Note: Although not in Anthony’s post, this wonderful video featuring David Attenborough is very moving and worth your time. Yes it is a wonderful world as Rod McKuen sang. There is not a skeptic I know who doesn’t appreciate nature and its beauty every bit as much or more than those who sit in their Ivory towers and points wagging fingers and call us deniers.

Anthony Watts, WUWT

Readers may recall my original post, Nature’s ugly decision: ‘Deniers’ enters the scientific literature. followed by Dr. Paul Bain Responds to Critics of Use of “Denier” Term (with thanks to Jo Nova, be sure to bookmark and visit her site) Dr. Robert G. Brown of Duke University, commenting as rgbatduke, made a response that was commented on by several here in that thread. As commenter REP put it in the update: It is eloquent, insightful and worthy of consideration. I would say, it is likely the best response I’ve ever seen on the use of the “denier” term, not to mention the CAGW issue in general. Thus, I’ve elevated it a full post. Please share the link to this post widely.  - Anthony

Dr. Robert G. Brown writes:

The tragic thing about the thoughtless use of a stereotype (denier) is that it reveals that you really think of people in terms of its projected meaning. In particular, even in your response you seem to equate the term “skeptic” with “denier of AGW”.

This is silly. On WUWT most of the skeptics do not “deny” AGW, certainly not the scientists or professional weather people (I myself am a physicist) and honestly, most of the non-scientist skeptics have learned better than that. What they challenge is the catastrophic label and the alleged magnitude of the projected warming on a doubling of CO2. They challenge this on rather solid empirical grounds and with physical arguments and data analysis that is every bit as scientifically valid as that used to support larger estimates, often obtaining numbers that are in better agreement with observation. For this honest doubt and skepticism that the highly complex global climate models are correct you have the temerity to socially stigmatize them in a scientific journal with a catch-all term that implies that they are as morally reprehensible as those that “deny” that the Nazi Holocaust of genocide against the Jews?

For shame.

Seriously, for shame. You should openly apologize for the use of the term, in Nature, and explain why it was wrong. But you won’t, will you… although I will try to explain why you should.

By your use of this term, you directly imply that I am a “denier”, as I am highly skeptical of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (not just “anthropogenic global warming”, which is plausible if not measurable, although there are honest grounds to doubt even this associated with the details of the Carbon Cycle that remain unresolved by model or experiment). Since I am a theoretical physicist, I find this enormously offensive. I might as well label you an idiot for using it, when you’ve never met me, have no idea of my competence or the strength of my arguments for or against any aspect of climate dynamics (because on this list I argue both points of view as the science demands and am just as vigorous in smacking down bullshit physics used to challenge some aspect of CAGW as I am to question the physics or statistical analysis or modelling used to “prove” it). But honestly, you probably aren’t an idiot (are you?) and no useful purpose is served by ad hominem or emotionally loaded human descriptors in a rational discussion of an objective scientific question, is there.

Please understand that by creating a catch-all label like this, you quite literally are moving the entire discussion outside of the realm of science, where evidence and arguments are considered and weighed independent of the humans that advance them, where our desire to see one or another result proven are (or should be) irrelevant, where people weigh the difficulty of the problem being addressed as an important contributor (in a Bayesian sense) to how much we should believe any answer proposed - so far, into the realm where people do not think at all! They simply use a dismissive label such as “denier” and hence avoid any direct confrontation with the issues being challenged.

The issue of difficulty is key. Let me tell you in a few short words why I am a skeptic. First of all, if one examines the complete geological record of global temperature variation on planet Earth (as best as we can reconstruct it) not just over the last 200 years but over the last 25 million years, over the last billion years - one learns that there is absolutely nothing remarkable about today’s temperatures! Seriously. Not one human being on the planet would look at that complete record - or even the complete record of temperatures during the Holocene, or the Pliestocene - and stab down their finger at the present and go “Oh no!”. Quite the contrary. It isn’t the warmest. It isn’t close to the warmest. It isn’t the warmest in the last 2 or 3 thousand years. It isn’t warming the fastest. It isn’t doing anything that can be resolved from the natural statistical variation of the data. Indeed, now that Mann’s utterly fallacious hockey stick reconstruction has been re-reconstructed with the LIA and MWP restored, it isn’t even remarkable in the last thousand years!

