceptical of all sources.
The old HadCrut datasets 1-4 are still available for download. Changes and corrections are documented and explained.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/crutem3/jan_2010_update....
What are that random blog's incentives? Entirely opaque - merely an about page that could be entirely fiction. No proof. No accountability. No corroboration anywhere. I see poor practice in presentation, poor practice in analysis, and I see attempt to take down pretty much the entire field from a skim through the pages - that's not healthy scepticism and correcting error, or advancing knowledge, that's a campaign. An agenda. Even if they do find genuine fault in some areas. From the example given there appears to be a real case to investigate on that particular region. Yet the presentations in the entirety lead me to expect to find cherry picking or sleight of hand, and I just haven't spotted it yet. Wouldn't surprise me in the least to discover "the author" is actually a dozen people inside CATO or Exxon.
I know how _I_ would make a case again some of the results if I felt I had found errors, and it would focus on the specific rather than keep widening to the general at every opportunity. If I were to conclude it widened to generality I would have presented compelling and extraordinary evidence covering the whole generality. I would not just presume it so and yell "fraud". I would encapsulate it to correlate with each set of historic corrections and attempt to show their validity or not. That would also aim to include no judgemental language. I would present it in the best way I could to encourage NOAA or whoever to respond, or investigate my finding to permit correction. Perhaps to discover a year or two later that my investigation prompted some improvement.
Even the takedown of Dr Andrew Wakefield, with his bullshit and actually fraudulent MMR study didn't have others immediately yelling "fraud" on an anonymous unaccountable blog. Others sought to replicate and see if the study stood scrutiny. Still others sought to find fault in his methods. Talk of fraud only came much later as preparation and case was made for him to be struck off. Interesting he is still free to promote and pollute the US with his lies and false medical claims, and earn high on the back of them.
Throwing in emotive words like "fake", "fraudulent" and all the others that imply deliberate intent with no proof of fraud whatsoever, are trying to sway the reader into political opposition. To take their "side". There is no "side". Present the errors, explain the errors, try and get them corrected and better practice in future. We're shooting for accuracy and improving the corpus of knowledge, not standing for election are we not?
Ah, there's the issue. I am now, on balance, convinced that site is not trying to correct careless mistakes, improve accuracy or advance knowledge. It's emotively trying to persuade - truth being secondary, or at best incidental. Even then, they may have found actual issues with some of the readings.
I really can say no more.
I used to have near absolute faith in academic scientists, with much the same reasoning as you: the government pays them merely to do research and doesn't demand any specific outcomes, so they must be less biased than anyone working in industry where there is at least pressure to produce something pleasing for their employer.
Over the years I've read a lot of research papers. Mostly in computer science but sometimes others too. In the past few years I noticed that I tended to be more enthusiastic about reading papers that came out of corporate research labs than pure academic productions. On reflection about why I felt that way, I realised it's because when I thought about the research I'd found most exciting over the years it was usually the research that solved some major (in my eyes) problem in a practical and useful way, and that such papers typically had some corporate email addresses at the top, or were at least collaborations with universities. On the other hand papers that came out of only academia often felt rather useless, trivial or like they were going down blind alleys.
Worse, a very small number of university papers unfortunately were in my eyes outright misleading or appeared to be deliberately deceptive, e.g. making eye-catching claims in the abstract that were undermined or voided by statements right at the end of the paper, or which didn't mention critical details that broke their conclusions. I'm thinking of papers dealing with security technologies I happen to be specialised in. Despite what many would have me believe, my own experience has been that corporate funded research never tried to mislead me in this sort of way, but it's happened multiple times with government funded research.
During the time these feelings were developing the whole replication crisis started. At first it was just a few psychology papers that seemed in trouble. Amy Cuddy was outed as building a speaking career on top of her flawed psychological research. I noticed that despite one of her co-researchers admitting the paper was nonsense in writing and effectively retracting it, Cuddy continued to build up her career on the back of it, aided by journalists who wrote breathless articles about this "inspiring woman", apparently not bothering to spend two minutes Googling her research to check if it replicated. Then more and more papers started getting in trouble. Whole fields of research started to disappear. Nutrition turned out to be riven with fake findings. I learned that venture capitalists avoid investing in biotech firms because of an open secret: that around half of all published microbiology papers coming out of academia didn't replicate. Earlier this year I read https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-rev... which showed how psychiatric researchers investigated the gene 5-HTTLP for decades, published over 400 papers on their "discoveries", and then they all collapsed at once because a single paper showed that the gene couldn't possibly have the claimed effects. Literally that entire area of research was the result of misuse of statistics.
