Below follows a response to arguments made against Anthropogenic Climate Change in a an Angur Millar lecture given by Dr Ridley.  This was originally sent to me by a friend who is a climate change skeptic.

For the original place I saw this article please see: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/01/thank-you-matt-ridley/#more-50468

>That the earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare is pseudoscience.

That’s nothing to do with science or pseudoscience.  Its a conspiracy theory, its not claiming to be scientific, so it can’t be pseudoscientific.  The same goes most of the other statements in that sentence.  UFO’s being on there makes no sense – as there are undoubtedly flying objects which are unidentified.  Perhaps if the author was more credible he would have said “little green men”

>So is quite a lot, though not all, of the argument for organic farming.

Which argument is “the” argument?  My argument might be different from his.  Was banning DDT part of the organic farming movement?  Was it psuedoscience?
Religious faith isn’t pseudo science – it isn’t claiming to be science.  Its faith.  A different thing

>Imagine my surprise then when I found I was the heretic and that serious journalists working not for tabloids but for Science Magazine, and for a Channel 4 documentary team, swallowed the argument of the cereologists that it was highly implausible that crop circles were all man-made.

Notably “journalists” not “scientists – regardless of what publication they work for.  Also, to be classed as a “heretic” you’d need to be holding a position opposed to that of the scientific consensus.  There was no scientific consensus on crop circles as they weren’t deemed worth of study.  If they had been, i’ve no doubt the clear consensus would have been that crop circles are human-made

>So I learnt lesson number 1: the stunning gullibility of the media. Put an “ology” after your pseudoscience and you can get journalists to be your propagandists.

Agreed.  But you can’t run the argument in reverse.  Not all disciplines with an -ology on the end are psuedoscientific.  Hello biology :)

>Like antisepsis, many scientific truths began as heresies and fought long battles for acceptance against entrenched establishment wisdom that now appears irrational

That entrenched establishment wisdom wasn’t held by the scientific community though – it was typically imposed by the church – whom we agree aren’t scientific

>What sustains pseudoscience is confirmation bias. We look for and welcome the evidence that fits our pet theory

Of course.  Both sides of the climate change debate do this.  Notably, the vast majority of deniers have strong external reasons to be deniers, or don’t have even the most rudimentary scientific education.

>Philip Tetlock did the definitive experiment. He gathered a sample of 284 experts – political scientists, economists and journalists – and harvested 27,450 different specific judgments from them about the future then waited to see if they came true. The results were terrible. The experts were no better than “a dart-throwing chimpanzee”.

None of those disciplines is scientific – those people don’t use a system for predicting based on historical success unlike scientific method – which does have a long history of sucessful prediction.  Are doctors just as bad at predicting the future of your health?  What about astronomers predicting eclipses?  They seem pretty accurate to me

> Never rely on the consensus of experts about the future. Experts are worth listening to about the past, but not the future.

So, because political scientists and economists are useless at predicting the future, everyone else is too?  Almost every action in your life is based on a “best-guess” about the future.  I put money into savings on the “sensible” prediction that I won’t die tomorrow.  Is it sensible to predict that the world population will be higher in 6 months than it is today?  Yes, of course it is.  Is it possible it might be lower?  Yes, something could kill a lot of us.  Is a prediction that it will be higher appropriate – yes.  Is it useful – yes.

> I fully accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, the climate has been warming and that man is very likely to be at least partly responsible.

OK, So that’s pretty much the debate over from my point of view.

> still conclude that the threat of a dangerously large warming is so improbable as to be negligible

OK, even if I accept “negligible” – the consequences are SO severe that it isn’t worth the risk.

> while the threat of real harm from climate-mitigation policies is already so high as to be worrying

What harm?  Short-term economic harm?  I fail to see how replacing the burning of coal with the spinning of wind turbines can be bad for my health or our economy

> In the mid 2000s one image in particular played a big role in making me abandon my doubts about dangerous man-made climate change: the hockey stick

Surely you’re not STILL banging on about that, as if its relevant?

