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Losing the Public Debate On Global Warming
Hugh Pickens writes "Dr. James Hansen, director of the NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who first made warnings about climate change in the 1980s, says that public skepticism about the threat of man-made climate change has increased despite the growing scientific consensus. He says that without public support, it will be impossible to make the changes he and his colleagues believe need to occur to protect future generations from the effects of climate change. 'The science has become stronger and stronger over the past five years while the public perception is has gone in completely the other direction. That is not an accident,' says Hansen. 'There is a very concerted effort by people who would prefer to see business to continue as usual. They have been winning the public debate with the help of tremendous resources.' Hansen's comments come as recent surveys have revealed that public support for tackling climate change has declined dramatically in recent years. A recent BBC poll found that 25% of British adults did not think global warming is happening and over a third said many claims about environmental threats are 'exaggerated,' compared to 24 per cent in 2000. Dr. Benny Peiser, director of skeptical think tank The Global Warming Policy Foundation, says it's time to stop exaggerating the impact of global warming and accept the uncertainty of predictions about the rate of climate change. 'James Hensen has been making predictions about climate change since the 1980s. When people are comparing what is happening now to those predictions, they can see they fail to match up.'"
When we have a nontrivial portion of the population who does not believe that humanity resulted from evolution by natural selection, and that the universe is less than ten thousand years old, did we really expect people to accept science that something bad is going to happen if they do not change their behavior?
Our failure to insist on scientific literacy rates as high as written-word literacy rates is going to be something that comes back to bite us, I'm afraid. I'm not sure there is anything to be done for the problem now, except educate as well as we can.
Maybe we can have some scientists say that a god revealed to them that it dislikes the smell of vehicle exhaust and is angrily heating up the planet as a result. Unfortunately, I'm only half-kidding.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Once the sky falls enough for a piece to hit you in the head, then it's too late to prevent its complete collapse. So do we want to prevent it from falling, or not?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
But shouldn't we be concerned that NASA's interest in Global warming is going to get in the way of their Primary Mission of Muslim Outreach"...
Without taking a position whether or not global warming is caused by human activities:
- There is a complete industry now that exists by the grace of the belief that GW is man-made and we can do something about it. This is business having an interest in governments and public believing we should reduce CO2 emissions.
- Being a GW denier is silly. However try taking the position that GW is not entirely man-made, or that GW will not be as damaging as to justify billions of investments. You will get attacked almost in the way blasphemists were attacked in the middle ages. You are a non-believer, and you should go along with the "common believe" and "consensus", what we all think. How dare you disagree? But science is not consensus based. One experiment is all it takes to create new insights, models, theories.
I feel frustrated by governments taking GW as an excuse to raise taxes and increase influence on everyones personal life whenever they can. For instance, banning the light bulb - just how stupid is that?
My karma ran over your dogma
We need a strong fundamental shift in our lifestyles - stop eating meat - stop driving everywhere - stop flying in planes, stop consuming useless shit. No one - even global warming believers - seems to be willing to do this.
I know a few people who do that.
Personally I don't. I don't believe the answer is for a few people with the highest integrity to take action, whilst the majority don't do anything.
There has to be systematic solutions, such that everyone changes. The market always wants to go in the direction of more consumption, so those solutions have to come from governments' mandates.
It's either that or wait till the environment does turn to shit and non-sustainable resources are exhausted. And let nature put an and to it.
The problem really is chicken little.
I've tried to explain this to people "in the movement" and they just get livid. Because the environmentalists have spent so much time focusing on AGW/carbon, other issues which are much more obvious and easy to rally people on have been ignored.
The problem with the apocalyptic arguments are that people tune them out the same way they tune out fundamentalists Christian apocalypses. The AGW fundamentalists come off the same way.
The real shame is that while they've been preaching, real issues are being ignored. Mountain top mining goes on. Coal ash fallout continues. The irony is that if they addressed these real and obvious concerns about which few disagree, then carbon emissions would be reduced as a side effect.
Another thing is that the AGW apocalypse isn't as bad as the Christian one unless we go Venus. I don't think any scientists are suggesting that. I always imagine a couple guys in the Bay Area 20,000 years ago. One turns to another and says, "hey, put out that fire. If you don't the world will heat up and the whole valley will flood". Well, Hello... 20,000 years later we have "save the bay". Save the Bay??? That's the paleo-native American apocalypse. We should be filling it back in.
