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David Brin: Distinguishing Climate "Deniers" From "Skeptics"

34 points by MaysonL 17y ago

TomOfTTB 17y ago
To me it's those who feel the need to label that are the problem. If someone is making an easily refutable argument than refute it. That's how an intelligent, civilized person makes their case. Name calling is the tool of children and the irrational
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
  - lionhearted 17y ago
    > why should we believe that these people will pay attention when their arguments are refuted again and again and again? That's the burden that you carry if you wish to be sensible and mature when discussing with people. Some people are stupid, but you can't sink to that level. Starting to throw mud and call names isn't the right way to deal with stubborn people, and shows a lack of grace and maturity when people do it.
patio11 17y ago
Is there a reciprocal duty on the part of responsible climate change supporters to admit that data has been destroyed to prevent it from being analyzed by skeptical researchers, and that there has been a explicit, documented campaign to destroy the professional reputations of journals which publish papers critical of what is often called the consensus? If there is no such reciprocal obligation, I'd be interested in knowing why not, because both of those are documented in the "Climategate" emails and subsequent follow-on investigation. (e.g. The data that Jones threatened to destroy rather than allow to get hit with a Freedom of Information request was indeed requested and is, indeed, beyond recovery.)
- necubi 17y ago
  Yes, there have been mistakes and imperfect scientists working on climate change. But you can find such foibles in nearly every scientific field—and very rarely do they shake the foundations. For example: evolution. I hope we can all agree that evolution and natural selection form a stunningly successful model of the diversity found in the natural world. This is the position of virtually every biologist and is really only opposed by fundamentalist crazies. Despite this, there have been many mistakes in the history of evolution (for example, the Piltdown Man) that have served to weaken its public credible. However, despite these errors there was never anything fundamentally wrong with the underlying theory. Scientists make mistakes, for both good reasons and bad. But to use a few isolated incidents to cast aspersions on an entire field suggests that you have already come to a conclusion and are looking for evidence, however tenuous, to support it. Your criticisms are at their heart intellectually vacuous and are not sufficient to cast down decades of research by thousands of very smart, dedicated people.
  - cletus 17y ago
    "Making mistakes" as you call it is a white wash. Refusing to publish data, actively obstructing efforts to get that data, selective sampling and black-box "massaging" of raw data essentially invalidate any conclusion drawn from that data. The essence of the scientific process is reproducability. Anything that isn't reproducible or at least testable is worthless. Anything built on it is worthless. It's like some physicist somewhere announcing to the world "I've proven the existence of the Higgs Boson" and then refusing to tell you how he did it.
    - Adam503 17y ago
      Fail, Cletus. What it's actually like is doing the 10 to the x repeat of Newton seeing and Apple dropping an from a tree, the apple landing on the foot of a research assistant standing under the tree. The scientist says, "Ooops, I should have told my research assistant to get out from under the tree." While Cletus, Sarah Palin, and a few in denial friends go running off to Fox News and announce "I saw Jesus cancel gravity. It's a sign from God."
    - 17y ago
cletus 17y ago
