h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Sure there is a solar activity school. However I was at a seminar by a guy who does research into solar activity, and he seemed to think that the variations in solar activity just wasn´t enough to explain the observed warming. But he also pointed out how much fidgeting is often done with climate graphs.

Yep, there's a huge amount of fidgeting. If you read somewhere that a graph has been 'smoothed' it's usually not a good sign. Depending on the smoothing algorithm you use on your computer you can 'smooth' it into whatever shape you want.

Yeah, beware of hockey sticks.

"Sure there is a solar activity school."

There's a creatinist school too...

The raw data is out there for anyone to download. Analyse it yourself without smoothing and see what you come up with...

The solar activity school is founded and funded by the oil industry. The people at the school are actually the same people from the "smoking doesn't cause cancer school" - literally - the same lobbyists and PR firms.

Good post Otto,

I agree with your thinking, and also liked Blicky's slightly more succinct summary!

Doing nothing isn't a choice.

Novo

<<"Yes, but 'significant amount' is still a far cry from the 'entirely responsible' line many people take."

It's not *that* far away, really. You will never get a scientist to say something is "certain" or "entirely responsible".>>

I know. But all too often when scientists say “we’re mostly responsible for global warming” the media tells Joe Public “we’re entirely responsible for global warming” and Joe Public generally believes it.

The mistake too many people make is assuming that science is infallible.

"The mistake too many people make is assuming that science is infallible."

I disagree. I think that would have been true up to about thirty or forty years ago, perhaps even more recently. "Here, madam, drink this tonic. It's fortified with radioactive radium!" "Yes, doctor, thank you doctor.... Urk."

But then we've had a number of high profile occurrences which have shaken the public's (and specifically the media's) unquestioning faith in science. We were all warned in the 1970s that there we were about to suffer catastrophic climate change. The thing was, we were warned of an impending ice age. Oops. We were told nuclear energy was perfectly safe, then Chernobyl happened. Oops. We were told beef was perfectly safe to eat. Oops. We were told that AIDS was an unstoppable epidemic and that by 1995 one in ten people in Britain would be HIV positive. Oops.

A combination of incorrect doom-mongering and high profile cockups like BSE led to the situation where parents put their children at risk by not vaccinating them based on a media scare story put about by a single rogue doctor and a bunch of non-experts. You get a situation where the public honestly believes "genetically modified" = "bad" without context or analysis. You get a situation where the most powerful man on earth believes as a matter of educational policy in the world's most technologically advanced nation that teachers should "teach the controversy" over the origin and development of life, when the truth is that there is no controversy, just some superstitious people with a fairy story that doesn't conform to the observable facts.

The true situation is that the public actually views scientists as shifty people who are invariably pushing some sort of line. They can believe that global warming, the safety of the MMR vaccine or the theory of evolution are merely one point of view, held by people who hold those views because of some sort of hidden agenda. The depressing truth is that science and scientists have probably never been held in lower esteem than they are in today's society.

SoRB

But regardless of that I still hear a lot of people saying things to the effect of "a scientist said it, therefore it's true".

Apart from the article about Mars my scepticism towards CO2 levels being responsible for global warming stem from seeing various graphs in presentations from consulting bodies keen to spend lots of money providng solutions to something that might not happen. Faint echoes of Y2K, BSE, holes in Ozone, SARS etc.

The CO2-Temperature comparisons all show quite large blips around 1940-1950 and I think 1900. Nobody knows why. Also CO2 is a very small constituent part of the atmosphere and that global warming due to CO2 would be indicated by a rise in temperature of the troposphere that isn't happening.

In support of Solar Activity:-

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2000/climate_change/1026375.stm

I'll ask what I always ask in this situation. Can any of those sceptics please explain why the vast majority of climatologists (who, unlike the sceptics, are experts in this field) think CO2 is contributing to (not "causing") global warming? How likely is it that experts in this field are wrong and a handful of mavericks (many of whom have vested interests and many of whom know nothing of climatology) are right?

"Faint echoes of Y2K, BSE, holes in Ozone, SARS etc."

Y2K was a real problem that businesses took advantage of, computer experts never claimed planes were going to fall out of the sky and all the other daft scaremongering stuff. BSE was (is) a real problem although the chance of it being passed to humans remains contentious and nobody has claimed a definite either way, the ozone hole was a problem and did happen and massively-reducing CFC output helped solve it, SARS is a real and dangerous disease.

As I've said before, the *vast majority* of experts agree that CO2 output is contributing to (not causing) global warming and that our extremely-high CO2 output will make a bad situation potentially much-worse. We either have to assume that the laws of science and averages have been turned on their heads or a huge number of scientists are engaged in a massive conspiracy for reasons unknown. If there were real, credible evidence that CO2 adds nothing to global warming why aren't climatolgists taking it on board? Why are they dismissing it with, y'know, evidence and stuff?

"I read this morning that Mars is experiencing almost exactly the same change in temperature as Earth.

How can this be when there has been no industrialisation of Mars."

Mars' atmosphere is largely already made-up of... CO2.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars#Atmosphere

"Apart from the article about Mars my scepticism towards CO2 levels being responsible for global warming stem from seeing various graphs in presentations from consulting bodies keen to spend lots of money providng solutions to something that might not happen."

That's the sort of cause-and-effect thinking that lends itself to nonsense like the 9/11 conspiracies. "These people have taken advantage of it therefore it must all be a set-up!"

"
But then we've had a number of high profile occurrences which have shaken the public's (and specifically the media's) unquestioning faith in science. We were all warned in the 1970s that there we were about to suffer catastrophic climate change. The thing was, we were warned of an impending ice age. Oops. We were told nuclear energy was perfectly safe, then Chernobyl happened. Oops. We were told beef was perfectly safe to eat. Oops. We were told that AIDS was an unstoppable epidemic and that by 1995 one in ten people in Britain would be HIV positive. Oops."

