Archduke Russell John wrote:according to Mead,

... when it comes to global warming, the shoe is on the other foot. Now it is suddenly the environmentalists — who’ve often spent lifetimes raging against experts and scientists ... - who are the pious advocates of science and experts. Suddenly, it’s a sin to question the wisdom of the Scientific Consensus. Scientists are, after all, experts; their work is peer-reviewed and we uneducated rubes must sit back and shut up when the experts tell us what’s right.

I think it is an interesting hypothesis with more then a little truth in it.

I don't disagree - there is some truth here.

But here's my personal history on the subject. I am not from an environmentalist background. My dad works in engineering. My mum's dad did too. I loved science at school, and did a science degree. I work in IT.

While there are some subjects where I have usually agreed with environmentalists and similar groups (some areas of the countryside should be protected from destruction, for example), I was never an anti-development type. It was the anti-scientific approach of greenies that put me off them, and still means I veer away from a lot of green politics, and in particular from the Green movement itself.

But I do accept that the IPCC reports and other evidence are pretty compelling, and my view is that there is probably a warming trend, that human interactions are likely to be a major factor, and that it is prudent to investigate mitigation and militation against further change while continuing to work on the science.

So not all who get labelled as 'warmists' or 'alarmists' come to it from the angle Mead selects.

By the way, organic is not simply about GM food. Organic food is non-GM (and in the US is pretty much the only way to be sure you are not eating GM food), but it is more importantly about not using artificial fertilisers and pest-killers. GM food is often set up to allow the use of particular chemicals, as well, which affect the produce less as a result, but could mean more residue gets into our food chain.

I have reservations about GM because I'm not sure we have really nailed the science, because I don't like the idea of corporations 'owning' the strains, because much of it is not (as sold) about improving the life of people in the Third World as much as it is about profitability, and because there's a consent issue. In the EU, we are not supposed to be sold food with GM sources without being told. In the USA, you guys have no way of knowing.

I read the Mead article and I conclude that Mead is onto something but that Ricky is mostly correct in saying that the dynamic he describes is largely irrelevant to the question of why so many Americans have become anti-science. It's the far right that leads the "you can't trust guys in lab coats" brigade, and the far right never bought zilch from the environmentalists. Mead's thesis may, however, help explain why the denier count is so high at the margin - the far right might lead but lots of moderates agree, and maybe the moderates have soaked up some of the cultural wisdom the environmentalists once pushed.

Looking at things slightly differently, I wish to highlight Mead's line "The environmental movement has turned into the Army Corps of Engineers" and bring in some additional perspective. I happen to be well-informed about the history and environmental/engineering situation of the Mississippi River. The Corps of Engineers is the lead agency when it comes to "control" of the Mississippi. Mead talked about hydro dams, genetically modified food, DDT vs malaria and nuclear power. The Mississippi is another great example of this sort, a wonderful story about what happens where Mother Nature, science, engineering, politics and special interests meet. [Coincidentally, some of what I've learned about the river is from "The Control of Nature" by John McPhee, who's mentioned in the article to which I linked as being Freeman Dyson's best friend.]

In the official history of their work in southern Louisiana, the Corps says ‘Society required artifice to survive in a region where nature might reasonably have asked for a few more eons to finish a work of creation that was incomplete’. The Mississippi, like the planet as a whole (and its climate), is evolving. Once modern man came onto the scene that process of evolution got modified, just as is the case with the climate. In the Mississippi basin you first had the indigenous tribes clearing forest, then instituting agriculture. The white man brought more intensive agriculture, and roads, and eventually parking lots. These activities alone would have profoundly influenced the river's evolution, just as man's burning of fossil fuels and destruction of forest has influenced climate. But then, starting in 1850, due to pressure brought by agriculturalists, industry, fishermen, shippers, the tourist industry, and the environmentalists of that day, Congress instructed the Corps of Engineers to tame the river - to control it - to prevent it from changing. We had adapted to it as it was, and though it wanted to keep changing, we found that to be an inconvenience.

