I don't know about others but I came to doubt AGW because of inconsistencies in their claims and the data they used. And because of their striking similarities in techniques (computer modelling of systems too complex for competent models) and prescriptions (we must suffer and gov't needs more power, MORE POWER) that they shared with other environmentalist claims that have been falsified over the decades. I already knew that they have been fudging the data, from their own reports, long before this leak from CRU.
Your response is far from unusual; in fact, it's probably a greater example of the psychology of AGW denial than any of the ones cited in the article.
There is a pattern of thinking which is common in many areas of expertise, but is especially prevalent in technical professions. It goes like this: the best solution to a complex problem is a simple one, and if the problem is so complex that I can't understand it in ten minutes, then it isn't worth my time.
So, for example, rather than taking the time to absorb the myriad complexities of climatology, and rather than reading the emails ourselves and analyzing their content and context, we instead take the "simpler" solution, the shortcut: we say, these emails are evidence of what I always believed all along, that the entire field of climatology is a hoax.
And really, that's a beautifully simplistic explanation for a very complicated field. Rather than needing to understand the field, it's much simpler to just say, this thing is a global conspiracy, and then move on to the next simple solution to a complex problem.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the inconsistencies in claims and data that people love to point to are actually things that have explanations, that can be understood -- if someone takes the time and effort to do it.
It's really rather like the Monty Hall Problem. Marliyn vos Savant ended up having mathematics professors -- among others -- writing to her for a long time after she published the correct solution to that problem. The solution they proposed instead -- while much simpler to understand -- was wrong.
Understanding the right solution took much more effort, and required abandoning certain preconceived notions.
I think you've answered the question for the wrong side. Climatology is an incredibly complex field and working out what the climate is requires multivariate modelling in order to try and work out what has happened and what will happen.
However, to try and simplify the theory for the man on the street, the AGW theory proponents have watered down the complexities to one villain : CO2. They are saying that, despite the complexities, despite the many variables, an increase in one of the least significant greenhouse gases will cause catastrophic (the word is everywhere - cue the screaming girl) warming.
The rational thinkers don't think the field of climate science is a hoax or conspiracy. What they think is that a small group of influential scientists is doing poor science and going to any length to keep a lid on it. A hoax implies forethought and planning. The reality is that they are caught up in the populuarity of the theory and the fame and fortune that it brings, and so are (probably) indulging in a good old 'us and them' groupthink session.
"a small group of influential scientists is doing poor science and going to any length to keep a lid on it"
That is in fact the definition of a hoax.
Tell you what. Why don't you publish your competing theory which explains global warming in a more convincing fashion.
You do have a competing, more plausible theory, right?
BTW -- the theory of evolution has poor explanations for several things in the natural kingdom. Does that mean it's a fraud, being perpetuated by a small group of scientists who are keeping a lid on more plausible explanations?
EDIT: Downrated? So, in response to an article talking about how people shut down their brains and respond emotionally, you start downrating people you disagree with rather than responding intellectually?
"a small group of influential scientists is doing poor science and going to any length to keep a lid on it"
No, a hoax is when people deliberately create a plan to deceive others, and know they are lying the whole time. It's different to when people fervently believe in something and get involved in groupthink, ignoring dissenting opinions and developing an 'us and them' mindset.
"You do have a competing, more plausible theory, right?"
No, I don't. But then I'm not asking anyone to give me their money, either. The Earths climate has always been changing, and the causes have never been fully understood. Why did the medieval warming period occur? Why the little ice age after that? It's not up to sceptics of a theory to provide a competing theory that's better. The burden of proof is on the proponent of a theory to prove it is true. Something many people believe has not yet been achieved with the AGW theory.
The scientists aren't asking for anyone's money, either. They're simply giving their best forecast.
Here's the thing, (and mind you 95% of the people who've studied this for longer than 5 minutes on cable news commercial breaks agree on it), the carbon theory makes sense and there's a lot of correlation. If they're wrong, then all we'll have done is get off of fossil fuels, which we have to do anyways, and leave cleaner air for our children.
If you're wrong? I mean, do you buy homeowner's insurance or flood insurance? Why not earth insurance?
Lastly, to revisit the original point, regarding groupthink and dissenting opinions -- if you don't have an alternative model that makes more sense, you don't have a dissenting opinion. You're just getting sucked into the politics of the situation.
The earth is definitely warming, ice is definitely melting, and atmospheric CO2 definitely causes at least ocean acidification which is massively disruptive itself. That's just basic chemistry. It also seems to be the most likely candidate for the cause of global warming, based on what we know.
