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Why Are You a “Climate Skeptic?”
Last week, The New York Times hired former Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens to add a little ideological diversity. Granted, Stephens is a Never Trumper, but it was an effort to provide some center-right thought to an opinion page almost entirely devoted to center-left and far-left viewpoints.
Stephens’s first piece for the paper had liberals cancelling subscriptions and calling for his job. His crime wasn’t to sanction genocide or the re-institution of slavery. He merely said that, though he believes in man-made climate change, we should have more humility before pretending to have all the answers.
“Claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science,” Stephens wrote, adding, “censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.”
In my weekend op-ed for the local paper, I explained why I’m a skeptic on environmental apocalypse narratives:
I blame my first-grade teacher. She handed us maps showing how the pollution-caused ice age would bury our Chicago suburb under a massive glacier. My mom, ever the pragmatist, assured me I wouldn’t die since we were moving to Phoenix that summer.
After a childhood expecting to see polar bears chasing Cubs around Wrigley Field, in my late teens I was told to forget that ice age nonsense. The Ozone Hole would give all of us cancer.
Then imagine my 20-something shock to watch politicians trip over their aerosol empties to tell me global warming would chase me back out of Arizona, maybe to that glacier-free Chicago suburb.
Global warming gave way to the short-lived “global weirding” then to the endlessly malleable climate change. In the process, I lost the ability to panic. Throughout my life, the most extreme climate alarmists have been more wrong than right, at least after their more nuanced research was spun by politicians greedy for votes and dollars.
I’m 50 years old, so those of you in my age bracket might have had a similar experience with environmental hysteria. My question for all of you is in two parts:
- If you believe in man-made climate change, especially of the apocalyptic variety, what convinced you of that?
- If you are skeptical of the issue, what made you think that way?
I am skeptical. I have read and heard that the climate measurement stations around the world have been moved often from one place to another, but the measurements stay the same. This is totally non-scientific, since if you want to compare measurements over time, the placement of the stations cannot change or your measurements are bogus. If we cannot accurately measure the temperature, how are we able to affect it?
And the climate alarmists have absolutely no faith in human ingenuity (as liberals seem to think we humans are a blot on the environment, and must be reduced or eliminated, except for them, of course) to be able to mitigate whatever effects there might possibly be if the climate is indeed getting warmer. What we humans do best is adapt.
I don’t believe in apocalyptic varieties of any of the claims. I just assume that man must have made some kind of impact on the climate, because we have had so much impact on the earth and atmosphere overall. The main reason I’m skeptical of the fanatics is because they say the science is done. Uh . . . no. It’s not. Thanks for the post, Jon
My scepticism began with Martin Durkin’s documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. Then I started reading Andrew Montford, Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts and it went on from there. Incidentally, the channel on which Durkin’s documentary was shown in the UK, Channel 4, was licenced during the Thatcher years, and she insisted that they had to show “alternative” or anti-mainstream content every now and then, which is how the documentary got commissioned — so indirectly I have Thatcher to thank. Thatcher, of course, believed in global warming whilst in power, but later changed her view through reading Julian Morris, Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer.
Al Gore confirmed my skepticism. I went to see An Inconvenient Truth and right there in the middle of the film he talked about how Greenland a 1000 years ago was green and much warmer. He said it was due to a volcano, so I thought, “You’re admitting natural causes made this change and it doesn’t sound like things were too bad when things were warmer.” So I’d like to thank the former Vice President, current private jet passenger, for bringing me to this point where I feel good about scoffing about such things.
I have skepticism about “climate change” because:
1. The predictions showing that this is a cataclysmic problem are made with computer models which have yet to be found valid. They failed backtesting when they came out, and the rate of warming is significantly lower than predicted since these predictions have been made.
2. The predictions of disaster are all of the form that the cataclysm will happen when the temperature increases by X degrees 100+ years in the future. Humanity has never been able to predict any complex phenomena on that timescale with any accuracy whatsoever.
3. This is a heuristic, but the treatment of people who disagree with the “consensus” view on “climate change” is not consistent with that of how cranks are treated in other scientific fields. Usually a scientist can dispassionately and in detail explain by someone is wrong. Nobody in the “climate change” business seems to really do this; instead the primary means of public persuasion that seems to be deployed is to ostracize absolutely anyone who expresses a non-consensus view. We don’t see this sort of behavior to the same degree about other matters of public policy concern that are informed by science.
