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I Deny I’m a Denier
I consider myself to be a skeptic in the matter of man-made global warming. I’m not a denier; I’m not smart enough to be that certain. But, as with a lot of things in life, I’m skeptical. (And see what they did there? By labeling skeptics as deniers, they equate us with Holocaust Deniers. Pretty clever, huh?) Every now and then, I’ll use my Twitter account to send out a tweet poking fun at climate alarmists (see what I did there?). And, while most Twitter users understand the humor, there are those who get very, very angry.
First, they pointedly remind me that I’m not a scientist. That’s very helpful, because sometimes I confuse being a TV game show host with being a scientist. (It’s always embarrassing when I show up for a taping in a white lab coat.) Actually, that’s not the first thing they do; the bulk of them usually start with obscene name-calling. There are two favorites, but Ricochet’s Code of Conduct forbids my being any more specific on the matter. Finally, most of them tell me that they don’t care what such an idiot who hosts such an idiotic program for idiotic viewers thinks about something that 90% (or 94% or 97%) of climate scientists agree on. Of course, the fact that they read my tweet, became agitated by it, and responded to it demonstrates that they truly do care. I find that rather odd, because I’m not sure why anyone would particularly care about any beliefs—or non-beliefs—held by a quasi-celebrity, especially one who doesn’t use his television forum to proselytize (as some are wont to do).
I’m also often reminded by my global warming (climate change?) Twitter buddies that climate is not weather. The fact that it’s extraordinarily cold in particular areas at particular times does not negate their argument. The climate—hockey stick and all—will doom us if we do not act quickly and drastically. I find the climate vs. weather argument interesting because weather events can only prove their point; they cannot disprove it. The historically calm Gulf hurricane period since Katrina—despite predictions of increasingly strong and devastating storms—can be explained away. However, it’s a safe bet that, had the last decade been marked by more violent activity, it would have been more evidence that The End Days were near. Snowless winters in England are a sign of the climate changing times, but when the snow and ice return…well, it’s weather, not climate.
So here we are. The science is settled. Extreme weather of any kind confirms it. Weather that seems to fly in the face of predictions is irrelevant. So how can one possibly deny all that? I can’t, because I’m not a scientist. But can’t I be just the teeniest bit skeptical?
Published in General
Panic is so much more energizing than skepticism. Truth has nothing to do with it. Only feelings count, and impending doom is the granddaddy of them all.
It’s important to mention that no matter what I think of the case made so far by climate alarmists, I don’t really want to die from planet pollution. Believe me, if there’s good reason to think that this is what’s truly happening, then I’m all in favor of addressing the problem. I’m not going to invite catastrophe just to be stubborn.
I do acknowledge that I have, along with the rest of humanity, an obligation to take care of this earth so that my children can enjoy life as much as I have. I’m happy to fulfill that responsibility.
But before we make sweeping changes to society, I want more than the self-serving assurances from specialists. I need some proof. And right now, for every scientific “report” that claims that climate change is happening and is man-made and is bad, I see other information that says that the earth’s temperatures have been stable for a decade, that any human impact is minimal, or that such change is normal. These same people assured us that the Polar Ice Caps would have melted away by now, etc., none of which has happened.
And secretly, I have an in-bred suspicion that “specialists” who have devoted their professional careers to proving climate change might just have a self-serving motive for dramatizing the effects of climate change. (How would you like to dedicate your life to fighting a disease, only to discover that the disease went away naturally? As Buzz Lightyear would say, “years of academy training … wasted!”)
I think it says this snowstorm is Bush’s fault
It’s helpful, to me, to break this issue down to its component parts:
By breaking it out like this, I’ve had sputtering alarmists come back to their senses enough to come to some kind of reason on the middle and later points. Most of the sputtering is caused by the first three points. Once I stipulate that warming has occurred (though I wouldn’t be surprised if that turns out to have been wrong or exaggerated), that the change is bigger than normal (though “normal” is hard to pin down and subjective), and that human activity contributes (though I’m skeptical we’re the cause and it’s at least still plausible that this is part of a natural change) then the splutterers actually start to sound reasonable about the inherent risks involved with making future predictions and about making huge policy proposals based on such a small theorized change to come over such a long time horizon.
My question to ’em:
Why do Y’all think anything and everything in all of creation up until now has evolved from nothing and is still evolving, except planet Earth?
Racist.
I remember when scientists were telling us that we were on the verge of a new ice age, and I’m middle-aged, not, you know, ancient. Scientists sometimes get things wrong.
