Andrew ([info]prock) wrote,
@ 2009-11-27 23:47:00
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Who's squirming whom?
One recurring meme that's been popping around over the last couple of days is the idea that climate researchers (and those who trust climate research as a science) are some how in fits of contortions squirming about trying to rationalize this sudden cognitive dissonance. It's a good meme, tells a fun story, and like many memes is generally hogwash.

I spent some time today reading a thread of comments at esr's blog:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1447

There's a lot of discussion there, but for the most part it's a predictable display of global warming skeptics being unskeptical about anything which supports their position, and backers of science asking for more information, more context, and more data. In a poetic turn of events, one line of code has become the anti global warming movement's "hockey stick". The mere existence of commented out code somehow proves once and for all that climatology is just a house of cards, and if they could only pull that bit of code out and show everyone it would topple.

It's almost embarrassing to watch. But at the same time, it's sort of hilarious watching the skeptics try over and over again to prove by assertion that this data dump is the end of climate science. In the end, I expect that they whole lot of them will convince themselves that global warming is a fraud (your classic no-op) while generally sane people will continue to monitor scientific publications and/or broad surveys of results (also a no-op).

The most disturbing aspects of this whole debate are the parallels with creationism/intelligent design. Both anti-global warming zealots and creationists have done a great deal to dress up their rhetoric in the garb of science, but have had very little success in coming up with scientific models which validate their hypotheses. I wouldn't be surprised if 150 years from now, we still have tons of anti-science crusaders railing against climate science, despite the many probable leaps and bounds the field will make in that time. There's not much that can be done when it comes to certain kinds of irrationality it seems. I understand why some people flock to anti-Darwinism, but for the life of me I have no clue what it is about global warming that gets people's undies in such a bunch.

Does anyone have any idea what it is that attracts the wing nuts to anti-global warming?

[eta: quote which illustrates esr's own wing nuttery: "Creationism is certainly politicized science..." Yes, that's right. Some software guy railing against global warming thinks creationism is a science.]

(43 comments) - (Post a new comment)


[info]pimpofpoker
2009-11-28 08:30 am UTC (link)
"Does anyone have any idea what it is that attracts the wing nuts to anti-global warming?"

Cuz Rush limbaugh told them so. His entire fan based is comprised of born-agains whose belief system is based on faith rather than facts. Furthermore, science poses a threat to their belief system. Of course, when global warming finally dooms us, they'll say it god's plan to punish us sinners.

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[info]prock
2009-11-28 03:23 pm UTC (link)
But what is it about global warming that drives them to a frenzy as opposed to say, cell phones. Or more seriously, why aren't the all over nuclear fusion, which has it's own share of mistakes, mispredictions, unfulfilled promises, and cranks.

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[info]markgritter
2009-11-28 08:32 am UTC (link)
Wow, what a bunch of paranoid rambling. It doesn't even take any time to get warmed up.

Rather, ask what makes anti-global warming appealing to wing-nuts and it practically answers itself. Heaven forbid that a left-of-center politician be correct about anything, that academics actually contribute useful knowledge, or that the market economy might be failing to avoid a catastrophe.

(Reply to this)


[info]jellymillion
2009-11-28 11:28 am UTC (link)
Also interesting is wondering why the US in particular has managed to become the (ahem) hot-bed of anti-science that it now appears. Maybe the country should take a leaf out of Pol Pot's book and just clean out all those corrupt intellectuals once and for all.

(Reply to this)

Shoe on the other foot
[info]slowjoe
2009-11-28 01:35 pm UTC (link)
Well, the skeptics have been asking for data and code for 10 years, so your point about the AGW crowd asking for data is slightly unfair.

I'm going to ignore the parallel with intelligent design. It isn't worthy of debate. Similarly, you don't discuss the problems with the missing temperature index data, Mann's principal component method, the divergence problem with proxies, upside-down proxies, the urban heat island (currently dismissed as non-existent on the basis of a Phil Jones paper from 1990) or problems with adjustments with the temperature reading or maintenance of weather stations, strip-bark bristlecones, or the Yamal data. There's more meat in this than the FOIA.zip file. I could explain how the posse involved in this are the guys that are "explaining" that current warming is unprecedented, rather than a normal climate cycle. These are the guys that renamed the "Medieval Warm Period" to the "Medieval Climate Anomaly". There actually are issues with the science.

