An Easy 100,000 Dollars?

... or a fool and their 15$ parted?

I see via Deltoid that JunkScience is offering $100,000US for anyone who can prove the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming. The problems?

• there is no such thing as proof in these kinds of scientific theories
• JunkScience explicitly states they are the sole and subjective arbiter of all terms and conclusions
• they want proof of the difference in global social, economic and environmental effects between two possible futures 100 years away!

I don't think they even take themselves seriously, it is just a cheap way to provide another shallow talking point.

Keeping it simple

A commentor, bmcworldcitizen offers us this amusing, simplifying and positive YouTube video about, well, what else?



(About 5 minutes)

I notice an entertaining image I used here in the past.

Hot times in the Solar System

There is an interesting and entertaining column by Oliver Morton on Nature's news website about the continuing use by climate science contrarians of climate change on other bodies in the solar system. I have a couple of "Talk to a Sceptic" guide entries on that (see here for the newest version of the Mars and Pluto canard) as well as some artwork that takes its inspiration from on of the more obscure versions of this talking point.

Oliver Morton's article is full of great lines and clear rebuttals and methodically goes planetoid by planetoid showing the lack of substance "skeptics" so readily embrace. For example:

• Pluto is still warming from its ~80 year summer
• Triton's warming southern hemisphere is just in its hottest orbital position
• Mars is experiencing changing albedo, probably due to dust storms

He also make the very good point that given "climate is always changing", in any random look around our solar system you should expect to find a handful of warming climates.

For his conclusion he writes:

What's saddening is that people should miss what these various phenomena really have in common — their explicability. They show that our ideas of atmospheric physics are applicable and useful on bodies that range from the tiny (Pluto, the atmosphere of which is hardly worth mentioning) to the gigantic (Jupiter, the atmosphere of which outweighs a hundred solid Earths).

And computer models based on the ones used to study the climate on Earth provide results even when applied to the hugely different conditions on Mars. That is truly impressive.

So what these disparate observations actually tell us is that the scientific community — the scientific community that enjoys a firm consensus on the causes of Earthly climatic change — has a fairly impressive grasp of the fundamentals of how weather works elsewhere, as well. It's a rather inspiring insight. But it is not the lesson that climate sceptics want their readers to learn.

Word.

Making an ASS out of U and ME

(The title seems like a good description of what it is to argue too long with your typical climate denialist, but it has a more specific connection to this short post.)

Unfortunately Blogger, (as far as I can tell) has no way to display recent comments, so a few interesting exchanges go on behind the scenes. I don't have any good ideas for rectifying that, but I did want to share a laugh with readers from the latest comment on the "How To" front page. I spent some time back and forth with one anonymouse and after all that work their concluding position is?

"I will stand by my assumptions"

LOL! Who needs data and logic when you are well armed with assumptions, right?

Policy advocate, or human being?

Roger Pielke Jr has another posting complaing about how the IPCC is not policy neutral despite its stated objectives, and therefore not an "honest broker" of the science of climate change. He offers this quote as support:

I hope this [forthcoming IPCC] report will shock people, governments into taking more serious action as you really can't get a more authentic and a more credible piece of scientific work.

from Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC director.

I commented over there that his accusations of some sort of hypocrisy rest entirely on the assumption that everyone shares his definitions and I do not think that most people consider statements like "we should take serious action" to be advocating a policy at all.

Quite rightly Roger asked me how I would define "policy neutral". So, because I wrote a lengthy reply to that and would like to keep it handy, I thought I would reproduce it here. ("You" refers to Roger, of course)

I daresay "policy neutral" is one of those concepts where the only possible comprehensive definitions for it in its most abstract meaning render it a useless term. That is to say, the purest definition - having no preferences for any policy over any other and even no preference for any goals or set of goals over any other - is one that no living breathing human being could conceivably subscribe to. It requires having no values, no aspirations, no ethics.

So to avoid defining such a term out of a useful existence, policy neutral can only have meaning within a specific context. For example, if you are sitting at a meeting and there are five proposed policy options on the table and you have no preference of one over any other, you are policy neutral within this context.Now, of coures, the five that were on the table must have come from somewhere, but to be policy neutral, and human, you must already be looking at a limited set of options.

So let me try to bring this into its specific context here. I believe that one can be policy neutral even though they believe that climate change is an urgent problem that needs to be dealt with. Someone could be policy neutral because they have no particular convictions about how addressing climate change should be done: nuclear energy, CO2 sequestration, drastic lifestyle changes, combinations of approaches, etc.

