From Climategate to Denialgate

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

I certainly can't see how it's a good idea that climate scientists play dirty. That just feeds into the damage people like Heartland are already doing to public acceptance of science.

The "wider good" in a single debate can't be served by damaging the credibility of virtually the only technique we have for arriving at objective analysis.

cordially,
Scofflaw

BluntGuy wrote: »

Absolutely. Given the stark parallels between the creationism "controversy" and the global warming "debate", one might also wonder if there is some analogue of the "Wedge Document" among denialist circles. There are certainly revealing documents here and there, but nothing that quite so clearly and egregiously lays out a misinformation strategy as that particular one, in my experience.

I think some of the difference might be explained by the fact that the climate "debate" is a moving target, requiring a flexible and evolving 'message', while the climate movement is hoping to influence movers and shakers, and as such requires at least a basic level of credibility, and the abandonment of scientifically untenable positions.

There was a period where, for example, every 'sceptic' you met appeared to be firmly convinced that solar changes explained current climate changes. While there are a few vestiges of that belief, most have moved on, and the current talking point appears to be climate change sensitivity, with the 'sceptics' setting up a straw man of x3 sensitivity as the only predicted sensitivity.

So the debate over climate is - with apologies - still evolving, while the debate on evolution largely isn't. Also, there's no danger of climate change being seen as a religious issue, so the US church-state separation doesn't affect it.

On the other hand, something that is very visible is that climate change has become a party issue primarily in the US, but also to some extent in the UK. The US data is unequivocal:



http://www.environmentmagazine.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/September-October%202008/dunlap-full.html

Hence we have, for example, (not singling you out!) Permabear's reiteration of "left-wing" on this thread as something pertinent to the science. Science is, of course, neither left-wing nor right-wing, but the relevance of political position to the "debate" as opposed to the science is strong, and leads to people who would ordinarily support scientific conclusions, such as Permabear (this time I am), having to reverse that support in this particular case because not to do so is to fail, implicitly, to defend their political position.

Obviously the simplest way of dealing with the resulting conflict in internal values is to dismiss the science of climate change as a conspiracy - so it becomes "not-science" - but that option isn't really open under challenge to anyone who is capable of logical thought, since the required conspiracy is far far larger than, for example, that required to bring about faked Moon landings. A far preferable strategy, in that case, is to hold onto scientifically valid doubts, even where these are extremely limited compared to the positive evidence - in extremis one can opt for the Freeman Dyson approach of claiming that you just can't do climate prediction. And I would expect to see that position grow in strength going forward, as other valid positions of doubt are swept away - it's the climate debate equivalent of the final "God isn't amenable to science" argument open to the religious, although it lacks the complete opt-out nature of that argument, since climate science rather clearly is science.

So something like the Wedge document is both unnecessary - since there's no church-state separation to overcome - and would entirely blow the opposition case if it existed, because the climate change "debate" has to at least look like a scientifically credible one, whereas creationists fundamentally don't care about that. And that's really the importance of the Heartland documents, because it makes it very clear that a major player on the opposition side has no real interest in scientific credibility, but only in what works in PR terms.

cordially,
Scofflaw