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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
But since after a few decades they have been unable to make a single correct prediction using their computer models, its about time to stop believing them. The situation is getting really ridiculous. This is the only science I have ever heard of that has a 0% record of accurate predictions, and people still believe in it. It’s like some sort of cult.
You are right to say it is easier to predict climate than it is to predict weather, but can’t they just get one prediction right?
It’s because there is huge daily and short-term variation in weather, but climate is the average of all these short-term variations and the average doesn’t change very much from decade to decade.
I get your point about the “correct” position, but 6/10 of one degree Celsius Warming over a period of 140 years is so statistically insignificant it should still be labeled a hoax, a fraud. As I pointed out earlier, their admitted margin of error is as much as the entire microscopic rise in temperature.
I like to ask people if they were to put their most sensitive finger into a glass of water, and then place it in another glass of water that is 6/10th’s of one degree warmer, would they be able to tell the difference? Even holding two fingers simultaneously in two different glasses with a 6/10th of a degree difference, could you tell? Now imagine holding your finger in a glass and it takes 140 years to change 6/10’s of a degree. How many could detect the difference? This shows how ludicrously small of a change we are talking about.
I live in Cleveland, Ohio where the temperatures vary by 100 degrees Fahrenheit (55 Celsius) year round, and we don’t have anywhere near the worst extremes, which are around 200 degrees F. They are trying to tell me that a change in 1/100th of this amount is going to make any difference? And as I posted before, the more accurate temperature measurements made by satellites put it at 1/200th of a change (for Cleveland). That would put the change at Verkhoyansk, Siberia, at about 1/400th, (of course over a period of 140 years)…… Oh, the horrors!
What sort of margin of error do you wish to allow for? I don’t have a lot of faith in the predictive power of climate models, especially when politically motivated, but they usually come closer to the mark than weather predictions. (That reminds me that politically motivated weather forecasts make an appearance in Eldar Ryazanov’s 1982 film, Railway Station for Two, which is the film Reagan should have watched over and over again before meeting with Gorbachev, rather than Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears. But maybe the timing wasn’t right, because the latter movie came out two years before Ryazanov’s movie.)
As a SKEPTIC, not a denier or denialist (which is a garbage word to match the thinking), my position is that I don’t believe any global warming is guaranteed with or without man but I will not be surprised at any global warming with or without human involvement, and that if and when there is, it will be insignificant or easily manageable — unless they can actually prove something using real inarguable evidence and reason. Otherwise it’s political, self-serving, taxpayer-paid, globally-hysterical bosh.
Is China dirty? Sure. Is the world dirty? Sure. Can we stop it by being the sole good guys and stopping all CO2 production? No. Is there any real evidence of global heating or cooling, or typhoons or tornadoes or tomatoes increasing in frequency or strength because of CO2 that isn’t fraudulent? No. Is the AGW-alarmists’ position fraught with garbage linguistics and deceptive statistics and disingenuous propagandizing? Yes. Is there anything to it? Show me. (There’s a song in there someplace. And a musical.)
When people choose their only argument to be a propagandist one, one knows the reason is that there is very likely no logical one they can make. From then on all future arguments receive extra skepticism because of the character and of scentific ethics in the first place.
If anyone could make the AGW argument by now someone would have published and promoted it, and we wouldn’t have to wade through a twenty-foot tide of people arguing with ludicrous disingenuity, false science and extraordinary ignorance that “the science is settled” — and that people should be killed or imprisoned for saying otherwise! When someone has to resort to that kind of intellectual hogwash there is no debate. And nothing to be debated.
The margin of error just has to be smaller than the actual measured changes in temperature in order to be scientifically relevant. Otherwise it is just guesswork.
This hits home when we hear the Polls saying “Hillary is leading Trump by 2 percentage points, but the polling margin of error is 3 percentage points.”
@DonG’s comments reflect my thoughts exactly. I do wish skeptics would talk about the science more but don’t fault those who use the China/India argument. Actually, I think it’s an important argument that plays into other issues.
I’ve never heardt this before, but that doesn’t mean what you say isn’t true.
It’s true however, there are long term variations, but many of them have a periodicity that has been measured indirectly. Current changes to that periodicity may be due to man, or some other reason such as statistical variation.
Maybe what we should say is, “Long term predictions made by anthropomorphic climate change supporters are highly questionable.”
