This essay discusses climate contrarians, or deniers, or faux-skeptics. They spread disinformation about climate and try to prevent climate risk management.
The "contrarians" or "climate-change deniers" are a loud vocal minority. They include some practicing scientists, who however with rare exceptions are not professional practicing climatologists. HERE is evidence that contrarians in general have far less expertise in climate science than mainstream climatologists. The conservative MIT climatologist Kerry labels contrarians as "mavericks" and "charlatans", see HERE.
Many fields of science have fringe “mavericks”, generally without appropriate qualifications, who rail against established science. Usually these people are demonstrably wrong, violating some well established data or scientific principle, and are ignored. Their arguments do not constitute legitimate scientific debate. An example is Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, whose validity is established beyond question, but nonetheless following an initial period of legitimate scientific discussion, has had a 100-year parade of cranks claiming it is wrong; see here. With climatology, such cranks are given wide publicity, generally by right-wing libertarian media, producing a false appearance of controversy.
Right-wing politicians promote contrarian/denier fallacies from bully pulpits. HEREis a recent documented example of a powerful contrarian/denier Minnesota State Senator who claims to have a scientific background, but actually never graduated from college. Other examples are below.
The general agenda of contrarians is to derail meaningful discussion and action on global warming by sowing confusion and influencing public opinion. Some contrarians do not have an overt political agenda but rather have an incomplete understanding of the relevant science.Regardless, the right-wing media push contrarian claims, and have unfortunately succeeded in the U.S. using this tactic.
What do Contrarians say about Global Warming?[The "four trenches"]
Various contrarians hold mutually inconsistent beliefs and positions. There are four categories, rather like four trenches.
1. Some contrarians deny that recent global warming exists (they distort the meaning of global warming, which is a globally-averaged upward temperature trend seen in the data since 1975, and instead invoke irrelevant fluctuations).
2. Other contrarians do admit that recent global warming exists but claim it is not largely caused by humans (they ignore or distort the attribution provided by climate models, and they emphasize irrelevant ancient data).
3. Other contrarians admit both that recent global warming exists and that it is largely caused by humans, but deny harmful impacts (they ignore current data and expert forecasts).
4. Finally some contrarians admit that global warming exists, is caused by humans, and indeed has harmful effects, but assert that it is too expensive to try to mitigate global warming (they use hand-picked economic scenarios that ignore benefits of new technologies, and they ignore the immense potentially devastating economic costs of unbridled global warming).
Contrarians have largely changed tactics from arguing about economic costs/benefits of mitigation (#4) to attacking the actual science (#1).
It is worthwhile noting that scientists, by nature, are skeptics. It takes a long time, with evidence from many sources, with peer-reviewed journals as a filter, for scientists to become convinced. However, once a scientific result becomes established, contrary claims are treated with with the same skepticism. Contrarians misinterpret this fundamental aspect of science. They misrepresent scientific standards by complaining that their ideas are suppressed by a "scientific establishment".
For a real-life example of skeptical scientists, click HERE.
The contrarian product often resembles Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science". Sometimes this is because of an incomplete understanding of the relevant science. Indeed, some contrarians seem to misunderstand the very nature of science, which consists of a web of facts and theory, different from a mathematical "proof". Other contrarians seem politically or financially motivated.
Regardless of the cause, contrarians routinely engage in various distortions of science, data, and logic. Their tactics and fallacies include ignoring or distorting mainstream scientific results, cherry-picking data and falsely generalizing, bringing up irrelevant red-herring arguments, demanding unachievable "precision" from mainstream science with the motif “if you don’t understand this detail you don’t understand anything”, overemphasizing and mischaracterizing uncertainties in mainstream science, engaging in polemics and prosecutorial-lawyer Swift-Boat-like attacks on science - and lately even scientists, attacking the usual scientific process, misrepresenting legitimate scientific debate as "no consensus", and overemphasizing details of little significance.
On the other hand, and although there are a few exceptions, contrarian claims constitute pseudo-science that routinely contain flagrant errors and huge uncertainties that contrarians hypocritically persist in ignoring. Contrarian claims are often just misapplied illogical conjectures using irrelevant data, unwarranted generalizations, and sometimes mathematical mistakes. The contrarian strategy is similar to, and arguably derived from, the old propaganda strategy of the tobacco lobby. Contrarians generally do not publish in peer-reviewed journals, mostly because of the generally low quality of their work. Instead right-wing blogs and media loudly proclaim contrarian claims, often in lock-step. A few contrarians publish quality climate papers, but they also sometimes give unpublished talks repeating incorrect contrarian claims.
HERE is a long list of logical fallacies. Contrarians make all of them. Wikipedia says: By accident or design, fallacies may exploit emotional triggers in the listener or interlocutor (e.g. appeal to emotion), or take advantage of social relationships between people (e.g. argument from authority). Fallacious arguments are often structured using rhetorical patterns that obscure the logical argument, making fallacies more difficult to diagnose. Also, the components of the fallacy may be spread out over separate arguments. HERE is a great summary of dishonest illogical tricks in argumentation from The Art of Being Right by Schopenhauer, the original is HERE and HERE. The right-wing media that push contrarian arguments are masters of these tricks.
Recently, Dr. Peter Gleickhas exposed a flagrant case of fallacious data cherry picking by a contrarian organization. In the drawing below, one data point was used in a false argument about arctic sea ice area. This is a great example of the classic logical fallacy of false generalization often used by climate deniers.
Aside from being factually wrong, the contrarian argument is a red herring, because the area of extent of sea ice is not as important as sea ice thickness, and sea ice in the Arctic has become very thin. HERE are the data.
We have seen the tactics of climate contrarians before with cigarette propaganda tactics, as noted HERE: "An identical strategy succeeded in delaying government action against tobacco companies for years despite overwhelming evidence of the hazards of cigarettes". HERE is a University of California paper using the words of the tobacco industry, including this on page 9: "A demand for scientific proof is always a formula for inaction and delay". The same tactic is used by climate contrarians. Convincing evidence documenting the ties between the tobacco attack on medical science and the climate contrarian attack on climate science is in the second half of the video "The American Denial of Global Warming" by Naomi Orestes.
What do Contrarians Misunderstand about Climate Risk Management?
Climate Risk Management deals with mitigation and adaptation as procedures to ameliorate the risks of future impacts of global warming / climate change. To do risk management in any setting, risk estimation must first be carried out. This requires the best available input, including models, scenarios, backtesting, and statistical analysis. By definition, risk includes uncertainties. The 2007 IPCC reports and other expert reports summarize the best available information for a sensible climate risk-management framework.
Contrarians misunderstand (either by omission or deliberately) all aspects of climate risk management. First they mischaracterize the expert information for input to risk management. Instead they propagate the message "there is no climate risk". Contrarians have absolutely no evidence for this statement. Also notice that "no risk" has "no uncertainty", so contrarians oppose risk management for uncertainty. This is simply fraudulent. Risk management is largely about coping with uncertainty.
Contrarians and their media outlets routinely denigrate scientific forecasts of harmful effects of global warming as "alarmist". Above all they oppose any sensible proposals of risk management of harmful climate impacts.
Naturally, risk management comes with a price tag. Ignoring risk management comes with a price tag also. Contrarians overemphasize the price of risk management, and underemphasize the price of ignoring risk management.
As an imperfect but instructive parallel, the attitude of contrarians toward climate risk is similar to the attitude of unprincipled traders on Wall Street who insisted on short term profits at the expense of sensible bank capital requirements against high-risk events, an attitude that lead to the recent financial crisis. The contrarian attitude of ignoring and even sabotaging climate risk management is leading humanity toward a climate crisis.
It can be argued that contrarians (mostly in the US) are currently the main obstacle to beginning the process of implementing sensible risk management actions against the increasingly severe impacts of global warming / climate change. Future generations will look back with an extremely harsh eye at this contrarian myopic, destructive behavior.
From ClimateScienceWatch: "Senator James Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, has gone a step beyond promoting his long-notorious global warming denialist propaganda. He is now using the resources of the Senate committee to seek opportunities to criminalize the actions of 17 leading scientists who have been associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports." Inhofe believes that global warming is a "hoax".
This is not the first time that right-wing US politicians from oil states (again notably Inhofe) have attacked climate scientists. Here is Michael Mann's 2003 Senate testimony. Because of his prominence in producing the first so-called "hockey stick" that shows recent temperatures are unprecedented in at least the last 1000 years, climate deniers regularly attack Mann. HERE is some commentary.
Similar disturbing history is in the article by Rich Piltz called "The Denial Machine - Science, Censorship, and the White House" examining contrarians and the Bush Administration HERE.
While contrarians are mostly a US phenomenon, disturbing developments in Australia are reported HEREandHERE, including DEATH THREATS and one high-level Australian politician in an outrageous speech accusing climate scientists of totalitarianism.
HERE is a professor who says: "At the American Association for the Advancement of Science meetings last month in San Diego, I was amazed at the number of my mild-mannered scientific colleagues who admitted, in private conversations, the pressures and/or threats they've received."
HERE is another article called "Climate Debate gets Ugly..." that says: Climate scientists, used to dealing with skeptics, are under siege like never before, targeted by hate emails brimming with abuse and accusations of fabricating global warming data. Some emails contain thinly veiled death threats...
HERE is testimony by Benjamin Santer, a climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, California at hearings of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming on May 20, 2010: "I firmly believe that I would now be leading a different life if my research suggested that there was no human effect on climate. I would not be the subject of Congressional inquiries, Freedom of Information Act requests, or email threats. I would not need to be concerned about the safety of my family. I would not need to be concerned about my own physical safety when I give public lectures. "
The IPCC and its work is described HERE. The 2007 IPCC reports consist of summary but detailed accounts of the best up-to-date scientific and economic research on climate change and global warming, containing 3000 pages in 3 volumes. Recently a few small mistakes were found, including one isolated erroneous paragraph on glaciers in the Impacts 2007 IPCC 1000-page report. This has been used as a pretext by right-wing contrarian media to manufacture a destructive attack on the entire IPCC structure. Actually, the IPCC has been under attack for many years by right-wing contrarians. It should be noted that no human endeavor is guaranteed 100% error-free, not even published papers.
For analysis, see RealClimate's discussion called "The IPCC is not infallible (shock!)". More RealClimateanalysis is at: "IPCC errors: facts and spin". HERE is the analysis of the Union of Concerned Scientists. HERE is documentation of misreporting on IPCC coverage of rain forests.
The few minor glitches in the IPCC reports should be contrasted with the contrarian product, which is full of glaring errors.
A common misleading attack on the IPCC promoted by right-wing media and politicians claims that IPCC authors and reviewers disagree with the IPCC conclusions. Explicit documentation shows that this applies to at most 1% of such people.
