If skeptics can't get basic facts right, how can they understand more complicated science?

Question

Recently here, a skeptic made this claim:

"The term junk science was actually coined for the study of

GW. (Danna) (sic), (GNCP) (sic), you do know not all

physicist have been right."

However, the term predates the global warming debate, and was first used in civil litigation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_science

The book by Peter Huber, Galileo's Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom, deals mainly with tort cases (e.g., Audi's accelerating uncontrollably for instance) and nothing on climate science. (Huber's book is an interesting read, if you can stomach it, by the way.)

The point is that if skeptics are so convinced they know basic facts, but what they think they know is wrong, how can we trust their assessments of far more complicated scientific data?

Answer 1

Mark Anthony - Earning a PhD doesn't require gum chewing or walking (Stephen Hawking would probably fail your "test"), but it does require a significant amount of hard work and intelligence in the specific field of study which awarded the degree.  I may not give a lot of heed to the advice of PhD physicists I've worked with in the area of parenting, sports, or brain surgery, but it would be dumb of me to not pay attention to what they say about electromagnetic hexadecapole moments.  And if a whole slew of PhD physicists were telling me the same basic things, it would be ludicrous for me (without any PhD in the field, no matter how much googling I did on the subject) to assert that they were all wrong or corrupt.

As for the question, yes basic facts are important.  And there are quite a few doubters that repeatedly post links to things that don't support what they are asserting.  If they can't read their own links all the way through (and understand them), how can they expect to have any credibility?

Along with the Dunning-Kruger effect, one of my favorite quotes is by Bertrand Russell:

“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt”

Answer 2

Let's never forget that it was a skeptics view that the Sun, not Earth was at the center of the solar system.  The consensus at that time from Plato and his student Aristotle and the work of Ptolemy until the time of Copernicus some 2,000 years later all agreed that the Earth was the center of the universe.  

This belief predates the church by 600 years.

There were even models that showed how the geocentric universe worked, and they were accurate.

Imagine the first skeptic who challenged 2,000 years of knowledge by proclaiming that the Sun, not Earth was the center of the solar system.  I'm glad they had the courage to stand up when they had the math on their side, rather than models.

Aren't you?

Answer 3

How do we know that scientist can get facts straight, I have dealt with some that couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time. Yet if they have  PHD they are automatically assumed intelligent and accurate.  That may or may not be the case, that is why we have skeptics.

Answer 4

They can't.  For example.

"no warming since 1998 IS valid"

No, it's not, and provably so.  Forget judgments about "signal" and noise".  The VALUES for the five year average temperature have increased.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2007/

1998 was simply an outlier, an unusually warm year.  More basic science, understanding "outliers".

And this statement also shows a certain lack of knowledge about science.

"How do we know that scientist can get facts straight, I have dealt with some that couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time."

Maybe so.  But that argument on no way applies to the National Academy of Sciences, 1800 of the nations best scientists, selected by their peers.  Few get any funding for global warming, either.  This is perhaps THE best summary of present global warming science.

http://dels.nas.edu/basc/climate-change

Large groups of scientists always diminish the importance of the mediocre ones.  Which is why the IPCC is vastly more credible than a few skeptics, most with theories that actually conflict with each other.

This one's pretty good, too.

"The 800 year lag doesn't prove that CO2 can't drive temperature but it certainly indicates that it wasn't the driver over the last few glacial cycles."

Exactly, and scientists agree.  But the lack of ANY lag certainly shows it's a major driver THIS TIME.

Answer 5

I should preface my comments by saying that it is politically incorrect to beat down the cognitively challenged, but I can be an arrogant politically incorrect SOB at times.  If the PC police come, I am prepared to go down in a hail of bullets.

Getting basic facts right and understanding more complicated science are different issues.  A grade 4 student has sufficient cognitive development to retain an amazing number of facts.  Applying multiple concepts to solve a problem is an ability that many people never acquire.  One of the problems that I pose to my new students (I take gifted high school students into my lab during summer holidays to encourage careers in science) is:

d/dx is drives x km and notices n mosquitoes on the windshield of area A inclined at an angle alpha.  He gets out of the car.  How many mosquito bites does he get?  How many Purple Martins does he see?  A few figure it out in an hour, many take a day, a few keep trying for a week, and some never get it.  

Skeptics don't exhibit the ability to solve problems that require a synthesis of different scientific concepts in the answers provided so far in YA.  Consequently, the inevitable conclusion is that skeptics are also incapable of recognizing inconsistencies in 'facts' that they receive from dubious sources.  Rather than analyzing information and drawing  correct conclusions about the veracity of their sources, skeptics merely recite by rote incorrect information with the same fidelity as their grade 4 counterparts.  If Joseph Goebbels were alive today, his heart would be warmed to see the mass media principles he pioneered put to effective use in the energy lobby's disinformation campaign.  

