As the Earth's climate continues to change at an accelerating rate, the juggling and magical thinking and outright hypocrisy of climate change deniers continues to accelerate as well. While there are many examples of the remarkable ability of deniers to hold onto mutually contradictory beliefs and ideas, here are four well-worn arguments regularly put forward by deniers in public forums despite the fact that they've all been debunked (over and over and over) by scientists:
Deniers claim that climate models are bad, but they're happy to rely on far less reliable economic models to argue against taking action: One of the classic arguments of climate deniers is that the multitude of climate models is bad. Yet at the very same time, they promote the conclusions of a couple of economic models that say that doing anything about climate change will bankrupt the global economy. In fact, climate models are far superior to economic models. Climate models are far more rigorously tested, far more firmly based in physical reality, and far more unanimous in their projections than the economic models that have been applied to the problem of climate change. Indeed, you can find one set of economic models that says that mitigating greenhouse gases will be relatively cheap and another set that say it will be extremely expensive. You cannot find a state-of-the-art climate model that says the climate won't change with growing greenhouse gas concentrations.
In addition, none of the economic models that look at the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions addresses the other, critical side of the economic argument -- the vast and exponentially increasing costs to society of doing nothing. What's the economic cost, for example, of losing California's snowpack or a species of plant or animal? What's the economic cost of a one-month acceleration in the timing of runoff in major rivers in the western U.S.? What's the economic cost of rising sea level or growing heat stress or more intense storms or changing distributions of plants and animals -- all impacts that are certainly going to occur? Perhaps we can compute some dollar values for some of these things, but we haven't yet, and so no complete estimates are included in cost comparisons. In other words, climate deniers and those who argue against action say that the cure (reducing emissions) is worse that the disease (the impacts of climate change), when we have contradictory estimates of the costs of the cure and no comprehensive estimate of the costs of the disease.
Government action is anathema; the answer is let the free market work (oh, but we can't have markets for carbon): Some climate deniers argue that climate science is wrong because they're driven by a strict ideology that opposes (rightly or wrongly) growing government regulation, while they simultaneously believe that economic free-market approaches are the only way to handle public policy problems like pollution. This is free-market fundamentalism, and while one might agree or disagree with that philosophy, it has no bearing on the validity of climate science. Yet these same free-market ideologues reject market solutions and strategies to control greenhouse gases, such as carbon markets, trading systems, and classic tax programs that would internalize externalities. Thus we have the odd situation where the Federal government is now being forced to regulate greenhouse gases through the USEPA and potentially awkward governmental mechanisms because climate skeptics and deniers in Congress failed to adopt their own preferred market and economic solutions.
Deniers argue that comprehensive observational data on the world's changing climate are wrong, but then point to cold weather in this or that location to argue that the world cannot be warming: While the public may not fully understand the difference between climate and weather, or understand how the world could be warming while it's cold outside, most well-known climate deniers fully understand these distinctions -- they just choose to ignore them in order to make false arguments to and score points with the public and gullible policymakers. Cherry-picking selected data that supports a particular point (i.e., it's cold today), while hiding or ignoring more data that points in exactly the opposite direction (i.e., global average temperatures are rising), is bad science and it leads to bad policy. Just last week Glenn Beck pointed to a snowstorm in Minneapolis as proof that global warming isn't happening. He knows better, but his audience may not.
Another example was the effort by the Bush Administration to argue that they were taking action on climate change and that the US was doing more and better than European countries, when in fact, the White House cherry-picked the data that showed their position in the most favorable light. All the data, analyzed together, showed exactly the opposite conclusion.
Oh, and by the way, it looks like 2010 will be, globally, one of the warmest years on record, after a long series of increasingly hot years. And the entire decade from 2001-2010 is undoubtedly the warmest 10-year period since the beginning of comprehensive weather records in 1850.
Deniers seize on a few minor mistakes in the IPCC report to claim its overall conclusions are invalid; but then use massively flawed scientific arguments to dispute real climate science: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has produced a series of reports over the past decade or more, thousands of pages in length, summarizing the scientific understanding from tens of thousands of peer-reviewed reports. It is not new science; it is a comprehensive and clear summary of the science. A few minor errors have been made (and corrected), but none of these affect the conclusions, despite the fact that they've been seized upon by climate deniers as evidence that the whole thing is wrong. Yet climate deniers use deeply flawed scientific arguments that have been debunked over and over or have little or no basis in reality. This is a double standard: it is incumbent upon scientists to produce their best work, to acknowledge mistakes, and to correct them. It is time to hold climate deniers to the same standard, rather than letting them repeat long debunked falsehoods.
