Climate Contrarians Seek Leadership of House Science Committee

An article at Ars examines three members of the U.S. House of Representatives who are seeking chairmanship of its Committee on Space, Science, and Technology. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) said in an interview, "My analysis is that in the global warming debate, we won. There were a lot of scientists who were just going along with the flow on the idea that mankind was causing a change in the world's climate. I think that after 10 years of debate, we can show that that there are hundreds if not thousands of scientists who have come over to being skeptics, and I don't know anyone [who was a skeptic] who became a believer in global warming." James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) has a similar record of opposing climate change, as does Lamar Smith (R-TX). Relatedly, Phil Plait, a.k.a. The Bad Astronomer, has posted an article highlighting how U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), a member of the Senate's Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, has declined to answer a question about how old the Earth is, calling it "one of the great mysteries."

Comments

Richard Muller

[eldavojohn]

I don't know anyone [who was a skeptic] who became a believer in global warming.

You mean like Richard Muller who quite famously denounced anthropogenic global warming only to come to the same conclusion by his own means? Yeah, that opinion piece by him opens with "Call me a converted skeptic."

Oh, I get it, after it turns out that his research didn't back up your "beliefs", he must never have been a skeptic to begin with, right? Or perhaps when you made that statement you meant that you just don't know Richard Muller personally?

Political word games have always been such a pain in the ass.

But you are right that while peer reviewed journals move one way, the population moves the other:

The most striking result is the increase in the proportion of Americans who express strong doubt or rejection of the reality of global warming through their free associations. In 2003, only 7% of Americans provided “naysayer” images (e.g., “hoax,” or “no such thing”) when asked what thought or image first came to mind when they heard the term “global warming.” By 2010, however, 23% of Americans provided “naysayer” images.

Re:Richard Muller

[microbox]

Muller was never a skeptic.

The minute he said something you disagreed with, he become "biased".

Re:Richard Muller

[Doctor_Jest]

The reason our federal government is set up this way is PRECISELY for keeping the mob rule (House) or the aristocracy (Senate) from becoming a battering ram to shove whatever agenda they see fit through the process. The process is geared towards compromise. The Founders meant for it to be this way (ever wonder why it's so damn hard to amend the Constitution? Same logic.) If you read the Founders' writings (Jefferson and Adams in particular) you'll see that their purpose was not to create a "juggernaut" that trampled over anything in its path, but a slow tortoise that didn't rush into legislation and learned from compromise rather than intimidation.

Granted, there are exceptions to the rule, but the point being, we don't WANT a speedy federal government (remember the PATRIOT Act?)... we want a lukewarm slow moving behemoth that doesn't fuck things up every 2 years.

Re:Richard Muller

[davester666]

Except R isn't interested in compromise.

For example, way back when Obama started with redoing health care, he invited the Republicans to participate and said "Lets start with the plan from one of YOUR people, John McCain." The response was that that plan was unacceptable and that they wouldn't participate AT ALL.

For every issue that actually matters, R largely is "Either you do what we say or we will block everything you want to do".

Re:Richard Muller

[Gadget_Guy]

The same ones who are just as skeptical as a Republican congressman, but just happen to be playing for the other side? Tell me more.

Happy to oblige. On one hand you have the scientists who joined a profession where being skeptical and wanting more information is their entire raison d'être. There are no right or wrong answers in science, only supported or unsupported theories.

On the other hand, you have a bunch of uneducated politicians who see that climate change is going to cost their supporters a lot of money. They didn't come to this debate with doubts about the science. They came with an agenda to discredit the science so their campaign contributors would not be forced to make costly changes to how they currently do business.

If it was not for the fact that there is a lot of money riding on this, there would not be any "sides" to this issue. Why is it that the two major scientific disputes that have now have one side with a huge vested interest in keeping science down? Big business hates climate science and religion hates evolution because both have a lot to lose from the science.

Scientists faced exactly the same forces in the past when they tackled the dangers of asbestos, as well as tobacco smoking. Even back then the motives of scientists were questioned to discredit the message. Who turned out to be right then? Your idea that there is more money in proving AGW is not backed by historical precedent. On the other hand, politicians doing the bidding of their wealthy supporters has a depressing amount of precedent.