> Yet it has been utterly debunked by the work of Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick

It has been well challenged, but not “utterly debunked” by any stretch

> I urge you to read Andrew Montford’s careful and highly readable book The Hockey Stick Illusion*

I can reference good books by thorough authors that support the graph too.  Its not case closed

> For, apart from the hockey stick, there is no evidence that climate is changing dangerously or faster than in the past

The graph itself isn’t data, its just a representation of a small part of the data.  So that sentence doesn’t even make sense.  The wealth of data, which is increasing all the time, is what provides the evidence.

> It was warmer in the Middle ages* and medieval climate change in Greenland was much faster.

The temperature isn’t the issue, its the rate of change of temperature.  Also – we’re looking at global change, not localised change.  So neither statement is relevant – they’re just FOD

> Sea level* is rising at the unthreatening rate about a foot per century and decelerating.

The sea doesn’t have to go up in a linear relationship with temperature.  Melting sea ice won’t raise sea level, only ice melting on land in large quantities will do that.  The antarctic continent is warming, but hasn’t warmed enough to start melting in the central (land based) area yet.

> Your probability* of dying as a result of a drought, a flood or a storm is 98% lower globally than it was in the 1920s.  Malaria* has retreated not expanded as the world has warmed.

These are due to other influences.  Malaria has gone down due to better drugs, nets, etc.  If you could adjust for those then the story might be very different

> I’ve looked and looked but I cannot find one piece of data – as opposed to a model – that shows either unprecedented change or change is that is anywhere close to causing real harm.

No “one piece of data” will do it.  The climate is intensely complicated – you need lots and lots of data

> No doubt, there will be plenty of people thinking “what about x?”

Yes – here’s my “x”.  The sentence that the author himself accepted earlier… “I fully accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, the climate has been warming and that man is very likely to be at least partly responsible.”.  If that warming continues what will happen?  Eventually ice will melt, seas will rise, weather will change.  So the only questions really are “will it continue warming” and “if it continues warming, how long will it be before serious problems occur”.  It seems to me that if we keep raising CO2 levels, we will get continued warming.  So that only leaves the second question – how long until serious consequences happen.  I’d rather not find out…

> A snowy December, the BBC lectures us, is “just weather”

Au contraire.  Firstly – 1 year isn’t enough data to conclude anything, the climate can and does jump up and down locally.  We’re talking about long-term trends, not 1 off years.  Secondly – there is good reason to think climate change may bring colder winters to the UK by interupting the gulf-stream which brings us warmth

> To see confirmation bias in action, you only have to read the climategate emails, documents that have undermined my faith in this country’s scientific institutions. It is bad enough that the emails unambiguously showed scientists plotting to cherry-pick data, subvert peer review, bully editors and evade freedom of information requests. What’s worse, to a science groupie like me, is that so much of the rest of the scientific community seemed OK with that. They essentially shrugged their shoulders and said, yeh, big deal, boys will be boys.

Bullshit – Climategate was a big nothing.  Firstly – just because 1 or 2 people didn’t behave impeccably doesn’t make the whole scientific community dishonest.  Secondly – the climategate nonsense came out of attempts by climate deniers to demand incomplete data, so they could twist it to fit their own conclusions, and release it before it was complete – to undermine the use of the data in supporting climate change

> Water vapour forms clouds and whether clouds in practice amplify or dampen any greenhouse warming remains in doubt.

There is no doubt over water vapour being a potent greenhouse gas.  Further – evidence for clouds comes from post 9/11 – when the US grounded all airlines.  The temp dropped by over 1 degree in the US

> The sensitivity of the climate could be a harmless 1.2C, half of which has already been experienced, or it could be less if feedbacks are negative or it could be more if feedbacks are positive.

So, shall we assume it isn’t sensitive, and just take the risk, regardless of the consequences?

