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Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2006 18:11:36 -0400
To: improvetheworld &AElig umich.edu
From: Erik Talvitie <etalviti &AElig eecs.umich.edu>
Subject: Re: Global Warming
Status: RO

> 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.

Well here's a quick article from Science (which appears in a prestigious
publication, cites its sources, and doesn't attempt to muddle the issue)
that I think is what you are looking for: 

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686

> 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. 

Indeed, and it would be a fallacy to do so (mmmm...ad hominem grits).
And I really was trying to shy away general accusations about who uses
distortionary arguments precisely because they *are* so common,
especially from politicians who are trying to justify their policy
decisions and who probably don't understand the science much better than
the public they are addressing, nor do they often *want* to. Listen, my
point is that there is distinction amongst publications. I trust Al Gore
more than I trust Steven Milloy because Al Gore cites his sources and
doesn't try to confuse me with bad logic. If I have nothing better to go
on, and I'd rather not become an expert myself, the best I can do is
corroborate a potentially dubious source with some more legitimate
sources (like...kajillions of climate scientists). A responsible author
makes that process easier by *supplying* that corroboration.

> 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?)

Which is exactly my point. I can't refute his technical claims but I
don't feel the need. He just makes a bunch of claims and metaphors and
then draws a bunch of conclusions without citing supporting studies.
Milloy is not a scientist, nor does he seem to be publishing his
evidence in any journals and his findings seem to be at odds with the
scientific community at large. There's no reason to assign his website
with the same legitimacy as, say, The American Meteorological Society
and so there's no reason we, as lay readers, should worry about refuting
his unsubstantiated claims. It's *his* job to provide evidence to make
his arguments convincing, which he has failed to do.

> 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? 

> I 
> also know many skeptics, Republicans who buy that party line, and I 
> need to win them over.

Yeah so I don't know how to help you here. If you say to someone, look,
all of these scientific societies are in agreement and a huge literature
review reveals empirically that the community at large is basically in
agreement that this is happening and then you provide them with a
plausible (though admittedly high-level, metaphorical, and simplistic)
model for the phenomenon and they come back at you with "yeah but
there's this lawyer/lobbyist/think tank faculty member, Steven Milloy,
who has a website and he disagrees...," well what makes you think that
providing more science will change their mind? Why would you be a more
reliable source than *all of climatology*? And if you did manage to
refute whatever technical issue they had brought up, what's to stop them
from coming up with another, that sends you back to the books? The
fundamental problem is not that they don't understand the science, or
that they haven't been given a complete enough explanation. The
fundamental problem is that a lot of people don't trust science. It
seems to me the most important thing to try and convince your skeptics
of is the power of the scientific method and the academic institution.
You'll never get everybody to believe in global warming until they
believe that hundreds of climatologists are *more qualified* to answer
the question than Steven Milloy or Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or
whoever. 

The political issue should *not* be do we trust the science, but rather
what do we do about what the science tells us? 

Anyway, I feel like I'm ranting now instead of improving the world, so
let me stop. My take home message: Americans do not need to learn more
atmospheric chemistry; they need to learn how to distinguish between
legitimate and illegitimate sources of information and how to separate
questions of political opinion from questions of scientific fact.

Erik