April 20, 2020, by Brigitte Nerlich
Chanting to the choir: The dialogical failure of antithetical climate change blogs
This is a guest post by Jennifer Metcalfe on a paper she just published. The article explored the potential for people commenting underneath two very different, even antithetical, blogs dealing with climate science, to chat about and engage with climate science.
***
My paper, Chanting to the choir: the dialogical failure of antithetical climate change blogs, was recently published in the Journal of Science Communication. This paper emerged from one of the chapters in my PhD thesis, Rethinking science communication models in practice, which was accepted at the Australian National University last year.
My motivation for studying two antithetical blogs on climate change science was to look at whether laypeople—those without a scientific background—were engaging in deliberative discussions about the science on blogs. I chose antithetical blogs because I was interested to see if the quality of dialogue was different between those who engaged with the consensus science of climate change (https://www.skepticalscience.com/) versus those who engaged with a blog that denied such science (http://joannenova.com.au/).
I was particularly interested in the dialogue between commenters on such blogsites as this had rarely been studied compared to science blog posts or bloggers. I was interested in dialogue on a publicly controversial issue like climate change because deliberative dialogue is thought to have the potential to bring about democratic change and action, compared to the mere dissemination of information.
Since the publication of my article on 14 April, there’s been some interesting twitter discussions about it. Concern has been expressed in several tweets that I did not comment on the scientific credibility of each of the sites. Related to this, other tweets were concerned that by looking at antithetical climate change blogs, I have been giving false balance or equivalence to the issue in a similar way to how some journalists will give climate scientists and deniers equal space. Other tweets are concerned that I call both John Cook (Skeptical Science blogger) and Joanna Nova ‘science communicators’.
To be frank, I did not expect such reactions to this paper but it’s great that it’s stimulated such discussions and I want to explore each of these concerns.
Firstly, I did not assess the scientific credibility of each of the blog posts nor of the comments made on each post because this was not the purpose of my research. I am not a climate scientist, which means I could not rigorously assess the scientific credibility of the blogposts or comments, even if I wanted to.
However, commenting as a science communication practitioner of more than 30 years, I am very aware that Skeptical Science goes to great lengths to ensure the peer-review credibility of their posts. The site won a prestigious Eureka prize for its excellence in science communication in 2011. The opposite is true for Joanna Nova’s blog site.
I deliberately focussed on the comments rather than the posts. I looked at the comments as contained on each blog site and was not specifically looking to see if Skeptical Science engaged with deniers or if Jo Nova’s site was engaging with those supporting scientific consensus.
And what I found interesting when exploring the dialogue between commenters on both sites, regardless of their scientific credibility, is that they consolidated “their own polarised publics rather than deliberately engaging them in climate change science”. The problem with this, even for a highly credible blog like Skeptical Science, is that the blogsites are not engaging laypeople deliberately in their science. Instead, I found that the dialogue for both sites were dominated by a few vocal commenters, and for Skeptical Science most of these commenters made very technical comments that an average layperson would not understand. I was actually surprised that only rarely did commenters on each site try to influence other commenters to their point of view. I concluded that this was largely because they were already talking with like-minded people.
With regard to the false balance argument: this is a research paper written for a scholarly audience, not a journalistic piece. As a science communicator who also writes popular science articles, I would never give credence or equal weight to anti-science commentary regardless of the topic.
This brings me to the last point about calling someone who denies consensus climate science a ‘science communicator’. Jo Nova is a pseudonym for Joanne Codling who is a graduate from and was a lecturer in the Australian National University’s (ANU) science communication program. Her blog’s About page says: “Before blogging she hosted a children’s TV series on Channel Nine, was a regular keynote speaker, and managed the Shell Questacon Science Circus. She was an associate lecturer in Science Communication at ANU. At one time she helped fundraise for The Australian Greens. Then she grew up.” I certainly don’t regard Jo Nova as a ‘science communicator’, and perhaps I should have made it clearer in my paper that this was her claim rather than mine. However, it’s an interesting point to consider: what do we call lawyers, teachers or doctors who’ve gone bad?
My research for this paper does not claim to speak for all climate science blogs, credible or not. It provides an in-depth exploration of the comments and dialogue on two among many. My research did not aim to promote either of the blogsites examined. But I hope my research adds to our understanding about online dialogue about climate science. From my perspective, we clearly need to find ways other than blogs to engage laypeople in credible climate science which leads to political and individual action.
Image: Thomas Webster: The village choir, Wikimedia Commons
I was one of those who commented on the lack of an attempt to assess the relative credibility of the sites. As you say in this, there are strong indicators that Skeptical Science presents credible scientific information and Jo Nova (by and large) does not.
However, since you are mostly interested in the comment threads, I thought I would comment on my own experience. My blog is still reasonably active, but was much more so in the past. I had a number of threads with ~1000 comments. My tagline for a while was “Trying to keep the discussion civil”. I failed, though. Without strong moderation, the comment threads just degenerated. You also start to notice patterns, so you start to moderate some commenters more quickly than others (i.e., you get a sense if a comment is made in good faith, or not).
So, in some sense the comment threads get sculpted by the nature of the contentious discourse. If you don’t moderate strongly, it degenerates, and just ends up with people fighting with each other. If you do moderate strongly, you will then end up with comments that tend to be amongst people who can at least satisfy the moderation policy and, probably, have similar views. It certainly wasn’t my intent to end up with the latter, but it became that because of a desire to not have comment threads that were wildly unpleasant.
This doesn’t mean that people always agree with each other in the comments, and I do think I had some comment threads there were quite interesting from this perspective. However, the strong moderation did preferentially tend to encourage those who strongly questioned the anthropogenic nature of climate change to stay away (not all, but this was probably a consequence).
I could also comment on my experiences posting comments on “skeptical” blogs, but I’ll leave that for the moment.
Sure.. then there are those (Dr Roger Pielke junior, for one) that think Skeptical Science is not a highly credible blog.. ‘who decides?’
Skeptical Science has pages dedicated to criticizing Prof Ian Plimer… who coincidentally is a twice Euereka prize winner… (is he not ‘doubly’ credible.) and having pages of ‘climate misinformers’ which comes across as political activist rhetoric, and a reason some scientists will not cite Skeptical Science.
If we were to use ‘credibility’ as by how many academic citations someone has. Roger Pielke jnr. is well ahead of John Cook (SkS) . so what are we to make of Roger’s harsh words about Skeptical Science?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerpielke/2020/02/09/a-climate-blacklist-that-works-it-should-make-her-unhirable-in-academia/#782082ef6368
but many SkS opponent think SKS is a highly partisan one, stuffed full of political activists (and are you aware of Dr Jose Duarte blog, highly, highly critical of Cook.) SkS has some very odd behavior (their leaked self photoshopped Nazi photos, as but one example as Roger Pielke refer to in the article above)) and basically perceived by many as disingenuous (like their ‘claimed’ moderation policy.-as shown when their leaked hacked private moderators forum, gave a large window, into their activist behavior )
and in part, ironically, with their attitude and behavior they are one of the bigger creators of climate skeptics (similar to the reaction Realclimate recieved, back in the day.. in fact there is a paper about the Realclimate effect) and SkS has similarly driven sceptic reactions and responses.(not least my own and the resulting blog battles)
Of course when it comes to Skeptical Science I would/should be considered a highly partisan opponent, having written for Watts Up With That, and a friend of Jo Nova (and ATTP above, on their ‘side’) An example of their ‘moderation’ policy below. when i was banned for life, for questioning one of Cook’s papers.
https://skepticalscience.com/how-deniers-accept-so-many-impossible-things-at-once.html#118728
Looking back at the history of SKS and Jo Nova. they in part could be argues to have created each other… starting with Jo writing her Skeptics Handbook, and Cook being tasked with a response to her handbook. and largely the public totally indifferent to both, and people who are skeptical or on the side of the climate concerned find their way and gravitate around like minded blogs.
not that these blogs ever really created concerned people, or skeptical people. and of course. all of the above becomes personal for the people involved, John Cook, Jo Nova, etc.
I mentioned a paper, and how a blog can create it’s opponent (Realclimate as an example) and how Skeptical Science in my opinion has/had a similar effect.. (and vice versa JoNova vs SkS)
https://www.academia.edu/12247717/Why_are_people_sceptical_about_climate_change
extract:
“The second most cited blog, with 42 references, is RealClimate, a long-running blog promoting climate science run by a team of climate scientists. Comments from sceptics are critical of this blog, and many imply that reading it may have been a factor leading to scepticism. Some of these comments say that they were concerned by RealClimate’s arrogant or dismissive tone, or hostility towards those who disagreed with them. Others report that questions raised were not answered, or in some cases censored. Another blog promoting climate science, “Open Mind”, is mentioned seven times, with similar critical comments. Several individuals report that when they started looking into the climate change question, they started reading these blogs but were put off by their style and turned instead to the sceptical blog
(as a personal ancedote, I survived for ~ 3 comments at Realclimate back in 2009, before being deleted and blocked.. I’d been referred there by an IPCC scientist whow was a co-editor of the 3rd IPCC report. I knew nothing about the climate change at the time, and went there on recommendation of this very good friend. and Realclimate managed to alienate me in a matter of hours, in a very similar manner as described in the paper. in fact the paper, may actually ref to me making it’s observations, as I re-counted my experiences of Realclimate on the blog The Air Vent, that the paper analysied) )
seriously – this, in reference to Jo Nova?
“I certainly don’t regard Jo Nova as a ‘science communicator’, and perhaps I should have made it clearer in my paper that this was her claim rather than mine. However, it’s an interesting point to consider: what do we call lawyers, teachers or doctors who’ve gone bad?” –
why bad? ..because she has gone against the ‘consensus’.. ( the object of the consensus, (ie what specifically do they agree about, being so hard to define, that Skeptical Science really struggled to do so, – in their 97% consensus paper)in because they were concerned that all their definitions of the ‘consensus’ included sceptics views)
leaked Skeptical Science moderators forum.
http://www.hi-izuru.org/forum/The%20Consensus%20Project/2012-01-24-Defining%20the%20scientific%20consensus.html
Then again, they were concerned about how they were going to market their 97% research result.. befiore they had done the ‘research’ (a reason many think them dishonest/activists)
http://www.hi-izuru.org/forum/The%20Consensus%20Project/2012-01-19-Marketing%20Ideas.html
(as one person commented)
http://www.hi-izuru.org/forum/The%20Consensus%20Project/2012-01-19-Marketing%20Ideas.html
– ” I have to say that I find this planning of huge marketing strategies somewhat strange when we don’t even have our results in and the research subject is not that revolutionary either (just summarizing existing research). I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t do this, but just that it seems a bit strange to me.” – Ari
by this logic.. of ‘going bad’
has Prof Lindzen ‘gone bad, has Dr Roger Pielke jnr gone ‘bad’ or Dr Roger Pielke snr, or Spencer, Cristy, Soon, Singer..? all gone ‘bad’, what of of Prof Judith Curry, or any Skeptical Science list (blacklist Pielke called it publicly) of scientists they call ‘climate misinformers’..
then we go to Desmog blog’s database of scientists labelled ‘deniers’ – all gone bad? (like Will Happer, of Freeman Dyson, Don Keiller)
maybe one day someone will decide you have ‘gone bad’…
can they just be ‘wrong’ – with very specific examples given of why?
Is this an example of subconcious pre-judging/prejudice.. which academics should be self aware enough to try to avoid..
can you give a specific example of where Jo Nova as ‘bad’… (as it just seems, because she is a ‘climate sceptic’ that this is a ‘given’
(I’m asking as a friend of hers.. and a more general point ref all those people above, and having written for Jo’s blog and WUWT, presumably I’m ‘bad’ as well)
Hi Barry, it appears we agree about the polarising nature of climate change blogs, regardless of our differing opinions about who is credible or not, and that is the point of my article. And perhaps ‘gone bad’ was an unfortunate turn of phrase, especially given the nature of good and evil appears to be mostly subjective. Certainly, from my point of view as a science communicator the consensus climate science is what I need to be explaining simply and clearly to others, including all its uncertainties. Best wishes, Jenni
Hi Jenni. I imagine Jo Nova see you as a climate communicator gone activist? perceptions are different from where ever you sit..
Have you seen the new documentary – Planet of the Humans – the darling documentary of the political left documentary nature – Michael Moore. is basically now being accused of going ‘bad’ – demands of censorship, because he has looked at ‘big’ green energy and found it wanting… all his dreams of ble future shattered by big green financial interests..
the social media reaction has been amazing from the environmentalists, basically trying to cancel him, and smear him… in exactly the same way they have every climate sceptic for a decade… the fact that he is just finding the same issues with renewable energy (vested financial, not very green, etc) as many ‘climate policy’ sceptics have for decades is by the by..
note.. being sceptic of renewables is not necessarily to be sceptical of agw.. Moore remains very scared of climate change, and is of the too many humans persuasion. me. let’s just go for nuclear power, and a high tech solution (ie do no harm, and it works)
Shellenberger is usually fairly sound for an analysis
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2020/04/21/new-michael-moore-backed-documentary-on-youtube-reveals-massive-ecological-impacts-of-renewables/#529db7906c96
one for Brigitte perhaps.. to look at the reaction to Michael Moore committing green heresy.
have you watched it yet?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE
I’ll have a look!
Just to be a bit cheeky regarding the distinction between science communicator and activist. Lets say science communicators decided to say that the earth moves round the sun, rather than that the sun moves round the earth, would they be activists? To communicate established science is not activism, is it?
the immediate reaction, is always censor, excommunicate..
“Director and activist Josh Fox, climate scientist Michael Mann and others signed a petition Friday asking Films for Action, one of the film’s distributors, to take down “Planet of the Humans” due to “errors, falsehoods and misinformation.”
—
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2020/04/27/michael-moore-planet-humans-doc-out-talks-coronavirus/3031584001/
this demand backfired and they backed off, as it was giving it even more publicity… ie from Moore’s worldview perspective. ‘big green’ vested financial interests, trying to cancel the truth!?
ie.note the demand it be taken down for ‘misinformation’ (that word again..) and no actual examples… just take their word for it.
Maybe Michael Moore to be added to Skeptical Science – Climate Misinformers page..? lol) .. or Desmog blogs – Deniers database. and yes I’ve seen Moore called that already. but they never actually give any specific examples of the misinformation…. it is enough to demand censorship. and to tell people don’t watch it. it is lies… (as political activists do)
and the public. most go huh. can’t be bothered either way.. the climate activist and environmentalists say. ok, it’s terrible. and never watch it..because important people say so.
and those slightly more sceptical/individualistic may say. well, let’s take a look… maybe it is terrible.. but I’ll decide for myself, thank you very much….
and maybe another climate policy sceptic is born. and a convert to nuclear power (who is still worried by climate change?)
In reference to the above comments, and in particular to the enduring attempt to ‘keep the conversation civil’ while emphasising ‘the relative credibility’ of sites and their authors, blogs, climate blog archaeologists hoping to establish the functioning of such virtue and ethics may wish to visit the discussion under my 2013 blog post at http://www.climate-resistance.org/2013/07/tom-curtis-doesnt-understand-the-97-paper.html .
That post was itself spawned from my own contribution to this project at https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingsciencepublic/2013/07/23/whats-behind-the-battle-of-received-wisdoms/ which discussed precisely that issue — the tendency of the climate ‘debate’ (such as it is) to become a battle of received wisdoms, ultimately at the expense of wisdom — the putative and contested objects of ‘science’ fading from the substance of those debates the more they emphasised ‘credibility’.
