Tag Archives: science

Gambling on a Lie

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All right, here it is. A list of professional scientific organizations that have issued statements saying that humans are causing the Earth to warm. Thanks to Logical Science for helping in the creation of this list. Keep in mind that, since the list is several years old, it is probably longer today.

  • Academia Brasileira de Ciéncias
  • Académie des Sciences
  • Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei
  • Russian Academy of Sciences
  • National Academy of Sciences
  • Royal Society of Canada
  • Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina
  • Science Council of Japan
  • Academy of Science of South Africa
  • Chinese Academy of Sciences
  • Indian National Science Academy
  • Academia Mexicana de Ciencias
  • Royal Society
  • Australian Academy of Sciences
  • Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for  Sciences  and the Arts
  • Caribbean Academy of Sciences
  • Indonesian Academy of Sciences
  • Royal Irish Academy
  • Academy of Sciences Malaysia
  • Academy Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand
  • Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
  • Union of Concerned Scientists
  • Woods Hole Research Center
  • Intergovernmental Panel on Climate  Change
  • United Nations Framework Convention  on Climate Change
  • American Association for the  Advancement of Science
  • American Meteorological Society
  • National Research Council
  • Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
  • Federal Climate Change Science Program
  • National Oceanic and Atmospheric  Administration
  • UN Project on Climate Variability and Predictability
  • American Geophysical Union
  • Geological Society o f America
  • American Chemical Society
  • Geological Society of London
  • Institution of Engineers Australia
  • American Association of State Climatologists
  • US Geological Survey
  • National Center for Atmospheric  Research
  • NASA
  • World Meteorological Organization
  • United Nations Environment Program
  • Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences
  • International Council on Science
  • State of the Canadian Cryosphere
  • Environmental Protection Agency
  • American Astronomical Society
  • Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
  • American Institute of Physics
  • Pew Center on Climate Change
  • InterAcademy Council
  • World Health Organization
  • American Quaternary Association
  • Network of African Science Academies
  • European Science Foundation
  • American Society for Microbiology
  • American Public Health Association
  • World Federation of Public Health Associations
  • Institute of Biology
  • Society of American Foresters
  • The Wildlife Society
  • European Federation of Geologists
  • European Geosciences Union
  • International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics
  • American Physical Society

As of 2007, no professional scientific organization in the world publicly disputes that humans are causing the Earth to warm. (No, the Heartland Institute is not a professional scientific organization.)

As we discussed in Making Up Your Own Science, whatever objections an individual holds to the theory of anthropogenic climate change have almost certainly been addressed by the folks metioned above. They know that the climate has changed in the past. They know that the urban heat island effect can cause regional warming. They know that volcanoes emit carbon dioxide. And yet they are still saying that humans are causing the Earth to warm. What does this tell you?

1) They could be right. They could have satisfactory explanations for all of these objections.

2) They could be ignorant. You, the average individual who thinks global warming stopped in 1998, might be smarter and more thorough than 97.4% of climatologists and all of the aforementioned organizations put together.

3) They could be lying. The entire scientific community might be composed of liberal extremists who are plotting to destroy capitalism and free trade.

Which of these outcomes seems most likely?

How sure are you? What if you were wrong?

Are you willing to gamble that the entire scientific community is incompetent or lying?

Are you willing to bet your life, your civilization, and your species on it?

Normal Scientific Practice

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Scientists debate each other’s work all the time. In fact, they’re encouraged to do so. The peer-review process was set up so that every misconception, assumption, or source of error in a scientific article could be nailed down and corrected. Scientists look for mistakes. It’s practically in their job description.

Normal scientific practice states that, should a scientist find a mistake in someone else’s work, they approach them about it, either directly or through the journal which published the article. If the criticism is deemed to be valid, the author will make any necessary changes and/or the journal will publish a retraction.

That’s what happened when the “hockey stick graph” attracted some criticism. The graph was sent to the National Academy of Sciences, who had some concerns about the way the graph was used, but generally found it to be legitimate. The IPCC revised its data, and came out with a new graph – a whole hockey team. The criticism lead to revision which led to further advancement of knowledge and data.

Directing concerns to the authors is probably the best way to fix any scientific errors as it leads to superior data. It is accepted and encouraged.

So, then, why do so many climate change skeptics turn to the media or the Internet instead?

It’s hard to watch Fox News, visit the website of a conservative think tank, or browse the blogosphere without finding someone who claims that climate change is false and they can prove it.

