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?"

Comments

A question

[Vinegar Joe]

Where do all the scientists who are skeptics fit in?

Common Ground?

[Toonol]

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.

But it goes beyond the computer models.

[MyFirstNameIsPaul]

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.

No

[Selfbain]

I have to go with the way Dawkins approaches this type of situation. Giving them a seat at the table gives them credibility.

Re:Which questions?

[cirby]

"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...