Climate Change "Controversy"

I'm going to beat a dead horse with a new thread. Deal with it.


If climate change is "hotly debated", where, exactly, is the debate occurring?


Not in peer-reviewed science journals, apparently.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astro...al_papers.html

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astro...ic_papers.html

http://www.desmogblog.com/2012/11/15...-one-pie-chart

I like graphs:

http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta...-Pie-Chart.png

You can go through his methodology here:

http://www.jamespowell.org/methodology/method.html

So my question is, if it's as people say and climate change is so controversial in the scientific community... where's the controversy?

It's a fundamental misunderstanding (or misrepresentation) of science and peer review with some confirmation bias thrown in.

The "controversy" exists in every place that the Koch brothers pay for it to exist. It's not a hard sell, given that the people targeted are already distrustful of scientists, the UN and other government organizations, "the liberal media," universities and empricism in general. Sociological research shows that often, trying to correct people's misinformation often leads to an even more entrenched belief in the misinformation--and it's super easy to politicize an issue when one party blatantly rejects reality in favor of fantasy, and ties it in to various tribal mentalities.

Evangelical Christians often reject climate science because they delusionally believe the world is going to end within their lifetimes anyway and it doesn't matter, or that the planet is somehow immune to humanity's influence because--who knows?--God's creation must be perfect and immune to damage. Responsibility to protect "God's creation"? Oh, hells naw.

Mainstream Republicans love to see monied interests in the green energy sector, which is only viable because of government investment--which they revile whenever public funds are spent on something that isn't one of their priorities. Mainstream Republicans *love* to fixate on Al Gore, and whatever money he's made for himself by investing in green energy, to the tune of about $100 million total dollars, claiming that any advocacy he does now is purely self-interest, while simultaneously ignoring the multi-trillion dollar a year oil industry, and its total special-interest dominance of our congress.

Fox and conservative radio virtually never report on IGCC, NASA, NOAA or EPA reports, addressing them only when unavoidable--with absolute skepticism, scientific denialism and sometimes outright conspiracy theories.

There's really no fixing the issue until the problem becomes so apparent to even the total layperson, that conservative efforts to hand-waive them away are seen for what they are (similar to what's now happening with income inequality). One can only hope that that point isn't where China has totally destroyed their own environment, and the planet continues to warm beyond our ability to repair.

Well, I think you need to add "Man Made" to that.

But still. Doing an internet search and then saying, "Look, Proof that nearly all scientists agree that there IS Global Climate Change/Global Warming" ranks right up there with giving Obama the Nobel Peace Prize his first year in office as all time stupidest things to do.

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Originally Posted by Jarvan

Well, I think you need to add "Man Made" to that.

But still. Doing an internet search and then saying, "Look, Proof that nearly all scientists agree that there IS Global Climate Change/Global Warming" ranks right up there with giving Obama the Nobel Peace Prize his first year in office as all time stupidest things to do.

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Ok, so show me peer-reviewed dissent. I'm not finding much.

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Originally Posted by Taernath

It's a fundamental misunderstanding (or misrepresentation) of science and peer review with some confirmation bias thrown in.

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Flatlanders used the same argument. "What do you mean the world is round? I can see that it's flat. Your science is bullshit."

Are these articles playing the semantic games like in the other thread?

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Out of 2,258 articles (with 9,136 authors), how many do you think explicitly rejected human-driven global warming? Go on, guess!

One. Yes, one.

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I can't help but notice this isn't phrased "How many say global warming is due to human activity" and then answer with 2,257, instead it says "How many explicitly reject human-driven global warming."

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Articles that merely claimed to have found some discrepancy, some minor flaw, some reason for doubt, I did not classify as rejecting global warming.

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So articles that claimed to have found some reason for doubt against man made global warming didn't count as outright "rejecting" global warming.

I guess I can buy that. Problem is when you phrase things this way you make it sound like every other article clearly endorses man made global warming.

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Originally Posted by Tgo01

So articles that claimed to have found some reason for doubt against man made global warming didn't count as outright "rejecting" global warming.

