climate communication

Showing posts with label climate communication. Show all posts

Sunday, July 23, 2017

Is nitpicking a climate doomsday warning allowed?

Journalist and amateur mass-psychic David Wallace-Wells published an article in the New York Magazine titled: "The Uninhabitable Earth - Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think."

Michael Mann responded on Facebook as one of the first scientists. He disliked the "doomist framing" and noted several obvious inaccuracies at the top of the article that all exaggerated the problem.

Some days later seventeen climate scientists of Climate Feedback (including me) reviewed the NY Mag article.

In my previous blog post I argued that this is a difficult, but important topic to talk about. The dangers of unfettered climate change are huge. Also if we do not act faster than we did in the past we are taking serious risks with our civilisation and existence. We should seriously consider that the situation can become worse than what we expect on average. Such cases are a big part of the total risk.

While the danger is there and should be discussed, the article contained many inaccuracies, which typically exaggerated the problem. Thus I have rated the article as having "low scientific credibility", which was the most selected rating of the other scientists as well.

Both the critique of Mann and of Climate Feedback produced quite some controversy. This was exceptional; normally the people who see climate change as an important problem trust the scientists who told them about the problem.

Like other climate scientists I correct both sides when I see something and have enough expertise. Although it is much rarer to have to correct people who see climate change as a problem (let's call them the "concerned"). I guess the real problem is big enough, there is not much need to exaggerate it. The overwhelming amount of nonsense comes from people playing down the problem. Normally the deniers really dislike contrary evidence, but the concerned are mostly happy to be corrected and to be able see the problem more clearly.

It is interesting that this time the corrections were much more controversial. Why was it different this time? Was our "nitpicking" a case of the science police striking again? Could Climate Feedback give more useful ratings?

Doomsday scenarios are as harmful as climate change denial

Michael Mann followed up his Facebook post with an article in the Washington Post together with communication expert Susan Joy Hassol that "doomsday scenarios are as harmful as climate change denial". The key argument was:

Some seem to think that people need to be shocked and frightened to get them to engage with climate change. But research shows that the most motivating emotions are worry, interest and hope. Importantly, fear does not motivate, and appealing to it is often counter-productive as it tends to distance people from the problem, leading them to disengage, doubt and even dismiss it.

This is an argument climate activists who want to be effective need to be aware of. The well-known groups already tend to stick to the science. Climate change is bad enough as it is and they rightly value their credibility.

The argument makes me uncomfortable, however, when connected to science. The situation is what it is. Also if that provokes fear, scientists should stick to the evidence and not tone it down to be "effective". It is the job of an activist to be effective. It is our job is to be honest.

If the population would have to fear we are not honest, that would produce additional uncertainty and give more room for the prophets of doom. Thus toning it down fearing fear can also produce fear.

David Wallace-Wells uses the fear that scientists hide the severity to make his story more scary. He is claiming throughout that article that scientists are not giving it straight: scientist are technocrats who are too optimistic that the problem can be solved, "climate denialism has made scientists even more cautious", he talked to many scientists, but does not name most in the original article, thus suggesting they are only willing to tell the truth anonymously, "the many sober-minded scientists I interviewed over the past several months ... have quietly reached an apocalyptic conclusion", "Pollyannaish plant physiologists", "Climatologists are very careful when talking about Syria", "But climate scientists have a strange kind of faith: We will find a way to forestall radical warming, they say, because we must."

This framing may have made the article more attractive to readers who expect scientists not to be honest and to understate the problems. This in turn may have provoked a more allergic reaction to the Climate Feedback critique than an article mostly read by people who love and respect science.

That the audience matters is also suggested by clear difference in the responses on Reddit sceptic and Reddit Collapse. The people on the Reddit of the real sceptics (not the fake climate "sceptics") were interested, while the people preparing for the collapse of civilisation were more often unhappy about Climate Feedback.

In the Climate Feedback reviews the doomist tone is often not appreciated, but if you look at the details, at the annotations of the scientists, it is clear that the problem is that the NY Mag article contains errors that exaggerate the problem, not the bad news that is accurate. In the summaries spreading doom and exaggerating were sometimes used interchangeably. So let me say clearly: I have never talked to a scientists who was more worried in private than in public.

While scientists say what they think, they do tend to be careful in what they claim. The more careful the claim, the more confident a scientist can be that the evidence is sufficient to support it. We like strong and thus careful claims. This is justified when it comes to the question whether there is a problem. You do not want to cry wolf too often when there is none. However, as I have argued on this blog before we should not be careful about the size of the wolf. Saying the wolf is a Chihuahua is not good advice to the public.

My advice to the public would be to expect problems to be somewhat worse than the scientific mainstream claims, but not to go to prophets of doom and especially to avoid sources with a history of inaccurate information. (At least for mature problems, in case of fresh problem it can go both ways.)

Nitpicking

Looking at the high risk tails is uncomfortable for everyone, also for scientists. That provokes more critical reading and an unfortunate claim in such a story will get more comments than a similar one hidden in a middle of the road most accurate story.

However, unfortunately the article also often made statements are clearly inaccurate, wrong or are missing important context. The biggest error in the article — from my perspective as someone who works on how accurately we know how much the Earth is warming — was this line:

there are alarming stories every day, like last month’s satellite data showing the globe warming, since 1998, more than twice as fast as scientists had thought.

This has been updated by David Wallace-Wells to now read:

there are alarming stories in the news every day, like those, last month, that seemed to suggest satellite data showed the globe warming since 1998 more than twice as fast as scientists had thought (in fact, the underlying story was considerably less alarming than the headlines).

This was a report on a satellite upper air dataset that was the favourite of the climate "sceptics" because it showed the laast warming. Scientists have always warmed that that dataset was unreliable. Now an update has brought it in line with the other temperature datasets. The "twice as fast" is just for a cherry picked period. That is about as bad as mitigation sceptical claiming that global warming has stopped by cherry picking a specific period.

The scientific assessment for the actual warming did not change, certainly not become twice as much. If anything we now understand the problem better, which would mean less risk. The change is also not that much compared to the warming we had over the last century.

Because the actual scientific assessment did not change one could also argue that the mistake is inconsequential for the main argument of the story and the comment thus nitpicking. At least for me it matters. I hope more people feel this way.

There were many more mistakes like this and cases where missing context will give the reader the wrong impression. I do not want to go through them all in this already long post; you can read the annotations.

There were also cases which were also nitpicking from a scientific viewpoint. Where these comments were mine, I included them for completeness. They also did not influence my rating much.

Apparently I have to add that parts of the text without annotations are not automatically accurate. Especially for such a long article annotating is a lot of work. At a certain moment there are enough annotations to make an assessment. In addition even with 17 scientists it will happen that none of the scientists has relevant expertise for specific claims.

Climate Feedback rating system

We may want to have another look at the rating system used by Climate Feedback; see below. Normally finding a grade is quite straight forward. In this case I had to think long and was still not really satisfied.

Suggested guidelines for the overall scientific credibility rating
Remember that we do not evaluate the opinion of the author, but instead the scientific accuracy of facts contained within the text, and the scientific quality of reasoning used.

+2 = Very High: No inaccuracies, fairly represents the state of scientific knowledge, well argumented and documented, references are provided for key elements. The article provides insights to the reader about climate change mechanisms and implications.
+1 = High: The article does not contain major scientific inaccuracies and its conclusion follows from the evidence provided.
0 = Neutral: No major inaccuracies, but no important insight to better explain implications of the science.
-1 = Low: The article contains significant scientific inaccuracies or misleading statements.
-2 = Very Low: The article contains major scientific inaccuracies for key facts supporting the author’s argumentation and/or omits to mention important information and/or presents logical flaws in using information to reach his or her conclusion.
n/a = Not Applicable: The article does not build on scientifically verifiable information (e.g., it is mostly about politics or opinions).

The scale is not symmetrical in the sense that if you get X facts wrong and X facts right you are in the middle. It might be that some people expect that. I would argue that getting only 50% right is pretty bad for a science article.

A problem in this case was that we can only give integer grades. So I gave a -1. I thought about neutral, but decided against it because that would mean "no major inaccuracies" and there were. For the part I could judge I found several mistakes and cases of missing important context (that is the description of -1). Had it been possible, I would have given the article a -0.5., because the tag "low scientific credibility" sounds a bit too harsh.

The rating of the article and the summary is made independently by all scientists and most made the same consideration. Had I been able to see the other "low" rating, I might have opted for "neutral" for balance. (We can see the annotations of the other scientists and can also respond to them. Sometimes when I am one of the first to make annotations, I wait with my rating to see what problems the others find.)

