Noted Climate Change Skeptic Reverses Stance.

GIGObuster · August 8, 2012, 2:29am

It is actually better to forget your embarrassment but since you need a cite:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=14905336&postcount=82

This has been typical, requesting cites like even casual people who are aware of the issue do not know that already.

As the BEST case showed it was funded by a denialist institution, turns out they could not deny the evidence.

Sorry, when we are dealing with fake skeptics it is a valid term, it is actually a sign of a losing side that they had to cry foul for the use of a term that matches their modus operandi.

A real skeptic withholds belief and disbelief until persuaded by evidence. When asked what might possibly change his mind, Inhofe gave no answer at all:
The room is nearly empty when I ask Inhofe, finally, if he could imagine the possibility, however remote, that science could provide any amount or type of evidence that could convince him that human-caused climate change could be real. The senator darts an impatient look at his watch, and his handlers rise. It’s clear that the interview is coming to an end. “When people like you ask that question,” Inhofe says, “I can tell you believe it.”
Fake skeptics have several stages of denial. Stage 1: “It’s not happening.” Despite Robert G. Brown’s claim, that stage is still actively pursued, on WUWT and in the U.S. Senate. Brown wants us to believe it’s the exception, that it’s rare — but the truth is, it happens all the time. Like the day before Robert G. Brown’s last protest against use of the word “denier.” On WUWT.

Stage 2: It’s not due to human activity, it’s just natural. All such attempts have been refuted by evidence, but it’s still an immensely popular stage since it would take the “A” out of “AGW.” When fake skeptics do admit the “A” it’s to exploit Stage 3: It’s not that bad. That’s where Robert G. Brown is. Eventually even that claim will no longer be tenable, at which point the focus will shift to Stage 4: There’s nothing we can do about it without ruining the economy. That’s part and parcel of the scare tactic that suggests “Doing anything will knock us back to the stone age.” The truth is, we want to prevent global warming as much as possible so that we can avoid being knocked back to the stone age.

I tend to prefer the term “fake skeptic.” It’s accurate, and it addresses the dishonesty of such people calling themselves skeptics. They’ll attach themselves to ridiculous (i.e., worthy of ridicule) ideas, and as long as those ideas include doubt about global warming they’ll forego anything even close to skepticism, choosing the utmost gullibility instead. But if you prefer the term “denier,” use it. It doesn’t refer to the holocaust — that’s just Anthony Watts’ excuse for outrage — it refers to being in denial. Of the obvious.

To the fake skeptics I say: there’s a simple way to get us to stop using the word “denier.” Stop being deniers.

GIGObuster · August 8, 2012, 2:45am

The usual reason is really political, so lets get an explanation from republican scientists:

Like Richard Alley:

Like Bickmore:

And even the most celebrated of the early scientists on this issue was a Republican, back when republicans listened to science that is.

James Hansen:

Climate scientist Dr. James Hansen, began a recent TED talk with two important questions.

He asks, “What do I know that would cause me – a reticent, midwestern scientist – to get myself arrested in front of the White House protesting? And what would you do if you knew what I know?”

Hansen explains that his work as a climate scientist dates back to 1981 and a paper he co-authored on global warming. He and his colleagues found that “observed warming of 0.4 C in the prior century was consistent with the greenhouse effect of increasing CO2.” He says that they also found, “that Earth would likely warm in the 1980s, and warming would exceed the noise level of random weather by the end of the century.”

(Watch his entire TED talk, titled “Why I must speak out about climate change,” in the video above.)

Most strikingly, Hansen says, the paper predicted that the 21st century “would see shifting climate zones, creation of drought-prone regions in North America and Asia, erosion of ice sheets, rising sea levels and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage.”

Noting that “most of the things mentioned in our 1981 paper were facts,” Hansen moves to the present and makes a case for working to decrease atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.

Hansen shows pictures of his young grandchildren and argues that “It would be immoral to leave these young people with a climate system spiraling out of control.”

Leaffan · August 8, 2012, 3:02am

Fuck it. The world’s been changing forever. We’re not the cause.