Furthermore, examination of this record over the last 5 million years reveals a sobering fact. We are in an ice age, where the Earth spends 80 to 90% of its geological time in the grip of vast ice sheets that cover the polar latitudes well down into what is currently the temperate zone. We are at the (probable) end of the Holocene, the interglacial in which humans emerged all the way from tribal hunter-gatherers to modern civilization. The Earth’s climate is manifestly, empirically bistable, with a warm phase and cold phase, and the cold phase is both more likely and more stable. As a physicist who has extensively studied bistable open systems, this empirical result clearly visible in the data has profound implications. The fact that the LIA was the coldest point in the entire Holocene (which has been systematically cooling from the Holocene Optimum on) is also worrisome. Decades are irrelevant on the scale of these changes. Centuries are barely relevant. We are nowhere near the warmest, but the coldest century in the last 10,000 years ended a mere 300 years ago, and corresponded almost perfectly with the Maunder minimum in solar activity.

There is absolutely no evidence in this historical record of a third stable warm phase that might be associated with a “tipping point” and hence “catastrophe” (in the specific mathematical sense of catastrophe, a first order phase transition to a new stable phase). It has been far warmer in the past without tipping into this phase. If anything, we are geologically approaching the point where the Earth is likely to tip the other way, into the phase that we know is there - the cold phase. A cold phase transition, which the historical record indicates can occur quite rapidly with large secular temperature changes on a decadal time scale, would truly be a catastrophe. Even if “catastrophic” AGW is correct and we do warm another 3 C over the next century, if it stabilized the Earth in warm phase and prevented or delayed the Earth’s transition into cold phase it would be worth it because the cold phase transition would kill billions of people, quite rapidly, as crops failed throughout the temperate breadbasket of the world.

Now let us try to analyze the modern era bearing in mind the evidence of an utterly unremarkable present. To begin with, we need a model that predicts the swings of glaciation and interglacials. Lacking this, we cannot predict the temperature that we should have outside for any given baseline concentration of CO2, nor can we resolve variations in this baseline due to things other than CO2 from that due to CO2. We don’t have any such thing. We don’t have anything close to this. We cannot predict, or explain after the fact, the huge (by comparison with the present) secular variations in temperature observed over the last 20,000 years, let alone the last 5 million or 25 million or billion. We do not understand the forces that set the baseline “thermostat” for the Earth before any modulation due to anthropogenic CO2, and hence we have no idea if those forces are naturally warming or cooling the Earth as a trend that has to be accounted for before assigning the “anthropogenic” component of any warming.

This is a hard problem. Not settled science, not well understood, not understood. There are theories and models (and as a theorist, I just love to tell stories) but there aren’t any particularly successful theories or models and there is a lot of competition between the stories (none of which agree with or predict the empirical data particularly well, at best agreeing with some gross features but not others). One part of the difficulty is that the Earth is a highly multivariate and chaotic driven/open system with complex nonlinear coupling between all of its many drivers, and with anything but a regular surface. If one tried to actually write “the” partial differential equation for the global climate system, it would be a set of coupled Navier-Stokes equations with unbelievably nasty nonlinear coupling terms - if one can actually include the physics of the water and carbon cycles in the N-S equations at all. It is, quite literally, the most difficult problem in mathematical physics we have ever attempted to solve or understand! Global Climate Models are children’s toys in comparison to the actual underlying complexity, especially when (as noted) the major drivers setting the baseline behavior are not well understood or quantitatively available.

The truth of this is revealed in the lack of skill in the GCMs. They utterly failed to predict the last 13 or 14 years of flat to descending global temperatures, for example, although naturally one can go back and tweak parameters and make them fit it now, after the fact. And every year that passes without significant warming should be rigorously lowering the climate sensitivity and projected AGW, making the probability of the “C” increasingly remote.

These are all (in my opinion) good reasons to be skeptical of the often egregious claims of CAGW. Another reason is the exact opposite of the reason you used “denier” in your article. The actual scientific question has long since been co-opted by the social and political one. The real reason you used the term is revealed even in your response - we all “should” be doing this and that whether or not there is a real risk of “catastrophe”. In particular, we “should” be using less fossil fuel, working to preserve the environment, and so on.

