No, going to Google is the generic solution, incidentally items like the Marcott research are discussed with new articles outside the myths in the main page:
Indeed, there is many times a fast response to many recent misrepresentations of science contrarians apply to research like the one from Marcott.
This is coming from experience with several contrarians in the past in the SDMB itself, and many contrarian sources also have a dislike of Skeptical Science. Before getting into this my forte was dealing with moon hoaxers and creationists, just as they hated NASA and Talkorigins.org I have encountered the same flawed arguments from climate change contrarians against using a resource like Skeptical Science.
I’ve also changed my position on nuclear over the years - right now I believe that we have to go massively nuclear, and can only hope that personal transport keeps up by developing viable all electric vehicles (or some form of hydrogen fuel).
I also believe that at some point there is going to be a reversal of the current trends of more / better / faster / bigger in relation to consumerism and things are going to get simpler…
If I understand your intentions, I certainly applaud them, but I must disagree that such an exercise would have the desired outcome.
For one thing, such sites exist, Skeptical Science being a pretty good example. Your arguments seem a bit contradictory, too, in that you simultaneously seem to be calling for a site that gives a person “the right information in 5 minutes or less” yet condemning Skeptical Science for being “too generic”. I think it actually takes a pretty good approach in formulating much of the information in the form of issues that are frequently raised, and then providing different levels of response based on the individual’s technical background.
There are also other sites – RealClimate is a good one, with contributions by notable scientists like Gavin Schmidt and a more involved level of scientific discussion. There are reports from independent bodies like the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciencies, and of course the IPCC itself; although its full reports are indeed dauntingly large, they also provide summaries – WG1 has both a short Summary for Policymakers and a longer Technical Summary to supplement the main body of the report. And beyond that, much of the scientific literature is available online, despite some of the journals themselves being paywalled. The information is available at every level, categorized and sorted nine ways to Sunday.
So why isn’t any of this converting the denialists? You’ve already hinted at the reason. Because for every such legitimate source of real information, Google reveals hundreds of shrieking denialist sites shouting them down, generally filled with the most egregious garbage that varies from misleading truisms to outright lies. And the reason for this ultimately has its roots in what I talked about in my first post #62 here: that the campaign to undermine climate science is the most relentless and well-funded disinformation campaign that has ever been waged by private enterprise, one far more powerful and widespread than was ever dreamed of by the tobacco industry, with hundreds of millions in untraceable funds through “donor-directed charities” and other means going to support countless front groups all over the world. And the ordinary person seems to be totally bereft of any ability to tell the difference between real science and junk, between a site dedicated to providing information and one run by industry shills dedicated to peddling an agenda. A lazy and sensationalist press contributes to the notion of equivalency by casting the science vs. lunacy arguments in terms of legitimate debate.
And the problem is further promulgated by a great many individuals who for personal or business reasons need no encouragement at all to condemn the science; they’re happy to do it entirely on their own initiative. As Upton Sinclair famously said, it’s hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon not understanding it.
And this is exactly what we’re seeing. In January 2011 John Holdren, Obama’s science advisor, invited climate scientists to give presentations and answer questions before a skeptical Congress, uninformed about and largely leery of climate science. The opportunity to hear from the experts and get their questions answered seemed to only inflame their skepticism and increased their resolve to oppose emissions regulations. Republicans used to be the party of science. Abraham Lincoln created the National Academy of Sciences in 1863; William McKinley won two presidential elections, in 1896 and 1900, over the anti-evolution Democrat William Jennings Bryan, and he supported the creation of the forerunner to today’s National Institute of Standards and Technology. Not any more. Every single Republican candidate for president in the last election had to be a denialist to have any hope of securing the nomination. Ninety-six of 100 newly elected Republican members of Congress either deny climate change is real or have signed pledges vowing to oppose its mitigation. And for that you can thank the great denialist spin machine and a vast public misperception.
Why are you evading my extremely simple yes or no questions?
