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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?
Because Iceland was already spoken for?
Oh I keede, I keede
Skeptical, yes, and for the reasons you said: I remeber the progression from “global ice age” to “global warming” to “climate change.” There’s another reason why I’m so skeptical of the science: I know computers, and I know programming, and I know a bit about modeling. More to the point, I know the limitations of computer modeling, and I know how easy it can be to get the result you want by how you make your model behave. There are also real limitations on the answers you get from computer models, because there are real limitations on the questions you can ask of them.
I don’t think GIGO has been superseded yet.
If Norse songs about Erik the Red are to be trusted further than a cod be thrown, it was a con. The only halfway habitable space on its southern tip was better than anything found on his travels and naming it was to attract other to settle within his family’s domain.
Agree!!
Another reason I am a skeptic: those who cry apocalypse the loudest live as they ever did.
Their actions kind of take the edge off their Chicken Little tune.
Skeptic for several reasons. (Sorry if I’m duplicating anyone else’e reasons)
There are so many reasons, I can’t list them. I’ll just mention one of them. In 2007, more than a hundred scientists signed a letter challenging the received wisdom of the IPCC.
Okay, for me there was a full stop in there. Freeman Dyson! Freeman friggin Dyson!! Probably the smartest man in the world. Even without all the other names on that list, and even without all the other reasons I have for rejecting climate hysteria, if Freeman Dyson said it then that alone would be good enough for me.
That last is a shame, too. The scene with the cannibals would have the entire audience on their feet cheering.
“State of Fear” is now on my Kindle. Thanks for the recommendation.
I think the right should abandon some of these arguments, as they aren’t really valid to the debate:
“Climate is always changing” – Yes, but that’s irrelevant. Using this as an argument is more about snark than science. Of course climate is always changing – the question is whether or not man is changing it in a direction it would otherwise not go, and whether this matters. But in terms of advancing the debate, this works in reverse. People who are committed to believing in AGW see this kind of argument as an example of ignorance or sophistry, and discount it outright.
“In the 70’s scientists thought the globe was cooling!” – Being wrong in the past does not mean you are wrong now. This is a form of ad-hominem argument that again, is completely dismissed by the people you are trying to win over. Also, people using this argument often conflate the opinions of scientists with the opinions of journalists or professional book writers. I think if you look back at what the majority of scientists were saying then, you won’t find the kind of consensus for an imminent ice age that you now find for global warming.
“There has been no warming since 1998!” – Unfortunately, there are two problems with this: The first is that 1998 was especially hot, and therefore you are open to charges of cherry-picking a start date. Second, the variance in temperature on an annual or even decadal basis is large enough that you can have a decade or two of cooling even if the globe is heating up.
Here’s a chart of global temperature changes since 1880:
Notice that even though there is an undeniable upward trend in that data, there have been some long cooling spells along the way. For example, if you started at the temperature peak of 1943 as a starting point, you could claim that the earth’s temperature hadn’t increased until about 1975 – a ‘pause’ of over 30 years. And yet, the overall signal is still upwards.
If we want to be honest about global warming, I think we have to accept the ‘97% consensus’ of scientists. That’s no big deal, because this is all they agree on:
That’s it. That’s all they’ve really agreed on. And I think that’s reasonable. CO2 is demonstrably a greenhouse gas. Putting more of it into the atmosphere should, all things being equal, result in somewhat higher temperatures.
The real problems in climate science have to do with future prediction, not with the basic science. CO2 by itself should result in a forcing of about 1 degree C per doubling of CO2. To get climate sensitivities greater than that, you have to assume feedbacks that will amplify the CO2 signal. The primary feedback is water vapor – if a gas warms up, it can hold more water in saturation. So the 1 degree forcing of CO2 will be amplified by an increase in water vapor. That’s how scientists have reached a range of up to 6 degrees C for each doubling of CO2.
The problem here is that the atmosphere is a complex adaptive system, and it exists alongside complex biological and geological systems that all feed back into the climate. The result of all these feedbacks is truly unknown, as we have not even identified all the primary feedbacks, let along the secondary and tertiary ones.
For example:
– Rising CO2 leads to increased plant growth, which absorbs more of the excess CO2.
– A wetter, warmer world may trigger more cloud formation, increasing the earth’s Albedo and causing more heat to be reflected back into space.
– Melting ice may change ocean currents and change the way oceans distribute heat around the planet, for better or worse.
