The odd title is because the previous repost from the 2010s should have been #22!
At last: a genuine climate change debate
Back in February there was a debate in Sydney between Lord Monckton (right) and Tim Lambert, UNSW computer scientist of Deltoid fame. At the opening Lord Monckton generously acknowledged that such a debate was almost unprecedented and warmly thanked Lambert for agreeing to it. The chair was 2GB broadcaster Alan Jones, who conducted the event in a scrupulously proper manner. (Coaching debating was one of my duties during my teaching career.)
Monckton in fact began strongly with an account of the serious and tragic unforeseen consequences of biofuel production – the wrecking of third world economies and death by starvation. From here on things went downhill for him. His opponent was unfailingly polite in front of a largely hostile audience and unfailingly logical.
I am reminded, having at last been able to see the debate on Youtube, of the great Bishop Soapy Sam Wilberforce versus T H Huxley on Darwin in the 19th century…..
See also Snowballs, Snowjobs and the Lambert-Monckton Debate and I went to a circus and a science debate broke out. From the latter:
Today I attended the debate between UNSW computer scientist Dr Tim Lambert (author of Deltoid blog) and Lord Viscount Christopher Monckton of Brenchley.
The venue was the Hilton Hotel Grand Ballroom, and attendance was about 60% of capacity, that is roughly half the number of people who attended last time I was there, when it was packed to 120% of capacity for the launch of MySpace (remember MySpace? Neither do I…)
At any rate, I am pleased to report that the debate was indeed just that, a real debate, conducted civilly, in front of an attentive and polite crowd, and well moderated by Alan Jones.
It was neither the rabble-rousing denialist circus some feared it would be, nor an embarrassing excursion into Monckton’s many personal foibles. It was instead, a robust, articulate presentation and dissection of the factual content behind Monckton’s denialist propositions. Both speakers were modest, neither hyperbolic, and both approached the question in an open and non-dogmatic fashion.
In two fifteen-minute presentations, each speaker addressed the proposition that “manmade global warming is a real threat”. The substance of the debate hinged, I am happy to say, on a scientific question concerning the degree of climate sensitivity to differing concentrations of CO2. Namely, Monckton has independently calculated a level of climate sensitivity that is lower than the IPCC’s estimate, by a factor of approximately 7-8 times. Dr Lambert showed Monckton’s calculation to be based on a misunderstanding of data provided by a satellite scientist, one Professor Rachel Pinker (2007). Dr. Lambert also showed that Monckton’s thesis depends entirely on the climate sensitivity being a very low estimate, while the other denialist darling, Ian Plimer’s, thesis depends on climate sensitivity being a very high estimate. They cannot both be right, and perhaps both are wrong.
What followed was about 90 minutes of questions from the floor, which again was handled very calmly and coolly by all the proponents. Some of the questions were truly odd, and showed a very low level of understanding of science, and a very high level of paranoia and confusion among the (predominantly old and angry) audience members:
- One gentleman attempted to suggest that, since a lot of the world’s carbon is in the oceans, it is water vapour evaporating from the oceans, and not fossil fuels, that is causing warming (what is causing all that extra evaporation, he didn’t say). Neither proponent had the heart to tell the gentleman that water vapour is made of, well, water, not CO2.
- Another questioner thought that the 1976 international treaty banning weather-control devices (anyone heard of this?) showed that nations already had the technology to control the weather, so why aren’t they using it?
- Another questioner said that our government is being totalitarian about environmental issues, and he lived under Soviet occupation in the former Czechoslovakia, so he should know.
- Another questioner wanted to know whether Dr. Tim Lambert wanted to stop him from procreating with his wife (ewww).
- Another questioner wanted to know if continental drift wasn’t the real driver of sea levels.
Contrary to many who worry about functions like this providing a platform for denialists, I think the debate generated far more light than heat (sic). It is a credit to the way both proponents, and the moderator, and indeed the audience, conducted themselves that it was a fruitful and enlightening discussion.
