A letter from an angry climate-change denialist: give your response

289 thoughts on “A letter from an angry climate-change denialist: give your response”

1. Now, I tend to believe scientists about science. Climate change is probably happening and it is probably because of us, no question.

   But the thing that tips it for me as truth: capitalists, who will lose money if human driven climate change is real and pollution needs to be regulated – ACCEPT and ADMIT that climate change is real and our activities need to be regulated.

   To me – that is the most damning evidence of all!*

   *Meant to be a little tongue in cheek but you get my point.

   1. “capitalists, who will lose money if human driven climate change is real…”
      You mean this fiscal quarter?

      1. “You mean this fiscal quarter?”

         I took some time to work the relevance. Funny!

         1. Sorry for the delay

2. “When I see stability in a circuit I design, or robust thermostatting in nature, I know it is due to negative feedback (a loop in my circuit) or some natural feedback in the case of nature (NO MYSTERY – Second Law of Thermodynamics).”

   Dear physicist/engineer/denialist: Not all feedback is negative. This should have been covered in your elementary school science classes.

   1. And even if such negative feedback loops do indeed exists, what makes you think human life will be inside the new range of conditions? Remember it is not just us but we need wheat, rice, fish, many other biological organisms to support our population.

   2. I’m not sure this guy really is a “physicist” as he claims. His remarks about the 2nd law don’t make sense.

      1. Bingo. I cannot figure out how this guy thinks the 2nd Law works. “…the corresponding self-organizing mechanisms of the 2nd Law” ? If anything it is ‘self-disorganizing’ but really it doesn’t tell you anything about whether the Earth is heating up or not.

      2. Maybe he considers himself a physicist because he is an engineer, engineers having to take engineering physics, calculus, etc. Just speculating.

         1. True.

            Though some engineers do know physics well, he is not one of them.

            1. I “studied” electrical engineering for three and a half years after I finished school. Just over half of the course work was split evenly between maths and physics subjects.

               I was not a good student, but I recall that “stability” had two definitions. A stable system could be described as one which settled to a final state, or one which did not veer off to infinity (which in real life would usually be one in which the system might saturate, or lock up, in some extreme state). So an oscillator would not satisfy the first definition of stability, but it could satisfy the second.

               Also, there are passive circuits and active circuit. Purely passive circuits, as far as I know, have no feedback loops and are always stable by either definition of stability. Furthermore some oscillators (which can be considered unstable, i.e. they oscillate) mandate the use of stable negative feedback loops for proper operation, along with positive feedback to produce the instability that results in oscillation. The Wien bridge sinewave oscillator is a prime example.

               The writer’s analogy with electronic circuits is unimpressive.

            2. “Stability” is partly a subjective idea that can be defined in various ways. For instance, your first definition “settles to a final state” depends on the definition of “state”. If I consider the state to be instantaneous voltage and current, then an oscillator isn’t stable. But if I model the system as amplitude, frequency and phase, then I can describe an oscillator as stable. If I consider a system perturbed by noise, then I might define stability as convergence in mean or convergence in distribution; but in some cases I might need to define it strictly as convergence to a specific point or region. It really depends on what you’re trying to do and what kind of model you’ve constructed.

            3. “Stability” is partly a subjective idea that can be defined in various ways. For instance, your first definition “settles to a final state” depends on the definition of “state”. If I consider the state to be instantaneous voltage and current, then an oscillator isn’t stable. But if I model the system as amplitude, frequency and phase, then I can describe an oscillator as stable. If I consider a system perturbed by noise, then I might define stability as convergence in mean or convergence in distribution; but in some cases I might need to define it strictly as convergence to a specific point or region. It really depends on what you’re trying to do and what kind of model you’ve constructed.

      3. That stood out for me too as well as the oversimplification of the complexity of climatology to a controlled feedback circuit. I smell a theist or a theist wannabe.

   3. Somewhat oversimplifying, in climate models involving energy balance, the feedback is “negative” in the sense that, in the relatively short term, the average surface temperature tends to move toward a stable equilibrium value. But the effect of adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere is to increase the temperature “set point,” i.e., that equilibrium value is inexorably moving upwards. The writer offers no information as to how their view of “feedback” might counter this largely prevailing view. And the fact that they invoke the 2nd law of thermodynamics (entropy increases) clearly reveals they are out of their depth (standard climate models, and the fact of warming, are in no way at odds with the laws of thermodynamics). Then there’s the old canard of “18 years with no warming” – which has been debunked numerous times (energy is stored in the oceans, and in fact many temp reading sin that stretch were ocean readings that were not accurate due to churn from passing ships …) In sum, the “quality” of this person’s denial is no better than typical from what I can see.

      1. It is too easy to just say what one’s credentials are then they have to show they actually have some means of proving it. Paul Hormwood has a site I get just to see how he looks at things. His mostly cheering section when he claims that scientists on purpose are making the past cooler via recalibration of the readings in order to promote the idea of global warming. It is all about “corruption” in science. That as long as they are working for any organization they are biased totally. Which the only way such a claim could work would be, just be coincidence, is in the opposition. The old ploy of seeding doubt. Concerning science. But not on their side which is never mentioned as anything but “dedicated, hard working, no nonsense leaders in clean science.

         1. The question I never see answered by the people promoting the conspiracy theories is: What in the world is in it for the scientists?

            Why have this conspiracy? Money? Surely, large sums of dirty money would be detected somewhere. They’re very good at hiding it? Then, what the hell is the point of having it?

            I suppose the closest answer I’ve seen is from the outright science deniers; i.e. the ones who deny science across the board and say that scientists are in the grips of Satan. Of course, then they have to explain why all the modern comforts we have, especially the Internet, are thanks in no small part to all these people under the influence of the devil. Alan Turing anyone?

            1. Bingo. It’s the same question I ask the Creationists who claim that, as an evolutionary biologist, I’m part of some giant conspiracy. What’s in it for us?! And don’t they realise that the most famous – and ultimately therefore rich – scientists tend to be the ones that overturn dogmas?! “Toeing the line” purely for the sake of it makes no sense.

               The closest answer that I have seen is basically “job security”, i.e. you won’t get hired if you’re a crackpot. But that argument only holds if your ideas really are crackpot, i.e. don’t have the support of evidence! Many people get hired who challenge dogmas with evidence.

               It’s also similar to the claims that atheists are conspiring to keep God out of science because we don’t want to admit he is needed. Again, what’s the benefit there? If we knew that God was needed, we wouldn’t be atheists.

            2. I suspect there’s a good deal of psychological projection going on with Creationists as well. To your last point, simply demonstrating God’s usefulness as an explanation in any area would suffice to demonstrate atheists are wrong. Instead, history is littered with examples of God being posed as a non-specific explanation, only to be replaced later by something that’s actually explicable.

               As for the conspiracy and money, well one doesn’t need to look far to find evidence that they do precisely (in reverse) what they accuse atheists and scientists of doing–not admitting that there’s never been convergence on God as an explanatory power and that there’s a lot of money flowing through their unholy coffers of denialism.

            3. Actually I have seen a few working scientists who did have crackpot ideas. One worked in collaboration with a teaching hospital, and claimed to be able to effect healing from a room adjacent to the patient (IIRC). He’d collaborated with a “poet-in-residence”, and the university newspaper unashamedly published some of his “results”. Most of us were just gobsmacked.

               And there was a particle/high energy physicist who believed in yogic flying, and had photographs all around his office depicting it.

            4. “What in the world is in it for the scientists? Why have this conspiracy?”

               I think it goes back to their persecution complex. Everyone is out to get them and their god. So, naturally, “the scientists” are too.

               There doesn’t have to be any money or prestige involved. Just the simple satisfaction of persecuting the Christians is all anyone could need or want. Poor, poor Christians.

   4. Robust thermostatting in nature???

      Has the engineer not heard of the ice ages? Tiny variations in the Earth’s orbital parameters led to tiny changes in the seasonal distribution of heat across the Earth’s surface, and these led to the oceans absorbing or releasing more CO2, and this finally led to the observed huge variations in climate over the past 800,000 years (and smaller ice age/interglacial fluctuations some 2.5 million years before that).

      The Earth has a very forgiving thermostat that operates over millions of years that has kept our planet habitable for at least the past 3.5 or 4 billion years, but global climate has nevertheless swung wildly from producing continental ice sheets in the tropics to allowing tropical plants to live in the polar regions (up to 85°N during the Eocene)!

      Human activities are unlikely to push climate to where it has never gone before, but we need only relatively small changes to bring deadly heat waves like the current one in India and Pakistan and dry spells like the one that impacted Texas and Oklahoma from about 2011 to about a month or so ago. We are substantially increasing atmospheric CO2, so it is inevitable, according to 97% of climate scientists, that we will see substantial climate change.

      (And by the way, climate scientists could get more grants if they had big disagreements over whether any change was coming. Big important scientific controversies are big scientific problems than attract lots of funding. Thus, the 97% agreement rate cannot be explained as some sort of conspiracy to keep funding going.)

      1. He should ask Venus and Mars about their “robust thermostatting.”

         1. Some still state that the “AGW is going on in the solar system like Mars and Jupiter.” Such ignorance. It has been reported that even cold, dry Mars goes through periodic seasons one can tell by the polar ice increasing and shrinking. Jupiter emits more energy than it receives. This isn’t hidden information.

      2. Some here might be interested in playing with this online model, “Build Your Own Earth”, that was recently put online by U of Manchester. I came across it since it is used in a class I am taking through Coursera. Not a perfect tool (not all climate change factors can be included and allow real-time feedback), but fairly easy to use.

         http://www.buildyourownearth.com/index.html

   5. Reginald,

      Brilliant as usual. I would like to hear our electrical engineer explain why high powered oscillator circuits have to be programmed with automatic gain control. Then he can explain how he would install AGC into the global climate.

      1. Isn’t AGC a form of the negative feedback he is referring to?

   6. And would it have killed him to name the sources of negative feedback he is imagining?

      It’s not a mystery what these could be. Maybe warming will somehow increase the world’s albedo, which would act as negative feedback. Well, is that likely? Will a hotter earth cause more reflectivity? Not in glacial regions or the arctic, as ice and snow are pretty reflective compared to open water. Perhaps if some new deserts are created that will increase the albedo in those areas. So, where are your estimates of the relative sizes of these effects? You don’t have to have a degree, sure, but you have to do the work. Show your work, please.

      What are some other possible negative feedbacks? Well, maybe a warmer earth will cause more plant growth and that will cause more CO2 absorption by plants. That’s at least a hypothetical feedback in the right direction. So, does a warmer earth mean more plant growth? How much? If so, is the magnitude of that effect big enough to make a difference? Be sure to cite your evidence for these claims (hint: others have thought of this and done experiments).

      Are there other negative feedback mechanisms you are thinking of? Please name them, provide evidence they will happen, and estimates of their relative sizes compared to the size of anthropogenic forcing. That’s what scientists do… enumerate all of the possibilities they can think of and address them one by one. I look forward to his reply.

      1. Or here is another… CO2 makes the atmosphere more opaque in some wavelengths. In the troposphere this means that some photons from below are reflected back down, reducing heat loss. In the higher atmosphere, however, this opacity means that some reflected radiation coming from the sun will go into space, cooling the outer atmosphere. Which of these effects dominates the overall heat flux? Perhaps the letter author has a proof that the heat flux will be balanced, or a net loss cooling the Earth? I look forward to seeing the empirical evidence and calculations on this bit of feedback also.

         1. Does increased water vapor form more light reflective clouds? Or does the heated atmosphere prevent cloud formation?

            1. From what I’ve read more water vapor is net warming. The positive feedback from water vapors opacity to IR slightly overcomes the negative feedback from the increase in albedo due to increased cloud formation from the increase of water vapor in the atmosphere due to warming. Although I will admit I haven’t checked the most recent data and my information is several years old.