I have skepticism because I’m 51 years old and I’ve lived long enough to see warming and cooling cycles first-hand. And I remember the hysteria about the coming ice age which matches the hysteria of global warming (and for some reason is caused by the exact same thing).
Skeptic. Why is Greenland called that?
I was initially sort of neutral. In my “day job” as an engineer, I was doing a lot of modeling (nothing to do with climate) and I was interested in a computer language called ‘R’. I found the site “climate audit” by Steve McIntyre since he posted algorithms, code (in R) and data for the checks he was doing on various climate reports. He also showed correspondence with various researchers – I remember one exchange where the researcher was asked for a copy of the data he used for his conclusion and basically replied “Why should I give you anything? You will just try to find problems with it”!
That is not science. Eventually, McIntyre worked through the Mann “Hockey Stick” analysis and showed that Mann’s algorithm would have found a hockey stick in random data.
That led me to other climate sites, primarily “Watts up with that” by Anthony Watts. That is a very good summary of a very wide range of topics and includes a very thorough peer review.
Some of the things I learned from that site are:
I died of cancer years ago.
Big-green billions are granted to those who fall in line with their climate change zealot overlords. Thus this crowd have become self-serving, intellectually shallow, moral preening pavlovian mutts ringing the tired Armageddon bell for Scooby snacks.
Follow. The. Money.
Climate alarm-ism isn’t science. Its data selective computer modeling. Unfortunately we don’t know enough about the earth’s thermal dynamic systems to effectively model them. I think there is a Anthropological Warming – it has nothing to do with carbon – its caused by urban heat islands.
Science is skepticism. Every scientist should look at every claim made, with a “Ya? Prove it!” and look at the data. Many of the climate studies that are released, keep their data confidential.
Thirdly, the biggest media promoters of global warming – dont actually believe it. Al Gore spends millions on a beach front mansion – a mansion that he claimed would already be underwater. (and not just on the mortgage) Not to mention all the private jets they frequently use.
Funny story… The AN-124’s have been showing up at SFO (San Fransisco International Airport) a lot recently. (the AN 124 is one of the world’s largest cargo planes – it consumes 3160 gallons of fuel each hour it flies and can carry up to 150 tonnes of cargo) Apparently the global elites are sending it to pick up their Tesla Cars…. So they buy a zero emission car – and then consume more fuel getting it home, than a Honda Civic would consume in a many of decades.
So when the “believers” start to act like its a crisis – rather than demand that I do – I’ll start to worry. Otherwise it really looks like a hoax that’s designed to lower demand for commodities that the wealthy wish to consume.
It’s not caused by the same thing, but the solution is the same: more government control.
Thank you for posting this, it’s extremely imformative.
The fact that increased weather activity strongly correlates to sunspot activity – which is a result of the vagaries of how the sun generates its energy, and its subsequent magnetic fields, etc – means that its much more likely that the interaction between the sun and the earth’s magnetic fields, and the corresponding coronal mass ejection, are what impacts the Earth’s weather so much, in the short run.
Dozens of hurricanes were predicted to have been generated by now, big ones, hitting the US and devastating the shorelines of the south. Hasn’t happened. In fact, we’re in a lull in these types of storms, both in number and intensity.
This cycle will come back around, of course. And any and all storms will be blamed on man-caused disasters, er, climate change. Data that corresponds with that worldview will be held up as “settled science”. Data that does not correspond with that worldview will be derided and discarded.
And that idiotic political cycle appears likely to continue to repeat.
But to answer Jon’s question: I think the man-made impact on the planet’s ecosystem, magnetic fields, etc, everything that might contribute to warming, or cooling, is vastly overstated. Mostly because it buys votes, and expands the power of gov’t into our lives.
That’s it. That’s all it’s ever been.
Here are 18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970 when the “green holy day” (aka Earth Day) started:
1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.
3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.
8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
Continued..
10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.
12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in his 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.
13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out.
14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.
16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”
18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
I am a skeptic for the following reasons:
I think Malthus predicted the same thing, and was just as wrong.
I seem to recall that back in the 70s it was stated that an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere was going to keep the heat from reaching the earth and turn us into Hoth. Now the increase in CO2 is going to turn us into Tatooine.
Either way we get to live in the Star Wars universe, so I guess we win.