Off on another tangent, did I miss something about Chinese in Greenland in my history classes?  Did the Chinese irrigate their rice patties with water from melting glaciers in subtropical Greenland during the MWP?  Can a skeptic give me a reference besides C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?

Answer 6

I would say on the average, that skeptics are probably more informed than alarmists.  Some alarmists such as you and Dana, for example, know your stuff.  That doesn't mean you are right. Generally, the nonsensical claims from alarmists,  far exceed those on the skeptical side, in my opinion.  The pope knows a great deal more about his religion than I do but that doesn't mean he has a better understanding of the truth.  Sometimes it is difficult for some to see the forest through the trees.  They can't recognize their own biases and how those biases influence their view of the world and science.  

p.s. The 800 year lag doesn't prove that CO2 can't drive temperature but it certainly indicates that it wasn't the driver over the last few glacial cycles.  Perhaps it was on very rare occassions as theorized recently.  Perhaps other factors were the cause.  In fact, we don't know for sure.

Answer 7

I love this " you have to stop making glaringly factual errors like Vikings having to go through the NW passage to reach Newfoundland"   Did it not occur to you they may have made a pit stop in the Philippines?  Don't forget the part about "they didn't walk across".  Indeed, they did not!

How about this one "How CO2 even remotely contributes to global warming besides some spectrum light c**p".  Yes lets not involve the spectrum or the periodic table when we discuss heat, light and chemistry.  LOL

No Jello, it was the view of Copernicus, Archimedes, Ptolemy, Aristarchus, Galileo, and Kepler,  Pythagoras and the other scientists back at least to 300 BC in the Western World.  In the East it was written about by Shatapatha Brahmana in 900 BC.  Just like the fact that the earth is round, scientists acknowledged the truth in their writing long before the general audience.

Answer 8

So because ONE skeptic made a small clerical error, we're ALL wrong and stupid, right?

Gimme a break!

Here's a basic fact: Archaeologists have found Viking settlements in Newfoundland. The ONLY way they could have gotten there was by using the 'Northwest Passage'. You know, the one that's only now opening up for the 'first time'? Even though europeans were convinced that it existed, even though they couldn't find it??? GW is CYCLICAL. AGW is bullsh*t. How many SUV's do you think were running around 1000 years ago???

Answer 9

That's really the fundamental issue behind the denial movement - people who don't understand the basic facts, but are convinced they know it all.

Many deniers don't understand the greenhouse effect and thus think the '800 year lag' argument is valid.  Clearly CO2 can't cause warming!

They don't understand basic statistics and thus think 'no warming since 1998' is valid.  Susan's rant perfectly exemplifies this complete lack of understanding and yet certainty of her knowledge.

They don't understand the difference between signal and noise and thus think one cold month disproves global warming.  

They don't understand peer-review or how the scientific community works in general and thus think the whole issue is a massive hoax.  

They don't understand the planet's cycles and thus think the recent warming could be "natural".

I could go on, but you get the point.  The global warming denial movement is based on people who don't understand the science and yet are convinced that they do.  They hear some amateurish and wrong argument, think it "makes sense", want to believe it ("feel good" arguments, as you put it), and thus they believe.   After reading most 'skeptic' questions my first reaction is to ask "do you really think climate scientists haven't considered that?".

As I discussed in a previous question, "common sense" based on ignorance will lead you to the wrong conclusion every time.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

Answer 10

Actually a lot of their "science" consists of former theories that were discarded years ago.  They sound plausible today because they were valid theories until the evolving understanding of science eventually disproved them.

Consider for example the claim that CO2 can't be responsible for warming because water vapor absorbs all of the energy in the same wavelengths:

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.h...

A few years after Arrhenius published his hypothesis, another scientist in Sweden, Knut Ångström, asked an assistant to measure the passage of infrared radiation through a tube filled with carbon dioxide. The assistant ("Herr J. Koch," otherwise unrecorded in history) put in rather less of the gas in total than would be found in a column of air reaching to the top of the atmosphere. The assistant reported that the amount of radiation that got through the tube scarcely changed when he cut the quantity of gas back by a third. Apparently it took only a trace of the gas to "saturate" the absorption — that is, in the bands of the spectrum where CO2 blocked radiation, it did it so thoroughly that more gas could make little difference.(7*)  



Still more persuasive was the fact that water vapor, which is far more abundant in the air than carbon dioxide, also intercepts infrared radiation. In the crude spectrographs of the time, the smeared-out bands of the two gases entirely overlapped one another. More CO2 could not affect radiation in bands of the spectrum that water vapor, as well as CO2 itself, were already blocking entirely.(8)

  

These measurements and arguments had fatal flaws. Herr Koch had reported to Ångström that the absorption had not been reduced by more than 0.4% when he lowered the pressure, but a modern calculation shows that the absorption would have decreased about 1% — like many a researcher, the assistant was over confident about his degree of precision.(8a) But even if he had seen the1% shift, Ångström would have thought this an insignificant perturbation. He failed to understand that the logic of the experiment was altogether false.