I always remember this one argument I got into with a guy at a coffee shop. I never got to explain why I thought it was wrong for the movement to focus on AGW. He just flew into a rage. That's not science. That's religion.
But if that were the case why is it that alternatives to those solutions are not given but, more often instead, it is argued that anthropogenic global warming is not happening in the first place?
At least the former tactic I can respect. People who deny all scientific evidence because it disagrees with their worldview I cannot.
Happy people make bad consumers.
'James Hensen has been making predictions about climate change since the 1980s. When people are comparing what is happening now to those predictions, they can see they fail to match up.'
In other news, Hansen's 30-year-old global temperature predictions close to spot-on
I agree, failing to protect our future from death is far less important than profits now.
There's $4 billion available without raising taxes: the oil and natural gas subsidies.
Dilbert RSS feed
I largely agree but the "progressives" are not for extreme environmentalism - the conservatives greatly exaggerate their attacks to the point where it is hard to use satire to ridicule it. 1st time I saw Glenn Beck I thought he was over the top satire. The conservatives just went too far lately labeling a woman a slut just for wanting access to birth control. They'll often call Obama a Nazi and a Communist in the same rant.
Restraining the extremes of capitalism is not anti-capitalism anymore than Firemen are anti-fire. To an extreme capitalist, any criticism of their religion is blasphemy - and they are at the point of religion just like communists in the USSR. (A god is not required for something to be a religion.)
I agree progressives want to strengthen and expand democratic institutions greatly; not all of them believe centralized power is always the solution.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Humans eat meat. Our teeth and intenstines are the evidence.
Naturalistic fallacy. Just because we evolved to eat meat doesn't mean we have to eat meat, or even that we should.
(not that I don't - I'm just pointing out the reasoning flaw)
Dilbert RSS feed
For years, the environmentalists have believed that it was necessary to exaggerate.
If they said "Here is a problem we should try to solve", they believed they would be ignored.
So instead they scream "THIS PROBLEM THREATENS OUR SURVIVAL!!! WE NEED TO SOLVE IT NOW!!!!".
After years of hearing this, the public recalibrates their bullshit sensors.
And yes, I consider myself an environmentalist. I just wish the rest of us were more honest.
This is simply not true. The economy has faulted because of massive fraud in the banking sector. Thanks to deregulatory policies of Larry Summers, Paul Ruben, and Alan Greenspan, we have no paper-trail to bring changes, since bankers were no longer required to underwrite loans. We had people printing money for themselves, and the greed got so intense, that the entire banking system is in jeopardy.
All of this has nothing to do with investing in renewable technologies -- or including the price of pollution into burning CO2. It can be phased in gently over 20 years.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
"When people are comparing what is happening now to those predictions, they can see they fail to match up."
Citation needed. When you are engaging in skeptical analysis, you need to show your work. If the majority of scientists agree, but you have found that they are wrong, you need to show the empirical evidence. Which predictions have you falsified? Using what data?
How about a spot check of your work? Let's see if we can tell whether your way is to use science or subterfuge.
Venice Skepticism: You reference a prediction that observed increases in the rate and severity of floods in Venice will abate over coming years, but do not provide empirical evidence that it has been abating. The paper you reference says on the first page that predicting changes in storm surge levels is inherently uncertain. It provides no significant empirical events that could be a cause for a reversal of the current trend, and relies on a new way of modelling the problem which has not been empirically tested. There is empirical evidence that it has been increasing, as well as empirically tested models that predict the flooding will continue. A claim that the current trend will reverse without empirical evidence -- with nothing more than an untested model that gives the answer you want -- is not science.
Greenland Sea Level Rise: You claim to refute the observation that the accelerating breakup of Greenland's ice sheet may lead to increased sea levels by showing evidence that the sea levels have not risen yet. The fact that levels have not risen in the past does not contradict the prediction that they will rise in the future if the Greenland ice continues to break up.
Those are the first two stories on your "False Alarms" page, not cherry-picked, just the first two. They are completely without rational or scientific merit. They are exactly the sort of thing TFA claims are at the heart of global warming criticism. I love rational skepticism -- but based on the first two examples on your own website, I can reach no other conclusion than that you are a shining example of intentional disinformation with a shoddy veneer of scientific inquiry.