      2. I believe plants are today absorbing more CO2 than they used to, but then the question becomes for how long will they continued to do this, and how much carbon can they actually store over the long term? Plants die, and with the OBSERVED warmer temperatures bacteria convert the plant matter back into CO2 at higher rates.

         1. And even if they are absorbing more than they used to – as is the ocean, I believe – because concentrations are higher, it does not matter if they are still not absorbing the same amount being produced. It is not the sum CO2 flux of the system that is important, it is the inbalance between sources and sinks of CO2.

            1. Currently natural carbon sinks are greater than natural carbon sources. If it weren’t for human activity we would actually be slowly heading towards the end of the current inter-glacial period of the ice age. Us humans have forestalled that in the dumbest way possible.

               If the plants are absorbing more CO2, which is something I haven’t heard before, it is likely because the CO2 humans are releasing into the atmosphere is a lighter isotope and so more readily absorbed by plants. There’s data showing the we are shifting the atmosphere to higher concentrations of Carbon-12 versus Carbon-13 from the burning of fossil fuels.

               I’m waiting to be corrected by someone for likely screwing up photosynthetic biology/chemistry.

            2. I don’t think it’s as complex as isotopes. (I think the difference there is pretty tiny in absolute terms.) I think it’s simply that plants grow more in higher CO2, putting on more biomass and capturing more carbon as a result. Plants change their physiology in high CO2 and become more efficient in terms of growth versus water use etc.

            3. Tom, plants grow faster in a higher concentration of CO2 and when the temperature is higher. I doubt if winter has ever been the growing season.

               But that fact contradicts the supposed consensus that a warmer climate and more CO2 in the atmosphere is bad for the planet in every single instance. The result is a multitude of contorted ad hoc theories from climate religionists to explain why a few degrees warmer and more CO2 does not lead to an increase in food production.

            4. If it was only an increase in temperature and CO2 then all would be fine and dandy. However, a few degrees raise in average global temperature leads to drought, fires, expansion of pest/disease ranges and all sorts of wonderful things whose negative impacts outweigh the positives.

            5. Experiments have shown that heat plus CO2 can suppress some plants like corn, but others like poison oak do so much better and it increases the potency of their allergenes and oils.

            6. Yes. Different plants have different responses. I guess the most important thing to note is that plants (as a whole) will probably be fine. Humans will probably be completely screwed.

            7. Currently natural carbon sinks are greater than natural carbon sources. If it weren’t for human activity we would actually be slowly heading towards the end of the current inter-glacial period of the ice age. Us humans have forestalled that in the dumbest way possible.

               If the plants are absorbing more CO2, which is something I haven’t heard before, it is likely because the CO2 humans are releasing into the atmosphere is a lighter isotope and so more readily absorbed by plants. There’s data showing the we are shifting the atmosphere to higher concentrations of Carbon-12 versus Carbon-13 from the burning of fossil fuels.

               I’m waiting to be corrected by someone for likely screwing up photosynthetic biology/chemistry.

               Update:
               One thing I forgot. Currently the oceans are a carbon sink but if they warm enough they will become a carbon source. I don’t remember the temperature, but if the planet warms enough the oceans will start to emit C02.

               Pro-tip: A beer/soda that is cold will retain carbonation longer than one that is warm as the amount of CO2 you can stably dissolve in a beverage is dependent on temperature.

            8. The concentration of CO2 in carbonated drinks is equivalent to water that’s under an atmosphere, not of 400ppm CO2, but 1,000,000 ppm, i.e. 100% CO2 (actually more since soda-style drinks are supersaturated with CO2).

               If a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere is claimed to dangerously acidify the oceans, how is it that water, pumped with as much CO2 as it can take, is safely consumed every day by millions? I await the usual ad hoc contrived theory from a climate religionist.

            9. thh1859, the acidity of soft drinks is irrelevant unless you try to grow coral or coccoliths in it. (Ever seen what happens to teeth left in coke, by the way?) Soft drinks have a pH of around 2.5, which is about the same as your stomach acid so, no, it does not do you direct harm. pH is on a logarithmic (log10) scale, so smallish changes in pH can have large effects on ion exchange. (Did you ever do titration at school?) The ocean is about pH 8.1. That’s over 100,000 times less acidic than coke, or your stomach.

            10. No need to leave the teeth in them. Just drunk it every day.

   7. Dear physicist/engineer/denialist: Not all feedback is negative. This should have been covered in your elementary school science classes.

      Case in point : the positive feedback between (Arctic) sea-ice cover and (Arctic) warming : reduced sea-ice cover leads to increased absorbtion of sunlight (instead of reflection) leading to increased melting leading to reduced sea-ice cover.
      Of course, it is more complex than that – there is the different stability of this yesr’s newly formed ice in the face of foul weather compared to “multi-year” sea-ice, changing degrees of anchoring of ice to coastlines also affecting it’s stability against storms … yadda, yadda. But the basic physics isn’t in question.
      On the subject of basic physics, since the Old Faithful

      (remember that most geologists didn’t accept the notion of continental drift),

      brickbat is being laid across my colleagues shoulders, I should point out that until the 1950s there was very little in the way of a plausible mechanism for the continental drift tectonic schemes proposed by (most famously) Wegener. Wegener’s best attempt at a mechanism for his proposed continental drift scheme was a mythical centrifugal force causing the continents to creep away from the poles. Holmes in the mid-30s suggested that there might be a degree of mantle convection as a driving mechanism, but there wasn’t much evidence to back up that speculation. It wasn’t until the post-war period that data started coming through that made the sea-floor spreading mechanism elaborated by Tuzo and Wilson in the late 50s and early 60s credible. Backed up by, for example, magnetometer data which was a spin-off from mine-sweeping and U-boat hunting technologies developed in the War. Yes, it took time for data to accumulate, and for people working with slide rules and (if they were lucky) punched card data processing to start to assemble convincing evidence, but when the evidence started to come through it only took a decade or so for the paradigm to shift. In comparison, Carnot, Joule and Kelvin were working on thermodynamics from the 1810s to the 1840s or so. Revolutions aren’t quick things.

   8. “Dear physicist/engineer/denialist: Not all feedback is negative. This should have been covered in your elementary school science classes.”

      I think virtually all electronic circuits have negative feedback designed in because positive feedback is highly unstable.

      In fact it’s hard to conceive of a natural system that could include positive feedback because such a system would immediately ‘run away’ and crash, i.e. it would cease to exist as a natural system. (The risk with climate change is that we might drive the system to some point where feedback becomes positive).

      cr

      1. Lots of natural biological systems have positive feedback loops. They make “switches”.

      2. You have to remember that natural systems (including Earth) are rarely closed, so even a positive feedback loop can be reversed by external events. They are also complex, so competing positive feedback loops may drive things in different directions and it becomes a question of which wins.

         1. Yes, agreed that natural systems are complex. I’m not sure whether competing positive feedback loops could ever be stable, though I guess any particular parameter could reach its limiting state – ‘switches’ as you say.

            My impression is that most electrical circuits are designed to be as simple as possible, which is probably how the writer gets his views on negative feedback. But I’m an amateur in this respect, I see some genuine experts have weighed in downthread so I’ll leave it to them.

            1. I think the main point is that the climate is not really a stable system. The are various positive and negative feedback loops acting that, together, result in cycles and changes of various time frames. The ancient climate was very different to now and the future climate will no doubt be different again. Climate change denialists love to point out that both CO2 and temperature have been higher in the past – neglecting that there were no humans or human-like creatures at that point either.

3. I’ve seen this sort of thing from my colleagues in engineering. I used to be a member of the ASME, but not any more. The straw that broke that camel’s back was the continual “false balance” articles disputing climate change. I remember one practicing engineer claiming that anyone with a good grasp of high school physics could easily disprove climate change.
   Yeah, right.

   1. If only the world included some physicists who could weigh in! If physics “easily” disproves it that would mean that almost every professional physicists would know, from these easy proofs, that it’s bunk. If that were true, why don’t we hear this proof repeated over and over by physicists? Saying that it won’t fit in the margins doesn’t count!

      Being slightly versed in physics and thermodynamics, I tried, at one time, to work my way through the physics. I thought that surely, the overall conclusion of net forcing would be easy to establish, even if the magnitude and nature of various effects would be a mess. I found, fairly quickly, that the thermodynamics of various mixes of gasses in the atmosphere is a fiendishly complicated topic. I eventually gave up becoming an amateur expert since the complexity would make it a full time endeavor.

      1. Saying that it won’t fit in the margins doesn’t count!

         How big are Wiles’ margins, I wonder?
         [Googles]127 pages. (For the first two major papers putting forward the proof, but the proof of the proof is probably a lot longer.)

         Hanc marginis exiguitas non caparet.

      2. But with all the scientists in some sort of secret club where they thwart the efforts of the Mavericks, that just can’t happen. 😀

         1. Diana, please, don’t give away the secret handshake and magic garment knowledge.

            1. I’ve read the literature. If you take the 6th letter of the 6th line on every 6th page of each piece of pro-global warming literature, it reads:

               Circle, circle, dot, dot
               Now I’ve got my cootie shot
               If in summer it gets hot
               Talk about the warming a lot

               I think what I’ve just posted here is irrefutable evidence for a secret society only the likes of Dan Brown could expose. It’s a conspiracy!

      3. There are satellite measurements that show more energy has been entering the Earth system than exiting for some time now. That’s pretty simple.

         As for how things are done in physics, we eliminate the variables that will have minor effects and then solve for the remainder. There is also the technique of simplification, resulting in jokes about assuming a spherical cow.

         Basic climate models assume greenhouse gas layers are specific layers that reflect a certain percentage of IR. Much of the energy the Earth receives is not in the IR wavelength range and so isn’t affected by greenhouse gasses, it is only the re-radiation back out to space that is affected. Concentration of greenhouse gases are controlled by the number of layers. Fundamentally it is like adding more blankets to a bed to make the person sleeping there warmer.

         I had to learn enough Fortran in 2005 to use NOAA’s basic greenhouse gas models for my Radiative Transfer class. Just to make clear, these are the most simplistic temperature models on offer. Also much easier than the two 300 level quantum mechanics classes I had to take to get my BS in physics. Math for quantum mechanics is weird.

         PS: Mixture of gases is governed by the Law of Partial Pressures.

4. “Instead in your case, you have Faith (word considered) in a bit of “greenhouse” arithmetic that is already in error by 18 years of no warming.”

   This sentence is a pretty strong indication that the person who wrote it is not interested in actually learning about climate science.

   1. I wonder how they reconcile that statement with the fact that the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 2007, and 2015 is on track to be the hottest year ever.

      1. the fact that the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 2007

         -Yup. That’s mathematically possible.

         1. I think Michael misspoke and meant 1997. The 10 warmest years on record have apparently occurred since then (although it’s contested by “climate skeptics” who claim 1934 is the hottest year on record).

            1. For anyone who doesn’t know: 2014 was the hottest year on record. (2015 is on track to beat it so far.) It’s possible that the ‘actual’, as opposed to recorded, global average surface temp was higher in 2010 or 2005, but 2014 is the most likely hottest actual year as well. 1934 was a very hot year in the US, ranking fourth behind 1995, 2005 and 2010. The fact that ‘skeptics’ peddle nonsense like this tells you why they are called deniers.

            2. 1934 was a very hot year in the US, ranking fourth behind 1995, 2005 and 2010. The fact that ‘skeptics’ peddle nonsense like this tells you why they are called deniers.

               Climate covers the entire Earth, they are talking about just the USA.