It was there, too, seven years ago, that the commenter was so driven to emphasise my lack of credibility — I am not a climate scientist — that he failed to notice the problem that the approval of two climate scientists of my post created for his own argument. As he wrote,
— “The real problem seems to be that they feel that their views (in general) should have the same credibility as those of professional climate scientists…” —
Perhaps worse, he (not a climate scientist) was driven then to depend on the opinion of a (failed) academic philosopher, a PHd candidate psychologist and a non-climate non-scientist (co-authors of the disputed work) for doubling down on his ‘keeping the conversation civil’. All of them had been angered by the suggestion (from a non-climate-scientist equal) that the 97% survey had been poorly-conceived, and further enraged that such a view had received approval from ‘professional climate scientists’.
It turns out that ‘credibility’ has nothing to do with ‘credibility’.
Seven years has perhaps not been sufficient time for deeper reflection on what ‘credibility’ might mean for the evaluation of contested perspectives in debates. It remains under-theorised, other than for some cod cognitive science that hypothesises a ‘gateway belief model’ of science communication, under the logic of which the expression of unauthorised opinion is an existential danger to the human race and all life on Earth. Any project that begins from such a premise can therefore be not unfairly compared to medieval scholasticism and its adherents compared to an angry mad clergy, concerned by the moral and political authority of an institution waning in the face of challenges to its objective and normative claims. (NB, the comparison here is not between anyone and Galilei, but between self-appointed Enforcers of a new orthodoxy, and the excesses of the old Church. It is the fact of criticism, not its substance, which drives such anger.)
‘Civility’ might mean not speaking out of turn in a political order that demands deference and obedience. ‘Credibility’ might mean proximity to political authority. Evidence that this is the correct interpretation of those terms exists in the prolific nature of the project. There is barely an online discussion of consequence in which it has not been over-represented. A project which is intent on establishing an orthodoxy — rather than persuading through debate — is manifestly a project which is advanced in bad faith. Hence it finds itself booted out of conversations which would be civil without its help — and which usually are, on the very rare occasions where it has been absent. That is to say that the point of the project is to poison debate across lines of disagreement, which could otherwise be both possible and good-natured. The point is not to punish the expression of denial, but to deny its expression by punishing any provider of a platform for discussion across those lines that might seemingly lend the unorthodox argument “credibility”, as though debate itself was apostasy.
Online squabbles, are of course, an enduring characteristic of the Internet. Hence, it should not be a surprise that online discussion fora do *tend* to develop particular cultures as one or other ‘public’ begins to dominate. The above is a preamble that may, therefore, look like so much he-said-she-said — bitterness generated by half a lifetime of such heated debates. But the point (which I also made in 2013) is that the quality of climate debate does not improve as one moves away from the Internet. It is notable also that the dominant players in the broader climate wars are people based in universities, with letters before and after their name, often occupying very senior positions in institutional science and policymaking. I.e. they are not anonymous trolls, in basements, without anything better to do, though you would not know it from the quality of their arguments in public.
It is furthermore notable that, in contrast to the blogosphere, there are no counterparts — “deniers”, in the study’s terminology — in the broader public sphere. That is to say that “deniers”, in most of the world, including in the UK and Europe, have almost zero presence, much less formal representation on campuses, in institutional or commercial science, in mainstream political parties, in a constellation of civil-society organisations, in corporate lobbying, and on broadcast news media. Yet many of those seemingly respectable panjandrums will tell you otherwise, with a straight face, from institutions bearing the names of billionaire benefactors, that a conspiracy of private interests have distorted the public debate. Needless to say, they are unable to quantify their claims, much less to put those quantities into comparison with a project the scale of the climate agenda: supranational organisations, almost all western governments, all of the universities, all political parties and so on — and all their resources.
Are there even as many active climate ‘denial’ bloggers and commenters as there are researchers active in the science communications and science studies fields that make such blogs the object of their study? It seems very possible to me that there are not. And yet this possibility should invite a further comparison: the resources available to researchers are vastly greater than those available to bloggers. I write this comment on the research on time borrowed from scraping a living — as do most climate bloggers. Are my counterparts? Many,including the one preoccupied by ‘civility’ and ‘credibility,’ are tenured. In contrast, I can think of fewer than half a dozen FTE positions in the UK which are given to criticism of the climate agenda at all, none of which enjoy anything at all that resembles tenure.
Yet there seems to be an endless stream of ‘science communicators’ desperate to lead the public towards ecological utopia. There are armies of NGO hacks. There are hundreds of ‘civil society’ organisations and think tanks, in the UK alone, almost all of which, if they have taken a position on climate, have taken the pro-consensus position. Your chances of getting a job at any of those organisations, if you have a detectable sceptic view of the climate debate are zero.
What I am suggesting here is that any ‘research’ which makes “denial” the object of its study begins from an position of abandoning any sense of proportion. Researchers are forced to study ‘denial’ blogs because there is almost no other expression of ‘denial’ in public life. Yet ‘denial’ vexes researchers and their funders. Isn’t that worthy of study? Why does it provoke such institutional rage?
What is the proportion? How many green vs brown FTEs are there, engaged in formal climate debates? What are the resources available to them? I suggests that the difference is at least three, and perhaps as many as six orders of magnitude. Blogs are seemingly the primary vehicle of climate scepticism, whereas the focus of the climate agenda is an annual conference, attended by nearly every government, every NGO, every global corporation, thousands of activists, scientists and journalists, from which critics are all but banned. And that is just the start of the pro climate agenda’s formal expression.
The disparity is sufficient to call academic preoccupation with ‘denial’ a madness.
It is a constant source of amazement to me, therefore, that recalcitrant climate bloggers are the object of “research”, which takes for granted the dominant categories of that overwhelmingly predominant orthodoxy: “science” versus “denial”. It seems implausible to me that a scientific hypothesis could unite so many hitherto disparate and counter-posed public organisations, nations, institutions and enterprises without a great deal of ideological glue. There is evidently more going on than ‘science’, and thus ‘research’ is much more than it claims to be.
Why are academic researchers so interested in establishing a critical understanding of ‘denial’, but not of the far, far, far more consequential orthodoxy? Why are the dynamics of blogs of interest to academics, but not the dynamics of intergovernmental fora and academia? Why are the psychological profiles of ‘deniers’ a matter for cognitive scientists, but not the psyches of green alarmists, spivs and chancers? Oh, and scientists?
Added to the failure to bring a sense of proportion to research, then, there exists a failure of good faith — ‘ethics’, if you will. So much research on how ‘denial’ is expressed, what motivates its expression, and how it may be defeated. But so little academic commentary is concerned with what has been said, and what it has been said in response to. No, it is not just a response to the claim ‘climate change is real’. It is just as much a response to an orthodoxy, the ascendancy of which has gone without scrutiny of any kind, as rooted in ideology as any 20th century political movement, the facts and consequences of which most academics seem wilfully blind. Full disclosure: I think it is a dangerous ideological movement, made all the more dangerous by blindness to itself, and that is my motivation.
Guess what… Academia produces its own ‘publics’. Try it. Try being a critic of sustainability at any one of a number of ‘research’ organisations whose mission statement is ‘sustainability’. Try getting a grant for a study which reflects critically on, rather than promotes sustainability, from the ESRC. Try going to an academic conference and expressing a view that runs counter to the conference’s prevailing orthodoxy. Try getting a paper on it published. See for yourself if blogs are any more or less hostile to alternative perspectives than academe. If there are any substantial differences between what you observe in blogs and what can be seen on any campus, I will be surprised, and will agree that the dynamics of blogs are more worthy of study than the dynamics of research organisations, leaving aside the fact that ‘research’ organisations are called on to inform policy-making processes, and are funded by public money and legacies from politically-oriented philanthropic foundations whereas blogs — not ‘denial’ blogs, anyhow — are not.
And try the other fora too — the broadcasters, the civil society organisations, the political parties… And then tell me that blog-based research is of any consequence, and not a motivated distraction.
I am having trouble posting this. It is perhaps too long. I shall try posting in two parts.
In reference to the above comments, and in particular to the enduring attempt to ‘keep the conversation civil’ while emphasising ‘the relative credibility’ of sites and their authors, blogs, climate blog archaeologists hoping to establish the functioning of such virtue and ethics may wish to visit the discussion under my 2013 blog post at http://www.climate-resistance.org/2013/07/tom-curtis-doesnt-understand-the-97-paper.html .
That post was itself spawned from my own contribution to this project at https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingsciencepublic/2013/07/23/whats-behind-the-battle-of-received-wisdoms/ which discussed precisely that issue — the tendency of the climate ‘debate’ (such as it is) to become a battle of received wisdoms, ultimately at the expense of wisdom — the putative and contested objects of ‘science’ fading from the substance of those debates the more they emphasised ‘credibility’.
It was there, too, seven years ago, that the commenter was so driven to emphasise my lack of credibility — I am not a climate scientist — that he failed to notice the problem that the approval of two climate scientists of my post created for his own argument. As he wrote,
— “The real problem seems to be that they feel that their views (in general) should have the same credibility as those of professional climate scientists…” —
Perhaps worse, he (not a climate scientist) was driven then to depend on the opinion of a (failed) academic philosopher, a PHd candidate psychologist and a non-climate non-scientist (co-authors of the disputed work) for doubling down on his ‘keeping the conversation civil’. All of them had been angered by the suggestion (from a non-climate-scientist equal) that the 97% survey had been poorly-conceived, and further enraged that such a view had received approval from ‘professional climate scientists’.
It turns out that ‘credibility’ has nothing to do with ‘credibility’.
Seven years has perhaps not been sufficient time for deeper reflection on what ‘credibility’ might mean for the evaluation of contested perspectives in debates. It remains under-theorised, other than for some cod cognitive science that hypothesises a ‘gateway belief model’ of science communication, under the logic of which the expression of unauthorised opinion is an existential danger to the human race and all life on Earth. Any project that begins from such a premise can therefore be not unfairly compared to medieval scholasticism and its adherents compared to an angry mad clergy, concerned by the moral and political authority of an institution waning in the face of challenges to its objective and normative claims. (NB, the comparison here is not between anyone and Galilei, but between self-appointed Enforcers of a new orthodoxy, and the excesses of the old Church. It is the fact of criticism, not its substance, which drives such anger.)
‘Civility’ might mean not speaking out of turn in a political order that demands deference and obedience. ‘Credibility’ might mean proximity to political authority. Evidence that this is the correct interpretation of those terms exists in the prolific nature of the project. There is barely an online discussion of consequence in which it has not been over-represented. A project which is intent on establishing an orthodoxy — rather than persuading through debate — is manifestly a project which is advanced in bad faith. Hence it finds itself booted out of conversations which would be civil without its help — and which usually are, on the very rare occasions where it has been absent. That is to say that the point of the project is to poison debate across lines of disagreement, which could otherwise be both possible and good-natured. The point is not to punish the expression of denial, but to deny its expression by punishing any provider of a platform for discussion across those lines that might seemingly lend the unorthodox argument “credibility”, as though debate itself was apostasy.
I am having trouble posting this. It is perhaps too long. I shall try posting in parts.
In reference to the above comments, and in particular to the enduring attempt to ‘keep the conversation civil’ while emphasising ‘the relative credibility’ of sites and their authors, blogs, climate blog archaeologists hoping to establish the functioning of such virtue and ethics may wish to visit the discussion under my 2013 blog post at http://www.climate-resistance.org/2013/07/tom-curtis-doesnt-understand-the-97-paper.html .
That post was itself spawned from my own contribution to this project at https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingsciencepublic/2013/07/23/whats-behind-the-battle-of-received-wisdoms/ which discussed precisely that issue — the tendency of the climate ‘debate’ (such as it is) to become a battle of received wisdoms, ultimately at the expense of wisdom — the putative and contested objects of ‘science’ fading from the substance of those debates the more they emphasised ‘credibility’.
It was there, too, seven years ago, that the commenter was so driven to emphasise my lack of credibility — I am not a climate scientist — that he failed to notice the problem that the approval of two climate scientists of my post created for his own argument. As he wrote,
— “The real problem seems to be that they feel that their views (in general) should have the same credibility as those of professional climate scientists…” —
Perhaps worse, he (not a climate scientist) was driven then to depend on the opinion of a (failed) academic philosopher, a PHd candidate psychologist and a non-climate non-scientist (co-authors of the disputed work) for doubling down on his ‘keeping the conversation civil’. All of them had been angered by the suggestion (from a non-climate-scientist equal) that the 97% survey had been poorly-conceived, and further enraged that such a view had received approval from ‘professional climate scientists’.
It turns out that ‘credibility’ has nothing to do with ‘credibility’.
In reference to the above comments, and in particular to the enduring attempt to ‘keep the conversation civil’ while emphasising ‘the relative credibility’ of sites and their authors, blogs, climate blog archaeologists hoping to establish the functioning of such virtue and ethics may wish to visit the discussion under my 2013 blog post at http://www.climate-resistance.org/2013/07/tom-curtis-doesnt-understand-the-97-paper.html .
That post was itself spawned from my own contribution to this project at https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingsciencepublic/2013/07/23/whats-behind-the-battle-of-received-wisdoms/ which discussed precisely that issue — the tendency of the climate ‘debate’ (such as it is) to become a battle of received wisdoms, ultimately at the expense of wisdom — the putative and contested objects of ‘science’ fading from the substance of those debates the more they emphasised ‘credibility’.
It was there, too, seven years ago, that the commenter was so driven to emphasise my lack of credibility — I am not a climate scientist — that he failed to notice the problem that the approval of two climate scientists of my post created for his own argument. As he wrote,
— “The real problem seems to be that they feel that their views (in general) should have the same credibility as those of professional climate scientists…” —
Perhaps worse, he (not a climate scientist) was driven then to depend on the opinion of a (failed) academic philosopher, a PHd candidate psychologist and a non-climate non-scientist (co-authors of the disputed work) for doubling down on his ‘keeping the conversation civil’. All of them had been angered by the suggestion (from a non-climate-scientist equal) that the 97% survey had been poorly-conceived, and further enraged that such a view had received approval from ‘professional climate scientists’.
It turns out that ‘credibility’ has nothing to do with ‘credibility’.
Seven years has perhaps not been sufficient time for deeper reflection on what ‘credibility’ might mean for the evaluation of contested perspectives in debates. It remains under-theorised, other than for some cod cognitive science that hypothesises a ‘gateway belief model’ of science communication, under the logic of which the expression of unauthorised opinion is an existential danger to the human race and all life on Earth. Any project that begins from such a premise can therefore be not unfairly compared to medieval scholasticism and its adherents compared to an angry mad clergy, concerned by the moral and political authority of an institution waning in the face of challenges to its objective and normative claims. (NB, the comparison here is not between anyone and Galilei, but between self-appointed Enforcers of a new orthodoxy, and the excesses of the old Church. It is the fact of criticism, not its substance, which drives such anger.)