  

The greenhouse effect will in fact operate even if the absorption of radiation were totally saturated in the lower atmosphere. The planet's temperature is regulated by the thin upper layers where radiation does escape easily into space. Adding more greenhouse gas there will change the balance. Moreover, even a 1% change in that delicate balance would make a serious difference in the planet’s surface temperature. The logic is rather simple once it is grasped, but it takes a new way of looking at the atmosphere — not as a single slab, like the gas in Koch's tube (or the glass over a greenhouse), but as a set of interacting layers.

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Here's where they finally "got it":

Not until the mid-20th century would scientists fully grasp, and calculate with some precision, just how the effect works. A rough explanation goes like this. Visible sunlight penetrates easily through the air and warms the Earth’s surface. When the surface emits invisible infrared heat radiation, this radiation too easily penetrates the main gases of the air. But as Tyndall found, even a trace of CO2, no more than it took to fill a bottle in his laboratory, is almost opaque to heat radiation. Thus a good part of the radiation that rises from the surface is absorbed by CO2 in the middle levels of the atmosphere. Its energy transfers into the air itself rather than escaping directly into space. Not only is the air thus warmed, but also some of the energy trapped there is radiated back to the surface, warming it further.



That’s a shorthand way of explaining the greenhouse effect — seeing it from below, from "inside" the atmosphere. Unfortunately, shorthand arguments can be misleading if you push them too far. Fourier, Tyndall and most other scientists for nearly a century used this approach, looking at warming from ground level, so to speak, asking about the radiation that reaches and leaves the surface of the Earth. So they tended to think of the atmosphere overhead as a unit, as if it were a single sheet of glass. (Thus the "greenhouse" analogy.) But this is not how global warming actually works, if you look at the process in detail.  

What happens to infrared radiation emitted by the Earth's surface? As it moves up layer by layer through the atmosphere, some is stopped in each layer. (To be specific: a molecule of carbon dioxide, water vapor or some other greenhouse gas absorbs a bit of energy from the radiation. The molecule may radiate the energy back out again in a random direction. Or it may transfer the energy into velocity in collisions with other air molecules, so that the layer of air where it sits gets warmer.) The layer of air radiates some of the energy it has absorbed back toward the ground, and some upwards to higher layers. As you go higher, the atmosphere gets thinner and colder. Eventually the energy reaches a layer so thin that radiation can escape into space.

  

What happens if we add more carbon dioxide? In the layers so high and thin that much of the heat radiation from lower down slips through, adding more greenhouse gas means the layer will absorb more of the rays. So the place from which most of the heat energy finally leaves the Earth will shift to higher layers. Those are colder layers, so they do not radiate heat as well. The planet as a whole is now taking in more energy than it radiates (which is in fact our current situation). As the higher levels radiate some of the excess downwards, all the lower levels down to the surface warm up. The imbalance must continue until the high levels get warmer and radiate out more energy. As in Tyndall's analogy of a dam on a river, the barrier thrown across the outgoing radiation forces the level of temperature everywhere beneath it to rise until there is enough radiation pushing out to balance what the Sun sends in.  

While that may sound fairly simple once it is explained, the process is not obvious if you have started by thinking of the atmosphere from below as a single slab. The correct way of thinking eluded neary all scientists for more than a century after Fourier. Physicists learned only gradually how to describe the greenhouse effect. To do so, they had to make detailed calculations of a variety of processes in each layer of the atmosphere.

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Isn't it interesting that current denial propaganda comes from theories disproven in science over 100 years ago?  It's a pretty creative trick they use to find plausible-sounding junk.  Yet you'll see people here an almost a daily basis absolutely convinced that they're making a valid point when they claim that CO2 "can't" be a greenhouse gas due to water vapor.  The same holds true for a dozen other anti-GW myths, but it's a complicated issue and some people can't get their head around the science, or simply choose not to.

Answer 11

If you consider that I use more or less the same sites the extremist use. I shouldn't dispute what your saying. Yep... you've had some pretty lame ones yourself. What's the point of arguing over nomenclature, anatomy, cars, and litigation? Anyone that likes to fish can't be all bad. So I humbly apologize, and didn't mean to hurt your feelings.

Answer 12

It's exactly like the creationist claiming that there are no transitional fossils. It is absurd, but nothing can change their mind. The evidence is overwhelming.

Yet, just like with GW, they insist that there must be a giant conspiracy where science is purposely ignoring dissenting viewpoints.