How a liberal vegan environmentalist made the switch from climate proponent to climate skeptic
Anthony Watts / 9 hours ago October 16, 2015
Hint: He did his homework, then took himself to the other side of the debate.
Guest essay by David Siegel
My name is David Siegel. I’m not a climate expert; I’m a writer. Early in 2015, I became interested in climate science and decided to spend the better part of this year trying to learn what I could. It didn’t take long before it was clear that there isn’t likely going to be any catastrophic warming this century. What was clear is that skeptics are losing this battle, and I want to tell you why.
For thirty years, James Hansen and Al Gore have been building their PR machine along with David Fenton, the wizard of nonprofit PR. They understand that the messenger is more important than the message. People don’t easily change their minds. People get their opinions from “experts” and brand names like NASA, MIT, Harvard, TIME, The Daily Show, etc. Fenton knows the game is about credibility and repetition, not science. As long as we are trying to convince people with the facts, we will lose.
So I did my homework and wrote a 9,000-word essay aimed at liberals who have a voice, who have access to media, and who might take 30 minutes to educate themselves.
I submitted my piece to every liberal publication, from the LA Times to the Atlantic Monthly to National Geographic to Huffington Post and many more. They all turned it down. Now I’m launching it myself and hope you will read it and help spread the word.
I ask you to help get the word out through social media, links, and the press, to the liberal audience I’m going after. Links really help. If you can help reach Bill Gates, Jeff Skoll, Jon Stewart, George Clooney, and other influential liberals, I hope to help them understand that the science is not settled. I think this is the best way to tip the scales back to reasonable, impactful environmentalism. If you can help move it on Reddit, Voat, Quora, NewsVine, etc., I would appreciate that.
I’m going to ask people to leave comments here, rather than on my page, because I can’t manage the comment spam there. I will, however, read the comments here and will respond if I can.
My work is aimed at your liberal friends; please send them to read it.
Excerpt:
What is your position on the climate-change debate? What would it take to change your mind?
If the answer is It would take a ton of evidence to change my mind, because my understanding is that the science is settled, and we need to get going on this important issue, that’s what I thought, too. This is my story.
More than thirty years ago, I became vegan because I believed it was healthier ( it’s not), and I’ve stayed vegan because I believe it’s better for the environment ( it is). I haven’t owned a car in ten years. I love animals; I’ll gladly fly halfway around the world to take photos of them in their natural habitats. I’m a Democrat: I think governments play a key role in preserving our environment for the future in the most cost-effective way possible.Over the years, I built a set of assumptions: that Al Gore was right about global warming, that he was the David going up against the industrial Goliath. In 1993, I even wrote a book about it.
Recently, a friend challenged those assumptions. At first, I was annoyed, because I thought the science really was settled. As I started to look at the data and read about climate science, I was surprised, then shocked. As I learned more, I changed my mind. I now think there probably is no climate crisis and that the focus on CO2 takes funding and attention from critical environmental problems. I’ll start by making ten short statements that should challenge your assumptions and then back them up with an essay.
1 Weather is not climate. There are no studies showing a conclusive link between global warming and increased frequency or intensity of storms, droughts, floods, cold or heat waves.
2 Natural variation in weather and climate is tremendous. Most of what people call “global warming” is natural.
3 There is tremendous uncertainty as to how the climate really works. Climate models are not yet skillful; predictions are unresolved.
4 New research shows that fluctuations in energy from the sun correlate very strongly with changes in earth’s temperature, at both long and short time scales.
5 CO2 has very little to do with it. All the decarbonization we can do isn’t going to change the climate much.
6 There is no such thing as “ carbon pollution.” Carbon dioxide is coming out of your nose right now; it is not a poisonous gas. CO2 concentrations in previous eras have been many times higher than they are today.
7 Sea level will probably continue to rise, naturally and slowly. Researchers have found no link between CO2 and sea level.
8 The Arctic experiences natural variation as well, with some years warmer earlier than others. Polar bear numbers are up, not down. They have more to do with hunting permits than CO2*.
9 No one has shown any damage to reef or marine systems. Additional man-made CO2 will not likely harm oceans, reef systems, or marine life. Fish are mostly threatened by people who eat them.
10 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others are pursuing a political agenda and a PR campaign, not scientific inquiry. There’s a tremendous amount of trickery going on under the surface*.
Could this possibly be right? Is it heresy, or critical thinking?—?or both? If I’ve upset or confused you, let me guide you through my journey
You’ll find it at: www.climatecurious.com.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/16/how-a-liberal-vegan-environmentalist-made-the-switch-from-climate-proponent-to-climate-skeptic/
Goldrider says:
October 16, 2015 at 6:25 am
When I said it to one of MY PhD friends, he winked and said “Lots of people know it, but they agree with the political agenda so why let science get in the way of a good story?”
