It's really not surprising at all, though. AGW rests on some very shaky evidence, which has only recently come to light because the "scientists" involved have been assiduously avoiding requests to share their data (which is crazy when you think about it: "I have evidence we need to spend trillions of dollars or the world will end! What? You want to see my work? No way!").
When you get down to it, the whole thing falls apart without the hockey stick, because otherwise you don't need CO2 to explain anything; as this graph shows, the proxy averages indicate the Earth saw very similar warming around 1200. But for all the cries of "consensus" the hockey stick is the product of a relatively small group of people who all cite each other and tend to be environmentalists -- and some of them appear to have done some very bad things with the data; this year, it's started to look more like a hoaxey stick.
Meanwhile, AGW proponents' predictions both short- and long-term haven't panned out. The Arctic wasn't ice-free this year or last, hurricane activity is dropping off the charts, the 1988 IPCC predictions were all too high, and the methane prediction turned out to be way off too.
I think most people are open to the idea of AGW, but the evidence just isn't there, at least not yet. If temperatures spike over the next 10-20 years, we might have to reconsider, but if a cooler PDO pushes them down AGW may be regarded as the Club Of Rome prediction of its day.
posted by Dave on 10.23.09 at 06:18 PM
Comments
The global warming clergy refuse to listen to any evidence that tends to undercut what they've long accepted on faith.
It turn out that John Maynard Keynes was a far wiser scientist than he was an economist, given his quote so great I wonder if it's apocryphal: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
Rhodium Heart · October 23, 2009 8:10 PM
One thing I know for sure. I don't have any special knowledge in regard to climate science. Something I think I know is that most of the people arguing most strenuously against the idea of AGW don't know any more about it than I do. When I start to hear the voices of a predominance of professionals in the field voicing the sort of skepticism I currently hear expressed here, I'll begin to take that sort of skepticism seriously. Meanwhile surrounding the word "scientist" with scare quotes doesn't constitute an argument. And public opinion polling doesn't constitute evidence in the matter one way or the other.
"When I start to hear the voices of a predominance of professionals in the field voicing the sort of skepticism...opinion polling doesn't constitute evidence in the matter one way or the other."
Global warming belief in a nutshell.
Of course the polls showing only 36% now believe in AGW aren't proof of anything, they merely reflect the fact the actual science behind AGW is very weak.
By the same token, polls of climate "scientists" don't prove anything either; science is about facts, not opinions (and in any case, unlike, say, cosmologists, they tend to be politically biased on the subject of their research before they even enter the field). I put the scare quotes there because as the links demonstrate, they are not practicing science.
I, too, lack qualifications to judge the science, but I have been around policy debates for a long time, and the old adage "follow the money" is a useful guide. Massive funds from both government and private industry rent seekers supports the pro-AGW movement. The scientist-supporters do not even have to lie (much); all they have to do is say that AGW is possible and the money keeps flowing.
The deniers are a small group of dedicated but impoverished skeptics, with a few major academic names thrown in, such as Lindzen and Happer.
So you can believe Al Gore, Kleiner Perkins, and the UN kleptocrats if you want. I will go with Lindzen, Fred Singer, and the Heartland Institute. It is always useful to ask "are these people really interested in telling me the truth?" and for the pro-AGW forces the answer is mostly "no."
TallDave: You explicitly elided the word "public" in the phrase "public opinion polling." That was a fairly dishonest rendering of what I said. I call a foul.
JV: You're all about "follow[ing] the money," but you'll "go with" the Heartland Institute? I'd suggest doing a little research into the role of Heartland, the Cooler Heads Coalition, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, Exxon/Mobil, et al, and the flow of money to anti-AGW sou rces. (Such as the $10,000 offer to attack the IPCC as "resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work." Regardless of what you think of the IPCC, that can't be regarded as anything except obviously corrupt. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/feb/02/frontpagenews.climatechange)
I think your standard and your conclusion are in conflict. I don't detect "skepticism" among the deniers, btw. It looks an awful lot to me like only finding one possible result acceptable - pretty much the diametric opposite of skepticism.
Your argument is equally fallacious with or without the word public, unless you're arguing opinion polls of scientists prove something. Opinion is the operative word there, not public. And one could just as easily accuse you of "dishonestly" claiming the post argues that public opinion polls mean something in the first place.
Calling people "deniers" doesn't prove anyhing either; it's just an extremely dishonest attempt to link them to Holocaust deniers by connotation.
It is a fact Briffa, Hansen, and Mann have all been, shall we say, reluctant to show their work. If you're not skeptical of their results you're either not paying attention or don't understand the scientific method.
Also, the amount of money going to skeptics is a tenth of that being spent by believers. Who's corrupt again?
It sys right in the post skeptics are willing to accept AGW with better evidence. But ERBE alone is devastating to GCMs. The facts just aren't on your side, and as a result neither is the public.
C'mon, Dave. Your edit changed the meaning of what you purported to quote. Uncool. And instead of acknowledging that, you shifted the thrust of your argument to something incoherent and apparently unrelated to your original argument. Then you complain about my use of the term "denier," despite the fact that I used it in reference to JVDelong's first use of the term. And finally you assert without support something about funding levels that doesn't bother to acknowledge the corruption issue I was highlighting.
I'm not a global warmmongering scientist but I make fun of them on the Internet.
AemJeff, which global warmmongering model predicted the current, 8+ year cooling trend?
Have you noticed that the graph of the temperature of the Earth closely resembles the graph of how active the Sun is?
Global warmmongers don't practice science, it's religion and they "believe who they want to believe". As we can see from AemJeff's assertion that When I start to hear the voices of a predominance of professionals in the field
Look in the archives of this blog for many examples of just that. But then, you don't want to see them and if you do, they're just tools of big oil.
I don't have a religion but if I did, it surely wouldn't be global worming. That's giving your money to conmen and too much power to politicians. A very bad combination.
Whatever, it's wrong either way. Polling isn't scientific proof, and I didn't argue it was; you did.
It's really too much for AGWers to whine about moeny corrupting skeptics' objectivity when James Hansen, who's getting arrested outside coal plants, has a big chunk of NASA's budget at his disposal, and Al Gore stands to make billions from rent-seeking "green" companies that survive only if we pass the very same government regulations he's lobbying for. If money is corrupting the AGW debate then most of the corrupting is being done by the people who need to scare it out of taxpayers' hands with a hokey hockey stick that suddenly appeared in the 1990s and agitprop films.
I mean, come on. It doesn't matter much to Exxon-Mobil whether you pass emissions caps; they'll make billions regardless. In fact, the more you push up the price of oil, the better they do.
The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
Don?t bang your head!
The global warming clergy refuse to listen to any evidence that tends to undercut what they've long accepted on faith.
It turn out that John Maynard Keynes was a far wiser scientist than he was an economist, given his quote so great I wonder if it's apocryphal: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"