What Climate Change Skeptics Aren’t Getting About Science

Wired - Rhett Allain



Isn’t it great when people get together to reasonably discuss ideas? Sadly, this recent BBC clip isn’t that. It features highlights of a climate change conversation between physicist Brian Cox and Australian politician Malcolm Roberts. Cox uses evidence to support the idea of global climate change, while Roberts denies the changes. Why is this still up for discussion? I won’t rehash the details of climate change—others do a better job of it. But I think some of the points that Roberts raises are important to discuss in regard to the nature of science.
Roberts contends that science shouldn’t be based on consensus but rather empirical evidence. Let’s look at these terms as they relate to science.

What is empirical evidence?
Here is the Wikipedia definition:

Empirical evidence: also known as sense experience, is the knowledge or source of knowledge acquired by means of the senses, particularly by observation and experimentation.

I’ll add my own definition. Empirical evidence is data collected in an experiment. Honestly, I never emphasize the empirical part—I just call it data. Sometimes people add “empirical” to mean that it is absolutely true. Unfortunately, no such truth exists in science. Science is sort of like Plato’s allegory of the cave. In it, Plato says we are like people in a cave with our backs to a wall. Objects paraded in front of a fire cast shadows on a wall. We see only shadows and must determine what the objects are. This is how scientists do things. Here’s a good example: No one has ever seen an electron. You can’t see them with the naked eye; they’re too small. However, there is great experimental evidence that electrons do exist, and scientists are pretty confident about some of their properties. But I wouldn’t call it the truth.
Climate science also is difficult to measure. How do you know the temperature of the Earth? You can’t measure it directly. You can’t take a giant thermometer and stick it up the Earth’s butt to find out if it has gotten warmer. Instead you must use many indirect measurements obtained via many different methods to estimate the temperature. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best available. With this, science always includes uncertainty in its measurements. But scientists are confident that the global temperature is rising, just as they are fairly sure about the mass of an electron.

Image: NASA http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/ NAS

This is the graph of global temperature that Cox used to support climate change. Let’s be clear—this graph shows the data for global temperatures. Roberts said he wants the empirical data (I’m not sure what he really wants) and suggested that perhaps this data has been manipulated by NASA. I think Roberts is waiting for the temperature-up-the-butt graph. He won’t get it.

What is scientific consensus?
Let me go with Wikipedia’s definition of scientific consensus.

Scientific consensus: is the collective judgment, position, and opinion of the community of scientists in a particular field of study. Consensus implies general agreement, though not necessarily unanimity.

If science was one person, the consensus would be what that person said. But science is not one person. You will always find people with advanced scientific degrees who don’t agree with the rest of the community. No one seeks unanimity, and not reaching the same conclusion is OK. But there is still a consensus. Together, scientists decide to use a particular model for some aspect of science, based upon the data available at that moment.
Here’s an example: gravity. Everyone has a feeling for gravity. Is there a consensus model for gravity? Yes. Einstein’s model of General Relativity has plenty of experimental evidence supporting it. Are there scientists who don’t use this model and think there is something better? Of course. Does that mean we should not “believe” the General Relativity model? No. Science isn’t about believing. It’s about building models.
There is indeed a scientific consensus that the Earth is warming due to additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and that it is the result of human activity.

Science is all about models
Cox does an excellent job emphasizing the model building nature of science. I think “scientific model” is the best term to use when discussing the nature of science (and here are three scientific words everyone should stop using).
But what is a scientific model? It’s just like any other model. Think of a 1:24 scale model of a Corvette. It has many of the features of a Corvette, but it is not a Corvette. It represents a Corvette. A scientific model is the same idea. It is something scientists use to represent the real world. There are many kinds of models:

• Conceptual
• Physical
• Mathematical
• Computational

These are the most common types seen in science. They are evidence-based, and can be used to make predictions (like future global temperatures). Models aren’t permanent. If scientists find new data that disagrees with the model, they change the model. Here is an example of how the model of the atom changed over time.
Oh wait, you say. Does this mean I am saying the climate model is wrong and will change in the future? Yes and no. Will it change? Probably. Is it “wrong”? Not really. It agrees with our data and can be used to make predictions, so it’s still useful. Consider the gravitational model. Your physics textbook probably says gravitational force is equal to mass multiplied by the gravitational field (9.8 N/kg). This is of course wrong. Gravity isn’t constant. It decreases in magnitude with distance from Earth. But this wrong model is still very useful. And so is our climate model.