GIGObuster · August 8, 2012, 3:13am

Your sources, whatever they are, are discredited, and even more with the recent data obtained.

Multiple sets of independent observations find a human fingerprint on climate change.

When presented with the overwhelming evidence that the planet is warming, many people react by asking “but how can we be sure that we’re causing the warming?” It turns out that the observed global warming has a distinct human fingerprint on it.

In climatology, as in any other science, establishing causation is more complicated than merely establishing an effect. However, there are a number of lines of evidence that have helped to convince climate scientists that the current global warming can be attributed to human greenhouse gas emissions (in particular CO2). Here are just some of them:

10 Indicators of a Human Fingerprint on Climate Change

The first four pieces of evidence show that humans are raising CO2 levels:
1)Humans are currently emitting around 30 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere.
2)Oxygen levels are falling as if carbon is being burned to create carbon dioxide.
3)Fossil carbon is building up in the atmosphere. (We know this because the two types of carbon have different chemical properties.)
4)Corals show that fossil carbon has recently risen sharply.
Another two observations show that CO2 is trapping more heat:
5)Satellites measure less heat escaping to space at the precise wavelengths which CO2 absorbs.
6)Surface measurements find this heat is returning to Earth to warm the surface.

BrainGlutton · August 8, 2012, 3:16am

WTF?! Humans are the cause of all kinds of perfectly visible changes on the landscape. Even North America was very different physically after the Indians had been living here a few centuries. (You can read the details in American Colonies, by Alan Taylor.) And Pre-Columbian Indians were purely stone-age in technology. Why would that stop after the Industrial Revolution?!

Budget_Player_Cadet · August 8, 2012, 3:16am

And, like with the person who says, “I’m going on the record now. I don’t believe in evolution,” or the person who says, “I’m going on the record now. I believe that races have a real genetic effect on a person’s abilities,”, I’m going to have to ask why you’d take a position that runs contrary to around 98% of the leading scientists in the field, and contrary to pretty much every piece of evidence available to us. And, you know, one that isn’t controversial in almost the entire rest of the world, save for the republican party of the USA. And unfortunately, regardless of how much you want to bury your head in the sand, all you’re doing with your incorrect and pointlessly contrarian position is fucking the rest of us, who want to do something about what may be the defining issue of the next generation, over.

GIGObuster · August 8, 2012, 3:23am

The science is even clearer than 60 years ago when scientists began to say this was going to be a problem.

The solutions are getting more expensive the longer we wait.

Fake Skeptics are reaching the same levels of intellectual bankruptcy like the creationists have already.

It seems very likely to me that Watts really doesn’t think anything about it–and that’s the problem. Many climate change contrarians, like Watts, simply don’t have any consistent intellectual framework for their ideas. They just know the mainstream science is wrong, and so they tend to grasp onto any argument that seems to detract from the views of mainstream climate scientists. A sort of fog goes up around their brains, preventing them from recognizing the absurdity of even the stupidest contrarian arguments. Likewise, everything in the stolen e-mails looks sinister to them, no matter how innocuous it really is.

To my mind, the all-pervasiveness of arguments like these, that are rarely challenged within the climate change contrarian community, is a very strong indicator that their movement has filed for intellectual bankruptcy.

P.S. This seems an opportune time to give a plug for my Bickmore’s Laws page by reproducing three relevant excerpts.
Bickmore’s First Law of Being Reasonable
Reasonable people understand that good arguments can sometimes lead to false conclusions, and bad arguments can sometimes lead to true conclusions.
**Bickmore’s Second Law of Being Reasonable**
Reasonable people resist bad arguments, even if they agree with the conclusions.
**Bickmore’s First Law of Being Biased**
Bias makes you human. Unchecked bias makes you stupid.

magellan01 · August 8, 2012, 3:32am

I hear you. While I don’t deny that man has probably played a role in the earth’s warming, I do think that the changes that are happening would be happening anyway. The earth has warmed and cooled thousands of times. The current change is most likely 1) normal (in the grand scheme of things) and 2) not anything we can do about. Especially with this guy playing a large role that no one fully understands. Also here. It makes me laugh that with such a small window of the history of the world that they can arrive at any position with such certainty and not be laughed at. And then they claim themselves to be men of science. I find it pretty comical.

