Arguments
Rogues or respectable? How climate change sceptics spread doubt and denial
Posted on 24 June 2011 by John Cook
CLEARING UP THE CLIMATE DEBATE: Professor Ian Enting takes a look at the front groups and published texts of Australia’s climate sceptics.
The “name-calling” in what passes for public debate on climate was recently discussed in The Conversation by Garth Paltridge.
“It seems appropriate to expect the establishment to take the first steps in any attempt to bridge the divide between the sides,” he said, proposing we should, “recognise that not all climate sceptics are rogues and vagabonds.”
“The very first step should be for climate scientists to make a conscious effort to read some of the documentation appearing in the more respectable sceptic weblogs,” he argued.
Garth should get out more.
Many of us, including most of the authors of this series, have engaged with the arguments of self-styled “sceptics”.
We’ve looked at not just the blogs, but also the information from organised groups, the few published scientific papers and the books in which these their claims are presented in detail.
As a counter proposal, I would argue that any self-styled “sceptic” who claims to have a genuine case should do what normal scientists do and dissociate themselves from those who practise fabrication and misrepresentation, those who in Garth’s words might be called “rogues”, if not “vagabonds”.
The reality is that the most prominent pseudo-sceptical scientists are doing the opposite: gathering together to provide apparent respectability to front organisations that are designed to spread confusion.
This is the message from Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.
Authors Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, backed up by documents obtained in the course of tobacco litigation, show that not only was greenhouse denial using the same misinformation techniques as the tobacco industry, but that it was often the same groups and the same people. These anti-science activities hide behind names such as “Friends of Science”.
In Australia we have a similar phenomenon, with the additional twist of often using names that aim to capture a “martyr for science” image. They present themselves as being ignored by an entrenched establishment, when in reality they are ignoring or distorting the accumulated scientific knowledge.
An early starter was the Lavoisier Group – a single issue organisation similar in structure and name to organisations like the Bennelong Society (on indigenous affairs), the HR Nicholls society (on industrial relations) and the Samuel Griffith Society (on constitutional matters and support for the monarchy). But for the Lavoisier Group, the “martyr for science” ethos is a bit of a stretch – Lavoisier was executed for his activities as a tax collector.
The latest entry is the Galileo Movement, again co-opting the name of a “martyr for science” for an anti-science activity. The Galileo Movement’s founders funded the previous visit to Australia by Viscount Monckton. The movement’s “Independent Climate Science Group” includes Monckton, Bob Carter, S. Fred Singer and Ian Plimer as well as Garth Paltridge.
Monckton’s extravagant claims were described by John Abraham earlier in this series. Monckton’s recent testimony to the US Congress has been extensively refuted by a larger group of scientists.
The title of Bob Carter’s book Climate: The Counter-Consensus captures the problem succinctly. There is no such counter-consensus. What groups such as the Galileo Movement present as a alternative to mainstream view of climate is not an alternative consensus, but rather a collection of wildly conflicting and extensively discredited fragments designed to create confusion.
Singer’s book (with John Avery), Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years proposes a natural 1500 year cycle for global temperature. I find this unconvincing, with no evidence provided for the claim that Imperial Roman times were as cold as the Little Ice Age 1500 years later.
I am also puzzled as to how a man who claims we are in a natural warming cycle until about 2300 could be part of the Heartland Institute group. which convinced Senator Steve Fielding that the Earth is cooling.
But in Australia, it is Ian Plimer’s book Heaven + Earth. Global Warming: The Missing Science that has had most impact. Kurt Lambeck, President of the Academy of Science at the time, put it aptly when he stated that Heaven + Earth is not a work of science.
The book is extensively referenced with 2311 footnotes. But oddly many of these references directly support the mainstream view of climate change.
Plimer repeatedly quotes the paper that says “climate sensitivity greater than 1.5 degrees C has been a robust feature of the Earth’s climate over the last 420 million years.”
In other words, the geological record shows that doubling CO? causes an increase in temperature of at least 1.5 degrees. That is what “climate sensitivity” means: how much warming CO? causes.
This aspect of Heaven + Earth was recycled last year by Cardinal George Pell in a letter to the Senate, claiming that temperatures in Roman times were two to six degrees warmer than now, (the opposite of what is implied by Singer’s book).
