The phrase “the consensus” is slippery as there is a large gap between what the science tells us and what is claimed about it in third-hand accounts—even large, well-funded, and well-intentioned summaries of summaries. As we go from published scientific papers to what’s in the IPCC main report to what’s in the IPCC “Summary for Policymakers” to what’s in the press release that accompanies it to what’s in the news articles written from that press release, at each step the level of doom-mongering increases and the amount of visible uncertainty decreases.
The phrase “AGW” is slippery too. Nobody denies that humans do some things that have the effect of warming the planet. For instance, we pave roads and build cities and cut down forests. It’s very hard to word a survey such that it excludes that sort of thing from the measured percentage of scientists who “think humans are warming the planet” and the people taking such surveys have little incentive to try. So attempts to quantify consensus tend to end up with large meaningless numbers. There is a fair amount of dissent within the IPCC—some of the scientists whose work formed a basis for it disagreed with the conclusions thereby generated—Chris Landsea would be a notable example—but the main problem is that the case presented within the IPCC reports isn’t particularly alarming. To become alarmed, to think that AGW is urgent rather than simply interesting and probably worth further study to confirm and understand better, is to go beyond even what “the consensus” actually supports.
So AGW skepticism can be considered well-founded if one defines the terms carefully enough. Nonetheless, I don’t think AGW is something one can reasonably assume everyone here has “seen the folly of”. I’m sure some here have a worldview that renders the whole prospect dubious but I doubt many are followers of ClimateAudit and RealClimate or have even read the IPCC reports. Reflexive climate skepticism is common; informed climate skepticism is rare.
at each step the level of doom-mongering increases and the amount of visible uncertainty decreases.
Ordinarily that would be true, but in this case I don’t think it is. At the IRC meetup yesterday, we played a variant of Paranoid Debating where in addition to Red players who try to make the spokesman give the wrong answer, there was also a hidden, randomized time limit and a Deadlocker, whose goal was to make the spokesman miss the deadline (in which case the round ends and everyone else loses).
The climate debate includes deadlockers, and their strategy is to increase the perceived uncertainty.
@jimrandomh, I think what glenra is saying is very much true, even in the formal IPCC report itself. Different coalitions wrote the technical report, the summary and the press release, and each coalition was more politicized than the previous, and had less room for nuance. The technical report had a lot of detail and room for a lot of caveats, graphs showing the limitations of the models and presented alternative views. The summary left out the most optimistic possibilities, and focused attention on nearly the scariest of the possibilities, though these didn’t have the bulk of the probability-mass according to the main report. And of course the press release was designed to attract attention, rather than to illuminate the subject, but that’s the role of a press release.
I agree that there are deadlockers in the larger debate, but you may not have realized that politics and the majoritarian viewpoint had so much control over the official report.
The phrase “the consensus” is slippery as there is a large gap between what the science tells us and what is claimed about it in third-hand accounts—even large, well-funded, and well-intentioned summaries of summaries. As we go from published scientific papers to what’s in the IPCC main report to what’s in the IPCC “Summary for Policymakers” to what’s in the press release that accompanies it to what’s in the news articles written from that press release, at each step the level of doom-mongering increases and the amount of visible uncertainty decreases.
The phrase “AGW” is slippery too. Nobody denies that humans do some things that have the effect of warming the planet. For instance, we pave roads and build cities and cut down forests. It’s very hard to word a survey such that it excludes that sort of thing from the measured percentage of scientists who “think humans are warming the planet” and the people taking such surveys have little incentive to try. So attempts to quantify consensus tend to end up with large meaningless numbers. There is a fair amount of dissent within the IPCC—some of the scientists whose work formed a basis for it disagreed with the conclusions thereby generated—Chris Landsea would be a notable example—but the main problem is that the case presented within the IPCC reports isn’t particularly alarming. To become alarmed, to think that AGW is urgent rather than simply interesting and probably worth further study to confirm and understand better, is to go beyond even what “the consensus” actually supports.
So AGW skepticism can be considered well-founded if one defines the terms carefully enough. Nonetheless, I don’t think AGW is something one can reasonably assume everyone here has “seen the folly of”. I’m sure some here have a worldview that renders the whole prospect dubious but I doubt many are followers of ClimateAudit and RealClimate or have even read the IPCC reports. Reflexive climate skepticism is common; informed climate skepticism is rare.
Ordinarily that would be true, but in this case I don’t think it is. At the IRC meetup yesterday, we played a variant of Paranoid Debating where in addition to Red players who try to make the spokesman give the wrong answer, there was also a hidden, randomized time limit and a Deadlocker, whose goal was to make the spokesman miss the deadline (in which case the round ends and everyone else loses).
The climate debate includes deadlockers, and their strategy is to increase the perceived uncertainty.
@jimrandomh, I think what glenra is saying is very much true, even in the formal IPCC report itself. Different coalitions wrote the technical report, the summary and the press release, and each coalition was more politicized than the previous, and had less room for nuance. The technical report had a lot of detail and room for a lot of caveats, graphs showing the limitations of the models and presented alternative views. The summary left out the most optimistic possibilities, and focused attention on nearly the scariest of the possibilities, though these didn’t have the bulk of the probability-mass according to the main report. And of course the press release was designed to attract attention, rather than to illuminate the subject, but that’s the role of a press release.
I agree that there are deadlockers in the larger debate, but you may not have realized that politics and the majoritarian viewpoint had so much control over the official report.
I’m not a climate scientist.