I'm going with the Nobel Prize-winning economist and the scientific community on this one.

Source

RedState's Vladimir has taken it upon himself to write another ignorant post about climate change. (This is what I had to say about one of his previous posts.)

His target: Paul Krugman. He quotes Krugman as writing the following:

While several factors have contributed to soaring food prices, what really stands out is the extent to which severe weather events have disrupted agricultural production. And these severe weather events are exactly the kind of thing we’d expect to see as rising concentrations of greenhouse gases change our climate — which means that the current food price surge may be just the beginning.

Vladimir responds to Krugman as follows:

[H]aven’t we heard this all before?

“Gee, this is some crazy weather we’ve been having.”

I’m old enough to remember some pretty darn extreme weather, like Hurricane Camille, a monster Cat 5 storm that devastated the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 1969. There was the Super Tornado Outbreak of April, 1974: a complex of 148 twisters that spun across hundreds of mile of the Midwest, killing 148, injuring 5,300, and wiping the town of Xenia, OH off the map. And lest we forget the record cold winter of 1977-78, when natural gas supplies ran low.

Many of our impressions of current extreme weather conditions have to do with the fact that 1) they’re fresh in our memories; 2) we have better communications and 3) higher population densities than in times past.

Complaining about extreme weather is part of the human condition. 

Vladimir then goes on to cite 19 stories about extreme weather dating back to 1888 (I am assuming that none of them were fabricated), and in some cases the extreme weather prompted speculation that the climate was changing. I take it that Vladimir considers that speculation to have been unfounded.

So, what's wrong with Vladimir's response?

Vladimir is attributing to Krugman the following argument:

1. There have been recent outbreaks of severe weather. 
2. Therefore, global climate change is real. 

Granted, Vladimir says nothing about global climate change, but there is little doubt that Vladimir's response is intended to convince his readers that recent severe weather is not evidence that the climate is changing. That is, Vladimir is arguing that the truth of (1) isn't sufficient evidence for the truth of (2).

But if you put the quotation in context and read the rest of Krugman's column, you'll find that Krugman's argument is much stronger than the one Vladimir attributes to him:

It’s true that growth in emerging nations like China leads to rising meat consumption, and hence rising demand for animal feed. It’s also true that agricultural raw materials, especially cotton, compete for land and other resources with food crops — as does the subsidized production of ethanol, which consumes a lot of corn. So both economic growth and bad energy policy have played some role in the food price surge. 

Still, food prices lagged behind the prices of other commodities until last summer. Then the weather struck.  

Consider the case of wheat, whose price has almost doubled since the summer. The immediate cause of the wheat price spike is obvious: world production is down sharply. The bulk of that production decline, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, reflects a sharp plunge in the former Soviet Union. And we know what that’s about: a record heat wave and drought, which pushed Moscow temperatures above 100 degrees for the first time ever.  

The Russian heat wave was only one of many recent extreme weather events, from dry weather in Brazil to biblical-proportion flooding in Australia, that have damaged world food production.  

The question then becomes, what’s behind all this extreme weather?  

To some extent we’re seeing the results of a natural phenomenon, La Niña — a periodic event in which water in the equatorial Pacific becomes cooler than normal. And La Niña events have historically been associated with global food crises, including the crisis of 2007-8.  

But that’s not the whole story. Don’t let the snow fool you: globally, 2010 was tied with 2005 for warmest year on record, even though we were at a solar minimum and La Niña was a cooling factor in the second half of the year. Temperature records were set not just in Russia but in no fewer than 19 countries, covering a fifth of the world’s land area. And both droughts and floods are natural consequences of a warming world: droughts because it’s hotter, floods because warm oceans release more water vapor.  

As always, you can’t attribute any one weather event to greenhouse gases. But the pattern we’re seeing, with extreme highs and extreme weather in general becoming much more common, is just what you’d expect from climate change.