Want examples? Just wait for the comments to this posting: you'll find plenty of tired, long-disproved arguments trotted out.
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1) The earth is warming
2) It is warming at a rate that will cause massive catastrophe, starvation, an end to life as we know it, etc
3) The warming is overwhelmingly man-caused.
4) The warming is stoppable/reversable through man's actions
5) Such a stoppage/reversal is worthy virtually any amount of money or change to current lifestyles.
If you have doubts about any single one of these positions, you're more of a skeptic than a denier.
Some other denier contradictions:
1.
a. Taking action to gradually reduce greenhouse gas emissions will be an absolute economic catastrophe and will bring us back to the stone age, or at least horse and buggy.
b. Climate scientists are alarmists.
2.
a. Climate is too complex to possibly understand and it's arrogant for anyone to pretend to know much about it.
b. Human activities are not affecting the climate to any significant degree.
3. Deniers claim any scientist speaking out on policy is not credible, and then go on to cite contrarians outspoken on policy.
4. Deniers respond to scientific consensus by claiming science isn't about consensus or a show of hands, and then proceed to put forth dubious "skeptic" petitions, go off about how popular their favorite denialist blog is, or cite public polls indicating lower support for climate science.
Yawn.
The following are scientific facts:
* The Earth has warmed significantly over recent decades, to what may be the highest level in 2,000 years if not far longer.
* Greenhouse gases including anthropogenic CO2 -- which is generated mostly by fossil fuel burning -- warm the Earth. Without greenhouse gases the average temperature of the Earth would be below freezing.
* Satellite measurements demonstrate that increasing atmospheric CO2 has increased heat energy retention in the atmosphere.
* Atmospheric CO2 has increased by almost 40% since the dawn of the fossil fuel era, to the highest level in at least 800,000 years, if not far longer.
* The scientific evidence strongly indicates that said increased atmospheric CO2 is due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and there is no other viable scientific explanation for said atmospheric CO2 increase.
* There is a strong correlation between said atmospheric CO2 increase and said recent warming.
* Known natural forcing agents of past global warming - including changes in orbital cycles and increases in solar radiative output - cannot explain the bulk of said recent warming. Neither has any scientific theory to explain the bulk of said recent warming other than anthropogenic global warming survived scientific scrutiny.
Again these are all scientific facts. Which is to say:
The scientific evidence supporting anthropogenic global warming is overwhelming.
Source: “Antarctic Melting as Deep Ocean Heat Rises”, Discovery News, Dec 12, 2010
http://news.discovery.com/earth/antarctica-melting-warming-penguins-101214.html
How many disaster stories must we be hammered with before it is agreed that it is likely we are simply observing the natural climate changes that have been occurring on earth since before man appeared on the scene? Articles that exaggerate the dangers of should only be sent to the IPCC, where there are still a few people who appreciate them.
Funny how when mentioning the Antarctic R2 you always neglect to point out that it is melting. Gee, I wonder why.
R2: "At the other pole, we have the opposite situation. "
At the other pole, the ice sheets are melting too.
R2: "it is likely we are simply observing the natural climate changes"
The scientific evidence strongly indicates otherwise. See above.
2) No one thinks global warming doesn’t exist because I don’t like big government or because we sometimes have to put a coat on. I believe global warming doesn’t exist because it actually doesn’t exist. When you add up falsified tree ring and glacial data (not actual mistakes but purposeful manipulations of the data to suit their purposes – done after temperature data was beginning to show the cooling trend of the 90’s), the removal of the massive middle ages heat bump from UN and other data in the mid nineties, data that was agreed upon by most scientists at that point, the subjective selection of beginning and end points of temperature data in several major global warming reports from the UN, even your simplified generalizations of the whole mess, you haven’t convinced me of anything. I understand you’re preaching to the choir in some ways, but I’m not convinced.
3) My favorite part of this whole article is how you close off all inquiry by triumphantly declaring that no matter what anyone says in response to this article, they will be wrong. How scientific of you.
What's missing?
CO2 absorbs and re-radiates energy as heat, some of that radiates back down to earth, some into the atmosphere - the net effect is that the air around the CO2 molecule warms up. Rather than a greenhouse, think of a down comforter - the air in the comforter warms up, and the feathers trap that warm air, which then re-radiates the heat around it - some of that heat escapes, depending on how cold your bedroom is, but most of it stays in with you, keeping you toasty warm.
