Continued commentary on How to talk climate change with a skeptic: 5 critical tips by Sam Parry.

The five tips are:

  1. First of all: Don’t get angry.
  2. Leave apocalypse to the movies.
  3. Seek common ground.
  4. Tell your own stories.
  5. Stick to the facts.

I’ve already addressed tips 1-4. It’s time to tackle # 5:

5. Stick to the facts.

Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists unequivocally agree that climate change is happening now and that humans are the main cause. Like gravity, our warming climate is a scientific fact. …

Ok, let’s start with the definition of a scientific fact, care of Wikipedia:

“A fact is something that is postulated to have occurred or to be correct. The usual test for a statement of fact is verifiability—that is, whether it can be demonstrated to correspond to experience. Standard reference works are often used to check facts. Scientific facts are verified by repeatable careful observation or measurement (by experiments or other means).”

Four points:

Point one: the ‘97%’ figure came from Cook et al (2013) –a paper that did a sampling of Abstracts! The Abstracts alone could not have provided “unequivocal” evidence of anthropogenic global warming, because most were narrowly focused on specific research findings rather than the big picture question of whether humans are the main cause of warming.  What Cook et al did was infer the authors' opinions about global warming from their Abstracts.

Point Two:  Let’s assume a large majority of climate scientists unequivocally affirm that, to date, the climate has warmed and human activity accounts for most of the warming. That is a different matter than what climate scientists think the trajectory of warming will be. Predicted trajectories are not “facts”. The range of predicted trajectories is actually rather large. In other words, there is no consensus on where the climate is going.

Point Three: Many climate change skeptics accept that the climate has warmed since pre-industrial times.  That’s rarely the issue. More often, the argument is about how much warming has occurred and how much human activity is to blame.  As mentioned in previous posts, many labeled as skeptics actually accept anthropogenic warming but just aren't all that concerned.

Point Four: Climate science is all well and good but since the core idea of climate change is that human activity is the main contributor, the input of the human sciences is also necessary. What do climate scientists know about changes in production and consumption patterns, human fertility, life expectancy, population growth, game theory, economics, technological change, etc. -  all things that affect the use of fossil fuels and thus emissions?

Ok, you must think I’m a climate change skeptic. I’m not. But what does it mean to not be a skeptic? To be addressed….

Reference:

Cook, J., Nuccitelli, D., Green, S. A., Richardson, M., Winkler, B., Painting, R., ... & Skuce, A. (2013). Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature. Environmental Research Letters, 8(2), 024024.