More global warming denial from Anthony Watts at WUWT

The denial continues at Anthony Watts' blog WUWT. He's written a few words all by himself, for a change (archived here). (In the past four or five months, Anthony Watts has written almost nothing. He's handed his blog over to his readers to post their nonsense instead of writing his own nonsense. )

Source: Skeptical Science

Today Anthony is denying something that's plain - that the world is warming and climate change is happening. He was writing about a new paper in the journal Nature Climate Change, and he topped and tailed it with some words that he wrote all by himself - in what comes across as frustrated denial that the ice age still hasn't cometh.

Global warming will continue in line with long term projections

The paper is by scientists Matthew H. England, Jules B. Kajtar & Nicola Maher of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science at the University of New South Wales. What they did was examine about 200 climate model projections, separating those that showed the sort of slowdown of the past few years from those that didn't.

WUWT denier is horrified by opinions about climate

A denier on WUWT called Eric Worrall, who finally got turfed from Watching the Deniers, a very tolerant website, is horrified.   This is the same Eric Worrall who persistently expressed his opinion that climate science is like eugenics in the 1930s.

Eric is horrified (archived here) that someone would write:

“What we need now is to become comfortable with the idea that the ends will justify the means. We actually need more opinions, appearing more often and expressed more noisily than ever before.”

The person who wrote the above is Dr Rod Lamberts, deputy director of the Australian National Centre for Public Awareness of Science (CPAS) at the ANU, a founding partner of the Ångstrom Group, and a former national president of the Australian Science Communicators.  It was part of an article he wrote for The Conversation.

In that same article, Rod Lamberts also wrote:

At best, presenting people with facts to counter their beliefs makes them ignore you; at worst, it drives them further away. How much more evidence do you need than the singular failure of scientific facts to convince deniers that humans are buggering up the climate?

What delighted Eric Worrall was that Rod Lamberts criticised Tim Flannery.  Rod wrote:

A colleague of mine recently received an invitation to a Climate Council event. The invitation featured this Tim Flannery quote: “An opinion is useless, what we need are more facts."

My first thought was that my colleague was taking the piss. Tim Flannery is an experienced science communicator, but that phrase made my jaw drop. It was apparently meant in earnest, but it’s wildly off the mark.

The quote is ludicrously, appallingly, almost dangerously naïve. It epitomises the reasons we are still “debating” climate science and being overwhelmed by climate skeptics/deniers/contrarians in the public space.

The Conversation article offers some food for thought into how to communicate the dangers we are hurtling toward with such nonchalance.  These same dangers that the Eric Worrall's and Anthony Watts of the world want us to hurtle towards faster and faster.

Rod Lambert is in no way suggesting that facts are not important or that we don't need more of them.  He argues:

Ultimately, we can only say “that’s not cricket” for so long. Eventually we have to stop tutting and accept that others aren’t even trying to play cricket – they’re boxing. We can decry climate deniers for their unfair, lowbrow tactics, but their tactics are getting them exactly what they want. Ours are not.

The continuing focus on gathering and presenting more and more scientific data to reinforce a position the vast majority already holds is not leading to the changes we need. Yes, scientists should keep monitoring, researching and reporting on the climate. But assuming that we want people to act according to the science, the focus must now be on influencing positive action.

The question is - will more "facts" make a difference.  We've got facts coming out our ears.  Here in Australia we've just had another "hottest year on record" and yet we elect a Prime Minister who has said the science behind climate change is "crap".  Tony Abbott's first attacks against our nation when entering office were to dismantle as much as he could of any offices that monitor climate and and mitigate climate change and shift to a new clean energy economy.  He's appointed climate science deniers not just to any important posts, but to positions of responsibility in relation to climate change.

So how to get the message out there?  How to persuade voters that putting people like Tony Abbott into arguably the most powerful position in the country is risky at best if not downright harmful.

My thinking is we need both.  The Climate Council has influence.  It gets airplay. When it broadcasts the fact that a hotter Australia is a more dangerous place to live, some people hear it - but is it enough?

As Rod Lambert says:

The biggest impediment to climate action these days is not because of the human frailties that science is hell-bent on resisting – those alleged failings of opinion, belief and emotion. Ironically, it’s exactly because we are still trying to suppress them that we are now stalled.