The mouth and lower few hundred miles of the Mississippi has radically shifted position quite regularly on a thousand-year cycle. Climate, as implied by this graph, also has gone through cyclical changes:



The Mississippi generates (geologically speaking) more frequent catastrophes: floods. Climate also generates catastrophes in the form of hurricanes, drought, etc. In the case of the river, Congress was mainly concerned about floods, whereas with the climate we know we can't stop all hurricanes and droughts - we want to prevent any long-term changes from occurring. But because floods are how the Mississippi evolves, whereas hurricanes and drought are incidental to climate change, the analogy remains very close. First we messed around with the river basin, not thinking we'd be affecting the river, then we decided to mess around with the river directly. First be burned fossil fuels not thinking we'd be influencing climate, now environmentalists want us to get directly involved in that influencing.

In the case of the river, the a Corps of Engineers General said as recently as a decade ago, "The Mississippi will stay just where the Corps says it should stay for just as long as the Corps says it should stay there." Events have yet to prove him wrong, but the environmentalists of this day and age are confident (as am I) that nature will prevail, not the Corps. And fairly soon. The story of the Mississippi is a prototypical story of hubris. The river is a tremendous force of nature. I'm pretty sure I could shock 99% of you with tales of its power, but space does not permit. But impressive as it is, it's also vulnerable to experiencing significant perturbation due to the incidental effects of mankind just going about its business of being mankind. Every parking lot we make causes that much more sediment and that much less resistance to flash flooding. Had the Corps never touched the river, we'd still be able to see man's effect on it from outer space.

The Corps has been heroic in its efforts to tame the river, and by the terms they originally set they've been successful. Likewise, governments today could (perhaps) meet or even greatly exceed Kyoto targets (as they are measured). Whereas the Corps is trying to control the river, warmists want to control consumers of energy. The analogy shifts here, but is still poignant. The Corps can be successful by the terms they have set but still fail in a much larger sense - they can win the battles but lose the war. Likewise, mankind might be able to "do" a lot "about" global warming but still fail utterly to significantly influence a "force of nature" in the form of an average Chinese person wanting to own a car, and a home with a concrete foundation and air-conditioning; a citizen of rural India raising demand for imported consumer goods their parents once considered impossible luxuries; Africans shifting more and more from subsistence to intensive agriculture.

The force of nature that's stronger than the Mississippi, and certainly stronger than any group of governments and environmentalists, is the human desire to procreate. With the Mississippi, we wanted to have our cake and also to eat it, and the same is true with the climate: we want to have it that mankind doesn't trigger any environmental tipping points, but also continues as we've been doing since we were in the trees: progressing. "Sustainability" is the byword for how this is supposed to take place, but here's how things look to me: we are a whole lot closer to those tipping points than we are to any sort of global sustainability.

Well, it is basically a U.S. centric article meaning about why the argument is being lost in the states.

Sure. But the point is that if the arguement is being lost in the States because environmentalists won using different tactics in the 60s and 70s it begs the question of why the US is different then the rest of the world. After all Environmentalists used the same tactics in Germany but AGW is an accepted fact by most germans. (85%)
source: http://www.naturalnews.com/021131.html

So it can't be that the past actions of enviromentalists have sullied the reputation of the scientific community or it would affect their reputation everywhere.
And this point by Mead

"A better educated and more skeptical public opinion was no longer prepared to defer to technocrats, experts and government bureaucrats who said they knew best.

Better educated? Hardly.
Sceptical? Come on. Belief in hokum like 9/11 truthers, guaredian angels, Obama birthers.... There's no level of sophisticated scepticism at all amongst these people. A great portion of the US population will believe anything if they are told it by tehir favorite pundit or radio blabber... Or by celebrities like Jenny the anti-vaccine crusader.

