mood: warm music: The Album Leaf - Shine

(or, ha! Get it? That was a play on words. Because...we're talking about global warming? Get it?)

In the early part of the 21st century, a vocal group of people began to question the circumstances behind what some considered to be one of the defining disasters of the times. This small but outspoken crowd began to discover problems with the reports coming in from the various research groups and independent investigators - something wasn't adding up. They claimed they wanted only to find the truth - a disaster creating destruction on this scale required nothing less. They even released films highlighting some of the problems with the "official reports". To them, a disturbing trend was emerging as they looked at the evidence - one of massive conspiracy by the government, with the end result being to curtail our liberties and advance anti-American ideals.

The problem is that their claims rely on little more than innuendo, unverifiable evidence, and hearsay. Their claims aren't just controversial - they're laughable. Are we talking about the people who claim that September 11th was in inside job? Nope. We're talking about global warming "skeptics".

Climate science has turned from an obscure academic discipline to the center stage of a raging worldwide dispute over facts and figures, which I seriously doubt climate scientists were going for. It's also become an oddly polarizing topic among people who generally accept science and evidence-based conclusions. I'll delve into that particular topic a little bit later, but for now, let's talk about the scientific method and why you're not qualified to disagree with climate scientists.

Science is Real

Science is not a corporation. It is not a state. It is not a giant book filled with the collected knowledge of everyone, everywhere. It is a process. It is the process by which data is observed, collected, analyzed, and acted upon. It's something you do. It's a verb. And it's never focused in just one area.

For instance, the Hubble Space Telescope is a marvelous feat of mechanical and optical engineering. One of the most beautiful pictures it ever took also happens to be one of its most famous: the grandly-named "Pillars of Creation".

This picture is breathtaking, in scope and color and grandeur. But for all of Hubble's technological sophistication and amounts of incredibly important and beautiful data it sends back, is it the end-all-be-all of interstellar knowledge gathering? Of course not.

We know better than to put all of our observational eggs into one low Earth orbit basket. (I might have just stretched that metaphor a bit.) The Hubble is amazing, but it can't land on the surface of other worlds and sample the soil. It can't fly by Saturn and discover a giant hexagonal cloud pattern around the north pole. It can't fly human beings to the moon and set them down on a barren yet hauntingly beautiful landscape. It's an important tool, but it's not the only tool. It's not made to operate outside of its design parameters.

And so it is with all of science - and especially a science as highly scrutinized as global climate studies.

Nobody who has anything worthwhile to claim about a system and large and complex as the Earth is basing his claims on a single data point. And no expert is. The evidence comes from multiple sources. And most of the time when I hear someone picking on AGW as a whole, they are attacking a misunderstanding - or, more often, an extreme over-simplification - of one particular data set. Take, for instance, the so-called tree rings divergence problem.

Here's the idea: scientists use tree rings as one of (many) methods to reconstruct climate conditions of the past 2,000 years. Traditionally, they've looked at tree ring width and density, preferably from trees at the very edge of their comfort zone as an indicator of temperature. The temperature signal will be strongest in trees living in extreme environments where cold is a major factor limiting growth. Trees grow more when it's warmer, and less when it's cold. But in recent decades some - although not all trees have stopped responding positively to higher temperatures. How do we know? For the past 150 years, we've been measuring the temperatures directly with various instruments. And trees seem to follow the temperature levels, growing more during warm years and less during cold - until around 50 years ago. Then, even as our direct measurements continued to register rising temperatures, some trees starting growing less.

Now, if you were tree ring growth as your only temperature data set, you'd conclude - wrongly - that temperatures were falling when, in fact, they were rising. That's why scientists sometimes omit tree-ring data from recent decades in favor of more accurate instrumental data.