If you really can prove it, I’d like to say to these people, tell the scientists about it. Find specific mistakes in their methods and ask them to change them. If they don’t, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re biased against any data that contradicts their theory. You might just not fully understand climatology and why the scientists use the methods they do – especially if you’re not trained in climate science.

Ranting about the inaccuracies of climatology online or to a journalist isn’t going to fix those inaccuracies. All it’s going to do is confuse the public. If confusing the public is your goal, please stop, because our children’s lives are at stake here. If you really do believe that you can prove that climate change is false, direct it to the people who study this issue. For the betterment of human knowledge, please approach the scientists, not the media.

Climate Denial Crock of the Week

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In the popular media, Youtube, and the blogosphere, you get an awful lot of compelling documentaries of why climate change is nonexistent/natural/a global conspiracy. You don’t get as many grassroots projects from the advocates, at least not as many as you’d expect given the scientific distribution on the theory.

I recently came across a fantastic video series by Peter Sinclair, an American journalist. Keep in mind our credibility spectrum – Mr Sinclair is only a professional individual – but it appears that he cites the professional scientific organizations at the top of the spectrum almost exclusively.

Each of his videos deals with a common objection to the mainstream scientific view on climate change. Here’s his most recent, and my favourite, which addresses the all-too-common-claim that “Global warming stopped in 1998.”

If you enjoyed that, here are links to all his videos to date. Watch whichever ones strike your fancy.

“The Antarctic isn’t warming, so the planet, overall, isn’t changing at all.”

“It’s cold. So there’s no climate change.”

“The Arctic ice is growing, not declining.”

“Global warming is caused by the sun.”

“Climate change is a natural, unstoppable, 1500-year cycle.”

“The scientists were all warning of an ice age in the 70s, so why should we trust them now?”

“The urban heat island effect is skewing the data.”

“Every other planet in our solar system is also warming, so we can’t be causing it.”

“But lots of scientists signed the Oregon Petition saying climate change was false!”

“It was warmer during the Medeival Warm Period.”

“Al Gore said the ocean was going to rise more than the IPCC did.”

“Temperature determines carbon dioxide level, not the other way around.”

“Global warming stopped in 1998.”

Have fun and spread it around to your friends.

Making Up Your Own Science

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Why do so many people believe they’re more qualified on the topic of climate change than the climatologists themselves?

Visit Youtube, the editorial page of a newspaper, or even the blogosphere. All over places like these, where opinions can be expressed freely, there are countless people who

1) have little to no scientific training,

2) rely solely on the popular media for information on climate change,

3) are obviously unfamiliar with elementary principles of climatology, such as the Milankovitch cycles, El Nino and La Nina, or the importance of long trend lines in graphical measurements. (Sorry, not all of these sources are that high up on our credibility spectrum, but their citations are great.)

But, most importantly,

4) They seem to believe that their opinion of the forcings and mechanisms of a complex system such as climate, as well as its basis in physics and chemistry, is more noteworthy than the opinions of the professional scientific organizations at the top of our credibility spectrum.

In simpler terms, “It doesn’t matter what the scientists say. I’m smarter than all of them put together.”

Why you need science

Climatology is not as simple as you might expect after watching An Inconvenient Truth. The folks at NASA don’t just look at two graphs that are both going up and automatically assume that they’re correlated.

Climatology is every bit as complicated, thorough, and dry as any other area of science. In fact, it is deeply entrenched in the physical sciences. As an over-eager student who is trying to understand more aspects of climatology than I have the scientific foundation for, I continually run into this entrenchment.

For example, the exact process of how a CO2 or CH4 molecule absorbs infrared energy and thus acts as a greenhouse gas involves quantum chemistry that I haven’t learned yet. I’m still puzzling over the difference between the direct cooling effect of aerosols versus the cloud albedo effect. I hear all the time that climate change is based on the Laws of Thermodynamics, but I have yet to find out what those laws are.

It’s not easy stuff. It’s not something just anyone could grasp entirely in an afternoon. It’s something that requires years of study.

If I told you that parts of the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets were thickening, chances are that you’d think, “More ice = cooling, therefore the world is not warming.”

In fact, these thickening ice sheets are a sign of warming. The thickening areas were previously so cold that the air could not hold enough moisture for significant precipitation. With warming, the air has more capacity for humidity, and precipitation falls in the form of snow. But it’s still too cold for that snow to melt, so it builds up and thickens the ice sheet.

