The substance of the article is a lot more reasonable than the headline. Clearly there are people who honestly believe that global warming is real and argue it in good faith. Calling all climate change skeptics liars is simply wrong, and weakens climate position.
That said, calling out specific distortions/lies is totally fine. Take away the headline and that's what this post does.
That's why PZ (author of the post) didn't do that. He said that climate change deniers lie. There are skeptics who argue in good faith, and they get drowned out by the sheer level of noise from the denialists who aren't interested in the truth.
I admit, though, that the headline is somewhat inflammatory. I didn't want to change it for my submission, though, as I felt it would be best to let the author choose the headline.
But there's the thing. The only part of the debate that most people see is the crazy people shouting from both sides. Each camp has Big Loud Liars trying to defame the other side. Unfortunately, that's the part of the discussion that does the least amount of good.
Somewhere in the middle, there's a mildly interesting discussion to be had, about a little-understood phenomenon that might have some minor repercussions over the next few hundred years, some of which might be possible to mitigate by changing human behavior.
This post doesn't help things at all. It just makes one side (the author's) look a little more crazy and thus a little bit less believable.
That's one hell of a false equivalency. Because the author chose to put a valid and rational argument under a valid but slightly inflammatory headline, you equate him with those intentionally misrepresenting the science? PZ is many things, but he is not a "Big Loud Liar trying to defame the other side." What he is doing here is showing the actual behavior of the other side and exposing it for what it is: a baldfaced lie, repeated by uncritical followers.
Moreover, it is certainly not the case that climate change is "a little-understood phenomenon that might have some minor repercussions over the next few hundred years, some of which might be possible to mitigate by changing human behavior." While one can debate the magnitude of the probable consequences until the cows come home, there is near universal agreement within the scientific community that those consequences will likely be anything but minor.
But if you're going to predict the End Of The World, you need to be careful about how you do it. Because you're competing with a long history of crazy people making the exact same sort of prediction, all of whom were wrong.
So if you want to distinguish Climate Change from Asteroid Impacts, Africanized Killer Bees, Antibiotic-resistant Bacteria, Russian Nukes, Mayan Calendars, and the dozens of other things that we've forgotten about in the last few decades, all of which were set to End The World in the next few years, you'll need to tread lightly.
I'd suggest being the reasonable side of the debate. The one with the facts, research and data. And the one that never resorts to name calling.
That's an odd list of catastrophes there. A couple of those, such as antibiotic-resistant bacteria and nuclear annihilation, turned out not to be catastrophes because efforts were taken to stop them from becoming catastrophes, not because scientists were wrong. In fact, the threat of antibiotic-resistant strains will never go away, but demands constant efforts to keep the problem in check.
Let me add one to your list: Y2K. As we approached the year 2000, a lot of intelligent people noticed a problem, documented how it could adversely affect society and advocated fixing the problem. Millions of dollars were spent, and thanks to those efforts, the problems were almost entirely mitigated (at least, insofar as the general public was concerned-- many annoyances, inefficiencies and strange bugs remain due to the manner in which problems were dealt with). While some people took a religious bent on the problem and started stockpiling food and batteries, we were fortunate in that cooler heads prevailed and dealt with a major problem.
Admittedly, Y2K never even threatened to be as large a problem as climate change is, but my point is that one can list examples all day long of times that society has faced a crisis and overcome it with lots of effort. That doesn't, however, mean that those who originally warned of the crises were wrong.
Your phrase a mildly interesting discussion to be had, about a little-understood phenomenon that might have some minor repercussions over the next few hundred years makes it clear that you have failed to understand what the mainstream of science is saying.
Even with small temperature changes there are large projected impacts from changing weather patterns causing drought in some areas and flooding in others. Think of the regular El Niño/La Niña oscillation to see how much small temperature changes change weather patterns. This is on top of ocean acidification which is already damaging coral reefs and could widely threaten all kinds of shellfish (and ecosystems dependent on shellfish) in our lifetimes. And there are small changes in ocean level projected, which have a disproportionately large economic effect because we have so much important commercial activity at the ocean/land boundary.
In truth there is a fascinating discussion to be had about how much and when. There are a lot of open questions and that discussion is hardly one-sided. For instance look at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100127134721.ht... to see scientists projecting that the projected rate of increase of CO2 due to global warming (yes, increasing temperature releases natural CO2 which increases warming some more) is much less than had been projected. This will push us towards the lower end of what has been projected. Which, contrary to the yelling you hear from climate deniers, is far from nothing, and is not economically unimportant.
In short there is a fascinating scientific discussion going on about significant impacts that are likely within the coming decades. And if you subtract out the yelling on both sides, you might be able to hear it.
