The Juicebox Mafia writes about Climategate:
Something those of us who want to prevent catastrophic climate change need to remember is that we’re right. Not just factually right, but morally. But while it’s true that effective communications tactics employed by the other side have been helpful to their cause, ultimately the main thing that’s helped them has been the willingness of people who know better to act in a morally indefensible manner.
I’m fairly certain, for example, that Fred Hiatt wouldn’t strangle a baby polar bear just for cheap thrills. But he would run an ignorant Sarah Palin op-ed on climate, and repeatedly allow George Will to mislead people about climate science. What’s more, if Hiatt strolled around Washington soaked in the blood of polar bears he’d been strangling, people would treat him like a pariah. But instead his friends and colleagues and professional peers have evidently decided that he’s just a nice guy who happens to run a crappy-but-influential op-ed page.
Who could have known, at the time, that the climate deniers and contrarians had not yet launched their greatest and most devastating attack? Certainly, it was hard to imagine how they might pull off such a strike: They had virtually nothing going for them, no raw scientific materials to work with. All the science pointed to a greater-than-ever urgency of addressing the climate issue and a quickly closing window of opportunity for action. Within scientific circles, it was even becoming commonplace to discuss planetary modification, or geoengineering, as an alternative last ditch solution if we couldn’t stop runaway greenhouse warming in time.
But the skeptics were lying in wait. They didn’t need good science to make another sally: Their strength has always been in communication tactics anyway, and not scientific exactitude or rigor. And the U.S. public, never overwhelmingly sure about climate change, has long been susceptible to their smokescreens and misinformation campaigns.
You know, I’d say that given what’s emerging as we get – not only into the emails, but into the computer models and raw data that being unearthed, that concrete certainty like this can only be explained in one way:
…since the essential act of the party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality that one denies – all this is indispensably necessary.
– 1984, Orwell.
Because truth isn’t just inconvenient, it’s instrumental.
I remain in the ‘not sure’ camp on AGW as science; but put me down into the ‘damn sure’ camp that making society-reshaping decisions on bad science isn’t about the science – it’s really about the reshaping.
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Really? That’s the only explanation?
I can think of several more, although perhaps they’re all sufficiently related to be considered as one:
1) The debate has, for many, taken on the characteristics of a religion (on both sides) or
2) Plain old group-think, which I assure you can still be very powerful, or
3) The ideas have outgrown the status of ordinary ideas and have infused themselves into the self-images of the thinkers.
Once firmly established, any and all of these can stay lodged in the mind like a virus, using cognitive dissonance techniques as a defense mechanism. No need for grand Orwellian nightmares.
As anecdotal evidence, I was talking about this with a friend, who eventually let slip, “Well, it’s not about the temperature anyway, I don’t care about that– I care about the carbon dioxide levels, which are reaching a tipping point.” This, in contrast to many prior statements.
And I thought to myself, “Really? You didn’t notice yourself falling prey to a cognitive dissonance minimization technique? It’s surely far easier to substitute CO2 levels for temperatures in your mental structures, than it would be to stop, think, re-evaluate your scientific stance, and if necessary re-evaluate the rest of your world-view. Because I noticed it.”
I didn’t bother to point it out, though. No matter how true I think it is, that tactic jut generates ill-will.
bq Their strength has always been in communication tactics anyway…
Pot. Kettle. Black.
That is where the CRU team went astray. They put communication tactics ahead of the science. Thus we got the Hockey Stick Controversy, and from the same guy, the Nature Trick.
These are the people who brought us raining polar bears, for Chrissakes.
THE most important misnomer in this debate is how narrow the science actually is, at least in the historic temperature sense. The proxies all have serious problems, and the temperature data is much, much more dependent qualitative decision making than anyone thought, by a very small group of people (3 closely tied facilities). Everything else has sprung from that fountainhead.
The science seems hugely conclusive, but _nearly all of it_ is based off the NASA, NOAA, and CRU datasets, and Jones was the godfather of all of them.
Check out “this”:http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/climatedata.aspx?Dataset=GHCNTemp app. It lets you select any of the station data in the world and compare the ‘raw’ GHCN data with the NOAA ‘adjusted data’. You can see with your own eyes. Very cool.
bq. They had virtually nothing going for them, no raw scientific materials to work with. All the science pointed to a greater-than-ever urgency of addressing the climate issue and a quickly closing window of opportunity for action.
If you manage to hide the evidence, or lack thereof, how does the science point to anything? How do you know your “factually right“? Matthew Yglesias is a foolish child.
_THE most important misnomer in this debate is how narrow the science actually is, at least in the historic temperature sense._
“misnomer” should be “misconception.”
A “misnomer” is a wrong label for something. Such as calling what the AGW crowd does “science.”
_I care about the carbon dioxide levels, which are reaching a tipping point._
The Tipping Point is actually the weakest link in the AGW argument. It assumes that when the CO2 levels get high enough, the increased heat triggers a positive feedback loop, and the runaway heating is what causes the ecological disaster.
Positive-feedback loops are almost non-existent in our climate system, which is actually dominated by negative-feedback loops.
Furthermore the earth has been warmer than it is now, and the CO2 levels have been much, much higher, and you’ll observe that we’ve kept going into and out of ice ages with no problem at all.
Lastly, Richard Lindzen of MIT recently finished 20 years of taking measurements to see how much heat is radiated back into space as CO2 levels (and atmospheric temps) increase. Every single AGW scientist predicted that the amount would decrease as CO2 kept heat trapped in. Lindzen’s _measurements_ showed that the amount has _increased_.
The Tipping Point is physically impossible to achieve if the amount of heat radiating into space increases alongside the increases in CO2.
The only place you get a Tipping Point from is the computer simulations, which don’t trump observed phenomena no matter how many people cite them as evidence.
No Tipping Point means that there’s nothing to worry about with increased warming or increased CO2, because the negative feedbacks will kick in, and in no time we’ll be back into the next ice age, which we’re due for fairly soon.
_(1) The debate has, for many, taken on the characteristics of a religion (on both sides) or_…
I read that and to me it seems to imply that my position as being unconvinced of any substantive anthropogenic component to either cause or remedy for a warming state that remains unproven and patently impossible to model as being simply the product of contrariness…
to which I say “It’s only _religion_ if you operate on faith”.
The other side – the burlap boxer/bike to work/birkenstock legions; yeah, if this was 1975 they’d be splitting their time selling magazine subscriptions for Rev. Moon.
Me, I’d be doing what I do now. Looking for data. Then looking again to make sure it never got touched by the UN or their accomplices.
AGW is a scam. I speak with the unassailable moral authority possessed only by survivors of the Great Ice Age (1975), the End of Oil (1995), the Population Bomb (1990), and as near as I can tell, I survived Hale-Bop, too.
True believers can continue to Believe in Bullshit. But no matter how you spell “bullshit” it is still BULLSHIT. AGW has been, is and continues to be a Fraudulent HOAX.