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You have totally mischaracterised the debate. Most scientists aren't shouting about the end of the world -- but /some/ scientists are shouting about doing /something/ to mitigate against future risk. If there is a 10% chance of CAGW, and that can be reduced to 5% by investing 1% of resources now, then that is simply common sense. Heck, we spend 5% on the military budget.
/may/ get worse at an exponential rate (say 10% chance), and lead to serious suffering -- even in the USA.
But we cannot even talk about risk and risk-management, because as soon as you bring up the topic, "skeptics" accuse you of predicting the end of the world. This is just bullsh*t. Everyone has to feel the are right on whatever issue, even when they have to make up complete bulls*t.
As for AGW being "chicken-little", it is entirely plausible that there will be no ice-caps in 500 years time. It normally takes 10x that long or more for an ice-age to end. In just the next few decades, we will be hit in the wallet by insurance companies, who are already starting to factor in the costs of increased extreme weather events. The effects
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The economy is hardly working as is. Add regulation to reach a 20% reduction in CO2 and we break its back.
And that 20% reduction would only be symbolic anyway.
Speaking of chicken little and hyperbole in the debate.
Our economy and its energy usage is just like the obese person who goes into a restaurant and order 3 low calorie dinners for themselves.
We're running around trying to fix the symptoms when the airline industry, for one, has been solving the problem for decades.
To save fuel costs, they buy more efficient engines and streamline their operations - as much as they can - and as a result, they use less fuel; which has a side effect of lower pollution and other emissions AND they become a bit more profitable.
So, as we become more "green" we will use less fossil fuels - expensive fuels (and we're not even talking about the health and environmental costs) which will - get this - lessen the economic drag on the economy.
By being more fuel efficient and "green" it will actually boost the economy.
Or since folks like comparing the China; they are reaping what they sow because now, with the environmental devastation of their economic polices, they are experiencing some god awful things (obscene healthcare burdens for example) that will harm their economy.
Whether climate change is occurring is properly the domain of science. Here, I think Hansen is on relatively solid footing. Pretty much all the important policymakers have signed on to the fact climate change is occurring -- as David Brin pointed out a few days ago, when the US Navy is updating its warplans to account for the Northern Passage being open, it's hard to argue that climate change _isn't_ being taken seriously by the establishment.
However, what we should do about climate change is not a scientific question. How much will CO2 mitigation cost -- not just in terms of direct and indirect monetary damages, but in terms of human life lost? Economic growth (a large part of which is driven by the availability of cheap power) has historically been the most reliable tool for improving the human condition. Without power, life is nasty, brutish and short. If CO2 mitigation mechanisms like the sort Hansen advocates were to be adopted worldwide, what would the butcher's bill be? That's an economics problem, and Hansen is not an economist. If the climatology community is going to scream at people, "well, you're no climatologist, so you're only invited to this discussion if you agree with us!", then the economics community is entirely within its rights to tell climatologists to STFU about economic choices.
Then there's the geopolitical angle. Let's say Hansen gets his worldwide controls on CO2. Let's also say that China, currently the world's leading CO2 producer, says "no, our poor deserve a better life and we need economic growth in order to provide it, if we stop building power plants we'll have a civil war and millions will die, so fuck you, we're going to continue to build one new coal-fired power plant each week." What does the rest of the world do then -- invade China to shut down their power plants? The rest of the world can't do nothing: if it lets China slide, then the next thing you know India says, "yeah, we're in the same boat, screw you guys" and the entire thing falls apart. How do you build a geopolitical framework for enforcement of such a system? Hansen is a climatologist -- he's not Henry Kissinger.
Hansen has won the scientific argument. He's losing the economics argument and the geopolitical arguments -- and deservedly so. He's neither an economist nor a diplomat, after all.
Note to the climate change looneytunes who are about to leap down my throat: I'M AGREEING WITH YOU, DAMN IT. The only thing I'm saying is that this is a big stinking problem with a whole lot of dimensions, most of which the climatology community is completely unqualified to talk intelligently about; and within the realm that it _is_ qualified to talk about it, the climatology community has already substantially won that argument.
