Christopher Moore is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Coastal Carolina University. He lives in Myrtle Beach, SC with his wife and two children.Global warming alarmists have spent years blathering on about so-called models and data showing world temperatures rising and the catastrophic consequences. They are obviously full of crap for two reasons: (1) Have you looked outside? It’s snowing. In Myrtle Beach, SC. Blizzards up north. It’s cold. (2) Weren’t they talking about the coming Ice Age only a decade or two ago?
Yes, I am being sarcastic, but only slightly. I’m not really going to try “debunking” the hard work of thousands of competent scientist working in a field in which I have no training. As a scientist myself, I trust them. I know most have no agenda but to the truth.
However, climate scientists have absolutely sucked at communicating their science. And worse, they’ve allowed environmental groups to heavily politicize it, almost daring their political opponents to point out huge snow drifts whenever they appear.
Yes, there is a huge difference between climate and weather. Yes, some liberal politician or pundit points this out every time some dumbass on Fox News tells us snow in New England disproves global warming. But who is going to win that fight to win the minds of the non-science public? You betcha.
I watched Tucker Carlson last night fill in for Sean Hannity on Fox News. I did this because I like Tucker. I read the Daily Caller. I think he’s a smart and witty guy, and more importantly he is a libertarian. But, there is snow in New England and he knows his audience.
The scientific reasoning ability of your typical college student is poor. Now extrapolate to the average American.
I felt sorry for the pundit providing the “liberal” view. She was right. On every point. There is a huge difference between climate and weather. Most scientists talk about climate change, rather than warming. These types of extreme storms actually support climate change models.
Global warming is badly communicated science
With all of that said, I am going to stick by my title at least with respect to the communication of the science. Global warming is “bad science,” (not-really) and here are my reasons:
- Communicating science is just as (or more) important than the science itself.
- Climate science is based on really complicated models, and real climate is based on more variables than could possibly be controlled. Not a big deal in and of itself, but you have to be careful when you communicate with the public about said models.
Climate scientists have sucked at communicating their science, mainly because they have left it up to left-of-center political organizations. We’re also talking about a system that is dependent on thousands if not hundreds-of-thousands of variables, many of which are not completely understood. That makes the communication part even more important.
What can be done?
First, everyone interested in climate needs to stop uttering the words “global warming.” They should have never started that meme in the first place. This was most likely a consequence of political lobbyists trying to sell public policy, and warming data is probably the easiest to sell. But, then it snows and we learn a thing or two about many people’s conception of the term “average.” Global warming is real, don’t get me wrong, but it isn’t the warming per se that is the problem and it isn’t the “warming” that we experience as an end result. Climate change is a far meter meme; however, it’s probably too late.
I’m not calling most people stupid. They’re just ignorant. I don’t know a lot about French Literature. That doesn’t make me stupid. If you want to sell policy based on science, then you damn well better sell the science first. Appeal to authority doesn’t work well in these situations, especially when it appears like the authority is in bed with the policy makers. (Notice I said “appears.”)
I think the best way to combat both points above is to directly address the second. The science is complicated. Let’s just admit that. Just admit that there are lots and lots of variable that may or may not have huge effects that just aren’t currently known. Coming clean on that score may hurt if your goal is to sell policy. It helps sell the science, though. Get the PR out of the Sierra Club’s hands.
Climate scientists need their own Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Sell climate change first, then we can discuss policy
Here is how I handle the conversation in a way that a thinking conservative (yes, they exists) can comprehend. Think economics. A good conservative will give you a great line about the unintended consequences that result from central planning, especially problems that are incredibly complicated and rely on lots of variables. Think health care.
The climate is similar. Aerosol may be important to the growth of an economy, but when injected into a highly complex system governed by zillions of different and competing mechanisms, do you honestly think there won’t be some consequences. And like economic planning, those unintended consequences are most likely going to suck.
I’m not arguing against the science behind climate change. I just want public climate scientists, and those that profess to be their mouth pieces, to own up to the fact that the science is really complicated and in its infancy. That will help the science, because it will get the discussion back to where it belongs: on the science and not the potential public policy.
