Show Me The Evidence: Juggling Climate pseudo-skepticism and 'Wind Turbine Syndrome'

Last Friday, the IPCC report on climate change was released. George Monbiot of The Guardian describes it neatly:

"It's perhaps the biggest and most rigorous process of peer review conducted in any scientific field, at any point in human history."

The report is conclusive, and unnerving. For a good summary, try Graham Readfearn's article, 'IPCC climate change report by numbers', or The Guardian's interactive infographic.

If we keep injecting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the Earth will continue to warm - the Earth being our domicile, that small rock, covered by a  concerningly thin film of liquid and gases, hurtling hastily through space. We ought to try pretty hard not to screw it up.

Earth is our only home, and it's worth keeping it liveable.
An updated image of Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, taken from Cassini spacecraft from underneath the rings of Saturn 

Typically, we listen to experts, particularly when they're telling us about imminent danger. Yet, climate scientists have been burdened with an effective, angry and motivated crowd of climate 'skeptics' - fuelled by talented pseudoscience communicators like Joanne Nova and Andrew Bolt. They derail public confidence in the science of climate change by convincing people to demand 'evidence' that climate change is real. An excerpt from Nova's 'Skeptics Handbook' - a handy PDF guide to haranguing 'warmists':

The concept that actual scientists should be the ones engaging in scientific discussions is classified by Nova as the sacred ramblings of 'religious dogmatists'. Nova masks her arrogant dismissal of scientific expertise as distate for an 'appeal to authority'.

Through this fallacy, the discourse around climate shifts from those with the necessary expertise to understand and interpret the data to a large number of unqualified nom-experts. 

Climate' skeptics' have kept this force constant, and it's easy to see it happening on social media, like Twitter (immune to my attempts at sarcastic distraction):

@ArghJoshi @NASA Mate: what warming? Seriously. Science and all that. You remember science?
— Derek Sorensen (@th3Derek) August 27, 2013

@ArghJoshi Negative, KJ. I'm asking you to show me one thing which will prove your AGW religion.
— Derek Sorensen (@th3Derek) August 28, 2013

Idiot of the week to van Onselen, who wouldn't have a clue about science if it hit him. Clue Peter, science is about data, not a vote!
— Dennis Jensen MP (@DennisJensenMP) September 15, 2013

The logical fallacy of equating expert consensus with a deference to 'authority' is frequently and unashamedly deployed by climate change 'skeptics', and they're rarely called out on this sly maneuver. They seem blissfully comfortable with the cognitive dissonance spawned by their assertion that thousands of climate scientists have reached their conclusions falsely, and that a small number of non-experts have avoided these falsehoods through their true dedication to evidence:

@ArghJoshi @GlenSpeering Perhaps you should ask them. Too much reliance on models and climate sensitivity, methinks.
— Dennis Jensen MP (@DennisJensenMP) September 23, 2013

It's fairly obvious that their demands for evidence are tactical, rather than sincere. That it's literally written in a handbook, described as 'strategies and tools' should make this pretty clear. But this always hits home when I see climate 'skeptics' attempting to engage with the issue of 'wind turbine syndrome' - a brilliant example of a phenomenon that is assumed to be true by opponents of wind farms and climate 'skeptics' alike, despite there being a complete lack of evidence for its existence. The 'Galileo Movement', one of Australia's key climate 'skeptic' groups, makes this pretty clear on their Twitter feed:

Climate 'skeptic' site 'Watts Up With That' featured a post on the Portugese study mentioned by the Galileo Movement. This study reportedly shows that wind turbine vibrations cause deformities in foals. How do we know the wind turbines are responsible? The author, Ric Werne, explains the science:

"The wind turbines are obvious prime suspect, they were built nearby" 

Obviously. The problems with the study are outlined on this forum, and quite a few of the commenters on the original post, to their credit, took issue with Werne's adoption of the cause.