The hacked email incident, propagandized as "Climategate", has been blatantly distorted by right-wing media in a destructive frontal attack on climate science and climate scientists. Independent investigations concluded that "Climategate" had no scientific content. Examples:
Prof. Phil Jones, at the center of the controversy, was exonerated by the Science and Technology Committee of the British House of Commons; see HERE.
The definitive rebuke to the attempt by right-wing contrarians to exploit this incident was provided in the exhaustive Sir Muir Russell report, which emerged after six months of inquiry, clearing scientists in the Climategate affair. HERE is the full report. The professional climate website RealClimate has a description. HERE is a report from the Guardian UK, which says in part:The climate scientists at the centre of a media storm were today cleared of accusations that they fudged their results and silenced critics to bolster the case for man-made global warming.Sir Muir Russell, the senior civil servant who led a six-month inquiry into the affair, said the "rigour and honesty" of the scientists at the world-leading Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) are not in doubt. They did not subvert the peer review process to censor criticism as alleged, the panel found, while key data needed to reproduce their findings was freely available to any "competent" researcher."
The MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel has recently written a very hard-hitting essay: "Climategate": A Different Perspective, posted on the politically conservative National Association of Scholars NAS website. Emanuel castigates the right-wing attack on climate science that uses the pretext of the hacked emails and the minor IPCC report errors. This essay is extremely important. Here are a few quotes (more extensive quotes are HERE):
...the scandal I see is very different from the one that has been presented to NAS members. Climategate is merely the latest in a series of coordinated, politically motivated attacks that represent an aggravated assault on scholarship...
At the time of this writing, three separate panels convened in Great Britain, and two investigations conducted by the Pennsylvania State University have cleared the authors of the controversial emails of any serious wrong doing, and with good reason. Meanwhile, the gross mischaracterization of what those emails actually contain continues unabated...
The sin of those responsible for simplifying the summary figure pales in comparison to that committed by all those who have sought to elevate this to the level of a grand conspiracy among climate scientists and thereby to discredit a whole field of scholarship...
The allegation that the researchers actually destroyed data has been shown to be false, but it is repeated endlessly.
...several factual errors were discovered in the most recent assessment report of the IPCC. These include a permutation of digits in the year in which certain Himalayan glaciers were predicted to vanish...While errors of this kind are regrettable, the attempt to leverage them into a sweeping condemnation of the whole report betrays such obvious political skullduggery as to be unworthy of further remark..
This deployment of inflammatory terminology has a distinctly Orwellian flavor. It originates not in laboratories and classrooms, where ideas are the central focus and one hardly ever hears labels applied to researchers, but in the media, the blogosphere, and political think tanks, where polarization attracts attention and/or turns a profit...
But it turns out that there are not enough mavericks in climate science to meet the media’s and blogosphere’s insatiable appetite for conflict.Thus into the arena steps a whole host of charlatans posing as climate scientists...
While the climategate email authors are castigated for not being paragons of virtue, the sins of others go unremarked. In the summer of 2009, a one-page letter was sent to Congress, signed by one actual climate scientist and six physicists with little or no background in climate science, three of whom were retired. Among other untruths, it contained the sentence, referring to evidence of anthropogenic global warming, “There is no such evidence; it doesn’t exist.” I confronted the sole climate scientist among the authors with this statement, and he confessed that he did not hold that to be the case. Last I checked, lyingto Congress was a federal crime. [See the Nb below].
Kerry Emanuel is a professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes, (2005, Oxford University Press).In May 2006 he was named one of Time magazine's "Time 100: The People Who Shape Our World."
Nb: Who was the climate scientist that Emanuel implied lied to Congress? Why, it seems to be Richard Lindzen, the "sole climate scientist among the authors" who signed the above letter (which is HERE on Marc Morano's contrarian website). The six physicists referred to by Emanuel "with little or no background in climate science" who signed the above letter are Robert H. Austin, William Happer, S. Fred Singer, Roger W. Cohen, Harold W. Lewis, and Laurence I. Gould.
Right on cue, just before the 2011 Durban IPCC Climate Conference as for the 2009 Copenhagen Conference, another batch of stolen climate emails was released. See HERE for analysis. As before, selected emails were taken out of context and blatantly distorted by right-wing media, clearly aimed at preventing sensible risk management of climate risks. HERE is an excellent video summary with specific examples of this distortion. See also: We are smarter this time around and Snippets of stolen e-mails cannot make the Earth flat.
While the history of science is littered with discarded or crank ideas, contrarians producing such ideas today have the unprecedented advantage of being supported notably by powerful energy and right-wing libertarian interests. The media, in order to "present both sides", gives the contrarians unwarranted coverage. In addition there are contrarian Internet bloggers, right-wing politicians, and some influential newspaper editors and TV “news” shows that present only contrarian arguments.
HERE is the way one professor put it: "What really bothers me is the stunning lack of balance in U.S. media reports on climate science. In Europe, newspaper coverage gives a pretty accurate reflection of what the leading scientists are saying. In the U.S., the scientific findings are “balanced” against the views of people who know how to spin juicy quotes but can’t even spell “climatology.” When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change releases a major report, its main conclusions get a few stories, while most of the attention goes to small errors that don’t affect its substance – and that show up about once every 1000 pages."
The right-wing media chronically, purposely, and blatantly distort climate science.
A Fox News e-mail was leaked confirming Fox News deliberate editorial interference with its climate reporting; it is from Bill Sammon, the Washington DC managing editor. It was sent last December to Fox News producers just as the UN Copenhagen climate conference was beginning. Sammon wrote, "we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts..."
The most influential contrarian-biased paper is the Wall Street Journal. Here is a revealing graph by Prof. Scott Mandia showing that WSJ editorials/op-eds supported consensus climate scientific findings only 7% of the time!
HERE is a paper by William R. Freudenburg , UC Santa Barbara, which discusses the "... growing realization that media coverage of supposed debates has been strongly skewed by a tactic so widespread that it has its own name -- "Scientific Certainty" Argumentation Methods, or SCAMS ".
HERE is a paper "Exaggerating Denialism: Media Representations of Outlier Views on Climate Change" by Maxwell T. Boykoff , U. Colorado.
HERE is a video of Prof. Carl Wunsch of MIT complaining about the contrarian film "Global Warming Swindle", which "completely distorted" his comments. He called the film "as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two." Although Wunsch is sometimes quoted for support by contrarians (e.g. see page 7 of Richard Lindzen's 2010 Heartland speech), Wunsch wrote in a letter dated 15 March 2007 that he believes climate change is "real, a major threat, and almost surely has a major human-induced component".
HERE is a point-by-point refutation of an wildly inaccurate contrarian report in a British newspaper.
HERE is a great video on the chronic distortion of climate science by Fox News.
A few other positive signs exist of better media accountability. RealClimate reported that the Sunday Times (UK) retracted a story by Jonathan Leake on a supposed ‘Amazongate’ and published an apology. This is in response (see HERE) to an official complaint to the Press Complaints Commission by Simon Lewis, an expert on tropical forests at the University of Leeds, over the above "inaccurate, misleading and distorted" newspaper story; the story falsely reported a supposed mistake made by the IPCC .
Media inaccuracy on climate has also been moving into the mainstream. Here is a RealClimate article discussing an example of misleading media, through incompetence or intent or both; see also "Whatevergate". Part of the problem is that mainstream media have been firing their science writers.
Are the Scientists Hitting Back against the Contrarians?
Yes.
The Climate Science Rapid Response Team CSRRT is a match-making service to connect climate scientists with lawmakers and the media. The group is committed to providing rapid, high-quality information to media and government officials.
HERE is a UK Guardian article that says: "Leading climate scientists have given their support to a Freedom of Information request seeking to disclose who is funding the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a London-based climate sceptic thinktank chaired by the former Conservative chancellor Lord Lawson. James Hansen, the director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies who first warned the world about the dangers of climate change in the 1980s, has joined other scientists in submitting statements to be considered by a judge at the Information Rights Tribunal on Friday...James Hansen told the Guardian: "Our children and grandchildren will judge those who have misled the public, allowing fossil fuel emissions to continue almost unfettered, as guilty of crimes against humanity and nature... If successful, the FOI request may, by exposing one link in a devious manipulation of public opinion, start a process that allows the public to be aware of what is happening, what is at stake, and where the public interest lies." "(1/22/12)
HERE is an extraordinary letter published in the journal Science, signed by 255 members of the US National Academy of Sciences, including 11 Nobel Prize laureates. It says: "Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence."
Further, "We also call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them."
HERE is an account of the courageous efforts of three climate scientists to cope with personal attacks on them, including for one of them, 91 pages of abusive emails.
The Union of Concerned Scientists UCS has announced a program to organize scientists from around the country to beat back misinformation and educate decision makers and the public about the real facts on global warming. A recent UCS email states: "The Union of Concerned Scientists is leading a campaign to promote climate science facts and return the public’s attention back to the urgent need to rein in global warming emissions and implement common-sense solutions to our country’s energy needs."
Academics are speaking out against a recent attack against the climatologist Michael Mann by the Attorney General of Virginia Ken Cuccinelli; see HERE and HERE. This attack has disturbing academic freedom implications and is clearly politically motivated. U-Va. has gone to court to stop the AG. 39 U-Va.law school faculty members urged the administration to fight Cuccinelli. A UCS analysis HERE shows that the attack makes basic factual errors. Cuccinelli's demand was denied by the circuit judge on August 30, 2010.
A remarkable series of rebuttals to climate contrarians/deniers/"faux-skeptics" has appeared on The Conversation, an Australian academic site.
HERE is the book Global Warming and Political Intimidation - How Politicians Cracked Down on Scientists as the Earth Heated Up by Raymond S. Bradley(University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geosciences and director of the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst).
From the article "Playing Rough": Bradley is depicted by contrarian websites "as a ringleader in a conspiracy to orchestrate panic over climate change, one of a cabal intent on making themselves rich and famous, taxing the free market to death, and instituting a new world order headed by Al Gore."
Prof. Andrew Weaver, Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling at U. Victoria and author, filed a lawsuit against the right-wing newspaper The National Post, for libels based on published falsehoods. He also filed suit against the well-known climate contrarian Tim Ball for defamation.
HERE is "A Response to Climate Change Denialism" by Richard Somerville, a distinguished professor emeritus and research professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.
HERE is a AAAS Symposium at it's 2010 annual meeting on "Understanding Climate-Change Skepticism: Its Sources and Strategies".
In the UK, Prof. John Beddington, the government's chief scientific adviser, hit out at climate sceptics who attack global warming science on spurious grounds, see HERE and HERE. Beddington said he intends to take this agenda forward with his fellow chief scientists and also with the research councils. “I really believe that... we need to recognise that this is ... an increasingly pernicious influence and we need to be thinking about how we can actually deal with it."
