Climate scepticism 'on the rise', BBC poll shows

[2 As and a B]

It was a bit unbalanced, having someone with plenty of broadcasting experience against a proper climate scientist who hesitated a bit at times

[Philip Stott] is not a climate scientist, but a botanist whose special interest has been the ecology of Indonesian grasslands. He is very media savvy and since retiring has made a career of pushing his agenda in the media. ...

Real climate scientists are just too reasonable, polite, non-shouty, to get the message over in this tough rough world. But of course that's the nature of scientific discourse. It's a big problem with no obvious answers.

The problem is not about someone having an unacceptable opposing view, nor about that person being media savvy, but about the forum for the discourse being run by non-experts whose interest is only in producing a "good" programme. I blame the Bbc for being a bunch of wet arty farty namby pambies and not the impartial bastions of our democracy that they like to claim to be. A moderator with a good grasp of the topic under discussion could expose the deceit on both sides and draw the truth out. Education and comprehension of the problems we face is what the people of this country need if we are to knuckle down and sort out the problems. Not a little bit of lite titillation whilst absent-mindedly munching on some cheesy Wotsits.

[stumuzz]

it is clear that he is embedded in the denialsphere.

Yes Biff, this is a problem. How are we going to get rid of contrary decisions? We know the truth but there are so many denialists that just do not know what is good for them. We could get a register of those unenlightened non believers or maybe have a certified list of people whom may comment intelligently on the subject.

It is so important to get our language right when discussing climate change, remember what Orwell said,

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought”

It is clear that contrary opinions will carry on especially amongst those that should know better. Do you have any suggestions how these scientists should be eradicated?

Is it too late for the non believers? When we get to the final logical solution for overpopulation these non believers could be the first to be dispatched.

Surely a good Stalinist approach would be better. Teach the children the correct way about climate science or as uncle Joe said,

“Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed”

We must get rid of contrary opinions at all costs. Remember we know whats good for people not the plebs.

[snow hope]

hehe, loved the irony stumuzz.

I dislike the word denialist, it shows lack of respect and an attempt to make out that others are entirely in the wrong and indeed that they know it and have some ulterier motive for denying. This may be true in a small number of cases, but I would bet that in the vast majority of cases that sceptics are sceptical because they have simply not been convinced by the AGW Theory and arguments.

There are climate scientists and other scientists as well as plently of laymen who are sceptical of the AGW "concensus" that is pushed out at us by various organisations, with that political organisation, the IPCC in the forefront.

It is well known that it is good practise for all scientists to maintain a degree of scepticism and indeed that is exactly how science progresses. Are we going to call these scientists denialists?

[fifthcolumn]

What's annoying to me is the holier-than-thou contempt the believers have for anything that strays from their position of urgently shutting down the world economy, not burning any more oil or coal and their absolute unshakeable faith in MODELS which are constructed out of assumptions.

They're not a lot different from those who believe that the crappy limits to growth models made in 1972 with technology a thousand times less impressive than an excel spreadsheet are entirely predictive of future economic conditions. It would be laughable if it weren't so dangerous.

I am convinced of a couple of things:
Carbon dioxide and methane content has gone up more or less in harmony with world population
AND
Science shows that both of these gases have a greenhouse effect in a closed system presented with infrared radiation with no additional factors present.

Extrapolating that the carbon dioxide and methane are going to cause runaway warming that kills most of the world population and possibly most of life down to bacteria based on ONLY those two facts WITHOUT truly understanding ALL of the other linked parts of the global system is scarily irresponsible IMO.

But then again I'm not a global warming animist or head druid. I'm just a f***ing economist.

[eatyourveg]

Do you need extra qualifications to be a 'f***ing economist?'

[Andy Hunt]

All that is happening is that people are realising that it's much easier to formulate your stance on climate change to suit your lifestyle rather than the other way around.

After all, not only us the Earth flat, but the sun revolves around it, not the other way around.

[Quintus]

In a democracy is it possible to take dramatic action that will adversely impact on the majority of the population? In an adversarial political system can you execute a long-term plan for radical structural change? In my view, the first is very difficult, the second is almost impossible.

