1. Don’t.
Science is all about debate.
Science welcomes debate! Without debating, there is no science. Science is debate.
On the other hand, nobody actually means this.
When graciously declining an invitation to debate, a gentleman scientist always explains:
Debating deniers would be like mud–wrestling with pigs.
(They’d win, you could get seriously hurt—pigs are pretty strong!—and you’d just end up humiliated, bemerded and bawling a stream of excuses for losing to an opponent that, let’s be frank, is somewhat dirty and subhuman.)
The trouble with debates is that a skilled speaker can make almost any scientific evidence seem worth considering.
It isn’t, of course—but the audience might not know that. You can’t expect non-experts to recognize industry-linked, ideologically-driven, think-tank-funded, notorious, crank, serially-crank and other low-credibility evidence—especially since researchers still aren’t required to disclose credibility statistics alongside their results. (The Respectable Science movement argues that such transparency needs to be mandatory if we want to keep scientific integrity out of the reach of illegitimate, non-mainstream, disreputable and/or unserious scholars).
And this is exactly what the science ignorati are so good at: drawing attention to science a scientist would ignore.
Rhetoric (the art of speaking persuasively) and scientific truth (which nobody really knows how to define) are not always easy companions.
The orator essentially has the audience at his or her mercy: he or she can cherry-pick; sensationalize; fail to mention contrary, pro-science studies; or cite papers from journals the majority of serious scientists would probably say are fast getting a reputation for not being very respectable on any legitimate level.
I’ve even seen speakers deliberately forget—for ideological motives—to put enough emphasis on the fact that for every paper that flies in the face of the broad science, scientists have a mountain of science broadly agreeing that our understanding of the majority of the evidence is more or less consistent what the opinion of experts likely says!
Literally. And the audience is none the wiser.
As I like to quip when warming up the room: rhetoric is a weapon of mass deception.
That’s why I’m perfectly happy to speak to any audience, in any venue, as long as they don’t grant the other side an opportunity to do so.
Anyway, it’s only logical that scientists are rarely willing to debate. They’re so busy doing science that most of them haven’t had a chance to debate since high school.
Remember, science isn’t about debating, it’s about the eternal human quest to prove what we believe.
Just by turning up the deniers win. They don’t even need to win (though they usually do); all they need to do is debate you, because by debating you, they create the illusion of debate.
Which is just what their side wants the general public to think: that there are somehow two sides to this. So the worst thing our side could do is to play into their dishonest strategy.
Despite these warnings, you’ll find yourself debating one day. What then?
2. Be prepared!
Don’t leave preparation to the last minute. I know, I know, it’s an apple-pie truism. But no matter how many times I say it, there’s always one in every debate: the person who’s still madly scribbling rebuttals while the other side speaks!
This just makes you look rude—reducing you to the level of the skeptics, in other words. Even worse, it gives the impression you’re thinking on your feet.
Always make sure you can answer all the points of your opponent’s case, confidently and succinctly, the night before.
But how? Well, refuting climate skepticism isn’t exactly rocket science. It’s climate science, which is far more difficult intellectually and requires fluency in a whole network of scientific domains.
Luckily it’s all available to you, in non-scientific language, at the popular anti-skeptical site SkepticalScience.
The slick, intuitive layout is designed to be instantly familiar to anyone who remembers Sunday School catechisms. For every skeptic meme, it provides a simplified, one-sentence response; and if that’s not convincing, you can even look up a valid response. (Simply click on the “Advanced” tab). This multi-comeback system is ideal when you don’t know what level of critical thinking to expect from your audience on the day.
So unless you’ve spent the last 10 years in a cave with patchy ADSL, there’s no excuse for leaving a single skeptic claim undebunked.
Finally, if you haven’t already done it, copy out the top five or so SourceWatch hits on your opponent—and that’s it. Your argument’s practically written for you.
Remember to find out how long your opponent is scheduled to speak so you can get there on time to give science’s response.