Also in the UK, Simon Lewis, an expert on tropical forests at the University of Leeds, said regarding a false subsequently retracted article on the Amazon in the UK Sunday Times due to Lewis' official complaint to the Press Complaints Commission: "There is currently a war of disinformation about climate change-related science, and my complaint can hopefully let journalists in the front line of this war know that there are potential repercussions if they publish misleading stories. The public deserve careful and accurate science reporting."
HERE is an analysis of the problem in the journal Nature.
Google announced a new program of Science Communication Fellows, initially focused on climate change. Google says: "we chose scientists who had the strongest potential to become excellent communicators. That meant previous training in science communication; research in topics related to understanding or managing climate change; and experience experimenting with innovative approaches or technology tools for science communication."
Part of the climate communication problem, besides media inaccuracy, is the chronic inability of many scientists to communicate in a simple effective fashion with the media and the public, as discussed HERE.
Fallacious tactics used by contrarians constitute a deliberate psychological agenda to influence the public.
HERE is an excellent essay that says: "People are only too happy to accept a message of denial: you do not need to change, it will all be fine".
One problem is "Confirmation bias" which hampers people from changing beliefs if they first hear contrarian disinformation - cf:Persistence of discredited beliefs and Preference for early information.Confirmation biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. Hence they can lead to disastrous decisions, especially in organizational, military, political and social contexts.
HERE is the description of a good article by Clive Hamilton on "Why we Resist the Truth on Climate Change", download HERE. Interestingly, he says "...the campaign in the 1920s against Einstein’s general theory of relativity provides an uncannily complete template for the conservative attack on climate science eight decades later."
The biggest psychological ploy is simply confusion, using right-wing media to propagate the illusion that climatologists are so uncertain about the basic science that no action on mitigating climate change impacts should be taken.
Listen to this Scientific American audio clipwith Jay Ingram, host of Daily Planet: Your Opinion of Climate Change Depends on Your Social Psychology.
An overarching framework for right-wing and fossil fuel opposition to climate science and climate risk management can be found at Greenpeace’s website ExxonSecrets, which documents “Exxon Foundation and corporate funding to a series of institutions who have worked to undermine solutions to global warming and climate change.” A recent article documents that 9 out of the most prolific 10 contrarians is linked to Exxon Mobil. See also HEREand HERE.
A recent Greenpiece report "Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine" is described HERE, and the report can be downloaded HERE. That report says: "Koch has out-spent ExxonMobil in funding these groups in recent years. From 2005 to 2008, ExxonMobil spent $8.9 million while the Koch Industries-controlled foundations contributed $24.9 million in funding to organizations of the ‘climate denial machine’." THIS article in the LA Times regarding an attack on the California state greenhouse gas law says: "The money from David and Charles Koch could significantly help the campaign for the ballot measure, which has been trailing in most polls. They have founded a web of libertarian organizations and think tanks dedicated in large part to fighting what they see as excessive government regulation. They also have helped finance efforts to develop arguments denying that global climate change is a real phenomenon." And from the NY Times, Charles and David Koch, the billionaires from Kansas who have played a prominent role in financing the Tea Party movement, donated $1 million to the campaign to suspend the [California] Global Warming Solutions Act...
HERE is a smoking-gun 1998 document from the American Petroleum Institute detailing a plan to influence public opinion by sowing doubt about the science, complete with multi-million dollar budget figures.
HERE is a useful site called DirtyEnergyMoney that documents the contributions of big fossil fuel interests to politicians who deny the science of global warming.
The Case of Patrick Michaels
An op-ed by one of the most vocal contrarians, Patrick Michaels, was refuted HERE by the AGU (American Geophysical Union). The AGU said: "Mr. Michaels's op-ed reflects a political strategy to sway popular opinion on climate change without regard for facts or the enormous body of scientific evidence...The result damages the scientific community and is a disservice to the public." HERE is a report indicating perhaps why Michaels makes such misleading statements; it says: "And a 2006 leaked industry memo revealed that he received $100,000 in funding from the Intermountain Rural Electric Association to fund climate denial campaigning around the time of the release of An Inconvenient Truth." You can download an IREA memo here. Michaels currently works for the Cato Institute, founded by the Koch Brothers.
Michaels admitted in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on Aug 15, 2010 that around 40% of his funding comes from the petroleum industry, see the video HERE. Now Michaels recently submitted a "revised" CV to the US Congress that lists $4.2 million in cumulative income from sources over $10,000 (he did not reveal his total income). Michaels claims that only 3% is attributed to energy sector industry sources, which is manifestly inconsistent with the 40% figure he gives in the above 8/15/10 video. Henry Waxman has asked for an investigation of Michaels for this inconsistency, which if true could constitute a federal offense of lying to Congress punishable by jail and fines; see HERE for examples.
Dr. Peter Gleick (member of the National Academy of Sciences) recently exposed fallacies in two denier articles in Forbes Magazine by "serial climate science conjurer Patrick Michaels with egregious and outrageous claims and errors. This falls well into the category of climate B.S. (bad science)."
See HERE for a scathing review of Michaels' activities, including this gem: Michaels "co-operated with Ross McKitrick on a paper that managed to "prove" that global warming wasn't happening by mixing up degrees with radians." See the RealClimate commentary on this "egregious basic error" HERE.
The Case of Willie Soon
Willie Soonadmitted to receiving over 1 million dollars from petroleum (oil) and coal companies since 2001. As documented on Realclimate.org, his writings on climate are strictly contrarian. One of his papers led to the resignation of 6 editors in protest at the failure of peer-review that led to its publication.
The contrarian Roy Spencer gave this blatant admission on his blog: "I view my job a little like a legislator, supported by the taxpayer, to protect the interests of the taxpayer and to minimize the role of government." Spencer's climate views are reviewed here. It is worth noting (see HERE) that Spencer is on the board of directors of the George C Marshall Institute, a right-wing thinktank critical of mainstream climate science, and an advisor to the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, an evangelical Christian organisation that claims policies to curb climate change "would destroy jobs and impose trillions of dollars in costs" and "could be implemented only by enormous and dangerous expansion of government control over private life".
Jeremy Grantham, whose firm GMO manages over $100 B, writes Everything You Need to know about Global Warming in 5 minutes: ...right-leaning think tanks...have allowed their drive for desirable policy to trump science... I have a...plausible “conspiracy theory”: that fossil energy companies, driven by the need to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of profits, encourage obfuscation of the inconvenient scientific results...Challenging vested interests as powerful as the oil and coal lobbies was never going to be easy... Scientists are not naturally aggressive defenders of arguments...The skeptics are far, far more determined and expert propagandists to boot. They are also well funded. I, for one, admire them for their P.R. skills, while wondering, as always: “Have they no grandchildren?”
HERE is an editorial in Nature Magazine entitled:Science Scorned: The anti-science strain pervading the right wing in the United States is the last thing the country needs in a time of economic challenge. Denialism over global warming has become a scientific cause célèbre within the movement. [Rush] Limbaugh, for instance, who has told his listeners that “science has become a home for displaced socialists and communists”, has called climate-change science “the biggest scam in the history of the world”.
HERE are the results of a Gallup poll showing most conservatives doubt that global warming is even occurring. And HERE is a Guardian article on a report documenting that all but one of the Republican candidates for Senate "are skeptical about climate change".Anyone doubting the connection of climate contrarians with right-wing politics is invited to clickHERE.
HERE is an interesting article by Sherwood Boehlert, NY Congressman (1983-2007) who says "...My fellow Republicans should understand that wholesale, ideologically based or special-interest-driven rejection of science is bad policy. And that in the long run, it's also bad politics...The National Academy reports concluded that "scientific evidence that the Earth is warming is now overwhelming." Party affiliation does not change that fact."
The rest of this essay is full of connections of the right wing with contrarians.
A very long and detailed response to myriad contrarian attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency made during the EPA's public hearings in 2009 is HERE.
Here are three great videos debunking contrarians with excellent historical overviews of the science by Dr. Naomi Orestes: "The American Denial of Global Warming" , "Merchants Of Doubt" , and "Answering Climate Change Skeptics". The case is convincingly made that the contrarian attack on science has nothing to do with science, but has its roots in the right-wing political distaste for government regulation.
HERE is the Union of Concerned Scientists "Fact-checker" site debunking contrarian claims.
A persistent and incorrect claim of contrarians is that solar effects are responsible for recent global warming; HERE is a paper debunking that contrarian claim, with documentation of the "flawed science" behind it.
Here is an essay "The Attack on Climate Change Science"by Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org. These attacks use Swift-Boat tactics. HERE is a report on a well-known contrarian who admittedly played a part in the Swift-Boat incidents attacking John Kerry and John Murtha.
HERE is an excellent interview with Prof. Stephen Schneider discussing the contrarians.
Mostly, climate contrarians are not climate scientists who publish in peer-reviewed climate journals. HERE is documentation.
HERE is an excellent summary "Global Warming Contrarians and the Falsehoods they Promote" on the State of California AG website. Contrarian positions used by Republicans are affecting California state politics, the state climate change law AB32, and green economic initiatives in Silicon Valley; see HERE.
Although the denial industry is largely American, there are a few European contrarians.HERE is a recent article in Le Monde documenting numerous contrarian errors.
It is telling that one of the most vociferous countries with an official contrarian view is Saudi Arabia. The Saudi's lead climate negotiator told BBC News that "...there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change." Recently, Saudi Arabia blocked a call by vulnerable island states at climate talks for a study... A Fox News / AP article says that Saudi Arabia has a long history of playing an obstructionist role at climate conferences. Indeed, Saudi Arabia wants reparations if a climate treaty is adopted, which would be inimical to oil consumption. There is a blatantly obvious connection of this fact with the anti-science contrarian Saudi stance.
HERE is an article by the climate contrarian Tim Ball entitled Scientific Reaction To Velikovsky Symptomatic Of Climate Science Debacle. Velikovskywas a Russian psychiatrist who produced wild fallacious conjectures on astronomy.
HERE is documentation that links creationists and contrarians in right-wing politics and attacks on science in school curricula; and in amazingly in South Dakota, astrology.
Generally contrarians do not publish in reputable climate journals. This is partly because their "work" is generally not up to the scientific standards set by these journals. In any field of science there are cranks that produce pseudo-scientific material, and climatology is no exception. In fact publication in journals is not of much interest to contrarians. Powerful right-wing political media publicize contrarian material, providing far more exposure to the public than would reputable scientific journals.
There are a few contrarians that do publish in reputable climate journals and some that publish in fringe non-climate journals. The reliable website RealClimate.org has descriptions and critiques of some contrarian papers.
When contrarian articles get published, they are often controversial in content or process.Here are four examples.
1. WEGMAN: As USA TODAY reported in May 2011, a statistics journal decided to retract a federally funded contrarian paper due to plagiarism. One of the authors is Edward Wegman. His earlier "Wegman Report" is also under investigation for plagiarism.
