Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Climate Change Denialism and the Conservative Loss of the Skeptical High Ground
I posted a comment on this week’s Ricochet Podcast (Bjorn Lomborg was one of the guests) and someone suggested I turn it into a post. I think that’s a great idea, so here I go.
I am essentially as much of a Climate Change Denier as one can intelligently be. Yes, the Earth’s climate is always changing, slowly, for various reasons, and yes, perhaps it is changing slightly and slowly from human activity. But the current Consensus on Climate Change that is making predictions of what is going to happen to Earth’s Climate in the next 20-100 years, I believe, is radically wrong.
Manhattan will not be underwater in 100 years. We will not all be dead from hurricanes and heat waves. We will still have plenty of snow days and blizzards, and the average person will experience everyday weather in 100 years in basically the same way we experience it today, and like they did 100 years ago. In other words, there is no Climate Change crisis, and the field of science that is telling us that there is has basically been captured by activism. This is the current residence of the new Green Movement that is, at its heart, anti-capitalist, and needs a crisis like Climate Change that can be both catastrophic and vague at the same time.
The purpose of my post is to point out how much I have noticed that conservative commentary on Climate Change has shifted, in, say, the last five years, in the direction of retreat. By that, I mean that there are very few conservative journalists and commentators who actually hold and defend what has come to be called the Climate Denier position. What has replaced it has been a kind of lukewarm position that concedes that of course Climate Change is happening, and of course it’s a problem, but. … And then comes the list of things that basically amount to a kind of changing of the subject. “But China and India are the real problem, not us.” “But thanks to fracking, we’ve actually lowered our carbon output.” These arguments basically imply that conservatives care about the problem, and we just have different ideas on how to solve it. And I suspect, for most of the commentators and columnists making them, that these arguments aren’t really sincere. At least I hope they aren’t.
I first noticed this after Trump pulled us out of the Paris Agreement. I expected to hear, from the Right, “good, because Climate Change is a load of hooey.” But I didn’t. Instead, I heard, “good, because actually, the Paris Agreement wouldn’t have really solved Climate Change. It wasn’t even binding!” This caused me to do a mental double take because it was almost as if we were suddenly pretending that we were concerned about really tackling Climate Change, and a non-binding agreement simply wouldn’t do. Of course, we don’t really believe this, because if we really thought Climate Change was a big problem, we would be proposing solutions to it. We aren’t, because we don’t.
So then why have we ceded the skeptical high ground on this subject? The burden of proof is on a very young branch of science that is making stark predictions of something that is apparently 1) already happening, and 2) going to, very soon, get catastrophically much worse. Their record of successful predictions since the 1980s (and I won’t even take the obvious cheap shot of mentioning the global cooling predictions of the 1970s) has been abysmal, and anyone saying that the Earth’s climate today is really any different than it was in 1980 is insane. The record has been failed prediction after failed prediction. So why are we now acting as if they are slowly being proven right, and we need to jump on board the Science Train lest we get left behind?
My answer to this question is that climate science, as a field and a community, has been utterly captured by this issue and the activism that has flowed from it, so there is really no alternative science being done from within its ranks. Yes, there are excellent bloggers and researchers who are holding up the Denialist conversation, but these have all been thoroughly outcast from the scientific field. So it’s hard to go on CNN and stake out a Climate Denier position because you immediately get bombarded with “but 97% of the scientific community says you are wrong!” Even people like Lomborg have taken the Lukewarmer position and run hard from accusations of being a denier. So I get that it’s hard to do. But we need to be honest about what we really think about this issue because otherwise less informed people will really start thinking the science is settled and now all that remains is discussing solutions. And once we start having that discussion, it will become apparent that a lot of people who are saying of course this is a problem, really don’t think it is, as evidenced by how much we are truly willing to sacrifice for it.
I have become, in the same time period, somewhat obsessed with reading every single pro-consensus climate article that comes across my feed, because I really want to know what is passing for evidence for climate catastrophe these days. Most of it is click-baity stuff like “This Town Has Been Ravaged By Climate Change,” and you click on the article, and it’s about a town in Louisiana that is sinking into the ocean because it was built on the Mississippi Delta. Then the article will say “a combination of sinking, unstable ground, and rising oceans is making this town get slowly swallowed by the sea,” basically handwaving the evidence of rising oceans, as if coastal flooding from sea levels is a thing that is happening in the US.
Another article came out last year in Canada’s Globe and Mail called “The Costs Of Climate Change Are Rising.” In it, the author, who presumably is an intelligent person who went to college, compares insurance claims from the 1980s to insurance claims today, and, get this, tells us that the amounts of insurance claims due to weather events are going up. Can you imagine why insurance claims due to weather events are more costly today than they were in 1980? I can’t! The lesson we are supposed to take away is that our weather today is much more extreme that it was 30 years ago, a claim that people are apparently accepting without any serious critical thinking or scientific study.
