The Empiricist

Jason Soon asked for feedback and opinions on the Scientific Article, Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense.

Jason, since you asked, here’s my take on that article. I think it’s weak in many places, but particularly weak when it gets to climategate.

The Scientific American (SciAm) article by John Rennie looks at seven claims of so-called contrarians about climate change, goes through each one, and explains it away. These seven claims, Rennie believes, are nonsense. But are they? It’s a bit of a straw man hunt, but someone packed those straw men with bricks. Rennie should watch his toes.

Claim 1: “CO2 is only a trace gas in the atmosphere and the amount produced by humans is dwarfed by the amount from volcanoes and other natural sources.”

Rennie’s point is that this does not refute the AGW hypothesis, and he’s right, it doesn’t. It was never supposed to. But What it does is raise a face-value plausibility hurdle for the AGW hypothesis. It’s a move in the chess game, not the checkmate.

Claim 2: The alleged “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past 1,600 years has been disproved.

This is hardly “contrarian nonsense.” The hockey stick has been disproved. It’s what made the climateaudit.org blog famous (and indeed the climategate emails show how much they loath and fear McIntyre to this day). The SciAm defense seems to be to diffuse the hockey stick across many papers and models, rendering it safe from attack, which is no defense at all.

SciAm raises the question “what if the hockey stick was false” and concludes that the theory would still stand. Okay. But the hockey stick featured in IPCC reporting AND in Al Gore’s movie. So it’s something. There was a time when it was considered an important piece of evidence. So if it’s disproved, that may not be a knockout, but it’s not nothing.

Claim 3: Global warming stopped a decade ago; Earth has been cooling since then.

Again, this is factually true. SciAm’s point is that the long-term trend is still there; and certainly if you look at the past 100 years, the overall trend is up. However, the models 10 years ago were predicting further rises in the decade just gone that did not eventuate. They predicted warming when cooling occurred. Once upon a time, that would have been called “disconfirming evidence.” These days you just tweak the model post-hoc and keep going.
However climate scientists are privately troubled by the fact that their theories were falsified (as any scientist should be!). The climategate emails include admissions that they fretted about the fact that this was devastating evidence against AGW.

Claim 4: The sun or cosmic rays are much more likely to be the real causes of global warming. After all, Mars is warming up, too.

Unimportant either way. It’s an alternative hypothesis with a similar amount of empirical support, which is to say, not much at all.

Claim 5: Climatologists conspire to hide the truth about global warming by locking away their data. Their so-called “consensus” on global warming is scientifically irrelevant because science isn’t settled by popularity.

Here, the Scientific American article is flat-out wrong. Rennie says (I imagined, with a chuckle)

“If there were a massive conspiracy to defraud the world on climate (and to what end?), surely the thousands of e-mails and other files stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and distributed by hackers on November 20 would bear proof of it. So far, however, none has emerged.”

I have to call a big B.S. on that. There is proof, in the climategate emails for anyone to see, that climate researchers thwarted FOI requests for their data and that they stacked and subverted the peer review process.
That’s a conspiracy.
And it’s not a conspiracy “theory” any more than watergate is a conspiracy “theory.” It’s verifiable fact.

Claim 6: Climatologists have a vested interest in raising the alarm because it brings them money and prestige.

I have no opinion or comment on this one.

Claim 7: Technological fixes, such as inventing energy sources that don’t produce CO2 or geoengineering the climate, would be more affordable, prudent ways to address climate change than reducing our carbon footprint.

This is about the economics. Does it cost more to act now, or to adapt? It’s not “contrarian nonsense” to argue for delayed costs, especially in the face of multiple uncertainties.

That’s the seven claims, but the article doesn’t mention the most powerful skeptical claim of all… let’s call it claim 8.

Claim 8. There is no hard evidence that CO2 causes temperature rises.
The best we have is a modest correlational evidence, and as any graduate student will tell you, correlation does not equal causation. Even the IPCC says there’s only a 90 percent chance that AGW theory is correct.
The fact that that is an acceptable thing for scientists to say with a straight face just blows my mind. Gauss, Popper and others are rolling in their graves.