It’s not as simple as temperature = climate. You have to look at changes in humidity and precipitation over time. You have to use a lot of maps. You have to factor in wind and ocean currents.

You have to know what you’re doing to make an accurate analysis of climate data. If you haven’t studied physical geography, atmospheric physics, or climate modelling at the post-secondary level, chances are that you hold misconceptions and assumptions that are skewing your interpretation.

I know this is true for me. I don’t pretend to know everything about climate change. I have an awfully long way to go. I’m just a student.

The more I learn about climatology, the more I realize how little I know.

So please, have some humility. Realize that it might be wiser to trust the experts than to try to analyze it all yourself. Don’t automatically assume that NASA, IPCC, the 32 national academies of science that endorsed the IPCC, and every other professional scientific organization on the planet are completely wrong just because somebody said they were.

Chances are, there are satisfactory explanations for whatever objections you may hold to their methods. Yes, they are making sure the sun is not responsible. No, they weren’t all saying an ice age was coming in the 70s. Yes, they are aware carbon dioxide is plant food. These are smart people. Accept that they might know more about climate change than you do. It’s not such a terrible thing.

To conclude, there are many things in life, such as fashion, political beliefs, and spirituality, where all opinions are equal, and nobody is justified to tell anybody what they should believe.

Science isn’t one of them.

Why They Don’t Debate on TV

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I read an interesting article not long ago that claimed that scientists were not debating climate change enough. It said that they were refusing to debate skeptics on television and in the media, as they “knew they would lose”. Examples of “believers” who apparently refused such debates were Al Gore, David Suzuki, and well-known climatologists such as Hansen and Weaver.

Could it be that these advocates are refusing debates not because they “know they will lose”, but because they know that such a media-ravaged spectacle will have no scientific value?

If you look at these people, two – Gore and Suzuki – do not specialize in climatology. They are purely lobbyists and media figures (Suzuki is also a geneticist). For the purpose of determining how much debate goes into creating working conclusions on climate change, we should look at  the top of the credibility spectrum. Let’s exclude An Inconvenient Truth, editorials, films, and narrative non-fiction (such as Keeping Our Cool by Dr Weaver). These have not been peer-reviewed. They are (hopefully) based upon scientific conclusions, but would not be acceptable to cite in a research paper about climate change. They were created purely to reach the general public and to relay a certain political or ethical message.

What we will include are the documents which drive government policy, which have been peer-reviewed (or are peer-reviewed compilations of peer-reviewed science, such as the IPCC reports) and which have been created by sources at the top of our credibility spectrum. NASA is a good source. So is the IPCC. So are the 32 national academies of science that have approved the IPCC. Peer-reviewed scientific journals such as Nature, Science, or EOS are also credible.

This is where it all starts. This is where climate change theory began. It wasn’t cooked up by the government, the media, or someone like Al Gore. These are the people that objectively study details of global warming that you or I can’t even understand.

Back to the debate thing

There would be no point in Al Gore facing down a skeptical journalist in a “scientific debate” on prime-time TV. One of two scenarios would occur:

1) The debate would be of a true scientific nature (which would be surprising as neither of the sources are even climatologists). They would be talking about things like Dansgaard-Oeschger events, Milankovitch cycles, and the solubility of carbonic acid in water as a function of temperature. To the average viewer, it would be really boring. They wouldn’t understand a word of it. Nobody would watch. The television station would declare it a failure.

2) The debate would resort to name-calling and ridiculous claims. The journalist would go on about it all being a liberal conspiracy. Al Gore would go on about ethical responsibilities. The journalist would take advantage of the audience’s lack of scientific knowledge and claim that, as CO2 levels often lag behind temperature, climate change wasn’t real at all. Al Gore would take advantage of the audience’s lack of scientific knowledge and claim that Hurricane Katrina could be directly attributed to a warming planet. Scientists all over the world would shake their heads. The public would get even more confused.

You can have a scientific discussion. You can have a debate that becomes a media spectacle. It’s much harder to do both at once.

Scientists aren’t lawyers. They don’t each try to prove opposing arguments. Scientists aren’t politicians. They don’t try to make their ideas interesting for the general public. Scientists are seekers of truth, or the closest to truth humans can get, regarding the physical world.