The Lie about Tim Flannery

Eric finishes up his WUWT article by resurrecting an old denier myth.  He claims that Tim Flannery once said it would never rain again.  He didn't.  It's little wonder that Eric Worrall and Anthony Watts don't link to anything supporting this wrong claim.  The closest they got was an article by Andrew Bolt repeating the lie with a teeny tiny cherry pick from a longer segment on youtube - see the transcript here.  He said in the interview with Lateline back in 2007, referring to the Big Drought:

So even the rain that falls isn't actually going to fill our dams and our river systems, and that's a real worry for the people in the bush. If that trend continues then I think we're going to have serious problems, particularly for irrigation.

And we did have serious problems.  Particularly for irrigation. That drought that Tim Flannery was referring to in 2007 didn't break until 2010!  The major dams that got perilously close to empty finally started to fill up again.  Only to be followed by those record-breaking floods that were so bad that they caused a dip in global sea levels.

Why are there still climate science deniers in Australia?

What is the bigger wonder than the Big Drought and the Big Flood and the Big Fires is that there are any climate science deniers left in Australia.  We are used to extremes of weather, but the extremes we've been seeing go beyond what we're used to.

I'm thinking that we need both facts and opinion.

We need the facts, like those reported by the Climate Council and RealClimate.org and ClimateProgress and SkepticalScience.com.

We also need strongly worded opinion, as is being advocated by Rod Lamberts to counteract the three word slogans of idiots like our Prime Minister and deniers at WUWT.


PS There's a new article by Victor Venema that is worth a read in this regard.  He is exploring why science deniers are not interested in facts. In "fact" they eschew facts for fiction.

From the WUWT comments

There are lots of opinions being expressed in the WUWT comments, mostly all worthless.

As Chris4692 says of Eric Worrall's opinion:

March 15, 2014 at 5:07 pm
If you have no facts, you have nothing else but opinions.

Robert of Ottawa's opinion is quite clear.  He says:

March 15, 2014 at 5:09 pm
Australia has a government that rejects the Warmista scare and is gradually dismantalling the state apparatus that propagates it. Hence the hysterical squeals of the Warmista pigs (those at the public trough)

PaulH needs a lesson in Strine and says:

March 15, 2014 at 5:15 pm
My first thought was that my colleague was taking the piss.
I have no idea what that means.

Latitude comes up with a novel opinion and is a very deep thinker:

March 15, 2014 at 5:19 pm
of course they can’t win it with facts…….

DirkH has about as much depth as Latitude and says:

March 15, 2014 at 5:37 pm
“What we need now is to become comfortable with the idea that the ends will justify the means. We actually need more opinions, appearing more often and expressed more noisily than ever before.”
Oh, I misunderstood him. What he means is, every warmist will now have to choose between being honest or being efficient. Now that’s a whole new approach. (sarc)

pottereaton is just another dumb fake sceptic who favours WUWT opinion over science and says:

March 15, 2014 at 6:03 pm
The problem with “consensus” climate science from the beginning is that it has been mostly opinions– i.e. speculation and conjecture– and not facts–i.e. solid data and verifiable hypotheses arrived at with scrupulous statistical methods.

Konrad must think there is somewhere hidden group of "sceptics" that haven't yet reared their heads.  Does anyone out there know of a "sceptic" that uses facts or has a case to argue?  Konrad says:

March 15, 2014 at 6:33 pm
“Facts won’t defeat the climate deniers – using their tactics will”
When when this fool finds someone who denies that planet has a variable climate he can use whatever tactic he likes.

If however, this propagandist twit Lamberts is referring to sceptics then he is on a hiding to nothing. After all the sceptics main tactic is to use facts to argue their case.

Of course, a lot of WUWT-ers twist Rod Lamberts' article to mean something quite different.  Like conspiracy theorist Chad Wozniak who says (excerpt):

March 15, 2014 at 5:32 pm
How typical of the AGW crowd – why tell the truth when lies serve your corrupt, perverse purposes better?

What Rod Lamberts is suggesting is that we don't merely quote dry scientific facts at people, we counter the deception of science deniers and show people what those facts mean for them personally and for our nations and for the world as a whole.

Are Anthony Watts and James Delingpole claiming to be part of an "organised campaign funding misinformation"?

See Update and Update 2 below - WUWT is organising a barrage of mail for RIT.

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Anthony Watts is beginning to make a habit of reposting nonsense written by James Delingpole. Maybe he's feeling sorry for him after he got the boot from his blog on the UK Telegraph.  He's living up to his reputation as a fake sceptic.  Anthony reposted some Delingpole nonsense, apparently without reading the article James was ranting about.

First the article.  It's a piece in The Conversation by Lawrence Torcello who is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.  His research interests include ethics and denial of climate science. In his article he writes (my bold italics and underline):

The importance of clearly communicating science to the public should not be underestimated. Accurately understanding our natural environment and sharing that information can be a matter of life or death. When it comes to global warming, much of the public remains in denial about a set of facts that the majority of scientists clearly agree on. With such high stakes, an organised campaign funding misinformation ought to be considered criminally negligent.

Which organised misinformation campaign is Anthony Watts a party to?

There are numerous organised (some more some less organised) climate misinformation campaigns as discussed in Naomi Oreskes' book Merchants of Doubt. Which one is Anthony a party to?  The reason I ask is that in response to the article in The Conversation, Anthony Watts wrote an article under a headline (archived here):

Despicable climate ugliness courtesy of Lawrence Torcello – assistant professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology

He obviously doesn't like the suggestion that an organised campaign funding misinformation should be regarded as criminally negligent.  I also fail to see what is "despicable" about the suggestion that it should be so regarded.  Especially as the article makes it quite clear that Lawrence Torcello is talking about an organised campaign that is knowingly funding misinformation.

Is James admitting that he's funded by part of "an organised campaign".  Is Anthony Watts admitting the same.  If not, why would they protest such a suggestion?

Anthony writes:

Via Delingpole at Breitbart:

Scientists who don’t believe in catastrophic man-made global warming should be put in prison, a US philosophy professor argues on a website funded by the UK government.

Now that there is "misinformation" if ever there was misinformation.  It doesn't resemble what Lawrence Torcello wrote even if you were to stretch your imagination as far as it could go.  Let's see how many things are wrong with it:

1. Lawrence Torcello isn't just talking about scientists spreading misinformation (ie scientists acting alone), he's talking about "organised campaigns" - whoever is running them, whether it involve scientists like Fred Singer or political lobby groups like CFACT or denier blogs like Climate Depot.
2. Lawrence Torcello isn't talking about what people "believe", he's talking about organised misinformation campaigns.  Organised campaigns to fund misinformation - the desired result of which is to shape people's "belief" to something false.
3. It is misleading to describe The Conversation as being "funded by the UK government".  The Conversation was started in Australia.  (Lawrence Torcello's article appears on the Australian edition, too so I don't know which office produced it.) The UK edition is funded by all these organisations.  If you track back you'll find UK taxpayer dollars and UK government funding, but it was mainly set up by universities, which are independent of the government of the day.  Not only that, but for people who bemoan at every chance they get, the idea that free speech might be curtailed, it should be irrelevant who is "funding" a website.

Anyway, the article raises some points that have been raised by others before.  At one point he refers to the L'Aquila earthquake and the sentences handed out to six scientists and the defence Minister.  He writes:

The ruling is popularly thought to have convicted scientists for failing to predict an earthquake. On the contrary, as risk assessment expert David Ropeik pointed out, the trial was actually about the failure of scientists to clearly communicate risks to the public. The convicted parties were accused of providing “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information”. As one citizen stated:

We all know that the earthquake could not be predicted, and that evacuation was not an option. All we wanted was clearer information on risks in order to make our choices.

Crucially, the scientists, when consulted about ongoing tremors in the region, did not conclude that a devastating earthquake was impossible in L’Aquila. But, when the Defence Minister held a press conference saying there was no danger, they made no attempt to correct him. I don’t believe poor scientific communication should be criminalised because doing so will likely discourage scientists from engaging with the public at all.

But the tragedy in L’Aquila reminds us how important clear scientific communication is and how much is at stake regarding the public’s understanding of science. I have argued elsewhere that scientists have an ethical obligation to communicate their findings as clearly as possible to the public when such findings are relevant to public policy. Likewise, I believe that scientists have the corollary obligation to correct public misinformation as visibly and unequivocally as possible.

I won't bother with the WUWT comments.  Like Anthony Watts, most of the people making comments don't seem to have read the article in question and are just using Anthony's blog post as an excuse to bash their keyboard.