This is why I keep mentioning the value of coalitions; and in the current financial crisis perhaps even an emergency coalition of the three main parties.

[kenneal - lagger]

What's annoying to me is the holier-than-thou contempt the believers have for anything that strays from their position of urgently shutting down the world economy, not burning any more oil or coal and their absolute unshakeable faith in MODELS which are constructed out of assumptions.

The models may be constructed from assumptions but they are then fed historical information and run to see if they produce the current result that they should. If they don't they are remodelled until they do produce the correct current result. Only then are they let loose on future scenarios.

Are the models that economists use on a regular basis equally crap, then?

They're not a lot different from those who believe that the crappy limits to growth models made in 1972 with technology a thousand times less impressive than an excel spreadsheet are entirely predictive of future economic conditions. It would be laughable if it weren't so dangerous.

The Limits to Growth people used the best technology of the time and then updated the technology for the recent rerun. They worked many different scenarios and used the ones which correlated with each other. Anyway many of their predictions are coming true now. 1970s computer technology got men to the moon and back, something we haven't managed for a while, so it can't have been that backward.

I am convinced of a couple of things:
Carbon dioxide and methane content has gone up more or less in harmony with world population

But world population has risen most in places where the carbon footprint is extremely low so CO2 output shouldn't correlate with population growth.

Science shows that both of these gases have a greenhouse effect in a closed system presented with infrared radiation with no additional factors present.

The greenhouse effect will still work even if there are external factors present. So if solar irradience rises or falls the greenhouse effect will still work underneath the solar heat difference. The extra CO2 will mitigate the effects of a lower solar irradience while it will exacerbate higher irradience.

Extrapolating that the carbon dioxide and methane are going to cause runaway warming that kills most of the world population and possibly most of life down to bacteria based on ONLY those two facts WITHOUT truly understanding ALL of the other linked parts of the global system is scarily irresponsible IMO.

They don't ONLY base their work on those two facts. The effects of solar variance due to orbit, attitude and other factors are well known. As are the effects of water vapour. But the models, as I said above, are checked against past data.

But then again I'm not a global warming animist or head druid. I'm just a f***ing economist.

Economists are idiots who believe that constant growth is possible in a finite environment. Who'd believe anything they say?

Economists are the people who give us derivatives, asset bubbles and such like wonderful ways of making money.

[kenneal - lagger]

All that is happening is that people are realising that it's much easier to formulate your stance on climate change to suit your lifestyle rather than the other way around.

After all, not only us the Earth flat, but the sun revolves around it, not the other way around.

These are two points of view printed alongside each other in our local parish magazine. One person thinks we have a choice about how green we should be, the other doesn't.