‘Civility’ might mean not speaking out of turn in a political order that demands deference and obedience. ‘Credibility’ might mean proximity to political authority. Evidence that this is the correct interpretation of those terms exists in the prolific nature of the project. There is barely an online discussion of consequence in which it has not been over-represented. A project which is intent on establishing an orthodoxy — rather than persuading through debate — is manifestly a project which is advanced in bad faith. Hence it finds itself booted out of conversations which would be civil without its help — and which usually are, on the very rare occasions where it has been absent. That is to say that the point of the project is to poison debate across lines of disagreement, which could otherwise be both possible and good-natured. The point is not to punish the expression of denial, but to deny its expression by punishing any provider of a platform for discussion across those lines that might seemingly lend the unorthodox argument “credibility”, as though debate itself was apostasy.
Online squabbles, are of course, an enduring characteristic of the Internet. Hence, it should not be a surprise that online discussion fora do *tend* to develop particular cultures as one or other ‘public’ begins to dominate. The above is a preamble that may, therefore, look like so much he-said-she-said — bitterness generated by half a lifetime of such heated debates. But the point (which I also made in 2013) is that the quality of climate debate does not improve as one moves away from the Internet. It is notable also that the dominant players in the broader climate wars are people based in universities, with letters before and after their name, often occupying very senior positions in institutional science and policymaking. I.e. they are not anonymous trolls, in basements, without anything better to do, though you would not know it from the quality of their arguments in public.
It is furthermore notable that, in contrast to the blogosphere, there are no counterparts — “deniers”, in the study’s terminology — in the broader public sphere. That is to say that “deniers”, in most of the world, including in the UK and Europe, have almost zero presence, much less formal representation on campuses, in institutional or commercial science, in mainstream political parties, in a constellation of civil-society organisations, in corporate lobbying, and on broadcast news media. Yet many of those seemingly respectable panjandrums will tell you otherwise, with a straight face, from institutions bearing the names of billionaire benefactors, that a conspiracy of private interests have distorted the public debate. Needless to say, they are unable to quantify their claims, much less to put those quantities into comparison with a project the scale of the climate agenda: supranational organisations, almost all western governments, all of the universities, all political parties and so on — and all their resources.
Are there even as many active climate ‘denial’ bloggers and commenters as there are researchers active in the science communications and science studies fields that make such blogs the object of their study? It seems very possible to me that there are not. And yet this possibility should invite a further comparison: the resources available to researchers are vastly greater than those available to bloggers. I write this comment on the research on time borrowed from scraping a living — as do most climate bloggers. Are my counterparts? Many,including the one preoccupied by ‘civility’ and ‘credibility,’ are tenured. In contrast, I can think of fewer than half a dozen FTE positions in the UK which are given to criticism of the climate agenda at all, none of which enjoy anything at all that resembles tenure.
Yet there seems to be an endless stream of ‘science communicators’ desperate to lead the public towards ecological utopia. There are armies of NGO hacks. There are hundreds of ‘civil society’ organisations and think tanks, in the UK alone, almost all of which, if they have taken a position on climate, have taken the pro-consensus position. Your chances of getting a job at any of those organisations, if you have a detectable sceptic view of the climate debate are zero.
What I am suggesting here is that any ‘research’ which makes “denial” the object of its study begins from an position of abandoning any sense of proportion. Researchers are forced to study ‘denial’ blogs because there is almost no other expression of ‘denial’ in public life. Yet ‘denial’ vexes researchers and their funders. Isn’t that worthy of study? Why does it provoke such institutional rage?
What is the proportion? How many green vs brown FTEs are there, engaged in formal climate debates? What are the resources available to them? I suggests that the difference is at least three, and perhaps as many as six orders of magnitude. Blogs are seemingly the primary vehicle of climate scepticism, whereas the focus of the climate agenda is an annual conference, attended by nearly every government, every NGO, every global corporation, thousands of activists, scientists and journalists, from which critics are all but banned. And that is just the start of the pro climate agenda’s formal expression.
The disparity is sufficient to call academic preoccupation with ‘denial’ a madness.
It is a constant source of amazement to me, therefore, that recalcitrant climate bloggers are the object of “research”, which takes for granted the dominant categories of that overwhelmingly predominant orthodoxy: “science” versus “denial”. It seems implausible to me that a scientific hypothesis could unite so many hitherto disparate and counter-posed public organisations, nations, institutions and enterprises without a great deal of ideological glue. There is evidently more going on than ‘science’, and thus ‘research’ is much more than it claims to be.
Why are academic researchers so interested in establishing a critical understanding of ‘denial’, but not of the far, far, far more consequential orthodoxy? Why are the dynamics of blogs of interest to academics, but not the dynamics of intergovernmental fora and academia? Why are the psychological profiles of ‘deniers’ a matter for cognitive scientists, but not the psyches of green alarmists, spivs and chancers? Oh, and scientists?
Added to the failure to bring a sense of proportion to research, then, there exists a failure of good faith — ‘ethics’, if you will. So much research on how ‘denial’ is expressed, what motivates its expression, and how it may be defeated. But so little academic commentary is concerned with what has been said, and what it has been said in response to. No, it is not just a response to the claim ‘climate change is real’. It is just as much a response to an orthodoxy, the ascendancy of which has gone without scrutiny of any kind, as rooted in ideology as any 20th century political movement, the facts and consequences of which most academics seem wilfully blind. Full disclosure: I think it is a dangerous ideological movement, made all the more dangerous by blindness to itself, and that is my motivation.
Guess what… Academia produces its own ‘publics’. Try it. Try being a critic of sustainability at any one of a number of ‘research’ organisations whose mission statement is ‘sustainability’. Try getting a grant for a study which reflects critically on, rather than promotes sustainability, from the ESRC. Try going to an academic conference and expressing a view that runs counter to the conference’s prevailing orthodoxy. Try getting a paper on it published. See for yourself if blogs are any more or less hostile to alternative perspectives than academe. If there are any substantial differences between what you observe in blogs and what can be seen on any campus, I will be surprised, and will agree that the dynamics of blogs are more worthy of study than the dynamics of research organisations, leaving aside the fact that ‘research’ organisations are called on to inform policy-making processes, and are funded by public money and legacies from politically-oriented philanthropic foundations whereas blogs — not ‘denial’ blogs, anyhow — are not.
And try the other fora too — the broadcasters, the civil society organisations, the political parties… And then tell me that blog-based research is of any consequence, and not a motivated distraction.
I am having trouble posting here. It may be too long a comment. I’ll try posting in parts.
In reference to the above comments, and in particular to the enduring attempt to ‘keep the conversation civil’ while emphasising ‘the relative credibility’ of sites and their authors, blogs, climate blog archaeologists hoping to establish the functioning of such virtue and ethics may wish to visit the discussion under my 2013 blog post at http://www.climate-resistance.org/2013/07/tom-curtis-doesnt-understand-the-97-paper.html .
That post was itself spawned from my own contribution to this project at https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingsciencepublic/2013/07/23/whats-behind-the-battle-of-received-wisdoms/ which discussed precisely that issue — the tendency of the climate ‘debate’ (such as it is) to become a battle of received wisdoms, ultimately at the expense of wisdom — the putative and contested objects of ‘science’ fading from the substance of those debates the more they emphasised ‘credibility’.
It was there, too, seven years ago, that the commenter was so driven to emphasise my lack of credibility — I am not a climate scientist — that he failed to notice the problem that the approval of two climate scientists of my post created for his own argument. As he wrote,
— “The real problem seems to be that they feel that their views (in general) should have the same credibility as those of professional climate scientists…” —
Perhaps worse, he (not a climate scientist) was driven then to depend on the opinion of a (failed) academic philosopher, a PHd candidate psychologist and a non-climate non-scientist (co-authors of the disputed work) for doubling down on his ‘keeping the conversation civil’. All of them had been angered by the suggestion (from a non-climate-scientist equal) that the 97% survey had been poorly-conceived, and further enraged that such a view had received approval from ‘professional climate scientists’.
It turns out that ‘credibility’ has nothing to do with ‘credibility’.
But that isn’t what is happening.. unless you can find someone actually doing something equivocally as silly.. so why say that.? As we are specifically talking about Jo Nova and SKS, unless you can give an example of either doing something as silly, or anyone else for that matter
But that isn’t what is happening.. unless you can find someone actually doing something equivocally as silly.. so why say that.? As we are specifically talking about Jo Nova and SKS, unless you can give an example of either doing something as silly, or anyone else for that matter
Brigitte,
“Just to be a bit cheeky,” as you say, the result you call “established science” is anything but.
It may well be the *consensus* (at least among the public, and even among science journalists perhaps) that the Earth moves around the Sun and the Sun does NOT move around the Earth.
But unless they repealed Newton’s Third Law of Motion when I wasn’t looking, that’s not actually (how shall I put this?) true.
When Torvill and Dean lock hands and spin on the ice as a binary system, do you tell your students that the man is stationary and the woman—being less massive—moves around him?
Because that’s in effect what you’re “communicating” when you assert that the Sun simply stays where it is while the Earth does all the orbiting.
The truth is that they orbit each other, mutually exerting equal and opposite gravitational pulls. Because their masses are vastly different a superficial observer may get the impression that the Sun is imperturbable, but no scientist who remembers her physics ought to fall for that.
Your misconception, and my correction thereof, are a perfect example of the benefits of dialogue. You provided the cheek (thesis), I turned the other cheek (antithesis), and the reader is now better equipped to come to her own synthesis.
Heck, my counterclaim could be improved on for all I know, so why limit it to two voices? An anti-anti-thesis might help get us even closer to good science.
Suppose you’d had your science communicator hat on right now, Brigitte.
Had you simply decreed (what you thought was) The Truth and forbidden back-talk, or declared that anyone contrary enough to disagree with you had to submit their claims to the time-consuming and questionable litmus-test of academic peer review before earning the right to be heard, you would have done your students, readers, audience, visitors, public etc. a disservice, wouldn’t you?
Despite what I’m sure were the best intentions, and with the utmost confidence that you were behaving in accordance with “established science,” you would have taken the first step from science to religion. It’s a slippery slope, my friend.
Brigitte,
“Just to be a bit cheeky,” as you say, the result you call “established science” is anything but.
It may well be the *consensus* (at least among the public, and even among science journalists perhaps) that the Earth moves around the Sun and the Sun does NOT move around the Earth.
But unless they repealed Newton’s Third Law of Motion when I wasn’t looking, that’s not actually (how shall I put this?) true.
When Torvill and Dean lock hands and spin on the ice as a binary system, do you tell your students that the man is stationary and the woman—being less massive—moves around him?
Because that’s in effect what you’re “communicating” when you imply that the Sun stays put while the Earth does all the orbiting.
The truth is that they orbit each other, mutually exerting equal and opposite gravitational pulls. Because their masses are vastly different a superficial observer may get the impression that the Sun is imperturbable, but no scientist who remembers her physics ought to fall for that.
Your misconception, and my correction thereof, make a perfect example of the benefits of dialogue. You provided the cheek (thesis), I turned the other cheek (antithesis), and the reader is now better equipped to come to her own synthesis.
Heck, my counterclaim could also be improved on for all I know, so why limit this to two voices? An anti-anti-thesis might help get us even closer to good science.
Suppose you’d had your science communicator hat on right now, Brigitte.
Had you simply decreed (what you thought was) The Truth and forbidden back-talk, or declared that anyone contrary enough to disagree with you had to submit their claims to the time-consuming and questionable litmus-test of academic peer review before earning the right to be heard, you would have done your students, readers, audience, visitors, public etc. a disservice, wouldn’t you?
Despite what I’m sure were the best intentions, and with the utmost confidence that you were behaving in accordance with “established science,” you would have taken the first step from science to religion. It’s a slippery slope, my friend.
Sorry everybody these many comments did not come up in my emails! Something is wrong with the system. And now I have little time to deal with them as I have a bit of a family emergency to deal with today. Will look soon. In the meantime thank you all for engaging so actively in dialogue. I knew I was falling into a trap of my own making when saying what I said. I should have found a better example. But you all know what I mean, don’t you?
But that isn’t what is happening.. unless you can find someone actually doing something equivocally as silly.. so why say that.? As we are specifically talking about Jo Nova and SKS, unless you can give an example of either doing something as silly, or anyone else for that matter.. what was the point of that comment..utterly unhelpful and irrelevant, or do you think Jo Nova is actually like that,but not quite brave enough to say so directly..
Whenever anyone says don’t look at because misinformation, without any actual specifics. .. every academic especially, should be thinking, what specifically is ‘misinformation’ and look for themselves… to check.if it is true.
This was meant as a reductio ad absurdum (of the claim that science communicators who choose to communicate the mainstream science, rather than the non-mainstream one are activists), but I admit that I failed because I wrote in haste – and as we know: ‘write in haste, regret at leisure’! I hope….
…and Then There’s Physics in the first comment is right to point out that moderation has an effect on civility. For example, the fact that several writers at our blog cliscep.com (including, I think, Barry) have regularly had comments removed at Physics’s blog, means that when he comments at our blog (which he used to do frequently, and is always free to do) he is sometimes received uncivilly. It’s unfortunate, but it’s in the nature of blogging, I’m afraid.
Your choice of Jo Nova and John Cook as examples is a good one, because John Cook’s blog was set up specifically to counter Jo Nova’s blog, and they’ve been circling each other ever since.
They are not of equivalent scientific weight, as you note. For example, Cook has written a peer-reviewed paper naming Jo Nova as the originator of conspiracy theories, and accusing her of various psychological failings, such as false belief in nefarious intent, nihilistic skepticism, and acting the persecuted victim – of suffering from paranoid delusions, in other words. Nova’s response was not a reply in the peer-reviewed literature, but mockery, in which she was joined by several hundred thousand other people. The paper was retracted and replaced by another, in which the original data – quotes from blogs by Nova and scores of other people – have been altered in an unsuccessful attempt to disguise their origin. The fact that Cook’s first peer reviewed paper should be based entirely on data that he claims to have made up himself tells us something about the state of social science perhaps? Up to you science communicators to tell us exactly what.
Jenni,
Certainly I agree with this, and I think it’s pretty straightforward to work out which science communicators are doing this, and which ones are not. I’m not sure, though, in what way your current paper plays a role in helping us to do this. Is there some broad conclusion you could draw from it that would help us to better ensure that science communication involves communicating the consensus climate science (with uncertainties)?
Brigitte,
sorry for any impatience exuded on my part earlier, as a result of apparently being unable to post here.
You say, presumably in reference to the Sun-Earth orbital example, that:
> I should have found a better example. But you all know what I mean, don’t you?
Sort of. Presumably you meant something more like: choosing to communicate that in humans, the blood circulates through one-way vessels, rather than communicating that in humans, the blood is pumped from the heart out to the periphery of the body, slows, stops, reverses and goes back the same way it came (as some anatomists used to believe)?
> of the claim that science communicators who choose to communicate the mainstream science, rather than the non-mainstream one are activists
I’ve never in all my years on this planet seen or heard the claim:
“Science communicators who choose to communicate the mainstream science, rather than the non-mainstream one are activists.”
…or anything logically tantamount to it.
Absent a quote, I’m forced to assume you’ve just imagined it. (Of course you may have premeditatedly strawmanned it—but then, I have no evidence that you’re a dishonest person, so I presume that’s NOT what you did.)
There is only one stream in science, by the way. So your paraphrased “claim” also suffers from an incoherency issue.
If by “mainstream” you mean “majority-endorsed” then you’re clearly talking about climate science, and your comment is meaningless outside climate science.
After all, climate science is the only field for which that information (percentage endorsement) is available, and only for a single hypothesis therein (albeit one that nobody seems to be able to articulate twice without changing a few words each time)!
