William H Stewart  President IC and T LLC
Climate-Change Skeptics Revisited
John P. Holdren.......5 August 2008
http://www.websuccess4you.biz/Environment/Climate-Skeptics-Revisited-Prof-Holdren.html
I did not expect that my op-ed in Monday’s Boston Globe, to which the editors gave the title “Convincing the Climate-Change Skeptics”, would actually convince many skeptics. It was aimed more at reinforcing the resolve of the majority in the public and the policy-making community who, betting on the scientific consensus, are ready to move forward with a serious approach to dealing with the problem but are being slowed down by the ill-founded skepticism of a minority. That is why my own title for the piece was “Climate-Change Skeptics Are Dangerously Wrong”.

I am being castigated by many respondents for resorting to reference to authority rather then providing substantive responses to the specific arguments of climate-change deniers. I suggest that this criticism is in part based on a misunderstanding of what is possible within the length constraint of an op-ed piece. The ”top ten” arguments employed by the relatively few deniers with credentials in any aspect of climate-change science (which arguments include “the sun is doing it”, “Earth’s climate was changing before there were people here”, “climate is changing on Mars but there are no SUVs there”, “the Earth hasn’t been warming since 1998”, “thermometer records showing heating are contaminated by the urban-heat-island effect”, “satellite measurements show cooling rather than warming”) have all been shown in the serious scientific literature to be wrong or irrelevant, but explaining their defects requires at least a paragraph or two for each one.

This cannot be done in the 700 words of an op-ed piece. But there are plenty of other forums where it can be…and has been. Persuasive refutations are readily available not only at a high scientific level in (among others) the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( HYPERLINK "http://www.ipcc.ch"
www.ipcc.ch), the UN Scientific Expert Group on Climate Change and Sustainable Development ( HYPERLINK "http://www.unfoundation.org/SEG/"
www.unfoundation.org/SEG/), the US National Academy of Sciences ( HYPERLINK "http://dels.nas.edu/globalchange"
http://dels.nas.edu/globalchange), the US National Center for Atmospheric Research ( HYPERLINK "http://www.ucar.edu"
www.ucar.edu), and the UK Meteorological Office ( HYPERLINK "http://www.met-office.gov.uk"
www.met-office.gov.uk) -- as well as on a myriad of websites run by serious climatologists (e.g.,  HYPERLINK "http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/"
www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/,  HYPERLINK "http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Climate/Climate_Science/CliSciFrameset.html"
stephenschneider.stanford.edu,  HYPERLINK "http://www.realclimate.org"
www.realclimate.org ) -- but also in a form boiled down for the intelligent layperson by organizations skilled in scientific communication, such as the BBC ( HYPERLINK "http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/629/629/7074601.stm"
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/629/629/7074601.stm) , the New Scientist magazine ( HYPERLINK "http://environment.newscientist.com/climatemyths"
http://environment.newscientist.com/climatemyths), and the promising new Climate Central organization ( HYPERLINK "http://www.climatecentral.org"
www.climatecentral.org) featuring The Weather Channel’s climatologist, Heidi Cullen. Any skeptic who actually wants to know what’s wrong with the standard deniers’ arguments can easily find out.

I provided all the above-mentioned references and more in a longer essay on climate-change skepticism that I wrote in June in response to requests for an explanation of the apparent continuing influence of deniers in the U.S. policy process, and from which I abstracted the op-ed I submitted to The Globe. The references wouldn’t fit within the op-ed word limit without losing too much else that I thought needed to be said.

Even more regrettably, I agreed to a further shortening of what I submitted by the editors at The Globe. I regret agreeing to it because it’s clear (from the responses I’m receiving) that the resulting omission of a sentence about the value of skepticism in science left the impression that I am unaware of the positive role that healthy skepticism has played in the scientific enterprise over the centuries. The omitted sentence was in the middle of a passage that in the original read as follows (omission italicized): All three factions are wrong, but the first is the worst. We should really call them “deniers” rather than “skeptics”, because they are giving the venerable tradition of skepticism a bad name. Their arguments, such as they are, suffer from two huge deficiencies.

As my original reference to “the venerable tradition of skepticism” indicates, I am in fact well aware of its valuable and indeed fundamental role in the practice of science. Skeptical views, clearly stated and soundly based, tend to promote healthy re-examination of premises, additional ways to test hypotheses and theories, and refinement of explanations and arguments. And it does happen from time to time – although less often than most casual observers suppose – that views initially held only by skeptics end up overturning and replacing what had been the “mainstream” view. Appreciation for this positive role of scientific skepticism, however, should not lead to uncritical embrace of the deplorable practices characterizing what much of has been masquerading as appropriate skepticism in the climate-science domain. These practices include refusal to acknowledge the existence of large bodies of relevant evidence (such as the proposition that there is no basis for implicating carbon dioxide in the global-average temperature increases observed over the past century); the relentless recycling of arguments in public forums that have long since been persuasively discredited in the scientific literature (such as the attribution of the observed global temperature trends to urban-heat island effects or artifacts of statistical method); the pernicious suggestion that not knowing everything about a phenomenon (such as the role of cloudiness in a warming world) is the same as knowing nothing about it; and the attribution of the views of thousands of members of the mainstream climate-science community to “mass hysteria” or deliberate propagation of a “hoax”.
Feb 16th 2012 21:44