Climate Change and The Decline of Reason

I want to start off by saying that I firmly believe that we need to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels and pump less crap into the air, as well as cut down fewer trees, throw less garbage into the oceans and be cleaner better people. I don't think that the Canadian Government is doing enough, nor do I think the liberals will do enough.

Now, onto my main point:

Since the release of the IPCC report last week I have seen a form of zealotry normally associated with middle eastern politics. Headlines in my local weekly papers have read that "The debate is Over," "Global Warming Verdict is In" "Climate Change is a Fact". [I wish I still had the papers and could cite them properly. Alas, they have been recycled] Generally the past week has seen normally rational people call for an end to any discussion, debate or conversation regarding the science of climate change. Appeals to the "consensus" of scientists and the credentials of an international panel have all been designed to halt the debate. I understand that the good intention behind these headlines is to prod those people who wish to go on with their polluting lives as they have for decades, but the result of these headlines is to ignore the very roots of our great Western Civilization.

Undeniable Global Warming (washingtonpost.com)

Many people have the impression that there is significant scientific disagreement about global climate change. It's time to lay that misapprehension to rest. There is a scientific consensus on the fact that Earth's climate is heating up and human activities are part of the reason. We need to stop repeating nonsense about the uncertainty of global warming and start talking seriously about the right approach to address it.

My concern is the decline in the willingness of rational people to permit debate, doubt and scepticism. The ideas of human caused climate change (HCCC) are considered to be so sacrosanct that I worry that should someone find evidence against it that it would go completely unnoticed. The concern within the scientific climate-change "community" is not with empirical fact, but with coming to a formulation scientific data that will be sufficient to force political change. In this way it bears greater resemblance to a lobby or a political-religious movement than a group of dispassionate observers of the natural world.

There seems to be a general trend against funding scientists that are sceptical of HCCC. Sceptics are not given a voice further stifling debate and other theories are not explored.

Leading scientific journals 'are censoring debate on global warming': Telegraph

Two of the world's leading scientific journals have come under fire from researchers for refusing to publish papers which challenge fashionable wisdom over global warming. A British authority on natural catastrophes who disputed whether
climatologists really agree that the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity, says his work was rejected by the American publication, Science, on the flimsiest of grounds.

The ideas of deniers are often given little credence and dismissed. Take the example of Dinner Table Donts, who is often very rational and conscious of what makes a good or bad argument. In this post he dismisses a statistical argument with a list of facts that may or may not point towards HCCC. He should know that the fact of a pine beetle infestation has no bearing whatsoever on what constitutes a significant statistical sample. In fact they are just more small samples and do not address the thrust of the sceptics argument.

Dinner Table Donts: Denying Climate Change

"Whatever age of the earth you pick, data collected on weather patterns in 100 years is almost entirely meaningless and cannot be used to predict future patterns." [Source]

Never mind the fact that entire forests in British Columbia are being destroyed by the pine beetle, a direct result of warmer winters. Or the fact that the polar caps are melting, resulting in the destruction of natural habitat.

It seems odd that in Western Civilization with our experience of Galileo, Inquisitions, and Darwin that we would be so willing to shut-down debate.

Moreover Western enlightenment and the edifice of science has been build upon the ideas of people like Rene Descartes

• The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt. (The Discourse on Method)
• Doubt is the origin of wisdom. (Principles of First Philosophy)

David Hume (from WikiQuote):

• A wise man's kingdom is his own breast: or, if he ever looks farther, it will only be to the judgment of a select few, who are free from prejudices, and capable of examining his work. Nothing indeed can be a stronger presumption of falsehood than the approbation of the multitude;
  
• In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.

John Stuart Mill

• If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. (On Liberty)
  

Headlines you may have heard (if you were around):

• 1970: "The Earth is Cooling: Prepare for an Ice Age"
  
• prior to 1610: "Scientific consensus: The Sun Orbits the Earth"
• Circa 360 BC: "Leading Scientist Says Women by Nature Inferior"
  

Is HCCC of the same magnitude as the issues above - maybe. I am sceptical of the arguments, the data and spin; however, I do not believe that nothing should be done about our emissions of CO2. On the contrary, but stifling debate, and silencing sceptics is not the way to go. Our great traditions of science and analytic thought are based on scepticism and doubt. It would be a shame to see those traditions thrown out with the bathwater in an attempt achieve the political points.

Some good places to start learning about what the sceptics are saying:

Wikipedia:

• Some Arguments by Sceptics
• List of Sceptics
  

Sourcewatch

The National Post

UPDATE: Here's a good headline: Climate Change - From “Inconvenient” to Incontrovertible

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