John P Ioannadis published a meta-study that appeared to show "why most published research findings are false":
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
This paper is not the result of some kind of weird cranko blogger. As far as I know, the paper had huge impact and kicked off the current replication movement in a few subfields (by no means all of them).
I did some of my own research into an economics paper that was being used to make suspicious claims on a topic I was an expert in. It had got picked up by major global newspapers, but on reading the paper I discovered grotesque amounts of scientific fraud. Then I discovered that the Chief Economist of the World Bank had been sounding the alarm about research malpractice and bogus papers in economics for years: his reward for blowing the whistle was to be fired.
Finally, there was this paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4816570/
It basically destroys every area of science based on doing small-scale experiments (where "small scales" means fewer than thousands of participants, i.e. nearly all of them). At a stroke that one paper wipes out huge areas of what we thought was "knowledge".
Now we see climatologists editing their data sets in such a way that the results always fit their theories. I was taught at school that adjusting theories to fit the data is science 101, that you handle uncertainty with error bars and statistics. But that entire principle has been thrown out with barely a sound. How did all this happen, and what else isn't obvious about how science happens in the real world?
The problem is that government funded academics are not free of incentives or bias, as I had once assumed. Yes, the government doesn't tell them what to find. But academics are just as strongly incentivised as any corporate-funded researcher, namely, they're incentivised to find things that are interesting. That is so vague it doesn't sound problematic, but it is. Researchers who fail to find things that are interesting don't get published and thus "perish", to use the well worn aphorism about academic success.
What defines interesting, exactly? Anything eyecatching or novel counts. Replications mostly don't. This is how psychology and biotech got into such a mess.
What defines eyecatching or novel? Anything your peers like. Who are your peers? More academics, with the same incentives. Please them and you'll be rewarded with grants, jobs and funding. Displease them and unless you win the argument so comprehensively there's no doubt possible at all, there will be no reward. You can't do what businessmen do and prove you're right via market success.
The least pleasing thing you can publish is evidence that nobody understands the field of study you're in. If the results of your research is "an economy is too complex to model at this time", or "the climate does not behave like our theories say but there are no other theories" then this is a dead end for an academic career.
The entire system is circular. I find corporate funded research into computer science more exciting than academic research because so much academic research has gone off into the weeds and never came back. Corporate researchers do, at some point, have to justify to their managers why their research has some sort of practical utility even if it might be quite long term. Their findings are integrated into products that just won't work if the research is bogus. Academics are never tested in this way. With no ground truth to anchor them it's easy for entire fields of science to spin off into a groupthink dominated la-la land, in which pleasing your colleagues preconceptions is much more important to your success than actually establishing the truth. Outsiders are the only people who can bring them back.
That's why I want to see more oil companies funding research. I want to see GM food companies funding research into GM foods. I don't believe anymore that they're more biased than academics, they just have different biases, but in the end they're still writing papers and making claims that anyone should be able to check. Academics should not be destroying raw data and forcing outsiders to use millions of FOIA requests in order to check their work. They should be welcoming such scrutiny from whoever gives it and especially from outsiders who have different things to lose - just as they would expect corporate funded science to be subject to their own scrutiny in turn.
> I used to have near absolute faith in academic scientists, with much the same reasoning as you
If I had to summarise my position today from my particular life experience it would be "trust no one". Especially politics and commerce, but including lawyers, doctors and academia and the rest. It rather unavoidably goes with human endeavour.
Most of my career has been in corporations. That's included some time as founder.
That has not taught me to prefer commerce, but to deeply mistrust it. The non-technical CEO or manager who requires some negative activity, or to not mention that our product is entirely unsuitable for the large sales prospect. The IBM or HP consultant presented as field expert, costing hundreds per hour, that over lunch turns out spent only one week on a training course. Last week in fact. Their only exposure to that niche.
Elizabeth Holmes conducting a personal visibility campaign selling snake oil. Bayer and heroin - the non addictive pain killer. Asbestos - the universal and entirely safe substance.
I could go on all day with the fraudulent, but then there's the inconvenient.
Sure GM companies have great research into GM. Then solely publish the studies that favour continued sale of their product. Maybe there are 30x more studies in their filing cabinets that show up the major danger. They stay in the archive, never published. No one knows they exist. Mention them and you are in breach of your NDA and contract of employment.
With luck, like tobacco, they might leak over the coming decades. So we only ever find out the negative far, far too late. or after regulator (that USA has tried to mostly gut), or academic (that the entire world has pushed nearer and nearer commercial intent)
That's also circular. With far stronger incentives to fraud. Fraud, fighting to ruin something that works and partial information appears to be the regular, day to day normality of commerce.