               Their bottom line is the same ones as the petrochemical conglomerates. They want to burn the 21 gigatons they have. Going past 5 gigatons you get what it was like in the Smithian-Sprathian interval between the end of the Permian and beginning of the Triassic. Torrid World where just the poles were minimally habitable. Hot House Earth at its extreme.

               If such a planet was found it wouldn’t considered for immediate colonization unless they were desperate.

            3. In the U.S.? Maybe. In the world? Definitely not.

         2. Sorry, I meant 1998. I used:
            http://www.climatecentral.org/gallery/graphics/10-warmest-years-globally
            as a reference and it had 2007 on the left, and I didn’t recognize that the years weren’t sequential.

5. I believe that climate change is real, that it is in significant part caused by human activity and that it demands a policy response.

   However, I understand that there is also broad agreement now that the Cook paper which gave rise to the frequently quoted “97% Consensus” is unreliable.

   1. Discussion on the reliability of the 97% figure from the Cook paper here …

      http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/global-warming-consensus-claim-doesnt-stand-up/story-e6frg6zo-1227276959248

      1. Subscriber only article – no access.

         1. Sorry. Similar material on the author’s own blog …

            http://richardtol.blogspot.ie/2015/03/now-almost-two-years-old-john-cooks-97.html

         2. – I think that article is by Richard Tol. You can find the related blog post at: http://richardtol.blogspot.ca/2015/03/now-almost-two-years-old-john-cooks-97.html

            – From Judith Curry’s blog: http://judithcurry.com/2014/07/27/the-97-feud/

            1. Google Free the Tol 300. Tol agrees that there is a c97% consensus but has spent two years trying to find a pointless hole in Cook2013. I think most who accept man made climate change think that Tol is a joke. Curry is rapidly heading for the denier side too.

               For those that disagree with Cook’s paper, they are free to replicate the procedure and see what they find. That such a simple procedure hasn’t been replicated by the denialist side suggests that the result is pretty secure.

            2. Actually, several attempts were made to replicate Cook’s results, without success.

               http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421514002821

               Also, if Tol is a joke then someone should tell the IPCC. They cite him often enough.

            3. The paper you linked is not an attempt to replicate Cook’s results. It is a criticism of Cook’s methods, along with a reanalysis of part of his data using different standards. Some points raised are legitimate but some are badly justified. Even throwing out everything he thinks is biased towards the pro-AGW side Tol comes up with 94% that explicitly endorse AGW. I’ll quote him from the conclusions “There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans.”

            4. Sounds like we shouldn’t be describing Tol as a “AGW denier” then.

            5. Also, several polls of climate scientists have been conducted (rather than papers counted) and they have not found a 97% consensus.

               http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf

            6. Tol jumped from the IPCC ship last year. Around about the time that his most famous work on the economics of climate change was found to be rather flawed (gremlins is how he described it).

               If you read the Doran paper, actively publishing climatologists come out as 97% favouring man made climate change, although the questions are framed in a rather odd way.

            7. Also, several polls of climate scientists have been conducted (rather than papers counted) and they have not found a 97% consensus.

               http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf

               I think you messed up your citation, as that paper finds a 97.4% consensus among climate scientists who publish on climate change. To quote from the paper: “It seems that the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who under- stand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes.”

            8. Correct citation. It finds 97% GW and 82% AGW.

            9. Again, you are misreading. The figure of 97.4% is the percentage of those who ought to know (climate scientists who have published on the subject) who answered yes to question 2, the one about AGW. The 82% figure is the overall percentage of respondents, including non-specialists, who answered yes to the same question. The study found that the greater the expertise of the sample, the higher the percentage of agreement.

               I ask you again to consider the summary quote.

            10. The summary quote is not in dispute. The question relates to the reliability of the 97% figure in the context quoted.

                “As for the evidence for global warming, there is a consensus among experts in climate science that Earth is experiencing anthropogenic global warming: 97% of climate scientists see this happening and, based on evidence, see the change as due to human activity.”

                This statement does not follow from the Cook study.

            11. Now you’re being either obtuse or disingenuous. We aren’t talking about the Cook study. We’re talking about the paper you cited as contradicting the Cook study, and that paper actually supports the results of the Cook study, contrary to your implication. It’s dishonest to make a claim and cite as support a paper that contradicts that claim.

                Now perhaps you’re quibbling about the term “experts in climate science”. I would suppose that refers to climatologists who have published on climate change, which is the 97.4% figure. But perhaps you want to refer to all climatologists; in that case the figure (which your citation doesn’t give but which can be estimated from its fig. 1) is about 88%. 82%, again, is the figure for all respondents, who were earth scientists of many sorts, only 5% of whom were climatologists.

            12. I wasn’t misreading. I just quoted a different sentence than yours. Both are correct.

            13. I’m becoming a bit exasperated. Yes, you cited a paper to support the opposite of what it actually says. You stated percentages from that paper but misunderstood what they were percentages of. You quoted no sentences from that paper; the only quote you provided isn’t from that paper at all, and you quoted it only to disagree with it anyway.

                I’m beginning to doubt that you read what you cited or even read my comments. Certainly your credibility is declining each time you post.

            14. I don’t define my credibility based on my degree of agreement with you and I didn’t misunderstand the percentages that I accurately quoted.

            15. “Are you being obtuse or disingenuous?”

                “I don’t understand, and I’m not saying.” 🙂

            16. You: “It finds 97% GW and 82% AGW.”

                The actual paper (Doran & Zimmerman 2009): “Results show that overall, 90% of participants answered “risen” to question 1 and 82% answered yes to question 2. In general, as the level of active research and specialization in climate science increases, so does agreement with the two primary questions (Figure 1). In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change (79 individuals in total). Of these specialists, 96.2% (76 of 79) answered “risen” to question 1 and 97.4% (75 of 77) answered yes to ques- tion 2.”

                The two questions:
                “1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?
                2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?”

                What you said doesn’t match the actual paper. Can you see that? This paper does not provide support for your position.

      2. Ah gee, the Australian, Australia’s answer to the Daily Mail.

   2. The source you cite is a well-known AGW denier (Richard Tol) and now luke-warmist whose blog reads like predictable, hackneyed Climatedepot.com nonsense. Cook et al’s response to him and others is here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/docs/24_errors.pdf?f=24errors

      1. Thanks, I read the piece by Tol and it smelled very fishy to me.

      2. I don’t think it’s fair to describe Richard Tol as a “AGW denier”.

         1. So he is just a good meaning skeptic who thinks the science is far from “settled”?

            1. He’s someone who has stated that AGW is a fact. Many many times. He’s also a co-ordinating author for the IPCC. I don’t think it’s fair or accurate to describe him as a ‘AGW denier’ and I don’t think ad hominem helps the discussion.

            2. It’s difficult to tie Tol down on anything. I’ve tried to engage him on a number of sites over the last couple of years. His style is to make some semi cryptic comment or assertion then fail to support it. It is fair to say that Tol has denier sympathies, act like a denier at times and likes the attention he gets in denier circles.

               I think he just likes to be contrary for its own sake. True denier? Perhaps not but it is hard to get him to accept that he might be wrong.

            3. Even though he has stated AGW is a fact many times, “Tol has denier sympathies”. Wow. Sounds like he’s been convicted of Thought Crime.

   3. Maybe this is just me, but arguing about the size of the consensus makes me uncomfortable anyway.

      Science isn’t authority based, nor is it a popularity contest, it’s argument and evidence based. Tallies are important perhaps to counter lies, “Most client scientists don’t accept warming” is a lie, for example, and a tally counters that lie. But as a way to establish the truth about climate claims it is better to talk about the actual evidence, physics, and arguments than trying to come up with a tally. Of course, the climate is a fiendishly complicated topic, so maybe my preference is infeasible.

      In any case, the policy response can be taken on purely actuarial grounds: there is a non-trivial chance of certain very bad outcomes. How can we hedge against this? One doesn’t have to establish the bad outcome with certainty first, one only has to acknowledge it’s real possibility to start acting.

      1. Fully agreed on all points!!

      2. I see your point but I take consensus as meaning other scientists have repeated the models and have reached a similar conclusion rather than the scientists are in agreement out of some sort of affiliation.

         1. I think the value of mentioning the consensus is partly to show that media attempts to present doubts about global warming are not really based on credible science. There will always be a few dodgy papers and crackpot ideas; noting how seriously other scientists take them is a good way of figuring out which are which.
            With that in mind, it’s probably worth pointing out that there is a published response to Tol’s paper indicating that his “consensus value is based on a math error that manufactures ~300 nonexistent rejection papers”. Oops!

      3. Agree.

6. For a guy who claims he is a physicist and an electrical engineer, he shows very little expertise in science methods. I also wonder why someone like this writes a letter that is so nasty and arrogant and yet still expects a decent answer. Of course, he provided no links and no references to his babble. He needs to either put up or shut up

   Since this guy is supposedly a fan of Christopher Hitchens, I will respond with this quote:

   “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” – Christopher Hitchens.

   1. That would be my answer in general to this letter or rant to Prof. Coyne from this skeptic. And before he could even dream of an apology of any type he would first have to stop the denial and incoherent babble and actually provide some evidence for his position. I should retract that word as he indicates no position except criticism of everyone and everything.

7. 1. Climate Change: the scientific debate by Potholer54, carefully researched. There are many more parts, each dealing with some aspect of the topic.

8. “I have however studied the issue for over 12 years.”

   Translation: “I’ve trolled around on biased internet sites for 12 years, so I’m an expert.”

   This gambit occurs so often it needs a name.

   As a physicist, I come across this gambit all the time. I can’t tell you how often people think they’re an “expert” at quantum mechanics because they read a few books by Brian Greene or seen a few videos. Guess what: you don’t know quantum mechanics, and you don’t know climate science. Move on.

   1. This gambit occurs so often it needs a name

      It has a name. Confirmation bias.

      1. Or how about the “‘University of Google’ Fallacy?”

         1. Like this:

            https://insolemexumbra.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/7783365118_ceac1b72a7_z.jpg

            1. I want one!!!

      2. Confirmation bias is when you cherry-pick reality to confirm your beliefs. The gambit I’m referring to is claiming that you’re an expert because you casually read some selective websites and books and then think you’re an expert. Related to confirmation bias, but not quite the same thing.

         1. I medicine we sometimes talk about patients who’ve consulted Dr. Google, or went to Google University Medical School.

            1. You mean that WebMD is not a real, honest-to-goodness, flesh and blood doctor? Now I know he will never make house calls.

         2. I think the Dunning-Kruger Effect is pretty close to what you’re talking about:

            http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect

            1. That’s it! Thanks!

            2. Woohoo! Two (now make it three) Dunning-Kruger references on this thread.

      3. I think Dunning-Kruger Effect is more apt.

         1. I count NINE references to Dunning-Kruger at this point! I must be right b/c I am good at counting things so that makes me an expert.
            😗

            1. Clearly, you only think you’re good at counting for I see ten Dunning-Kruger references. I wonder if this post will elevate to the top returns for that search.

            2. “ten Dunning-Kruger references”

               Does that include your own?

               (Damn, have I just made it 11?)

               cr

   2. That’s exactly what I’d like to know – what of climatology he’s studied for 12 years. He has no degree in climatology but wants to put his “expertise” ahead of the 97% of climate scientists who warn of the ongoing event of climate change and cite the role that humans contribute to this process.

   3. well then I guess I have a PhD in Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry. I’ve been “studying” them for at least 12 years, and then served as an advisor for my son’s “undergrad” in cartoons!

      I better go update my resume and CV!

   4. Mathew,

      I think that is a great point. I am far from being a quantum physicist, but from from everything I’ve read, a large part of the greenhouse effect is due to the quantum effect of gasses such as CO2 absorbing and re-emitting various frequencies of electromagnetic waves differently. Interestingly, something the email author never addressed.