I agree wholeheartedly, modulo your very last sentence. I think that "yelling," as you put it, is a valid, defensible and necessary response to the yelling of the denialists, provided that one only yells things which are true. The other side has not been playing nice for quite some time, and that scientists have done themselves a disservice (along with the rest of society) by being unwilling to respond to denialist canards repeatedly and loudly. It's a tiresome and thankless job (just as the biologists), and one that I find myself poorly cut out for, but I do think it's needed.
Having read it, I think the author gives the "liars" too much credit. The "lie" he refers to looks to me like it may well be simple ignorance/stupidity. In my book, lying requires one to actually understand the data and intentionally mis-represent it. If one just doesn't understand statistics and what terms like "statistically significant" and "confidence level" actually mean, I can easily see someone reading the remark he quoted and just misunderstanding it to mean the exact opposite of what was really said.
Not that it would be any less inflammatory to post these remarks under a headline like "Climate change denialists = climate change idiots".
(FWIW: Count me as someone who is something of a "climate change skeptic". I don't deny that the climate is changing. I just like the comment one of my professors once made: "We are like fleas on the butt of a dog trying to figure out which way the dog is going." :-D )
I think the point being made is that many of the ones who started pushing this misleading quote did understand, even if not everyone who has since repeated also understood. Quote mining is something that scientists are seldom trained to defend against (I'm very quote-minable, I'm sure), and so if you put a microphone in front of any of us for long enough, and we'll say something true but that when taken out of context would seem to imply something false. When you take Jones' comment out of its context, it can be very misleading, even to intelligent people, and so I don't doubt that intelligent and honest people have repeated this lie without intending to be dishonest.
That's not how I read it all. Here is the closing statement from this piece:
They were afraid that any data they allowed to be characterised by non-climate scientists would be vulnerable to propagandistic distortion. And they were right.
Most people seem to routinely ascribe evil intentions to whomever they view as "antagonists" for some reason. I don't find that is typically true. This article pretty clearly takes that same position (and you seem to agree with it). I really don't think that is what most people do at all. But taking the position that someone else is being intentionally misleading is a great way to deepen the rift, if that is your goal. If your real goal is to get better information out there, it's a terribly counterproductive thing to do.
Given that there is an immense amount of money involved in the fossil fuel industries, it's hard (and even, in my opinion, unwise) to not ascribe ill motives to those who start such lies. When it comes to climate change, the denialists have spent so much time, effort and money on propagating patent falsehoods that I think we are completely justified in saying that we have applied Hanlon's razor [1], but that the falsehoods we are now seeing take root cannot be ascribed to stupidity alone.
I'm sorry, I don't see it that way, even given "conflict of interest" or whatever else you might want to call it. It looks to me like the immense amount of money involved in the fossil fuel industries is basically a survival/self-preservation issue. And so is trying to clean up the environment so the species as a whole can survive. It generally does not help to disregard the short-term survival needs of the people you are arguing with and leap straight to an assumption of "malice", which assumes they actively want to hurt people. Willingness to disregard the welfare of others (or downplay long-term negative consequences out of fear of the short-term consequences) because one has a compelling survival issue is not the same thing as malice. I also believe firmly that in many cases they really just don't see a problem, at least not one compelling enough to embrace/justify the kind of "radical" positions that the opposition takes.
I live without a car. In online forums where I talk about my choice to live without a car, it sometimes gets very freaked out reactions from people. People who are in no position to give up their car find my views and my choices very personally threatening. I see no reason to vilify them for such feelings and every reason to do all in my power to not vilify them. In most conflicts, both sides feel the other side "started it". In many cases, no one intentionally started anything. The friction that exists is very often inherent to the circumstance and not indicative of human evil.
The solution is simple: just stop reading anything on the Daily Mail related to climate change. Or any conservative tabloid, since AGW is nowadays not a matter of science, but of left vs. right... and the right is getting more and more fanatical and wrong as years pass by: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T4UF_Rmlio
Anybody with a modicum of common sense realizes the climate is changing. It always has been. It's also painfully obvious that we haven't had good data on world-wide climate for a long period at all -- it's just a tiny drop in a very huge bucket.
There's probably some technical point about the standard of statistical reliability, but, quite frankly, who cares? Either you can state significantly that some decade or two did something or not, and in either case the climate keeps changing and one decade out of countless eons does not much of a measurement make one way or the other.
So for Joe Six-pack the underlying issue isn't there. What's left out of that? That people misquote each other in news media? That slogans and broad, fuzzy statements are used in the public discourse in place of scientifically exact ones?
Is this guy mad because people don't debate climate science in the precise terms he would like? So it's a cheap shot at people who "dumb-down" things in common discourse? Sounds elitist.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 50.1 ms ] threadThat said, calling out specific distortions/lies is totally fine. Take away the headline and that's what this post does.
I admit, though, that the headline is somewhat inflammatory. I didn't want to change it for my submission, though, as I felt it would be best to let the author choose the headline.
Somewhere in the middle, there's a mildly interesting discussion to be had, about a little-understood phenomenon that might have some minor repercussions over the next few hundred years, some of which might be possible to mitigate by changing human behavior.