There are several theories about why this is happening, and they're not mutually exclusive. But here's the key point: for more than 100 years, tree rings and instrumental data track each other closely. They only diverge during the last 20 years. And it's further worth noting that this isn't some new, controversial problem that scientists are working hard to cover up. It's been discussed in scientific literature since the mid-1990s. And it doesn't invalidate using tree ring proxies as a whole - the problem is generally restricted to trees from high, northern latitudes. The phenomenon has been studied, and shown to be limited to certain known areas. Tree ring proxies, once you account for divergence, are reliable at least back to the Medieval Warm Period.

My point is that this is how science is done - it's not a single set of data thrown onto a pretty pie chart to show that the world is getting warmer. It's a process - hundreds of years in the making and still being refined. And corollary to this is that unless you've read the reports, pored over the data, and studied the effects of introducing greenhouse gasses into a dynamic system like a planet, you aren't qualified to call climate change scientists' claims bogus. You can question, and research, and ask questions. But may not outright reject the science unless you have solid evidence to back up your claims.

My understanding of the current state of global climate science is this: the earth has been, over the last century at least, on a trend toward a significantly warmer climate, and that the best (current) explanation we have for this is human forcing via CO2 and other greenhouse gas production. If this trend continues, there will probably be very significant unpleasant consequences - for everyone.

You Are Not Entitled To Your Own Scientific Facts

Facts are not opinions, and vice versa. What is most annoying about the AGW row is how many of the skeptics (I feel that this term unfairly co-opts the legitimate discipline of critical thinking, but I'm willing to tolerate it for this article) engage in non-skeptical arguments and downright logical fallacies when arguing about it. One of the primary arguments I hear from people who doubt the veracity of the current consensus on AGW comes in the form of what to do about it.

The skeptical community seems to be (and this is an over-simplification) made up of a lot of people on the liberal side of the fence, with a sizable minority being libertarians. And the libertarians tend to be the most outspoken about proposed measures to reduce carbon emissions. But this is looking at the wrong thing. Libertarians value free trade and personal liberty above all else, and as far as I can tell (and I could be wrong) much of their objection to the science of climate change is based on the unwanted side effects that curtailing AGW will have on free trade. Many have legitimate objections to programs like cap and trade and carbon credits. But those are ultimately political arguments. And while the politics (policies, proposed measures to help the problem) of global warming can't be completely separated from the science of global warming, to argue against the reality of it by pointing out problems with proposed fixes is a red herring.

This tendency was illustrated to an even greater degree during the recent "Climategate" scandal. I don't have much to say about this, other than two things that I think are extremely clear: the public's understanding of the science is climate change is abysmal and appears to be largely based on Fox News reports, and two, the CRU scientists were not following the rules of transparency and had developed a bunker mentality. The best evidence says that they were not engaged in deliberate fraud. They did not - although it was (sadly) discussed - destroy e-mail records. Further, an analysis of the e-mails shows that the hackers had targeted them by keyword, including "Yamal", "tree rings" and "Phil Jones" - and so the leaked e-mails comprise a very small sample size of the whole of the correspondence at the CRU.

So here's the thing: looking for truth is one thing, but when you find it, you have to accept it. Being overly-skeptical - or inconsistently skeptical - is counter-productive and foolish. Humans believe anecdotes. We want to believe anecdotes. We love to have "one-up" information on the masses. Or we place such a high value on the ideology of free trade and laze-faire economics and fear the consequences of acknowledging their effects on the planet so much that we turn a blind eye to the reality of the situation. We don't believe governments and scientists giving us peer-reviewed studies and papers. When people see things like Climategate or the tree-ring divergence problem, and immediately jump to the conclusion that these incidents confirm all of their most extreme opinions, they're not doing good science. They're confirming their damn biases.

The result of that is disastrous. Anomaly hunting and confirmation bias are not good arguments. Neither are ideological objections to proposed fixes. I still haven't heard a legitimate scientific argument from global warming deniers as to why I should reject the claim that global warming is happening and that is has a strong anthropogenic component. I am not impressed by political arguments, liberal conspiracy theories, or junk science. If you think I'm wrong - and I may be - then let's discuss the science. If you truly wish to wear the cloak of "Skeptic", then focus on that. My opinion can be changed.

Exit, stage left. Sparks