Jonathan Baxter :
@jquiggin

But putting that aside, there are fundamental differences between “AGW as defined by the IPCC” and the smoking:disease link that highlight why skepticism about the former is far more prevalent than the latter.
1) Despite literally decades of effort, the uncertainty in climate sensitivity has not narrowed appreciably. It is still 1.5C-4.5C. Contrast that with smoking: there is a huge body of empirical evidence supporting the link between smoking and all kinds of diseases.

This comparison you make is flawed. Just because they cannot predict the exact temperature rise, doesn’t mean that the earth wont heat up. Just like the science can’t predict how long in each individual case it will take until a smoker develops lung cancer, only that smoking causes cancer and various other diseases.

You say AGW can’t predict exactly the amount of heating and then say smoking has a causal link to cancer but no hard numbers and expect the two to equate…

What’s clear from our debate now is that there is indeed no difference between your views on global warming and on smoking. You’re on the anti-science side of both, and keen to make excuses for corporate shills while repeating their standard talking points.

How is that clear? I already agreed that smoking:disease is well established. All I did was point out that the Fraser Institute seems to be more of a libertarian anti-regulation group than paid-for tobacco industry shills.

Frankly, what is abundantly clear from this debate is that you will look for any excuse to smear someone who does not agree with you. Really quite disappointing from someone in your position.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3827/is_199906/ai_n8858099/

All the sources named are bought and paid for tobacco hacks, and the attack on the EPA (overturned by a higher court) was a disgraceful industry exercise in intimidation.

What’s clear from our debate now is that there is indeed no difference between your views on global warming and on smoking. You’re on the anti-science side of both, and keen to make excuses for corporate shills while repeating their standard talking points.

jquiggin :
The interesting point is that JB knows this and is also happy to assert that mainstream scientists are motivated by financial gain “a multi-billion dollar industry whose very existence depends on promoting alarm”

I am not asserting that mainstream scientists are motivated by financial gain. It is more subtle than that. Mainstream scientists do like to receive funding for their work, but not for personal financial gain. It helps to advance their research and their careers. Additionally, the global warming industry has spawned a vast army of hangers-on (bureaucrats, academics from non-climate-science fields, etc). A lot of those people would be out of a job if the alarm was found to be unjustified.

but wants to ignore the fact that, almost without exception, his preferred sources are demonstrably corrupt hacks.

My preferred sources are far more varied than you suggest. And even the ones you mention don’t pass muster as “corrupt hacks”. I took the trouble of looking up the “Fraser Institute”. Under “Controversy” Wikipedia has only the following line:

In 1999, the Fraser Institute was attacked by health professionals and scientists[citation needed] for sponsoring two conferences on the tobacco industry entitled “Junk Science, Junk Policy? Managing Risk and Regulation” and “Should government butt out? The pros and cons of tobacco regulation.”

And then the very next paragraph:

In 2004, the Institute published a Crime & Drug Policy paper suggesting the prohibition on marijuana cannot be sustained with the present technology of production and enforcement

Sounds more like an anti-regulation libertarian crowd than some tobacco industry shill. Same goes for the Heartland link provided by John Mashey, eg:

This would place the lifetime odds of dying from smoking at 6 to 1 (45 million smokers divided by 100,000 deaths per year x 75 years), rather than 3 to 1. However, about half (45 percent) of all smoking-related deaths occur at age 75 or higher. Calling these deaths “premature” is stretching common usage of the word. The odds of a life-long smoker dying prematurely of a smoking-related disease, then, are about 12 to 1.

You can dispute their definition of “premature death” but their reasoning is hardly controversial. Note that they are not claiming tobacco does not cause premature death, just that it has been exaggerated. And again, the whole tone is libertarian rather than anti-science (I don’t necessarily buy their argument. I am just trying to point out that demonizing groups like Fraser and Heartland as tobacco shills seems to be missing the message).

It is hard to argue that governments are not hypocritical with respect to tobacco. On the one hand we demonize smokers, while on the other they’re treated as revenue sources (disclosure: I am not and never have been a smoker). If it so harmful, why not ban it instead of taxing it?

And something else I have often wondered about: in this age of long retirement and expensive aged-care, do smokers really cost the state more than non-smokers? Seems to me someone dropping dead from lung cancer at age 70 is probably doing the state a favor. If true, that would pretty much neutralize the tax argument.

But, let us not forget:
George C. Marshall Insitute (Frederick Seitz)
SEPP (Fred Singer)

The Heartland Institute, which has tobacco as a top-level subject, along with Environment (Global Warming is a level down, despite Heartland’s conferences and list of “experts”.

Heartland is discussed by Sourcewatch:

‘The Institute sees its primary audience as “the nation’s 8,300 state and national elected officials and approximately 8,400 local government officials.”‘

Of Enting’s list of 11 greenhouse skeptics:

2 are deceased (Crichton, Daly)
3 (Jack Barrett, Ray Evans, Bob Foster) do not appear.
6 are on Heartland’s list (Bellamy, de Freitas, Lindzen, Lomborg, Plimer, Kininmonth)

Heartland has a pretty good list (about 115 of the ~250 or so I’ve got in a spreadsheet vs afffiliations, with numerous examples for various taxonomies.