So why are you so invested in making sure we don't act on it?
If we already had clean energy, hypothetically.. would you be willing to take on all of the risks of global warming in order to be 2% richer? Honest answer.
I don't recall ever downrating a comment or a story in HN. If someone is downrating your comments, it's not me.
"If we already had clean energy, hypothetically.. would you be willing to take on all of the risks of global warming in order to be 2% richer? Honest answer."
No, of course not. None of my posts indicate a dislike for clean renewable energy. I am an enthusiast of electric cars, passionate about ocean pollution, believer in locally based sustainability. It would be my ideal to have a self sufficient home with no fossil fuels providing energy. Hopefully I'll see that in my lifetime.
However, I stop at correlation=causation, I distrust any non-testable computer models intensely (be they of the economic or climatic type) I'm also dubious about the 2% - it's also based on computer modelling and government forecasts, none of which I place the slightest faith in.
The scientists are asking for peoples money - that's the whole point. Directly through more research grants and funding. Indirectly by asking for wealth transfers from people.
"if you don't have an alternative model that makes more sense, you don't have a dissenting opinion. You're just getting sucked into the politics of the situation."
I completely reject that statement. I don't have to have an alternative view on any theory. Any theory on anything is completely rejectable without coming up with an alternative. It's perfectly logical to say "I don't have a better explanation, but you've failed to convince me".
Well, clearly several people are doing it, and I'd wager that they're also Republican voters, if we're going to play the statistics. That sort of rating seems to be abusive to me, and against the HN ethos, particularly if you can't be bothered to form a cogent response.
Regarding not being convinced -- fine. But what's your incentive to go so far out of your way to discredit them? Correlation doesn't equal causation but when we have a plausible theory, correlation, and no other theories that come even close as far as the smell test, well, you've gotta do better than crossing your arms and proclaiming yourself unconvinced to be credible.
Given that you agree that we should move to clean and renewable energy, what's your investment in tarring the scientific community? You try to bring it to grants.. what's that, a few dozen million worldwide for the whole climatology community? I'd think anyone who labels themselves intellectual would be proud to sponsor pure research.
Basically, where's your beef come from, if it's not politics? Why aren't you trying to poke holes in the theory of evolution? You don't need an alternative to be unconvinced, right? That'd be easier than the warming one, frankly.
My beef is pretty simple : they're not doing good science. I always thought of them as well-meaning but misdirected researchers. Since the emails came out, I don't think they are that well meaning anymore. My problem with the whole thing is that to me, from day one in the late 1980's, the man-made global warming hypothesis has been full of contradicting information, alarmist predictions and became a political football. I don't believe the ends justify the means. I also don't like the money and 'public thought' that has been diverted from real, immediate environmental problems like ocean and air pollution, things that can be solved for a fraction of the price and will make real difference to people straight away.
And brc, seriously, knock off the downrates for political disagreement. I'm being polite here, and whoever is doing this is pretty much proving that they're not interested in the truth, they're interested in politics.
So why are you so invested in making sure we don't act on it?
This is why I downvoted you.
I grew up in a religious environment, although I am not religious now. Your statement reminded me almost exactly of the way I watched religious conversion being pitched to new prospects when I was a child. On one hand, there's a chance of total damnation. On the other, if you make these simple commitments, all will be good. And the commitments you make are good for you in either case. You have been doing wrong. Now is the chance to repent and change your ways. How long will you stay childishly in your selfish ways?
The similarity was almost spooky.
What can I say? I didn't like the style of the comment. Your downvote had nothing to do with the any sort of politics that I'm aware of. While I don't agree with you, carry on the conversation. I'm sure my little downvote will easily be compensated by dozens of other votes from people who didn't have my response to your particular turn of phrase.
Well, there's multiple people doing it, and frankly, attempting to silence opinions you disagree with seems much more religiously invested to me than simple hedging against the worst case.
Anyways, I hope you're right but I fear that you aren't.
> Not to put too fine a point on it, but the inconsistencies in claims and data that people love to point to are actually things that have explanations, that can be understood -- if someone takes the time and effort to do it.
Oh really? The procedure that generated the hockey stick graph doesn't generate roughly the same graph almost independent of the input data?
Unfortunately for the "it's all okay" theory, the CRU folks keep admitting things that show that it isn't. Today's is that they made up some of the "homogenized" data.
The initial dump contained the uncontested statement that they can't explain the last decade's cooling....
And then there's still the data gathering problems. (Stations have been moved to hotter areas and others haven't been maintained in ways that cause them to record higher temps even if nothing actually changes.)