Getting closer to that truth requires a lot of second-guessing, a lot of checking and revising and admitting that you’re wrong. It requires looking at every possible outcome and deciding which is the most probable. It requires inspecting new evidence whenever it comes up. It is “debating” in a gentler, more objective, more dry sense of the word.

So yes, scientists do debate in their own way. It’s called peer-review. It involves all that second-guessing, checking, and revising we just mentioned. It involves considering every objection. It involves addressing every objection that is deemed relevant. The sources we listed above – NAS, IPCC, Nature – peer-review all of their publications.

If this skeptical journalist had a new idea about climate change, he or she should get a degree, study their idea meticulously, write it up in the form of an article and submit it to a peer-review institution. That’s the normal scientific practice. Spreading their scientific hypotheses around the media without first passing their work through a peer-review process shows that they’re trying to influence the public, not educate them.

Go do some reading about how claims like “climate change is caused by the sun” or “it’s a natural cycle” have stood up to peer-review. Go see what the qualified, credible, objective scientific theories have found. Go see just how much research the scientific community has done about solar activity or natural cycles.

Yes, scientists do debate about climate change.

They just don’t do it on TV.

Artificial Balance

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All issues have two (or more) sides. We can probably all agree on that. But are they always two equal sides?

Journalists are trained to always present both sides of an issue with equal weight. This works well for matters of politics. Got the Conservative? Get the Liberal. (That’s Republican and Democrat, respectively, for our American friends.) It works for policy – reporting the pros and cons of building a new bridge vs not building a new bridge. Journalistic balance is appropriate for matters which concern personal opinion, where everyone’s view is as credible as anyone else’s, and you don’t need a PhD to understand the stuff.

But what about matters of science?

Remember high school science class? Did they present both sides of absolutely every topic with equal weight? Did they say to you, “This is the evidence for and against the existence of photosynthesis. You can form your own personal opinion”? Did they do the same with Newton’s Laws, chemical reactions, or the idea of a heliocentric universe? Of course not. It would just confuse you further, and it was unnecessary as the ideas being taught were widely accepted in the scientific community.

So why should climate change be any different?

“Climate change is still being debated,” you might say. “Scientists are split over whether or not it’s happening, and whether or not we’re causing it.”

And that, my friends, is where the media comes back into the story.

Let’s hear what Ross Gelbspan has to say in his book The Heat is On.

“The professional canon of journalistic fairness requires reporters who write about a controversy to present points of view. When the issue is of a political of social nature, fairness – presenting the most compelling arguments of both sides with equal weight – is a fundamental check on biased reporting. But this canon causes problems when it is applied to the issue of science. It seems to demand that journalists present competing points of view on a scientific question as though they had equal weight, when actually they do not.”

We’ve previously discussed how there is wide agreement over the existence of anthropogenic climate change among individual scientists. Among professional scientific organizations, the numbers are even higher. As soon as you tune into the discussions of scientists, instead of only what you hear in the media, it’s clear that climate change was accepted long ago. Right now, they’re debating technicalities such as when the Arctic will be free of summer ice, how quickly feedback mechanisms will work, and how much emission reduction is necessary.

But the media hasn’t caught onto this. The media likes a controversy, and they don’t want to be accused of only presenting one side. So they present the opinions of climate scientists as 50-50, instead of the 97-3 that Doran and Zimmerman determined.

What kind of balance is this, when the fringe opinions are hugely over-represented, and the vast majority are hugely under-represented? Does that not cause more bias than we were trying to avoid?

*Further reading: Misguided “Balance” in Science Journalism by Chris Mooney*

The Importance of Error Statements

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Scientific error is unavoidable. There is a very good chance that whatever measurements we take will be slightly off. There is even a small chance that our conclusions are completely wrong. We accept that we don’t know everything. We live with it. We do the best we can.

Stating error and uncertainty is required in peer-reviewed science. Quite simply, it increases the author’s credibility. When you admit that you might be wrong, people feel more inclined to trust you. You seem like the kind of person that would admit to mistakes, and continually revise your findings to improve them as much as possible.

Something you hear a lot from climate change skeptics is something along the lines of, “We’re not completely sure if humans are changing the climate. Therefore, we shouldn’t waste money on reducing our emissions.” To me, it often seems like the people making these statements are exploiting the natural uncertainty of science, doing everything they can to make the uncertainty of climatology seem unusual. My favourite example of this can be read here.

