Via Immanuel Rant, I found this piece by Michael Duffy in Saturday’s SMH, pushing global warming denialism. Immanuel points out that Duffy has been more than a little economical with the truth, saying
Duffy is correct to warn us not to overlook agendas and political interests and how they affect science. The trouble is that Duffy’s “cold, hard look� forgets the mote in his own eye. Kellow and William Kininmonth (also mentioned) are members of The Lavoisier Group. The group was created by Ray Evans of Western Mining and is an astroturf operation.
The article is full of similar examples. Sceptic Bob Carter is described as “an environmental scientist at James Cook University”. At least when I knew him there, he was a geologist working (not surprisingly) with the mining industry, and his current affilation is still with the School of Earth Sciences Nothing wrong with that, as Duffy himself says, but, why the misrepresentation.?
Then there’s the reference to a conference held by
The Friedrich Naumann Foundation, a liberal think-tank,
which
held a climate seminar in Germany in February and conducted a poll of the 500 climate researchers who attended. A quarter doubted that the modest warming of the past 150 years is due to human activity.
For most Australian readers, the term “liberal’ without capitalisation might imply a moderate progressive, perhaps an Australian Democrat. Duffy doesn’t bother to inform us that the Foundation is liberal in the classical sense. It stands for
he reduction of state interventionism, the advocacy of decentralization and privatization, the cutting of existing state regulations and of bureaucratic red tape in our daily lives.
In other words, it’s an ideological clone of the CIS, IPA or Cato. It appears to have close ties with the last of these, a well-known promoter of junk science on this and other topics. Duffy could have been honest with his readers and called it a “free-market thinktank”, but that would have alerted them to possible bias. I managed to find a report on the meeting here, but it’s in German and I can’t really follow it. It doesn’t appear to me that those in attendance were climate scientists, though some of the speakers were.
It seems to be just about impossible to attack the consensus view on global warming without resorting to dishonest misrepresentation. Duffy is no exception to this pattern.
Update Tim Lambert has more.
And, given his past form, I’m not surprised to learn that Duffy is an exponent of rightwing postmodernism.
As you’d expect from someone hired as the “right-wing Philip Adams’, Duffy poses as a critic of postmodernism, as in this Counterpoint episode where he links it to Leninism, eugenics and contempt for ordinary people, and defends science as a source of truth.
But, when science says something Duffy doesn’t like, for example on global warming, he’s happy to embrace the “social construction of reality” thesis, as propounded by political scientist and Lavoisier Institute member Aynsley Kellow.
Further update It turns out (see the comments thread) that the respondents to the survey described by Duffy were not, as he says, climate scientists attending a conference in 2005, but members of meteorological societies who responded to a survey sent out in 1996! It’s scarcely surprising that a lot of respondents took the view, at that time, that anthropogenic climate change was not proven. IIRC, the IPCC took the same view. I’ll put this one down to sloppiness rather than deliberate deception, but it’s illustrative of the point that Duffy is not engaged in a serious search for truth here.
Yet further update 20/4 A lengthy search suggests that the claimed result does not refer to the 1996 survey, but to another survey undertaken by the same researcher in 2003. The results are apparently here but I can’t get them to work on any of my browsers.
John Quiggin 
John, Michael Duffy has been running an anti-global warming/climate change/Kyoto line on his right-wing radio program Counterpoint. Coming up this Monday (4pm) he will have Bob Carter, Research Professor of Geology, James Cook University, Townsville, who will answer our queries from the Climate Change show Monday 4 April. He often does this sort of thing. He grabs right-wing viewpoint holder and puts him on as an authoritative source without the slightest qualification. Peter Saunders is one of his favourites as an authority on social security issues and whatever else Saunders goes on about.
The said Climate Change show of Monday 4 April included guests Harlan Watson, Senior Climate Negotiator, US State Department; William Kininmonth, Australasian Climate Research; Garth Paltridge, Emeritus Professor and Honorary Research Fellow, University of Tasmania; Professor Aynsley Kellow, School of Government, University of Tasmania. Only Kellow and Watson made it into the transcript.
