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Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2006 01:48:39 -0500 (EST)
To: improvetheworld &AElig umich.edu
From: Daniel Reeves <dreeves &AElig umich.edu>
Subject: Re: Fwd: Global Warming
Status: O

I hate to put my brother-in-law on the spot but he's a chemical engineer 
working in the oil industry and quite well-informed and he has expressed 
doubt that the risk/benefit analysis indicates that any drastic 
curtailment of industrial emissions is warranted.

Cam, could you elaborate on that?
Improvetheworld settles for nothing less than the truth!

Thanks!
Danny

--- \/   FROM Daniel Reeves AT 06.10.24 13:18 (Oct 24)   \/ ---

> You rock, Erik.  For those with a more casual interest in climatology, the 
> take-home point from Erik's analysis, in my opinion, is: junkscience.com 
> exists to create doubt in the consensus of the scientific community, namely 
> that global warming is real and potentially catastrophic.
>
> That was really insightful, Erik.
>
> And I think there's even more to this point.  Junkscience.com is full of 
> phrases like "the existence of X is uncertain", "they may add to warming ... 
> or, equally likely, suppress it", and "it is not known that..."
>
> I mean, sure, production of greenhouse gases *may* put New York City 
> underwater but maybe it *won't* and then we'd sure feel silly for doing 
> anything about it!
>
> Danny
>
> --- \/   FROM Erik Talvitie AT 06.10.24 12:31 (Today)   \/ ---
>
>> 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.
>> 
>
>

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