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Denialist Agenda (Part 4): Manufacturing a scientific scandal

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Clive HamiltonThis  is part 4 of an excellent series of articles on the denialist agenda by Clive Hamilton.  Here, Clive outlines how ludicrous the claims are about the IPCC made by hack journalists such as Jonathan Leake (The Sunday Times).  As to someone who has participated in the IPCC process, Clive’s account is accurate and Leake’s horribly twisted.  It’s just a pity that much of the world’s media is so horribly gullible or complicit.  Surely there are mechanisms that we should be using to combat this deceit?

Clive Hamilton, ABC Unleashed.

Although sceptics have been gnawing away at the credibility of climate science for years, over the last five months they have made enormous leaps owing to the hacking of emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and the discovery of a number of alleged mistakes in the benchmark reports of the IPCC.

While the “revelations” have been milked for all they are worth, and a lot more, the science remains rock solid. If instead of cherry-picking two or three that lend themselves to spin, you read the 1000 or so emails that were posted on a Russian server the picture that emerges is one of an enormously dedicated group of men and women doing their best to carry out research of the highest quality.

If there were a conspiracy among scientists to manipulate the truth, you would expect the evidence to be there in spades in these private emails. But it’s not. Instead they show scientists working their backsides off to do good science, with email exchanges stopping briefly on Christmas Eve to be resumed on Boxing Day, with apologies to colleagues for taking time out to have surgery or get married, all with a sub-text of worry about the implications of their work for the future of humanity.

Rather than cover-ups, we read private emails from one scientist to Phil Jones, the CRU head who has been forced to step down pending an inquiry, saying he has been watching the sceptics blogs and, anticipating misrepresentation, says “this last aspect needs to be tackled more candidly in AR4 than in the SOD, and we need to discuss how to do this”. Others show them bending over backwards to be open.

Before the leak of the CRU emails, one colleague emailed others in response to attacks by sceptics on Phil Jones:

“The sad thing here is that Phil Jones is one of the true gentlemen of our field. I have known Phil for most of my scientific career. He is the antithesis of the secretive, “data destroying” character the CEI and Michaels are trying to portray to the outside world.”

And the emails reveal the enormous external pressure they were under. They show they were constantly accused of being frauds and cheats; their work was twisted and misrepresented; and they were bombarded with vexatious freedom of information requestsorchestrated by denialists. In short, they were caught up in a hot political debate that they did not really understand or want to be part of, yet they were the target of savvy, secretive and ruthless organisations ready to pounce on anything they said or wrote.

This is the real story exposed of “Climategate”. Instead, the scientists in question have seen their professional reputations trashed in the world’s media for no cause, to the point where Phil Jones has been on the verge of suicide. It has been the most egregious and unfounded attack on the integrity of a profession we have ever seen.

Yet the science remains rock solid

Since the leaking of the CRU emails the worldwide press have reported a series of “mistakes” in the IPCC reports that have allowed the denial lobby to claim that the entire IPCC process and the body of climate science should be junked. It turns out that almost all of the mistakes are fabrications. How could this have happened?

The first and only significant error identified in the IPCC report is the claim that 80 per cent of Himalayan glaciers are very likely to disappear by 2035. This was a serious mistake for a scientific report that should not have got through the review process. But let’s be very clear about its significance:

  • The error occurred in Volume 2 of the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), the volume on the impacts of climate change. Volume 1 reports and assesses the physical basis for climate science, including projections of warming. Chapter 4 contains an extensive discussion of glaciers, snow and ice. Projections for glaciers are also discussed in Chapter 10. No one has challenged any of the statements in these chapters, prepared by teams including the world’s leading glaciologists, which carefully lay out what is known.
  • The erroneous “2035” claim was nowhere highlighted by the IPCC. It appeared neither in the chapter summary, the report summary or the crucial Summary for Policymakers. In no sense was it a central claim of the IPCC report, as some newspapers have said.
  • It was a glaring error that should have been picked up earlier, but it was so deeply buried in the report that denialists around the world, with all of their supposed scientific expertise, did not pick it up for two years. In fact, they did not pick it up at all; it was first pointed out by Georg Kaser and others. Kaser is an eminent glacier expert who was a lead author of Chapter 4 in Volume 1.

Although mistakes like this one should not occur, to suggest that it has any bearing on the credibility of the science of AR4 is absurd. The more remarkable fact is that so few errors have been identified in AR4, and none at all in the crucial Volume 1 which sets out the physical basis for climate change. On page 493 of Volume 2, where the “2035” mistake occurs, I count 20 factual claims that are falsifiable. Multiply that by the 3,000 or so pages in AR4 and you can see how utterly trivial that single mistake is.

But haven’t many more mistakes been found in AR4? No. The only other claimed error that has any substance is the statement that “55% of its [the Netherlands] territory is below sea-level”. This figure was supplied by the Dutch Government. It is slightly misleading because the correct statement is that 55% per cent of the Netherlands is at risk of flooding,although the Dutch Ministry of Transport says that 60% of the country is below the high water level. The confusion may have implications for the Netherlands’ dike planning but has no bearing whatever on the science of climate change.

There are three additional “errors” in AR4 that have attracted press attention and sparked denialist frenzies. They are analysed on the Realclimate website.

  • “Africagate” refers to the claim that AR4 overstated the potential decline in crop yields in Africa. The figures in AR4 have since been shown to be an accurate assessment.
  • “Disastergate” is the allegation that the IPCC erroneously attributed some of the rising costs of disasters to climate change. In fact, the section in question is hedged around with caution and the expert whose work was said to be misused by the IPCC has declared that the IPCC has fairly represented his findings.
  • “Amazongate”, a story that opened with the claim: “A startling report by the United Nations climate watchdog that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise”. The story is plain wrong, with the expert on whose work the IPCC relied stating that the information is correct, although the referencing is incomplete.

Apart from the fact that these three “gates” are beat-ups with no basis in their criticism of the IPCC, they have one feature in common – the stories were all written by Jonathan Leake, science and environment editor of The Sunday Times.