– Rising sea levels may cause more coastal erosion, which could put more iron and other particulates into the water, triggering algae blooms which absorb huge amounts of CO2.
And so it goes. We don’t have a handle on all these feedbacks, and what we know about complex systems tells us that we probably can never know how they will all interact with each other. Complex systems are sensitive to initial conditions and take essentially a random walk into the future. Predicting exactly what they will do is folly.
There was a recent study that looked at publication bias in climate studies, and which found significant bias as measured by the value for the ‘multiplier’ that was published immediately before major climate summits and legislation debates. When the bias was corrected, the average value for the multiplier was 1.6 degrees per doubling of CO2. That sounds like a fairly reasonable number to me – and one that shouldn’t worry us too much. That’s barely above what is expected for this part of the inter-glacial period anyway, and it means that global temperatures will likely not exceed the magic 2.5 degrees needed before the warming becomes really expensive.
A value of 1.6 leads directly to a conclusion that we shouldn’t really be doing much to stop it, because it isn’t going to be particularly damaging. Below 2.5 degrees C, the benefits we get from opening shipping lanes, longer growing seasons, more arable land in the north and other benefits will outweigh the costs in the equatorial regions. That means we could just take some of the wealth created in the north and use it to ameliorate the damages in the south.
I guess this makes me a ‘lukewarmer’ like Bjorn Lomborg and Judith Curry. Yes, global warming is probably happening, and we’re probably contributing to it. But it’s not likely to be of catastrophic proportions, and it’s outside of our ability to stop it anyway. At least, so long as nuclear power is out of the mix.
When the same people are wrong over and over again, the probability that they are right this time diminishes significantly.
There is no “97% consensus.” That’s as bogus as the rest of it.
However, models have been 97% wrong.
Is it the same people? Paul Erlich is not NASA Goddard.
Of course the environmental activists glom onto any ‘scare’ they can find and amplify it way out of proportion. That’s what they do. Alar in apples, GMOs, nuclear power, the ozone hole, DDT, acid rain, the ‘garbage crisis’… All issues where minor risks or known engineering issues with known solutions were amplified to be world-ending catastrophies. That can all be true, and still say nothing about the actual science behind global warming.
That’s not to say that the science of global warming is immune from criticism. I think there are huge biases at play that distort the science, starting with the fact that the only people who make it through a college degree in a field that involves global warming have to already believe in it to successfully make it into grad school and to go on to publish papers in the field. That, plus the money involved, plus the obvious attempts to destroy the careers of skeptics tells us that there is likely to be a significant amount of bias in the literature.
And the global warming catastrophists suffer from the same problem as other sciences that attempt to unravel the workings of complex systems – they are cargo cult sciences. They can’t hope to really understand the intricacies of thing they are studying, so they pick a few emergent properties that support the conclusions they already want to believe, then build mathematical models around them to prove what they wanted to believe in the first place.
This is where the debate should be – the weaknesses of the predictions, and the weaknesses of the plans the activists and governments have come up with to stop it, which will not work but which will give them more power and influence.
I know the source of the ‘97% consensus’, and I know it’s weak. But still – if you took a poll of scientists, I believe most of them would agree with the basic premise that the globe is warming, and that humans have something to do with it. Because that’s an easy claim to agree with. We can measure atmospheric CO2, we can tell that it comes from us by looking at various properties, and we know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. So that consensus shouldn’t be surprising at all.
Where the consensus breaks down is immediately after those non-controversial statements – how much is CO2 warming the planet, what effect it will have on us, how the climate will react to that warming, etc. These are the actual important questions, and here there is no real consensus.
Exactly!
And to show just how screwed up American academics are “Dr” Ehrlich is
Bing Professor of Population Studies of the Department of Biology of Stanford University and president of Stanford’s Center for Conservation Biology.
When the orbital data from the first two satellites of the EOS system were filtering out to the climate community (~2005), much acrimony was levied on the observational scientists. This stuff was not matching “the models”. Given the stakes when it comes to the source funding and where the debate is now, you can see who caved and who is getting more shrill. Aside from the pre-eminate scientists who are in field and cannot be legitimately disparage for being ignorant, or those who are financially comfortable (or close enough to retirement) seem to be trying to describe the lack of precision we have on predicting the future climate. Until the modelers acknowledge they don’t have all of the feedback mechanisms, or perhaps even the driving physics, I don’t think the “activists” have the right to push non viable, very expensive, impractical solutions (e.g. solar and wind power).
We have enough financial issues when it come to government spending.