Links

• How Climate Change Will Redraw Louisiana's Flood Maps
• How Can California Cut Methane Emissions if Cows Keep Cutting the Cheese?
• Marine Heatwaves Are Spawning Unprecedented Climate Chaos
• Siberian Child Dies After Climate Change Thaws an Anthrax-Infected Reindeer
• If Clinton Wins, America Can Look to California for Cutting Carbon
• This Year, Every Vote Is a Vote for or Against Climate Change

How The Fossil Fuel Industry's New Pitch Is More Like An Epitaph Than A Life Lesson

The Guardian - Graham Readfearn

New fossil fuel advocacy group launched to celebrate an industry that's driving dangerous climate change

Old oil fields around Azerbaijan. Most of these towers are left over from soviet-era oil mining, dating back to the late 1800s. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Bright and glistening with all the glory of youth and promise, her eyes glance upwards. A jet crosses a cloudless sky.
A field of wheat sways in the breeze. She opens her arms in a wide embrace, open to the horizon.
"This moment we're in didn't just happen," muses the narrator as an uplifting orchestral score builds. "We didn't just arrive here by luck."
The scenes in the new online commercial are cut fast.
Metronomic oil derricks pump at dusk. A dawn runner burns city streets. Sausages sizzle. Coffee bubbles. A ballet dancer stretches. A devoted new dad kisses a newborn's head (there's always a rent-a-baby).
Then, once we're feeling all that collective love for humanity that we're all known for, we finally get to the punchline.
"Using oil and natural gas to build cities, connect populations and achieve a goal at the heart of the efforts of men and women. The ability to provide."
Yep. It's a new advert for fossil fuels and it tugs on our hopes and aspiration with all the subtlety of a dog tearing at your trouser leg.

New campaign video from fossil fuel advocacy group Fueling U.S Forward

This slick effort comes from a just-launched "non-profit" group called Fueling US Forward, reportedly financially backed by the oil billionaire Koch brothers.
So no conflict then.
The group's president, long-time fossil fuel industry figure Charlie Drevna, says he wants the group to remind people "out in the real world" how fundamental fossil fuel energy is to their lives.
Of course, not mentioned are the widespread global impacts of climate change from the increasing risks of bushfires to rising sea levels, extreme heat and the acidification of the oceans.
The Koch brothers have been pumping millions of dollars into organisations that spread doubt about the causes of climate change while fighting attempts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
It's true that since the start of the industrial revolution, the vast majority of the world's energy has come from digging up and burning long dead plants and animals.
While it was good for a while (forgetting the oil spills, polluted waterways, smog, acid rain and whatnot), scientists have been warning for decades that if we don't break that nasty habit, then the impacts will be wide, expensive and, for some, unliveable.
But the Fueling US Forward campaign is just the latest in a desperate bid for moral superiority from the fossil fuel industry.
In 2015, the peak mining lobby group launched its "Little Black Rock" campaign to tell us about the "endless possibilities" of coal.
But the campaign appeared to backfire. Polling suggested public support for coal dropped during a campaign that was mercilessly mocked.

Comedy group A Rational Fear released its own version of the coal industry's "Little Black Rock" advertisement

In February 2014, major coal company Peabody Energy launched its "Advanced Energy for Life" campaign to convince the public and politicians that coal was the only way to bring poorer countries out of poverty.
Australian politicians, from the current and former prime ministers down, have embraced the coal industry's talking point.
But Peabody's current financial state is analogous to its "energy poverty" argument and the wider plea from the fossil fuel industry to keep on burning. Bankrupt.
According to figures from Bloomberg New Energy Finance and reported in the Financial Times, the world's 20 biggest economies are shifting away from fossil fuels. In the last five years, the share of electricity coming from renewables has jumped 70 per cent.
It's fine for the fossil fuel industry to remind us of all the great things coal, oil and gas helped the world to achieve.
But campaigns like Fueling U.S Forward, with all their stock images and cynical baby-kissing should be seen as the lament of a dying industry.
They're an epitaph, not a life lesson.

Links

• How sun, salt and glass could help solve our energy needs 
• The weight of light: how gravity is illuminating sub-Saharan Africa – video 
• Sustainable energy: inside Iceland's geothermal power plant 
• Why Malcolm Roberts' demand for 'empirical evidence' on climate change is misleading
• Scientists endure extreme Antarctic temperatures to extract ice cores – video
• What the Earth's frozen burps tell us about global warming
• US senators detail a climate science 'web of denial' but the impacts go well beyond their borders 

Fossil Fuel Industry Holding Australian Economy To Ransom

Renew Economy - Giles Parkinson

How often do we hear it? Australia, with its world-leading renewable energy resources, particularly wind and solar, and its technological know-how, has the opportunity to become a global energy superpower in a global economy committed to rapid decarbonisation.
Is it an opportunity the country is likely to seize? Probably not.

Illustration by Greg Foyster, greg.foyster@gmail.com.