Leake has close links with deniers and in fact based these stories directly on wild and unsubstantiated claims by sceptic bloggers, as uncovered by Tim Holmes. In the case of Amazongate, Leake had been informed by another expert that, while the referencing was inadequate, the claim in AR4 is correct and, if anything, an understatement. But Leake disregarded this and quoted that same expert in his story to exactly the reverse effect, as if he were a severe critic of the IPCC.

On the role of Leake I can do no better than quote Tim Holmes:

“While it is wholly unsurprising that the denial lobby should be attempting to push baseless and misleading stories to the press, what is surprising is the press’s willingness to swallow them. In this case, two experts in the relevant field told a Times journalist explicitly that, in spite of a minor referencing error, the IPCC had got its facts right.
That journalist simply ignored them. Instead, he deliberately put out the opposite line – one fed to him by a prominent climate change denier – as fact. The implications are deeply disturbing, not only for our prospects of tackling climate change, but for basic standards of honesty and integrity in journalism.”

Leake’s stories have been reproduced in the other Murdoch broadsheets, The Australianand the Wall Street Journal and of course have been amplified on Fox News, and are themselves now being referred to as “Leakegate”.

Bloggers and columnists, who attack climate science without ever opening an IPCC report or speaking to a real climate scientists, imagine that the body of climate science is a house of cards, and taking away one or two will cause it to collapse. In fact the scientific case for global warming is like a mountain built up by adding one rock at a time over many years. Even if all of the alleged errors were true it would amount to picking off a handful of rocks from the top of the mountain, leaving the rest unchanged and unmoved.

Yet these alleged mistakes – non-existent or trivial – with no implications whatever for the robustness of climate science have been deployed in a sophisticated campaign to blacken the reputations of the scientists responsible for alerting us to the perils of global warming.

Perception versus reality

Unfortunately, the chorus of declarations that the climate scientists got it wrong has had no impact on the earth’s climate. Indeed, those who study the climate itself rather than the bogus debate in the newspapers and the blogosphere understand that climate science and popular perceptions of climate science are diverging rapidly, not least because the news on the former is getting worse.

Soon after AR4 appeared in early 2007, those familiar with the science began to say that as a result of the consensus process and the natural caution of scientists, the Fourth Assessment Report had seriously understated the risks from climate change, particularly in its selection of scenarios and its estimates of likely sea-level rise.

Rather than rehearse the evidence for these warnings, well known to those who follow the science, let me make mention of a number of developments in climate science that have been published or reported in the five months since the leaking of the Climategate emails. It is evidence that warming is more alarming than previously thought yet which has been buried in the avalanche of confected stories claiming that climate scientists have exaggerated.

  • We have just had the warmest decade on record.
  • A new study concludes that an average warming of 3-4°C (which means 7-8°C on land), previously thought to be associated with carbon dioxide concentrations of 500-600 ppmv, is now believed to be associated with concentrations of only 360-420 ppmv, a range that covers the current concentration of 385 ppmv, rising at 2 ppmv per annum. If confirmed by further research, the implications of this are terrifying.
  • While news reports allege glacial melting has been exaggerated, the best evidence is that the rate of disappearance of glaciers is accelerating. The University of Zurich’s World Glacier Monitoring Service reports that “new data continues the global trend in strong ice loss over the past few decades”.
  • The rate of flow into the sea of Greenland and Antarctic glaciers is accelerating, adding to sea-level rise. This augments the evidence that IPCC cautiousness led to significant underestimation of the likely extent of sea-level rise in the 21st century. The East Antarctic ice-sheet, previously believed to be stable, has now begun to melt on its coastal fringes. The West Antarctic ice-sheet continues its rapid melt.
  • Sharply rising temperature in the Arctic has, over the last five years, caused a rapid increase in the amount of methane being emitted from melting permafrost. The limit of the Arctic permafrost has retreated northwards by 130 kilometres over the last 50 years in the James Bay region of Canada.

    • I have tried to find some new studies that go the other way in the hope I can counterbalance this bleak story, but have not succeeded.
    Over the last five months, a vast gulf has opened up between the media-stoked perception that the climate science has been exaggerated and the research-driven evidence that the true situation is worse than we thought.

    Just when we should be urging immediate and deep cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions, the public is being lulled into disbelief, scepticism and apathy by a sustained and politically driven assault on the credibility of climate science. For this we will all pay dearly.

    Tomorrow: Where are the defenders of science?

Denialist Agenda (Part 3): Think tanks, oil money and black ops

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Clive HamiltonHere is the part 3 of Clive Hamilton’s expose of the denialist movement.  He explores the role of special interests funded ‘think tanks’ …

Clive Hamilton, ABC Unleashed.

The army of denialist bloggers and cyber-bullies is sometimes accused of being the tool of fossil fuel companies. Although there is certainly a concordance of interests, that is as far as the relationship goes. The bloggers are motivated not by financial gain (indeed, their activities may have a financial cost) but by political grievances and an anti-elite worldview at odds with the mainstream.

Nevertheless, it is true that the raw material that feeds their anger is generated overwhelmingly by a network of right-wing think tanks and websites in part funded by Big Carbon. These links, which have been heavily documented, are close enough to provoke the Royal Society to take the unprecedented step of writing to Exxon Mobil asking the company to desist from funding anti-science groups.

Yet the funding continues, often through foundations that in effect launder oil and coal money to make it more difficult to trace to its sources. One of the more important conduits is the Washington-based Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Atlas supports financially a network of some 200 libertarian think tanks around the world, including (according to an investigation by US magazine Mother Jones) the Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies in Australia.

Atlas co-sponsored the Heartland Institute’s climate sceptic conference in Washington last June attended by a number of prominent Australian skeptics. The Heartland Institute has received funding from Exxon Mobil and earlier received funding from Philip Morris to campaign against smoking restrictions. It has superseded Frontiers of Freedom and the Competitive Enterprise Institute as the foremost US “think tank” working to discredit climate science and stop action on climate change.