The problem with this “end justifies the means” argument - where the means involved is the abhorrent use of a pejorative descriptor to devalue the arguers of alternative points of view rather than their arguments at the political and social level - is that it is as close to absolute evil in social and public discourse as it is possible to get. I strongly suggest that you read Feynman’s rather famous ”Cargo Cult” talk

In particular, I quote:

For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of this work were. “Well,” I said, “there aren’t any.” He said, “Yes, but then we won’t get support for more research of this kind.” I think that’s kind of dishonest. If you’re representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you’re doing - and if they don’t want to support you under those circumstances, then that’s their decision.

One example of the principle is this: If you’ve made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish both kinds of results.

I say that’s also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don’t publish such a result, it seems to me you’re not giving scientific advice. You’re being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don’t publish it at all. That’s not giving scientific advice.

Time for a bit of soul-searching, Dr. Bain. Have you come even close to living up to the standards laid out by Richard Feynman? Is this sort of honesty apparent anywhere in the global climate debate? Did the “Hockey Team” embrace this sort of honesty in the infamous Climategate emails? Do the IPCC reports ever seem to present the counter arguments, or do they carefully avoid showing pictures of the 20,000 year thermal record, preferring instead Mann’s hockey stick because it increases the alarmism (and hence political impact of the report)? Does the term “denier” have any place in any scientific paper ever published given Feynman’s rather simple criterion for scientific honesty?

And finally, how dare you presume to make choices for me, for my relatives, for my friends, for all of the people of the world, but concealing information from them so that they make a choice to allocate resources the way you think they should be allocated, just like the dishonest astronomer of his example. Yes, the price of honesty might be that people don’t choose to support your work. Tough. It is their money, and their choice!

Sadly, it is all too likely that this is precisely what is at stake in climate research. If there is no threat of catastrophe - and as I said, prior to the hockey stick nobody had the slightest bit of luck convincing anyone that the sky was falling because global climate today is geologically unremarkable in every single way except that we happen to be living in it instead of analyzing it in a geological record - then there is little incentive to fund the enormous amount of work being done on climate science. There is even less incentive to spend trillions of dollars of other people’s money (and some of our own) to ameliorate a “threat” that might well be pure moonshine, quite possibly ignoring an even greater threat of movement in the exact opposite direction to the one the IPCC anticipates.

Why am I a skeptic? Because I recognize the true degree of our ignorance in addressing this supremely difficult problem, while at the same time as a mere citizen I weigh civilization and its benefits against draconian energy austerity on the basis of no actual evidence that global climate is in any way behaving unusually on a geological time scale.

For shame.

Russell Cook, American Thinker

Is there any issue more dependent on widespread lapses in critical thinking than the idea of man-caused global warming?

Nothing wrecks an argument faster than a question revealing a gaping hole in that argument’s fundamental premise.  Notice the abundantly obvious derailment in this example:

“We need to do something about the proliferation of ghosts causing an unprecedented number of people to have nightmares lately.  This problem leads to widespread sleeplessness, which in turn leads to a downturn in work productivity and overall economic hardship, and you are a cold-hearted capitalist pig if you deny the need for workers to be healthy.”

Any critical thinker will yell, “What?! Prove ghosts exist before you start calling me names!”

The so-called global warming crisis has gotten away with an equally preposterous premise - that human activity drives climate change - for nearly two decades, because that premise at least sounded plausible.  After all, humans do damage the environment to some extent in various ways, and the weather does seem a bit weird lately, so maybe it’s possible that our greenhouse gas emissions have a detrimental effect.  Plus, reporters tell us that scientists are saying this is so.

Overlooked by many is the very thing that’s kept the issue alive all this time.  No different from in a ponzi scheme, the public must never lose confidence in the idea that this issue is a problem in need of a solution.  The moment anything approaching a majority of people starts asking tough questions about skeptic scientists expressing legitimate opposition, the entire issue goes into a fatal tailspin, taking down all those who unquestioningly defend the idea.

Think about all the assertions we’ve heard and what happens when anybody starts asking critical questions using information that’s easier than ever to find on the internet.

Even at the height of winter in the northern hemisphere, we’re told the Arctic ice cap is melting and that polar bears drown when swimming through too much open water.  Yet polar bear populations are increasing, online Arctic weather station feeds closest to the ice cap routinely show freezing temps in all but the warmest summer months, and this particular winter, Arctic Sea Ice Extent has returned to levels very close to the 1979-2000 average.

The media has been implying that extreme weather is more frequent, yet blaring headlines from long ago are easily found on weather appearing to be just as extreme, if not worse.

