
Professor Brian Cox clashes with Australian climate sceptic - asib
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-37091391
======
tominous
Video and transcript are here:
[http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s4499754.htm](http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s4499754.htm)

It's rare to see such a civil debate on this issue. I was impressed with
everyone except for Shadow Minister Linda Burney who went straight to personal
anecdote.

Minister Greg Hunt and mathematician Lily Serna had very reasonable positions
for lay people: that they accepted the advice of the experts and wanted to
find solutions.

Scientist Brian Cox was his usual charismatic self but did get flustered by
the end. Skeptic Malcolm Roberts was composed and polite and clearly had a
considered opinion.

The meat of the debate was a bit weak. Brian Cox had a cherry-picked
temperature graph (land temperature). I have no idea why he rejected
vehemently the claim that CO2 rise comes after temperature rise in the long-
term record -- maybe he thought the claim was about current times? He was
plain wrong on this. He was right to point out the potential damage from
climate change in many areas.

Malcolm Roberts was weak in cherry-picking the Central England temperature
record. He lost the audience in saying "NASA" was untrustworthy, when he could
probably have pointed to James Hansen's record of activism and the close
network revealed in the Climategate emails.

The key scientific point was whether the climate models have been validated or
refuted. No real information was presented here, just assertion on either
side.

~~~
vixen99
Thoroughly convincing then for a skeptical public? What do they deduce from
not seeing Cox trounce Roberts?

~~~
twelvechairs
We should find better representatives for science than Cox

~~~
humanrebar
You use the word 'science' like it's an ideal and not a practical set of
techniques used to discover natural truths and convince each other of them.

~~~
austinjp
Well, Cox is Professor for Public Engagement in Science [1] so perhaps
twelvechairs feels he's not very good at his job.

[1] [https://royalsociety.org/news/2015/01/professor-for-
public-e...](https://royalsociety.org/news/2015/01/professor-for-public-
engagement-brian-cox/)

~~~
twelvechairs
Thanks. Yes this is my point. Im surprised its apparently not clear to some

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sprash
Sadly Brian Cox stepped into the common pitfalls (like mentioning "consensus")
when arguing with climate sceptics. You can shut down any climate sceptic with
two points which can be easily measured and verified in any laboratory:

* We know the absorption spectrum of the CO2 molecule to be true

* We know the first law of thermodynamics to be true

Hence global warming. Finished. Arguments like the fact that some models can
not accurately predict the exact amount of heat oceans can absorb or that the
NASA data might be biased are suddenly irrelevant.

~~~
adam-a
I would love to read some accessible information on this - how the models can
be so trustworthy. I sort of reluctantly accept climate change, and I
generally support environmentally positive politics, for a host of reasons.
But when I see graphs like this[1] from the IPCC I can't help but think that
predicting 100 years in the future from 100 years of data is never going to be
very reliable. What kind of validation have these models had? Surely they are
not just fitted to the past 100 years?

1:
[https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-...](https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-
spm-5.html)

~~~
akuchling
_A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global
Warming_ is a history of climate models and data, published by MIT Press.
[https://www.amazon.com/Vast-Machine-Computer-Politics-
Infras...](https://www.amazon.com/Vast-Machine-Computer-Politics-
Infrastructures/dp/0262518635/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1471439919&sr=8-1&keywords=a+vast+machine)

------
throwaway1974
Debates like this make me realize we as a species have little hope.

Brexit, Trump, Climate Change just shows he who shouts loudest and repeats the
most lies gets attention and support.

~~~
madeofpalk
But on the panel, it was the skeptic that was made out to be the crazy person.
The audience (which admittedly skews towards more educated, political-left)
was clearly behind the majority of the panel.

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quink
The guy's also a sovereign citizen nutter. Here's a letter he wrote to the
prime minister at the time, Julia Gillard. Or rather, The Woman Julia Eileen:
Gillard., acting as The Honourable JULIA EILEEN GILLARD.

> [http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-05/one-nation-senator-
> den...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-05/one-nation-senator-denies-
> link-to-sovereign-citizens/7695442)

He's a Queensland Senator now. Awesome.

~~~
prawn
What.

 _" I, Malcolm-Ieuan: Roberts., the living soul has not seen or been presented
with any material facts or evidence that I, Malcolm-Ieuan: Roberts., the
living soul am not living in a free and equal society or should pay for it in
some further spurious tax levied supposedly on carbon dioxide, and believe
that none exist."_

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lordnacho
Would it be hard for a climate scientist to present the numerical evidence in
something akin to a Jupyter notebook?

So, something that says

"Here's how we collected the data, and here it is"

"Here's some transformations on it"

"If we're right about xyz, this bunch of statistical tests will turn out like
so..."

I tend to give the experts the benefit of the doubt, also on this issue. But
everything I hear in the media is simply "consensus" vs "conspiracy".

I actually would like to understand how the data works, and how the models
work.

