Climate Science And Honest Debate

The late spring we are having here in northern Minnesota is giving some of the local climate change skeptics more hope than ever that global warming is just some socialist plot to try and take away their pickup trucks and SUVs. Unfortunately for them local weather is not the same as global climate (as I tried to point out in this post). The skeptics are becoming more and more shrill in their arguments as the science that refutes them becomes more solid every day, and most of the arguments they make are full of holes and cherry-picked data that makes attempting to engage them in honest debate an exercise in futility. Coby Beck has gathered together a very nice page of links called "How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic" which has categorized the most commonly encountered denialist arguments.

What is interesting is that many of the same debate techniques used to deny climate change are the same as those used by those who denied a link between smoking and cancer, or used by creationists to discredit evolution. One of the things they all have in common is the attempt to put "reasonable doubt" in the mind of the public that there is scientific agreement on these subjects. Mainstream journalists follow along by framing the subject as a two-sided debate with merit on both sides. The problem with this is that the general public does not see the peer-reviewed scientific journals where actual scientific debate takes place, and they don't realize that it is a small but vocal minority creating most of the controversey.

Please click on the links provided and the links under Climate Change in my list on the left. Often Google Scholar can provide abstracts to peer-reviewed science on climate change that you can find at a university library. Reading science is not easy, but it is nessecary if you want to know the real data and not just spin driven by ideology.