There's a HUGE discussion going on in the blogosphere about the global warming data. My dad keeps sending me links on it.
I couldn't care less. If people that I respect say that that there isn't global warming, then okay. For the record, I need more evidence that than commentary from Powerline and Little Green Footballs.
Apt. 11d 
Hey, I’m having this same with my husband (almost identical, actually, down to the links to Powerline, which I also said I would take as absolutely no authority whatsoever). My husband is actually quite knowledgeable about the subject (in a very ancient history, he actually modeled chemical reactions in the upper stratosphere, or something like that). So, it’s particularly frustrating when he sends me links to Powerline to prove something. Next, I ask him, will he send me something from Fox?
McArdle alluded to the discussion (which concerns the release of emails of a climate change institute in England) and dismissed it the same way that I would. Nothing that’s been released suggests that the practice of the science in the field is any different than in any other field.
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I’ve read a number of threads on this, and I’ve seen several people state that the computer code used for the models is very amateurish and ad hoc. I wouldn’t know, myself, but it’s one angle of approach that would be accessible to a technically savvy non-climatologist.
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My experience with people who know computer code is that they are quick to announce their superiority to anyone else. Climatologists aren’t necessarily code people; there is a certain amount of statistical know-how that needs knowing, but basically, when you do research, you rely on existing products, no? You don’t create code from scratch.
I’m a little sensitive on this subject and sympathetic to the scientists. In another life, my e-mail was hacked and the results were upsetting and thoughts were attributed to me that were taken out of context.
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When it comes to coding, being “amateurish and ad hoc” does not necessarily mean the resulting calculations are incorrect. It could mean it’s not elegantly coded, or difficult to maintain over time (which again does not necessarily impair accuracy), or may perform sluggishly, not scale up, etc. You would have to see their QA plans and results to really know how bulletproof their work was.
I guess I see why even highly rational people are so eager to disavow global warming research. It’s really scary.
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I can assure you that the climate models are not “amateurish and ad hoc.” Hundreds of people have spent years building up a base of climate modeling software, validating it along the way in comparison to the data we have from other sources. Some of the software is written in Fortran, which may be where the snide comments are coming from. But there hasn’t been any push to re-write all the code in some newer language because re-writing thousands of lines of code is a huge job, and then it will all need to be extensively re-validated before the results can be used. It’s easier to keep on training grad students in Fortran.
As Paul Krugman said on the Sunday morning policy wonk panel, those leaked emails are academics talking to each other. This is no different than the side conversation in any academic field. And probably in business, too. Can you imagine if the emails of CEOs with snide comments about their competitors were revealed?
Science is not some golden perfect one-time experiment, it is a process of proposing hypotheses, testing them, learning from your results and moving forward. Climate change science has a strong basis in fact, even if some of the details are still under discussion.
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There’s lots of history of settled science and its defenders: Agassiz at Harvard against the Darwin theory of evolution, Lysenko and Lamarck for inheritance of acquired characteristics, gastroenterologists against infectious origin of ulcers, Lewontin and Gould et al against Wilson and sociobiology, and later against Jensen/Murray/Herrnstein on heritability of IQ. When I was a kid, there were inert gases, and one day suddenly somebody had made xenon hexafluoride – that one didn’t get much resistance, as you could see the crystals. Prions as a source of mad cow, that upset everybody, that proteins could replicate without nucleic acids. That one was messy. Copernicus, Galileo. Often, the settled science is absolutely right, and the challengers are obsessed nutters, I think the cold fusionists and AIDS-not-from HIV people would be in that area. So is Al Gore the new Trofim Lysenko? Is Phil Jones Alfonso X, making ever more complex epicycles?
Comments above sneer at Powerline, and that’s not where I’d look for knowledge, either. I have had doubts seeded by Warren Meyer at Coyote Blog, who has photoed a number of the temperature measuring stations and pointed out that they have been surrounded, over time, by asphalt parking lots and that this seems a plausible reason that temps recorded have gone up in the same location.
It seems to me that the attempts to squelch other views were unseemly, as was discarding that raw data. It’s prudent to try hard to reconstruct these conclusions from the ground up, and by folks who aren’t determined going in to produce their desired answer, before we spend trillions of dollars reconstructing the economy.