The focus on how global warming is being caused has been detrimental. Its pretty deep stuff for a business major to know. You have to understand band gap orbitals to verify CO2 does indeed absorb various IR bands. Actually computing wavelengths from the orbitals filled is on the upper edge of what might be in highschool chemistry, I was not exposed until college chem. Then there is the statistics necessary to interpret temperature readings. Even engineering stat in college wasn't entirely sufficient, though most college statistics courses would be (engineering stat was dumbed down). There is no accepted water/cloud model yet even among the experts.
Trying to walk everyone through this so they are willing to act is hopeless. The cause is only of secondary importance in any case. If this was in fact a natural trend and it was harmful, we should still act and/or adapt in precisely the same ways for precisely the same reasons.
Presenting the consequences, good and bad, in a non-melodramatic way on a region by region basis for the entire world is the first step. It answers "Why should *I* change?" Water levels rising will harm many, but its not sufficient to convince many others. It is hard for a Welsh farmer who anticipates being able to start a vineyard, to be convinced by NYC turning into Venice. Give the farmer the whole picture for their region.
The second step is to present all the options for climate control and their relative effectiveness both alone and in concert. Reducing CO2/methane emissions is the most natural approach, but there are many others like sequestration, albedo engineering, and counter agents. One that comes up a lot is aerosolized SO2. Thus side effects of these other approaches should also be discussed.
We as a society will likely make the wrong choice, but right now many are making the choice without any knowledge of the consequences apart from climate horror movies, or any knowledge of the tools we have to counter these consequences apart from some vague idea we should drive less or use a different sort of light bulb.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
A number of historians have written about this topic, and what history says isn't encouraging.
Quite a lot has been written about the history of the "Fertile Crescent", whose core area was what we now call Syria and Iraq. 3000 years ago, it was a a fertile area, semi-arid but covered with forests and farmland. Now most photos you see from anywhere in the area show a rocky, plant-free landscape. The change is generally attributed to salination that was the result of irrigation projects that started about 8000 years ago, but reached their peak extent maybe 3000 years ago. Historians have said that there is a lot of evidence that the people then (farmers and hydro engineers) understood the problem of soil salinification, and understood that the solution is over-watering to leach out the salts. The problem was that, in the short term (of a human life span ;-), it was more profitable to use the limited water supply on the maximal crop area. So salts slowly accumulated, and eventually the farming died out because nothing would grow there any more. This process has been documented in other areas, but this is one area in which we know that the people continued maximizing their short-term profit even though they knew of the long-term disaster that would result.
Actually, it seems that the problems there aren't as serious as they look. Back in the 1970s and 80s, an interesting series of experiments were conducted: The researchers leased plots of land of 1 to 2 square-km, built goat-proof fences around them, then sat back and watched. This was done across the southwest-Asian "desert" area, roughly from Syria to Pakistan. The results were that a year later, every such experimental plot of land had turned into "grassland" (or prairie if you prefer). The conclusion was that the entire southwest-Asian desert is artificial. If we would remove the grazing animals from the area for one year, it would all revert to grasslands. Then the grazing animals could be brought back, since the land would support them. As long as the population of grazers was then kept low enough, the area could become several orders of magnitude more productive than it is now. But the result has been to ignore this. There's no way you can get the governments or the farmers in that area to cooperate with such a project, when it requires taking the land out of production for a year.
In both of these cases, the general population may not have understood the issue. The local technical experts (including the farmers) did and do. But their short-term interests have always been to maximize this year's profit, partly because if they don't do that, they'll be bankrupt and out of business. So the ongoing disaster continues.
The "global warming" issue is pretty much the same story. We've documented the process for centuries, and have detailed information for the last half-century showing conclusively that the changes are primarily due to human activity. But the people who run our economies have the usual interest in short-term profit, partly because if they don't behave this way, they'll lose to the others who go with the short term.
Anyway, history says that we probably won't do much about the issue, even though we have enough information to know how to do so. And, since the evidence says that the recent warming is mostly due to human activity, we can say that we now have the ability to control our climate if we wish. But we can only do this on a rather large scale, and we know pretty well that humanity won't organize on the scale that it takes to actually carry out such projects.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
So... an entire field of scientists doing their utmost to produce the most accurate models of climate change, with ever-improving accuracy and consensus on their work are being politically manipulated? They are _all_ blindly stupid or complicit? That appears to be what you're saying.