When they accuse you of not being a scientist, point out that all climate scientists agree that we are nearing the end of an interglacial period. An ice age is coming, probably sooner than later. Isn’t it odd that the one thing they can all agree on should make us worry about cold, not warming? And that therefore, a rational response would be to find some way to heat the planet up to counteract its effects?
Skepticism is an appropriate response. Disgust, which I also feel toward the warmist movement, is also understandable under the circumstances. Warmist scientists and non-scientists have hectored, lied, changed the terms of the debate, and changed the very terminology used to describe the phenomena that alarm them. They have been disingenuous, condescending, and misleading. They have demonstrated unprofessional conduct (remember “hide the decline”?) and behavior more akin to religious fervor than to scientific inquiry and prudence.
The warmist movement changed the name of the phenomenon of concern from “global warming,” which was a controversial subject, to “climate change.” See what they did there? The fact that the climate changes is completely uncontroversial. What if an activist claimed that a river was drying up due to human activity and then, when the evidence for it was inconclusive, changed the name of his cause to “river level change”? Wouldn’t he be considered an idiot, or a mountebank? River levels change constantly.
We are told by warmists that human activity is causing “weather weirding.” This nebulous and unscientific term is so ridiculous it doesn’t even deserve refuting. It can mean whatever one wants it to mean. (And, anyway, I thought we were told that weather is not climate. As Pat notes, we’re told that only when the weather is cold and/or quiescent.) We are also told that ocean levels are rising, and yet we see with our own eyes this isn’t so. I work on an island that is a few feet above sea level. I own a house that is a few feet above sea level. There have been no changes. I think we would have, you know, noticed. I’m pretty sure the oceans are all, you know, connected.
Skepticism is perhaps the only appropriate response.
Here’s a photo I snapped from an exhibit in the Museum of London:
Unless our friend James Delingpole snuck in one night and hung this up while no one was looking, I figure an exhibit at a major museum is a fairly mainstream apolitical source. In other words, I didn’t get this from some conservative “denier” blog.
At the far right of this timeline you can see the familiar “hockey stick” showing a sharp spike in global temperatures in recent years. What’s interesting here is the larger context showing similar spikes have occurred several times in the past, roughly every 100,000 years or so. Did our ancestors cause those, too?
I also can’t help but notice that previous spikes did not trigger the end of the world. Instead, the temperature seems to have gradually cooled over the centuries without (so far as we know) a global treaty among Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons to institute Cap-and-Trade.
It’s a bit like someone running around in a panic on August 1st with a graph showing a sharp rise in average daily temperatures over the prior 6 months.
I believe it’s now up to 105% of climate scientists in agreement.
Wait! It will soon be discovered that there WAS a global treaty between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons to institute cap-and-trade. And that’s why there aren’t any Neanderthals left!
My experience has been that people prefer a warmer climate to a cooler one.
Evidence: Look at the population migration patterns in the United States. People voluntarily have been voluntarily moving from cold weather states to warm weather states.
More evidence: Observe the relative number of tourist resorts in Hawaii/Florida/So Cal/AZ compared to, say, Fargo ND or Calgary AB.
OK Jimmy, I’ll explain it to you. For billions of years God (or Gaia or Mother Nature or whatever) has been tweaking the Earth’s thermostat. Up and down and up and down until it was juuust right, like Baby Bear’s porridge. This took until about 1880. Then the industrial revolution starting to kick into high gear a short time later and ruined it all.
Beautiful, Joseph.
Pat, it’s idiots like you that have caused me to consider having my name changed. I don’t want to be even tangentially associated with a denier of your caliber. I am, however, willing to consider an alternative solution. Let’s say you pay me, oh, $10,000.00 a month for mental-abuse-because-I-have the same-first-name-as-you credits. You can then continue your climate denying ways, and I will absorb the accusations of “Pat is a climate denier” that should rightfully have been heaped upon you. You’ll feel better. My developing personal economy will get a boost and the mental anguish hockey stick will go away. PM me if you are interested in not being on the receiving end of a major intentional infliction of emotional distress lawsuit.
I subscribe to Popular Science magazine, and overall it’s pretty good. But on the issue of climate change, they are 100% believers. I’d like to think they are objective but they are not. Recently an article was talking about drought and said that climate change would make droughts worse. How can this be true? The author wasn’t saying that global warming would lead to more droughts, but climate change. So I’m supposed to accept that some time in the recent past the planet was the optimal temperature for maximum rainfall and any deviation from that temperature – up or down – would lead to an increase in droughts? This does not seem like scientific thinking to me.