Which is probably a fit place to mention economics. Until the US deconstructed Bretton Woods and abandoned the gold standard, kicking off the inflation of the seventies, the groupthink was Keynesian. Though just about no government was actually Keynesian, most having adopted the obvious bits and completely ignored the challenging bits - that were the parts intended to compensate for the excess.
Come 1980 and we've moving into the groupthink of Friedman and Hayek. Less economics more extremist politics with a veneer of economics - particularly Friedman. Once again, just about no government is properly Hayekian adopting the convenient "free money" parts. The fact that both were far into political, or specifically irrational phobia of Communism in every corner, opinion ruins their economic credentials.
So someone trying to get an economic education can only get the groupthink. Just about none of the economics, or far more dangerous, Philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) courses that all modern politicians seek present the other economic models.
So bullshit all around us, but I find from my career, hearing of everyone else's career, and all I have read and experienced that the strongest negative incentives - to scientific honesty - come from corporations. If we had some trustworthy way to require research be declared before start, and results published to all, you would probably be right. As they frequently do indeed do the best research. They just never publicise the negative.
This is true, but not helpful, because it's a framework that treats all probabilities except 0 and 1 as equivalently vague. Anthropogenic climate change > 1℃ is extremely likely, 99%+ probability. It could be wrong, but it's not useful skepticism to just say "it could be wrong" about everything. The IPCC is putting out good probabilistic forecasts. Scientists are doing the work of testing the hypothesis. As new evidence comes out, we should respond to it. In the present, we have to act using the probabilities we have.
I don't know if you consider chemistry a real science, but my employer makes decisions based on probabilities less certain than 99% every day! We accept that sometimes we will be wrong, and plan so we can tolerate that too. This is how you use science in the real world.
Just because Einstein unseated Newton, apples didn’t stop falling from trees. Similarly, if climate science evolves it’s pretty unlikely at this point that we’ll find that human generated CO2 isn’t warming the planet — the macro effects are pretty well understood at this point.
Let’s not conflate science with bad-faith denialism.
Suppose I form a scientific hypotheses P. By your claim it cannot be proven true, just disproven later on with new evidence. That is, P is not probable, but ~P is.
Then, later, I form a second scientific hypotheses which happens to be the negation of the first: ~P. Again by your claim, ~P is unprovable but its negation, P can be proven.
This is a contradiction, either P can be proven or it can't.
I think you're actually talking about a scientific theory, which can not be proven true but which can--as evidence comes to light--be shown to be less useful than alternatives and therefore not fit for maintenance (which is not the same as being false).
The trouble with climate science is a separate one. Causation can not be separated from correlation without experiment. Experiment requires both a control variable and an experimental variable--but we only have one Earth to dick around with, so there are no experiments available which will generate a definitive causal argument for cause regarding the global climate.
Rather than arguing about whether there is cause (behavior that the Smithsonian rightly dislikes), I think that we should instead accept that the cause question is unknowable and focus instead on how we as a global culture intend to gamble on it. The debate would focus on similar issues, but be couched in different terms and I think there would be less digging in of heels.
I'd say that the Smithsonian, like most advocates of scientific authority, appears to be more worried about being right about P vs ~P, and less concerned about moving stasis forward so we can actually make the best gamble that we can.
Yes, in science. Not in policy.
The minute some scientist goes on TV or some podcast targeting a general audience, they try to shape public opinion instead of furthering academic knowledge. At that point they have to be aware of societal consequences, even if they "just present data".
A little bit of warming seems certain; the catastrophic scenarios, not so certain.
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/06/epistemic-caution-and-...
Reducing fossil fuel use is still the prudent thing to do, of course.
Are you accusing all cliamte scientists of fraud?
At one point, it was common for exasperated speakers to claim “there’s no point discussing it further; the science is settled”. Which is about the least scientific thing that could ever be said.
Ever had a conversation with someone who didn't believe in evolution.
Get ready to discuss at length why it being the "theory" of evolution means even scientists know it's less credible than the "law" of gravity.
It's easy to share truths that only know nothings would believe so your opponent knows 78 of them. Debunking them will require knowledge of 17 fields and taking a week to debate the matter
Bad comparisons aside, it should tell you they (we) trust our data and conclusions enough to panic. Someone in it for just the money wouldn't do that, someone inflating the importance of the issue for grant money wouldn't either.
(And the argument about doing that to keep a job is ridiculous, as if no other jobs existed that would either pay far more money or would be similarly interesting and important.)