I always make it a point to reject the label of “denier” when it comes to climate change. I concede up front that there has been warming, and that humans could be the major cause of it. But I also point out that the warming has slowed recently, and that nobody knows why. The label of denier is then a straw man argument. Then I point out that what we are really talking about is whether climate change is an imminent threat. I deny that it is an imminent threat, and place the burden of proof back where it belongs, on those who would have us recklessly transform our economy on speculation of a catastrophe. I point out that ideology plays as much of a role in this belief of imminent catastrophe as does climate science, which still cannot accurately model major influences upon our climate—such as El Niño and cloud systems. I posit that the whole damn thing reminds me of the “climate of fear” that helped to kill nuclear energy in this country when we were all kids. I refer to the accident at Three Mile Island. When I was in elementary school, my teachers scared the living daylights out of us when they spoke of doomsday scenarios like “reactor core meltdowns.” The fear and ideology of nuclear power killed the promise of clean energy in this country—no reactor has been built since Three Mile Island. If they have not grasped the irony, I point it out to this. I bring up the overestimation of Soviet strength in nuclear missiles —the missile gap—the fear of which allowed politicians and the military industrial complex to overspend wildly. If they haven’t gotten my point yet I just say it: I think this is another situation in which vested interests have created a climate of fear of imminent catastrophe in order to bilk the people out of a great deal money—that this is a swindle of the first waters. I don’t accuse every politician or activist who supports the swindle of being a swindler (I don’t think they are all swindlers), and I don’t call these folks useful idiots (they can’t all be useful idiots), either.
If they’re still listening to me at this point, I will, if I remember, ask them to consider whether they are selling eco socialism as the “moral equivalent of war.” Long ago, socialists figured out that Americans are an independent thinking lot who don’t like to take orders from people. We are a nation of diverse views. In order to create unity, the kind of unity required to put over socialism in the U.S., progressives decided to sell their opinions as military campaigns for progress, which is what eco-socialists are doing right now with climate change.
From the standpoint of persuasion it’s more compelling to show people that even if you assume that the government climate science models are correct that there is no solution that has ever been proposed that is economically or politically feasible that will have a significant effect on the climate.
So don’t even argue about the predictions. The question is what do we do about it? The answer is that there’s nothing short of completely destroying the developed and developing world that would do anything.
Once this has sunk in we can turn to what it is reasonable to do, which is adjust to any climate changes as they occur.
Well stated. I submit ideology plays a signifcantly larger role than climate science, and the science that is being used is twisted because of the ideology.
You might be interested in this site: http://surfacestations.org Unfortunately, it is several years old, but it is the result of a volunteer effort to audit all of the US based surface temperature stations. It used the NOAA standards of station quality to audit as many stations as they could get to. It has many examples of the type of encroachment that is a problem.
There have been other studies done of the subset of NOAA stations that are still rural. They show no warming.
A good book to read to get a perspective on the changing climate is “The whole story of Climate” by E. Kirsten Peters. It uses geological evidence (with some backup from archaeology ) to examine the changes in climate from the Pleistocene (about 1.8 million years ago) to the present. Clearly the majority of this time is before any impact by man, but the climate went through multiple cycles from ice age with glaciers to more moderate temperatures. One thing I hadn’t known is that many of the changes were pretty rapid – withing one or two generations.
So yes, I believe in Climate Change, but I am skeptical of man’s impact.
“For, mark, lad,” Crouch said, “there are forces alive in the land. We are not of them, but, rather, a distraction from the troubling knowledge of their presence.”
David Mamet, Chicago
I embrace “denier.” Yes, yes, I know the connotation, but I’m not a Holocaust denier.
I don’t deny the climate is changing. Duh. I deny the change is predictably catastrophic or is even in a minimal way due to man-made carbon emissions. I want the evidence. And that evidence better account for solar and cosmic radiation or it lacks all credibility. As if the giant thermonuclear engine blasting the atmosphere 24/7/365 is inconsequential to the climate. Idiotic.
Climate hysteria is a false religion, complete with end time prophecies, dogmas, scapegoats (the white Christian West), sins of omission, commission, and emission, excommunications (Judith Curry) and saviors (socialist government(s) run by lefties). It has little relation to science and everything to do with denying us our freedoms. I’m a climate heretic.
This notion of adapting as opposed to affecting Earth’s climate is so retina-fryingly obvious and yet so seldom mentioned that it is bewildering. It is the one approach that represents possible common ground as well as having the most potential for payoff. Whether or not we agree at all on Anthroprogenic causes for climate change, we can virtually all agree that the climate has changed rather dramatically across our Earth’s history. From various Ice Ages to tropical swamps in Antarctica, we all agree that climate has changed and can or will change again. So, if we focus on advancing technologies and policies that point us toward greater adaptability then who could argue? It is easy to imagine benefits beyond that situation by becoming more adept at rolling with changes to Earth’s ecosphere. You have already stated a few.