2. SPENCER: Roy Spencer, a contrarian with a university position and a NASA medal, but also with a track record of bad mistakes, co-published a defective paper in a non-climate journal (HERE) in July 2011, claiming that some predictions of climate models are wrong. The chief editor Dr. Wagner resigned in protest, saying in a published editorialthat Spencer's paper was most likely problematic with fundamental methodological errors and false claims,"fundamentally flawed and therefore wrongly accepted by the journal". Peer-review was corrupted, with contrarians selected as referees in a biased process. Wagner alsoprotested "against how the authors and like-minded climate sceptics have much exaggerated the paper's conclusions in public statements", including headlines such as "New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism" on the Forbes magazine website and "Does NASA data show global warming lost in space?" on Foxnews.com.It is interesting to note Spencer's right-wing connections; he is also said to be a creationist. Excellent commentary on this sordid event by the scientist Dr. Peter Gleick is HERE.
3. SOON and BALIUNAS: An earlier 2003 contrarian paper by W. Soon and S. Baliunas was fallacious, published under an abuse of peer review, and is used as support for incorrectly denying that humans are the cause of recent global warming (see HERE). Denier right-wing politicians (e.g. Senator Inhofe) use the paper to attack climate science with the aim of sabotaging climate negotiations. Although fallacious (see HERE,HERE, and HERE), the paper was accepted for publication by a known contrarian, following which the journal's chief editor and others on the editorial board resigned. The publisher subsequently admitted that the conclusions of the paper could not be supported by the evidence and that the journal should have requested appropriate revisions prior to publication. The paper was funded in part by the fossil fuel industry, and both authors at the time were paid consultants for a right-wing think tank. Neither Soon nor Baliunas have any climate credentials; they are astrophysicists. An excellent video by Peter Sinclair putting all this into perspective is HERE.
4. ENERGY and ENVIRONMENT: Contrarians publish in a non-climate-science journal called Energy and Environment. The editor Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen posted on 04/26/2011 04:36 PM: "E&E is an interdisciplinary academic journal publishing on relevant economic, social and technological subjects. Climate science is only of importance because of the growing role this alleged threat has played in policy justification and regulatory efforts. The demonisation of greenhouse gas emissions has encouraged me to publish so-called climate sceptics, with the helpful support of my publisher, since the early 1990s." She also said: "I'm following my political agenda -- a bit, anyway. But isn't that the right of the editor?"
The "hockey stick" is an iconic graph of inferred temperature data, see below. It shows that recent temperatures are unprecedented in the last 1000 years. Therefore it has been under attack by contrarians, who do not like the inconvenient truth that recent global warming is occurring.
Importantly, the Wegman Report just discussed (page 3) contains erroneous criticism of the original hockey stick methodology. Wegman was chosen by the right-wing representative Joe Barton to testify before Congress, where Wegman repeated the same erroneous criticism.
Wegman's erroneous criticism just mentioned is actually a non-issue. It involves a "centering" convention used in a mathematical technique of data analysis called principal component analysis. Centering is usually done in a particular way, but in fact centering can be done arbitrarily provided that an appropriate number of principal components, which depends on the centering convention, is retained (see RealClimate and Wahl-Ammann). It should be noted that if ALL principal components are used for any centering convention, the data in question are described exactly. A WRONG procedure does not retain enough principal components using some centering convention to accurately describe the data, and that wrong procedure is PRECISELY what contrarians/deniers do. It is a contrarian fallacy.
The hockey stick is found regardless of the technique used, provided this contrarian mistake is not made. Contrarians butcher the mathematics with this mistake and erroneously conclude that there is no hockey stick. The hockey stick is present even if NO principal component analysis is made at all.Many groups independently have shown that the hockey stick is really there (the graph is below).
A whole industry of contrarianpseudoscience, loudly trumpeted by right-wing media and politicians attacking climate science and scientists, has arisen over this contrarian fallacy. The attack by Cuccinelli against Michael Mann (see above)is a blatant example.
Another contrarian/denier claim, somewhat more obscure, was that statistical red noise generally produces a hockey stick under Mann's assumptions, a claim which is false.
Contrarian pseudoscience pushed by right-wing media has now essentially trapped the US Republican Party into denial. This includes Republicans who previously asserted the mainstream scientific consensus that recent global warming exists and is caused by humans. Some Republicans also asserted that global warming will have increasingly bad impacts, and were willing and ready to take risk management mitigation steps.
A good example is John McCain. In October 2003, McCain co-sponsored the Climate Stewardship Act that would have introduced a cap and trade system aimed at returning greenhouse gas emissions to 2000 levels; see HERE.McCain later abruptly abandoned his support of a climate bill, see HERE.
A noticeable retrograde change in US attitudes toward climate likely due to contrarians is documented HERE in the document American Climate Attitudes (2011).
To give an idea of the rampant distortion of climate science by contrarian media, HERE is a popular right-wing blog that states: "Another global warming myth comes crashing down. No warming since at least 1995, no melting glaciers and now no rising sea levels. Basically this leaves the warmers with no credibility..." All these assertions are simply wrong.
HERE is a list of contrarians and what they say. HERE is a list of contrarian links, organized by topics. HERE is background information on contrarians. HERE is a list of contrarians with reference links.
HERE is a list of common contrarian arguments, along with one-liner easy-to-use rebuttals.
The right-wing Heartland Institute organizes contrarian conferences supposedly for science, but actually highly politicized. The BBC report on the latest such said that Heartland's libertarian president Joseph Bast declared climate change is being used by governments to oppress the people. There was cheering when a member of the audience demanded that the "Climategate criminals" - the scientists who wrote the University of East Anglia hacked emails - should be jailed for fraud. HERE is an account of the 2011 Heartland Conference including this gem: George Mears, a former navy flier... is politically active in the Norfolk, Va., area, where he promotes limited government and fiscal restraint. He opposes things like light rail and all the "green crap."This conference was analyzed HERE in a recent Nature editorial. The appropriate summary word in the editorial is "Absurdities".
See Prof. Richard Feynman's famous talk, "Cargo Cult Science". The contrarian/denier/faux-skeptic pseudo-science is well characterized by this term, which is "form over substance".
Galileo played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His championing of heliocentrism was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, and the Inquisition concluded that the idea that the earth goes around the sun could only be supported as a possibility, not as an established fact. An excellent analog of Galileo's science to climate science is that right-wing attacks on climate science are acting quite similarly to the inquisition attacks on Galileo. This analogy is fallaciously turned on its head by contrarians to become the canard that contrarians are like Galileo railing against established science. This absurd idea is promoted by the right-wing; see e.g. HERE. The "Galileo movement" in Australia shows its true colors on its front page: "Stop the carbon tax".
Here is a painting of Galileo facing the inquisition. The real analogy is to substitute right-wing politicians for the Inquisition on the left and mainstream climate scientists for Galileo on the right.
Bottom Line: Quacks, Tobacco, Right-Wing Think Tanks, and Contrarians
Here is the bottom-line summary. Some contrarians, without professional climate science credentials, assume the role of a climate scientist and mangle the science to arrive at pre-ordained contrarian conclusions. As emphasized by the climatologist Kerry Emanuel HERE, "a whole host of charlatans posing as climate scientists" now exists. This is effective because detecting the errors in contrarian pseudo-science often requires real expertise. Think of a medical quack without an MD who puts on a white coat and starts talking about cancer using scientific jargon, while criticizing peer-reviewed medical research in medical journals. Sometimes the contrarian is a scientist paid by the fossil-fuel industry (see HERE) who, although knowing better, hypocritically misrepresents the science - think of scientists who defended the tobacco industry by claiming tobacco wasn't dangerous. Others with an ideological right-wing libertarian philosophy and funded by right-wing think tanks, distort the science to influence public opinion with the real goal of preventing governments from acting against global warming. Their arguments may change, but contrarians invariably arrive at the same conclusions. The full panoply of contrarian tactics and fallaciesare employed, with the four trenches of contrarian attack.
Layered with distorted commentary and op-eds, contrarian pseudo-science is broadcast in lockstep on the powerful right-wing media machine: TV, radio, newspapers, and blogs.
The contrarian goals are to sow confusion and doubt, hampering mitigation efforts, facilitating attacks on legislative attempts, opposing greenhouse gas regulation, and fighting the adoption of a binding climate treaty. The primary motivations are protection of fossil-fuel profits and libertarian anti-government sentiments.
The results are simultaneous attacks on social justice, intergenerational equity, and long-term human preservation. Not to mention the animal species that will disappear.
The contrarians no doubt believe that they can survive, casting all others (apparently including their own grandchildren) to their fate.
What's the Picture? A contrarian fallacy regarding the "Hockey Stick"
The notorious apples-and-oranges comparison in the misleading contrarian picture above with two graphs provides an instructive example of fallacious contrarian argumentation. The two graphs correspond to entirely different geographical regions, falsifying the fraudulent contrarian argument that the current global warming over the last 30 years is not caused by humans.
Actually this contrarian argument, besides being wrong, is a red herring.
Attribution of the observed global warming trend over the last 30 years to human activity is done completely differently and has nothing to do with irrelevant old data, as explained HERE.
Details:
Current global average temperatures are actually the hottest in 1,000 years and the current temperature trend is UP. Besides, as explained below, there was no pronounced global "medieval warming period", contrary to the implication of the bottom graph. HEREare relevant data. Here is a great video called The Medieval Warming Crock.
The upper "hockey stick" scientific graph of the contrarian picture shows temperatures over the last thousand years averaged over the entire Northern Hemisphere (although this essential fact is deliberately avoided), and this upper graph shows the recent observed global warming since around 1970. The upper graph is simplified but is essentially correct(the real graph is pasted below, see HERE, from the work of many groups of professional climatologists).
The lower graph in the above picture is wrong and is moreover used in a fraudulent manner, because it does NOT correspond to the entire Northern Hemisphere, as does the upper graph. The lower graph in the above picture is based on an outdated graph from an old 1990 IPCC report that contained an even earlier temperature estimate in medieval times by Lamb only from a few places that happened to be warm (mostly from Central England; a few other places like Greenland were also warm); the graph was labeled as a "schematic", all documented HERE (p. 36). The old 1990 graph was then incorrectly extended to 2000 by a German high school teacher (analyzed HERE).
Since this outdated graph does not include data from medieval cold places that largely canceled out the warm places, there is not a big bump in Northern-hemisphere medieval temperature - there was no pronounced global "medieval warming period".Nonetheless, this fallacious contrarian analysis has been and continues to be widely disseminated in right-wing newspapers and contrarian blogs. All this is similar to claiming the earth is flat by looking at an ancient map. Here is the
See Stephen Colbert's video of Fox News (at 2:43) saying winter snowstorms "disprove Al Gore's theory of global warming". Colbert uses the same cherry-picking illogic to "prove" - because it is nighttime - thatthe sun has been destroyed.
HERE is a hilarious article by George Monbiot exposing fake weather forecasters quoted by several British newspapers as women with skills including "mail-order bride".