But no, this isn't a good situation. The CRU/GISS/NOAA cabal have been using "appeal to authority" arguments for years (since they controlled the peer review process). In hindsight, it's obvious that this would either hold, or alternatively, there would be a bit of a revolution.

And now, we see what a "revolution" looks like, and it isn't pretty. Thankfully, there is no blood on the floor.

Yet.

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]slowjoe
2009-11-28 01:38 pm UTC (link)
Oh, and btw, you are correct that ESR doesn't know what is going on there. In the "hide the decline/Mike's Nature trick" process, they need to develop some stats from data that behaves strangely at the end. This array that ESR has found is normalising the data so that reliability stats can be calculated.

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]slowjoe
2009-11-28 02:22 pm UTC (link)
"Behaves strangely" is actually the decline that they want to hide.

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]prock
2009-11-28 03:21 pm UTC (link)
There actually are issues with the science.

I agree with that statement 100%. That's not a problem in any way. Problems with science are rather common, in large part because it's an exploration of the unknown (otherwise it wouldn't be science). The proper way to address the problems is through more science. Either by coming up with new models, or by producing negative results with the current models.

The basic issue is that there is a cabal of anti-science wing nuts who eschew the scientific process and want people to take them seriously. In that exact regard, the parallel with creationism is quite robust. Occam's Razor says that the reason that they aren't publishing truckloads of scientific results is that the science just isn't there.

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]slowjoe
2009-11-28 04:51 pm UTC (link)
"anti-science" needs to be defined. And "cabal"?

If you mean attacking published scientists without publishing in recognised journals, the backstory is eye-opening. McIntyre and McKitrick spent five years trying to get a reasonable hearing for their criticisms of the MBH98 (original hockey stick) paper.

They spent several years trying to get journals to force the authors of the emails to release or archive the input data for their articles (in compliance with the stated journal policies). That only changed when the authors published in the wrong journal last year, and some data got released this fall.

If you mean the cabal that subverted the IPCC process and refused to acknowledge criticisms: eg http://camirror.wordpress.com/2009/11/26/ipcc-reviewer-show-the-decline/

If you mean the cabal that refused to even say which data they were using for temperature indexes: http://camirror.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/willis-eschenbachs-foi-request/

The processing algorithm that is frequently used in this is called Regularized Expectation-Maximization (contracted frequently to "RegEM".) This correlates data series, and will turn the input upside down if it is negatively correlated. An example of this has been pointed out from a paper a couple of years ago. That inverted series was used again in a paper released this week.

Seriously, Andrew, while there are a few hysterical kids going overboard, and politicians doing what politicians do, the true "agnostic" position on both GW and the "A" in "AGW" has a lot going for it. A full audit of the science is desperately needed. And indeed, robust challenge and iterative improvement is the true scientific way. The religious comparison is best made to the high priests who said "trust us".

People like yourself comparing this crisis with creationism is generating more heat than light. An example of how bad things are is the Orwellian situation which means that the word "skeptic" is now sufficient to discredit anyone with questions. Skepticism used to be the basis of scientific investigation.

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]prock
2009-11-28 05:43 pm UTC (link)
"anti-science" needs to be defined.

Anti-science is the position that there is some other line of inquiry outside the scientific method that is better for investigating the natural world. It includes various fallacies such as:

1) Scientific understanding is brittle.
2) The scientific community is not qualified to interpret science.
3) That naked skepticism is in any way scientific.

A full audit of the science is desperately needed.

That would be an utter waste of time and money. That is not science. If you had said that development, verification and predictive measurement of new models is needed, I would agree.

Skepticism used to be the basis of scientific investigation.

No. It never was the basis of scientific investigation. A desire to understand natural phenomenon is a more correct basis. Skepticism is just one tool in the toolbox of science.

