Climate Science Conference with Contrarians — An Inside Look

 

Climate scientist Mark Boslough and non-scientist Monckton having a beer. Credit: Mike Thompson

Most of you have probably never been to a climate science conference. While you can probably get an idea of what one looks like from other scientific conferences you’ve been to, the politics of climate change action and the MASSIVE disinformation campaign going on to attack the discipline make climate science a bit unique. Furthermore, it’s not too often that you get the few rogue scientists (and non-scientists pretending to be scientists) at the same conference as ‘mainstream’ climate scientists. There was such a conference recently in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a mainstream climate scientist, Mark Boslough, not only attended but also wrote up a Very interesting summary of the conference and his experiences with ‘contrarians’ (as he calls them, also known as skeptics, deniers, and many other things).

I highly recommend checking out the full piece.

Knowing that some of you won’t head over there, here are a few pointed excerpts:

I have long complained about the lack of willingness of most contrarians to attend and present their arguments at mainstream scientific conferences. After three years of convening climate-related sessions at AGU, I have yet to receive an abstract that argues against anthropogenic global warming. Such presentations can usually only be seen at conferences held by the Heartland Institute. There isn’t much chance of a mainstream scientist attending a meeting organized by a political think tank known for its anti-science activism, so opportunities for interaction between the groups are rare….

It quickly became apparent that the meeting would be run with a firm, no-nonsense approach to confrontation. In my original abstract, I used the term “contrarian,” which I have always considered to be a polite, non-judgmental descriptive term. Petr Chylek, LANL Laboratory Fellow and chair of the conference program committee responded by telling me, “I would like to ask you for some revision. The designations like ‘contrarians, skeptics, deniers, etc.’ may be offensive to some scientists present. Perhaps you can re-write your abstract and your presentation without using such words.” Fair enough, given the potential for contentiousness. Later, a generalized request went to all speakers: “Please, do not use any demeaning labels like deniers, contrarians, warmers, alarmists, … Please, stick to science. Stay away from personal attacks on other scientists present or not.”…

The first day of the conference was buzzing with news of Richard Muller’s announcement of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) results. Just a week earlier, he had published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, titled, “The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism (There were good reasons for doubt, until now)”. Then, only one day before the conference, David Rose of the Daily Mail broke a supposed “scandal”: “Scientist who said climate change sceptics had been proved wrong accused of hiding truth by colleague”. Muller’s coauthor, Judith Curry, was quoted saying, “There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped. To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.” This story was picked up by Fox News and the narrative that spread throughout the blogosphere was that “Curry has turned on Muller.”

Reading about climate change in the mainstream media — let alone on blogs — can be like looking at reality in a funhouse mirror. When Muller got up to discuss the BEST results on Tuesday morning, the first thing he did was point out that the title of the WSJ piece did not come from him. His original title was “Cooling the Global Warming Debate.” But since his name was under the title he didn’t write, it was automatically attributed to him, as a direct quote. In fact he said, he had been misquoted more times since this was published than he had in the rest of his life. The Daily Mail/Fox News story seemed just as distorted. If Curry and Muller had a major scientific disagreement, wouldn’t a scientific conference be the appropriate place for the debate? If they were at loggerheads over the fundamental question of whether “global warming hasn’t stopped” wouldn’t one of them have mentioned it? They each gave two presentations, and this never came up in public or in any conversation I was aware of….

Note: I bolded the lines above because I think it’s highly ironic, and telling, that someone once adored by climate science deniers (BECAUSE he was so willing to misquote climate scientists and completely misrepresent what they had said) had been turned on by the denier crowd and was receiving the same treatment he used to dish out just because his findings lined up completely with those of climate scientists.

But on with some of Mark’s key points:

On Judith Curry (not the whole section on her, but most of it):

The conference was remarkably well run. For the most part, participants were well behaved and adhered to Petr Chylek’s strict rules—avoiding inflammatory terms, and steering away from personal attacks and interruptions. The one exception was Judith Curry, who apparently did not get the memo. She gave a banquet presentation entitled, “The Uncertainty Monster at the Climate Science-Policy Interface”. My impression was that her presentation was intended to be more of a vehicle to criticize her adversaries than to talk about uncertainty.

Her most personal attack was against Michael Mann, who she used to illustrate “uncertainty hiding” by showing a caricature of him standing next to the “uncertainty monster” holding a hockey stick and hidden by a sheet, with the cartoon-Mann saying “what uncertainty?” Next to the cartoon was and image of the cover of the book “The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science” illustrated with the multiproxy time series that Mann and his coauthors made famous. Ironically, Mann’s carefully plotted uncertainty bands were not visible on the presentation graphic, just as they were not reproduced in Fred Singer’s NIPCC report. “What uncertainty?” indeed!

Curry described her transition from a scientist who felt that it was the responsible thing to do to support the IPCC conclusions to someone who is “about 50% a denier”. She attributed this change to “climategate” and the reaction she received due to her initial comments about it. She was the only speaker who ignored the policy against the word “denier.” She used the banned “d-word” repeatedly for effect when setting up a straw-man argument against what she called “IPCC/UNFCCC ideology” — a term she coined to label notions such as “anthropogenic climate change is real” and “deniers are attacking climate science and scientists”. She assured the audience that she didn’t think there were any “IPCC ideologues” at the conference but she had heard rumors that some were invited and had declined. She called out Kevin Trenberth as a supposed example of such an ideologue (again rejecting the policy against personal attack).

Some apt comments on Curry are in the comments of the post (links above).