   5. In fairness, as Lawrence Krauss opined in in interview with Richard Dawkins, nobody understands quantum mechanics. Or as Richard Feynman once observed, it you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you don’t understand quantum mechanics. Or to cite Steven Weinberg, quantum mechanics is a preposterous theory that, unfortunately, appears to be correct.

      I have a PhD in elementary particle physics and I don’t pretend to understand quantum mechanics. For any one who claims otherwise, he/she should be asked to explain quantum entanglement or the 2 slit conundrum.

      1. Well, I think that the many worlds interpretation “explains” those conundrums pretty trivially, but that’s another can of worms. I would modify Feynman’s quote: “Nobody understands quantum mechanics if you shoehorn wave-function collapse into the theory. Without wave function collapse, you just have MWI, which is elegant and perfectly easy to understand. It’s just hard to ACCEPT.”

         1. Yes.

            Would David Deutsch and Sean Carroll (both MWI proponents) agree with Krauss and Feynman?

            When I did my Ph.D. I essentially took the “shut up and calculate” approach. But (as I’ve mentioned hereabouts before), when I read Deutsch’s explanation of MWI in _The Fabric of Reality_ years later I felt that I did understand what was going on *physically* for the first time.

            /@

            1. Carroll is the resident physicist at WEIT; I’m just a physicst/troll. We could ask him. But I would guess that both he and Deutsch (like me) consider QM to *not* be mysterious, in light of the MWI.

9. In spite of his education, your correspondent shows an alarming lack of understanding of basic physics and data analysis – I just hope he has never been in any courses I’ve taught. Like you, I find engaging individual in debate to be fruitless. If they truly want to learn, I direct them to

   http://www.skepticalscience.com

   and in particular

   http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php

   In short: No, there has not been “18 years of no warming”….surface temperatures may not have warmed as fast as in the 1990s (and we know why: El Nino, slightly biased measurements early on, and heat going into the oceans), but 2015 is already set to blow that myth out of the water.

   http://www.skepticalscience.com/latest-global-temp-data-breaking-records.html

   Also, in order to get no warming in the past 18 years requires some serious cherry picking of the data, as well as a willingness to believe a trend derived from a time series that is too short because of the inherent noise in the signal.

   So, lack of understanding of basic physics (heat transport, radiative transfer, heat capacities), and data analysis (cherry picking, ignoring effects of noise in data etc.). Pretty much par for the course.

   1. The real question is why is the writer using 18 years when the standard period is 30 years?

      My PhD was in an area of climate change, Carbon dioxide fluxes from soils under different land uses and management systems, riveting I know but I did have to read a lot on where the ideas of global warming and climate change came from.

      John Tyndall explained the heat in the Earth’s atmosphere in terms of the capacities of the various gases in the air to absorb radiant heat. He concluded that water vapour is the strongest absorber of radiant heat in the atmosphere and is the principal gas controlling air temperature. Absorption by the other gases is not negligible but relatively small (Tyndall, 1861).
      The idea of CO2 being responsible for climate warming was proposed independently by the American geologist T.G Chamberlain in 1898 (Chamberlin, 1898) and the Swedish chemist S. Arrhenius in 1903 as an explanation for the ending of glacial periods.
      In 1952, Lewis D. Kaplan showed that in the upper atmosphere, adding more CO¬2 must change the balance of radiation (Kaplan, 1952). This was backed up by Gilbert N. Plass in 1956 who calculated a 3-4 degree rise with a doubling of carbon dioxide.
      In 1955, the chemist Hans Suess reported an analysis of wood from trees grown over the past century, finding that the newer the wood the higher its ratio of plain carbon to carbon-14. He had detected an increase of fossil carbon in the atmosphere. Suess working with Roger Revelle at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California showed that the oceans couldn’t absorb the increased supply of anthropogenic carbon dioxide. Dave Keeling tackled the next problem of measuring carbon dioxide accurately. Keeling was hired by Suess and Revelle to do this. Keeling not only developed a baseline for atmospheric carbon dioxide he also showed it was rising after just two years of measurements(Revelle and Suess, 1957).

      In other words this isn’t a new idea and has many lines of evidence supporting the central hypothesis.

      Sorry about the length of the reply

      1. No need to apologize.

      2. He’s using 18 years because that allows him to start with an abnormally hot year, namely 1998.

10. My response would simply be:

    http://climate.nasa.gov/

11. Oh for Fu**s sake!

    1. Or wouldn’t that be “Fu**’s sake”?

       1. Or even F***s’ sake, depending on how active one is…

12. Email said:

    “You are doing a “hit job” on many honest thinkers, many of whom know far far more about the issues of CAGW than you apparently do”

    Uh, perhaps time to listen to your own criticism? When the WHO, IPCC, NAS, NASA, and the Royal Academy all agree strongly that anthropogenic climate change is a real phenomenon, then it’s time to start being skeptical of your own skepticism. Time to start actually educating yourself on WHY so many diverse and decorated scientific bodies concur. And why they all disagree with you.

    Just because you don’t understand something, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

    1. The problem often comes down to people not understanding that they don’t understand. They are sure that they do understand.

       It’s like those people that audition for the big talent shows like The Voice, So You Think You Can Danc, America’s Got Talent, etc., that are supremely confident that they are awesome, and they aren’t even close. So far off that it seems to everyone watching that they are delusional. And then they are surprised and offended when they don’t make the cut. They have vastly over estimated their competence and evidence to that effect is a personal offense.

       Although that type of thing is typical of humans in general, some people have less ability to govern it than others.

       1. This comment made me think of Superstar USA.
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstar_USA
          A spoof reality show that basically played off that exact sentiment you describe where untalented people really believe they’re stars. It was a hilarious show. Too bad the formula only lent itself for a one-off season.

          1. Missed that one.

       2. Dunning-Kruger says it all.

          1. Yeah. A formalized description of self-delusion.

             1. There is the inverse Dunning-Kruger Effect where really good at stuff people who think they are not.

             2. I think I have inverse Dunning-Kruger — but it’s probably just my straight-ahead Dunning-Kruger making me think that.

             3. That’s actually part of Dunning-Kruger. People who are competent at a task think they are less competent than they are while people who lack competence think they are extremely competent.

                I’m trying to get better at recognizing when I can handle a task.

             4. Betrand Russell quote about clever people having doubts and dull people being absolutely certain goes here.

                /@

             5. My recollection from childhood and always being one of the top students in the class demonstrates this side of the effect. I never understood why people thought I was smart when the things I knew so easily simply weren’t difficult. (I was one of those math nerds who could compute stuff incredibly quickly in my head). It seems to be an intrinsic human trait to automatically associate one’s own skill level with everyone else’s. On the other hand, I was also a young earth creationist throughout high school and college, proving the full Dunning-Kruger effect can be found in a single person.

       3. Off topic, but to be fair to the contestants on those shows, (a) we don’t know how much of the attitude they display is due to editing, (b) some of them are taking the mickey, and it’s not always easy to tell who, and (c) it’s a performer’s job to project confidence, whether she feels it or not.

          But yes, a lot of them are just deluded.

          1. Youtube has some grisly examples of the more extreme cases of this delusion, trawled from the depths of X Factor, American Idol and the like.

             They do seem to be genuinely deluded (not to mention spectacularly awful). All I can say is, if they are putting on an act, they are in fact very good actors.

             (There’s a low limit to how much I can watch, my taste for metaphorical blood sports is small).

13. That was a good laugh, especially about the thing engineers try of applying engineering principles to nature. He chose a fine example of cherry picking 18 years to show no warming thing. I thought it was about 16 or 17 years, starting from an unusually high temperatures of 1998 and ignoring everything before. He even added a few carefully chosen words to type in capitals as if he’s shouting, because tone is important to scientific arguments. The Daily Mail couldn’t have done a better job. But he’s got more qualifications than me so I defer to his authority, hopefully one of the 97% of climate scientists is better qualified so then I can defer to his/her authority.

    1. Of course the planet is self-correcting: after we heat it up enough to kill us off, our artifacts will return to the ground as oxides of iron, aluminum, and the other substances to which we added energy so they would exist in a usable form as buildings, cars, and anything else we make.

       By the time the planet is as far away from us as we are from the (non-avian) dinosaurs, or perhaps even the mammoths, all will be right again. For those of us who measure time in human – rather than geologic – terms, that’s small consolation.

       1. I’d recommend looking at the time between the Permian Extinction and Triassic period.

14. Following the comment of Leeta (#1) above, the US military also accepts the reality, if not of CAGW, at least of CGW (I don’t think they care about the source so much, just the reality of what is happening). They are worried about it because of the effects it will have on the geopolitical situation – future conflicts as water becomes scarcer and crops fail.

    1. Believe it or not, the numbnuts in the Rethuglican caucus in Congress is actually trying to pass legislation to prevent the military from spending any money on investigations of climate change and their consequences for us relative to tasks it might be called on to perform in the future.

15. …(yes, I’ll say that it’s a man)…

    You didn’t give up any info there that wasn’t self-evident. There’s a variety of male-flavored hubris that spurs us guys to launch a mansplaination with the equivalent of “What you and all the so-called experts don’t understand is this … “

    1. No, I think that sort of hubris is found in plenty of women also. It’s hubris-flavored hubris.

       1. I haven’t seen it in nearly as many women as men — but that may be due to some male-centric myopia on my part.

          Or maybe it’s the availability heuristic. An overwhelming number of “denialists” online (at least among those who identify themselves sufficiently to be able to discern their gender) seem to be men.

          Come to think of it, however, the hubris-flavored hubris you mention is also prevalent in the anti-vaxxer crowd, among whom women are well-represented, especially along the hubris-drenched Palin/Bachmann vector. So I’ll stand corrected, and revert to being an equal-opportunity denialism critic.

          1. This is a good point. I was just thinking ‘but it is the guys that do this sort of thing’, but Sastra and you just straightened me out. Yep, we see this sort of tone from both XX and XY people.

          2. And the anti-GMO crowd who see that this isn’t taken care of properly and motivated by what is good for the corporation, not the people are lumped in as well. Which I think just may be wrong.

          3. Yeah Sastra is right; women are just as full of it. What I have witnessed is men can be more confident in many areas,never when they don’t really know what they are talking about. I actually observed this for years working with men and learned to adapt it in my own approaches because it makes a big difference in how you’re perceived.

             1. Never = even.

             2. OK, now that makes sense. I’ve observed that a popular male tactic is to use offense as the best defense, especially when they don’t know or are faking it. For some men, that’s when they’re most full of piss and vinegar.

          4. Yes, Sastra is right on this one, at least in terms of views: http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/02/12/how-different-groups-think-about-scientific-issues/

             I don’t know how one would go about determining if the loudest people on the Internet are majority male. It seems the biggest disparities in scientific views are in evolution and GMOs. In all other areas, the sexes are equally nutty (or educated if you take an optimistic stance, but based on these numbers, it’s stretching the limits of optimism).

             1. My original point was not so much about views, as about tone. I accept the insight of Sastra and Diana about women being just as hubris-filled as men. But if I were a gambling man — and I am — I would have laid long odds, based on (to borrow Smokedpaprika’s phrase) the piss-and-vinegar tone alone, on the person who wrote the email to Jerry being a Y-chromosome bearer.

             2. Could it be that males are inclined to think about ‘things’ (hence their predominance in climate-change debate) while women are more inclined to think about people-related issues such as health (hence their prevalence in anti-vaxx issues). I am generalising _wildly_ here, of course.

16. “We deny that carbon dioxide—essential to all plant growth—is a pollutant.”

