Sender: -2.6 (spamval) -- NONE
In-Reply-To: <b95abeb8a1dfa2e2046dffff1bcb1ec6 &AElig umich.edu>
References: <b95abeb8a1dfa2e2046dffff1bcb1ec6 &AElig umich.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain
Message-Id: <1161707516.1283.95.camel &AElig localhost.localdomain>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2006 12:31:56 -0400
To: improvetheworld &AElig umich.edu
From: Erik Talvitie <etalviti &AElig eecs.umich.edu>
Subject: Re: Fwd: Global Warming
Status: O

Well I hope junkscience.com of all things isn't enough to shake your
faith in the scientific process. While it is absolutely important to
stay skeptical and critical, especially with regard to issues in which
so many people with lots of money and lots of power have a large stake,
there's no need to doubt everything you hear anywhere. 

First off, the beauty of science is its redundancy. Yes, any individual
piece of work might be exaggerated or overblown or biased or in the
worst case entirely fabricated, but there are so *many* people reviewing
papers, repeating experiments, challenging assumptions, and so on that
overall, progress is made. So when there's a politically charged debate
over a scientific issue, I think the first thing to do is *go to the
actual science.* Scientific consensus is not *always* right (surely
lock-in on ridiculous conclusions has happened before and will happen
again) but it's sort of the best we've got and I think it's pretty good.
Sometimes there isn't a consensus to fall back on, but in this case
we're lucky. I am not a climatologist, but as I understand it, the
debate over the existence/danger of rapid, global climate change and its
causal link to human industrial activity stems largely from think tanks
and lobbying organizations (junkscience.com included, due to Steven
Milloy's affiliations) and less from within the climatological community
itself. Indeed, it seems like all of the science Milloy references he
brings up to refute. One is then obligated to ask, where is the science
that *agrees* with him and how much of the literature is he *not*
refuting?

Secondly, sometimes one can spot propaganda just from looking at it. In
the case of junkscience.com, one will usually find the articles filled
to the brim with straw man arguments, and this one is no exception. Here
are some of my favorite claims that nobody makes that Milloy
successfully refutes:

- Greenhouse gases have the same thermodynamical properties as sheets of
glass
- Greenhouse gases do not allow heat to escape from the Earth's
atmosphere
- The greenhouse effect is categorically and objectively bad
- CO2 is categorically and objectively bad
- CO2 is the only greenhouse gas
- Average global temperature is the best metric for climate change
- (this one is my favorite) Greenhouse gas molecules absorb and then
re-emit the "same" energy, unchanged

He also hijacks the term "climate change" and defines it as change of
the climate, something "the climate is always doing," and something that
is "outside the realm of anthropogenic (manmade) effects," not
acknowledging that "climate change" is used by the scientific community
as a term of art, a shortening for catastrophic or rapid climate change.
Using straw-men like this allows Milloy to make misleading statements
like "Greenhouse gases therefore do not trap heat" and undermines the
scientific discussion by muddying the meaning of terms. When I see this
much logical fallacy and obfuscation in an article, I'm significantly
less inclined to trust the more technical conclusions to be well-founded
or well-researched.

So, in short, I think there *are* things you can trust and conversely I
think it is possible to spot dubious claims that one should at least
corroborate with some auxiliary reading if not totally ignore.
Personally, I'm more inclined to trust articles that have a broad, deep,
and clearly presented list of references that demonstrates support in
and connection to legitimate scientific literature and that contain
clear, well-presented, and logically sound arguments. Even better is
when the article appears in a publication that is either peer-reviewed
or that is otherwise under intense scrutiny (like high circulation,
well-reputed magazines/newspapers, etc.) I've never seen anything on
junkscience.com that met any of those criteria for me. In fact, I'll
even go so far as to say that I believe junkscience.com and publications
like it exist expressly to *create* doubts like those you expressed,
rather than to create understanding or spread knowledge. They *want* to
create the impression that all sources of information are equally
informative (or uninformative) and that's just not true. There is a
range of legitimacy and it's important that we retain our ability (and
our trust in our ability) to perceive it.

Well I wrote kind of a lot -- much more than I intended. Hopefully I've
addressed your conundrum at least a little bit, though.

Erik

On Tue, 2006-10-24 at 09:40 -0400, Dave Morris wrote:
> http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/
> 
> Some rather compelling arguments that maybe we're focusing our efforts 
> on the wrong problems, or at the very least CO2 is a problem for 
> reasons other than what everyone has been telling us it's a problem 
> for.
> 
> Kind of makes you doubt everything you hear anywhere, since it's 
> (including this) almost always presented by someone with such a strong 
> agenda that they're really inventing science to support their arguments 
> rather than the other way around. What's even more scary- I think about 
> all the research I've done as a scientist and the Powerpoint 
> presentations I've put together to try to make it look good... it's so 
> easy to do. But you can't ignore everything you didn't do yourself and 
> bury your head in the sand.  Quite the conundrum.