We’re told that the dry warm winter in the U.S. this time around indicates global warming, yet horrible cold temperatures in Europe this same winter aren’t called a similar indicator.

Many express anguish over ocean acidification, yet these same people never mention the irrefutable fact that oceans are alkaline and that it would thus take some kind of herculean phenomenon just to push them into a pure neutral pH balance, long before they ever become even mildly acidic.

Prominent NASA personnel who criticized NASA’s alarmist narratives on global warming in a recent WSJ letter are said to be politically driven, yet NASA climate scientist James Hansen is routinely seen being arrested at civil disobedience global warming rallies organized by far-left enviro-activists.

The chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that “everything that we look at and take into account in our assessments has to carry credibility of peer-reviewed publications, we don’t settle for anything less.” Yet people who meticulously sift through IPCC reports are finding out that in its 2007 report alone, over 5,500 such publications were non-peer-reviewed.

And on and on.  Critical thinking is eventually deadly to the idea of man-caused global warming.  It’s a death by a thousand cuts.

But there is one more especially egregious lapse in critical thinking here - not regarding the science, but instead vis-a-vis what the public is led to believe about skeptic scientists.

We’re told that skeptic scientists lie about all of the “death by a thousand cuts” evidence.  We’re told that they work for big coal and oil - much like so-called -expert shills were paid by tobacco industries to “manufacture doubt” about the hazards of smoking.

Yet no reporter pushing that narrative bothers to show which peer-reviewed science journal-published paper written by a skeptic is an outright fabrication written in exchange for fossil fuel industry money.  No reporter bothers to show how myriad examples of critical thinking reveal pre-existing - not manufactured - doubt about claims of evidence for global warming.  And no reporter ever attempts to first disprove that the paltry funding skeptics did receive from the fossil fuel industry was given simply because those people agreed with what the skeptics were already saying.

The accusation that skeptic scientists are corrupt is devoid of critical thinking.  Anybody will spot these problems after a thorough examination of all the facts:

Al Gore says that book author/reporter Ross Gelbspan discovered leaked evidence from 1991 coal industry memos proving that skeptics are corrupt, yet other book authors and reporters quoted words from those memos prior to Gelbspan, including Gore himself.

Uncounted numbers of people quote words from those memos to prove that skeptics are corrupt, yet not one ever shows the memos in their full context.

Gelbspan claimed in a late summer 1997 NPR radio interview, using the most commonly quoted fragment sentences from the memos, that “sinister” efforts were being made to confuse the public about global warming, yet when the full-context memos are read at Greenpeace archive scan web pages (where only an astute researcher would know to look for them; they are not found there via ordinary internet searches), it becomes abundantly obvious that the memos were for a very small pilot project PR campaign, and Gelbspan took the fragment sentences entirely out of context.

Gelbspan was long praised as a Pulitzer-winner, the designation even appearing on the front of his hardcover 2004 Boiling Point book, yet the Pulitzer organization has never recognized him as a prize-winner.

On and on and on, there is a sea of red flags to be found in the accusation itself and all the people surrounding it.

Tie the full exposure of the global warming issue’s ever-increasing science problems with the revelation of how a literally unsupportable accusation bordering on libel/slander was concocted against its scientist critics, and the world should now see how all the hysteria was and is nothing more than an “information” Ponzi scheme based on constant infusions of misinformation that could have been revealed as such years ago.  A death of a thousand cuts becomes a stake through the heart.

By Art Horn

It is strange for me to see the president of the United States actually working against making this nation stronger. I must confess I’ve never seen anything like it. It feels different and it is different. Ever since he took office, President Obama has overtly and covertly worked fastidiously to close electric generating facilities that use coal. The rhetoric in his speeches about his belief in man made global warming and his commitment to funding so called “renewable energy” projects is disconcerting. Of course it’s his operatives at the EPA that are the actual troops on the ground carrying out the mission. If he were somehow re-elected to a second term, the unreported and unprecedented war on fossil fuels will continue unabated.

