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Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2006 13:46:12 -0400
To: improvetheworld &AElig umich.edu
From: Dave Morris <thecat &AElig umich.edu>
Subject: Re: Global Warming
Status: RO

Indeed, these are very good points, and perhaps the one I find most 
compelling is the argument about peer reviewed journalism. I have heard 
that the global warming problem in peer reviewed journals is pretty 
much universal and it's only in popular press that you see doubt.   But 
even that fact I've only heard second and third hand, not through 
actual research, or with anyone presenting a study that was done to 
show it.

What I don't want to do is trust Gore because he's a democrat, and not 
trust this guy because he's a republican. The web pages about how much 
global warming is a problem are often equally full of poor arguments 
and exaggerations, built from bits of truth as a premise. I too was 
laughing at his over extension of the green house analogy just so he 
could refute it. But he does, however, despite having screwed up the 
majority of his greenhouse arguments, have a valid point that the 
effect of CO2 may be logarithmic instead of linear or exponential 
because once a portion of the spectrum is blocked, blocking it 
additionally does not have additional effect.  (does anyone have any 
direct refutation of this point?)

What I'd like to have is a concise technical argument that I can 
present to skeptics that I encounter, without having to become a 
climatologist myself. How do you accurately move someone that CO2 in 
particular really is a problem, in a casual conversationally viable 
span of time? This is, of course, what the environmentalists try to 
present. But by oversimplification it because easy to refute, as the 
skeptics present their own oversimplifications instead.     Maybe it's 
just not possible to have a simple argument. Or maybe CO2 really isn't 
the core of the problem maybe it's something else?  I am an 
environmentalist by nature, I've heard enough to believe it, my next 
car will be a hybrid, I'm insulating my house, etc., - so my point in 
this is to acquire better arguments to use to persuade others, as I 
also know many skeptics, Republicans who buy that party line, and I 
need to win them over.


Myself, I feel that Danny's maybe maybe not argument about New York 
ending up underwater is not compelling. (he's on the 39th floor anyway, 
so he's safe :-)) There are too many potential crisis that won't happen 
for us to dedicate tons of time and resources to all of them. We don't 
have enough resources, especially when you count how few resources we 
have the political will to actually spend. Especially when there are 
crisis that we do have hard data/facts about that don't have enough 
resources right now (our health care system, for example, and 
education). The speaker at my graduation, Dyson- a very serious 
scientist, argued just this point- that in the balance of where we 
should be spending our limited resources, the environment was currently 
getting more than it's proper share of focus.    So to succeed the 
argument has to be compelling in a rather direct sense.


Thanks for your thoughts! I appreciate the critical responses.

Dave

On Oct 24, 2006, at 12:31 PM, Erik Talvitie wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>
>
David P. Morris, PhD
Senior Engineer, ElectroDynamic Applications, Inc.
morris &AElig edapplications.com, (734) 786-1434, fax: (734) 786-3235