Graham writes about talking with a cliomate change denier

Graham Parton has engaged in a conversation we have all had with climate change deniers and subsequently written about the experience.
Graham, a keen Beneath the Wisteria supporter said he was inspired to write the piece after reading a story recently in the Guardian about the experiences of a scientist in New Zealand who was responsible for ensuring the accuracy of the weather monitoring stations.

He said: “The story its self was interesting enough, but also fascinating was the on-line comments after it. There were some deniers throwing their views in, but they were outnumbered maybe 20-1 by people who knew more about the subject and were able to easily debunk the nonsense that the deniers were spouting. They did it all so clearly and cleverly too, it was a delight to read.

“Now maybe this just reflects the readership of The Guardian, but it might also reflect how people are starting to answer back to deniers when they spout their views. I fear we have just politely deferred when people say things in social setting that we disagree with, just to avoid an argument”, Graham wrote.

Graham said his response was a want to write something, not doing any research or pushing back the frontiers of science or anything like that, except that I am regularly corresponding with an active denier.

Here are Graham’s 2800 words:

I once wrote a letter to the editor of my local paper on an issue to do with climate change. There was a report that the Wilkins Runway in Antarctica was becoming unusable because the ice was becoming too thin, and my letter suggested that this was part of the increasing body of evidence on ongoing climate change. About a week later a parcel arrived in the mail with a letter attached. The letter congratulated me on getting a letter published, but the writer, Michael, was a bit concerned that I didn’t really have all the facts. Enclosed in the package was a CD that would explain everything.

I duly loaded the CD, but I immediately recognised some of the data, and the authors. It was a collection of all the discredited dead end arguments that deniers routinely trot out, familiar ones like that we’re entering an ice age, the planet has been cooling since 1988, it’s the sun, not atmospheric pollution, all very familiar old cases, all bunkum.

The CD contained nearly 200 articles or links to articles, but after looking at the first dozen or so and seeing what was being suggested in the rest I was confident that I knew where this was going and stopped looking. I was sorely tempted to get in touch with Michael but the prevailing advice from friends and others involved in the debate was that the last thing we should do is give them oxygen. Ignore it they all said.

I couldn’t though. I can understand if this was a high profile person who would get some publicity out of a debate I wouldn’t want to help that process, but both Michael and I are not public people and nobody is going to know about our conversation. I politely write back to Michael thanking him for the CD but telling him that I had seen enough to convince me that there was nothing of any value in it.

His response was quick and direct. How could I know that if I hadn’t followed the links and read the articles? I told him I had followed some of the links and had already read some of the articles, plus the subsequent ones that debunked them, but he was having none of this. In an exchange that lasted several months and numerous emails he accused me of being too scared and closed-minded to dare to look at the evidence, and I infuriated him more and more by continuing to refuse.

I added that I categorised the deniers according to which of the following groups they fit into;

a)    Those who believe the climate isn’t changing

b)   Those who accept it’s changing but what we’re seeing is all just normal cycles, nothing to do with human activity

c)    Those who accept that human activity might have an impact but it’s insignificant

d)   Those who accept that human activity is significant, but there are some benefits to a warmer climate so there’s no need to worry.

 I suggested that based on the arguments he had put to me he was wavering between the first two groups and that I wouldn’t debate anything with him until he moved into the last group. I suggested that the “debate” (which I said was largely manufactured by his side) had been settled and that we should be expending energy on what we’re going to do about it and when, not wasting time on whether or not it’s happening.

 

After several months we hadn’t made much progress. Well Michael hadn’t - because I hadn’t examined any of his arguments and had taken up a lot of his time. Generally my emails were much shorter than his so I’m assuming he spent a lot longer working out ways to shame, bully, coax or persuade me to click the links, all unsuccessfully. I like to think I had successfully distracted Michael from bothering anyone else who had written letters to the local paper.

Climate change and hurricanes
- endless debate.

Eventually his tone became ever more impatient and I was afraid I was going to lose him so in what might have been a moment of weakness I mentioned one of the “arguments” he had put forward. It was one that I had chosen almost at random from a menu of well over a hundred different claims or points, and it had what I thought was a glaring error which I mentioned to Michael.

Buried in the mountain of data he had sent was a chart that showed the frequency of hurricanes over atmospheric CO2 levels, but it took no account of time scale. The basic premise was that in the years when CO2 levels were low there were a lot of hurricanes, yet in the more recent decades when CO2 levels have been higher there have been fewer hurricanes. As it moved closer to present day the units of time became ever shorter so that eventually the graph was comparing the number of hurricanes in one year with the number over ten years. Not surprisingly there were many more hurricanes over the longer period than in the single year, from which Michael had concluded a negative correlation between atmospheric CO2 and extreme weather events. As this is exactly the opposite to what the scientific community had been saying he concluded that they were clearly wrong, and if they are wrong about that it’s a reasonable step to say they are wrong about everything else to do with climate change.

Actually he didn’t use the term “negative correlation” at any stage, nor any other mathematical or statistical terminology. I attempted to argue the point that the correlation would need to control for time scale or it would have no meaning. I said that would be like saying a lot more rain fell in all of the 1960s than last year so it must have been wetter then.

This time it was his turn to infuriate me. He would not debate the basic maths, but reverted back to insisting that I follow the links he had sent me to the “research” that had produced the charts. This would explain everything.

I tried to say that it didn’t really matter how the chart had been produced, it was clear that it was false or misleading. I even made a crude attempt to work out the frequency based on attempting to extract data from a line graph. It was necessarily rough and I conceded that from the start, but my attempts to measure the numbers based on the chart appeared to show almost no change in the frequency of hurricanes, or if anything a very slight decrease over time. It was nothing like the trend line that had been imposed on the chart, which showed a spectacular decline in hurricanes. I asked Michael if he had followed the link himself and if so did he think the chart was misleading.