A Crooks says:
October 16, 2015 at 2:46 am
Exactly, CodeTech. I crossed the line in 2010, and that ended a whole range of friendships.
Bart Simpson with a bucket over his head comes to mind. “I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!”
In the end though, what anyone believes is irrelevant. The Climate will do what the Climate does, whatever the boffins of either side say.
But even that is irrelevant.
I was just reading Freeman Dyson on Dellingpole, and I saw “It’s like a hundred years ago, before World War I, there was this insane craving for doom, … ”
My point is that the Climate change debate is only a symptom of a much bigger and deeper malaise – as it turned out in my activist life time, it wasn’t Acid Rain, it wasn’t Overpopulation, It wasn’t Ozone Holes, It wasn’t Limits To Growth, It wasn’t the Tragedy of the Commons, It wasn’t Peak Oil, … and so on, and so on, and so on. And if it wasn’t Climate Change, it would have been something else.
Mr. Siegel might be able to change the mind of his liberal friends, but when Climate Change dies in the arse, as it inevitably will, it WILL be something else all over again, until the death wish of the West is fulfilled. We are watching a culture that has run out of ideas, and is committing suicide.
( I take my text for today from Oswald Spenger – The Decline of the West)
willybamboo says:
October 16, 2015 at 4:37 am
Very succinct. Except – We haven’t run out of ideas. We have run to an ancient idea and embraced it. You call it suicide, but it is really murder, at least murder-suicide. Your list is a list of all the evil man has done to the earth. A young college student, a girl, an environmentalist, said to me over thirty years ago; “Sometimes I just wish all the people would die because of the violence we do to the earth” Its an old, old story – death and sacrifice for the atonement of sin.
Recycling and reducing our carbon footprint has become righteousness. Skeptics have become heretics. Belief and faith in the ‘orthodoxy’ of scientific consensus has become the definition of truth.
Nietzsche was right: “I’ll tell you where God is,” returned the madman. “God is dead! God remains dead. And we have killed him.”
God is dead, but man is still religious. Evidently, man isn’t capable of believing in ‘nothing’. So – we pick our poison. Perhaps we are making a big mistake. I liked the old juice better.
wickedwenchfan says:
October 16, 2015 at 12:49 am
I was a long time supporter of Greenpeace. A big anti right wing Leftie! I came out of the Climate Change closet just over two years ago. Welcome to the denier pride parade!
Ivor Ward says:
October 16, 2015 at 1:28 am
Very interesting. Welcome to the world of daily abuse for voicing an opinion.
I was genuinely interested in the science of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming in 2007/8 but things did not quite seem to add up so I tried to ask some questions. Why did it warm as much in the early 20th Century as it did in the late 20th Century? Why was there as little ice in the Arctic in the 1920’s as there is now? Why were past century floods and storms more violent than they are now? Why do we start from a period called “The Little Ice Age” to measure a temperature increase? Why were there 5000 polar bears in 1950 and now there are 25000? Why are there signs of farming under the current ice field on Greenland if it had not been warmer before now?
I went to such places as Sceptical Science to ask !! I received such a torrent of abuse that I was shocked. So I tried different sites. I very soon realised that there were gatekeepers in play. The abuse was remarkably personal and tonally similar. Not once did I get an actual answer to my genuine questions.
Having lived in the age of rampant communism I could see the pattern. It does not take many readings of Animal Farm or Fahrenheit 451 to understand what is going on. Then, having researched the existence of Maurice Strong and Agenda 21 it all becomes very clear. They don’t go away. They just change the uniform, get a new vehicle and start again. You cannot fight them with facts. You just have to wait for them to commit economic suicide. Hopefully without the deaths of 100 million people this time.
Welcome to the proletariat.
Eliza says:
October 16, 2015 at 3:30 am
I was a convinced warmist until ~1998 even though my father at the time, an atmospheric physicist/meteorologist told me literally it was all c@@@, a tax grab he said. However it was only when I read Svensmark;s work (after my father deceased), on cosmic rays that I changed my mind as I recalled that that he thought the same but years ahead. He was involved with the WMO, NOAA and EU for setting up the cosmic ray counters in Chacaltaya, Bolivia in the 60’s. I do not think C02 has any effect on weather/climate, I mean literally 0 effect because it has been at 1000’s ppm during glaciations and at 0ppm there would be no life but climate/weather would probably be unchanged.