Black ops

The deployment of think tanks and sceptic websites to attack climate science has been a carefully planned strategy that was developed in the United States in the mid-1990s. It was refined with the advice of political consultant Frank Luntz who in 2002 urged the Republican Party to undermine the credibility of climate science by commissioning “independent” experts to “make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate”. The strategy is comprehensively exposed by former PR insider Jim Hoggan in hisrecent book Climate Cover-Up.

The strategy’s use of operations that fall into the “grey area” of political campaigning – such as the creation of fake citizens groups to advance the interests of fossil fuel companies – is well-known and continuing. Only now is light being shone on a far more sinister campaign of black operations.

The hacking into computers at the Climatic Research Centre at the University of East Anglia is only part of a more extensive campaign of black ops organised by elements of the denial industry in the run-up to the Copenhagen meeting. Others include break-ins to the offices of climate scientists, an attempt to infiltrate the computer system at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis at the University of Victoria by two people posing as technicians, and industrial espionage directed at US green groups.

The think tanks

Although Australia does not have the proliferation of well-funded conservative think tanks that have been so influential in US politics, local counterparts have served effectively as conduits for the stream of anti-science pouring out of their kindred organisations in the United States. They have also been instrumental in publicising and promoting the work of Australian sceptics such as Ian Plimer and Bob Carter. There are three established think tanks and a new one emerging.

Lavoisier Group: Perhaps better described as an advocacy group than a think tank, theLavoisier Group was founded in 1999 by Hugh Morgan, then CEO of Western Mining Corporation and a former president of the Mining Industry Council, and his long-time political operative Ray Evans. Its board consists mostly of mining industry figures. Evans has close links with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, for some years the most active denialist think tank in the United States.

Evans, with Morgan’s backing, had created a string of organisations promoting conservative causes, including the anti-union H.R Nicholls Society (with which the Lavoisier Group shares a postal address) and the Samuel Griffiths Society, committed to defending states’ rights.

The Lavoisier Group brings together leading sceptics at its conferences, promotes sceptics’ books, and publishes material such as “Nine Lies About Global Warming”, penned by Evans and parroted by sceptical columnists in the newspapers. A book edited by Evans was last year launched by Senator Barnaby Joyce, now the shadow finance minister.

Institute of Public Affairs: The oldest think tank in Australia, and with close links to the Liberal Party, the IPA took up the denialist cause early. The IPA is coy about its funding sources, but is known to have received the bulk of its income from mining, resource and tobacco companies. In addition to promoting the work of Australian sceptics like Ian Plimer, the IPA has hosted international visitors such as Bjorn Lomborg and Mark Steyn, events attended by Liberal Party heavyweights.

The IPA also sponsored the visit to Australia of President Putin’s former adviser Andrei Illarianov who fulminated against “fraudulent science” and described the Kyoto Protocol as a “death pact”, “an interstate Auschwitz”, “a sort of international Gosplan, a system to rival the former Soviet Union’s”, an argument bizarre even in the world of climate denial, but reasonable enough to be reproduced by The Australian.

Centre for Independent Studies: The CIS projects itself as a more moderate conservative think tank, but has not been able to resist promoting climate scepticism. After struggling in its early years, it was reprieved by a major funding boost from six mining companies, a rescue facilitated by Hugh Morgan. Among its board members is Sir Rod Eddington, a senior business adviser to the Labor Government. It has hosted a string of climate sceptics from overseas and Australia.

Brisbane Institute: The Brisbane Institute has for some years been a middle-of-the-road think tank but appears to have been taken over by climate sceptics. Some of its followers were shocked to hear that the Institute would host the Brisbane leg of Christopher Monckton’s Australian tour.

Last year the Brisbane Institute hosted a public lecture by Dr Jay Lehr, Science Director of the Heartland Institute. As we saw, the Heartland Institute is now the most active climate denialist organisation in the United States. Lehr was presented by the Brisbane Institute as an “internationally renowned” scientist, which is simply untrue; he has been heavily criticised for distorting and misrepresenting climate science. He is better known for spending three months in jail for defrauding the US Environmental Protection Authority in 1991.

The Brisbane Institute is perfectly entitled to take the denialist road. The puzzle is why the University of Queensland, the Institute’s primary sponsor, would support an organisation that promotes anti-science. Paying for Monckton and Fehr to trash climate science in Brisbane does not seem compatible with the University’s aim “to achieve internationally-acknowledged excellence in all forms of research”.

Several scientists from the University serve as authors or reviewers for the IPCC, a body attacked as fraudulent by Monckton and Lehr. The University of Queensland appears unconcerned about linking itself with climate denial. In 2008 it accepted a donation of $350,000 from a climate change sceptic, channeled through the IPA, who wanted it to be spent on funding doctoral research on climate change. Of course, the University said there would be no strings attached.

These think tanks are at the heart of the denial movement in this country. They provide funding and organisational capacity, they convene conferences and private meetings, they commission sceptical scientists to write papers, they publish and promote sceptical papers and books, they supply “experts” to the media and they lobby at every opportunity.

Every sceptical scientist, no matter how independent he starts out, is sooner or later drawn into the web formed by these think tanks. In Australia, Bob Carter is a favourite of the Heartland Institute and the Lavoisier Group, Ian Plimer is an associate of the Institute for Public Affairs and an adviser to Nigel Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation, and William Kinninmonth (the Australian sceptic with perhaps the strongest claims to being a climate scientist) allowed his book to be launched by the Lavoisier Group.

The links of these sceptics to political organisations with strong ideological agendas stands in sharp contrast to the vast assemblage of legitimate climate scientists who have no political connections. Yet it is the latter who are accused of being politicised.

Backlash against the 60s

Despite their financial support from Big Carbon, it would be wrong to believe that the conservative think tanks operate solely at the behest of the fossil fuel industries. Their objectives are principally ideological and they would still be campaigning against climate science without funding from Exxon Mobil and others; they would just be less effective. In the United States and Australia, it is probably true that they have received more funding from right-wing foundations with no links to Big Carbon than from oil and coal companies (although some, like the Scaife Foundations, owe their wealth to oil).

