One Word

On the phone with Jon just now I asked him to describe himself in one adjective. I answered for him by ejecting "carefree!"

A Summary of the Tentative Conclusions I Made From My Climate Research

Here are my own answers to my Climate Change survey. In writing these down, I was tempted to go into detail and cite all my sources, but I decided just to summarize my view in the clearest language I can. If you are interested in getting further information on any of these tentative conclusions, let me know.

1. Has the globe been heating up?
The mean global temperature has risen a bit over the last 120 years, but it is still about 16 degrees Celsius.
We aren't entirely certain of exactly how much it has risen.
We aren't entirely certain of the exact timeline associated with this.
We aren't entirely certain of what the relevant timeline to look at is.

2. What are the causes of this?
The causes are primarily natural.
The primary natural cause is the sun.
Natural atmospheric carbon dioxide plays a marginal role.
There are also causes associated with human activity.
The primary human cause is the creation of urban areas that heat their immediate surroundings.
Another human cause is local deforestation.
Human generated atmospheric carbon dioxide plays a marginal role.

3. Will the globe continue to do so?
Probably.
We aren't entirely certain exactly how much.
We aren't entirely certain of the exact timeline associated with this.

4. What will be the effects of this?
The warming trend will bring environmental and societal gains and losses, but will likely bring a net minor benefit to the globe as a whole.
The sea level might rise a couple of inches in places.
If the Antarctic trend continues, the continent will have significantly more ice 100 years from now, and Antarctica contains 99% of the world's ice, so a net rise in sea level is unlikely.
Canada, Scandinavia, Russia, and Alaska might gain a centimeter of useable latitude.
My Dad might sell one more air conditioning unit over the course of the century.

5. Is there a scientific consensus on this?
It seems that most scientists agree that the globe is warming due to natural and human related causes, including solar variations and the Urban Heat Island Effect. Most scientists agree that CO2 has some effect. Most scientists agree that atmospheric CO2 is increasing.

Though there is legitimate disagreement about a lot issues related to these things, such as how much warming will likely occur, how much of an impact human generated atmospheric CO2 can have, and whether a little warming will be bad.

Many scientists, even Global Warming theorists, agree that the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is largely influenced by the mean global temperature, and not the other way around.

There is a decently large intergovernmental consensus on the necessity for alarm.

6. How should we proceed?
We should mitigate genuine pollution.
We should study the climate.
We should blind scientists to their funding.
We should invest in the developing world.
We should encourage a free exchange of ideas.
We should continue to perform and esteem peer review.
We should rethink how we patronize our news sources.
We should not worry about CO2 emissions.
We should hold politicians accountable for their claims.
We should require transparency of all our authorities on all subjects.

7. Should we ratify Kyoto?
No, nor anything similar.

8. Do you have any other notes?
Al Gore is a fraud by anyone's standards.

Check out this clip:


Conclusion:
Casual propagation of the major claims of the Global Warming theorists only serves to further convince the general public that there is reason to prevent the developing world from developing, purchase carbon credits that will likely line the pockets of the biggest carbon emitters in society, initiate unnecessary policies that will stifle the economy, and split prizes with politicians who get criticized even by Global Warming theorists.

Epilogue:
It is very difficult to accurately record temperatures long-term or worldwide. It is also extremely difficult to measure sea level (which makes sense). We should distinguish between local weather patterns and long-term global trends. Global climate is non-linear and chaotic, in the technical sense of the term. Correlation does not imply causation.

There is propaganda, bias, and corruption in both major camps.

Brush your teeth. Feed the poor. Recycle. Think critically about how to study and manage the environment. Invest in science. Rebel against censorship. Love humans. Be a good citizen. Write to local newspapers and congressmen. Enjoy public beaches and natural foods.

Afterward:
Also, instead of using inflammatory terms like "Global Warming alarmists" and "Global Warming deniers", we should opt for more neutral terms like "Global Warming theorists", and "Global Warming skeptics" where possible.

Further Reading:
Climate Skeptic
Global Warming

Addendum:
If you want to be really fair and balanced, you should really read what the critics of any survey or argument say about it. Then hunt down the original source's response, and continue oscillating until you get to the end of the published conversation. But don't assume that the guy who got the last word in has everything right. Examine the data and weigh the testimonies. Then, don't stand by your conclusions if new evidence pops up that seems to undermine your original conclusions. Investigate it. Godspeed and good luck.

Parting Remarks:
While we should recycle and generally study and care for the environment, we shouldn't buy Kyoto, carbon credits, or anything like them.

Rhetorical Values List: First Draft

Italo Calvino inspired me vicariously through Jon Wright. Instead of literary virtues however, I want to think about broad and ultimate rhetorical ideals. My intention is to produce a short list with ultimate yet specific enough and distinct values such that, if any given piece of rhetoric truly satisfies all of them, no further changes will ever be necessary - or even helpful. Here is the list I have so far:

1. Relevance
2. Accuracy
3. Precision
4. Concision
5. Clarity
6. Completeness
7. Eloquence

What do you think? Do any of the values overlap unnecessarily? Are any less than ideal? Are any missing?