And of course you have more moderates that only go to the Fridays for Future protests and give talks etc.
Two things to learn from the book:
1) The are same people and organizations behind many science related denials: DDT, tobacco, SDI defenders, acid rain, ozone hole, and climate change denial are linked to same group of people. They try to "maintain the controversy" and "keep the debate alive".
2) The usual suspects don't do this just for the money. Sure, they take money from business sponsors, but the merchants of doubt themselves are not purely cynical operatives and money grabbers. There is type of Manichaean paranoia and ideology behind it. It's related to cold war mentality and free market fundamentalism.
George C. Marshall Institute (GMI) was one of the centers of this ideology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_C._Marshall_Institute
Correction: Union -> United
1) Bush v. Gore 2000: only time the court ever issued a decision, knowing that it was totally vaporous, and said this should not be used as future precedent. The entire point of the court is to set precedent.
2) Citizens United: continuing the notion that companies deserve as much protection as people.
Pair those together and it becomes hard to claim that the US is a democracy at all. The court has some other notoriously bad decisions, but I hope they eventually come down on the side of democracy in regards to gerrymandering, despite the recent rulings.
You’re being disingenuous to say the least.
Edit: btw I am not a lawyer, and so this is of course my lay persons opinion.
It was.
> But that case was about campaign finance and the ability to control how much money, spending, etc., could be used in an election.
It wasn't.
The law in question in CU banned corporations (including non-profit corporations) and unions from paying for any broadcast, cable, or satellite communication that mentions a candidate within 60 days of a general election of 30 days of a primary.
A non-profit wanted to air a film critical of a candidate. They were prohibited by that law from buying air time to show to their film, or even from buying ads advertising the availability of the film. They sued to overturn the law.
The case did not involve nor did the ruling change the law on campaign finance.
> The case did not involve nor did the ruling change the law on campaign finance.
You’re right. And I was inaccurate. What we’re discussing is the rise and unregulated use of PACs and Super PACs to influence elections.
This is an issue for fair elections and democracy.
Ultamist positions (NRA, ACLU, BBV) are useful thought experiments, defining the boundaries. To better understand the problem domain. And utterly impractical.
Any idea taken to its logical extreme becomes its own opposite, highlighting the absurdity.
Freedom Speeches™, like Freedom Markets™, reject compromise, deny the existence of other concerns, eschew balance. They're terrible policies for actual governance. Toxic.
As we now see.
I can kinda understand how someone lacking any sense of balance, nuance, history could support Freedom Speeches™. That money is speech, and more money means more freedom, booyah. Some people are just wired to believe that might makes right.
But believing that corporations have the same rights, but none of the pesky responsibilities & obligations, as natural persons really is just misanthropic.
However, what we are suffering from as a species at the moment is more related to what Bertrand Russell described as:
“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt.”
The article was retracted, followed by the underlying study. One of those pesky members of the climate denial movement spotted that they'd messed up their calculations, and the authors basically copped to this. This shouldn't have been necessary. They were using a bizarre, indirect method to try and estimate something we'd already measured directly, and got an answer that contradicted that existing measurement. The first assumption should've been that their method was wrong and it should've taken a hell of a lot of evidence to overcome it, but there's such a strong bias towards claims of climate doom that it got a spot in Nature and uncritical regurgitation in the global press instead. (Part of the problem is that Nature has a general bias towards shocking, novel claims that leads to them publishing dubious work, but it's hard to imagine them being so gung-ho about work leaning in the opposite direction.)
Naturally, most people who read the existing coverage will never see the retractions and will continue to be influenced by the now-retracted claim.
The climate denial movement never budges a nanometer on any of its points. The scientific movement admits its mistakes and errors.
And yes, there's dispute in small details of the matter. The grander narrative has been clear since the 19th century. No, not a typo. Not since the 20th, but the 19th.
Suppose for a moment that the scientists hadn't budged. That they'd listened to all the folks who say that climate change deniers are simply liars who aren't worth listening to and not even bothered to look at their complaints. Who would you believe - the Nature-published scientists or the evil climate denial movement? Because unless you'd be willing to believe the deniers over the mainstream scientific community, it seems like we're in unfalsifiable territory here, where if the mainstream scientists admit they're wrong it proves they're right, and if they don't it also proves they're right.
Science, as a process, is a process at arriving at truths. It's fundamentally dialectic, as opposed to rhetorical, the profession practiced by many around the denial movement, several in this thread.