While Pell cited the references in Plimer’s book as evidence, the reality is that Plimer’s whole section on “Roman Warming” cites seven scientific papers and none of them support this claim.
One of the scams used in Heaven + Earth is to plot graphs on different scales to claim that different data averaging gives different trends.
This device was used in Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear as a simple fictional example of how to fool a gullible jury, though it also seemed to fool many gullible readers.
But, it is Plimer’s misrepresentation of the cited references in Heaven + Earth that really justifies Kurt Lambeck’s statement. Some of these are downright silly, the claim that New Orleans subsided a metre in the three years prior to hurricane Katrina, for example.
Comparable is the claim that the 1991 eruption of volcano Mount Pinatubo emitted large quantities of chlorofluorocarbons, citing a paper that says nothing of the sort. The serious fabrication arises when claiming that satellite measurements of temperature don’t show warming while citing a reference that says the opposite. So far, my analysis of Plimer’s references shows 28 cases in which he misrepresents the content of his cited sources.
Finally, there is Garth Paltridge’s own book, The Climate Caper. This contains little science at all.
It is mainly about the institutional pressures that act on scientists. I agree with much of what Garth says, but my observation is that the pressures have largely acted in the opposite direction, inhibiting communication of mainstream climate science when governments found the implications inconvenient.
Thus organisations such as CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology remain muted on the inadequacy of proposals from both sides of politics.
Even those who support Garth’s views think that his book would have been more credible, more “respectable” perhaps, if he had chosen someone other than Monckton – indeed almost anyone other than Monckton – to write the foreword.
Scientists who claim genuinely respectable scepticism destroy their own case when they link their arguments to those who mis-use and misrepresent the processes of science.
Such links expose the activities of groups like the Galileo Movement for what they are: exercises in spreading confusion for political ends.
[DB] "my motivation to read further disappeared as quickly as a proxy temperature record data set"
Would that be what real skeptics do?
Please try to adhere more closely to the Comments Policy when formulating future comments. Thanks!
[DB] Please refrain from linking to...websites such as that one. At SkS the focus is on the science within an atmosphere of civility.
[DB] Perhaps I over-reacted a bit; sorry. On threads with topics such as this, one must hold one's nose a bit. Perhaps a not-so-direct quote with a link to the actual.
Some thoughts triggered by Garth Paltridges "The Climate Caper" (2010):
Hermann Hesse wrote a poem that is included in his novel "The Glass Bead Game. It is called "A Compromise" and it opens:
"The men of principled simplicity
Will have no traffic with our subtle doubt.
The world is flat, they tell us, and they shout:
The myth of depth is an absurdity!"
The goal of science is to find satisfactory explanations for whatever we feel needs explaining. Whatever explanations we come up with in science are regarded as permanently open to criticism and refinement, but the holding of doubt is subtle, for not even the philosopher Karl Popper would suggest that theories that have survived severe testing should be readily discarded without serious consideration.
The closing sentence of Hesse's excerpt raises the issue of who are the flat-earthers, the denialists of human accentuated climate change or the proponents? It is obvious in matters of conjecture and refutation that exaggeration and dogmatism can stain all sides of the debate. If Garth Paltridge's text highlights the dangers of an excess of dogmatism, the inertia of normal science, and the dangers of herd mentality, yes even in the IPCC, it is perhaps a worthy aim, if however it subtly reinforces denialist claims that have already been falsified in peer-reviewed testing then it would be a sad legacy for his eminent and long fought career. A forward by The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley is not a good way to start a work of serious intent. Sad career finales are not without precedent, Sir Ronald Fisher, arguably the greatest statistician of the twentieth century naively stained his legacy in the final years of his life in questioning the impact of smoking for public health. Science has implications that are far from neutral or saintly in their disinterest. Do shrill, and politically correct, warnings about the dangers of tobacco look so misguided now?
Moving to specifics, Garth Paltridge in this short book does question the hockey-stick model of climate change - later studies do seem to have falsified Garth's stance or at least have made it questionable.
It is all well and good to comment on the sociology of science, to stress situational analysis and piecemeal engineering rather than big budget government social engineering. The price of liberty is indeed eternal vigilance but even piecemeal solutions can turn toxic if out of context. Climate change does present complexities of a new scale that require a diversity of opinion and robust debate, but denialism is not scepticism.