And do you agree that the blue band represents the IPCC’s models of global surface temperature WITHOUT anthropogenic effects? (Extremely simple yes or no question).
And do you agree that the red band represents the IPCC’s model’s of global surface temperature WITH anthropogenic effects? (Extremely simple yes or no question).
And do you agree that before 1950, the red and blue bands essentially track each other? (Extremely simple yes or no question).
Also, do you dispute the following claim about the graph?
Please answer this question so that I can understand your position.
Let’s assume that it is. It doesn’t change the fact that the models of pre-1950 temperatures both with and without anthropogenic affects essentially co-incide.
Do you agree that a graph which illustrates Point A might contain additional implications?
Please show me where I interpreted or asserted that it didn’t. Please quote me. Failing that, please admit that I said no such thing and apologize.
Please show me where I created such a strawman. Please quote me. Failing that, please admit I did no such thing and apologize.
I’m not sure what your point is here. I was talking about pre-1950 surface temperatures – not the 20th century as a whole. Do you understand that?
And do you dispute that before 1950, the models which include anthropogenic effects and those which omit them essentially coincide? Please answer this simple question so that I can understand your position.
Please show me where I have done this. Please quote me. Failing that, please admit that I have done no such thing and apologize.
Your choice.
Please show me where I have made such a claim. Please quote me. Failing that, please admit that I have done no such thing and apologize.
I missed that main page one because it was 3/4ths the way down the mainpage, a long, long scroll. And finding your second link using the search is not obvious.
Additionally, that article tells “contrarians” what they should like.
And this is where I’ll always have a deep divide with you, Mr Buster. You always seem to look for any reason to claim that you are facing a true disbeliever. I would warn you that evangelism isn’t working out too hot for Christianity and it won’t work out for climate science.
[quote=“wolfpup, post:283, topic:677984”]
If I understand your intentions, I certainly applaud them, but I must disagree that such an exercise would have the desired outcome.
For one thing, such sites exist, Skeptical Science being a pretty good example. Your arguments seem a bit contradictory, too, in that you simultaneously seem to be calling for a site that gives a person “the right information in 5 minutes or less” yet condemning Skeptical Science for being “too generic”. I think it actually takes a pretty good approach in formulating much of the information in the form of issues that are frequently raised, and then providing different levels of response based on the individual’s technical background.
There are also other sites – RealClimate is a good one, with contributions by notable scientists like Gavin Schmidt and a more involved level of scientific discussion. There are reports from independent bodies like the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciencies, and of course the IPCC itself; although its full reports are indeed dauntingly large, they also provide summaries – WG1 has both a short Summary for Policymakers and a longer Technical Summary to supplement the main body of the report. And beyond that, much of the scientific literature is available online, despite some of the journals themselves being paywalled. The information is available at every level, categorized and sorted nine ways to Sunday.
[/quote[
I have referred people to both. When all I get back is “that’s just believer kool aide” I start to assess the value of sites like these for actually informing people. If you take a view at how they are informing versus what their content is, you can start to see how it can be laid out better.
So we should just sit out, then? All other efforts have failed. Let’s just buy some waterfront property in Arizona?
No. You have to make your message accessible and creating sites that quickly devolve into a cult on either side that adds to the cacophony is just detrimental to crossing those lines.
Which is why we need to avoid those individuals and go for the average person.
The politicians will change if the public that elects them change. If you go from “Anti Green” to “Green” you don’t have a political job anymore. We should target the strength of their numbers and ignore that their followers (politicians) don’t listen.
That’s a fallacious argument. While it is true that there are large components of the climate system that we do not understand, it is also true that the temperature has been going up.
Now, maybe (just maybe) we will find ourselves in a similar situation that was 5,000 years ago: We will plateau and the temperatures will drop back into Little Ice Age 2: Ice Age Harder.
But that plateau’s rise was over almost 200 years and not 50. The subsequent cooling will take almost 2,000 years, following that curve. That gives rise to four scenarios:
A) We all gon’ die from heat stroke
B) We all sweat our balls off, but stay alive.