The only reason the science is being contested is the same reason evolution is: because some people have agendas that don't care about facts.
Would you like a slice of toast?
It's not the scientists who have framed the debate in this way. It's the politicians. As soon as it became a political discussion, it created an "us versus them" mentality between the Democrats and the Republicans. At that point, any hope of actually improving things through sane, well-reasoned legislation went out the window because neither party is capable of even remotely sane or reasonable discussion of any issue.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Actually, my knowledge of Greenland circa 1000AD is personal: In my undergrad days, I helped process samples from a Geology expedition to Greenland by two of my professors. Amongst the samples I cataloged were wood and tree branch sections, pulled out of the ice, and carbon-dated to ~990-1020 AD. Kind of hard to grow trees on the icecap. . . .
Since when has scientific consensus, or any kind of consensus of anybody's opinion been equivalent to truth? Study the history of science, or even just plain history of humanity. The majority scientific opinion once upon a time was that the earth was flat, everything could be made out of the 4 elements of air water Earth and fire. etc. etc.... If all the erroneous ideas of times past and of today were collected into a book, it would likely be one of the thickest books ever published.
The Earth has been much warmer and much colder, long before humans started driving SUVs and flying airplanes, thereby burning large quantities of oil. This is indeed a chicken little manifestation that does not exist except in the minds of those who have an agenda of more government control. Personally I am waiting for some warmer, drier spring weather here in Oregon.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
There are natural cycles DOES NOT MEAN THAT all variations are thus accountable.
This... is kind of the problem here.
First, we have natural climate variation.
Second, we have possible anthropogenic climate variation.
We know the former happens. This is pretty much a given. So to see whether the latter is significant, we *have* to analyse both. That's what climate scientists do; it's a basic and obvious step.
The conclusions they have come to, as a massive consensus, is that AGW is very much real and significant, and cannot be explained away by natural means. ... and then people like you come along and say, hey now, all you smart scientists, what about natural climate change?! I bet you weren't smart enough to think of that!!!!!
Would you like a slice of toast?
The temperature change over the last 30-50 years is of comparable magnitude to the shift from the medieval warm period to the little ice age (the two greatest temperature extremes of the last 2000 years), a change that took more than 10 times as long to occur. Perhaps if you look further back you can find natural cycles that match the volatility of the current one, but the examples given above certainly don't cut it.
There hasn't been an increase in the last 10 years primarily because of a particularly strong la nina. Short term cyclical events generally have a greater magnitude than the overall warming trend. If you take ~11 year moving averages to hide the known cyclical variations, the warming trend is very much still there.
"Hide the decline" refers to the fact that temperatures inferred from tree ring sizes in the last couple decades haven't matched actual temperature readings (possibly because of other human influence on tree growth). When presenting tree ring data, they replace very recent data with actual temps, usually using a different color or something to indicate that it has been swapped out.
There are legitimate criticisms of the AGW argument, but you haven't put forth any of them. <ad hominem> This clearly indicates that you don't seek the truth, just the promotion of a personal agenda. That or you're not very smart, and it's usually wrong to attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. </ad hominem>
It is very revealing that so-called "skeptics" of global warming reject the results of studies carried out by multiple different laboratories, using a wide variety of different analytical methods and many different types of data collected from around the globe, but uncritically accept as fact conclusions based upon 3rd hand accounts of agricultural practices in one small region of Europe. Summary and citations of the actual science can be found here
It is by the way, absolutely false that there has been "NO" temperature increase in the past 10 years. In fact, analysis of the data shows a clear upward trend over the past 10 years. The question is whether the increase satisfies the technical criterion of "statistical significance" -- which means showing that there is less than a 5% probability that an apparent increase of that magnitude could occur by random statistical variations. This is a particularly stupid argument, because statistical analysis of climate models (as well as weather trends) indicates that 10 years is too short an interval to reliably detect the predicted global warming trend even if it is real. (Although if you correct for known natural sources of climate "noise," it turns out that it is significant after all. So while we cannot prove that global warming did not end 10 years -- or 10 seconds -- ago, this is not evidence that it has stopped.