I listened to the program and thought you did an excellent job.  Two minor criticisms, at the beginning when you were talking about paleoclimate you buried your lede, taking a long time to build up to the conclusion about how greenhouse gases affect climate.  Second, when you hit the nutter at the end you might have said something about your opinion being based on physics.  On the whole excellent, but I fear you will now have the problem of champion fighters, with every drunk in the bar thinking that he can take you.

Hi Andrew:  I listened to your debate (or lack of) and thought you came across very well.  However I am not sure I agree with your point "It also drove home just how useless these kinds of "debates" really are."

A couple of years ago I would have agreed with this, but I have seen too much in the way of politics happening in both the US and Canada.  I think that the majority of the people don't consider the science behind climate change.  They feel that there is a debate and that each side has points - albeit the side supporting probably AGW has more.

Debates like this show that how strong the science is.  True you will never convince all the people, but you don't need to.  Your target is the large group who will quietly watch.  They are the ones who will influence policy in the future.

Regards,
John

   Andrew, it is never useless!!  The lurkers and listeners outnumber the skeptics, and they are your true audience.

   It was only when people who believe in science and rational thought gave up the debates that the creationists and anti-science folks began to make real headway.

   There is probably nothing more crucial you could be doing!!  Thanks from all of us for carrying the ball!

patrick in Beijing

I hope there were people listening that took something away from it. Personally I admire you for the civility and patience. I do feel for Eric though. He's got a real bunch on his blog... Talk about paranoid cranks...

I'd like to echo the thanks to Andrew for attempting this debate. I do find it useful, for me at least, to gage how the public perceives this issue. I really believe that the caller who graciously volunteered to be the counterpoint after Ball went MIA is like a lot of people in this country. They don't claim to be scientists but they truly believe, based on what they see in the media, that there is a lot of disagreement in the scientific community over climate change. As we've heard many times before...this stems from the idea that the media is is selling a product. And a debate is much more of a hot seller than a non-debate. Thus, there is this huge disconnection between what the scientific community actually knows about the issue and what the greater public believes the scientific community knows about the issue. In the media, the skeptic arguments exist in an echo chamber and a few loud-mouth skeptic scientists can seem like a whole army to the unsuspecting citizen.

The last caller was also frustrating to listen to. I really didn't understand his point about creating a null hypothesis of "There is a global climate". How do you put numbers to that and test it in a statistically meaningful way? He mentioned correlating nearby climate data to create test the idea of a regional climate but not finding significant correlation between all of the global weather stations wouldn't mean that a global climate doesn't exist. Surely, if you had a large spatial collection of paleoclimate data, you could correlate measurements over geological time during glacials and interglacials. But I still wouldn't know how to phrase that null hypothesis.

I really started to get annoyed when he started with the whole semantic issue of "What is truth" and the argument that nobody should ever utter the word scientific consensus. Andrew, your cancer example was excellent but we never got to hear the caller respond to it. Bottom line: scientific consensus is absolutely essential in a rational society where scientific knowledge influences policy-makers who are not scientists themselves. This scientific knowledge is not the same as absolute truth as the caller wishes it could be but it is (like Andrew said) the best we have to work with.

I have to assume that early caller's the proprieter of Dr Dave's TruthBlog, Dr. Dave's RadioBlog, Dr. Dave's Techblog, Soldiercentric, i.e. Dave Mason - he never says what he's a doctor of, just calls himself dr dave.

I would say if that's him, then assuming he's a phd in something besides business or economics or what have you, then there was a debate. it's just that dr dave's side sucks eggs, and he's too ignorant even to make their strongest case. both his truth blog and his tech blog are foam-at-the-mouth right-wing screed-blogs, and he gives no evidence of understanding a science of any kind, let alone climate science. recommended (esp. the truth blog, which obsesses on global warming) because it'd be great for the next show to have him call in and be called to account for his pseudoscience.

Glad you have finally come around to the fact that these debates are a waste of time, my thoughts exactly.  The AGW advocates and activists will never move and the skeptics are the same, with the same old, tired talking points on both sides unaccepted by the other. Since it is really politics that's no surprise, except that you thought it otherwise.  However, as with the NPR debate, which the skeptics won easily, the public still knows there is controversy over the cause of climate change. And thus the "what do we do about it" remains mired in the uncertainty of the cause and thus the probability the "solutions" will work.  

I am fine with moving the discussion and debate to what we do about "it".  In that one political realities and economic sanity will succeed where these debates with believers vs. skeptics may fail.  That is a good thing, and as the cooling and natural forces emerge once again to show themselves more powerful than AGW believers, things will again become more rational and less religious/political on the science of climate change.