Propaganda: A Case Study

A story syndicated in the October 23rd edition of Washington's Spokesman Review (one of the "two worst" newspapers in the United States, according to Harry Truman, by the way) is syndicated from the Associated Press. In the opening paragraph it says

...an alarming new study finds that carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere faster than expected.

Now, it may be true that such a study was conducted, and that carbon dioxide is in fact increasing in the atmosphere, and at an unexpected speed.

But publishing such information implies that it's relevant.

Setting the Record Straight on Propaganda

Princeton University's lexical database defines "propaganda" as "information that is spread for the purpose of promoting some cause" (think of "propagate"). The term may be used to occasionally point out information that may be true, but whose presentation is motivated by an agenda.

The other day my friend, whose preferred candidate is Ron Paul, sent me an email entitled "Ron Paul Propaganda". In it were a series of links to videos and websites in support of Ron Paul. It was merely descriptive, but it helps to keep things in perspective.

Fill out this Climate Change survey today!

I am curious about you. What do you think about Global Warming? Here's your chance to casually voice your opinion without fear of judgment or criticism, for I promise to abstain from both (really, I do).

Answer as many or as few of the following questions as you want to, and feel free to add your own:

1. Has the globe been heating up?

2. What are the causes of this?

3. Will the globe continue to do so?

4. What will be the effects of this?

5. Is there a scientific consensus on this?

6. How should we proceed?

7. Should we ratify Kyoto?

8. Do you have any other notes?

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The Climate Consensus, Part II: Falsity [UPDATED]

Claim: The majority of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles about Global Climate Change explicitly accept the "consensus" view, that the earth has been warming at an unnaturally rapid pace, that human activity is a significant contributor to this, and that it will have devastating effects on mankind and the environment if not stopped.

Status: False (but irrelevant).

Origin: Science apparently presented the first empirical evidence in support of a unanimous consensus on the major issues of Global Warming:

...That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords "climate change" (9).

The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.

-Naomi Oreskes, BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change

That's pretty convincing. But there are problems with Naomi's study. And the good news is that even you can duplicate the study that undermines it:

Oreskes claims to have analysed 928 abstracts she found listed on the ISI database using the keywords "climate change". However, a search on the ISI database using the keywords "climate change" for the years 1993 - 2003 reveals that almost 12,000 papers were published during the decade in question (2). What happened to the countless research papers that show that global temperatures were similar or even higher during the Holocene Climate Optimum and the Medieval Warm Period when atmospheric CO2 levels were much lower than today; that solar variability is a key driver of recent climate change, and that climate modeling is highly uncertain?

These objections were put to Oreskes by science writer David Appell. On 15 December 2004, she admitted that there was indeed a serious mistake in her Science essay. According to Oreskes, her study was not based on the keywords "climate change," but on "global climate change" (3)...

Since the results looked questionable, I decided to replicate the Oreskes study.

METHOD

I analysed all abstracts listed on the ISI databank for 1993 to 2003 using the same keywords ("global climate change") as the Oreskes study. Of the 1247 documents listed, only 1117 included abstracts (130 listed only titles, author(s)' details and keywords). The 1117 abstracts analysed were divided into the same six categories used by Oreskes (#1-6), plus two categories which I added (# 7, 8):...

7. natural factors of global climate change
8. unrelated to the question of recent global climate change

RESULTS

The results of my analysis contradict Oreskes' findings and essentially falsify her study:

Of all 1117 abstracts, only 13 (or 1%) explicitly endorse the 'consensus view'...

This is not to deny that there is a majority of publications that, although they do not empirically test or confirm the view of anthropogenic climate change, go along with it by applying models based on its basic assumptions. Yet, it is beyond doubt that a sound and unbiased analysis of the full ISI databank will find hundreds of papers (many of which were written by the world's leading experts in the field) that have raised serious reservations and outright rejection of the concept of a "scientific consensus on climate change". The truth is, that there is no such thing!

- Dr. Benny Peiser The letter Science Magazine refused to publish

Hence the importance of peer review in the first place, I guess.

Dr. Peiser's personal webpage can be found here.

Fair enough. You might think. But I am sure that the few, proud leading climate physicists are convinced of the major claims of Global Warming. Au contraire. Let's examine two case studies: Claude Allegre and Richard Lindzen.

Here's the deal with Allegre:

Claude Allegre, a former government official and an active member of France’s Socialist Party, wrote an editorial on September 21, 2006 in the French newspaper L'Express titled “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (For English Translation, click here) detailing his newfound skepticism about manmade global warming (click here). Allegre wrote that the “cause of climate change remains unknown” and pointed out that Kilimanjaro is not losing snow due to global warming, but to local land use and precipitation changes. Allegre also pointed out that studies show that Antarctic snowfall rate has been stable over the past 30 years and the continent is actually gaining ice...

- U. S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works

Richard Lindzen is a climate physicist at MIT, and has been studying climate for over 40 years. He even wrote one of the chapters in one of the IPCC's very own reports. While concurring with a lot of the claims of Global Warming theorists, such as that the earth has been warming, and human generated carbon dioxide has been increasing in the atmosphere,

he parts company with the IPCC [regarding] the extent to which this increasing concentration can cause warming, or in other words, how much man is influencing the climate.

