Topic: Episode #268

[imwtn]

"This is a bit of a straw man. There are arguments like these going on all the time in the literature, and climate scientists and statisticians do cooperate."

I know that, the point I was trying to make was that I thought it was the scientific process, rather than the practitioners of that process that gave an imprimatur to a conjecture.

Appeals to consensus are essentially appeals to authority. As my favorite saying goes: Ask an Authority a question and they will give you and answer. As an expert the same question and they will say: It depends.

I'll take an expert any day. If we have reached the point that the process is such that you need to understand the entire process in order to ask questions about any part of the process, then I wonder how students learn, and worry that we might be going from discovery to dogma.  A well designed process should be able to tolerate decomposition into smaller parts.

Your answer on anthropogenic greenhouse gas and warming was a good example. It was informative, and without understanding the entirety of climate science, I'm able to understand that aside from there being no other appropriate "suspect" the observed results are consistent with what one would expect from the known injection of anthropogenic greenhouse gas.
I'm able to cross that confusion off my list.

[werecow]

Appeals to consensus are essentially appeals to authority. As my favorite saying goes: Ask an Authority a question and they will give you and answer. As an expert the same question and they will say: It depends.

I'm not sure I agree with that entirely. While a consensus may be wrong, it's far less likely to be completely wrong than any individual expert. I don't think appeal to authority can be cast in black and white terms like that when you're talking about large expert majorities in modern science; in the case of climate science, there is no scientific body in the world that takes an explicit standing against the consensus (that I know of, anyway), whereas there are very many consensus statements by, among others, Academies of Science of various countries. On top of that you have a variety of polls among experts that show that not only does a vast majority of them agree with this concensus, but the consensus gets stronger as you move up the ladder from "fringe experts from a related field" to "publishing researchers on this topic".
Does that prove anything? Well, no, but unless I'm an expert, I can't really assign more credibility to the lone gunman who tells me that all of them are wrong.

It would be better to base your judgment on the available evidence, of course, which is why I'm spending a lot of time trying to learn the basics right now, but since this issue really is immensely complex, and it really does take some pretty substantial knowledge to see through some of the more subtle misinformation -and there's quite a bit of that out there- I think that for a lot of people there's really not much choice but to side with the consensus position in lieu of better information (unfortunately, the perception of consensus is also being undermined by a number of poorly executed but convincing looking polls from the other extreme of the debate, such as the infamous Oregon Petition). What else can you do except spend years learning about the issue?
Luckily, it turns out to be a very interesting topic. I never really looked into paleoclimatology or climate science in general before I got into this debate, but they're actually very cool subjects.

Your answer on anthropogenic greenhouse gas and warming was a good example. It was informative, and without understanding the entirety of climate science, I'm able to understand that aside from there being no other appropriate "suspect" the observed results are consistent with what one would expect from the known injection of anthropogenic greenhouse gas.
I'm able to cross that confusion off my list.

Thanks for the compliment. }|:o)

And sorry about the many edits, btw, it's a very annoying habit of mine.

EDIT: see, I did it again. }|:o(

[khendar]

Its funny to hear the guys discussing the phenomenon of scientists expressing opinions on topics which are way out of their field of expertise. It reminds me of the HIV/AIDS denial list here: http://www.aras.ab.ca/rethinkers.php

98% of these "Rethinkers" are psychologists, holistic medicine purveyors, homeopathic doctors, mathematicians, journalists, nuclear physicists, certified legal assistants (good thing they're "certified"), engineers, science fiction writers, and of course, Meryl "My qualification is that I have a brain" Dorey.

[werecow]

I'll just leave this nice video on evolution and ID/creationism by Prothero here:

Evolution: How We Know it Happened & Why it Matters (with Dr. Donald Prothero)

"There are no transitional fossils in the fossil record."

[Kwisatz Haderach]

Secondly I was bothered by your guests seeming assertion that if you were not part of the community of climate scientists, your questions did not deserve to be answered. Is a computer modeling expert incompetent to raise issues about climate models? is a statistician incompetent to raise issues about statistical methods used?  I thought it was the scientific method that skeptics were trying to apply, not appeal to authority.

Steve gives a thorough explanation of the the difference between legitimate scientific authority and fallacious arguments from authority in this old SGU episode, starting about 17 minutes in:

SGU Episode 47

[alanog]

For an interesting discussion on when it is appropriate to listen to authority and expertise, herie is Massimo on his latest podcast: http://www.rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs16-deferring-to-experts.html

[wallet55]

[quote author=kem link=topic=30443.msg800886#msg800886 date=1283720630

I remember the sign on the inside of the door on a twin Beech.  Casa Grande Airlines.  We Fly, You Die.  It complemented the Jolly Roger painted on the hangar roof.
[/quote]
That takes me back. One of my friends (and more than one of my friends' friends) died at Casa Grande. That was the notorious drop zone in the 70's

[kem]

[quote author=kem link=topic=30443.msg800886#msg800886 date=1283720630

I remember the sign on the inside of the door on a twin Beech.  Casa Grande Airlines.  We Fly, You Die.  It complemented the Jolly Roger painted on the hangar roof.