I think perhaps the most important thing that came out of the debate is that it takes a lot of wind out of denialist sails when they meet a real-life supporter of AGW science and realise that we are not trying to drag civilisation back to the stone age, prevent people from having babies, wreck the economy, keep the developing nations in poverty, or any of the other shibboleths that drive the denialist circus. As Tim Lambert explained to the audience, as a computer scientist, he is first and foremost an engineer, and it is an interesting and important engineering problem to work out how to get as many people as possible enjoying a high standard of living, without trashing the planet in the process. That’s all…
Just an extract from that one; clicking on its heading will take you to the whole. I would be surprised if the key links still work, but you never know! So frustrating that virtually the same tomfoolery is happening ten years later! Speaking of which….
Robyn Williams: Climate change science: the evidence is clear
… with 115 comments: one referred us to Climate Cover-Up by James Hoggan with Richard Littlemore. Sounds interesting. There’s an extended interview with the author here.
JAMES HOGGAN: … Our book—I’m a PR guy of about thirty years, and I kind of stumbled across this campaign, what I would call a kind of confusion campaign, when I was doing some reading. And we’ve documented this two-decade-long campaign by industry and Canada and the United States, that the energy industry basically designed to confuse the public about climate change and give people the sense that there’s a debate about the science of climate change. And my reason for writing this book is that I don’t think that PR people and industry front groups should be determining what our policies are in Canada and the United States on solving climate change.
AMY GOODMAN: So, outline the strategy. What was the corporate strategy to do this? And name names.
JAMES HOGGAN: Well, the first thing was to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on everything from focus groups to very sophisticated messaging to setting up groups of pseudoscientists to confuse the public about—to create the impression that there was actually a debate, where there was none.
In the—two decades ago, there was a group called the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition that was put together by Philip Morris. They were having problems, as we know, with public credibility, so they decided to invite some friends to join this fight, what became a fight against scientists. And one of the first companies they invited was Exxon Mobil. And this was kind of the beginning of these front groups in this war on science that has evolved and continues today with front groups all over the United States…
JAMES HOGGAN: Yeah, well, I mean, one of the things that they did was they basically started to create this impression that there was a scientific debate. There was an enormous amount of research done in this area to—you know, they do these focus groups, and they find out that your average person thinks that there’s always a debate in science. So, rather than kind of fighting and saying climate change isn’t happening, let’s just say we don’t know if it’s happening. There’s a debate.
Now, that debate actually wasn’t taking place in the scientific community; it was actually taking place in the news media, in the mainstream news media. And just by repeating it, having enough money to repeat these kinds of messages over and over again, people start to become susceptible to this. The root of all this, this campaign, is the fact that corporations have less and less credibility as the years roll along, particularly over the past couple of decades…
The more we know about these kinds of groups and these kinds of efforts, the less they work. And I would just encourage journalists to ask these people whether or not they’re actually practicing climate science, whether they have—they are climate scientists, and who they’re taking money from. Start to ask these questions and shed light on these people, they’ll be far less effective…
As Robyn Williams concludes:
…why does the opposite seem to prevail? Three reasons, I suggest.
One is that the scientists themselves have been naive, even lazy. When I asked Tim Flannery and Philip Campbell, editor of the journal Nature, their opinion of so called deniers like Ian Plimer, or the incongruous toff Lord Monkton, they just shrugged and said “the climate debate has moved on.” Well, it hasn’t. It’s gone backwards. Not least because the scientists, in the main, have been passive, restrained and much too polite. And after Climategate – too much mea culpa. It’s time for them to get their skates on. To be aggressive in the cause of truth.
After the Climategate debacle and theft of the personal emails of climatologists going back over 10 years the journal Nature finally tackled the smear that science was faking its data.
“This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country’s much needed climate bill. Nothing in the emails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real – or that human activities are almost certainly the cause.”
The paradox is that allowing this chaos to continue is likely to delay, catastrophically, any moves to combat climate change itself.
Another reason we hear the voices of the extreme the loudest is that the new media allow many citizens to occupy their own nether world where they need never come across an opinion that conflicts with their own.
A third reason extremists seem to dominate has been the powerful use of lobby groups. Now, it so happens that we keep well away from lobbyists in our science broadcasting, left or right, green or brown, because they are unstoppable, often shameless and rarely alter their messages, despite the evidence.
We go by published research results, in top journals and commentators with a reputation for probity … the evidence is clear. We need to change policy and to do so urgently.
Robyn Williams has been hosting the ABC Radio National Science Show for yonks…
Neil's Commonplace Book 