Will the real skeptics please stand up?

Chris wants to ask the age-old question: what separates denialists from skeptics? There are no scientific studies that unequivocally show particular people are being dishonest, and all people (even scientists) are prone to mistakes, so the existence of a bad publication doesn’t show that someone is pushing an agenda. Being “skeptical” is a job that all scientists have, and although the term may have a bad name attached to it in global warming debates, it’s actually a very honorable title to have and it’s difficult to find any scientist who is not skeptical of a lot.

This is of course different than simply plugging your fingers in your ears and denying any evidence put in your face.

 When Alfred Wegener proposed the idea of continental drift in the early 20th century, one of the principle objections to his hypothesis was his inability to provide a mechanism that was capable of moving continents across the globe. Wegener proposed that the tidal influence of the Moon was strong enough to give continents a westward motion, but physicists at the time (such as Harold Jeffreys) quickly showed the physical implausibility of this scenario.

Wegener used various types of evidence to support his idea, including the remarkable similarities of the continental margins on opposite sides of the Atlantic, identical fossils being found in both Africa and South America, and also paleoclimatic evidence (Wegener was actually a meteorologist by trade). However, the mainstream geology community was not convinced, and they had every right not to be. Some pieces of evidence were there, but the grounds for a paradigm shift had just not been established yet.

Following World War 2, oceanographic exploration opened up immensely and scientists were able to get a much better picture of the ocean bottom.  Emerging from this work was the discovery of the oceanic ridge system that winds through the major oceans like the seams on a baseball. This, and other discoveries eventually led to the theory of plate tectonics which was far more encompassing than continental drift. After much more evidence, and now a suitable mechanism for how landmasses could move around over geologic time, scientists could not longer reasonably deny this new idea, which is now a unifying idea in contemporary geology.

The scientists in Wegener’s time were correct to be skeptical of the argument, and there were far too many question marks that had to be addressed before specialists would just hop on a new boat which contradicted previous ideas.

Let’s go elsewhere: After Charles Darwin published his “Origin of Species” the idea was actually well received, even by the Catholic Church. It wasn’t until his later publication on “The Descent of Man” which seemed to change the ratio of fact to speculation, that many people seemed to oppose his theories. The theory of evolution is now a very well-encompassing theory in modern biology and geology, and is supported by countless pieces of evidence in multiple fields. There are still minority groups who oppose the theory, but the objections are very repetitious and necessitate that much of what we know about physics should be tossed out the window. The objections presumably arise out of the need to push a specific interpretation of a specific faith rather than anything to do with evolution in particular. Similarily, objections to how tobacco caused cancer presumably arose out of financial interests rather than anything inherently flawed with the science of smoking and lung effects.

What are the reasons for the opposition to anthropogenic climate change? Clearly, they cannot arise from any real scientific reasons because the peer-reviewed literature is devoid of any content refuting the underlying physics or expected spatio-temporal patterns associated with increased greenhouse gases. What’s more, CO2 and other greenhouse gases play as much a role in tying together planetary climate as plate tectonics does in geology or evolution in biology. After all, their role in influencing radiative balance is required in explaining the faint young sun, the hothouse climates of the Cretaceous and Eocene, why Venus is so hot, why Mars may have once had liquid water, snowball Earth, the interglacial-glacial cycles, and the 20th century observations. My guess is that there are many people with financial interests in not slowing fossil fuels, but also many people are just scared that there own lifestyle may have to be altered if AGW is correct.

Are scientists skeptical? Sure, there are lots of questions such as how ecosystems will shift, how fast it takes Greenland to melt, how cloud feedbacks will respond, the role of aerosols in climate forcing, etc…but the overall physics of the greenhouse effect and the fact humans can influence climate is very well-established. There is a lot we do not know, and these uncertanties need to be properly portrayed in scientific articles and to policy makers, but we shouldn’t just make up uncertanties or dwell too much on the stuff which is “settled.”

What makes a denialist? As I’ve said before, even scientists make mistakes. But experts in the field should not consistently make undergraduate-level errors, they should not clearly misrepresent the conclusions of peer-reviewed papers, and they should admit error in the face of correction rather than repeating a knowingly flawed argument to a new (more laymen) audience. It is not an opinion that people doing this, and people need to call them out on it. Many of the facts and conclusions in primary papers are very straightforward so to screw them up should raise some eyebrows.  Many of the “errors” speakers or writers make are so elementary, that if they are actually honest mistakes, any relevant degree in climate that they received should be taken away.

There are lots of arguments out there that might be expected from someone new to the subject with little scientific training, but to come from actual “experts” is unforgivable. Such examples include claiming that water vapor is “95% of the greenhouse effect” and can swamp the effects of additional CO2, the implication that trace amounts of a gas cannot influence climate, claiming that “global warming stopped in 1998,” mentioning CO2 can’t cause climate change since it lagged temperature in Vostok (without mentioning feedback mechanisms), saying that CO2 can’t cause temperatures to rise because they didn’t rise from 1940-1970, saying that most CO2 comes from natural sources so our emissions are negligible, and the like. Anyone who consistently uses these and other similar-style lines can safely be ignored with virtually no chance that you’re going to miss out on some divine revelation that debunks greenhouse physics. Lots of people are actually working on serious issues like improving the instrumental record, understanding ice sheet physics better, understanding cloud-aerosol interactions better, etc.

Repetition does not make an argument right. I did not come up with those lines off of the top of my head, but I’ve seen them all numerous times in many areas of the internet and offline. It’s virtually certain that countless people are not all discovering the same “counter-arguments” or are misusing them in all the same way, so it just shows me that they are coming from a handful of sources that have a large reader(viewer)ship, perhaps the “Global Warming Swindle” video from Channel 4 is an example. As sloppy of a scientific piece it was, they have clearly succeeded in confusing a lot of non-specialists and probably halting policy action on global warming– which I take it was the goal. It clearly was not to educate scientists of “new data” or anything of the sort, and none of that would be able to be presented at a real scientific conference without the lecturer being laughed off the stand.  Before using these arguments, people should ask a few questions:

1) Would I use them in front of experts in the field and be expected to be taken seriously?

2) Forget the science for a second: does this reasoning make logical sense and is it contradictory with other views I hold?

3) Is it likely that experts in the field for a long time have missed out on this piece of information, or forgot about something so important?

4) Can I find real support for my ideas in the scholarly literature, or is the most authoritative source to back me up a newspaper article or blog?