Naomi Oreskes' name has already been mentioned here. In addition to writing on climate (and ozone/CFCs, tobacco, lead, asbestos, etc., etc., etc.) denial, she's written on the history of one of the more amazing feats of collective mind-changing in science: the adoption of the theory of plate tectonics, or continental drift, as it was first called.
When proposed, the theory was ridiculed as completely crackpot. But what happened was that more and more evidence, and mechanisms, turned up. And, yes, over the course of about a half century, many of the original objectors died. But from roughly 1915 to 1965, established views changed from believing that the continents had always occupied their current positions to the understanding that they very much had not.
Geography, geology, fossils, radioactive decay (as both heat source and clock), undersea surveys, earthquake faults, seismic analysis. The preponderance of evidence changed minds.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/plate-tectonics-an-insiders-h...
https://www.worldcat.org/title/rejection-of-continental-drif...
It ain’t just the right, the center have their own propaganda-like think tanks that work closely with the DNC.
But, we are in a post-fact era. Expect this to get much worse.
And I was enlightened.
Meanwhile the Dems are off cancelling all of the waste repository projects (yucca mountain) and then turning around and complaining about all of the dangerous radioactive waste sitting around the country.
This isn't a Burger King.
Adds billions in loan guarantees to build nuclear plants https://www.apnews.com/38189fb0550e401da6b339ad9870a007
Signs NEICA https://www.energy.gov/articles/president-trump-signs-bill-b...
Republican bill NELA https://www.energy.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2019/3/murkow...
The remaining problems are local/social ones. We need the left to tell the Sierra club and their ilk not to sue every potential nuclear plant into oblivion. Hollywood largely owns the culture, we need them to make pro-nuclear media to help alleviate NIMBYism. The environment is not the GOP's issue. They GOP supports nuclear but without it they will happily keep burning coal. Nobody made the claim that nuclear power was a top priority for Republicans, the claim is that Republicans largely support nuclear and are going to keep burning coal while politely waiting for the Democrats to come around to the only real viable clean grid energy solution.
The billions in loan guarantees in your first link was additional funding for a nuclear reactor approved by the Government in 2012, during a Democratic administration.
The NEICA was co-sponsored by 4 Republicans and 3 Democrats in the Senate. [2] It passed both houses in a bi-partisan manner.
The "Republican bill NELA" has 11 Republican co-sponsors and 9 Democratic co-sponsors. [3]
This all seems pretty bi-partisan to me, not sure where you got the idea that Republicans are "politely waiting for Democrats to come around." If that were true, they wouldn't be co-sponsoring and voting for the legislation you mentioned.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/energy/10-states-run-nuclea...
[2] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/97/...
[3] https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/903...
>Republicans (65%) are more likely than Democrats (42%) to favor the use of nuclear power throughout Gallup's trend dating back to 1994.
Democrats are now starting to come around. But Republicans have been in favor of nuclear since before you even heard of climate change.
It’s ok to admit that something isn’t R or D. Republicans support oil and coal most, Dems support wind and solar most, both support nuclear. The Gallup analysis itself talks about the cost of other energy sources playing a part in the perception. As solar, natural gas and oil have become cheaper, expensive nuclear plants have become less popular. Your link about the Georgia plant says it is years behind schedule and costs have doubled, maybe Democrats see that as fiscally irresponsible and that’s why they don’t support it as much. Either way, this simple poll can’t answer those questions and actual legislation tells its own story.
Also, legislation isn't the only part of the story, so are lawsuits. Do you think environmentalist groups like the Sierra club who have a history of burying efforts to build plants in lawsuits are more closely associated with Democrats or Republicans?
Trying to boil everything down to a yes/no or left/right issue leads to this type of back and forth. Issues have many sides and multiple nuances, it’s ok to admit that.
>Republicans (65%) are more likely than Democrats (42%) to favor the use of nuclear power. Republicans typically have been more supportive of nuclear energy throughout Gallup's trend dating back to 1994.
It's true Republicans aren't as hung up specifically on CO2, but Republicans have been largely in support of nuclear since before you ever heard the phrase "climate change." If we had listened to Republicans back when it was just "clean air" we'd be in a much better position.
Adds billions in loan guarantees to build nuclear plants https://www.apnews.com/38189fb0550e401da6b339ad9870a007
Signs NEICA https://www.energy.gov/articles/president-trump-signs-bill-b...
Republican bill NELA https://www.energy.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2019/3/murkow...