This post doesn't help things at all. It just makes one side (the author's) look a little more crazy and thus a little bit less believable.
Moreover, it is certainly not the case that climate change is "a little-understood phenomenon that might have some minor repercussions over the next few hundred years, some of which might be possible to mitigate by changing human behavior." While one can debate the magnitude of the probable consequences until the cows come home, there is near universal agreement within the scientific community that those consequences will likely be anything but minor.
But if you're going to predict the End Of The World, you need to be careful about how you do it. Because you're competing with a long history of crazy people making the exact same sort of prediction, all of whom were wrong.
So if you want to distinguish Climate Change from Asteroid Impacts, Africanized Killer Bees, Antibiotic-resistant Bacteria, Russian Nukes, Mayan Calendars, and the dozens of other things that we've forgotten about in the last few decades, all of which were set to End The World in the next few years, you'll need to tread lightly.
I'd suggest being the reasonable side of the debate. The one with the facts, research and data. And the one that never resorts to name calling.
Let me add one to your list: Y2K. As we approached the year 2000, a lot of intelligent people noticed a problem, documented how it could adversely affect society and advocated fixing the problem. Millions of dollars were spent, and thanks to those efforts, the problems were almost entirely mitigated (at least, insofar as the general public was concerned-- many annoyances, inefficiencies and strange bugs remain due to the manner in which problems were dealt with). While some people took a religious bent on the problem and started stockpiling food and batteries, we were fortunate in that cooler heads prevailed and dealt with a major problem.
Admittedly, Y2K never even threatened to be as large a problem as climate change is, but my point is that one can list examples all day long of times that society has faced a crisis and overcome it with lots of effort. That doesn't, however, mean that those who originally warned of the crises were wrong.
Even with small temperature changes there are large projected impacts from changing weather patterns causing drought in some areas and flooding in others. Think of the regular El Niño/La Niña oscillation to see how much small temperature changes change weather patterns. This is on top of ocean acidification which is already damaging coral reefs and could widely threaten all kinds of shellfish (and ecosystems dependent on shellfish) in our lifetimes. And there are small changes in ocean level projected, which have a disproportionately large economic effect because we have so much important commercial activity at the ocean/land boundary.
In truth there is a fascinating discussion to be had about how much and when. There are a lot of open questions and that discussion is hardly one-sided. For instance look at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100127134721.ht... to see scientists projecting that the projected rate of increase of CO2 due to global warming (yes, increasing temperature releases natural CO2 which increases warming some more) is much less than had been projected. This will push us towards the lower end of what has been projected. Which, contrary to the yelling you hear from climate deniers, is far from nothing, and is not economically unimportant.
In short there is a fascinating scientific discussion going on about significant impacts that are likely within the coming decades. And if you subtract out the yelling on both sides, you might be able to hear it.
Not that it would be any less inflammatory to post these remarks under a headline like "Climate change denialists = climate change idiots".
(FWIW: Count me as someone who is something of a "climate change skeptic". I don't deny that the climate is changing. I just like the comment one of my professors once made: "We are like fleas on the butt of a dog trying to figure out which way the dog is going." :-D )
They were afraid that any data they allowed to be characterised by non-climate scientists would be vulnerable to propagandistic distortion. And they were right.
Most people seem to routinely ascribe evil intentions to whomever they view as "antagonists" for some reason. I don't find that is typically true. This article pretty clearly takes that same position (and you seem to agree with it). I really don't think that is what most people do at all. But taking the position that someone else is being intentionally misleading is a great way to deepen the rift, if that is your goal. If your real goal is to get better information out there, it's a terribly counterproductive thing to do.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
I live without a car. In online forums where I talk about my choice to live without a car, it sometimes gets very freaked out reactions from people. People who are in no position to give up their car find my views and my choices very personally threatening. I see no reason to vilify them for such feelings and every reason to do all in my power to not vilify them. In most conflicts, both sides feel the other side "started it". In many cases, no one intentionally started anything. The friction that exists is very often inherent to the circumstance and not indicative of human evil.
Anybody with a modicum of common sense realizes the climate is changing. It always has been. It's also painfully obvious that we haven't had good data on world-wide climate for a long period at all -- it's just a tiny drop in a very huge bucket.
There's probably some technical point about the standard of statistical reliability, but, quite frankly, who cares? Either you can state significantly that some decade or two did something or not, and in either case the climate keeps changing and one decade out of countless eons does not much of a measurement make one way or the other.
So for Joe Six-pack the underlying issue isn't there. What's left out of that? That people misquote each other in news media? That slogans and broad, fuzzy statements are used in the public discourse in place of scientifically exact ones?
Is this guy mad because people don't debate climate science in the precise terms he would like? So it's a cheap shot at people who "dumb-down" things in common discourse? Sounds elitist.