Climate Change Deniers; What more proof do you need?

The BBQ Pit
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Basically true. It should be noted that the Gulf Stream is part of the AMOC (and also the North Atlantic gyre) but you’re quite correct that they’re not the same thing and the risk factors are not the same. The AMOC can be thought of as a complete system that includes the southbound return path of the Gulf Stream deep in the ocean, created as Gulf Stream waters cool in the north, sink, and return south in the deep ocean, hence the “overturning” part of “Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation”. The IPCC concluded at the time of the AR6 publication that the Gulf Stream is probably not at risk even if the AMOC substantially weakens or even collapses. It potentially could weaken, though.

So yes, the media conflating the two systems is a problem. The paper in fact never even mentions the Gulf Stream. But the fact still remains that the collapse of the AMOC (or any other significant part of the global thermohaline circulation) would have major climate impacts.

In press releases, yes. Those have to be worded carefully. In the actual papers, no. Those are for communicating with other researchers and scientists aren’t responsible for the media’s ignorance or sensationalist inclinations.

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Climate change deniers are cut from the same sheet of cloth as the COVID-19 vaccine deniers (and HermanCainAward winners) - they will refuse to let some government egghead tell them what needs to be done. If the bible or Fox News doesn’t tell them what’s going on, then it’s all a liberal hoax.

143

Yes! My son is a scientist (in virology and immunology) and this is one of his pet peeves. It happens all the time. A common form is a research team reports, “A weak but previously unrecognized correlation exists between A and B. Additional research is warranted.”

This is reported as, “Scientists discover that A causes B!” No, that’s not what they said, and the difference is important. More often than not, if you dig into complaints about “scientists can’t make up their minds, first they said such-and-such was bad for you, then it was good for you, now it’s bad again,” you’ll just find bad reporting.

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Since we are sharing:

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:laughing: :disappointed: :sob:

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I’ll also add, in addition to the comic I posted, that in my first-hand experience most (not all) “science journalists” consider themselves writers first and foremost – in their ideal world they’d be best-selling novelists and not have to suffer the grief of writing about science and technology that they don’t understand. Being journalists comes second, and actually understanding science is a distant third or not there at all. This helps explain why so much science reporting in mainstream media is so shitty. What’s especially pathetic is when they assume that their reader is an ignoramus and try to explain things in their own simplified terms, and they get that wrong, too.

But there are indeed exceptional science journalists, like Bob McDonald at the CBC. It’s just that they’re very rare. All the ones I’ve seen on CNN are morons, although to be fair, even they didn’t flub that AMOC climate story as badly as many other media did.

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There is also the fact that things can be good for you in some ways and bad in others. So eating fish might improve your cholesterol but also may include mercury.

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IOW, science is complicated, because reality is complicated, and as science advances, the body of knowledge grows and sometimes also changes.

One of the things that infuriates me about Bill Maher – who I generally like in most respects – is his vociferous skepticism about medical science, and particularly vaccines. He cites changes in our body of medical knowledge as evidence that “medical science doesn’t know anything”, and therefore we should “make up our own minds” about things like vaccines.

Listen, Bill, if you had serious heart disease or cancer, would you seek out the best cardiologist or oncologist that you could find, or would you consult with your remarkably open-minded pool cleaner who “makes up his own mind” based on things he’s heard on Facebook and Fox News?

150

This is also why a number of STEM-training institutions have created some form of degree program called something like “Science Communication” and encourage STEM graduate students to participate in science popularization efforts, C&M internships, etc. We’ll have a better shot at training knowledgeable scientists to communicate about science effectively at popular levels than at persuading many non-scientist journalists to accurately understand and report science.

151

I’ve been thinking about how it is that not just crap media but respected publications like The Guardian are saying that this Nature Communications study about the AMOC is predicting the potential demise of the Gulf Stream, and I think I see what’s happening here. It’s sloppy journalism but maybe we’re being a bit too harsh on them. I was also sloppy myself in describing the AMOC previously and was enlightened by an article I was just reading, so just want to clarify a couple of important nuances.

It’s a matter of definitions. What exactly is “the Gulf Stream”? Pretty much everyone has heard of it, and the common impression of it is that it’s a flow of warm ocean water from the Gulf of Mexico northward along the east coast of North America, and then veering off towards northern Europe, and that it has a major warming effect on these northern areas… Right off the bat we have a nomenclature problem, as the part that flows across the Atlantic is more properly called the North Atlantic Drift, but never mind that detail. Is the popular conception of it correct?

