Leaving the Land of Woo

Tags: global warming deniers

I recently came across some amazingly misleading articles about climate change, courtesy of the Telegraph, which warned of the dangerous growth of intergovernmental bodies.  It seems pretty representative of those who deny global warming that they integrate their doubts about the science into some over-arching conspiracy involving governments giving away our rights and freedoms.  But the recent leak of emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit has also given rise to attacks on the science itself.  Nevertheless, there is overwhelming evidence that global warming is a fact, and that humans are responsible for the majority of it.  But that doesn't matter if you've already convinced yourself there's a conspiracy.

A brief look through the emails is enough to show you that this is normal everyday banter amongst scientists working on difficult questions.  But for conspiracy theorists, every mention of using a statistical trick to identify a trend is converted into an intention to suppress globally significant data.  Every joke about taking a short cut is seen as the intention to do just that.  But these interpretations completely ignore the fact that the data is public domain, that any distortion would be immediately obvious, that any results derived from such a distortion would be exposed immediately by peer review.  For such a conspiracy to have any credibility, it would need to involve several tens of thousands of scientists around the world.  If any one of them expressed any doubts, the whole thing would come tumbling down.

There's no doubt that climate science is complex.  It deals with effects which have many interrelated causes and the physics is often difficult.  There have been scientific arguments about the measurement of concentrations of carbon dioxide, the significance of solar energy, the role of water vapour in the greenhouse effect, the record of warming, whether or not there were cyclical changes which adequately explained what is being seen nowadays, and so on.  All of this discussion is exactly what you would expect of genuine science.  The data is collected and analysed and conflicting theories are proposed, leading to more data collection, experiments, predictive models, re-analysis of the data, and so on. Science doesn't automatically discover everything and scientific questions are typically contentious. As Dara O'Brien so memorably put it "if science knew everything.... it would stop!"

But now the data is in, the scientific hypotheses have been evaluated and tested, the predictive models (although still not entirely adequate) are reliable.  The data has been analysed by independent teams across the planet and even the datasets were compiled independently.  There is a massive consensus - global warming is happening, and it's down to us.

But the deniers won't have it.  Some commentators are arguing that there is a conspiracy to fix the data, the hide the real results, to manipulate the conclusions to fit the political agenda of people who want to establish world government.  I kid you not!  This viewpoint is seriously put forward in the articles in the Telegraph newspaper, who have been arguing that global warming is a con and that it isn't really happening. But despite the newspaper claims, there are no massed ranks of dissenting scientists challenging the reality of global warming caused by human activity. Instead, there are groups of deeply conservative political organisers trying to use the issue to campaign against multinational governmental responsibilities.  One even goes so far as to claim that we are heading towards a communist world government by stealth.  Rational people laugh it off as a joke, but the fact that a serious national newspaper still prints this stuff shows that it is far from comical.  Those who don't understand the science will be led from their prejudices to supporting the political aims of the paper, without the slightest understanding of the real science.

One serious liberal response from Mike Hulme and Jerome Ravetz suggested that scientific knowledge needed to be validated in some way, as if it was only valid if people accepted it.  In response to the attacks on scientists, they thought that the science wouldn't be valid until people accepted it as correct.   The whole point of science is that the results are independent of anybody's opinions.  That's its great strength.  Scientific results are validated against the real world, not against someone's opinions. But what they are concerned about is that unless the science is explained better in accessible ways, it is all too easy to distort its reporting, just as the Telegraph does. But there is a difference between validating the science and explaining the science.  It doesn't need social validation to be true.  Without social acceptance, it won't be acted on, but it will remain true just the same.

Because the science is complex, it is by the same token easy to quote scientific statements out of context with little chance of discovery when it is read by the general population.  Those few scientists who are fulminating at the gross distortion of the science won't be heard amidst the clamour of support for condemnation of their accused colleagues.  Ironically, the deniers are calling themselves sceptics, but they are not in the least sceptical about their prejudgements, their conspiracy theories, and their pseudoscientific articles.  We should call them by their real name - global warming deniers.