Climate change in a nutshell

[pozorvlak]

I wrote this in a comment to a post on atreic's journal, and thought I'd repost it here.

If you don't have a friendly climate scientist you can ask, you can still get a good idea of whether climate change is real by following the money and asking yourself the following questions:

1. Is there much money to be made by convincing everyone that climate change is real when it isn't?
2. Is there much money to be made by convincing everyone that climate change isn't real when it is?
3. Who has the money for a big campaign of disinformation, the establishment or the green movement (or whoever their shadowy bankrollers might supposedly be)?
4. Has the fossil fuel industry displayed any evidence of scruples before, ever?

The answers are, respectively:

1. Yes, a bit: wind turbines, insulation, etc.
2. Yes, a fsckload.
3. The establishment.
4. No.

Hence, it seems clear to me that climate change is real, and sites like junkscience.org (beloved of the deniers) are, in fact, corporate shills. As a special case, which is more likely: that the IPCC exaggerates its claims to sound more important and advance people's careers (as the deniers claim), or that they are under huge pressure from governments to tone them down, as the green movement claims?

[Oh yeah: upcoming Climate Change bill. Write to your MP!]

Previously.

Edit: robert_jones was not impressed, and replied that he is "convinced by rational argument, rather than by anti-establishment paranoia." I replied,The problem with this "debate" is that there is potentially a lot of money to be gained and lost, and so people are able to lay down massive amounts of pharmaceutical-grade bullshit to confuse and deceive. You can try to follow the climatological literature and critically read the writings of the deniers: but ultimately, both sides have accused the other of outright fabrication of data, so if you really want to know you'll have to go to Antarctica and repeat the key experiments yourself. Much as I'd like to go to Antarctica, this would be a bit tricky to fit into my teaching schedule. It's at this point that the kind of simplistic, ad hominem, follow-the-money line of argument that I outlined becomes quite valuable. Is the kind of climate instability we're noticing significant and unprecedented, or is it just part of an ordinary cycle, like the Medieval Warm Period (or whatever)? I'm not qualified to judge. I am, however, qualified to listen to others and guess at their motivations, and thus at whether they're likely to be lying to me or not.

[I'd also dispute your claim that doing things in a carbon-efficient way is going to be more expensive than doing things in a carbon-inefficient way. Most low-carbon technologies require higher up-front investment, but pay for themselves in the long term. One of the major obstacles to the improvement of, say, energy-efficient lightbulbs has been that the patents are held by the same people who hold the patents for incandescent bulbs, who don't want to endanger their revenue.]