Climate Change
A friend and I have been exchanging letters about climate change lately. I sent him a fairly detailed answer when he asked for my opinion about a certain video. My response started off as a criticism of the video itself, but quickly turned into a rant about how little trust people have for experts these days.
After I re-read my response, it occurred to me that it might make a good blog posting. If nothing else, it stakes out my position on the whole climate change issue, and explains why I adhere so strongly to that position.
Are you looking for my thoughts on climate change (which have not changed in over a decade) or my thoughts on this particular video?
This guy starts out by claiming to be a humble non-scientist, which is very disarming, until he proceeds to use a landslide of pseudo-science to "prove" his point that climate change is just a big fraud. I don't care how persuasive he is, or how many non-experts he can convince. Thanks to the Internet, it's not very hard to produce convincing charts and cherry-picked facts that seem to support *any* position at all.
This is doubly true when talking to laypeople about a highly specialized topic. If this guy's presentation was being given to a bunch of climate scientists and it seemed to convince them, well then that would make me sit up and take notice.
Actually, I'm getting sick of wading through mountains of information about global warming. I don't even read news coverage about climate change anymore; there's nothing new to read. Climate science is far too complicated for most people to really understand, and these days pretty much every news article and presentation (including Al Gore's) is nothing more than an attempt at persuasion. In other words, most of the climate change discussion these days is just an attempt to influence people who cannot possibly understand the backing science well enough to form their own well-supported conclusions. It just encourages everyone to ignore the opinion of experts in favour of their own "gut feelings".
But the truth is, the noble idea that you should "view the evidence and make up your own mind" is just plain arrogant when you don't have the training or skill to comprehend that evidence and assess how it fits into the whole system.
There are thousands of climate scientists in the world, and nearly all of them agree that climate change is real and man-made. That's it. That's all anybody who is not a qualified climate scientist needs to know. And if that doesn't convince them, then they probably don't understand how science or scientists work.
This is and will remain my position on climate change until a scientific consensus on the matter no longer exists. Frankly, as someone who isn't familiar with climate science, it would be both absurd and presumptuous for me to believe anything other than what the actual experts tell me.
Unfortunately, it's all too easy to convince people that they know more about a topic than they really do. But just because someone shows me a bunch of graphs and charts and explains things in a way that makes me feel like I understand and agree with them, that doesn't mean a thing. Why? Because I am fundamentally unqualified to verify a) whether I am being shown the whole picture, b) whether the data is accurate, and especially c) whether the interpretation of the data is correct.
Fortunately, there are people who *are* qualified to verify these things: the experts. These people have dedicated their lives to understanding how the global climate system works, and to be honest, they are the only ones whose opinions about climate change matter to me.
Everything else is just people making excuses to justify believing what they were going to go ahead and believe anyway.
December 17th, 2009 - 09:55
Very well put. The only concern that I would have is who is funding this very small group of experts and what type of vested interest do they have. I suppose we just have to trust in them because they are still a much more reliable source then the media.
December 17th, 2009 - 10:14
Well, scientists from around the globe generally don’t band together to hide the truth–rather, they compete with each other to find new discoveries and make new publications in their field of expertise.
So if one scientist or group of scientists can be lured by money or fame into making a claim that can be proven false, there will normally be other experts in that field who would see that as an opportunity to boost their own reputation by publicly pointing out the error.
And even if those other scientists didn’t point out the error, they’d still be very unlikely to risk their own reputations by publicly agreeing with any idea that they know will eventually be proven false.
That’s why it’s such a big deal when scientists do all agree on something–they do so mainly because, in the face of evidence, they have no other choice but to agree.
December 17th, 2009 - 11:41
As a research scientist I can say that we don’t really make any profit on the research we do. For example, I have a grant that provides me with money to buy myself out of my teaching so that I can focus on the research; I won’t be making any more money, but I will have more time to do research. As for the source of funding, most of it is from federal government sources and a smaller portion is from NGOs with specific and varied interests and then there is some form large corporations.
Getting funding isn’t a simple thing. For federal funding your research proposal, which explains why your research should be performed and supports your position with other accepted research, is heavily scrutinized. There are specific research topics or areas to which the government agency allocates money for research. So, all research proposals dealing with a topic compete against one another for funding. The selection for funding is by a peer review process, other expert scientists in the field who are not applying for funding that round review the proposals. There are usually 20 scientists per committee and each proposal is reviewed thoroughly by a sub-committee who present the merits of the proposal to the whole committee and they debate which proposals merit funding.
The number of grants funded is typically only about 20% (or lower), so only the best proposals are funded. So wild unsubstantiated speculation will not be funded, the proposal needs to present evidence that supports the hypothesis that is being proposed if there is even a chance for there to be funding.
So in the case of climate change research, decades of work and data have gone into developing an understanding of what has been happening. The general public has only seen the final stages of a decades long evolution of the theory. The experts have gone from being skeptics to seeing and discovering the facts that now form the understanding of what they believe.
Sorry for the long comment, as Cory stated, the general public often doesn’t know what goes on in the scientific process, so hopefully this sheds some light on how the money is involved in research.
December 17th, 2009 - 12:10
I was hoping you’d comment on this, Chris. Thanks for your thoughts.
BTW, Erin and I will very likely be in San Diego again this summer, hopefully we can meet up with you guys again…
December 17th, 2009 - 16:49
That’s great to hear that you and Erin might be down here again, it’ll be great to see the two of you again.
January 24th, 2010 - 13:52
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/286345
“These assertions were used to acquire grant money, specifically, the Carnegie Corporation which aids research into “the potential security and humanitarian impact on the region”.
“The IPCC have now retracted their claim and revised their stance, stating that if the threat would to exist, it would take centuries.”
Isn’t that interesting. Scientists with ulterior motives? The hell you say!!