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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 because the Global Warm-mongers cannot answer one simple question: if humans are THE driving force behind climate change, then what is the quantitative level of influence humans have on the climate versus the natural changes in the climate?
I am a climate-apocalypse skeptic for many of the same reasons as Jon. Certainly, man contributes to changes in the atmosphere to some extent, but how much is surely debatable. None of the dire predictions has come verifiably true. (I sit writing this in Columbus, Ohio, on May 7 amid frost warnings. Warming, indeed.)
I enjoyed the predictions from the original earth day. It was about folks trying to expand their 15 minutes of fame into a half-hour or so. One does not make headlines with reasonable predictions. No one would have watched Al Gore’s movie if he had concluded there was nothing catastrophic to worry about.
Here is something I find amusing. You watch various documentaries about great scientists of the past and the common theme is that the scientific community was pretty much satisfied with the theories of the day. Along comes our hero who thinks he has a better explanation than the current theory of whatever. Many of the old guard dismiss the new theory, but eventually it becomes apparent that the new guy is on the something and the new theory becomes widely accepted. But today when someone shows all the holes in the man-made CO2 catastrophic global warming theory they are told to shut up. The holy scriptures have been handed down to us by Saint Algore, and only heretics would question them.
BTW, I think we should call the fear mongers ‘Earthers’. Having the ‘-ther’ suffix is always a sign of crazy people, other than ‘mother’. Truthers, birthers, Earthers… all crazy people.
Advertising, if I remember right.
There’s also the question that follows: if the exact level of human influence on the climate can be determined, how does that compare to what it should be?
You can ask any number of people that and get a different answer.
Macron “pledged strong and stringent action on climate change.”
Hillary Clinton-voter Bret Stephens today after Macron’s victory: “Thank. The. Lord.”
Why exactly are NYT readers angry at Stephens?
It was a Viking advertising ploy. Really, it was.
But the usual answer I give for my skepticism is “Because I know enough history to be aware that planet was hotter and colder than it is now, for millennia at a time, in fact, and the likelihood that anthropogenic factors are contributing to any change we can observe is only marginally higher than the likelihood that you are about to spontaneously metamorphose into Bastian Schweinsteiger.”
The snarky answer I give is “Because I am better-educated and smarter than you are.”
In about 1990, renowned scientist Ted Danson said we had ten years to “Do Something” before the world ended. About the same time, Rush Limbaugh said that environmentalism is nothing but a new home for socialism. I found Rush’s take to be more likely. And if that weren’t enough, the data-fudging scandal at the University of East Anglia put me over the edge.
Time Magazine June 1974: Can there be any question why these idiots hastily changed the name to “Climate Change”?
Thus the popularity of the derisive appellation “watermelon”: environmentalist green on the outside, communist red on the inside.
I think it was about 10 years ago that well-known brain surgeon and rocket scientist Prince Charles said there were only 5 years left to “Do Something”.
Does anyone ever ask these people to comment on their prior statements?
Setting aside the political reasons for my skepticism (why are all the solutions to AGW more government power??), the main reason is the shoddy science, starting with the shoddy treatment of science as a discipline. Computer models are not evidence. Computer models which fail to make any accurate predictions are even worse, because they’re used to befuddle credulous people with no understanding of how science works. The unwillingness to release raw data is appalling. Any “scientist” who hangs his hat on a manipulated data set used as input to a flawed model is not really a scientist and taints the credibility of people trying to do honest work. In a just world, these charlatans would be strung up for the damage they do.
Short answer: there is no evidence that CO2 emissions from human activity is causing catastrophic climate change. When the hysterics provide some evidence, I’ll start paying attention.
AGW theory is not science as it is non-falsifiable.
Any hypothesis that claims to be scientific MUST have some experiment that would disprove it.
AGW theory is not science because it is assumed to be true and skeptics are forced into the role of disproving it, a logically impossible task.
Any hypothesis that claims to be scientific MUST present compelling evidence to positively support its assertion. It is never the job of skeptics to disprove the hypothesis. How can they? A skeptic says “the satellite temps are not rising”. The proponent says “oh they don’t matter”. The skeptic can present 1000 proven sets of of data that contradict AGW theory. The proponent says “oh they don’t matter”
AGW theory is not science, because it is not reproducible by its most ardent skeptics.
When a scientist makes a claim they need to present ALL their data and analysis methods so a skeptic can evaluate and reproduce their experiment. When a proponent holds these back, their results should be dismissed.
Oh, and Al Gore’s “documentary” An Inconvenient Truth? He was caught red-handed using a CG (computer generated) image of an iceberg falling dramatically into the sea. I believe the footage was even cadged from a disaster movie. I saw an interview with a woman at the studio that had created the image. I really can’t imagine how that pile of doodoo got away with calling itself a documentary, let alone winning an Oscar.