This essay discusses climate contrarians, or deniers, or faux-skeptics. They spread disinformation about climate and try to prevent climate risk management.
The "contrarians" or "climate-change deniers" are a loud vocal minority. They include some practicing scientists, who however with rare exceptions are not professional practicing climatologists. HERE is evidence that contrarians in general have far less expertise in climate science than mainstream climatologists. The conservative MIT climatologist Kerry labels contrarians as "mavericks" and "charlatans", see HERE.
Many fields of science have fringe “mavericks”, generally without appropriate qualifications, who rail against established science. Usually these people are demonstrably wrong, violating some well established data or scientific principle, and are ignored. Their arguments do not constitute legitimate scientific debate. An example is Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, whose validity is established beyond question, but nonetheless following an initial period of legitimate scientific discussion, has had a 100-year parade of cranks claiming it is wrong; see here. With climatology, such cranks are given wide publicity, generally by right-wing libertarian media, producing a false appearance of controversy.
Right-wing politicians promote contrarian/denier fallacies from bully pulpits. HEREis a recent documented example of a powerful contrarian/denier Minnesota State Senator who claims to have a scientific background, but actually never graduated from college. Other examples are below.
The general agenda of contrarians is to derail meaningful discussion and action on global warming by sowing confusion and influencing public opinion. Some contrarians do not have an overt political agenda but rather have an incomplete understanding of the relevant science.Regardless, the right-wing media push contrarian claims, and have unfortunately succeeded in the U.S. using this tactic.
What do Contrarians say about Global Warming?[The "four trenches"]
Various contrarians hold mutually inconsistent beliefs and positions. There are four categories, rather like four trenches.
1. Some contrarians deny that recent global warming exists (they distort the meaning of global warming, which is a globally-averaged upward temperature trend seen in the data since 1975, and instead invoke irrelevant fluctuations).
2. Other contrarians do admit that recent global warming exists but claim it is not largely caused by humans (they ignore or distort the attribution provided by climate models, and they emphasize irrelevant ancient data).
3. Other contrarians admit both that recent global warming exists and that it is largely caused by humans, but deny harmful impacts (they ignore current data and expert forecasts).
4. Finally some contrarians admit that global warming exists, is caused by humans, and indeed has harmful effects, but assert that it is too expensive to try to mitigate global warming (they use hand-picked economic scenarios that ignore benefits of new technologies, and they ignore the immense potentially devastating economic costs of unbridled global warming).
Contrarians have largely changed tactics from arguing about economic costs/benefits of mitigation (#4) to attacking the actual science (#1).
It is worthwhile noting that scientists, by nature, are skeptics. It takes a long time, with evidence from many sources, with peer-reviewed journals as a filter, for scientists to become convinced. However, once a scientific result becomes established, contrary claims are treated with with the same skepticism. Contrarians misinterpret this fundamental aspect of science. They misrepresent scientific standards by complaining that their ideas are suppressed by a "scientific establishment".
For a real-life example of skeptical scientists, click HERE.
The contrarian product often resembles Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science". Sometimes this is because of an incomplete understanding of the relevant science. Indeed, some contrarians seem to misunderstand the very nature of science, which consists of a web of facts and theory, different from a mathematical "proof". Other contrarians seem politically or financially motivated.
Regardless of the cause, contrarians routinely engage in various distortions of science, data, and logic. Their tactics and fallacies include ignoring or distorting mainstream scientific results, cherry-picking data and falsely generalizing, bringing up irrelevant red-herring arguments, demanding unachievable "precision" from mainstream science with the motif “if you don’t understand this detail you don’t understand anything”, overemphasizing and mischaracterizing uncertainties in mainstream science, engaging in polemics and prosecutorial-lawyer Swift-Boat-like attacks on science - and lately even scientists, attacking the usual scientific process, misrepresenting legitimate scientific debate as "no consensus", and overemphasizing details of little significance.
On the other hand, and although there are a few exceptions, contrarian claims constitute pseudo-science that routinely contain flagrant errors and huge uncertainties that contrarians hypocritically persist in ignoring. Contrarian claims are often just misapplied illogical conjectures using irrelevant data, unwarranted generalizations, and sometimes mathematical mistakes. The contrarian strategy is similar to, and arguably derived from, the old propaganda strategy of the tobacco lobby. Contrarians generally do not publish in peer-reviewed journals, mostly because of the generally low quality of their work. Instead right-wing blogs and media loudly proclaim contrarian claims, often in lock-step. A few contrarians publish quality climate papers, but they also sometimes give unpublished talks repeating incorrect contrarian claims.
HERE is a long list of logical fallacies. Contrarians make all of them. Wikipedia says: By accident or design, fallacies may exploit emotional triggers in the listener or interlocutor (e.g. appeal to emotion), or take advantage of social relationships between people (e.g. argument from authority). Fallacious arguments are often structured using rhetorical patterns that obscure the logical argument, making fallacies more difficult to diagnose. Also, the components of the fallacy may be spread out over separate arguments. HERE is a great summary of dishonest illogical tricks in argumentation from The Art of Being Right by Schopenhauer, the original is HERE and HERE. The right-wing media that push contrarian arguments are masters of these tricks.
Recently, Dr. Peter Gleickhas exposed a flagrant case of fallacious data cherry picking by a contrarian organization. In the drawing below, one data point was used in a false argument about arctic sea ice area. This is a great example of the classic logical fallacy of false generalization often used by climate deniers.
Aside from being factually wrong, the contrarian argument is a red herring, because the area of extent of sea ice is not as important as sea ice thickness, and sea ice in the Arctic has become very thin. HERE are the data.
We have seen the tactics of climate contrarians before with cigarette propaganda tactics, as noted HERE: "An identical strategy succeeded in delaying government action against tobacco companies for years despite overwhelming evidence of the hazards of cigarettes". HERE is a University of California paper using the words of the tobacco industry, including this on page 9: "A demand for scientific proof is always a formula for inaction and delay". The same tactic is used by climate contrarians. Convincing evidence documenting the ties between the tobacco attack on medical science and the climate contrarian attack on climate science is in the second half of the video "The American Denial of Global Warming" by Naomi Orestes.
What do Contrarians Misunderstand about Climate Risk Management?
Climate Risk Management deals with mitigation and adaptation as procedures to ameliorate the risks of future impacts of global warming / climate change. To do risk management in any setting, risk estimation must first be carried out. This requires the best available input, including models, scenarios, backtesting, and statistical analysis. By definition, risk includes uncertainties. The 2007 IPCC reports and other expert reports summarize the best available information for a sensible climate risk-management framework.
Contrarians misunderstand (either by omission or deliberately) all aspects of climate risk management. First they mischaracterize the expert information for input to risk management. Instead they propagate the message "there is no climate risk". Contrarians have absolutely no evidence for this statement. Also notice that "no risk" has "no uncertainty", so contrarians oppose risk management for uncertainty. This is simply fraudulent. Risk management is largely about coping with uncertainty.
Contrarians and their media outlets routinely denigrate scientific forecasts of harmful effects of global warming as "alarmist". Above all they oppose any sensible proposals of risk management of harmful climate impacts.
Naturally, risk management comes with a price tag. Ignoring risk management comes with a price tag also. Contrarians overemphasize the price of risk management, and underemphasize the price of ignoring risk management.
As an imperfect but instructive parallel, the attitude of contrarians toward climate risk is similar to the attitude of unprincipled traders on Wall Street who insisted on short term profits at the expense of sensible bank capital requirements against high-risk events, an attitude that lead to the recent financial crisis. The contrarian attitude of ignoring and even sabotaging climate risk management is leading humanity toward a climate crisis.
It can be argued that contrarians (mostly in the US) are currently the main obstacle to beginning the process of implementing sensible risk management actions against the increasingly severe impacts of global warming / climate change. Future generations will look back with an extremely harsh eye at this contrarian myopic, destructive behavior.
From ClimateScienceWatch: "Senator James Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, has gone a step beyond promoting his long-notorious global warming denialist propaganda. He is now using the resources of the Senate committee to seek opportunities to criminalize the actions of 17 leading scientists who have been associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports." Inhofe believes that global warming is a "hoax".
This is not the first time that right-wing US politicians from oil states (again notably Inhofe) have attacked climate scientists. Here is Michael Mann's 2003 Senate testimony. Because of his prominence in producing the first so-called "hockey stick" that shows recent temperatures are unprecedented in at least the last 1000 years, climate deniers regularly attack Mann. HERE is some commentary.
Similar disturbing history is in the article by Rich Piltz called "The Denial Machine - Science, Censorship, and the White House" examining contrarians and the Bush Administration HERE.
While contrarians are mostly a US phenomenon, disturbing developments in Australia are reported HEREandHERE, including DEATH THREATS and one high-level Australian politician in an outrageous speech accusing climate scientists of totalitarianism.
HERE is a professor who says: "At the American Association for the Advancement of Science meetings last month in San Diego, I was amazed at the number of my mild-mannered scientific colleagues who admitted, in private conversations, the pressures and/or threats they've received."
HERE is another article called "Climate Debate gets Ugly..." that says: Climate scientists, used to dealing with skeptics, are under siege like never before, targeted by hate emails brimming with abuse and accusations of fabricating global warming data. Some emails contain thinly veiled death threats...
HERE is testimony by Benjamin Santer, a climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, California at hearings of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming on May 20, 2010: "I firmly believe that I would now be leading a different life if my research suggested that there was no human effect on climate. I would not be the subject of Congressional inquiries, Freedom of Information Act requests, or email threats. I would not need to be concerned about the safety of my family. I would not need to be concerned about my own physical safety when I give public lectures. "
The IPCC and its work is described HERE. The 2007 IPCC reports consist of summary but detailed accounts of the best up-to-date scientific and economic research on climate change and global warming, containing 3000 pages in 3 volumes. Recently a few small mistakes were found, including one isolated erroneous paragraph on glaciers in the Impacts 2007 IPCC 1000-page report. This has been used as a pretext by right-wing contrarian media to manufacture a destructive attack on the entire IPCC structure. Actually, the IPCC has been under attack for many years by right-wing contrarians. It should be noted that no human endeavor is guaranteed 100% error-free, not even published papers.
For analysis, see RealClimate's discussion called "The IPCC is not infallible (shock!)". More RealClimateanalysis is at: "IPCC errors: facts and spin". HERE is the analysis of the Union of Concerned Scientists. HERE is documentation of misreporting on IPCC coverage of rain forests.
The few minor glitches in the IPCC reports should be contrasted with the contrarian product, which is full of glaring errors.
A common misleading attack on the IPCC promoted by right-wing media and politicians claims that IPCC authors and reviewers disagree with the IPCC conclusions. Explicit documentation shows that this applies to at most 1% of such people.