Regarding the IPCC report itself, Lindzen

does believe that this was well carried out and resulted in statements that were couched in suitably uncertain terms. However, he objects to the way that this document was then used to prepare the summary for policy makers, a process that involved people from government, industry and environmental organizations as well as scientists. If that was not bad enough, he says, the summary for policy makers was then further stripped down by the press, eager for a good story, and politicians, keen to play up the significance of the report as much as possible in order, as he says, to "co-opt the authority of scientists".

Lindzen, however, reserves his greatest wrath for scientists who are not climate-research specialists but who, as he sees it, try to exploit their authority in the climate-change debate. For these people, he says, there is a "special place in hell".

- Edwin Cartlidge, A climate of alarm.

Why do they do it then? Why do reporters and politicians continuously claim that there is an overwhelming scientific consensus regarding the major issues of Global Warming? If I were trying to convict the media of murder, I would need to sell the you on a motive.

I don't want to demonize those who disagree with me.

Instead I will say that in light of the evidence, the necessity for the media to sell the jury on an alibi should be much more pressing.

The Climate Consensus, Part I: Irrelevance [UPDATED]

Claim: The majority of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles about Global Climate Change explicitly accept the "consensus" view, that the earth has been warming at an unnaturally rapid pace, that human activity is a significant contributor to this, and that it will have devastating effects on mankind and the environment if not stopped.

Status: Irrelevant (but false).

Origin: The first empirical evidence in support of a unanimous consensus on the major claims of Global Warming is discussed in Part II of this discussion. But it's propagated by the general public, as well as many Global Warming theorists themselves.

In a comment at the bottom of the above linked article, a Global Warming theorist named Eric himself says

...I would emphasize the general point that it is important to separate the question of the existence of a consensus from the question of the correctness of that consensus...

Then why do Global Warming theorists continually bring up the "consensus"? The scientific consensus used to be that the world was flat until the correctness of that consensus was challenged. Plate Tectonics and the Continental Drift theory were revolutionary at the time they were proposed. Darwin's theory of the origin of species by the means of Natural Selection rebutted the general scientific consensus of Spontaneous Generation at the time. Ptolemaic Astronomy was supplanted by Copernican Astronomy, as Newtonian Gravity was by Einsteinian Relativity. Somehow it turned out that Euclid was wrong.

We should be about examining the correctness of each scientific consensus. This is exactly what scientists do, and they love it when they're proved wrong, because their lives are committed to the evidence and they go where it leads.

I will answer my own question: The reason people keep citing the "consensus" is because the majority of people trust that the scientific zeitgeist is basically trustworthy.

And that's pretty much as it should be.

I don't expect every man to be a scientist for a living. Division of labor and specialization build efficient societies.

But the trust of the general public is easy to exploit, whether intentionally. Scientists aren't always unbiased. Politicians are rarely unbiased. Logically possible explanations of data sets aren't all always thoroughly analyzed. Findings aren't always presented in a straightforward manner. And overarching paradigms often govern research unchecked for years, decades, or sometimes centuries before being overturned. And that's just how life and science go.

I am not trying to cast doubt on the scientific method. Absolutely nothing could be any further from the truth. It's just the opposite:

Science is about testing hypotheses and eventually tentatively accepting a theory as an explanation and description of a wide class of phenomena and using it to make falsifiable predictions about the future. But, as one of 20th century's greatest astrophysicists, Stephen Hawking says

...any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis; you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation which disagrees with the predictions of the theory...

- Stephen Hawing, A Brief History of Time

It's perfectly acceptable to basically trust the overarching scientific paradigm of the day. But we should never, ever, censor the revolutionaries.

Revolution is built-in to the very heart of science.

It's helpful to investigate highly politicized and lucrative issues such as Global Warming.

Like smoking:

THE largest ever cardiology study has failed to find a link between heart attacks and the classic risk factors, such as smoking...

- Aisling Irwin, Science Correspondent, Study casts doubt on heart 'risk factors'

Of course smoking damages your health. Everyone knows that.

And yet, this 501(c)3 organization, to whom your donations are tax deductible, is committed to unbiased scientific research:

...FORCES is an organization in support of scientific integrity and the use of appropriate scientific methodology in the science which is claimed to be at the foundation of public policy.

But there is a reason why this organization exists:

FORCES International is an organisation in support of... the defence of those who expect... to smoke, eat, drink and, in general, to enjoy personal lifestyle choices without restrictions and state interference.

- FORCES International, Who We Are

Everybody has an agenda.

Our Global Warming theorist Eric goes on in his comment to say:

Those who wish to argue the consensus is wrong would do better to find convincing ways to disprove the consensus view (which will be very hard to do, but we will all praise you as a great scientist if you succeed), rather than fruitless attempts to disprove the existence of the consensus itself (which will be impossible).

And I agree. But the reverse holds true as well. Those who wish to argue the "consensus" is correct would do better to demonstrate that the "consensus" is in fact correct, rather than repeatedly insisting that it exists.