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Fifty top astronauts, scientists and engineers at NASA have signed a letter asking the agency to cease its global warming buffoonery. The global warming emperor has no clothes, and people are finally saying so out loud and in public.
Notrickzone brings us the entire letter, noting that the signers have a combined 1000 years of professional experience. Here it is:
One of the most familiar memes we hear from the climate-change deniers is the phrase, “Global warming ended in 1998 and it’s been cooling since then.” You find something along these lines on most of the AGW denier books and websites, and it is repeated endlessly as if somehow repetition makes it more true. This is just like creationists who continually repeat the phony argument that “evolution violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics”, even though this is patently false. As has been pointed out many times, the Second Law only applies to closed systems. The earth is not a closed system since it receives energy from the sun. Yet in every creationist book and website and debate for many decades now you’ll hear them repeat it over and over again, since it sounds impressive to their scientifically unsophisticated audience and apparently they cannot understand why it’s wrong, or they don’t care as long as it suits their political agenda.
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Picking 1998 as a starting point is a classic example of cherry-picking data to show what you want it to show, and a deliberate attempt to distort the actual record. As climatologists have known for years, 1998 was an exceptionally warm year due to a record El Niño, which boosted average global temperature way above the overall trend from the past few decades. During El Niño years, the marine circulation patterns release a lot of tropical heat from the oceans and raise overall global temperature for a short time. Likewise, 2008 was a La Niña year, and it was cooler than normal. These are part of the year-to-year “noise” in the system of global temperatures that is well known to scientists. Scientists nevertake a single year’s temperature and then connect it to another data point and claim it’s a “trend.” Instead, the only rigorous and scientifically defensible method is to look at the long-term trends in climate over decades and “smooth” the curve using rolling averages, so that a more statistically meaningful curve fit can be performed.
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Cherry-picking can be played both ways. If I pick any year prior to 1998-2000 and connect with any data point from 2001 onwards, I get a warming trend. In fact, the only way a AGW denier could get their “no warming since 1998″ misrepresentation is to deliberately and consciously look at the curve, pick 1998 to start, and only compare it to 1999-2001. Any other long-term combination of the data shows warming. Thus, this distortion of the data that Will keeps repeating is not just a simple misreading of the facts. Since the meme is quoted from 2009, this means that the deniers were consciously and fraudulently trying to distort the data to suit their purposes. The fact that this lie keeps being perpetuated despite the fact that scientists have offered numerous corrections shows the AGW deniers have the same casual disregard for the truth that creationists do. Such practices demonstrate the absymal level of their scientific integrity, and speaks to the fact that AGW deniers are not climate scientists, but people with political agendas who cherry-pick data, quote-mine out of context, and use whatever lies and half-truths they need to support their cause. The parallel with creationists and other science deniers could not be any clearer.
I study the history of climate science, and my research has shown that the think tanks and institutes that deny the reality or severity of climate change, or promote distrust of climate science, do so out of self-interest, ideological conviction or both. Some groups, like the fossil fuel industry, have an obvious self-interest in the continued use of fossil fuels. Others fear that if we accept the reality of climate change, we will be forced to acknowledge the failures of free-market capitalism. Still others worry that if we allow the government to intervene in the marketplace to stop climate change, it will lead to further expansion of government power that will threaten our broader freedoms.
But most Americans do not work for the fossil fuel industry, and most Americans accept that there is an appropriate role for government to protect human and environmental health. So why has the denial of climate change achieved so much traction?
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In my travels, I have met many, many people who have told me that they are not in denial about climate change; they simply don't know enough to decide. It strikes me that these people aren't unlike my fellow jurors at the start of jury selection. They are trying to keep an open mind, something that we are routinely enjoined to do in many other aspects of daily life.
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, there has been clear-cut evidence that the climate is changing because of human activities: burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests. For the last decade or so it has been increasingly clear that these changes are accelerating, and worrisome.
Yet many Americans cling to the idea that it is reasonable to maintain an open mind. It isn't, at least not to scientists who study the matter.
