Tags
AGW, climate change, global warming, JREF, kyle hill, science, skepticism, TAM
“I think I have you skeptics figured out,” he said with a cautious smirk. “For you this isn’t about the science. It’s more of a political agenda. The science isn’t settled and it isn’t a popularity contest. Why can’t you see that?”
I feigned an understanding smile. This was the third time in so many days that I had to confront a denier of anthropogenic climate change (AGW) at the James Randi Educational Foundation’s 10th annual Amaz!ng Meeting.
“Politics has nothing to do with it. We have multiple lines of evidence all pointing towards the same conclusion: the Earth is warming and humans are the main cause. Nearly everything else has been ruled out,” I said.
“But the science is not settled…” he began.
“Let me put it this way: do you accept evolution?” I interjected.
“Yes, I do” he said with noticeable hesitation.
“Would you say the fact that nearly 100% of biologists agree with the theory of evolution, based on multiple lines of evidence and a century of study, lends credibility to the theory?” I asked.
“Yes, I think so,” he said.
“Apply that same fact to climate change and climate scientists,” I said, nearly cutting him off.
“But the science is not settled. And we found out how unethical those scientists were behaving with ‘Climate Gate.’ I thought this conference about skepticism…”
**********
Last week I attended TAM 2012, the largest meeting of skeptics of its kind in Las Vegas, Nevada. TAM 2012 was definitely a success, meshing great speakers with even greater camaraderie. Yet, like my last conference outing where I discovered the disconnect between skeptics and atheists, I ran into a good number of skeptics who divulged to me that although they were die-hard skeptics, AGW was a hoax. Of course, it wouldn’t be a problem if AGW was an emerging or tentative theory in climate science, but it is not. The planet is warming, and humans are the main cause.
For over 100 years, climate scientists have been noticing warming trends in our climate, based on everything from tree rings to ice cores, thermometers to polar melts. All the evidence points in one direction: a rate of warming since the industrial revolution that cannot be accounted for by the urban heat island effect, solar cycles, inconsistent temperature recordings, or previous cycles of warming and cooling.
It is not my purpose here to outline the evidence behind AGW (other resources on the web do a fantastic job of that), but to say that for skeptics, this should be a settled issue. Remove all of the other variables that mask the AGW conclusion, like political pressures, propaganda campaigns, and outspoken decriers, and you are still left with all the evidence pointing towards the same end.
So again, we have a disconnect. The most likely answer for this is political orientation. Indeed, we find that AGW denial is not linked to scientific illiteracy, but to “cultural identity” (i.e. political and economics identities). Furthermore, this gap in AGW acceptance based on political orientation reveals that republicans are behind democrats in nearly every issue concerning the acceptance of AGW, and that conservatives attribute recent bouts of warm weather to AGW far less than democrats, just to highlight a few examples.
As was the case in the previous article, I am using anecdotes to make my case, but the lack of significant AGW acceptance in the skeptical community baffles me. Why don’t the skeptical notions of weight of evidence, scientific consensus, and independent confirmation hold sway on this issue? Again I suspect that politics is the answer. For example, the man who came up to me and engaged in the dialogue above noted that he was an outspoken libertarian, as if that was supposed to also imply that libertarians do not accept AGW.
Peruse even the most skeptical websites long enough and you will find comments from “skeptics” like this one, which I pulled from an article on Skeptic.com:
I was going to subscribe to your site and newsletter, but I see you have no more rational way of dealing with belief-driven drivel than do people like Graham Hancock or Billy Graham.
Where’s your skepticism when we, the consuming public, need it the most? Why do you accept the test data as factual, when so many of the testing stations have been PROVEN to give fundamentally flawed readings? Why are you just accepting, as dogma, the IPCC reports? Where’s your healthy skepticism of the data?
By your standards, David Copperfield has harnessed the real power of magic because video cameras don’t lie.
How incredibly disappointing to see an article like this on a site that prides itself on its rational thinking.
Our in-group fighting employs the dirty tactic of turning our own values against us. Skeptics will argue amongst themselves about dogmas and data, but it boils down to a fundamental disagreement that cannot be overcome by accusations of irrationality. The data backs up AGW; appealing to a skeptic by calling them in effect a bad skeptic does not change this. My only recourse is to assume that some other variable, namely politics, grossly overshadows the skeptical principles that would otherwise lead us to embrace climate science.
But those of us who already accept AGW know this to be the case. We know how divided people are on AGW based on politics (as the polls show above), and because skepticism does not necessarily equate to any one political position, there is little reason to believe that skeptics would not be divided as well. But as we divide ourselves along party lines, climate science progresses, and the real questions about what can we do to mitigate the effects of climate change, and how to deal with its consequences, pass us by.
It’s time for the skeptical community to embrace its own values and to accept climate science. It is one of the most important issues of our time, and certainly not inconsequential or “alarmist” to acknowledge. We have the data, we have consensus in the scientific community, we actually see the effects slowing taking shape in the form of intense wildfire seasons, rising sea levels, and national heat waves. It’s time to drop the chains of ideology and be proper skeptics, supporting the science we put so much value in.
Let the accusations of my incomplete skepticism commence in the comments below, keeping in mind that it only proves a point.