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]hgfalling
2009-11-28 05:33 pm UTC (link)
Let me see if I follow you. It's okay for climate change advocates to eschew the scientific process by hiding their data and methods, making it impossible for people to reproduce their experiment, which is the core of doing experimental science. This is okay because their opponents, who are a bunch of rabid idiots, are even LESS scientific.

This isn't how science is done. Science is done with transparency and reproducibility. The evidence for evolution isn't locked up in Richard Dawkins' office in Oxford, because if it were released, then the creationists would do something nefarious with it. If there are issues with the science, the process is that other scientists try to reproduce the results, fail or partially succeed, do their own reproducible experiments, and science advances through their work.

A point that some commentor on some blog brought up (now I don't remember where) is that in a lot of scientific disciplines, transparency and reproducibility doesn't matter that much, because the only people who are interested in your results are people in the same field; ie you are investigating the mating habits of some species of African frog. This kind of used to be the case with climate science; not that many people were actually interested in the underlying data, it wasn't a very big field, etc.

Now, however, based on results reported by climatologists, there are movements to make significant, expensive changes in practically everything. So climate scientists, whether they are right or not, ought to be meticulous in their transparency. These guys at CRU, it appears, at some point became convinced that they were right about the danger of climate change and ceased to work as scientists and started discussing deleteing their emails rather than respond to FOI requests.

Whether they're right or wrong, and I think they are mostly right, some of what these emails reveal they were doing isn't science.

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]prock
2009-11-28 05:49 pm UTC (link)
Let me see if I follow you.

Ok.

It's okay for climate change advocates to eschew the scientific process by hiding their data and methods, making it impossible for people to reproduce their experiment

It looks like you didn't follow me very far. That's someone else's position you're setting up for a take down, not mine.

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]jpmassar
2009-11-28 06:12 pm UTC (link)
So is the data that the much-maligned graphs were based and and which the program in question massaged available? (Or, a better question, I guess, was the data available before the hacking incident?)

Did other scientists use this (or equivalent) data and different programmers / programs to arrive at similar conclusions?

I haven't seen any discussion of this question in all that I've read about this tempest.

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]slowjoe
2009-11-28 09:01 pm UTC (link)
That's almost a thesis question. But I know a little bit about this, so I'll give you my understanding.

In the beginning, there were two questions asked about global warming.
1. Is this warming unprecedented? Didn't we have the Medieval Warm Period 1000-1400 and the Little Ice Age 1600-1750?

2. How much of the warming that we observe comes from the Urban Heat Island effect?

Point 1: Unprecedented warming

The hockey stick came from a paper now referred to as "Mann, Bradley, Hughes 98" or "MBH98". This paper used different "temperature proxies" (typically ice cores and tree rings) to reconstruct temperatures going back to about 1000AD. In order to do this, each proxy had its average subtracted from it (to base it at zero), and then divided by its standard deviation. This may also have been the paper where the proxy was spliced with the temperature record (this being refered to now as "Mike's Nature Trick") The resulting data was fed into a hacked statistical algorithm called something like Primary Component Analysis (PCA). This paper said that the recent warming was unprecedented, but also that the LIA and MWP were not much different from the millenial average.

A retired statistician named Stephen McIntyre and an academic named Ross McKitrick tried to reproduce this. Mann refused to provide either data or code. Nevertheless, M&M found that when they re-wrote Mann's PCA, they generated Hockey sticks from red noise. In addition, they found that from the list of proxies in the paper, that one group, from "strip-bark bristlecone pines" in the western US seemed to provide all of the warming signal.

M&M had major problems publishing these findings. These problems are possibly related to the stuff about not recognising journals, pressure to remove journal editors, and pressure on academic departments to stop retired staff using the university name. The original journal wanted to keep any comment to a small word limit. When they rewrote as a paper, they were told there wasn't sufficient material.

Mann refused to provide his data or code, but this material was found a couple of years ago on an FTP server.

Anyway, while M&M were reverse engineering the MBH98 paper, other reconstructions were being written. Among the proxies they use, there were the bristlecones plus either a dataset called "Polar Urals" or, later, "Yamal", both in Siberia, and published by the deputy head of CRU, Keith Briffa. (Briffa was also the editor of the historical temp chapter in the latest IPCC report.) Polar Urals had a problem: it said that a year between 1000 and 1100 (bang within the MWP) was the coldest in the past millenium. Yamal didn't have this problem, so later reconstructions have used this.

