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Engaging With Climate Skeptics
In the wake of the CRU "climategate" leak, reader Geoffrey.landis sends along a New York Times blog profile of Judith Curry, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech. "Curry — unlike many climate scientists — does not simply dismiss the arguments of 'climate skeptics,' but attempts to engage them in dialogue. She can, as well, be rather pointed in criticizing her colleagues, as in a post on the skeptic site climateaudit where she argues for greater transparency for climate data and calculations (mirrored here). In this post she makes a point that tribalism in science is the main culprit here —- that when scientists 'circle the wagons' to defend against what they perceive to be unfair (and unscientific) attacks, the result can be damaging to the actual science being defended. Is it still possible to conduct a dialogue, or is there no possible common ground?"
Where do all the scientists who are skeptics fit in?
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
There very much is a common ground. Truth. Because people disagree doesn't mean that both aren't seeking to know the truth; really, both might have reasonable positions, given everything that individual has experienced and learned to date. Reality will be the ultimate arbitrator which decides who is correct.
There may be people on either side of the debate that aren't interested in the truth... in fact, there clearly are, in both camps. Those aren't scientists, though, and they aren't doing science. They're just people interfering with science. Best to publish all data, and keep discussion reasonable and non-accusatory. The amount of political and activist cruft attaching to the believers and deniers are harming the TRUE cause, which is to find out the truth.
Even the common labels, "believers" and "deniers", are ridiculous; they have more of a place in religious debate.
Let's have some light shone on the temperature data and how it is collected:
From Surfacestations.org[pdf], a project to survey all 1221 of the climate-monitoring stations in the U.S.:
During the past few years I recruited a team of more than 650 volunteers to visually inspect and photographically document more than 860 of these temperature stations. We were shocked by what we found.
We found stations located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat. We found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas.
In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations – nearly 9 of every 10 – fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source.
And let's not forget the international methods of survey.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
I have to go with the way Dawkins approaches this type of situation. Giving them a seat at the table gives them credibility.
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
Thank You!
I would be classified as a skeptic. I'm not convinced that they are wrong, I'm just not convinced that they are right. The first one would be my fault, the second is theirs. I'm not one of the "earth can't change" types. I'm positive that it is changing, I'm just not convinced that:
A We are responsible for it
B That it's the end of the world as many seem to believe it is.
I am employed as a scientists, in an admitedly unrelated field. My industry is also under fire by "Skeptics" and I can relate to the frustration evidenced in the leaked emails. However, I've always believed that enganging those who are willing to listen, and ignoring those who made up their mind and as you say "Started with a conclusion and worked backwards". My industry is only recently taking the innitiative and it seems to be working.
P.S. I would NEVER use a word like "Hide" in context of normalizing a dataset. That smacks way too much of fraudulent data manipulation.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Ah, but you forget one thing: Green-washing is now a valid way of bringing in the big bucks from consumers. Look at things like the Toyota Prius, which is blown out of the water in fuel consumption by pretty much any modern diesel of the same size or smaller (and the diesel doesn't require environmentally unfriendly battery production/destruction techniques) - but it doesn't matter, that, because the Prius has been cemented in the public consciousness. Mention diesel to people, and it conjures up images of the smoky, rattling behemoths spawned by the 70s oil embargo. It's not about better, it's about perception. The public is so willing to give up money and comfort now to save the environment (which fills me with an odd pride in humanity) that they'll give up their supposedly errant ways for ones that are perceived as helping reduce damage.
The big thing, the elephant in the room that nobody is talking about is the farm industry, by FAR the most polluting industry out there. One cow puts out more methane by belching (cows don't fart) in one year than a Land Rover Discovery. Put down that steak, and pick up that asparagus!
Yes, I know I didn't cite anything, but I felt like ranting. I read it somewhere, I think. Anyway, that's still a more robust source than most of the envirogangsters' info.