The difference between attitudes to the science of climate change, and the pseudoscience of 'wind turbine syndrome', are telling. The scripted demands for evidence simmer to the background, when a potential shortcoming of renewable energy peek temptingly over the horizon.

James Delingpole, one of Britain's most prominent climate change 'skeptics', bears no embarrassment in compartmentalising his approach to the two issues:

And Fox News demonstrated this dualistic, 'skepticism'-pseudoscience combination in the most comical, contradictory and utterly memorable way, last year:

Can't beat Fox News for instances of Poe's Law. 

Selective skepticism isn't limited to climate change 'skeptics' - it happens on both sides of politics, and isn't a function of your level of education. As described by social scientist and lawyer Don Braman, part of the Cultural Cognition project at Yale:

"It doesn't matter whether you show them negative or positive information, they reject the information that is contrary to what they would like to believe, and they glom onto the positive information"

Climate 'skeptics' angrily rejecting the scientific consensus behind climate change, but happily accepting the outlandish claims of wind farm opponents, seems to be a great example of this. Not all climate 'skeptics' are wind farm opponents, and not all wind farm opponents are climate 'skeptics', but the region in which those two groups overlap is a truly fascinating case study into how we filter evidence according to our respective worldviews.

Most importantly, it's a reminder that the public debate about climate change ought to be considered for what it is: fatally compromised by the rarely-acknowledged flaws in our cognition. What we ought to turn to is the discussion conducted by experts, in fields that are embedded with controls (like, peer-review) that control for the flaws that so ubiquitously infest the public discussion.

It's called science, and if we care anything for the acceptance of evidence and the rejection of arrogance and hubris, then we'd do well to pay close attention to the content of the IPCC's latest report.

Via XKCD

Saving the Climate Commission's Resources

Update - The Climate Commission has been reborn as the crowd-funded 'Climate Council' - be sure to donate! They're already raised nearly $1,000,000. 
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Creating a disconnect between the views of scientific experts and the understanding of the general public is quite likely to make the world a significantly shittier place.

An unambiguous effort to widen this disconnected, with respect to climate science, has been Tony Abbott's recent move to scrap the Climate Commission, a body aimed at providing apolitical, scientific information on climate change to the public. From the Climate Commission's website:

"The Climate Commission was established to provide all Australians with an independent and reliable source of information about: the science of climate change, the international action being taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and the economics of a carbon price."

If one really were to believe that the science of climate change is 'crap', axing any body that links the public to the views of scientific experts seems a logical way of preserving that belief.

Tim Flannery, Chief Commissioner of the Climate Commission, bore the brunt of criticism spawned from the climate skeptic movement

The news is sad, expected but most certainly not all doom and gloom. The CSIRO, universities and yet-to-be imagined groups communicating climate science could fill the gap, and perhaps exceed the capabilities of the Climate Commission. There's already a petition to create a 'citizen-funded' climate commission, here.

Meanwhile, the excellent resources made available on the Climate Commission website are still up, but it's unlikely they will be for long. The site is archived on The Wayback Machine, and on Pandora. I also downloaded a copy of the entire website - click here to grab a copy of the 229 megabyte zip file, which you can extract and browse offline at your leisure.

The Climate Commissions Youtube videos might not last long either, but they can't really be archived using services like Pandora or Wayback. So, I grabbed copies of the videos and uploaded them to a new channel, along with copies of the descriptions for the more popular videos (I disabled comments, because, 'why not tell louis armstrong to his face').