So, in the end, their motives are political rather than commercial. The arms of the denialist war on climate science – the bloggers and letter writers; the right wing columnists like Andrew Bolt, Christopher Pearson and Miranda Devine; the Murdoch broadsheets; and the conservative think tanks – are united by one factor, a hatred of environmentalism. Environmentalism is variously seen to be the enemy of individual freedom, an ideology of smug elites, an attack on capitalism and consumerism, and the vanguard of world government.

This antagonism towards the real or assumed ideas of environmentalism is spiced with a loathing for “green culture” represented by the image of the long-haired tree-huggers who want to impose their ascetic lifestyle on others.

Politically, climate denialism represents a backlash against the advances begun by the social movements of the 1960s and their destabilisation of traditional social structures and beliefs, including those of the right of humans to exploit the natural world, which helps explain why its activists are overwhelmingly older. Raging against climate science fits perfectly with the worldview, style and audience demographic of populist shock-jocks like Alan Jones, Australia’s answer to Rush Limbaugh.

To turn back the tide of denialism, perhaps the most significant step would be for those conservative leaders who accept the science to speak out loudly and clearly about the need to take action. It is in their hands to break down the belief that global warming is somehow a left-wing cause.

Tomorrow: How to manufacture a scientific scandal.

Climate sceptics are recycled critics of controls on tobacco and acid rain

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Jeffrey Sachs, guardian.co.uk,          Friday 19 February 2010 12.47 GMT

In the weeks before and after the Copenhagen climate change conference last December, the science of climate change came under harsh attack by critics who contend that climate scientists have deliberately suppressed evidence — and that the science itself is severely flawed. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC), the global group of experts charged with assessing the state of climate science, has been accused of bias.

The global public is disconcerted by these attacks. If experts cannot agree that there is a climate crisis, why should governments spend billions of dollars to address it?

The fact is that the critics — who are few in number but aggressive in their attacks — are deploying tactics that they have honed for more than 25 years. During their long campaign, they have greatly exaggerated scientific disagreements in order to stop action on climate change, with special interests like Exxon Mobil footing the bill.

Many books have recently documented the games played by the climate-change deniers. Merchants of Doubt, a new book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway set for release in mid-2010, will be an authoritative account of their misbehaviour. The authors show that the same group of mischief-makers, given a platform by the free-market ideologues of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, has consistently tried to confuse the public and discredit the scientists whose insights are helping to save the world from unintended environmental harm.

Today’s campaigners against action on climate change are in many cases backed by the same lobbies, individuals, and organisations that sided with the tobacco industry to discredit the science linking smoking and lung cancer. Later, they fought the scientific evidence that sulphur oxides from coal-fired power plants were causing “acid rain.” Then, when it was discovered that certain chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were causing the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere, the same groups launched a nasty campaign to discredit that science, too.

Later still, the group defended the tobacco giants against charges that second-hand smoke causes cancer and other diseases. And then, starting mainly in the 1980s, this same group took on the battle against climate change.

What is amazing is that, although these attacks on science have been wrong for 30 years, they still sow doubts about established facts. The truth is that there is big money backing the climate-change deniers, whether it is companies that don’t want to pay the extra costs of regulation, or free-market ideologues opposed to any government controls.

The latest round of attacks involves two episodes. The first was the hacking of a climate-change research centre in England. The emails that were stolen suggested a lack of forthrightness in the presentation of some climate data. Whatever the details of this specific case, the studies in question represent a tiny fraction of the overwhelming scientific evidence that points to the reality and urgency of man-made climate change.

The second issue was a blatant error concerning glaciers that appeared in a major IPCC report. Here it should be understood that the IPCC issues thousands of pages of text. There are, no doubt, errors in those pages. But errors in the midst of a vast and complex report by the IPCC point to the inevitability of human shortcomings, not to any fundamental flaws in climate science.

When the emails and the IPCC error were brought to light, editorial writers at The Wall Street Journal launched a vicious campaign describing climate science as a hoax and a conspiracy. They claimed that scientists were fabricating evidence in order to obtain government research grants — a ludicrous accusation, I thought at the time, given that the scientists under attack have devoted their lives to finding the truth, and have certainly not become rich relative to their peers in finance and business.

But then I recalled that this line of attack — charging a scientific conspiracy to drum up “business” for science — was almost identical to that used by The Wall Street Journal and others in the past, when they fought controls on tobacco, acid rain, ozone depletion, second-hand smoke, and other dangerous pollutants. In other words, their arguments were systematic and contrived, not at all original to the circumstances.

We are witnessing a predictable process by ideologues and right-wing think tanks and publications to discredit the scientific process. Their arguments have been repeatedly disproved for 30 years — time after time — but their aggressive methods of public propaganda succeed in causing delay and confusion.

Climate change science is a wondrous intellectual activity. Great scientific minds have learned over the course of many decades to “read” the Earth’s history, in order to understand how the climate system works. They have deployed brilliant physics, biology, and instrumentation (such as satellites reading detailed features of the Earth’s systems) in order to advance our understanding.

And the message is clear: large-scale use of oil, coal, and gas is threatening the biology and chemistry of the planet. We are fuelling dangerous changes in Earth’s climate and ocean chemistry, giving rise to extreme storms, droughts, and other hazards that will damage the food supply and the quality of life of the planet.

The IPCC and the climate scientists are telling us a crucial message. We need urgently to transform our energy, transport, food, industrial, and construction systems to reduce the dangerous human impact on the climate. It is our responsibility to listen, to understand the message, and then to act.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010

Scientists Defend UN Climate Change Report From Right Wing Assault

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This was posted at TechPulse360 by Mark Boslet this morning.

Scalding critiques of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 report run hotter than Ronald Reagan’s temper when confronting a Vietnam War peace demonstration.

Mistakes, these right wing critics, claim, undermine the entire U.N.-sponsored study, Al Gore’s Nobel Prize and the entire body of scientific evidence supporting global warming.

Return to the do-nothing policies of the Bush years, they scream.

It is shocking the force that several rather trivial errors have in undermining a massive three-volume report totaling more than 3,000 pages. Welcome to the nonsense of the climate change debate (or rather non-debate).