Sell the science first. Sell cap-and-trade second.
Update: The Daily Caller gets it right.
The Daily Caller (Tucker Carlson’s conservative site) gets it right on climate science. Read the article closely. Both Brad Johnson from the Center for American Progress and Dr. Patrick Michaels from the Cato Institute are completely correct, even though it seems like they are disagreeing with each other.
Very good points made: we do need to sell science rather than sell policy. to do that, we need to teach scientific reasoning, and science itself. Scientists do not communicate their science very well at all, which is part the fault of the scientists, and part the fault of science reporters, who often seem to not have any idea of what goes on in science-land or how to think about scientific information. It’s their job is to serve as the critical link between complicated science (and the associated scientists) and the general public, and I think that they’re as much (more?) to blame than the researchers themselves. I remember reading an excellent article on this once, I’m almost certain by Ben Goldacre, I cannot find it on his site at the moment though.
My major hangup with the article is the assertion that climate science is new.: its really not. Global warming is much more than a correlation between global temperatures and CO2 emissions. Its based in molecular spectroscopy, and to deny climate change involves either (1) denying that atmospheric gases do not absorb light in the IR, which means asserting that molecules do not have electronic/vibrational states, (2) denying that IR absorption adds energy, and therefore heat, to a molecule, which means denying conservation laws, or (3) denying that the amount of atmospheric CO2 has increased in the past 200 years, or (4) denying that the sun emits infrared light. Don’t laugh at the last one, Rush Limbaugh once decried global warming as a myth, since Mars has more CO2 than earth, and is colder, completely ignoring that Mars is several million more miles farther from the sun than earth is. This is also especially ironic, since he is agreeing that Mars has high CO2 amounts, and our knowledge of Martian CO2 comes almost entirely from measurements based on principle (1)
These scientific principles have been understood since the late 1800s, with people warning about the concerns of global warming almost as soon as those principles were understood. I’ve even read an essay dated 1910 about global warming, (I believe by Thomas Dixon, author of “life worth living”), and I understand there are scientific papers from the 1890′s outlining that global temperatures will rise as humans continue to add CO2 into the atmosphere.
Beer’s Law, and the concept of total absorption, is important to understanding why CO2 is so important. I read an article by George Will several years ago where he used a common misconception that since water vapor absorbs light also, that making cars which emit H2O vapor will contribute to our global warming problems as well. H2O and CO2 (and methane, and ethanol, and every other molecule) absorb at their own unique set of wavelengths. When one adds enough of a certain gas, total absorption occurs. Our atmosphere, thanks to the worlds oceans, has total absorption for the wavelengths at which water absorbs. No amount of added gaseous H2O will contribute to global warming, there is no more light to absorb. CO2 density, on the other hand, is far from total absorption, and adding it will absorb more IR radiation, heating the earth. But why CO2, and not methane, or the other gasses that global warming deniers like to point out? There is no total absorption of CH4, and we’ve added lots of that to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. CH4 absorbs around 3500nm and 8000nm. CO2 absorbs at 2400nm and 4000nm, PLUS a total absorption at all wavelengths past 13000nm. It absorbs more light than other common gases, and therefore heat things up more
So the basis of climate change is very well grounded in very old science. Sadly, though most criticisms of global waring do not even acknowledge that there are reliable measurements of global temperatures, as though scientist make up their graphs. Comments I have read, like “Al Gore’s graph had straight lines! Annual temperatures go up and down, he should have shown a picture of a sine curve” show a basic incomprehension, not of scientific principles, but of how basic data taking and graph making (and therefore science) work. One takes measurements, plots those actual measurements, and the fit MUST go through those measurements, no matter how badly one would like the fit to look like something different. So maybe I’m shooting too high trying to explain light absorption in molecules. But I’ll keep trying, and resist invoking Fourier analysis in letters to the editor, to assert that a graph of straight lines is sinusoidal.
That ended up being long. There’s just so much fun physics in the greenhouse effect.