I’m skeptical.
I try to take every cry of apocalypse from the Left with a block of salt, because I’ve learned how much they have been, and are, wrong about. (I may not be as aloof, sometimes, as I should be with fears from the Right.)
If you hear enough cries from the same people, invariably followed by twisting of the language, slanting of reports, and efforts to stampede voters into supporting ever more limits of freedom, it’s smart to start by solidly doubting them. Resisting their siren call of government control is much easier if you have an alternative — say, libertarian — system in mind that you’re convinced has a decent chance of handling any problems they’re shrieking about at the moment.
Once I started looking at the global warming scare — not “climate change”, and we shouldn’t let them change the language that way — I divided it into 5 questions that I thought had to be answered a certain way in order to maybe justify the steps the Left wants to take (massive collective and coercive action):
I accept that the Earth is warming, although with the pause, I’m even a bit skeptical of that.
I don’t know enough to know the answer to (2), and I’ve heard enough to leave me skeptical.
No. 3: I don’t think it’s certain.
No. 4: The latest predictions don’t sound catastrophic.
If it’s not immediate and catastrophic, if it has horizon of ~100 years, why the heck can’t people just be free to change things slowly over the generations to deal with the problem, if problem it be?
Predictions for at least the last three depend on computer models, and I know enough about how those are made and run to realize the weaknesses of them.
Um, Obama got a Nobel.
I have to say this, the way the fear is designed to create a market. The final nail in my skeptic coffin is the outrageous idea that those who dissent should be punished.
That is not science. That is….bullying, to tie in another pet leftist cause.
When the news about global warming came, I lived in Pittsburgh. It happens that I could not stand the cold weather there, so my first reaction was that global warming seemed like a great idea, and my basic desire was to make it more of it happen considerably faster than the projections.
As it happened, that year winter came late. So the newspaper wrote an article. It said that the tubing (snow sliding) place was doing horribly. It said the ski slopes were crushed. But it didn’t note record revenues for the swimming pool, and it forgot to mention the longer boating season and people enjoying warm weather recreation for a few extra months.
And so I asked myself, why are we getting such an imbalanced view? Surely there are advantages to warmer weather! Surely some of the allegedly awful impacts are offset by longer growing seasons, more pleasant winters, fewer roofs damaged due to snow, etc, etc. And yet the apocalyptic articles continued, and I started to think it was nothing but propaganda.
I really liked Bjorn Lomborg’s approach: He computed that what we’d need to do to eliminate global warming would destroy our industrial civilization. Basically, he said this simply won’t work. We wouldn’t make a dent in these projections even if we ceased all industrial activity today. So how could human activity be a cause, especially since temperatures were all over the map historically?
Yes, he said, we will need to mitigate the damage from warming if it happens, but that can happen only if we are rich enough to pay for it. So trying to stop warming now, with the resources we have, is civilizational suicide. Even if the projections are right, we have time, and we have resources.
Take Miami Beach. This small strip of land is subject to flooding today, and could be inundated tomorrow. It also has about US$1 trillion worth of property. If it is technically possible, we will find a way to save it. I leave how to the experts, since I am not one. But I am confident. The nice folks with $45 million Star Island mansions are surely more than able to help. It will get worked out.
As for my own story, I eventually got tired of waiting for global warming and moved to Miami. I love the warmth, I love the vibrancy, I love the entrepreneurial spirit all around me. Best move of my life, what can I say?
Because, when I was a kid, I watched claptrap like this:
Later, when I was in university, I read Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, which illustrates (at least in my reading), how the political and the personal can drive outcomes in even the hard sciences.
About the same time, I discovered this essay by author (and M.D.) Michael Crichton , called “Aliens Cause Global Warming“. If you haven’t seen it before, I highly suggest it.
I like @judgemental‘s comment about how he’s not a climate change skeptic, but a climate science skeptic. I’m right there.
Another “tell” is the recent proclivity to attach the word “justice” to the whole thing. The first time I heard the term “climate justice,” I wanted to run all around the house slamming doors.
Also read his book, State of Fear. In the appendix he states that he believes there has been some warming and human activity is probably contributing, but the book itself is highly skeptical. It may be 20 years old by now, so he didn’t even have the bonus of a 20 year ‘pause’.
It’s also the only book he wrote that will never be made into a movie.
But Algore did good work trying to find ManBearPig.
https://youtu.be/xf69EEL3WBk
Haha, RA, that was not the ‘computer model’ graphic I expected from you.
I pictured a mac book pro, wearing sexy white Capri pants, a fetching top and, an adorable pair of sandals, snacking on a York peppermint patty!
?
Algore should have framed it as “ManBearPig justice.”