As someone who deeply respects David Brin (the author), I am deeply disappointed in this post. The tipping point was the tired dogma of the Fox-Limbaugh conspiracy. If they say something that's wrong, it's wrong because it's wrong, not because of who said it. The so-called "conspiracy" of "Saudi princes", "Russian oil interests" and other "petro-moguls" is just populist claptrap basically. It's far easier to kill the messenger. As Homer Simpson said "let's go burn down the observatory so this never happens again" (after the meteor strike). Not that I'm saying Fox isn't or can't be biased but to dismiss everything they ever broadcast just because it's Fox is a far more untenable and ludicrous position. The bias here is even more obvious when a comparison is made between those skeptical of HGCC to the tobacco proponents of years gone past. Apart from the obvious emotional connotations this attempts to conjure let me put it this way: the Roman Catholic Church was wrong and Galileo was right. But that doesn't automatically make Catholics wrong in any subsequent dispute. The biggest fallout from the CRU email hack was how it shone a light on what is basically a subversion of the scientific process: prestigious journals failing to enforce their standards (Nature requires publication of raw data but published AGW articles without it and ignored requests by third parties for Nature to procure it from the authors), blacklisting of journals that publish climate-skeptic works (mcCarthyism basically), failure of the peer review process, selective sampling, obstructionism and deliberate efforts to defeat FOI requests. This alone should be serious cause for concern from anbody regardless of their position as global policy and billions of dollars are being committed to what is at best a questionable scientific process. The onus isn't on skeptics to prove AGWists wrong. AGWists have postulated an hypothesis and the burden on them is to prove it. Creationists fall victim to similar fallacies.
- Adam503 17y ago
  Fox News and Rush Limbaugh are paid to repeat and defend the days Republican Party propaganda points of the day.
- Locke1689 17y ago
  The tipping point was the tired dogma of the Fox-Limbaugh conspiracy. If they say something that's wrong, it's wrong because it's wrong, not because of who said it. The so-called "conspiracy" of "Saudi princes", "Russian oil interests" and other "petro-moguls" is just populist claptrap basically. In an ideal world, this is true. In reality, one must distinguish signal from noise and usually it's easier to just throw out most of the noise and lose a little signal too.
ErrantX 17y ago
Well I am not sure it is 100% consensus (there are dissenters); so this seems to fall for some of it's own fallacies. :-p
- Adam503 17y ago
  There's not 100% consensus the sun will rise in the morning or that Earth is round. Not to mention the embarrassing fact of how many Americans truly believe dinosaurs and cavemen were on the Earth at the same time about 6,500 years ago.
  - ErrantX 17y ago
    Agreed. But I was more concerned with his continued use of "100% consensus" - it felt like a "shouty argument" and out of place in a piece which was discussing the rationality of the skeptics argument :)
nkurz 17y ago
I'm tired of all the labeling, and I don't care much for the article with it's circular argument about 100% consensus among all experts. But I'm all for his proposal of common ground: "we need more efficiency and sustainability, desperately, in order to regain energy independence, improve productivity, erase the huge leverage of hostile foreign petro-powers, reduce pollution, secure our defense, prevent ocean acidification, and ease a vampiric drain on our economy." I could quibble with some of his colorful language (eg, how desperately?), but the principle seems sound: we would benefit from greater energy efficiency and improvements in alternative energy sources regardless of their effect on global warming. Is there anyone here (either side) who disagrees with this? If so, why?
- wedesoft 17y ago
  Hoping that the politicians will do the right decisions for the wrong reason won't do. The AGW scare has compelled governments to direct resources towards reducing CO2 while neglecting other environmental issues. The lower bound of food prices has doubled because more bio fuel means less food and this is causing death and starvation in third world countries. A lot of windfarms have been built which is probably the most expensive and most unreliable source of energy on the planet. Furthermore projects about geological carbon storage (pumping CO2 underground) are currently being planned. And then there is Cap And Trade and the Carbon Swaps. The tax payers will not be able to get rid of this schemes as long as CO2 is used as a benchmark for measuring environmental impact.
