Phelim McAleer is a film-maker who has produced a documentary challenging the climate change consensus. He appeared on an Irish political program this evening to debate with a climate scientist, Dr. Kieran Hickey. Now I haven’t watched much of this guy’s documentary yet, but even so, his argument was full of glaring logical fallacies.*
1) A key plank of McAleer’s argument by the sounds of it is that because the scientific consensus got DDT so badly wrong that they must be wrong this time.
Rubbish. Even if the scientists did get DDT wrong (and I’ll bet there’s a bit more to this story than meets the eye), that doesn’t necessarily mean they are wrong on climate change. Methinks there is some selective thinking going on here. What about other scientific consensuses he omitted to mention? The connection between HIV and AIDS? Cowpox vaccination and Smallpox? Microbes and cholera? Smoking and lung cancer? Indeed, when it comes down to it: Gravity, Genetic theory, Plate Tectonics, Quantum Mechanics and Evolution are all scientific consensuses. It’s just a classic case of poisoning the well.
2) Scientists have an agenda.
The allegation here is that climate change is a big liberal conspiracy. This is an odd one, because the biggest vested interests in the climate change debate have always come from the other side! Get this: the combined revenue of the top 5 oil companies last year was 1.5 trillion dollars. 1,500,000,000,000 dollars. 1.5 million million dollars. That’s more than the entire GDP of Canada. Climate scientists were persona non grata in the White House for most of the last 8 years of the Bush presidency. If it’s a big conspiracy the financial backers must be an odd bunch indeed. Just because scientists are (according to you) bad people, it’s doesn’t make them wrong, Phelim.
3) Climate change is a fad.
Apparently Phelim was taught in school in the 1970’s that the Ice Age was approaching in our lifetimes. In between there have been lots of fads, many of which have never come true. This argument attempts to conflate fads with real science, which is just ridiculous. Many of these fads never had any sort of consensus scientific backing. They were just media baubles – minority views that caught the imagination of the press for a period of time. Climate Change originated in the 1970’s as a seriously minority view. There was an activism bandwagon on climate change in the 1980’s which was often shone more heat than light. Cultural fads like this come and go, but the difference in this case was that real science began to weigh in over the past 20 years or so. This has swung the pendulum away from pure fad and into the realm of fact. An analogue is Wegener’s continental drift model that began as a minority view, but became in time accepted as a valid scientific theory when the science began to validate many of his arguments. Fads are not science. They lie on the margins, waiting to be validated or disproved. A lot of hard work needs to take place for a fad to become science, and in the case of climate change, this work has been carried out, with the argument pointing in no uncertain terms towards a deeply worrying future for us all.
Here’s my biggest gripe with the whole thing. Debates are good when one person’s opinion is pitched against another person’s opinion. So if you bring the audience around to your point of view, you’ve won. Well done. A big prize to you. However, when you have a debate against a scientific consensus, then it doesn’t work so well. Even if the audience all agree with you, even if they carry you around on their shoulders in adulation, that doesn’t make your argument right. Science is not determined from public opinion. It has nothing to do with public opinion. It’s based on evidence, and the only way to challenge the science is to use the tools of science against it. These challenges do happen, but they don’t take place in public debate forums. No, they happen in scientific journals, conferences and papers, where each piece of evidence is scrutinised and debated until, you guessed it – a consensus emerges. So, even if the science is wrong in this case, Phelim, what is your alternative? Film-making?
* If you have never heard much about logical fallacies, I recommend you to take a look through this site. It may be the most educational hour or so you will spend this year.
Sunny spells and scattered showers 
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November 26, 2008 at 3:06 am
truce
brilliant final paragraph, Colm.
On a vaguely related note, I had a conversation with someone this week who insisted that Creationism is a valid scientific theory, “just like the theory of Evolution”. Now, laying aside the fact that Creationism is utter nonsense, it is a faith-based dogma, not in any way empirically verifiable and thus, by definition, not scientific. I could not make this person understand the difference. Maddening.
Just because hundreds of thousands of people believe in Creationism and want it taught in schools does not confer any scientific credibility on it. Believe it if you want because your religion tells you to, but don’t tell me science has proved it. Bishop Ussher would have LOVED that. 😉
November 26, 2008 at 9:18 am
Colm
Thanks Truce,
Yes, Bishop Ussher was one product of Ireland I would not be terribly proud of (although Steven Jay Gould once wrote a fascinating article defending him as a product of the times, and in itself a highly impressive work of scholarship).
Talking to creationists is really difficult because they occupy a very different mental world than you or I do. All criticism is seen as temptation and there is no room for doubt. It’s a good example of how incredibly selective we can be when trying to come up with arguments to support our point of view.
November 26, 2008 at 10:13 am
Phil
Did you manage to see the short BBC series the climate wars earlier this year. Prof Iain Stuart (a geologist as well as TV presenter) looked at the whole of the climate change debate starting with those 70s ideas that we’d all freeze and the science that changed the ideas.
He also did go to a climate change sceptics conference and even those people agreed things were changing (differing views on how fast and why).
A very good piece on the whole history and where we are now in the science of climate change.
November 26, 2008 at 10:35 am
Colm
No I haven’t seem this documentary – what a pity!
What’s pathetic about this guy is that he’s late to the party. Now if this was the 1980’s he might have been able to argue the toss, but right now he ends up looking stupid: a hero only to the entrenched denial lobby.
An Irish Ben Stein, who’da thunk it?
November 26, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Phil
Shame, it was good. There doesn’t seem to be much on the BBC website about it either to point you towards.
November 26, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Ed Darrell
This director is really off the mark on DDT.
Today DDT is recognized as a very dangerous chemical. It is one of the “Dirty Dozen” pesticides targeted for extinction by the world in the 2001 Persistent Organic Pesticides Treaty (POPs).
We now know that DDT kills birds, and all predators in any ecosystem in which it is released. We now know that DDT causes cancer in humans, generally in the offspring of the generation exposed. DDT is a known carcinogen in mammals, and though its carcinogenic effects in humans are weak as the acute toxic effects, it is still listed as a “probable human carcinogen” by every cancer-fighting agency on Earth.
In 1962 Rachel Carson was the target of a $500,000 public relations campaign to condemn her views on DDT, published in Silent Spring. President John F. Kennedy turned to the President’s Science Advisory Council for a report on the accuracy of Carson’s claims. In May 1963 PSAC reported that Carson was absolutely right on everything but one: She had understated the dangers of DDT, and action was required sooner rather than “after more study.”
In November 2007, Discover Magazine ran a count, and found more than 1,000 studies published in peer-review science journals since 1962 backing Carson’s claims that DDT harms birds. No study contradicted that view.
What is it McAleer alleges that scientists “got wrong” on DDT? I’ll wager he doesn’t know what he’s talking about on that topic.
That almost guarantees he doesn’t know what he’s talking about on warming, either.
November 27, 2008 at 12:27 am
Colm
Thanks Ed. Very informative. That’s pretty much what I guessed.