Hey, @Polyphemus I agree with most of what you say, but what is the “atomic fireball 23 minutes away.”?
The light from the sun travels to the earth in 8 minutes 20 seconds.
Yep. Completely opposite of the post-Katrina predictions. I believe you can find remaindered books about the coming epidemic of superstorms in the 10¢ section of used bookstores.
In spite of the 20-year lull in warming, I have assumed that the goal at this point is to keep the alarmism at a fever pitch so that when the cycle eventually turns again, they will say “See, we were right all along.”
I was probably in 4th or 5th grade when our teacher told us that we were at the beginning of a new ice age. It seemed plausible at the time, since we had experienced global cooling from about the mid-1940’s through the late 1970’s. So if you only take a snapshot of that time period and ignore everything that came before, sure. Just like Al Gore does today where he shows the data that proves his case and dismisses data that contradicts it. And being that the Earth has had four or five great ice ages and oodles more little ice ages, we probably will see another ice age some
daymillennia, unless we achieve a Star Trek-like level of technology first.There’s a difference between being skeptical that the climate is changing – period, and being skeptical that carbon dioxide is the primary driver of global warming. One could even accept that theory and still be skeptical that it will reach catastrophic levels before leveling off.
I, too, found both Climate Audit and What’s Up With That. Circa 2001 or so. Before the first batch of leaked emails from East Anglia that became known as ClimateGate. I’d read breathless tales in major newspapers of the latest catastrophe predicted by climate “scientists”, and I would turn to CA and WUWT for the detailed takedown, complete with raw data and ‘R’ code. Where the alarmists would hold back their code and/or data, the crew at CA would often reverse engineer the published charts and figures to find the actual methodology. And then highlight the flaws. Many a paper at Science or Nature has been withdrawn or corrected after McIntyre’s attention.
The alarmist websites that attempt to balance the dominance of CA and WUWT in the blogosphere would engage in comment and analysis battles, the two sides linking back and forth, but the treatment of factual but embarrassing criticism was clearly not equal. I learned that the alarmists were not only publishing flawed science, but were filtering criticism so their partisans would never encounter a skeptical view. This is still true today. Try to make a well-researched skeptical comment on RealClimate and see how quickly you are black-holed.
The scientific method depends upon review and reproduction, and openness to technical criticism. There are very few real scientists in the climate “science” business. ( Not zero, though: see Dr. Judith Curry. ) From my perspective as an engineer, I’ve seen absolute zero scholarship on the impact of CO2 from energy consumption of sufficient certainty to justify mitigating action, whether private or public.
Yeah, but only if there is no traffic and you catch all the lights on the way.
Pretty much the same sort of experience you had.
I might be more inclined to listen to what the alarmists have to say on this so-called crisis if only scientists hadn’t worked so hard to scare the bejeesus out of me as a kid with dire predictions of the next Ice Age (should I live to see it, that is, since one of the more imminent “crises” of over-population, total crop and energy-depletion and the world-wide starvation and riots that loomed ahead in the earth’s one-way express trip to dystopia would most likely do me in first).
And just how “scientific” is it to look at a period of time that amounts to the blink of an eye, relatively speaking, in the lifetime of our planet and decide that it’s proof-positive of a permanent and irreversible one-way trend?
Well, “irreversible” unless of course you buy some carbon credits (i.e., the government’s “scientific” version of buying indulgences.)
Let me do the math here. Let’s see, 93,000,000 divided by 186,000 equals 500 seconds.
Actually most or all of the periods of warming in the historical record corresponded to increases in prosperity and population.
The main effect of 1-2 degrees of global warming would be (if it happens) to increase the amount of land in which food crops can be grown. That doesn’t sound like such a bad thing to me.
I’m not a climate change skeptic; the climate changes all the time, always has. I’m a climate science skeptic.
To start with, what is the correct temperature? Is the temp before the first ice age, the temp during an ice age, or the temp between ice ages?
It’s a 4 billion-plus year system, with at least dozens, probably hundreds, and possibly thousands of factors involved. There is 20 years of good data. Everything before that is questionable at best. To think they can extrapolate anything from that 20 years of data is insane.
I was promised an ice age, and did not get it.
Also, all of human history has been in an interglacial warming period. Earth is far colder than normal.
I haven’t heard him lately but I believe that is one of Bjorn Lomborg’s arguments. He’s not a total skeptic but thinks that the cure is worse than the disease.