One of my very best friends doesn't believe in global warming. Wait, what?! Believe? When did this become a faith based debate? I'm getting ahead of myself though, allow me to rewind a bit...
I'm back in Maine. Land of blueberries, lobster, moose, and yes, the majestic sea cucumber. Though I'll always be 'from away', the people and experiences of my graduate years have provided the foundation that makes traveling north feel like coming home. It's been a wonderful opportunity to catch up with old friends eager to hear stories of what I've seen and done and so on. After listening to my adventures across the political divide and back again, my self-proclaimed big brother of the Pine Tree State Jake shook his head. 'I don't really understand the big deal about global warming...excuse me...climate change.'
Now mind you, Jake's not a scientist, but he is a grounded intellectual. What struck me about this situation is that he's not the conservative standard we've come to expect doubting the science. Jake's not a republican, he's a registered independent who would be considered agnostic on his most spiritual day. I listened as he justified his perspective explaining he feels science is based on the principle of believing in something that isn't fact. 'Scientists don't prove anything.' To Jake, global warming sounds like another alarmist cause we don't understand and expects the earth has the capacity to mitigate our impact and recover. Simply put, he's dismissed the idea that we can change the climate as human hubris.
RealClimate fans take note - we must recognize that naysayers do not universally fit a one-size-fits-all mold. Jake has no hidden agenda or strong political alliance, he's just decided independently that global warming is a lot of hot air. And he's not alone...lots of people who think critically for themselves don't buy the package science has been selling.
Is Jake justified in doubting the environmental crisis? Of course. Freedom of thought is encouraged. But there are larger implications and he provides a valuable reminder that science might be failing to find messages that resonate with the public. However, I take comfort recognizing that the Jakes of the world are intelligent and generally still patient enough to listen. So we as scientists need to wake up a bit and be better prepared. The question is how do we arm ourselves with weapons in the form of words?
Later this afternoon, I'll begin reexamining why communication has broken down and how we might come up with a better approach that appeals to a greater constituency than those already convinced.
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I think there are a great number of people like that in the educated professional people around. I try to be very careful not to lump people together, because very many independents I talk to feel like they might as well be republican for the way anyone who doubts anything climate related is portrayed. I don't know a good answer except to point out that the things we need to do to help CO2 emissions also help a lot of other things. It also helps when there is a good super conservative there to be contrasted with, it kind of allows me to be more assertive also.
Of course the Earth has the capacity to "mitigate our impact and recover." We are but a fleeting mote in its eye. The Earth has survived snowball ice ages, intense heat, huge impacts (including the one that created the Moon), dinosaurs, trilobites, gamma ray bursters and so on.
The problem is that this recovery is unlikely to be on the scale of our or our immediate descendants' lifetimes, so we are going to be the ones who suffer. Imagine the climate is a great big pendulum (like a really heavy Foucault pendulum). Humanity has been giving it a great big push over the last 100 years and it's slowly starting to move. It'll stop swinging eventually but not for a long time yet. But if we don't slow it down (or at least stop pushing) it's gonna give us one hell of a smack in the face very soon.
"Scientists don't prove anything"
I dunno. Jake doesn't sound all that smart to me. Without the very powerful (and well financed) noise machine of the global warming deniers, he might actually listen to reason. Too bad his noise filter doesn't work.
He is right about one thing. The earth most certainly will recover. It's the rest of humanity that is going to have the problem.
This does seem to be a fundamental problem. With all of the political and market salesmanship that goes on in our culture, people are understandably skeptical of everything (except the things that fit with what they already think). Since even the smartest, most involved people can't learn everything about all issues, how do they decide where the truth lies?
The real tragedy, as you have written about repeatedly, Chris, is that many people are viewing science as just another interest group. Rather than being able to weigh credibility and expertise, there is some notion that the IPCC, NAS, AAAS etc. are just like everyone else, trying to sell us something!
jockyoung:
The real tragedy, as you have written about repeatedly, Chris, is that many people are viewing science as just another interest group. Rather than being able to weigh credibility and expertise, there is some notion that the IPCC, NAS, AAAS etc. are just like everyone else, trying to sell us something!
That and the "everything is politics" riff that I get from a mid-30s conservative member of our congregation. I like him a lot and value his passion and take-charge approach to tasks that strengthen our community, but I can't understand why he refuses to see science as something other than another political approach.
I have to assume that Jake's intellectualism is basically the liberal arts kind. The most intellectual liberal artist in the world does not necessarily understand what science is and how it works.
