The $500,000 Climate Carny Scam

Ultimate Global Warming Challenge

The Ultimate Global Warming Challenge! “$500,000 will be awarded to the first person to prove, in a scientific manner, that humans are causing harmful global warming.” That’s the challenge on Steven Milloy’s junkscience website. An easy $500,000 for someone, right? So why no takers?

The name Steven Milloy should be familiar as the former tobacco spinmeister mentioned in “Smoke and CO2: How to Spin Global Warming.” He is well known to climate rationalists as a major climate change / global warming Denier¹. These from DeSmogBlog alone:

• Junk Scientist Milloy Disrobed – Again
• Junkman Milloy spins himself into corporate caveman
• Milloy’s National Post Spin is Textbook PR Manipulation
• More Slander for Steve Milloy – and So Well-Deserved
• Debatable Science? The fallacy of Steve “the Junkman” Milloy
• Steve Milloy’s compact fluorescent & mercury junkscience
• Top 10 Best Moments of Free Enterprise in 2005
• Junk Science: Steve M’Lie Sticks to His Script

You get the picture, but see also SourceWatch‘s list of “Articles About Milloy” if you still have doubts.

So maybe this challenge isn’t exactly what it seems. You know those Carnival games where you get 3 softballs to try and knock over some dolls? Dolls that will still be standing after a nuclear holocaust?  It’s hard to get over the impression that those dolls are rigged somehow.

So how has Milloy rigged his little Carny Stall? Half a million is a lot of money, so you can bet that he has made sure that it puts those carny dolls to shame. Let’s look at the layers of the impossible that one must accomplish to claim the prize.

Impossibility One

The Challenge specifically states that you must ” prove, in a scientific manner.”  Well, if it’s “in a scientific manner” it must use the “Scientific Method.” As I discussed in an earlier post “because of the problem of induction science abandoned the fiction of proofs many decades ago” except in pure mathematics. So if it’s science it can’t be a proof, and if it’s a proof it’s not “in a scientific manner.”

So the challenge is impossible. But of course Milloy cannot risk the extremely unlikely possibility of a scientific revolution where proofs may be accepted again, hence the need for:

Impossibility Two

To paraphrase myself from the same earlier post: Anthropogenic climate change is not a single testable hypotheses in the same sense that the strength of the force of gravity is. Rather it is a meta-concept like Evolution that is the simplest, most rational overall explanation for the huge masses of data from thousands of studies across many disciplines. Thus there is no one test that could potentially falsify it in and of itself.

So there can be no single proof. In fact if proofs were possible it would still require multiple proofs and I am not even going to try to guess how many. Still too easy though.

Impossibility Three

To win you have to prove “The benefits equal or exceed the costs of any increases in global temperature caused by manmade greenhouse gas emissions between the present time and the year 2100, when all global social, economic and environmental effects are considered.”

You have to prove future events?  This is beyond impossible and well into the totally ridiculous. Still too easy though.

Impossibility Four

“All entries must represent the original work of an entrant that has been produced specifically for the UGWC.”  So this epic scientific feat must be something you did at home in your spare time. If you happen to be a climate scientist or equivalent you must not use anything that you did at or for work. So we can rule out just about anybody who has any meaningful knowledge of climate science.

The language also implies it must be the work of a single individual (“the original work of an entrant”), which given the multiple disciplines involved in climate science this pretty much rules out all humans and most hyper-intelligent silcon based life forms.  Still too easy though.

Impossibility Five

“All data used in an entry must be publicly available and readily accessible to the public.” Notice the double condition? If your “proof” is based on material freely available at some institute like for example the Max Plank Institute in Göttingen, but you have to drop by to pick up a copy …  well that’s not “readily accessible to the public” now, is it?  So if the proof involves access to data that is not online, forget it. I’ll note that people rarely publish the raw data, but I bet that’s what Milloy is expecting.

So Milloy’s money is pretty safe. Any being that can manage the five impossible things can undoubtedly also warp space and time and do a few other things as well, so it is unlikely they would bother with this challenge, but just in case:

“the concepts and terms mentioned and referred to in the UGWC hypotheses are inherently and necessarily vague, and involve subjective judgment. JunkScience.com reserves the exclusive right to determine the meaning and application of such concepts and terms”

So if by some act of a divine being with supernatural powers a winning entry is submitted, Milloy can just say it doesn’t meet the criteria and is disqualified. Talk about cautious.

Impossibility Six

To take the Deniers seriously.

The challenge is not anything that someone with any knowledge of science or Steven Milloy would look at twice.  As with most of Denierism it’s a Potemkin facade partly meant to fool the naive, but mostly designed to assure the Faithful who are desperate to believe.

Unfortunately there are enough of them about. Use a search engine to check out “Ultimate Global Warming Challenge” and see how many of the hits actually take this thing seriously. It’s positively scary. However, it does give us some insight into what we are up against and how we can approach this struggle, but that’s for a later post.

For other deconstructions and commentary see:

• About The Disingenuous “Global Warming Challenge” by JunkScience.com
• Steve Milloy’s Ultimate Global Warming Challenge,
• The Ultimate Global Warming Challenge: A desperation Hail Mary Pass publicity stunt from Steven Milloy
• Pseudoskepticism from the “Junkman”
• About The Disingenuous “Global Warming Challenge” by JunkScience.com

Oh yes “No entries will be accepted after December 1, 2008.”, only three weeks left, so get working on those proofs!
——

Denier “Challenge” aka Deathwatch Update: Day 32 … still no evidence.

¹As I discuss here I do not use the term “Denier” to refer to all climate change doubters. Those who thoughtfully and intelligently address the facts I call ’skeptics’.

Those who irrationally deny the existence of the science and instead propagate the lies and distortions such as those discussed above and linked to the right under “Debunking Denier Nonsense” are “Deniers”.

The choice of the correct term is based on their actions, not their conclusions.

IMAGE CREDITS:

carnival games by rauchdickson

Columbus Day Parade – Oct. 7 by rauchdickson

The impossible cube from Wikimedia Commons

William Blake’s etching/watercolour “Ancient of Days” from Wikimedia Commons

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