    — I’ll take this one as a place to make a comment. I’d think that a pollutant is something with *air quality* concerns, which is true if there’s enough carbon dioxide. Moreover, what does this have to do with warming? Suppose there were suddenly much more oxygen and less nitrogen. Oxygen is essential to life too (well, much of it) and yet too much relative to nitrogen and we’d have fires burning all the time, etc.

    1. I once read an environmental report that said that nickel is an important element in human nutrition and then went on to describe levels far above allowable concentrations. I thought about starting reports on petroleum contamination by stating that hydrogen is the most common element in the universe and carbon is the building block of life, so how can hydrocarbons be bad?

       1. similar to the granola-for-brains Whole Paycheck crowd and their “natural” obsession. At a gym I used to go to, there were quotes form personal trainers on the wall, one of which, perpetrating chemical fears, said something like “if you can’t pronounce it, don’t eat it!” which I assume that means most americans shouldn’t eat Chipotle.
          My usual response is well, cyanide is “natural”, so is rattlesnake venom, ebola virus, and well, dog crap is pretty natural…

          1. …means most americans shouldn’t eat Chipotle

             Nice 🙂 By your metric, most of the WASPs I’ve dined with need go on a prosciutto-free diet.

    2. Of course higher levels of oxygen would been bigger insects. Much bigger insects. And bigger spiders.
       I personally would love to live in such a world.

       1. Hey, how about a [Trigger Warning] for arachnophobes when you post a comment like that?!

          1. +1 Mark and his damn arachnids all the time! 🙂

             1. 😄 Calvin and Hobbes almost get me; only I would reverse the frogs and bugs.

       2. It’s funny how all these posts intersect somehow. Just the other day during the TP wars (flare-up, actually), it occurred to me that having the thing roll under and closer to the wall would be to invite spiders to hitch a ride. Egads!

          1. With over the top, though, they might land in your lap!

17. NO MYSTERY – Second Law of Thermodynamics

    It’s a mystery to me how entropy results in negative feedback all by itself. Increasing entropy applies only to closed systems and the Earth is not closed. There is that little matter of energy flows into and out of the system.

    It is the balance of those energy flows that is the crux of the matter. Increase CO2 and the energy flow out is decreased. The temperature of the Earth will then increase until the energy flows are again balanced. Hopefully that happens well before we resemble Venus.

    It isn’t that hard to understand even for me with my education in engineering.

    Speaking of which, I was appalled to see that my alma mater has removed almost all of the core engineering sciences from the requirements to get a degree in electrical engineering. Statics is still required but the other courses (thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, dynamics, materials science) are reduced to a single elective. It used to be you could count on someone with an engineering degree to have studied thermodynamics but that no longer appears to be the case. They may get a brief exposure to it in other courses but it isn’t the same.

    1. When I got a degree in Electrical Engineering (BCE), we took all the science courses you mentioned as part of five rquired courses in physics. I took one biology and one chemistry course, but do not recall if they were required or elective. I never liked statistics and did not finish a graduate degree because I had to take a few more statistics courses.

       1. When I was in school any 4 year plus “S” degree of any kind required 2 general Physics courses, 2 general Chemistry courses, a Circuits course, Statics, Dynamics, 3 Calculus courses and Differential Equations. That was the core starting bloc of courses that seemed fairly typical of any STE type degree back then at a typical US university, comprising most of the first two years of study.

    2. I missed that the first time through. You’re right, its a complete nonsequitur.

    3. In EE programs today, we are increasingly book-ended by forces beyond our control. Way back when I did my undergrad, requirements included core physics, thermodynamics, chemistry and mathematics; those on the research track were encouraged to take the same courses offered to math and physics majors. Under that regime, highly prepared students could waive certain courses through AP credit, and it was still typically a five-year program. Today, the field of electrical engineering is more complex. There is pressure to include a wider breadth of topics in the BS degree. There is pressure from administrators to include business and commercialization electives; pressure from the legislature to get students finished in four years; and every year the incoming students are less prepared and need more remedial instruction. We’re trying to teach more stuff, at a slower pace, and finish quicker. Most of this pressure flows downhill to the departments and instructors, with few effective feedback channels for us to express our needs and limitations. Over time, a lot of fundamental instruction has been just squeezed out. As much as I hate to say it, an EE degree today is not an indicator of any general scientific competence.

       1. I was talking to friend from one of the lesser local universities recently, and he painted a gloomy picture. He was in engineering and said that many students had little or no mathematics when they first arrived.

          The reason was that these students saw engineering as giving good employment prospects, so they had configured their options at school to maximise their entry scores. Apparently the subjects taken don’t matter much, it’s the aggregate score that’s important, and engineering is pretty demanding in that regard.

          Unfortunately for my friend all the good students, with high scores in maths and science, had been accepted by the higher ranked universities, so he had to teach some remedial subjects.

          Competition, ain’t it great. Apart from the fact that it motivates people to fudge, lie, cheat, and steal. To be honest though, I’ve heard universities moaning about how students are unprepared for university all my life (and now I’m 60).

          1. I also work at a “lesser local university” and have seen all the problems you describe. My outlook is a little more optimistic though, since I think we capture the complete distribution of students, not just the stragglers who missed out on the elite experience. There are a lot of reasons why good students choose our campus. Unfortunately we have to address their needs alongside the rest of them. Our administration’s interpretation of the “land grant” mission is that everyone succeeds here, while paying negligible tuition. So somehow we have to force success onto the ones who are simply untalented or unmotivated or underprepared, we take an absurdly soft approach to cheating and plagiarism, and we also try to serve the best and brightest with virtually no resources and too few personnel. I don’t really think it’s a downward spiral but it doesn’t point to an inspiring future either.

18. Whew. Where to begin? I’ll try and respond from my perspective as a professor of electrical engineering. The complainant in this letter seems to have a strong faith in the power of negative feedbacks. Perhaps he is trained in control systems; perhaps in analog circuit design; in either case the mere presence of negative feedbacks does not ensure the stability of a designed system. One of the points I try to emphasize in my teaching is that as designer we invest most of our energy into making things conform to simple, analyzable models. If I’m designing an op amp, for instance, I will deliberately insert loads to lower its bandwidth so that the stability analysis can be done with only one to three poles to worry about (the remaining complexity is thereby suppressed so that I don’t have to understand it). Then I can deliberately manipulate the remaining poles to create a stable linear amplifier, or an oscillator. If I screw this up then my circuit can become unstable and start a fire on my lab bench. There are small holes in my lab walls where students created something so unstable that the chips rapidly overheated and shot their lids off like little ceramic bullets. All of these circuits have negative feedback, but they can also have multiple feedbacks or positive feedbacks, and if the loads change then negative feedbacks can suddenly become positive feedbacks.

    So the complainant, as an engineer, may have a great deal of experience working with things that are deliberately made to be simple, linear and stable. But perhaps he should seek more experience in general systems that are much more diverse in their behaviors. I can make you a circuit that is perfectly stable at room temperature or in a dark room, but becomes catastrophically unstable when those conditions are perturbed. Why should the climate be expected to conform to stability conditions that are not guaranteed in your circuits?

    1. Ooh yeah, I’d forgotten about that. You can have a stable system that becomes unstable with the application of negative feedback. Well, I guess the problem is really that the negative feedback becomes positive at some frequency and you’ve reinvented the oscillator.

       Last year I came across a Texas amp which had a reference or bias supply that could become unstable if it got too hot, so cooling was important even though it was a low power device (ran on 5 to 10V). GBW was ~200MHz so it required a bit of current, and might have had to drive 50 ohms. Weird.

19. I wonder if this guy would concede that CO2 and Methane are greenhouse gasses. If so, it is a simple analyses from there. More greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, the hotter it will get. If you want contemporary proof, google Venus. We can easily measure these gasses today and in the past. It is clear that the levels are rising dramatically. The 2nd law of thermodynamics can’t disprove that. And what, I wonder, is causing this alarming rate of greenhouse gas accumulation? One doesn’t have to be a scientist to imagine that 7 billion humans with their 1 billion cars, 20,000+ airplanes, industrial farming/manufacturing, electricity production and day to day living are the obvious contributors. But hey, it’s not a crime to ignore evidence.

    1. The oceans have been both heating and absorbing carbon dioxide and is reaching its limit. The hotter the waters are the less they absorb and eventually that carbon dioxide will begin releasing into our atmosphere. And that might make the feed back self sustaining without us pumping an average 4% – 6%+ rise in CO2 every year.

20. When I see stability in a circuit I design, or robust thermostatting in nature, I know it is due to negative feedback (a loop in my circuit) or some natural feedback in the case of nature (NO MYSTERY – Second Law of Thermodynamics). Looking at an overall physical picture, I understand it pretty well, and must conclude that Nature does in fact take pretty good care of Herself.

    A great conclusion…if only there weren’t ice ages, interglacial periods, and hundreds-million-years-long stints where the Earth was so hot there were no ice caps.

    1. And it isn’t as if our concern about global warming is because we’re worried about Nature. The dope dosn’t seem to have noticed, Nature isn’t worried about us.

    2. This fellow has Lenz’s law on the brain. Not all feedbacks are negative.

21. It is mildly tempting to refute this guy on a point-by-point basis. There is so much nonsense here, but daveyc said, if he is so invested in denial that he buys “no warming in 18 years” trope, he is not worth the trouble. There are many, easily accessible sources that explain why that and every other claim made by this so-called engineer/physicist are nonsense. Jerry is absolutely right, “it’s always counterproductive to engage people like this.”

    1. he seems to come from the Ken Ham school of intellectual development, in that no amount of evidence to the contrary could disabuse them of their pet belief.

22. Not to mention, what, five mass extinction events, with the first one corresponding to a radical change in the composition of the atmosphere. The Earth really couldn’t hit us over the head with a clue bat harder if it tried.

23. The website “http://www.realclimate.org/” is also a good resource – climate science by climate scientists, as it says. They have some really good and extensive posts debunking certain persistent myths, and it’s an interesting site to read anyway to see what’s going on climate science.

24. Dear Writer,

    You are a physicist and an engineer yet you don’t know what a trendline is?

    Imagine you join a bowling League and over five years you average 145, 155, 175, 195, and 200. During your first season, you bowled your first and only 300 game. According to the logic you present on global warming, you’ve been getting worse at bowling ever since. Repeat after me, “A data point is not a trend, a data point is not a trend…”

    Sincerely,

    Chris

    1. I think you got Email-man imagining that 300-game so hard, he went off to find fortune & fame in the Professional Bowlers Association…

25. Coincidentally, just before reading this, I was checking out the animated infographics at Bloomberg:

    http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-world/

    Checkmate, denialists

    1. Awesome! Infographs FTW.

    2. Thanks! That is good.

26. In the past, most of the CO2 came from god’s volcanoes. It has also been shown that anytime god emitted more CO2 the temperature rose accordingly. The level never went above 400 ppm. Now man pumps in 35 billion metric tonnes of CO2 annually and god’s volcanoes add in the range of .15 to .44 billion tonnes annually. AGW is true as man adds 34.85 to 33.56 more billion tonnes of CO2 than god does and the CO2 is 400 ppm. I did the math because deniers are not very good at it even if they physicists/engineers.

27. Looking at an overall physical picture, I understand it pretty well, and must conclude that Nature does in fact take pretty good care of Herself.

    Given that we define “Nature” according to whatever happens, noting that “Nature does in fact take pretty good care of herself” is an especially empty statement. If all the volcanoes on earth erupted in a glorious burst of flame and spouted a bunch of pretty, pretty lava we would simply be observing how Nature maintains Her good health and beauty, once again taking care of Herself just fine.

    I think the concern is over ourselves — and Nature doesn’t give a flying patootie about us.