The Yamal data was subject to a bunch of FOI requests and journal data access requests. Finally, it was used by the original author last year in a paper to Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. The Royal Society has a policy of access to data and code for papers published in its journals (similar to other journals where previous papers have been published.) However, the Royal Society enforced this. This fall, the Yamal data was made available. For the period after 1990, less than 10 trees were used, and one tree in particular was 6 standard deviations away from the average.

All papers which produce a hockey stick use at least one of Polar Urals, the Greybill Bristlecones or Yamal. In response to the critics, papers were written that showed if you had use B and Y, then removed either, you retained a hockey stick.

The latest papers also use a lake sediment dataset from a lake in Finland as a temperature proxy. However, they have inverted the series from the interpretation in the original academic paper, and refused to address the point. This series was used upside down in a paper that Mann released this week.

That is as much as I know about point 1 above.

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]slowjoe
2009-11-28 09:01 pm UTC (link)

Point 2: Urban Heat Island
It's actually hard to produce a global temperature. You can look at the satellite data, the land data or the sea data. The satellite data shows less warming than the land, which has been explained as orbital anomalies, and an adjustment is added to the satellites.

There are a few indexes, among which is HADCRUT compiled by CRU (of leak fame), and another compiled by NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Science (headed by James Hansen). HADCRUT uses land stations. One of the problems with land stations is that the perfect weather station should be rural, unshaded, well maintained and in the centre of about an acre of ploughed earth. They are supposed to be in a whitewashed wooden box a standard height above ground with a north facing door. Very few are like this. Likewise, the ideal station should not have moved.

In contrast, the typical weather station may or may not be shaded, often isn't in the same location where it started, almost certainly isn't in the centre of that ploughed earth, and may be in the centre of a town, or at least near other man made structures. There are examples of stations with south facing doors, electric light bulbs wired into the box for reading (banned), boxes with the wrong paint, placed next to aircon outflows, beside tennis courts or (EXTREMELY frequently) airport runways.

Because of urbanisation and station moves, adjustments are made to the historical data. These adjustments are very controversial, not least because the adjustments have changed in the past 10 years, particularly to make the 1930s colder and the post 1970 period increasingly warmer.

Questions about this in general are not being answered either in the UK or the US.

The FOI requests to the man at the centre of this (Jones) were trying to find out about this, because his academic focus has been the HADCRUT index. However, he stonewalled completely, as described in the article at http://camirror.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/willis-eschenbachs-foi-request/ to the point of refusing to list the stations he used.

In all the above, the reason the data is being requested is that algorithms are not being published and therefore a reverse-engineering exercise is necessary. However, the group around Mann, Jones, Briffa, Schmidt etc are even refusing to provide the input data to validate reverse engineering efforts.

Happy to answer any questions. Some of this may be in error, for which I apologise.

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]patrissimo
2009-11-28 08:30 pm UTC (link)
I find it rather odd that you are labeling the people who want to hide their data and methods as "science" and the people who want transparency and sharing of data so that other scientists can do science with it "anti-science". If you are actually evaluating people by whether they are contributing to increased understanding, that would be an absurd choice of labels. The most obvious explanation is that rather than evaluating individual scientists or ideas, you have decided that one entire side of a debate (the mainstream) are "scientists" and the other side (anti-AGW) are "wingnuts", and so the former must be doing science and the latter must not be.

But it doesn't fit the data. Labeling people who ask for release of data as "anti-science wing nuts" is just absurd. Transparency promotes science. Obfuscation hinders science.

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]prock
2009-11-28 10:17 pm UTC (link)
I find it rather odd that you are labeling the people who want to hide their data and methods as "science" and the people who want transparency and sharing of data so that other scientists can do science with it "anti-science".

I'm not doing that in any way. If I implied that somewhere, please let me know where so I can clarify.