Watson’s contribution is actually interesting as he authentically represents the official American viewpoint. From him we learn, though, that the Europeans problem is that they are risk-averse whereas the Americans don’t mind putting our future at risk.
From Kellow we learn that the whole problem is socially and politically constructed and originally had to do with Helmut Kohl trying to wrong-foot the Greens and the Social Democrats. They wanted to phase out nuclear power stations in favour of greater use of coal.
Of the rest, I think it was Garth Paltridge who was highly critical of climate change models.
Meanwhile the issue has broken out at Webdiary, with a useful piece by David Roffey who seems quite knowledgeable. The gainsayers and minimizers are there, of course.
Duffy is normally a pretty sound critic of “constructivism”, without being a foaming-at-the-mouth exponent of conservatism. He should have been more candid about the ideological allegiances of individual and institutional critics of Global Warming. That said, one wants to get past ad hominum attacks and get to the gist of the issu. Did Duffy actually misrepresent the arguments or facts relevant to this ecological issue? Or did he fail to be critical of the critics?
He didn’t make any substantive points. He presented an argument from authority (many climate scientists don’t believe in GW) and misdescribed his authorities.
You can’t make that distinction in this case, Jack. Since Duffy has no scientific credentials, his piece is of necessity an appeal to authority. Most of it is a catalogue of dissent. He throws in a few facts and figures – carbon dioxide is only one percent of the atmosphere, etc. – but since he is not remotely qualified to judge the significance of those facts, it’s obvious they’re there only for the sake of technical verisimilitude. Furthermore, he makes no attempt to report that the ‘arguments and facts’ he raises are and have been frequently and easily dealt with by climatologists. Most Herald readers have neither the time nor the patience to read the IPCC web site, so they are desperate to know where the balance of authority lies. Duffy’s column is written on this basis, so the the credibility of the authorities he cites is indeed the issue.
And yeah, what John said, too.
I would understand “liberal” in the classical sense, but I wouldn’t take the CIS etc. as exemplars of that. Rather, I would take their position as allowing in legal entities as well as natural persons as the subject matter of “liberal” – which allows non-state corporatism as well as individual freedom, and ends up squeezing the latter.
Thanks for the mention John.
Duffy having no scientific credentials is no excuse to rely on argument from authority. To do so is lazy journalism and suggests a predisposition to a particular view. With most scientific debates there is more than enough information for the layperson to form a considered opinion without cherry picking from like-minded ideological combatants. Though I think James gives Herald readers less credit that they are due 😉 his point can be extended to the general community. We need better reporting on science issues other than the fallacy that because there are differing opinions each deserve equal time in the press (the fallacy of balance).
While consensus does not always indicate that a scientific position will hold it generally is a damn good sign without compelling evidence to consider otherwise.
Cheer, Cheer, the Red and the White,
Honour the name, by day and by night…….
No coarse or offensive language, please, Irant! 50-metre penalty indeed!
John, I hope you are not a Broncos fan as well.
I’m a loyal Brisvegan, irant, but I have my limits!
My comments on Duffy’s radio show are here.
I would have to agree with the criticism made of Duffy by Pr Q et al. Duffy’s neglect of the counter-blasts to Global Warming denialists published in Nature, Sci-Am and sundry estimable blogs is especially disappointing.
He is normally a pretty fair and reasonable conservative on sociological issues. Its a pity that his conservatism does not carry over to ecological issues.
A small contribution (I can’t see it mentioned anywhere else here).
The site Real Climate is an excellent resource for data and analysis on the science and media coverage of global climate change.
(“Global Climate Change” being the preferred scientific term, as the current projections are that parts of the world will get colder – found that out on this little site.)
John was hoping for something more constructive and balanced from Duffy but it was a big ask.
Again it raises my questions concerning confirmation bias, institutional bias and that we do use bounded rationality with its inherent limitations. I do see both sides as I admit I question and do reject the work of qualified individuals in their field of expertise, as the over diagnosing of childhood mental conditions that seems to be happening in child psychiatry and there are still some psychologists that think homosexuality is a mental disease. If that became a consensus position no amount of peer reviewed journals would sway me otherwise.