- fleitz 17y ago
  We may benefit from increased energy efficiency but that's largely a benefit the market can handle for itself. Whether it is better to buy more fuel or more insulation depends on the price of insulation and the price of fuel and how long you plan to live in your house. All energy sources are alternative. Fossil fuels exist, if they can provide cheaper sources of fuel than otherwise available why not use them up, to stop using them earlier is to waste resources we could have used. What exactly is the difference between buying the oil from a "foreign petro-power" and buying the goods it could be used to produce from that foreign power, or the goods some other country produced from that oil. It's not like there is a global gas tank that will keep running continuously and then suddenly turn off with out notice. Production will slowly dwindle sending signals via the market that it is time to start looking for alternatives as the price of oil goes up and other energy sources look comparatively cheaper. Wealth for the history of humanity has been tied to energy production. Gas shortages are caused by gov't intervention in the market, not solved by it. Case in point, read about gasoline shortages in Iran caused by the gov't fixing gasoline prices. This is a scrappy startup forum, if you think there is a lot of money to be made finding alternative energy sources perhaps you should pursue that as a market opportunity, or invest with people who are pursuing it.
akamaka 17y ago
This particular argument is stupid and pointless. To an intelligent person who understands the basic principles of the greenhouse effect, the real questions are "How much?" and "How fast?" My understanding of climate science is that we don't yet have accurate enough models to make anything more than wild estimates of the economic costs of climate change. Once we do have such data, nobody will care about what David Brin said.
- Tichy 17y ago
  "My understanding of climate science is" Care to elaborate what your understanding of climate science is?
  - akamaka 17y ago
    "My understanding" means what I understand of it, which obviously not very much, because I'm not a researcher myself.
- nailer 17y ago
  > To an intelligent person who understands the basic principles of the greenhouse effect, the real questions are "How much?" and "How fast?" The first question should be 'is this happening' - skepticism is the default position of science. The onus is to prove a hypothesis, not to disprove it. I honestly don't ever think I will know whether man-made large scale climate change is happening or not - the IPCC, University of East Anglia, Auckland University, and Al Gore have all made very public mistakes and in some cases have been shown to deliberately manipulate data - all within the last 2 years. Meanwhile I keep hearing other credible sources (the Oxford spokesperson on the BBC) still state that the link between man and climate is still not considered proven. Given these two facts, it's very hard for someone without scientific training to identify the credible sources from the incredible ones, and until I can do so, I remain skeptical as I should.
CulturalNgineer 17y ago
If we look at the arguments for or against vigorous action on climate change, there really is an overwhelming weight on the side of taking action. And that's the case even if the climate change argument were a weak one (and it isn't) since the remedies have so many ancillary benefits. In truth, most (though not all) offered solutions should appeal to both deniers and skeptics for reasons having nothing to do with climate. Yet meaningful action seems impossible. So we come to this: If the weight on one side of the teeter-totter is overwhelming, And yet the teeter-totter won't budge leaving good solutions in the air and stagnation firmly rooted... Then we must consider that the teeter-totter is broken and/or a new fulcrum is needed. I'm not trying to be mysterious here. It just seems a good analogy. In which case, the solution isn't piling on more good arguments... It's to find out what's wrong with the teeter-totter and get to fixing it.
- azgolfer 17y ago
  And if the teeter totter shows he is as light as a duck, burn the denialist !