Australia has an opportunity to accelerate that shift at a critical meeting of the federal and state energy ministers on Friday, but it is highly unlikely that the status quo will be troubled. There are still too many powerful vested interests at play.
Take, for instance, the situation in South Australia. This so-called "energy crisis" – July's big spike in prices that used to be common before the advent of wind and solar – was predicted, hoped for, and possibly even confected in the hope of illustrating the limitations of renewable energy.
Instead, it has simply proved that the fossil fuel industry is holding Australia's transition to a clean energy economy to ransom, and that consumers are being gouged at every level of the energy industry.
Numerous reports have pointed to the market manipulation by a few powerful interests. The Melbourne Energy Institute outlined how a few generators "gamed" the system, exploiting their unusual market power to charge "monopoly rents", with parallels to the energy crisis confected by Enron in California more than a decade ago.
The Clean Energy Council has complained about stratospheric prices extracted by fossil fuel generators in the name of "energy security," while RenewEconomy's own David Leitch and the MEI have pointed to the huge lift in margins.
A new study to be released tomorrow by Bruce Mountain of research group CME will show that one-third of capacity was "deliberately" withheld at the peak of the south Australian energy "crisis", at a time when the generators knew that they could cash in on high prices.
The first part of his report, released on Tuesday, showed how the big three retailers – pretty much the same companies that own the state's gas generators – were price gouging in South Australia, charging $650 more than the cost of generation and delivery, just to act as a go-between for wholesalers and network companies.
And, of course, there are the network costs, the gold plating of which has seen consumer bills skyrocket in recent years. Even as regulators attempt to crack down on spending plans for yet more poles and wires, the network owners – and particularly the NSW government – is taking the regulator to court to enable them to spend more and pass those costs on to households and businesses.
Little wonder, then, that the ministers' meeting in Canberra on Friday is being asked to look beyond more fossil fuel solutions – i.e. drilling for more gas – to solve the NEM's problems, and to open the markets to more competition. Such measures might include new interconnectors, encouraging more battery storage and "complementary" renewables such as solar towers with storage. In short, they want more competition for the incumbents.
"The future of the national energy market is 100 per cent renewable," says Tom Quinn, the CEO of the Future Business Council. "The grid must be re-imagined with this reality in mind and built to enable diversified generation and simple import and export throughout the national energy market."
Quinn says Australia needs to rapidly transition from to its "dumb grid" to an "adaptive grid" and embrace those new technologies, which could include solar, storage, electric vehicles, pumped hydro and ocean energy.
"The country has the world's richest renewable energy resources and the opportunity to create the lowest cost base of energy for industry in the world," he notes.
The Labor states appear to recognise this. South Australia's Labor government says its economic future depends on transitioning to a clean energy economy. It is already nearly half way there, a benchmark that the incumbents and ideologues are keen to demonise rather than celebrate.
The ACT is half-way to its 2020 target of sourcing the equivalent of all its electricity from renewable energy, a remarkably canny and visionary strategy that will provide its homes and businesses with an effective hedge against volatile fossil fuel prices and price manipulation in the market.
Victoria and Queensland are keen to follow, and Tasmania is keen to use its massive hydro resources as a clean-energy battery for the mainland. Even Western Australia realises that the future lies in solar and storage.
But there is no sign of this transition at the federal level. Our interview with Josh Frydenberg last Thursday confirmed the worst fears of many in the industry. Frydenberg understands some of the dynamics that are working in the industry, but there is no sign that the Abbott era policies on climate and renewable energy are about to change.
Frydenberg may be less willing than some of his coalition colleagues to blames renewable energy for soaring electricity prices, but he shows he is not about to accelerate the push – ARENA will be stripped of funds; next year's review of climate targets will be a stocktake, rather than a launch-pad; and there will be no long-term setting of targets, be they for renewable energy or for the decarbonised economy that the Coalition signed up for in Paris last year. The answer for everything appears to be: more gas.
This is depressing stuff. Everyone knows that the transition to new technologies is unavoidable, the question is over the shape, the pace and the cost of that change. The federal government's role is critical: it can seize the moment and work towards becoming a world leader and renewable energy super-power, or it can be dragged along as it hits the brakes on change to suit the narrow business interests of a few powerful players.
It would, of course, be unfair to blame only Frydenberg for this mess. He, and Turnbull, are constrained by the right wing of the party who, far from wanting to accelerate the transition to clean energy, are reluctant to even accept the science of climate change. The actors may have changed, but the script remains the same.
The role of mainstream media is also important. In short, it has been appalling. Since when has the media considered its role to turn a blind eye – as it has done, quite literally – to the abuse of power of a few key players in the energy market.
The Murdoch press splashed a front page "scoop" about the absence of wind power at critical moments in early July, part of its long and intense campaign against renewable energy. Apart from being wrong – and sourced from the Coalition – it completely missed the point. Yet it has written nothing of the market manipulation and "economic" withdrawal of nearly 1,000MW of fossil fuel generation. The price gouging of retailers has barely got a mention.
Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry does as it pleases: demonising renewables, withholding capacity, exploiting market holes to push prices higher, pleading for subsidies to help fossil fuel generation leave the market, pleading for other subsidies to "guarantee" the retention of other fossil fuel generators, fighting rule changes that could open the market to new competition, and taking the regulator to court in an effort to further gold plate the grid.
That is what they are able to do. They have a majority share of the market operator, extraordinary influence over the policy maker and federal and state regulators, and a stranglehold over conservative politicians. And as long as the Coalition refuses to translate its Paris commitment to practical policy, they will continue to run amok.

Links

• Fiddling the books on renewables while the planet burns
• Solar and storage in apartment blocks: innovations and road blocks
• Millennials want solar, storage, shared energy – and an app for all that
• Australia battery storage comparison table – July update
• The fall and fall of rooftop solar prices: four years of data
• United Energy taps solar, storage, software to defer network upgrade
• First act of Coalition's "innovation" government: strip funds from ARENA