It was the IPCC report that forcefully told the world the burning of fossil fuels was warming the globe and action had to be taken. The study was immediately assailed as over reaching. Now right-wingers and Republicans are feasting on several errors that have come to light, including an incorrect date for the melting of the Himalayan glaciers. It was said to be 2035, but it more probably later.

Another incorrect statement describes the Netherlands as more than 50 percent under sea level. A final comes because the IPCC relied on non-scientific source to claim that 40 percent of the Amazon rain forest will become to savanna if the warming trend from CO2 accumulation is not reversed.

None of these mistakes should have appeared in the scholarly work, people from both sides of the aisle agree. But they are relatively minor points considering the scope of the work, according to climate scientists interviewed about the controversy.

“I’m not surprised that a report which involves three massive volumes (each over 1000 pages of smallish print), written by over 450 lead authors and 800 contributing authors (and reviewed by 2,500 expert experts who submitted 90,000 review comments on the draft document) (could) have a few errors in it,” says Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Professor and Director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland in Australia.

“When you compare it to the gross errors of fact which are promulgated by people claiming that climate change is not occurring, these few errors in an otherwise very watertight document are relatively insignificant,” he says.

Presenting errors like these should be a major concern for the IPCC, Hoegh-Guldberg wrote in an e-mail. But do they justify throwing out the rest of the work?  “Of course not.”

A Down-Under Journalistic ‘Wipeout’ In Covering Risks to the Great Barrier Reef

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By John F. Bruno | February 23, 2010 YALE FORUM ON CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE MEDIA

BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA — Growing tensions between scientists and major news outlets in Australia center around scientists’ concerns over coverage of the potential effects of climate change on coral reefs.

Many of the environmental scientists point to what they see as biased and misleading reporting, leaving them frustrated and wondering how they can best engage in a public debate that seems to have left them behind.

NEWS ANALYSIS

Unlike anywhere else in the world, national media coverage of coral reefs in Australia is a near-daily occurrence. The primary reason? The close proximity of theGreat Barrier Reef (GBR), a natural wonder made by the accumulation of calcareous skeletons of countless billions ofcoral polyps over the last 8,000 years. The GBR is more than 2,000 km long and consists of thousands individual reefs. The biodiversity of the GBR is bewildering; a single reef can easily house many times more coral and fish species than the entire Caribbean Sea, the global center of biodiversity.

Across this vast island continent, citizens have a genuine and broad sense of national stewardship of the GBR, in part because this natural tourism magnet is valued at $51.4 billion, nearly 5 percent of Australia’s annual GDP.

A threat to the reef 40 years ago by exploratory oil drilling and outbreaks of the crown-of-thorns-starfish, a voracious coral predator, largely inspired the beginning of the now global reef conservation movement. Cars since the 1970s have criss-crossed the nation sporting “Save The Reef” bumper stickers. This popular movement led to establishment of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and to what is now in many regards the world’s largest and best managed marine reserve.

Over those three-plus decades, coral reefs around the world have declined as the result of a range of impacts. Local threats include activities like dynamite fishing and damage from boat anchors. Globally and in the longer-term, threats mount from ocean warming and from acidification.

Coverage of the GBR and reef science on radio and television programs of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and some other outlets is generally sympathetic to conservation efforts and in alignment with the findings and perspectives of reef scientists.

In contrast, the nation’s largest daily newspaper, The Australian, frequently reports on and champions aggressive opposition to coral reef science and management and to the Labor government’s proposals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A recent example is a front-page February 4 story bylined by reporter Jamie Walker and headlined “Report undercuts Kevin Rudd’s Great Barrier Reef wipeout.”

Australia’s pro-environment Prime Minister, Rudd recently spoke to the parliament of potentially devastating future effects of anthropogenic global warming on the Great Barrier Reef. Temperatures only 1 or 2 degrees C above normal summertime highs can cause “coral bleaching“. If such warming lasts for weeks or goes much higher than that, corals can die en masse, having cascading impacts on all the reef inhabitants.

The well-documented temperature sensitivity of corals leads to theexpectation that if tropical ocean temperatures increase by 2-3 degrees C, as they are predicted to do even under the more conservative IPCC emissions scenarios, coral populations would be reduced and the overall reef ecosystem could be degraded.

A Journalistic Wipeout

The lead of Walker’s story was “Kevin Rudd’s insistence that the Great Barrier Reef could be ‘destroyed beyond recognition’ by global warming grates with new science suggesting it will again escape temperature-related coral bleaching.”

The new science purportedly undercutting Rudd’s warning came from theAustralian Institute of Marine Science, an internationally respected research institution. The report indicated that as of mid-January, there was no sign of mass bleaching on 14 reefs on the southern GBR. According to Hugh Sweatman, PhD, leader of the AIMS Long Term Monitoring Program, the absence of any mass bleaching is attributable to several recent cyclones and current atmospheric conditions having reduced local water temperatures.

The point is that the reef has not (yet) bleached this summer, a simple consequence of the fact that temperatures around the Reef had not increased to more than 1 degree C above the long-term average (the well-documented trigger for coral bleaching and the basis for the satellite “hotspot” detection program run by NOAA in Washington D.C.).

Furthermore, the first sentence of the second paragraph of the report states “median reef-wide live coral cover declined on the majority of sampled reefs [10 of 14] since previous surveys [in 2009].” That finding does not jibe with the rosy description of recovering and resilient reefs painted by the newspaper’s “wipeout” story nor in recent Australian stories tellingly titled “Scientists ‘crying wolf’ over coral” and “How the reef became blue again.”

Besides getting the science wrong, The Australian’s February 4 article illustrates what appears to be a new approach to media news coverage in Australia of climate change: The central interpretation was not corroborated by the text of the report or by any scientist. This fact and Walker’s tone make this front-page article better suited for the opinion pages.

These examples of recent coverage illustrate that the once-honored wall between news pages and opinion pages in Australia appears increasingly porous. This is probably not surprising given the strong influence of the British Broadsheet format on Australian papers.

Reporters around the world in fact appear to be getting more assertive and openly subjective in their role as arbiters of the frenzied debate over climate change science, further blurring the line that for many had long separated news and opinion pieces.