But your post above very much makes it sound like the GOP is actively trying to fight climate change through nuclear power, and those darn Dems just won't let them. But since attaining power in 2016 the GOP environmental position looks to have mostly been gutting the EPA, rolling back regulations, and braying about bringing back coal ("clean air" indeed!). From here it looks like the GOP is just utterly indifferent towards climate change or the environment and extremely pro-fossil fuel; any interest in nuclear they might have doesn't appear to have much to do at all with it being a path towards clean energy.
I went out of my way to say that Republicans aren't all that concerned about CO2. So you are just reading something into my comment that isn't there. Honestly it just seems like you're unwilling or unable to see nuance. You couldn't see it in my post and you can't see it in the Republican position of simply having a different idea about how to balance strong economies and environmental concerns, both of which save human lives and improve quality of life. I mean, who do you think is digging up all that coal in Appalachia? Do you think it's a bunch of Democrats getting black lung to keep the power running? Do you really think you have anything to tell them about how dangerous it is?
But at the end of the day, none of that matters. The only thing that matters is that nuclear is the only viable solution for clean grid power and Republicans support it while Democrats don't. If you want to get into the weeds about why they support it or how they're wrong about other issues or even details on this issue, then have at it. I think it's a waste of time personally.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/4/23/1850729...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/248048/years-three-mile-island-...
>Republicans (65%) are more likely than Democrats (42%) to favor the use of nuclear power.
If you look to see who funds climate change advocacy I expect you'll find governments doing most of it, with various ngo's doing most of the rest. Look at the ngo's and you'll find maybe soros or gates as prominent, but I don't think there will be much concentration: the environment movement is a real popular movement, not astroturf.
Meanwhile, this has nothing to do with "saving the world", only with the sovereign debt crisis. United States, EU and Japan are dead broke, they will try every ploy to raise taxes and steal from the "evil rich people", even if it means ending the Western Civilization.
The real question is, are these really the people you want in control?
Cost a few thousand dollars, and a few hundred every few years to have them come and pump the tank.
I pay Amazon ~$10 a month for access to more reading, listening and video content than most major university libraries have access too.
No late fees either.
Of course sewage is better handled at the municipality level in dense areas, and I'm not okay with private firms having control over access to information, but Federal level governments are highly inefficient.
If one has 12-48k to pay rent this year a few hundred for a machine, about 1k for internet access then one can pay 10 a month to access a worse collection a homeless man could check out at the library.
Access to the rest of human knowledge is available for 10 to 100 a pop.
Or ~$1.50 a day. And you get the rest of the internets knowledge included.
No hours of operation, no librarians giving you dirty looks
And human beings, in my experience, can be lazy, venal, honourable or hardworking, in both the private and the government sector. But the last time I checked, the private sector only cared about the people with money, whereas the government is required to care about everybody.
But the public at large, politicians, and most business interest desire the comfort of facts, so people have a tendency to want to believe things are more settled and concrete than they may actually be.
I am grateful, by contrast, that my med school professors frequently declared “ten years from now, perhaps half of what we’re teaching you today will have been proven incorrect”. While half is an exaggeration, I’ve certainly been astonished at how much has changed so dramatically in such a short time.
Of course we just have to do the best we can with what we know at any particular time. So if the climate consensus is pointing one way, by all means let’s follow the bread crumbs. But overconfidence can be a dangerous comfort.
In Germany energy taxes + VAT make up more than 50% of the price of gasoline and this has been the case for decades. If we switch to 100% electric cars then the government will lose 10% of its tax income. This is a strong motivation to avoid transportation policies that are good for the environment.
The government can tax whatever it wants, there is no reason why electric cars couldn’t generate the same tax receipts.
[0] 'The Prize', Yergin
Smart energy companies that produce less CO2 are definitely funding the other side. The Natural Gas folks, for instance, generate less CO2 than the coal companies (per BTU) and so, naturally, they're fueling the protest fires. Nuclear emits hardly any CO2 and so they're very anti-CO2. And certainly the wind and solar companies have everything to gain by sticking it to the fossil fuelers.
Here's one link, perhaps biased, but still informative. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/28...
https://reneweconomy.com.au/australia-get-stupid-clean-energ...
No it's not. It's very much a thing in Europe too.
Climate change is supported by evidence and we humans are the cause. The situation is worse than we ever imagined. It is an existential crisis, which must be mitigated. If we don't do something major and do it soon, extinction of much of life on earth will be the result. In fact, we may already be too late to be able to take actions to avert collapse.
Climate deniers are irresponsible, distracting, and amoral. They don't seem to understand how science is done and how scientific knowledge is created. They are well funded, apparently by the same cabal of folks that protected tobacco companies and blessed clean coal.
