The video below is a talk by Dr. Barry Bickmore about methods people use to avoid the truth about climate change.
On his blog Bickmore introduced the video as follows:
I gave a talk called “How to Avoid the Truth About Climate Change” for the College of Science and Health at Utah Valley University. For those of you who aren’t familiar with me, I am a Republican and a geochemist who, until a few years ago, was quite skeptical about the idea that humans are causing significant climate change.
In the presentation, I briefly talked about how I had made the transition from being a climate change “skeptic” to being an outspoken advocate of mainstream climate science. I then discussed how it is that people like me can so effectively avoid the truth about climate change.
I am no expert in philosophy but these lectures seem to me to be a great introduction to some philosophical issues. Sandel's teaching technique is also interesting bring to life what might otherwise be dry academic philosophy by using carefully chosen moral dilemmas.
It is often claimed that Julia Gillard is a liar on the basis that she said before the last election that she would not introduce a Carbon Tax. The argument continues that as she is now introducing a Carbon Tax she lied. Some people have taken to calling her JuLIAR.
There are two issues to consider here:
1. What did Gillard actually say before the last election?
2. What is the nature of the legislation that is currently before the parliament?
The day before the election the Australian published an article on Gillard that can be found at this link.
Here is the direct quote from Gillard from that article:
"I don't rule out the possibility of legislating a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, a market-based mechanism," she said of the next parliament. "I rule out a carbon tax."
The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme mentioned in the quote is the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) that was negotiated between the Rudd Government and the then Opposition led by Malcolm Turnbull. (The Opposition kicked out Turnbull, but only by one vote, the then reneged on the agreed ETS.)
So she ruled out a Carbon Tax but not an Emissions Trading Scheme.
See this post and this post for analyses of the differences between a Carbon Tax and an Emissions Trading Scheme.
So what is the Government introducing a Carbon Tax or an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS)?
The clear answer is that it is an ETS.
There is an interesting wrinkle though. For the first few years of the scheme it will operate somewhat like a Carbon Tax as the price per tonne of carbon released will be charged at a fixed price ($23 per tonne). There are differences though as the permits can be traded.
The reason why there will be an initial price placed on carbon emissions is to facilitate the transition to a full ETS and avoid the problems of excess permits that occurred in the early years of the European ETS.
So the simple answer to the question: did Gillard Lie, is clearly no.
She did not rule out an ETS before the election and she is now introducing an ETS to the parliament.
It is significant that the quote from Gillard came from the Australian newspaper. This is not some left of centre paper. The Australian has made its life work to destroy the Gillard Government.
Here is a link with comments by Gillard on how the price mechanism would work.
The best speech in the Federal Parliament given on the topic of Carbon Pricing was by Malcolm Turnbull. The speech can be found here.
This post emphasises the importance of checking original sources. For an interesting take on this issue see this post.
The climate policy worked out by the Multi-party committee - Government, Independents and Greens - is based on the Garnaut review, the summary of which can be found here.
Recently a very good friend of mine claimed that the recent volcano in South America put out more carbon dioxide that humans did in a year. I tried to explain to him that this claim was not true and that my source was the United States Geological Union who were experts on geological issues. Here is a link to the source that I quoted. (Note that the web page gives a link to a recent article on this issue).
This conversation highlighted to me the issue of sources of information. There is an enormous amount of misinformation currently in circulation. How does the sort of misinformation claimed by my friend get so widely disseminated? I think the reason is that when people hear ideas that they agree with they don't bother to check out the validity of the idea of the reliability of the source.
The video below by Peter Harfield, who produces the potholer54 channel of on YouTube discusses the importance of checking sources of claims that are made in the media.
I first became aware of this issue of sources when reading an online article by Andrew Bolt in 2006. the article was on Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth. The article can be found here.
The article was online so I started researching using Google. I fairly quickly started to have doubts about Bolt's claims.
Bolt's first objection was this one:
1: Gore claims that a survey of 928 scientific articles on global warming showed not one disputed that man's gasses were mostly to blame for rising global temperatures. Only dumb journalists and bad scientists in the pay of Big Oil pretended there was any genuine debate.
In fact, as Dr Benny Peiser, from Liverpool John Moores University has demonstrated, Gore relies on a bungled survey reported in Science.
It appeared that Peiser was finding difficulty maintaining the claims that Bolt relied on.
I then came across this email communication. In it Peiser seems to retract his major claim and at the finish notes:
I do not think anyone is questioning that we are in a period of global warming. Neither do I doubt that the overwhelming majority of climatologists is agreed that the current warming period is mostly due to human impact.
That, of cause is not the sort of message that Andrew Bolt tries to give on his site.
I then checked out Bolt's third criticism:
3: Gore says ice cores from Antarctica, that go back 650,000 years, show the world got warmer each time there was more carbon dioxide in the air.
