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.



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Related reading

Older post by a Dutch colleague on Adams' main problem: Who to believe?

How climatology treats sceptics

What's in a Name? Global Warming vs. Climate Change

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

Video medal lecture Richard B. Alley at AGU: The biggest control knob: Carbon Dioxide in Earth's climate history

Just the facts, homogenization adjustments reduce global warming

Climate model ensembles of opportunity and tuning

Journalist Potholer makes excellent videos on climate change and true scepticism: Climate change explained, and the myths debunked


* Photo Arctic Sea Ice by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license.
* Cloud photo by Bill Dickinson used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) license.

The Tea Party consensus on man-made global warming

Dan Kahan, Professor of Law and Psychology at Yale, produced a remarkable plot about the attitude towards global warming of Tea Party supporters.

Kahan of the Cultural Cognition Project is best known for his thesis that climate "sceptics" should be protected from the truth and that no one should mention the fact that there is a broad agreement (consensus) under climate scientists that we are changing the climate.

Without having the scientific papers to back it up, reading WUWT and Co. leaves one with the impression that there are many more scientific claims on climate change that would make these "sceptics" more defensive. They may actually be willing to pay not to hear them. We could use the money to stimulate renewable energy; to reduce air pollution in the West naturally, not for mitigation of global warming that would help everyone.

Tea Party

Maybe I should explain for the non-American readers that the Tea Party is a libertarian, populist and conservative political movement against taxes that gained prominence when the first "black" US president was elected.

It is well known that members of the Tea Party are more dismissive of global warming as the rest of the Republicans or Democrats in the USA. It could have been that Tea-Party members are "more Republican" as other people calling themselves Republican. The plot below by Dan Kahan suggests, however, that identifying with the Tea Party is an important additional dimension.

In fact, normal Republicans and democrats are not even that different. The polarization in the USA is to a large part due to the Tea Party. Especially, when you consider that the non-Tea-Party Republicans most to the right of the scale may still have a more tax-libertarian disposition than the ones more in the middle.

For me the most striking part is how sure Tea Party members claim to be that global warming is no problem. On average they see global warming as being a very low risk, the average is a one on a scale from seven to zero. Given how close that average is to the extreme of the scale, there cannot be that much variability. There thus probably is a consensus among Tea Party members that global warning is a low risk. That was something Kahan did not explicitly write in his post.

That is quite a consensus for a position without scientific evidence. I guess we are allowed to call this group think, given that many climate "sceptics" even call a consensus with evidence group think.

Related reading

Real conservatives are conservationists by Barry Bickmore (a conservative).

"The radical libertarians’ knee-jerk rejection of the scientific consensus on climate change isn’t just anti-Conservative. It borders on sociopathy in its extreme anti-intellectualism and recklessness."

The conservative family values of Christian man Anthony Watts

A post on the extremist and anti-intellectual atmosphere at WUWT and Co.

Planning for the next Sandy: no relative suffering would be socialist

Some people seem to be willing to suffer loses as long as others suffer more. This leads to the question: "Do dissenters like climate change?"

Five reasons scientists do not like the consensus on climate change

There is a consensus among climate scientists that the Earth is warming, that this is mainly because of us and that it will thus continue if we do nothing. While any mainstream scientist will be able to confirm the existence of this consensus from experience, explicitly communicating this is uncomfortable to some of them. Especially in the clear way The Consensus Project does. I also feel this disease, so let me try to explain why.

1. Fuzzy definition

One reason is that the consensus is hard to define. To the above informal statement I could have added, that greenhouse gasses warm the Earth's surface, that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that the increase in the atmospheric CO2 concentration is mainly due to human causes, and so on. That would not have changed much and also the fraction of scientists supporting this new definition would be about the same.

You could probably also add some consequences, such as sea level rise or stronger precipitation, without much changes. However, if you would start to quantify and ask about a certain range for the climate sensitivity or add some consequences that are harder to predict, such as more drought, stronger extreme precipitation, the consensus will likely become smaller, especially as more and more scientists will feel unable to answer with confidence.

Whether there is a consensus on X or not is a question about humans. Such social science questions will always be more fuzzy as questions in the natural sciences. I guess we will just have to live with that. Just because concepts are a bit fuzzy, does not mean that it does not make sense to talk about them. If you think some aspect of this fuzziness creates problems, you can do the research to show this.

2. Scientific culture

By defining a consensus and by quantifying its support, you create two groups of scientists, mainstream and fringe. This does not fit to the culture in the scientific community to keep communication channels open to all scientists and not to exclude anyone.

Naturally, also in science, as a human enterprise, you have coalitions, but we do our best to diffuse them and even in the worst case, there are normally people on speaking terms with multiple coalitions.

However, also without its quantification, the consensus exists. Thus communicating it does not make that much difference. The best antidote is for scientists to do their best to keep the lines of communication open. A colleague of mine who does great work on the homogenization thinks global warming is a NATO conspiracy. My previous boss was a climate "sceptic". Both nice people and being scientists they are able to talk about their dissent in a friendlier tone as WUWT and Co.

3. Evidence

Many people, and maybe also some scientists, may confuse consensus with evidence. For a scientist referring to a consensus is not an option in his own area of expertise. Saying "everyone believes this" is not a scientific argument.

Consensus does provide some guidance and signal credibility, especially on topics where it is easily possible to test an idea. If I had a new idea and it would require an exceptionally high or low amount of future sea level rise, I would probably not worry too much as there is not much consensus yet on these predictions and I would read this literature and see if it is possible to make matters fit somehow. If my new idea would require the greenhouse effect to be wrong, I would first try to find the error in my idea, given the strong consensus, the straight forward physics and clear experimental confirmation it would be very surprising if the greenhouse theory would be wrong.

For scientists or interested people knowing there is a consensus is not enough. Fortunately, in the climate sciences the evidence is summarised every well in the IPCC reports.

The weight of the evidence clearly matters: The consensus in the nutritional sciences seems to be that you need to move more and eat less, especially eat less fat, to lose weight. As far as I can judge this is based on rather weak evidence. Finding hard evidence on nutrition is difficult, human bodies are highly complex, finding physical mechanisms is thus nearly impossible. The bodies of ice bears (eating lots of fat), lions (eating lots of protein) and gazelles (eating lots of carbs) are very similar. They all have arteries and the ice bears arteries do not get clogged by fat; they all have kidneys and the lions kidneys can process the protein and their bones do not melt away; they all have insulin, but the gazelles do not get diabetes or obesity from all those carbs. Traditional humans ate a similar range of diets without the chronic deceases we have seen the last generations. Also experiments with humans are difficult, especially when it comes to chronic decease where experiments would have to run over generations. Most findings on diet are thus based on observational studies, which can generate interesting hypotheses, but little hard evidence. It would be great if the nutritional sciences also wrote an IPCC-like report.

For a normal person, I find it completely acceptable to say, I hold this view because most of the worlds scientists agree. I did so for a long time on diet, while I now found that the standard approach does not work for me, I feel it was rational to listen to the experts as long as I did not study the topic myself. It is impossible to be an expert for every topic. In such cases the scientific consensus is a good guiding light and communicating it is valuable, especially if a large part of the population claims not to be aware of it.

4. Contrarians

The concept "consensus" is in itself uncomfortable to many scientists. Most of us are natural contrarians and our job is to make the next consensus, not to defend the old one. Even if our studies end up validating a theory, the hope and aim of a validation study is to find an interesting deviation, that may be he beginning of a new understanding.

Given this mindset and these aims, many scientists may not notice the value of consensus theories and methods. They are what we learn during our studies. When we read scientific articles we notice on which topics there is consensus and on which there is not. When you do something new, you cannot change everything at once. Ideally a new work can be woven into the network of the other consensus ideas to become the new consensus. If this is not possible yet, there will likely be a period without consensus on that topic. If there is no consensus on a certain topic, that is a clear indication that there is work to do (if the topic is important).

5. Scientific literature

A final aspect that could be troubling is that the consensus studies were published in the scientific literature. It is a good principle to keep the political climate "debate" out of science and thus out of the scientific literature as well as possible. It is hard enough to do so. Climate dissenters regularly game the system and try to get their stuff published in the scientific literature. Peer review is not perfect and some bad manuscripts can unfortunately slip through.