I believe that I am not alone in thinking this way, and in fact it is you who need to "come to grips" with what others mean by policy neutral. The way you have defined and use this term (I have no doubt that it is consistent with your field's usage btw) means that the simple desire to avoid large scale human suffering makes you a policy advocate.

This is really splitting semantic horsehairs while the fossil fuels burn.

I am sure I will be following up on that over there...

The changing climate of climate change

David Roberts has an insightful and entertaining narrative on Gristmill of the recent climate change in the climate change debate. He is right on the money about how the insiders manipulate public policy debates.

No wonder those geeks in lab coats get eaten alive!

I would like to highlight this sentiment:

Once more for the cheap seats: there is no equivalence between denialists and global-warming activists. None. Their motives are not the same. They do not have equal credibility or deserve equal respect. They are not "two sides" of anything.

This does not get said often enough. The whole article is well worth the read!

Andrew Revkin's latest

As anyone who circulates anywhere in the climate blogosphere is undoubtedly aware, Andy Revkin wrote a piece in the NYT (non-subscription link!) very recently about a "new middle ground" in the climate debate. The main point being this is a refreshing and new voice of reason between two irrational extremes ("we will all die", versus "warming? what warming?"). Since I am so slow off the mark to bring it up, much of what I might have said has been already. So in brief, with acknowledgments to those who beat me too it, are some thoughts, in no particular order:

• Real Climate did a post which is a good starting point and with which I pretty completely concur. The middle ground is the IPCC consensus, very few serious scientific voices have strayed from it.
• I am very grateful to all the excellent work Andy Revkin has contributed to the otherwise poor showing from the main stream media on this issue. The NYT in general deserves some acknowledgment as well. The only weakness of this article is probably from the need to make a newsworthy event out of a slow general trend. It is also on shaky grounds because it really the media reporting on itself. The media shapes the debate much more than does the reality of the issues, so how to now report on the debate changing its character?
• the phrase "non-skeptic heretic" is unfortunate and definately not climate debate neutral, as I said in comment #3 on Roger Pielke Jr.'s blog.
• David Roberts is pretty much right on the money WRT his comments about RP Jr, in my opinion. Coining this phrase was more self-serving and/or self-flattering than anything else. He is however too hard on Revkin who is deeply inside of a fatally flawed system.
• Andrew Dessler makes an important point about the distinction between the political debate and the scientific debate. This distinction, or rather the lack of keeping it in mind, muddies much of many of the discussions of this article and its issues.
• James Annan makes the tongue-in-cheek point that since everyone else is slightly off to one side or another from him, he is in fact in the middle. The serious point being that dividing a spectrum of opinion and values into boxes, especially just three (too hard, too soft, just right!) is not the Path to Enlightenment.
• The whole notion of a two-sided debate (from which this "reasonable" middle ground then emerges) is an artifact of the mainstream media's misguided notion of balance. (h/t to Bob Ward on RC)
• There is no moral equivalence between the exagerations of the "alarmists" and the obfuscations and distractions of the denialists, so again the notion of "middle" is inappropriate. David Roberts makes this point in another RC comment.

I did not read these other blog threads, but they are there and surely interesting: Tim Lambert, Matthew Nesbit, Chris Mooney and John Fleck

The New Denialism

Eli Rabett has done a very good summary of the recent blogosphere kafuffle surrounding the phrase "climate change denial" and whether it is an allusion to Holocaust denial. I have decided I reject that notion much more strongly than I did in the comments at Prometheus. But this post is only tangential to that debate. What I really want to post about is that Michael Tobis wrote an excellent piece in the Global Change goggle group that he has kindly agreed to let me reproduce here in its entirety (Eli scooped me on that too, but did not reproduce it all). Comments here are not refused, but I encourage anyone with something to say to add it where it appeared originally. Without further ado:

The New Denialism

In "An Inconvenient Truth" Mr Gore alluded to the contemptible incipient switch among the denial industry to jump from you haven't proven that anything needs to be done" to "you haven't proven that it isn't already too late" without passing through any position that something must be done.

Denialism does not have as its purpose a denial of warming. It is the denial of necessity for a policy.

Its weapon is diversion. It diverts the conversation to minutia of the science. Its objective is to divert the scientist from summarizing the situation effectively, to divert the casual reader from making the effort to understand, and to leave the casual reader with the impression of a subtle controversy even where the facts are entirely clear and rather straightforward.