> The graph

Clearly shows an upward trend.  Thanks :)

> Her conclusion is that*: “Of the 18,531 references in the 2007 Climate Bible we found 5,587 – a full 30% – to be non peer-reviewed.”

Or, turned on its head.  70% of the IPCC’s huge report is based on carefully peer reviewed aticles.  12,944 articles that are peer reviewed and support climate change.  In addition there are 5,587 more articles which whilst not peer reviewed, also support climate change.  Thanks :)

Is the author trying to claim all those scientists are bad at the profession?  Is he claiming they’re all part of an enormous international conspiracy?

> Remember Britain’s unilateral climate act is officially expected to cost the hard-pressed UK economy £18.3 billion a year for the next 39 years and achieve an unmeasurably small change in carbon dioxide levels.

So the crap political implementation is the fault of the scientists who’ve identified a problem?  More likely, reducing our CO2 emissions will BOOST our economy.  Would the author also complain about the spending of government money on the road network (“these new roads are set to cost the UK tax payer 18 billion pounds a year to build for the next 40 years)

> At least* sceptics do not cover the hills of Scotland with useless, expensive, duke-subsidising wind turbines whose manufacture causes pollution in Inner Mongolia and which kill rare raptors such as this griffon vulture.

LOL.  So – burning coal and releasing soot, sulpur compounds, nitrogen compounds, etc is better for the environment is it?  Also, since the author is such a careful “skeptic” – where is his thorough research proving this harm to raptors.  And finally, how about offshore wind farms?  If these turbines were so bad, why aren’t the environmental NGO’s making a fuss?  Are they also a part of the climate change conspiracy?

> At least crop circle believers cannot almost double your electricity bills and increase fuel poverty while driving jobs to Asia, to support their fetish.

Double my electricity bill?  I thought it was the rising price of oil that did that?  The oil that the author seems to think we should keep merrily burning

> At least homeopaths have not made expensive condensing boilers, which shut down in cold weather, compulsory, as John Prescott did in 2005.

Does the author mean those boilers that are really reliable, and more efficient – saving the owner money on fuel bills

> At least astrologers have not driven millions of people into real hunger, perhaps killing 192,000 last year according to one conservative estimate, by diverting 5% of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel

Fair point.  Except its nothing to do with climate scientists.  Silly politicians came up with stupid biodiesel

> Around 1910 the vast majority of scientists and other intellectuals agreed that nationalizing reproductive decisions so as to stop poor, disabled and stupid people from having babies was not just a practical but a moral imperative of great urgency

Vast majority?  I’m afraid not.  Eugenics was a theory devised by politicians, economists and other leading non-scientist figures

> Or remember Trofim Lysenko*, a pseudoscientific crank with a strange idea that crops could be trained to do what you wanted and that Mendelian genetics was bunk. His ideas became the official scientific religion of the Soviet Union and killed millions; his critics, such as the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, ended up dead in prison.

Because it was politicians who decided which “science” was right, rather than a scientific consensus.  Notably – in the west, where scientists WERE Free to make up their own mind, they concluded that mendelian genetics was correct

> There is no great fossil-fuel slush fund for sceptics.

The author names 4 people who may or may not be making any money (most likely not, but I don’t know – i’d like to see a declaration that they’re not).  Even if those 4 aren’t – that doesn’t mean the vast majority of deniers have nothing to gain

> My argument is that like religion, science as an institution is and always has been plagued by the temptations of confirmation bias. With alarming ease it morphs into pseudoscience even – perhaps especially – in the hands of elite experts and especially when predicting the future and when there’s lavish funding at stake. It needs heretics.

Agreed wholeheartedly.  The sensible critics help improve the science.  Just like sensible critics of parts of the theory of evolution.  What those challenges will result in is small tweaks to the overall theory, or even quite substantial changes (like relativity did to newtonian physics) but they wont bring down the whole theory