For a while now, I’ve considered climate change denial to be akin to superstition, which the Oxford Dictionaries site defines as “a widely held but irrational belief in supernatural influences.” I mention this because when challenged, contrarians often claim that the climate changes we are witnessing are not man-made, but products of ‘natural variability’. In this context, I find that ‘natural variability’ appears to be a synonym for ‘supernatural influence’.
Why? Because they can’t explain it. Not just that: many seem to believe they are not obliged to do so, which is suspiciously convenient, and all too reminiscent of those who would claim they don’t need to ‘explain’ God. In this, they share a view once expressed in a Guardian forum which, to this day, remains one of my favourite denialist non-sequiturs. When challenged, a poster calling himself Hamlet 4 insisted “I don’t need to prove climate change is caused by natural variability. It just is.”
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Recently in the Guardian, Dana Nuccitelli wrote an interesting article entitled Magical climate contrarian thinking debunked by real science. The first sentence creates the context:
“One of the most important concepts to understand when trying to grasp how the Earth’s climate works, is that every climate change must have a physical cause”.
He follows that up with the premise on which his argument is based:
“It’s not sufficient to say global warming is the result of “a natural cycle” – which cycle is causing the change? For example, is it due to the Earth’s orbital cycles around the Sun, which operate very slowly over periods of thousands of years? Is it changes in solar activity, which has on average remained flat and even declined slightly over the past 60 years? Is it ocean cycles, which shift heat between the oceans and air, and don’t cause the Earth to accumulate more heat?”
Dana is taking issue with a specific paper, authored by Syun-Ichi Akasofu, a retired geophysicist and former director of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks:
“[Akasofu] claimed that the current global warming is merely a result of the planet “recovering” from the Little Ice Age – a cool period (the cooling mostly isolated in Europe) that lasted between the years of about 1550 and 1850. Problem – Akasofu didn’t identify any physical cause for this supposed ‘recovery.’”
I’ve often remarked that climate change contrarians have no science. A common retort is that since we ‘warmists’ are making the claims, it is us that need to produce the evidence to support it. On the face of it, this seems fair enough – and indeed we have produced the evidence, not that contrarians are prepared to acknowledge any of it. (No surprise there). However, as with calls for probity, accuracy and transparency, one might imagine that such virtues, attributes or burdens of proof would be applicable to us all, not just scientists, advocates or journalists. Evidently, one would be wrong.
Clearly, the pseudo-sceptics do not care to understand that when they make claims, the same rules ought to apply. Describing the changes we have already witnessed as ‘natural variability’ without explaining the forcing or its origin is exactly the superstitious ‘magical thinking’ that Dana discusses, which explains absolutely nothing and has as much credibility in scientific terms as claiming that God did it.
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Since theological explanations are no longer popular, contrarians need some kind of new, unknowable force to conveniently explain climate change; the new superstition of ’natural variability’. They don’t seem to understand that, in the scientific context in which these claims are usually made, this is yet another hypothesis, and requires exactly the same standard of scientific examination they demand of existing climate science.
Natural variability is not an explanation of cause, but the observation of a pattern of effect. It is not a mechanism, nor is it a description or function. Natural variability is an attribution, a generalisation, a vague but convenient catch-all. All phenomena are 'natural' and they vary a lot. Citing 'natural variation' as an explanation, explains nothing. The missing component in this 'explanation' is how and why ‘natural variability’ takes place at all - and to discover this, we must turn to science.
To bring about a ‘natural’ change still requires an energy input or output. Climate change contrarians cannot produce any science that attests to energy changes that might cause this recent ’natural variability’ any more than creationists can produce science (or evidence) to support their claim that 'it was God what done it'. This should not be surprising, because climate change denial is a belief system, founded not on science and evidence, but something akin to a religion, or superstition.
The problem with the claim that all the climate changes we are already witnessing are within the bounds of natural variability is that those making the claim cannot identify the forcing – the change in energy levels – required to increase the global temperatures rapidly over three decades, to melt glaciers, to warm oceans, to change seasonal periodicity, to expand deserts, to cause extreme weather, change precipitation patterns, to decrease Arctic ice volume or increase Antarctic sea ice extent.
