News & Views item

News & Views item - December 2010

An Intellectual Black Hole. (December 6, 2010)

The "Correspondence" in the November 25, 2010 Nature from Larry Gilman Sharon regarding news items on climate change in the media (popular and otherwise) and the two comments it elicited from Martha Stokely and Martin Hill show in capsular form the difficulties faced in explaining the anthropogenic effects on global warming, their extent and the degree of confidence that its proponents have in asserting their plea that measures need to be taken to obtain useful abetment.

Larry Gilman Sharon Wrote	Martha Stokely Commented	Martin Hill Commented
An intellectual black hole News items on climate change are now regularly flooded with negative online comments (see, for example, http://go.nature.com/Lfigec). These tend to have certain features in common. The comment writers struggle to find words that are emphatic enough to express their contempt for anthropogenic global warming and for the 97% or so of active climate scientists who accept its reality. They feel attacked, lied to and conspired against: they are intensely angry. Their comments are often pervaded by heavy sarcasm. In their view, climate scientists are not merely mistaken, but foes of truth and liberty. They see themselves as fighting a powerful enemy — a posture that can be addictive. These comment authors rarely engage with the original science (in the above example, an article in Geophysical Research Letters). They have unplugged from the scientific discourse because they believe it to be driven by crypto-environmentalist (or crypto-communist) ideology. This conviction characterizes fundamentalisms: a true believer does not need to engage, they already know. The denialists charge that it is the scientists who refuse to consider the evidence; alternatively, scientists know all about it and are lying. The parallels with some creationist rhetoric are striking. Certain standard fallacies and counterfactuals are held by these commenters as irresistible 'gotchas' — any one of which makes the idea of human-induced global warming absurd (and further thought unnecessary). For example, a popular line of argument is that because climate has changed in the past without human input, humans cannot be changing it now. Mistaken beliefs are held that scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, climate modellers and other researchers ignore factors such as water vapour, urban heat islands and the Sun. The peculiar danger of any full-blown conspiracy theory is that it can become an intellectual black hole, a one-way trip. Hope lies mostly in keeping people out of the hole, rather than trying to rescue those who have fallen in.	_Climate is an extremely difficult field to study and it suffers from the fact that it's really not possible to perform a controlled experiment in which there is only one variable that has been changed. This means it is often not possible to establish causation, regardless of whether there is overwhelming evidence of correlation, so people are always dealing with the problem commonly illustrated by the question: Do blue skies cause deserts? If you decide to make that vast logical leap from overwhelming evidence of correlation to assuming causation, then you still will have to deal with the questions of whether anthropomorphic global warming (AGW) is a significant effector of climate when compared with other climate effectors, such as solar output and whether the effects of AGW can be teased-out from the effects of solar output and other climate effectors. Then if AGW is a significant effector of climate whose effects can be teased-out from the effects of solar output – and only then – can we start to make intelligent decisions about the desirable levels of green house gasses (GHGs) in our atmosphere. We might wish to decrease GHGs when solar output is high but we might also wish to increase GHGs if solar output is dropping. And we might not wish to decrease GHGs during a decline in solar output. These considerations are important because periods of continental glaciation have historically been far more inimical to life than the Interglacial Period. But denigrating people with different views doesn't help answer any of those important questions.	It's not really surprising that commenters feel 'attacked, lied to and conspired against' when articles like this appear in respectable scientific journals. Comments are not exactly the ideal place to engage with the original science, and the effort and resources involved in repeating experiments and other investigative work are beyond most of those who are not publically funded to do that work. The best commenters can sensibly do is point at potential errors and holes, in argument, process and quality as well as the science. One point, for example, is that the line taken by some MMCO2GW [man-made carbon dioxide global warming] advocates is that because current changes are unprecidented, they must be caused by recent human activity. Showing that they are not unprecidented merely removes this line of argument; it's not a serious argument that it cannot be human activity, but that it is not necessarily so, and so other evidence will need to be presented and accepted. It's hardly surprising then that commenters indeed get angry when the response is not the oft-touted 'open and honest welcoming of criticism' of science but charges of 'denialism'. This recent claim that 'denialists' are 'full blown conspiracy theorists' is particularly depressing, especially given how often MMCO2GW advocates – some of them respected scientists – claim that denialism is a well organised oil-funded conspiracy.