    Dawkins/Harris/Hitchens would not make that mistake. Nor would they think that an engineering degree and the University of Google gives peer-level competence in climate science. So you have no Bachelors in Atheism from the Dawkins/Harris/Hitchens School of Atheism, Dropout. Stop saying you do — or you risk a Marshall McLuhan Moment.

    1. Wait… You mean that reading this website the last six years does NOT make me an evolutionary biologist PhD equivalent?

       1. No. And I just happen to have evolutionary biologist Dr. Jerry Coyne hidden right here behind this billboard …

    2. Exactly, “Mother” Nature doesn’t exist any more than the gods he professes not to believe in.

    3. I think the denier must be thinking also that nature is one monolithic whole. Sure, the earth will survive global warming, but millions of animals and plants and fungi etc. won’t. (Including us, perhaps.)

28. It is hardly worth to fisk this … but it is fun.

    This is a typical aggressive attack from a position of inflated credentials. It is immediately apparent as comments have noted before me that this person do not know statistics (making descriptive statistics such as trendlines), science (using predictive theories instead of cherrypicked data sets) or engineering (not realizing negative feedback systems can be unstable).

    Some specifics:

    – ““Denialism” (a toxic word that)”.

    A descriptive term, when there is consensus (as Jerry notes) and it is based on a well tested remaining theory [IPCC].

    – “When I see stability in a circuit I design, or robust thermostatting in nature, I know it is due to negative feedback (a loop in my circuit) or some natural feedback in the case of nature”.

    A negative feedback is a negative feedback. This is the kind of cognitive dissonance one would expect from denialists and/or religious.

    More to the point here, AGW is as of yet a regime without any obviously failed negative feedbacks (tipping points) as everyone knows. We don’t blame negative feedback of our sound amplifiers when someone turns up the volume to unbearable levels. We blame the forcing, here man made greenhouse gases.

    – “the 2nd Law insisting that we must have something, somehow”.

    The 2LOT says nothing of the kind.

    Yes, we can’t have structure formation without 2LOT. But having 2LOT says nothing about structure formation. We could very well inhabit a universe with a “standard particle model” that gives us only hydrogen and no higher elements or dark matter. Then there would be no structures despite having 2LOT.

    – “18 years of no warming.”

    I think last year broke that camel’s back, you can no longer find an interval which doesn’t demonstrate warming. But I can’t be arsed to check such inanities, I trust that the references in other comments lead to this recent data.

    Most denialists have moved on from the indefensible “no warming” to “no _man made_ warming”. (You no longer need climate science to see from data alone that warming is happening. Also a recent observation.) But that means you have to provide a better theory than the prevailing one, and as we have already seen this denialist’s strength do not lie in science (or engineering).

29. Hmmmm…not AGW??? Man adds about 35 gigatonnes tonnes of CO2 annually. We know from ice core samples that when C02 levels went up in the past, temperature went up. The levels were never above 400 ppm. God’s CO2 emitters, volcanoes, both land and under water emit in a range of 0.13 gigatons/yr to 0.44 gigaton/yr. God is behind by 34.56 to 34.87 gigatons/yr! Now the level is 400+ ppm and rising. Unless thee is a difference in mam made vs god’s CO2 there is AGW. Note: I did the math as deniers usually aren’t very good at it even if they are physicists/engineers.

    1. yes, but Sen. Inhofe found SNOW once, DURING WINTER even!,So checkmate, scientists!

30. One thing – the statistic that 97% of published scientists endorse AGW is low (Cook’s paper on which this number is based used very conservative methodology). The actual is likely > 99%. See, e.g.,

    http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/how-climate-change-deniers-got-it-very-wrong

    (Don’t trust MSNBC? Follow the links to Powell’s original research.)

    1. +1

31. I am trying to understand what this person is claiming. It appears that he is denying anthropogenic global warming because… the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics? Thermostating? I honestly have no clear idea what he is saying since he is pretty incoherent. Invoking Big Words that Sound Very Important and Therefore I Know What I am Talking About is supposed to impress anyone? Nah. He is just doubled-down.

    For some reason Name Redacted thinks that there is some process that keeps the earth from warming up, I guess. The sun shines continually on our atmosphere which is increasing its proportion of green-house gases, and meanwhile laws of physics will make it so that there will be no upward trend in temperature? Sorry, Name Redacted, but physics says otherwise.

    Name Redacted is also ignoring the evidence from the geological record that the earth has been much, much warmer in the past. Perhaps he should look into rumors of coal beds in Antarctica, or speculation from the petroleum industry that maybe, just maybe, there are oil fields from former tropical seas within the arctic circle.

    1. If the earth was much warmer in the past, and obviously flourishing, what’s bad about it getting warmer in the future?

       1. Flourishing for whom? Dinosaurs? Was that a good time for mammals? Would that have been a good time to have an advanced agriculture based society?

       2. There weren’t 7 billion people in the not so recent past. In particular, our species, Homo sapiens, only goes back about 150 thousand years, a mere second in the history of the 4.5 billion year old earth.

       3. One of the problems is as heat is increased in a weather system it becomes more chaotic. Increased storm intensity, increased storm surges, increased number of storms. This is why it’s called climate change not global warming. Climate change can include rising sea levels, droughts, increased storms and more powerful storms, acidification of oceans. Some scientists are predicting large changes in ocean food fish species. 10 percent of the earths population get their protein from the ocean. Many crops only grow in a certain temperature range. Above this temperature crops fail. That failure point is not much higher than current high temperatures in the USA and Canada, which provide food to billions of people.

          Temperature will rise in the far North and far South making some areas a suitable for farming the soil in those areas is generally poor.

          Rainfall patterns may change and how that will effect agriculture is a big fat question mark.

          Another problem is harmful insects are now able to overwinter. They used to be killed by extended hard frosts. I hardly ever see hard frosts anymore in the PNW, and some insects are becoming problems. As is the fungus that caused potato blight in Ireland.

          Increased sea levels alone will displace at least hundreds of millions, perhaps a billion humans. Some of the most fertile agriculture lands in the world is just above sea level and will be destroyed. The damage from rising sea levels will be in the trillions of dollars as many cities, including Manhattan and New York will eventually be underwater. Glaciers are melting faster than anyone thought likely.

          Political instability will cause even more refugees and hunger.

32. Jerry’s correspondent claims, in his anthropomorphizing way, “that Nature does in fact take pretty good care of Herself.” He offers no explanation, however, for how the old gal accomplishes this except, in essence, “because, entropy.” I also wonder how he would explain our planet’s having undergone five mass-extinction events (only one of which, the K-T boundary event that wiped out the dinosaurs, had a cause exogenous to Mother Earth herself).

    Although Jerry’s correspondent states that he is non-religious, his claim mirrors that of the “Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming” quoted in the OP:

    We believe Earth and its ecosystems … are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing[.]

    To these claims, I can think of no more apt rejoinder than the Douglas Adams’ quote about the puddle who thought the hole fit him so staggeringly well, that it must have been made to have him in it:

    This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise.

    Humans have flourished because modern man and our hominid ancestors have been adapted by evolution to survive in the relatively stable climate of the earth’s relatively recent past — obviously, not the other way round.

    There is also no evidence that there is anything in the universe that cares about “human flourishing” other than (some) human minds, which supervene on their corresponding human brains.

33. Why is it engineers who seem more prone to these things? Moon hoaxers too…

    1. How much do engineers study “The Scientific Method,” as opposed to “The Engineering Method”? Engineers don’t repeatedly test the science on which their designs are based. Is anything “provisional” in engineering, as it is in science? Certainly, a willfully scientifically illiterate airline passenger doesn’t want to hear any “provisional” talk from anyone regarding the airworthiness of the aircraft in which he is being transported.

       1. As someone who has worked on aircraft software (I know, this is playing the credential card), I can safely assert that engineers do indeed use the scientific method. The problem is that the assumptions are far enough removed from the basics that most engineers don’t think about them. We go by results (just like science). However, many engineers don’t dig any deeper (nor should they in the context of work) to think about the underlying assumptions. Science has proven them to such a high degree that it is safe to take them for granted. While they are “provisional” in the scientific sense, they are not provisional in the colloquial sense. The problem with science deniers arises when smart engineers either intentionally (but I think usually unintentionally) swap the colloquial definition of provisional with the scientific definition.

          1. Just to be sure… they use math and physics to design airplanes, not prayer and scripture, right?

             1. Yes indeed, and a large amount of robustness testing to ensure the math and physics were properly applied.

                The people riding the airplanes are another story. My mom always thanks Jesus for having provided safety on her flight. According to her worldview and given the statistics, Jesus has apparently taken an increasing interest in aviation since its birth a century ago. If only we could get him on board with preventing natural disasters like he did in the good old days…

    2. I cringe whenever I see it argued that engineers are more likely to be cranks. One reason why we see so many crank engineers is because there are a lot of engineers: 1.5 million engineers work in the US (plus another 3.5 million in computing), compared to 274 thousand physical scientists and 260 thousand life scientists. There is less competition to get those engineering jobs, so practicing engineers are less likely to have advanced education compared to practicing scientists. In 2009, about 35k engineering MS degrees were awarded, compared to 5k for physics and 15k for biology/agriculture. Finally, I think it would be hard for a climate denier or creationist to get all the way through a biology or physics program, but engineering programs don’t directly address those topics; so maybe the cranks who start out in biology/physics will defect to engineering programs.

       1. And there is of course the popular joke about engineers when I went to school in the mid-sixties, “Four years ago, I couldn’t spell injuneer, and now I are one” This may fit Jerry’s friend!

       2. I have heard that there is a statistically higher (slight, but still significant) chance of engineers being cranks. I have no ideas why, really. That’s why I asked. Could be that the initial question is not even based on truth.

       3. I don’t know about being “cranks” in general, but I think engineers are more likely to be suckered in by Intelligent Design and similar arguments because they are trained to see design everywhere. We often make analogies between natural and designed systems but primarily to make explanation easier. The mistake comes in taking those analogies too literally and making all sorts of unsupported inferences about the natural system just because part of it is similar to an engineered one. (You see this a lot in molecular biology, where it can be easy for people to forget that the system they study has evolved rather than been engineered.)

          1. I agree that engineers are often predisposed toward intelligent design thinking, but that’s always confused me. They must not understand their own field very well if they can’t recognize that technologies, methods and designs evolve over long periods of time through a process involving many generations of designers. Most novel design efforts fail in some way. Big advances tend to be lucky accidents. There is no example of a consummately intelligent designer in engineering. We all just recapitulate the methods we’ve been taught, and if we’re lucky then we may contribute something novel that gets picked up and repeated by others.

             1. That’s true but that’s still an active process of (sometimes not so) intelligent agents tinkering towards a specific purpose. That’s probably why they see gradual change in nature as an ongoing process of the designer tinkering – perhaps even with the occasional accident – rather than the Bam! Perfection! of young Earth Creationists.

                The big difference (to me) is not so much the nature of the change as the nature of the purpose. Apparent design in biological systems evolves because stochastic changes are captured by natural selection. Designed systems are usually goal-oriented. In my experience, ID advocates struggle to let go of the false notion that natural systems are trying to achieve some pre-determined end point.

             2. I don’t see goal oriented designers as anything separate from physical processes. In fact we now offload an increasing amount of design effort onto automated software that makes random moves to arrive at optimal configurations. Design products often don’t work as planned but turn out to have lucky application to something unexpected. Over the past two years I redirected the majority of my research effort toward a method that originated from a student error. It turns out to be really great, and our big research problem is to figure out why. So my view on goal oriented designers is that they are agents who generate trials and then apply some selection on the outcomes. There is no magic intelligence that can start from a blank state, imagine a product, and then realize it through the pure power of mind. The process is always driven by small increments and lucky innovations.

             3. “ID advocates struggle to let go of the false notion that natural systems are trying to achieve some pre-determined end point.”

