Reason fights back
MELANIE PHILLIPS DIARY
Now we can see why the global warming truth-deniers loudly insist 'the debate is over'. When they are forced to take part in a proper debate, they lose. On Wednesday night, reason scored a great victory over the forces of obscurantism when, at an Intelligence Squared debate in New York, climate sceptics persuaded an audience of several hundred that 'Global warming is not a crisis'. What's more, it was the arguments they used — or maybe the inadequacy of the arguments on the other side — which persuaded a part of the audience to change its mind. When the audience arrived, 57 per cent thought it was a crisis and 30 percent thought it was not. After the debate, 42 per cent thought it was a crisis and 46 percent thought it was not. The undecideds moved from 13 to 12.
For the motion were the best-selling author Michael Crichton, whose novel State of Fear challenged global warming, and who also happens to be a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies; Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT; and Philip Stott, an emeritus professor and biogeographer from London University. Against them were Brenda Ekwurzel from the national climate programme at the Union of Concerned Scientists; Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York; and Richard Somerville, a Professor of meteorology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego.
So how did the global warmers react to the fact that the audience did not find their arguments convincing? According to Gavin Schmidt on RealClimate, it had nothing to do with any facts the other side had produced — good heavens, no. It was simply that they had been more entertaining. The audience was gulled by celebrity, you see, and a bit of 'revivalist' fervour. It just didn't have the intellectual stamina to fully appreciate the manifest superiority of his own side. He concluded:
"So are such debates worthwhile? On balance, I'd probably answer no (regardless of the outcome). The time constraints preclude serious examination of any points of controversy and the number of spurious talking points can seriously overwhelm the ability of others to rebut them. Taking a 'meta' approach (as I attempted) is certainly not a guaranteed solution. However, this live audience were a rather select bunch, and so maybe this will go over differently on the radio. There it might not matter that Crichton is so tall…"
You don't say?! The full transcript of the debate is here. Read, and decide.
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