One could see the publication of a consensus study as a similar attempt to exploit the scientific literature. Given that all climate scientists are already aware of the consensus, such a study does not seem to be a scientific urgency. Furthermore, Dana Nuccitelli acknowledged that one of the many aims was to make "the public more aware of the consensus".

However, many social scientists do not seem to be aware of the consensus and feel justified to see blogs such as WUWT as a contribution to a scientific debate, rather than as the political blog it is, that only pretends to be about science. One of the first consensus studies was even published in the prestigious broadly read journal Science. Replications of such a study, especially if done in another or better way seem worth publishing. The large difference in the perception of the consensus on climate change between the public and climate scientists is worth studying and these consensus studies provide an important data point to estimate this difference.

Just because the result sounds like a no-brainer is no reason not to study this and confirm the idea. Not too long ago a German newspaper reported on a study whether eating breakfast was good for weight loss. A large fraction of the comments were furious that such an obvious result had been studied with public money. I must admit, that I no longer know whether the obvious result was that if you do not eat breakfast (like Italians) you eat less and thus lose weight or whether people that eat breakfast (like Germans) are less hungry and thus compensate this by eating less during the rest of the day. I think, they did find an effect, thus the obvious result was not that it naturally does not matter when you eat.

As a natural scientist, it is hard for me to judge how much these studies contribute to the social sciences. That should be the criterion. Whether an additional aim is to educate the public seems irrelevant to me. The papers were published in journals with a broad range of topics. If there were no interest from the social science, I would prefer to write up these studies in a normal report, just like an Gallop poll. However, my estimate as outsider would be that these paper are scientifically interesting for the social sciences.

Outside of science

An important political strategy to delay action on climate is to claim that the science is not settled, that there is no consensus yet. The infamous Luntz memo from 2002 to the US Republican president stated:

Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate

This is important because the population places much trust in science. Thus holding that trust and the view that there is no climate change must produce considerable cognitive dissonance.

There is a consensus within the Tea Party Conservatives that human caused climate change does not exist. It is naturally inconvenient for them that this is wrong. However, I did not make up this escapist ideology. Thus for me as a scientist this is not reason to lie about the existence of a clear consensus about and strong evidence for the basics of climate change. Even if that were a bad communication strategy, which I do not believe, my role as a scientist is to speak the truth.

What do you think? Did I miss any reason why a scientist might not like the consensus concept? Or an argument why these reasons are weak if you think about it a bit longer? I will not post comments with flimsy evidence against The Consensus Project. You can do that elsewhere where people are more tolerant and already know the counter arguments by heart.

[Update, 23 Sept 2014. This post is now linked on Spiegel Online, where the local climate "skeptic" Axel Bojanowski needs no act as if I agree with him. I admit that the title suggests this, I was hoping to get a few "sceptics" to read it, but I was hoping that people reading the post itself would see that every single "reason" is countered. Thus Bojanowski was cherry picking, I hope it was not on purpose, but just by not reading carefully.

Axel Bojanowski calls the topic of the Cook et al. study a "banality". Because even the most hardened skeptics of the climate research do not doubt the physical basis that greenhouse gasses from cars, factories and power plants heat the atmosphere. (Selbst hartgesottene Kritiker der Klimaforschung zweifeln nicht an dem physikalischen Grundsatz, dass Treibhausgase aus Autos, Fabriken und Kraftwerken die Luft wärmen.) It would unfortunately be a great jump forward if Bojanowski was right.

The blog Global Warming Solved lists 16 people/blogs that agree with them that climate change is not man-made. In this list are well known people/blogs from the "skeptic" community: Roger “Tallbloke” Tattersall, The Hockey Schtick (often cited at WUWT), the German blog No Tricks Zone (Pierre Gosselin, who is followed by Bojanowski on twitter), Tom Nelson, Climate Depot (Mark Morano; CFACT), Steven Goddard, James Delingpole, Luboš Motl, and Tim Ball (regularly posts on WUWT).