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Global warming or not – isn’t it just a more prudent choice to live as sustainably as we can? Everything in moderation and all that. Doing better with less. Focusing on relationships rather than consuming “stuff”. Just slower living in general.
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“Global warming or not – isn’t it just a more prudent choice to live as sustainably as we can? Everything in moderation and all that. Doing better with less. Focusing on relationships rather than consuming “stuff”. Just slower living in general.”
Indeed, but part of slower living might be putting off such things as the purchase of a new $40,000 hybrid.
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We’ve circled around this issue of science-based decision making on a bunch of other issues. Most recently, I encountered it on the report on established/emerging/useless (they didn’t use the last word) treatments for autism. The immediate fear in the autism community was that the decision making was financially motivated (i.e. saying that expensive treatments were emerging) and that the political decision makers would draw the line between what they would pay for between established and emerging. The intent of the scientists was certainly neither of those things . They were looking at the evidence, and some expensive treatments made it into the established list. They chose the word “emerging” to suggest that these treatments deserved further study.
But these nuances of science get translated into binary decision making (both in evidence based medicine) and in public policy. So, the scientists doing the science end up explaining, over and over again, why the nuances don’t make a difference for the big conclusions (for example, the asphalt around temperature sensors, which they are aware of and correct for).
Now, in spite of this understanding, I think these guys were playing a version of the game that I think is wrong — the explanations for the non-release of data are standard, among competitive j*ks who do not want to release their data, and, unfortunately neither journals nor granting agencies do a good job of enforcement (for selfish motives of their own). I’d rather people were more generous with data they control (remember the dead sea scrolls — that was terrible). I think that when people show an example, they should show their “average” rather than their best. But, those are all pretty standard elisions of purity. They rarely undermine the overall conclusions (and there’s no reason to believe that they have in this debate).
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Good Intelligence Officers don’t read their own mail–they read that of the enemy. For those that post regularly here I might suggest a trip over to Pajamas Media and read an article by a Professor of Mathematical Physics from Tulane named Frank J. Tripler entitled: “Climategate: The Skeptical Scientists View.” There are several other articles on the subject there as well, but I’d start there.
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It’s not a discussion, it’s the denialists eagerly grasping at a new straw.
http://mediamatters.org/research/200912010002
has actual facts. You don’t need to be a scientist to understand misrepresentation: which is all there is to this kerfuffle. A nice summary from the Media Matters article: “REALITY: Distortions of illegally obtained documents from one group of scientists do not undermine overwhelming consensus.”
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And, if you want to read a good scientific summary of responses to the same tired arguments:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/
Very nice. I stumbled on it following Laura’s links to LGF. It’s cited, and addresses the things the skeptics will bring up head on. It’s going to be a good one to share.
BTW, the questions need to be kept separate in a scientific analysis. 1) is there a global rise in temperature? 2) is this change a new trend, or part of a cyclical pattern? 3) is the global temperature change a result of changes in CO2 concentrations? 4) is the change caused by human activity? 5) is the change caused by human production of CO2. Those are some questions about global warming.
What to do about it is a separate question, and where the real debate should lie.
My husband is a skeptic because he’s wary of alarmist arguments (Malthus and we’re going to run out of food, the ZPG movement, the global cooling, the Y2K disaster, the H1N1 alarms). But part of the response of anti-alarmists should be to talk about what should be done given the scientific conclusions.
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Speaking of what to do, I like the Pedant General’s global warming flow chart:
http://www.devilskitchen.me.uk/2009/11/crudgate-why-this-cant-be-swept-under.html
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My husband is a skeptic because he’s wary of alarmist arguments (Malthus and we’re going to run out of food, the ZPG movement, the global cooling, the Y2K disaster, the H1N1 alarms).
That’s pretty much my view also. Of course, truly alarming thing do happen.
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“That’s pretty much my view also. Of course, truly alarming thing do happen. ”
Indeed, and, as someone else wrote above, there is, balanced against those who like alarm, those who are resistant to the message, and want to find a reason not to believe the alarm.
But, the science itself, especially the details of whether there’s been a global warming trend can be discussed separately from the alarm about the future, or what the alarm should cause us to do.
