US Politicians Are Committing Treason Against the Planet

Appendix 1 – Editorials

Monday, January 25, 2010

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US politicians are committing treason against the planet

Creationists and climate change deniers have this in common: they don’t answer their critics. They make what they say are definitive refutations of the science. When these refutations are shown to be nonsense, they do not seek to defend them. They simply switch to another line of attack.

This month saw a critical vote in the US House of Representatives on climate change. As they debated, it became clear that these were not people who had thought hard about a crucial issue, and were trying to do the right thing. They were people who showed no sign of being interested in the truth.Today we have 20 years of evidence, across tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers, to show that they are wrong.

They don't like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they've decided not to believe in it – and they'll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial. Watching the deniers make their arguments was almost like watching a form of treason – treason against the planet. By denying the human influence on climate, these sceptics are condemning future generations, not to mention those currently living in much of the developing world, to increased risks of disease, damage to homes and communities, and even death. This catastrophe and injustice will not be avoided by ignoring it.

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Monday, January 25, 2010

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We are as certain about climate change as we can be about anything

As in economic forecasts, medical diagnoses, and policy making, uncertainty runs through climate science like the lettering in sticks of rock. For some, the mere presence of uncertainty in climate models is reason enough to doubt them. But uncertainty is not an enemy of science that must be conquered – it is the stimulus that drives science forward.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a body of international climate scientists whose responsibility it is to produce Assessment Reports of peer-reviewed climate science. In order to be included in an Assessment Report, a piece of peer-reviewed science must be agreed on by all authors – that is, only papers on which there is a consensus get included in the Report. That means the studies that are included have been peer-reviewed twice, and the conclusions of the IPCC are thus naturally cautious. So, when they announce that there are 90% certain that humans are causing global warming and that the consequences will be overwhelmingly negative, it should be enough to convince anyone that climate change is real.

There is very little uncertainty about whether humans are causing climate change – the uncertainty relates to how bad the consequences will be. The good news is that scientists are particularly adept at acknowledging, identifying and modelling uncertainty. If there's one group of people who have thought long and hard about uncertainty, it’s climate scientists – and their considered opinions are the best evidence we have.

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Tuesday, 29th December 2009

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Why are environmentalists exaggerating claims about climate change?

The hackers that broke into the computer systems of the University of East Anglia claim they have found the ‘smoking gun’ that proves climate change is being exaggerated by scientists. One email includes a reference to ‘hiding the decline’, and other emails discuss keeping certain academic papers out of the peer review process.

It isn’t the first time that suspicions have been raised about whether climate change claims have been exaggerated. Over the last few years a new environmental phenomenon has been constructed in this country - the phenomenon of "catastrophic" climate change. It seems that mere "climate change" was not going to be bad enough, and so now it must be "catastrophic" to be worthy of attention.

Why would anyone want to exaggerate climate change? Because controversial new climate change legislation will impose a massive tax on people. Climate change has been exaggerated by people who want to see us pay more tax and want to control us, and they are dangerously close to getting what they want.

The problem with the environmental movement is that it has always had some reason why people should not be doing the things they do. First, it was CFCs. Then it was animal experiments. Now it is climate change. And what do these things have in common? They all want to stop progress. Perhaps it is time to call the environmentalists’ bluff – climate change is one exaggeration too far.

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Tuesday, 29th December 2009

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If we can’t predict the weather, how can we predict the climate?

The UK Met Office has in recent years become something of a laughing stock. Its much-derided forecast that Britain would enjoy a "barbecue summer" in 2009 was only the latest of a string of predictions that proved wildly off-target. These short-term forecasts which are often so comically wrong are produced with the aid of the same super-computer used to provide predictions of what the world's climate will be like in 100 years' time.

In fact, accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long-term rate of increase in global temperatures. Average ground station readings do show a mild warming of 0.6 to 0.8C over the last 100 years, which is well within the natural variations recorded in the last millennium. The ground station network suffers from an uneven distribution across the globe; the stations are preferentially located in growing urban and industrial areas ("heat islands"), which show substantially higher readings than adjacent rural areas ("land use effects").

Perhaps it is time we scrapped the expensive Met Office computers, and the dodgy ground station readings and focussed on trying to improve our predictions about the weather next week. We are a long way off being able to say anything at all reliable or useful about the climate of next century.

Appendix 2 – Analysis of editorial evaluation measures in each experimental condition

Scientific uncertainty editorials

A repeated-measures ANOVA was conducted with level of scepticism as the between-groups variable, editorial type (Irish Times vs. Scotsman) as the within-groups variable, and ratings of editorial convincingness as the dependent variable. We observed the expected interaction between level of scepticism and editorial type, F (1, 86) = 24.74, p <.001. Non-sceptical participants rated the pro-climate change Irish Times editorial as significantly more convincing (M = .59, SD = .83) than the sceptical Scotsman editorial (M = -.35, SD = 1.08), t (86) = -4.95, p<.001. Sceptical individuals rated the Scotsman as more convincing (M = .71, SD = .92) than the Irish Times (M = .31, SD = 1.00), although this difference was not significant.

An identical ANOVA was conducted with ratings of editorial reliability as the dependent variable. Again, we observed the expected interaction between level of scepticism and editorial type, F (1, 86) = 21.28, p<.001. Non-sceptical participants rated the Irish Times as significantly more reliable (M = .70, SD = .81) than the Scotsman (M = -.43, SD = 1.03), t (86) = -3.49, p<.001. Sceptical participants also rated the Irish Times as significantly more reliable (M = .26, SD = .83) than the Scotsman (M = .21, SD = .90), t (86) = 2.64, p<.01.

Moral/political uncertainty editorials

A repeated-measures ANOVA was conducted with level of scepticism as the between-groups variable, editorial type (Irish Times vs. Scotsman) as the within-groups variable, and ratings of editorial convincingness as the dependent variable. We observed the expected interaction between level of scepticism and editorial type, F (1, 83) = 17.05, p<.001. Non-sceptical participants rated the pro-climate change Irish Times editorial as significantly more convincing (M = .31, SD = .95) than the Scotsman editorial (M = -.38, SD = 1.17), t (83) = 2.77, p<.01. Sceptical individuals rated the Scotsman as significantly more convincing (M = .21, SD = 1.21) than the Irish Times (M = -.28, SD = 1.01), t (83) = -2.29, p<.05.

An identical ANOVA was conducted with ratings of editorial reliability as the dependent variable. Again, we observed the expected interaction between level of scepticism and editorial type, F (1, 83) = 6.94, p<.01. Non-sceptical participants rated the pro-climate change Irish Times editorial as more reliable (M = .10, SD = .98) than the Scotsman (M = -.33, SD = 1.00), while sceptical participants rated the Scotsman editorial as more reliable (M = -.07, SD = .99) than the Irish Times (M = -.28, SD = .96). Neither of these differences was statistically significant.