I was recently interviewed for an article at the Daily Beast by Bahar Gholipour. She had recently been forwarded a press release from Peter Ward about an upcoming talk at the 2018 meeting of the Geological Soceity of America about his “ground-breaking” research showing that the common understanding of the greenhouse effect is wrong. This is, of course, ridiculous, and she found my previous post on Peter’s ideas and wondered what I thought about whether we should really be accommodating to people like him.
Why Is a Climate Change Skeptic Headlining Science Conferences?
I think this is an excellent question that I’ve thought about it quite a bit. I really like the discussion in the article. There’s a clear distinction in the article that his ideas are clearly misguided, and the discussion nicely focuses on the central question of how and why these ideas are given a platform.
To answer the central question plainly, I think that people like Dr. Ward should be given a platform at conferences. However, in the specific case of Dr. Ward, he has repeatedly failed to support his claims with concrete evidence, and we should NOT give valuable conference speaking time to people who do not adhere to the scientific method.
Giving time to climate skeptics may feel like a painful waste, but it’s the fair and professional thing to do. This is assuming that they are civil, respectful, and open to criticism of their fringe ideas. The tendency of scientists to eviscerate each other’s work means that conference talks about potentially paradigm shifting ideas will invoke well-informed and thoughtful challenges, which you won’t get from personal blogs or social media. Being able to adequately address these challenges is critical for moving a fringe idea into mainstream acceptance.
The misinformation struggle is like this in every sector of knowledge. We need more tiers and tranches, more overt class signals, more words for “public” like the Inuit famously have many words for snow. For a general public, misconceptions and quacks must be stooped to, indeed that is a teachable moment for getting the best minds up a tier. Among researchers, of course we don’t waste the time. I guess this is an edge case: a credentialed person with at least logical coherence playing to an upper-peanut gallery, shall they be engaged, or forbidden (causing “controversy”), or just ignored? Dunno.
Could you respond to this, or pass it to someone who can, please? Friends are in thrall to these deniers and their claims need to be roundly rejected, where misleading.
https://principia-scientific.org/one-equation-to-rule-them-all/
You climate scientists need to engage, not suppress. Take the discussion following this post: http://hannahlab.org/climate-skeptics-peter-wards-ozone-depletion-theory/.
I’m a layperson, uncertain re: the degree to which humans are impacting the climate. I’m not qualified to read scientific papers, so I rely on the objective sharing of knowledge by others to inform my opinion. I found the discussion from the preceding link to be highly informative. It made it clear to me that, while Peter Ward has some interesting ideas re: the impact of volcanism and mankind’s depletion of the ozone layer on climate change, he lacks the experimental or mathematical proof to challenge the role of CO2. I would not have gained that insight if not for that discussion.
Suppressing Ward’s views would have had the opposite effect on my opinion. Why? Not because I’m a conspiracy theorist, but because I’m a realist. Humans are fallible. Scientists are humans. Just as there are scientists who have sold their souls to act as shills for the fossil fuel industry, there are those who have done the same for the renewable energy industry, their careers, or simple attention. How do you think we ended up with so many reckless predictions over the past 50 years that have ended up failing spectacularly and damaging the credibility of the AGW argument?
As much as I respect the work you are doing, it astonishes me how bad you guys are at PR. Speaking arrogantly about how you’re right and everyone else is wrong, and all you have to do is find a way to educate the idiots, is not a very bright strategy. Exposing people to facts is a much more constructive approach.
What I’d like to see are more in-depth debates between leading skeptics like Richard Lindzen, Judith Curry, etc., and the scientific champions of the AGW argument, similar to what occurred between Stephen Hawking and Leonard Susskind re: the nature of black holes. Now that would be educational.
Wayne, thanks for your comment. I’m glad you liked my article about Peter Ward. I’ve been meaning to do more like it, but I’ve been caught up with work.
The counter argument I would make to your suggestion is that we do expose people to facts all the time, but we lack the social capital required for the public to trust us. Case in point, I was on a work trip last week and stayed with some AirBnB hosts who were very nice, but also very opposed to the idea of AGW. They were particularly against the notion that there was a consensus. Their experience was in private sector businesses and they told me a story about this Russian business man who was particularly good at statistics and thought AGW was a sham. So in other words, they were fine with trusting this random guy they had never met who was allegedly good at math, but they were quick to dismiss the published findings of TENS OF THOUSANDS of people who are also good at math. The trust issue at play here really struck me.
I gave them my usual elevator speech on how AGW is irrefutable based on the current evidence that matches the theory, but they just waved me off suggesting that I wasn’t educated properly. It was a friendly conversation, I was not condescending in any way, I even agreed with many of their points, but they still lumped me in with a fictional population of “money hungry scientists” that are hell bent on convincing the world of a delusion.
The type of public debate you’re suggesting would only hurt things more by reinforcing this idea that there are two equal sides. Many of the ideas put forth by Judith Curry and Richard Lindzen have been strongly refuted in the community, which is science working as it should. However, that back and forth of untested ideas should not interest the general public because it would only leave them trying to decide who is more “trustworthy” rather than who is “correct”.
