Climate Change Deniers: “But They Are Scientists!”

[n2doc]

One of the Deniers1 favourite tactics is to throw out this or that list or petition of “scientists” who are Climate Deniers (eg “The Deniers“). After you discard the obvious frauds (eg the Oregon Petition), cull out the names that are made up, the ones who are not scientists, the ones who are dead, the real scientists who are not actually Deniers, etc, you are invariably left with a handful who do seem to be scientists and really are Climate Deniers. Huh?

This can be very confusing to the lay person who has no experience with the sciences.

So just how many people are we talking about here? It’s hard to say actually, in part because it depends on just how you define a Denier (or Skeptic). Heartland’s much touted PR event of last winter seems to have drawn only 19 “real scientists” and Wikipedia lists only about three dozen. Given that there are millions of scientists in the world that’s pretty lame. Even so, if it were only one and she happened to be right then the millions wouldn’t matter - so what’s going on here?

Let’s step back for a moment and do a reality check. Reality - scientists are human beings. This has some implications:

In the first place there are some scientists who are just plain incompetent. It is an unusual department or faculty of any size that does not have at least one such creature shambling about. Whether they faked their way to tenure or subsequently developed problems of one form or another doesn’t matter, the fact remains they couldn’t conduct adequate science to save their life.

In some cases it is a more elderly member of the department who has not kept up with their field, possibly because of diminishing abilities or just plain loss of interest. Typically these people are inflicted on the first year students or cross promoted into some marginal role until they get the hint and take early retirement to devote themselves full time to their paper clip collection.

http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/climate-change-deniers-but-they-are-scientists/

[iiibbb]

1. I'm slightly neutral on climate change...

There's a lot of politics around the issue of climate change. I still think we should cut down emissions, but more from the need to conserve energy and resources.

The measures that are proposed to fight global warming are either inefficient or ineffectual. Carbon credits/Cap and trade are a false economy because they don't actually encourage lower emissions; specifically, the entities that weren't using carbon anyway are getting money for doing what they were always doing, and entities that were will continue to use as much as ever.


And at the end of the day, world population is an issue that dwarfs my concerns about climate change.

[BlooInBloo]

2. Chalk one up for the stupid camp.

[iiibbb]

3. And that's the epitome of science debate where you come from?

Stupid camp... really?

World population _dwarfs_ global warming issues.

Clean water _dwarfs_ global warming issues.

[Indenturedebtor]

4. The Pentagon rates climate change as one of the biggest threats to national security

It will help ALOT with the world population thing though... do away with an awful lot of clean water as well. Oh and screw up agricultural production all over the world, bring malaria to places like Canada, etc.

It is the single biggest problem facing our nation and the world. Nothing much else matters in fact. We are fish in an aquarium. When the aquarium goes bad we all die.

[silverweb]

5. They're inextricably linked.

It's human activity that has caused global warming, and the sheer number of people and their activities (factory farms, ranching, heavy industry, electricity generation, water pollution, automobiles, etc, etc) drives it.

However, the number of people is not going to change quickly, barring global catastrophe (although Mother Earth may take care of that for us soon enough).

Thus, the immediate focus needs to be on wasy to quickly slow/stop/reverse global warming, i.e., modifying the human activities that drive it.

One of those focuses, among others, is the population issue, but it can't be dealt with quickly enough to have any immediate effect. Reducing fossil fuel use, cattle ranching, deforestation, etc, can have a more immediate impact.

We have to be able to focus on more than one thing at a time. It may already be too late, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't give it our best shot.

The biggest question really is: How do we get everyone on the same page and willing to cooperate in doing whatever is needed?

[rayofreason]

6. Climate always changes.

The difference now is that there is an anthropogenic component. How much is anthropogenic is what the real debate is about, and unless the solar cycle starts up soon we may find out directly.

Regardless of the the cause, one can ask several questions, like which will deal better with climate change - a poor society or a rich one? My view is that rich societies can deal much more effectively with climate change, and so be careful with any "solutions" to the climate change issue that have a major negative impact on economic growth, especially in poor countries. Same with environmental laws of all stripes. Environmentalism is the prerogative of the rich.

Want to help the environment? Do what you can to help a poor country get rich and literate. Well-off literate families have many fewer children (viz. US vs. Yemen) and can afford tough clean-up measures. The success of American environmentalism is nothing short of fantastic. Look up the data. For example, by every measure there has been a huge increase in air quality over the past few decades.

http://www.epa.gov/air/airtrends/sixpoll.html

Rich people can afford these kinds of controls, poor people cannot. Rich people will be able to mitigate anthropogenic climate effect. Poor people will not.