If you go and read a peer-reviewed scientific report on any topic at all, you’ll see that the uncertainty over anthropogenic climate change isn’t really that unusual. We’re not completely sure about how gravity works. We’re not sure if light is a particle or a wave (or a particle that’s a wave, or a wave that’s a particle, etc). In fact, there are no conclusions in scientific articles that claim to be infallible.

This doesn’t mean there are two equal sides fighting over every topic you can imagine. In a lot of the cases, scientists have pretty much made up their mind. But they must, and always do, remain open to the possibility that they could be completely wrong.

Let’s look at the quantitative explanation of some terms of likelihood used by the IPCC. Extremely unlikely refers to a <5% chance. Virtually certain refers to a >99% chance. The numbers 0% and 100% are non-existent. They never say that something will definitely happen, or definitely not happen.

Check out the claims from the scientific organizations at the top of our credibility spectrum. Read the statements on climate change from the national academies of science of every major industrialized nation. Read what the folks at NASA have to say. Watch for the error measurements, and uncertain words like “evidence for” or “reason to believe”.

The important part

And then, more often than not, a lot of the people who said “Climate change is too uncertain” then turn around and make claims with no acknowledgement that they could be wrong. Let’s find some of the most extreme examples of this phenomenon….anonymous YouTube comments.

“The Earth has been heating up for thousands of years at a steady rate and it has nothing to do with people.”

“If these findings were anywhere near accurate, then I would see changes on at least a weekly basis. But nothing.”

“Nothing is significantly wrong that Mother Nature cannot put right.”

“I don’t think CO2 causes global warming, not at all.”

When I see comments like these – which are, sadly, extremely common – I wish I could say to every one of them, “What if you were wrong?”

I realize I could be wrong. It’s something I came to terms with long ago. I could be totally wrong about all this climate change stuff (in fact, I’d love to be). That’s why I support multi-benefit policies, that will help areas like the economy or health. If climate change turns out to be nonexistent/natural/a global conspiracy, at least our action will have brought us some good.

But what if all these anonymous YouTubers were wrong?

All those people who are so certain that we’re causing no change in the climate.

What if they were wrong? Can you imagine what the consequences could be?

Is this really something worth questioning, when there is so much agreement, and the stakes are so high?

Is this really a gamble worth taking?

Scientific Agreement Quantified

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You hear the term “scientific consensus” thrown around all the time in climate change. Al Gore claims absolute consensus. Many skeptics claim none at all. Earlier this year, Peter Doran and his student Maggie Zimmerman, from the University of Illinois, published the results of a poll aimed at quantifying the degree of scientific agreement on climate change.

Peter Doran is a publishing climatologist, so he falls into the most credible category of individuals on our credibility spectrum. The poll was published in EOS, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. EOS is a peer-reviewed journal, which falls even higher on our credibility spectrum than a publishing climatologist. I think we can establish strong credibility for this poll.

Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change (click on the link for the most complete summary you can get without an EOS account) polled 3146 Earth scientists on their opinion on climate change. The summary describes the details of how the poll was carried out, for anyone who is questioning objectivity.

First, the poll asked, “When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?” Overall, 90% of participants answered “risen”, as did 96.2% of actively publishing climatologists, the highest level of specialization categorized in the study.

The second question asked, “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?” As seen below, 82% of participants answered “yes”, as did 97.4% of actively publishing climatologists. Note that the darkest blue bar represents the general public, as seen in a recent Gallup poll.

Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in chaning global mean temperatures?

Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?

The poll noted that the level of agreement on anthropogenic global warming increased with the level of specialization. They also noted that the public perception of debate was, obviously, largely unfounded. We’ll be talking a lot more about perceived debate in the weeks to come here at ClimateSight.

The results of this poll are not surprising to me. In a way they make me happy, as they confirm that my previous perception of scientific agreement was well founded. But they also make me sad. 97% of the world’s most qualified individuals on this topic agree that we’re affecting the climate – something which is generally very negative as, with climate, stability is best. As David Suzuki said, “We are playing a crap game with the only home we have.”

How it All Ends

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For anyone who hasn’t yet heard of these video series –

Greg Craven is a high school teacher from the States who put together six hours of video explaining why we should act on climate change. Don’t be scared by the “six hour” thing – all his arguments are condensed into the first, 10-minute long video.

Still skeptical? Chances are, whatever you’re thinking of is covered in the other five hours and fifty minutes. Check out the rest of the videos here.