Assessment and development of scientific reasoning among non-scientists is the direction my pedagogical research has taken me. I do blame scientists fundamentally for poor reasoning; (1) We teach the primary and secondary teachers, and (2) we teach the journalists when they are in college. That’s why I think it is fundamentally important that we re-focus our conceptual physics courses at least in the short term to focus explicitly on reasoning. Long term we need to ask why every college student has to take upper-level English, but we stop their science education at PHYS 101 or an equivalent?
I didn’t mean to suggest that all of climate science is new, but modern modeling of large systems like climate is relatively new. It’s these models that make the predictions of problems in which modern public policy is being crafted to solve.
I’m no global warming skeptic. Temperatures are rising and there is a strong correlation between that and CO2 emissions. You point out brilliantly (and simply) the mechanism. However, climate is more than just average temperatures. It’s a whole lot more. When systems get extremely large, and the number of variables unwieldily, then models get very unreliable except for very specific questions.
Global warming is well established. [The blog title is intentionally controversial to drive traffic. ;)] I just don’t know exactly how this would affect global climate, and I’m skeptical of strong government intervention to solve a problem that I’m not sure is very well defined. [I'm skeptical of government intervention completely, even with clearly defined problems, but that is a different topic for a different blog.]
This most likely has more to do with my own ignorance. I’m a solid state physicist. But I’m a smart guy with a lot of training and a predisposition to trust scientists. If it’s not clear to me, then it certainly isn’t clear to my grandmother.
That is the selling that needs to be done.
So, is astronomy bad science? It’s not easily falsifiable……
Some quotes:
psikeyhackr: “But doesn’t anyone doing REAL PHYSICS have to have the quantities to plug into the equations. So don’t we need to know the TONS of STEEL and TONS of CONCRETE on every level of the towers?”
You: “I have said that it is indeed a very difficult problem requiring calculus to model in even the most simplified one-dimensional analysis, and computer analysis for anything more rigorous……The problem you have is that they do not specifically tell you something that is not possible to know in the detail that you want it. They make reasonable assumptions about the mass distribution based on known facts about the buildings’ construction. They then show that progressive collapse is a viable model well within the range of reasonable values.”
Explain to me how your stance on global climate change is not in direct contradiction to your response to the 9/11 troofer you argue with above. If we do know that CO2 production is correlated with temperature increase, as you state above, and temperature increase is correlated with a whole slew of other (bad) things, how is a policy that limits CO2 production a bad idea? We can argue around the edges about the specific outcomes of specific climate models, but to let that stop us from doing anything about CO2 production seems irresponsible at best. I mean, it seems pretty clear to me that anthropogenic CO2 production is the plane that hit the building.
Your fundamental point is that science education is bad, and more people should use their critical thinking skills, and we scientists should do a better job of presenting science and teaching these skills. I think to choose this highly politicized issue to make that simple point adds heat but not light to a very important but difficult issue. Every single major scientific organization in this country and across the planet agrees with the climate scientists on this issue. You know, because of your training, the kind of work that goes into science this complex. Where is your analysis that refutes or even calls into question the outcomes of scientific study of the issue? I am not making any claims to any better knowledge than you have (I’ll leave that to people far more knowledgable than me). But I am also not dismissing the work of thousands of climate scientists as bad science because (you again) “climate science is really complicated…..”
I figured the title might draw you out. Please forgive me sometimes if I’m not clear in my writing. I typically have two little ones running around me.
The science is there. I don’t dispute it at all. I’m not sure about the science with respect to future outcomes and their extent, but that’s just ignorance on my part.
If you want to enact policy, then you have to convince a lot of politicians that listen to a lot of people in their districts every Nov. 2nd. Global Warming is loosing the battle of ideas even though its right. We can just blame Fox News, or come up with a better sales strategy on the science.
But you should be on the side of the science, then! I’d lay a bet with you right now that someone, soon, will be contacting you to provide “balance” on global warming and that your title is going to lead *another* person to think that “even scientists can’t agree.” How does that do any good, either for policy discussions, or global climate change issues, or even poor science education?
Let them contact me. I’ll tell them what I’m saying here. Let them link to this article because they are suckered in by the title. That’s exactly my mission for the title I have chosen. I could preach to the choir, but that obviosly dosen’t work.
I’m convinced global temps are rising. The data is telling. What I’m not convinced about are the implications and the direness of them. I can’t simply accept appeal to authority. That would be bad science. I’m confident I could be convinced, I just haven’t been. Mostly because I am ignorant. But the way climate change is being sold doesn’t help.
That is my fundamental point. The science behind climate change models has not been sold, it’s just been accepted by some who are ready to fundamentally alter another extremely complicated system, economy, in responce.
And I disagree with your last sentence. I think that the obfuscation of the fundamental science has been sold by those who don’t want to change a very profitable system to them. It’s never been about questioning the science or the wisdom of doing or not doing something based on science, it’s about not want to change a very profitable status quo.
And one more thought: the argument against policy change is almost never nased on science….how can a scientist argue against that. Again, I refer you back to your troofer argument above.
If I understand you correctly, I do think you have a good point about the direness (or lack thereof) of global warming predictions. Its clear that global temperatures are rising, and that they are rising at an unusually fast rate. It’s very hard to make a science-based argument that the temperature increases are not anthropogenic in origin. The mechanisms for this are well understood, I outlined them in a previous post.
Modeling of complex systems is a much newer thing than photoabsorption in gas molecules, and one can make arguments of the validity of those models. This can be argued separately from the ethical issue of global warming: even if climate change does cause major environmental disasters, why should we care? Personally, I do care that life on earth could be significantly altered by CO2 emissions, although I’m not sure if I can completely explain why, considering how much change life has undergone in the past million or so years. And while I’m not 100% convinced that climatic disaster will strike if we do nothing about CO2 emissions, I don know that curbing those emissions will not result in environmental disaster. So doing nothing results in either bad results or null result; doing something results in either good results or null result. So I’m on board for alternate energy.
The biggest problem I do see with climate change deniers and those arguing against it are not making arguments based on scientific principles. Most do not seem to understand the basics of how CO2 absorbs light, many do not even understand the difference between the greenhouse effect and global warming, a vital distinction to understanding how life on earth is able to exist. Making accusations of conspiracies by the scientists does no good if you cannot present scientific evidence to contradict the research that has already been done by those scientists.
Personally, while I do understand much of the evidence behind anthropogenic climate change and the physics behind how the greenhouse effect works, I don’t have the modeling background to criticize as precisely those models. If I know the basic assumptions behind models, I can often point out their limitations, but I’m sure the creators of those models know their limits as well. Sadly, it’s often the media who love to point out any holes in a single journal article or a statement by a single “expert”, and use that to pretend like the entire body of climate research conducted over the past century is somehow not valid. They do this in the same way that evolution deniers use something like an improperly assembled dinosaur fossil or an argument about punctuated equilibrium to cast doubt upon evolution as a whole.
I suspect one of the major reasons that people are able to use any legitimate scientific disagreement to discredit science as a whole is a fundamental lack of understanding by the general public of how science works. We have science presented to us in school as books of irrefutable facts, and on the news as statements by irrefutable experts. If science was presented as a way of thinking, as a method of analyzing information and of allowing others to criticize, contradict and build upon each others findings, then maybe people would be more skeptical when someone with a fancy pedigree comes on TV with a brand new finding that has yet to be reproduced, and more accepting of concepts which have been verified by hundreds of papers and experiments. Scientists disagreeing with one another is not scandal, it’s the only way that science can work.
So to the public: When we don’t know all the details doesn’t mean that the underlying concepts are invalid or that science is bogus; it just means we need to do more research. And really, we’re not trying to fool you when we get something wrong, we like to be right just as much as everyone else. We just wish you’d understand that every new discovery and every emerging field is not going to be perfect, and we’d like you to be able to look at information yourself, and decide for yourself how believable the things you hear are. But you’re going to have to pay attention in science class if you’re going to be able do a good job at that.