And, as John Cook writes at Skeptical Science, “When you read through the many global warming skeptic arguments, a pattern emerges. Each skeptic argument misleads by focusing on one small piece of the puzzle while ignoring the broader picture.”
That’s the problem with a lot of “skeptic” arguments in science (on ID, for example, or vaccines).
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And, as John Cook writes at Skeptical Science, “When you read through the many global warming skeptic arguments, a pattern emerges. Each skeptic argument misleads by focusing on one small piece of the puzzle while ignoring the broader picture.”
Yes, but my concern is that people views counter to the consensus won’t get funding.
And things that are indeed a ‘small piece of the puzzle’ from the point of science are very likely to be ‘my entire livelihood’ to somebody else.
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The people with views counter to the consensus are getting plenty of funding. They are getting it from the oil companies and their think tanks. Whether they choose to do science with that money or not is their decision.
Seriously, this whole thing about how the scientists are making up scary scenarios to get rich! is baloney. Academics fighting for research grants to pay their grad students and post-docs aren’t getting rich, though I admit they are mostly earning comfortable salaries. Lapsed academics taking oil industry money to give speeches saying climate change is a hoax might be getting rich, though.
And things that are indeed a ‘small piece of the puzzle’ from the point of science are very likely to be ‘my entire livelihood’ to somebody else.
Whether or not someone’s own research focuses on a small aspect of the system (which is what I assume you mean by “entire livelihood”) to be a credible scientist they should understand the wider context of evidence within which that small piece lives.
Or do you mean that saying “oil is bad” eliminates jobs for all the people who work on oil rigs, and so on? That is certainly true, but we need to find better solutions to that than “Let’s fry the earth to avoid losing some jobs.” Which jobs will certainly disappear anyway when the fuel is gone. Ask all the people in coal-mining communities how well things go once the mines are empty.
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The people with views counter to the consensus are getting plenty of funding. They are getting it from the oil companies and their think tanks. Whether they choose to do science with that money or not is their decision.
Given that source of funding, could they get their results accepted regardless of their rigor? That’s my concern there.
Or do you mean that saying “oil is bad” eliminates jobs for all the people who work on oil rigs, and so on? That is certainly true, but we need to find better solutions to that than “Let’s fry the earth to avoid losing some jobs.” Which jobs will certainly disappear anyway when the fuel is gone. Ask all the people in coal-mining communities how well things go once the mines are empty.
Oil and coal sources often do not go away within the time periods that most people would think of as a working life. I live in a area where coal has been mined for a couple of hundred years and it’s still a going industry.
There are huge distributional differences in how fast you transition and how you encourage/require that transition. That’s why I tend to assume the alarmist language is at least partially a ploy. Those putting out the alarmist language aren’t the ones who are going to be paying more of the cost of the transition so they want to start the transition before working out the details. Those more likely to pay the costs are going to want to hammer out more detail before starting.
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We’ve talked about the utility of the alarmist language in other public debates (most recently on breastfeeding, perhaps?)
Unfortunately, delay can always be an answer to anything — I’d say the right debate, from the point of view who either feel alarm, or think that something needs to be done, is to distribute the pain. Moving away from coal, for example, shouldn’t fall solely on the shoulders of the miners. Demanding that China limit it’s CO2 production can’t ignore the fact that China’s per capita emissions are 5/person and the US, Canada, and Australia are over 20/person. We need to talk about these things, and the costs. But, the details are irrelevant to the big picture that CO2 emissions are causing unprecedented global warming.
A nice source for this analysis is Sustainable Energy, by David MacKay, you can download your own copy for free: http://www.withouthotair.com/ (’cause MacKay decided he didn’t want to make money off the subject). In this book, MacKay talks about the details of different changes in human civilization and their impact on Co2 emissions and global warming. Those are the details we need to be discussing.
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Moving away from coal, for example, shouldn’t fall solely on the shoulders of the miners.
I’m actually talking about more than just that. I’m expecting that the wealthy will get $60,000 electric cars and everone else will get a bus that sucks because a carbon tax has dumped 200% new riders on it and everybody who could insist on a decent transit system bought the $60,000 electric car. Kind of like with public schools in urban areas once the middle class decided to leave.
If there is a carbon tax, the wealthy will be able to drill geo-thermal heat sinks, put down solar panels and keep their material standards the same. And then they’ll make smug TV commercials telling me to wear a sweater and take shorter showers.
