{"id":2113,"date":"2016-05-18T19:48:21","date_gmt":"2016-05-18T19:48:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/?p=2113"},"modified":"2016-05-18T19:48:21","modified_gmt":"2016-05-18T19:48:21","slug":"climate-change-doubters-really-arent-going-to-like-this-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/2016\/05\/18\/climate-change-doubters-really-arent-going-to-like-this-study\/","title":{"rendered":"Climate Change Doubters Really Aren\u2019t Going to Like This Study"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"glacier2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Washington Post<\/em><\/a>
\nMay 18, 2016<\/p>\n

Researchers have designed an inventive test<\/a> suggesting\u00a0that the arguments commonly used by climate change\u00a0contrarians don\u2019t add up, not only according to climate scientists (we know what they think already) but also in the view of unbiased experts from other fields.<\/p>\n

The trick? Disguising the data \u2014 and its interpretation \u2014 as if it was part of an argument about something else entirely.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we find is that whatever so called climate skeptics say about [climate] data just doesn\u2019t characterize the data adequately,\u201d said Stephan Lewandowsky<\/a>, the new study\u2019s lead author and a psychologist at the University of Bristol. \u201cIt\u2019s as simple as that. It\u2019s judged to be misleading, false, and just incorrect basically,\u201d by independent experts from fields like economics and statistics, he said.<\/p>\n

Lewandowsky, often a thorn in the side of climate skeptics or doubters, has previously published data<\/a> linking rejection of the science of climate change to beliefs in conspiracy theories, leading to withering criticism from said\u00a0skeptics. The new study was published in a peer-reviewed journal, Global Environmental Change, by Lewandowsky and colleagues from Australia, Switzerland and Norway. One of its authors, Rasmus Benestad, of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, is a prominent climate scientist.<\/p>\n

However, the research has already received some criticism from scholars \u2014 suggesting that there could be a significant debate over the meaning and interpretation of the results.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s back up: How\u00a0is it actually possible to \u201cdisguise\u201d climate-related arguments, so that they can be evaluated by other experts who don\u2019t know much of anything about climate change?<\/p>\n

First of all, consider\u00a0that climate doubters (like scientists) often use objective\u00a0data to back up their claims. They just tend to represent it in\u00a0ways that scientists have long found objectionable.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s an example: Data indicate that in the long run \u2014 over many decades \u2014 global temperatures have been rising. But over shorter periods,\u00a0temperatures might fluctuate up and down quite a bit. Climate contrarians might exploit this fact by pointing to a small block of data from a short-term period when temperatures were on the downswing, or weren\u2019t rising, and use it to suggest that global warming isn\u2019t actually happening. It\u2019s a tactic known as \u201ccherry-picking\u201d \u2014 selecting only data that suit one\u2019s purposes, instead of data that reflect the whole story.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to talk about these problems, though, without the conversation turning into a figurative shouting match between mainstream climate science and climate doubters, who are generally going to disagree with one another no matter what. So Lewandowsky\u2019s\u00a0group of researchers decided to take another tack.<\/p>\n

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~<\/p>\n

But not everyone is convinced. According to Jonathan Jones, a physics professor at the University of Oxford who has critiqued previous research<\/a> published by Lewandowsky, a problem with the study is the data it chooses to begin with.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe obvious problem is that because they have control over both the choice of dataset used to assess a contrarian claim and over the corresponding \u2018consensus claim,\u2019 it is essentially trivial to construct situations where the data supports the consensus claim and opposes the contrarian claim,\u201d he added. \u201cIn reality, many of the real arguments are over precisely which dataset to use (there are several competing datasets for global temperatures) and over which time periods to use (recent trends or longer term trends).\u201d<\/p>\n

Max Boykoff, a climate communication researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder, also had a critical take on the study. While he said\u00a0the research approach was \u201claudable\u201d because it tried to \u201csystematically examine\u201d how climate change contrarians often misuse scientific information, he\u00a0had a number of methodological questions about the approach, including noting that \u201cthese disembodied statements extracted from the context within which the claims are made can run the risk of misrepresenting or not fully representing what props up the statements.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those remaining skeptical of the science of climate change, then, will likely\u00a0object to the experimental design. But the researchers say the findings strip away preconceptions to prove a basic point: that across disciplines, experts know good science when they see it. Read the full article…<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Washington Post May 18, 2016 Researchers have designed an inventive test suggesting\u00a0that the arguments commonly used by climate change\u00a0contrarians don\u2019t add up, not only according to climate scientists (we know what they think already) but also in the view of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-31 16:16:22","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2113"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2115,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2113\/revisions\/2115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}