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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
That’s right. Crush Bob’s dream.
Well, it’s kind of a hockey stick, but going in the other direction! I guess that’s the hockey term known as “stick down.”
Wow, I was one of those who still thought oil came form dead dinosaurs. Thanks for the article! Fascinating.
Yea. Did a quick search to find the origin of the link between petroleum and dinosaurs. This explanation seemed as good (or humorous) as any. Most of the articles related it with the theory of peak oil.
And don’t forget The Sweet Meteor of Death . . .
I’m still disappointed that SMOD didn’t live up to his promises in 2016. But yes, he certainly would have an impact on the climate.
Sounds like Kurt Schlicter-type tactics. Never give an inch, slippery slope death, blah blah.
I repeat, the issue is taking facts and interpreting them correctly, and not being stupid about it. Pat Michaels says that there is global warming, probably it is net beneficial, there is probably some human contribution, not a big deal, and we should adapt, not panic. And do seminal research toward very cheap technological energy fixes.
Same as Lomborg. Lukewarmers. Conservatives who are hard over “nothing at all to see here, folks” are not helpful to the total ultimate- truth- message.
Let me restate. Don’t compromise without getting something in return. Compromise is always a likelihood but the republicans have, for most of my life, always started with accepting the socialist/progressive premises and then negotiating. I have never heard them start with a full throated defense of capitalism and free enterprise. I have never heard them start with repealing the NFA or the GCA. I have never heard them start with abolishing the unconstitutional FBI. No. They always start with more government intrusion into our states and our lives. They always start with taking more of our money and giving it to those who didn’t earn it. They always start with losing and with betraying our freedom.
Who is Pat Michaels and why is his opinion so important?
“impact”
Dr. Patrick Michaels is a now-retired professor and Cato environmental fellow, emeritus from the U of Virginia, former Virginia State Climatologist, who was the first person to blow the whistle on the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) nonsense in 1989 or so. Here are several of his books on the subject, plus one paper. Do yourself a favor and listen to this if you want to develop some background on the topic. But there is a huge, long list of solid scientists to follow on this.
I’m glad someone caught that. I was starting to think the pun was wasted.
Scott Adams talks about the hockey stick, predictive models, and the 97%, in terms of persuasion:
Added:
TLDW:
(Too Long, Didn’t Watch. But he gets to the meat pretty quickly.)
To young people these are pretty persuasive arguments. But for people who have had more experience, or worked in business, for them, hockey stick curves, predictive models, and 97% consensus is exactly how people lie.
John Hinderaker over at PowerLine uses the headline The Greatest Scandal In The History Of Science for this pattern of scientific misconduct, as he introduces the latest such alarmist effort.
Great article, Phil. Thanks for posting! My brother once gave me a printed article on how Australia’s raw temperature record actually showed an overall cooling trend, so that any warming shown at all was due to the scientist’s adjustments in the first place. I have no way of confirming this.
“Young or journalist” — Haha!
The archives of Climate Audit and then What’s Up With That have many details. Though there’s so much misconduct that finding documentation of specific types can be tedious. Also see SurfaceStations.org, a spin-off from What’s Up With That.
Thanks for that info, Phil! I made a thorough study of this stuff years ago, but I haven’t delved into it very deeply in the last few years. I already knew about the Watts Up With That site but I haven’t seen those others, and they are really informative.
This may be an appropriate discussion to mention it: I watched, just yesterday, a video on Weather Underground (shameless proponents of AGW) that showed an island in Hawaii which had washed away and disappeared some years ago. The interesting thing is, even with the sea levels rising , that island is coming back.
Well, islands are unusual cases, because it completely depends on what the particular island is built on. Bangladesh, for instance, is located at the worlds largest multi-river delta, and stands on constantly moving silt. That’s pretty much doomed.
(I don’t know how, but…) The NOAA has continuous Honolulu sea level data since 1905, and shows a 6.75 inch rise over the last 115 years:
The plot is quite linear, with no increase in rate correlating with, say, industrial development.
I no longer believe any source of any kind concerning climate. NOAA may have the original data here, but so many such charts are based on altered data. I personally think it’s ludicrous that the oceans have increased so much in a hundred years. It may have, but the vast scope of misrepresented data and outright lies put out by the climate science community means that they should not be trusted, even if they aren’t lying, because we can’t tell when they are or aren’t lying.
If they shut up and just stay in the corners for about a few generations, then perhaps, maybe, they can be trusted again.
6.75 inches increase rise in ocean levels over 115 years is really hardly anything. That would be enough for the water to cover up my feet and nothing more. Contrast this with the tremendous mass of the water down below. The average ocean depth is more than two miles deep, with the deepest trench being nearly 7 miles down. I haven’t calculated it, but the percentage of increase has to be infinitesimally small.
I understand your point. That may or may not be the case with this particular NOAA data.
Nonetheless, consider the fact that ever since commercial shipping began, there has been a strong incentive to collect accurate ocean level and tidal data.
And accurately collecting water level data to a fraction of a millimeter with tides that regularly move 7 ft twice a day is a very interesting problem. And there are all sorts of possible measurement variations.
And exploring the NOAA Sea Level Data is fascinating. I highly recommend checking it out.
So here, for instance, is the sea level for Juneau, Alaska:
(That’s not the same scale!) It’s dropping at 13.25 mm/year, or over 4ft per century.
There is also a question if it is an actual rise in water level or the sinking of the land mass.
That has been bugging me for a long time. Landmasses are not completely stable. They move and shift around on their tectonic plates gradually every year. Another factor is that the ocean floor is also subject to earthquakes that shift the seascape and can displace water or create more room for water. Thirdly, volcanic action under water displaces some of the water with magma.
With such small changes in sea level, any of these factors could weigh in.
Yes indeed.
Sea level measurements are rising in cities such as New Orlean and Bangkok, cities that are actually sinking due to collapsing aquifers.
If you see a dropping sea level, with nearby rising sea levels, it may well be that the land is riding a tectonic plate.
We see quickly dropping sea levels in Alaska, and also in the scandinavian countries. Maybe the top of the earth is bulging. Who knows?
But with all this NOAA data, and there’s a lot, it’s really hard to find any examples that are not linear, where the slope is increasing.
By the way, I live in Silicon Valley. The nearest NOAA sea level monitoring station with a lengthy collection of uninterrupted readings is across the bay in Alameda. (Next to the Port of Oakland, one of the largest shipping ports on the west coast.)
Of course the local eco-warriors are screaming about the sea level rise.
This is what it looks like, according to the NOAA:
0.82 mm/year, 3 inches per century.
Man, it’s hard to imagine anything more stable.
As Dennis Prager once put it “We’ll have no trouble outrunning the slowest moving tidal wave in history.”
Another aspect is ocean currents and wind pattern changes. Both will cause water to bunch up or shallow out.
And even then I assume the data has been adjusted.