The debate over the enviroment was and still is largely a debate centred upon an examination of evidence . DDT wasn't banned because people beleived DDT caused cancer. They showed that it did.
Today, when scientists present evidence any crank is given a stool to stand on and voice his oppostion. There's no editing of the message, and no correction to look into the cranks claims and evidence before hand...So he gets his message out, and an unsceptcal public buys the trash.
Back in the 60s and 70s the debate in the media over the enviroment was fairly even handed and there was a respect for the credentialled scientist and the scientific process. Today, only really in the US, that has dissolved.
Russell Mead is a foreign policy expert, and should know that to check his suspicions he should be able to see the same affects around the world from the same forces.
That the US stands almost alone as an island of uninformed and misinformed scepticism is not because of a scientific debate that went on, and is still going on, in the environmental field. Its because Americans are misinformed and ill informed about science, and particularly about AGW. Period.
You bring up nuclear energy. Most of the world is okay with nuclear energy. France gets the majority of their power from nuclear energy. There hasn't been a nuclear power plant built in the US since 3 mile island. Is that because people truly understand the relative risk/safety of nuclear energy is or is because they hold an idea formed upon the emotional response to that one disaster?
There was a debate about the safety of nuclear energy in France too. In that debate "experts" were given their due, and their knowledge and expertise was respected.
In the US, a doofus like Bill OReilly who doesn't know how or why the tides work holds sway over a greater portion of the electorate than any group of scientists.... Add on the ability of the Internet to spread recycled crap every 4 years to a gullible public, like the stuff Tom referred to earlier, and
What do you expect?
For the record, I'm not all that worried about the effects of gloabal warming with one major exception. The seas will rise, and since we know where the level of water used to be ..... we know that coastal areas will be devastated if the ice all melts... Reading Minister X's piece on the Missippi should be instructive of this concern.
Maybe we should try and avoid causing the seas to rise on our grand children? Or their children...

danivon wrote:So not all who get labelled as 'warmists' or 'alarmists' come to it from the angle Mead selects.

First I don't think that Mead suggests that all do. I believe he is saying that it is the main cause. However, by the same token, I don't think the U.S.'s underlying religousity is the controlling part. I mean I would be considered a climate skeptic but accept Evolution over creationism.

Minister X wrote: read the Mead article and I conclude that Mead is onto something but that Ricky is mostly correct in saying that the dynamic he describes is largely irrelevant to the question of why so many Americans have become anti-science. It's the far right that leads the "you can't trust guys in lab coats" brigade, and the far right never bought zilch from the environmentalists.

I actually wrote a long response to ricky's initial post but deleted it because I wasn't 100% confident in my knowledge but what the hell. I think the problem with this argument is that historircially the evolution v. creation debate was being won hands down by the evolution side. Even mainstream religions were attempting to accomodate evolution within their doctrines. For example, in the late 60's a ministerial group from Arkansas made a statement that said "to use the Bible to support an irrational and an archaic concept of static and undeveloping creation is not only to misunderstand the meaning of the Book of Genesis, but to do God and religion a disservice by making both enemies of scientific advancement and academic freedom."
It wasn't until the mid-70's - 80's, when the Religious right started to use the tactics of attacking the experts behind the science (the tactics of the environmentalist) did creationist start to really be able to stand against and start to push back against Evolution.

rickyp wrote:Sure. But the point is that if the arguement is being lost in the States because environmentalists won using different tactics in the 60s and 70s it begs the question of why the US is different then the rest of the world. After all Environmentalists used the same tactics in Germany but AGW is an accepted fact by most germans. (85%)
source: http://www.naturalnews.com/021131.html

So it can't be that the past actions of enviromentalists have sullied the reputation of the scientific community or it would affect their reputation everywhere.

It is a good questions. I came across another article searching for the Mead article this morning that might answer but I hestitated to post it because I was fearful of being accused of fostering American exceptionalism ( and found it quite insulting to non-Americans). It was written back in March and is here. In it the author asks

There is less backlash against climate science in Europe and Japan, and the U.S. is 33rd out of 34 developed countries in the percentage of adults who agree that species, including humans, evolved. That suggests there is something peculiarly American about the rejection of science. Charles Harper, a devout Christian who for years ran the program bridging science and faith at the Templeton Foundation and who has had more than his share of arguments with people who view science as the Devil's spawn, has some hypotheses about why that is. "In America, people do not bow to authority the way they do in England," he says. "When the lumpenproletariat are told they have to think in a certain way, there is a backlash," as with climate science now and, never-endingly, with evolution.

and

Finally, Americans carry in their bones the country's history of being populated by emigrants fed up with hierarchy. It is the American way to distrust those who set themselves up—even justifiably—as authorities.

rickyp wrote:[The debate over the enviroment was and still is largely a debate centred upon an examination of evidence . DDT wasn't banned because people beleived DDT caused cancer. They showed that it did.

At first experts said DDT was safe. Later experts said no it wasn't. Mead responds to this in his article as well.

More, on issues the public follows closely, the scientific consensus keeps changing. Margarine was introduced as the healthy alternative to butter; now experts tell us that the transfats in many types of margarine are the worst things you can eat. Should you eat no fat or the right fat? All carbs, no carbs or good carbs? How much vitamin E should you take? How much sun should you get? How much fish oil should you swallow? How should you divide your time between aerobic and non-aerobic exercise? On these and many other subjects, expert opinion keeps changing. Perhaps the current consensus will last; quite possibly, it won’t — but the experts can’t tell you what will happen.