"The claim that all scientists' warnings must be driven by a desire for grant money can be countered by pointing out that this is a universal argument against all warnings. By that argument, scientists must be wrong about thalidomide being a problem for pregnant women, it must be fine to dump mercury waste in fishing grounds (see Minamata), the Newfoundland cod fishery never collapsed, all other fisheries are fine, too, there are plenty of passenger pigeons and Tasmanian tigers, and the oceans are just brimming with blue whales, which are kept out of sight by scientists. The universal denial argument clearly is not universally correct.
Both evolution and global warming are “controversial issues” in the public sphere, but are not controversial in the world of science. There is some overlap between the two issues, but far more people are climate change deniers than evolution deniers. What is interesting to skeptics, however, is the similarity in the techniques that are used by both camps to promote their views. The scientific issues are presented as “not being settled,” or that there is considerable debate among scientists over the validity of claims.
Evolution and global warming opponents also demonize the opposition by accusing them of fraud or other wrong-doing. Denialists in both camps practice “anomaly mongering,” in which a small detail seemingly incompatible with either evolution or global warming is considered to undermine either evolution or climate science. Although in both cases, reputable, established science is under attack for ideological reasons, the underlying ideology differs: for creationism, the ideology of course is religious; for global warming, the ideology is political and/or economic.
Sceptics and believers quarrel about the science because they both start from a mistaken premise: that science will determine what we do about climate change. The idea is that once we agree what the science says, policy will automatically follow. That’s why the Nobel committee gave Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change a peace prize.
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the demonization of skeptics is a key strategy in elevating the importance of science in the political debate.
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If it wasn't for the alleged risks that skeptics pose to our future, we'd have to instead be arguing about things like values, goals and priorities, which are messy and carries with them none of the imputed authority of science. It is in the interests of both skeptics and their opponents to argue about science, because it suggests that their debate is somehow directly relevant to policy action. It is not.
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On October 20th Nature News reported on a new analysis of land temperatures by an independent group. They found the same results as previous analyses – since 1950 the earth has warmed by about 0.9 C. The results have yet to be peer-reviewed, but already reports of their analysis are making some waves.
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The analysis was designed to be what can be called a consensus study – an independent group is taking a thorough analysis of the data, accounting for prior criticisms, to arrive at a result that everyone can agree on. Prior to announcing the results, in fact, some global warming skeptics stated publicly that they welcome the independent analysis and would stand by the results. PZ Myers reports on Anthony Watts response – initially saying he would accept the study results, but now considering the study to be fatally flawed.
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The point of a consensus study is to bring all sides of a scientific controversy together, account for all criticisms of existing data, and then try to specifically address those criticisms so that everyone can agree on the results.
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Anthony Watts took a brave step a while back, and I commend him for it. He was enthused about an independent research project, the Berkeley Earth Project, that would measure the planet's temperature over the last centuries and compare it to the work of NOAA and NASA on earth's temperature — he apparently expected that it would show that NASA and NOAA had been inflating the data. He was so confident that he went on the record saying:
I'm prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.
Excellent! That's a good scientific attitude.
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So the results have been published, and they look like this:
Results from the Berkeley Earth project data fits existing NASA and NOAA temperature records like a glove - 1 more annotation(s)...
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New York Times Magazine columnist Ron Suskind interviewed Karl Rove on Oct. 17, 2004:
he said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
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Paul Krugman. As he puts it in his recent column:
Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.”
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Rick Perry is dominating the headlines for his supposedly inept remark invoking Galileo. Famous for his skepticism of climate change, the Texas governor said, "The science is not settled on this. The idea that we would put Americans' economy at jeopardy based on scientific theory that's not settled yet to me is just nonsense. Just because you have a group of scientists who stood up and said here is the fact. Galileo got outvoted for a spell.
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"Just because a tiny fraction of people claim global warming isn't real, or that humans aren't responsible, doesn't make them correct. Especially when going up against the overwhelming evidence compiled by a consensus of 97 percent of scientists who study climate as their career."
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"I think the governor answered consistent with his philosophy, consistent with what frankly a lot of Americans and a lot of Republicans believe - that the climate its changing. We're not sure that it's man-made. In fact, there's a lot of questions about whether it's man-made," the Perry campaign's communications director, Ray Sullivan, told ABC News after the debate.
