View Article & Comments

by Ken Blanchard

My good friend and cherished Keloland interlocutor, BB, has this in reply to my recent post on Climate Change and Renewable Energy. BB begins with this:

I get the feeling that your vitriol comments concerning anything to do with climate change are based emotively rather than rationally. Generally what intelligent and open minded people do is to evaluate and weigh the evidence in as fair and impartial manner as possible. Then through the use of intellect come to a reasoned and rational answer. What you seem to do is the inverse: you have already promulgated what the "correct" answer is and then attempt to stitch together an argument.

I don't believe that my comment was vitriolic at all. I simply challenged some popular views on the subject. It is quite wrong of you to say that I have "already promulgated what the "correct" answer is" on this subject. I have been posting on climate change for several years, and I have generally accepted the propositions that the world is in a warming trend, and that human activity is having some effect. Recently I have begun to doubt both propositions, which is the kind of thing that people sometimes do when they "evaluate and weigh the evidence in as fair and impartial a manner as possible." My position is agnostic. I don't think we can know what is going to happen next or what we had to do with it.

By contrast, it is the global warming faithful who always begin by declaring that the science is settled. Science is never settled. BB continues with this:

Look at the guy you cite as "proving" that your erroneous argument has validity. He is one of a handful of scientists throughout the whole world that still cling to the idea that global warming is a myth. He is not a climatologist, has never had any of his crackpot ideas peer reviewed and is totally discredited in his own scientific community. I can not fathom why an intelligent person such as yourself can rebuke the findings of over 99% of the scientific community. You are just plain wrong....

This is a mess. It is a classic ad hominem argument: it is geologist Robert Carter himself that BB attacks, with no attempt at all to show that Carter's evidence or arguments are faulty. It also contains a number of odd ideas. Is it really true that only "climatologists" are allowed to speak about global warming? If we take that standard seriously, then we can draw some interesting conclusions about BB's identity. Since he speaks about my "emotions" and about climate change, he must be not only a climatologist Ph.D., but a licensed psychiatrist or clinical psychologist. There can't be too many people out there with both degrees. Likewise, if only climatologists are allowed to speak on the subject, and if 99% of the scientific community has leave to speak, then 99% of the latter must be climatologists. I would never have guessed.

One of us, BB or myself, is wrong about science. He thinks it works like politics: count the votes and that is the right scientific conclusion. I think that consensus is largely irrelevant. What counts is not what scientists believe, but the arguments and evidence that they present. Is Bob Carter wrong when he says that it has frequently been warmer in the past than it is now? I have not seen any summary of global climate estimates over any defined range of time that contradicts him, and I have looked (see "evaluate and weigh the evidence."). If Carter is right, then recent global temperature trends are not at all out of the ordinary. That might matter.

I am also very skeptical about BB's 99% figure. Where, exactly, does that number come from? Apparently BB is also a trained demographer.

Global Warming is not just a scientific research program, it is also and emphatically a political agenda. I am a trained political scientist (like BB), so I can speak about that. When someone tries to dismiss or stigmatize all opposition to a policy agenda, that ain't science, it's politics. So here is my political take on the matter.

Barring a real global economic collapse, China and India are going to keep expanding, economically. The developed nations are just not going to reduce their greenhouse emissions. Whatever we might wish or prescribe these are the facts. So the thing to do is to prepare for whatever climate change may result. Meanwhile, we might want to think about what to do with we are wrong about the future. What if we are in for a sustained cooling trend? Maybe we ought to think about that. BB thinks I am "just plain wrong." Maybe I am. But neither of us knows. Robert Carter shows that global temperatures over the last century are well above the long range trends. What goes up must come down is only common sense. If that is what a crack pot is, count me in.