Climate change deniers never get tired - only their arguments do

According to cognitive scientists, the first thing our brain naturally does when hearing a new statement is believe it. Only afterwards do the habits of skepticism kick in -- if we have trained them -- and send our neurons scouting for any counter-evidence. "It ain't necessarily so" is a trained response -- not a built-in circuit.

So what do you do if your claim is disproved the first time you make it? Repeat it -- over and over and over, until everybody gets tired of correcting you, and then you win!

I am not tired yet. Steven "The JunkMan" Milloy of the Competitive Enterprise Institute posts a Global Warming Denial's Top Ten List as a year-end wrap-up. Here, once again, is why he is still wrong:

1. Milloy trumpets a study by climate-change skeptics claiming that Observed temperature changes measured over the last 30 years don’t match well with temperatures predicted by the [IPCC's] mathematical climate models..."
   
   He didn't finish his research. On the same day that Science Daily and Fox News noticed the study, the climate scientists at RealClimate.org posted a refutation of it. For a less technical summary, See #3 of Prof. John Mitchell's Climate Change Myths:
   

   Myth 3 - There is less warming in the upper atmosphere than at the surface which disproves human-induced warming
   
   We expect greater warming in the upper atmosphere than at the surface in the tropics, but the reverse is true at high latitudes. This expectation holds whether the cause of warming is due to greenhouse gases or changes in the Sun’s output. Until recently, measurements of the temperature changes in the tropics in recent decades did not appear to show greater warming aloft than at the surface. It has now been shown that allowing for uncertainties in the observations, the theoretical and modelling results can be reconciled with the observations.
   
   The bottom line is that the range of available information is now consistent with increased warming through the troposphere (the lowest region of the atmosphere).

   Turns out, the authors tried the same argument before in 2004 and got trounced. They tried this year with a slightly revised version; they are still wrong.
   
   
2. Milloy says one more time with feeling, "It's all the sun's fault!" This is getting as old as "Evolution is just a theory." One more time, with feeling, "No, it's not!"
   
   
3. It was even warmer 1000 years ago, so we can't be causing the warming now!
   
   This is one more attempt to sell the Medieval Warming Period as a global phenomenon; still shoddy merchandise. The latest "study" is by Craig Loehle, of the National Council for Air and Stream Improvement -- an "environmental resource for the forest products industry" that is largely funded by the forest products industry.
   
   Find out more on the Medieval Warming Period at GristMill, NOAA, and Wikipedia, as well as the RealClimate entry linked above.
   
   
4. We don't have to do anything to correct global warming: the atmosphere self-regulates.
   
   One more example of "personal responsibility" conservatives sloughing off any hint of personal responsibility. James Lovelock, who first proposed the vision of a "self-regulating" system Earth, himself thinks we have overloaded the system.
   
   I think: 1) When you make a mess, do you clean it up yourself or do you wait for the "natural forces of the environment" to decay it? 2) How many people have to lose their livelihoods, lose their homes, sicken, and die while we wait for the climate to "self regulate"? 3) Nature has no reason to favor human interests in her "self-regulation." Natural "self-regulation" could include plague, flood, fire, and other methods more unpleasant to humans than cutting down on driving.
   
   
5. Roll out the Straw Man! A 2005 report on the Atlantic Ocean current raised alarms in some of the media. Milloy uses this as an example of scientists being "alarmist," although scientists themselves were much more cautious about the findings. A better way to prevent future alarmism would have been to improve his readers' understanding of the science, as the scientists at RealClimate did. Further news about the Atlantic Current.

I have gotten a bit tired, after all. I'm going to have to close this blog entry here and continue the list "next year." Do you think that Steven Milloy, who gets paid for this kind of thing, could be induced to do his own research?

More on Steven Milloy.