With oil and gas interests among his campaign's top contributors, Perry's scientific pronouncements are unlikely to gain acceptance beyond the ranks of climate skeptics.
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U.S. is almost alone in its anti-scientific attitudes toward both evolution—and AGW. Almost all the other industrialized nations in western Europe and Asia have accepted it long ago, were enthusiastic signatories at the Copenhagen Conference, and are actively involved in working to reduce their carbon footprints. More revealing is the fact that numerous relatively conservative or non-ideological institutions also accept the reality of climate change. This includes the insurance companies and their re-insurers (like Swiss Re), many other major businesses, emergency management agencies at every level, and even the U.S. military (hardly a bastion of liberalism).
Dr Willie Soon, an astrophysicist at the Solar, Stellar and Planetary Sciences Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, is known for his view that global warming and the melting of the arctic sea ice is caused by solar variation rather than human-caused CO2 emissions, and that polar bears are not primarily threatened by climate change.
But according to a Greenpeace US investigation, he has been heavily funded by coal and oil industry interests since 2001, receiving money from ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Insitute and Koch Industries along with Southern, one of the world's largest coal-burning utility companies. Since 2002, it is alleged, every new grant he has received has been from either oil or coal interests.
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freedom of information documents suggest that Soon corresponded in 2003 with other prominent climate sceptics to try to weaken a major assessment of global warming being conducted by the UN's leading climate science body, the Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Soon, who had previously disclosed corporate funding he received in the 1990s, was today reportely unapologetic, telling Reuters that he agreed that he had received money from all of the groups and companies named in the report but denied that any group would have influenced his studies.
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"I have never been motivated by financial reward in any of my scientific research," he said. "I would have accepted money from Greenpeace if they had offered it to do my research."
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Hardliners on opposing sides in the battle over climate change are guilty of a weird "religiosity" which hinders a sensible debate, energy minister Greg Barker has said.
In a Guardian interview, Barker said sceptics were failing to accept the "broad base" of scientific opinion, while climate change campaigners could be guilty of behaving in an arrogant manner.
Amid frustration in Whitehall at the tone of the debate, Barker said: "If you look at the extremes of the climate debate, whether it is the extreme climate sceptics or the extreme climate zealots, there is a slight religiosity there which is weird."
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hardliners on both sides should reflect on the consequences of adopting such strident stances. "I think the broad base of sound scientific opinion, of sensible and respected science, supports urgent climate action," he said to sceptics who question the need for action. "Of course science is constantly evolving. The notion that you need to have 100% certainty on any given issue is unhelpful anyway. Acting now on climate is the prudent sensible thing to do."
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climate change campaigners needed to be careful not to dismiss sceptics such as the former Conservative chancellor Lord Lawson of Blaby. "We need to make sure don't behave in an arrogant or offhand way because that really pisses people off," he said.
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Conservatives are more likely to embrace climate science if it comes to them via a business or religious leader, who can set the issue in the context of different values than those from which environmentalists or scientists often argue. Doing so is, effectively, to signal a détente in what Kahan has called a "culture war of fact." In other words, paradoxically, you don't lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values—so as to give the facts a fighting chance.
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All we can currently bank on is the fact that we all have blinders in some situations. The question then becomes: What can be done to counteract human nature itself?
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If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn't trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.
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A key question—and one that's difficult to answer—is how "irrational" all this is. On the one hand, it doesn't make sense to discard an entire belief system, built up over a lifetime, because of some new snippet of information. "It is quite possible to say, 'I reached this pro-capital-punishment decision based on real information that I arrived at over my life,'" explains Stanford social psychologist Jon Krosnick. Indeed, there's a sense in which science denial could be considered keenly "rational." In certain conservative communities, explains Yale's Kahan, "People who say, 'I think there's something to climate change,' that's going to mark them out as a certain kind of person, and their life is going to go less well."