~~~
Kenji
It doesn't work that way. Climate change is so politicised that pretty much
every source of information is biased. It is impossible to get a clear
picture. Politics is absolutely toxic to science. Many people would like to
establish something like a world government by leveraging issues like climate
change. Even though we really have no idea about the severity and magnitude of
the problems ahead of us. I personally think scientists are exaggerating
massively; here we have climatologists who cannot even predict correctly
whether it rains next week, yet they make predictions about how in 20 years
the climate is such and such.

~~~
Freak_NL
> here we have climatologists who cannot even predict correctly whether it
> rains next week, yet they make predictions about how in 20 years the climate
> is such and such.

Consider observing a forest road in an area with lots of rabbits. You can't
accurately predict how many rabbits will dart across the road in the next
hour, but you can — based on long-term observations — predict roughly how many
rabbits will cross that road in a year, and based on the empirical evidence of
bunnies counted conclude that the number furry creatures moving from one side
to another is increasing or decreasing.

Symptoms versus trends. The latter can be predicted with some degree of
accuracy.

~~~
Kenji
You raised a good example with rabbit population. Consider this:

[http://fractalfoundation.org/OFCA/predatorprey.jpg](http://fractalfoundation.org/OFCA/predatorprey.jpg)

Nobody would ever dare to fit any of the two populations with a straight line,
yet they do that with temperature data with barely any explanation for the
choice of a linear function.

~~~
beevai142
Read and understand the IPCC reports, and then we'll talk.

~~~
Kenji
Thank you, I will.

For those who are interested:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment_Report](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment_Report)

[http://ipcc.ch/report/ar5/](http://ipcc.ch/report/ar5/)

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joantune
This needs more upvotes. Like creationism, global warming denial is one of the
myths that has strong support on the 'developed' USA yet no basis in actual
proof.

The thing is: this issue is vital to our survival (while creationism isn't)

~~~
philliphaydon
Where do I fall in? I believe in climate change. I don't believe climate
change is the result of only humans. And if climate change turns out to be
bullshit, I'm glad it's being a driver for alternative energy sources, better
production of goods, more environmentally friendly packaging, etc. I just
believe the cause being humans is over hyped and the fact that we renamed it
from global warming to climate change because the models didn't support global
warming....

~~~
joantune
What caused it then? Volcanoes? please, farming, livestock and fossil fuels
produce much more quantity of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide than anything
else? whose fault is that? fertilized plants and Cows? but who mass produces
those? Humans.

And can we really take the risk of betting that it's not us?

Yet, you are fundamentally right, there are also other punctual events that
contribute to it, but decisively that the major factor is us.

This is like the leaded gasoline incident in the 60s or 70s, now everyone sees
how obvious it is but all of the white noise built by special interest groups
that control one major party in the US makes it look like it's feasible for it
not to be a thing.

It isn't

When Brian Cox talks about consensus, he is not talking about consensus among
the average Joe or Jane, he is talking about the scientific community, the
ones that are experts in the matter.

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lumberjack
This is counterproductive. All he's doing is legitimising the shill's position
by debating him on TV.

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kbart
I'm surprised we don't have flat Earth debates on TV yet.

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sklivvz1971
"I brought the graph, right." is the new tableflip. I also have no tolerance
for science skeptics. Enough.

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l33tbro
It's "NASA", BBC. Not "Nasa".

~~~
longwave
Lowercasing of acronyms is a common stylistic choice made by UK media to aid
readability.

"Where you would normally pronounce the abbreviation as a string of letters -
an initialism - use all capitals with no full stops or spaces (eg FA, UNHCR,
NUT). However, our style is to use lower case with an initial cap for acronyms
where you would normally pronounce the set of letters as a word (eg Aids,
Farc, Eta, Nafta, Nasa, Opec, Apec)."

~~~
l33tbro
I see. Fair enough, I thought it was odd that it was repeated more than once.
Thanks.

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gd1
"By who? NASA? The people the… Hang on a minute. No, no, see this is quite
serious. But can I just – just one thing. NASA, NASA… The people that landed
men on the moon?"

Can anyone explain to me what is happening in this bit?

It's either:

a) Brain Cox doesn't know that NASA is responsible for GISTEMP and is
completely incredulous at the mention of NASA (The people that landed men on
the moon?), as if they aren't relevant to the discussion.

or

b) Brian Cox is aware that NASA maintains one of the major surface temperature
datasets, but thinks that it is completely beyond the pale to question any of
the decisions (adjustments, station selection) that go into the construction
of GISTEMP, because they are NASA (The people that landed men on the moon!!!).

So which is it? Is he clueless, or just a dick?