> The procedure that generated the hockey stick graph doesn't generate roughly the same graph almost independent of the input data?
I'll do a little looking, but do you have some more information on this? I'd love to see it.
> The initial dump contained the uncontested statement that they can't explain the last decade's cooling....
This one I know off the top of my head. You're almost certainly referring to the now-infamous "trick", roughly related to tree ring datum.
There is still apparently some debate among climate scientists over what the differences in tree-ring measurements versus expected measurements actually means. It's going to take a while to sort out. Does it mean that the trees are growing very differently under different climates? Is there some property of tree growth that's been overlooked?
But either way, this is only one method of data gathering amongst many. To point to this one thing and say, "A-ha! This proves that the planet is actually cooling and thus this is a field that I don't have to understand" is exactly the same kind of tactic used by those who refuse to accept evolutionary theory for the divergence of species.
This is the case, again, with the data stations. I wholeheartedly agree that more effort needs to be put into monitoring them, and from that standpoint at least, the work being put into cataloguing them is important. However, even given all of their differences, and even assuming that there was no other data to go off of, they still would not lead to a dramatically different climate model.
The field of climate science is much more complicated than a smattering of weather stations and examinations of tree rings.
> And you know this because....
Look at my comment history.
I'm a former "AGW denier" who, years ago, was pissed that cans of spray paint stopped working right and was annoyed by emissions control systems in vehicles. However, climatology has remained one of my interests, and I've continued to try to understand it. I know far, far less about the field than any of the scientists actually involved in it, but I've seen enough to convince me that the human species is better off listening to their claims than the claims of those that can't be bothered to try.
> I'll do a little looking, but do you have some more information on this?
You don't know about the Wegman report and the relevant 2006 American Statistical Association session? (Yes, I know that Mann's students attempted a save.) Google is your friend....
The "real" climatologists stopped mentioning the hockey stick a while ago, at least in places where some numeracy could be assumed. Only the rubes mention it now.
> This one I know off the top of my head. You're almost certainly referring to the now-infamous "trick", roughly related to tree ring datum.
Not even close. However, this shows that you don't even have a passing familiarity with the "hacked emails" as I'm referring to one of the more publicized excerpts, namely "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate." see http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1048&file... for the whole message.
However, thanks for mentioning the tree data. The tree data is used to derive temp data using a model that doesn't predict the actual temp data when we have both. In what sense is that model reasonable?
> However, even given all of their differences [temperature gathering], and even assuming that there was no other data to go off of, they still would not lead to a dramatically different climate model.
Not even close. AFrench-Russian group who couldn't get the wasn't given access to the CRU temperature data assembled their own temp data and found that, the 20th century temp was flat except for some cooling in the 40s and some warming in the 90s. CO2 is thought to have been steadily rising the whole time and the models say that temp goes with CO2. (Note that there are also questions about the CO2 measurements, but ....)
They're not the only ones.
Oh, and there's also a problem with the sea level rising claim. The whole argument rests on one observation station and the folks who actually study sea levels don't agree with the climatologist's conclusions....
I get nervous around science that have political prescriptions mostly because of what I know about government intervention and how it have a tendency to create unintended consequences.
AGW can provide powerful excuses for expanding governmental power so I am naturally weary of the science.
That is not to say I don't think AGW is real. I accept the possibility that it could be real for the lack of climate knowledge. The only question is how much it should factor if at all in my long range decision making standard operating procedure.
It's similar to evolution in that regard. Much has been written by advocates of it that is wrong and disagrees with other things written about it. That does not mean one should throw the baby out with the bathwater.
But I'd suspect most people don't think as deeply as OP. Most people take a side in this debate based solely on their politics and/or wishful thinking.
Your response is far from unusual; in fact, it's probably a greater example of the psychology of AGW denial
I hear "we've created a computer model from ten thousand variously interacting systems and we can predict temperature change in a hundred years" and I grab my wallet. I would think, as somebody familiar with complex systems and computer models, that I am acting rationally.
But who knew? As it turns out I have deep psychological problems that are expressing themselves in my opinions.
I have no idea what the climate is doing. And I'm perfectly happy with that. Others are completely entrenched in the idea that some future catastrophe awaits us all that demands immediate action.
Which group was it that is the example of some kind of psychological condition?
You're practicing argument-from-ignorance: you can't predict an outcome, so nobody else can, either.
Additionally, psychology does factor into all kinds of decisions, even those by "rational" persons. Sites like lesswrong and others on cognitive biases focus on exactly this.