I started off thinking that there was some basis for being worried about global warming.
But then all the pundits and government and especially Al Gore said “the science is settled,” they lost me. Then they said “thre consensus is clear.” Science is never settled (we are still testing relativity) and consensus in science is meaningless. Facts and testable theories backed by those facts are what matter. And the current Global Warmist community lack both.
Then it becomes clear that they are fudging the data. All early adjustments are lower, modern ones are higher. So you can’t even trust the temperature they are reporting.
Are human beings affecting the environment? Absolutely yes. Are we headed toward doom per the Warmist creed? Absolutely no.
The other thing that really bothers me is how the bogus focus on Global Warming has undermined the credibility of real environmental needs. 30 years ago you would never see the mountains in Los Angeles in the summer. Now we see them all year. There are changes that do need to be made to reduce harm humans do produce. But this focus on Carbon Dioxide as a pollutant makes all other claims suspect.
Damn you Al Gore.
NYT, 10/20/2016: “California Today: The Drought Isn’t Going Away….”
Today: “Heavy Rain in Southern CA has postponed the Dodgers vs. Padres baseball game….”
I remember it well – before those satellites went up, the global warming community was crowing about how they were going to finally have global temperature measurements that would prove their case, and which couldn’t be dismissed as being manipulated. There was much anticipation of their upcoming vindication.
Then the satellites went up, and their measurements did not match the predictions. Then suddenly the community found all kinds of problems with satellite measurements, and decided that their old ground-based measurements were better after all. Not only that, but they ignored what the remote sensing scientists had to say. See, in global warming the only people allowed to have an opinion are the experts in very narrow fields – unless that field doesn’t agree with the consensus. THOSE experts are then no longer welcome in the debate.
Motivated reasoning strikes again.
Yes, those old ground measurements can be “corrected.”
The phrase “climate skeptic” is too broad.
I have only the mildest skepticism about anthropogenic warming taking place. I’m mildly skeptical because, even though the models and the data have been subjected to (what I consider to be) an indecent amount of manipulation and adjustment: the models still diverge widely from the reported temperatures; and, last I checked, the models still fail to account for substantial early 20th century warming that predates significant anthropogenic CO2 contributions. These suggest that, whatever is going on, we don’t have a good handle on it.
I have serious skepticism about projections of apocalyptic climate change. Long-term climate is a complex system, and we are notoriously poor at projecting the behavior of complex systems. We’re whiz-bang at simple things like chemistry and physics, micro-electronics, shooting something into the sky and hitting Pluto, stuff like that — easy stuff. But complex systems we get wrong as often, or more often, than we get them right. So anyone who claims with any kind of confidence to know what the climate is going to do fifty years from now is, I think, talking through his hat.
I have profound skepticism, bordering on laugh-out-loud derision, for anyone possessed of the Earth-shaking, mind-numbing audacity to presume to predict what the economic impact of hypothetical global warming will be on mankind a century from now, and the gall to arrogate to himself the prerogative of inflicting his global plan for healing on the rest of us. That kind of hubris in the face of unknowns, known and unknown, is beyond irresponsible: it’s either fraudulent or ignorant.
So, yes, maybe we’re warming the planet. I haven’t seen compelling evidence of that, but maybe we are.
Perhaps it will become a serious problem. I’ve seen no evidence of that, and no evidence that we can even predict the sign — good or bad — of the long-term change for mankind.
And I dismiss as ludicrous the idea that we can put a price on global change a century from now, and so justify a transformative agenda today.
Great post, Jon. Thank you.
So you can understand the bitterness of contributing to a “Balls to the Wall” effort, and all of the personal sacrifices required, and then be dismissed as your data is wrong? Yesterday was my birthday, and yet here I am again, 1200 miles away doing TVAC for one of the follow on satellites for data continuity. Idiot activists.
I am skeptical for the same reasons as John and those expressed in the comments. I am, however, a total believer in the human capacity for hubris, greed, the lust for power and celebrity. True science, I believe, is a humble discipline. The scientist says, “I observed this phenomenon; I made this hypothesis to explain it; I tested using these methods; this is my data; I analyzed the data this way; I have this degree of confidence in my findings. Does any of your research support or disprove my findings? Can you replicate my findings? There is also the realization that new insights or methods of exploration can undo previously held ideas. This is always the caveat in the confidence a scientist can have in research findings.
From WUWT:
‘Climate Change’ Clobbers French Wine Crop
See? They wouldn’t have been able to say any of that if it were still called “Global Warming.”