Originally published at the James Randi Educational Foundation
Isn’t it time for the “skeptical community” to move beyond just this and confront the larger libertarianism problem in its ranks? I think of Penn, being a Big Tobacco flak, among other things.
There is no “libertarianism problem”. I am skeptical that government intervention will impact climate change and will instead stifle individual freedom. I am confident that “free markets will beat climate change: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWChDY4JzRw&list=PL3D35A6F8E72FA484&index=1&feature=plpp_video
Demetrius,
Whatever you think of the free markets, this is a different issue for whether or not AGW is occurring.
“humans are the main cause”. Congratulations, you’re causing global warming no matter what you do.
(I think you mean “human activity is the main cause”, or perhaps even more precisely “human carbon footprint is the main cause”.)
Yes, without human activity, there would not be the increase in global temperatures that we see today. Humans are the main cause.
When will you finally figure out that humans are ALL biased? Whether it’s denying the heavy evidence surrounding AGW in favour of other “facts”, or denying the heavy evidence surrounding 9/11 Truth or other “facts”, etc.
Science may be blind, but “scientists” certainly aren’t. (Especially ones who are just self-pronounced club members.) We can only hope that people will overcome their biases with sheer moral courage and emotional strength.
I am well aware of bias Steve. But do not conflate AGW support with 9/11 support. 9/11 conspiracy theories are advocated by a fringe with poor evidence to support them. AGW has 100 years worth of data and the consensus of nearly all relevant scientists behind it. To equalize the two is to misunderstand what “weight of evidence” means.
You are very incorrect about a lack 9/11 Truth physical science evidence–indeed the opposite is true. For example, a building cannot collapse at free-fall acceleration AND do work to crush its own walls/floors as it collapses. It’s impossible, yet that is supposedly what happened to WTC7?! The “official” scientific explanation is insanity. Also, pools of molten iron “flowing like lava” below the destroyed towers were witnessed and testified by Ground Zero workers, and photographed by a NASA plane for WEEKS after 9/11. (http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2001/ofr-01-0429/thermal.r09.html) Yet office fires cannot account for this phenomenon by hundreds of degrees Celsius. There is a missing fuel/energy source. The “official” scientific explanation does not account for this discrepancy.
This is just for a start. The “official” story cannot uphold to a multitude of scientific laws. And should therefore be discarded and re-investigated. Yet neophite’s biased assumptions remain in full force. I can at least understand that, for I used to be one. You pretend that AGW has “solid” evidence while 9/11 Truth does not. But you say that only out of ignorance and/or bias, not from real fact. I invite you to learn the real facts by doing the research.
Kyle, what warming are you seeing? Temps have been flat for over 10 years. Are you saying that climate is changing due to CO2 without the intermediate warming step? If so, there is no known mechanism for that, and besides, how could we possibly know what climate would do without the added CO2 from people? And I presume that you use gasoline and electricity and heat and cool your home and eat food like most other Ameicans, so what do you expect others to do that you are not doing? The CAGW theory is in shambles, so stop worrying about it. John in Michigan
None of what you said is correct. The last decade was the warmest ever recorded, with the last few years being some of the warmest ever recorded. And if you look beyond one decade, you can easily see that we are following a warming trend. This isn’t speculation.
The climate is warming, hence the term “global warming.” It has increased a global average of 1 degree Celsius since the industrial revolution.
There is of course a mechanism for CO2 to warm the planet called the “greenhouse effect.” Again, this is clearly demonstrable and not some uncertain idea as you make it seem.
We know that people alone are having an effect on the climate because we can go back in time with the evidence we have obtained to see what the climate was doing without humans dumping the equivalent of 8 gulf oil spills worth of CO2 everyday into the atmosphere. What we then see in comparison is an unprecedented rate of warming which lines up with when we began emitting greenhouse gases in amazing quantities.
Everyone can cut back, do not make this out to be a hopeless issue. That is intellectually lazy and irresponsible.
The AGW theory has 100 years worth of converging evidence behind it, and is certainly not “in shambles.” That kind of gross ignorance of the state of climate science rings of denialism talking points, not an informed conclusion.
The timeline of industrial revolution vs. rising global temperatures is often dismissed as a casual relation, not a statistical causation. You may be better off to site stronger evidence than that.
You are wrong in this statement. See here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm
I couldn’t find any mention of C02 on that page. Did I miss that, or did you miss my logical point…. that C02 from humans and global temperatures are not a causation relationship?
(In other words, how does that page prove, for example, that lowering the pirate population didn’t _cause_ a rise in global temperatures?)
The interaction between human CO2 emissions and a warming climate is too complex to establish a black and white causation (like much in science). However, the correlation is incredibly strong, and suggests causation (so much so in fact that I would deem the relationship causal). Are you familiar with the famous “hockey stick” graph? In it we see an increase in global temperature directly related to when humans began pumping it out (1900′s and the industrial revolution). This is demonstrated in the first graph of the last link I sent you. Then this link shows the connection between atmospheric CO2 and global temperature, agreeing with the trend in the hockey stick graph. Being that is is patently obvious that the majority of CO2 emissions in this century is due to human activity, we indeed have something to suggest a causal link.
Your pirate example is a farcical representation of how variables are correlated in science, and does not apply here.