The hacked email incident, propagandized as "Climategate", has been blatantly distorted by right-wing media in a destructive frontal attack on climate science and climate scientists. Independent investigations concluded that "Climategate" had no scientific content. Examples:
Prof. Phil Jones, at the center of the controversy, was exonerated by the Science and Technology Committee of the British House of Commons; see HERE.
The definitive rebuke to the attempt by right-wing contrarians to exploit this incident was provided in the exhaustive Sir Muir Russell report, which emerged after six months of inquiry, clearing scientists in the Climategate affair. HERE is the full report. The professional climate website RealClimate has a description. HERE is a report from the Guardian UK, which says in part:The climate scientists at the centre of a media storm were today cleared of accusations that they fudged their results and silenced critics to bolster the case for man-made global warming.Sir Muir Russell, the senior civil servant who led a six-month inquiry into the affair, said the "rigour and honesty" of the scientists at the world-leading Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) are not in doubt. They did not subvert the peer review process to censor criticism as alleged, the panel found, while key data needed to reproduce their findings was freely available to any "competent" researcher."
The MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel has recently written a very hard-hitting essay: "Climategate": A Different Perspective, posted on the politically conservative National Association of Scholars NAS website. Emanuel castigates the right-wing attack on climate science that uses the pretext of the hacked emails and the minor IPCC report errors. This essay is extremely important. Here are a few quotes (more extensive quotes are HERE):
...the scandal I see is very different from the one that has been presented to NAS members. Climategate is merely the latest in a series of coordinated, politically motivated attacks that represent an aggravated assault on scholarship...
At the time of this writing, three separate panels convened in Great Britain, and two investigations conducted by the Pennsylvania State University have cleared the authors of the controversial emails of any serious wrong doing, and with good reason. Meanwhile, the gross mischaracterization of what those emails actually contain continues unabated...
The sin of those responsible for simplifying the summary figure pales in comparison to that committed by all those who have sought to elevate this to the level of a grand conspiracy among climate scientists and thereby to discredit a whole field of scholarship...
The allegation that the researchers actually destroyed data has been shown to be false, but it is repeated endlessly.
...several factual errors were discovered in the most recent assessment report of the IPCC. These include a permutation of digits in the year in which certain Himalayan glaciers were predicted to vanish...While errors of this kind are regrettable, the attempt to leverage them into a sweeping condemnation of the whole report betrays such obvious political skullduggery as to be unworthy of further remark..
This deployment of inflammatory terminology has a distinctly Orwellian flavor. It originates not in laboratories and classrooms, where ideas are the central focus and one hardly ever hears labels applied to researchers, but in the media, the blogosphere, and political think tanks, where polarization attracts attention and/or turns a profit...
But it turns out that there are not enough mavericks in climate science to meet the media’s and blogosphere’s insatiable appetite for conflict.Thus into the arena steps a whole host of charlatans posing as climate scientists...
While the climategate email authors are castigated for not being paragons of virtue, the sins of others go unremarked. In the summer of 2009, a one-page letter was sent to Congress, signed by one actual climate scientist and six physicists with little or no background in climate science, three of whom were retired. Among other untruths, it contained the sentence, referring to evidence of anthropogenic global warming, “There is no such evidence; it doesn’t exist.” I confronted the sole climate scientist among the authors with this statement, and he confessed that he did not hold that to be the case. Last I checked, lyingto Congress was a federal crime. [See the Nb below].
Kerry Emanuel is a professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes, (2005, Oxford University Press).In May 2006 he was named one of Time magazine's "Time 100: The People Who Shape Our World."
Nb: Who was the climate scientist that Emanuel implied lied to Congress? Why, it seems to be Richard Lindzen, the "sole climate scientist among the authors" who signed the above letter (which is HERE on Marc Morano's contrarian website). The six physicists referred to by Emanuel "with little or no background in climate science" who signed the above letter are Robert H. Austin, William Happer, S. Fred Singer, Roger W. Cohen, Harold W. Lewis, and Laurence I. Gould.
Right on cue, just before the 2011 Durban IPCC Climate Conference as for the 2009 Copenhagen Conference, another batch of stolen climate emails was released. See HERE for analysis. As before, selected emails were taken out of context and blatantly distorted by right-wing media, clearly aimed at preventing sensible risk management of climate risks. HERE is an excellent video summary with specific examples of this distortion. See also: We are smarter this time around and Snippets of stolen e-mails cannot make the Earth flat.
While the history of science is littered with discarded or crank ideas, contrarians producing such ideas today have the unprecedented advantage of being supported notably by powerful energy and right-wing libertarian interests. The media, in order to "present both sides", gives the contrarians unwarranted coverage. In addition there are contrarian Internet bloggers, right-wing politicians, and some influential newspaper editors and TV “news” shows that present only contrarian arguments.
HERE is the way one professor put it: "What really bothers me is the stunning lack of balance in U.S. media reports on climate science. In Europe, newspaper coverage gives a pretty accurate reflection of what the leading scientists are saying. In the U.S., the scientific findings are “balanced” against the views of people who know how to spin juicy quotes but can’t even spell “climatology.” When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change releases a major report, its main conclusions get a few stories, while most of the attention goes to small errors that don’t affect its substance – and that show up about once every 1000 pages."
The right-wing media chronically, purposely, and blatantly distort climate science.
A Fox News e-mail was leaked confirming Fox News deliberate editorial interference with its climate reporting; it is from Bill Sammon, the Washington DC managing editor. It was sent last December to Fox News producers just as the UN Copenhagen climate conference was beginning. Sammon wrote, "we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts..."
The most influential contrarian-biased paper is the Wall Street Journal. Here is a revealing graph by Prof. Scott Mandia showing that WSJ editorials/op-eds supported consensus climate scientific findings only 7% of the time!
HERE is a paper by William R. Freudenburg , UC Santa Barbara, which discusses the "... growing realization that media coverage of supposed debates has been strongly skewed by a tactic so widespread that it has its own name -- "Scientific Certainty" Argumentation Methods, or SCAMS ".
HERE is a paper "Exaggerating Denialism: Media Representations of Outlier Views on Climate Change" by Maxwell T. Boykoff , U. Colorado.
HERE is a video of Prof. Carl Wunsch of MIT complaining about the contrarian film "Global Warming Swindle", which "completely distorted" his comments. He called the film "as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two." Although Wunsch is sometimes quoted for support by contrarians (e.g. see page 7 of Richard Lindzen's 2010 Heartland speech), Wunsch wrote in a letter dated 15 March 2007 that he believes climate change is "real, a major threat, and almost surely has a major human-induced component".
HERE is a point-by-point refutation of an wildly inaccurate contrarian report in a British newspaper.
HERE is a great video on the chronic distortion of climate science by Fox News.
A few other positive signs exist of better media accountability. RealClimate reported that the Sunday Times (UK) retracted a story by Jonathan Leake on a supposed ‘Amazongate’ and published an apology. This is in response (see HERE) to an official complaint to the Press Complaints Commission by Simon Lewis, an expert on tropical forests at the University of Leeds, over the above "inaccurate, misleading and distorted" newspaper story; the story falsely reported a supposed mistake made by the IPCC .
Media inaccuracy on climate has also been moving into the mainstream. Here is a RealClimate article discussing an example of misleading media, through incompetence or intent or both; see also "Whatevergate". Part of the problem is that mainstream media have been firing their science writers.
Are the Scientists Hitting Back against the Contrarians?
Yes.
The Climate Science Rapid Response Team CSRRT is a match-making service to connect climate scientists with lawmakers and the media. The group is committed to providing rapid, high-quality information to media and government officials.
HERE is a UK Guardian article that says: "Leading climate scientists have given their support to a Freedom of Information request seeking to disclose who is funding the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a London-based climate sceptic thinktank chaired by the former Conservative chancellor Lord Lawson. James Hansen, the director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies who first warned the world about the dangers of climate change in the 1980s, has joined other scientists in submitting statements to be considered by a judge at the Information Rights Tribunal on Friday...James Hansen told the Guardian: "Our children and grandchildren will judge those who have misled the public, allowing fossil fuel emissions to continue almost unfettered, as guilty of crimes against humanity and nature... If successful, the FOI request may, by exposing one link in a devious manipulation of public opinion, start a process that allows the public to be aware of what is happening, what is at stake, and where the public interest lies." "(1/22/12)
HERE is an extraordinary letter published in the journal Science, signed by 255 members of the US National Academy of Sciences, including 11 Nobel Prize laureates. It says: "Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence."
Further, "We also call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them."
HERE is an account of the courageous efforts of three climate scientists to cope with personal attacks on them, including for one of them, 91 pages of abusive emails.
The Union of Concerned Scientists UCS has announced a program to organize scientists from around the country to beat back misinformation and educate decision makers and the public about the real facts on global warming. A recent UCS email states: "The Union of Concerned Scientists is leading a campaign to promote climate science facts and return the public’s attention back to the urgent need to rein in global warming emissions and implement common-sense solutions to our country’s energy needs."
Academics are speaking out against a recent attack against the climatologist Michael Mann by the Attorney General of Virginia Ken Cuccinelli; see HERE and HERE. This attack has disturbing academic freedom implications and is clearly politically motivated. U-Va. has gone to court to stop the AG. 39 U-Va.law school faculty members urged the administration to fight Cuccinelli. A UCS analysis HERE shows that the attack makes basic factual errors. Cuccinelli's demand was denied by the circuit judge on August 30, 2010.
A remarkable series of rebuttals to climate contrarians/deniers/"faux-skeptics" has appeared on The Conversation, an Australian academic site.
HERE is the book Global Warming and Political Intimidation - How Politicians Cracked Down on Scientists as the Earth Heated Up by Raymond S. Bradley(University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geosciences and director of the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst).
From the article "Playing Rough": Bradley is depicted by contrarian websites "as a ringleader in a conspiracy to orchestrate panic over climate change, one of a cabal intent on making themselves rich and famous, taxing the free market to death, and instituting a new world order headed by Al Gore."
Prof. Andrew Weaver, Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling at U. Victoria and author, filed a lawsuit against the right-wing newspaper The National Post, for libels based on published falsehoods. He also filed suit against the well-known climate contrarian Tim Ball for defamation.
HERE is "A Response to Climate Change Denialism" by Richard Somerville, a distinguished professor emeritus and research professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.
HERE is a AAAS Symposium at it's 2010 annual meeting on "Understanding Climate-Change Skepticism: Its Sources and Strategies".
In the UK, Prof. John Beddington, the government's chief scientific adviser, hit out at climate sceptics who attack global warming science on spurious grounds, see HERE and HERE. Beddington said he intends to take this agenda forward with his fellow chief scientists and also with the research councils. “I really believe that... we need to recognise that this is ... an increasingly pernicious influence and we need to be thinking about how we can actually deal with it."