So your argument is limited in scope to ONE HYPOTHESIS out of the countless millions which a “science communicator” is likely to be concerned with communicating.
The consensus information is available because of a cottage industry of consensus studies going back to Oreskes.
It started when Naomi Oreskes got a one-page-long joke of an “article” published in a special, non-peer-reviewed “Essay” section of Science in December 2004.
She then spent the next 16 years changing her story about what percentage of papers she actually found that Agreed.
In 2007, for instance, she published a graph of Oreskes04 showing that ~235 out of 928 papers had Agreed.
Eight years later, she produced another graph of Oreskes04 (when she was consulting for the movie Merchants of Doubt) that showed all 928 out of 928 papers had Agreed!
She has also referred in various writings to the Agreed number as “very few” and “almost none.”
To be clear, these different and hard-to-reconcile descriptions are all about the SAME survey, the one she did in 2004.
I just mention all this to give you some sense of the integrity (or lack thereof) of the foundations underpinning the Consensus Science movement—which, if you ask anyone who understands the scientific method, doesn’t belong in science to begin with.
I posted a more detailed catalysis of Prof Oreskes’ Magical Shifting Consensus at WUWT:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/12/23/oreskes-harvard-and-the-destruction-of-scientific-revolutions/
Of course, proving that the intellectual progenitor of the climate-consensus-quantifying school of “thought” is a dishonest person might not be considered to prove very much, other than that she’s a dishonest person. (If you think it doesn’t prove much, please say so and I’ll be happy to explain why I think it proves a bit more than that.)
Finally, your Problem With Ken (or rather Ken’s Problem with You).
From what I could ascertain before nodding off, Ken Rice appears to object to the very fact that you *compared and contrasted* two websites of which he (Ken) considers one evil (spit!) and the other good (Hallelujah!), and which he (Ken) would be MUCH more careful to avoid giving the impression of treating symmetrically, even for the PURPOSES of comparison and contrast—or mentioning in the same sentence, for that matter, if he could help it.
Ken’s beef with your approach is religious, in other words. All to do with ideological purity.
In case it helps, you might want to bear in mind that Ken literally *doesn’t know what the word ‘science’ means.*
This he proved one day at his own blog:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/expertise/#comment-12819
Ken’s is an ignorance which has never stopped him lecturing others on scientific matters, but which would surely give a real “science communicator” some pause.
My cheeky comment was in reply to a comment by Barry saying “I imagine Jo Nova see you [Jenni, communicating mainstream science] as a climate communicator gone activist?” Perhaps I misunderstood that comment.
I am Brigitte, by the way.
Ken’s comment was about Jenni’s study and I want to leave it to Jenny to reply.
I should not have butted in I suppose, and confused everything by replying to Barry.
A bit of an exaggeration there. I don’t object. I was expressing a view that there’s a risk that some might interpret this as implying some kind of equivalence, when – in my view – there is a vast difference in terms of the credibility of the information presented on the two sites (I don’t recall Skeptical Science ever presenting some special solar climate model that would explain global warming as being pre-dominantly due to the Sun).
However, I don’t disagree with the conclusions of the study (it seems pretty reasonable) and maybe it is worth thinking a bit more about polarisation in climate blog comment threads. It is actually something I have spent quite some time thinking about, but have mostly concluded that it’s unavoidable and impossible to do anything about. I may, of course, be wrong and maybe others will come up with some way of improving the situation.
Firstly, my apologies for getting Jennifer and Brigitte mixed up in my posts above. It’s my fault, not Brigitte’s.
I just wanted to add that an interesting next step for (Jennifer’s) research might be this question:
How does the average climate blog *become* a choir-preaching echo chamber?
Did they all start out that way, or do they at some point in time host a genuine diversity of commenters?
If so, what happens? Does the proprietor of the blog slowly kick out everyone who doesn’t agree with him/her? Do they leave of their own accord? Do they leave because they’re verbally abused?
In my experience (in case you want to know it), the answer to all the above questions depends on which “Side” of the debate you’re talking about.
As a VERY broad generalization with lots of exceptions (but lots more NON-exceptions), my answer is:
Believers don’t choose to visit Denier sites.
Deniers do choose to visit Believer sites, but are progressively banned for a range of reasons, from:
– they are rude to the Believers, so the owner gets rid of them (usually in response to complaints)
to:
– they discredit and embarrass the owner, so the owner gets rid of them (of his/her own volition)
… and many more besides, I’m sure.
But I could be wrong (or lying)—so that’s what science is for, right?
In any case, THAT’S a study I would be very interested in reading.
One methodological difficulty you’ll encounter, of course, is that so many comments—including the critical ones that result in people leaving or getting banned—are redacted. So you might have to limit your scope to relatively censorship-free blogs.
Ken,
you just confirmed my characterization of your criticism/concern/misgiving/objection/whatever:
You fear the *wrong message* could be sent by *implying* some sort of *equivalence* between blogs you consider to be of totally incommensurable “credibility,” whatever that decidedly non-scientific noun means.
It’s telling that your indictment of JoNova’s blog is substantiated by this:
“(I don’t recall Skeptical Science ever presenting some special solar climate model that would explain global warming as being pre-dominantly due to the Sun).”
Let me get this straight.
In your view, “presenting” (as true? for consideration? for discussion?) a “special” (heterodox?) model that “would” (if it were correct?) explain something as being pre-dominantly due to something you (Ken) refuse to believe any reasonable scientist could possibly think it’s due to… DISCREDITS JoNova’s blog!
You’ve heard of “damning by faint praise”, I trust?
You just praised JoNova’s site by faint damnation.
What you just described, unless you wildly mis-described it, is just the kind of thing any reasonable, “credible”[?] science blog would be perfectly within its rights to do.
But it’s a heretical explanation, so we all know SkS would never be so irresponsible as to even “present” such a “model,” don’t we? LOL!
(Any scientist reading your comments and mine must be starting to form a sense by now of which of the two blogs comes closer to deserving the epithet “scientific.”)
Thanks for partially de-opacifying that for me, Brigitte 🙂
You’re welcome. Now I have to cook!
ATTP: “Is there some broad conclusion you could draw from it that would help us to better ensure that science communication involves communicating the consensus climate science (with uncertainties)?”
Here’s a handy hint. Try citing the IPCC every time someone says something silly. For example, each time that a journalist or striking schoolgirl or nutter superglued to the pavement (e.g. George Monbiot) claims that a flood or wildfire or hurricane is a sign of impending doom, point out that the scientific consensus is that there is little evidence that extreme weather events have increased over the past hundred years. You and we at cliscep agree about that, so why not pool our resources and defend the science together?
Because I don’t agree about that and it’s not correct.
Geoff, I hate to ruin an ecumenical moment, but:
“why not pool our resources and defend the science together?”
1) because Ken is exclusively interested in “defending the science” [sic, sic, sic] against dezaggeration, whereas we’re primarily interested in … er… doing said verb… against EGGzaggeration.
Of course, it’s almost impossible to *understate* the impacts of climate change on human life, hence the asymmetry of workloads.
Ken couldn’t care less that the Global Humanitarian Foundation, Kofi Annan and innumerable and immemorable other worthies said with a straight face, back in 2009, that 300,000 people per year were dying of climate change.
Nor that the climate establishment en masse, sensu lato, de facto, en bloc und so weiter has silently slunk back from that indefensible and slightly comical lie now that COVID-19 has reminded ordinary people what 200,000 dead bodies actually look like.
Nor that without even a single capillary’s blush they’ve now repositioned climate corpses from the present continuous tense to the indeterminate future, keeping one step ahead of pop-Popperianism.
Nor that such unrepentance is literally *against the rules* of science. After all the scientific method provides for specific penalties to be paid by the party whose hypothesis causes them to mischaracterize the empirical world (viz. “if your prediction is wrong, your hypothesis was wrong”).
If it were a truth about the material world that climate change killed ten people a year, and I’m being generous there solo ad argumentum, Ken couldn’t care less if “credible” figures like Kofi Annan massaged this upwards by 299,990.
But got forbid Jo Nova “present a model” that, if true, would mean only 7 people died last year, representing a denial of a whopping 30% of the science.
THAT’S the kind of thing that’ll get Ken out of bed and down the Bat-pole to the KrusherMobile.
2) Ken on one hand, and I (and hopefully you) on the other, want to defend different parts of this sentence:
“the scientific consensus is that there is little evidence that extreme weather events have increased over the past hundred years”
I don’t care, and I’d like to think you don’t care either, about the first 5 words of that sentence. I wouldn’t be caught dead “defending” such sub-scientific irrelevantia in a climate debate (though I’d conceivably take a position on it in a debate about group psychology).
To Ken, the first five words are the ONLY territory that needs defending. If he can defend those, anything else he manages to hold on to is a lucky bonus.
As long as Ken et al. have the Consensus on their side, they can live without any physical evidence, as they’ve proven (in much in the same way that certain species of fish can survive for up to 25 years with no access to a bicycle). If the evidence doesn’t support them, well, it’s the evidence’s loss.
BRAD
Much as I hate to disagree with you on a foreign blog, I’m not sure you’re allowed to state what’s going on in the mind of a fellow seeker after climate truth like Ken. Not unless you’re a licenced cognitive psychologist, communicator, or expert in exoplanets.
I thought you knew me well enough by now to realise that my reference to the scientific consensus was a little giftwrapped (or Gift eingepackt) Potlatch peace pipe to Dr Physics “solo ad argumentum” (or all alone talking to himself.)
KEN PHYSICS
Congratulations. You and I seem to have found a point of agreement in that neither of us accept that the word of the IPCC is Gospel. Should we tell Jennifer that an exception to her rule has been found, or should we slope off together and find an abandoned railway carriage where we can continue our negotiations?
Ben
Bingo.
What’s the most damaging thing a person can do to her own credibility? What single thing constitutes credibility suicide more than any other?
Ask anyone with half a brain, and he’ll say you lose credibility by:
Getting caught lying.
(So, for example, every time John Cook has been caught lying, he’s forfeited whatever credibility he may have had with the people who weren’t paying attention last time he got caught.)
Ask someone who DOESN’T have a complete cerebral hemisphere to play with, and they might say you lose credibility by:
Presenting some special solar climate model that would explain global warming as being pre-dominantly due to the Sun.
(So, for example, in their bizarro mental model, Jo Nova can only look up in impotent envy at Peter Gleick’s or Michael Mann’s or John Cook’s credibility, because Ken can’t recall John Cook ever presenting some special solar climate model that would explain global warming as being pre-dominantly due to the Sun.)
Ken srsly, srsly doesn’t understand why he’s right to say there’s ‘a huge disparity in the credibility’ of Jo Nova’s versus John Cook’s blogs, but wrong about the direction.
‘Credibility,’ mind you, as we both know, belongs to the lexicon of social proof, along with ‘consensus, respectable, serious, taken seriously, laughed off stage if you tried to present that model in the postgrad seminar i teach, every scientific body of international or national standing affirms, crank, I think you’ll find this confirmed by just about any legitimate person you ask,’ etc.
Such words are beneath the contempt of scientists, or at least they were until they were Gavaged and Mannaged and Lewaged down their throats by the modern ‘science communicator’ profession.
Science, as we both know, only cares about ‘plausibility, probability, likelihood, confidence, significance, error, deviance’ and other words whose formal meaning is (tragically) above the paygrade even of people with three quarters of a brain.
Our opponents, in their ongoing policy of malign neglect when it comes to the scientific method, have slowly but pervasively corrupted the language of public science (to the extent that it was ever pristine) by smuggling in words like ‘credibility’ for use as weapons.
And after all that effort, they can’t even get credibility RIGHT. They miseducate large swathes of the public into believing in all innocence that science is decided by credibility, and THEN what do they do? They trot out as their spokesmodels the very persons who most closely approximate the ideal of ANTI-credibility: liars and forgers and decline-hiders and tobacco millionaires.
The ineptitude is hilarious—or at least it was for the first decade.
Brad
It’s not entirely true. As linked to above, my first contact the Keeping the Conversation Civil (TM) project was on my own blog. It was also my first contact with the notion of ‘credibility’ as the precondition of taking your own arguments about a thing seriously, as it would seem anathema to thinking at all, if you thought about it, which seems to be the point — not thinking about it, but taking it for granted, and obeying. Which raises the question of *how* to become credible.
I have asked the author of the project many times what he thinks he wants to achieve by telling people that they lack ‘civility’ and ‘credibility’ — terms which seem most of the time to mean gritted teeth and missing the point. The only motivation I have been able to ascertain is that this species of believer appears precisely when there is a possibility of a dialogue between ‘publics’ — that someone who does not deserve it might be made to appear credible by someone else taking their argument seriously.
Believers also visit deniers sites to gather data on denial. The most famous example of which was in my view Professor Lewandowsky’s visit to Bishop Hill, to harvest comments, such as Geoff’s (from above), which went into the database of conspiracy theories with climate scientist Richard Betts’ comments. Psychology being a harder science than meteorology, then, Professor Lew got to assess both the civility and credibility of the climate scientist’s intervention — a feat he surpassed a few years later when he damned the entire field of climate science, which he accused of having been infected by ‘denier memes’.
That’s where the Gateway Belief model gets you. It’s a slippery slope to its own form of climate science denial. And the denial of so much more besides.
What believers want, in general, is obedience. What deniers want, in general, is debate. But the precondition of debate is some kind of equal standing that believers — on campuses, in news media, in civil society, in politics, and in “science” — are not prepared to extend to deniers. This precludes dialogue.
JENNI METCALFE
“for Skeptical Science most of these commenters made very technical comments that an average layperson would not understand.”
I think this is to misunderstand the nature of blogs. Even if a very popular blog like SkepticalScience reached a million people, that would barely amount to 0.2% of the population of the English-speaking world. But that would be a significant proportion of the interested population. A survey of readers at BishopHill, which was at the time the main British climate sceptic blog, showed that a large proportion (about 40% I think) had science PhDs. These are the people that you, or John Cook, or Dr Physics, need to persuade first. SkepticalScience is quite right to keep its comments technical.
“perhaps ‘gone bad’ was an unfortunate turn of phrase, especially given the nature of good and evil appears to be mostly subjective.”
If ‘gone bad’ was an unfortunate turn of phrase, ‘good and evil’ is hardly an improvement. I couldn’t tell you off-hand how many domain experts would agree with you that “the nature of good and evil appears to be mostly subjective.” Friedrich Nietzsche, the 17th century English Ranter Ebenezer Coppe, and certain early Christian heretics spring to mind, but none of them produced peer-reviewed articles, and their views are pretty marginal. If you don’t think that Jo Nova has “gone bad,” by disagreeing with certain views of the scientific “consensus,” what exactly do you think she has done?
Jennifer,
Is it just me, or is this post officially preaching to the Satanists? 😉
We’ve even got a token choirboy—the exceptional Mr Rice—to prove the rule!
LOL
Ben
reluctant as I am to add my reverb to this skeptical echo-chamber, your comments are brilliant so far.
“as though debate itself was apostasy.”
But there’s no “as though” about it!
Remember that the Hoofnagi—the Brothers Hoofnagle, the double-threat physiologist-lawyer symbiote—explicitly define denialism as debatalism.
Our opponents’ elision of debate —> denial makes perfect sense. They know their belief system is indefensible in a contest of ideas. If they couldn’t figure out how abortive it was a priori, they must have figured it out a posteriori, just by witnessing the utter rout that is the robust conclusion of the few debates they’ve made the mistake of agreeing to.