Remaining ignorant of it doesn't make it less true.
1. I resent that skepticism is portrayed as tin-hat denial.
2. "If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future, said Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, when the report was released. This is the defining moment."
Really? After billions of years of spinning around the sun, or let's just say hundreds of millions of years with a climate essentially like ours, with ice ages and hot times galore, we have two years or then we're dead? Gimme a break.
3. Related to 2 above, what makes the current climate configuration special? All the ice ages, all the hot times over millions of years, and suddenly when we get a small amount of data, we decide that the climate we find today is the standard from which we deviate at our peril?
Perhaps a more rational and practical view would be to recognize that climate does change significantly over time, and we should learn to adapt to that as individuals and nations. Because casually looking back over millions of years (casually is all I'm personally capable of, sorry), it seems that we're going to have to live with warming and cooling at some time (as we already have in the past), even if we turn off every light switch on Earth.
The problem is that the way we humans are living right now is NOT fit to adapt to significant changes in climate, and changing that would be even harder than curtailing our emissions. And it does not matter that there have historically been much greater differences in climate - we're living right now.
In the long run (centuries, millenia), yes, finding a way of living that can adapt to climate changes would be better. But that would require a significant smaller population density to have safety margins.
What is it about the way we live right now that's not fit to adapting? Is it population, as you mention in your last sentence? Not asking as a challenge, just clarification.
We probably just squeaked through the big ice, and I think low population was a disadvantage for species survival. I think we "adapted" through the recent little ice age pretty well, although it was probably not an align-the-governments scale challenge.
Yes, we are living right now. I think we'll make it through.
The part that is astounding about this article: it was written on December 9th, 2009, well after the CRU email/data dump; it is about climate skepticism; yet, it has NO mention of the CRU email/data dump while discussing said skepticism.
(to be fair, perhaps the interview was conducted before the CRU dump and only now is being published; but why didn't the editor catch it?)
People who believe in AGW don't see anything wrong with those e-mails. They consider it just another part of the "extremely well organized, well funded" PR Campaign. Their argument would be that a bunch of people are taking sentences out of context in order to make standard statistical analysis seem like a cover up.
I don't agree with that but I know enough people on the other side to know that's what they think.
And there are a bunch of AGW people who believe the noble lie, ie. "Since we need to be doing all this green stuff anyway, let's just do it (carbon tax, population reduction) and not argue about these particular emails and let's just have a little faith in the system"
I have doubts about AGW not because I borrowed other people's opinions but instead I went to an original data source - the Global Historical Climatology Network - and plotted the raw (version 2) temperature data, both for different countries and also as a global average. The results show that there are a range of trends going on. Some, like that for Sri Lanka, are clearly related to geothermal activity. Temperatures for Countries such as the UK and Germany have neither increased nor decreased significantly over the last 150 years, and Canada, Russia (Asian sector) and China have been getting colder.
I know from examining the raw data that the global temperature graphs typically shown in the media contain significant distortions, which are due to missing temperature data within the series for particular locations. For example, Turkey only has reliable temperatures for the last 50 years or so, and when you add patchy series into the global average it appears to increase or decrease suddenly.
If I only plot temperature series which are more than 98% complete over the last 150 years the overall trend looks like a very linear increase in temperature of around 1-2 degrees. It certainly not obvious that there is a significant anthropogenic component.
Perhaps the simplest explanation for falling belief in the AGW theory is the best - that "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions...]
I think what we are seeing is the gradual realisation that the alarms have been ringing a bit too loud, a bit too often, and people are beginning to wonder what all the rush is.
If you want an anology it's similar to when people realised that .com companies with massive costs and tiny sales weren't actually ever going to make any money, and started to sell. Remember the quaint term 'new economy'?
"The Helioculture process utilizes highly-engineered photosynthetic organisms to catalyze the conversion of sunlight and carbon dioxide into transportation fuels and chemicals" - http://www.ethanolproducer.com/article.jsp?article_id=5858
How long before a future in which we're pumping back into oil fields to get CO2 out of the atmosphere?
Out of all of human history, technology at the scale of helping climate change is more likely this century than any other. I haven't seen anyone suggesting we push on towards it full steam ahead, but slowing down isn't enough. We either get such technology at some point or we stop polluting completely, anything else is just a delay tactic and will prolong the problem. Who is to blame doesn't really help anything.
Also:
Guess who's taking it seriously? "Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes". ""We haven't got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand," she says. "We're having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden."
(People in power) can tell me to take it seriously and drive five miles less per week all they like, I'll be more likely to listen when they stop their much more polluting ways.