In fact, as the University of California's Professor Jeff Severinghaus and others note, at least three studies of ice cores show the earth first warmed and only then came more carbon dioxide, many hundreds of years later. So does extra carbon dioxide cause a warming world, or vice versa?
I Googled Severinghaus and first I found articles about rapid warming in Greenland. I eventually found articles that discussed the last deglaciation, including this one. In these articles and in an email reply to me Seveinghaus emphasised that carbon dioxide was very important in the last deglaciation, providing between 35% and 50% of the warming. I later found this article where Severinghaus cries foul on Bolt's reporting.
When I returned to Bolt's article and re-read his point 3 I realised that Bolt had not directly stated that Severinghaus agreed with Bolt's interpretation, so technically Bolt had not mislead his readers. But most people who read the article would expect that the expert that he referenced would agree with Bolt's argument - and the expert clearly does not agree with Bolt's argument.
After that experience, I realised that it was very important to check the sources of claims that are made in the media, which is the point that Peter Harfield is making in his video.
I find it difficult to argue against the claims of any these 50 brilliant people.
As always the wonderful Carl Sagan puts it beautifully:
"What is faith? It is belief in the absence of evidence. Now I don't propose to tell anybody what to believe, but for me, believing when there is no compelling evidence is a mistake. The idea is to withhold belief until there is compelling evidence. And if the universe does not comply with our predispositions, OK then we have the wrenching obligation to accommodate to the way the Universe really is."
To slightly change Darwin's quote: there is a grandeur in this view of the Universe, but I would only add one thought to those of those in the video. Although reason and evidence compels us to a non-religious world view there is still a sense of loss when we reject religious belief. Consequently my feelings are most closely aligned to the great 19th century poet, Matthew Arnold when he wrote in Dover Beach:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Nobel Prize winner Sir Paul Nurse, who is also President of the Royal Society, investigates this issue in the horizon documentary below.
This is a fairly gentle response which comes to the conclusion that scientists have to be more active in explaining and defending their work from those who would attack it. This is fair enough, though I wonder if Nurse would be so calm and measured if the likes of Singer and Delingpole came after his work in the dishonest and deceitful way that they attack the climate scientists. My suspicion is that he would take the sort of strong defense shown by Ben Santer in this post.
The graphic below sets out the utter absurdity of the Government and Opposition policies on Assylum Seekers. (Click on the graphic to open a larger version in a separate window or tab.)
I find myself in complete agreement with Malcolm Fraser (a former Liberal Party Prime Mininter) on this issue. In an interview with Margaret Simmons that can be found at this link Fraser said:
The Opposition plays politics with border protection.
The government has got a two headed policy, claiming to be more compassionate than Howard was and to an extent they are but on the other head of their policy they’re saying “we’re just as tough as Howard was”. They can’t have it both ways.
The opposition saying “You’re lost control of the borders" is arrant, absolute, bloody nonsense. (They) claim that 4 or 5 thousand people a year represent a threat to Australia. It’s not so. What we desperately need in this area is a government and an opposition that will develop a unified, sensible, compassionate, firm, if you like, policy, but one which they then take outside the realm of politics, because playing politics with this issue is playing politics with people’s lives, playing politics with people very often fleeing the most terrible tyranny or distress, and that’s the most unseemly thing we could do and it is something which is noticed right around the world and which just makes people wonder have we really put Tampa behind us and more extreme people will ask have we really put the white Australia policy behind us.
I almost feel like going to South Africa or Zimbabwe organise a boat load of white farmers, and I’d sail them into Fremantle harbour and that would expose the policy for what it is in one blow.
Note: the comment is towards the end of the interview. If you don't want to listen to the whole interview I have produced a verbatim summary at this post.
There are many absurd attacks on Climate Science and some shocking personal abuse of Climate Scientists. See this post for some examples.
It is important that Climate Scientists make clear to the general public the urgency of reducing CO2 emissions and in reducing our impact on the globe.
Today 250 scientists have released a statement explaining the facts and decrying the irrational and immoral tactics of the deniers.
I have reproduced the statement below:
"CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE INTEGRITY OF SCIENCE
Lead Letter Published in Science magazine, May 7, 2010
From 255 members of the US National Academy of Sciences:
We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular. All citizens should understand some basic scientific facts. There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions; science never absolutely proves anything. When someone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutely certain before taking any action, it is the same as saying society should never take action. For a problem as potentially catastrophic as climate change, taking no action poses a dangerous risk for our planet.
Scientific conclusions derive from an understanding of basic laws supported by laboratory experiments, observations of nature, and mathematical and computer modeling. Like all human beings, scientists make mistakes, but the scientific process is designed to find and correct them. This process is inherently adversarial— scientists build reputations and gain recognition not only for supporting conventional wisdom, but even more so for demonstrating that the scientific consensus is wrong and that there is a better explanation. That's what Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin, and Einstein did. But when some conclusions have been thoroughly and deeply tested, questioned, and examined, they gain the status of "well-established theories" and are often spoken of as "facts."