The most obvious explanation is that rather than evaluating individual scientists or ideas, you have decided that one entire side of a debate (the mainstream) are "scientists" and the other side (anti-AGW) are "wingnuts", and so the former must be doing science and the latter must not be.

It might seem that way, but it's exactly not the case. I'm labeling people who do science as scientists, and those who engage in anti-scientific fallacies as wing nuts.

Labeling people who ask for release of data as "anti-science wing nuts" is just absurd.

I agree 100%, and you will never find me applying the wing nut label on the basis of that sort of position.

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]slowjoe
2009-11-28 10:31 pm UTC (link)
I think the source of this is that the tactics of the group of paleoclimatologists subject to the recent leak have been to fortify around control of the peer-review process for climate journals.

This means it's quite hard to seperate your statements above from similar statements. For instance, Greenpeace types are trying to invade airports in the UK claiming that they are armed with peer-reviewed science.

This has brought the name of science into disrepute.

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]prock
2009-11-28 10:43 pm UTC (link)
This means it's quite hard to seperate your statements above from similar statements. For instance, Greenpeace types are trying to invade airports in the UK claiming that they are armed with peer-reviewed science.

Well, I certainly haven't advocated that sort of wing-nuttery in any shape or form. Arguing positions that aren't being advocated (i.e. various forms of strawman-ship) is another fallacy that wing nuts on all strides make regularly.

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]patrissimo
2009-11-29 01:50 am UTC (link)
Glad to hear it. When you said:

"The basic issue is that there is a cabal of anti-science wing nuts who eschew the scientific process and want people to take them seriously."

I thought you were talking about all anti-AGWers as the cabal, and saying that the CRU (mainstream) scientists were doing good science. I take it that is not the case?

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]prock
2009-11-30 06:31 am UTC (link)
I thought you were talking about all anti-AGWers as the cabal, and saying that the CRU (mainstream) scientists were doing good science.

I was referring to the people who think that if the CRU was shown to have been a bunch of frauds that that meant the entire field was a fraud, as opposed to established science in the process of developing models for global climate.

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]slowjoe
2009-11-30 12:44 pm UTC (link)
I guess you're thinking a step ahead. For the record, what do you think needs to be done? Would you investigate the whole of CRU, or just Phil Jones?

Do you accept that after telling people he'd delete the data, he now says that it is lost?

And do you think that the work of US scientists like Mann, Santer, Schmidt needs to be reviewed also?

What about the papers which were reviewed rather than written by these people?

What is your view of reliabilty of the IPCC 4th Assesment Report?

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]patrissimo
2009-12-01 03:35 am UTC (link)
"meant the entire field was a fraud" is a bit strong. But surely evidence that main researchers and peer reviewers in an area were frauds would mean that the fraud-rating for the entire field goes up. Perhaps substantially, depending how much of the field they represented and how much influence it had.

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]prock
2009-12-01 03:57 am UTC (link)
But surely evidence that main researchers and peer reviewers in an area were frauds would mean that the fraud-rating for the entire field goes up.

I generally think assuming guilt by association is a poor way of approaching these sort of things. If they are in fact guilty of fraud, it does mean any work that relied on their results or data should be re-reviewed.

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]patrissimo
2009-12-02 06:32 pm UTC (link)
The people involved are peer-reviewers. Whether or not they committed fraud, there is clear evidence that they were using their influence to advance their ideological agenda. (a little bit of) Guilt by association is not an assumption, but a simple logical reading of that situation.

Not that the anti-AGWers have any shortage of wanting to advance their own ideological agenda by whatever means they can...they just have less influence.

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]prock
2009-12-02 06:51 pm UTC (link)
The people involved are peer-reviewers. Whether or not they committed fraud, there is clear evidence that they were using their influence to advance their ideological agenda. (a little bit of) Guilt by association is not an assumption, but a simple logical reading of that situation.

No. Guilt by association is never logical. If a person is not an honest actor, that does not convict those who associate with him.

Not that the anti-AGWers have any shortage of wanting to advance their own ideological agenda by whatever means they can...they just have less influence.