Archduke Russell John wrote:

rickyp wrote:[The debate over the enviroment was and still is largely a debate centred upon an examination of evidence . DDT wasn't banned because people beleived DDT caused cancer. They showed that it did.

At first experts said DDT was safe. Later experts said no it wasn't. Mead responds to this in his article as well.

More, on issues the public follows closely, the scientific consensus keeps changing. Margarine was introduced as the healthy alternative to butter; now experts tell us that the transfats in many types of margarine are the worst things you can eat. Should you eat no fat or the right fat? All carbs, no carbs or good carbs? How much vitamin E should you take? How much sun should you get? How much fish oil should you swallow? How should you divide your time between aerobic and non-aerobic exercise? On these and many other subjects, expert opinion keeps changing. Perhaps the current consensus will last; quite possibly, it won’t — but the experts can’t tell you what will happen.

Well following that logic you really never can come to a decision on anything. In 1, 5, 10, 50 years we might know better or it can turn out that what we thought was wrong.
Plus don't underestimate how many "experts" are motivated not by advancing science or knowledge about an issue but rather by capitalistc greed for money.
Especially true with food, were every little advance in knowledge is instantly turned into a cash generating diet book with supplement sales.
You take a look at the best knowledge you have today and decide wether you want to act at all or how you want to act.

GMTom wrote:and if we had "record levels" of CO2 wouldn't it follow that we would have record warmth? But some reports say we are warming, some show cooling, some go this way, some go that way so it became easier to drop "Global warming" and embrace "Climate Change".

A quick point of historical fact: "Climate Change" wasn't adopted because global cooling had replaced global warming or because there was uncertainty about the direction of change. The change was made for two reasons: 1) many people (like you, I must say) saw cooling in your backyard and thought that was evidence against GW; the effects of global warming will NOT be even warming all over but rather a mix of changes in temp with some large changes (both hotter and colder) in some places but just a moderate overall AVERAGE warming. The large local changes in all directions are of more immediate impact than the overall warming. 2) If and when the globe warms, changes in temperature will not be the only climate problems human must face. There will also be changes in precipitation patterns, ocean currents, winds, storm tracks, and so on - in other words... climate.

Tom: think about your accusation that the phrases were changed because scientists don't know if it's getting warmer or colder and need a catch-all. Seriously: does that "ring true" to you? And BTW the substitution hasn't really been all that effective - we're still talking about AGW, not ACC.

And now I've joined (or re-joined) the argue-with-Tom crowd, which is something I promised myself I'd not do. In the case of both creationism and AGW there's a phenomenon I've noticed: some who, out of ignorance of the facts (and other reasons), either "believe in" creation or "don't believe" AGW, also believe they have a much better grasp of the science of the subject than people who in actuality know a lot more about that. Thus Tom can argue in one post that the scientific establishment is unscientific while in the last he forwarded as evidence of his case an anecdote regarding a set of informal and undocumented personal perceptions of temperature.

There is no way to scientifically refute creationism. The last two dozen Nobel laureates in biology combined cannot convince a true believer in creationism that he's wrong. There's a faith-based rebuttal to nearly every scientific point, and for those last few that are the real proof of evolution it ALWAYS works to say, "We can never know exactly why or how God operates." And yet people continue to argue with them. Arguing with Tom about AGW, and doing so on the basis of what science has revealed, when he thinks he knows more about the scientific method than you do, is just as pointless. And I absolutely dare anyone to try to convince him that he's wrong about his beliefs about how that method has been applied (or not) to the research that's been done on AGW.

I look at the Climategate emails and see some human frailty and shoddiness of professionalism but nothing that impacts overall conclusions about AGW. Ricky sees nothing amiss whatsoever. Tom sees crushing revelations of a global failure of science.

Listen only to me.

[I really hate these smilies]

The more I read posts of alarmists, the more I chuckle. You guys refuse to read what is stated and concentrate only on things that grab your fancy. First, Ricky states how all the facts are there and available to all? I guess he wants to forget all about that whole east anglia nonsense where they kept data from those who questioned.