Well, not really, at least not the “major warming” part. Technically the Gulf Stream is a wind-driven flow of near-surface water and doesn’t really do much to warm northern climates. What keeps many of us warm(er) with warm Gulf water is not actually the Gulf Stream to any great extent, if you want to be strictly technically accurate. What does it is hugely massive flows of Gulf water, in much greater volumes than the Gulf Stream, powered not by winds but by the powerful thermohaline dynamics previously mentioned resulting from density differences due to temperature and salinity differentials. And the name of this massive flow is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the AMOC.

So by telling us that this study predicts a possible shutdown of “the Gulf Stream”, the media is technically wrong and downright confusing, yet the gist of what they’re saying is right. They’re just using the wrong words, either because they figure the public is more familiar with “Gulf Stream” and wouldn’t understand “AMOC” even if it was explained to them, or maybe because they themselves don’t know any better. But the bottom line is, if the AMOC shuts down, it will be a climate disaster.

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So AMOC is what I thought the Gulf Stream was? Ignorance fought! Thanks @wolfpup.

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I fully expect Arizona to go deep blue after this summer’s heat. Having one too many saguaros fall on one’s car will do that.

What?

154

To be clear, as you correctly said earlier the AMOC and the Gulf Stream are two different things, and the Gulf Stream is likely not at any significant risk. The central issue here is that it’s the AMOC that does most of the heavy lifting with respect to heat transport between the Gulf and the North Atlantic, and hence this is the system that is of great concern with respect to climate.

All the more so because there’s evidence that the AMOC and major systems like it may be sensitive to climate thresholds which, once reached, will flip them into a different state relatively quickly. Hence the longstanding concern about climate tipping points, driven by circulation systems that exhibit bistable behaviour.

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The article glosses over the fact that the US has a pre-existing denial industry. Denial didn’t just spring up out of nowhere in 2000. If it did, then the article would have a point. I am not sure if there was a denial industry in Europe at the time. But the data are consistent with denialism preferentially existing in the US before 2000, denialism continuing to exist to an outsized extent in the US after 2000, and denialism being the major (but not the only) cause of the US continuing to emit per-capita GHG way more than Europe.

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I don’t know about “industry”, but there were and continue to be loudmouth deniers in Europe, though AFAIK they never coalesced as a political force the way they did in the US. The English peer Christopher Monckton, for example, is a vociferous and comically incompetent climate change denier, but it’s notable that his organizational affiliations are the likes of the right-wing US Heartland Institute presumably because there aren’t equivalent denialist organizations in the UK. I’ve come across a number of others but they’ve tended, like Monckton, to be individuals rather than large organizations.

In general one finds organized climate change denial in countries that have a vested economic interest in fossil fuels – not generally at the governmental level, fortunately. It exists in Canada because of the Alberta oil patch, and naturally tends to be centered in Alberta. It exists in Australia in part because of the lucrative coal industry, much of its production destined for China. But the US has proven to be exceptionally fertile ground for climate denialism, through a combination of its massive fossil fuel industries, right-wing politics, corporate power, and a ready-made disinformation industry.

I was going to add that I had the impression that in the light of overwhelming scientific evidence in recent years, such as the IPCC AR5 and AR6 assessments, that outright climate change denialism was dying down, even in the US. I just checked to see whether one of the most infamous denialist website was still in operation, and it’s going strong, denying everything, awash with disinformation. An article about the recent paper on the AMOC caught my eye because we were just discussing it here. I’ll just say a few words about that.

I’m not going to link either to the site or to the article, but suffice to say that it’s a pack of lies credited to someone who used to work for the Heartland Institute, and now works for something called the “Arthur B Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy”. Sounds … almost distinguished, if you don’t know who Arthur Robinson is. He’s an unmitigated raging lunatic who, among other things, is a founder of something called the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM). That sounds distinguished, too, until you realize that the last I heard it was basically a barn in a farm outside a tiny village, Robinson was its only permanent staff member, and its purposes were things like apocalyptic survivalism, home schooling, and climate change denial. The latter was accomplished with several iterations of a fake “petition” commonly known as the “Oregon Petition” allegedly signed by thousands of “scientists” disclaiming climate change. Those “scientists” turned out to be a combination of crackpots, fake signatories like “Dr” Geri Halliwell (of the Spice Girls), and I believe several cartoon characters.

I’m sorry now that I ever ventured into that cesspool again. I thought the days of having these arguments were way behind me and I’d like to keep it that way. The point is, sad to say, that not only is climate change denialism alive and well in the US, it seems to be hitting new peaks of lunacy.

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Then I’m surprised they’re not even further ahead of the US in fighting climate change.

