On Friday, May 7th, the journal Science published a strongly worded letter signed by 255 of the nation's leading scientists decrying recent political attacks on climate science and climate scientists. This letter drew substantial media attention from a wide range of outlets, including Time, The New York Times science blog, several major British, Australian, Portuguese, and Canadian papers, and much more. See my previous post on this.
In a remarkable bit of irony, the art chosen by editors (not by the authors of the letter) at Science to accompany the letter was a picture of a polar bear on an ice floe. To the embarrassment of the journal, this photo is "photoshopped" -- combining polar bear, ice floes, clouds, and other elements into a perfectly lovely, albeit made-up piece of art. Oops. The journal, of course, when they realized their mistake, agreed to swap out the photo and post a sheepish correction.
But this incident has also provided a fantastic peek into the way the climate denial "machine" works -- and I call it a machine, because it truly operates like one. The small but vocal part of the infosphere dominated by the climate deniers seized on this "fake" photo to try to paint the entire climate science community as fake.
Here is the logic of the climate deniers: the photo is manipulated, therefore we can claim the science of climate change to be manipulated and we won't have to challenge the actual content of the letter.
Nice try, but no. This focus on the art the editors chose to accompany the letter is an attempt by climate deniers to divert public attention once again from the facts of climate change. This is exactly what the scientists are talking about in the letter. Instead of challenging the science with better science, the vocal deniers are grasping at any straw to muddy the waters and confuse the public about the real climate threats we face. Mistakes found in the IPCC assessment of climate? Oh, then all climate science must be mistaken.
It doesn't, or shouldn't, work this way. Will the media be taken in, or the more informed part of the blogosphere? We'll see. As the Science letter says, there is still "compelling, comprehensive, and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend," and it highlights that there is nothing identified in recent events that has changed the fundamental conclusions about climate change. That remains true, even as Science magazine swaps out its polar bear picture.
Oh, by the way, there really are polar bears on ice floes. I'm sure the editors at Science can find a real photo that illustrates the same thing.
That absurdity reminds me of quote by Isaac Asimov:
"When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
Here's more from Asimov's essay "The Relativity of Wrong" (all of which is well worth reading):
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The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.
However, I don't think that's so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts, and I will devote this essay to an explanation of why I think so.
...When my friend the English literature expert tells me that in every century scientists think they have worked out the universe and are always wrong, what I want to know is how wrong are they? Are they always wrong to the same degree? Let's take an example.
continued...
In the early days of civilization, the general feeling was that the earth was flat. This was not because people were stupid, or because they were intent on believing silly things. They felt it was flat on the basis of sound evidence. It was not just a matter of "That's how it looks," because the earth does not look flat. It looks chaotically bumpy, with hills, valleys, ravines, cliffs, and so on...
Perhaps it was the appearance of the plain that persuaded the clever Sumerians to accept the generalization that the earth was flat; that if you somehow evened out all the elevations and depressions, you would be left with flatness. Contributing to the notion may have been the fact that stretches of water (ponds and lakes) looked pretty flat on quiet days...
There were reasons, to be sure, to find the flat-earth theory unsatisfactory and, about 350 B.C., the Greek philosopher Aristotle summarized them...
About a century after Aristotle, the Greek philosopher Eratosthenes noted that the sun cast a shadow of different lengths at different latitudes (all the shadows would be the same length if the earth's surface were flat). From the difference in shadow length, he calculated the size of the earthly sphere and it turned out to be 25,000 miles in circumference.
continued...
The curvature of such a sphere is about 0.000126 per mile... The tiny difference... accounts for the fact that it took so long to pass from the flat earth to the spherical earth...
And yet is the earth a sphere?
Not in the strict mathematical sense...
The correction in going from spherical to oblate spheroidal is much smaller than going from flat to spherical. Therefore, although the notion of the earth as a sphere is wrong, strictly speaking, it is not as wrong as the notion of the earth as flat.
Even the oblate-spheroidal notion of the earth is wrong, strictly speaking. In 1958, when the satellite Vanguard I was put into orbit about the earth, it was able to measure the local gravitational pull of the earth--and therefore its shape--with unprecedented precision...
There seemed no other way of describing this than by saying the earth was pear-shaped...
In short, my English Lit friend, living in a mental world of absolute rights and wrongs, may be imagining that because all theories are wrong, the earth may be thought spherical now, but cubical next century, and a hollow icosahedron the next, and a doughnut shape the one after.
What actually happens is that once scientists get hold of a good concept they gradually refine and extend it with greater and greater subtlety as their instruments of measurement improve. Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.
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http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
1) get your trade group (or equivalent) together and set your goals, 2) fund a bunch of captive "institutes", 3) find credentialed individuals to staff these institutes, 4) cherry pick the scientific literature and only report the outlying or flawed studies that support your goals - nit pick to find more, 5) send out tons of press releases to industry friendly news media who have space to fill, 6) build an echo chamber by having your industry friendly institutes cross cite publications.
