Early environmentalists wore the badge of ‘skeptic’ as an honor.
Thomas Huxley, a colleague of Charles Darwin, wrote: The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.
In 2005 to be a skeptical environmentalist is to almost be a social outcast.
A former Environment Minister has described the problem to me as follows:
“While it may be true to say that we are all Greenies now, the great majority of Australians have little or no say in the environmental policies being put to governments, federal, state or local. These policies are now almost exclusively the domain of a network of conservation groups that are interlinked and interrelated. There is an extraordinary degree of unanimity among the green groups about the environmental problems and the solutions ensuring that one view, and one view only, is being received by the decision-makers.”
The problem is confounded by pressure on the science community to work in with the established green groups.
In a scathing review of science funding in Australia, James Cook University Professor Bob Carter has written:
“Current public debates in Australia on matters such as GM food, the health of the Great Barrier Reef, and the reality of climate change, are irredeemably in the hands of the spinmeisters.
“To capture government’s attention, and funding, requires the generation of a crisis in one of these politically sensitive areas. And for a government employee to speak out against a prevailing science or societal wisdom which generates research money for his employment agency is, rightly, perceived to be professional suicide.”
There remain a few passionate and skeptical environmentalists in Australia and even some on the internet.
Warwick Hughes‘ commentary always interests me mostly because it is accompanied by data – not his own but the governments.
Have a look:
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
In principle, the term “skeptic” should be worn as a badge of honour.
In practice, global warming skeptics make a complete mockery of the term.
Their arguments tend to fill to the brim with logical fallacies. The most common of these include: strawman descriptions of the climate sciences and cherry picking research which supports their ideology.
Both of these fallacies are ok if your pushing propaganda, but not if your interested in the science.
Hi Ken,
Many thanks for the information on sun spot cycles sent to my Yahoo email address.
I am interested to know of a couple of specific examples of climate skeptics cherry picking? Could you maybe post some links or give some examples?
Also what is ‘the ideology’ that the climate skeptics push? Many of them would say they are just after the truth?
Cheers,
A good example of skeptics cherry picking is “Altitude dependence of atmospheric temperature trends: Climate models versus observation” by David Douglass, Benjamin Pearson and Fred Singer (Geophysical Research Letters, 2004, Volume 31, Page L13208).
Here the authors claim to compare modeled and observed atmospheric temperature changes.
A nice idea in theory.
But in practice, the data set which they compare the modeling results against has been cherry picked in three ways.
* There are a number of different attempts to determine atmospheric temperature trends. They pick the only one that shows a cooling influence.
* The authors of this attempt to determine atmospheric temperature trends have since refined their algorithms, the new dataset shows warming. Their new data is ignored.
* They end their analysis in 1996. Had they included the extra data, the dataset would have shown warming.
Climate change skeptics may say that they are just after the truth, but in the vast majority of cases (I can only think of two prominent exceptions) it simply isn’t true.
Like they say, there is the truth…and there is the TRUTH. Anybody who studies climate will know that you can manipulate the data to the point that it can be changed to suit your own theory. Global warming skeptics are just asking the questions and making the rest of the science community outline the ‘fine prints’ to there studies.
Mike, I understand that many skeptics may use data to show a cooling trend, but many of them are using it to show that the data can be manipulated into another alternative to the mainstream belief.
I am a proud global warming skeptic and will continue to be so. When I hear a ridiculous claim by some Einstein stating that our water crisis is due to global warming, I will question these claims thoroughly.
It is just a shame in todays science community that asking a question is seen as offensive and counter productive.
cheers
I could not agree more. Bob Carter’s observations on science spin doctoring and how government agencies stomp on critique of the science to capitalise on an issue is so very true! Coral bleaching is just one example.
There is one relationhip fundamental to global warming that is the amount of CO2 needed achieve a given temp.It is quoted as ppm per degree centigrade.
Did you know that it took 5 times more CO2 to raise the global temperature by 1 degree during the period before the present halocene than it does today?
I’m told that this because the “dominant physics” are different today than they were in past eons.
Trouble is, nobody has told me what sort of “dominant physics” would cause such large change in what should be a fundamental constant.