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As in Post Script, Climate Shift, and Bull Shit.<\/p>\n
I really wasn’t expecting so many responses (getting boinged<\/a> obviously ramped up the amplitude a bit). There have been hosannas and trolls and yes, some well-taken objections to my last post<\/a>, both here and around teh tubes. Once again, some of my responses are too long to fit comfortably into a typical comment thread; hence this follow-up.<\/p>\n There are four major objections I feel compelled to respond to. Plenty of other hackles have been raised<\/span><\/span>\u2014<\/span><\/span><\/span> over broken hockey sticks, selective use of data, “tricks” used to “hide” alleged “declines”<\/span><\/span>\u2014<\/span><\/span><\/span> but these have generally been raised by deniers more interested in slinging shit than in reasonable discussion. The specifics of those specifics have been explored and explained here (a little) and elsewhere (just google “Climategate”) <\/span><\/span>\u2014<\/span><\/span><\/span> and while some of it certainly shows some folks in a bad (and possibly deserved) light, none of it compromises the weight of evidence for anthropogenic climate change. That’s not what the last post was about anyway; so forget that stuff.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n You may remember some of these points, though:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Stop using \tthe word “deniers” to stereotype open-minded skeptics. \tYou spit upon the millions killed in the Holocaust. <\/em>(No, really; check the comment stream).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n Individual \tweather events (Australian firestorms, west-coast flooding) do not \tconstitute evidence for ACC.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n Academia is \tnot quite so uniformly cutthroat and petty-minded as you would have \tus believe.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n Come on, \tdude; we’re talking about deleting e-mails in the face of FoI \trequests. That’s a bit beyond private ill-mannered sniping.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n So. Let’s go through them.<\/p>\n \n Stop using the word “deniers” to stereotype open-minded skeptics.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Sure. Just as soon as I encounter some open-minded skeptics.<\/p>\n I’m not being flippant. I’ve no doubt, given all the chaff out there, that there are a lot of confused folks who are honestly trying to figure this stuff out. But I don’t see them posting on the ‘crawl in any great numbers, nor do I see them making much of an appearance on other more erudite blogs. What I do see are hecklers who strafe forums with highly-specific talking points about thermal spikes and volcanoes, and then<\/span><\/span>\u2014<\/span><\/span><\/span> when challenged<\/span><\/span>\u2014<\/span><\/span><\/span> either disappear or muddy the water with invective and deliberate misconstruction. They’re the equivalent of those idiots who shouted from the bleachers at last summer’s town hall meetings; their goal is not to engage, but to disrupt and obstruct. “Uncle Al” and “Neil Craig” are examples who’ve posted on this crawl, but if you check out the comments threads for How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic<\/a> you’ll see a lot of others. (“Craker14”, for example, weighs in with an innocent-seeming question under “Measurements taken on top of a volcano!<\/a>“, accuses someone who answers him of “jibbering”, and proceeds to hijack the thread with denialist talking-points that have been asked and answered a hundred times.) This is not honest inquiry, or a search for understanding from an open mind. This is the French Knights from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Their kind are not skeptics in the empirical sense of the word: they are deniers, pure and simple.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n \n Australian firestorms do not constitute evidence for ACC.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n This objection has more substance to it, because of course it’s true. You can’t pin any given forest fire, flood, tornado, or heat wave on global warming, just as you can’t state with certainty that the cancer that killed a specific smoker was caused by smoking. There’s always the chance that the guy would have got cancer even if he’d never lit up in his life; there’s always the chance that California would have caught fire even if the Industrial Revolution had never happened.<\/p>\n But man, when ten times as many smokers than nonsmokers die of cancer, you sure as shit know that <\/span><\/span>something<\/span><\/em>‘s going on.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n That’s what we’re looking at here. Extreme weather events are up all over the globe, and it’s all consistent with current climate-change models. The denouement in which I cited some of those (the fires, the flooding) was simply an illustration of events we don’t need the modelers and the climatologists to show us; it’s in our face, happening now, and you don’t need to know the Stefan\u2013Boltzmann law to turn on the weather network. (My citation of the Australian fires was based on communications from a couple of folks I know down there, who do in fact seem under the impression that those things have gotten worse recently.)<\/p>\n \n Scientist are not all the cutthroat assholes you describe.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n No, of course they’re not. <\/span><\/span>I <\/span><\/em>wasn’t a cutthroat asshole (although the people who ended up as department heads frequently were), and I had lots of non-asshole friends and colleagues. Furthermore, peer-review was frequently a very positive and constructive experience. Which was why I was careful to put phrases like “to at least some extent” and “at least partly” in front of my claims. I was not trying to describe the behavior of scientists in its entirety; I was only trying to describe that vitriolic part of it on display in some of the Climategate e-mails, and which seemed to take so many outsiders by surprise.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n\n
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