It is a mistake to take genuine scientific debate into the PR arena, save it for the classroom, peer reviewed journals and symposia. PR techniques need to be battled with PR. Use classic techniques of forensic debate. Point out who funds the denial machine, and their commercial incentives to deny. Shed light on sophistry, challenge their credentials, ask why their institutes are think tanks unengaged in basic research. Get organized and get material out to the print, net and TV media. Call it education, which it is.
Statements like Gore's "the scientific debate is over" reflect a deep misunderstanding of science. Science simply does not operate by consensus, and science never "settles" any debate. At any given time current scientific thinking is wrong about almost everything. Far from being a criticism of science, this ability to be wrong is precisely the thing that lets science occasionally get things right (or at least less wrong). But it does mean that the "scientific consensus" should not be taken as the last word on any policy debate, much less allowed to dictate the solutions. The world hardly would be better off now had 20th century policy been dictated by what scientists in 1900 predicted would happen, or thought were the main problems facing humanity.
One could argue that science still provides us with the best information we have to go on. Perhaps, but humans have almost no ability to predict the future, with science or without it, so "the best" means very little. The "well informed decision" largely is an illusion. Predictions, whether they come from astrologers, market analysts or scientists, derive their authority from their ability to satisfy our present need for certainty, not from any retrospective analysis of their accuracy.
Agree public policy should not be set exclusively by scientists. Have never in my experience seen any instances where this was a practical problem outside a lab. Whether or not science provides answers depends on the questions. Science is good at figuring how things work and why things work. Not so good at telling you what things are worth or if they are beautiful. Al Gore's comment is an exaggeration, there is strong scientific consensus regarding global warming, but not complete agreement.
Disagree with most everything else you say. Science, in the main, seeks and fosters consensus, partly due to scientific emphasis on reproducibility and also because the scientific method tends to result in convergence of opinion about cause and effect. True,the process of getting convergence is often contentious at the cutting edge. Dogma is static, science evolves over time. To say that science occasionally gets things right makes about as much sense as saying that clocks, being less than perfect, only occasionally tell us what time it is. Humans have developed excellent powers of predicting the behaviors of many complex systems. If you don't believe this, then you should definitely stop driving your car and using airliners. Predictions derive their authority from a perception they are useful, which you basically determine by careful retrospective analysis. That's why I personally don't trust any astrologers and most market analysts.
But what they--and we--do have is several decades worth of data, the vast majority of which points towards the fact that human activity is altering the climate in large and potentially damaging ways. As with any scientific idea, compelling evidence to the contrary might cause scientists to rethink their claims and revise their positions. Meanwhile, though, as climate models continue to accurately predict how CO2 levels affect sea level rise and the melting of glaciers and many other results of climate change, the case for global warming caused by human activity grows stronger every day. And one or two or even 20 errors in the data can't change that fact.
So NYC, Boston, and San Francisco are under water?
I've been to places in Europe along the coast. They have cities and towns, 3 feet above sea level, have been there for 1,000 years, and they aren't under water.
Yes. Have a look, compliments of the Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research:
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/2005_rel5/sl_noib_cu2005_rel5_global.jpg
boston997: "So NYC, Boston, and San Francisco are under water?"
No.
boston997: "I've been to places in Europe along the coast. They have cities and towns, 3 feet above sea level, have been there for 1,000 years, and they aren't under water."
So? You say this as if it somehow demonstrates that sea levels are not rising, which of course it doesn't (just as the Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research). If you think otherwise do explain, boston997.
Ever hear of the geologic process isostatic rebound? How about uplift and subsidence?
All three are independent of actual changes in sea level.
The fact is sea level has been rising since the last glacial maximum 20,000 years ago. The rate of sea level rise over the 20th century averaged 1.8 to 2.2 mm/year, but in the early 1990s it accelerated to 2.8 to 3.4 mm/year.
Deal with it.
April 15, 2010
Carbon fixation by phytoplankton in the open ocean plays a key role in the global carbon cycle but is not fully understood. Until now researchers believed that cyanobacteria overwhelmingly accounted for phytoplankton's role in carbon fixation in the open ocean. But now scientists at the University of Warwick and the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton have opened 'the black box' of eukaryotic phytoplankton and discovered that they actually account for almost half the ocean's carbon fixation by phytoplankton.
Blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, grow in vast numbers in the sunlit surface waters of the oceans, the photic zone. They use sunlight to 'fix' carbon by converting carbon dioxide into sugars and other organic compounds through photosynthesis. They discovered that eukaryotic phytoplankton actually fix significant amounts of carbon, contributing up to 44% of the total, despite being considerably less abundant than cyanobacteria. "This is most likely because eukaryotic phytoplankton cells, although small, are bigger than cyanobacteria, allowing them to assimilate more fixed carbon," says Zubkov.