How Green Should We Be?
by XXXXXXXX
Many Wash Commoners are conscious of the need to do something, but probably want to maintain much of their current lifestyle. To put Wash Common into context, here are rough estimates of some annual consumption figures for our 3,000 inhabitants and what the "deep green" equivalent may be.
Electricity Usage – 8-10 Megawatt hours. That would need one wind turbine the size of the one beside the M4 at Reading (128 metres high). For comparison, it would take 10 such turbines to supply the rest of the town and close to 2,000 to produce the same output as Didcot power station.
Car Usage – 15-20 million miles a year. That‘s 2 million litres of petrol. If it were possible to carbon capture the carbon dioxide emitted at normal pressure, it would fill two reservoirs the size of the local Tesco Extra annually. Alternatively, every man, woman and child would need to cycle 15 miles every day of the year.
Food – 2 million tonnes per year. The distribution of this needs around 30 heavy goods vehicles covering 100,000 miles a year each. Alternatively, and assuming we are not too reliant on meat, we could farm locally some 1,500 hectares or 15 sq. km. This is the area covered by extending the envelope of Wash Common to Kintbury Cross Ways in the West and to Crookham Common in the East. And your choice of food would be more restricted.
Shades of Green:
A total shift to "deep green" any time soon is not practical. Even if we want to do our bit for the environment, the "pale green" choices are not always clear cut.
Use low energy light bulbs. But compact fluorescent light bulbs contain mercury which could be an environmental hazard when they are disposed of. The future for home lighting is probably in some variant of the LEDs now often found in torches.
Don‘t buy produce with high food miles, such as green beans from Kenya. However, conditions overseas may be more environmentally efficient for growing such crops. Not buying them could mean making farm workers in the developing world unemployed.
Buy goods that are less packaged. However, this needs more care to avoid damage in transit or food that goes bad quicker, both with consequences of higher waste.
Recycle all your paper products and glass. But sometimes this is worse for the environment if the additional reprocessing and travel impacts are taken into account.
In other words, some "obvious" environmentally friendly measures may not be so environmentally friendly after all. We also need to be wary of alarmist or inflated claims that lack scientific substantiation, including:
Peak Oil - The world is close to the time of "peak oil" where oil reserves are dwindling. A recent Scientific American article showed that historic estimates of reserves have always been understated. New technologies, such as horizontal drilling and biological injection can access oil that was previously considered unextractable.
Inconvenient Truths - False claims by Al Gore in his film The Inconvenient
Truth. A High Court judge in 2007 deemed 9 claims as unsubstantiated, and other analysts have counterclaimed as many as 35 "inconvenient truths".
Food Production - There is an impending global food production crisis since there is insufficient land to meet a 50% increased demand over the next few decades. Although this could be a scenario, better agricultural technology (GM crops anyone?), food distribution and skyscraper hydroponic farms offer a potential solution, not to mention population control.
Science & Ethics - Unfortunately such claims detract from what otherwise are important messages. What is needed for every choice on how we live our lives is accurate scientific analysis of all the benefits and all the costs – not just financial but of the health and wellbeing of individuals and mother Earth. Take the topical case of nuclear power. From one perspective it is really very environmentally friendly with zero carbon emissions. On the other hand there are environmental (as well as safety) issues in constructing power stations and dealing with nuclear waste. In short, we need better knowledge, so that individuals, organisations and governments can make informed choices. Even then these choices will often require delicate balancing of equally laudable but competing objectives. And the difficulty is compounded when ethical and moral arguments are taken into account. How right is it, for example, to deplete the Earth of non-renewable resources (such as oil) or to contribute to global warming?
Making the Choice – Choosing how green we want to be, or can achieve, is not as straightforward as some environmentalists would have us believe.

