9 Kinds of Global Warming “Skeptic”

Which kinds have you encountered?

“But your skepticism has only gone in one direction, right?” I said to the smartest-sounding denier I encountered. “Absolutely false,” he answered. “I am skeptical of all claims that exclude the null hypothesis.”

He defined the null hypothesis as “no causal relationship between two factors” and stated — correctly — that even perfect correlation does not prove causation. The null hypothesis says, in effect, that global warming is caused by unknown factors that contrarians have never been able to explain. Why is this hypothesis so clearly better than the greenhouse theory, with its many successful predictions? I forgot to ask, but he was so certain humans are not to blame that, he said, doing anything to reduce emissions would just be “Pascal’s wager” — a religious act.

His reasoning was almost completely unique — I never saw anything like it from the other 11 deniers I spoke with earlier.

A study by Verheggen (2014) showed that contrarian scientists don’t agree about what, if not CO2, causes global warming. During the past few months I debated a bunch of deniers, and found their beliefs to be even more divergent.

More than one answer was allowed. On average, those disagreeing with the IPCC gave 2.45 reasons why, yet not one of these answers broke the 50% mark, i.e. there is no consensus among contrarians. And while “natural variability” was the most common answer, it is also pretty vague; many factors go into “natural variability”. Climatologists will tell you that “natural variability” goes up and down — not just up. Source: PBL NEAA. Question 3c (Figure 6) in the original Verheggen study also suggests that contrarians do not agree on what, if not CO2, causes global warming.

Each of the vocal deniers I spoke with had a unique, personalized approach to denial. Although they typically believe many of the popular myths, each denier emphasizes certain myths much more than others.

Here are nine approaches I encountered:

• The Joe McCarthy: 👲 global warming was a hoax created to redistribute wealth. Apparently Karl Marx wasn’t really interested in seizing the means of production; the real endgame was to tax oil corporations and transfer the money to clean energy corporations. And rather than impose this socialist clean-energy dystopia by ordinary legislation, “they” corrupted scientists worldwide to generate the greatest hoax in history.
• The Vague Conspiracy: 🕵️ this denier doesn’t say why a conspiracy occurred, let alone who is involved, when, where or how it happened, but for some reason scientists manipulated the temperature record to show “whatever they want” (e.g. see Tony Heller, alias Steve Goddard). Never mind the legitimate reasons why scientists adjust past data; never mind that these adjustments make little difference in global temperature trends.
• The Gish Galloper: 💩 this denier dumps dozens of myths on you at once, believing this deluge of delusion is an overwhelming case against AGW. He memorized the myths by heart and learned to deliver them rapid-fire without evidence or references, so that he can quickly write similiar screeds all over the internet, while you struggle to respond to all his points or even figure out what he’s talking about. You could point them to this list of 195 myths with rebuttals, but that would just prove you’re one of “them”.

A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. — Mark Twain

• The Galloping Goalpost: 🎠 this denier delivers one argument at a time, but when you identify the fallacy they switch to a new argument without missing a beat. This happens repeatedly until one of you stops talking.
• The Myopic: 👓 this denier cannot understand the difference between weather and climate (unless it’s a record hot summer day — surely just a fluke). He keeps an eye on cold weather around the world, and to minimize the apparent size of warming, the Myopic always compares the latest temperatures with 1998 (the hottest year until 2005). To enhance this effect, he can compare all temperature changes to the UAH troposphere record from June 1998, which held the record for “warmest month in the UAH record” until February 2016. The myopic “knows” that if we can’t predict the weather, we can’t have any clue what might happen if we double the blanket of CO2 around the planet.
• It’s all natural: 🌱 this denier ignores the findings of paleoclimate scientists while using data produced by many of the same scientists to overestimate the size and speed of climate change in the last 2000 years, the maximum warmth in medieval warm period, and the minimum temperature in the LIA. This denier relies on cherry picking (ignoring global averages, selecting records in certain locations that show high temperatures or fast change, or citing a particular contrarian paper) and a smoothing fallacy. The smoothing fallacy says that because some past temperature indicators, such as most sediment records, are smoothed out and cannot accurately measure changes smaller than a few centuries, it’s impossible to know if climate ever changed quickly in the last few thousand years. From these arguments he jumps to the false conclusion that global temperatures “probably” changed quickly in the recent past, so the change now is probably normal (argument from ignorance).
• The magic CO2 fairy: 🧚 humans are emitting 30 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere per year, and atmospheric CO2 concentrations are rising at almost 15 gigatons per year (“sinks” like oceans and vegetation are consuming the rest). This denier may insist we can’t tell why CO2 levels are rising, and besides, climate doesn’t really “want” to change so it will simply suck out the CO2 if it gets too high. You could point out that paleoclimate records show the opposite: there have been enormous (albeit very slow) global temperature swings that match up with the Milankovich orbital cycles, but cannot be explained by the mild warming and cooling that those cycles should cause by themselves. Therefore, there is a process that greatly exaggerates the effect of these cycles, and the only explanation ever proposed is CO2. Sadly, the denier may ignore the argument entirely and fixate on how these huge temperature swings took thousands of years. “There was smoothing in the records,” he’ll say, “so we can’t prove the temperature didn’t change faster! Therefore, we must assume that fast modern temperature changes are an inexplicable natural effect!”
• The Astrologer: ♎️ this denier doesn’t believe any physical mechanism is required to cause climate change. Instead the climate will follow patterns from the past, magically, in ways that mere physics cannot explain. He’ll either note that we’re overdue for an ice age (glaciation), following the pattern of Earth’s distant past — or he’ll say the earth will keep warming long after we cut CO2 emissions, following the pattern of the more recent past.
• The Moron: ❓this denier randomly misuses terminology, sloppily constructs incoherent arguments, misunderstands basic physics and seems too daft to understand your rebuttals. The Moron may deny the greenhouse effect using grossly misinterpreted laws of physics such as “high temperatures are caused by high atmospheric pressures”, and may offer a link to Zeller and Nikolov’s latest paper, which begins by citing their own past paper under the pseudonyms “ReLlez and Volokin” to give the impression that they were building on the work of other scientists.
  Note: some deniers who appear at first glance to be morons are just making honest mistakes in their use of terminology, and upon closer inspection will fit a different stereotype.

Thanks for reading! See also:

Here's what happens when you try to replicate climate contrarian papers | Dana Nuccitelli

Or if you’d like to understand climate science denial quick, have a look here:

Climate Change Denial Explained - David Piepgrass - Medium

Land+Ocean+CO2: Land is heating much faster than ocean, but the global average depends mostly on the ocean.