Without a strong connection to the view of actual climate scientists, the public will continue to accept the illusion of debate - a 'Manufactroversy' of serious consequence. This video explains why rejecting the view of a large number of experts on a particular science, whilst accepting the views of scientists in other fields, is relatively silly:



And here's the entire channel:

The Minister for Climate Denial

Something caught my eye last night, whilst I splashed casually through the babbling brook of 140 character twitter snippets on my phone:

If Abbott looking for replacement for Sophie Mirabella, @DennisJensenMP tells ABC24 he can "pick me" because he's a scientist #ausvotes
— Phillip Hudson (@PhillipMHudson) September 11, 2013

At the time of writing, Sophie Mirabella is in danger of losing her seat in Indi, faced with a formidable campaign by independent Cathy McGowan. In 2009 Mirabella was appointed as the Shadow Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research. Even if Mirabella wins her seat, she's unlikely to retain the Industry portfolio. Avowed climate skeptic Dennis Jensen, an MP with a PhD in ceramics, calmly raised his hand.

Dennis Jensen (left) attend the 2011 anti-carbon tax rally, featuring crude, sexist placards. Image source: Dennisjensen.com.au 

The concept of a science minister who rejects the science of climate change inspires the same nervous discomfort I'm sure many Americans felt when proponents of Intelligent Design began to gain a foothold in the American education system. In 2009, Jensen invoked Adolf Hitler when trying to support his view that anthropogenic global warming is utterly non-existent:

``Albert Einstein was very much criticised by Hitler, and Hitler actually had a group of 100 top scientists in Germany write a book called 100 scientists against Einstein,''. ``Einstein was asked: `Doesn't it bother you Dr Einstein that you've got so many scientists against you?'. And he said: `It doesn't take 100 scientists to prove me wrong, it takes a single fact'.''

Jensen's propensity for equating himself with supremely intelligent scientists put him in obvious good stead with the Galileo Movement, a climate skeptic group even Andrew Bolt distances himself from, (due to his concerns around their professed fear of 'Jewish banking families', something the Galileo Movement strenuously denies):

Last year, Delingpole classified Australia's wind energy industry as a paedophile ring, and called for the 'metaphorical' execution of those that accept climate science. In addition to his seeming endorsement of Delingpole's robotic but vile rhetoric, his stance as a climate change skeptic acts as a beacon to incoherent conspiracy theorists:

Worse than the buzzing cloud of grammatically-challenged hyper-sensitive conspiracy theorists is Jensen's own rejection of the existence of a scientific consensus among experts in the field:

A team led by John Cook and Dana Nuticelli examined 11,644 abstracts, and found the following:

"Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors' self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research."

The outright rejection of climate science is becoming less feasible every day. Maintaining that rejection in the face of mountains of evidence necessitates a weird treadmill of relentless conspiratorial narrative, and repetitive lines about a 'global warming pause' - easily debunked, but also easily spread when jettisoned in the passionate, emotional network of climate skeptics.

Instead of cherry-picking data or provoking stoushes on social media, the great pseudoscience communicators of our time simply work through analogy - Delingpole's execution metaphors, or the violent imagery of anonymous anti-wind blogs.

In Jensen's eyes, he's the modern day analogue of Albert Einstein, and every single scientist and scientific institution that supports climate science is equivalent to a genocidal dictator, suppressing the cold, hard truth of climate denial. Jensen explains the discrepancy between his own belief and hundreds of scientific institutions around the world through this analogy. Consequently, he can discard the possibility that climate scientists might know more about climate science than himself.

Draping violent analogy and repetitive myth over established scientific opinion is not an attitude one would want in the individual charged with steering the great ship of Australian science. No dictator has created a conspiracy to turn climate scientists against the deniers. In reality, their findings are the outcome of incomprehensible hours of hard work - huge quantities of time and effort devoted to efforts that likely won't result in glory - thanks to climate skeptics, publishing work as a climate scientist is now more likely to result in threats of physical harm.

Brian Schmidt, Laureate Fellow and Distinguished Professor at The Australian National University's Mount Stromlo Observatory and recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, sums up the issue succinctly.

It continues to be a tough year for those of us who like to discuss policy with science Ministers #indivotes
— Brian Schmidt (@cosmicpinot) September 11, 2013

Indeed. I certainly hope it gets better.