and the answer

How Green Will We Have To Be?
by XXXXXXX
We don‘t have the option to maintain our current lifestyle. We either go "Deep Green" or we perish. For the world to live as Europeans do, and they are trying hard to catch up, we need the resources of three planets. The mismatch of supply and demand will probably mean we cannot afford the resources we currently consume.
Electricity Usage – Age and safety considerations mean that we will lose all but one of the UK‘s coal and nuclear power stations by 2025. The time taken to build replacements means that, even if we start now, we will have at least a five year gap in electricity supply.
Car Usage –Will reduce. Even the most optimistic authority now accepts that the world‘s oil supply will peak in about 10 years: this will make last year‘s peak oil price of $147 per barrel to look very cheap. Many people put peak supply sooner than that. Our own North Sea oil is depleting at 6% a year so we will have to rely on the world market for fuel with disastrous effect on the nation‘s balance of payments and our global credit rating.
Food – India has had another year with only 75% of its normal monsoon rainfall.. This seems to be becoming a long term trend which also affects China: their irrigation relies on melt water from Himalayan snow, provided by the Indian monsoon. When those two countries start to import food because they don‘t have the water to grow it themselves the price of food will rocket. The debt from the banking crisis and the loss of our own oil make it unlikely that we would be able afford to buy large quantities of food.
We then face the dilemma of do we grow biofuels or food. We could reduce the area required to grow food if we cut out the 50% of food bought that we throw away, reduce the amount of meat that we buy (rising grain prices will make it very expensive) and grow food on a garden scale (twice as productive as farming).
Shades of Green:
The Hirsch Report to the US government said that it would take 20 to 30 years to fully implement "deep green" non oil based economy. We need to start now.
Low energy lamps have lower mercury emissions than coal-fired power used by "normal‘ bulbs". They will probably eventually be replaced by LEDs, but we must use them until we have the LEDs .
Buying green beans from Kenya steals the water that the Kenyans need to grow their own food. Not buying them means that Kenyans will be employed growing food for their own countrymen instead of being reliant on international aid.
Packaging costs will increase as oil prices rise so it will be used more economically. As we buy more local produce and less highly processed food the requirement for packaging will also reduce.
Before we recycle we should reuse. Increased manufacturing costs due to higher energy costs will reduce the amount we buy so there will be less to recycle and more incentive to repair and reuse. Lack of cheap energy will sort out what practises are adopted in future.
Peak Oil - New oil technologies have generally had the effect of increasing the rate of oil production rather than the proportion made available. We have not been able to reverse the decline in output of oil from areas such as the North Sea. Even in the USA production has been declining since 1976.
Inconvenient Truths - False claims made by Al Gore are substantially outnumbered by those made by the anti global warming industry, funded by the oil and car manufacturing industries. Regardless of who makes them, they are a distraction which should be ignored.
Food Production - the impending global food production crisis is not about land, it is about peak water, peak phosphorus, soil loss and contamination and our reliance on oil to produce food. It takes five calories of oil to produce one calorie of food in the western world. Increasing oil prices and shortages are going to have a huge effect on the cost and quantity of food that we can produce. GM foods have not increased the volume of food produced worldwide, only the amount of herbicide used. Skyscraper hydroponic farms, indeed any hydroponic farms, would require unaffordable amounts of energy to pump all the fluids around even if we could afford to build them
Science & Ethics - Much of the science is there already to show how we will have to live in the future. All we need is politicians who will tell us the truth.
But acknowledging the truth would lead to the collapse of our present debt based economic system, which relies on perpetual growth for the payment of interest—and it has some very powerful lobbies.
Making the Choice – The choice is not "How green" - we, our children or, if we are lucky, our grandchildren will have to be as green as is necessary to survive. The choice is when to start the transition of lifestyle - and we don’t know how much time there is.

[fifthcolumn]

The models may be constructed from assumptions but they are then fed historical information and run to see if they produce the current result that they should. If they don't they are remodelled until they do produce the correct current result. Only then are they let loose on future scenarios.

No. If they approximate an acceptable range of historical data closely enough (determined arbitrarily by the particular team) then they are assumed to be more or less correct and are then used to take a guess at the future.

Are the models that economists use on a regular basis equally crap, then?

Yes they are. And it's the height of arrogance to suggest that climate models are going to be better than economics models especially given that economics models generally have more money thrown at them.

The Limits to Growth people used the best technology of the time

Which was crap and due to it's limitations they made a shitload of shortcuts which are not defensible for something which governments are supposedly going to base their policies around.

and then updated the technology for the recent rerun.

They used the same assumptions. The model wasn't updated AT ALL.

Anyway many of their predictions are coming true now.

Are they? Like the one that says EVERYONE wants to have as many children as possible? I wonder how the populations of most countries are shrinking then. Or like the other one that pollution control technology could reduce pollution by a factor of 4 only. When in fact modern pollution control technology can reduce pollution down to close to zero.
Or that technology can only increase efficiency by a factor of 4 and the real humdinger of NO RENEWABLE SUBSTITUTES ALLOWED to replace fossil fuels and NO RECYCLING ALLOWED. (rolls eyes)

1970s computer technology got men to the moon and back, something we haven't managed for a while, so it can't have been that backward.

We haven't had a need to go back to the moon. Not one that could be justified at any rate.

I am convinced of a couple of things:
Carbon dioxide and methane content has gone up more or less in harmony with world population

But world population has risen most in places where the carbon footprint is extremely low so CO2 output shouldn't correlate with population growth.

Interesting then that the following two graphs correlate fairly closely. You will note they both start spiking up around 1850.

The greenhouse effect will still work even if there are external factors present.

Will the greenhouse effect COMBINED with those other factors ALWAYS cause warming? I think not.

They don't ONLY base their work on those two facts.

Those are the ONLY two facts that are cast iron. The rest are guesses.