Clearly, Krugman is not making the hasty, crude inference Vladimir attributes to him. Krugman's reasoning is more sophisticated than that. Krugman is making what has been called an inference to the best explanation. The idea is this: we are justified in inferring the truth of what best explains what we observe or already know. The mere occurrence of extreme weather does not alone justify the claim that the climate is changing, obviously. But extreme weather, combined with all the other evidence Krugman mentions, does, because if the climate were changing, the phenomena we're observing is exactly what we would expect to observe, i.e., we wouldn't be surprised to make the observations we are in fact making. And that means that the hypothesis that the climate is changing is probably true.

Look at the argument Vladimir attributes to Krugman again. It's bad. Vladimir's post might leave his readers with the impression that those of us who believe that climate change is real accept bad arguments for our belief. But the evidence for climate change is much, much stronger than the argument Vladimir attributes to Krugman. And no amount of bullshit from non-scientists like Vladimir will convince me otherwise, much as I would like it to, because what we face is terrifying.

Perhaps you choose to ignore the evidence because you're not emotionally equipped to deal with the reality of global climate change. Perhaps you have an economic interest in ignoring it, like those Republicans who have been bought by the energy industry. Perhaps you are comforted by the lie that God won't allow global climate change to do serious damage to the planet and those who live on it; perhaps you turn to the Bible for scientific enlightenment. Maybe you're ready to simply continue leading your life as you have always led it because it is comfortable and familiar, and it is good to live in the adolescent haze of the belief that we can release as much carbon dioxide into the environment as we like without consequence. And even if it turns out that the scientific predictions are correct, maybe you won't have to deal with the worst of it, and what do you care if your children, and your children's children, have to live in a far less hospitable world? Why should you care, really?

Sorry, Vladimir. I'm going with the Nobel Prize-winning economist and the scientific community on this one.

Please leave the science to the scientists

Some RedState blogger named Vladimir is overjoyed that Great Britain's unusually cold winter is causing problems for its wind farms.

Vladimir writes:

Bwhahahahahaha!

In a replay of last year’s weather pattern, the U.K. is once again in the grips of a Global Warming Climate Change-induced record cold snap.

Not to worry. Those industrious Brits had the foresight to build wind farms with rated capacity equal to 5% of the country’s electricity needs.

But they’re getting only 1.6% of their electricity from the wind farms. Because…

Extreme wintertime cold comes from high pressure weather systems. And high pressure weather systems don’t generate much wind. Not much wind = not much wind energy.

But since the weather is so cold, big mechanical things like wind turbines freeze up. To prevent damage, they need to be thawed out.

This is priceless:

As the temperature has plummeted, the turbines have had to be heated to prevent them seizing up. Consequently, they have been consuming more electricity than they generate.

Bwhahahahahaha!

I know! As Erick Erickson would say, this is just so awesome! That serves those limey bastards for supporting our unprovoked attack on Iraq! Wait, that doesn't sound right and now I'm confused.

Does RedState require of their bloggers that they be assholes? Just wondering.

Anyway, Vladimir gleefully quotes a columnist for the Daily Mail as saying,

Even though the winters of 2008 and 2009 were ferociously cold, they were dismissed as ‘random events’. The Met Office put the odds on a third harsh winter no higher than 20-1. . . .

Needless to say, the head of the Met Office is not even a weatherman. He’s a leading ‘climate change activist’ who buys into the propaganda pumped out by the fanatics at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) — exposed for blatantly suppressing evidence which contradicts their messianic belief in ­‘global warming’.

There's a fair and balanced source!

Vladimir finishes his post with some dated philosophy of science:

Back in the olden days, the Scientific Method worked like this: you made a prediction based on a hypothesis, then tested the prediction. If it was false, you scrapped that hypothesis & went back to the drawing board for a new hypothesis. Now, when the facts are 180 degrees opposite the prediction, the hypothesis dogma stands unchallenged, and a new explanation is fabricated to wrap around and reckoncile with the contrary observations.

Vladimir sounds so smugly self-assured that his readers probably have no idea that he doesn't know what he is talking about. There are very few things more irritating than an idiot who thinks he's a genius.

