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The Forum > Article Comments > Good planets are hard to come by > Comments

Good planets are hard to come by : Comments

By Andrew Glikson, published 9/2/2010

Climate change: the international system required to protect the lives of future generations is failing.

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There are many AGW supporters that seem to subscribe to the belief that skepticism is caused by skeptics, when in fact it is the consequence of a failure by the promoter to convince. The reflective angst of AGW supporters seeks to blame the “skeptic” for not being convinced. Curious?

Skeptics are born with built-in “nonsense detectors”. Like many skeptics I’m sure, I have visited almost every link, pro and anti that has ever been posted. Then I get examinator telling me that I should visit Real Climate. Why would examinator “assume” that I’m not a regular visitor to this and many other similar sites?

Perhaps it needs to be stated again that I’m not a scientist however, I have visited any and every site to which I’ve been directed on AGW, scientific or otherwise over the last four years.

I admit that last year I almost “crossed the floor” when I learned from CDIAC just how much carbon we have consumed since 1850 however, I could not accept any link with AGW.

I then began to understand the sources of my skepticism. When reading or hearing the various arguments offered, I was reacting negatively to nuances. These include but are not limited to the degrees of: emotion, rhetoric, arrogance, people, processes, evangelism, openness, sarcasm, exaggeration, proselytizing, judging, assumption, name calling, maturity and politicization.

To validate my negative responses, I revisited many of the sites and arguments, for and against AGW. My skepticism has very little to do with the science, perhaps because I’m not a scientist, it does however, have much to do with the message, the people and the almost subliminal nuances.

Every case I revisited “for” AGW is riddled with the nuances that triggered my skepticism. The cases against AGW certainly have a degree of such nuances but nothing like the same scale.

As the post Copenhagen reality begins to sink in, I’m increasingly comfortable with my skepticism.

Continued:
Posted by spindoc, Wednesday, 10 February 2010 11:45:15 AM
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Continued:

The Guardian UK this week launched an almost hysterical “experiment”, a 12 part book on-line, 11 articles by Fred Pearce no less, all filled with mitigation and excuses for what has gone wrong for the AGW case. Fred Pearce seems to have missed the fact that his mitigation and excuses are needed because they did indeed get it wrong. It is “drama queen” responses like this that make skeptics more skeptical.

This conjures for me, a picture of Fred Pearce with no horse, a broken lance, a tattered pennant, grimy face and staring eyes as he leads his weary remnants round the carnage, mentally replaying the battle they just lost.

Meanwhile in NZ, NIWA has finally admitted that they do not have the adjustments that were used to show warming, when the raw data showed no warming at all since 1850. The NIWA report was used by ministers to back NZ’s ETS legislation and it is now admitted to be “invalidated data”. The adjustments will be re-created (under scrutiny) by NIWA and might yet show warming. However, the “other” adjustments left NIWA with Dr. Salinger (Salinger’s Secret) when he moved to the UK. I bet we could find Salinger somewhere at the CRU? This makes skeptics more skeptical.

The catalogue of IPCC errors, probity failures and people credibility makes skeptics more skeptical. The tainted relationships between researchers and CRU make skeptics more skeptical.

Andrew, I’ve just given you an open and honest appraisal of what I, as a skeptic, can respond to and what I won’t. This may apply to other skeptics, if so you have the secret to gaining some serious yards and placing skepticism where it belongs, in your front yard.

If you are genuine, capable and willing, I for one am listening because it is just possible that it is your presentation that is blocking the message.
Posted by spindoc, Wednesday, 10 February 2010 11:47:20 AM
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Spindoc, a well written post.

Something bothers me though, because we have been through this before. You say;

<< Meanwhile in NZ, NIWA has finally admitted that they do not have the adjustments that were used to show warming, when the raw data showed no warming at all since 1850. The NIWA report was used by ministers to back NZ’s ETS legislation and it is now admitted to be “invalidated data”. The adjustments will be re-created (under scrutiny) by NIWA and might yet show warming. However, the “other” adjustments left NIWA with Dr. Salinger (Salinger’s Secret) when he moved to the UK. I bet we could find Salinger somewhere at the CRU? This makes skeptics more skeptical. >>

Can you please post a link to this "admission"?

Notwithstanding, what you say seems to be contradicted here:

http://www.niwa.co.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0017/101834/7-Station_Temperature-Series.pdf

As I have pointed out to you before, the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition made the NZ warming trend ‘go away’. This well known group of ‘sceptics’ were the ones tampering with the data (they did this by treating measurements from different sites as if they came from the same site). (un)Surprisingly, they "released their revelation" just prior to Copenhagen.