Actually, the parallel is exact. As with global warming, the science on smoking threatened large and powerful economic corporations and other vested interests. And as with global warming, those interests recruited publicists, ideologists and corruptible scientists to push their views. Finally, and I speak from personal experience here, anyone who advocates mainstream science on smoking is likely to be attacked as a tool of the health lobby, Big Pharma and so on.

In fact, it’s not just a parallel. As can easily be checked, the same people and institutions on whom sceptics like JB rely for their info on global warming learned their trade working for the tobacco industry. For example, Ross McKitrick, the definitive critic of the hockey stick, is a Senior Fellow of the Fraser Institute, which has repeatedly attacked scientific research on smoking, using the Steve Milloy (ex-Cato, now Fox and CEI) line of “junk science”. His co-author Pat Michaels works for Cato, which is similarly part of the tobacco machine. The lines of attack used by the three M’s are precisely those they learned from their association with the tobacco lobby.

The interesting point is that JB knows this and is also happy to assert that mainstream scientists are motivated by financial gain “a multi-billion dollar industry whose very existence depends on promoting alarm” (without any evidence showing that scientists gain any benefit from researching climate change rather than some other topic, or from reaching particular conclusions if they do), but wants to ignore the fact that, almost without exception, his preferred sources are demonstrably corrupt hacks.

John Mashey :
BTW: I just finished Ian Enting’s nice book “Twisted – The distorted mathematics of greenhouse denial” (2007). Sections 2,4, 2.5, and parts of others are germane to this thread.

I checked out the chapter headings you linked to (I am not going to order it – why can’t people make these things available as ebooks?). He seems to mostly attack the more extreme skeptical positions. But two can play that game: should we characterize climate science by the more extreme alarmist positions?

Chapter 7 is more germane to this thread:

7 The risks
Is the IPCC underestimating the risks ahead?

7.1 Feedbacks The issues where there is real scientific
debate.

7.2 Complexity and climate Some aspects of climate
change are hard. Some are easy enough that as early
as 1896, Arrhenius could predict a 5 degree Celsius
warming from doubling CO2.

7.3 Feedbacks in action Some of the data behind
analysis of feedbacks, including the correlations
between temperature and greenhouse gases in the
Vostok ice core. Why criticism of Al Gore’s use of these
data misses their true significance.

7.4 What is alarmist? The distortions do not all come
from one side – an attempt to ‘hose down’ some of the
wilder claims about climate change.

He likes to quote Richard Feynmann: “. . . reality must take
precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be
fooled”. I couldn’t agree more. Were he alive today, I doubt Richard Feynmann would have been much of a fan of modern climate science.

the interpretation of AGW as defined by the IPCC is the obvious one to discuss.

Except that it is not the one most often discussed in public. What gets the most attention is headline-grabbing alarmist claims.

But putting that aside, there are fundamental differences between “AGW as defined by the IPCC” and the smoking:disease link that highlight why skepticism about the former is far more prevalent than the latter.

1) Despite literally decades of effort, the uncertainty in climate sensitivity has not narrowed appreciably. It is still 1.5C-4.5C. Contrast that with smoking: there is a huge body of empirical evidence supporting the link between smoking and all kinds of diseases.

2) The same climate models that are unable to narrow down climate sensitivity are used to project future temperature increases. If they can’t agree on climate sensitivity what confidence should we place in their predictions? Again, for smoking the link is clear, well-documented, and well-tested. If you smoke, we can predict very accurately how much more likely it is that you will die young as a result. Try asking for a smoker vs. non-smoker term life-insurance quote. You can use the difference to reverse-engineer the difference in life-expectancy. (OT, this exercise can be fun even if you are not a smoker. I already have term life insurance, but I get a requote every few years so I can work out how much my life expectancy has decreased. You’d expect one year for each additional year lived, but it is usually less than that due to medical advances).

3) The smoking:disease question did not spawn a multi-billion dollar industry whose very existence depends on promoting alarm.

4) One of the iconic claims of the IPCC – that temperatures in the latter half of the 20th century exceeded anything for at least the last millennium – does not stand up to close scrutiny. (the claim may be true but the methods used to establish it do not achieve their goal). Yet the IPCC continues to back that claim. I know of no similar case in the smoking:disease debate where medical researchers stood behind false claims for so long.

I could go on, but in short, the IPCC’s position on AGW is based primarily on modeling of dubious quality (and I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense: it is probably the best modeling we can hope for but it is still very limited in its predictive ability.) And as a field, climate science tends to overstate the effectiveness of their models, rather than focusing on the flaws. The smoking:disease link is based on hundreds (thousands?) of empirical studies.