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“the wealthy will be able to drill geo-thermal heat sinks, put down solar panels and keep their material standards the same. And then they’ll make smug TV commercials telling me to wear a sweater and take shorter showers.”
Yeah, that’s true, and the people in China feel that way about your car and refrigerator. But knowing that doesn’t avoid the issue of what to do if there’s a real and significant threat, one that can only be addressed very slowly. I think folks who want delay have to think about the math and what it means, too. Yeah, some of them might decide a p(of destruction of human civilization as we know it in X years (where X is sufficiently large and p is sufficiently small) is fine and dandy, but I want to hear that argument made straight out with different proposed p’s and X’s. We can balance those against present day costs, for everyone.
I for one, believe that hydro & nuclear (two non-CO2 emitting power sources that are not a favorite among environmentalists) & “clean coal” (i.e. coal sequestration) have to be explored further. That’s one of the points of the MacKay book — that small scale changes (don’t plug in your mobile phone, turn off the lights, turn the temperature down) aren’t going to reduce CO2 emissions significantly enough to make a difference.
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Yeah, that’s true, and the people in China feel that way about your car and refrigerator.
They are very easy for me to ignore.
But I agree about the hydro and nuclear (nervously, because PA has had trouble with dams and reactors).
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MH, you may be right that scientists funded by industry would have a harder time getting their work accepted by peer review. That’s a valid point and it is reasonable to expect that rigorous science should be published with a notation about the funding — they might need to be twice as rigorous to get accepted, given the bias assumed from their funding. Sorry, but I feel the same way about pharmaceutical companies funding medical research. They have a bias, which government funding does not, and therefore must bend over backwards to show they are trustworthy.
You talk about transitions and speeds of change, and that is all important to work out as part of the details of our response, as BJ said. We should be looking at how to protect communities that are at risk during the upheaval to come. What isn’t useful is saying “We don’t need to do a darn thing because the whole thing is a hoax.” That gives us no room to start thoughtfully planning a range of responses.
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MH,
That sounds horribly plausible. Take, for example, the upshot of Cash for Clunkers (which was in part inspired by global warming fears, as well of course by the desire to prop up the US auto industry):
1. cheap, viable older cars were destroyed and removed from the market where they could have served poor folk as survival transportation
2. the carmakers got a temporary spike in sales
3. in a shaky economy with 10% unemployment, buyers lured in by Cash for Clunkers got tied down to a $400-a-month payment for the next 60 months (that’s approximately average for US car loans)
4. taxpayers have to pay $4500 per car engine destroyed
Cash for Clunkers was a bad idea on so many different levels, but I think that’s what we’re going to get more of if we jump from the science of climate change to the policy without an intermediary stop in economics or common sense.
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“Yeah, that’s true, and the people in China feel that way about your car and refrigerator.
They are very easy for me to ignore. ”
Am I allowed to the same thing about the peasants who can’t afford the 60K hybrid? I mean, really, you should all ride the bus (and eat cake).
(and, yes, the point of this, is that we can have this discussion, once we stop ignoring the conclusions of the science)
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Sorry, but I feel the same way about pharmaceutical companies funding medical research. They have a bias, which government funding does not, and therefore must bend over backwards to show they are trustworthy.
The percentage of qualified medical researchers who have not been funded by a pharmaceutical company at some point in their career is probably lower than the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere.
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Am I allowed to the same thing about the peasants who can’t afford the 60K hybrid? I mean, really, you should all ride the bus (and eat cake).
Not if I can help it. When it comes to politics, my main goal is the maintaince and strengthening of the U.S. middle class relative to both ends of the economic spectrum domestically and the rest of the world. I can see how that is threatened without science.
(By U.S. middle class, I mean people who have enough skill/capital to provide for themselves at least most of the time, but who can’t quit working.)
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I wonder how many individuals who denied a link between CFCs and ozone depletion are now doing the same with human-produced greenhouse gases and climate change. I don’t know really know where to begin such a search, but I suspect that it might be instructive.
(Madeleine, there are reasons to be less skeptical about privately-funded pharmaceutical research — considered as a whole — but I suspect that is a topic for another day. I reported on Germany’s biotech industry for a few years, and continue to follow it to a degree.)