Danivon goes on to claim this was the single warmest decade yet the facts simply do not concur and an earlier posting had quotes from east anglia people who even claim the warming of this past decade was not statistically relevant (but warming nonetheless). The past decade has cooled from the previous one. Still fairly warm compared to the past century but cooler than the previous decade. Yet all the studies tell us the world will continue to warm, they simply have no idea why their predictions have failed to come true over and over and over ...some "science"

MX wants us to believe the name change was due to reasons other than cooling, what evidence is their of this other than personal opinion? It syncs up exactly with the cooling trend, that is not a personal opinion.

Someone else talks of the Hudson not being frozen, so? Is this due to global warming? If you actually looked into a few facts you would find North America has experienced more cooling than most of the rest of the world. You also find that most of the reasons for Arctic waters warming is not due to the weather but rather other reasons down deep in the oceans.It's too easy to listen to Al Gore and his polar bear lies I suppose?

All this being said, I have stated over and over that this could very well be true but I am not sold on the facts nor the science, I am more than a bit skeptical of the ulterior motives of the IPCC and their ilk. What can we do that can really help? Can we really know for certain warming is all that bad? It goes on and on, bottom line, there are far too many questions to answered with any certainty.

TOM: by lumping me in with the "alarmists" you show just how superficially you read things and how quickly you jump to conclusions.

BTW, in my earlier post I'm sure I sounded like a pompous ass. It's hard to write a post like that and not sound like one. (The fact that I also happen to be one doesn't help!) But I don't want to give the impression of personal disrespect and apologize if I did.

Faxmonkey wrote:Well following that logic you really never can come to a decision on anything. In 1, 5, 10, 50 years we might know better or it can turn out that what we thought was wrong.

Well, not really. I am pretty sure that Gravity is a proven that won't change. I think evolution is pretty much there as well.

Faxmonkey wrote:Plus don't underestimate how many "experts" are motivated not by advancing science or knowledge about an issue but rather by capitalistc greed for money.
Especially true with food, were every little advance in knowledge is instantly turned into a cash generating diet book with supplement sales.

Absolutely. Isn't this one of the points Tom has been making for a while. That some experts who support AGW do so out of a pecuniary interest?

Faxmonkey wrote:You take a look at the best knowledge you have today and decide wether you want to act at all or how you want to act.

I agree. I accept that the climate is getting warmer. However, I don't think the anthropogensis of climate change has been proven. The planetary climate has gotten warmer and colder numerous times in the past so perhaps this is just another part of the cycle. Further, I remain unconvinced that it will be as catestrophic as portrayed by the alarmist. I mean we are talking about a projected temp increase of about 6 degrees F and a sea level rise of about 3'. I am not sure that requires drastic action.

Archduke Russell John wrote:Well, not really. I am pretty sure that Gravity is a proven that won't change. I think evolution is pretty much there as well.

We are more confident about our knowledge in some areas opposed to others, true. Take evolution though, do you think the sceptisim of the sizeable group of people that doesn't buy into it is based on facts or other considerations ?

Archduke Russell John wrote:Absolutely. Isn't this one of the points Tom has been making for a while. That some experts who support AGW do so out of a pecuniary interest?

You certainly don't get rich by being a scientist involved in climate research on any level. I'd rather have a diet book. But sure you can't rule out that individuals are in explicitly for pecuniary gain, but the whole community ? It's not like they are brokers.

Faxmonkey wrote:I agree. I accept that the climate is getting warmer. However, I don't think the anthropogensis of climate change has been proven. The planetary climate has gotten warmer and colder numerous times in the past so perhaps this is just another part of the cycle. Further, I remain unconvinced that it will be as catestrophic as portrayed by the alarmist. I mean we are talking about a projected temp increase of about 6 degrees F and a sea level rise of about 3'. I am not sure that requires drastic action.

Personally i'm pretty sure that we have a relevant influence on GW, but i don't rightly see what we can change in a hurry. Alternative energies will take care of alot of problems, but there's no way we can switch the whole world in in less than 25-100 years.
I think we can use the money available for enviormental protection alot better than fighting a lost cause about CO2 increases. And i really believe that we have to invest massively in enviormental protection on many levels. Pollutants, quotas on fishing industries, there's lots of areas were we can produce quicker, more efficient change than carbon emissions.

GMTom wrote:The more I read posts of alarmists, the more I chuckle. You guys refuse to read what is stated and concentrate only on things that grab your fancy.

