Carl Sagan coined the phrase “Baloney Detection Kit” and Michael Shermer refined it. Shermer suggests 10 questions to ask when encountering any claim.
The first two questions are: Have the claims been verified by another source? and How does the claim fit with what we know about how the world works?
Take, for example, the claims of Professor Ian Plimer, an Australian geologist. He has an impressive list of awards for his expertise in mining and for his science writing. But when he denies the human contributions to climate change, a baloney detector alarm goes off.
In 2019, he claimed that polar ice is not melting. In reviewing that Plimer opinion piece, published in The Australian, University of New South Wales professor Katrin Meissner wrote: “This article is an impressive collation of the well known, scientifically wrong, and overused denier arguments. It is ideologically motivated and, frankly, utter nonsense.”
Ten scientists analyzed the article and rated its credibility “very low.” They tagged it as biased, with flawed reasoning, inaccurate and misleading when it comes to what we know about the way Earth’s climate system works and how climate has changed and continues to change.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) tells us:
“Arctic sea ice reaches its minimum each September. September Arctic sea ice is now declining at a rate of 13% per decade, relative to the 1981 to 2010 average.” An accompanying graph shows the annual Arctic sea ice minimum each September since 1979, derived from satellite observations.
On global temperature, NASA tells us: “Earth’s surface continues to significantly warm, with recent global temperatures being the hottest in the past 2,000-plus years.”
On Carbon dioxide, NASA reports that human activity and volcanos both affect its levels. “Since the beginning of the industrial era (1850), human activities have raised atmospheric concentrations of CO2 by nearly 49%. This is more than what had happened naturally over a 20,000 year period (from the Last Glacial Maximum to 1850, from 185 ppm to 280 ppm).”
Here’s a statement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) science writers Michon Scott and Rebecca Lindsey found at Climate.gov. It was reviewed by Terrence Gerlach, who has done research with the United States Geological Survey (USGS).
“Human activities emit 60 or more times the amount of carbon dioxide released by volcanoes each year. Large, violent eruptions may match the rate of human emissions for the few hours that they last, but they are too rare and fleeting to rival humanity’s annual emissions. In fact, several individual U.S. states emit more carbon dioxide in a year than all the volcanoes on the planet combined do.”
Elsewhere, the USGS reports that scientific studies indicate the average global volcanic CO2 output is insignificant when compared to emissions from human activity.
Critics of a 2018 Plimer opinion piece titled, ”Repeat after me: carbon dioxide is good for us,” said it “rejects evidence of harmful consequences of human-caused climate change and only cherry-picks a few possible benefits. Scientists who reviewed the story found that it distorted or ignored published research on many topics. Plimer’s extraordinary claims were not supported with evidence or research. That’s not just bad science; it’s dishonest baloney.
