UPDATE:

Our emailer insists on being named, so named his shall be as requested in the missive below:

Bernard Arthur Hutchins Jr

You Must Acknowledge Intellectral Property

Jerry – I make it three days now since I asked you to put my name on the item on your blog that was MY intellectual property which YOU posted without giving the source. First, I asked you to put my name on it. Second, you threatened to put my name on it if I contacted you again. I did contact you again – asking you to acknowledge the source. [Threats likely should not list actions that the threatener is already morally obliged to do!] Thirdly, it is (as you must know) a tenant of academic integrity to acknowledge the source of material quoted. I presume this is the policy at UC, but I am willing to investigate this. I think Noon Monday is a reasonable deadline for some response from you.

Bernie ________________________________________________

I’m busy preparing for my trip, and don’t have much original stuff to post, but I wanted to share this email from a climate-change denialist who is angry and nasty about what I said in Faith Versus Fact about climate change. I’ll make a few remarks at the end, but I’m posting this mainly so readers can respond, and then I’ll simply send this person a link to the post and comments. I find that an efficient and multipronged way to deal with critics like this, and I don’t have to write my own long response, since it’s always counterproductive to engage people like this.

This is, by the way, typical of the kind of angry email I get, most of which I don’t mention on this site.

Dr Coyne – Whatever possessed you (word carefully considered) to add the six pages (245-250) on “Denialism” (a toxic word that) of global warming to your otherwise admirable recent book? It would seem you didn’t select or write this material with your usual care? It comes across at an intellectual level of Jr. High, a cherry picked religious-flavored “strawman” contrivance, ignorant of (or dismissive of) the very existence of a true SCIENTIFIC opposition to your supposed CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming) consensus. Moreover, viewed as a not uncommon or original “denier-rant”, it is less skillful than what a half-dozen blogs post nearly every day. This reeks of a hasty, unfortunate, puerile afterthought. Singularly poor work in your book. May of us “deniers” are CAGW “skeptics” motivated not in the least by religion (or politics), but by physics, engineering, and evidence. I myself am an atheist of the Dawkins/Hitchens/Harris school; and a physicist and electrical engineer. When I see stability in a circuit I design, or robust thermostatting in nature, I know it is due to negative feedback (a loop in my circuit) or some natural feedback in the case of nature (NO MYSTERY – Second Law of Thermodynamics). Looking at an overall physical picture, I understand it pretty well, and must conclude that Nature does in fact take pretty good care of Herself. Incidentally, I have always viewed natural selection as really little more than feedbacks. [JAC: Oy! Little more than feedbacks?] Much as the links of an evolution process can be complex, the thermostatting chains of the climate are complex (thus appearing designed) but only reflect the 2nd Law insisting that we must have something, somehow. It is a bit astounding that an evolutionary biologist such as yourself, familiar with amazing Law-of-natural-selection-driven puzzles does not immediately grasp the corresponding self-organizing mechanisms of the 2nd Law. Instead in your case, you have Faith (word considered) in a bit of “greenhouse” arithmetic that is already in error by 18 years of no warming. Picking and choosing your science – so it would seem! I have never heard of the silly “Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming.” but what did you expect? Of the two paragraphs you reproduce, the first is unreadable claptrap; the second is essentially the correct CAGW-Skeptic (scientific) view. What was the point of this radical juxtaposition? Do I have any climate scientist credentials from which to speak? I have a degree in climatology fully equivalent to the one Al Gore has and the one you have – NONE. I have however studied the issue for over 12 years. How important are credentials? Google “Chomsky, Credentials, Substance” for my view. Your unjustified “pigeon holing” of people who have analytically reasoned conclusions with those who resort only to religion for a similar conclusion, is frankly embarrassing, if not insulting to us. You are doing a “hit job” on many honest thinkers, many of whom know far far more about the issues of CAGW than you apparently do, and you come across less as a scientist and more as a political animal. Those of us who are travelers within the CAGW-skeptic circle to which I am a part, are owed an apology. Name redacted

The section that this guy (yes, I’ll say that it’s a man) is referring to in Faith Versus Fact discusses religiously based climate-change denialism while also noting that religious opposition to climate-change is only a part of general opposition, much of which is based on economics. (But do note that 49% of Americans see natural disasters, including global warming as a sign of the End Times.) I also give quotes from US Senators and Representatives who also have religiously based take but in the opposite direction: that God would never let the Earth be destroyed by global warming. That attitude, of course, is as bad as denialism, for it encourages a lack of response.

Further, the “Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming,” signed by hundreds of prominent and credentialed economists, scientists, theologians, and other religionists and academics, also notes this:

We believe Earth and its ecosystems—created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence —are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history. . . . . We deny that Earth and its ecosystems are the fragile and unstable products of chance, and particularly that Earth’s climate system is vulnerable to dangerous alteration because of minuscule changes in atmospheric chemistry. Recent warming was neither abnormally large nor abnormally rapid. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming. We deny that alternative, renewable fuels can, with present or near-term technology, replace fossil and nuclear fuels, either wholly or in significant part, to provide the abundant, affordable energy necessary to sustain prosperous economies or overcome poverty. We deny that carbon dioxide—essential to all plant growth—is a pollutant. Reducing greenhouse gases cannot achieve significant reductions in future global temperatures, and the costs of the policies would far exceed the benefits.

As for the evidence for global warming, there is a consensus among experts in climate science that Earth is experiencing anthropogenic global warming: 97% of climate scientists see this happening and, based on evidence, see the change as due to human activity. Of course scientific consensus can sometimes be wrong (remember that most geologists didn’t accept the notion of continental drift), but with such a strong consensus, the best evidence we have points to human-caused global warming, not to the denialism of the writer.

I won’t write more, or discuss the stupid “credentials” card played by the writer (except to note that the vast majority of scientists with equally good or better credentials than his disagree with him), except to point you to one place that gives a good summary of the evidence for anthropogenic global warming. It’s the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) site “Climate change: How do we know?“, which summarizes the diverse lines of evidence, including temperature and gas monitoring, glacial retreat, ocean warming and acidification, reduced snow cover, and so on (it includes copious references). You can find the evidence for human causation at the NASA site “Why is climate change happening?” That evidence constitutes my “faith” to which the writer alludes. He couldn’t be more wrong—about everything he says, especially his silly take on evolution.