A typical example is coverage of the snowstorms in Washington D.C., suggesting (falsely) that such localized weather events indicate global warming has ended.

Among reporters seeing through the fog of weather/climate confusion,Washington Post political reporter Dana Milbank correctly wrote, “As a scientific proposition, claiming that heavy snow in the mid-Atlantic debunks global warming theory is about as valid as claiming that the existence of John Edwards debunks the theory of evolution.”

Journalistic Accountability

AIMS CEO Ian Poiner, PhD, in a letter to The Australian published online one week after the February 4 “wipeout” story, wrote, “This year the Australian Institute of Marine Science has observed that there is no mass coral bleaching on the southern Great Barrier Reef.” He said The Australian’s front-page story “uses these observations to contradict the view that the reef is threatened by climate change. This is not the case. The Great Barrier Reef is one of the healthiest coral reef ecosystems in the world, but climate change is a significant long-term threat … One or two seasons of no bleaching do not mean that the GBR is not threatened.” (AIMS has also issued an easy to read white paper on its home page, outlining its major findings related to coral reefs and climate change.)

Given the recent focus by some media on development and review processes of IPCC reports and of scientific peer-review more generally, scientists find the absence of rigorous review or accountability in the mass media ironic and frustrating.

Reacting to such coverage, Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland in Brisbane said, “The recent unprofessional and unethical behavior of journalists has all of us very concerned. Not only does there seem to be a lack of accountability for telling fibs, but there seems to be a concerted effort to harass and intimidate some of our best scientists as well as the institutions to which they belong.”

Unequal Media Access

The only major news outlet in Australia regularly and responsibly reporting on climate science and openly challenging reporting by The Australian has been the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Veteran ABC reporter Jonathan Holmes followed up a hard-hitting segment of his Media Watch program that dissected the flaws in the newspaper’s story with a broader editorial about the disproportionate prominence in Australian mass media of climate change “deniers”:

There’s no denying that the climate change deniers, or sceptics, (the term you prefer depends which side you’re on) have succeeded, to a degree that orthodox climate scientists find baffling, in persuading a large proportion of the public that the science of global warming is, in the Opposition leader’s words, “absolute crap”.

The opinion pages – and as we showed on Media Watch last Monday, sometimes the news pages – of our only national broadsheet have heavily favoured sceptics over proponents of the scientific consensus.

The Melbourne-based Herald Sun’s Andrew Bolt responded with an editorial of his own, disagreeing with Holmes’ assertion that journalists unfriendly to science are dominating Australian newspapers.

I’m flattered, but Holmes is kidding himself. Warmists have for years had unrivalled access to the mass media. Even better, they’ve had their cause taken up by the most powerful outlets … Every newspaper environment reporter pumped out warmist scare stories about polar bears and collapsing glaciers …

Perhaps. But the tide has clearly turned, and in the news columns and not solely on the editorial pages. The Australian has been running a campaign ofnear-daily articles andeditorials sharply critical of the IPCC and evidence of anthropogenic climate change.

The relative frequency of “denialist” and “warmist” pieces in Australian media could be quantified. Yet that would miss Holmes’ central point: there is a big difference between merely describing the science in the dry and balanced tone of an environmental reporter and vehemently attacking it and its practitioners from a pulpit of populist outrage and scorn.

There is no Aussie media watcher comparable to the liberal climate analystJoe Romm, nor a nationally syndicated columnist like The New York Times‘Tom Friedman, forcefully advocating green energy policies, often from a centrist economic or national security perspective. Climate change scientists simply lack an adequate platform to communicate directly with the public the way agenda-driven critics of their research do. Like many of their science colleagues in the U.S. and elsewhere, they are also stuck on the defensive and are sorely in need of training on how to work more successfully with the media.

The battle of words among reporters and opinion makers in Australia goes on, with neither scientists nor the science playing any discernable role. Despite some knowledgeable media coverage of threats to the GBR and reefs around the world, scientists sense their findings are being drowned out and misrepresented by partisan and agenda-driven advocates with daily access to hundreds of thousands of readers.

The consequences are sobering, Hoegh-Guldberg cautions. “You might write bad journalism off as simply an acceptable consequence of our freewheeling society. The implications, however, are extremely serious. It threatens to undermine our ability to respond to the challenges of climate change. In my mind, the media must devise mechanisms to deal with such journalistic practices or we will all suffer the consequences.”

Ice Shelves Disappearing on Antarctic Peninsula

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From ScienceDaily:

ScienceDaily (Feb. 22, 2010) — Ice shelves are retreating in the southern section of the Antarctic Peninsula due to climate change, according to new data. This could result in glacier retreat and sea-level rise if warming continues, threatening coastal communities and low-lying islands worldwide, experts say.

Research by the U.S. Geological Survey is the first to document that every ice front in the southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula has been retreating overall from 1947 to 2009, with the most dramatic changes occurring since 1990. The USGS previously documented that the majority of ice fronts on the entire Peninsula have also retreated during the late 20th century and into the early 21st century.

The ice shelves are attached to the continent and already floating, holding in place the Antarctic ice sheet that covers about 98 percent of the Antarctic continent. As the ice shelves break off, it is easier for outlet glaciers and ice streams from the ice sheet to flow into the sea. The transition of that ice from land to the ocean is what raises sea level.

“This research is part of a larger ongoing USGS project that is for the first time studying the entire Antarctic coastline in detail, and this is important because the Antarctic ice sheet contains 91 percent of Earth’s glacier ice,” said USGS scientist Jane Ferrigno. “The loss of ice shelves is evidence of the effects of global warming. We need to be alert and continually understand and observe how our climate system is changing.”

The Peninsula is one of Antarctica’s most rapidly changing areas because it is farthest away from the South Pole, and its ice shelf loss may be a forecast of changes in other parts of Antarctica and the world if warming continues.

Retreat along the southern part of the Peninsula is of particular interest because that area has the Peninsula’s coolest temperatures, demonstrating that global warming is affecting the entire length of the Peninsula.

