Climate Skepticism
2020-11-01
For decades a debate has occurred about what, if anything, is happening to the climate. Tens of thousands of studies, papers, reviews, and replications have been funded by governments across the world, and the unanimous conclusion is that it’s a runaway greenhouse effect causing the earth’s surface to cool more slowly than it used to, leading to slightly hotter global temperatures.
But that’s not convincing to a lot of people. In fact, most of the world’s people don’t buy it. Belief in manmade climate change is nearly-exclusively a western phenomenon.
I want to point out a constellation of things that (quite rightly) make people skeptical about it. Frankly, if you’ve never been skeptical about it, you probably know extremely little about it; and can probably not speak very well to a skeptic about their concerns. To someone who believes in climate change, it probably seems that skeptics should come to believers to receive information. To skeptics, believers are the ones who are avoiding questions and not coming to skeptics to receive information.
Consider this a believer’s guide to skepticism.
Points
Before starting, we have to acknowledge that most opinions on climate change pivot around "points". Generally, folks don’t have a holistic view of a situation like this, and are instead convinced by a couple things that really resonate with them. A believer might perk up when told that sea levels are allegedly going to rise, or a skeptic might be turned off when someone asserts solar power is allegedly going to save us. It’s rarely a fully fleshed-out opinion, and everyone who talks about it is very bad at addressing each other’s concerns.
There are as many ignorant believers as ignorant skeptics - if you subscribe to "I Fucking Love Science" or the NYTimes, you are extremely unlikely to have done a literature review in the way a well-read skeptic has. Conversely, if you nod along to something on FOX news, it’s unlikely that you’ve got anything more to go on than scattered anecdotes about data inconsistencies.
So let’s go through points that cast sincere doubt on the belief that manmade climate change is real.
Predictions
The predictions made by climate scientists are consistently awful, and not much better than a coinflip.
Global warming has a history of predicting that the Earth will be rendered unliveable in a short time span, usually 50 years from the time of the announcement. This first happened in the 1960s, but in the 1970s the calls became more pronounced.
There is a very long history of how climate and weather modelling came to be. I highly recommend the IAP history. To boil it down, when global warming was first theorized, we had an extremely primitive understanding of the climate. After all, we were completely unaware of the existence of the jetstream until 1944, and in 1964 the people responsible for understanding the weather were saying we’d all be doomed by the year 2000. To use a folksy analogy, it would be like someone making a cake without knowing sugar exists. One of my favorite anecdotes is that we’re 70 years past the first prediction that "in 50 years" the earth would be uninhabitable, and there hasn’t been meaningful change to global temperatures.
The problem here is that modelers can only model what they know about. And the entire history of climate change can be summed up by "wait the model was wrong, what did we miss?" Followed by a new version of the model that adds in more variables, which is then also shown to be wrong, rinse and repeat. It doesn’t invalidate the foundational claims of climate science, but imagine if you’ve been told your entire life that the earth was headed for apocalyptic heating, and nothing at all happened. Isn’t the golden standard of science the ability to accurately predict future events, based on a solid theoretical understanding of the past observed evidence? How could you not be skeptical?
Data quality
The data we have is inconsistent in its accuracy and granularity, and only reliable starting in the last ~60 years, whereas we’re trying to discuss something on a geological timescale.
The usual next step is to ask why modellers get it so wrong. And an obvious problem is the data they’re using.
Climate science has two general sources of data - geological and direct measurements. Prior to the 1950s, there was virtually no reliable global temperature data. The best you could have was very coarse data scattered around by merchant ships and a few ground stations of some scientists. But the conditions they were kept, the precision that a tube of mercury being hand-recorded could reach, and even the intervals being recorded, were all variable. This means that we’ve got less than a century of reliable temperature data, and even less of reliable CO2-in-atmosphere data, and we’re trying to come up with grand predictions. Not a great plan.
The geological data, for better or worse, informs most of our understanding of the climate. There are semi-regular cycles, with generally agreed-on consensus on why they occur (although those predictions are harder to conclusively prove, since you’d have to sit around for another few hundred thousand years to see if you were right).
The two together paint a picture where recently the temperature and CO2 has started increasing wildly. Half our dataset doesn’t show it, it just shows historical patterns, and the other half is very new and we have no clear accurate baseline.
It doesn’t help that there are ever-present cases of climate data loggers being put into conditions that compromise the integrity of the data - such as an infamous case where loggers were placed directly onto a hot concrete surface, uncovered, outside, for months without anyone suggesting maybe this would show warmer temperatures than one nailed to a tree in the forest. This is such a common problem that organizations have popped up to audit and submit corrections to official weather researchers. The margin of error on most audited systems is enough to explain trends in warming.
While the data is massaged to correct for these errors in newer models, it’s not particularly comforting to a skeptic knowing that the people being paid to collect this data seem to have persistent issues doing so with accuracy. Especially not when there is such a large disjoint between the quality of the various sources.
Energy
The energy solutions proposed are unworkable for even our current electricity needs, and there is absolutely no plan or discussion for how to address the majority of fossil fuel usage.
Generally, "renewable" electricity is believed to be a balm for climate change. Replace natural gas power plants with solar panels or wind turbines, which do not burn hydrocarbons for energy, and less CO2 will end up in the atmosphere, arresting the trend of the problem.