It is true that Global Climate and its various drivers is not well understood, yet we persist in under-funding research. We have too little data, too few people working on the problem, and no organization with global reach and global authority coordinating things, setting rules, and running things. Decisions about mitigation need to be based on rational analysis and not on political, economic, or social grounds. Some decisions and actions will necessarily be unpopular.
I too like what Eric Weinstein said about climate change:
">The fact that we do not have much historical data and good verifiable models to understand how the planet climate behaves under large changes in parameters (CO2 emission, etc.) makes it even more important and urgent to act. We never know at what moment the system will cross the threshold, and damage becomes irreversible, and planet destruction accelerates."
We are already in regimes which are outside historical experience and data, that is, in uncharted territory.
Personally, I think it may all be over and that everything will collapse sometime between 2030 and 2050 while everyone is sitting around denying that there is any problem.
This tells me one thing: the current plan is that we are going to extract and burn every last drop of fossil fuels everywhere in the world. That is, whatever anybody says, the current plan.
"He has published more than 200 scientific papers and books. From 1983[1] until his retirement in 2013, he was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[2] He was a lead author of Chapter 7, "Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks," of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Third Assessment Report on climate change. He has criticized the scientific consensus about climate change[3] and what he has called "climate alarmism."[4]"
I know how unpopular this comment will be in some circles, but I feel I have to say it anyway: Anthropogenic climate change is not a “scientific fact”. It is a theory, and (to the best of my knowledge) an untestable one at that.
I believe in anthropogenic climate change, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to abandon the scientific method and intellectual honesty in some desperate attempt to convince others of this. I fear a world without truth and science more than I fear one a few degrees warmer.
Anthropogenic climate change unfortunately lacks those two advantages.
It is absolutely a scientific fact.
>and (to the best of my knowledge) an untestable one at that
You have no knowledge, so little it's hard to believe that you've in good faith ever looked it up. Foundation: the Earth is an open system, with the Sun providing the primary energy input and radiation into space being the thermal sink. The average energy of the atmosphere depends on the balance point between those. If all/most of the energy was trapped, temperature would skyrocket towards Venus levels. With little to none trapped (or all reflected) the atmosphere would freeze out. In between is a dynamic equilibrium. "Climate" and "weather" happens because thermal input is not even, which results an enormous heat engine that redistributes energy around the globe. The equilibrium point can be shifted by retaining more energy, or not.
The anthropogenic climate change overview comes down to three basic questions:
1. Is CO2 a greenhouse gas? The answer to this is yes. Most of the energy input from the Sun is in the visible part of the spectrum. Some is reflected outright, some used by vegetation for work, and around half is absorbed and then re-radiated in the IR part of the spectrum. CO2 absorbs light in the 2.7, 4.3, and 15 micrometer bands which makes it a strong IR absorber. You can verify this with an infrared spectrophotometer, or inversely by looking at the emission spectrum. This isn't cutting edge tech, spectral data has been a heavily used tool in a range of science for a long time now.
2. Is CO2 concentration increasing? Also yes. Like, we can just measure this directly and have directly for decades. We don't need to go back any further for the purposes of establishing global warming, because we already know increasing the greenhouse effect will warm things up. Though measures like air trapped in bubbles in ice at the poles can give us concentrations farther back too.
3. Is the increase in CO2 due to humans? A final and also unambiguous yes. Carbon, like other elements, has multiple isotopes. Only C-12 and C-13 are stable, with the ratio between them fixed overall on Earth. However, plants preferentially use the lighter isotope, in turn being consumed by other creatures, and as fossil fuels come from organic life they have a different C13/C12 ratio than inorganic carbon sources. Isotope geo and atmospheric chemistry has let us analyze and track the ratio over significant time, both directly in modern times and going back a significant period via tree rings. The C13/C12 ratio dropped dramatically starting in about 1850, along the industrial revolution, and has fallen ever since. The extra carbon in the atmosphere is therefor coming overwhelmingly from organic sources, primarily fossil fuels [1].
And that's really all there is to it at a basic level. CO2 traps heat. There is more of it. And it's due to us. Now, high precision predictions for exactly what the effects of energizing the atmosphere with far more heat will be for any given area and time are very hard. But the overall basis for anthropogenic global warming is not.
>I know how unpopular this comment will be in some circles
It's unpopular because it's fucking stupid. Willfully stupid. You are not an oppressed brave rebel speaking truth to The Man. You are just mindless repeating trivially disproved crap.