Update

Now Christopher Monckton of Brenchley has put up his hand to be added to those who misinform (archived here, latest update here).  Is he part of an "organised campaign to fund misinformation" too, one wonders?  If so, he's not the most credible poster boy.  More of a potty peer.  Poor old Christopher confuses freedom of speech with freedom to tell lies.  And he confuses academic freedom with freedom to make up stuff.  He's just an utter nutter.

PS Christopher seems to be organising a hate mail campaign to the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.  One thing though - Christopher got a bit confused and placed RIT in New York, New York instead of Rochester New York.  It looks to me that Christopher's letter, indeed the entire thread (archived here), would make a fairly easy lesson in Professor Torcello's Critical Thinking classes (see Update 2 below).

And I wonder if Christopher would finally meet his match if he ever tried to debate Lawrence Torcello?

Update 2

By all accounts, Lawrence Torcello isn't just any philosopher, he's highly regarded by his students as a terrific teacher, respectful, prepared to deal with difficult topics, easy on the eye, awesome - and "hot".  Perhaps James Delingpole, Anthony Watts and Christopher Monckton could learn some critical thinking if they took his classes.

Besieged deniers Anthony Watts and Barry Woods engage in wishful thinking @wattsupwiththat ...

Science deniers are the same as everyone else in the world in regard to confirmation bias.  Well, maybe they have it worse than most of us when it comes to climate science.  Still, everyone suffers confirmation bias to some degree.

Today Anthony Watts and his correspondent, Barry Woods, have caught a bad case of it (archived here).  Most of Anthony's WUWT readers haven't.  Anthony and Barry think that Mike Hulme is disputing the fact that 97% plus of scientists who do research relating in any way to climate agree that humans are causing global warming.  But Mike Hulme is not disputing that at all.

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**Update**

Barry Woods has stated in the comments that what he meant was "Mike Hulme doesn't appear to like Cook et al's paper".

I doubt I'll ever know what Anthony Watts thinks Barry Woods meant.  Obviously most of the WUWT-ers read it the same way as I did (see WUWT comments below).

It's interesting that Barry jumped in so quickly and went to a lot of effort to explain himself here at HotWhopper, but he didn't bother correcting the same interpretation as me, which everyone at WUWT made.   I wonder why that would be...

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Anthony Watts picked out three paragraphs written by Mike Hulme and published them out of order, in contravention of the agreement with The Conversation.  (The Conversation gives permission to republish with provisos, including: Unless you have express permission from the author, you can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. To make material edits contact us.)

I'll publish the full article below, then make some observations.

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Science can't settle what should be done about climate change

By Mike Hulme, King's College London

The sight of speakers known to dispute the scientific evidence supporting climate change being called to speak at a parliamentary select committee on the latest IPCC report last week has raised certain commentators' blood pressure.

Some have gone so far as to claim that the climate change debate in Britain has become “as depressingly unscientific and polarised as it is in the United States”.

I disagree. The debate about climate change needs to become more political, and less scientific. Articulating radically different policy options in response to the risks posed by climate change is a good way of reinvigorating democratic politics.

The now infamous paper by John Cook and colleagues published in May 2013 claimed that of the 4,000 peer-reviewed papers they surveyed expressing a position on anthropogenic global warming, “97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming”. But merely enumerating the strength of consensus around the fact that humans cause climate change is largely irrelevant to the more important business of deciding what to do about it. By putting climate science in the dock, politicians are missing the point.

What matters is not whether the climate is changing (it is); nor whether human actions are to blame (they are, at the very least partly and, quite likely, largely); nor whether future climate change brings additional risks to human or non-human interests (it does). As climate scientist Professor Myles Allen said in evidence to the committee, even the projections of the IPCC’s more prominent critics overlap with the bottom end of the range of climate changes predicted in the IPCC’s published reports.

In the end, the only question that matters is, what are we going to do about it? Scientific consensus is not much help here. Even if one takes the Cook study at face value, then how does a scientific consensus of 97.1% about a fact make policy-making any easier? As Roger Pielke Jr has often remarked in the context of US climate politics, it’s not for a lack of public consensus on the reality of human-caused climate change that climate policy implementation is difficult in the US.