The relativity of wrong is very important. This same week Climate Feedback reviewed a Breitbart story about the accuracy of the instrumental warming estimate (my blog post on it). That was a complete con job and got "very low" rating. Giving the New York Magazine piece half the Breitbart rating does nor feel right. A scale from 0 to 4 may work better than one from -2 to 2. A zero sounds a lot worse than one and "low" would not be half of "very low".

The actual problem may be only -2 means inaccuracies influencing the main line of the story. It is more a scale for a science nerd looking for a high quality article than a scale for a citizen wanting to know how reliable the main line of the story is. Up to now that was mostly correlated, for this piece is was not, which made grading hard.

The more concrete a claim is, the more objective it can be assessed. Thus I would personally prefer to keep it a scale for science nerds and not go to a more vague and subjective assessment whether the main line is accurate.

A previous Feedback on a climate nightmare article by climate journalist Eric Holthaus got plus and minus ones. That shows that such an article can get positive ratings. That the article was never rated "neural" suggests that we may have to reconsider its description. That it states "no important insight" may make neutral almost worse than -1. It sounds like the famous quote: "not even wrong."

Based on the above discussion of the NY Mag review my suggestion for a new rating system would be the one below. It should be seen if it also fits well to other articles. I changed the numbers, the short descriptions and the long description for neutral.

4 = Excellent science reporting: No inaccuracies, fairly represents the state of scientific knowledge, well argumented and documented, references are provided for key elements. The article provides insights to the reader about climate change mechanisms and implications.
3 = Very good science reporting: The article does not contain major scientific inaccuracies and its conclusion follows from the evidence provided.
2 = Good science reporting: Mostly accurate statements and only minor inaccurate ones.
1 = Some problems: The article contains significant scientific inaccuracies or misleading statements.
0 = Major errors: The article contains major scientific inaccuracies for key facts supporting the author’s argumentation and/or omits to mention important information and/or presents logical flaws in using information to reach his or her conclusion.
n/a = Not Applicable: The article does not build on scientifically verifiable information (e.g., it is mostly about politics or opinions).

Why climate feedback?

There were people asking why we, Climate Feedback, were doing this. This could be interpreted in two ways:
1) Why do you nitpick this article I feel is an important wake-up call?
2) Why do you do this at all?

First of all, we do not know in advance what the outcome will be. Many articles on climate change are also very good and get great ratings. That is the kind of feedback journalists appreciate and which may help them in their careers and stimulate them to write better articles. Some journalists have even asked for reviews of important pieces to showcase the quality of their work.

We had a few authors who updated their article. David Wallace-Wells also did so and added more sources and transcripts. As far as I know such updates have only happened on the side that accepts the science. Also in that way our work improves science journalism, although such updates will come too late for most readers.

Most people will likely only get a general impression of how reliable news sources are when it comes to climate change. When we have enough reviews Climate Feedback will also make "official" assessments of the reliability of media sources. For more prolific writers also their individual credibility starts to become clear.

The reviews have already made clear that people who accept that climate change is real typically write accurate articles, while writers who do not want to solve the problem typically write error-ridden and misleading articles. That is good to know.

Only criticising the climate "sceptics" is not in the nature and in the training of good scientists. More utilitarian: solving climate change is a marathon, the energy transition will not be completed before 2050. Adaptation to limit the consequences of climate change will also be a job for generations to come. It is thus important that scientists are seen as trustworthy and only picking on one group would damage our reputation.

There are people who want to understand the details and when they meet misinformation being able to explain what is wrong with it. On reddit these people gather in /r/skeptic/. They normally accept climate change is real and like details/nitpicking, quality arguments and a rational world.

29. Along comes a brilliant writer from outside those circles, w/ a galvanizing, wildly popular piece, & for his efforts, he is ... scolded.
— David Roberts (@drvox) 12 July 2017

I do worry that there is also a downside to science policing in that people are less comfortable speaking about climate change fearing to be corrected. That is one reason to let minor cases slip and in bigger cases be gracious when it is the first time making a mistake. David Wallace-Wells responded graciously to the critiques, it were others that objected.

Making a mistake is completely different from the industrial production of nonsense on WUWT & Co.

It would be progress if scientists had a smaller role in this weird US "debate". It was forced on us by a continual stream of misinformation on the science from climate "sceptics". There should be a debate what to do about it and that is a debate for everyone. If you would see less scientists in US debates around climate change that would probably mean that the important questions are finally being addressed.

It would also be progress because scientists are typically not very good communicators. Partially that is because most scientists are introverted. Partially that is the nature of the problem, some things are simply not true, some arguments are simply not valid and there is little room for negotiation and graciousness.

On the other hand, science communication works pretty well in countries without the systemic corruption in Washington and the US media. So I do not think scientists are the main problem.

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

How to talk about climate doomsday scenarios

David Wallace-Wells wrote a 7000 word cover story in New York Magazine on how unchecked climate change may make the Earth uninhabitable. With 2.5 million readers this longread was the most read article in the magazine's history.

That shows the impact a well written article can have. It also points to a change in the mood in America. Since Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement, happy to risk climate rapture for the quarterly earning of his donors, attention for climate change in America has spiked.

Americans are living through a nightmare, where you see the danger coming, but cannot convince others to stand up to it. Until you wake up bathing in sweat and pick up your phone from the night stand to read tweets from climate "sceptics" mocking you for facing reality. The same people that make a nightmare out of a perfectly solvable problem.

Sixteen climate scientists of Climate Feedback (including me) reviewed the NY Mag article. This number of reviewers may also be a record.

My summary would be that while the dangers of unfettered climate change are real, we found many inaccuracies, which typically exaggerated the problem. Thus the article was rated as having a "low scientific credibility". Both the NY Mag article and the Climate Feedback rating and earlier criticism by Michael Mann have sparked some controversy.

This post will be about how I would prefer the media to report on worse case scenarios. A second post will be about whether our "nitpicking" was the science police striking again?

I have no idea how 2100 looks like. Put yourself in the place of a well-informed citizen of 1900 and what they may have thought today looks like. Meters of horse shit on the streets due to the growth of traffic? Or imagine how an American thought this time would look like 50 years ago. Flying cars and Mars colonies?

Maybe in 2100 humanity has gone extinct, maybe civilization is gone, maybe humans are enslaved by corporations, maybe currently poor countries are also affluent and corporation can no longer repress us, maybe after another century of development we lead wonderful lives, maybe we are building our first intersolar cruiser, maybe no one cares about intersolar cruisers and people impress each other with poetry and four dimensional chess. Very likely they will be painfully embarrassed for me for the options I gave.

I have no idea how they view climate change in 2100. Do they see it as the biggest historical liability put on them? Are they annoyed at the tax burden for the huge necessary geo-engineering program? Do they wonder why people in 2017 thought it was such a big problem, while it was so easy to solve? Are they happy that due to the geo-engineering program they now have weather satellites and it only rains at night in urban areas?

Even in the best case scenario we are taking the climate system out of known territories. There will be many surprises and to be honest those are what worry me the most. The Uncertainty monster is not our friend and that makes it very hard to say which worst case scenarios are unrealistic.

It is custom to accept smaller risks the bigger the stakes are. Cars and smoking kill many people, but one at a time. A risk someone may be willing to take personally will be larger than the risk one takes with a community, a country or our civilization. The risk of dying in a car accident is 1 in 84 (1.2 %), this would be an unacceptable risk for civilization or humanity. Thus we have to look at the tails.

Finally, we expect the impacts of climate change to accelerate: Because some variability is normal, the first degree of warming makes much less problems than the next. Thus the risks of above average warming are expected to contribute much to the total risk. It is thus good that the article explores what surprises may be in store and talks about scenarios that are not likely, but risky.

Four horsemen of the apocalypse

The article reaches the worst case scenarios in four ways:

The worst case for the emissions of greenhouse gases.
The worst case for how sensitive the climate system responds.
The worst case for the impacts and how humanity responds.
The worst case for the scientific assessment of the evidence.

1. The worst case emission scenario was the [[RCP8.5 scenario]] of the IPCC. These scenarios are really just that: scenarios. No probability is assigned to them.

This is the IPCC report from 2013 and the scenarios were created well before that. My impression is that with the [[Paris climate agreement]] and the fast drop in the prices of renewable energy and storage, the RCP8.5 scenario is no longer very realistic. Another optimistic sign is that industrial emissions have stabilized the last 3 years. However, the US mitigation sceptical movement and their president will keep on fighting to make this dystopia a reality. So it is a legitimate question what kind of a world fossil fuel companies and these people want to create.

2. It is completely legitimate to explore the tails of the probability distribution of the climate sensitivity. Even if it had only 30% probability, Trump did get elected. Even if the chance is just one out of six, you sometimes role a six. And let's not start about Russian roulette. Unfortunately the tail of the distribution is not well constrained and very high sensitivities are hard to exclude.

