So far this week, we’ve shown how deniers reacted to the NCA and how the administration is handling the UN negotiations. For a midweek break from the big important stories, today we’re looking back at how far we’ve come with an odd little post on WUWT that shows how denial leads to bizarre contortions of logic and refuses to acknowledge decades of scientific advances.
This week, a guest post by Doug Ferguson (who seems to be a random nobody) writes about a 1976 story from National Geographic titled What’s Happening to Our Climate?
According to Ferguson and his denier-fueled logic, the story is an example of “Climatic Irony.” In reality, it’s a frank discussion about the state of climate science in the early days of modeling, as we were still sorting out what pollution cools and what warms the atmosphere.
At that point in time, as Ferguson excerpts from the article, scientists weren’t quite sure which direction we were headed: warming or cooling. As scientists mapped out the natural climate influences, and the cooling influence of aerosol pollution, it seemed as though global cooling could be in store.
But when scientists added fossil fuels and greenhouse gasses to the picture painted by natural cycles, it looked like warming was on the horizon, as the 1976 article describes. According to Ferguson, the story gives “a pretty good review” of paleoclimate records and natural cycles, and “interviews a dozen or more” climate scientists to describe the past and determine what the future would look like.
We look at the article and see an explanation for the weird-sounding fact from the NCA’s 2017 report that as much as 123% of warming is human caused, in that greenhouse gasses are overcoming a natural cooling cycle to cause warming. But Ferguson goes off in a different direction. He points out that annual expenditure of “the agencies governed by the law” that requires the NCA is “slightly under 3 billion dollars a year!” (emphasis his) Considering the NCA is a product of 13 federal agencies, it’s not clear why that’s relevant, since it’s not like the NCA is even a remotely significant portion of the budget for each of the 13 agencies.
Ferguson then suggest that “by some estimates” (no source cited or even obvious via google) governments have spent 90 to 100 billion dollars on climate studies. (By our own estimates, that seems… a little high.) Ferguson concludes by suggesting that even though we’ve spent all that on research, we are only “just beginning to learn” how to measure the climate.
After praising the 1976 article for explaining past measurements of the climate and the natural cycles that influence it, this assertion rings strange. Ferguson, blind to his own denial, pretends that despite all the research conducted before and after 1976, “we are faced with more questions than answers” and are “no further toward conclusively predicting what the future holds.”
This is true, only if you deny all the progress made on science and technology over the past forty years, and how this new technology answers many of those specific climate questions scientists had back in 1976. The NCA provides the most up-to-date review of that science, yet WUWT would apparently rather remain mired in the past when their denial could still be considered justifiable skepticism.
It is “interesting and ironic,” Ferguson concludes, that the 41-year-old article “had the optimistic view that if we just spend enough money on the problem we would surely solve it!”
But why is it ironic that scientists would think that researching a problem would find solutions? How else would anyone solve any problem if not by learning about it? Irony is found in the unexpected, not the commonplace.
Sounds like Ferguson could use a refresher in what makes a situation ironic. One example we’d point to is this headline from ThinkProgress: “Steve Bannon used Robert Mercer’s offshore millions to accuse Clinton of corruption.” A second example would be when a president who campaigned on a promise to drain the swamp in DC of special interest lobbyists reverses his predecessor's policy and opens the White House doors to special interest lobbyists.
Top Climate and Clean Energy Stories: