Hey Ricochet! Help An Undergrad: Why Are You A Climate Change Skeptic?
I have a niece who is an undergraduate student at Rutgers University. Aside from offering her such intellectually stimulating fare as learning from Snooki and dodging bullets, there appears to be a professor at Rutgers who is interested in offering her something to learn.
My niece is an environmental studies major. Naturally I've had a few sleepless nights worrying about what the left might do to her fecund curiosity, not only by what they tell her, but by what they might withhold from her.
To my delight, her assignment this week is to ask "Climate Change Skeptics" why they are skeptical. I assume the assignment refers to "man-made climate change" since it is uncontroverted, even in Academia, that world climates went through many changes long before Henry Ford made his planet destroying machine masked as the Model T automobile.
On Thursday, her class will begin to discuss what the students found from interviewing skeptics. Rather than give her one man's view, I thought I'd enlist the services of the entire Ricochet noosphere on climate change skepticism, to give Rutgers a more complete image of it, posted right here to Al Gore's Internet.
I have my reservations about the assignment. I hope the challenges to claims of man-made climate change are presented in university classrooms by scientists who are skeptical, and not limited to opinions of lay people like me. But it's a start.
So post your best. There are young minds at stake!
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Mar '11
Re: Hey Ricochet! Help An Undergrad: Why Are You A Climate Change Skeptic?
These are all good people to read. If you are short of time, start with Anthony Watt's website (Watts up with that), as recommended above.
I'd also recommend "Slaying the Sky Dragon" - it gets heavily into Thermodynamics towards the end (the key to the whole thing), but it is mostly readable.
After reading all this, I think it's fair to say that the effects of AGW are somewhere between zero and very small (like a tenth of a degree, or less) - the experts disagree on the numbers.
The Science is far from settled - pretty much like any area of Science. Only a carbon trader or a politician will claim otherwise.
Edited on Apr 25, 2011 at 5:44pmMar '11
Re: Hey Ricochet! Help An Undergrad: Why Are You A Climate Change Skeptic?
It seems to me that there are 4 statements that different folks are skeptical about:
1. The earth's climate is changing
2. The change in climate is going to have more harmful effects than beneficial effects.
3. Human action can prevent the current harmful change in the climate.
4. The most effective way to prevent the current harmful change in the climate is to limit human released carbon dioxide.
I am most skeptical of (4). The cost of limiting human released carbon dioxide is high. Possibly much higher than the benefits. Those who are attempting to transform the worlds economies tend to have a great deal of confidence in the benefits, while not considering the costs.
May '10
Re: Hey Ricochet! Help An Undergrad: Why Are You A Climate Change Skeptic?
I'd like to second Dr. Savage's endorsement of Anthony Watts web site.
The most illuminating thing you'll find on the web is the survey of official temperature stations at surfacestations.org.
Of 1003 temperature reporting stations surveyed in the United States, 69% of them are so poorly installed that they over report temps by 2° C or higher. Eight percent are off by more than 5° C.
These thermometers are located over asphalt, next to air conditioning vents and dryer vents.
What's more other like-minded surveys around the world have shown other poorly designed placements. The raw data may be so bad it matters little how good the computer modeling.
Apr '11
Re: Hey Ricochet! Help An Undergrad: Why Are You A Climate Change Skeptic?
to scare a generation of kids in order to manipulate them later into BS legislative measures ;D... like taxing exhalations, and regulating light bulbs
Aug '10
Re: Hey Ricochet! Help An Undergrad: Why Are You A Climate Change Skeptic?
I take the Jim Manzi position that climate change is real but the cure is worse than the disease.
1. An optimally designed GHG reduction policy would involve tremendous economic losses immediately to forestall or mitigate slightly less tremendous economic losses in the long run. The only way to make the math work on this is if you set aside the IPCC's main estimates and worry about tail risk.
2. In the real world any GHG limitations policy is likely to be sub-optimally designed and a vehicle for all sorts of mischief. There will be hold-out nations (which may provoke trade wars), expect various types of Coasean bargaining over "offsets" will create massive opportunities for corruption and rent-seeking, various stakeholders will need to be bought off, etc. Think of how FUBAR our ethanol policy is then multiply that by a million.
Nonetheless, I still favor a domestic carbon tax because I figure it's a way to peel off enough of the left to get what is in effect a consumption tax.
Nov '10
Re: Hey Ricochet! Help An Undergrad: Why Are You A Climate Change Skeptic?
A basic tenet of science is that any study must be reproducible to be credible. Michael Mann produced a paper inferring temperatures over the past millennium. This study was key to the widely publicized hockey stick graph. Some have been trying to reproduce that study for years, unsuccessfully. Perhaps they just don't have the right laboratory equipment. But wait, no laboratory is needed. Mann's study took data produced by others (e.g. tree ring data), processed the data with a computer program and generated temperatures. Anyone can run data through a computer program. Why can't Mann's results be duplicated? Because he wouldn't provide the precise data and program he used. The excuse he gave to a congressional committee: the program is Mann's personal property. No joke.
How does one bad apple condemn an entire field? It is the job every other scientist in the field to call out such unscientific behaviour. Most did nothing. Many did worse and made excuses or claimed what he did was valid. They circled the wagons. They hid the decline. Inexcusable. I am skeptical of any scientist (or journalist) that does't admit this behaviour is anti-science.
Sep '10
Re: Hey Ricochet! Help An Undergrad: Why Are You A Climate Change Skeptic?
If she wants to get an A she should just write, "because they're stupid!"
Edited on Apr 25, 2011 at 6:02pmOct '10
Re: Hey Ricochet! Help An Undergrad: Why Are You A Climate Change Skeptic?
Ask her what is the #1 green house gas that contributes to global warming? If she doesn't know that it’s WATER VAPOR, say "I rest my case."
If she answers correctly, then ask if white clouds (made of water vapor) reflect solar radiation, therefore reducing the green house effect. It sure seems like the earth has self-correcting mechanisms in order to maintain a basic equilibrium.
Then ask why Greenland is called “Greenland.” Since the Vikings landed there during the medieval warming period, and the land was green and not snow covered, and the Vikings lacked SUV’s and oil refineries, then the earth must have been much warmer back then.
Edited on Apr 25, 2011 at 6:31pmFeb '11
Re: Hey Ricochet! Help An Undergrad: Why Are You A Climate Change Skeptic?
Hmm, skepticism? I can't remember. I've been forgetful ever since the food shortages of the population bomb. We were happy then just to get an apple - until we learned about those poisonous pesticides. Regrettably, we survived that by eating frankenfoods. And then there was the acid rain - of course the acid might have helped keep us warm during the 70s ice age. Despite our misfortunes, we felt lucky to survive DDT. And the truth is, as a climate change refugee, it's hard to find time to be skeptical. At least we don't have to worry about those polar bears anymore.
Jan '11
Re: Hey Ricochet! Help An Undergrad: Why Are You A Climate Change Skeptic?
A statistical reason: Mann's "hockey stick" is bogus. Montford's The Hockey Stick Illusion is a good introduction to the shoddy math and the sneaky selection of records.
The failure of predictions: By 2010 snow was supposed to be a distant memory in Britain, Australia was going to be suffering from massive drought, and there were going to be 50 million climate refugees (from areas they helpfully specified, so it was easy for researchers to check and find that populations in those areas have increased).
The past-prediction scam: Now they tell us that the last three horrendously cold winters are the result of global warming? Be a lot more impressive if somebody had mentioned that in, oh, 2007
The behavioral reason: Global warmists attack the motives of anyone who questions their research. Skeptics aren't nearly so nasty: mostly they just point and giggle.
The Climategate reason: It's not just that a bunch of academics behaved badly. It's that they revealed enough of the IPCC process to totally discredit its assertions.
The "consensus" reason: Science is not done by consensus. Arguments based on a supposed consensus smell of snake oil to me.
Mar '11
Re: Hey Ricochet! Help An Undergrad: Why Are You A Climate Change Skeptic?
Many billions of dollars have been wasted and many thousands of jobs have been destroyed over a theory that has not been proven. None of the data being thrown around can be trusted. The remedies being prescribed are on a scale with amputating both legs above the knee to cure athletes' foot.
Short of asphyxiation levels, the only proven effect of increased cabon dioxide in the atmosphere is that plants grow faster. One climate change voluptuary warned that this effect would lead to us all being whiped out by a global forest fire.
Apr '11
Re: Hey Ricochet! Help An Undergrad: Why Are You A Climate Change Skeptic?
The Heartland Institute has a web page with a great many resourses on AGW and why it is not the immediate disaster that the left has made it out to be: http://www.globalwarmingheartland.org/
Patrick Michaels of the CATO Institute as a number of books out on the subject if you want to get into the statistical details. See his book Meltdown
http://www.amazon.com/Meltdown-Predictable-Distortion-Scientists-Politicians/dp/1930865791/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1303781642&sr=1-9
Jan '11
Re: Hey Ricochet! Help An Undergrad: Why Are You A Climate Change Skeptic?