C) Our little ice age 2 becomes “Standard Age: We Killed the Ice”
D) We freeze our balls off, but there’s nothing we can do to stop it.
There’s a 3/4ths chance life sucks ass and 1/4 chance everything is hunky dory. 1/2 of the chance we can manipulate by reducing output and actively sequestering carbon.
Even in the worst case scenario of acting on this, we cleaned up a potential pollutant. As long as we don’t try to modulate behavior via centralized bureaucracy it won’t kill us to clean up after ourselves.
Your answer to my question is that the question is flawed? I didn’t ask what causes natural global warming, I asked why I should believe you.
I have not made nor have I endorsed any of these claims. What makes me a denier is that I claim global warming is a good thing.
I lied, I’m for it.
1] If every neighborhood had their own energy source, then the entire energy sector of the economy becomes decentralized. Local control would remove the burden of margins and administrative costs. [Raises eyebrows] It would break the back of Big Oil, which alone would cure 75% of the world’s pollution problems.
2] Keeping a nuclear bomb in every neighbor is a proper and just extension of our 2nd Amendment rights. Why shouldn’t the People be more heavily armed than the Government? We’re certainly more responsible with our weapons than they are.
3] Un-metered electricity, remember that promise?
My rebuttal:
I’m thinking of slamming a semi truck into the containment structure. Sure, we’d have to hope the reactor vessel doesn’t meltdown before we could fix the 3’ wall of concrete. But the odds are same as slamming a semi into some poor bloke’s home. Yes, there would have to be fail-safes built in. If the neighborhood decides to neglect maintenance, they and they alone will suffer.
Conceded, just can’t say anything with a straight face …
I wouldn’t bury it in Texas … not if Nevada is asking for it. Dump it in the ocean, it’ll clean itself. Serious, drop the waste into a subduction fault and it’ll be sucked down inside the Earth long before it stops being radioactive.
Hopefully, we’ve moved into a discussion on mitigation. The scientific minutiae is still available I suppose. Did you really read all that … wow … I’m impressed.
No, I do not think you are a disbeliever, only that do you remember about your advise of not listening to envirowakos? There is **also **a problem and it feeds deniers when there is a lot of information missing when looking at the other side, and it has to be blamed on the mainstraim media and the denier one. Just like in discussions of creationism, one side has driven the discussion to make the ones more grounded in reality to sound like extremists when in reality they are not.
Thing is, based on congressional testimony and many debates names like Barry Bickmore, Richard alley and others should be familiar already, also resources like Skeptical Science that are recommended by them (I became aware of Skeptical thanks to Realclimate and Barry Bickmore) and others like Scientific American and Realclimate.org
The point here is that contrarians do not want you to be aware of those and they have very good reasons for “spreading the word” to the common folk to not look at places that show the real levels of support the contrarians have in the scientific community, academia and scientific publications.
You asked why and I gave reasons why the argument isn’t a valid one. Saying ‘We don’t understand this part of climate science’ is reasonable. There are, as I said, large swaths of climate science that we need more research on. Drawing the further conclusion from that statement, e.g. ‘thus why should I believe in man-made climate change’ is a fallacious extension.
It would be akin to “We don’t understand gravity, so the sun doesn’t actually work.” Well, it’s true. We don’t understand gravity. But we know that the math and observable effects are close enough to reality to allow us to operate on it at a 90% level. And we doubt that we will make a discovery that somehow contradicts the effects of gravity as we observe it. The remaining discoveries will simply clarify the view of gravity that we have.
I never attributed any of this to you. I said these were the scenarios that come forth from historical comparison versus our modern interpretation of the climate science.
Good…for…you?
And it would introduce dangers of exposure, as I elaborated earlier. Additionally, having a few 250mW reactors outside of large population centers would allow for an accident to not damage and/or irradiate 200 people and their belongings.
Except Thorium reactors aren’t nuclear bombs. They can’t “explode.” At worse, you will irradiate persons, animals, and objects by removing the shielding.