Eugenics and the non-sexual female in Victorian times would seem good examples of social/institution bias that blinkered academic institutions in the past so it is plausible-though less so in the physical sciences- that it could happen again.
Not so long ago you seemed to feel quite justified to make judgements about what is happening in evolutionary psychology eve though you are not trained in that discipline. It raises the question can science trained individual give opinions about things they don’t have a full understanding of let alone an intelligent lay person.
It would seem to me that some institutions would be more prone to influences of social/institutional bias as their subject matter is more strongly tied to social construction. Whether masturbation is ‘harmful’ would seem to be directly related to how one socially constructs its context. Is for a society that sees it as wrong not in society’s who don’t.
Maybe someone could tell me of a multidisciplinary approach that encourages science but in a socially deconstructed context? Is that even possible?
Simon has articulated the technical basis of the disquiet that people feel about accepting science or research as political justification.
“They’ve been wrong before,” we think. “I’m not going to be blinded by science.” “Hey, this thing is going in a really nasty direction.”
But it is indeed true that some institutions are more vulnerable to social/institutional bias, partly because they centre on the measurement of human behaviour at inherently non-quantifiable points.
Measurement in climate science depends on hard facts collected by machines. Where they go, how sophisticated they are, and what happens to the data are all fallible human decisions. But the chart recorders just do their job.
Yes we are measuring human behaviour – our use of fossil fuel – but it is testable by the laws and customs of the natural sciences.
In the end, I suppose, out here in the civilian world we can apply the same rough and ready rules about bias we apply to any institution. Is this huge institutional mass-mind actually plausible in this case? Can we see how this benefits the members in some direct way?
I can see how developing a branch of psychology to justify torturing homosexuals would benefit its members. But not climate science.
Duffy appears to adhere to the infamous Luntz memo to the US Republican Party, “The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science. Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”
In scouting about a bit I came upon a recent paper by James Hansen:
A slippery slope: How much global warming constitutes “dangerous anthropogenic interference”? An editorial essay. Clim. Change 68, 269-279
There is an abstract and pdf link here.
Hansen discusses the difficult problem of ice sheet degradation and makes a case for keeping additional climate forcing to 1.4 watts/m2, which would keep temperature rise to about 1C. About half that is already in the pipe-line.
It’s a big ask, but he thinks things may go pearshaped quite quickly if we don’t. Of course ‘quite quickly’ doesn’t mean tomorrow, but maybe in a century or three. He is worried about a tipping point and thinks we may be already close to it.
At the end of the paper he quotes his favourite quote from Richard Feynnmann:
“We must continually question our conclusions, presenting all sides of an argument equally, and changing our conclusions when the evidence warrants it.”
He has done this with the IPCC.
……
Intellectual degeneration springs from political corruption. Liberal England collapsed as the traditional party system morphed along European lines. The British elite were, as Muggeridge observed, a ruling class on the run and prone to embrace bad ideas. The Tories went proto-fascist and the Liberals went proto-socialist. Only Labor seemed to embody traditional liberal and chapel values, and even they went by the way when the Soviet illusion took hold. This period was, as Stove notes, also the high tide of Idealism, the foundational metaphysic of post-modernism.
A similar intellectual degeneration deformed the partisans of the Left when New Left ideologies took root in the seventies.
Now it is the US New Right, paeleo-cons excluded, which seems to be embracing some form of post-modernism or at least virtual realism. Steve Sailer points out that power politics now condition truth values in the post-modern GOP:
……………
Sailer’s analysis was stunningly confirmed when a high-ranking Republican official, Rove by the sound of it, told Ron Suskind of the NY Times that, in the new GOP, ideology trumped reality:
…………………
This is the authentic voice of power-mania and a diagnostic of the intellectual degeneration of some sections of the Right. This hostility to scientific epistemology is evident in the Rights antagonism to evolutionary thinking where it threatens theological shibboleths. In this the New Right mirrors the anti-scientific New Left which also opposed evolutionary thinking where it threatened sociological shibboleths.
This is all very strange, coming from someone who advocates a treaty (Kyoto) that will do nothing to change global warming, even if fully implemented. Who is it that is in denial again?