3. The uncertainty of some impacts can be quantified reasonably well. These are the ones with the most physics in them such as heat waves and large-scale increases in precipitation. Then it is legitimate to go into the tail.

Other impacts are not understood well enough yet (Will ice sheets collapse? How much greenhouse gasses will the soil release due to heating?) or will never be fully predictable because of societal and technological influences (Will The Netherlands evacuate before or after Noah's flood? Will plant breeding keep up with climate change? Will societies be able to cope with climate refugees?). In such cases I would like to hear a balanced spectrum of views, including extreme ones.

Because the broad sweeping article discussed many climate change impacts it could not do justice to complexity of individual impacts. Climate change is typically just one stressor of many. When The Netherlands floods, the climate "sceptics" will not suddenly wake up and say "silly me, I was wrong, now I recognize that climate change is a problem, sorry about that". They will say the storm was to blame and it was really bad luck the storm came from the North West and its maximum coincided with high tides, the dikes were not strong enough, the maintenance not good enough and especially the government is to blame.

Looking at history or at the future only from a climate change perspective brings back bad memories of [[climate determinism]]. The Age recently reported on farm workers in Central America suffering and dying from chronic kidney disease. The regions where this new decease happens is well predicted by warming and changes in insolation. Simultaneously the problem is that these people are so poor that they have to work on hot days and also have a strong work ethic that promotes this. They tend not to drink during work and when they do it are often soft drinks because they are perceived as safer. A large part of the problem is funding for preventative care and people die because they cannot afford dialysis.

Among the worst: Ellsworth Huntington's maps of climate 'energy'. But the idea that climate determines society go back to the Greeks 3/10 pic.twitter.com/5sVUmC70Dj
— Simon Donner (@simondonner) 13 July 2017

This example shows two things. First of all, like the dikes breaking in The Netherlands, the problem has many aspects. Secondly, this was a problem because it was new. There will be many surprises due to climate change. The study of (rare) diseases helps in understand how a healthy body works. It shows what is important for healthy functioning. Medicine can study many bodies, we only have one Earth and will very likely be surprised what the Earth did for us without us realising it.

4. Like for non-physical impacts, where I am hesitant to go into the tail is when it comes to the interpretation of the evidence. That quickly ends in cherry picking experts that say what you want to hear. Those are strategies for mitigation sceptics. Even if those experts do not stray from the evidence and only hold a pessimistic view; I feel this is not for serious science reporting. It is fine to explain the ideas of such experts, but they should be balanced with other views.

Concluding, for the objective part of the problem: if you clearly say you are looking at the worst case feel free to go deep into the tail of the probability distribution. Only looking at mean changes understates the risks. The tail is a big part of the risk and thus very important. Do not forget to talk about many further surprises and that the Uncertainty Monster has an ugly bite.

When it comes to the more subjective parts, please balance pessimistic with optimistic voices. Subjective judgements are unavoidable when it comes to worst case scenarios and the far future where the changes will be largest. People can legitimately have different world views and as a science nerd I would like to hear the full range of legitimate views.

An article needs a focus, but please consider that climate change is one stressor of many. Climate change impacts are complicated, do them justice like a great novelist would and do not make a cartoon out of them.

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Scott Adams: The Non-Expert Problem and Climate Change Science

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, wrote today about how difficult it is for a non-expert to judge science and especially climate science. He argues that it is normally a good idea for a non-expert to follow the majority of scientists. I agree. Even as a scientist I do this for topics where I am not an expert and do not have the time to go into detail. You cannot live without placing trust and you should place your trust wisely.

While it is clear to Scott Adams that a majority of scientists agree on the basics of climate change, he worries that they still could all be wrong. He lists the below six signals that this could be the case and sees them in climate science. If you get your framing from the mitigation sceptical movement and only read the replies to their nonsense you may easily get his impression. So I thought it would be good to reply. It would be better to first understand the scientific basis, before venturing into the wild.

The terms Global Warming and Climate Change are both used for decades

Scott Adams assertion: It seems to me that a majority of experts could be wrong whenever you have a pattern that looks like this:

1. A theory has been “adjusted” in the past to maintain the conclusion even though the data has changed. For example, “Global warming” evolved to “climate change” because the models didn’t show universal warming.

This is a meme spread by the mitigation sceptics that is not based on reality. From the beginning both terms were used. One hint is name of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a global group of scientists who synthesise the state of climate research and was created in 1988.

The irony of this strange meme is that it were the PR gurus of the US Republicans who told their politicians to use the term "climate change" rather than "global warming", because "global warming" was more scary. The video below shows the historical use of both terms.

Global warming was called global warming because the global average temperature is increasing, especially in the beginning there were still many regions were warming was not yet observed, while it was clear that the global average temperature was increasing. I use the term "global warming" if I want to emphasis the temperature change and the term "climate change" when I want to include all the other changes in the water cycle and circulation. These colleagues do the same and provide more history.

Talking about "adjusted", mitigation sceptics like to claim that temperature observations have been adjusted to show more warming. Truth is that the adjustments reduce global warming.

Climate models are not essential for basic understanding

Scott Adams assertion: 2. Prediction models are complicated. When things are complicated you have more room for error. Climate science models are complicated.

Yes, climate models are complicated. They synthesise a large part of our understanding of the climate system and thus play a large role in the synthesis of the IPCC. They are also the weakest part of climate science and thus a focus of the propaganda of the mitigation sceptical movement.

However, when it comes to the basics, climate model are not important. We know about the greenhouse effect for well over a century, long before we had any numerical climate models. That increasing the carbon dioxide concentration of the atmosphere leads to warming is clear, that this warming is amplified because warm air can contain more water, which is also a greenhouse gas, is also clear without any complicated climate model. This is very simple physics already used by Svante Arrhenius in the 19th century.

The warming effect of carbon dioxide can also be observed in the deep past. There are many reasons why the climate changes, but without carbon dioxide we can, for example, not understand the temperature swings of the past ice ages or why the Earth was able to escape from being completely frozen (Snowball Earth) at a time the sun was much dimmer.

The main role of climate models is trying to find reasons why the climate may respond differently this time than in the past or whether there are mechanisms beyond the simply physics that are important. The average climate sensitivity from climate models is about the same as for all the other lines of evidence. Furthermore, climate models add regional detail, especially when in comes to precipitation, evaporation and storms. These are helpful to better plan adaptation and estimate the impacts and costs, but are not central for the main claim that there is a problem.

Model tuning not important for basic understanding

Scott Adams assertion: 3. The models require human judgement to decide how variables should be treated. This allows humans to “tune” the output to a desired end. This is the case with climate science models.

Yes, models are tuned. Mostly not for the climatic changes, but to get the state of the atmosphere right, the global maps of clouds and precipitation, for example. In the light of my answer to point 2, this is not important for the question whether climate change is real.

The consensus is a result of the evidence

Scott Adams assertion: 4. There is a severe social or economic penalty for having the “wrong” opinion in the field. As I already said, I agree with the consensus of climate scientists because saying otherwise in public would be social and career suicide for me even as a cartoonist. Imagine how much worse the pressure would be if science was my career.

It is clearly not career suicide for a cartoonist. If you claim that you only accept the evidence because of social pressure, you are saying you do not really accept the evidence.

Scott Adams sounds as if he would like scientists to first freely pick a position and then only to look for evidence. In science it should go the other way around.

This seems to be the main argument and shows that Scott Adams knows more about office workers than about the scientific community. If science was your career and you would peddle the typical nonsense that comes from the mitigation sceptical movement that would indeed be bad for your career. In science you have to back up your claims with evidence. Cherry picking and making rookie errors to get the result you would like to get are not helpful.

However, if you present credible evidence that something is different, that is wonderful, that is why you become a scientist. I have been very critical of the quality of climate data and our methods to remove data problems. Contrary to Adams' expectation this has helped my career. Thus I cannot complain how climatology treats real skeptics. On the contrary, a lot of people supported me.

Another climate scientist, Eric Steig, strongly criticized the IPCC. He wrote about his experience:

I was highly critical of IPCC AR4 Chapter 6, so much so that the [mitigation skeptical] Heartland Institute repeatedly quotes me as evidence that the IPCC is flawed. Indeed, I have been unable to find any other review as critical as mine. I know "because they told me" that my reviews annoyed many of my colleagues, including some of my [RealClimate] colleagues, but I have felt no pressure or backlash whatsoever from it. Indeed, one of the Chapter 6 lead authors said “Eric, your criticism was really harsh, but helpful "thank you!"

If you have the evidence, there is nothing better than challenging the consensus. It is also the reason to become a scientist. As a scientist wrote on Slashdot:

Look, I'm a scientist. I know scientists. I know scientists at NOAA, NCAR, NIST, the Labs, in academia, in industry, at biotechs, at agri-science companies, at space exploration companies, and at oil and gas companies. I know conservative scientists, liberal scientists, agnostic scientists, religious scientists, and hedonistic scientists.