All this to say: it is clear to me that either a hardcore denialist position like I have, or perhaps a more lukewarm position like Bjorn Lomborg maintains, is going to be shown to be correct as the decades pass. Weather and climate in 2050 are going to be pretty much like it is now, and most of us will be there to see it, and point out all the hysterical predictions of our current decade that didn’t come to pass. So why would we cede the skeptic’s high ground for a kind of lukewarm “of course its a problem” middle ground that no one actually buys? I think this is one of these issues where conservatives will be shown to be on the right side of history. We should talk like we are.
Published in Environment
I think the idea of
Global Warming, I meanClimate Change, whatever is usually quite silly and very dangerous as it religious zealots only use it as a way to take away personal freedom and turn more money and control over to the government and thug-like international organizations.I simply refuse to listen to such interviews, so I skipped that part of the Ricochet podcast, something I rarely do.
I was listening to the Area 45 old interview with George Shultz this weekend. Halfway through he stops talking about nuclear weapons and is obsessed with the dangers of Global Warming/Climate Change. I turned that interview off too. Besides George Shultz isn’t a scientist. He fell for Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos scheme, although it was apparently his grandson Tyler who is widely credited with being one of the first whistleblowers at Theranos.
Speaking of nuclear weapons, the first time and perhaps only memorable time I was called a racist was about 10 years ago when on a social media site that I said that I thought Iran getting nuclear weapons and causing thousands of degrees of a deadly temperature increase in one spot was much more dangerous than some imaginary fractional degree temperature change spread across the entire planet.
This is quite evident by the solutions offered by the “man-made climate change is killing us all” crowd. All of their solutions involve a radical realignment of how we live our lives, as well as high taxation and government micromanagement of every aspect of our existence. Their solutions also involve the silencing of opposition to the point some pro-climate change people want deniers executed.
The truth be known, a little warming might actually help humanity. Vast lands too cold for habitation and farming (think Canadian wilderness and Siberia) would open up.
Even with the technology we have today, the five-day forecast still isn’t always accurate. Projecting what a global climate will be like even in 20 years is sheer lunacy . . .
I’m guessing this is sarcasm, because a 1980 dollar is worth over 200% more than a dollar today: In other words, inflation.
In a related matter, I would like to see an accounting of all the government regulations that have already been adopted. We really dodged a bullet with Obama’s huge money raising scheme for carbon taxes. People forget that he was going to pay for Obamacare with carbon taxes. However there are many, many other things that have been implemented. The electricity production sector is rife with such things. Does anyone know of a place that keeps track of this stuff?
The Heartland Institute has done some work on enviromental stuff. They might have the info: https://www.heartland.org/
Exactly. And the article also completely ignores the growth in population of Canada over 30 years (hence many more buildings to insure), and the appreciation of property values over 30 years, which have outpaced inflation (hence each building is much more valuable). Overall, this was the typical idiotic thinking articles like these engage in.
I too dislike it when Conservatives give an acknowledgement of Global Warming but downplay its significance. It is a bunch of hooey. Here are some simple points.
The result of these four different measuring methods has been for the Global Warming scientists to cling desperately to the old-fashioned ground-based measurement data because it gives them the most desirable, albeit most inaccurate, results. This is actually anti-scientific.
It has long been easier to predict a long term average rather than short term variation. Perhaps long term variations, too, since a mistaken prediction is not likely to be mistaken by as much as a mistake in short term variation. Depending on what criteria you’re using for “accuracy.”
I can’t say I don’t care whether or not AGW is real because I do. Humans have always been capable of fouling their nests, and are increasingly capable of doing it, given their larger populations and more powerful tools. If they can’t mess up the climate now, they will be able to soon enough. And I do care about depletion of non-renewable resources. There are many episodes of resource depletion (e.g. in fisheries) where people keep denying it until their denials are irrelevant in the face of reality.
However, no matter how catastrophic AGW can be, that’s nothing compared to the damage that leftist governance can do, so I do not want to give them more power and money. All predictive models show that any local or global increase in their governance will be disastrous.
I need to copy and save this statement, it’s a classic: Especially the last sentence,.
A long time ago I heard that most land based thermometers were in cities (with air conditioning differentially heating the outside environment), and often over blacktop parking lots. Is this still going on?
Just out of curiosity, if they can’t predict the weather, say tornadoes, over, say Tupelo, because they don’t have a thorough enough knowledge of what is necessary to cause a given tornado, how can they predict that in general any few tornadoes are caused by general climate-change? (Maybe it’s those new parking lots and office buildings that did it.)
It seems to me that shark attacks are easier to predict that tornadoes.
They say the Sahara was started by overgrazing domesticated animals.
There has been a big battle going on between the Skeptics (especially meteorologist Anthony Watts) and the temperature readers over this subject. Yes, many of the stations are in big cities which have laid down a lot of concrete over the years. Concrete and especially asphalt, along with buildings, soak up a whole lot of heat compared to land with vegetation and forests, thus skewing the temperature results. Supposedly the temperature readers have made efforts to correct for this by situating their instruments away from such “heat Islands,” and the scientists who analyze the data make corrections for it, but Anthony Watts and his minions keep finding egregious examples of carelessness still to this day.