So politics, not science, must take centre stage. As Amanda Machin shows in her recent book, asking climate scientists to forge a consensus around facts with the expectation that decisive political action will naturally follow misunderstands science and politics in equal measure. If democratic politics is to be effective we need more disagreement, not more consensus, about what climate change is really about.
As I have argued elsewhere, the most important questions to be asked about climate change extend well beyond science. Let me suggest four; all of which are more important than the committee’s MPs managed. They are questions which people should and do disagree about and they have no correct answer waiting to be discovered by science.

• How do we value the future, or in economic terms, at what rate should we discount the future? Many of the arguments about urgent versus delayed interventions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions revolve around how much less we value future public goods and natural assets relative to their value today. This is a question that clear-thinking people will disagree about.
• In the governance of climate change what role do we allocate to markets? Many arguments about climate change, as about environmental management more generally, revolve around whether commodifying nature, by pricing environmental “goods” and “services”, is part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
• How do we wish new technologies to be governed, from experimentation and development to deployment? This question might revolve around new or improved low-carbon energy technologies (such as fracking, nuclear power, or hydrogen fuel), the use of genetically modified crops as a means to adapt to changing climate, or proposed climate engineering technologies. Again, these are not questions upon which science, least of all a scientific consensus, can adjudicate.
• What is the role of national governments as opposed to those played by multilateral treaties or international governing bodies? This requires citizens to reflect on forms of democracy and representation. They are no less important in relation to climate change than they are in relation to state security, immigration or financial regulation.

Any considered response to climate change will need to take a position, implicitly or explicitly, on one or more of these four questions, and others besides. And the percentage of climate science papers that accept humans are causing global warming has little to no bearing on public deliberations about these four questions.

Because the questions about climate change that really matter will not be settled by scientific facts. They entail debates about values and about the forms of political organisation and representation that people believe are desirable. This requires a more vigorous politics that cannot be short-circuited by appeals to science.

Mike Hulme does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.


This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

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From his bio at The Conversation: Mike Hulme is professor of climate and culture in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. His work explores the idea of climate change using historical, cultural and scientific analyses, seeking to illuminate the numerous ways in which climate change is deployed in public and political discourse....From 2000 to 2007 he was the Founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, based at the University of East Anglia, and since 2007 has been the founding Editor-in-Chief of the review journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs) Climate Change.

Politicians and the public should be debating policy not the science

I agree with Mike Hulme that it's way past time politicians and the public accepted the science and moved on to discuss policy.  I don't agree with him if he was suggesting that there was any value whatsoever in UK politicians giving a platform to fake sceptics like Donna Laframboise and Richard Lindzen.

Most politicians of any standing do accept climate science.  Some might be reluctant in this regard, but it's getting harder and harder to deny it.  In the USA the Republican Party as a whole seems to punish members who do accept the science but this will change.  Looking around the world, though, governments (as opposed to individual politicians) have accepted the science for more than two decades now.  Governments have made some progress in doing something about global warming - just not nearly enough progress.  Some time over the next couple of decades no-one (except the bedraggled mob at places like WUWT) will have a choice about whether or not to accept the science.  The climate will be doing it's thing.  It's happening already with hotter heatwaves and flashier floods.  More and more people are noticing.

Barry Woods and Anthony Watts engage in wishful thinking

Anthony Watts and Barry Woods are engaging in wishful thinking.  They grabbed onto one word written by Mike Hulme: "infamous".  Mike used that word to describe the 97% consensus paper by John Cook et al, published last year.  Anthony Watts and Barry Woods decided that Mike Hulme thinks there is not an overwhelming consensus among scientists that humans are causing global warming.  That's despite the fact that Mike Hulme clearly wrote that humans are causing global warming - and Anthony even published that particular paragraph.  Anthony quoted from an email he got from Barry Woods:

Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but if Mike Hulme thinks Cook 97% is nonsense AND pointless, this will be noticed. 

Except that Mike Hulme doesn't think that the 97% is nonsense.  What he's arguing is that it's time to move beyond the science of climate and explore some big questions relating to what we are going to do about climate change.  I'll paraphrase his questions as:

• What value do we place on the future?
• What role do we want markets to play in mitigating global warming or adapting to it?
• Do we want to regulate new technologies and if so how?
• What is the role of national governments vs multi-lateral agreements vs international governing bodies?

These aren't new questions.  Nor are they single answer questions.  In fact, the article by Mike Hulme is probably quite a good illustration of the point he is making.  Scientists are good at science but can't be expected to excel at policy.