You know what motivates scientists? Science. And to a lesser extent, their ego. If someone doesn't love science, there's no way they can cut it as a scientist. There are no political or monetary rewards available to scientists in the same way they're available to lawyers and lobbyists.

Scientists consider and weigh all the evidence

Scott Adams assertion: 5. There are so many variables that can be measured – and so many that can be ignored – that you can produce any result you want by choosing what to measure and what to ignore. Our measurement sensors do not cover all locations on earth, from the upper atmosphere to the bottom of the ocean, so we have the option to use the measurements that fit our predictions while discounting the rest.

No, a scientist cannot produce any result they "want" and an average scientist would want to do good science and not get a certain result. The scientific mainstream is based on all the evidence we have. The mitigation sceptical movement behaves in the way Scott Adams expects and likes to cherry pick and mistreat data to get the results they want.

Arguments from the other side only look credible

Scott Adams assertion: 6. The argument from the other side looks disturbingly credible.

I do not know which arguments Adams is talking about, but the typical nonsense on WUWT, Breitbart, Daily Mail & Co. is made to look credible on the surface. But put on your thinking cap and it crumbles. At least check the sources. That reveals most of the problems very quickly.

For a scientist it is generally clear which arguments are valid, but it is indeed a real problem that to the public even the most utter nonsense may look "disturbingly credible". To help the public assess the credibility of claims and sources several groups are active.

Most of the zombie myths are debunked on RealClimate or Skeptical Science. If it is a recent WUWT post and you do not mind some snark you can often find a rebuttal the next day on HotWhopper. Media articles are regularly reviewed by Climate Feedback, a group of climate scientists, including me. They can only review a small portion of the articles, but it should be enough to determine which of the "sides" is "credible". If you claim you are sceptical, do use these resources and look at all sides of the argument and put in a little work to go in depth. If you do not do your due diligence to decide where to place your trust, you will get conned.

While political nonsense can be made to look credible, the truth is often complicated and sometimes difficult to convey. There is a big difference between qualified critique and uninformed nonsense. Valuing the strength of the evidence is part of the scientific culture. My critique of the quality of climate data has credible evidence behind it. There are also real scientific problems in understanding changes of clouds, as well as the land and vegetation. These are important for how much the Earth will respond, although in the long run the largest source of uncertainty is how much we will do to stop the problem.

There are real scientific problems when it comes to assessing the impacts of climate change. That often requires local or regional information, which is a lot more difficult than the global average. Many impacts will come from changes in severe weather, which are by definition rare and thus hard to study. For many impacts we need to know several changes at the same time. For droughts precipitation, temperature, humidity of the air and of the soil and insolation are all important. Getting them all right is hard.

How humans and societies will respond to the challenges posed by climate change is an even more difficult problem and beyond the realm of natural science. Not only the benefits, but also the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions are hard to predict. That would require predicting future technological, economic and social development.

When it comes to how big climate change itself and its impacts will be I am sure we will see surprises. What I do not understand is why some are arguing that this uncertainty is a reason to wait and see. The surprises will not only be nice, they will also be bad and all over increase the risks of climate change and make the case for solving this solvable problem stronger.

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Climate scientists are now grading climate journalism

Guest post by Daniel Nethery and Emmanuel Vincent Daniel Nethery is the associate editor and Emmanuel Vincent is the founder of Climate Feedback. Climate Feedback is launching a crowdfunding campaign today.

The internet represents an extraordinary opportunity for democracy. Never before has it been possible for people from all over the world to access the latest information and collectively seek solutions to the challenges which face our planet, and not a moment too soon: the year 2015 was the hottest in human history, and the Great Barrier Reef is suffering the consequences of warming oceans right now.

Yet despite the scientific consensus that global warming is real and primarily due to human activity, studies show that only about half the population in some countries with among the highest CO₂ emissions per capita understand that human beings are the driving force of our changing climate. Even fewer people are aware of the scientific consensus on this question. We live in an information age, but the information isn’t getting through. How can this be?

While the internet puts information at our fingertips, it has also allowed misinformation to sow doubt and confusion in the minds of many of those whose opinions and votes will determine the future of the planet. And up to now scientists have been on the back foot in countering the spread of this misinformation and pointing the public to trustworthy sources of information on climate change.

Climate Feedback intends to change that. It brings together a global network of scientists who use a new web-annotation platform to provide feedback on climate change reporting. Their comments, which bring context and insights from the latest research, and point out factual and logical errors where they exist, remain layered over the target article in the public domain. You can read them for yourself, right in your browser. The scientists also provide a score on a five-point scale to let you know whether the article is consistent with the science. For the first time, Climate Feedback allows you to check whether you can trust the latest breaking story on climate change.

An example of Climate Feedback in action. Scientists’ comments and ratings appear as a layer over the article. Text annotated with Hypothesis is highlighted in yellow in the web browser and scientists’ comments appear in a sidebar next to the article. Illustration: Climate Feedback

Last year the scientists looked at some influential content. Take the Pope’s encyclical, for instance. The scientists gave those parts of the encyclical relating to climate science a stamp of approval. Other “feedbacks,” as we call them, have made a lasting impact. When the scientists found that an article in The Telegraph misrepresented recent research by claiming that the world faced an impending ice age, the newspaper issued a public correction and substantially modified the online text.

But there’s more work to be done. Toward the end of the year the scientists carried out a series of evaluations of some of Forbes magazine’s reporting on climate change. The results give an idea of the scale of the problem we’re tackling. Two of the magazine’s most popular articles for 2015, one of which attracted almost one million hits, turned out to be profoundly inaccurate and misleading. Both articles, reviewed by nine and twelve scientists, unanimously received the lowest possible scientific credibility rating. This rarely occurs, and just in case you’re wondering, yes, the scientists do score articles independently: ratings are only revealed once all scientists have completed their review.

We argue that scientists have a moral duty to speak up when they see misinformation masquerading as science. Up to now scientists have however had little choice but to engage in time-consuming op-ed exchanges, which result in one or two high-profile scientists arguing against the views of an individual who may have no commitment to scientific accuracy at all. Climate Feedback takes a different approach. Our collective reviews allow scientists from all over the world to provide feedback in a timely, effective manner. We then publish an accessible synthesis of their responses, and provide feedback to editors so that they can improve the accuracy of their reporting.

We’ve got proof of concept. Now we need to scale up, and for that we need the support of everyone who values accuracy in reporting on one of the most critical challenges facing our planet. Climate Feedback won’t reach its full potential until we start measuring the credibility of news outlets in a systematic way. We want to be in a position to carry out an analysis of any influential internet article on climate change. We want to develop a ‘Scientific Trust Tracker’ – an index of how credible major news sources are when it comes to climate change.

We’re all increasingly relying on the internet to get our news. But the internet has engendered a competitive media environment where in the race to attract the most hits, sensational headlines can trump sober facts. We’re building into the system a new incentive for journalists with integrity to get ahead. Some journalists are already coming to us, asking our network of scientists to look at their work. We want readers to know which sources they can trust. We want editors to think twice before they publish ideological rather than evidence-based reporting on global warming.

On Friday 22 May 2016, more than 170 countries signed the Paris climate agreement. But this unprecedented international treaty will lead to real action only if the leaders of those countries can garner popular support for the measures needed to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The fate of the Paris deal lies largely in the hands of voters in democratic countries, and we cannot expect democracies to produce good policy responses to challenges of climate change if voters have a confused understanding of reality.

Scientists from all over the world are standing up for better informed democracies. You can help them make their voices heard. We invite you to stand with us for a better internet. We invite you to stand with science.

Victor Venema: I am also part of the Climate Feedback community and have annotated several journalistic articles when they made claims about climate data quality. It is a very effective way to combat misinformation. Just click on the text and add a short comment; Climate Feedback will take care of spreading your contribution. If you are a publishing scientist, do consider to join.

* Photo at the top. Severe suburban flooding in New Orleans, USA. Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by ark Moran, NOAA Corps, NMAO/AOC (CC BY 2.0)

Monday, December 7, 2015

Fans of Judith Curry: the uncertainty monster is not your friend

I think that uncertainties in global surface temperature anomalies is substantially understated.

Judith Curry

People often see uncertainty as a failing of science. It's the opposite: uncertainty is what drives science forward.

Dallas Campbell

Imagine you are driving on a curvy forest road and it gets more foggy. Do you slow down or do you keep your foot on the pedal? More fog means more uncertainty, means less predictability, means that you see the deer in your headlights later. Climate change mitigations sceptics like talking about uncertainty. They seem to see this as a reason to keep the foot op the pedal.