Peter Taylor says:
October 16, 2015 at 4:20 am
I have always been a left-liberal-green environmentalist – and actually also a scientist and policy analyst with decades of experience in advisory work from UK local council level through national and EU institutions, all the way to the UN – mostly on pollution protection strategies, energy policy and renewable supplies and some biodiversity work – with two books out on the latter. I was Greenpeace International’s chief advocate at the UN for ten years, and then a special advisor to the International Maritime Organisation. We had many successes.
Between 2000-2003, having accepted and never bothered to check the atmospheric physics of CO2, I engaged with UK government agencies on ways of integrating renewable energy with other environmental objectives such as landscape protection, community and biodiversity. In that work I realised that ‘going green’ would create huge damage to the environment – all in the name of staving off rapid climate change. I decided to check the science and see how much time we had because decisions were being railroaded, with no impact assessment on their consequences.
I spent three years studying the science. Within the first month I was shocked at how ‘bad’ is was – many untested assumptions and models that contained no natural cycles. And crucially, data which did not support the conclusions of the IPCC regarding ‘most’ of the driving force being CO2. NASA data on the trends of short-wave radiation at the Earth’s surface clearly showed that from 1980-2000, there was a steady rise in SW radiation – and this was the dominant input in wattage to warm the surface – by about 3:1, and even then the CO2 component was not measurable, but estimated from models.
I wrote a long report in 2008 and visited some of my old Greenpeace colleagues. There was absolutely no feedback – no one wanted to engage in rational scientific discussion – with one exception – Professor Jackson Davis, (University of Santa Cruz)with whom I had worked on pollution issues. He knew my previous work and was willing to look at the data. At first, he simply said ‘Peter, you cannot possibly be right’…and then ‘These questions you have about surface flux must be answered before we can accept the models’. He endorsed by 2009 book ‘Chill: a reassessment of global warming theory’ – and I also then discovered he was a drafting author of the Kyoto Protocol (that went on the book cover).
The silence was then broken. I was roundly attacked in all the left-liberal-green media, with critics refusing to read the book, instead focusing on my ‘mad’ beliefs derived from decades as a teacher of meditation and yoga (parallel to my governmental work, which was never mentioned!).
Jackson Davis began to study the science and by 2010, following a high level discussions on the science where we were received at top climate labs in the USA, he realised my analysis was correct. We have been engaged since then on analysis of climate cycles.
There are still no invitations to speak to environmental groups. All of the top groups – WWF, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, even the bird protection organisations, woodland and wildlife trusts and development lobbyists such as Oxfam, are part of the Climate Coalition, and they brook no scepticism.
The problem – as this site well understands, is that ‘campaigners’ run the show – even newspapers that were once relatively objective, have become campaigners, and the BBC joins them. Vast amounts of foundation money and even EU grants are channeled through these campaigns.
And it is certainly the case that real environmental issues are comparatively neglected – as are, still, the environmental consequences of ‘renewable’ supplies – most particularly the from the import of biofuels.
Facts will not change things. Sadly. Even could they be given a decent discussion in the media. Even the ‘pause’ has been airbrushed out. Global cooling – which is likely over the next five years, might do it – but I would not bet on that not being manageable by spin doctors.
Dave says:
October 16, 2015 at 4:25 am
I used to teach university students in their first year. In my lectures on climate change I started by asking the question: `who believes in anthropogenic global warming ?` (responses are in approximate %s). 80% said yes, 15% said `no`, and 5% said `do not know`. At the end of the lectures, which had set out the basic facts, the %s changed. 10% said `yes`, 80% said `no`, and 10% said `do not know`. This was carried out for several years and these were really intelligent kids. Imagine what the bulk of the population are susceptible to! At the recent UK general election, canvassers for different political parties called at my door. They all believed in global warming. Mr Seigel is right: it is only by ensuring that the real unmodified facts are made widely known that reality will prevail. Anything else will be spun by the political class for their own gains.
thechuckr says:
October 16, 2015 at 8:07 am
Kudos and congratulations. My path is similar – I saw Al Gore’s movie and got “terrified.” as a result I started digging into the research and skeptic sites (like WUWT) but the more I dug, the more I saw that there was so much research and information contesting the CO2/Global Warming meme that I had to revisit my thinking and ultimately changed my mind about the death, doom, and destruction that was and has been promised to occur as a result of manmade greenhouse gases by proponents and acolytes.
As has been mentioned above, you may become a pariah among your (former) friends who are staunch believers of the Catastrophic Global Warming/Climate Change dogma. I lost two friends who despite being highly educated and intelligent individuals, took it personally and were offended by my challenging their belief system. Perhaps I was mistaken in my appraisal of them. |