That takes me back. One of my friends (and more than one of my friends' friends) died at Casa Grande. That was the notorious drop zone in the 70's
[/quote]

I saw a few that didn'd get their canopies opened in time. 

Great place to skydive, though.  I seemed to have lived through a few hundred jumps there.  13 jump tickets for $60, I recall.

[Stephen Dawson]

Long time listener, new member. Love the show almost always, but ...

I found one aspect of this episode extremely unfair: the accusations levelled by Prothero against Plimer. This was clearly ad hominem. Does SGU consider it appropriate to consider the possible damage to the reputation of the person who has been besmirched?

Plimer has written a book in which he has attacked the AGW thesis. He may be right. He may be wrong. But he has a couple of hundred pages of heavily foot-noted arguments. Countering those arguments rather than suggesting that Plimer had no right to make them would strike me as the more intellectually honest thing to do.

Prothero makes Plimer out to be a light-weight. But Plimer works as an academic in similar fields to Prothero. Google '+Plimer +Prothero' and you will find a palaeontologist from the Natural History Museum of the UK has published some of his work in a volume co-edited by Plimer, and some more in a volume co-edited by Prothero.

So on what basis does Prothero say that Plimer has no right to comment?

Is it because Prothero is one of us, for having taken on Duane Gish back in the 1980s? Actually, so did Plimer -- a lifelong member of the Australian Skeptics. Later Plimer put his money where his mouth is, and did something of which I strongly disapproved, taking legal action against one of the 'we found Noah's Ark' proponents under Australian law. He lost at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars to himself.

Plimer has won Australia's most prestigious science prize, the Eureka, several times, including one for his book 'A Short History of Planet Earth'.

Am I overblowing what Prothero actually said? Here's my transcription (starting around 50:05 into the Podcast):

'[The release of Gore's movie 'An Inconvenient Truth'] suddenly spurred all the forces on the other side to make it their job to basically muddy the waters, and there are several really good books out there that have all the documentation about how it's entirely driven by oil company and coal company money to right-wing think-tanks and it's entirely done by people who are not climate scientists. It's entirely people like Ian Plimer, the Australian mining geologist who has a conflict of interest there right away. You don't ask a mining geologist or coal geologist or an oil geologist about climate change. Number one, of course, they aren't qualified to talk about it. And number two, of course, their living, their livelihood depends on them not believing in it. And yet he publishes a book and people take it seriously'.

It's hard to read or hear that without taking on the message that Plimer should not be taken seriously because he doesn't know what he is talking about and because he is corrupt.

That is a foul and unfair accusation against a good skeptic. I think it was very poor form to allow this part into the podcast without asking for a response from the individual that was smeared.

[werecow]

Good skeptic on other issues or not, Plimer spreads such obvious BS on climate science that it's hard not to suspect that he either doesn't know what he's talking about, or is being disingenuous. For example, he argues that volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans, which is patently absurd for at least four reasons:

First of all, When you compare some of the highest estimates of volcanic CO2 outgassing to estimates of human CO2 emissions, you'll find that our output is at least a hundred times higher. To put some numbers on that, the estimates for volcanoes range from 132 million to about 378 million, whereas the estimate for anthropogenic release is over 36,300 million. Taking a middle of the road figure, the USGS has calculated it to be over 130 times as high. We'd need to be off by two orders of magnitude in our estimates to get to the point where the two sources are even equal, and then we'd have to explain where all that fossil fuel CO2 went if not the atmosphere and oceans.

Second, the CO2 rise has been faster in the northern hemisphere, which is where most of our emissions are coming from (IPCC AR4).

Third, the anthropogenic source of the CO2 rise of the recent past is confirmed by both isotopic analysis of the carbon (fossil fuel carbon differs in isotopic signature from that of inorganic carbon released from volcanoes), and by oxygen concentration measurements (which have gone down in line with what is expected from the burning of fossil fuels) (see the works of father and son Keeling, among others).

Finally, in order to believe this claim, one would have to postulate a massive increase in volcanism that started exactly around the time of the industrial revolution, that doesn't show up in paleorecords (the CO2 is there, but no other indicators of volcanism, and again there's the isotopic signature to consider), and that matches our anthropogenic emissions, and you'd simultaneously have to explain where all that anthropogenic CO2 went.

[Stephen Dawson]

You make good points, Werecow. But none of them were made by Prothero. Instead, he went straight to impugning Plimer's motives, accusing him of being corrupted by his association with mining. That is a nasty thing to say about anyone, let along a University professor, and was clearly designed to persuade people not to even listen to him.

What I'm suggesting here is that SGU ought to give strong consideration to seeking comment from an individual who has been accused of -- effectively -- moral turpitude.

Perhaps with the exception of Sylvia Brown, anyway.

[Kwisatz Haderach]

You make good points, Werecow. But none of them were made by Prothero. Instead, he went straight to impugning Plimer's motives, accusing him of being corrupted by his association with mining. That is a nasty thing to say about anyone, let along a University professor, and was clearly designed to persuade people not to even listen to him.