This is great until we are reminded that electricity is only around ~25% of the global energy consumption, and "renewable" energy is only able to account for about 1% of that portion, or around ~.2% of the total energy consumption. Billions have been poured into these technologies, and .2% is all we get back?
For sake of argument we can assume the current predictions of climate science are accurate, and we must eliminate fossil fuel usage by as much as possible, it would seem imperative that we invent as many alternatives to current energy needs as possible. It is clear that container ships, airplanes, trains, and heavy industry are unable to use electricity as a form of energy - it is simply too heavy and expensive to cart that many batteries around. It is simply unworkable to try to make a 747 jet fly on electric power.
Ignoring that, why solar and wind for electricity? Nuclear fission is capable of powering all human activity for the next thousand years, even accounting for growth. If you wanted to make the entire grid green, could we not have taken those billions in subsidies and built reactors that we know are actually going to produce the electricity needed?
The measures being taken do not line up with the things being claimed. If we were truly facing an apocalyptic situation, solar and wind would not be considered for even an instant. How can this not make a person skeptical?
Petroleum
Energy is only one of a thousand uses for oil products. If we are to be concerned with reducing our carbon footprint, we must also consider the impacts of drawing down oil production, and come up with an answer for petroleum products that we would no longer be able to produce.
While full lists of petroleum products would take many pages, a few classes of them should illustrate the problem. plastics, synthetic fibers (nylon), synthetic rubbers, waxes, paints, soap, lubricants/grease, and (again) plastics. These are huge categories of products that are absolutely essential for modern first-world life. It’s a fair bet that the vast majority of things you own contains petroleum products.
A skeptic, then, thinks about the section above (entitled "Energy") and how the proposed solutions don’t match the proposed problem - and then wonders how there isn’t even a conversation about replacing the constellation of petroleum products required for modern life. If we’re to eliminate fossil fuels as a product, surely it must be understood that these are heavily impacted too?
Funding
The funding for climate science has a clear incentive to find climate change to be real, and a souped-up threat. This biases who gets published, and what is communicated publicly.
At this point, a skeptic is going to look around for an explanation for why these points are not taken seriously by climate change believers. Why is the data quality not a huge public concern? Why are we still taking people at their word when they’ve been wrong in their predictions every time? Why do the solutions not match the proposed problems?
The most obvious issue is a conflict of interest. Let’s take a step back in history, and remember the tobacco lobby of the mid-20th century. Smoking was increasingly found to be deeply unhealthy, and a connection was being made the elevated rates of cancer. The tobacco companies paid for waves of studies claiming to find no negative health impacts from tobacco, and perhaps even discovered some benefits. The data found was shoddy, and the predictions incorrect. It was not a true scientific inquiry, its funders wanted it to say something specific.
These cases of perverted science are usually due to bad financial incentives. Scientists need to be paid, and the people paying them do it for a reason. That reason is not always blind altruism; it often has a motive.
A skeptic would notice that climate funding comes heavily from companies selling "solutions" (that would not address the issue), and governments which want to impose new taxes and expand their power. That doesn’t exonerate climate denial studies, which very clearly have an equal and opposite bias, but it does call into question the whole discussion. If the only people funding research have a vested interest in a specific outcome, can we trust that research?
Incentives
The solutions presented seem to align strongly with bad incentives for governments and corporations.
A government has a strong incentive to take more tax money from its people, and have its regulators control company actions. But on the same token, governments have all the incentive to keep other governments down by imposing rules on them.
China, for instance, is largely skeptical of climate change. On the ground, mainlanders are generally of the opinion that it’s a western hoax, used as a bludgeon to try to keep China - the world’s factory and rising superpower - down. Whenever someone talks about carbon emissions or renewable energy, China knows it’s the elephant in the room. By absolute numbers, China is the biggest contributor to every factor of climate change.
The government will make promises to be "carbon neutral" by some date or another, but China invests in hydroelectic and nuclear because it has vast untapped reserves of it - and knows that it needs the consistent and dense energy in order to compete. It would be a very different story if China needed to pay, say, Japan for its nuclear fuels.
A step back, a note on conviction
In a section above, it was written that;
most opinions on climate change pivot around "points"
This bears repeating. Skeptics and believers alike generally don’t understand each other’s points. Each has bulletproof answers to points that convinced others. You can see this in smug things like an XKCD which cites a study whose data granularity doesn’t allow comparison to modern warming, but XKCD does exactly that. Bulletproof answer in the mind of Munroe I’m sure, but underpinned by bad science to which skeptics also have a bulletproof answer.
This entire conversation is held in a deeply political fashion, which makes it extremely easy for each side to become convinced in their own way, and not see it as a conversation at all. Two people who disagree rarely come together to compare notes and figure out what’s going on.
Defense Mechanisms
My normal inclination at this point is to clarify that I, myself, am a believer - albeit one with a more honest streak who acknowledges that there’s rather a lot of bad science and incentives that go into climatology these days.
But let’s linger on why I’d want to say such a thing. If i were explaining why some think tau is a better constant than pi, nobody would view me as a tau apologist if i didn’t include a few cult-like sentences about how I actually love pi.
If you at any point questioned the motives of me writing this, please recognize that your instinct to do so is a defense mechanism. It was clearly outlined at the beginning that I’m trying to help believers understand skeptics, to better engage with each other and bridge the gaps. This is a handbook to understanding the skeptic position. If you’re so allergic to genuinely understanding someone else, that bears more inspection than the others’ beliefs.