That's exactly my point. The anti-AGW crowd are motivated by ideology, not a desire for understanding the natural world. Science is by it's very nature not ideological. Sure you can have ideological scientists, but they still have to do science. This is exactly why you don't see tons and tons of ID papers being published despite the fact that a large number of scientists believe in God.

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]patrissimo
2009-12-02 09:49 pm UTC (link)
Guilt by association is never logical. If a person is not an honest actor, that does not convict those who associate with him.

Are you being deliberately obtuse? If the editor and/or peer reviewers of a journal are not honest actors, that means the function of the journal to filter for legitimate research has been corrupted, and one can no longer view "published in a journal" as a quality signal for a paper. It means there is even more selection bias than usual - maybe a lot more. Call it what you want, but there's nothing illogical about it.

The anti-AGW crowd are motivated by ideology, not a desire for understanding the natural world.

Who's using guilt by association now? There are plenty of anti-AGW people, like Steve McIntyre, or the economists like Arnold Kling who compare climate models to macroeconomic models, who are motivated by a desire for understanding the natural world. (Or more accurately, for not pretending to understand just because we have fancy math models, if we really don't understand).

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]prock
2009-12-02 10:45 pm UTC (link)
Are you being deliberately obtuse?

No, I was just stating a fact. Guilt by association is a fallacy.

If the editor and/or peer reviewers of a journal are not honest actors, that means the function of the journal to filter for legitimate research has been corrupted, and one can no longer view "published in a journal" as a quality signal for a paper.

Sort of. It means that the articles published in the journal merit more scrutiny. As with all publications, you should never attribute blind faith that publication in any journal is an indication of settled science. The articles which were reviewed by bad actors, or selected by for publication by bad actors require more skepticism than other articles, but all articles should be viewed skeptically.

It means there is even more selection bias than usual - maybe a lot more.

Sure. That's why publication in a journal does not constitute science.

Who's using guilt by association now?

Not me. Unless you think that suggesting people have ideological bents is somehow a crime.

There are plenty of anti-AGW people, like Steve McIntyre, or the economists like Arnold Kling who compare climate models to macroeconomic models, who are motivated by a desire for understanding the natural world.

I may have spoken a bit loosely. I was basing the statement on the fact that there just isn't much science being published by the anti-AGW researchers. It may be that they are trying to understand the natural world through their ideology, but just not having much success.

I guess they could be also interested in understanding the real world, but just not interested enough to actually try and understand it. If you're trying to get a better understanding of the natural world, pretty much the only way to do that is either by doing or studying science. If you're not doing either of those things then you're not doing anything to advance understanding.

(Or more accurately, for not pretending to understand just because we have fancy math models, if we really don't understand).

I'm not sure what this even means. Are you ready to discard quantum theory, or public key encryption because you don't really understand the fancy math? If you're not qualified to understand the math, that seems like the perfect opportunity to defer to someone who does.

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]patrissimo
2009-12-02 11:02 pm UTC (link)
It's not a question of understanding the math, but whether the math describes reality, or whether it has enough free variables to fit an elephant.

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Re: Shoe on the other foot
[info]prock
2009-12-02 11:05 pm UTC (link)
whether the math describes reality, or whether it has enough free variables to fit an elephant.

You do realize that those are not two mutually exclusive states, don't you?

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]nokomisjeff
2009-11-28 03:57 pm UTC (link)
Probably the same thing that attracts the left wing bleeding hearts to the other side. None of this is science, and it's all political. While I don't deny that climate changes, always has and always will, I suspect the man made part. I will start worrying about the man made part when Al Gore stops flying around in his Gulf Stream V and stops running up $25K/month utility bills.

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[info]prock
2009-11-28 04:07 pm UTC (link)
I agree that the political aspects of the whole thing are putrid beyond compare on both sides. But that's basically my whole point. This isn't the sort of thing that can be sorted out by flag wavers and politicians. That's why letting scientists do their work is the right way to go. Personally, I don't expect it to be sorted out in less than a hundred years, if that.

