The climate compass
October 28, 2009 Climate Here's a bit of fun. Inspired by the Political Compass, your humble Bishop brings you what I think is a slightly different way of looking at the various groups in the climate debate. I've analysed people's perception of the debate along two axes - one covering how much one thinks that global warming is a problem, the other looking at how people perceive the integrity of climate science. I've added some likely groupings in the space I define, which I think you'll agree are quite interesting.
There are a growing band of Lukewarmers on the web, of course; people who believe in AGW but don't think it's a big issue. I also identify a group who I've called the Doubters. This group intrigues me. The idea was inspired by Atte Korhola's comments of a couple of weeks back. Korhola believes in AGW, there seems no doubt of that, but he is clearly concerned over the integrity of climate science. I don't think it is reading too much into his position to describe him as a doubter, therefore. He may still believe, but if he doubts the integrity of the science his faith must at least be subject to occasional pangs of doubt.
Here's some questions that occur to me on the groupings:
- Should the Lukewarmer bubble extend further north? Or do all lukewarmers think that there are problems with the integrity of climatology?
- Is there really a gap between the Faithful and the Doubters in terms of perception of problems with the integrity of climatology?
- Is there nobody in the north western quadrant?
- Who are the other doubters?
And lastly, for fun, suggest coordinates for your favourite global warming debate personalities. There are some people out there who really intrigue me. Of course, if you are a global warming debate personality or a climate specialist of some sort, you could just tell us. Over to you Mr President.
Reader Comments (31)
Well, there are clearly climatologists who don't believe that global warming is a problem. What do you call them though ... ??
I like the idea but I reckon you need a third axis - "Acceptable effect on lifestyle". There are loads of people who sit around 2,2 mainly because they believe what they hear in the news. They're also the same group of people who reckon that their foreign holiday doesn't count, etc, etc. So what you really need to be able to plot is not only what people believe but what they personally are prepared to forego/pay for. I suspect the answer for most of those outside the PlaneStupid fraternity is not much. I'm probably -2,-4.
Well, obviously I am -5 and -5.
DK
Hard to know about the climatologists - the whole subject is so full of cargo-cult ideas and medieval thinking that it just needs burning and starting over.
A blogger bowmanthebard on the goddamn BBC echoes my thoughts:
'suppose astronomy became overrun with astrologers, so that to keep a job or get funding in the field an astronomer had to "toe the astrology line". Then the vast majority of astronomers would say that astrology is a perfectly acceptable as science -- and "the Moon is in the Seventh House", or whatever.'
It's tragic.
I've recently returned to the UK from overseas and I see that schools no longer teach how to think - they teach what to think.
Overall there is a huge amount of propaganda about all kinds of stuff from anti-smoking, anti-plastic bags, "healthy" eating. A constant nagging about what to do - and mainly what not to do. And the AGW propaganda has reached brain-washing levels.
A lot of people have been duped and think that they can get their "carbon footprint" down to zero by looking at windmills and recycling a bit more.
This is maybe the achilles heel of the whole bandwagon - get the greenies to spell out the green lifestyle and the coercion needed to impose it on everyone.
If you really believe this stuff you would impose WW2 levels of rationing - forever. Draconian levels of coercion and punishments for infringers. Punishments for naysayers as well - for thought crimes.
The lack of anybody in the top left quadrant intrigued me, since when I read the top of the vertical axis I kind of thought I'd just creep in there myself, but I think it's to do with the rather false dichotomy presented. It's either “Climatology is uncorrupted/Climatology is corrupt”, or it's “Climatology is bunk/Climatology is admirable”. Obviously going by the former, many sceptics would be above the zero-line - climatology is (or can be) perfectly respectable science - but few sceptics doubt that it has become, to a great extent, corrupt.
And obviously, nobody who doubts the integrity of current climate science could accept its conclusions.
I think the axes are incorrectly labelled. You perhaps have fallen for the propaganda that "global warming" which is an observable phenomenon is synonymous with its cause - ignition of fossil fuels by Mankind - which it is not. The logical fallacy then is if the Earth's climate is warming then Mankind must be causing it, affirmed by increased use of fossil fuels and increased observed warming.
The horizontal axis should be labelled left, AGW is true; right AGW is false.
Climatology is a group of sciences and surely all science is admirable even though some scientists may be corrupt. Perhaps the lower vertical axis should be "Global warming is evidence based', and the upper "Global warming is a belief based".
Sorry . the labels for the horizontal axis should be the other way round.AGW false left and AGW true right..
You need to extend the plus axes.
The negative ones are fine but the position of the faithful is far too 'tepid'.
George Monbiot is at +20 and +20 on both axes.
Also, I don't know how you manage this, but it would be useful to add an axes that indicates scientific literacy. As I think both the faithful and the heretics are equally scientifically illiterate (i.e. they don't care whether science is right or wrong). And from the statements of many successful and famous scientists it appears that a classical scientific education is no guide to the ability of an individual to think logically.
After all, the greatest minds of the mediaeval period devoted hundreds of years of intellectual argument to how many angels can dance on the head of a pin -- an argument that is completely irrelevant if there is no such thing as angels.
Sound familiar?
What is missing is a clear elucidation of the /mechanism/ by which human activity is causing global warming. It is useful to recall what happened in another sphere of science a generation or so ago.
During the 1950s there was a clearly observable increase in the number of deaths from lung cancer - but what could be the cause? A lot of pattern matching was done, and a matching growth curve was observed: the increase in the number of motor cars. The inference was clear: motor cars (exhaust, or whatever) cause lung cancer. The problem was, no one could find a mechanism by which it actually happened. And we know how that turned out.
Tricky stuff this science.