Yep, as too often with these sorts of articles, little survives after logical-fallacy and ethical filters are run.
Would someone with more current economics expertise at their fingertips than myself like to compare the economic modellers’ estimates of the impact of Kyoto on global economic performance with the IMF’s estimate that rising oil prices will trim 1% per annum from global economic growth over the next few years?
In other words, are we at the point where growing consumption of fossil fuels on a “business at usual” basis is doing more economic harm globally, even in the short run, than the reduction in fossil fuel use which Kyoto is designed to achieve?
Most estimates of the cost of Kyoto with emissions trading below 1 percentage point of GDP. This is a change in levels, not growth rates. A 1 per cent decline in growth for three years, followed by a return to normal growth, implies a 3 percentage point cumulative loss.
AN Smith, since you know that I support Kyoto, I assume you’ve read my repeated refutation of your tired talking point. If not, search on Kyoto and you’ll find it.
Is it not time that so-called conservatives were exposed for what they really are, namely shameless carpetbaggers. I may not be fully convinced about the effects of global warming but I am sure as hell less convinced by people with transparent agendas who seek to create smoke screens of confusion.
Lowering greenhouse gases should be seen as a marker for greater economic efficiency. You should not need to belong to the church of the Kyoto believers to want lower greenhouse emissions. Even Greenpeace is coming around to this view.
No, JQ, you havent refuted anything.
Even the strongest proponents agree that Kyoto wont do a thing unless followed by even more precipitous falls in CO2 generation.
Interesting that Ansley Kellow makes the statement “It’s certainly the case that CO2 is the largest single anthropogenic greenhouse gas,” as there are a few camps of skeptics. Some that deny CO2 is a man made problem, others that accept that CO2 is a minor problem that technology can fix, and the people who say CO2 will be beneficial.
So Aynsley seems to be in the second camp.
They are quoting the usual party line – economic cost, Kyoto ineffectual, developing countries excluded, junk science etc however like the people re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic are ultimatly going to be affected sooner or later. Do they think that Climate Change will bypass them because they are rich from the coffers of the polluters? Radical climate change if it happens, like a tsanami, is very democratic. It will kill you equally whether you are rich or poor, muslim or christian. Or are they like most people, living like kings now and hoping like hell that they are dead when it is time to pay.
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one first step” but some of us apparently won’t even be bothered to put two ideas together in sequence.
John,
Sadly, the game is up. You and I and all the others who believe in scientific method and evidence have been exposed for what we are. The editor of Scientific American confesses all here http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s1333437.htm
AN Smith, it’s not clear whether you read John’s opinions on Kyoto before you wrote your second comment. He recognises that Kyoto is a first step and believes it is not pointless.
Without sounding flippant, (watch me get flamed over this) how can meteorologists claim with any certainty that temperatures and resulting climate changes will be adverse in 100 years time, when they cannot with any certainty tell what the weather will be like in 7 days time.
In addition, if you go to NASA’s website, there is a range of data/papers etc looking at temperature changes globally. They make interesting reading, as in many cases, based on temperature histories in many cities, the TREND, (not one off annual averages) shows little to no change, and in some cases quite the reverse. Further, many temperatures were higher pre-1930s than today. For example, yesterday in Melbourne recorded the highest temperature since 1939. I guess we were pumping all of greenhouse gases that day in 1939!
cheers
I’d like to understand more about the costs of mitigation, for instance, if the world decided to limit CO2 concentrations to 485ppm at 2050, and did it entirely via phased-in carbon taxes, what rates of tax would be needed each year over that 45 year period?
Roberto, climate scientists aren’t claiming that any particular day in 100 years time will have bad weather. They are claiming that average weather conditions then will differ from average weather conditions now. They can do this because models of climate are less chaotic than models of weather, being driven by inputs such as CO2 levels and solar radiation, rather than initial conditions which are difficult to measure accurately. (At least, that’s my understanding—I’m neither a meteorologist nor a climate scientist!)
roberto –
There is no need to be worried about being flamed as you are just making a basic error that millions of people also make ie: not knowing the difference between climate and weather.