This approach should include preparing for solar events over which we certainly have no control but can affect climate and much more in a quite dramatic way. “Be Prepared” is not as sexy. (And now that the Left has hollowed out the Boy Scouts, not likely to be taught to our young.)
Has anyone heard any politician or other policy wonk talk about such an approach? I have not.
That has *not* happened at all.
So this is exactly what I *don’t* want to do, and why I wrote the original post. When we step past the central problem, and don’t dispute that it is a problem, we 1) grant a point that I believe is not true, and 2) shift the ground to a discussion that I believe conservatives have to be dishonest about in order to have. We have to say “sure, we’d be open to a solution to this problem, as long as it’s cheap and non-disruptive,” thinking that of course any solution offered would NOT be cheap and non-disruptive. But we aren’t really open to a good solution, because we don’t think it’s a real problem.
As a thought experiment, imagine if someone said that aliens were going to invade us sometime in the next 20-100 years, and we have to take measures to protect ourselves NOW, and we CANNOT WAIT. And I don’t feel like arguing with them about whether or not aliens will be invading, so I say, “OK, I’d be open to doing something about it, as long as it’s a cheap and non-disruptive solution.” Of course I don’t believe this, and I don’t really believe in aliens, but it just seems like an easier argument to have. Then the person says, “tin foil! Tin foil is the answer! It’s cheap, easy to distribute, and if everyone just wears it on their head, we will be safe.” Where does that leave me? Am I now going to say “but tin foil ISN’T non-disruptive. It’s quite disruptive!” And all the sudden I’m arguing about their solutions as if I really do want to find a solution. But I don’t. I don’t think there is a problem to begin with. So I am basically asking to have a cynical discussion from the get-go.
This is why I think it’s important to defend logical ground even then it’s hard or politically disadvantageous to do so.
I don’t think its so bad to allow a few subsidies for renewables, since eventually we’ll need other energy sources and red states are the major beneficiary for wind energy. But, the PTC subsidy is ending and no new subsidies are coming. How much more do you want the Left crushed on this for you not to hate conservatives?
Anyway, the Left is dogmatic on climate change. They never change their 100% convictions. I don’t want the Right to be that way. Follow the data. If it changes….you should change. Lets worry more about data and less about conservatives not following dogma.
I’m with @rhfabian on this. For one thing, the bottom line is that we don’t want more leftist governance. For another, if I argue on the same side with other conservatives on the data, I find a lot of silly, non-scientific nonsense is on my side. The politicizers of climate on the left also spout a lot of silly, non-scientific nonsense, but I’d rather not get bogged down in all of that. I don’t mind that some people do, but I recommend keeping our eye on the ball.
No subsidy. No compromise. Once you grant the premise, the question becomes how much to subsidize or control? They will always succeed with, “if a little is good, then more is better.” That is how we got to where we are now.
Here’s one view on long-term macro-view predictions of highly complex systems and three examples.
1- If you produce too much CO2 then eventually the poles will melt and we’ll have more, and more violent and destructive , floods and flooding, droughts, famines, blizzards, fires, tornadoes and hurricanes.
2- If you oppress people too much then eventually you will have bombings, shootings, riots, assassinations and revolution.
3- If you go too far into debt then eventually no one will lend you any more money and you will have to create more money leading to monetary failure and bankruptcy.
My view is that what is predictable in the macro is predicable in the micro.
So (1) you should be able to accurately predict the individual occurrences of floods and flooding, droughts, famines, blizzards, fires, tornadoes and hurricanes — BUT we can’t; and (2) we should be able to accurately predict individual bombings, shootings, riots and assassinations — BUT we can’t; and (3) we should be able to predict individual occurrences that any given individual over-indebted family or business will lead to running out of those willing to lend, then theft, counterfeiting or kiting, and then bankruptcy and poverty or closure — AND WE CAN; that’s just what happens in the micro.
If you understand the fundamentals well enough, the macro follows the micro’s example. All three examples are highly complex systems with interactive components. The economy is the only purely human-invented and regulated system of these three, and it is the only one that can be observed that gives consistently accurate predictions of the future.
Societies occur spontaneously without any guiding or designed impetus (and with any attempted design they seem to only make things worse), but at least we can observe and document some of the various complex interactions at play. Yet still we can’t tell which country will end up a Cuba and which will undergo a revolution.
The weather is so primordial and complex we have no idea (barring certain arguments that the weather is fully and secretly controlled already) from which direction the wind will blow next and what it will actually do.
In the back of my mind I still say: Prove it.