There's a pretty good laymans summary of the science in a recent issue of Quadrant.
Some of this has been said or implied above already, but I really think she should start by getting her to define precisely what the questions being asked is - when you say "I assume the assignment refers to "man-made climate change"", you hit immediately on problem 1 - what precisely are we being sceptical about?
1. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas - uncontroversial in a laboratory environment, more questionable in effect in the atmosphere because of many complex interactions.
2. We are increasing the amount of free atmospheric carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels - relatively uncontroversial, although plenty of argument about relative amounts compared to natural emissions.
3. There has been some increased temperature globally over the last 50 years - given the murky sources and large measurement variability in the source data, not completely uncontroversial, but there probably has been.
So you need to get over arguing about these things, and get into what it is that she's being asked - and get her teacher to define it, and define it precisely. What do they mean when they say "climate change"?
May '10
Re: Hey Ricochet! Help An Undergrad: Why Are You A Climate Change Skeptic?
Bjorn Lomborg? No, no no. He thinks there is warming; just that it isn't that much and/or we can't do much about it and/or what's being proposed won't work.
Climate change/global warming is predicated on these basic assumptions:
1. it's getting warmer in any significant, non-normal way
2. Humans are causing it
3. Warming would be bad
4. CO2, at least in the tiny fractions of a percent at issue, can cause any warming.
5. if it is getting warmer, that we can do anything about it
6. we can do anything about it that costs more than it's worth.
Climate change is a lie, because there is no serious evidence for even the first of these, and at least, if not greatly more evidence of the opposite of each.
I'm distressed how even people on the right give the climate change people too much credit, conceding even #1 above.
Edited on Apr 26, 2011 at 5:36amJul '10
Re: Hey Ricochet! Help An Undergrad: Why Are You A Climate Change Skeptic?
May '10
Re: Hey Ricochet! Help An Undergrad: Why Are You A Climate Change Skeptic?
I want the video of the class discussion!
Apr '11
Re: Hey Ricochet! Help An Undergrad: Why Are You A Climate Change Skeptic?
I've been a climate change skeptic for about 20 years. (Anthropogenic climate change, that is; it's undeniable the climate changes.) When I was a young'un in college, I read a short article in Discover Magazine about how they'd found that global temperatures had fluctuated much more in the past than they had today, well before humans even existed. The final sentence of the article, though, was something along the lines of "But of course we humans are the ones heating up the planet!" I wrote to the author of the article to suggest that the topic of the article contradicted her concluding sentence, and she wrote back that I was just a global warming denier and why couldn't I get with the program like everyone else. So I guess that made me officially a skeptic of anthropogenic climate change!
May '10
Re: Hey Ricochet! Help An Undergrad: Why Are You A Climate Change Skeptic?
Is this an assignment for a science class? Good grief.
May '10
Re: Hey Ricochet! Help An Undergrad: Why Are You A Climate Change Skeptic?
This is a repost of something I wrote on Diane Ellis's Facebook wall last week:
See section 3.4 ("Fingerprints") of the 2009 report from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. Starting on page 106 of the document, which is page 44 of the pdf, it says:
"Is there a method that can distinguish anthropogenic global warming from natural warming? The IPCC and many scientists believe the 'fingerprint' method is the only reliable one. It compares the observed pattern of warming with a pattern calculated from greenhouse models. ... A mismatch would argue strongly against any significant contribution from greenhouse gas (GHG) forcing and support the conclusion that the observed warming is mostly of natural origin. ...
"While all greenhouse models show an increasing warming trend with altitude, peaking around 10 km at roughly two times the surface value, the temperature data from balloons give the opposite result: no increasing warming, but rather a slight cooling with altitude in the tropical zone.
"The CCSP executive summary inexplicably claims agreement between observed and calculated patterns, the opposite of what the report itself documents. ...
"This mismatch of observed and calculated fingerprints clearly falsifies the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming (AGW)."
(Emphasis mine.)
Edited on Apr 25, 2011 at 8:16pmApr '11
Re: Hey Ricochet! Help An Undergrad: Why Are You A Climate Change Skeptic?
You guys have already said everything I wanted to say except this. The teacher should also have the students interview people who in the 1970's were skeptical of the claims that we were on the fast track to another great ice age, due to heavy industry. This was after all, 30 years into a cooling streak which showed no signs of stopping.