Climate is the general conditions that an area will experience over a year or decade or longer. For instance Perth has a temperate climate – hot dry summers and cool winters, Darwin has a tropical climate and so on. These climatic are expected to to be the same over long periods of time. All our life patterns, agriculture, housing designs etc are based on the local climate.
Weather is the day to day conditions that are experienced in an area. Rainy, cold, sunny etc. These are incredibly difficult to predict as there are so many variables. To predict the weather the climate, daily cloud cover, the past weather conditions for that time of the year, air pressure , wind strength amongst other things are taken into account to give a daily weather prediction.
What is changing is the climate. With the increased forcings of CO2, methane etc minus the effects of atmospheric reflectors the net effect is a slow heating of the atmosphere which may affect the climate. Rainfall could increase or decrease, summer and winter temperatures could change.
When all of these averages are taken together the it can be seen that global temperatures are rising. There will always be peaks and troughs and freak days but overall with all the peaks and troughs averaged out over the whole globe the temperature rise so far is about 0.6 of a degree. This rise is accelerating and could reach 2 degrees by 2020.
The effect of this rise could be climate change, increased extreme weather, sea level rises as glaciers and sea ice melt or nothing at all. Scientists do not know exactly what will happen only what might happen.
Its sort of like holding a revolver with 1 bullet in 6 chambers to your head. A scientist can tell you that you have 1/6 chance of living if you pull the trigger. However no scientist living or dead can tell you, without looking at the gun, whether you will live or die next shot until you are down the to the last chamber and still alive.
Basically the earth is getting down to the last couple of chambers. When we can definately say what will happen it will be far far to late. Unlike the gun example by the time we are at the last chamber we cannnot choose not to press the trigger as that option will have been removed from us by past generations. The Earth will press the trigger and we will have to live with the consquences.
With respect to the German conference and the comment about the poll of climate scientists, the quote does not match what’s in the actual documents. The original poll can be found here.
It was a survey of 450 randomly selected members of the German Meteorological Society plus 50 randomly selected members of two Meteorological Institutes in Hamburg. Not a very scientific approach, since that would capture anyone from students to top level researchers. The response rate was 45%.
roberto –
Without sounding flippant, (watch me get flamed over this) how can economists claim with any certainty that profitability and the resulting economy will be adverse (or good) in a years time, when they cannot with any certainty tell what the stock market will be like in one days time.
Thanks Peter. Am I right in thinking that this is the same as the survey reported here which was conducted in 1996?
Patrick – I agree! – but don’t tell my clients that – cheers
Ender – thanks for the very constructive response to my ‘basic error’. – cheers
John, yes, it is the same survey. The paper was published in 1998. It does not say anywhere in the paper when the questionnaires were sent out, which is odd in itself.
Roberto,
I can’t predict with any real accuracy the maximum temperature in Brisbane tomorrow however I am reasonably confident that the average maximum daily temperature in mid-July this year will be lower than the average daily temperature was in January this year.
Similarly, I can’t predict how the price of a particular good or commodity will change over the next week but I can point to a couple of hundred years of economic data that say the average price of most goods will tend to rise over time.
Roberto,
Last century, eight of the warmest years were in the 90s [source IPCC].
Ender, it has risen 0.6 degree compared to when?
Compared to the “medieval summer”? Probably not.
Compared to the time of dinosaurs? It’s a lot cooler now.
Compared to the “ice ages”? More than 0.6.
The earth might be heating up at the moment, the only thing that would be truly suprising was if the earth stayed the same temperature.
But the earth changing temperature does not mean humans are the cause. I’d be more willing to accept that explanation if someone can show me what caused all the other temperature changes the earth has undergone, and why this one is different.
wpc perhaps you could look up the sources and their references for the temperatures you quote. After all these numbers had to be determined somehow, and the literature references may well include the explanations you seek.
wpc, you might start by noting that the “medieval warm period” was a local event in Northern Europe and not a period of global high temperatures. And there is a large literature on the causes of both ice ages and Mesozoic warming.
More generally, you might want to consider your attitude to science in general. There are lots of areas where standard scientific findings are counterintuitive to me, and where objections occur to me and I’m not aware if scientists have answered them. As a general rule, I don’t leap to the conclusion that the scientists are wrong.