I am near your age Jon, and I am a skeptic. I accept the historical data which it seems widely acknowledged shows some warming having occurred through the 20th century.
However I am much less confident about predictions for the future. I guess there are really a few reasons.
First, I’ve written computer code and back in the day we used to have an acronym “GIGO” which stood for “garbage in, garbage out.” In the climate change context, what that means is that I know full well that the climate model predictions are only as good as the assumptions built into the model – and those assumptions are uncertain. They simply are. The earth’s climate is an incredibly complex system and on top of that, it’s affected by changes in the nearby extra-terrestrial environment, much of which we don’t fully understand. Humans never nail every variable correctly in trying to model a staggeringly complex system. We’re just not that smart. None of us. Period.
Second, all the “science is settled” talk leads me to smell a rat. Settled science is an oxymoron, and it’s a little too convenient for my tastes that we’re being told that “settled science” requires us to rewind the industrial revolution and submit ourselves to some pre-industrial socialist paradise by left wing luddites to whom that result would represent the achievement of a lifelong dream, regardless of what the “science” actually said. When your “scientific” conclusions align that perfectly with your ideological ones, you need to be a little bit circumspect about which of the two is infecting the other.
Finally, as a lawyer I’ve had the occasion to think hard about “causation” on occasion and I know that it’s not as simple as it sounds. We say “this caused that” all the time and most of the time we’re either overstating our certainty of the causal relation, overstating the degree of the causal relation, or sometimes just plain wrong. Attributing causation in a meaningful way can in truth be extremely difficult. It’s not something that can be measured or observed in most cases. It’s generally an inference, and often wrongly conflated with correlation. And again, the attribution of causation by people with an ideological interest in doing so, leads me to smell a rat.
Consensus has no meaningful application to science, per se. Consensus is most decidedly not about voting for your favorite scientific hypothesis. Consensus is only relevant to policy positions.
Scroll back and click on Dr. Crichton’s essay and learn what the word consensus means within scientific matters.
I am a skeptic. I have no doubt there has been climate warming. From what I can tell it proceeds mankind industrialization. My skepticism is multiple faceted.
First, I was raised at a time when my liberal teachers were convinced we would all be dead of a new ice age, that we would have starved to death by now since we could not feed the planet, that we would be out of oil by now and living in a primitive state, etc. So I have seem enough of these hypes that not only did not come true but did not even come close to coming true that I am a little jaded.
Second issue is that I was lucky and had a very good Catholic grade and high school education. My teachers were monks, nuns, priests, and non clergy that in many cases had more initials after their names than in them. These individual taught me SCIENCE, they taught me the scientific method. So where I hear that they can determine the temperature of the whole planet a thousand year ago based on ice cores and tree rings I have some doubts as to the accuracy of such methods much less that you can determine these items to the tenth or hundredth place. Quite frankly if I suggested such a thing to my old science teachers I would have gotten a scolding.
Third issue. I am a software engineer by trade and temperament. Computer models do not impress me. I have programmed them. I have seen them go way wrong and spit out unbelievably stupid results. They are only as good as the assumptions and math that went into them. Also they can be incredibly complex. So complex that no one person can not truly understand them so they are only understood by teams of individuals. It is in the differences of these individuals and teams that error creeps into the models as understandings and assumptions differ and do not align. Also, sadly, I have also seen way too much fraud in computer models as
flub numbersadjustment numbers and calculation are tweaked to present results that management views in a favorable light.Fourth issue. Even if they have the science correct and their predictions are sound. I have yet to see any answer to the issue that makes any sort of sense to actually resolve the issue. Everything I have seen presented looks more like money moving schemes to justify more taxes, fees, penalties, etc and funnel these to favored politically connected individuals. Thus far all the solutions look more like scams to grab power and money more than actually address the stated problem.
Thus I have my doubts.
I have been skeptical of the left since my mid-twenties and of “Global Warming” since the left began scaremongering on it.
That skepticism was solidified when I, unfortunately, saw the 1998 movie adaptation of “Lost in Space.” It featured an absolutely horrible product placement for Silicon Graphics, “Silicon Graphics, saving the planet.” Later that month, at work, I had a meeting with the representative from Silicon Graphics. I mentioned that scene. He thought it was just as ridiculous as I did.
I realized that I was correct in my skepticism when I found out who Trofim Lysenko was, and further when I read Micheal Crichton’s excellent “Aliens Cause Global Warming.”