I responded directly to your points, taking one of your posts and looking at the majority of it.

First, Ricky states how all the facts are there and available to all? I guess he wants to forget all about that whole east anglia nonsense where they kept data from those who questioned.

And you ignore the fact that he was talking about the NASA owned GISS data that is open to all. What's more, the data used by CRU at East Anglia is also available, from the same sources that they used. It's just for legal reasons that they are not allowed to pass it on without permission. Nothing stops the critics from going past CRU to the source.

Danivon goes on to claim this was the single warmest decade yet the facts simply do not concur and an earlier posting had quotes from east anglia people who even claim the warming of this past decade was not statistically relevant (but warming nonetheless). The past decade has cooled from the previous one. Still fairly warm compared to the past century but cooler than the previous decade. Yet all the studies tell us the world will continue to warm, they simply have no idea why their predictions have failed to come true over and over and over ...some "science"

Tom. Read my post again. I looked at the NASA results. Look at the graph that wikipedia has for the past 130 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Instr ... Record.png

There is no way that you can claim that the last 10 years were not warmer than the preceding 10. That's what my use of comparisons was about.

And what you've written shows that you don't understand what 'not statistically significant' means. It seems to me that what it means matches with what I wrote that over the past decade, the rate of warming has slowed, and may have paused. It in no way suggests that there must have been a cooling. And just because the last decade has not seen much change, does not mean that it is not also warmer than the previous decade.

Now, you've had the chance to read and digest what I've written. You've had the time and opportunity to check for yourself or present an alternative set of data. You did none of those, but simply repeated you duff assertion. As I said before, repeating a falsehood after it's been shown to be false is lying.

MX wants us to believe the name change was due to reasons other than cooling, what evidence is their of this other than personal opinion? It syncs up exactly with the cooling trend, that is not a personal opinion.

You didn't read my post then, did you? If the cooling is in the last decade, and is the reason to start using 'Climate Change' rather than 'Global Warming', this does not explain why the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) was set up with that name in the 1980s, in what you say was the period of warming.

Perhaps they were psychic. Or perhaps you are flat out wrong. Again.

All this being said, I have stated over and over that this could very well be true but I am not sold on the facts nor the science, I am more than a bit skeptical of the ulterior motives of the IPCC and their ilk.

You also seem reluctant to engage honestly with us on it. I can sense MX's frustration. He is like you not convinced, but the way you approach this debate undermines your cause and leads him to challenge you.

Min X is not a 'warmist'. You demean yourself by using such terms to describe people, especially those who are closer to your point of view than you think.

But it's entirely consistent with your approach. Repeat yourself. Ignore the response. Claim victory. You do science like Lysenko.

What can we do that can really help? Can we really know for certain warming is all that bad? It goes on and on, bottom line, there are far too many questions to answered with any certainty.

Welcome to science, Tom. If you want certainty, go to church, or a political rally. If you want to explore knowledge, accept that 100% certainty is not what you will get. Even Newton's Laws are not 100% applicable to every situation (we still don't have a fully accurate model of how gravity works).

Lack of certainty is not a reason to ignore a high probability.

I have maintained that we should carry on the research, and look as as many angles as possible. In the meantime, as a precaution, a little restraint on output of CO2 and other pollutants should be practised.

Now Tom, can you please engage brain before replying next time? The more you blather, the more often I will tear into your posts and hit you point for point. If you don't want me to try to make you look stupid, how about you making it harder for me?

Minister X wrote:I look at the Climategate emails and see some human frailty and shoddiness of professionalism but nothing that impacts overall conclusions about AGW. Ricky sees nothing amiss whatsoever. Tom sees crushing revelations of a global failure of science.

My view is closer to yours than the others. Unfortunately, I think that means you will be lumped in with me as an alarmist warmist.

I do like these smileys, but not as much as the old ones. I really miss that 'Lies' one.

archduke said

At first experts said DDT was safe. Later experts said no it wasn't. Mead responds to this in his article as well.

Mead responds, but ignores the fact that the debate about the safety of DDT was decided by the presentation of scientific evidence. And as this evidence mounted scientists changed their mind.
He completely misconstrues the scientific debate at the time. There was also a "political debate" over the regulation of DDT...with the chemical industry appealing to the legislatures for continued de-regulation. However, with an honest scientific response the legislatures responded to the change in the stance of the scientific community.