I am unfortunately forced to put most "believers" in Human-Caused Global Climate Change into the same group that believe in the "not a sparrow shall fall" form of biblical fundamentalism. Beliving that humans are fully in control of the Earth's climate and can change it at will is just as dangerous as those that believe in a personally involved God that oversees every event on Earth.
Right now, we have at our disposal enough information that we can see most of the inputs to the Earth's climate. We do not yet understand all of these inputs and their relative weightings. Nobody has any real knowledge of how much energy is stored in oceans or how much effect solar variance has on oceans.
Sure, we know there is a lot more CO2 than there was 100 years ago. And some fairly obvious conclusions can be drawn from there being more CO2, but we have real information for only an extremely short period for the Earth. We might know some things about the climate 1000 years ago, but the information is very incomplete.
Could the climate be changing? Sure it could. Can we materially change this, given what we know today? Almost certainly not, at least not without huge inputs of energy or removal of what energy we are putting into the climate system. Neither of which is proposed. The Earth's climate engine is something that is measured in gigajoules. So far, the proposals on the table are not even rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. They are like dusting off the tower that held the Trinity device.
It is obvious that nobody in any position of power really believes there is some onrushing global catastrophe. Most of the rather weak carbon emissions reductions that have been proposed will have zero effect on emissions for a decade and even then it is a decrease in growth, not a real decrease in emissions. Of course, the costs for this decrease in growth will affect everyone in US and Europe in some pretty unpleasant ways. But still, regardless of the cost, the net effect is so close to zero as to be meaningless. And there is nobody saying that if these steps were taken immediately there would be any net change.
So what else could be done? Well, for starters we could eliminate passenger air travel. The reduction in emissions might only be 20% of the total but it would be a 20% decrease in emissions rather than a reduction in growth. We could require special permits to enter a large city by car. You can't outlaw cars in the US because of the way cities have been built for the last 70 years or so. By requiring such a permit it could eliminate much of the commutting by car that is happening. Might not cut emissions by more than 5%, but again it would be a 5% decrease rather than a decrease in growth. This might take years to be able to implement, but it could be done.
The problem is, if we did this what would happen? Nobody really knows. There is a theory that it might change the climate, or stop a change that we don't seem to like much. But the ugly truth is that we simply do not know what would happen. Clearly, the leaders of the world today do not believe (as some do) that it would save thousands if not millions of lives.
Instead, in the US we are looking at utterly pointless plans to implement some sort of point trading system that will enrich a few at the cost of all consumer goods going up in price. Oh the price for manufacturing them will stay the same, but transport will cost more. You can't bring manufacturing back to high-labor-cost US from cheap-labor-cost Mexico and China, but the traders can get rich. Net effect of this will be somewhat lower sales and the three or four manufacturers still in the US will be forced to move out. But little else will really change. Except the growth of emissions will slow just from economic changes.
If you believe that humans can change the climate in a few years with minor energy inputs you are almost certainly wrong. It is extremely arrogant to believe that the energies commanded by humans today could do any suc
"My experience is that a good number of 'those questions' -- at least as they filter out into popular discussion -- are either ridiculous or end up having credible responses in support of anthropocentric climate change."
The first and largest was "what did your simulations actually DO when calculating this predicted climate change?"
And yes, the answer was, basically, "shut up - we know what we're doing, you don't need to see the computer code."
Whereas the truth was "the computer code sucks, it doesn't give the 'correct' answers, so we filled it full of hard-coded routines that gave us the answer we wanted."
Another question was "have you adjusted the raw data?" They said "no," the truth was "oh, hell yeah, and we're going to delete it before you can get an honest look at it."
The straw man questions you post were, oddly enough, not that straw-mannish, especially since the guy who is the godfather of the global warming computer models apparently did the computer model that predicted global cooling back in the day. I guess you didn't know that, though. It's another of those "dumb" questions you didn't even know was asked, much less the answer to...