For instance, there is compelling scientific evidence that our planet is about 4.5bn years old (the theory of the origin of Earth), that our universe was born from a single event about 14bn years ago (the Big Bang theory), and that today's organisms evolved from ones living in the past (the theory of evolution). Even as these are overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, fame still awaits anyone who could show these theories to be wrong. Climate change now falls into this category: there is compelling, comprehensive, and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend.
Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers, are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other scientific assessments of climate change, which involve thousands of scientists producing massive and comprehensive reports, have, quite expectedly and normally, made some mistakes. When errors are pointed out, they are corrected. But there is nothing remotely identified in the recent events that changes the fundamental conclusions about climate change:
(i) The planet is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. A snowy winter in Washington does not alter this fact.
(ii) Most of the increase in the concentration of these gases over the last century is due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.
(iii) Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth's climate, but are now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes.
(iv) Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patterns to change at speeds unprecedented in modern times, including increasing rates of sea-level rise and alterations in the hydrologic cycle. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making the oceans more acidic.
(v) The combination of these complex climate changes threatens coastal communities and cities, our food and water supplies, marine and freshwater ecosystems, forests, high mountain environments, and far more.
Much more can be, and has been, said by the world's scientific societies, national academies, and individuals, but these conclusions should be enough to indicate why scientists are concerned about what future generations will face from business- as-usual practices. We urge our policymakers and the public to move forward immediately to address the causes of climate change, including the unrestrained burning of fossil fuels.
We also call for an end to McCarthy- like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them. Society has two choices: we can ignore the science and hide our heads in the sand and hope we are lucky, or we can act in the public interest to reduce the threat of global climate change quickly and substantively. The good news is that smart and effective actions are possible. But delay must not be an option.
The names of the 255 scientists can be found at this link.
In normal times signing this type of document would be unexceptional in a western democracy, but with the personal abuse and legal threats aimed at climate scientists, the scientists are showing considerable personal bravery.
We are more prosperous and more educated than ever before. Most of the good life we live comes from technology that is based on scientific discoveries. A rational response would be a continuing respect for the discoveries of science, but the reverse seems to be happening. There are many movements aimed at undermining our undestanding of the world that has been developed by science. Some examples are: * Climate denial * Vaccine denial * Opposition to Genetic modification of food * HIV denial * Alternative medicines * Young Earth creationism * Opposition to evoltionary theory * Moonlanding hoax * Belief in psychics and other paranormal phenomena * UFOs
The first five examples in the list are causing deaths or will cause deaths in the future. The others, might not be as directly dangerous, but they undermine acceptance of science and rationality which is a more subtle but still serious danger.
The video presentation by Michael Specter discusses some of these issues. A brief bio of Specter can be found below the video. Two of my favourite quotes from the video are:
Be sceptical, ask questions, demand proof. Demand evidence. Don't take anything for granted. But here is the thing: When you get proof, you need to accept the proof. And we're not that good at doing that.
You know, science isn't a company. It's not a country. It's not even an idea. It's a process. It's a process. And sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. But the idea that we should not allow science to do its job because we're afraid, is really very deadening and it prevents millions of people from prospering.
I also laughed with the audience when Specter described the alternative medicine industry as "big placebo".
Here is Specter's bio from the TED site:
Michael Specter's new book, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives, dives into a worrisome strain of modern life -- a vocal anti-science bias that may prevent us from making the right choices for our future. Specter studies how the active movements against vaccines, genetically engineered food, science-based medicine and biotechnological solutions to climate change may actually put the world at risk. (For instance, anti-vaccination activists could soon trigger the US return of polio, not to mention the continuing rise of measles.) More insidiously, the chilling effect caused by the new denialism may prevent useful science from being accomplished.
Specter has been a writer for the New Yorker for more than a decade; before that, he was a science writer and then the Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times. He writes about science and politics for the New Yorker, with a fascinating sideline in biographical profiles.
I particularly like this Specter quote, which isn't in the video:
"Denialism is a virus and viruses are contagious."
Humanity ahs a capacity to believe many absurd things. There is a sea of information coming at us from all directions, how do we sift out the misinformation and bogus claims, and get to the truth? Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine lays out a "Baloney Detection Kit," ten questions we should ask when encountering a claim.
The 10 Questions: 1. How reliable is the source of the claim? 2. Does the source make similar claims? 3. Have the claims been verified by somebody else? 4. Does this fit with the way the world works? 5. Has anyone tried to disprove the claim? 6. Where does the preponderance of evidence point? 7. Is the claimant playing by the rules of science? 8. Is the claimant providing positive evidence? 9. Does the new theory account for as many phenomena as the old theory? 10. Are personal beliefs driving the claim?
Michael Shermer discusses each of the ten questions in the video below. (If your broadband speed is not fast enough let the video play through with the sound off and then play it through with the sound on.)