The effects of solar variance due to orbit, attitude and other factors are well known. As are the effects of water vapour.

The very FIRST google hit I get says "Stratospheric Water Vapor is a Global Warming Wild Card" from "physorg" so I think not.
Likewise the effects of solar variance due to orbit attitude and other factors are poorly understood and can only be guessed at.

But the models, as I said above, are checked against past data.

And not one of them is able to correctly predict with 100% accuracy past climate. So to trust them to predict future climate is just blind faith.

Economists are idiots who believe that constant growth is possible in a finite environment. Who'd believe anything they say?

No that's what animists and arch druids say economists believe.
Economists believe that given enough demand more supply of a product will be brought on line. If the supply of product cannot be increased and there are no substitutes price will increase to infinity. Otherwise substitutes will be found and used instead.
You will be hard placed to find an economist who actually believes the economy is based around constant growth. The economy instead goes through cycles of boom and bust. The only constant growth is a cycle of CHANGE.

Economists are the people who give us derivatives, asset bubbles and such like wonderful ways of making money.

And animists, archdruids and pontificating doomers in a long line since malthus have given us .......????

[biffvernon]

How many times does one have to point out that it's not the numbers of people but what they do that counts.

And changing behaviour is less painful than changing existence.

[fifthcolumn]

How many times does one have to point out that it's not the numbers of people but what they do that counts.

And changing behaviour is less painful than changing existence.

Wot, move the goalposts why don't you biff?

[caspian]

But then again I'm not a global warming animist or head druid. I'm just a f***ing economist.

Well, that explains a lot.

[caspian]

I dislike the word denialist, it shows lack of respect and an attempt to make out that others are entirely in the wrong and indeed that they know it and have some ulterier motive for denying.

I use the word "denier" in describing these people, because that's the most accurate and appropriate label. They deny AGW, therefore they are deniers. I also think that the parallels with other forms of denialism (HIV/AIDS deniers, anti-vaxxers, creationists, 9/11 "truthers", etc.) are quite striking. There might be many different reasons why people adopt these stances, but ultimately it requires an extraordinary degree of intellectual sloppiness or malice to continue to believe these things in the face of overwhelming evidence.

There are climate scientists and other scientists as well as plently of laymen who are sceptical of the AGW "concensus" that is pushed out at us by various organisations, with that political organisation, the IPCC in the forefront.

The IPCC isn't "pushing" anything, it is collating and documenting the science as it's understood at any given time. Of the many thousands of scientists in this field, I think you'd be hard pushed to find many who disbelieve that AGW is a real phenomenon. Like it or not, there is a scientific consensus that AGW is a real and dangerous phenomenon.

Your argument is exactly the same as the one used by creationists, who try to pretend that scientists are completely split on whether evolution is real, on the basis that a tiny number of individuals who studied biology at religious universities think it's bunk. And just like creationists, AGW deniers go anomaly hunting to find things that on cursory inspection don't seem to fit the scientific paradigm. They then grossly magnify those discrepancies (often completely misunderstanding the thing they're looking at, and/or ignoring the scientific explanation) to imply that the whole subject is flawed, and proceed to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It happens over and over again, and it's getting boring frankly.

It is well known that it is good practise for all scientists to maintain a degree of scepticism and indeed that is exactly how science progresses. Are we going to call these scientists denialists?

What the AGW deniers are doing is most definitely not scepticism, which is why I avoid using the term in relation to AGW. Real sceptics take a position based on the best scientific evidence of the day, rather than fear, ignorance, political/religious agendas, or any other irrational belief systems.

[stumuzz]

Caspian'

You are using the term denialists in a pejorative way. If you used the words ‘someone who disagrees with AGW or ‘not convinced by AGW’ then this connotes a person whom has given thought, reflection and come to a subjective opinion.

However, ‘not convinced by AGW’ does not suit your political and social fundamentalist view on AGW.

Did you see what I did there? I used language philosophy to link your fundamentalist view on AGW to the islamic fundamentalists, BNP, Israel, Christian right in the USA.

Keep an open mind, you will become a nicer person.