While this is madness, psychology suggests that this is an effective political strategy. When you talk about uncertainty people have a tendency to become less decisive. Maybe people want to wait deciding until the situation is clearer? That is exactly what the advocates for inaction want and neglects that deciding not to start solving the problem is also a decision. For someone who would like to see all of humanity prosper deciding not to act is a bad counter-productive decision.

Focusing on uncertainty is so common in politics that this strategy got its own name:

Appeals to uncertainty to preclude or delay political action are so pervasive in political and lobbying circles that they have attracted scholarly attention under the name “Scientific Certainty Argumentation Methods”, or “SCAMs” for short. SCAMs are politically effective because they equate uncertainty with the possibility that a problem may be less serious than anticipated, while ignoring the often greater likelihood that the problem may be more deleterious.

Meaning of uncertainty

Maybe people do not realise that uncertainty can have multiple meanings. In case of climate change "uncertainty" does not mean that scientists are not sure. Science is very sure it is warming, that this is due to us and that it will continue if we do not do anything.

When we talk about climate change, "uncertainty" means that we do not know exactly how much it has warmed. It means that the best estimate of the man made contribution is "basically all", but that it is possible that it is more or that it is less. It means that we know it will warm a lot the coming century, but not exactly how much, if only because no one knows whether humanity gets it act together. It means that the seas will rise more than one meter, but that we can only give a period in which this threshold will be crossed.

Rather than talking about "uncertainty" I try to talk about "confidence intervals" nowadays, that conveys the idea of this latter kind of uncertainty much better. Science may not know the exact value, but the value will most likely be in the confidence interval.

That the term uncertainty can be misunderstood is especially a problem because scientists love to talk about uncertainties. A value is worth nothing if you do not have an idea how accurate it is. Thus most of the time scientists work on making sure that the uncertainties are accurate and as small as possible.

More uncertainty means higher risks

The damages of climate change rise with its magnitude (let's call this "temperature increase" for simplicity). I will argue in the next section that these damages rise faster than linear. If the relationship were linear, twice as much temperature increase would mean twice as much damages. Super-linear means that damages rise faster than that. Let us for this post assume that the damages are proportional to the square of the temperature increase. Any other super-linear relationship would show the same effect: that more uncertainty means higher risks.

In this case, if there were no uncertainty and the temperature in 2100 will increase by 4 degrees Celsius. For comparison, the temperature increase in 2100 is projected to be between 3 and 5.5°C for the worst scenario considered by the IPCC; RCP8.5. With 4 degrees warming the damages would be 16*D (4²*D) dollar or 16*H human lives.

In the case with uncertainty, the temperature in 2100 would still increase by 4 degrees on average, but it could also be 3°C or 5°C. The damages for 4 degrees are still 16*D dollar. At 3 degrees the damage would be 9*D and at 5 degrees 25*D dollar, which is on average 17*D. The total damages will thus be higher than the 16*D dollar we had for the case without uncertainty.

If the uncertainty becomes larger, and we also have to take 2 and 6 degrees into account we get 4*D (for 2°C) and 36*D (for 6°C), which averages to 20*D dollar. When we are less certain that the temperature increase is near 4°C and uncertainty forces us to take 2°C and 6°C into account, the average expected damages become higher.

Judith Curry thinks that we should take even more uncertainty into account: "I think we can bound [equilibrium climate sensitivity] between 1 and 6°C at a likely level, I don’t think we can justify narrowing this further. ... [T]here is a 33% probability that that actual [climate] sensitivity could be higher or lower than my bounds. To bound at a 90% level, I would say the bounds need to be 0-10°C."

If the climate sensitivity were zero, the damages in 2100 would be zero. Estimating the temperature increase for a climate sensitivity of 10°C is more challenging. If we would still follow the carbon-is-life scenario mitigation skeptics prefer (RCP8.5), we would get a temperature increase of around 13°C in 2100^**. It seems more likely that civilization will collapse before, but 13°C would give climate change damages of 13²*D, which equals 169*D. The average damages for Curry's limiting case are thus 85*D, a lot more than the 16*D for the case were we are certain. If the uncertainty monster were this big, that would make the risk of climate change a lot higher.

Uncertainty is not the friend of people arguing against mitigation. The same thinking error is also made by climate change activists that sometimes ask scientists to emphasis uncertainty less.

Super-linear damages

Accumulated loss of regional species richness of macro-invertebrates as a function of glacial cover in catchment. They begin to disappear from assemblages when glacial cover in the catchment drops below approximately 50%, and 9 to 14 species are predicted to be lost with the complete disappearance of glaciers in each region, corresponding to 11, 16, and 38% of the total species richness in the three study regions in Ecuador, Europe, and Alaska. Figure RF-2 from IPCC AR5 report.

The above argument rests on the assumption that climate change damages rise super-linearly. If damages would rise linearly, uncertainty would not matter for the risk. In theory, if damages would rise less fast than linear (sub-linear), the risk would become lower with more uncertainty.

I am not aware of anyone doubting that the damages are super-linear. Weather and climate are variable. Every system will thus be adjusted to a small temperature increase. On the other hand, a 10°C temperature increase will affect, if not destroy, nearly everything. Once a large part of civilization is destroyed, the damages function may become sub-linear again. Whether the temperature increase is 10 or 11 degrees Celsius likely does not matter much any more.

What is a small temperature increase depends on the system. For sea level rise, the global mean temperature is important and the average temperature over centuries to millennia. This did not vary much, thus climate change quickly shows an influence. For the disappearance of permafrost, the long-term temperature is also important, but the damage to the infrastructure build on them depend on the local temperature, which varies more than the global temperature. On the local annual scale the variability is about 1°C, which is the global warming we have seen up to now and where new effects are now seen, for example nature moving poleward and up mountains (if it can). In summary, the more temperature increases, the more systems notice the change and naturally the more they are affected.

Damages can be avoided by adaptation. Both natural adaptation to the vagaries of weather and climate, as well as man-made adaptation in anticipation of the mess we are getting into. In the beginning there will still be low-hanging fruit, but the larger the changes will become, the more expensive adaptation becomes. More uncertainty also makes man-made adaptation more costly. If you do not know accurately how much bigger a centennial flood is, that is costly. To build bigger flood protections you need to have a best estimate, but also need to add a few times the uncertainty to this estimate, otherwise you would still be flooded half the time such a flood comes by.

An example of super-linear impacts is species loss for glacier catchments when the glaciers disappear. The figure above shows that initial small reductions in the glaciers did not impact nature much yet, but that it rises fast near the time the glacier is lost.

The costs of sea level rise rise super-linearly as a function of the amount of sea level rise. Data from Brown et al. (2011).

Another example are the super-linear costs of sea level rise. This plot to the right was generated by sea level rise expert Aslak Grinsted from data of a large European scientific project on the costs of climate change. He added that this shape is consistent across many studies on the costs of sea level rise.

Those were two examples for specific systems, which I trust most as natural scientist. Economists have also tried to estimate the costs of climate change. This is hard because many damages cannot really be expressed in money. Climate change is one stressor and in many cases damages also depend on many other stressors. Furthermore, solutions can often solve multiple problems. As economist Martin Weitzman writes: "The “damages function” is a notoriously weak link in the economics of climate change

The climate change damages functions of Weitzman (2010b) and Nordhaus (2008). For a zero temperature change Ω(t)=1Ω(t)=1 (no damage) and for very large temperature changes it approaches 0 (maximum damage).

Consequently, the two damages functions shown to the right differ enormously. Important for this post: they are both super-linear.

Unknown unknowns

If there is one thing I fear about climate change, then it is uncertainty. There will be many surprises. We are taking the climate system out of the state we know well and are perform a massive experiment with it. Things are bound to happen, we did not think of. Some might be nice, more likely the surprises will not be nice. As Judith Curry calls it: climate change is a wicked problem.

Medical researchers like to study rare deceases. They do so much more than the number of patients would justify. But seeing things go wrong helps you understand how things work. The other way around this means that until things go wrong, we will often not even know we should have studied it. Some surprises will be that an impact that science did study turns out to be better or worse; the known unknowns. The most dangerous surprises are bound to be the unknown unknowns, which we never realised we would have had to study.

The uncertainty monster is my main reason as citizen to want to solve this problem. Call me a conservative. The climate system is one of the traditional pillars of our society. Something you do not change without considering long and hard what the consequences will be. The climate is something you want to understand very well before you change it. If we had perfect climate and weather predictions, climate change would be a much smaller problem.

Gavin Schmidt

I think the first thing to acknowledge is that there will be surprises. We’re moving into a regime of climate that we have not experienced as humans, most ecosystems have not experienced since the beginning of the ice age cycle some three million years ago. We don’t know very well what exactly was happening then. We know some big things, like how much the sea level rose and what the temperatures were like, but there’s a lot of things that we don’t know. And so we are anticipating “unknown unknowns”. But, of course, they’re unknown, so you don’t know what they’re going to be.

