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Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2006 13:18:21 -0400 (EDT)
To: Erik Talvitie <etalviti &AElig eecs.umich.edu>
cc: improvetheworld &AElig umich.edu
From: Daniel Reeves <dreeves &AElig umich.edu>
Subject: Re: Fwd: Global Warming
Status: RO

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.
>

-- 
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/dreeves  - -  search://"Daniel Reeves"

Where are we going?  Why am I in this handbasket?