I met most of the conference participants during the course of the week, and had cordial conversations with all those with whom I disagreed. One thing I have long suspected was strongly reinforced: there is no common scientific understanding amongst contrarians. Many of them are just as critical of one another’s ideas as they are of conventional science. William Gray stood up after many of the presentations on solar influence to declare that solar variability is not important. It’s even less important than CO2, he said. It’s ocean variability that is the cause of most climate change. Petr Chylek stood up after Fred Singer’s presentation (in which Singer presented old uncorrected UAH MSU data that suggested cooling) and said emphatically, “Denying the warming makes no sense!”.

I spent a lot of time talking to Christopher Monckton, who may have been the only non-scientist to give a presentation. He has no understanding of science or the scientific method, and when I asked him about scientific prediction, he called it a “fool’s errand”. He has a strong authoritarian approach to those with whom he disagrees, and his conspiracy theories run deep and dark. He names specific names and calls IPCC contributors “malevolent”. I asked him to share the very worst hacked email he could remember. The only specific example he gave was the one in which someone referred to him as a “charlatan”.

Monckton doesn’t understand science? Who would’ve guessed?

Mark’s final summary/conclusions:

The main lesson I took away from the conference was this: there is no consistent contrarian science, and there is no defining contrarian ideology or motivation. Some are sincere. Others are angry at their lack of funding. Some appear to be envious of the IPCC scientists’ success, and others have found a niche that gets them attention they would not otherwise get. Only a few appear to be motivated by politics. No single label applies to them, and I found myself referring to them as “contrarians/skeptics/deniers/enablers/provocateurs/publicity-seekers”.

The one common thread I found among them was the fervent belief that “Climategate” was a conspiracy and that the IPCC is rigged. This faith-based belief seems to be unshakable, and is the antithesis of true skepticism. Those I met were uniformly cynical about the honesty and motivations of mainstream scientists. If I were forced to use a single label, I would be inclined to call them “science cynics”.

Nice of him to give us all a taste of what that conference was like.

Again, the full piece (and over 80 useful or interesting comments) is here.

13 thoughts on “Climate Science Conference with Contrarians — An Inside Look”

  1. I agree with you to a point, but the fact is that the U.S. public’s understanding of climate science is pitifully low and has gone through waves of better and worse states. And to create the change needed, more of them need to be exposed to climate science, not fake science.

    I don’t expect to convert many of the hard-core deniers, but the discussions could help some passers-by.

  2. The link to Boslough’s “summary” and the link to his “full piece” go to the SAME ARTICLE. Surely this is some kind of mistake? It makes a total of three links in this post to the same article. The article IS much linked-to from many other sites, also.

    The winnowing of the article in this post (I HAVE read the source) is very good, by the way – Boslough goes on a bit, for my taste/needs.

  3. The link to Boslough’s “summary” and the link to his “full piece” go to the SAME ARTICLE. Surely this is some kind of mistake? It makes a total of three links in this post to the same article. The article IS much linked-to from many other sites, also.

    The winnowing of the article in this post (I HAVE read the source) is very good, by the way – Boslough goes on a bit, for my taste/needs.

  4. I’m not sure what your point is (or points are) here.

    In the past, air and water pollution was more visible.

    Now, global warming pollution is the big threat. (Along with that previous pollution, but much more so.)

    Both types of pollution come from the same sources, for the most part.
    Again, not sure what your point was.

  5. No, it’s completely clear the world is warming.

    It’s completely clear that’s NOT because of the sun.

    And it’s completely clear you’d rather “question authority” than just read the bloody science.

    http://planetsave.com/2011/10/22/best-study-climate-science-skeptic-study-finds-global-warming-is-real-whats-new/ 

    http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming-intermediate.htm 

    http://planetsave.com/2011/10/28/yes-global-warming-is-real-and-caused-by-humans/

    (Btw, spamming our site is not accepted.)

  6. No, it’s completely clear the world is warming.

    It’s completely clear that’s NOT because of the sun.

    And it’s completely clear you’d rather “question authority” than just read the bloody science.

    http://planetsave.com/2011/10/22/best-study-climate-science-skeptic-study-finds-global-warming-is-real-whats-new/ 

    http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming-intermediate.htm 

    http://planetsave.com/2011/10/28/yes-global-warming-is-real-and-caused-by-humans/

    (Btw, spamming our site is not accepted.)

  7. Prior to the debate on Global Warming there was POLLUTION.
    Everyone knew what it was, what caused it and agreed it was bad.
    Opinions about Global Warming will not be changed and the debate only serves one purpose, shift the focus from the polluters and spread the blame.
    If the patient dies while the doctors argue the DEBATE is the cause of death!

    1. I’m not sure what your point is (or points are) here.

      In the past, air and water pollution was more visible.

      Now, global warming pollution is the big threat. (Along with that previous pollution, but much more so.)

      Both types of pollution come from the same sources, for the most part.
      Again, not sure what your point was.

      1. You might as well be arguing religious beliefs because you are not going to change any minds.
        The debate only serves to keep polluters from being held accountable.

        1. I agree with you to a point, but the fact is that the U.S. public’s understanding of climate science is pitifully low and has gone through waves of better and worse states. And to create the change needed, more of them need to be exposed to climate science, not fake science.

          I don’t expect to convert many of the hard-core deniers, but the discussions could help some passers-by.

  8. You Sir have shut your mind to the possibility that the planet might be cooling, and that – even if it is warming – the sun, not man, is responsible.

    Question authority!

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