And if you do arrive early, don’t just sit there twirling your thumbs while your skeptic opponent speaks, for heaven’s sake. Take the chance to do one last mental rehearsal of those all-important rebuttals.
Because you can never be too prepared.
CLIMATE NUREMBERG 
If you find yourself involved in an unpleasant debate with deniers, where you can’t remember the good arguments, take the Fifth as a last resort and save face! Even if it isn’t the Fifth in any juridical meaning (but sometimes it is) you can use the same rights to say nothing rather than an answer that can compromise you and the Movement. And answering ”I don’t know”, or ”You are right” or even ”We got it wrong” would surely be compromising. No one can hold it against you if you refuse to answer. Use an enigmatic smile to that and they will think that you know something they don’t.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Be Prepared” is the motto of the Boy Scouts and climate scientists would do well to adopt it as their own. Brad is correct to point this out. I would go further. As part of achieving your “Advanced Scout Standard” badge you are required to whittle a tent peg using only your sheath knife. Climate scientists should learn how to whittle tent pegs using only their sheath knives IMHO. That way they can counter any awkward questions with the honest rejoinder ‘Don’t ask me, I have been busy whittling tent pegs and haven’t been near any temperature records let alone fiddled with them’. This would leave their opponents at a loss. It would also be good for the temperaure records.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The elephant in the room is that Denialists don’t understand the nature of Scientific Debate, which is why they can’t – or won’t – understand that we’ve already had the scientific debate on climate. The debate is over, finished – it’s an ex debate – but Denialists can’t resist nailing it to its perch, so to speak, in the hope that no-one will notice. No wonder so many of them don’t believe in Evolution and think the Moon Landing was a Hoax! Denialists even try to deny that they think the Moon Landing was a Hoax!!! Don’t believe me? Well check out this drivel by a Denialist who even denies being a Denialist!!! http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/more-fraud [Apologies for linking to a Denialist site, yet again, but such duplicity needs to be exposed to the light of day so that it can be calmly, confidently, and loudly hooted at by one and all].
To be honest, a few Denialists do seem grudgingly to accept that we’re descended from monkeys, that cholesterol and saturated fats are bad bad bad, and that our cave-(wo)man – ancestors had to contend not with rhinoceri and elephanti, which are recent inventions, but with their equally grey-and-herbivorous-but-deceptively-ferocious ancestors, brontosauriaeiae and apatosauriaeiae. In these cases they accept that The Debate is Over and that The Science is Settled. But not, perplexingly, in the case of Climate Science. Why not? (Or as my daughter, Heidi D. Kline, would say, “WTF Not, then, Ducks?”)
The short answer as to why Denialists reject Climate Science is simple: THE KOCH BROTHERS DON’T HAVE A VESTED INTEREST IN TELLING YOU THAT BRONTOSAURIAEIAE AND APATOSAURIAEIAE AREN’T REAL.
The long answer is completely different, although I am not entirely satisfied that I know what it is. Sometimes I think we Defenders of Science are perhaps a little too willing to caricature Denalists as either as Greedy Capitalists or as Brainwashed Simpletons, when in many cases the problem seems more to do with the fact that They Just Don’t Get Science. E.g. some of them insist bizarrely that consensus building is not a part of scientific method, even though the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change serves as a glaring counterexample. Others insist that real science is about observational data and theory, and that suppositions and unvalidated computer models are a poor substitute. Surprisingly, many such people are semi-retired scientists of sorts, although they are generally embarrassments to their universities, still trying to do what passed for science in the 1950s in the high tech, computer savvy, environmentally aware 2010s. No wonder so many of them have been made Professors Emeritus – literally “professors without merit”.
The take home from this is: WHAT DENIALISTS NEED IS EDUCATION, NOT DENIGRATION. LET US EDUCATE THE DENIALISTS IN THE WAYS OF MODERN SCIENCE!!!
LikeLiked by 1 person