Bogus Gold

"Blaming [Anthropogenic Global Warming] on trace amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere is akin to blaming dolphins for the tides."

That's from the Daily Bayonet, reliable "skewerer of the clueless since 2006," in a post explaining the rationale for his skepticism. It's an interesting side-issue to the entire Global Warming debate that anyone expressing skepticism is pressed so frequently to explain why.

Anti-skeptics (which is an ironic position on its face for anyone claiming to be interested in scientific truth, but we'll leave that aside) seem drawn toward questioning the motives of anyone dissenting from Unquestionable Climate Change Dogma™. They have a hard time fathoming why anyone would demand higher evidentiary standards before accepting the "truth" that man made emissions of carbon dioxide are the key to predicting the average temperature of the planet and all its associated consequences. After all, we only want to use this assumption to restructure all of human industry in every society on the face of the earth. What possible reason could drive some lunatic to quibble with that?

At a high level, when someone with impeccable scientific credentials questions the AGW dogma, the suspicion is typically that they're being funded to lie about science by nefarious oil companies and the like. At a lower level, when mere plebeians object to the thing, it's different. We're usually just written off as being mindless drones taking marching orders from Rush Limbaugh. That only works until we get engaged in actual debate. At that point most AGW believers throw up their hands about us. We don't make sense in their "oil companies plus stupid conservative masses equals anti-science propaganda" world view. I mean we actually raise questions they themselves can't answer. Our refusal to buckle under when presented with their sketchy list of scientific contentions seems perplexing and frustrating.

Lost upon most of them is a rather fundamental point alluded to in the Daily Bayonet quote above: The proposition that man made carbon dioxide - by all accounts a trace gas when it comes to involvement in the earth's greenhouse effect - will be the main driver of global temperature for the next century is astoundingly counter-intuitive. On its face it makes little sense. There ought to be some truly compelling evidence to believe such a thing could overwhelm natural processes of climate variability before anyone proposed taking huge and costly actions upon that assumption.

Without going into great detail here, the most astounding thing about the AGW movement is that they refuse to revisit this assumption regardless of what the evidence shows. They act as if their "more human-caused carbon dioxide causes higher global temperatures" assumption is well founded, well tested, and the predictive models well supported by observation. But anyone taking even a layman's look into the subject quickly finds that this isn't true.

In other words, the reason for skepticism is well justified by the very nature of the proposition. The burden of evidence (and predictive models are a poor substitute for empirical observations when it comes to such things) in such cases is commonly understood to be upon the proponent of a contention. Skepticism in such cases is generally understood to be the natural and reasonable position.

It would be interesting, if it wasn't so emotionally overheated, to flip the challenge around and engage, not the main scientists involved, but rather the common people who believe so fervently in AGW why they are NOT skeptical.