The Antarctic Peninsula’s southern section as described in this study contains five major ice shelves: Wilkins, George VI, Bach, Stange and the southern portion of Larsen Ice Shelf. The ice lost since 1998 from the Wilkins Ice Shelf alone totals more than 4,000 square kilometers, an area larger than the state of Rhode Island.

The USGS is working collaboratively on this project with the British Antarctic Survey, with the assistance of the Scott Polar Research Institute and Germany’s Bundesamt fűr Kartographie und Geodäsie. The research is also part of the USGS Glacier Studies Project, which is monitoring and describing glacier extent and change over the whole planet using satellite imagery.

The report, “Coastal-Change and Glaciological Map of the Palmer Land Area, Antarctica: 1947 — 2009” and its accompanying map is available online (http://pubs.usgs.gov/imap/i-2600-c/).

The other completed reports in the Coastal Change and Glaciological Maps of Antarctica series can be viewed online (http://pubs.usgs.gov/imap/2600/).

This image shows ice-front retreat in part of the southern Antarctic Peninsula from 1947 to 2009. USGS scientists are studying coastal and glacier change along the entire Antarctic coastline. The southern portion of the Antarctic Peninsula is one area studied as part of this project, and is summarized in the USGS report, "Coastal-Change and Glaciological Map of the Palmer Land Area, Antarctica: 1947--2009" (map I--2600--C). (Credit: Image courtesy of U.S. Geological Survey)

IWC planning to allow commercial whaling

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Several newspaper are reporting that the IWC is planning to overturn the current ban on commercial whaling, despite the Rudd governments strong opposition:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf5cfE-z6S0&w=425&h=344]

From the ABC:

IWC flags compromise on commercial whaling

By environment reporter Sarah Clarke

Posted 5 hours 28 minutes ago

The International Whaling Commission (IWC) has released a compromise plan that could overturn a 28-year ban on commercial whaling.

The whaling body has been involved in negotiations to try to break an ongoing deadlock.

A small group of IWC nations, including Australia, have spent the past two years negotiating a way forward for the troubled IWC.

The group has released draft recommendations which include bringing scientific whaling under the commission’s watch, reducing catches from current levels, establishing caps on whale takes over a 10-year period, and improving the animal welfare aspects of whaling.

Japan currently conducts its scientific whaling through a loophole in the IWC’s rules.

Over the past five years it has killed up to 1,900 whales in the Southern Ocean as part of its research program.

The IWC says its plan would reduce the catch and bring it under a tighter watch.

And from our friends, The Australian:

COMMERCIAL whaling would be reintroduced on a limited basis and Japan would be able to continue hunting in the Antarctic, under a proposal released today by International Whaling Commission chairman Cristian Maquieira.

The Maquieira proposal cuts across Kevin Rudd’s demand for Japan to end its Southern Ocean scientific whaling program by November, before the scheduled start of the next summer hunt.

Mr Rudd has threatened Japan with a lawsuit in the International Court of Justice if it does not accept his ultimatum.

Greenpeace International today described the Maquieira plan as a “disaster” for whale conservation, “send(ing) shock waves through international ocean conservation efforts, making it vastly more difficult to protect other rapidly declining species such as tuna and sharks”.

“The proposal rewards Japan for decades of reprehensible behaviour at the IWC and in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary,” said John Frizell, head of the Greenpeace whales campaign.

Canberra is expected to reject Mr Maquieira’s plan, aimed at securing the future of an IWC at risk of collapse over Japanese so-called scientific whaling and the refusal of several other members to honour the 24-year-old international moratorium on commercial whaling.

Mr Rudd and embattled Environment Minister Peter Garrett are expected to unveil an alternative Australian proposal to the IWC as early as today.

The Maquieira proposal, developed but not endorsed by a “support group” of 12 countries including Australia and Japan, calls for suspending scientific whaling, the means by which Japan gets around the 24-year-old IWC ban on commercial whaling, this summer with quotas to catch up to 990 Southern Ocean whales.

Japan and the other IWC member countries that currently kill whales, however, would receive quotas for the next 10 years, set within sustainable levels for each hunted species.

The support group has not established what quotas would apply in the Antarctic, where only the Japan hunts, but has left the way open for targeted species to include the iconic humpback and still at-risk fin whales, as well as the numerous minkes that make up the overwhelming bulk of the Japanese fleet’s catch.

In effect, this is a return to limited commercial whaling, although only open to countries like Japan, Norway and Iceland that by one means or another have flouted the whaling moratorium.

The proposal, part of a wide-ranging suite of reforms to the IWC’s moribund rules and procedures, would operate until the end of 2010.

It goes early next month to an IWC working group meeting in Florida and, if approved, from there to the commission’s annual meeting where, if approved, it would become the operating regime for governing both whaling and whale conservation activities.

Denialist Agenda (Part 2): Who is orchestrating the cyber-bullying?

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Here is part 2 of Clive Hamilton’s series on the right-wing denial movement:

The floods of offensive and threatening emails aimed at intimidating climate scientists have all the signs of an orchestrated campaign by sceptics groups. The links are well-hidden because mobilizing people to send abuse and threats is well outside the accepted bounds of democratic participation; indeed, some of it is illegal. And an apparently spontaneous expression of citizen concern carries more weight than an organised operation by a zealous group.

Without access to ISP logs, it is difficult to trace the emails to a source. However, it is clear that hard-line denialists congregate electronically at a number of internet nodes where they engage in mutual reinforcement of their opinions and stoke the rage that lies behind them.

Those who operate these sites retail the “information” that reinforces the assertions made by their followers. They often post highly personal attacks on individuals who speak in favour of mainstream science and measures to combat global warming, knowing from experience that they will stimulate a stream of vituperation from their supporters.

The posts on these sites often provoke an outpouring of the most outlandish conspiracy theories and vilification of individuals. There is no restraining influence and, in the middle of one of these frenzies, it would be a brave sceptic who called for caution and moderation in the ideas expressed or the language used.

In Australia, a handful of denialist websites stand out. They include the blog of Herald-Suncommentator Andrew Bolt, Bolt’s stable mate Tim Blair at the Daily Telegraph, the website operated by sceptic Joanne Nova (a pseudonym for Joanne Codling), and the community forum site operated by the Queensland farmers’ organisation Agmates. Denialists also flock to the e-journal Online Opinion.