My reaction to the Mike Hulme article is - um yes.  Oversimplifying the obvious.  I reckon the people who are involved in high level discussions about climate action and associated policy development, have delved much deeper into these and other related issues.

It's science deniers who want to avoid discussing policy, not the general public. By continuing to rage against the science, deniers reckon they can avoid or put off the inevitable - deciding what to do about climate change.  Thing is, getting to policy solutions might be moving too slowly but it has been moving along.  Without the input of science deniers.  They have decided to forego the opportunity to help shape policy.  But policy is taking shape without them.  It's their choice to not participate.

From the WUWT comments

Quite a number of people pointed out to Anthony that Mike Hulme accepts the 97% consensus and is saying we have to move beyond debating science and into debating and developing policy. (Archived here.)


John F. Hultquist says:

February 4, 2014 at 9:52 am
My take-away of M.H.’s remarks is that he thinks “prominent critics” of the IPCC agree with the climate change projections, climate change is bad, governments can alter the future, and should, so let’s get on with it. Business as usual in the CAGW camp.

kenw says:

February 4, 2014 at 9:58 am
This is most telling: “What matters is not whether the climate is changing (it is); nor whether human actions are to blame (they are, at the very least partly and, quite likely, largely); …”
His mind is made up and the politicians have to tell us what to do about it. If they tell us to do nothing, well, it’s all their fault and we shall all cook like the frog in the slow boil.
as with most, he incorrectly believes that Mankind is in control of the ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’. If you have such a mindset, it is obviously a political solution since the underlying science is settled and all that remains is to decide what (yes, if anything) to do about it. It’s just more of a throwing up of the hands, fatalistic, we’re doomed point of view.

Ken Hall agrees Mike Hulme doesn't doubt the 97% consensus, then accuses him of being a "human hating zealot" - and says:

February 4, 2014 at 10:09 am
He is not putting doubt on the 97% figure, only the importance of it in furthering the alarmist’s aims. He is suggesting that it is so obviously self evidently true, that it must no longer be questioned, and even if questioned, policy should now urgently be taken upon the assumption of it being true. 

The telling quote for me is the following:

“By putting climate science in the dock, politicians are missing the point [.…] In the end, the only question that matters is, what are we going to do about it?”

So it matters not if it is true or not? The alarmist scientists are done with trying to prove it, we must accept it on nothing more than blind faith before the earth cools anymore and further falsifies their CAGW hypothesis, and get on with implementing the alarmist’s cure.

In other words, sod the science, start the de-industrialisation and the destruction of industrial economies now. Truly, the argument of a human hating zealot.

Jammy Dodger says:

February 4, 2014 at 10:13 am
Yes, you are reading too much into it. He does not say Cook’s 97% is nonsense. Or pointless. A bit of confirmation fantasy there.

DirkH says:

February 4, 2014 at 10:14 am
Hulme doesn’t criticize Cook’s “methodology”. He’s perfectly fine with it. He essentially just says, this propaganda approach is not relevant for The Cause right now; how can we enforce the policies we planned? And he has no answer, that’s the good thing. Another failed NATO strategy.

There are many more in that vein.  WUWT-ers aren't buying what Anthony Watts and Barry Woods are selling. Not this time.


There is of course the normal (for WUWT) science denying response. It's Just Weather says:

February 4, 2014 at 1:55 pm
Hulme seems to believe that human beings are the primary cause of climate change. And that the change is significant enough to cause “risk.” I hate to break it to him. 97% of all people do not agree with that.

The human species has proven to be amazingly adaptive and lives and thrives in a wide variety of climates already. Almost all human beings (97+%) are continuing on with their lives as if they believe they will be able to adapt to the climate change headed our way whatever it might be.

John Cook Uncloaks Fake 'Skeptics' of Climate Science

This article has been republished on numerous sites. It deserves to be.  Here it is again in case you missed it elsewhere.  (Republished with permission from The Conversation.)  - MobyT

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There is no such thing as climate change denial

By John Cook, University of Queensland

In a sense, there is no such thing as climate change denial. No one denies that climate changes (in fact, the most common climate myth is the argument that past climate change is evidence that current global warming is also natural). Then what is being denied? Quite simply, the scientific consensus that humans are disrupting the climate. A more appropriate term would be “consensus denial”.