Ha! ?
I am a global warming skeptic, because I am a scientist that knows kind of BS scientists will pitch to get funding.
This is what I know to be true: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, it traps heat closer to the earths surface. More CO2 in the atmosphere means a warmer climate, however the heating response is logarithmic with CO2 concentration, which means every doubling of atmospheric CO2 has the same effect. The coefficient of that effect is unknown and highly disputed, but likely it is slightly less than 2 degrees Celsius per doubling.
Atmospheric CO2 concentrations have gone from 320 ppm to 400 ppm since the 60’s. Estimations of the total amount of CO2 let into the atmosphere from man-made burning of fossil fuels, more than accounts for this increase. In fact there should have been a larger rise in atmospheric CO2, and scientists are not entirely sure where the missing CO2 is. Some of it is dissolved into the oceans, and the rest is likely due to faster plant growth. CO2 is to plants like oxygen is to animals. Plants grow much better and store more energy when there is more CO2 in the atmosphere – aka Global Greening. Plants have been out of breath for a long-time. A global increase in CO2 will be a net plus.
The most important part is that the apocalyptic climate soothsayers are just wrong.
This is close to me.
My day job involves modeling the predicted temperature of satellites on orbit. It is a process of creating a representation of the spacecraft’s geometry, exposing it to the attitudes and configurations the spacecraft will experience for the duration of it’s life. This model has to be sufficiently accurate to answer critical questions of hottest, coldest temperature,temperature gradients on critical optics, and rates of temperature change for assemblies made of disparate materials (think cycling electronics in the non convective vacuum of space).
A lot of design choices and assumptions have to be incorporated, to insulate the bulk of the systems from the cold of space, absorb a sufficient heat from the coating choices of the radiators, and manage the balance of energy from within the spacecraft against the energy absorbed from the sun and earth’s albedo. If we orbit close enough to the earth the upwelling of inferred energy must also be modeled. Some assemblies need to operate at cryogenic conditions (think of light sensitive sensors and adjacent optics for measuring infrared wavelengths from the earth). These focal plane assemblies need to be isolated from the avionics which like to remain in the temperature in which that they we manufactured (typically -10F to ~125F). Challenges abound.
So after this process is the design flung into space without a real world check? Failure is rarely an option, so we subject the entire mission’s hardware to a series of lower to higher level tests to insure everything will perform correctly at it’s coldest to highest temperatures. We add margin to our predictions, and we do it in vacuum so the convection cooling effect of earth’s sweet air does not mask the real temperature performance of everything. The final step it to have an all up satellite environmental test in a vacuum tank that has the provision to heat and cool everything as expected during it’s sojourn in space. This test confirms system end to end performance at the temperature extremes, and most importantly for my team, we perform an energy balance at both temperature extremes to use for correlating a model against everyone of the design assumptions of the real product as it sits in the chamber.
It is clearly the most expensive test we do, we are deviled by the high rate of success we have between our design’s and orbital performance. Since if we are that good why subject a project to such an expensive endeavor with all of the chances to damage something. Because sometime the process breakdown and we have a big goof, and thus we can fix it down here, not after it has be launched.
Long winded explanation to say we are approximating the same process as the climate model prediction folks. Create a model with all of the physics that guide the process, and test it against real data.
This is the climate modeler’s score card of predictions against real, highly calibrated, global, good resolution, orbital measurements of the parameters (it is more than just temperatures) the modelers ask for in the mid 1990’s.
If I presented these results in a preship review I would be tossed out and told to figure out what was not accounted for in the model.
To be fair my tribe sticks to interpolating between measured extremes and confine our operation to what we have demonstrated. Additionally we are not opining on highly chaotic systems. However climate modelers have decades of temperature data they can use to “back correlate”, yet cannot internally admit that their models are missing some critical physics when they view these measurements against their predictions.
So why is this personal? I spent 20 of the prime years of my career in the development of the orbital instruments that provided the highly calibrated (i.e. accurate) moderate resolution data, good for global mapping, over a 15 year period that they insisted was required for this effort. The experimental scientists that I worked with to develop the global data base are aware that the modelers have “some issues” (euphemistically said) with their correlation and predictions. However none will not dared voice in public what we have seen peeking out of the communications between East Anglia, Penn States, and other centers dependent on having a climate change problem and the funding it requires.
So is man effecting the environment? Yes since the day he created fire to survive a little longer than the prior generation, and finally get us to the point were we have the luxury to ask if our reach has finally reached to a global scale. However to ask civilization to return to a preindustrial level of energy consumption without looking at and truly understanding the process from the data we are collecting? Well when all of those folks running around chanting Science, are force to spend one year “off the Grid” I talk then. Perhaps then they will see the virtues of a nuclear power system based 21 century designs.