One big tell is how the alarmists changed the terminology from “anthropogenic global warming” to “climate change”. The climate is always changing. Always has, always will. (What’s truly crazy to me is when alarmists say they want to “stop climate change”. And somehow we’re the ones “denying” reality?) Can mankind influence climate? Certainly we can at local levels. Globally? It’s not unthinkable. Since “climate” happens in the atmosphere and we are making changes to the composition of the atmosphere, it’s probably having some impact.
But…
Models of chaotic (in the mathematical sense of the word), nonlinear systems can’t make reliable predictions of the future any further in advance than the model has been in existence and validated. If I created a model 10 years ago and it successfully predicted conditions today, then I would have some idea of whether it would be valid 10 years from now. If I created it 50 years ago and every year the predictions made 10 years prior had held up, then I would start to be quite confident in its ability to predict 10 years in the future, but I would only have one data point for how good it would do 50 years into the future. It would take centuries to validate a model that could be said to reliably predict 100 years into the future.
And no, you can’t take the model into the past and use old data to test how it would predict conditions today. That’s called “backfitting”, and its a great way to confirm all your biases and produce nonsense. Say for example I got the idea that I could predict NFL results by examining the stock market activity of companies located in each team’s home city. I’m fairly confident that it would be possible to go look at 50 years of stock market data and find some trends in that massive set of data that could be tied to each team’s performance, and if you picked just the right data you could build a model that would correctly predict all of the last 50 years of games. But because you’re building the model on data that has zero relation to the actual results, it would be completely useless for predicting future games. Climate models are better than that, because they’re at least working with data that is actually relevant to the results, but backfitting the model to test it against known results and then tweaking it until it matches today’s conditions is just as invalid as the example above. As many have noted, climate models have a lousy record of accurate long term predictions. When you throw in the possibility of unknown major events (volcanoes, unexpected solar activity, etc.) it’s even less likely that climate models are accurate for 100 years into the future.
You bring up something that is key in the scientific side of this. For some inexplicable reason the Global Warming scientists almost universally disregard the Sun as being a factor in how warm or cool the Earth is getting! Any graduate of the 2nd grade could tell you that the Sun is probably the main factor in Global Warming, but the political implications of downplaying man’s role in Warming is just too deflating for the Leftists to bear.
Here’s an Israeli scientist who demonstrates that the Sun is easily the most important factor in all of this.
Well put about the “backfitting” of computer climate models! Even many so-called scientists don’t get this basic principle.
Here is my favorite graph on climate change:
It’s a photo I snapped in a museum showing the history of global temperature over the past half million years. Yes, the planet has been getting warmer recently, and yes, we’re nearing the hottest the planet has ever been.
It doesn’t take a genius or a degree in climate science to look at this graph and predict that temperatures will likely continue to rise during our lifetimes, but that at some point in the next few thousand years the planet will begin cooling again as we enter the next Ice Age.
Great photo Joe! But I have to correct one thing you said. We are nowhere near the hottest our planet has ever been. In fact we are living in the coolest time in Earth’s history, if you believe the paleoclimatologists. The entire climatic history has been one of cooling, as shown by this graph from Wikipedia of the last 65 million years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record
This is why the Global Warming scientists only talk about temperature records going back about half-a-million years. It gives them a convenient starting point from which to compare, when Earth was at its coolest during the height of the Ice Age.
That makes sense considering that dinosaurs are generally depicted as living in swamps and jungles (or in modern environmentalese “wetlands” and “rainforests”), yet we find their fossils in what are today much cooler, dryer climates. Thanks for the correction!
but… but this looks nothing at all like a hockey stick?!?
Remember when oil (fossil fuel) came from dinosaurs ?
In 1933, the Sinclair Oil Corporation sponsored a dinosaur exhibit at the World’s Fair in Chicago on the premise that the world’s oil reserves were formed during the Mesozoic Era, when the dinosaurs lived. The exhibit was so popular that Sinclair promptly adopted a big, green Brontosaurus (today we’d call it an Apatosaurus) as its official mascot. Even as late as 1964, when geologists and paleontologists were starting to know better, Sinclair repeated this trick at the much bigger New York World’s Fair, driving home the connection between dinosaurs and oil to an entire generation of impressionable baby boomers.
Today, Sinclair Oil has pretty much gone the way of the dinosaur itself (the company has been acquired, and its divisions spun off several times; there are still, however, a few thousand Sinclair Oil gas stations dotting the American midwest). The premise that oil originated from dinosaurs has been harder to shake, though; politicians, journalists, and even occasional well-meaning scientists have repeated this myth.