Re:Richard Muller

[TapeCutter]

The same ones who are just as skeptical as a Republican congressman, but just happen to be playing for the other side?

Are you really so naive that you genuinely believe scientists and politicians are playing the same game?

Re:Richard Muller

[jc42]

Perhaps it might help to point out that people are using "skeptic" with two rather different meanings in this discussion. The word means something different in common English than it does in technical/scientific English.

In common speech, a "skeptic" is someone who actively disbelieves something. And note that in common speech, "disbelieves" and "doesn't believe" are synonyms.

In technical English, neither of these is true. A skeptic is rather someone who believes that something should be challenged, even if there's pretty good evidence that it's true. There is a lot of scientific history showing the value of challenging accepted theory, and challenges sometimes turn up important exceptions or qualifications. The poster child for this is Einstein's Relativity, which was based on experimenters testing Newton's theories/equations/mechanics, uncovering a number of exceptions. Newton's mechanics are still taught in schools, with the qualification that they're only approximations that are useful under "ordinary" (here on Earth) conditions, but at high speeds or accelerations become inaccurate. Similarly, even the most "devout" believers in climate change will agree that a lot of further research is needed, and our understanding of climate is still rather limited. So there's a lot of room for skepticism withing the field of climatology, if skepticism is taken in its scientific sense of "needing further research" to improve the accuracy of the equations.

The "disbelieves" vs. "doesn't believe" dichotomy is also important. In common speech, everything is typically either true or false. But scientists live in a world where a lot of things are in an "unknown" state. Disbelieving something therefore doesn't mean that you believe it's false. To a scientist, disbelief means that you don't think we know all the facts, and further testing is needed before we accept something as "theory". It's not uncommon for a scientist to express disbelief in even their own results, and insist that further research is needed. (Funding organizations are very familiar with this phenomomenon. ;-)

One of the clear cases of a long-lasting state of disbelief was back in the 1980s, when as a result of recent paleontological discoveries, birds were finally reclassified as a branch of the dinosaurs. This wasn't a new idea; it was suggested back in the 19th century by none other than Charles Darwin, as well as by numerous colleagues. The similarities between those newly-discovered dinosaur fossils and bird skeletons couldn't be missed, and the discovery of the few Archeopteryx fossils in Germany just added to the suspicion that they were close relatives. But until the 1970s, no further ancient bird fossils were found. So scientists said "Yeah, it looks like a real possibility, but we need a lot more evidence." Most biologists expected that it would be found true, but they remained officially skeptics until more evidence turned up. Then Mao died, China opened up to field research, and several beds of ancient avian fossils were found there. After a few decades and a few thousand more avian fossils, the skeptics finally said "Yeah; we've got the evidence now", and what everyone suspected all along was made official theory. But this followed more than a century of skepticism on the part of most biologists.

Also, note that some biologists continue to express skepticism about the bird-dinosaur link. It's mostly of a pro-forma nature, but it's generally considered proper if done scientifically. Compared to other kinds of critters, birds still have a very sketchy fossil record. Their thin bones just don't fossilize well. So various biologists continue to challenge the details of the classification, with the hope that funding will be found to collect the evidence. Thus, recent DNA studies have verified that the ratites are birds and not a separate branch of dinosaurs. Other studies have shown that cockatiels really are close relatives of cockatoos, and not an independent early bra

Re:Richard Muller

[davester666]

No.

Obama had Plan A during the presidential campaign
McCain says Plan A is crap and he would do Plan B

Plan B was not rejected by the Republicans UNTIL it was presented to them as "Lets start with Plan B". Followed by "We will not take part in any way with any plan, and we will repeal any plan you may pass."

To me, that is not anywhere in the vicinity of compromise.

Hell, the current "compromise" by R w.r.t. tax increases is....let's hit poor people by killing the charitable giving tax deduction [which this tax deduction encourages]. But not even 0.01% tax hike for rich, they will just flee the US.

Re:Profits will suffer

[AthanasiusKircher]

If the choice is between having an iDevice and cheap transportation, and having a world outside that I don't need an environment suit to survive in, I will take the latter one.

Unfortunately, that's not the choice most people are confronted with. Instead the choice is (1) have cheap tech, transportation, be able to waste resources, etc. NOW, or (2) have a world where your grandchildren or great-grandchildren might have to wear environmental suits many years from now.