All these and many more changes in our environment require energy, and what climate change contrarians cannot produce is even a convincing alternative hypothesis to explain where this energy is coming from, let alone produce empirical evidence for it. Yet this is their ‘theory’, their alleged explanation for what is happening to the climate. I think they owe us more than some vague, hand-waving generalisation. They owe us a scientific explanation of what drives this ‘natural variability’, because without it, they are asking us to dismiss a cohesive, consistent, consilient scientific theory in favour of nothing but untestable, unprovable, unfalsifiable superstition. They might as well be asking us to dump science in favour of magic – and then again, perhaps that’s exactly what they are doing.
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When it comes to credibility, a source of information should surely maintain some kind of balance. That isn’t to say that an editorial policy can’t be applied – the Guardian is still (barely) a left-wing media outlet but that doesn’t mean its output is mere propaganda, even though its detractors might conveniently characterise it as such.
This point is particularly salient when considering the main contrarian websites. These sites cannot possibly be considered sceptical, for a simple reason; they find fault in all climate science, not just some of it.
Think about it: thousands of papers published over the last 50 years. I just wrote about the Charney report – a remarkably prescient bit of work dating from 1979 – but the audit trail goes a long way further back than that, all the way back to Fourier, Tyndall, and Arrhenius with his greenhouse theory, published in 1896. (Arrhenius received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903 by the way, and in 1905 became Director of the Nobel Institute, where he remained until his death).
Surely I can’t be alone in thinking that a site calling itself ‘sceptical’ would find some papers to be accurate, some to be debatable, and some to be in error. That would be the logical assumption in regard of any statistical breakdown of technical materials, particularly when the material originates from scientists so geographically and culturally diverse.
The probability that all climate science is wrong (or right, for that matter) is, statistically speaking, zero. Indeed, Skeptical Science, while lauding many papers for their insight, had no compunction in finding fault with a recent paper about an alleged methane bubble. (A fine demonstration of true scepticism, the lack of an agenda – and the pernicious corruption of proper spelling by the colonies. Have they no respect?).
The unfortunate result of finding fault in everything is that one can no longer be seen to persuade, but to hector and harass, to denigrate and deny. Without a counter-argument, all that’s left is propaganda. Persuasion requires a counter-position at least as credible as the one argued against; propaganda requires only a credulous audience willing to believe something that confirms a view they already hold. When the subject is climate science, it isn’t a valid argument to dismiss one theory without being able to propose an alternative. As I’ve said before, to knock down an edifice, all that’s required is brute strength and a sledgehammer. Constructing a new edifice out of the rubble requires more; intelligence, architecture, planning, skills and crafts, design and construction. Contrarians certainly know how to wield the hammer, but there’s not much evidence of anything constructive in their position.
Why do I claim that criticism without a counter-theory is invalid? For the same reason Dana eschews ‘magical thinking’. At the heart of the climate change debate there is a question being asked, and to answer it requires science. (The Oxford Dictionary on-line defines science as “the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment”).
We study the physical and natural world for many reasons, but chief among them must surely be the desire to understand changes in the world around us that may affect us for better or worse. So we find ourselves contemplating an important question; the climate is changing – why is that?
If contrarians want to argue their case, it is not sufficient to be dismissive of climate science, any more than it is appropriate to pitch opinion against theory. There is no material explanation for climate change proposed by deniers, except the magical thinking of ‘natural variation’. The only valid way to improve science is through better science, and better science is not achieved by taking a sledgehammer to the existing canon, any more than it could be improved by burning books.
We have a really important question to answer: why is the climate changing? This question cannot be answered through rhetoric or debate. It is the stuff of science, and until those who take issue with anthropogenic climate change can produce an alternative theory of equal merit, they must rely entirely on hyperbole, demagoguery, personal attacks, misrepresentation, and bad science to promote their invidious case.
I’m open to persuasion, but only by one means; science. ‘Natural variation’ doesn’t explain anything. It doesn’t answer the fundamental question, which cannot be put back in the Pandora’s box it came from. We need an answer, and ‘natural variability’ isn’t it. What contrarians cannot do is persuade us that such a pressing question does not require an urgent answer.
All physical change involves changes in energy states. Until climate change contrarians can come up with a plausible, testable alternative explanation as to where this energy is coming from and why it is changing in distribution and quantity, they cannot present an argument that will persuade by force of logic. Appealing to pseudo-superstitions like ‘natural variation’ is an appeal to a mob mentality. It depends on predisposition, a certain ignorance, a credulous audience and a lack of sceptical enquiry. What it will never do is stop the ice melting, nor explain why it is.
Posted by gpwayne on Friday, 11 October, 2013
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