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[info]nokomisjeff
2009-11-28 04:22 pm UTC (link)
When I graduated from high school in 1974, the climate change people were worried about an impending ice age. The ice age was a big news deal, but couldn't compete with Nixon's Watergate scandal. It went underground for a decade and came out as a global warming crisis, later changed to "Climate change" brought out by the same group. I suspect that the politicos enjoy both left and right wingers to be extremely angry, filled with wrath. This anger allows deception which will enable the politicos to profit. People tend to be sheep, following whatever the meme of the day for their value system. Still, there are a few rugged individuals out there who call bullshit to the whole thing. It would be nice if the high schools would teach the philosophies of Nock, Galton, and Rand to everyone. That will never happen in the public school system(although they do teach them in places like Andover, Exeter, et al.)

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[info]jpmassar
2009-11-28 04:51 pm UTC (link)
When I graduated from high school in 1974, the climate change people were worried about an impending ice age.

False. The media were worried about an impending ice age. This myth is well-documented and another example of the 'big lie' that sticks in people's
minds after its falsehood is exposed. That a few scientists raised the possibility and suggested further research while most others thought global warming more probable hardly suggests sky-is-falling concern about an upcoming ice age.

For instance, searching the relevant scientific papers of the era produced:

The survey identified only 7 articles indicating cooling compared to 44 indicating warming. Those seven cooling articles garnered just 12% of the
citations.

-- See the 'Survey of Peer Reviewed Literature' section

But nice try.

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[info]nokomisjeff
2009-11-28 05:01 pm UTC (link)
whatever

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[info]telemann
2009-11-28 06:43 pm UTC (link)
Actually as other scientists reviewed the research, the theory was withdrawn. But what is missed sometimes, and it's starting to get some serious consideration-- why wasn't global warming happening as much during the 1950s/1960s and even 1970s? High numbers of particulates in the air were helping to block out some sunlight, and some scientists are suggesting that above ground test of nuclear weapons were a factor as well (very simliar to what volcanic eruptions). As air quality controls came into place during the 1970s, reducing large particles in the air-- the warming started up. It warrants further research obviously.

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[info]jpmassar
2009-11-28 06:59 pm UTC (link)
One seemingly obvious factor would be that the global population, and certainly the industrialized global population, would have been a lot lower,
putting a lot less carbon into the air, while the total rainforest area was probably higher.

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[info]telemann
2009-11-28 07:02 pm UTC (link)
Europe was being bombed extensively during WW2, creating tons of particulates and throwing that all into the air, I wonder if that had any cooling impact as well.

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[info]abostick59
2009-11-28 11:29 pm UTC (link)
Does anyone have any idea what it is that attracts the wing nuts to anti-global warming?

The bully pulpits and (in some cases) ample funding provided by oil companies might have something to do with it. Winguttery is sustained by Wingnut Welfare, and Big Oil is a substantial provider.

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[info]ahhunter
2009-11-29 04:46 am UTC (link)
The mainstream paleocon opposition is probably based in support for oil companies. The libertarian opposition (which as someone in the software industry, I have to deal with far more often) isn't, I think. Instead, I think it's this, which someone pointed out on Patri's blog (perhaps you?):

If AGW is true, libertarianism (at least in the full ancap form) is done. There is nothing free-market (that I have seen proposed anywhere--please correct me...) that can produce the required reduction in carbon. Only governments could even try to do so. I'm personally of the opinion that libertarianism doesn't work and the record amply shows this, but AGW drives a rather nice stake through it.

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[info]prock
2009-11-30 06:33 am UTC (link)
Interesting take on the libertarian slant. I hadn't seen that. Thank you.

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[info]patrissimo
2009-12-01 03:39 am UTC (link)
This makes the classic statist fallacy of assuming that, because private solutions are imperfect, public solutions must be better. It may be that no private solution can fix global warming...but it may also be that no public solution can fix global warming, and trying the latter method will waste many more tens of trillions of dollars. In which case, global warming argues for libertarianism, not against it (if governments will waste lots of money trying to fix public good problems and failing, that's an argument for small government).

And in this year of Emily Ostrom's Nobel, dismissing private solutions to public good problems is not very wise.

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[info]jpmassar
2009-11-30 06:29 pm UTC (link)
Another commentary on the vast global warming conspiracy.

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/11/a-conspiracy-so-vast.php

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