What’s worse, it was they who claimed that NIWA wouldn’t explain how NIWA adjust the data for site changes. That is simply untrue, as a reading of the above link will show.
Posted by qanda, Wednesday, 10 February 2010 1:46:46 PM
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Oh Dearie, Dearie Me, Aren't we all having such fun squabbling about which way we're going down the tube. Its rather like being at Terry Prachett's Unseen University. Let's leave some of the speculative climate science aside for a moment and get our priorities straight, if that's possible amongst the argy-bargy of whose brain is bigger. The facts are that all the gunk -oh, sorry, such an unscientific word - we put into our environment has exhausted the oceans' ability to cleanse and has nowhere to go, so is starting to accumulate on the sea bed, the planet's fish stocks are in freefall, we CONTINUE to despoil large tracts of arable land, either by patently outdated agricultural methods or by covering them with bricks and mortar, and are STILL in the process of denuding the planet of forests. Aaaaaaaghhhh! Just when are you lot going to remove your brains from your nether regions and come together on the one thing that IS self-evident. We are messing the only nest we have, and we have nowhere else to go. Effective answers to AND action on those problems will necessarily flow on to reducing carbon footprints anyway.
Posted by Dr Merlyn, Wednesday, 10 February 2010 5:14:52 PM
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Sigh...I am almost looking forward to the next piece of Antarctica falling off.
I went to the link and it is a good study in why scientists should stick to their area of expertise.
His theories are excellent FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) and show him to be articulate and convincing...He even covers some real science quite well, but his arguments bear little relation to real climate science. This sort of sceptic starts out by saying how complex and misunderstood things are, then proceeds to their own, easily explained "understanding" to prove some prediction *they* can make! Years of cooperative science undone by a lone genius...yeah, right.
A smart man's ego is not to be compared with years of patient evidence gathering and culling of "common sense" ideas that happen to be wrong.
What I find most annoying is the wilful ignorance of the data coming in these days: Sea levels are rising, temperatures are rising, ice is melting. This is all measurable and verifiable.
However the "sceptics" would prefer to believe that weather bureaus world-wide are engaged in a conspiracy. Reminds me of the good old "burn the astronomers" reaction when comets appeared.
Let's all get stuck into the politicians..they deserve it, but can the real sceptics please ask for more science...not more Fox News type propaganda. Surely if the science was bogus then at least *one* country would be shouting it? Instead we see the same players that saw WMDs, using the same tactics that we saw from big tobacco and the anti-evolutionists ("teach the controversy").
I work quite closely with the people who quality check the weather/climate data coming in from around Australia and surrounding oceans. The idea that they (and hundreds of others around the world) are part of a conspiracy is quite silly. Equally silly is the writing of "intelligent amateurs" can be considered convincing against decades of work by hundreds of scientists using many tools including supercomputer models (the same ones sanity checked by doing weekly/monthly/yearly weather prediction runs), hundreds of weather stations plus thousands of satellite measurements.
IPCC is international politics: it gets messy.
Posted by Ozandy, Thursday, 11 February 2010 9:02:31 AM
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ozandy - you write as if all the skeptics point to incorrect data or fabrications and all the AGW believers all point to and reiterate pure science.

Please don't do the big "sigh", and ignore one of the biggest complaint of skeptics - the massive exaggerations and doom predictions.

Even our dear ABC Science reporter, living treasure,Robin Williams with his massive exaggeration of 100 meter sea rise by the end of the century, admitted on JJJ under pressure from the compere who would not let it go, (good for him, he was not intimidated) that "you have to exaggerate to get people's attention"

That's not science mate, that's bullshyte. It needs to be exposed, by Fox and others otherwise you end up with poodles like The Age, who no longer seem to understand the objective stance of journalism.

So you build a climate (ha) of distrust out there, with constant predictions of doom and exaggerate consequences.

I note when some green glam group spokesperson waffles on in articles on OLO, all the supposed scientists don't all quickly point out they are speaking rubbish or exaggerating.

If you were as even handed in pointing out the errors and faults in AGW puff pieces as you are in attacking skeptics, we might get somewhere.

Until then, learn to live with distrust and the perceptions of the public at large that something smells here, and it's not the fish!
Posted by Amicus, Thursday, 11 February 2010 10:08:16 AM
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