And OF COURSE we deniers want to debate. Apart from anything else, it’s self-serving.
We know exactly the same thing our opponents do: in an open contest of ideas, climate skepticism will beat climate catastrophism every time.
We’re not even in the same weight class.
BRAD
I think you owe it to our hostesses to explain the sense of your technical terms “Gavage,” Mannage,” “Lewage.”
“..every time John Cook has been caught lying, he’s forfeited whatever credibility he may have had…”
But is that true? The first time, I believe, was when he was found to have dressed up as an SS Officer and photographed himself as such. He wasn’t even born in 1945.
The second time of which I’m aware was when he published the Debunking Handbook with Professor Lewandowsky, (see “Lewage” above) claiming that it was a scientific answer to Jo Nova’s highly successful work. But since it was advertised as a work of propaganda, does that count as lying? Lewandowsky and his protégé Cook have never disguised the fact that their publications are political propaganda, declaring since at least 2010 that the reason for emphasising the idea of consensus was to profit from the scientifically established fact that people are more likely to believe something that most other people believe (the Pied Piper Effect.) It worked for Big Oil, why shouldn’t it work for Cook and SkepticalScience?
The third time Cook lied was when he emailed me to ask me how I liked living in France, and tell me about his French grandmother, and insisted that he had posted something he hadn’t about a survey by his co-author Professor Lewandowsky.
And the fourth time of which I’m aware was when he lied to his co-author Professor Lewandowsky about the same survey.
Sorry, I haven’t been paying attention since 2012. Perhaps Jenni and Dr Physics can fill us in?
We live in a world where Barack Obama, James Hansen and the environmental journalist Andrew Revkin have been called deniers by people like Naomi Oreskes and Greg Laden. Any use it may once have had has dissipated through over- and mis-use.
The debate has pretty much consisted of skeptics and lukewarmers like myself pointing out real or imagined errors and inconsistencies on the part of the consensus and consensus defenders call us names, deleting or calling for the deletion of our posts and comments wherever possible and the creation of hate lists or blacklists or whatever you want to call it labeling people as anti-science, mostly without providing examples of why.
Those of us on the skeptic/lukewarmer side of the fence make numerous mistakes–most of us are not climate scientists. But the best of our points have held up over the years. On the other hand, the non-climate scientists supporting the consensus have had to steadily retreat from outlandish statements without (of course) ever admitting they have done so.
I attempted to critique climate blogs some years ago, pairing up sites of similar scope and activity. My conclusion was that much of the variation was due to moderation and quality of comments and that the different policies advantaged (for the most part) skeptic blogs.
Jo Nova is not anti-science. She is a partisan who seizes on the sections of science that support her position. And there is no shortage of published science that does make a skeptical position reasonable to hold. Much of it in the various Assessment Reports of the IPCC.
As this is exactly what SkS does, it seems a bit cheekier to disparage Nova’s efforts than to talk about the Sun and the Earth and their various rotationary roles.
BEN PILE
Correct me if I”m wrong, but I think we can all sympathise with JENNI’s disappointment that there is so little cross-fertilisation at “climate” blogs. In order to aid any future research, I’d like to indicate a few blogs where “pro-science” bloggers and denialists used to battle it out in all fairness.
First stop, the Conversation, a site for university types read by several million qualified people, financed by Nottingham University among others. If you go to
https://theconversation.com/profiles/john-cook-3280/articles
You will find 35 articles by John Cook, founder of SkepticalScience. And under these articles, believers and sceptics used to discuss more or less amicably the pros and cons, before the Conversation changed the rules.
When I wrote the above, I knew that the Conversation had established a policy a year or two ago of banning all comments that didn’t agree with the “consensus.” So I clicked at random on a Cook article from the past (2016):
https://theconversation.com/a-brief-history-of-fossil-fuelled-climate-denial-61273
where I was pretty sure that I would find the kind of joust that Jenni regrets doesn’t exist.
What I didn’t know was that the Conversation (financed by the University of Nottingham, among others) seems to have retrospectively edited comments.
The article indicates 108 comments, but only about 40 are visible, including a few “denialist” ones from, among others, our cliscep brother Paul Matthews. The other 70 or so have been removed, and replaced by the announcement:
”This comment has been automatically flagged for inspection by a moderator.”
Note: not “removed,” or “censored,” but simply “flagged.” Four years later, we are still waiting for the moderator to inspect the comments and judge whether they should be removed or not. In the meantime, we can’t see them.
JENNI
Your research seems to imply that climate believers and sceptics are incapable of interacting. There is evidence that this is not true. This evidence is being suppressed by a site financed by your university. I suggest that, in order to further your research into the possibility of interaction between climate believers and deniers, you suggest to your university that they encourage the Conversation, a website which they finance, to stop their censorship and allow the world access to the conversation which is happening ((or has happened) at the Conversation.
Because really, I can’t think of anything similar which has happened in Europe since abut 1933. I mean – dozens of universities financing an unelected blogsite, which takes a position on a particular interpretation of predictions of future global temperatures and censors alternative views. It’s not as if the Conversation has won 30% of the vote in the Reichstag, after all.
I am Brigitte, not Jenni, but I THINK Jenni’s research did no “imply that climate believers and sceptics are incapable of interacting”. It showed that commenters underneath two different blogs showed little interaction between themselves as commenters, that is to say, similar patterns of commenter behaviour were found underneath each blog.
Geoff,
I wonder if the reason you say it’s difficult to perceive John Cook’s forfeiture of his credibility every time he’s caught lying might not be that you only have to catch him once and the hymen of the temple is rent asunder, and the loom of Arachne herself cannot revirginate it in time for Cook’s *next* lie.
At the risk of stating the obvious, this model is analogous to Futurama, when Fry was struck amidships by a beam of flouro green radiation. “Ow! My sperm!” he whined. Then the inguinal ray hit him again and he shrugged, “Didn’t hurt that time.”
You remind us—and future historians—that:
> Lewandowsky and his protégé Cook have never disguised the fact that their publications are political propaganda, declaring since at least 2010 that the reason for emphasising the idea of consensus was to profit from the scientifically established fact that people are more likely to believe something that most other people believe (the Pied Piper Effect.) It worked for Big Oil, why shouldn’t it work for Cook and SkepticalScience?
Thank you for bearing witness.
This is the point where Lew & sons officially declare the undeclared war they’ve been waging on science for years.
All of modern science, all three centuries plus of it, is predicated, implicitly and too obviously for words, on the abhorrence of any such stratagem. That’s why scientists (real ones, in ALL the non-pathological fields) neither fill in opinion surveys nor fill them out. That’s why the only people’s opinions you’ll find quantified and percentagized and histogrammed when you google ‘scientific consensus’ happen to be quote-unquote scientists working in the same field who happen to be working on the same one hypotheses.
Of all the hypotheses that have been formulated and tested and discarded or confirmed in the history of modern science, the ONLY ONE we’ve been asked to believe in the basis of 9 out of 10 cats is AGW, albeit phrased differently each time (but close enough for government work).
If it were scientifically legal to persuade or “communicate science” using the Pied Piper effect then googling ‘scientific consensus’ would lead you on a virtual tour of the history of scientific hypotheses, MILLIONS of them, each of which triumphantly colonized the collective mind of the scientists on the back of an opinion survey.
It doesn’t, because it’s ILLEGAL in science to win arguments by peer pressure.
This is what concerns me about the tendency in this discussion towards what I call ‘false balance.’ It is exemplified in Tom’s otherwise brilliant remarks above:
“As this is exactly what SkS does,” Tom writes of what Jo Nova does.
They may (or may not) be equal and opposite partisans in a scientific-article pillow-fight. HOWEVER, Jo Nova has never to my knowledge gone out of her way to subvert the public understanding of HOW SCIENCE WORKS by pretending opinion polls on scientists are any part of that process. John Cook has rarely let a week go by WITHOUT effortfully propagating that anti-scientific myth.
So Ken is right about one thing (yes, it’s that time of day), after some edits for basic scientific literacy:
“there’s a risk that some might interpret [Tom’s comments] as implying some kind of equivalence, when – in my view – there is a vast difference in terms of the truthfulness of the claims made by the two sites” about *the workings of science,* a topic that make that of *the workings of the climate” seem jejune, trivial, academic and soporific.
There’s a risk that merely by elevating anti-science blogs like SkS to a position of *comparability* with science blogs like Jo’s, such comparisons may give the impression that SkS is basically a trustworthy resource put out by more-or-less honest human beings, whereas in fact there is a radical chasm between the essential probity of Jo Nova’s blog and the deceitful, demagogic agenda of John Cook’s.
The equivalentist doctrine can thus only do the public a grave disservice, by whitewashing the deceptive function of one blog while reducing the other to its level.
It’s high time we stopped giving SkS and its believalist stablemates the oxygen of what scientifically-unsophisticated people like to call “scientific credibility.” There can be no room at the grownups’ table for bad actors.
Professor Nerlich,
In respect of Professor Metcalfe’s comment regarding the importance of communicating the consensus science ‘simply and clearly’, and your subsequent comment alluding to the distinction between ‘science communicator and activist’, I would like, if I may, to say the following regarding the question of clarity and its role in forming said distinction.
Back in the 1950s the greatest existential threat facing the Western world was perceived to emanate from the Soviet Union. There was considerable uncertainty regarding the scale of that threat, since little was known about the size of the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal. The hawks within the US government chose to apply the precautionary principle (not yet referred to as such) and assumed that the Soviets’ arsenal was such that a massive increase in the US arsenal would be required in order to provide an adequate deterrence. Those who lobbied for such an increase wished to leave nothing to chance, and so ensured that policy document NSC-68 overstated the case. As Dean Acheson, then Secretary of State for the Truman government, wrote later:
“The purpose of NSC-68 was to so bludgeon the mass mind of the top government that not only could the President make a decision, but that the decision would be carried out… If we made our points clearer than the truth, we did not differ from most other educators and could hardly do otherwise.”
So my answer to the question regarding when a communicator becomes an activist is as follows: You have overstepped the line once your message has become clearer than the truth.
As a footnote to history, the hawks got their way and, as a result, they massively increased the level of existential threat that the world now faces. But that is the sort of thing that can happen when messages become clearer than the truth. Let us hope that IPCC AR5, and those engaged in climate science communication, are not so ‘clear’ that they emulate NCS-68 by encouraging inappropriate levels of investment in a course of action that actually heightens the risk.
I did not make the distinction between science communicator and activist. That distinction was made by Barry. In my view making that distinction is fraught with difficulties and there have been many debates about science/activist issues in the past, which I really don’t want to revisit. As for communicating mainstream science. I think there comes a point when something really is mainstream and findings are pretty clear. Not communicating that mainstream science would be unethical I think. But in the end its a judgement call and it all depends on whom you trust to speak ‘the truth’ whatever that may be, a word by the way that I would avoid in this situation, as there are still uncertainties in some corners of climate science and everybody knows that there are and nobody is hiding them and science communicators are also aware of them them…https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0606-6.
I go further than that. Much further than that. I explain my disappointment that blogs are the ONLY place where there is any conversation at all. I also explain that debate is possible, and indeed happens, when the possibility of such a discussion is not detected and then disrupted by Consensus Enforcers, but that they are prolific. I also hint at the possibility that academic interests too frequently tend to indulge the impulse to control what they observe. Studies from the last decade on the media, for instance such as James Painter from the Reuters Institute “for” “Journalism” at Oxford University, were used to argue for putting more pressure on editors and press regulators. It is exclusive academic signatures which appear on LSE-headed notepaper when unauthorised opinions have found their way onto Radio 4’s Today Programme, urging the broadcaster not to ever let it happen again, lest it “risk” lending the non “credible” speaker undue “credibility” — especially when that speaker is sitting opposite a climate “scientist”.
Hence I suggest that if Jenni is disappointed by the dearth of productive debate, she should shift the focus of her research. But I also suggest that this is likely to produce the result that her research is no longer supported.
There have been interesting experiments with conversation and debate. Though it is interesting that the notion of debate has to be regarded as ‘experimental’ at this stage in history. The Dutch government for a time financed Marcel Crok’s Climate Dialog project. https://www.mwenb.nl/climate-dialogue/
Also noteworthy, when Donald Trump took office, outrage was provoked from the suggestion within his ranks that there should be a red-team-blue-team approach to help determine the USA’s way forward. It came to nought, however — perhaps because of the uncooperative nature of just one of those teams. The consequence was the unilateral decision to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement, exposing and deepening the geopolitical fissures that the UNFCCC process was seemingly intended to overcome.
It is not deniers who deny the possibility of dialogue across lines of disagreement.
John,
The more interesting issue (in my view) is not whether or not they made a decision under uncertainty that ended up (in retrospect) being one that we might now not have made, but whether or not the uncertainty was justified. Did they really not know enough to make a more informed decision, or was the supposed uncertainty used to justify their preferred option?
Ben,
Can I clarify what you seem to be suggesting? Are you actually suggesting that you would like there to be more debate/dialogue between those who disagree about this topic?
Geoff, I forgot to tag you in that reply. I have hit the reply button, but I am not sure this comment will appear under that one, either.
Thinking some more about what Painter’s “academic” motivation was… I can remember briefly wondering at the time if his nervousness about the press exposing the dynastic nature of environmentalism — Painter had married into the Tickell family, every member of which since Sir Crispin, who persuaded Thatcher of the cause, is on the climate gravy train. The British upper classes had perhaps at last found a useful role in the world: saving it. But that conceit is no newer than hand-wringing about the “risks” that might be created if “some might interpret” words published by a free press, or latterly, a free broadcast media in the wrong way. That has always been the basis on which the press and autonomous public institutions have been regulated, and/or ultimately been absorbed into either the state or Church.
The vulnerable minds of the lower orders are always the concern of their superiors — well since the former learned to read, anyhow. Literacy is the great leveller. Science is nearly as levelling, though it was the late Robert May who died last week, who turned that ethic — on the word of no one — into ‘respect the facts’. If you read his words carefully, followed by the words of his successor, it turns out that they believe scientific literacy to be problematic. It *risks* (that word, again), the unauthorised expression of opinion as well as the unauthorised development of hypotheses and technologies. Hence, the emphasis on *institutional* science as the custodian of the facts (which are to be respected), rather than on the scientific method, hitherto the leveller.
President Rees put his money where his mouth is, and made a bet with Steven Pinker that by the end of this year, either bioerror or bioterror will have caused more than a million deaths in a single event. There are many conspiracy theorists working that angle right now, betting on the origins of covid-19 in a Wuhan laboratory, though the body count is still well shy of his prognostication.
But even if Rees wins his bet, and the conspiracy theorists are right, it will not be because science was opened up to the hoi polloi, in an atmosphere of political transparency, debate, freedom, and the rest. Those are not the characteristics of the CCP. Rees makes an argument for *not* doing science, *against* scientific literacy, for shutting the doors and closing the gate. It’s too dangerous. Plus ca change.
If it’s not the case that institutional science is antithetical to science, it is arguably that high-minded pompous pricks *are*. I think we should be wary of aristocracies, and we should be free to attack their claim to be custodians of the facts, even if it “risks” some people getting the wrong end of the stick. Better that than just that, Ken — using the stick to beat people with. Clear enough for you?
Not really, at least not in the sense that I can see it as an answer to my question (I’m not quite sure if you were trying to answer my question, though). FWIW, I find calling people pr*cks quite early in a discussion to be a particularly poor way of encouraging debate/dialgue. YMMV, of course.