34 points by MaysonL 17y ago

To me it's those who feel the need to label that are the problem. If someone is making an easily refutable argument than refute it. That's how an intelligent, civilized person makes their case. Name calling is the tool of children and the irrational

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
- lionhearted 17y ago
  > why should we believe that these people will pay attention when their arguments are refuted again and again and again? That's the burden that you carry if you wish to be sensible and mature when discussing with people. Some people are stupid, but you can't sink to that level. Starting to throw mud and call names isn't the right way to deal with stubborn people, and shows a lack of grace and maturity when people do it.

patio11 17y ago

Is there a reciprocal duty on the part of responsible climate change supporters to admit that data has been destroyed to prevent it from being analyzed by skeptical researchers, and that there has been a explicit, documented campaign to destroy the professional reputations of journals which publish papers critical of what is often called the consensus? If there is no such reciprocal obligation, I'd be interested in knowing why not, because both of those are documented in the "Climategate" emails and subsequent follow-on investigation. (e.g. The data that Jones threatened to destroy rather than allow to get hit with a Freedom of Information request was indeed requested and is, indeed, beyond recovery.)

necubi 17y ago
Yes, there have been mistakes and imperfect scientists working on climate change. But you can find such foibles in nearly every scientific field—and very rarely do they shake the foundations. For example: evolution. I hope we can all agree that evolution and natural selection form a stunningly successful model of the diversity found in the natural world. This is the position of virtually every biologist and is really only opposed by fundamentalist crazies. Despite this, there have been many mistakes in the history of evolution (for example, the Piltdown Man) that have served to weaken its public credible. However, despite these errors there was never anything fundamentally wrong with the underlying theory. Scientists make mistakes, for both good reasons and bad. But to use a few isolated incidents to cast aspersions on an entire field suggests that you have already come to a conclusion and are looking for evidence, however tenuous, to support it. Your criticisms are at their heart intellectually vacuous and are not sufficient to cast down decades of research by thousands of very smart, dedicated people.
- cletus 17y ago
  "Making mistakes" as you call it is a white wash. Refusing to publish data, actively obstructing efforts to get that data, selective sampling and black-box "massaging" of raw data essentially invalidate any conclusion drawn from that data. The essence of the scientific process is reproducability. Anything that isn't reproducible or at least testable is worthless. Anything built on it is worthless. It's like some physicist somewhere announcing to the world "I've proven the existence of the Higgs Boson" and then refusing to tell you how he did it.
  - Adam503 17y ago
    Fail, Cletus. What it's actually like is doing the 10 to the x repeat of Newton seeing and Apple dropping an from a tree, the apple landing on the foot of a research assistant standing under the tree. The scientist says, "Ooops, I should have told my research assistant to get out from under the tree." While Cletus, Sarah Palin, and a few in denial friends go running off to Fox News and announce "I saw Jesus cancel gravity. It's a sign from God."
  - 17y ago

cletus 17y ago

As someone who deeply respects David Brin (the author), I am deeply disappointed in this post. The tipping point was the tired dogma of the Fox-Limbaugh conspiracy. If they say something that's wrong, it's wrong because it's wrong, not because of who said it. The so-called "conspiracy" of "Saudi princes", "Russian oil interests" and other "petro-moguls" is just populist claptrap basically. It's far easier to kill the messenger. As Homer Simpson said "let's go burn down the observatory so this never happens again" (after the meteor strike). Not that I'm saying Fox isn't or can't be biased but to dismiss everything they ever broadcast just because it's Fox is a far more untenable and ludicrous position. The bias here is even more obvious when a comparison is made between those skeptical of HGCC to the tobacco proponents of years gone past. Apart from the obvious emotional connotations this attempts to conjure let me put it this way: the Roman Catholic Church was wrong and Galileo was right. But that doesn't automatically make Catholics wrong in any subsequent dispute. The biggest fallout from the CRU email hack was how it shone a light on what is basically a subversion of the scientific process: prestigious journals failing to enforce their standards (Nature requires publication of raw data but published AGW articles without it and ignored requests by third parties for Nature to procure it from the authors), blacklisting of journals that publish climate-skeptic works (mcCarthyism basically), failure of the peer review process, selective sampling, obstructionism and deliberate efforts to defeat FOI requests. This alone should be serious cause for concern from anbody regardless of their position as global policy and billions of dollars are being committed to what is at best a questionable scientific process. The onus isn't on skeptics to prove AGWists wrong. AGWists have postulated an hypothesis and the burden on them is to prove it. Creationists fall victim to similar fallacies.

Adam503 17y ago
Fox News and Rush Limbaugh are paid to repeat and defend the days Republican Party propaganda points of the day.
Locke1689 17y ago
The tipping point was the tired dogma of the Fox-Limbaugh conspiracy. If they say something that's wrong, it's wrong because it's wrong, not because of who said it. The so-called "conspiracy" of "Saudi princes", "Russian oil interests" and other "petro-moguls" is just populist claptrap basically. In an ideal world, this is true. In reality, one must distinguish signal from noise and usually it's easier to just throw out most of the noise and lose a little signal too.

ErrantX 17y ago

Well I am not sure it is 100% consensus (there are dissenters); so this seems to fall for some of it's own fallacies. :-p

Adam503 17y ago
There's not 100% consensus the sun will rise in the morning or that Earth is round. Not to mention the embarrassing fact of how many Americans truly believe dinosaurs and cavemen were on the Earth at the same time about 6,500 years ago.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  Agreed. But I was more concerned with his continued use of "100% consensus" - it felt like a "shouty argument" and out of place in a piece which was discussing the rationality of the skeptics argument :)

nkurz 17y ago

I'm tired of all the labeling, and I don't care much for the article with it's circular argument about 100% consensus among all experts. But I'm all for his proposal of common ground: "we need more efficiency and sustainability, desperately, in order to regain energy independence, improve productivity, erase the huge leverage of hostile foreign petro-powers, reduce pollution, secure our defense, prevent ocean acidification, and ease a vampiric drain on our economy." I could quibble with some of his colorful language (eg, how desperately?), but the principle seems sound: we would benefit from greater energy efficiency and improvements in alternative energy sources regardless of their effect on global warming. Is there anyone here (either side) who disagrees with this? If so, why?

