Is the sky falling?
When we politicize science it sure seems that way.
For example, a while back I reviewed The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz. What she found in her research about fat and sugar was that we followed the exact wrong diet path over the last 40 years by (1) rushing to judgment on the science in a field that was tricky and (2) politicizing it. This, in turn, affected the science. And not in a good way. Here’s a quote from the book.
“Once ideas about fat and cholesterol became adopted by official institutions, even prominent experts in the field found it nearly impossible to challenge them. One of the twentieth century’s most revered nutrition scientists, the organic chemist David Krivtchesky, discovered this thirty years ago when on a panel of the National Academy of Sciences, he suggested loosening the restriction on dietary fat. “We were jumped on!” he told me. “People would spit on us!…they were so angry that we were going against the suggestions of the American Heart Association and the National Institutes of Health”
“This kind of reaction met all experts who criticized the prevailing view on dietary fat, effectively silencing any opposition. Researchers who persisted in their challenges found themselves cut off from grants, unable to rise in their professional societies, without invitations to serve on expert panels, and at a loss to find scientific journals that would publish their papers. As a result, for many years the public has been presented with the appearance of a uniform scientific consensus on the subject of fat, especially saturated fat, but this outward unanimity was only made possible because opposing views were pushed aside.”
For the rest of us, the result has been the highest obesity and diabetes rates we’ve ever seen. And it seems to me that we’ve been doing this same thing with climate science.
Instead of vigorous and spirited debate and research, we’re rushing to judgment and politicizing it. The media, non-climate scientists, activists, politicians, and others have turned it into a religious eco frenzy. And so we end up with people like Bill Nye the science guy (who was a mechanical engineer and then TV host for a children’s science program, not a climate scientist) suggesting that “climate deniers” go to prison.
Prison?
I think Bill had a bad dream about Nazi Germany, socialist Russia, or ISIS.
We all want clean air and water. We all want awesome rivers and lakes. We all want good science. Is it possible to remove the politics and frenzy so we don’t go off into the weeds again? I don’t know. But I did find these short videos helpful. If you’re interested in the climate, I think you’ll enjoy them.
In the first one, Richard Lindzen, an MIT atmospheric physicist, addresses the politicization.
In the one, Will Happer, emeritus professor of physics at Princeton University, addresses whether we can actually accurately predict the climate.
This one by Patrick Moore, an ecologist and one of the founders of Greenpeace who subsequently left the organization because of its anti-science activism, explains why CO2 is actually awesome.
In this one Moore gives more details and argues that maybe we need more CO2.
In this one, Bjorn Lomborg argues against climate alarmism. Of course, Lomborg isn’t a climate scientist. However, if his facts are correct, then he asks an important question.
The other thing to ask is so what? So let’s say the seas rise a bit and it gets a bit warmer. We might lose some beach front properties over a number of years. That’s not new. It might accelerate and reach farther inland. Okay. But nobody is going to die. They’ll just rebuilt somewhere else.
So let’s avoid prison and climate pogroms and disastrous dashes off into public policy like we did with fat and sugar. Let’s simply support our scientists in doing what they do best. Let’s promote a vigorous search for more insight.
Notes
Richard Lindzen is wrong. On the quotes page as well as the myths page you will find over 30 times he is wrong.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/skeptic_Richard_Lindzen.htm
Here is a summary from 2012 of climate scientists taking on Lindzen.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-scientists-take-on-Richard-Lindzen.html
And here is a dozen errors from 2017.
https://blog.ucsusa.org/brenda-ekwurzel/a-dozen-doozies-setting-the-record-straight-on-richard-lindzens-letter-to-president-trump
Will Harper – His 23 errors.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/William_Happer_arg.htm
A response to a 2018 lecture by Harper, on of many he gives.
“Happer argues that the current concern over human-caused greenhouse gases is overblown. Although he clearly understands basic climate science, his presentation includes claims that are exaggerated, misleading, or incorrect regarding human-caused climate change. His presentation is entertaining, but he argues in many places against claims that climate scientists do not make. He acknowledges that CO2 has an influence on climate, but emphasizes that the influence is small. Yet he gives no physical reason to conclude that the current scientific understanding on the response of climate system to CO2 (the “climate sensitivity”) is wrong, other than to say that he does not trust climate models. His claims that climate models do not work are exaggerated and misleading. He also claims that increased CO2 will be beneficial by increasing plant growth – it is true that plant growth will increase by the CO2 increase alone, but he does not show that it will be beneficial, especially when climate is changing at the same time as CO2. His presentation ignores the large number of studies available that show that through climate change, CO2 will be detrimental to agricultural productivity as well as to human well-being generally.”
and more:
https://www.unc.edu/~jjwest/climatechange.html
Patrick Moore is policy advisor to the Heartland Institute, the leading source of climate change disinformation which has spent many millions provided by energy companies and conservative foundations and billionaires with energy company ties to stop government regulations against climate change.
Greenpeace accuses him of leaving when he saw opposing Greenpeace was much more financially lucrative and his career now is speaking out against climate change.
https://www.desmogblog.com/patrick-moore
Bjorn Lomberg is pretty famous for being fully funded by energy companies to deny the severity of climate change.
https://www.desmogblog.com/2014/06/25/millions-behind-bjorn-lomborg-copenhagen-consensus-center
https://www.desmogblog.com/bjorn-lomborg
He got major funding and wrote a book called ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist’ he was mostly known for along with his later book ‘Cool It’. Another writer decided to write a book examining that books claims. He found every reference cited was wrong or misleading in two chapters. The book ‘The Longborg Deception’ was going to handle the entire book and every citation but it would take years so he skimmed checking the cites in the other chapters. It concludes Lomborg is ‘a performance artist disguised as an academic,’ ‘misrepresenting academic research, misquoting data, relying on irrelevant studies, (omitting important citations and sources), (using the lowest estimates of likely climate changes), and citing sources that seem not to exist.’ Many of the cites appear to be simply cited to build up the number of cites with multiple entries to simply show where a person worked for example.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1nq1hv
http://www.newsweek.com/debunking-lomborg-climate-change-skeptic-75173
A short critical analysis of recent articles.
https://climatefeedback.org/authors/bjorn-lomborg/
http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/
There is a reason climate change skeptics rely on lies and misrepresentations. The science and evidence of human-caused global climate change is overwhelming and the warming is accelerating.
Gary, thanks for the links.
At the same time, I can’t see that any of them address the claims made in the videos posted.
They’re a general attack on the reliability and motives of all of these individuals. I think potential conflicts of interest are important to raise, but they do nothing to address the specific claims in the videos.
You say Lindzen is wrong. That out of the 200 papers he’s written, people have challenged him on various points. That seems par for the course. How many scientific papers are written that aren’t challenged on various points? More importantly, is he wrong on what he claims in the video? I can’t find any evidence of that. It doesn’t seem any of the links refer to anything in the video.
Same with Harper.
On Moore, you repeat a claim about him leaving Greenpeace that sounds like rumor. He left in 1986. From what I can tell that was well before global warming became any type of issue. Al Gore wasn’t until 2002. Heck, in the 70s, it was global cooling that was all over the news.
More importantly, what about the specific claims made in the videos?
The fact that he advises Heartland doesn’t mean any of the claims he made in the videos are wrong. Heartland seems to be like all other think tanks–favoring one political view.
With Lomborg, I made a mistake. Somehow I thought he was an actual climate scientist. He’s not. At the same time, the question is whether his facts are correct in the video.
Finally, the purpose of this post is not to refute any current theory or model. It’s a call to get the politics out of climate science so we avoid exactly what happened with nutrition science.