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Ludovic - You make a chain of accurate claims. Let’s look at another chart:

  1. Rapidly developing countries in general and China in particular are the main story. To Drum, this implies that the West needs to develop a bunch of technologies and give it to China, India, et al. To some extent Europe and the US have done this by subsidizing the Solar panel industry, which is now the lowest cost source of power at the margin.

  2. Honestly, Europe’s efforts have been inadequate to the task. The US and Europe are basically tied in terms of our progress this century. It’s true that during the 1990s, US per capital emissions rose while Europe’s gently fell. But when you drill down you get cases like Germany, which has a great renewable program that has been wholly neutered by their closing of nuclear power plants, or Poland which doesn’t want its hard working coal miners to lose jobs. Or Australia that passed a modest tax on carbon in 2012, then had a change of government and reversal in 2014. Bastaads. Carbon pricing in Australia - Wikipedia

  3. Has GOP nutbaggery made any difference at all? Well I say it must have. But it doesn’t show up in any obvious way in the data. That’s not unusual: in demography for example it takes a lot to move the life expectancy figures, though COVID managed to do exactly that. But we are facing some apparently larger and broader forces in regions like Europe and Asia where conservatives accept the science but policy makers have dragged their feet.

My take as an activist or concerned citizen? Try everything. Call out the GOP’s fossil fuel losers one day. Acknowledge the awesome efforts of Bloomberg to cover the green story in ways large and small the next. Bloomberg Green.

159

OK, since it kinda sorta fits the purpose of this thread, I humbly admit that despite my best intentions, I did go back to that denialist site I mentioned out of curiosity to see what sort of tactics they were using these days. And the answer is: same old, same old.

I couldn’t stand to spend more than literally just a few minutes there, so I missed 99% of it, but FTR, here’s what I picked up. And the moral of this little story is that climate change deniers are dangerous advocates for vested interests in fossil fuels that are a danger to science and a threat to our civilization.

The general strategy of scorched-earth attack on climate science is to attack everything in every way possible with no regard for any kind of consistency or rationality and certainly no regard for facts. Some examples, keeping in mind that this was just a couple-minute glance and I may have missed or misread things, but this is nonetheless a valid example of how they operate:

They try to hand-wave away record average global air temperatures this summer and record average sea temperatures off the coast of Florida, and indeed the entire climate history over the past 50 years by … someone finding that someplace in Florida was once hotter on some one particular day in 1933! (Or sometime in the 30s – I forget the exact date)

The rest of this pertains to the paper we’ve been discussing about the risk of AMOC weakening or shutting down, where I was fascinated to see how the lunatic from the Heartland Institute who wrote that piece would attack it. And it went like this:

  • Papers like this (by “activist scientists”) says ocean circulation systems may be weakening, but other papers (by other “activist scientists”) claim that those exact same systems are getting stronger. Hey, activist scientists, if you don’t know what you’re talking about at least get your stories straight!

The facts: First of all actual science has uncertainties and sometimes conflicting projections, but that isn’t what’s primarily at play here. From what I saw in a brief skim, these are absolutely NOT “the exact same systems”. In particular, the ocean currents that were observed to be getting stronger were surface currents energized by higher winds due to global warming. The ones observed to be getting weaker were the ones energized by deep-sea thermohaline dynamics, also due to global warming. There is no contradiction. Also, the “cites” they used to support their point were denialist sites making the exact same deceptive argument.

  • The AMOC is cyclical, so of course it’s sometimes stronger or weaker

The facts: Exhibiting cyclical behaviour in the short term is in no way inconsistent with being bistable in a longer term. All of this has been well demonstrated in both models and paleoclimate observations.

  • The IPCC is “one of the worst sources of dangerous misinformation”

The facts: There’s no need to defend one of the most prestigious and rigorously vetted scientific bodies on earth. I only mention this because it leads perfectly to the next point.

  • The recent AMOC paper is contradicted by the IPCC AR6 report

The facts: Science advances. Later reports incorporate new evidence. But what I really love about this is how their proclaimed “dangerous misinformation” is used as an authority to refute arguments they don’t like! They may have just declared it to be misinformation, but by gum, they’re fine with using it to bolster their position if they agree with it!

  • Michael Mann is quoted as saying, about the AMOC paper, that “I’m not sure the authors bring much to the table other than a fancy statistical method. History is littered with flawed predictions based on fancy statistical methods; sometimes they’re too fancy for their own good.”

The facts: Mann actually did say that. And no one is suggesting that this paper is definitive or anything other than new information that should be evaluated on its merits. But in the interests of facts and context, Mann also said this:

“I think the authors in this case are on to something real. We could be talking decades rather than a century [before a potential AMOC shutdown].”