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“I wonder how many individuals who denied a link between CFCs and ozone depletion are now doing the same with human-produced greenhouse gases and climate change.”
Lots, of course, but consider how different the two are. CFCs are pretty exotic compared to CO2. It’s awfully audacious to classify the stuff that we and other animals breathe out and the stuff that plants breathe in a pollutant.
As far as I can see, big corporations are licking their chops over the opportunities that global warming is bringing their way. Throw out your old light bulbs! Buy new bulbs! Junk your old car! Buy a new hybrid! Throw out your old appliances! Buy new Energy Star ones! It goes on and on. I find the whole thing extraordinarily perverse.
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I kind of want a new fridge and range. And a car. It just doesn’t seem like a good time to spend money, especially on a car.
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I am amused that Laura started this thread by saying “I couldn’t care less” and yet a few of us have commandeered her blog to debate the topic because we care a whole bunch.
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I’m amused that she said “I couldn’t care less” instead of “I could care less.” More precise, but rarer.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this environmental stuff and it has occurred to me that the only parts of it that register with me (basically those that boil-down to “consume less”) are those that match what a Franciscan sister will tell a ten-year old. The problem is that messages which work well coming from a woman who took a vow of poverty aren’t nearly as effective when delivered by people with bathrooms bigger than my living room. Everybody wants to lead by giving speeches, not by example.
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OK, I do care. (And, mocking the blog host is perfectly acceptable around here.) The science stuff goes over my head, I admit, but what I find strange and disturbing about this whole debate is the political subtext.
The people who are most gleeful about these memos and have been hammering away at the global warming science for ages aren’t scientists. They can’t understand the details any better than I do. They keep at the topic not because they care all that much about global temperatures, but because they hate the people who discuss global warming. They hate the New York Times, experts of any stripe, authority, elites, intellectuals, NorthEast types, and Obama. They think that if they undermine the credibility of these sources on this one matter than it undermines their authority on everything. Global warming science has become part of the culture war.
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They hate the New York Times, experts of any stripe, authority, elites, intellectuals, NorthEast types, and Obama.
We’re a simple people. We dance. We sing. We read the Style section and realize that this is written by people with whom we share nothing but a language and a right to trial by jury.
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“The people who are most gleeful about these memos and have been hammering away at the global warming science for ages aren’t scientists. They can’t understand the details any better than I do.”
Likewise, the celebrity folk who are most passionate about global warming are very photogenic, love Obama, and would have difficulty dealing with the intellectual burden of managing a Burger King. As a group, Hollywood types tend to glom onto extremely dubious things (Scientology, wacky autism theories, etc.) and to have poor money management skills.
See? Everybody can do ad hominem.
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Yeah, but isn’t that silly? I would like to take the culture war out of this and just let the scientists do their business.
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“Scientists do their business on peer-reviewed papers.”
Did somebody else already put that on a t-shirt?
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Anyway, of course it is a culture war. Globalization has its domestic analogs. Improving transit and communication have brought everybody closer together and this has overturned or weakened local elites across much of the U.S. Back home, people used the referendum procedure to vote down seatbelt laws twice. They knew the evidence. They knew they’d lose the federal money needed to pave the roads if they didn’t have a seatbelt law and that the legislature was going to re-impose the law in a week. They just wanted to give a hearty “Fuck You” to the experts before the inevitable law passed.
A substantial subset of the population views nearly any authority as an infringement on their personal freedom and they are especially suspicious of central authority. (Acceptance of local authority was easier because local authority often drank at the same bar.) It has gotten harder and harder to avoid that central authority, so they smack at it where they can. I’m not entirely unsympathetic to this view.
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“Yeah, but isn’t that silly? I would like to take the culture war out of this and just let the scientists do their business.”
Sure you would, but you were engaging in precisely that kind of us vs. them stuff, which is not the greatest way to call off a culture war.
I actually watched the whole of that Finnish documentary you posted, and it suggests a lot of malfeasance. There is an investigation at Penn State now
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/paper-trail/2009/11/30/penn-state-will-investigate-climategate.html
and Phil Jones is steppping down as head of the CRU
http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/2009/nov/homepagenews/CRUupdate
We’re still in the beginning stages of this.
