Debunking skeptics: pulling threads out of blanet statements.

[theclimateblog]

I got into an argument in the blogosphere yesterday about the climate change consensus, and the skeptic finally conceded that even if there was agreement, the scientists themselves are just doing bad science. One particular argument that really floored me was the assertion that climate scientists "ignore geology and orbital changes." Once I got

Comments

[tri_blog]

Good point, Jacquelyn! I also like Carl Sagan's The Fine Art of Baloney Detection, from his book The Demon Haunted World.

It amazes me that these critics will say the climate change people are not considering all possibilities, being objective---trying to appear "rational" and "scientific" themselves. They do this while, at the same time, they seem to know all about our political leanings, use meaningless emotional arguments, and commit the same fallacies of which they accuse us.

I think mixing political, inflammatory statements like "you're a socialist" is an advantage to these rude, boorish people. They realize they can't really battle fairly in a purely scientific discussion, so they drag in all this political/morality crap to distract the discussion from the main issue---the scientific data.

I was unpleasantly surprised yesterday by those two extremely rude trolls that came to my post on An Inconvenient Truth. I finally had to discipline them, because their so-called "dissent" brought up few meaningful points and was never

[theclimateblog]

I think that it's more important than ever that we encourage the development of interdisciplinary fields like Columbia's new masters program in climate change policy, or science journalism. I think that having some scientists who are really good at working in the public sphere is important, but there comes a point where doing that actually hampers science (though it's a good project for those in retirement or about to retire!).

I'll have to check out that Carl Sagan book. I wish he were around now to add his voice to the discussion.

[tri_blog]

Well my point about needing more scientist-celebrities is that people tend to follow news about celebrities, no matter what trivial things they do. They tend to follow personalities more than issues.

So we if established a bunch of recognizable, cool scientist faces in the national public's mind, we'd not only have some good role models, but people who actually start showing interest in their work.

I'm in health care, and we have some doctor-celebrities, which really helps educate the public on health. When people like Mehmet Oz go on Oprah, that only helps. Then they start actually caring about the medicine.

Do most people know the name of even one climate scientist? Nope. Because scientists are trained to stay out of the news, to let their work speak for itself. That's great and necessary to do good science, but it hurts in terms of marketing and stirring up public interest in scientists and their work.

[theclimateblog]

That's a good point; the problem is often that it takes such a unique mixture of skills to be really charismatic AND a good scientist. Carl Sagans, Stephen Hawkings, and Albert Einsteins are rare.

Then you have people like the Crocodile Hunter, with television shows that are so bent on being entertaining that they might not be conveying as much information to as many people as they could be.

[jackshoegazer]

I forgot about watermelons.

I have to do these same things when doing my consciousness research. Where did the facts come from? Who funded the study? Is there an obvious agenda? Often I find the deeper you look, the more confusing it gets.

And then there's just bad science, which gives all science a bad name.

[gyttja]

Well besides AAPG (American Association of PETROLEUM Geologists, which I believe is the only scientific body to reject anthropogenic climate change), the rest of us take offense to our science being used out of context. Or at least I do. We had a whole intro geology lab on the carbon cycle and how although atmospheric CO2 and temps were higher in the Cretaceous, the rate at which it was being produced was much lower and thus the natural carbon sinks could "keep up." My students got it, once they themselves worked through the data

[theclimateblog]

All excellent points. I'm trying to do my part- in fact, I started posting this blog on Blogger, a more "proper" blog. Though since I'm not very important, it might be hard to get the word out to get a decent readership of the right people! Sometimes I get a bit discouraged thinking that there's just a lot of mudslinging and no real conversation. I wish I had a handle on how many people had changed their opinion on climate change.

[adrinna]

I'm trying to find something I thought you said the other day.... something about measuring the amount of certain isotopes in atmospheric CO2 and radioactive decay (I am so bad at chemistry, please don't tell), and how we can actually see that a lot of the CO2 in the atmosphere is actually from fossil fuels because we can see how old it is! I can't find your comment!

Also, am getting around to posting in thelunarsociety, may take a bit though!

[theclimateblog]

I'll probably write an actual post about this soon, but basically, it has to do with radiocarbon. Carbon (which is normally carbon-12, aka 12 neutrons) is also found in a couple of isotopes, and carbon-14 is the one that's not stable (aka, it's radioactive). Radiocarbon has a half life of 5730 years, and while its production has slightly varied over time (because of changes in cosmic rays and the sun's intensity, which are what form it by interacting with carbon-12 in the upper atmosphere), it's essentially going to be relatively stable. We know its production rate going back to the late glacial, so we have an idea of the "correction" that has to be factored in to radiocarbon dates

[tectonite]

It is very frustrating to see geology painted as the science that disagrees with anthropogenic global warming. The vast majority of geologists that I know are convinced by it. (The exceptions are mostly retired petroleum geologists.) We talk about it in our classes - and when we don't, it's because we're talking about times and places where anthropogenic (or the atmosphere) aren't all that relevant -- I don't talk about anthropogenic anything when talking about the lower crust, for instance

[theclimateblog]

I think part of the problem is that a lot of climate scientist aren't watching Fox News or reading the skeptic blogs (I know I can't take much of www.junkscience.com before I get incensed), because it takes so much time and energy to weed through these things and point out flaws.

My Blogger site is: theclimateblog.blogspot.com

It's going to be the same feed as the LJ version, but hopefully getting a different audience. When my personal website goes live in a week or so (for my lab page), that's the one I'm going to link.