It is likely that some of the organic carbon of prymnesiophytes and other eukaryotic phytoplankton is eventually exported from the photic zone to the deep ocean, rather than being returned to the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide. http://www.physorg.com/news190545060.html
when are you going to finally acknowledge.. your repeated statements to the contrary.. that greenhouse gases send longwave radiation back to Earth?
you'll never understand even the basics of global warming science until you understand that basic fact of physics.. you know.
Got straw men? Why yes, you do.
Newsweek: 4-28-1975, "The Cooling World"
http://denisdutton.com/newsweek_coolingworld.pdf
Time Magaine, 6-24-1974, "Another Ice Age?"
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914,00.html
Compare with today in the modern era, a third of century later, where the overwhelming scientific consensus is that man-made global warming is real
The current trend is not short term. It cannot be weather noise. It is warming, and an explanation is required.
On 12 February Monckton said this.
"We are going to concede that Carbon Dioxide and other Greenhouse Gases which possess or mimic a dipole moment, will cause warming if you add them to the atmosphere."
Two things, the United States, according to the 'global warming is not real crowd' is supposedly full of 'scientists' who signed a petition along with 31,000 or so others stating as much. Why when there were 3 AMERICAN scientists who testified at this hearing stating the danger posed by climate change needed to be addressed, was the GOP only able to get a BRITISH journalist to tell America what to do.
Secondly, Monckton says CO2 does cause warming. So what is the argument now? Who has been conned if the very person identified as the top of the denier bandwagon, is even admitting warming is occurring?
Fox and Rush are not telling the truth, that's what.
Some of the doubting on this message board sounds as though it's of the same type.
it's just nutty to put 380 nuts up against 1,000,000,000 nuts..
and expect results.
But notice that what fumes does not tell you is that 999,996,600 of the nuts can't absorb infrared light, but that the remaining 4,400 nuts do, and that by doing so they manage to make earth's average surface temperature 33C (59F) warmer than it would be if they were not present.
In other words, just 4,400 parts per million of earth's atmosphere keep earth's surface from being frozen solid from pole to pole.
So much for the dilution argument.
Actually, it's just the chlorine atoms in CFCs that created the ozone hole, so it's much less than 1 part per billion, but you get the idea. Except for fumes, of course.
that 380/1,000,000,000 = a runaway scenario of ''unimaginable calamity''..
say fumes..
when are you going to finally acknowledge.. your repeated statements to the contrary.. that greenhouse gases send longwave radiation back to Earth?
you'll never understand even the basics of global warming science.. until you understand that basic fact of physics.. you know.
"There isn't much of X, therefore X cannot be not important."
Now, the lethal dose of botulinum toxin is around .01 microgram per kilogram. That's less than 380ppm by orders of magnitude. So, how's your logic holding up?
"There isn't much of X, therefore X cannot be important."
Unlike you Soter I don't take non-peer-reviewed "science" that goes against the scientific consensus seriously unless it is rigorously backed-up by peer-reviewed science - especially one that is as full of distortions and lies as that one.
But hey I'll bite.
Your link asserts:
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This graph asserts that temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period were higher than those of today...
The variable sun caused the Little Ice Age and in all probability caused the Medieval Warm Period too...
This account of climatic history contains two serious difficulties for the present global warming theory.
1) If the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today, with no greenhouse gas contribution, what would be so unusual about modern times being warm also?
2) If the variable sun caused both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, would not the stronger solar activity of the 20th century account for most, if not all, of the claimed 20th century warmth?
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In fact, that account of climatic history contains no "difficulties" for AGW theory at all, to say nothing of "serious difficulties."
Even if we were assume that the MWP was global and that it also warmer than now and that it was due to the sun, that still wouldn't - and couldn't - explain the global warming of recent decades. Why? Because over recent decades solar irradiance trend has not been increasing - to the contrary it has slightly decreased.
Hope this helps.
Sea level is currently rising at ~3.2mm per year and accelerating.
Both the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are loosing mass at an accelerating rate.
Worldwide, alpine glaciers are losing mass.
Sea water expands as it warms.
Now what do these facts suggest to you about future sea level?
No. What makes you think that?
medieval warming period....
pluto has warmed too....
in case you dumbos havent caught on, im just showing that there is more than one possible answer
You have yet to show a single alternate cause of the current observed warming.
Someone already explained why Pluto has gotten brighter down thread: it takes 248 years to orbit the sun. Pluto's spring lasts a long time.
On the other hand, uranus is cooling:
http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~layoung/eprint/ur149/Young2001Uranus.pdf
Soter: "in case you dumbos havent caught on, im just showing that there is more than one possible answer"
Really. And what other "possible answer" are you specifically trying to imply here, Soter?
Soter: "solar"
You are apparently unaware that the solar irradiance trend has remained essentially constant over recent decades.
Soter: "water vapor"
You are also apparently unaware that water vapor cannot be a global warming forcing agent.
Soter: "interior of the earth"
lol... Really. Elaborate on this one for us; thanks.
someone got whacked by an imaginary hockey stick....