I agree that there is a PR problem, which is related to a trust problem, but I have no clue how to fix it. Being less arrogant and “nicer” to people definitely does not work.
Walter,
The issue is complex, but keep in mind that the facts true
scientists are trying to expose are not the only AGW “facts” to which the rest of us are being exposed. I can’t access a single mainstream news site nowadays without some poorly founded claim that a weather event is proof of climate change, or yet more predictions of impending disaster or calamnity.
Those claims are mainly coming from non-scientists, but there’s enough of a sprinkling of scientists involved to help taint your collective reputations. From failed predictions of summers with zero arctic ice to polar bear decimations to claiming that the Maldives will disappear beneath the waves by such-and-such dates…I say just stop with that stuff. All it’s doing is harming scientific credibility.
The fact is, adding any man-made element in large quantities into a life-producing environment (CO2 into the atmosphere, plastics into the ocean, pesticides into soil and water tables) is at best reckless and dangerous. That simple argument is compelling enough on its own. Any statement beyond that from the scientific community should be demonstrable beyond a doubt. Trying to predict the timing of effects in a chaotic system is high-risk, low-reward behavior.
So, too, is the whole climate change denier meme. I’m a taxpayer. When others ask me to contribute higher taxes to solve a problem, I have the right to ask a few questions without being attacked as a denier. So, too, do dissenting scientists.
If the scientific majority is so certain of its position, you guys should gladly meet dissenting experts head on. Stop being politicians and activists, which frankly most of you suck at, and instead reclaim your rightful place in our society as fearless investigators and defenders of scientific truth.
Keep in mind, when reading the above comments, that I’m neither for or against AGW theory. I’m not qualified to make that assessment. Like most people, I just want a set of reliable facts on which I can base my personal and community decisions, and it really shouldn’t be so damned difficult to get them.
You definitely shouldn’t get labelled a climate denier for asking questions. If you’re being open and honest with your questions then you should be able to wear the “skeptic” badge without any judgement, but there are SO MANY people who go much farther than this and actively disagree with established facts. You don’t sound like one of these people. Just as an example, Judith Curry has said some things which I think are justifiably “denial” in the face of facts. She always gets away with it by invoking the “unknown unknowns” that might magically disprove the scientific consensus, but that distracts from all the evidence that lines up with theoretical predictions.
And don’t get hung up on these predictions about polar bears and one-off weather events, those things can never be held up as proof of anything. The real proof in the data is just too hard to talk about in the main stream media. Anyone who wants to credit the ocean and sun for driving century scale variability that might explain away the observed warming is ignoring a key detail that the stratosphere is cooling. A cooling stratosphere is a predicted outcome of increased CO2 that would not happen from warming by solar output or the Earth’s internal variability. Some may have under predicted the amount of cooling that we’ve seen so far, but that doesn’t contradict the qualitative prediction that is verified by the data.
So anyway, I think you make some good points. I’m gonna have to think more about how we can better make the distinction between qualitative and quantitative predictions. And like I said before, I’m still not sure whether public debates with deniers/skeptics is a helpful exercise, but maybe you’re on to something.
Walter:
Quote: “I gave them my usual elevator speech on how AGW is irrefutable based on the current evidence that matches the theory, but they just waved me off suggesting that I wasn’t educated properly.”
Well the statement is problematic. From theory-ladenness to confirmation testing, evidence can be manipulated, even under the best of intentions. But even if lacking such problems (a big “if”), it simply is not true that theories are “irrefutable” based on the “current evidence that matches the theory.” From trivial curve-fitting examples to historical examples such as geocentrism, it is obvious that theories which we would consider to be unequivocally false, nonetheless can, or did, “match the evidence” (and were considered to be irrefutable).
The bottom line is, when people hear high claims of certitude (“the theory is irrefutable,” etc.) about theories in the soft sciences, that just happen to align with cultural demands, then red flags are going to pop-up.
Perhaps a better strategy, at least for some readers, would be to discuss the details of the evidence, and why it is so compelling, in a non tendentious way. There must be a paper, or web site, with such a discussion.
I guess I was too quick with my story, but I did not just state that it’s irrefutable. My speech included many details. Maybe too many details, which is why they were so dismissive. I talked about the specific reasons why the different changes on ocean vs land and poles vs tropics all fit with the theoretical expectations.
However, I feel like I can never win in this respect. If I try to simplify things I get scolded for being naive because the world is a big complicated system, but when I try to be thorough people just tune out and don’t absorb what I’m saying.
There are sooooo many resources I could direct people too, but they never read them. There’s actually a really great paper that lays out 3 lines of solid evidence using satellite data. It’s very succinct and thorough, but it’s also too technical for non-scientists.
So going back to what I said above, I think that no strategy is any good when people think scientists have nefarious motives and can’t be trusted.
Agree with your points.
Quote: “There’s actually a really great paper that lays out 3 lines of solid evidence using satellite data.”
That sounds interesting. Perhaps you can share the citation.
I actually did a write up about it years ago,
http://hannahlab.org/benestad-2016-a-mental-picture-of-the-greenhouse-effect/
I was mistaken about it only using satellite data, but I don’t think that’s really an issue.