Roy Spencer recently wrote a post with the "Skeptical Arguments that Don’t Hold Water". Most of which were somehow acknowledging that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that was the biggest concession he was willing to make. He realized that even this was controversial in his community and wrote in the intro:

My obvious goal here is not to change minds that are already made up, which is impossible (by definition), but to reach 1,000+ (mostly nasty) comments in response to this post. So, help me out here!

He got "only" 700 comments, but the tendency was as expected.

At the main Australian climate skeptic blog, I once pointed out that even the host, Jo Nova, accepts that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. That produced a lively push back and no one came forward to say that naturally CO2 is a greenhouse gas.

I can only conclude that some "high profile" "sceptic" bloggers pay lip service to accepting that global warming is man-made (while many of their posts do not make sense if they would). And that at least a large part of their audiences is against accepting any scientific fact that is accepted by liberals. ]


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Related reading

In case you do not like people judging abstracts, there are also surveys of the opinion of climate scientists. For example this survey by the people behind the Klimazwiebel.

Andy Skuce responds to critique of consensus study in his post: Consensus, Criticism, Communication and gives a nice overview of the various possible critiques and why they do not hold water.

On consensus and dissent in science - consensus signals credibility


Photo: „Paris 2010 - Le Penseur“ by Daniel Stockman - Flickr: Paris 2010 Day 3 - 9. Licensed with CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Climate myths translated into econ talk

Yesterday, I was at an amazing meeting. The three public lectures about climatology were not that eventful, although it was interesting to see how you can present the main climatological findings in a clear way.

The amazing part was the Q&A afterwards. I was already surprised to see that I was one of the youngest ones, but had not anticipated that most of these people were engineers and economists, that is climate ostriches. As far as I remember, not one public question was interesting! All were trivially nonsense, I am sorry to have to write.

One of the ostriches showed me some graphs from a book by Fred Singer. Maybe I should go to an economics conference and cite some mercantile theorems of Colbert. I wonder how they would respond.

Afterwards I wondered whether translating their "arguments" against climatology to economy would help non-climatologists to see the weakness of the simplistic arguments. This post is a first attempt.

Seven translations

#1. That there is and always have been natural variability is not an argument again anthropogenic warming just like the pork cycle does not preclude economic growth.

#2. One of our economist ostriches thought that there was no climate change in Germany because one mountain station shows cooling. That is about as stupid as claiming that there is no economic growth because one of your uncles had a decline in his salary.

#3. The claim that the temperature did not increase or that it was even cooling in the last century, that it is all a hoax of climatologists (read the evil Phil Jones) can be compared to a claim that the world did not get wealthier in the last century and that all statistics showing otherwise are a government cover-up. In both cases there are so many independent lines of research showing increases.

#4. The idea that CO₂ is not a greenhouse gas and that increases in CO₂ cannot warm the atmosphere is comparable to people claiming that their car does not need energy and that they will not drive less if gasoline becomes more expensive. Okay maybe this is not the best example, most readers will likely claim that gas prices have no influence on them, they have no choice and have to drive, but I would hope that economists know better. The strength of both effects needs study, but to suggest that there is no effect is beyond reason.

#5. Which climate change are you talking about, it stopped in 1998. That would be similar to the claim that since the banking crisis in 2008 markets are no longer efficient. Both arguments ignore the previous increases and deny the existence of variability.

#6. The science isn't settled. Both science have foundations that are broadly accepted in the profession (consensus) and problems that are not clear yet and that are a topic of research.

#7. The curve fitting exercises without any physics by the ostriches are similar to "technical analyses" of stock ratings.

[UPDATE. Inspired by a comment of David in the comments of Judith Curry on Climate Change (EconTalk)
#8 The year 1998 was a strong El Nino year and way above trend, well above nearby years. Choosing that window is similar to saying that stocks are a horrible investment because the market collapsed during the Great Depression.]