I think the general pattern of the debt crisis, people unwilling to plan for paying their mortgage next month, let alone planning for retirement or grandchildren, gives a general sense of where most people's priorities are. "If it makes my life easier or just more fun today, I'll worry about that other stuff later..." even if that othet stuff means complete financial ruin or disaster.

If people are willing to gamble in these ridiculous ways with their futures just to buy the slightly larger sunmer house, you really think they're motivated to worry about the quality of people's lives a century in the future? A lot of people say stuff like how they don't want to ruin things for their kids or grandkids, but few of them seem to really do much about it other than buying a more energy efficient light bulb or recycling a tin can.

Re:My two cents...

[sg_oneill]

Serious failure of Occams razor going on here AC.

Lets take three things we know;-

1) You say climate change is happening. Well we agree on that. Lets put that into "Known knowns".

2) We know CO2 significantly traps infra red radiation. This was known since the 1800s when researchers first started putting alarm bells out about climate change after Fourier first demonstrated CO2s effect on IR spectrum light in the laboratory.

3) And we are putting staggering amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Something in the range of 35000 teragrams per year.

Yet.

4) You dont think humans are responsible for most of the climate change.

The question I ask then, is what mechanism are you proposing that is stopping physics from doing its thing here.

This is the thing the "Humans are not having an effect" people seem to miss here. Thats a huge claim which breaks a tonne of very old and very established physics, and for the "we are not causing climate change" thing to be true, novel physics needs to be proposed to provide a mechanism that causes CO2 to stop absorbing IR light.

I should note some caution here. If a mechanism is proposed, a LOT of things break. Huge amounts of our knowledge of chemistry , astronomy (absorbsion lines, etc) , and so on are dependent on our understanding of how gasses absorb light, and we'd be throwing out perhaps entire fields of science, because holy crap have we got a lot of things wrong? All that stuff we learned from staring at black lines on rainbows shitting out of our telesopes? Wrong wrong wrong. All the whacky stuff we've learned bouncing light through gasses in laboratories? Wrong wrong wrong. Chemistry wrong, physics wrong, astronomy wrong, biology wrong, its exaustive.

To wit;- Big claims require big evidence.

And I'm not seeing that evidence, instead I'm seeing frauds like "lord" monkton, a guy whos entire scientific/mathematical education was finishing highschool, being paraded around by right-wing think tanks as a "renowned mathematician". I'm seeing incredibly detailed frame ups of researchers involving multiple right-wing thinktanks pushing campaigns of deliberate misrepresentation of peoples emails. I'm seeing polls of scientists, in such dead-on fields as "political science" and "marketing" denouncing basic observational physics and not a single damn qualified climate scientist in sight.

I'm actually not seeing shit. Theres almost no legitimate reason left to doubt climate change and our role in it anymore. Its happening, its real. That debate ended 150 years ago in Fouriers laboratory.

I don't believe

[ygtai]

BTW, I don't believe in global warming. Facts just show that it is happening.

Re:Age of Earth is Mystery, assumptions are used

[Anonymous Coward]

By that reasoning almost everything is a mystery because very little can be isolated to perfect accuracy and precision. Consider, "how long does it take you to bake chocolate chip cookies?" "Well," I reply, "it's a mystery: last time it took 14 minutes plus or minus approximately 20 seconds, so I can't say."

Things we know are, outside the bounds of mathematics and pure logic, generally known only within reasonable bounds. If the earth is 4,540 million years old, a senator needn't stumble over the +/- 10 million error bars. What he means is that the age of the Earth is either a mystery to him because he's ignorant of such things, or just as likely isn't sure how to answer the question without fear of pissing someone off, so he chickened out. Maybe he believes the earth is 6000 years old but didn't want newspaper headlines the next day pointing out his conflict with all available scientific data suggesting this is wrong by approximately 4.54 billion years. Or perhaps since he's a Republican he didn't want to piss off his party's large fundamentalist wing by noting the scientifically indicated age of the Earth. It's a mystery.

What's not a mystery is that the Earth is quite surely about 4.5 billion years old. Saying it's a mystery does a serious disservice to the overwhelming amount we do know about its age.