The "impending ice-age" stuff is brought-up a lot but was there similar scientific-concensus and government concern? Is there any proof that scientists claimed that nuclear energy was "perfectly safe" or did they just claim it was relatively-safe on balance (which it arguably is) with the "completely safe" stuff being put-about by governments? IIRC, it was scientists who warned the British government about the possible-dangers of BSE being passed to humans and the government sat-on the evidence for years for fear of panicking the public and damaging the British beef industry. It was perfectly-reasoable to fear an AIDS epidemic in the 1980s since it was at the time a practically-untreatable virus and an epidemic was a real, rational possibility. Obviously, you can't expect scientists to predict the relative-success of the "safe sex" message and treatments they couldn't have foreseen in the early '80s.

If the public trusted science, you would expect public opinion to reflect the scientific concensus, i.e. 95% or so firmly believing in anthropomorphic global warming.

But they don't. I would hazard a guess that the public view is somewhat nearer 50/50 - which surprisingly enough, neatly reflects the popular media's insistence on reporting "both sides of the story" equally, regardless of the quantity and quality of evidence on each side. Unfortunately, most people glean their "facts" as filtered and sensationalised by the popular media, not from the scientific community. Some of the links in this thread are directly relevant.

This is a complicated issue. The evidence for AGW is not merely a simple graph of CO2 levels versus temperature. It is based on the known effects of these gases, their concentrations in the atmosphere, their lifetimes and re-uptake rates, evidence of past changes, weather patterns, ocean circulation patterns, ice cover measurements, satellite measurements of surface radiation, computer models, bird migrations, the reproduction rates of corals, etc etc etc.

Your average journalist would be hard-pushed to understand that lot, let alone make it understandable and interesting to his readership. Far easier to pick on a single aspect and selectively ignore the rest. Hence we get such ridiculously simplistic assertions as 'it's all down to solar activity'.

If instead people formed their views on scientific issues from Nature, Science, New Scientist or the IPCC reports themselves then their opinions would presumably be quite different, and far more aligned with those of the scientists themselves.

Skepticism is all well and good, but is often aimed in entirely the wrong direction. Why on earth would you believe the Times, BBC, Channel 4 or whatever over the IPCC???

Just a little in my defense:-

Y2K - Planes were going to fall out the aur, hospitals would grind to a halt. What happened, nothing but software houses and a raft of geriatic programmers made a mint. I know of one senior manager who bought himself a Rolex on the overtime he claimed for New Years Eve. Ah yes but if we hadn't done all that re-writing it would have happened. What really happened was IT managers used scare tatics to upgrade redundant software.

BSE - The cause was traced to rendering sheep carcasses at too low a temperature to kill the prions before making cattle food. But massive scare tatics supported by a majority of scientific opinion that it could jump the species barrier and cause a catastrophic CJD pandemic. Fully backed by trends and forecasts. What really happened. BSE is still endemic in some countries and the UK beef export has only just recovered and a fortune was spent on compensation. Oh CJD, err, even John Gummer's children seem to have survived.

On a similar note the same scientists would also seem to have got the Foot and Mouth tatics wrong. Immunisation rather than mass slaughter would have been more effective. How much compensation was paid, sometimes to no avail, as rural communities and smaller farmers were devastated.

SARS (Oh and lets throw in Bird Flu and the Asian Flu pandemic) - Pandemic forecast, the weight of scientific evidence, more research funding required, give your favourite vaccine manufacturer a nice cosy contract and a peerage, consultancy needed as to how we will cope. What happened nothing; but with the catch all safety net, to defer any criticism that the research funding or vaccine manufacture might have been a waste of money, it will definately happen within the next ten years. Ten years of course sees the predictor safely drawing his pension. I could predict a flu pandemic will arrive within ten or twenty years, and I don't have a PhD, simply by reading some history.

I apologise for the rant like nature of the response but the scientific community needs to get it's act together if it's to retain any credibility. We all know what happened to the boy who cried wolf.

Sorry forgot the Ozone Layer that, despite the Montreal Treaty and the replacement of CFC's with less efficient gasses that probably use more energy for the same cooling effect and so produce more CO2; whoops circular argument, now seems to be self healing at the lower levels and distributed by stratospheric wind patterns to the poles.

WanderingAlbatross, you keep making 2 major mistakes.

1) You assume it is the scientific community that causes all of those major scares. Wrong! As SoRB and others pointed out, it is journalists exaggerating a *minority* opinion, or exaggerating the worst case scenario.

2) You keep using the idea that there are people with a vested interest in global warming that are pushing the idea. Yet you have not once addressed the fact that the OIL INDUSTRY has a vested interest in the exact opposite position. Why don't you think they have a vested interest? There are many reports available categortically stating that the oil industry has dumped tons of money into keeping the debate on climate change going.

WA, don't you think that's all a little ad homenim?

I'm prepared to accept the thesis that scientists have got things wrong in the past, or have overestimated the risks, or have flagged up a real risk which fortunately turned out not to happen. In many cases, as has already been outlined in this thread, things didn't happen because action was taken.

What I'm not prepared to believe without evidence is that scientists and researchers are deliberately fabricating or exaggerating risks in order to enrich themselves of their research groups. What reasons are there for thinking that? It may be true that the salesperson trying to sell me a smoke detector will personally profit from my purchase, but that's no reason to think that it would be a foolish purchase on my part, or that she is motivated purely by personal gain.

The boy who cried wolf was a foolish prankster, who was eventually ignored to the ruin of all. But another boy who cries wolf when howls are heard in the distance should be listened to over and over and over again. If people don't listen, the fault is that of the rest of the shepherds, not the boy.