Vladimir's understanding of philosophy of science goes as far as Karl Popper's idea that bona fide scientific theories are falsifiable. In Conjectures and Refutations, Popper writes,

Every "good" scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is. . . . A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is nonscientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice. . . . Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. 

Now, what is wrong with this? Don't we want our scientific theories to have observational consequences?

As Philip Kitcher shows in Abusing Science: The Case against Creationism, falsifiability cannot be the only thing that separates science from non-science. For one thing, scientific theories by themselves have no observational consequences. In order to use a scientific theory to make predictions, one must make any number of auxiliary assumptions about the testing conditions, other background factual matters, and the like. Therefore, if the prediction turns out to be false, the falsity of the theory does not automatically follow: one of the other assumptions might be the culprit.

Now, one might attempt to modify Popper's criterion by stating that what makes a theory scientific is that it has observational consequences when combined with necessary auxiliary assumptions. But this won't do, either, because any theory, scientific or otherwise, has observational consequences when combined with auxiliary assumptions.

The upshot is this: a few cold snaps in Great Britain do not falsify the theory that human beings are warming the planet. The nature of scientific theory is much more complicated and much more interesting that Vladimir would have us believe. This is because Vladimir is completely out of his depth. And he should also learn how to spell "reconcile."

Those who deny the reality of man-made global warming usually have no expertise in the area. This "genius" compares global warming to a fictional card game mentioned in one of my favorite television series, Star Trek. (How dare he!) All he has shown is that he can't tell the difference between weather and climate:

As I sit here now, snowbound in our Offshore Command Center, I can see a parallel to the totally unbelievable explanations being given by the proponents of man-made global warming. A few years ago, they stated that snowfalls would become more rare. Now, it is a side-effect of the warming process. Much the same, I guess, as the 17 degree temperatures I experienced last week, a whopping 30 degrees lower than the norm for December.

And this "genius" (Vladimir again) appears to suggest that there couldn't be man-made global warming because a third of Americans don't think there is. Scientific questions can be settled by public opinion poll! That's just so awesome! In the same post, Vladimir writes,

There’s a huge difference between “global warming” and “anthropogenic global warming”. If one believes in warming, but that it is caused by natural forces, it is difficult to argue for man-made initiatives to counteract it. Wasting resources fighting earth-scale or even cosmic forces may be the ultimate act of hubris and folly.

I believe I have seen this argument before, i.e., if global warming is not man-made, then we don't need to concern ourselves with doing anything about it. If you think about it, that's not the sort of thing you'd expect to hear a genius say. Human beings have spent millennia battling natural forces, sometimes successfully. And if it just so happens that the scientific consensus on global warming is correct, wouldn't the prudent thing be to try to do something about it?

Hey, RedState bloggers: please leave the science to the scientists, you fucking morons.

Another Inconvenient Truth

There's been an interesting conversation happening about why the GOP is the only major right-of-center political party that doubts the science behind global warming. . . . This isn't a very popular statement, but there is a role for elites in public life. Just like I want knowledgeable CEOs running companies and knowledgeable doctors performing surgeries, I want knowledgeable legislators crafting public policy. That's why we have a representative democracy, rather than some form of government-by-referendum. But of late, the elites in the Republican Party are abdicating their roles, preferring to pander to the desire for free tax cuts and the hostility to Al Gore than make tough and potentially unpopular decisions to safeguard our future. —Ezra Klein, "The Failure of Conservative Elites"

A Few Climate Denial Crocks of the Week

Here are two videos from the series Climate Denial Crock of the Week with Peter Sinclair.

You have probably heard someone justify skepticism about the reality of climate change by pointing at the snow outside their window—as if a colder-than-usual winter was proof that all of the scientists who are convinced that climate change is real somehow made a mistake. In this video, Sinclair explains what is wrong with this argument.



Some global climate change deniers justify their skepticism by claiming that large numbers of scientists actually deny the reality of global climate change. It is often said that 32,000 scientists have signed a petition denying its reality. But it's a crock. Sinclair explains why in this video.

Warming ocean melts Greenland glaciers

Read about it here.