Lester Reales’s Recent Comments

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  The semantic shuffle

  While I think that the terminology that we use is pretty much irrelevant in the face of the evidence, perhaps we should ditch the term "consensus." It seems to be a convenient whipping boy for the pseudoskeptical community, in much the same way that evolution is criticized by creationist whack-jobs for being "just a theory."

  It's pretty rare to find a real consensus in science because scientists make their careers by coming up with new explanations for observed phenomena. The fact that there is such strong agreement among scientists on the issue of global warming is actually pretty striking. If someone had an theory that successfully explained the observed climate trends without including the effect of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, it would be groundbreaking, career-making work. The fact that there is a "consensus" on global warming is testament to the fact that there is no compelling reason to believe humans are not changing the climate.

  The contrarian scoffing at the "IPCC consensus," with the implication that it arose out of some kind of political arrangement (rather than decades of research) is just petty sophistry. New words will not change these people's minds, since moving the goalposts is their stock-in-trade. Every time one of the contrarian arguments is disproven, they move on to some even more unlikely claim (or they just keep using the old one and hope no one notices). It is the "god of the gaps" argument translated to atmospheric physics.

  Even though the purpose of adopting new terminology may be to frame one's argument in a way that the public is more likely to understand, I haven't seen many name-change proposals that sound better than what we have already. The ones that I saw on Andy Revkin's Dot Earth post certainly didn't seem (to me, at least) to be any more convincing than plain old "global warming" or "climate change." I hope that whatever word might be used to replace "consensus" would sound a bit less cloying than the suggestions there.

  David Nicholson and JonBoy, those who claim that global temperatures are currently decreasing are either being deliberately misleading, or they have zero understanding of what it takes to establish a statistically meaningful trend. The past 10 years of global temperature data are all within the expected range of variation for a continued warming trend, so there is no evidence for cooling. One good proposal for testing the hypothesis that global temperatures continue to increase over the coming decades (and distinguishing it from the hypothesis that temperatures are stable or declining) is on Tamino's blog, here. If those criteria are met (two years with average temperatures falling outside the 95% confidence limits of the 1975-present temperature trend), then I'll reconsider the idea that we are experiencing pervasive global warming. Would you concede that global warming is occurring if two years rise above the 95% confidence limits for a stable-or-declining temperature trend?

  -lessreal

  P.S. - I actually agree with you (D.N.) about the use of the word "denier." I believe that the terms "pseudoskeptic" and "climate contrarian" are much more descriptive. For those who continue to make claims that have repeatedly been proven false (and there are a lot of them out there, it seems), I reserve the term "disingenuous boob."On Climate science doesn't rely on a consensus of opinion posted 1 year, 8 months ago 16 Responses