An insider’s story of the global attack on climate science

What makes the whole conversation unproductive is there appears to be two sides: one which argues there is no problem and we must do nothing, and the other side says that the problem is going to end the world as we know it and we must change our entire way of living and make it our number one priority.

For me, there is a progression of questions that I must answer before I can sign on to the latter's assertions., And they look something like this:

1. Is the world warming? I think it most certainly is, but I would also note that it appears that the warming trend has halted for the past 10 to 20 years. From what I can gather, scientists have reasons why that might be the case but have not explained it.

2. Is the warming man-made? To a large degree, I believe that it is. However, there are a lot of things that we don't understand about climate (solar cycles, effects of water vapor, ocean CO2 sequestration, etc.) If I had to put a number on it, I would say 50 to 60% man-made.

3. Can we do anything about it? This is where I begin to separate from the global warming crowd. Theoretically, we can certainly do something about it, but having worked in government I just don't see any practical way that we can reduce greenhouse emissions to such an extent that it's going to make a great difference. Further, china and India are ramping up their CO2 emissions, and there's nothing that the developed countries can do about it. Finally, I have ethical objections to telling developed countries that they have to use less energy which will inevitably result in more lives lost due to starvation or simply just malnutrition and poverty.

4. Should we do anything about it? I believe this is a cost-benefit analysis. And I haven't done the analysis myself, but sometimes I question whether spending the enormous amounts of money today is worth putting off an uncertain disaster tomorrow when we have actual problems today that we could be working on instead. We have millions of people every year dying from malnutrition, poor water supplies, malaria, HIV/AIDS, etc. Why not save those actual lives instead of spending the money saving hypothetical lives in 100 years. And indeed, won't we be more suited to save those lines in 100 years than we are right now, meaning that the mitigation effort could be a lot cheaper?

But that's not how the 'consensus' is being used in argument. The way that advocates use it as a bludgeon: that because 99% of all climate scientists agree with anthropocentric climate change that any argument to the contrary is ludicrous and ought to be dismissed outright. Now, I don't think (I guess I hope) that the actual scientists think in those terms. But that's how their advocates (Al Gore and the like) frame the issue. And that both hurts their cause and provides fuel for the opposition. I'd bet that if Al Gore had never entered the cultural debate over climate change it would be much, much healthier.

For example, you make a point about predicting "the future behaviour of an entire planet's climate". But you could equally say that we should be skeptical of Newton's theory of gravity because it predicts the future physical movements of every atom of an entire planet. It was a specious point. You just said something that was true in a way that sounded impressive. You didn't even mention the models, let alone give any criticisms of the current state of climate model validation. You just made the target of the model sound complicated, without giving any detailed consideration of how complicated it actually is when taken in aggregate.

If you're going to criticise a science then use science to do it. The quality of the criticism has to be on a par with the interpretation it criticises. Otherwise it's clear you're arguing from ignorance. While it makes sense to be skeptical while ignorant, you can't expect people who aren't ignorant to take your views seriously.