Edited to add:
1: Incidentally, primary source is fossil fuels because it's both a huge net change so mere regular biological cycles isn't enough, and because the C-14 ratio dropped too. C14 is an unstable isotope with a half-life of about 5730 years, generated constantly by cosmic ray bombardment in the atmosphere. The process to produce fossil fuels takes so long that only infinitesimal amounts of C14 remains, so burning them lowers the C14 ratio as well. This is the same principle for what it's worth behind radiocarbon dating.
Though it doesn't really matter in this question because even if it was due to mass deforestation caused by humans say, or toxic waste killing marine life or whatever, that'd still be anthropogenic. It's been well studied, like every other aspect of this. If you have any basic questions as a layman about this field, it is highly probable they already have been answered.
I have no issue with your three points. In fact this simple energy balance model is the primary reason I believe in anthropogenic climate change.
But your claim that the three points in combination makes anthropogenic climate change a “scientific fact” is... just unscientific. How can you know what the climate would have been like had there not been any human activity?
It reflects that this is as certain as literally anything else in science, and that you are actively aiding in hurting people. It is reasonable to be irritated about that.
>But your claim that the three points in combination makes anthropogenic climate change a “scientific fact” is... just unscientific.
No. WTF? Are you some post-modernist who thinks all reality is subjective or something? CO2 traps heat. There is rapidly rising CO2. It is due to humans. And it is causing the temperature to go up. This will change the climate. That's the definition of scientific fact.
>How can you know what the climate would have been like had there not been any human activity?
Are you proposing that all the fossil fuels we've burned would have spontaneously migrated up through bedrock and combusted themselves? Because if not than without human activity they'd still be down there, there wouldn't be any of that CO2 in the atmosphere, which means that extra heat wouldn't be trapped, which means the world wouldn't be warming in the same way.
In fact there is far more well established scientific knowledge about that counterfactual based on analysis of solar cycles and so on, and you could bother yourself to go research it if you were really interested instead of smugly proclaiming that everyone else is wrong based on your "feelings". But none of that is relevant to the question of whether anthropogenic global warming is scientific fact and whether pumping tons more energy into the atmosphere will result in "climate changing".
> Multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.
If your definition is so narrow that it has no causal claim (as in “warming trend is due to human activities”), then by all means: call it a collection of disparate scientific facts. I have no issue with that.
1. https://www.google.se/amp/s/climate.nasa.gov/scientific-cons...
"It is likely that we are experiencing some global warming which is likely to get worse in the future, and it is likely to be man-made by emitting some greenhouse gases, mainly CO2 and methane, into the atmosphere, and if so we should curb these emissions to avoid some bad long term consequences, but even if that is a mistake, it is a good idea to scare people with because curbing these emissions also makes life of those damn Commies, that pesky Middle East, and many other sthole countries that hate us, worse, and limit their resources which they use to harm us, so good idea to do even the theory behind it proves wrong. Those liberals aren't going to go for that to fight Commies, but they will if you scare them with some made up stuff like dying corals or flooding islands, well enough".
That's the end of the conversation then, I guess. To bad.
Billionaires fund Extinction Rebellion...oh, virtuous enlightened billionaires, so smart, so moral.
https://freebeacon.com/issues/climate-change-reporting-websi...
Having said that, Freeman Dyson also seems to share this opinion, and I think it carries some weight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiKfWdXXfIs. Another article also says the same: https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/09/a-clim...
The later link also highlights an important aspect from IPCC's report: "In climate research and modelling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. (Chapter 14, Section 14.2.2.2.)]"
Whatever I know about modeling and Lorenz's theories, I do think long-term climate predication is impossible given our current models. Is that denial? Certainly not, and I am open to change my mind as models become more accurate and more data is avaiable.
Till then I would not want my wallet to be lighter in the name of carbon taxes, please.
Culture is not just influenced by scientific thought rather a lot of narrative based on emotion. Think how we are fighting LGBTQ+ and gender wars, when poverty is nowhere on any agenda!
BTW, I do not respond with position convenient for upvotes (a mentality I largely notice in the HN crowd), and it does not matter to me if the thread gets votes or not. I actually think these votes create perverse incentives that stiffle debate.
To argue that inherent complexity means we should remain in a state of inaction is in itself a form of denialism. The fact that it is difficult to make predictions about chaotic systems does not mean that the null hypothesis is automatically true.
Additionally, I do not see anyone arguing a moderate position on legislation, which logically follows, considering the data may be wrong. Action based on potentially incorrect data is as big a problem as much as the null hypothesis you define. I am hard pressed to see a legislation that talks about reducing materialistic consumption, or living frugal, but we are very interested in increasing taxes. No?