I wrote this quite ranty piece at a time when Senator Malcolm Roberts was receiving a stupid amount of media attention for his absurd climate change conspiracies. I can feel my blood pressure rise and my face redden just writing this. I did send it off somewhere to no avail …. so instead of working on it some more, I’ll just post it here and get it out of my system.
It also now seems so naively pre-Trump; back in those days before the US Secretary of State was the former head of Exxon Mobil and before a member of Trump’s team sent an survey asking for the names of Energy Department employees who had attended climate science conferences or before US based climate scientists began downloading climate data en masse for fear of not being able to access it in the future. I’d say God help us if I believed in God. Gaia help us perhaps.
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The latest foray by Senator Malcolm Roberts into public debate on climate change, accusing the CSIRO of lacking empirical evidence for the existence of climate change, is predictable but also infuriating. So long as these public discussions continue to be at least notionally about the science, the contrarians essentially win that round. Their marginal voice is amplified into being somehow equivalent to the accepted science and they achieve their desired confusion of the issue. It is so much easier to throw in some outrageous statement about the supposed climate change hoax and completely derail a discussion than it is to calmly consider the implications of a body of science that has been nearly a hundred years in the making.
If anyone thinks that as a layperson you can have an informed debate about the intricacies of climate science, I have a suggestion. Go to Google Scholar, type in “climate change” then limit the search to articles from 2016. What becomes immediately apparent is the huge volume of work currently underway in just about every field of human knowledge to understand climate change, what it means, what the impacts will be in just about every area of the physical and human world and what we might do about it. If, as the climate contrarians argue, climate science is wrong and the result of a grand hoax, then there are an astonishing number of presumably quite smart people from all fields of science who have been completely hoodwinked by the hoax.
My second suggestion is to click on one of the results. Choose one that is most obviously about the physical science of climate change. Read the abstract and if you can understand just that much of the paper well enough to meaningfully critique it, then your BSc was a whole lot more impressive than mine.
There seems to be a completely unrealistic expectation from the contrarians that climate science should be readily understood and able to be critiqued by the average keyboard warrior. If someone yelled into the void that the entire field of aeronautical engineering was a scam and a hoax perpetuated by the United Nations in order to create a New World Order who would listen? When it comes to climate science in Australia we do more than listen to these views, we elect the people that espouse them to parliament.
Anytime I’ve been unlucky enough to be stuck in a discussion with a climate contrarian I have asked for just one plausible explanation as to how the many thousands of climate scientists around the world working in this area have got it so wrong. Are they all under some mass delusion, or are they all completely incompetent, or are they all part of some vast conspiracy? Is there another area of science (that is not primarily funded by industry i.e. food and pharmaceuticals to pre-empt a possible response) where this kind of mass incompetence or delusion or conspiracy can be shown to exist? I’ve never received a remotely plausible explanation, just some vague assertion of confirmation bias and group think amongst scientists. As to how this small sub-group of scientists managed to convince every other major scientific organisation that their hoax is legitimate is also a mystery.
Our modern lives are based upon such complex fields of knowledge that the vast majority of us have to rely on the mediation of that information. In reality, most of us just don’t have the technical and scientific understanding to be able to meaningfully process or understand the primary research. We essentially need a synopsis and so we are forced to choose who to believe. In Australia, in regards to climate science, you can choose to believe the Bureau of Meteorology, the CSIRO and every relevant university department or you can believe the far right of the Liberal Party, and prominent contrarians like Jo Nova and now Malcolm Roberts.
Whatever is going on here is so clearly not about the science or about evidence or about being genuinely sceptical. The pitiful excuses for public debates need to move away from the science entirely. The tables should be turned on the people doing their best to obfuscate and confuse, all in the name of delaying urgent action on reducing carbon emissions.
Instead of arguing about the science, which for most of us, apart from the people actually doing the science, is like a blindfolded pillow fight, we should be asking the climate contrarian: “So on what basis do you find Jo Nova or Malcolm Roberts more trustworthy on climate change than the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO?”
Instead of trying to persuade a climate contrarian on the basis of scientific evidence, ask them to prove their claims. For example when someone like Malcolm Roberts claims (as he did on Q & A in April 2016) that the climate record data from NASA is corrupt we need to ask him how he knows that to be true. As Gavin Schmidt, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, pointed out at the time on Twitter, all of their data is publicly available and has been reviewed by numerous people, all showing the same trends.
While we are at it we could also ask climate contrarians why exactly they are so opposed to a risk management approach to climate change that would take the necessary action to decarbonise our economy and energy systems.
My hope is that our public debates begin to expose the contrarians’ claims for the absurd conspiracies they are, and that we stop wasting time on the spurious debates that are supposedly about climate science. There are more than enough genuine debates we need to have over how best to achieve the required transformation to a low carbon society and economy.