                It is often quite convenient in discussing evolution to speak as if organisms were deliberately changing their form. e.g. “Their hair grew longer as the climate got colder” rather than explaining how the longer-haired individuals in the population enjoyed better hunting and reproductive success yadda yadda. We know it’s incorrect but it’s a convenient way to visualise the process. (I think Richard Dawkins has pointed this out). Similar to the orbiting electrons in the Bohr atom.

                cr

          2. We are all been given an inborn need to see patterns, pattern recognition. Why some see all kinds of things in spots and stains like the Virgin Mary. Not just engineers.

             And Nature is the éminence grise for evolution. To humans it seemed that such powers were invisible and of their deity.

34. “Nature does in fact take pretty good care of Herself.”

    Yes. And the Earth and Nature will continue on their merry way, should we trigger or own extinction event.

    We, and many (most?) of the existing species, will be gone and buried. This personified Nature you credit will go on with those species that are able to adapt. We will never see what will have become of their descendants after 65 million or so years.

    1. And. Also. Too.

       A comic, for your consideration:

       https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/18/5b/21/185b21a294cf7d6297b6011fd0afbb77.jpg

       1. Sorry, Prof. Ceiling Cat!

          I thought I was posting a link. I’d edit it, but I can’t.

          My apologies for knowing Teh Rulz but failing to know how to follow them.

          1. WordPress started automatically embedding images a while back, to most people’s consternation. I mean, a link should be a link, right?

             The workaround is to remove the https:// from the beginning of the link before you post it. WordPress will add it back in, but your post will show a hotlink, not an image.

             (Personally, I rather like having the images here. 🙂 Great cartoon!)

             1. Thanks. I’ll try to remember that for next time.

       2. I have used this cartoon in one of my classes. It always gets a rather confused murmur which I is think is balanced upon: Does he think global warming is real? Or: Is he making fun of the denialists?

          1. He is saying that cleaning up our act is a plus regardless of the larger effect.

35. A couple of items here. The claim that there has been no warming for the last 18 years is an example of the big lie (Goebbels would be so proud). This is based on the anomalous result of 1998 which was abnormally warm due to the strongest El Nino on record (look out, the El Nino this year may be just as strong). The year 1998 was an outlier and if it is removed from the data base, it will readily be seen that, although the rate of warming is somewhat slower then in previous years, it has a statistically significant positive slope.

    Second, relative to feedback effects, there are both positive and negative such effects. Examples of a positive feedback effect include:

    (a) An increase in global temperatures will cause more water to evaporate from the oceans which will exacerbate the effects of increasing CO(2) as water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas.

    b)An increase in global temperatures will cause the permafrost in Northern Canada and Siberia to release CH(4), a green house gas many times stronger then CO(2).

    1. One need not even remove it from the database. Simply take a 5 year moving average and the trend is constantly up.

       1. Exactly. It is an artifact of a particular data set. Put the data points into different data sets, and that outlier disappears (which is a good indication that it is an outlier and not a significant difference that needs to be explained).

    2. Mount Pinatubo’s latest eruption had a temporary cooling effect in the 1990s too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Pinatubo#Global_environmental_effects

36. “Everything I have studied says anthropogenic climate change is not real. No, I am not going to tell you what I’ve studied. No, I am not going to compare my studies with the current state of the science. (Neither am I going to admit that I would get so damned lost in a real peer-reviewed climate science paper that I’d never be found again.) And I’m going to insult you, because I can.”

    This sounds like an engineer. I speak as someone who was one (and is now a scientist), and is married to one. Scientists assume all conclusions are provisional; engineers assume all conclusions are set in concrete. It’s a hugely different world view, one that takes and stores old information and never updates it. When I started taking geology classes in 2003, my husband began asserting things he’d learned about geology in an intro class he took in 1979!

    “Um, no, now THIS is the current state of understanding .”
    “Really? I remember .”
    “Dear, that was a long time ago!”

    Fortunately not all engineers go about insulting people at random. But I’ve worked with a few.

37. What Jerry is bumping into here is the edge of the Venn diagram on climate change skepticism. Virtually all in the antievolution crusade are Kulturkampf conservative religious, and climate change doubt comes as part of that passage (dating back at least into the 1970s Jerry Falwell era).

    But not all climate change denialists fall within that framework (prickly Australian anticreationist Ian Plimer would drop in this category as well), and can ripple outward even to the likes of Freeman Dyson (yet another physics guy thinking to dabble in climate data study).

    The common factor here is the “Tortucan” methodology of data selection for a tunnel vision version of the subject, and this post by Jerry will be added to my #TIP project dataset (www.tortucan.wordpress.com) as yet another instance of the bumpy interactions along the edge of that Venn diagram.

38. I am at a complete loss as to how the respond to such idiocy except to say that mental illness can strike at any point in a persons life. Keep up the good work Dr Coyne. We your voice and the voices of people like you to be heard. reason is a precious commodity.

39. One of the things that makes something a good explanation is this concept called “mechanism”. AGW proponents have a mechanism: Greenhouse gas effect. The AGW deniers have no mechanism that counteracts this. They just appeal to some unknown mechanism that, if the person were religious, we would say is the “GODDIDIT” mechanism. Instead, this commenter seems to be defaulting to NATUREDIDIT; instead of “god works in mysterious ways”, the commenter is claiming “nature works in mysterious ways”.

    And just like with god, this nature worshiper claims that no harm will come to us because nature has our best interests at heart. The same mentality behind those snake handlers or people who jump in lion cages.

    It’s really amazing how all religious/pseudoscience epistemologies fail in the same exact ways.

    1. Forgot to add: “Works in mysterious ways” is the biggest euphemism for failure ever conceived.

       (Sorry for the double post)

    2. I think this cannot be stressed enough – enough people reminding the deniers that Arrhenius did most of the work a while back has changed the denial tune from “it isn’t happening” to “we didn’t do it”. Then, one can push on the mechanism of increased GHS, and so on.

40. The engineer/physicist wrote: “a bit of “greenhouse” arithmetic that is already in error by 18 years of no warming.”. This is extraordinarily ignorant from someone who claims to be a trained physicist/engineer. How do you justify this interpretation of the data? You must know how stupid it would be to pick 2 data points and ignore everything else when trying to determine a trend. So treat us to your sophisticated analysis of the global temperature measures. Give us something that wouldn’t embarrass a high school student.

41. I don’t know if anyone has made this point, but the ‘catastrophic’ in CAGW is a science term. ‘Catastrophe’ meaning ‘tipping point’, as various positive feed backs come into effect, such as the melting of arctic ice reducing albedo. ‘Catastrophic’ might not mean a very bad outcome for you personally, or for the planet as a whole over the long term.

    And the planet’s climate is relatively stable over the very long term, because of greenhouse gases, oceans and tectonic plate geology. As CO2 levels go up, there’s more weathering of rocks, causing increased amounts of calcium carbonate to flow into the oceans to be converted into limestone later trapped in the Earth’s crust, reducing atmospheric CO2 levels and causing cooling.

    A negative feedback that stabilises the Earth’s climate over the long term (but not much use for the 7 billion humans living now).

    1. As temperatures go up, methane gas is released from the permafrost in the far northern latitudes which multiply the green house effect of CO(2). Methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas then CO(2). A positive feedback effect.

42. I remember a cartoon showing a burly worker leaning on his shovel handle. The caption:

    “We ditch-diggers just want to know how damned deep, how damned wide, how damned long, and in which damned direction!”

    CC hits the ceiling a bit too easily. A lot of pixels get spent on various fallacies (e.g., appeal-to-authority, straw-man, etc.). A lot more cyber-ink gets spilt on whining, personal attacks, and re-hashing of pieces related to global warming, but not to the points made by the correspondent, one by one. All this rings as defensive, to put it politely, and it’s difficult to find the nuggets of wisdom buried in all the chaff. Why?

    Why not dissect the correspondent’s points, one by one, and refute them based on their substance or the lack of it instead of going off in all directions like Roman candles? At long last . . . as it were . . .

43. i dont think he is providing any valid evidence of GW skepticism. there is already a huge concensus on anthropogenic global warming. if u want to know more google ‘skeptical science’ and enter the first site that appears on the list. this site has almost every refuttals on arguements made by skeptics and introduce the studies that proves the concensus among climatologists on the issue.

44. I’m not going to rehash any understanding of climate science, for my point assume I know nothing of it (which isn’t so far from the truth!).

    So experts in the field tell me AGW is real and is happening. I believe them. Is that Faith versus Fact? I think only if you define faith as confidence that the experts know what they are talking about, and not faith such as an unevidenced belief in god.

    The alternative is that an entirely field of science is involved in a massive conspiracy theory…for some reason.

    On a slight tangent, that he frames it as CAGW and mentions Al Gore is a big giveaway that his rant is politically motivated and nothing to do with the facts of the matter.

45. “Incidentally, I have always viewed natural selection as really little more than feedbacks. [JAC: Oy! Little more than feedbacks?]”

    I’ve thought of that analogy too. Negative feedback is the key to how you can, miraculously, make a circuit with .001% distortion out of hundreds of components each with a 1% tolerance.

    So in nature, a mutation generates a difference and the aggregate of thousands of natural selection events gives ‘feedback’ to keep the species in a stable configuration.

    But I guess I wouldn’t want to push the analogy too far.

    However (he said, promptly pushing the analogy), a circuit is only stable over a certain range of conditions. Go outside those parameters and instability can set in. That I think is the big worry about AGW.

    cr

    1. An area where ‘feedback’ does not really apply in evolution is in genetic drift, which is technically the bulk of evolution at the molecular level.

       1. My understanding is that mutations (genetic drift?) provide the variation and natural selection then decides which mutation(s) are favoured. But I’m not a biologist so that may very well be misleading.

          cr

          1. Yes, but with so-called neutral mutations there is no positive or negative effect on which selection may act; so these accumulate randomly.

    2. The analogy is at best very vague. The feedback mechanism you’re referring to only works for certain types of continuous-valued systems (and of course the effect is not miraculous). Genetic information is discrete, and variation is combinatorial. The mathematics doesn’t necessarily have any correspondence to feedback in continuous processes.

       1. I would agree the analogy is vague.

          I’d say that the ability to build e.g. an amplifier circuit out of 1% (or 5%) tolerance components and have it function with .001% total harmonic distortion certainly _seems_ miraculous – maybe counter-intuitive would be a better word.
          (Disclaimer: I’ve built amps from published hobbyist circuits but I can’t design one, I can never figure how to apply the maths to complex circuits).

          cr

46. The funniest thing is that I just Googled “Chomsky, Credentials, Substance”. I got two hits. Both were this WEIT post!

    1. You need to work on your wording.

       Noam Chomsky
       From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
       “Chomsky” redirects here. For other uses, see Chomsky (disambiguation).
       Noam Chomsky
       Chomsky.jpg
       On a visit to Vancouver, British Columbia in 2004
       Born December 7, 1928 (age 86)
       Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
       Other names Avram Noam Chomsky
       Alma mater University of Pennsylvania (B.A.) 1949, (M.A.) 1951, (Ph.D.) 1955
       Era 20th/21st-century philosophy
       Region Western philosophy
       School Generative linguistics, Analytic philosophy
       Institutions MIT (1955–present)
       Main interests
       Linguistics
       Metalinguistics
       Psychology
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       chomsky.info

       Avram Noam Chomsky (/ˈnoʊm ˈtʃɒmski/; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher,[21][22] cognitive scientist, logician,[23][24][25] political commentator, social justice activist, and anarcho-syndicalist advocate. Sometimes described as the “father of modern linguistics”,[26][27] Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy.[21] He has spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is currently Professor Emeritus, and has authored over 100 books. He has been described as a prominent cultural figure, and was voted the “world’s top public intellectual” in a 2005 poll.[28]

       1. I know who Noam Chomsky is. The angry climate change denialist wrote:

          How important are credentials? Google “Chomsky, Credentials, Substance” for my view.