[UPDATE. Found a nice one.
Daniel Barkalow writes:

Looking at the global average surface temperature (which is what those graphs tend to show), is a bit like looking at someone's bank account. It's a pretty good approximation of how much money they have, but there's going to be a lot of variability, based on not knowing what outstanding bills the person has, and the person is presumably earning income continuously, but only getting paychecks at particular times. This mostly averages out, but there's the risk in looking at any particular moment that it's a really uncharacteristic moment.

In particular, it seems to me that the "pause" idea is based on the fact that 1998 was warmer than nearly every year since, while neglecting that 1998 was warmer than 1997 or any previous year by more than 15 years of predicted warming. If this were someone's bank account, we'd guess that it reflected an event like having their home purchase fall through after selling their old home: some huge asset not usually included ended up in their bank account for a certain period before going back to wherever it was. You wouldn't then think the person had stopped saving, just because they hadn't saved up to a level that matches when their house money was in their bank account. You'd say that there was weird accounting in 1998, rather than an incredible gain followed by a mysterious loss.

]

One interesting question

The engineers and economists were wearing suits and the scientists were dressed more casually. Thus it was easy to find each other. One had an interesting challenge, which was at least new to me, he argued that the Fahrenheit scale, which was used a lot in the past is uncertain because it depends on the melting point of brine and the amount of salt put in the brine will vary.

One would have to make quite an error with the brine to get rid of global warming, however. Furthermore, everyone would have had to make the same error, because a random errors would average out. And if there were a bias, this would be reduced by homogenization. And almost all of the anthropogenic warming was after the 1950-ies, where this problem no longer existed.

A related problem is that the definition of the Fahrenheit scale has changed and also that there are many temperature scales and in old documents it is not always clear which unit was used. Wikipedia lists these scales: Celsius, Delisle, Fahrenheit, Kelvin, Newton, Rankine, Réaumur and Rømer. Such questions are interesting to get the last decimal right, but no reason to become an ostrich.

Disturbing

I find it a bit disturbing that so many economists come up with so simple counter "arguments". They basically assume that climatologists are stupid or are conspiring against humanity. Expecting that for anther field of study makes one wonder where they got that expectation from and shines a bad light on economics.

This was just a quick post, I would welcome ideas for improvements and additions in the comments. Did I miss any interesting analogies?

AVAAZ petition to Murdoch to report the truth about climate change

AVAAZ is a digital civil rights organisation, whose petitions and actions have influenced many important political decisions in the last few years.

Because, the summary for policy makers of the new IPCC report is published today, they are now organising a petition asking Rupert Murdoch to report the truth about climate change. The petition just started; they already have half a million signatures after one day.

To Rupert Murdoch:

The scientific consensus that human activities are causing dangerous climate is overwhelming, yet your media outlets around the world continue to seed doubt and spread inaccuracy. Any journalism that does not first acknowledge the evidence that humans are causing this problem is dangerous and irresponsible. As concerned citizens we call on you to tell the truth about man made climate change and report on what we must do to solve this problem.

You can sign this petition here. Please spread the word.

Christians on the climate consensus

Dan Kahan thinks that John Cook and colleagues should shut up about the climate consensus; the consensus among climatologists that the Earth is warming and human action is the main cause. Kahan claims that research shows that talking about consensus is:

a style of advocacy that is more likely to intensify opposition ... then [to] ameliorate it

It sounds as if his main argument is that Cook efforts are counter productive because Cook is not an American Republican, which is hard to fix.

Katryn Hayhoe

As an example of how you communicate climate science the right way, Kahan mentions Katryn Hayhoe as an example. Hayhoe is an evangelical climate change researcher and stars in three beautifully made videos where Hayhoe talks about God and climate change.

Except that she also talks about her religion, I personally see no difference with any other message for the general public on climate change. She also openly speaks about the disinformation campaign by the climate ostriches.

The most frustrating thing about her position, she says, is the amount of disinformation which is targeted at her very own Christian community.

Maybe naively, but I was surprised that the Christian community is a special target. While I am not a Christian myself, my mother was a wise environmentally concious woman and a devout Christian. Also when in comes to organized religion, I remember mainly expressions of concern about climate change. Thus I thought that Christians are a positive, maybe even activist, force with respect to climate change.

Thus let's have look what the Christian Churches think about climate change.