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When people grow polarized over a body of evidence, or a resolvable matter of fact, the cause may be some form of biased reasoning, but they could also be receiving skewed information to begin with—or a complicated combination of both. In the Ground Zero mosque case, for instance, a follow-up study (PDF) showed that survey respondents who watched Fox News were more likely to believe the Rauf rumor and three related ones—and they believed them more strongly than non-Fox watchers.
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Modern science originated from an attempt to weed out such subjective lapses
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Even if individual researchers are prone to falling in love with their own theories, the broader processes of peer review and institutionalized skepticism are designed to ensure that, eventually, the best ideas prevail.
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"A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point." So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger (PDF)
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How would people so emotionally invested in a belief system react, now that it had been soundly refuted?
At first, the group struggled for an explanation. But then rationalization set in. A new message arrived, announcing that they'd all been spared at the last minute. Festinger summarized the extraterrestrials' new pronouncement: "The little group, sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction." Their willingness to believe in the prophecy had saved Earth from the prophecy!
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The phenomenon is a familiar one: let’s call it “the Linus Pauling effect.” A highly respected and honored senior scientist, largely out of the mainstream and not up to date with the recent developments (and perhaps a bit senile), makes weird pronouncements about their pet ideas–and the press, so used to giving celebrities free air time for any junk they wish to say, prints and publishes it all as if it is the final truth. The great Linus Pauling may have won two Nobel Prizes, but his crazy idea that megadoses of Vitamin C would cure nearly everything seems to have died with him. William Shockley may have won a Nobel for his work on transistors, but his racist ideas about genetics (a field in which he had no expertise) should never been taken seriously. Kary Mullis may have deserved his Nobel Prize for developing the polymerase chain reaction, but that gives him no qualifications to speak with authority on his unscientific ideas about AIDS denial and global warming and astrology (he hits the trifecta for pseudoscientific woo).
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she slips outside the realm of science entirely, and becomes a full-fledged AIDS denier. My jaw just dropped when I read the following:
There is a vast body of literature on syphilis spanning from the 1500s until after World War II, when the disease was supposedly cured by penicillin. It’s in our paper “Resurgence of the Great Imitator.” Our claim is that there’s no evidence that HIV is an infectious virus, or even an entity at all. There’s no scientific paper that proves that the HIV virus causes AIDS. Kary Mullis said in an interview that he went looking for a reference substantiating that HIV causes AIDS and discovered, “There is no such document.”
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Has she never actually LOOKED at the hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers documenting the structure of the HIV virus, and the clear documentation of that virus in patients that suffer and die from AIDS? Or the fact that patients treated with anti-retrovirals manage to suppress their AIDS symptoms? Or the disaster in South Africa, when the government became active AIDS deniers, spread misinformation and myths about AIDS, and the infection rate shot up? Not even the hard-core AIDS deniers like Peter Duesberg deny that the HIV virus exists!
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Dear Professor Muller and Team,
If you want your Berkley Earth Surface Temperature project to succeed and become the center of attention you need to learn from the vast number of mistakes Hansen and Jones have made with their temperature records. To aid this task I created a point by point list for you.
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1) Any errors, however inconsequential, will be taken Very Seriously and accusations of fraud will be made.
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2) If you adjust the raw data we will accuse you of fraudulently fiddling the figures whilst cooking the books.
3) If you don't adjust the raw data we will accuse you of fraudulently failing to account for station biases and UHI. - 11 more annotation(s)...
We are not afraid to be called climate "deniers". In fact we embrace it as medal of honor bestowed on us by our alarmist foes. Galileo was a Denier. It is not an insult. I call this blog "Denier Depot" for that reason.
Welcome to my climate science blog.
I believe that one day all science will be done on blogs because we bloggers are natural skeptics, disbelieving the mainstream and accepting the possibility of any alternative idea.
We stand unimpressed by "textbooks", "peer review journals" and so-called "facts". There are no facts, just dissenting opinion. We are infinitely small compared to nature and can't grasp anything as certain as a fact.
Nothing is settled and we should question everything. The debate is NOT over Gore! When so-called "experts" in their "peer reviewed journals" say one thing, we dare the impossible and find imaginative ways to believe something else entirely.
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