There are two aspects to scientific consensus. Most importantly, you need a consensus of evidence – many different measurements pointing to a single, consistent conclusion. As the evidence piles up, you inevitably end up with near-unanimous agreement among actively researching scientists: a consensus of scientists.

A number of surveys of the climate science community since the early 1990s have measured the level of scientific consensus that humans were causing global warming. Over time, the percentage of climate scientists agreeing that humans are causing global warming has steadily increased. As the body of evidence grows, the consensus is getting stronger.

Two recent studies adopting different approaches have arrived at strikingly consistent results. A survey of over 3000 Earth scientists found that as the climate expertise increased, so did agreement about human-caused global warming. For climate scientists actively publishing climate research (79 scientists in total), there was 97% agreement.

This result was confirmed in a separate analysis compiling a list of scientists who had made public declarations on climate change, both supporting and rejecting the consensus. Among scientists who had published peer-reviewed climate papers (908 scientists in total), the same result: 97% agreement.

While individual scientists have their personal views on climate change, they must back up their opinions with evidence-based research that withstands the scrutiny of the peer-reviewed process. An analysis of peer-reviewed climate papers published from 1993 to 2003 found that out of 928 papers, none rejected the consensus.

Despite these and many other indicators of consensus (I could go on), there is a gaping chasm between reality and the perceived consensus among the general public. Polls from 1997 to 2007 found that around 60% of Americans believe there is significant disagreement among scientists about whether global warming was happening. A 2012 Pew poll found less than half of Americans thought that scientists agreed humans were causing global warming.

The gap between perception and reality has real-world consequences. People who believe that scientists disagree on global warming show less support for climate policy. Consequently, a key strategy of opponents of climate action for over 20 years has been to cast doubt on the scientific consensus and maintain the consensus gap.

How have they achieved this? Hang around and you’ll witness first hand the attack on consensus in the comment threads of this article. The techniques of consensus denial are easily identifiable. In fact, if one rejects an overwhelming scientific consensus, it’s inevitable that they end up exhibiting some of the following characteristics.

Expect to see reference to dissenting non-experts who appear to be highly qualified while not having published any actual climate research. Fake expert campaigns are launched with disturbing regularity.

Recently, a group of NASA retirees issued a press release rejecting the consensus. While possessing no actual climate expertise, they evidently hoped to cash in on the NASA brand.
A prominent Australian fake expert is Ian Plimer, the go-to guy for political leaders and fossil fuel billionaires. He hasn’t published a single peer-reviewed paper on climate change.

There should be many cases of cherry picking but how do you identify a genuine cherry pick? When a conclusion from a small selection of data differs from the conclusion from the full body of evidence, that’s cherry picking. For example, a common cherry pick of late is the myth that global warming stopped over the last 16 years. This focus on short periods of temperature data ignores the long-term warming trend. Importantly, it also ignores the fact that over the last 16 years, our planet has been building up heat at a rate of over three Hiroshima bombs worth of energy every second. To deny global warming is to deny the basic fact that our planet is building up heat at an extraordinary rate.

One way of avoiding consensus is to engage in logical fallacies. The most common fallacy employed to deny the human influence on climate change is the non sequitur, Latin for “it does not follow”. The onslaught of Australian extreme weather in 2013 has led to a surge in the fallacy “extreme weather events have happened before therefore humans are not having an influence on current extreme weather”. This is the logical equivalent to arguing that people have died from natural causes in the past so no one ever gets murdered now.

Finally, with consensus denial comes the inevitable conspiracy theories. If you disagree with an entire scientific community, you have to believe they’re all conspiring to deceive you. A conspiracy theorist displays two identifying characteristics. They believe exaggerated claims about the power of the conspirators. The scientific consensus on climate change is endorsed by tens of thousands of climate scientists in countries all over the world. A conspiracy of that magnitude makes the moon landing hoax tame in comparison.

Conspiracy theorists are also immune to new evidence. When climate scientists were accused of falsifying data, nine independent investigations by universities and governments in two countries found no evidence of wrongdoing. How did conspiracy theorists react? By claiming that each investigation was a whitewash and part of the conspiracy! With each new claim of whitewash, the conspiracy grew larger, encompassing more universities and governments.

A key element to meaningful climate action is closing the consensus gap. This means identifying and rebutting the many rhetorical techniques employed to deny the scientific consensus.

This article was adapted from Understanding Climate Change Denial.
John Cook does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.


This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.