I understand that fossils fuels will run out eventually, but I don’t think that panic and fear-mongering is helpful, particularly if it drives us into huge outlays on white-elephant technologies that may be obsolete in just a few years and/or environmentally harmful.
Here’s an article on the damage done by the ethanol experiment:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/21/AR2008042102555.html
I’m a new subscriber to Mother Earth News (I subscribed because I liked a newsstand issue on gardening). Upon moving to Texas two years ago and having to deal with three $400+ electric bills in a row our first summer, I became suddenly very interested in geothermal (it’s 65 degrees deep down under the surface!) and solar water heating (although that’s basically what happens in the summer naturally–our water heating bill shrinks to nothing because it comes in warm). I’d also eventually like to set up a water capture system, because while it rains a lot here, it would be nice to save some for when we need it and I despise paying for water. In actual practice, as we’ve gotten used to local conditions, we’ve managed to cut our summer electric bills nearly in half, through some judicious switches to CF bulbs (mostly in areas where the lights are on a long time, and only after the incandescent bulbs burnt out), as well as by changing electric companies and adjusting to warmer indoor temperatures. We’ll do the LED thing when the time comes. We spend a maximum of about $100 a month on gasoline, and it’s generally quite a bit less than that, despite having a car that’s a bit of a gas hog.
Anyway, my point is that solutions need to be local and individual, bottom-up and not top-down so that
failures can be small, cheap and limited, rather than large, expensive and ongoing (it’s generally understood now that ethanol was a bad idea, but who is going to pull the plug now that midwesterners are used to the money?).
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Churches and schools back home are going the geothermal thing in a big way. Given winters where it rarely gets above freezing for weeks at a time and the resulting five figure gas bills, the savings are huge.
And Whole Foods sold rain barrels last summer.
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I have to trust the scientific community on this one. They know a lot more about this stuff than I do and certainly more than the lawyers that post at Powerline. Yes, scientists do get things wrong, but there are enough checks in place so that errors get corrected in time. One lone blogger is never going to sort this stuff out. We’re not talking about a Dan Rather memo here. It’s more complicated than that.
I can’t stand conspiracy theories. They actually make me a little ill. The notion that the scientific community as a whole pulled one over on the American people is absurd.
It may be a pain in the ass to pay for a hybrid. You might not lectures from Matt Damon. You might hate everyone in DC. And nearly everyone hates the people in the Style section of the NYT. But those aren’t good reasons for doubting global warming.
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“And Whole Foods sold rain barrels last summer.”
With mosquito covers?
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“Did somebody else already put that on a t-shirt?”
Speaking of t-shirts and chafing at authority, there’s a Kathy Shaidle quote shirt that says “You’re not smart enough to tell me how to live.”
http://www.hollywoodloser.com/shirts/5feetFury.html
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You might hate everyone in DC…. But those aren’t good reasons for doubting global warming.
Yes, but dragging your ass just to see how hard the other guy will push is an excellent tactic when in a situation where you can’t understand the information. You can’t learn the truth, but you can see if other guy thinks he is telling the truth by what he is willing to yield on.
With mosquito covers?
I think so. There was a screen on top. I don’t have any direct experience. My outdoor water usage isn’t high enough to affect the water bill. My water bill is going up because the sewer authority refinanced its debt using bond insurance to save a few hundred thousand in interest and nothing could ever go wrong with that.
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“You can’t learn the truth, but you can see if other guy thinks he is telling the truth by what he is willing to yield on.”
Like nuclear power?
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I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I’m watching a pre-schooler and getting anti-social ideas.
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“Yes, scientists do get things wrong, but there are enough checks in place so that errors get corrected in time.”
Maybe the release of these emails is the check that corrects the error. Checks and balances in any scientific study include peer review of data, which has been stonewalled by the UEA, apparently to cover their own asses. The data that is the basis for nearly every climate study cannot be validated; it is either missing, compromised or “massaged”, depending on which excuse you read.
I know a little about climate study, but a lot about preserving and defending data from my years in nuclear facilities. This type of treatment of raw data in the nuclear field would get you fired in a minute. I am appalled at the lack of rigor that has been applied to this data , and fear that these people have endangered years of important work by their sloppy conduct of operations.
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