One irony is that climate models reduce the uncertainty by improving the scientific understanding of the climate system. Without climate models we would still know that the Earth warms when we increase greenhouse gasses. The greenhouse effect can be directly measured by looking at the infra red radiation from the sky. When you make that bigger, it gets warmer. When you put on a second sweater, you get warmer. We know it gets warmer from simple radiative transfer computations. We know that CO2 influences temperature by studying past climates.

The climate models have about the same climate sensitivity as those simple radiative transfer computations and the estimates from past climates. It could have been different because the climate is more complicated than the simple radiative transfer computation. It could have been different because the increase in greenhouse gasses goes so fast this time. That all those climate sensitivity estimates fit together reduces the uncertainty, especially the uncertainty from the unknown unknowns.

Without climate models it would be very hard to estimate all the other changes in the climate system. The increases in precipitation and especially increases in severe precipitation, in floods, in droughts, in the circulation patterns, how fast sea level rise will go. Without climate models these risks would be much higher, without climate models we would have to adapt to a much wider range of changes in weather and climate. This would make adaptation a lot more intrusive and expensive.

Without climate models and climate research in general the risks of changing our climate would be larger. We would need to be more careful, the case for reductions of greenhouse gas emissions would have been stronger.

Especially for mitigation sceptics advocating adaptation-only policies, climate research should be important. Adaptation needs high-quality local information. For a 1000-year event such as the downpour in South Carolina earlier this year or the record precipitation this week in the UK, we may have to life with the damages. If this will happen much more often under climate change, we will have to change our infrastructure. If we do not know what is coming, we will have to prepare for everything. That is expensive. Reductions in this uncertainty save money by reducing unnecessary adaptation measures and by reducing damages due to effective adaptation.

People who are against mitigation policies should be cheering for climate research, rather than try to defund it or harass scientists for their politically inconvenient message. Let's be generous and assume that they do not know what they are doing.

In summary. Uncertainty makes the risk of climate change larger. Uncertainty makes adaptation a less attractive option relative to solving the problem (mitigation). The more we take the climate system out of known territories the more surprises (unknown unknowns) we can expect. In a logical world uncertainty would be the message of the environmental movement. In the real world uncertainty is one of the main fallacies of the mitigation skeptics and their "think" tanks.

References

Botzen, W.J.W. and J.C. van den Bergh, 2012: How sensitive is Nordhaus to Weitzman? climate policy in DICE with an alternative damage function. Economics Letters, 117, pp. 372–374, doi: 10.1016/j.econlet.2012.05.032.

Nordhaus, W.D., 2008: A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies. Yale University Press, New Haven.

Brown, Sally, Robert Nicholls, Athanasios Vafeidis, Jochen Hinkel and Paul Watkiss, 2011: The Impacts and Economic Costs of Sea-Level Rise in Europe and the Costs and Benefits of Adaptation. Summary of Results from the EC RTD ClimateCost Project. In Watkiss, P. (Editor), 2011. The ClimateCost Project. Final Report. Volume 1: Europe. Published by the Stockholm Environment Institute, Sweden, 2011. ISBN 978-91-86125-35-6.

Lewandowsky, Stephan , James S. Risbey, Michael Smithson, Ben R. Newell, John Hunter, 2014: Scientific uncertainty and climate change: Part I. Uncertainty and unabated emissions. Climatic Change, 124, pp. 21–37, doi: 10.1007/s10584-014-1082-7.

Tomassini, L., R. Knutti, G.-K. Plattner, D.P. van Vuuren, T.F. Stocker, R.B. Howarth and M.E. Borsuk, 2010: Uncertainty and risk in climate projections for the 21st century: comparing mitigation to non-intervention scenarios. Climate Change, 103, pp. 399–422. doi: .

Weitzman M.L., 2010a: What is the damages function for global warming and what difference might it make?
Climate Change Economics, 1, pp. 57–69, doi: 10.1142/S2010007810000042.

Weitzman, M.L., 2010b: GHG Targets as Insurance Against Catastrophic Climate Damages. Mimeo, Department of Economics, Harvard University.

Acknowledgements.
* Thanks to Michael Tobis for the foggy road analogy, which he seems to have gotten from [[Stephen Schneider]].

** Judith Curry speaks of the equilibrium climate sensitivity begin between 0 and 10°C per doubling of CO2. The TCR to ECS ratio peaks at around 0.6, so an ECS of 10°C could be a TCR of 6°C. Since doubling of CO2 is a forcing of 3.7 W/m² and RCP8.5 is defined as 8.5 W/m² in 2100, that would mean a warming of 8.5/3.7 x 6 = 13°C (Thank you ATTP).

For comparison, the IPCC estimates the climate sensitivity to between 1.5 and 4.5°C. Last IPCC report: "Equilibrium climate sensitivity is likely in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C (high confidence), extremely unlikely less than 1°C (high confidence), and very unlikely greater than 6°C (medium confidence)"

*** Top photo by Paige Jarreau.

Monday, June 9, 2014

My immature and neurotic fixation on WUWT

More neutral titles for this post could have been: "why do I blog about pseudosceptics?" or "how to play climateball^(TM) for scientists".

Last week I wrote about the unchristian, indecent, ugly language at WUWT, in my post: The conservative family values of Christian man Anthony Watts. Just a sample: Pathetic whining, creature, sub-human, odious toads, evil, Hitler, Stalin and diseased narcissism (archive).

I just noticed that I had missed an insult by Anthony Watts himself, in his response to my request to remove a comment with the usual pun on my last name.

Looking at how often your cite WUWT in negative connotations, I’d say you have a fixation.

To fully appreciate the insult, you need to clicking on the link to Wikipedia. (Let's ignore the irony of Watts linking to Wikipedia in a post about how unreliable Wikipedia is and how the evil William M. Connolley single handedly turned Wikipedia into an alarmist CAWG propaganda tool. In other words, how Connolley as one of the editors and backed by the scientific literature kept their nonsense to a minimum.) Wikipedia writes about fixation (psychology) (archive):

Fixation is a concept originated by Sigmund Freud (1905) to denote the persistence of anachronistic sexual traits. ... More generally, it is the state in which an individual becomes obsessed with an attachment to another person, being, or object (in human psychology): "A strong attachment to a person or thing, especially such an attachment formed in childhood or infancy and manifested in immature or neurotic behavior that persists throughout life". ... Fixation to intangibles (i.e., ideas, ideologies, etc.) can also occur.

While minor compared to the language directed at Connolley and Mann, that is not a very nice thing to say. I would see it as an indication for a rather modest willingness to engage in a constructive dialogue to improve mutual understanding.

I guess a fitting reply would be: projection. Also part of Wikipedia's coverage of psychology.

Psychological projection is the act or technique of defending oneself against unpleasant impulses by denying their existence in oneself, while attributing them to others. ... Although rooted in early developmental stages, and classed by George Eman Vaillant as an immature defence, the projection of one's negative qualities onto others on a small scale is nevertheless a common process in everyday life.

Climateball is hard to sustain if you are not having fun. Are we even now? #kindergarten

Had Mr. Watt chosen a nicer term, he would have been partially right. Let me try to explain in this post why I blog and comment on pseudo-sceptics and especially on WUWT. This post will finish with some ideas on how to do so effectively.

I like using the term WUWT & Co. for blogs that spread misinformation about climate science. It is a neutral and clear alternative to "denier blogs", which the speudo-skeptics claim points to holocaust deniers. It does not, but one should not give them too much opportunity to change the topic.

A reason to find WUWT somewhat interesting is that the pet topic of Mr. Watts is the quality of weather stations. That is how I got introduced to the man. After writing a paper on the homogenization methods to remove non-climatic changes from historical instrumental data, I wrote a blog post about this. Knowing that Roger Pielke Sr. was also interested in that topic, I asked if Pielke was willing to repost it. He referred me to Watts, who asked me for permission to repost it. He probably thought I was okay, because of Pielke. After reading that homogenization improves temperature trend estimates, he never published it. You have to set priorities.

The main reason for my interest, however, is probably my personality. I like to understand how things work. I like civilised debate. I like reason. Hearing or inventing a new strong argument is a joy, similar to the joy of listening or making music. When I hear a claim, no matter how much I like the person or claim, my brain automatically starts producing counter arguments. This is a very effective way to annoy people, my apologies to all my friends for that.

That is who I am, that is why I became a scientist. I also believe that reason, civilised debate and the power of arguments are what have given us the rule of law, democracy, human right and prosperity. They are the foundation of our open societies and they are what WUWT and Co. are destroying in their political battle against science.