Very interesting, yer Grace, but I think I see the problem: your graph defines the interest groups and the interest groups define the graph, kind of like a climate model. I'd say this model is ready to be displayed at the Science Museum. As for the upper left quadrant..... that's the politicians: Al Gore, Obama and Waxman in my case, the Miliband Brothers in yours.
The upper left quadrant is surely people who believe that the science is sound but the impacts are overstated. I would say that Lomburg should be there. I think most politicians are cynical and see this as an opportunity to make money, increase their power (or just be seen to be caring). Whether that places them top left or anywhere else is moot.
I have a problem with the labels on the axes.
I'm sure there is lots of "good" climatology. However that is often overshadowed by highly tendentious claims. The vertical axis label has to capture that "all - most - equal - less - none" nature.
It's also a problem having the emotional label "admirable". In conjunction with corrupt it suggests the issue is less about whether the science is right so much as well intended.
I suggest vertical = "The science of AGW is completely well founded" vs "The science of AGW is completely tendentious";
Interesting idea. Good comments.
Leaving aside the question of labels, how do people find they have shifted their opinions?
I've gone from:
2000: (+2, +4) (As a scientist myself, I think "how can this many scientists be wrong?")
2007: (+1, +3) (Much of this change is due to Gore's movie. This movie, and how well it was received, left me with a bad taste in my mouth.)
2008: (0, +1 ) (Increasing doomsday scenarios just made me more and more cynical.)
June 2009: (-1, -1) (Acceptance that I was a skeptic.)
Now: (-2, -3)
The last few months I've been looking at the raw data and reading papers. I've done signal processing in the past, so this helps with climatology studies. I currently do physics-based computational modeling, so GCMs make some sense. In a quick sentence, I think it is a worthwhile effort to study these topics, I just have a problem with the level of certainty in the "predictions" of this very new science.
As an ancient physicist I have gradually gone from (x,y) about (+2, +2) to about (-5, -3). My conversion started when I saw "The Great Global Warming Swindle" and thought maybe this is worth a bit more study, rather than accepting what the media was telling me, which I had accepted until then. I've worked with complex computer models and my wife trained in geography/geology, so it didn't take long to find holes in the AGW mantra.
I agree with others that the axes don't fit all the possible opinions, but you can't make these things too complicated.
I'd have thought you'd need to decouple "Climate change is a problem", from "Climate change = AGW", e.g. I 'believe' in climate change, because change is what climates do, and I can see where it could indeed provide challenges, but I'm not convinced by the AGW argument now that I have actually looked at the science.
Actually, I think I fall outside the graph, becauseI;m not sure the globe is warming.
Oh noes! I needed my identity defined by those axes!!!!!!
:-)
Well it's an entertaining venture for certain, Your Grace! :-)
I might have been in the upper left quadrant briefly, only because I recognized that the media do a horrible job reporting science. Very quickly I fell into the lower left when I started realizing that the "climate scientists" were in on the scam. Well, many of them anyway. Now most of the deal is dominated by celebrities and politicians. In which quadrant would we put cynical politicians and profiteers who put on aires of "believing" but who really don't? Hmm...
I'm not sure that it's really possible to be in the upper left quadrant: the vilification meted out to any scientists demurring from the AGW orthodoxy makes it impossible to hold a contrary position without simultaneously understanding that the field is hopelessly corrupt. It's a logically incoherent and hence inherently unstable position.
There are strong similarities with the political compass in this respect. Top Left is the corollary of the "Left Libertarians" (please snip if this is considered OT and will just open a can of worms) - it's very hard to see how you can be in favour of individual liberty generally AND insist that individuals should NOT have economic freedom, or indeed that the act of trying to suppress economic freedom does not inevitably and always result in draconian restrictions on all other forms of individual liberty.
Eventually, the contradiction has to be resolved: for Left libs, it's usually the authoritarian streak that wins. For climate top lefters, the same must happen: either you retain your view that AGW is false and hence that climatology and climatologists must be corrupt, or you have to moderate your scepticism of AGW. As it's not possible to be Top Left without being a little logically incoherent, I wouldn't like to guess where these nutters will end up.
The problem is that your axes are not truly orthogonal. Other axes (not all of which are independent either) might be:
- Direction/strength of Climate change (warming -> staying about the same - > cooling)
- Actual Impact of mankind on climate (Strongly "A" -> no impact -> Man reducing scale of natural change?) This is strongly correlated with our ability to take action to reduce climate change. If we are the main agents, then we hold the power to improve matters. If GW is not A, then chances are there's little we can do.
- Timescale?
- Preference for solutions (Free market -> ? -> Government/global action)
Re. north western quadrant?
Perhaps farmers should be in that corner? i.e. loads more CO2 is great for crop production, it even saves costs, as less petro-chemical input is needed.
I don't think climatology is an especially corrupt field. Most scientific fields have the same sorts of pathologies; they're just less conspicuous because the fields themselves don't have the same sort of public policy importance. And most fields don't have outsider-gadflies like Steve McIntyre probing around.
I tend to make myself unpopular in my own field in much the same way Steve is unpopular in climatology; I ask questions about whether the methods that are generally used in my field actually show what people claim they show. And people play dirty tricks to try to stop my work getting published, etc.. Even though we're in a much more obscure area, there is the same back-scratching in peer review, the same ostracization of dissidents, etc., that I see among the climate scientists.
Anyone who thinks science is, in practice, the disinterested pursuit of truth needs to spend a few weeks in a working science lab..
When Richard Feynman made his "cargo cult" speech in 1974 it now looks like he was describing the train-wreck that is called climate-science.
But he wasn't. He was making a more general point about the rubbish that scientists at the time were doing. There are similar speeches from the 1920s about people wearing white coats and standing in labs but doing medieval nonsense.