His response was quite telling. He said that he was “no expert on hurricanes” but that he took notice of the experts. I attempted to turn it back to the maths, and suggested that it had nothing to do with hurricanes, you just can’t compare the frequency of events between a long time period and a short one unless you control for the time, but he kept insisting it was all about hurricanes, which by now he was describing me as “obsessive” about.

Eventually I accused him of not understanding the basic maths and therefore incapable of reaching valid conclusions. He never responded to that specifically but repeated the bit about relying on experts. I asked if that’s the case why he didn’t follow the 97% of climate scientists who came to quite different conclusions about global warming, and this opened a whole new can of worms.

It seems that to hold a significant world view that is so out of step with the vast majority of expert opinion, an equally vast array of conspiracy theories is necessary. For example it’s necessary to believe that virtually all universities and research bodies in the world are part of an elaborate conspiracy to make up climate science to maintain a steady flow of research dollars. Much of the media is in on it too, and governments are either duped or complicit in the plan. These overlapping and elaborate conspiracy theories permeate much of the person’s belief system and pop up everywhere.

For example at one stage we were talking about what actions the various Australian political parties were doing about climate change, and I made the hardly controversial suggestion that by most people’s reckoning the Greens had the most climate friendly policies. This certainly doesn’t translate into votes for the Greens but even their strongest critics would agree that climate is much more of an issue for the Greens than other parties. Michael’s advice in response to this was to advise that the Nazis had set up the Greens Party in Germany and that the current Australian Greens were the latest manifestation of this. Greens policies were really Nazi policies.

As with many of his weird tangents I was initially stuck for a response – should I discuss his claims that the Australian Greens were really just a cover for the Australian Nazis, or would I continue with our discussion about climate change and the frequency of hurricanes. In the end I decided that I really wanted to keep him focused on climate so I didn’t go anywhere with the Greens/ Nazi thing. I did however Google it and found that there are web sites that make this claim, but as with most of the things Michael believes the only thing lacking is any evidence.

After several months of occasional emails neither of us had moved. Michael remained convinced I would understand his whole point if I would just click the links, I said I would work my way through them one at a time, and the first item I wanted to discuss was the chart about the hurricanes.  I reminded him that I didn’t want to discuss whether or not climate change was happening, but as a concession I would pick one issue and we should get that out of the way and then we can move on to the next one.

Michael’s preference was to deal with perhaps a dozen different issues at once, which typically might include sun spots, oceans apparently cooling, the left wing conspiracy running the ABC, President Obama’s illegitimate claim to office and of course the Nazi / Green Party. Actually he never really “dealt with” them, his style was to send me numerous links to sites that made these claims and then refuse to discuss them until I had read them and become convinced. I suggested that there’s no point in expecting me to do all the work while he did nothing (what I really wanted was for him to do all the work while I did nothing). Then I would add that I was quite happy to discuss any of these things but one at a time, and what did he think of the evidence he had given me that didn’t really show a significant decrease in hurricanes?

A conversation
with any denier
is a little opening
a 'can of worms'.

Eventually Michael became so infuriated with me that he declared he was giving up and that I wouldn’t hear from him again.

Shortly afterwards our media began reporting on the summer of 2012-13 and described it as the “angry summer” when 123 weather records were broken over a 90 day period. I couldn’t resist – I sent Michael an email asking if this changed his views at all. His response was typical, suggesting that the 'angry summer' numbers were seriously manipulated, and a full investigation into this well warranted. The real records going back, easily checked from old published reports, show nothing unusual at all. What the media was describing as an unusually hot summer was really no different from what Michael had experienced as a boy, with his distant anecdotal evidence being much more reliable than our Bureau of Meteorology. Their claim that 2013 was the warmest Australian year on record is simply wrong.  He doesn’t suppose they are incredibly incompetent at weather analysis, so it’s obviously a deliberate plan to mislead.

I have no idea how much longer this will go on. My original purpose of keeping Michael busy while I learn more about what makes a denier tick is being met and I still enjoy the experience.  It has been over a year now and he still keeps in touch. His latest offering is an article headed “3014 days since the US was hit by a major hurricane” and written by a widely discredited author named Steven Goddard. Other links on the site describe how the frequency of bushfires has also declined and just how bad some heatwaves were in the 1860s.

His most recent message continued along the same lines as he usually does, raising a number of issues at once and making snide remarks about how I am too scared to look at the evidence for myself. In the space of a few paragraphs he commented on;

 

·         The credibility of various commentators (Joe Romm, Steve Goddard, John Cook, James Hansen, Graham Readfern, David Suzuki Tim Flannery) plus the Guardian and the ABC,

·         How the use of different terminology (“climate change”, “global warming”, “climate disruption”) simply reflects confusion amongst the scientists who change the name of the phenomenon whenever they are proven wrong,

·         Hurricanes (my obsession with them) and how once again he doesn’t want to examine the data himself but wants me to look at a particular web site that will explain it all,

·         How 2013 was not the hottest year since records began, he can remember hotter years when he was growing up in regional NSW, and 1896 was probably the hottest year ever,

·         Had I noticed how cold it had been recently in the northern hemisphere

·         And a challenge from someone who is offering $10,00 'for a conclusive argument based on empirical facts that increasing atmospheric CO2 from fossil burning drives global climate warming'.

 Dotted throughout the message were small comments like “Fear equals funding” which he doesn’t elaborate on but his point is still clear.

Our “debate” hasn’t moved much over the last year but I’m still keeping him busy and enjoying it, so my time is not wasted.