People will believe whatever SOUNDS smart

These two websites supply interesting contrasts regarding the climate debate. While “How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic” is very clearly concerned with spreading information on the reality of climate change, “Friends of the Science” supplies an alternative view, giving evidence that contradicts that from climate scientists. These two websites together form very good overviews of the key arguments from both sides of the climate debate.

Challenging one side on the quality of its scientific evidence, while blindly supporting the evidence provided by the other is the typical response of those involved in the climate debate. While I am obviously partial to one side of the climate debate, I attempted to evaluate the material on both of these websites as neutrally as possible.

What interested me was not the bizarre or questionable scientific evidence of “Friends of Science”, but the way that they framed many of their arguments compared to the Grist website. Grist, in an effort to effectively convert climate skeptics and make them reconsider their stance, has tried to be as plain spoken and clear concerning these issues as possible. He has stated everything in “layman’s terms,” while supplying graphs and citations that elaborate on issues more scientifically. One setback may even be that he is too vernacular with his analysis, especially when he is referring people to Wikipedia for a good article on a particular subject.

The authors of “Friends of Science” have taken a wholly different approach. Quite a lot of their reasoning are overly scientific-sounding with the probable intention of confusing the readers into believing what they say is true. I think specifically of two of their “Insights.” The first insight that the earth is cooling is based on a graph that does not support their claim. While they show that CO2 has increased rapidly and temperature has been variable, there is a noticeable trend of steadily increasing temperature. They distract readers from this by writing in a very convoluted way that sounds scientific, but actually does make much sense. One example: “Surface temperature data is contaminated by the effects of urban development… The high magnetic flux reduces cloud cover and causes warming.”

Their second instance of confusing the readers is in their second insight that the sun causes global warming. While they accuse Al Gore of reverse causality, they are willing culprits themselves. They show evidence proving a connection between solar irradiance and rising temperatures, something that most climate scientists would not dispute, but use it as a reason to deny global warming. The attempts of the “Friends of Science” to confuse separate them from the plainspoken information supplied by Grist’s website.