wedesoft 17y ago
Hoping that the politicians will do the right decisions for the wrong reason won't do. The AGW scare has compelled governments to direct resources towards reducing CO2 while neglecting other environmental issues. The lower bound of food prices has doubled because more bio fuel means less food and this is causing death and starvation in third world countries. A lot of windfarms have been built which is probably the most expensive and most unreliable source of energy on the planet. Furthermore projects about geological carbon storage (pumping CO2 underground) are currently being planned. And then there is Cap And Trade and the Carbon Swaps. The tax payers will not be able to get rid of this schemes as long as CO2 is used as a benchmark for measuring environmental impact.
fleitz 17y ago
We may benefit from increased energy efficiency but that's largely a benefit the market can handle for itself. Whether it is better to buy more fuel or more insulation depends on the price of insulation and the price of fuel and how long you plan to live in your house. All energy sources are alternative. Fossil fuels exist, if they can provide cheaper sources of fuel than otherwise available why not use them up, to stop using them earlier is to waste resources we could have used. What exactly is the difference between buying the oil from a "foreign petro-power" and buying the goods it could be used to produce from that foreign power, or the goods some other country produced from that oil. It's not like there is a global gas tank that will keep running continuously and then suddenly turn off with out notice. Production will slowly dwindle sending signals via the market that it is time to start looking for alternatives as the price of oil goes up and other energy sources look comparatively cheaper. Wealth for the history of humanity has been tied to energy production. Gas shortages are caused by gov't intervention in the market, not solved by it. Case in point, read about gasoline shortages in Iran caused by the gov't fixing gasoline prices. This is a scrappy startup forum, if you think there is a lot of money to be made finding alternative energy sources perhaps you should pursue that as a market opportunity, or invest with people who are pursuing it.

akamaka 17y ago

This particular argument is stupid and pointless. To an intelligent person who understands the basic principles of the greenhouse effect, the real questions are "How much?" and "How fast?" My understanding of climate science is that we don't yet have accurate enough models to make anything more than wild estimates of the economic costs of climate change. Once we do have such data, nobody will care about what David Brin said.

Tichy 17y ago
"My understanding of climate science is" Care to elaborate what your understanding of climate science is?
- akamaka 17y ago
  "My understanding" means what I understand of it, which obviously not very much, because I'm not a researcher myself.
nailer 17y ago
> To an intelligent person who understands the basic principles of the greenhouse effect, the real questions are "How much?" and "How fast?" The first question should be 'is this happening' - skepticism is the default position of science. The onus is to prove a hypothesis, not to disprove it. I honestly don't ever think I will know whether man-made large scale climate change is happening or not - the IPCC, University of East Anglia, Auckland University, and Al Gore have all made very public mistakes and in some cases have been shown to deliberately manipulate data - all within the last 2 years. Meanwhile I keep hearing other credible sources (the Oxford spokesperson on the BBC) still state that the link between man and climate is still not considered proven. Given these two facts, it's very hard for someone without scientific training to identify the credible sources from the incredible ones, and until I can do so, I remain skeptical as I should.

CulturalNgineer 17y ago

If we look at the arguments for or against vigorous action on climate change, there really is an overwhelming weight on the side of taking action. And that's the case even if the climate change argument were a weak one (and it isn't) since the remedies have so many ancillary benefits. In truth, most (though not all) offered solutions should appeal to both deniers and skeptics for reasons having nothing to do with climate. Yet meaningful action seems impossible. So we come to this: If the weight on one side of the teeter-totter is overwhelming, And yet the teeter-totter won't budge leaving good solutions in the air and stagnation firmly rooted... Then we must consider that the teeter-totter is broken and/or a new fulcrum is needed. I'm not trying to be mysterious here. It just seems a good analogy. In which case, the solution isn't piling on more good arguments... It's to find out what's wrong with the teeter-totter and get to fixing it.

azgolfer 17y ago
And if the teeter totter shows he is as light as a duck, burn the denialist !