ATTP: “I find calling people pr*cks quite early in a discussion to be a particularly poor way of encouraging debate/dialgue.”
I see that you would say that. But I saw you speak about unauthorised opinions, and that you have for a long time now, emphasised “credibility”. I don’t believe the concept to be any more *civil*.
The word “prick” has a long standing historical usage, particular to debates of this kind. From the first English translation of the Bible, since we are discussing literacy vs authority, after all:
— And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks. —
Some of us are resistant to being goaded (pricked) into deference and obedience by this word “credibility”, and will not be cowed by hand-wringing about the ‘risks’ created by the expression of unauthorised opinions. I think that resistance is beyond your ken, Ken, as are very many things that self-appointed clergy speak for. I don’t care for your view of what does or does not make for a good conversation: I have seen you and your colleagues sabotage very many of them.
Yes, obviously. I wouldn’t expect anything different.
Quite possibly, but I’m not sure why that somehow justifies you doing the same. Each to their own, of course.
Well, yes, I can see that you have no interest in credibility.
Briggitte :
I do. And I don’t think it is so difficult. Moreover, I think that if it is the case that not communicating […] mainstream science would be unethical, it would be unethical, by the same token, to fail point out that ‘mainstream science’ appears to be heavily influenced by ideological, rather than scientific precepts.
Here, I take a look at Gavin Schmidt’s claim that the danger of climate change is that all human industrial society has been built on the basis of an extremely narrow range of climate conditions, and that thus it will fall apart when it’s slightly warmer, wetter, whatever. I also suggest that this seemingly highly scientistic perspective –leaving aside the eco-mysticism — is a framing that is particular to the late 20th, early 21st century political landscape. The point being that ‘risk’ is a recently politicised concept, to which institutional science, cast as “mainstream science”, has been recruited. “Science communicators”, then, often turn out to be fear mongers.
http://www.climate-resistance.org/2015/01/advocating-the-science-cake-and-politicising-it.html
This is pertinent to the research in question, because criticism of it posited that to give ‘false balance’ lends undue ‘credibility’ to a claim — that research and debate that failed to prefigure, or failed to discriminate prior to comparing mere venues for discussion, let alone the arguments produced in them, creates *risks*. Risks, which it falls on institutional science to manage, of course.
Professor Nerlich,
Thank you for your response. I apologise if you felt I was misattributing but I only said you had ‘alluded’ to the distinction, which you clearly had.
On more important matters, you are quite correct in emphasising the important role that uncertainty plays when evaluating the epistemic value of a consensus. It is in uncertain situations that false clarity is often sought to support the decision-making process. As for the decisions required by our understanding of climate science, there are still significant uncertainties that are central to them. For example, I could cite the wide range of uncertainty in the stated range of ECS, an uncertainty that could hardly be referred to as existing “in some corners of climate science”. Furthermore, the claim that “nobody is hiding them and science communicators are also aware of them” could be missing the point. Sometimes hiding uncertainty can result in a clarity beyond truth, and sometimes the promotion of uncertainty has that effect. For example, please see:
https://www.jvds.nl/reports/PhDThesisJeroenvanderSluijs1997.pdf
Indeed, one has to be very careful making statements regarding the presence of uncertainties in climate science. By making such claims it is just too easy to run the risk of being clearer than the truth.
Professor Rice,
Thank you for your question.
The uncertainty regarding the size of the Soviet arsenal in the 1950s was profound and real. I cite NSC-68 as an example because it was an ostensibly scientific document, providing advice to policy makers, that had sought to play down the uncertainties in order to influence the decisions made. The false certitude expressed in the document, combined with a rhetoric that was quite out of place, led to it being an instrument of advocacy rather than just an attempt to communicate the necessary information. For further information you might wish to consult ‘Armageddon and Paranoia – The Nuclear Confrontation’, by Rodric Braithwaite, former British ambassador to Moscow.
Ben
The Reply button doesn’t work. I didn’t know that about James Painter. I suppose for the Tickells and their kind, saving the planet from the people on it is a logical extension of the enclosures and World War One, which links to John’s point about World War Three..
I see from the links in Jenni’s paper that Brigitte has written a whole paper
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17524032.2014.981560
about comments to a Monbiot article, the one where he said the cold weather was due to global warming. Both you and I commented there, but I don’t think Brigitte noticed us. But her article is not about what anyone said, more the way they say it and why, and what can be done about it.
We know what the Guardian has done about it – ban all comments which contradict the Guardian’s view of “what the science says.” Brigitte’s modestly optimistic conclusions about on-line debate have therefore been rendered pointless. I wonder if anyone’s written a paper about it.
Sorry about the reply button, but I have no access to the system… The article you refer to was based on corpus linguistics, so did not home in on individual commenters; the system did not even reveal them. And, hélas, science, even applied linguistics, is a process. Findings are not timeless and universal. Things change. These findings pertained to this corpus extracted from a newspaper at that time and gave an insight into what happened in comments at that time.
ATTP: “Quite possibly, but I’m not sure why that somehow justifies you doing the same. ”
I’m not. And I never have. I rarely comment anywhere. Even at Cliscep.
Brigitte
Thanks for that speedy response. You say (May 2, 2020 at 10:10 am)
and you support the statement with a link to “Climate Uncertainty Communication” by Ho and Budescu. We can’t read the article, but the Abstract begins:
“The consequences of global warming will be dire..”
I’m sure we can all agree that one of the “corners of climate science” where uncertainty is lurking is the question of what the consequences of global warming will be. The IPCC doesn’t know whether a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere will lead to a dire 4°C rise or a barely noticeable 1.5°C. You may be right that science communicators are aware of these uncertainties, but they don’t seem to be doing a very good job of communicating them. In fact Ho and Budescu go out of their way to deny awareness of the uncertainties in the very first sentence of their paper about communicating uncertainties. Climate science communication has a long way to go.
I think the article just set out at the beginning what is least uncertain, but yes, the expression thereof could have been more circumspect. The following is possibly interesting ““If you were going to describe a situation that is the prototype for the highest and most complex type of uncertainty, you couldn’t come up with anything more appropriate than climate change,” Budescu says. There are unknowns about the natural processes that drive climate, and uncertainties about the actual climate science. There are sociological uncertainties, including how fast the population will grow, and the environmental, geopolitical and economic consequences of that growth. And perhaps most susceptible to a loose interpretation of “likely” and “unlikely” are the uncertainties posed by some people who question the existence and causes of climate change altogether.“In terms of climate change … there are people who are using this notion of ‘uncertainty’ strategically,” he says. “Basically, as a justification to do nothing. To me that is the equivalent of, ‘We don’t fully understand cancer, therefore, let’s not treat anyone until we do.’”
https://www.apa.org/members/content/budescu-communicate-uncertainty
Brigitte May 2, 2020 at 1:37 pm
Very true. I wonder if ATTP and John Cook could be persuaded to support you on that?
John,
I don’t think anyone really disagrees that scientific advisors should aim to provide a reasonable representation of our best understanding, which would include aspects about which there is a good deal of certainty, and aspects that are still very uncertain. We can clearly learn from previous occasions when this hasn’t worked well. However, we should also be careful of assuming that a previous occasion when this hasn’t worked implies something about what might be happening now (for example).
Professor Rice,
“However, we should also be careful of assuming that a previous occasion when this hasn’t worked implies something about what might be happening now…”
That’s a fair point. But were you making it when Oreskes chose to cite the misdemeanors of the tobacco industry in the 1960s to add credence to the idea that oil companies have more recently been playing the same trick of gaming the uncertainties? It isn’t a matter of making assumptions based upon a previous occasion; rather it is a matter of recognizing the similarity of circumstances and so paying more respect to the notion that history can repeat itself.
But you turn uncertainty into privilege. If uncertainty can be used nefariously, to argue against a thing, it can be used nefariously for a thing.
It turns out the most and least informed theoreticians of the precautionary principle want the same thing. From Taleb to Thunberg, “I want to you panic”. In the most charitable form, this is an injunction to suspend judgement, the folly of which we may now see unfolding across the world, to most of its populations’ hardship, if not utter ruin, but to the glee and elevation of the precautionists.
The cancer analogy is hackneyed. There is climatic equivalent to cancer. And such arguments that hypothesise something equivalent *always* rest in the abstract geometry of tail risks.
*Risks* again, right… Censorship is no less a risk management tool than is emissions reduction.
Obey and you don’t get cancer… Speak out against the anologisers and you actively promote cancer… We can’t have Youtubers contradicting expert analogies… The BBC must not be a vehicle for unauthorised replies to daft analogies… We must not let non-credible replies to experts’ incredible analogies be aired in public without a health warning, if they must be allowed at all… lest we all get cancer.
As someone commented the other day on Twitter to his fellow academics… Biopolitics is a critique, not a manual. But maybe it isn’t.
“There is climatic equivalent to cancer. ” — was meant to be — “There is NO climatic equivalent to cancer. “
John,
I’ve never had a discussion with Naomi Oreskes about this. I agree with you that we should be aware of history and that it can repeat itself. My point is mostly that one should be careful of suggesting that since something has happened before, it is happening now. I’ll add that your example appears to be of a document produced by a government policy department, which may well have had some kind of underlying agenda. This is why – in my view – it’s important for scientists to communicate carefully about our best understanding and why they should be doing their best to properly represent the uncertainties.
ATTP, you are perfectly willing to engage in conversation here and at CliScep. But you do not at your own blog. Why is what John says worth responding to here but not at your own place of business?
Tom,
In what way am I not willing to engage in conversation at my place of business?
That’s a strange thing to say, I have to admit. I mean what Tom said.
Brigitte,
I suspect it’s a reference to the moderation on my blog, which some – I think – regard as stifling conversation.
Brigitte
I do appreciate your willingness to engage in a civilised discussion with us sceptics, but I’m afraid of the conversation turning sour, as has happened so often in the past twelve years in discussion with defenders of the consensus or orthodox position on climate change. I’ll try to explain:
You say, of the sentence I quoted from Ho and Budescu: “The consequences of global warming will be dire..”
If “it will be dire” is the least uncertain thing that can be said about global warming, what in Gaia’s name would an uncertain statement look like? If you wanted to say something certain about the science, wouldn’t you say something that a scientist might say, even something that scientist has said, in a scientific paper?
The article about Professor Budescu which you quote from has got me even more confused. Like you, he is interested in linguistic analysis, and the article (not Budescu) says at one point:
The author of the article clearly doesn’t know what sceptics (or deniers) think, and apparently doesn’t know the meaning of the word “refute.” And this is on the site of the American Psychological Association. Finally, the claim that he has conducted a survey among 13,000 people who have read IPCC AR4 merely confirms that we are out with the fairies here.
Which leads me to formulate (to myself) the question: “Why are you telling me this?”
The moment you ask yourself this question, even if you don’t blurt it out as I have, tends to be a turning point, in my experience. It’s like the moment you realise that there are no Nigerian princes with inheritances they’d like you to have.
I have huge differences of opinion with Ben, but sometimes I think he’s just further along the learning curve than the rest of us.
Professor Rice,
Okay. But we must be clear that at no stage have I used the argument that “since something has happened before, it is happening now.” Indeed, I expressed the hope that it wasn’t.
You are right regarding the political origination of NCS-68, since it was written by the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff. Nevertheless, it was supposed to be based upon the best intelligence available at the time and, although it would probably be a stretch to refer to it as a science-based document, it was supposed to reflect the USA’s best scientific understanding of the Soviets’ weapons capability. The intended audience had a right to assume that it was factually accurate and reflected the actual levels of uncertainty, notwithstanding the policy advice contained therein.
John,
Fair enough.
Brigitte, quoting Budescu:
“In terms of climate change … there are people who are using this notion of ‘uncertainty’ strategically. Basically, as a justification to do nothing. To me that is the equivalent of, ‘We don’t fully understand cancer, therefore, let’s not treat anyone until we do.’”
https://www.apa.org/members/content/budescu-communicate-uncertainty
Then Budescu isn’t very good at this. It’s not equivalent, not remotely. It’s closer to: we don’t have ANY convincing evidence that what we’ve got is cancer, nor is there any reason to think the proposed chemotherapy won’t kill us faster than whatever we do have, so let’s not commit to a regimen of it just yet.
The oncoanalogy is both a tawdry, cynical attempt to bypass rationality by evoking just about the most universal, emotionally potent boogeyman imaginable, and (perhaps worse than that) plain invalid.
It’s torn to even smaller shreds here:
https://cliscep.com/2016/04/24/dear-onco-analogists-your-imbecility-is-showing/
Back to this strawman argument nobody has ever made:
“‘We don’t fully understand cancer, therefore, let’s not treat anyone until we do.’”
Budescu presumably would like to see this (imaginary) weapon removed from the inactivist arsenal by keeping quiet about uncertainties.
Recall Stephen Schneider’s advice to climate scientists:
> On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.
To a scientist, Schneider’s philosophy above is an unconscionable insult.
Scientists adhere to radically higher standards of integrity that Schneider demands. Scientists behave more like Feynman:
> I would like to add something that’s not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the laymen when you’re talking as a scientist. . . . I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is [not just] not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, [an integrity] that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.
But what of *climate* scientists?
You yourself assure us that *no climate scientist* these days would “make little mention of any doubts we might have”:
> But in the end its a judgement call and it all depends on whom you trust to speak ‘the truth’ whatever that may be, a word by the way that I would avoid in this situation, as there are still uncertainties in some corners of climate science and everybody knows that there are and nobody is hiding them and science communicators are also aware of them them
Which is good to hear.
Further reassurance can be found in the kind of professional awards that climate scientists not only aspire to, but win:
So perhaps climate science gets a bad rap. Perhaps its practicioners don’t really deserve their notoriety as hiders-of-declines, hiders-of-adverse-r-squareds and hiders-of-uncertainties.
Perhaps it’s Feynmanian ethics that prevail in cli sci, and Schneiderian morality of compromise has long since been repudiated and left in the past, or left in Pachauri’s Proverbial Dustbin, or whatever. Where it belongs.
Wait, sorry, I misread something—that list above should say…
Past Winners of The Stephen H. Schneider Award For Outstanding Climate Science Communication
2018 Dr. Katherine Hayhoe
2017 Dr. Michael Mann Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science, Penn State University
2016 Dr. Naomi Oreskes Professor of History of Science and affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University
….
Brigitte,
Ken Rice has banned most if not all of the skeptics present in this thread from his own blog.
I think that’s what Tom was referring to when he mentioned Ken’s unwillingness to have a discussion at his place of business.
If his actions are any guide, Ken certainly welcomes debate, he just prefers not to do it with anyone who disagrees with him.
Ken,
Have you found calling people deniers quite early in a discussion to be a particularly good way of discouraging debate/dialogue?
I got cancer once – skin cancer – which often happens to English people who’ve lived in the tropics as kids. There was a lot in the papers about it at the time, so I read about it, had two operations, and didn’t think much more about it. Then recently I read that the version I’d had – malignant metastasic melanomas – was fatal in 97% of cases. It’s highly unlikely I’m alive.
Luckily I knew nothing about Bayesian priors (I still don’t) and “97%” didn’t have the awesome significance then that it has now. But I expect that the mention of cancer may have unconsciously sparked off my rather catty response to Brigitte just now.
