In 2007, NPR broadcast a now-infamous climate debate on the proposition “Global warming is not a crisis.” In theory, this sounds like an easy win for the “nay” side — “crisis” is obviously the mildest of words to describe the greatest preventable existential threat to the health and well-being of future generations.

But in practice such debates are almost unwinnable, even by those who are good at debating in public, a group that does not include very many scientists. As noted in Why scientists aren’t more persuasive, Part 1, scientists are lousy at rhetoric, the art of persuasion. Significantly, rhetoric, was discovered and developed by the Greeks and Romans in part to help them win debates, so it follows that modern debates are also won by those who are better at using the strategies and tactics of rhetoric. In his dialogue Gorgias about the master rhetorician, Plato gives him a speech that dramatizes the awesome power of rhetoric:

If a rhetorician and a doctor visited any city you like to name and they had to contend in argument before the Assembly or any other gathering as to which of the two should be chosen as doctor, the doctor would be nowhere, but the man who could speak would be chosen, if he so wished.

So a rhetorician could persuade any audience, no matter how intelligent, that he or she was more of a doctor than a real doctor. No surprise, then, that someone skilled in rhetoric can beat a scientist in a debate on climate.

The 2007 debate had, “speaking for the motion: Michael Crichton, Richard S. Lindzen, Philip Stott” and “speaking against the motion: Brenda Ekwurzel, Gavin Schmidt, Richard C.J. Somerville” — bios, audio, and transcript here, some analysis is here. The painfully inevitable result as announced by NPR’s Brian Lehrer at the end:

And now the results of our debate. After our debaters did their best to sway you … you went from, 30% for the motion that global warming is not a crisis, from 30% to 46%. [APPLAUSE] Against the motion, went from 57% to 42%… [SCATTERED APPLAUSE].

A few more debates like that and we can all buy beachfront property in Baton Rouge.

Personally, I still do one-on-one debates from time to time, although they are almost unwinnable against a sophisticated denier or delayer, like, say Lomborg. But a 3-on-3 is quite counterproductive, since the other side will just go after your weak link(s). The other flaw in this debate is the proposition. “Crisis” is a losing word — sorry Al — a word the public has grown tired of, since it’s been applied to too many (every?) major public ploicy problem in the last two decades.

In this post, I’ll talk a little bit about why “smart-talkers” like scientists don’t tend to win debates. I won’t critique the climate scientists in the 2007 debate, but comment instead on two of the deniers/delayers. Stott spends a considerable amount of time pushing the favorite denier narrative that just a few decades ago, scientists believed the climate was cooling but now they believe it’s warming. I will explain below why someone who has spent 10 years using “modern techniques of deconstruction to grand environmental narratives, like global warming,” would devote so much time to repeating such a long-debunked myth.

Even more fascinating is the opening statement from the one non-scientist in the debate, Crichton, who has obviously become very rich precisely because he knows how to put together (fictional) narratives that are compelling to millions of people. He adopts the classic everyman position that is classic old-school rhetoric:

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A1: She wants to help people remember what they looked like before her policies render them extinct.

A2: She likes sticking it to the bears.

A3. She couldn’t find a wolf-cub pin.

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is famously fighting the Bush administration liberals who designated the polar bears a threatened species, and her global warming denial, if enshrined into law, would finish off the bear’s habitat (see “McCain VP Palin is a global-warming-denying, polar-bear-dissing, Pat Buchanan acolyte“).

Yet she wears a polar bear pin off her right shoulder. [Some of you are looking in the wrong direction. That image off to the side of Palin's right shoulder is Cindy McCain, who I'm guessing just loves standing behind her husband's VP choice.]

Notwithstanding Palin’s faux pas of wearing white (with a white pin!) after Labor Day, her pin is clearly missing either a bull’s-eye or a red circle with a slash through it. I wonder what Polar bears against Palin think of this.

Given that eBay founder Meg Whitman is a McCain supporter, I suppose it is no surprise that you can buy the same pin Palin wears on eBay:

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A new study in Nature Geoscience (subs. req’d, abstract below) projects that “a warming of 4°C causes a 40% loss of soil organic carbon from the shallow peat and 86% from the deep peat” of Northern peatlands. And that amplifying carbon cycle feedback is dangerous for three reasons:

1. The northern peatlands are believed to store some 320 (+/- 140) billion metric tons of carbon, roughly half of what the atmosphere contains.
2. Peatlands tend to emit much of their carbon in the form of methane, which is more than 20 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.
3. A warming of 4°C this century is all but inevitable if we don’t sharply reverse emissions trends quickly (see “Is 450 ppm politically possible? Part 0: The alternative is humanity’s self-destruction“).

This study provides yet more evidence that the carbon cycle has a point of no return beyond which it becomes all but impossible to stop catastrophic global warming — the point at which we start to lose the northern peatlands and the permafrost (see Tundra, Part 2: The point of no return).

Most of the world’s wetlands are peat, which are better known as bogs, moors, mires, and swamp forests. Wikipedia notes, “Under the right conditions, peat is the earliest stage in the formation of coal.” The Reuters article on the study explains why peatlands contain so much carbon:

Peat is the accumulation of partially decayed vegetation in very wet places and it covers about two percent of global land mass. Peatlands store large amounts of carbon owing to the low rates of carbon breakdown in cold, waterlogged soils.

The carbon cycle feedback begins as human-caused global warming dries out the peatlands:

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