Again, remind me never to take your advise when you do not know how bacteria that you did not learn about in school does specifically work to cause a peculiar intestinal disease that you also were not aware before.
In the end one has to consult experts in the matter, and disregard the contrarians that claim that homeopathy will work wonders.
Yes, but the problem is on both sides: Envirowackos give a bad name to the environmentalist movement. This has been going on for years, too. People know that PETA isn’t a humane animal organization, they are closer to the extremist fringe.
The deniers can quote their own studies in the media and can seem rational. When you have 48 seconds to make a case on CNN or Fox News, the deniers are absolutely the people prepared for that.
Yes, but if you are not prepared to accept the message, you won’t. Like I said: Marketing. Simply having the correct information doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked for almost 40 years, now. Why? Because most people are intelligent enough to hear “But there’s this problem with that study” and then go “Oh, guess it’s still not settled” and shut off.
The problem is assuming that people will be 100% logical 100% of the time. Research as shown time and again that overcoming existing state-of-mind conceptions is HARD and that anything that will send them running will do so forthwith. That’s why I gave you that rubric, earlier. 5 minutes without language that would deride their existing beliefs, make them feel stupid, and so forth.
I’ve been reviewing that the last few days. I have some issues with some of the articles they selected. I’ve found some that don’t even mention climate science, which is distressing. Deniers will be all over these short-comings and we’ll lose any useful message in a sea of fluff.
Which is another issue: Some of the stuff climate advocates put out are data dredges that can be run through the ringer, also. Having a neutrally-worded critique of the papers making the news would also be something to help the education process along.
You’ve misquoted me, I said “why should we believe [climatologists] know what causes man-made global warming”. Ummm … we do understand gravity, there’s a law about it. That law is invariant in the classical universe. Look it up in your dog-eared copy of Halliday/Resnick.
[Whine whine] What about my imaginary fail-safe systems ??? – Conceded
Previously conceded (let’s not beat dead horses, much)
Ah, yes, the catch-phrase used to sell the bonds for building nuclear reactors in the 1950s. Turned out, what was built under the bleacher section at Solder Field, Chicago, wasn’t exact safe. So modification after modification after modification … well it made nuclear power MORE expensive than fossil fuels. It was in this environment that Three Mile Island reactor had a melt-down … bonds defaulted … and no “un-metered electricity”.
That is nice, but the issue is to also take into account the efforts that those groups are doing to drive the narrative. Also you need to adjust your skeptical levels, even I do not see PETA as normal.
That is clear too, but then I also have a lot of experience from media bias discussions, the examples of the mainstream media getting science wrong are legion, and that is another problem, also related to the corporate weight of the fossil fuel industry.
As pointed out it is not only the correct information that is the issue, you are ignoring that the marketing is being artificially tipped to get a simulated controversy.
Well, that is missing a lot of context, while what you say is true, that also assumes that we need to convince most of the population, this was already done.
Make no mistake about it, most of the condescension is directed towards the ones that are still misleading and propping out politicians (and the politicians) that are doing efforts that are clearly going against the opinion of most of the people they represent.
Remember, I said that there is a lot of “mainstream” points that in reality are percolated denier points, this one is also, climate science depends of a lot of lines of evidence, not all published science will talk about the main issue just as biology papers that support evolution. But if a paper does not mention evolution specifically it does not lead one to look at the paper with distress. (Well, only the creationists get distressed, sounds familiar?)
As pointed before the education of the people is even better than what is happening with creationism, the point here is that this level of education and progress the posts are made by me not much to convince the minority that only has one political party as their repository, but to inform the ones that are in the shrinking fence and to educate and to mention that the discussion at the political level is there thanks to artificial means.
The problem with gravity is as it applies to quantum mechanics. As I said, we have math that can replicate what we see, but it breaks down once you go too small or too fast.
And you’re right. I did misconstrue what you meant. My apologies.
You gave two points and it wasn’t clear what was actually your “Argument”. I was opening up the possibility that more than one “you” was weighing in.
