The Global Warming Debate

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Hello Refil!

Thank you for your comments. I’ve actually given a fair amount of thought into how to best refer to all sides of this argument, but I still haven’t found terms that I’m completely happy with. “Alarmists” wasn’t intended to be pejorative, but I can see how some might see it that way. I saw a special on PBS where they referred to the two sides as “scientists” and “skeptics,” which I didn’t think was quite fair, because it implies that none of the skeptics are scientists, and that no scientists are skeptics. “Denialists” is common used these days as an obviously derogatory term for skeptics. When I think of “pragmatist” in this context, I think of a third group that many refer to as “Luke Warmers,” who are people who believe that man-made CO2 emissions may be causing significant climate change, but that the most practical solution is probably just to adapt, rather than trying to severely cut back on CO2 emissions. I’ve seen the term “warmers” used, but that seems a bit ambiguous to me. It doesn’t distinguish between the luke warmers who believe that, yes, there’s warming, but it’s nothing to be too alarmed about. I’d put Bjorn Lomborg in that category. I’ll keep my ears open and continue to look for a better term than “alarmist.” “Highly Concerned Warmer” is too long

I partially agree with concept that the debate comes down to who you believe. Unfortunately, this creates a situation where we are left with situation that is defined by an appeal to authority with a tendency toward ad hominems.

Quote:When assessing whether to believe someone or not, you have to ask a) what are their creds., and b) if they have other factors influencing their expressed opinions.

I think that even those criteria are troublesome in this debate. People have argued that anyone with any connections to the petroleum industry can’t be trusted because there is the motivation of money. However, I think that the money argument goes both ways, since climate scientists are almost exclusively dependent on government grants. Additionally, there is an increasing lobby from industries that benefit from subsidies for low CO2 technologies. In the 2012 budget, there is $1 billion for “International Climate Assistance.” The president’s proposed budget for 2012 has $2.6 billion for the “U.S. Global Change Research Program’

In the end, however, I think that this not very helpful. What if the bad guy is correct? If Hitler says that one plus one is two, it’s still two.

Having said that, I do believe that there are some characteristics which can be more reliably used to judge someone’s credibility and reliability as a scientific resource. For instance, do they make their data available so that their work can be replicated, even by academic opponents? Do they have a tendency to hide data that doesn’t support their conclusions? Do they shield their work against critical scrutiny, or do they welcome it? If they don’t appear to behave ethically and within the bounds of scientific integrity, then I will tend to require a higher threshold of understanding before I will feel comfortable trusting their work.

I think that the ClimateGate emails conclusively show a lack of integrity on the part of several key climate researchers. Before this incident, however, I was aware of several instances of unethical behavior. The ClimateGate emails made some of these issues more public, and gave some behind-the-scenes input.

One article that I would highly recommend reading is Andrew Montford’s article, Caspar and the Jesus Paper.

For the previous few years, I had been keeping up in real time as these events had been unfolding. Much of the story is about the difficulties encountered by Steve McIntyre, a semi-retired mining executive with an extraordinary understanding of statistics who got involved in paleoclimate recontructions, and has now written multiple peer reviewed papers that have been published in climate journals (and served in the IPCC). Montford’s “Casper and the Jesus paper” is a little long (almost 4000 words), but gives you a good flavor for the types of things going on. Montford is professional science writer, but has an excellent grasp of the technical issues, and an extraordinary ability to summarize.

I rarely recommend books on this subject, because most tend to be slanted and are load with strawman arguments, but I highly recommend Montford’s book, The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science. The Casper and the Jesus paper incident is covered in his book. Another thing that I like about Montford’s book is that he goes into sufficient scientific detail so that the reader can understand the key technical issues.

The final point that I’d like to make is that I believe that many of the critical issues in the climate change debate are understandable by mainstream technical people who aren’t necessarily climate scientists. The issue of whether a data is robust, when the trend drastically changes when a single series of tree measurements is removed is fairly understandable. Issues like the upside-down data used in the Tiljander river sediment are not the level of detail you see in a New York Times article, but are easily understandable for many people. I’m planning to add more examples in my followup posting.