But, I’m with you in staying away from the global warming religionists. They’re every bit as hubristic as some southern evangelical. And a tad more annoying.

That said, I still think we should seek to live more efficiently and cleanly.

GIGObuster · August 8, 2012, 3:42am

magellan01:

I hear you. While I don’t deny that man has probably played a role in the earth’s warming, I do think that the changes that are happening would be happening anyway. The earth has warmed and cooled thousands of times. The current change is most likely 1) normal (in the grand scheme of things) and 2) not anything we can do about. Especially with this guy playing a large role that no one fully understands. Also here. It makes me laugh that with such a small window of the history of the world that they can arrive at any position with such certainty and not be laughed at. And then they claim themselves to be men of science. I find it pretty comical.

But, I’m with you in staying away from the global warming religionists. They’re every bit as hubristic as some southern evangelical. And a tad more annoying.

That said, I still think we should seek to live more efficiently and cleanly.

What is really funny is that several years ago the sun was already looked at and dismissed as the cause of the current warming.

In the last 35 years of global warming, the sun has shown a slight cooling trend. Sun and climate have been going in opposite directions.

As supplier of almost all the energy in Earth’s climate, the sun has a strong influence on climate. A comparison of sun and climate over the past 1150 years found temperatures closely match solar activity (Usoskin 2005). However, after 1975, temperatures rose while solar activity showed little to no long-term trend. This led the study to conclude, “…during these last 30 years the solar total irradiance, solar UV irradiance and cosmic ray flux has not shown any significant secular trend, so that at least this most recent warming episode must have another source.”

In fact, a number of independent measurements of solar activity indicate the sun has shown a slight cooling trend since 1960, over the same period that global temperatures have been warming. Over the last 35 years of global warming, sun and climate have been moving in opposite directions. An analysis of solar trends concluded that the sun has actually contributed a slight cooling influence in recent decades (Lockwood 2008).

Indeed, this idea is what creationists would be proud to continue to peddle, no matter how often it shows to others how wrong they are. It is like when creationists talk about irreducible complexity, they do not care that the old idea being pushed was debunked hundreds of times already.

Budget_Player_Cadet · August 8, 2012, 3:43am

Tell me, when was the last time temperatures have gone up at this speed in human history? I mean, sure, the earth has experienced higher temperatures before, but has it ever gone up or down at this speed? Have we ever had such extremes so fast?

Yes, let’s just ignore that we can drastically offset our emissions by switching largely to renewable energy, electric cars, and the like. Let’s just give up, because, well, nothing we can do about it. Hell, let’s not even spent the time and energy to prepare for what we already recognize is coming, because it’s not like we could do anything about that either. :rolleyes:

From what I’ve heard, the general consensus regarding solar flares is that their effect is somewhere between neutral and negligible. “No one fully understands” is one hell of a tall claim to make.

I find it pretty comical that you can ignore the actual research involved, not actually pay attention to how they gather their data and how their research has panned out over the last 50 years (with proxy data stretching back Millenia reconstructing a concordant time record), and still claim that they have no way of knowing what they’re talking about because “they’re in such a small window of the history of the world”. You sound like a creationist. Then again, I shouldn’t be surprised.

Religionists? What even…? Can anyone parse this?

GIGObuster · August 8, 2012, 3:56am

This is the also old old denialist move that claims that proponents (and yes even the scientists involved) use religion and not science on this subject.

This is even more silly when one realizes that this is also a favorite move by woo proponents and deniers of science of any kind.

I’m sure Hoggart is being truthful when he says he does not know who is right about climate change, but if he wanted to apply the same standards of knowledge to other areas he would have to admit he is not sure who is right about the link between smoking and cancer – the medical establishment, or the discredited hacks who spent years providing dodgy research to the tobacco companies. He can argue that wind turbines look ugly, but to argue that they have “no apparent effect” is to dismiss reams of independent evidence to the contrary, not least the energy meters attached to any wind turbine recording the power being fed into the grid.