The unconscious is a funny thing (witness Ben’s slip of the finger that left out a “not” in a recent comment.) The standard work on the subject of slips and errors used to be Freud’s “Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” but the Wiki article on “Mruphy’s Law” makes no mention of it. Freud has been practically effaced from our collective culture like some vulgar denier squashed by a cognitive psychologist.
I wonder if climate alarmism might not be some giant mass academic slip of the tongue?
My sense is that this would indeed be a good way of discouraging debate/dialogue.
Professor Rice, your name is attached to one of a group of exceedingly poor papers written specifically to shore up the idea of universal consensus among scientists. Of course you never refer to it, quote from it or even acknowledge its existence, something that might lead us to suspect you’re aware of its inferior quality.
But what never ceases to amaze and amuse is how these discussions never refer to actual surveys of climate scientists conducted over the last two decades. Those surveys show that roughly 66% of published climate scientists agree with the statement that ‘half or more of the current warming is caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.’
This narrow consensus is surely enough for research and academic purposes–and it’s enough for us lukewarmers. I would agree with it. The fact that you must push propaganda samizdat papers creating a 97% consensus out of whole cloth is more evidence–evidence that you lack confidence in the actual science, which is far more conservative than your claims.
Those of us in opposition take perhaps a clearer view of what published science tells the world. That we still do not know what sensitivity of the atmosphere to a doubling of the concentrations of CO2 may be. That our best take on the impacts of climate change this century are eminently addressable by current technology. That it is increasingly clear that sea level rise will not exceed and probably not approach the 59cm put forward as an upper bound in projections by the IPCC, and their optimum bet for global average temperature rise of 2C above pre-industrial guesses is likely to hold sway.
But yeah, keep swiping away at those of us in disagreement. It works wonders for the American president–it may work wonders for you too.
[…] we got here throughout a long, ranty blog post at CliScep that took nice offense to current blog post and study by Jennifer Metcalfe that examined feedback at SkepticalScience and JoNova to see how […]
[…] we came across a long, ranty blog post at CliScep that took great offense to recent blog post and study by Jennifer Metcalfe that examined comments at SkepticalScience and JoNova […]
[…] we came across a long, ranty blog post at CliScep that took great offense to recent blog post and study by Jennifer Metcalfe that examined comments at SkepticalScience and JoNova to see how […]
[…] we came across a long, ranty blog post at CliScep that took great offense to recent blog post and study by Jennifer Metcalfe that examined comments at SkepticalScience and JoNova to see how […]
[…] we came across a long, ranty blog post at CliScep that took great offense to recent blog post and study by Jennifer Metcalfe that examined comments at SkepticalScience and JoNova to see how […]
[…] we came across a long, ranty blog post at CliScep that took great offense to recent blog post and study by Jennifer Metcalfe that examined comments at SkepticalScience and JoNova […]
[…] we came across a long, ranty blog post at CliScep that took great offense to recent blog post and study by Jennifer Metcalfe that examined comments at SkepticalScience and JoNova to see how […]
Tom,
you say of Professor Rice’s sixteen-coauthored ‘Consensus on Consensus’ paper [CoC] (and, apparently, of one or more sequels he’s also attached his name to) that
> Of course you never refer to it, quote from it or even acknowledge its existence, something that might lead us to suspect you’re aware of its inferior quality.
Strictly speaking, he *has* been known to attempt apologias of his consensuology work in blog posts, at least where necessary to make some show of standing up for its honor against withering critiques by academics like Professor Richard Tol.
What he’s *never* done, no matter how sedulously beseeched, is to explain to us what the scholarly or (God forbid) *scientific* purpose of the CoC paper was—and therefore why the salary he received for wasting his University time on it, pro rata, should NOT be confiscated in the name of the people of Scotland as being the proceeds of embezzlement.
I’d like to include here some links to that simple question—what was the scholarly or scientific rationale for carrying out the CoC study?—as posed by myself and others to Professor Rice during our conversations at CliScep, a question he’s never indicated an ability to answer, not even with the lamest boilerplate.
I won’t, though, because I suspect pasting 20-plus URLs into my comment would result in a period of quarantine that makes COVID-19 look like a 24-hour touch of gastro.
Makes ya think, is all.
You add:
> The fact that you must push propaganda samizdat papers creating a 97% consensus out of whole cloth is more evidence–evidence that you lack confidence in the actual science, which is far more conservative than your claims.
The fake graph produced by Naomi Oreskes for use in the 2015 film Merchants of Doubt, in which an endorsement rate of 235 out of 928 is misrepresented as *928* (100%) is presumably evidence that Ken has no monopoly on the lack of courage in one’s own convictions. Apparently the insecurity goes all the way up the totem-pole.
> But what never ceases to amaze and amuse is how these discussions never refer to actual surveys of climate scientists conducted over the last two decades.
It ceased to amaze or amuse me years ago! I wish I were so easily surprised and entertained.
🙂
I suspect Professor Rice has no idea quite how serious his credibility problem is.
Who was it who said what a useful gift it would be to see oneself as others do?
Ken,
> you start to moderate some commenters more quickly than others
I’ve always said you rely on prejudice, not policy. Thanks for being open about it.
> (i.e., you get a sense if a comment is made in good faith, or not).
As anyone capable of skepticism understands, a “sense” like that is useless, and is exactly the kind of noise a scientist would know better than to mistake for a signal.
How can I explain this to you, Ken? See, unlike the traditional 5 senses, your newly-developed Spider Sense does NOT come with a mechanism for feedback, learning or refinement. There’s nothing anyone can do or say to stop you fooling yourself.
If you could open an envelope *after* deciding that a comment was bona fide or mala fide, in which was somehow written The Truth as to whether or not you were RIGHT, then perhaps you could have honed this intuition over time.
But you can’t so you couldn’t and you never did. Alas, you’ll go to the grave not knowing just how inerrantly and dependably wrong your psychic hunches were.
I know how central faith is to the climate movement, but take some friendly advice: worry less about our bad faith and more about your bad science.
> If you do moderate strongly, you will then end up with comments that tend to be amongst people who can at least satisfy the moderation policy
You don’t FOLLOW a moderation policy, Ken. You make up the rules as you go along.
Principles aren’t principles if you adopt them pro re nata. You have to define them in advance, then follow them EVEN WHEN YOU DON’T WANT TO.
Please tell me you’re better at astronomy than ethics.
> However, the strong moderation did preferentially tend to encourage those who strongly questioned the anthropogenic nature of climate change to stay away
So what encouraged me to stay away? I’ve never “strongly questioned the anthropogenic nature of climate change.”
> I could also comment on my experiences posting comments on “skeptical” blogs, but I’ll leave that for the moment.
You won’t? Phew. THANK YOU for keeping the injustices we “skeptics” perpetrate upon you just between us.
[Readers may find your stillborn threat reminiscent of the kind of 90-lb weakling who’s constantly telling bullies he knows karate, but chooses not to use it. Let me assure them that Ken is nothing of the sort! His arsenal of anecdata about skeptical behavior would, if unleashed, fatally discredit his opponents—so thank Gandhi he’s so Christ-like.]
Ken,
> My sense is that this would indeed be a good way of discouraging debate/dialogue.
I thought you’d think that. Without wishing to sound culturist, it’s all about culture. You’ve been raised the stereotypically UK way, to keep your nastiness to yourself.
Unfortunately it takes about 30 seconds for us to realize you THINK of us as deniers. Your politeness is therefore a waste of psychic energy, hypertension and gastric juices. There’s no point bottling up ugly thoughts unless your bottle is actually opaque.
What some people grasp (including no end of British people—again, I didn’t mean to put down an entire archipelago) is that hate speech is not only acceptable, it’s positively morally incumbent on us, when we hate someone.
Dialogue and debate will only work if you start being sincere, Ken.
So let it out.
Then I’ll be able to ask you the following question—purely rhetorically, of course; you’ll never answer it correctly:
“denier OF WHAT?”
I think this discussion has now run its course, become rather personal, repetitive and unproductive. It might be better to stop…
Brigitte
> I think this discussion has now run its course, become rather personal, repetitive and unproductive.
Hint received 🙂 I think we’d sort of given up on you, and it’s great you’re back. For my part I’m far more interested in seeing your take on what’s already been said (upthread, by Ben and Geoff especially) than in repeating myself.
> It might be better to stop…
*I’m* happy to stop, especially if it gives you and Jennifer a chance to resume 😉
I have to confess that my head swims just looking at the long comments. If somebody would be so kind and summarise in three bullet points what it’s all about, how it’s different to all previous discussions and how it relates to Jenni’s article, I would be most grateful. At the moment I have three work deadlines that have nothing to do with climate change and I have to give these a chance. I find concentrating under conditions of lockdown actually quite hard, especially since most of the day is spent on the phone or similar with relatives who can only hear your voice etc etc….and I don’t even have small children in the house!
I’m South African. I don’t think we’re noted for keeping our nastiness to ourselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NTcndxuwOA
[…] we came across a long, ranty blog post at CliScep that took great offense to recent blog post and study by Jennifer Metcalfe that examined comments at SkepticalScience and JoNova to see how […]
Ken, I should have known you were no true Scotsman! I withdraw wholeheartedly any accusations of politeness. I had a Sethafrican boss once. A couple of years ago, the papers said a sentencing judge had called him “abrasive.” Funny, I thought he was an absolute pussycat.
Brigitte: “If somebody would be so kind and summarise in three bullet points what it’s all about”
*All* of it? No chance! Some essence, maybe… (How did you ever manage to wade through CiF comment threads, if this here mere snippet of a thread is too much?!)
1. Countless studies have been done on ‘blogs’ by researchers, blogs being the only place there is any possibility at all of ‘dialogue’. Academic research misses this in its emphasis on blogs, and it typically misses the substance of blog discussions, proceeding from obvious preconceptions and prior framings of the ‘bad’ side.
2. There is no substantive difference between lowly blog commentary and “science communicators” verbiage from the very top of global institutional science. For instances, the late Bob May, as president of the Royal Society did not hold back on angry conspiracy theories, and the late Rajendra K. Pachauri compared Bjorn Lomborg to Hitler. Moreover, though hurtful words are more common on the Internet, the consequences for stepping out of line with respect to ‘publics’ in fora such as broadcast media, academe, civil society or politics are *far* graver than being called names.
3. There is A questionable aspect of so much research emphasis on blogs as somehow apart from other fora. Let’s call it ‘hand-wringing’, consistent with official concerns that unregulated discussion ‘risks’ the promotion of seemingly harmful ‘misinformation’ (again, no matter what the actual substance of the conversations happens to be). The good faith of the research imperatives, coming from the same agenda as the rest of it, therefore cannot be taken at face value, even if the researchers themselves show no obvious malign intent. Research — and more clearly, research budgets — has its own ideological agenda, whether or not it is clearly stated. Look closely at ESRC’s mission statements. They are all but identical to the Green Party’s. Why should bloggers/commenters, who find themselves made the objects of this research, take kindly to it, when there are so many other things that could be studied (see above)?
Not quite bullet points, but as concise as I could make them.
Just to say, this is no longer my day-job. My funding for climate change analysis stopped in 2014. Since then I have moved to other ‘fields’. I’ll look at this asap… as I said…
1. Can you give me evidence for that – prior framing of the bad side?
2. See Jenni’s study. Not sure what you call conspiracy theories. Is there evidence for the consequences you allude to and what stepping out line means, as compared to, let’s say, saying things that are not evidence-based?
3. I would have to do a quantitative empirical study into to whether blogs are the object of study par excellence for social science researchers. I bet the are not. They were for a while, when they were novel (and Jenni’s study started in 2014 I think). Then people moved on to twitter and so on. They also study focus groups, images, media in general, etc. etc. They look into all corners of societal debates about climate change, wherever they take place. The ESRC’s agenda is shaped by societal issues; climate change is one of them, whether we like it or not.
Brigitte. This is not my day job, either.
— Can you give me evidence for that – prior framing of the bad side? —
Barry and Jenni have a discussion about this above. Jenni replies to Barry:
That is to say that Jenni does see her role as normative, and brings that role and its concomitant values to her analysis. It is jarring to us objects of her study, though her study in question is far milder than some other research. I have found this very often, but perhaps more so in cognitive science, in which the researcher attempts to measure a participant’s understanding of seemingly consensus claims, but which only succeed in measuring participants’ agreement with the researcher, who has manifestly not understood the consensus. This is discussed in my contribution to this blog, years ago.
— Not sure what you call conspiracy theories.—
In the case of Robert May (and many others of his standing, such as chairs of public bodies and govt. departments), ‘conspiracy theories’ that he used the resources of the Royal Society and other institutions to promote included the view that there existed a “well-funded denial machine” intended to thwart climate policy. This was slightly muted under Rees, but continued under Nurse. There is more background to the story, of course, but the presidents clearly saw a future for institutional science in regulating rather than enabling debate. The RS, as with others, was unable and unwilling to provide evidence of the “denial machine”, let alone, as I discuss above, put it into contrast with the scale of the agenda that it was seemingly aimed against.
— Is there evidence for the consequences you allude to and what stepping out line means, as compared to, let’s say, saying things that are not evidence-based? —
Yes. Plenty. As discussed. Saying things which are not evidence-based from within ‘credible’ public institutions carries no consequences (Rees, Nurse, Gummer, Davey, for instances). Yet, and as you and Jenni have discovered, many times on this project, it is the act of seemingly ‘giving a platform’ to non-“credible” positions which draws the ire of the pro-climate “publics” — academic publics at that. We can see academics losing their positions for research which runs counter to the perceived consensus (Rudd and coral reefs, and Crockford and polar bear populations, are recent examples). And we can see academics closing ranks against perceived others. Above, I discuss the point that critics of sustainability are not invited to participate in sustainability research centres, which clearly begin from political/ideological, not ‘evidence’ premises. That is to say academia rules out criticism by institution ideological norms, which are then *aggressively* enforced throughout campuses.
— I would have to do a quantitative empirical study into to whether blogs are the object of study par excellence for social science researchers. I bet the are not. —
I don’t claim such a thing, and your reply is disingenuous. I say instead, physician, heal thyself.
— Then people moved on to twitter and so on. They also study focus groups, images, media in general, etc. etc.
For ‘blogs’ then, read ‘social media’. The point stands that unauthorised fora vex institutions and policymakers alike, because they create the *risk* of transmitting unauthorised opinions. See evidence to DCMS inquiries, for instance, and countless conspiracy theories — which have not stood up to scrutiny — from seemingly respectable institutions in the wake of the Brexit Referendum, to which research institutions were particularly and overwhelming attached, and which have misjudged every aspect of, including their own (counter-productive) interventions.
— They look into all corners of societal debates about climate change, wherever they take place. —
I beg to differ. And they will shrink away from mirrors. They will look where it is fashionable and convenient to look.
— The ESRC’s agenda is shaped by societal issues; climate change is one of them, whether we like it or not.
The ESRC’s agenda is shaped by politics and ideology. Its mission statement is as clearly intended to *shape* society as any overtly political project’s manifesto. Indeed, the CCCEP project, instigated by the ESRC under the chairmanship of Adair Turner — himself an archetypal green technocrat, who went on to chair the CCC — was established to produce policy-based research for the CCC, and a role for Nicholas Stern and his 2007 report, to the exclusion of any criticism. And indeed, that project’s resources can be found precisely being used to attack criticism, to bully other academics and institutions away from criticism, to prevent debate, and to prevent the expression of criticism in the media. I could go on… At length.