Recently the New Yorker magazine published a story titled “The Second Term” by Ryan Lizza. The story speculates about what the major priorities of the current president would be if returned to the White House. Lizza says “Obama has an ambitious second-term agenda, which at least in broad ways, his campaign is beginning to highlight. The President has said that the most important policy he could address in his second term is climate change, one of the few issues he thinks could fundamentally improve the world decades from now.” One thing is for sure, President Obama, if re-elected will not change his horse in mid-stream. He has been and continues to be committed to taxing carbon dioxide one way or another. Cap and Trade failed but least we forget, shortly after that defeat he said “Cap-and-Trade was just one way of skinning the cat, it was not the only way.” You can bet the ranch that any cat inside our borders will be scurrying for their lives if he is re-elected.

On January the 1st 2013 the Bush Era Tax Cuts will come to an end. Because of this the size of the federal government will be reduced and taxes will increase. It is speculated that this could have a major negative impact on the sputtering and fragile economy. Speaking from Air Force One on June the 6th 2012 president Obama insisted that he will not extend the Bush Era tax cuts for wealthy Americans. The president forgot to mention that all Americans will see their taxes increase on January 1st, not just those earning over $250,000 a year.

So what will the President do if he is re-elected and faced with this situation? My guess is that he will continue the path he has pursued all along. He will continue his attack on the fossil fuel industry. Using fear of global warming as his weapon, he will extract capital from the economy with a so called “carbon tax.” However, it will not be a tax on carbon. The term “carbon tax” is a smoke screen. It will actually be a tax on every industry and every entity that produces carbon dioxide gas. It will be Cap-and-Trade re-formulated, re-constituted and re-marketed in the name of saving the economy and having the double benefit of saving the world from global warming, excuse me, climate change! The president believes he has that kind of power. Remember on the night he was nominated he said “Let it be known that this was the day the oceans stopped rising and the planet began to heal.”

I wonder if the President knows that carbon dioxide is a colorless, odorless gas that makes up a tiny 0.038% of the atmosphere and is beneficial and essential to all living things. The re-formulating of Cap and Trade into a carbon tax makes it sound like he is actually trying to do something about carbon. Using the word carbon intentionally conjures up images of black soot and dirty miners and filthy air. The use of the term carbon, when actually referring to carbon dioxide, has been a deliberate attempt by the media and the administration to convince the scientifically illiterate people in their audience that carbon dioxide gas is dirty and is a pollutant. Using the word carbon as a substitute for carbon dioxide gas is willfully and knowingly deceptive.

The story in the New Yorker speculates that a new carbon tax might not be so far fetched. The article says “Early discussions on Capital Hill suggest that, in a wide-ranging deal, a carbon tax (sic) might be part of a grand bargain to settle Taxmageddon.” Taxmageddon is the term used by some to describe the negative impacts of the ending of the Bush Era tax cuts in early January 2013.

The Obama administrations war on carbon dioxide and those that produce it is a multifaceted battle front. Piloted by Lisa Jackson, the EPA will continue to be the lead tank rumbling over industries that get in the way, squashing them out of existence with crushing regulations. If Obama is re-elected this massive, unchecked government juggernaut will be fully armed to destroy one of our most abundant resources. Lisa Jackson’s has focused the barrel of the EPA cannon squarely on coal. On April 1st 2010 Jackson’s EPA issued “Interim Guidance on Clean Water Act (CWA) Procedures for Appalachian Surface Mines.” There was no warning this was coming and no period for public comment as is traditionally the case.

Measuring the electrical conductivity of water in streams is an indirect measure of the total dissolved solids (TDS) in the stream. The conductivity is measured in micro-siemens per centimeter. Drinking water typically has a conductivity level of 500 to 800 micro-siemens per centimeter. In the EPA’s April 1st 2010 issuance of “guidance on water quality requirements for coal mines in Appalachia” the standard set for streams was 300 to 500 micro-siemens. This is a level below that of drinking water and is virtually unattainable in Appalachia. On July 21st 2011 the EPA put out its “final guidance on issuance of the CWA and lowered the conductivity standard to no more than 300 micro-siemens in West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky.”

EPA knew from the beginning that these levels are unattainable by the coal industry. Any activity upstream such as salting of roads in winter, highway construction, agricultural activities or a storm can cause increased in conductivity levels unrelated to mining. The intent of the EPA is clearly to shut down the permitting of coal mining operations by using unrealistic water standards under the Clean Water Act.

If President Obama is re-elected this obstructive standard, now being used in Appalachia, could be spread across the nation with devastating effects on the coal industry, its employees and ultimately the United States economy and its people. If they are successful in shutting down coal with this regulatory firepower they would be free to turn the cannon around and target their next enemy, natural gas.