This property of CO2 was discovered in the 1800's and has been repeatedly confirmed since then. Beyond that, it's a matter of adding - CO2 warms the air around it when it's hit by energy, therefor more CO2 means more warming.
Also, it's important to remember - this warming was predicted BEFORE the temperature actually started going up. They were able to predict it because they saw that the CO2 levels in the atmosphere were increasing. This is not a case of it getting warmer, and THEN scientists saying why, this is a case of scientists saying "CO2 is increasing, and the impact will be a warmer climate", which is now occurring.
We can call it the "Climate Skeptic Monument."
Here's how to do it: http://www.alchemyofchange.net/climate-skeptic-monument/
The logic of which is flawed. For a causal relation it is necessary that the same cause always causes the same effect. The MWP argument is the opposite of a causal relation. It assumes that every effect needs to have the same cause. Just because my hand hurts when I hit it with a hammer, doesn't imply that whenever my hand hurts, I hit it with a hammer. So the basic assumption of the MWP argument (which is caused by a severe case of "hockeystick obsession") is wrong.
But not only the assumption of the whole MWP argument that a warmer temperature than today at some point in the last millenium proves anything else than that it was warmer then is wrong (apart from the factual basis), but the deduction about "being natural" is wrong as well. Because a "natural" cause is profoundly different from a "magical" or a "divine" cause. Natural causes can be observed and measured. We know so much about our planet that we know about a lot of influences to our climate. Of course there are probably influences we do not know about, but we know about the big influences, because they are big. We measure them. We observe them.
And since they are big influences, we can easily identify them. Like sun radiation, sunspot cycles and milankovitch cycles. Like volcanism. Like ice albedo. Like water vapor or methane. And like CO2.
To make current climate change "natural", we need to find two effects that are really gargantuan.
- one needs to offset the warming that is caused by the physical fact of a warming from higher CO2-concentrations
- the other one needs to explain the warming that is currently happening, shown not only by current temperature measurements, but by a multitude of indicators, proxies and observations.
Both factors are nowhere in sight.
Therefore, the whole MWP argument is not only deeply flawed in it's logic and execution, but even a little embarassing for those who cling to it.
The point of the MWP is as follows-
1) The IPCC's GCM models can not explain the MWP or the LIA, for that matter.
2) The IPCC's GCM models can not explain the warming of the early 20th century, during the thermometer recording era.
3) Why, then, should anyone believe the IPCC models can predict the future, when they cannot backcast either paleoclimate data or temperature data?
Since solar radiation and volcanism at that time is very uncertain, one could trim the models so they reproduce the MWP, just by adding more solar radiation. Which is not the point of GCM and basically just a waste of time, since it has no significance for the model's quality.
Models need to reproduce observation from known entry conditions. Trimming uncertain entry conditions so that they reproduce uncertain outcomes is rather fruitless.
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter9.pdf
One important aspect of this temperature profile is commonly called the "Tropical Tropospheric Hotspot", which refers to an area where the "lapse rate" does not behave as it would otherwise.
According to the IPCC, if the currently warming is caused by greenhouse gas release, there must be evidence of it through the "Tropical Tropospheric Hotspot".
The difficulty for the true believers is that the "Tropical Tropospheric Hotspot" cannot be found.
Radiosonde data does not show it. Satellite data does not reveal it, even when tortured by the Hockey Team.
An attempt to "prove" that it is really there, but hidden using some hocus, pocus about wind shear has been recently debunked and falsified.
Since the signature that the IPCC claims their theory says must be there, there are only a few alternatives-
1. IPCC climate theory is fundamentally wrong.
2. To the extent that IPCC climate theory is correct in predicting a hotspot due to extra carbon dioxide, we know that carbon emissions did not cause the recent global warming.
More information-
http://joannenova.com.au/2008/10/the-missing-hotspot/
http://www.sciencespeak.com/MissingSignature.pdf
http://www.skepticalscience.com/tropospheric-hot-spot.htm
The reasoning is that both eras were more of less in equilibrium, and differences in temperatures between the two eras are mainly because of 1) solar radiation level, 2) atmospheric content, and 3) ice cover.
As the authors state: "Climate models alone are unable to define climate sensitivity more precisely, because it is difficult to prove that models realistically incorporate all feedback processes. The Earth’s
history, however, allows empirical inference of both fast feedback climate sensitivity and longterm
sensitivity to specified GHG change including the slow ice sheet feedback."
Check it out. It's interesting reading if you have the time: http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126 (and download PDF file from upper right)