People who suggest climate change might not be happening are not heretics, but they are guilty of a quite staggering lack of intellectual rigour and those who suggest green is a religion, including the estimable James Lovelock, are guilty of a remarkable category error.

You can call environmentalism an ideology, a political movement, even a lifestyle; but it sure as hell isn’t a religion.

BrainGlutton · August 8, 2012, 4:05am

A PRATTfall ought to be funnier.

Aji_de_Gallina · August 9, 2012, 2:08am

You quote simply shows that Heartland and other evil deniers get about 3 million bucks.
It denies nothing. You do not compare it to, let’s say, The Climate Project’s budget or the IPCC’s.
When you compare TOTAL ammounts between deludeds (CAGW belivers) and deniers, then shall your quote be important.

[/QUOTE]
As the BEST case showed it was funded by a denialist institution, turns out they could not deny the evidence.
[/QUOTE]

You mean the non-peer-reviewed BEST.
Even so, it’d show that deniers are truthful.

You love quoting others to say what you don’t dare.
I couldn’t care less if you (especially you)call me a denier, being yourself a deluded, but such a term never foster a good debate even when they are true; it’s Debating 101.
Call me a denier, grow web-cojones, see if I lose a nanosecond of sleep.

tomndebb · August 9, 2012, 2:18am

GIGObuster and Ají de Gallina, the use of “denier” and “deluded” is now off-limits in this discussion. Knock it off and stick to arguing the merits of your positions without getting trying to insult your opponent.

[ /Moderating ]

GIGObuster · August 9, 2012, 2:49am

As pointed before the scientists at the IPCC contribute their time for free.

You pointed at a group that gets virtually $0 for contributing to that effort, and then compares it to one that gets paid to seed FUD.

Your say so here is worthless.

And of course they confirmed that guys like Watts do not now what they are doing, and they remain fake skeptics. As pointed before, BEST has just confirmed what many other scientists have reported in the last 20 years.

Piffle, as usual you do still thing that deprecating a poster in a message board is better than dealing with what even conservative scientists think about the fake skeptics.

You will have little problem, just hide these discussions from your descendants.

Aji_de_Gallina · August 9, 2012, 3:23am

As pointed out I asked for the IPCC’s budget. Thanks for the non-response

Are you saying that all deludeds work for (almost) free?

Whatever gets you through the night, sweetie. However worhtless you still can’t let a single letter go (badly, miserably failing) unchallenged.

But it is still non-peer reviewed, is it?

When your responses are mostly other people’s words, it’s hard to know if you are doing somthing more than cutting and pasting.

Why hide that I constantly kick your ass?

tomndebb · August 9, 2012, 3:43am

You will stop using the word “deludeds” in this thread.
Final note.

[ /Moderating ]

GIGObuster · August 9, 2012, 3:43am

The point was made regarding what the scientists are getting paid, for the IPPC efforts it is a volunteer effort, separated for the research they do.

Unless you have evidence that is not the case what you are implying is still baseless.

The fact is that you mention the IPCC in relation to a conflict of interest, the experts actually have to do less of their research when they have to contribute to the document that congregates the best research done all over the world.

Actually no evidence was posted by you.

As pointed many times before, and you still choose to ignore, when there is mountains of evidence out there regarding a subject, the best opinion is still the educated one. I see no reason why I should dismiss what the experts are telling us.

As the link in GQ and that thread showed, there was no evidence whatsoever brought by you even there.

Budget_Player_Cadet · August 9, 2012, 9:52am

But “denier” is a completely correct and accurate descriptive. There is simply no better word for those who reject good science, save for the strongly related “denialist”. Would there be similar objections if we called creatards deniers?

tomndebb · August 9, 2012, 10:06am

There is already a discussion of this point in ATMB.

[ /Moderating ]