Also in the UK, Simon Lewis, an expert on tropical forests at the University of Leeds, said regarding a false subsequently retracted article on the Amazon in the UK Sunday Times due to Lewis' official complaint to the Press Complaints Commission: "There is currently a war of disinformation about climate change-related science, and my complaint can hopefully let journalists in the front line of this war know that there are potential repercussions if they publish misleading stories. The public deserve careful and accurate science reporting."
HERE is an analysis of the problem in the journal Nature.
Google announced a new program of Science Communication Fellows, initially focused on climate change. Google says: "we chose scientists who had the strongest potential to become excellent communicators. That meant previous training in science communication; research in topics related to understanding or managing climate change; and experience experimenting with innovative approaches or technology tools for science communication."
Part of the climate communication problem, besides media inaccuracy, is the chronic inability of many scientists to communicate in a simple effective fashion with the media and the public, as discussed HERE.
Fallacious tactics used by contrarians constitute a deliberate psychological agenda to influence the public.
HERE is an excellent essay that says: "People are only too happy to accept a message of denial: you do not need to change, it will all be fine".
One problem is "Confirmation bias" which hampers people from changing beliefs if they first hear contrarian disinformation - cf:Persistence of discredited beliefs and Preference for early information.Confirmation biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. Hence they can lead to disastrous decisions, especially in organizational, military, political and social contexts.
HERE is the description of a good article by Clive Hamilton on "Why we Resist the Truth on Climate Change", download HERE. Interestingly, he says "...the campaign in the 1920s against Einstein’s general theory of relativity provides an uncannily complete template for the conservative attack on climate science eight decades later."
The biggest psychological ploy is simply confusion, using right-wing media to propagate the illusion that climatologists are so uncertain about the basic science that no action on mitigating climate change impacts should be taken.
Listen to this Scientific American audio clipwith Jay Ingram, host of Daily Planet: Your Opinion of Climate Change Depends on Your Social Psychology.
An overarching framework for right-wing and fossil fuel opposition to climate science and climate risk management can be found at Greenpeace’s website ExxonSecrets, which documents “Exxon Foundation and corporate funding to a series of institutions who have worked to undermine solutions to global warming and climate change.” A recent article documents that 9 out of the most prolific 10 contrarians is linked to Exxon Mobil. See also HEREand HERE.
A recent Greenpiece report "Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine" is described HERE, and the report can be downloaded HERE. That report says: "Koch has out-spent ExxonMobil in funding these groups in recent years. From 2005 to 2008, ExxonMobil spent $8.9 million while the Koch Industries-controlled foundations contributed $24.9 million in funding to organizations of the ‘climate denial machine’." THIS article in the LA Times regarding an attack on the California state greenhouse gas law says: "The money from David and Charles Koch could significantly help the campaign for the ballot measure, which has been trailing in most polls. They have founded a web of libertarian organizations and think tanks dedicated in large part to fighting what they see as excessive government regulation. They also have helped finance efforts to develop arguments denying that global climate change is a real phenomenon." And from the NY Times, Charles and David Koch, the billionaires from Kansas who have played a prominent role in financing the Tea Party movement, donated $1 million to the campaign to suspend the [California] Global Warming Solutions Act...
HERE is a smoking-gun 1998 document from the American Petroleum Institute detailing a plan to influence public opinion by sowing doubt about the science, complete with multi-million dollar budget figures.
HERE is a useful site called DirtyEnergyMoney that documents the contributions of big fossil fuel interests to politicians who deny the science of global warming.
The Case of Patrick Michaels
An op-ed by one of the most vocal contrarians, Patrick Michaels, was refuted HERE by the AGU (American Geophysical Union). The AGU said: "Mr. Michaels's op-ed reflects a political strategy to sway popular opinion on climate change without regard for facts or the enormous body of scientific evidence...The result damages the scientific community and is a disservice to the public." HERE is a report indicating perhaps why Michaels makes such misleading statements; it says: "And a 2006 leaked industry memo revealed that he received $100,000 in funding from the Intermountain Rural Electric Association to fund climate denial campaigning around the time of the release of An Inconvenient Truth." You can download an IREA memo here. Michaels currently works for the Cato Institute, founded by the Koch Brothers.
Michaels admitted in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on Aug 15, 2010 that around 40% of his funding comes from the petroleum industry, see the video HERE. Now Michaels recently submitted a "revised" CV to the US Congress that lists $4.2 million in cumulative income from sources over $10,000 (he did not reveal his total income). Michaels claims that only 3% is attributed to energy sector industry sources, which is manifestly inconsistent with the 40% figure he gives in the above 8/15/10 video. Henry Waxman has asked for an investigation of Michaels for this inconsistency, which if true could constitute a federal offense of lying to Congress punishable by jail and fines; see HERE for examples.
Dr. Peter Gleick (member of the National Academy of Sciences) recently exposed fallacies in two denier articles in Forbes Magazine by "serial climate science conjurer Patrick Michaels with egregious and outrageous claims and errors. This falls well into the category of climate B.S. (bad science)."
See HERE for a scathing review of Michaels' activities, including this gem: Michaels "co-operated with Ross McKitrick on a paper that managed to "prove" that global warming wasn't happening by mixing up degrees with radians." See the RealClimate commentary on this "egregious basic error" HERE.
The Case of Willie Soon
Willie Soonadmitted to receiving over 1 million dollars from petroleum (oil) and coal companies since 2001. As documented on Realclimate.org, his writings on climate are strictly contrarian. One of his papers led to the resignation of 6 editors in protest at the failure of peer-review that led to its publication.
The contrarian Roy Spencer gave this blatant admission on his blog: "I view my job a little like a legislator, supported by the taxpayer, to protect the interests of the taxpayer and to minimize the role of government." Spencer's climate views are reviewed here. It is worth noting (see HERE) that Spencer is on the board of directors of the George C Marshall Institute, a right-wing thinktank critical of mainstream climate science, and an advisor to the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, an evangelical Christian organisation that claims policies to curb climate change "would destroy jobs and impose trillions of dollars in costs" and "could be implemented only by enormous and dangerous expansion of government control over private life".
Jeremy Grantham, whose firm GMO manages over $100 B, writes Everything You Need to know about Global Warming in 5 minutes: ...right-leaning think tanks...have allowed their drive for desirable policy to trump science... I have a...plausible “conspiracy theory”: that fossil energy companies, driven by the need to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of profits, encourage obfuscation of the inconvenient scientific results...Challenging vested interests as powerful as the oil and coal lobbies was never going to be easy... Scientists are not naturally aggressive defenders of arguments...The skeptics are far, far more determined and expert propagandists to boot. They are also well funded. I, for one, admire them for their P.R. skills, while wondering, as always: “Have they no grandchildren?”
HERE is an editorial in Nature Magazine entitled:Science Scorned: The anti-science strain pervading the right wing in the United States is the last thing the country needs in a time of economic challenge. Denialism over global warming has become a scientific cause célèbre within the movement. [Rush] Limbaugh, for instance, who has told his listeners that “science has become a home for displaced socialists and communists”, has called climate-change science “the biggest scam in the history of the world”.
HERE are the results of a Gallup poll showing most conservatives doubt that global warming is even occurring. And HERE is a Guardian article on a report documenting that all but one of the Republican candidates for Senate "are skeptical about climate change".Anyone doubting the connection of climate contrarians with right-wing politics is invited to clickHERE.
HERE is an interesting article by Sherwood Boehlert, NY Congressman (1983-2007) who says "...My fellow Republicans should understand that wholesale, ideologically based or special-interest-driven rejection of science is bad policy. And that in the long run, it's also bad politics...The National Academy reports concluded that "scientific evidence that the Earth is warming is now overwhelming." Party affiliation does not change that fact."
The rest of this essay is full of connections of the right wing with contrarians.
A very long and detailed response to myriad contrarian attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency made during the EPA's public hearings in 2009 is HERE.
Here are three great videos debunking contrarians with excellent historical overviews of the science by Dr. Naomi Orestes: "The American Denial of Global Warming" , "Merchants Of Doubt" , and "Answering Climate Change Skeptics". The case is convincingly made that the contrarian attack on science has nothing to do with science, but has its roots in the right-wing political distaste for government regulation.
HERE is the Union of Concerned Scientists "Fact-checker" site debunking contrarian claims.
A persistent and incorrect claim of contrarians is that solar effects are responsible for recent global warming; HERE is a paper debunking that contrarian claim, with documentation of the "flawed science" behind it.
Here is an essay "The Attack on Climate Change Science"by Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org. These attacks use Swift-Boat tactics. HERE is a report on a well-known contrarian who admittedly played a part in the Swift-Boat incidents attacking John Kerry and John Murtha.
HERE is an excellent interview with Prof. Stephen Schneider discussing the contrarians.
Mostly, climate contrarians are not climate scientists who publish in peer-reviewed climate journals. HERE is documentation.
HERE is an excellent summary "Global Warming Contrarians and the Falsehoods they Promote" on the State of California AG website. Contrarian positions used by Republicans are affecting California state politics, the state climate change law AB32, and green economic initiatives in Silicon Valley; see HERE.
Although the denial industry is largely American, there are a few European contrarians.HERE is a recent article in Le Monde documenting numerous contrarian errors.
It is telling that one of the most vociferous countries with an official contrarian view is Saudi Arabia. The Saudi's lead climate negotiator told BBC News that "...there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change." Recently, Saudi Arabia blocked a call by vulnerable island states at climate talks for a study... A Fox News / AP article says that Saudi Arabia has a long history of playing an obstructionist role at climate conferences. Indeed, Saudi Arabia wants reparations if a climate treaty is adopted, which would be inimical to oil consumption. There is a blatantly obvious connection of this fact with the anti-science contrarian Saudi stance.
HERE is an article by the climate contrarian Tim Ball entitled Scientific Reaction To Velikovsky Symptomatic Of Climate Science Debacle. Velikovskywas a Russian psychiatrist who produced wild fallacious conjectures on astronomy.
HERE is documentation that links creationists and contrarians in right-wing politics and attacks on science in school curricula; and in amazingly in South Dakota, astrology.
Generally contrarians do not publish in reputable climate journals. This is partly because their "work" is generally not up to the scientific standards set by these journals. In any field of science there are cranks that produce pseudo-scientific material, and climatology is no exception. In fact publication in journals is not of much interest to contrarians. Powerful right-wing political media publicize contrarian material, providing far more exposure to the public than would reputable scientific journals.
There are a few contrarians that do publish in reputable climate journals and some that publish in fringe non-climate journals. The reliable website RealClimate.org has descriptions and critiques of some contrarian papers.
When contrarian articles get published, they are often controversial in content or process.Here are four examples.
1. WEGMAN: As USA TODAY reported in May 2011, a statistics journal decided to retract a federally funded contrarian paper due to plagiarism. One of the authors is Edward Wegman. His earlier "Wegman Report" is also under investigation for plagiarism.