That's exactly the opposite of the current attitude between some American governments and people lobbying for "creationism" in school. (Today's version is intelligent design") and for the lobbying efforts of industries afraid of the consequences of acceptance by the public of AGW.
Example: even President Bush said that there was a legitimate "scientific debate" over evolution. There isn't.
Much the same obfuscation occurs over climate science. Where the overwhelming credentialed climate scientists (97%) agree with AGW conceptually (and argue over the extent, speed, etc.) the media likes to put out that there is a debate in the area. And the organized skeptics like the heartland institute import the uninformed or poorly informed opinion of geologists, and cranks who make assertions with no support or even willfully distort the known data.
The point being that people seem to think that reality can be changed by lobbying politicians. That politicians can be convinced to view the scientific debate as balanced, doesn't mean it is... When DDT was banned there was still a respect for the scientific process in legislatures across the US. After Reagan it became acceptable to view unscientific blather like creationism as somehow legitimate.
Legitimize a view point based solely on faith, and other view points based upon the rejection of science become easier. That's the problem, Archduke. If you willingly accept that its all right to even discuss importing into science class the concept of dinosaurs co-existing with humans you've corrupted the whole idea of science. Mead is willfully ignorant of that fundamental difference between the US and the rest of the world. The acceptance of fundamental religious ideas and myths as an equivalent system of understanding the world to the method of science that has brought us a way to learn and evolve our understand through empirical knowledge.


And X, I wish you'd quote me when you speak for me... We've debated the CRU e-mails before, and at the time I'm certain I wrote; since my view hasn't changed, that the writers were being asses. And that transparency would clearly immunize the science.
That's why I pointed Tom to the GISS data. Which agrees almost completely with CRU data but is wholly transparent whereas CRU was more difficult to obtain (but not impossible).
Having said that, I do feel that the CRU e-mail controversy is total bullshit today. When did it happen? What has transpired since then? Every year the data compels more concern, as the data continues to reinforce the direction and indicate the increasing speed that the effects of AGW are having...I point primarily to the enormous changes being felt in the high Arctic. Perhaps for those of you who don't regularly receive that news it isn't important. But it certainly points to many of the predictions that AGW scientists have made...
As I've said before, it should not alarm those of us set to die in the next 3 or 4 decades.. But our grandchildren will be cursing us for our inactivity.
On the other hand, if the markets ever find a commercial response can be enriching I have every confidence that effective change can be made quickly. Its a matter of creating the conditions for the nascent market to grow quickly That's why I like Lomberg....generally not particularly.

"The Scientific Method" is both a deceptively simple and deceptively complex concept. On the complex end you have the philosophy of science, which gets into some quite deep questions of epistemology, and you also have the mundane day-to-day (but often very complex) techniques that have been found to be the most reliable ways to perform different sorts of investigations, tests, measurements, trials, and so on. Then, on the opposite side, you have this: the "scientific method" (or, perhaps more accurately, science) is simply humankind's accumulated wisdom about the best way to go about learning new things of practical value. Period. Nothing more than that. No hard and fast rules that are always applicable, no universal litmus tests, no comprehensive guidelines. Exceptions are possible (and not all that uncommon) even to such Science 101 concepts as reproducibility, Occam's Razor, full disclosure and peer review.

humankind's accumulated wisdom about the best way to go about learning new things of practical value

And thus one of the root problems we have talking about climate change, both in this forum and the worldwide one: there is very little in the way of accumulated wisdom about how to go about learning new things of practical value about climate change. For one thing, there are different "scientific methods" for oceanological chemistry versus solar astrophysics, atmospheric fluid dynamics versus economic resource geography, and the subject at hand encompasses a greater variety of disparate sciences than any previous one of comparable practical importance. Each little field has its accumulated wisdom, but we are not well-rehearsed in ways to integrate so many findings, facts, and numbers from different fields - from different "scientific methods". Special difficulties arise when so many different historical sciences get mixed in with so many different experimental ones. Another broad area of difficulty arises from the fact that we lack broad and widely-accepted theories of climate change out of which we can draw useful hypotheses. Our tendency is toward fragmentation of subjects, not integration of them; even in the field of climatology you have many sub-specialties, each with its own way of looking at climate generally, and each with its own set of guiding theories.