Among its tactics is a reliance on the good nature of the scientist, who loves to make every effort to explain and explore scientific knowledge, and in many cases believes himself or herself obligated to do so.

These tactics can smoothly be shifted from the "no proven need" to "no proof that it isn't too late". What is being denied isn't the science. It's the need for a policy. Poking scientists is just a tactic.

The fossil interests have little choice in this matter; they will act this way to defend their interests. It will be very hard to prove in court that their intent was malicious. Seen this way, they are protecting shareholder value. It would be good if we lived in a world where power centers limited their tactics by making moral judgements, but we are so far from that point that it seems a forlorn hope.

In the real world, unless we can come up with a policy that protects the interests of the fossil fuel entities, they will continue to actively confuse the public discussion. I think the "clean coal" alternative is something that needs to be actively pursued and even subsidized. It is a failure of policy when a significant constituency is motivated to lie to the public.

Meanwhile, anyone with any sense of decency should eschew this sort of propaganda work. A soup kitchen line has more dignity.

Of course it's always hard to prove whether any individual is dishonest or merely misguided. A scientist always wants to give the benefit of the doubt to the misguided. It's important, though, to notice that this kindness of disposition toward the misguided is consistently abused by the malicious.

mt

Important, accurate and well written thoughts, IMO.

Definately Not Galileo

A common theme among hardcore denialists, after slowly dragging them around to admit there is a consensus, is an appeal to the Galileo syndrome. "Galileo went against the consensus and he was right!" This is a flawed argument in the climate change debate for many reasons, and it is a Guide entry that is missing for the moment.

I am only bringing it up now, rather than do a proper entry, because of a discussion paper by Ernst-Georg Beck that was presented on Warwick Hughes' blog (no relation to me... to Glenn Beck? I don't know). It is basically a well dressed version of the "there is no anthropogenic CO2 rise" argument. Eli Rabett took the time to take it apart in a rather thorough and scientific manner, especially given the total lack of a credible conclusion Beck arrives at. You can see the featured graph at Deltoid and read Stoat's dismissive opinion of it here.

The irony I want to point out is that Galileo was a forward thinker, reaching into previously untrodden territory. His innovation and imagination helped him see past the prevailing state of human knowledge at the time and go into new ground. What are the denialists doing here? Digging up decades old research with results all over the place, results that lead to all sorts of impossible conclusions and then trying to claim that this is the reality and the new, consistent and refined results are the ones that are wrong. Never mind that this is what progress looks like, this is many minds working to overcome the challenges that caused prior confusion to finally achieve consistent, sensible and reliable data.

But what if you don't like what the new data are telling you? Just chuck it and go back to the old stuff!

Sorry, that is so not Galileo!

A Perfect Storm of Character Flaws

Roger Pielke Jr. has an interesting post on setting policy for emissions reductions that target particular levels at which CO2 should be stabilised. This seems to be the preferred approach, both for policy makers and advocates of climate change mitigation. I find myself in the odious position of criticising this approach while having nothing much better to offer. Nevertheless, here are some expanded thoughts on this matter that I submitted as a comment on Roger's post.

Firstly, any good emissions policy also needs to consider ocean acidity. It is fine for GW if stabilized emissions balance natural sinks at some low risk temperature change, but as long as that means increasing the level of carbonic acid in the ocean, the global environment still faces a huge problem. This urgent issue remains remarkably out of sight in the public debate.

As for the best policy on reducing carbon emissions, it is unfortunate that "as much as possible as soon as possible" is not precise enough for policy makers, litigators and tax incentive schemes. It is equally unfortunate that public perceptions seem to mirror the fabled "Frog in the Pot of Boiling Water". How much worse is 380 than 378? How much worse is 382 than 380, and on it goes until we find ourselves asking "how much worse is 550 than 450?"

But perhaps the greatest challenge to both our political and economic ways of thinking is the temporal seperation between cause and effect that characterizes this issue. Few alive now will ever see the consequences of their choices, and none will ever know the long term effects that our current and recent-past lifestyle and technology choices have set in motion. Four, five or six year terms do not encourage today's leaders to place any priority on such long range planning. Markets have trouble looking beyond the next financial quarter. The IPCC scenarios may stop in 2100, but let's not forget that the world does not.

So what the Climate Change debate is faced with here is a perfect storm of societal character flaws and through these, incontrovertible proof of the immaturity human civilization. I am a big believer in the adage that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, but that is what you say to yourself after you have survived. And while I am not worried that the species will not survived, I think there is abundant and clear evidence that our global society may not.