I guess I can buy that. Problem is when you phrase things this way you make it sound like every other article clearly endorses man made global warming.

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Here he explains why he puts it that way:

"When a new scientific theory is first proposed, scientists often go out of their way to state explicitly that they reject it, or that they accept it. This was the case with continental drift in the 1920s, with plate tectonics in the 1960s, and with the Alvarez theory of dinosaur extinction in the 1980s. One reading the literature in these fields can usually tell from the title of an article alone whether an author rejects the new theory. But after a theory achieves maturity and becomes the ruling paradigm, scientists no longer see any point in stating explicitly that they accept the now-no-longer-new theory. They take it as a given, often as an observational fact—like the measured movement of tectonic plates and the measured global temperature rise. To explicitly endorse the ruling theory would have the counter-effect of suggesting that the theory is in doubt. It is obvious that global warming has achieved the status of the ruling paradigm of climate science. Thus it is reasonable to assume that publishing scientists who today reject human-caused global warming would make it clear that they do so, while publishing scientists who accept the theory would not feel the need to say so explicitly. As a practical matter, virtually all of the global warming papers that Oreskes and I separately reviewed can be classified as about effects, mitigation, adaptation, methods of detecting, climate modeling, and paleoclimatology. Authors of these papers would hardly be likely to deny the existence of the very thing they are writing about. It is theoretically possible that a paper on paleoclimatology could be the exception, dealing with the lack of evidence for CO2-driven global warming in the geologic past, say, leading the author to question the seriousness of modern, human-caused global warming. I did not find such papers. What we know for a fact is that among the authors of peer-reviewed articles, only a tiny fraction, which I estimate as about 1 author in 1,000, rejects human-caused global warming. In my opinion, based on my understanding of the history of science, it is reasonable to conclude that nearly all publishing climate scientists accept that human activities are causing the Earth to warm. Polls of scientists reinforce this conclusion, but polls are no substitute for the primary, peer-reviewed literature, the ground truth of science. "

http://www.jamespowell.org/PieChartII/piechartII.html

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Originally Posted by waywardgs

Here he explains why he puts it that way:

"When a new scientific theory is first proposed, scientists often go out of their way to state explicitly that they reject it, or that they accept it. This was the case with continental drift in the 1920s, with plate tectonics in the 1960s, and with the Alvarez theory of dinosaur extinction in the 1980s. One reading the literature in these fields can usually tell from the title of an article alone whether an author rejects the new theory. But after a theory achieves maturity and becomes the ruling paradigm, scientists no longer see any point in stating explicitly that they accept the now-no-longer-new theory. They take it as a given, often as an observational fact—like the measured movement of tectonic plates and the measured global temperature rise. To explicitly endorse the ruling theory would have the counter-effect of suggesting that the theory is in doubt. It is obvious that global warming has achieved the status of the ruling paradigm of climate science. Thus it is reasonable to assume that publishing scientists who today reject human-caused global warming would make it clear that they do so, while publishing scientists who accept the theory would not feel the need to say so explicitly. As a practical matter, virtually all of the global warming papers that Oreskes and I separately reviewed can be classified as about effects, mitigation, adaptation, methods of detecting, climate modeling, and paleoclimatology. Authors of these papers would hardly be likely to deny the existence of the very thing they are writing about. It is theoretically possible that a paper on paleoclimatology could be the exception, dealing with the lack of evidence for CO2-driven global warming in the geologic past, say, leading the author to question the seriousness of modern, human-caused global warming. I did not find such papers. What we know for a fact is that among the authors of peer-reviewed articles, only a tiny fraction, which I estimate as about 1 author in 1,000, rejects human-caused global warming. In my opinion, based on my understanding of the history of science, it is reasonable to conclude that nearly all publishing climate scientists accept that human activities are causing the Earth to warm. Polls of scientists reinforce this conclusion, but polls are no substitute for the primary, peer-reviewed literature, the ground truth of science. "

http://www.jamespowell.org/PieChartII/piechartII.html

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There are an awfully lot of "oftens", "usuallys", and "assumes" in that paragraph.