Your second to last paragraph was pretty much the point I was trying to make. I would like to see more honest discussion in the media about the science behind climate change. A large majority of climate scientists agree that global warming is real and that it is most likely anthropogenic. However, I doubt that similar large majorities exist with respect to specific predictions of specific models. (maybe I’m wrong.) We are typically supposed to accept as fact that, for example, my ocean front condo will soon be under water. What scientists nearly unanimously agree on seems often to be conflated with dire predications that aren’t necessarily accepted so unanimously.
I disagree with you on the worst case scenario of doing “something,” though. That something could have significant unintended consequences for the global economy, potentially setting back innovation in alternative energy and/or other positive ecological outcomes.
The issue of value is why science cannot be the ultimate arbiter when it comes to public policy. Science has no means of ascribing value. Economics is the science of assigning value, and as much as some people hate to hear it, the dollar is simply the unit of measure. So how much good can a specific policy do and how much do we value that good? I’m not sure the science is able to tell us the good just yet for broad-based policy, so how on earth do we put a value on it?
Do we potentially crush the economy for no significant ecological gain? Of course not. Is this what a specific policy will do? Who knows? That discussion, of course, leads down a totally different rabbit hole.
The deniers suck, but so do those that simply tell us that science is totally on their side, so we shouldn’t ask questions. Can the science tell me that enacting this specific policy will have a good probability of producing some quantifiable good? If yes, then sell that. Don’t just point to “scientists” and tell me that they all seem to agree about some other related issue.
I’d like to see your evidence for claims that “doing “something” ……could have significant unintended consequences for the global economy, potentially setting back innovation in alternative energy and/or other positive ecological outcomes” and “potentially crush[ing] the economy for no significant ecological gain.” There’s some hyperbole there…..
[...] would stop conflating nearly unanimous agreement that global warming is real and anthropogenic with dire predictions of world-ending chaos, then we could have a good [...]
I never claimed any specific policy would “crush the economy.” I was being rhetorical. Some hypothetical Draconian policy very well could crush the economy. Nobody wants that. As far as I know, nobody is proposing anything that they think would do that. (Others disagree, of course) But, there is my point about value. Any regulation will have some economic consequence. Does a specific policy produce a “good” that is outweighed by potential consequences? In order to determine that, you need to be able to show what the policy will produce. When it comes to climate models, I’m not sure they can be reliable enough when we are talking about a significant portion of the economy. Matthew was saying the worst case scenario of action (however defined) was null. I disagree.
Any energy policy will have consequences that are impossible to foresee, exactly because economics is a system relying on a potentially unquantifiable number of variables. Legislation intending to help people obtain mortgages and realize the American dream of home ownership can be partly blamed for the collapse in the mortgage industry. You can claim greed on the part of bankers, but it was government policy that provided the incentives.
This topic, of course, moves off of the science behind climate modeling and into political and economic theory.
“This topic, of course, moves off of the science behind climate modeling and into political and economic theory.”
Exactly; which is why this blog title is misleading at best (or irresponsible)….global science deniers aren’t making scientific arguments……
Let’s definitely understand the science of climate before we make any predictions to where we are going in the future. The Earth has been around a very long time. Has anybody looked at the relationship between temperatures and levels of CO2 in Earth’s history? Earth scientists are well aware that Earth’s climate has fluctuated from much colder to much warmer periods than we are experiencing presently. More importantly, there were geologic periods when the CO2 levels were 20-30 times higher than the present levels and the average tempertures where similar to or even slightly lower than we have today. So where is the correlation with temperature and CO2 ? More recent geological history will reveal the period known as the Holocene Maximum is a good example because it was the hottest period in human history.
The interesting thing is this period occurred approximately 7500 to 4000 years B.P. (before present)… long before humans invented industrial pollution (maybe we can blame the camp fires they used). The list goes on and on…what about the Medieval Warm Period?
The interactions between the hydrosphere, atmosphere, biosphere and lithosphere are all intimately connected to climate. The climate system is extremely complex with thousands of variables. Scientists have barely begun to scratch the surface let alone profess to understand the science. Perhaps earth science (geology) should be a compulsory course in our science education? We live on the earth, we pollute the earth, we exploit the earth’s resources…..We may be more sensitive to more important issues other than climate change if we were more Earth literate.