Never mind blogs/social media. There are much bigger problems at home. But there is no incentive for academics to ‘research’ academe. There are only disincentives. It falls to us bloggers, then… Perhaps that’s why social media vexes researchers. It is political, after all.
Ok, I think I just have to admit defeat. My expertise in this domain is just not there. I have no idea who Adair Turner is. I don’t know whether Bob May believed in conspiracy theories and what they were supposed to be. I can’t read Nurse’s mind….. I just don’t know. I have not studied these things in detail, for at least six years and even before that my research focus was only tangentially related to sniffing all these things out. The only thing I know is that we don’t study blogs or social media because they vex us, but because they are there. Volcanologists don’t study volcanoes because they are vexed by them… I don’t get this. I am really sorry.
If it’s any consolation, neither do I.
Brigitte — The only thing I know is that we don’t study blogs or social media because they vex us, but because they are there. Volcanologists don’t study volcanoes because they are vexed by them… I don’t get this. I am really sorry.
That’s very honest of you. But you did ask. And I don’t think the claim that researchers study a thing because it is there — especially if it is an object of the human sphere — can be taken for granted.
Volcanologists do not study volcanoes on the premise that they appear out of nowhere. The subject of blog discussions similarly must have some kind of a genesis. The consensus, and various interpretations of it, which Jenni explains is her motivation, are produced by institutions.
Behind that consensus, the political agenda is there. The research agenda is there. Research funding agencies are there. Universities are there. Research departments are there. The lofty panjandrums of institutional science are there. The supranational political institutions are there. The constellation of civil society organisations are there. The broadcast media are there. Blogs are not outside of the same ‘there’, they do not exist independently of the ‘there’, in some separate reality. Yet academic emphasis on climate change debate, discussion, dialogue, whatever you want to call it, treats them as an entirely different category, apparently oblivious to the historical development, from which the ‘consensus’ has been produced.
You say the object of your studies (to the extent that they have ever been about this particular debate) does not vex you; though it manifestly vexes something, someone, somewhere. Because how else to explain the emphasis — and particular framing — of bloggers, blog commentators, and the expression and exchange of unauthorised opinion, and the funding of such investigations? Moreover, we can see it framed as problematic in the academic literature. We can see academics argue for the necessity of intervention. We can see researchers pitching themselves to policymakers, making promises to develop the means to “inoculate” the public against unauthorised knowledge.
What do you think all those bloggers and commentators were talking about? Why do you think they took issue with institutional science, if there was not some question about institutional science which was raised by the fact of institutional science’s excesses? We were talking about Bob May. We were talking about the Royal Society. We were talking about Adair Turner. We were talking about the ESRC. We were talking about the CCC. We were talking about DECC.
You make my point for me: academics study bloggers and commenters without reading what they actually say. Yet they take a view. They take a framing. And they bring prefigured understanding of things to their research. Academia is no less a closed ‘public’, that struggles to absorb challenges to its understanding than any blog’s population.
—If it’s any consolation, neither do I.—
We’ve been telling you that for a long time.
Of course we all bring prefigured understanding to our studies, even volcanologist do. But we try to base this pre-understanding on the best available science/evidence etc. That’s also why we, at least me, try to study emerging patterns of discourse, say, or words, or metaphors, not what every single blogger says. That is almost impossible to do. In many instances that would also be unethical, i.e. to identify individual people, unless they really are squarely in the public domain. I have, by the way, always resisted the lure of pitching to policy makers. As soon as I see one, I basically run away…When I said we study blogs because they are there…. I meant twenty years I ago I’d have looked at newspapers on microfiche or at Hansard reports or whatever, now there are blogs, a new source got listening into public conversations about climate change. They are there! Of course one should not overlook the context in which they are there as that shapes how they are and by whom they are read etc etc.
[…] we came across a long, ranty blog post at CliScep that took great offense to recent blog post and study by Jennifer Metcalfe that examined comments at SkepticalScience and JoNova to see how […]
Brigitte, you are casting your net too wide. Studying bloggers as some lumpen mass is unlikely to bring you joy.
Just to say I stopped studying blogging in 2014.
[…] we came across a long, ranty blog post at CliScep that took great offense to recent blog post and study by Jennifer Metcalfe that examined comments at SkepticalScience and JoNova to see how […]
If I were looking for repeated patterns of speech and thought that could serve as metaphors for the climate conversation, I would focus on two areas–entitlement and grievance.
Skeptics and lukewarmers resent the way they have been treated irrespective of the soundness of their arguments. This resentment is IMO to a large extent understandable and perhaps justifiable.
And this is because of the entitlement assumed by upholders of the consensus, who have consistently belittled, attacked and attempted to de-platform skeptics and lukewarmers.
The two competing metaphors made rational discussion rare and when it occurred, particularly vulnerable to disruption.
In another world we could have focused the debate on emissions, concentrations, impacts, adaptation and mitigation. This was not that world.
Tom,
> This was not that world.
If it were in the interests of the Upholders for this to be that world, then surely this would be that world, would it not?
There’s nothing STOPPING them from permitting a rational discussion—and I say ‘permitting,’ because like it or not, all the money and power and media access is on their side (upholders), not ours (skeptics and lukewarmers).
The (non-)debate is the way it is because they choose to make it this way, and to prevent it becoming any other way.
The question is surely what could possibly possess someone to spend 25 years doing something which (if they’re right about the climate) is delaying the rescue of human civilization from an impending Ragnarok.
If they’re right about the climate, then the very debate their behavior makes impossible is mankind’s only hope.
Doesn’t this tell you that they know perfectly well that they’re NOT right about the climate?
What could they possibly stand to gain from aborting every attempt at civilized debate, unless they knew their ragnarokalyptic claims could *not survive* civilized debate?
Brad
PS Their Side isn’t really upholding a consensus, it’s going wildly further than that. If the issue were The Consensus: Right Or Wrong? I’d largely agree with it. And why not? The consensus view does NOT entail any reason to lose a second’s sleep over climate change.
Bullet Point Reply to Metcalfe’s article: “Chanting to the choir: The dialogical failure of antithetical climate change blogs” – concerning this paper
https://jcom.sissa.it/archive/19/02/JCOM_1902_2020_A04
1.
Two informal surveys suggest that “laypeople” who comment at “sceptical” climate blogs are far from being “without a scientific background”. One third of those detailing their education at Jeff Id’s blog had an MSc or PhD, (Matthews 2013) and a similar result was found at BishopHill, the British equivalent of JoNova’s.
2.
The wording here is hopelessly confused. “Consensus science” is a nonsense. Everyone concerned is “engaging with the science.” It is impossible to “deny science” in the sense that an atheist might “deny Christ,” precisely because science is not religion. People on both blogs may “discuss science” or “argue about the science.” Or they may do something quite different while being under the illusion that they are discussing science.
[Correction to paper, in which it is stated that: “SS was set up and is maintained by John Cook, a research assistant at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University” At the time of setting up SkS John Cook was a cartoonist and website designer with a bachelor’s degree in science. His site is usually referred to as SkS to spare his feelings, since it was discovered that he likes to dress up in Nazi uniform.]
3.
Metcalfe is to be congratulated here on her intended method of analysis, which concerns what people say, as opposed to their putative age, sex or skin colour. In this she distinguishes herself from almost all other commenters on the nature of climate sceptics and their blogs.
4.
To be frank, this is not credible. Every time a sceptical scientist or commenter is given space in the mainstream media or the scientific literature, it is absolutely guaranteed that bloggers and activists supporting the “official” version of “the science” will cry foul and “false balance,” and demand censorship or correction. It is not possible to follow climate blogs and not know this.
5.
What “opposite”? That JoNova has won best topical blog, best Australian-NZ blog, and Lifetime Achievement awards in the annual Weblog Awards? Or that JoNova’s site does does not “…go to great lengths to ensure the peer-review credibility” of her posts? Credibility to whom? And how is “peer-reviewed credibility” different from the common or garden kind? What can the author mean which doesn’t contradict her claim that she “..could not rigorously assess the scientific credibility of the blogposts”?
6.
It is unfortunate that the three pairs of posts examined in the paper were all on the same subject – the attribution of extreme weather events to global warming. The IPCC and the whole scientific community is in agreement on the point that no such attribution can be made on a timescale less than several decades. I have avoided looking at the content of the blog threads studied by Metcalfe, but the descriptions of the subjects in her paper make it clear that there is nothing of scientific value to be said on the issue. There are scores, possibly hundreds of other subjects of contention between sceptics and consensus believers, and therefore between SkS and JoNova, but this is not one of them.
7.
This characterisation of JoNova contradicts the claim (point 5 above) about not judging the credibility of the two blogs. The author’s claim in a subsequent comment that her view of “good and evil” is subjective frankly doesn’t help her case.
8.
Only if “we” accept the view of the consensus science supporters at SkS, and reject the views of the sceptics at JoNova. But this contradicts the claim of objectivity in (5) above. And who is “we” here? Certainly not the objective researcher who treats the views of the two objects of research equally, and claims that she “could not rigorously assess the scientific credibility of the blogposts or comments, even if I wanted to.”
sorry, in various ‘meetings’ today and Jenni is working all day in Australia
Correction:
Ignore my comment at (3) above:
At the time of writing I had only read her intentions in the introduction, and not her results (Table 2.)
Tom,
So, the lack of dialogue and the polarisation is all the fault of these others people, the people who uphold the consensus and who have consistently belittled, attacked and attempted to de-platform skeptics and lukewarmers?
Ouch. My correction has appeared before the comment to be corrected, which is presumably in moderation because of its length. Sorry.
The authors of the don’t hesitate to call named individuals ‘climate change denier this’ and ‘climate science denier that.’
What can anybody hope to contribute to a field they so catastrophically misunderstand?
Are they really so encyclopedically ignorant of the content of the climate debate? As Geoff might puts it, “it is not possible to follow climate blogs and not know” that deniers of climate change are strictly mythical creatures.*
To quote John Cook, the creator and proprietor of Skeptical Science, himself:
There is no such thing as climate change denial.
(Let’s not further confuse Jennifer by mentioning that Cook subsequently taught an entire online course on the very phenomenon he admitted was imaginary. We needn’t revisit the issue of the climate movement’s dearth of credibility.)
Is there any point even reading on? I almost suspect it’s an IQ test, and I’ll lose 1pt for every paragraph I get through before the penny drops: it’s not worth the saccades.
____________
*Unless, of course, the authors are referring to people—like Michael Mann—who deny the changes in the Earth’s climate that took place before ~1900 AD. Even Mann doesn’t deny ALL climate change, however. He selectively concedes the reality of the last century and a bit’s worth.
Ken,
you asked Tom on which side the fault lies for the lack of dialogue. If you think the following episode could possibly have happened in reverse—with the ‘skeptic’ refusing to be in the same room as the ‘consensus scientist’—then say so.
Otherwise your question isn’t really a question at all: it’s self-evident to all that “your side” has a monopoly on anti-dialogue behavior:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYKggC5VOzA
As for polarization—to the extent that it’s anyone’s “fault” (that is, assuming it’s an inherently bad thing)—yes:
Your Side is wholly responsible for it, because Your Side of the debate chose, and still chooses to this day, to adopt a position in polar opposition to ours. All you’d have to do to end the polarization overnight is to become skeptics, like us. That you choose instead to persist in your diametrically-contrary belief system is strong evidence that any ostensible commitment on your part to fighting polarization is just so many empty words.
That was certainly my impression too.
So you *knew* what it would take to end the polarization all along, and still chose not to do it?
How telling. For all your show of worshipping at the altar of consensus, you’ve *knowingly* spent 30-plus years standing in the way of a genuine, global consensus on climate change by refusing to agree with skeptics.
We can’t move on, as a society, until this silly civil war of climate disagreement is over.
I’m glad we had this chat, so that in thirty years’ time—when your side is STILL holding out against a reconciliation of views—we can dispense with the coyness about What You Knew and When You Knew It.
Let’s just hope it’s not too late by then.
Ending polarization: it’s in your hands, Ken.
Too late for what?
Dear Ken
The day you encounter an alien life form, you’re going to have to be bit quicker on the uptake.
(Or perhaps you have…)
ATTP, obviously the fault is shared by both sides. It may not be for me to judge which side bears the larger share of responsibility, but obviously I lean towards the consensus side having caused the bulk of the problems, neatly shooting themselves in both feet. YMMV.
Tom,
If skeptics/lukewarmers regard climate change as something that we don’t need to be too concerned about, then why care if the discussion is polarised? You might argue that those who are more alarmed should care, but I suspect most regard there as more important things to do than pander to a minority who don’t regard this as a particularly important issue.
ATTP, I’m surprised you characterize skeptics/lukewarmers as a minority. When the UN asked 7 million people to prioritize the issues facing them, addressing climate change was last on the list.
Might even be lower on the list now, in the time of the virus.
…pander… interesting choice of words…
ATTP
We care about it being polarised because we want a discussion. If there were a discussion, we could make it clear that to Drs Metcalfe and Nerlich that we are more heliocentric than not (pace Brad) we believe in cancer treatments, we’ve not gone bad, we accept (mostly) the science in the IPCC reports (just not the model based predictions, calls for action, etc.) You can help start that discussion right now by saying what it is that you think divides us. Is it anything? Or nothing?
ATTP:
> Too late for what?
Too late to save the scientific method from metastatic oreskegenic multiple consensuoma.
Back to the attribution question (“Who is responsible for having divided society into Have-A-Sense-Of-Proportion and Have-Nots?”)….
Yes, it is EXCLUSIVELY the fault/doing/achievement of Your Side, not Our Side, that humanity is polarized. Fifty years ago, everyone on earth—even you—had exactly the same thoughts as me on climate: yawn.
(Well, OK, Stephen Schneider was panicking about climate change… in the sense of global cooling.)
Then, over the next couple of decades, Your Side began to reject the consensus and congeal into an increasingly shrill and vocal denial movement. This would never have happened if you’d respected [the] science. Instead you sought to replace the scientific method, which works, with the tropicopolitical method, which only “works” in the sarcastic sense in which one might say the IPCC process “works.”
Rajendra Pachauri himself (the IPCC’s hands-on boss, who’s now in Heck, if you believe in Heaven and Heck) repeatedly acknowledged that His Side was to blame for the societal schism:
Note: this is from the peer-reviewed journal Science, not some blog.
Note also: Pachauri’s rather innovative definition of “credibility” in his opening sentence, a variable apparently correlated to how much you’ve caused people to worry.
Or is that what you mean by ‘credibility’ as well, Ken?
I’m not asking rhetorically: it’s literally impossible to tell from your writings, so please fill us in.
Interestingly, Dr Rice believes in exactly the same hypothesis I hinted at above:
that skeptical blogs are echo chambers because their opponents “tend to avoid” them, whereas unskeptical blogs are echo chambers because they censor (oh, I’m sorry, “moderate”) THEIR opponents.
At his own article on the above article, Ken articulates:
> If you run a mainstream climate blog, and don’t want your comment threads to degenerate into a stream of abuse, you end up moderating in ways that will tend to discourage a typical JoNova commenter from commenting.
> Also, if you accept that anthropogenic global warming is real and presents risks that we should be taking seriously, and you don’t enjoy being verbally abused, you’ll tend to avoid commenting on a site like JoNova’s. So, it’s not a surprise that the comment threads end up with like-minded people.
Proof that even a stopped clock agrees with me twice a day 🙂