I heard the anti-climate-change “Counterpoint” several times – I was driving a taxi that night – and was quite amused that one of his guests was a social scientist (a walking, talking, oxymoron). Duffy’s major problem is that he has absolutely no understanding of the scientific method, or of scientific discourse. I think he believes it’s all a matter of opinion.
I’m uncertain whether Duffy is a fool or a rogue. Since I prefer to take a charitable view of people, I’ll think of him as a fool until I get some evidence of intelligence.
John, its not that I think they are definitely wrong, its just that I don’t think that they are definitely right either.
In my work area(health), I have noted how often “consensus of experts” becomes “whoops, got that wrong”.
The human body may be harder to predict than climate, but with fairly plausible arguments on both sides of the argument, I will remain skeptical.
(P.S I gain no direct profit from the use of petroleum, coal, etc. However, if any company would like to offer me kickbacks for my opinion, I will set up my talk back radio show as soon as possible)
wpc I’m only a layman, but I understand that the 0.6 degrees is from 1950. James Hansen in an article in the Scientific American (pdf) last year said that the best differentiated information of the various factors comes from the 1970s. You’ll find a graph of the main factors they measure on p.6. That will show you how irrelevant the sun has become.
There is an excellent diagram on p.9 showing how the climate forcing mechanism works in general, together with a graph showing the increased forcing in the last 50 years.
Hansen says we are just now reaching the equivalent of the peak temperature for the Holocene (present) interglacial, which was between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. If we go another degree we’ll reach the peak of the Eemian interglacial (the last one) when the sea level was estimated to have been 5-6 meters higher than it is now. That’s from the longer version of his Sci American paper (largish pdf file) pp13-14.
There is some uncertainty about the measurements, but a smaller rise would put Manhattan, Florida, the Netherlands and Bangla Desh in trouble.
They measure just about everything and model the changes at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (part of NASA). Their latest best estimate is that an additional 0.5 degrees of global warming will happen from what we have already done in putting stuff into the atmosphere. That’s halfway to where really interesting things happen and even the American neocons will become believers.
If that is what your best science tells you, can you see why some people take global climate change seriously?
Brian, my point was more to demonstrate that there are large temperature variations well before the industrial age.
I accept that there is certainly some evidence that the earth is getting warmer.
I would just like to see some evidence that we are the cause.
As one of the scientists said on that Real Climate site, correlation does not mean causality.
wpc if you read some of the stuff I referred to by Hansen he talks about very plausible mechanisms.
Like soot falls on ice. The darker ice absorbs more heat. The ice melts and chunks break off. Sea absorbs more heat than ice because it’s darker.
He doesn’t spell it out for everything, but I think the scientists working on this are good enough to think the thoughts you thought.
The sceptics and deniers I hear are mainly geologists who have a mindset of huge changes that have occurred over geological time. (Yes, I know there are others.) But I wonder if they can see the trees for the wood.
RealClimate, by the way, has a lovely April 1 spoof of the climate/weather argument.
wpc
Actually you are absolutely right. Correlation does not mean causuality. There is no direct evidence that increased CO2 is heating the atmosphere and there have been climate variations in the past.
Climate science is like astronomy and evolutionary anthropology. It is a science based on observations, computer modelling and inferences. In physics etc you can formulate a hypothesis, design an experiment and test the hypothesis with hard verifiable data. In climate science it is much harder to do this as it is extremely difficult to conduct experiments on the Earths climatic system. This is similar to astronomers and astrophysists that cannot conduct experiments on stars.
However when all the data that scientists have is taken with the computer models and also the basic physics that CO2 in the atmosphere traps heat it leads to the conclusion that increased CO2 will cause increased heating. This hypothesis is supported by data that shows that when the temperature variations are averaged over the whole globe (the hockey stick graph is one example) then a heating trend is observed.
Also the ratio of the isotopes of the CO2 in the atmosphere at the moment is that of fossil CO2. This means that scientists can be absolutely sure that the CO2 causing more heat to be trapped is from fossil origin. The only source of fossil CO2 is the fossil fuels we burn.
This climate event, if it happens, will be almost all man made.