What I'm suggesting here is that SGU ought to give strong consideration to seeking comment from an individual who has been accused of -- effectively -- moral turpitude.

Perhaps with the exception of Sylvia Brown, anyway.

That last line is that crux of the disagreement here.  For skeptics and scientists who do not have political or ideological objections to the consensus on AGW, most AGW deniers are in the same camp as Sylvia Brown.

If you listen to the interview again, you will see (or rather, hear) that Prothero does not simply question the motives or associations of AGW deniers, he presents a clear, evidence-backed case that they are wrong, and then gives examples of the historical similarities between AGW denial and Evolution denial.

SGU has been more than fair to AGW deniers over the years, giving them the benefit of the doubt time and time again, carefully analyzing their arguments, reviewing their "evidence", even refusing to use the term "AGW denier" until very recently.  But evidence is evidence, and denial is denial.

You can review the history of the SGU's generous attitude towards AGW denialism by going to the podcast archives and listening to episodes 12, 47, 77, 81, 98... there are probably a few others, but I can not think of them off hand.

I suppose the fact that I can identify those episodes as ones in which AGW was discussed off the top of my head without looking them up is evidence of my obsession with this topic, or with the SGU -- or both.  I'm not sure if that is good or bad -- or just freaky.

[alanog]

It's hard to read or hear that without taking on the message that Plimer should not be taken seriously because he doesn't know what he is talking about and because he is corrupt.

I wouldn't say that is an ad hominem to provide a context for a particular person and their views. If research saying that tobacco doesn't harm your health is funded by tobacco companies, that matters. If that research was then also written by a physicist, that also would matter.
While this obviously doesn't refute the argument straight away, I think the point Prothero was making was that none of the scientists arguing against climate change were climate scientists, so I don't think it was a specific attack on Plimer.

[GodSlayer]

OMG. Buddy, I think you have missed what you have just proved, conclusively: YOU HAVE A POLTERGEIST IN YOUR HOUSE:p

Run!

naa, as you can see from the data, we have audio evidence of the poltergeist, and our studies have shown that poltergeists are so shitscared of scientists that they hide all evidence of their existence they possibly can. So long as a skeptic is present, the poltergeist will be harmless (perhaps it saw GhostBusters and mistook it for a documentary ...makes sense that a poltergeist wouldn't be a skeptic).

[werecow]

You make good points, Werecow. But none of them were made by Prothero. Instead, he went straight to impugning Plimer's motives, accusing him of being corrupted by his association with mining. That is a nasty thing to say about anyone, let along a University professor, and was clearly designed to persuade people not to even listen to him.

Others already made this point, but if you consider it morally outrageous that Prothero accuses Plimer of being intellectually dishonest, why can the same not be said about Prothero's depiction of creationists? He accused Gish of lying, after all - he explicitly states that he thinks people like Gish know that they're not telling the truth. That has to be up there with pointing out that Plimer's a mining geologist.

As for pointing out Plimer's potential conflict of interest, well, call me crazy, but I don't think it's a huge coincidence that the American Association of Petroleum Geologists was the last scientific body of standing to drop the skeptical position on climate change as their official stance. Given how far Plimer deviates from the consensus position on nearly every point, it's hard to imagine that the dissonance caused by his occupation hasn't influenced his position on the matter.

Now, to be fair, Prothero isn't a climate scientist either (although he has done research on palaeo environments and their impact on the ecology of the day), but he's just relaying the position of a large majority of scientists in that field, whereas Plimer slams head first into that consensus.

If you're interested, there are many more points of contention in this point-by-point critique of Plimer's Heaven and Earth by Ian Enting (warning, it's 46 pages long). Or there are various shorter rebuttals out there. One bit from Tim Lambert's book review stood out for me. In his book (which I confess I have not read), Plimer apparently cites a paper by two petroleum engineers, Khilyuk and Chilingar. This study is rather infamous among people interested in climate change. What did this study do? Here's an excerpt:

Recalculating this amount into the total anthropogenic carbon dioxide emission in grams of CO2, one obtains the estimate 1.003×10¹⁸ g, which constitutes less than 0.00022% of the total CO2  amount naturally degassed from the mantle during geologic history. Comparing these figures, one can conclude that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emission is negligible (indistinguishable) in any energy-matter transformation processes changing the Earth's climate.

(emphasis mine)

They compare the anthropogenic emissions of CO2 released over 200 years to the total amount of natural CO2 degassed over geologic history and conclude that we can't possibly be significant. Yikes. That's not just a little wrong, it's a lot wrong (more on that paper here). Apparently, Plimer cites this paper not just once, but three times. And from what I've read, there seems to be a lot more cherry picking of flawed papers going on than merely that one example.

And the thing to note is that Plimer is presented as an expert to the unsuspecting public. If he was a backwater geologist with some controversial ideas, Prothero would probably not have picked him to criticize. But by contrast, Plimer may well be described as global warming skepticism's nr. 1 Australian spokesman. In doing so, he sells absolute pseudoscientific nonsense to his public, and it's not wrong to point that out.