    2. This is an example of a feedback loop…

       1. Yes. Positive. I should have said it gave only two hits. And yes, I know, it’s because I included the quotes. Point being, it’s a spectacularly obtuse and unhelpful way to say what you think.

47. CO2 and AGW? Deniers believe that only god can warm the earth. Ice core samples have shown that when CO2 levels go up, temperature goes up. Deniers are happy with that as usually it is god’s emitters, the volcanoes that cause the increase in atmospheric CO2. God’s emitters the volcanoes both land and underwater were the cause of the temperature increases in the past. Deniers therefore admit CO2 causes warming.

    It is estimated that god’s emitters produce a range of 0.13 to 0.44 billion tonnes of CO2 annually. Man emits about 35 billion tonnes of CO2 annually. Man’s emitters are ahead of god’s in the range of 34.56 to 34.87 billion tonnes annually. With a total emissions of god’s CO2 plus man’s CO2, that’s 35.13 to 35.44 billion tonnes annually causing an atmospheric concentration of 400+ ppm and rising. Note: I do the math, I have found that deniers aren’t very good at math even if they are physicists/engineers.

    If god’s emissions in the past caused temperature increases with atmospheric concentrations less than 400+. The max was around the 380’s, it follows then that man’s CO2 plus god’s CO2 is causing the global temperature to rise in 2015…Agreed???

48. CO2 and AGW? Deniers believe that only god can warm the earth. Ice core samples have shown that when CO2 levels go up, temperature goes up. Deniers are happy with that as usually it is god’s emitters, the volcanoes that cause the increase in atmospheric CO2. God’s emitters the volcanoes both land and underwater were the cause of the temperature increase. Deniers therefore admit CO2 causes warming.

    It is estimated that god’s emitters produce a range of 0.13 to 0.44 billion tonnes of CO2 annually. Man emits 35 billion tonnes of CO2 annually. Man’s emitters are ahead of god’s in the range of 34.56 to 34.87 billion tonnes annually. With a total emission of god’s CO2 plus man’s CO2, that’s 35.13 to 35.44 billion tonnes annually causing an atmospheric concentration of 400+ ppm and rising. Note: I do the math, I have found that deniers aren’t very good at math even if they are physicists/engineers.

    If god’s emissions in the past caused temperature increases with atmospheric concentrations less than 400+. The max was around the 380’s, it follows then that man’s CO2 plus god’s CO2 is causing the global temperature to rise in 2015…Agreed???

49. I agree that this guy’s comment is ranting and incoherent. It’s also a data point confirming that you were ill-advised to include the bit about global warming in your book. I assume your goal wasn’t simply to preach to the choir. In that case, what was the point of alienating a substantial bloc of potentially receptive readers? Global warming is a highly polarizing ideological issue. The very word “denialist” confirms that fact. It is a pejorative term used to attack ideological foes, and should have no more place in scientific discourse than its mirror image, “alarmist.” There is no one to one correspondence between fanatical evangelicals whose minds are in permanent lockdown and those who reject the claim that there is proof global warming is an existential danger to mankind, or that we should immediately devote massive resources to attempts to solve the problem without solid evidence that our actions will actually have any significant impact. The relevant section in your book is based on the assumption that the latter are irrational and unscientific, lock, stock and barrel. That simply isn’t true.

    In the first place, scientists are not just so many disinterested and objective saints. Their results can be and have been heavily influenced by ideological and political trends, the availability of research funds and the type of people who control them, the ideological leanings of journal editors, etc. A recent example that so traumatized the scientific community that its history will probably never be accurately recorded was the Blank Slate debacle. A “scientific consensus” that was palpably absurd to any ten year old nevertheless persisted for more than half a century.

    Certainly, global warming theory is not as absurd as the Blank Slate. Sun-like radiation impinging on an ideal, earthlike surface after passing through an ideal, earthlike atmosphere, will result in highly predictable increases in temperature as the concentration of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is increased. However, there is nothing ideal or simple about our actual ecosystem. Given the amount of greenhouse gases we are pumping into the atmosphere, some warming must inevitably occur. The relevant questions are, how much, and what can we do about it? We don’t know how much. The computer codes used to predict it are probabilistic models that must somehow cope with literally millions of degrees of freedom, along with often inaccurate and missing data. The highly deterministic physics codes used to predict the result of the recent experiments at Livermore’s National Ignition Facility predicted results that were off by almost two orders of magnitude in spite of being benchmarked against earlier experiments and containing state of the art models of all the known physics. The chances that the climate codes will have greater predictive value than these mature and sophisticated Livermore codes are vanishingly small.

    Meanwhile, we are already spending vast sums to “solve” the problem with no idea whether these efforts will have any effect at all. These sums might have been used to save many lives, increase the standard of living for millions of people, or conduct scientific research of great value to mankind. The notion that all this has no impact on the poor is not true. In Germany, one of the most active countries in “fighting global warming,” electricity prices for individual consumers are much higher than the European average. These costs are bound to have a disproportionately damaging effect on those who can least afford them.

    In a word, I don’t think a reasonable basis exists for equating reservations about the political response to global warming with religious fanaticism. The book is otherwise so good, making such a convincing case for science as our most valuable “way of knowing” by far, and turning the “sophisticated Christians” into so many dead men walking. I just don’t think that the bit about global warming was sufficiently germane to the theme of the book to include it, and detracted much from its overall effectiveness.

    1. I won’t speak for Jerry, but had I received your response rather than the engineer’s rant, it would at least be an acceptable critique of the actual evidence and solution to the global warming problem. Thus, you motivated me to go back and read the relevant section in Jerry’s book and I have to say that your points simply aren’t addressing what Jerry was arguing.

       The entire section was about people who deny the Earth is warming at all and gave several examples citing religious reasons for it. It is not unscientific to call such people denialists anymore than it is to call people denialists who say the Earth is not 4.5 billion years old.

       Jerry also addresses your other point about the ideological climate influencing scientists when he talks at length about the Piltdown Man scandal. It was science, not religion, that ultimately exposed the fraud. Likewise, there is reason to be confident (I’ll avoid using a conflated meaning of the word “faith” here) that if AGW is indeed wrong, science will eventually figure it out. But, it is not going to be proven by a bunch of raving religious fanatics who claim God will prevent the Earth from being destroyed because he gave us stewardship over it. I’m perplexed that a reading of this section would indicate that legitimate debate over the effect of proposed solutions to global warming is prone to some kind of groupthink when Jerry was clearly speaking about religiously motivated denial that the Earth is warming at all.

       1. OTH, Horgan of “Scientific American” panned the book so it must be good. He’s never been right about anything. Apparently he was asked to write a review by none other than the “Wall Street Journal.” Go figure!

          1. Wow, I read the first paragraph of his WSJ review (you can get around the paywall by hitting it through a Google search link) and he starts it off by saying that it’s pointless to bash irrational beliefs in a way that can’t possibly persuade anyone who disagrees. He immediately resorts to the gambit that “strident” atheism has had no effect, contrary to mounds of evidence showing otherwise.

             He doesn’t even touch on the subject of global warming and asserts without citations that cosmologists are genuinely puzzled by the existence of something rather than nothing. The only redeeming point I found was criticizing Jerry’s assertion that, “The compelling force that produced nuclear weapons, gunpowder, and eugenics was not science but people.” I even recall taking notice of this line when I read the book and thinking of the parallel it has to the NRA talking point about guns not killing people. But one instance of a weak point does not make the book bad, instead I think Jerry answered the rest of the main points well, Horgan just ignores them.

    2. @HelianUnbound The most considered take on the issue I’ve read so far.

    3. Ocean acidification is far more demonstrable and every bit as dire as GW.

       1. Hold on, Diane G! If you mean acidification by CO2, where’s the demonstration?

          1. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=ocean+acidification&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C23&as_sdtp=

    4. I did not “equate reservations about the political response to global warming with religious fanaticism.” Where in the bloody hell did you get that?

50. “Incidentally, I have always viewed natural selection as really little more than feedbacks.”

    You might want to move your microphone a little farther away from the amp in that case.

51. Is it just me or has anyone else ever encountered someone using CAGW that wasn’t a denialist? I haven’t.

    1. What’s the ‘C’ stand for?

       1. “Catastrophic” – see the elucidation elsewhere on this page.

          /@

          1. Thants.

52. Engineers are a funny bunch. Nearly all of the engineers I know are decent folks, but it seems that those with a conservative, religious bent are, shall I say, unique. I once had a series of lengthy exchanges with a retired electrical engineer who happened to host a creationism email group. Yes, he did not understand evolution very well, but insisted he did because he was an engineer. As these things usually come in packages, he was also a climate change denier. In one exchange, he went off on a tangent about how it was “impossible” for heavier-than-air (i.e., ‘greenhouse’) gases to be present in the upper atmosphere. He declared that because he was an engineer and took a lot of physics classes, that he KNEW this was true. I asked him how he knew – and, this is the truth – he claimed that he did an experiment in which he put a drop of mercury in glass of water and it did not float to the top of the glass, therefore, CFCs could not possible be present in the upper atmosphere, thus GW was a hoax.

    Can’t argue with such impeccable science. Engineering science.

    1. I just did a similar experiment throwing some carbon polymers out my window at a high rate of speed. They fell. The airline industry is a hoax.

53. But he was right. Heavier objects – be they solids, liquids or gases – sink below lighter ones. Your engineer friend was giving you a demonstration of that fact. That has no bearing on GW; a gas can greenhouse(TM as a verb) the planet from any position in the atmosphere.

    CO2 is heavier than the common air gases so sinks below them and covers the earth’s surface. Isn’t that lucky!
    If it didn’t, we’d have nothing to eat.

    1. 🙂

54. Couldn’t help but notice that the letter writer didn’t actually give any evidence for his position.

55. A careful reading of HelianUnbound
    Posted June 25, 2015 at 4:38 pm should be followed by a careful refutation of the points clearly made there. Failure to do so is an admission that one feels intimidated rather than challenged by the statements.

    Unless I am mistaken, this blog is supposed to be about scientific discipline, not opinions and faith in authority. Therefore, I would expect it to be dominated by reasoned discourse. In some cases that is clearly the case.

    1. Did you read the reply? Which points that require refutation are yet to have it? (And I think you are mistaken if you think that this website avoids opinions. They just need to be justified.)

       1. I think HelianUnbound is best-qualified to answer your first question.

          As to the statement, a close reading of my post will reveal that what I said was “Unless I am mistaken, this blog is supposed to be about scientific discipline, not opinions and faith in authority.” CC would be best qualified to state what the website is and is not about. I often (but not always) observe that it actually contains more opinion than reason. I do not object to that; it’s just an interesting observation. When it comes to “justification,” I find little responsiveness to challenges to opinions . . .

          1. Well, thanks for sharing your opinion, Wayne.

             /@

             1. Indeed.

             2. I rest my case–if the non-responsive replies are representative.

56. Back to the substance of the post, I confess confusion with respect to the “name redacted” statement and the insistence that the author’s name be included. ???

    1. An “update” refers to a matter that arose after the original post. Many writers who use their real names for private email do not necessarily want to do the same when the mail is made public; thus it’s a courtesy to redact the name.

       In light of subsequent (rude) correspondence from Bernard Arthur Hutchins Jr, Jerry has now complied with Bernard Arthur Hutchins Jr’s wishes.

       1. A quick Google search seems to indicate that his follow-up emails were both rude and ignorant to boot.

          1. Oh, good work!

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