Thread by @AndrewDessler

Civility seems to be in the news a lot these days and climate scientists seem to be the recipient of a lot of advice on this topic. 1/

This is typical: climate sci are "tribal, defensive, discussion by invective, dismissive of contrary data. More like a priesthood than a community of scientists” fabiusmaximus.com/2018/06/25/sci… 2/

Wow, tough words. Why, you might ask, would climate scientists act this way? Let me tell you my evolution from hayseed who wants to talk about science on blogs to guy who (occasionally) calls people “deniers” on twitter. 3/

I started grad school in 1988. My thesis was on measurements of ozone and water vapor made my instruments on NASA ER-2. This was the tail end of the debate over ozone depletion. 4/

At the time, I got to know uber-denier Fred Singer, who was an ozone skeptic before he was a climate skeptic. He didn’t believe mainstream ozone science. I tried to explain to him that his arguments were out of touch with our best understanding, but I never changed his views.5/

Then, I started working on tropospheric water vapor and that led me into climate science. And I ran into Fred Singer again. He was making essentially the same arguments to cast doubt on human activities causing climate change: not real, not us, not bad, scientists disagree. 6/

I decided that I needed to better communicate with the general public. I thought that communication about science and how it worked was the way to win hearts and minds. Man was I a rube. So I started my own blog. Here’s an example: …ncepoliticsclimatechange.blogspot.com/2006/09/are-sc… 7/

This didn’t convince anyone, as evidenced by this comment from that post. Sounds a lot like the blog post linked to above. Some things never change. 8/

Just for the record, the “unaffiliated scientist” Dr. J is actually a retired petroleum executive, so yeah he’s unbiased (eye roll). newscenter.nmsu.edu/Articles/view/… 9/

I went on to blog at grist (grist.org/author/andrew-…), which unfortunately doesn’t archive comments. If it did, you could see that being (mostly) civil had, shall we say, limited success. 10/

After a few years of blogging, I burned out. I was making the same points again and again. The science has been quite stable for the last 40 years and, at this point, either you accept it or not. Me talking about it was not convincing anyone. 11/

I still do outreach, such as this oped I wrote with my colleague Jerry North. I think it is respectful and reasonable and not "tribal, defensive, discussion by invective". mysanantonio.com/opinion/commen… 12/

The response from the denialsphere is, shall we say, "tribal, defensive, discussion by invective”: drroyspencer.com/2013/10/dessle… 13/

Recently, I decided to once again try to be civil with deniers. Didn’t work out well — as usual it ends with people accusing me of lying. If you want to see the details, start reading at my comment here
scienceofdoom.com/2017/12/24/clo…
and read to here:
scienceofdoom.com/2017/12/24/clo… 14/

So here’s the upshot: just about every scientist I know STARTED OUT being civil. In response, we get attacked for being corrupt/evil/incompetent. When we are uncivil, we get attacked for being rude/corrupt/evil/incompetent. What would you do? 15/