Knowing a little about climate and knowing how science works, it is obvious to me how wrong most of the WUWT posts are. It would be hard for me not to refute this nonsense. As WUWT is the biggest blog of this community and can be seen as its mainstream, it seems to make sense to give it more attention as even more extremist blogs that not even pseudo-sceptics take seriously.

Creationism is even more irrational. The evidence for evolution is even stronger as for climate change, by orders of magnitude stronger. However, that is a local problem the Americans have to deal with. The misinformation of WUWT and Co. affects all. Climate change is certainly not the only important global problem, but a solvable one.

If people would decide that it is better to suffer the consequences as to solve the problem, so be it, that is democracy or as Jac. commented at AndThenTheresPhysics:

In a democracy, you have to respect if the people’s consent is that they will accept climate change with all its consequences to happen; but at least let scientists make sure it is an ‘informed consent’ then.

That quote is the end of an interesting discussion at AndThenTheresPhysics. A discussion about the value of refuting climate "sceptics" and how scientists can contribute. As many people do not read comments, I would like to summarise this discussion below.

I have to admit to like reading comments (and call-in radio), especially at AndThenTheresPhysics. Most comments are not informative, but you have the chance of reading or hearing something you might otherwise not hear in the mainstream media.

Others disagree and like comments less.

"I saw a sound, well-reasoned argument in an internet comment, and it made me reconsider my position." -- Nobody, ever
— Don't Read Comments (@AvoidComments) May 18, 2014

Click on the time stamp to see the comments on it.

The not yet very interesting opening gambit at AndThenTheresPhysics (ATTP) was by Mike Fayette.

So why not find common ground with the skeptics and actually try to get something useful done? .. Mock the folks that exaggerate the threat the same way you mock the folks who deny basic physics.

The simple answer to the first part is: you can try to find common ground about political problems. Climate "sceptics" hinder this political discussion by refusing to talk about politics and claim problems with solid science. Unfortunately, you cannot negotiate with nature. Reality simply is.

The answer to the second part is that it is rare that people who worry about climate change make claims that are clearly untenable. Reality is sufficiently scary and is for them more then enough reason to act. Furthermore, climate change is a wicked problem with a lot of uncertainty and especially on the warm side it is hard to exclude much. Still, if people get too warm and fuzzy about climate change, I naturally do correct them.

My favorite future blogger, Mark Ryan, replies:

Mike Fayette’s comments, and his experience, are very interesting, [VV: If someone at a scientific conference starts a reply this friendly, expect a nasty comment or question.] and make me think about the problem of how scientific communities relate to evidence, compared with how the public –and particularly the political communities in the public- relate to it.

There is a lot of confusion about the fact that knowledge is fundamentally a social property –no individual can claim decisive knowledge across a domain (actually, some individuals obviously do, but they’re invariably wrong). What happens instead is that individuals [scientists] build on what they understand to be established knowledge, do their work, and add it to the constellation of previous and contemporary contributions.

Some elements within the knowledge constellation are much better established than others, and are therefore more likely to be true –with the well-worn caveat that no question is ever 100% closed. But this caveat is actually much more trivial than those who misunderstand it would have us believe; this point was never made better than in this short essay by Isaac Asimov. This is the best response I can think of to Mike’s earlier remark about competing theories in science.

There must be a hierarchy of knowledge for scientific knowledge to be possible. Core ideas support the contingent or peripheral ideas, otherwise every researcher’s work would arbitrarily re-establish first principles. ... Almost all research deals with anomalies or minor controversies, but based on established foundations; if someone wants to remake the foundations, they quite rightly find it hard going. ...

We have had over four decades now of a constant conflation of politics and science, a response to the culture of scientistic authority promoted in mid 20th century, and the new kinds of health and environmental risks that modern life has created. The net result is that complex and specialised knowledge is counterposed to commonsense and intuitive, easy to relate to, (but incorrect) alternatives. This is the “better story” that Mike mentioned, and large percentages of the public just buy into this without a second thought, because they are now conditioned to look straight past specialist scientific knowledge to project political motives onto the people making it. For people who buy into this politicisation of science, there is no need to educate themselves to understand the complex theories and jargon of the scientists, because in any case, they imagine scientists use facts the way we all see lawyers use facts in various media. It does not occur to them that the simple explanation has already been considered and improved on by the people who study the topic. ...

A clear example of such a simple explanation is the meme going round that CO₂ is heavier than air, will thus stay close to the ground and cannot act like a greenhouse gas. (This ignores turbulent mixing.) Do people really think that no scientist in all these decades has ever tried to measure up to which height CO₂ is a well mixed gas? It is fine to ask such a question. It is insane to immediately claim to have refuted the greenhouse effect.

Mark Ryan continues to explain that blogging about science makes sense:

ATTP, you said in your post that you were going through a phase of wondering what the whole point is.

It is a few years back now, but I started reading blogs like this one as a skeptic. My training is in politics and the philosophy of science, which at least gave me some basis for spotting patterns in the literature I was reading. My interest in climate came from my interest in the philosophy of statistics, but I had read social theorists like Thomas Kuhn, Harry Collins and Michel Foucault, and was predisposed to a very political take on the production of scientific knowledge.

Not having the appropriate scientific background, I needed to visit sites like this – at the time it was Tamino, Skeptical Science, Real Climate[,] etc, just so I could understand what I was looking at when I tackled even things like IPCC papers. Eventually, the most striking pattern I found in the so-called ‘mainstream’ climate literature was a constellation of arguments converging towards consilience [consilience refers to the principle that evidence from independent, unrelated sources can "converge" to strong conclusions], and a rigorous commitment to explaining the science. I didn’t find sites like Joe Romm’s very helpful, by contrast.

On the so-called “skeptical” sites, and in the small amount of scholarly literature, the pattern is negative -mutually contradictory arguments. This body of literature was not converging to an alternative, but was fixated on driving wedges into any cracks of uncertainty they could find. It was the comparative ‘shapes’ of the two different bodies of argument that convinced me.

I want to say I think what you do is tremendously valuable; it is clear, articulate, and sets a tone that encourages skeptical people, like the one I used to be, to stay with you. In this intensely polarised environment, that is a delicate act to pull off, but if I was running a blog, you would be one of my models. It is one of the unfortunate things about blogging, that you send your missives out into the void and never quite know whether you’re making any difference -it’s a kind of alienated form of social being, in a way. But you create a rare environment here, so well done.

Jac. had a similar experience as Mark Ryan and added:

... I am not a scientist. I am working in the legal/judicial system. The number of climate change cases that are brought to the courts is growing, and so is the body of literature about climate change liability that I am especially interested in. I think I am quite well informed on the legal liability aspects of climate change and the potential role of the judiciary. I started reading off and on some blogs about climate change some months ago, because I wanted to try to understand some of the science as well, and I also wanted to learn and understand about the way scientists and skeptics interact and discuss about their arguments and what these arguments are.

So my background and reason to start reading this blog seems to be somewhat similar to Mark Ryan. I completely agree with what he wrote (23/5, 1.30 pm) about the ‘shape of the two bodies of arguments’. I made the same observations, and arrived at the same conclusion.

I also noticed that generally speaking there is a difference in ‘tone’ and ‘style’ in the way the scientists argue and the way ‘skeptics’ argue.

Typically, the question of the scientist is one out of curiosity, whereas the questions of the skeptic are typically more like an aggressive cross-examination. Also typically the skeptic is not satisfied with the answers he gets; there is always another question following, never mind if it is coming from quite a different perspective, or he just changes the subject or disappears. Therefore, in my perception the typical skeptic is not interested in finding common ground with the scientist; he is on a ‘fishing expedition’ to see if there are any contrarian arguments that cannot easily be discarded by scientists, so he can claim that the science is far from settled and too uncertain for political decisions.

So my conclusion is that the skeptics in the blogosphere are not genuinely interested in (the advancement of) climate science.

If that analysis is correct, scientists have little if anything to win in engaging in discussions with skeptics on scientific issues because the skeptic has nothing to offer there and has a different agenda altogether. I am not at all surprised then that for scientists, discussions with skeptics can be irritating and tiresome. I assume that is what ATTP meant when he started this post.

For me these discussions are not pointless. For me, seeing how the arguments flow was helpful in understanding the climate debate. Like Tucholsky said: the understanding that the people have is usually wrong, but in their sensing the people are usually right. This blog has been guiding my ‘sensing’ of the climate debate and who is right probably just as much as it has been guiding my understanding of the arguments. ...

I wonder what it would be like if scientists would not engage in discussions with skeptics with the intention of convincing them – they won’t allow you to – but with the intention to demonstrate to other lurking readers (like me) that science has better (and more polite) answers and deeper understanding to offer than the skeptics have. It might turn out to be a whole other kind of ballgame, one that is far less frustrating for scientists.