It seems the more generic problem, is the lack of understanding of what science is and does. The result is what is doscussed above, a general lack of appreciation for the integrity of the profession.
I think a lot is due to educational deficiencies. The most obvious is that low level science is usualyy taught as collections of facts, and theories. The single day black-box experiment just doesn't inculcate an appreciation of the scientific method. Secondly there is the overemphasis on the adversarial method. Here we teach debating, as a battle between two sides, who each will use any trick they can get away with to make their side win. I've always thought this heavy emphasis on this method was going to be damaging, as its not really a very good method of ascertaining truth, and as we see for many they can't see and appreiciate the exist of other superior methods of truth determination.
"Global Warming! I don't buy it.
Just because some rich do-gooder that wants to be President starts going on about something doesn't make it true. Politicians have been lying to us since King George the Third started taxing tea.
I mean, it just doesn't make sense! What's a mere 200% increase in carbon dioxide emissions?! Do you know how much AIR there is up there? Besides, from what I hear, the biggest ozone-depleting chemical isn't CO2; it's methane, and the biggest producer of methane in the world isn't industry or herds of beef cattle - it's termites! By that logic, we could fix the ozone layer by slash-and-burning the rainforest!
Now, don't get me wrong here; I don't think we should burn the rainforest. But saying that we have the ability to change the chemical makeup of the atmosphere, altering the climate and flooding half the world while we're at it - it's just not reasonable."
The preceding is an excerpt from a note I've kept in my Inbox, and demonstrates a plausible counter-argument. I'm not saying it's proof, but it does certainly have appeal.
Global Warming is a phenomenon that has certainly been observed since the advent of the steam engine. Tying it to pollution seems to require no great stretch of logic.
But the same century that gave rise to the steam engine also held that infamous year of "Eighteen Hundred and Froze To Death", in which crops were frost-killed, Europe starved, and snow fell in August throughout New England. That period known as the 'Little Ice Age' was just ending, and there are those that speculate that, even now, we have yet to reach the temperature levels that existed beforehand.
Global Warming is real; it is almost undeniable. But could it be natural, rather than generated by mankind? It would indeed be hubris to assert this without sufficient evidence, and I for one do not see the proof - either way.
"Jake" - You do realize that you're asking science for proof.
The scientific method does not present proof positive. It can only generate negative proof, the 'it is not so' of Aristotle. So asking science to prove something is like asking a fish to ride a bicycle.
And fish don't grow legs often. (Tadpoles are not fish.)
-J the G
PS: Are you the "Jake" of the article? Just curious.
And it's Sheril, not Chris.
Actually, that is exactly why RC was founded - because most people who do not accept AGW are victims of delusion, not perpetrators.
Compare the moderation of comments at RC to, let's say, Deltoid, and you'll note things are kept more civil at RC.
All of the contention about the veracity of global warming obscures the most important feature of the problem. There is no solution. When the electrical grid starts to flicker and the AC sputters, we will burn all of the coal, dirty or not. The games is lost, to quote Kurt Vonnegut.
But more important, the global warming debate masks a far more urgent issue--oil depletion and the resulting economic and social turmoil. This is the most pressing issue facing industrial civilization and on a schedule that soon will steamroll all concerns about global warming.
I tend to agree with the view that the loudest issues are often masking the more serious and fundamental human issues. If we just stay at the surface of 'global warming' instead of going deeper and seriously reflect on the more fundamental problems, then we are missing a great opportunity to turn a challenging situation into a force to make changes within ourselves.
I think that people are influenced by media narratives about activists and environmentalists, and they apply this to global warming. After all, it's received lots of hype and attention in the media, and some people tend to be skeptical, sometimes for good reason, about anything the media obsesses over. In addition, some people are influenced by the media narrative of the middle ground somehow being better, and that probably both sides are lying.
I would also wonder if you don't see this more in technically trained people such as CSists, engineers, etc. who want to understand something before they believe it (unless it conforms to certain preconceived notions) but don't deeply understand the scientific method for fields of study which yield less precise outcomes.
So, I would argue that it might be effective to have more scientists in the media arguing that global warming is a problem along with other environmental problems and risks that could affect the viewer (and are documented in a way that can be tangibly presented to the viewer). It's not just global warming that's the problem, it's pollution that we breathe in, people getting sick from that, us running out of oil, etc. Alleviating global warming helps those other problems too.