On the continuum of climate alarmists and deniers I guess I’m a little closer to a denier than celebrity-scientist Pat. On the dying of pollution argument – the world has never has never been cleaner than right now. You don’t live in filth, you don’t breathe air not fit to breathe unless you are in Beijing or other place and they’ll eventually clean that up. Your water doesn’t kill you. Your food doesn’t kill you. Disease is largely controlled with the possible exception of Disneyland – which happens to be my next vacation destination this spring. In the mean time remember: the only thing constant about climate change is climate change.
That’s another thing. “Global cooling” or “global warming” or “global room temperature,” I ask these greenies,”Where’s the Earth’s owner’s manual stating the manufacturer’s suggested ideal global temperature? What is that temperature?” They look at Me as if I’m insane when They “think” people can control weather.
There seems to be some agreement that alarmists replaced “global warming” with “climate change” because though the warming stopped about 18 years ago we still need to be alarmed about hurricanes, droughts, etc.
Now, this is a question I’ve asked before on Ricochet, but no one has answered it for me: If the increased greenhouse gases don’t warm the atmosphere, how do they cause the climate to change? What is the causal connection between higher concentrations of CO2 and a change in the climate if the temperatures are not rising?
I want to see the tape of the show where you’re wearing the gown.
Basically it stems from the same line of thought that anything “natural” is better than anything “artificial.” “Natural” ingredients in food are better than “artificial,” “natural” homeopathic remedies are better than scary pharmaceutical chemicals, and so forth.
Therefore “natural” variation in global temperatures over time are fine, but any change attributable to mankind (warming, cooling, more rain, less rain, whatever) are “artificial” and ipso facto evil.
My canned response on the topic of Global Warming has long been, “I live in Chicago. I WANT global warming.”
The same thing seems to be going on in SlashDot. I subscribe because I like to see the more technical explanations of new tech coming out. But whenever the discussion turns to climate, all the gloves come off and the railing begins. Now they have found 1 “climate denier” who has some money that may have been touched by a Koch demon! PROOF that ALL climate deniers are paid stooges!
ArsTechnica too, but then, they changed a few years ago.
Now they are all about climate change, wikileaks, and the nsa.
They used to be about CPU architectures and filesystems and once in a great while they still are, but that’s the exception now. :(
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2002/03/an-introduction-to-64-bit-computing-and-x86-64/
http://arstechnica.com/features/2002/10/hyperthreading/
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2004/02/mac-02172004/
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2004/03/mac-03242004/
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10-4.ars/
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10-3.ars/
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10-2.ars/
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10-1.ars/
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/01q2/macos-x-final/macos-x-1.html
http://arstechnica.com/features/2005/02/cell-1/
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2005/06/mac-20050608/
http://arstechnica.com/staff/2006/08/4995/
http://origin.arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/11/30/timemachinescheduler-puts-you-in-the-time-machine-drivers-seat
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/01/11/6591
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/03/28/zfs-and-os-x-growing-closer-all-the-time
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/05/18/pick-the-right-file-system-for-your-macs-internal-or-external-storage
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/06/26/the-soap-opera-of-zfs-for-leopard-part-14
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/10/07/apple-delivers-zfs-readwrite-developer-preview-1-1-for-leopard
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/03/past-present-future-file-systems/5/
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/09/game-console-architecture-in-depth/
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/01/super-fast-ext4-filesystem-arrives-in-ubuntu-9-04/
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/bitrot-and-atomic-cows-inside-next-gen-filesystems/
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/ars-walkthrough-using-the-zfs-next-gen-filesystem-on-linux/
The CAGW answer is: There is a lot of evidence that increased concentrations of CO2 over the past century or so has caused warming. It is true that CO2 concentrations have continued to increase since 1998, while temperatures have been flat. But there have always been background changes in global temperatures that we don’t (yet) understand, and perhaps never will.
Absent the human-caused increase in CO2 levels, global temperatures would have fallen substantially between 1998 and the present, for reasons not (yet) understood. Thus, the “warming pause” does not disprove the theory. It is just a short-term anomaly in the data.
This explanation would be much more plausible to me if the authors of the five IPCC reports had been less Delphic in their predictions. All five reports made specific predictions, with “confidence intervals,” for global temperatures in the far future (like 2100). I would think that each and every report should have contained a simple, one-page table of the predicted global temperature in each year between the report date and 2100, with the relevant confidence intervals.
The failure to include such obvious information smacks of deliberate inscrutability. I think that the inclusion of such information would show one of two things:
My suspicion is that the predictions of the first three IPCC reports (1990, 1995, 2001) fall into the latter category, while the predictions of the two most recent reports (2007, 2013-14) fall in the former.
It sure would be nice if the IPCC folks would give us a straight answer on this issue. Again, the fact that they haven’t makes me highly suspicious.
I always like to ask how bulldozing forests and draining swamps to put up windmills is saving the planet?