And if you don’t feel like playing anymore, I think it would be perfectly OK to say ‘we have tried to explain you the science more than once, but either you seem not able to understand the science which is regrettable, or you just do not want to understand which is fine, but either way and with all due respect you have offered nothing to this discussion that has any merits and you and your repetitive comments are becoming a bit of a boring noise, so thank you for participating, but we will block you from this post / this blog.’ I think scientists could be a little more assertive about sticking to the rules of their discussions.

Our climate philosopher, Willard, got scared:

No more ClimateBall ™ ?
http://www.khaaan.com/ [Warning sound]

Jac. could reassure him:

Still Climate Ball I suppose, but how scientists want to play it. If scientists start perceiving (and thus expecting) that the game is not about trying to find common scientific ground with the skeptics or about advancement of science, but about proving how wrong/mistaken the skeptics are (while still maintaining the cool, rational, unbiased and open-minded, fact-based balanced way of truly scientific reasoning that, in my view, really is the stronghold of scientists that earns them credibility), scientists might find it less frustrating to be playing the game. In this other version of Climate Ball moving the goalposts is considered as acknowledging you have lost the previous argument. Don’t complain about moving the goalposts, but instead explicitly claim it as victory and as soliciting for another beating on another subject.

My selfish reason for suggesting this is that I would not want the scientists getting so frustrated that they are pulling out of the debate.

AndThenTheresPhysics regular BBD followed the same route and wrote previously:

FoxGoose, it’s an open secret that I used to be a fake sceptic. At one time, it was something of a USP [Unique Selling Point], even. Quote mining my past is an old, tired tactic. It also reveals something rather unpleasant about those doing it.

But to answer the question:

- I’ve learned more than you in the last three years.

- I’ve demonstrated that I am intellectually honest enough to overcome my denial.

- I’ve got the balls to keep the same screen name and own every statement I’ve ever made in public using it.

- Once I discover that I have been lied to and manipulated, I never forgive and I never forget.

Rachel naturally asked: "Wow, BBD. What made you change your mind?"

I discovered that I was being lied to. This simply by comparing the “sceptic” narrative with the standard version. Unlike my fellow “sceptics” I was still just barely sceptical enough (though sunk in denial) to check both versions. Once I realised what was going on, that was the end of BBD the lukewarmer (NB: I was never so far gone as to deny the basic physics, only to pretend that S [the climate sensitivity] was very low). All horribly embarrassing now, of course, but you live and learn. Or at least, some of us do. ...

Always check. Fail to do this in business and you will end up bankrupt and in the courts. I failed to check, at least initially, and made a colossal prat out of myself. Oh, and never underestimate the power of denial (aka ‘wishful thinking’). It’s brought down better people than me. ...

There wasn’t a single, defining eureka moment, just a growing sense of unease because nothing seemed to add up. ... Once I eventually started to compare WUWT [Watts Up With That] with RC [RealClimate] and SkS [Skeptical Science], that was it, really.

Thus maybe the information deficit model is not that bad. At least when people have to time to gather all information, hear all sides and think it over. Thinking deficit model might be a better name. How do we get people to start thinking? One way would be to reduce the vitriol in posts about science, this reduces critical thinking and strengthens tribal thinking. (Hard to do, the dramatic opening helped to get you to read until here.)

It also points to the importance of trust. Being lied to is not nice. In that respect I would not expect BBD to ever go back to the climate "sceptics". If BBD detects an inconsistency, I would expect that he would simply point it out to scientists. The way scientists do. If the evidence changes, you will hear it first from scientists.

Building up trust again will be hard for the pseudo-sceptics after having displayed how untrustworthy they are. But it would help if they would stop their disinformation campaign against science, stop repeating their completely idiotic talking points, and would start to make scientifically valid points about real uncertainties and weaknesses. They would be welcomed back home. Unfortunately, that is somehow a huge if and I do not expect this to ever happen, just to see the group get smaller and smaller, being laughed at by their neighbours and die out.

Steve Bloom wondered:

Jac, as I’m sure you know, most scientists, even climate scientists, choose not to play [Climateball] at all. But is it helpful to imagine the response to this blog (and the climate science blogosphere generally) of such a non-player who is considering starting to play? Is the lesson that other forms of engagement and outreach (e.g. reaching out to their local media and giving community talks) are a better use of their time? Or maybe it’s most effective to instead focus their research efforts onto things that will inform a better policy direction?

Many scientists are introverted or otherwise not interested in a public debate. That is fine. As a community we should be present, but people should do what they do best. Most "challenges" by pseudo-sceptics are so basic and repetitive that many lay people following the climate "debate" may well be better suited to reply.

Outreach will not help you avoiding the pseudo-sceptics. They will be the ones motivated to ask the questions. Expect some creative and weird ones. But eye to eye even pseudo-sceptics know how to behave. Youtube suggests that the main exception to that rule is Lord Monckton. (Highly recommended funny video about the comedian behind Monckton).

To close, Willard summarised the climate "debate" as:

ClimateBall™ can be fun! Stripped down to its bare essentials, ClimateBall ™ is just a conversation disguised as a scientific discussion.

More seriously, Jac. closed with the main purpose of the "debate":

In a democracy, you have to respect if the people’s consent is that they will accept climate change with all its consequences to happen; but at least let scientists make sure it is an ‘informed consent’ then.

What did I learn about the climate "debate" from the above comments?

1. Do not expect to be able to convince the people that have being a climate sceptics as their identity. Explain the science and explain why the climate "sceptics" are wrong for the lurkers. Explain why science is fun and why it produces reliable knowledge. Show you are open and interested in a better understanding.

2. Stay on topic to be able to go in depth like scientists would if they have a dispute. Pseudo-sceptics like to change topics before acknowledging that they were wrong on their first one. Make this strategy clear to the lurkers and explain that this suggests that the pseudo-sceptics are not really interested in understanding the problem. If necessary "answer" new topics with links (e.g. to the Skeptical Science list of Global Warming & Climate Change Myths).

3. Be friendly to people you do not know and might be honestly interested in the answer. There is no need to accept any kind of abuse, but try to make sure that there is a clear difference in tone between science and non-science.

4. Search for the name of your discussion partner and the topic. Very often he has discussed the topic before somewhere else and already knows all the answers. In this case, point out to the lurkers that your discussion partner is not interested in the answer, but just wants to create doubt.

5. Be fairly strict with moderation on your own blog, if you have one. The ugly language at WUWT we started this post with is great for stroking tribal feeling and very effective in reducing people's ability to think rationally. Not something you would like to see at a science blog. Personally, I also remove a large part of the comments without arguments, they waste the time of the reader looking for a real discussion. If you do this, you will only have to remove few comments, because people will adjust their tone.

6. Another function of the ugly language may be to discourage scientists from taking part. Try to ignore the misconduct and not to take it personally. These people do not know you and are only demonstrating their own problems. This is clearly illustrated by the hilarious puns on my last name. If those people would know me only a little bit, they would at least write something about homogenization or about my fixation with WUWT.

Try to have fun playing climateball and keep your eye on the WUWT ball.

[UPDATE. Maybe this and the previous post worked. Anthony Watts created an Open thread and asked what could we do better? He gives some suggestions himself.

3. I’d like less name calling. The temptation is great, and I myself sometimes fall victim to that temptation. I’ll do better to lead by example in any comments I make.
4. I’d like to see less trolling and more constructive commentary. One way to achieve that is to pay attention.

Let's see, how this works out. I am somewhat sceptical because they need the tribal atmosphere to suppress critical thinking. ]

[UPDATE: Just found an old post on Skeptical Science, Understanding climate denial, that mentions three more people that changed their mind based on the evidence, D.R. Tucker, Craig Good & Nathan McKaskle. It is not impossible, but probably still rare. Ironically Nathan McKaskle used to be a blogger, but gave up not knowing whether he had changed a single mind. That is a pity, changing people's minds does not happen immediately after reading an article, it takes time, if only to be able to say that one has always held the new position.]

[UPDATE 2016. Just found two more people convinced by science: Windchasers and Tadaaa. It does happen.]

Variable Variability

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Is nitpicking a climate doomsday warning allowed?

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Sunday, July 23, 2017

Doomsday scenarios are as harmful as climate change denial

Nitpicking

Climate Feedback rating system

Why climate feedback?

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Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Four horsemen of the apocalypse

Related reading

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

The terms Global Warming and Climate Change are both used for decades

Climate models are not essential for basic understanding

Model tuning not important for basic understanding

The consensus is a result of the evidence

Scientists consider and weigh all the evidence

Arguments from the other side only look credible

Related reading

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Monday, December 7, 2015

Meaning of uncertainty

More uncertainty means higher risks

Super-linear damages

Unknown unknowns

Related reading

References

Monday, June 9, 2014

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