I have been troubled for some time now about the skeptic community’s collective attitude towards those who are skeptical of anthropocentric global warming (AGW) claims. Granted, there is a range of AGW skepticism, from “global warming isn’t happening” at one end of the spectrum, to “AGW is real but some of the more dire predictions are a bit overblown” at the other. And I’ll stipulate that the AGW skeptics of the first variety are either in cognitive bias-driven denial or are woefully misinformed (or, more likely, both).

But the labeling of these folks as “deniers” — likening them to holocaust deniers — is an ad hominem attack unbecoming of a skeptic. And I’ve seen skeptics apply the perjorative “denier” label to a pretty wide range of the AGW skepticism spectrum, not just to those of the first sort as I’ve described above.

(Brief aside: I am refusing to call AWG skeptics anything other than “AGW skeptics”; I surely won’t call them “deniers.” Just to be clear, when I say “skeptics” without the “AGW” I’m talking about people in the skeptic community, e.g., members of the Skeptic’s Society and/or similar groups. When I’m talking about AGW skeptics I’ll explicitly say “AGW skeptics.”)

In short, I don’t think the skeptic community is applying good critical thinking on the AGW issue. The skeptical movement has a knee-jerk reaction to defend science against its critics, and its collective efforts are focused primarily on debunking various pseudosciences (e.g., anti-vax and alternative medicine nonsense) and other forms of woo (e.g., creationism, crop circles, etc.). It could be purely by conditioning and reflex that they have filed the AGW skeptics into the same mental pigeonhole shared by these woo proponents. But unlike creationism and other brands of woo and pseudoscience, the AGW skeptic’s claims are often science based. For an example, look at my recent post of Warren Meyer’s new climate presentation video, or this youtube video of an earlier presentation, or his A Layman’s Guide to Manmade Global Warming, all of which are science-based.

(Brief aside: Warren Meyer believes that global warming is happening, and that humans are contributing to it. He merely disagrees with many climate scientists on the positive versus negative feedback effect of CO2, and he makes a compelling scientific case for CO2 addition as a diminishing effect. Still, he has been repeatedly branded a “denier.”)

To denounce woo-pushers and call them out as quacks is one thing; but to discount and name-call people who disagree with you on purely scientific grounds is intellectually arrogant. And intellectual arrogance is not a characteristic befitting a critical thinker.

The final straw just happened this morning, prompting me to finally finish and publish this post (which has been gathering dust in my repository of draft posts for many weeks). Noted skeptic Dr. Phil Plait — the Bad Astromomer himself, and president of the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) — posted that he considers the recent Climategate scandal to be a “non issue.” Says Phil:

The global warming deniers have been trumpeting these as evidence of purposeful fraud, but in reality they are nothing of the sort…

One reason I haven’t talked about it is because I think it’s a non-issue. These files are not evidence of fraud. I am a scientist myself, and I’m familiar with the lingo. When we say we used a “trick” to plot data (as one of the hacked emails says), that doesn’t mean we’re doing something to fool people. It means we used a method that may not be obvious, or a step that does something specific. Plotting data logarithmically instead of linearly is a “trick”, and it’s a valid and useful method of displaying data (your senses of sight and hearing are logarithmic, for example, so it’s even a natural way to do things).

The full text of the “trick” email Phil refers to is below. I’ve emphasized the sentence of interest:

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@xxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxx.xxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxx.xx.xx,t.osborn@xxxx.xxx

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) xxxxx
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) xxxx
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxxx.xxx
NR4 7TJ
UK

If this email only used the word “trick” in the context described by Phil, I’d agree with him. But when combined with the phrase “to hide the decline” I suspect this may not be so innocent. See the posts here for Steve McIntyre’s discussions of the “hide the decline” comment made in the above email.

Moreover, these emails and files expose numerous other issues as well — the use of undocumented code that can’t be reverse engineered and validated, the use of code with unexplained fudge factors, the avoidance of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests for data (including the intentional deletion of emails), and the unscientific and unethical tactics that appear to have been employed to keep dissenting research papers from appearing in peer-reviewed journals. And Phil has been silent on these issues. Even if innocent explanations are surfaced for all of these issues, there is at least a strong appearance of impropriety that merits a comment from a leading defender of the scientific method such as Phil Plait. And if it turns out the accusations are all true, it doesn’t mean AGW isn’t correct; just that one particular group of climate research insiders behaved very unethically and unscientifically. All the more reason for a public figure in the skeptic movement to speak out.

And this is yet another reason why I’d like “critical thinking” and “skepticism” to be divorced from each other (as I first posted about here and here).