2. SPENCER: Roy Spencer, a contrarian with a university position and a NASA medal, but also with a track record of bad mistakes, co-published a defective paper in a non-climate journal (HERE) in July 2011, claiming that some predictions of climate models are wrong. The chief editor Dr. Wagner resigned in protest, saying in a published editorialthat Spencer's paper was most likely problematic with fundamental methodological errors and false claims,"fundamentally flawed and therefore wrongly accepted by the journal". Peer-review was corrupted, with contrarians selected as referees in a biased process. Wagner alsoprotested "against how the authors and like-minded climate sceptics have much exaggerated the paper's conclusions in public statements", including headlines such as "New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism" on the Forbes magazine website and "Does NASA data show global warming lost in space?" on Foxnews.com.It is interesting to note Spencer's right-wing connections; he is also said to be a creationist. Excellent commentary on this sordid event by the scientist Dr. Peter Gleick is HERE.
3. SOON and BALIUNAS: An earlier 2003 contrarian paper by W. Soon and S. Baliunas was fallacious, published under an abuse of peer review, and is used as support for incorrectly denying that humans are the cause of recent global warming (see HERE). Denier right-wing politicians (e.g. Senator Inhofe) use the paper to attack climate science with the aim of sabotaging climate negotiations. Although fallacious (see HERE,HERE, and HERE), the paper was accepted for publication by a known contrarian, following which the journal's chief editor and others on the editorial board resigned. The publisher subsequently admitted that the conclusions of the paper could not be supported by the evidence and that the journal should have requested appropriate revisions prior to publication. The paper was funded in part by the fossil fuel industry, and both authors at the time were paid consultants for a right-wing think tank. Neither Soon nor Baliunas have any climate credentials; they are astrophysicists. An excellent video by Peter Sinclair putting all this into perspective is HERE.
4. ENERGY and ENVIRONMENT: Contrarians publish in a non-climate-science journal called Energy and Environment. The editor Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen posted on 04/26/2011 04:36 PM: "E&E is an interdisciplinary academic journal publishing on relevant economic, social and technological subjects. Climate science is only of importance because of the growing role this alleged threat has played in policy justification and regulatory efforts. The demonisation of greenhouse gas emissions has encouraged me to publish so-called climate sceptics, with the helpful support of my publisher, since the early 1990s." She also said: "I'm following my political agenda -- a bit, anyway. But isn't that the right of the editor?"
The "hockey stick" is an iconic graph of inferred temperature data, see below. It shows that recent temperatures are unprecedented in the last 1000 years. Therefore it has been under attack by contrarians, who do not like the inconvenient truth that recent global warming is occurring.
Importantly, the Wegman Report just discussed (page 3) contains erroneous criticism of the original hockey stick methodology. Wegman was chosen by the right-wing representative Joe Barton to testify before Congress, where Wegman repeated the same erroneous criticism.
Wegman's erroneous criticism just mentioned is actually a non-issue. It involves a "centering" convention used in a mathematical technique of data analysis called principal component analysis. Centering is usually done in a particular way, but in fact centering can be done arbitrarily provided that an appropriate number of principal components, which depends on the centering convention, is retained (see RealClimate and Wahl-Ammann). It should be noted that if ALL principal components are used for any centering convention, the data in question are described exactly. A WRONG procedure does not retain enough principal components using some centering convention to accurately describe the data, and that wrong procedure is PRECISELY what contrarians/deniers do. It is a contrarian fallacy.
The hockey stick is found regardless of the technique used, provided this contrarian mistake is not made. Contrarians butcher the mathematics with this mistake and erroneously conclude that there is no hockey stick. The hockey stick is present even if NO principal component analysis is made at all.Many groups independently have shown that the hockey stick is really there (the graph is below).
A whole industry of contrarianpseudoscience, loudly trumpeted by right-wing media and politicians attacking climate science and scientists, has arisen over this contrarian fallacy. The attack by Cuccinelli against Michael Mann (see above)is a blatant example.
Another contrarian/denier claim, somewhat more obscure, was that statistical red noise generally produces a hockey stick under Mann's assumptions, a claim which is false.
Contrarian pseudoscience pushed by right-wing media has now essentially trapped the US Republican Party into denial. This includes Republicans who previously asserted the mainstream scientific consensus that recent global warming exists and is caused by humans. Some Republicans also asserted that global warming will have increasingly bad impacts, and were willing and ready to take risk management mitigation steps.
A good example is John McCain. In October 2003, McCain co-sponsored the Climate Stewardship Act that would have introduced a cap and trade system aimed at returning greenhouse gas emissions to 2000 levels; see HERE.McCain later abruptly abandoned his support of a climate bill, see HERE.
A noticeable retrograde change in US attitudes toward climate likely due to contrarians is documented HERE in the document American Climate Attitudes (2011).
To give an idea of the rampant distortion of climate science by contrarian media, HERE is a popular right-wing blog that states: "Another global warming myth comes crashing down. No warming since at least 1995, no melting glaciers and now no rising sea levels. Basically this leaves the warmers with no credibility..." All these assertions are simply wrong.
HERE is a list of contrarians and what they say. HERE is a list of contrarian links, organized by topics. HERE is background information on contrarians. HERE is a list of contrarians with reference links.
HERE is a list of common contrarian arguments, along with one-liner easy-to-use rebuttals.
The right-wing Heartland Institute organizes contrarian conferences supposedly for science, but actually highly politicized. The BBC report on the latest such said that Heartland's libertarian president Joseph Bast declared climate change is being used by governments to oppress the people. There was cheering when a member of the audience demanded that the "Climategate criminals" - the scientists who wrote the University of East Anglia hacked emails - should be jailed for fraud. HERE is an account of the 2011 Heartland Conference including this gem: George Mears, a former navy flier... is politically active in the Norfolk, Va., area, where he promotes limited government and fiscal restraint. He opposes things like light rail and all the "green crap."This conference was analyzed HERE in a recent Nature editorial. The appropriate summary word in the editorial is "Absurdities".
See Prof. Richard Feynman's famous talk, "Cargo Cult Science". The contrarian/denier/faux-skeptic pseudo-science is well characterized by this term, which is "form over substance".
Galileo played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His championing of heliocentrism was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, and the Inquisition concluded that the idea that the earth goes around the sun could only be supported as a possibility, not as an established fact. An excellent analog of Galileo's science to climate science is that right-wing attacks on climate science are acting quite similarly to the inquisition attacks on Galileo. This analogy is fallaciously turned on its head by contrarians to become the canard that contrarians are like Galileo railing against established science. This absurd idea is promoted by the right-wing; see e.g. HERE. The "Galileo movement" in Australia shows its true colors on its front page: "Stop the carbon tax".
Here is a painting of Galileo facing the inquisition. The real analogy is to substitute right-wing politicians for the Inquisition on the left and mainstream climate scientists for Galileo on the right.
Bottom Line: Quacks, Tobacco, Right-Wing Think Tanks, and Contrarians
Here is the bottom-line summary. Some contrarians, without professional climate science credentials, assume the role of a climate scientist and mangle the science to arrive at pre-ordained contrarian conclusions. As emphasized by the climatologist Kerry Emanuel HERE, "a whole host of charlatans posing as climate scientists" now exists. This is effective because detecting the errors in contrarian pseudo-science often requires real expertise. Think of a medical quack without an MD who puts on a white coat and starts talking about cancer using scientific jargon, while criticizing peer-reviewed medical research in medical journals. Sometimes the contrarian is a scientist paid by the fossil-fuel industry (see HERE) who, although knowing better, hypocritically misrepresents the science - think of scientists who defended the tobacco industry by claiming tobacco wasn't dangerous. Others with an ideological right-wing libertarian philosophy and funded by right-wing think tanks, distort the science to influence public opinion with the real goal of preventing governments from acting against global warming. Their arguments may change, but contrarians invariably arrive at the same conclusions. The full panoply of contrarian tactics and fallaciesare employed, with the four trenches of contrarian attack.
Layered with distorted commentary and op-eds, contrarian pseudo-science is broadcast in lockstep on the powerful right-wing media machine: TV, radio, newspapers, and blogs.
The contrarian goals are to sow confusion and doubt, hampering mitigation efforts, facilitating attacks on legislative attempts, opposing greenhouse gas regulation, and fighting the adoption of a binding climate treaty. The primary motivations are protection of fossil-fuel profits and libertarian anti-government sentiments.
The results are simultaneous attacks on social justice, intergenerational equity, and long-term human preservation. Not to mention the animal species that will disappear.
The contrarians no doubt believe that they can survive, casting all others (apparently including their own grandchildren) to their fate.
What's the Picture? A contrarian fallacy regarding the "Hockey Stick"
The notorious apples-and-oranges comparison in the misleading contrarian picture above with two graphs provides an instructive example of fallacious contrarian argumentation. The two graphs correspond to entirely different geographical regions, falsifying the fraudulent contrarian argument that the current global warming over the last 30 years is not caused by humans.
Actually this contrarian argument, besides being wrong, is a red herring.
Attribution of the observed global warming trend over the last 30 years to human activity is done completely differently and has nothing to do with irrelevant old data, as explained HERE.
Details:
Current global average temperatures are actually the hottest in 1,000 years and the current temperature trend is UP. Besides, as explained below, there was no pronounced global "medieval warming period", contrary to the implication of the bottom graph. HEREare relevant data. Here is a great video called The Medieval Warming Crock.
The upper "hockey stick" scientific graph of the contrarian picture shows temperatures over the last thousand years averaged over the entire Northern Hemisphere (although this essential fact is deliberately avoided), and this upper graph shows the recent observed global warming since around 1970. The upper graph is simplified but is essentially correct(the real graph is pasted below, see HERE, from the work of many groups of professional climatologists).
The lower graph in the above picture is wrong and is moreover used in a fraudulent manner, because it does NOT correspond to the entire Northern Hemisphere, as does the upper graph. The lower graph in the above picture is based on an outdated graph from an old 1990 IPCC report that contained an even earlier temperature estimate in medieval times by Lamb only from a few places that happened to be warm (mostly from Central England; a few other places like Greenland were also warm); the graph was labeled as a "schematic", all documented HERE (p. 36). The old 1990 graph was then incorrectly extended to 2000 by a German high school teacher (analyzed HERE).
Since this outdated graph does not include data from medieval cold places that largely canceled out the warm places, there is not a big bump in Northern-hemisphere medieval temperature - there was no pronounced global "medieval warming period".Nonetheless, this fallacious contrarian analysis has been and continues to be widely disseminated in right-wing newspapers and contrarian blogs. All this is similar to claiming the earth is flat by looking at an ancient map. Here is the
See Stephen Colbert's video of Fox News (at 2:43) saying winter snowstorms "disprove Al Gore's theory of global warming". Colbert uses the same cherry-picking illogic to "prove" - because it is nighttime - thatthe sun has been destroyed.
HERE is a hilarious article by George Monbiot exposing fake weather forecasters quoted by several British newspapers as women with skills including "mail-order bride".
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