There's an odd and ironic fact about science that's rarely noted: whereas data accumulates at a fantastic pace, technology changes so quickly we can't keep up, and our need for new knowledge grows and changes in a dizzying fashion, the profession of science changes only at glacial rates - at least compared to all that other stuff. HERE is an interesting page entitled "Climatology as a Profession"; it's much less a career guide than it is a history of climate research, and includes some surprising facts about how far the discipline has evolved relative to the need for integrated expertise.

By the end of the century... There was still no specific professional organization or other institutional framework to support "climate science" as an independent discipline...

When you look at the history of science in recent decades from the standpoint of phenomena like global warming, which entails a very high degree of dynamism, interconnected feedback mechanisms, and a huge array of inputs, the most significant advance has been the development of Chaos Theory. There's no question that climate behaves chaotically. This is a great insight, but it certainly doesn't help efforts to turn "Climate Science" into something like a recognizable field that can attract top students.

Back off one page from the above to HERE and you'll find something interesting: under "Contents/Site Map" is a fairly good breakdown of what's important about climate change, and under "Theory" what do we find? What is the theory of global warming? What rubric guides this field of research? What explains (at least tentatively) what we know? What collection of concepts have we found to be useful? Sorry. All that's listed there are models, and models are not theories. "Climate Change" is not a mature science and does not yet have any real comprehensive theories.

That doesn't mean it's not a science, or that work being done isn't scientific. It does, however, mean that even unsophisticated critics of Al Gore can come up with reasonable ways to pick at "what the science says". And it makes it difficult for those who understand science on a deeper level to rebut by describing just how "scientific" the work has been.

The weaknesses of climate science and what passes as AGW theory have been recognized and addressed (to some degree and with mixed success) in a way that recognizes the simple definition I started with, that science is humankind's accumulated wisdom about the best way to go about learning new things of practical value. We simply don't have a lot of accumulated wisdom about the best way to go about learning what we should do about the possibility of global warming. This is the part of science that moves slowly. Recognizing this, a new sort of mechanism emerged from a variety threads being drawn together. The history to which I linked describes how integrated thinking about climate science benefited from email, online journals, and blogs, but goes on to say:

Still, the most important mechanism was the one that had sustained scientific communities for centuries—you went to meetings and talked with people. As one scientist described the system, "Most successful scientists develop networks of 'trusted' sources—people you know and get along with, but who are specialists in different areas... and who you can just call up and ask for the bottom line. They can point you directly to the key papers related to your question or give you the unofficial 'buzz' about some new high profile paper."

For climate scientists, the process of meetings and discussion went a long step farther when the world’s governments demanded a formal advisory procedure. The resulting Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was not really a single panel, but a nexus of uncounted international workshops, exchanges of draft reports, and arguments among individuals, all devoted to producing a single authoritative assessment every half dozen years. From the 1990s on, the process engaged every significant climate scientist in the world (and many of the insignificant ones). At the time of its 2007 assessment, the IPCC process had grown to include 157 authors plus some 600 reviewers, giving a rough measure of the size of the scientific community on which the world's policy-makers now depended for crucial advice.

In some fields the IPCC process became the central locus for arguments and conclusions. This went farthest among computer modelers, whose efforts increasingly focused on cooperative projects to produce results for the IPCC assessments. When climate modelers studied the details of each factor that went into their calculations, and when they sought large sets of data to check the validity of their results, they had to interact with every specialty that had anything to say about climate change. Every group felt an intense pressure to come up with answers, as demanded by the world's governments and by their own rising anxieties about the future. In countless grueling exchanges of ideas and data, the experts in each field hammered out agreements on precisely what they could, or could not, say with confidence about each scientific question. Their projections of future climate, and the IPCC reports in general, were thus the output of a great engine of interdisciplinary research. In the world of science this was a social mechanism altogether unprecedented in its size, scope, complexity and efficiency—as well as in its importance for future policy.

In other words, the accumulated wisdom about the best way to go about learning new things of practical value about climate is the IPCC. It is the state of the art. And thus the difficulties: it's easy to criticize and hard to defend. And IMHO models without theories are very weak methodologically when the systems being modeled are chaotic and have emergent properties. BUT... the IPCC is the best we have. That means that according to the way science works its conclusions have to be considered "true". That's a fact that even people sophisticated about science and inclined to accept the truth of AGW will have great difficulty explaining to anyone inclined to scoff.