If you ask me, the whole idea of a person reading temperatures on a thermometer is only accurate to about a degree Celsius, if not more. And that is assuming that the thermometer is stable. There are a bunch of experiments showing how even modern-day thermometers’ accuracy shifts over time. All you need is a fraction of one degree shift to throw a monkey wrench into their 6/10 of a degree rise.
One thing the Global Warming scientists never publicize is their own estimate of their margin of error. It shows up as “error bars” on an honest graph. It usually happens to be exactly the same as that 6/10 of a degree rise they are claiming, which means according to their own estimates, there might not be any warming at all.
Good post.
Yes, I’m a bit of a skeptic myself at all levels of global warming theory–if it’s happening (probably not), why it’s happening (not convinced it’s human industrial CO2), and what we should (rule of law and free markets for economic growth and less pollution).
It’s even worse than you portray. Watts and his allies keep uncovering instances where “corrections” in the past are used to get modern trends to fit the alarmist designs. If you think about temperature stations that used to be rural and have been taken over by asphalt, one would expect the “correction” to that sharply-rising aberrant graph to be a reduction in the present to model continued rural temps, or an addition to the past to model current urban temps. But the corrections supposedly justified by “Urban Heat Island” arguments are invariably reductions in the past, exaggerating the aberration to help the climatistas’ narrative. It also gives alarmists repeating opportunities to claim “warmest year on record” where the real warmest years (during the dust bowl) have been whitewashed out of existence. James Hansen thoroughly polluted NOAA’s official records with these, and fought all FOIA attempts to catch it.
Invariably? I would need more data on that. (In the mid 1980s I was involved with data management involving a set of NWS weather stations in Michigan, including at least one that started out in a rural area that ended up as an urban heat island. There was a lot of talk about how researchers should treat that. I haven’t kept up but I would be surprised if the handling of these by data aggregators and modelers was “invariable.”)
I saw a funny graph once on the “Watts Up With That” website that showed the warming trend in the U.S. as it was portrayed by the data people 20 years ago superimposed over the same warming trend as interpreted by the data people 10 years ago and then superimposed over the latest incarnation of the same trend. In each successive graph they kept tweaking the data to make the past years look cooler and cooler in order to get a bigger temperature rise in the present. And all this hysterical nonsense is over minute fractions of one degree. It is almost comical.
Throughout this whole Climate spiel over the last 15 years I have learned that there is a lot of hokum in this field. I gives a lot of science a bad name.
Yes. We should never trust anyone claiming to be a climate scientist again.
The question I always ask when this subject pops up is this: If my nightly weather guesser on the local tv station can’t predict the weather accurately 3 days from now, why do the greenies think they can accurately predict it 50 years from now? Hmmmm…?
They don’t think that. They are predicting climate 50 years from now. It’s easier than predicting weather.
But still saying that you predict better 50 years from now rather than the 5-day forecast is so easy, because you have to wait 50 years to find out you were utterly wrong or not.
If you can say, okay more heat can cause in aggregate more hurricanes and tornadoes, but you still don’t know what causes them, or stimulates that last breathe of air movement before the cyclone starts, then how can you extrapolate out fifty years to say how many there will be and where 50 years from now? The same knowledge that can predict the number of tornadoes and hurricanes today is what you have to extrapolate with. And we don’t have that. And if you can’t predict today, I don’t see how you can predict a lifetime away.
Everybody gotta read Asimov.
Certain kinds of micro-events are hard to predict, but even so long-term trends made up of them can sometimes be predicted.
Among my concerns with the global warming theory’s long-term trend-predicting are the sorts of problems explored by @michaelstopa and @toddfeinburg on this episode of a Ricochet podcast, interviewing a skeptic.
If memory serves, one problem is that the predictions rely on computer models that presume we can understand not one but two systems, air and oceans, that are immeasurably complex.
That was the weak part of my argument. But still —
It’s really easy to make predictions if you are willing to lie.
Er, the reason that conservatives have migrated toward a lukewarmer position is because it is correct- that is exactly what Pat Michaels and Roy Spencer have described and explained for years. In fact, Pat Michaes has warned the “denialist” (bad choice of words) community that not recognizing global warming related to GHG with some human contribution is a mistake that will prove to be embarrassing at some point when the 20 year pause ends.
The key, as Dr. Michaels explains, is that Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) is a crock, a fraud, etc.- there is global warming, there is some level of human involvement (Phillip Stott traces it back to the first cave men lighting a fire), but it is neither catastrophic nor is thge level of anthropogenesis significant.
The climate change nuts who actually know something about the subject realize that, which is why they did the phony marketing re-brand to “Climate Change” from “global warming”. But it is neither smart nor accurate to be a “hard-core denialist”. The smartest and most subject-matter knowledgeable people are all lukewearmers: Dr. Michaels, Dr. Spencer, Dr. Christie, Dr. Happer, Dr. Lindzen, and Dr. Curry.
Or not.