On these sites discussion of the “global warming conspiracy” seamlessly segues into a hodge-podge of right-wing populist grievances and causes, including defending rural property rights, the martyrdom of farming hunger-striker Peter Spencer, the errors of the Club of Rome, blood on the hands of Rachel Carson for causing DDT to be banned, the evils of Al Gore, the plan by the United Nations to dominate the world, and the need to defend freedom and democracy from these threats. Sceptics are explicitly or implicitly portrayed as freedom fighters battling attempts by scheming elites to shore up their power or impose a world government.

Recently, this stew of paranoia has been given a boost by the media exposure granted to Christopher Monckton in his recent Australian tour. Monckton propounded his extraordinary theory about climate change being a conspiracy by communists – assisted by the Hitler Youth and a craven scientific establishment – to seize power through a world government hidden in a climate treaty. A few months ago a fantasist like Monckton would have attracted only eye-rolling from news editors.

I am not suggesting that the individuals and organisations I have mentioned are responsible for organising the cyber-bullying attacks on scientists and others. However, they do create an environment that encourages them. The effect of these sites is three-fold.

  1. They supply the ammunition that confirms and elaborates on climate deniers’ beliefs.
  2. They provide a forum in which deniers can participate in a like-minded community that reinforces their views.
  3. And they identify the individuals responsible for promoting climate lies, stimulating participants to make direct contacts with “warmists”.

Andrew Bolt’s blog deserves special mention both because it has become the most popular meeting place for deniers in Australia and because it is sponsored by a mainstream media outlet, Melbourne’s Herald-Sun, a Murdoch tabloid.

Bolt specialises in posts of angry ridicule directed at climate scientists and any others who publicly accept the science. Recent targets have included Ove Hoegh-Guldburg, Andy Pitman, and the CSIRO as a whole.

Bolt has admitted that his posts bad-mouthing climate scientists have incited his readers to send abusive emails to them.

Mainstreaming denial

It might be thought that vilification of climate scientists and others engaged in the climate debate is confined to the nether-world of the Internet. In truth, the most influential source of misrepresentation and ridicule resides in the “heritage media” in the form of the Murdoch broadsheet, The Australian. I will consider its long-running war on science later, but here it is important to draw attention to its role in identifying hate figures for deniers and fueling their aggression.

As an illustration of the newspaper’s tactic, at the Copenhagen conference in December an Australian named Ian Fry, representing the Government of Tuvalu, made an impassioned intervention from the plenary floor that captured the mood and made headlines around the world. Fry is a shy man who has for many years devoted himself to representing the tiny island state for minimal financial or reputational reward.

The day after his intervention The Australian published a story ridiculing his “tear-jerking performance” and suggesting he is a self-seeking hypocrite because he lives a long way from the sea. The story appeared on the front page alongside a photograph of Fry’s house.

At a time when climate campaigners were receiving grisly death threats, the editors of the national daily decided to expose Ian Fry and his family to danger by publishing information about where he lives that enabled people to work out his address. When challenged, the journalist responsible for the story showed no understanding or remorse.

In 2005 The Australian used the same tactic on Indigenous leader Mick Dodson, publishing a photo of his house under a headline claiming he lived comfortably in the suburbs while depriving other Indigenous people of the opportunity to own a house. Dodson, already the subject of death threats, said he feared for the safety of his family.

The Australian‘s grubby tactic was unwillingly revealed by one of its journalists, Caroline Overington. During the last election campaign, a Labor candidate decided he did not want to be interviewed and photographed, so she threatened to send a photographer around to stake out his house. She sent the following text message:
“Either you say yes to a photograph smiling and happy and out campaigning, or we stake you out at … Bondi Junction, and get you looking like a cat caught in a trap, in your PJs. Your choice.”

What drives denial?

What motivates the legion of climate deniers to send hate-mail? In recent years a great deal of evidence has come to light linking fossil fuel corporations with organisations that promote climate denial, but it would be a mistake to believe that the army of sceptical bloggers is in any sense in the pay of, or directly influenced by, the fossil fuel lobby.

Climate denialism has been absorbed by an older and wider political movement, sometimes called right-wing populism. Emanating from the United States, and defined more by what it fears than by what it proposes, the movement’s enemies were helpfully listed in a 2004 TV ad attacking Democrat Howard Dean, whose supporters were characterised as a:
“tax hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show.”

Although the targets are adapted to Australian conditions, in both countries the movement is driven by feelings of angry grievance. Those who identify with it see themselves as anti-liberal, anti-elitist and anti-intellectual. They are resentful of their exclusion from the mainstream and at the same time proud of their outsider status.

Since the mid-1990s, anti-climate forces associated with the Republic Party and oil-funded conservative think tanks have successfully linked acceptance of global warming and the need for greenhouse policies with those groups despised by right-wing populism.

In more recent years, the denial movement has been joined by some hard-line conservative Christian groups, including the notorious Catch the Fire Ministries and its witch-hunting pastor Danny Nalliah. According to Paul Colgan, these groups were heavily involved in the lobbying to have Tony Abbott elected as Liberal Party leader.

As this suggests, becoming a denialist does not follow from carefully weighing up the evidence (that is, true scepticism) but from associating oneself with a cultural outlook, taking on an identity defined in opposition to a caricature of those who support action on climate change. It is the energy in this wider movement that has seen climate denialism morphing into a new form of political extremism.

Some active climate deniers possess a distinct “mindset” comprised of a certain worldview, including a narrative centered on secretive forces – variously encompassing elected leaders, scientists, scientific organisations, environmental groups and the United Nations – that are using climate science and climate policies as a cover to accumulate power with the objective of creating a world government that overrides national sovereignty and deprives citizens of their rights.

Those who hold to this worldview often feel marginalised and persecuted. It attracts the unstable and fanatical as well as those with more legitimate political grievances. For political leaders so inclined, the energy being mobilised by climate denial is a golden opportunity. Although it remains necessary for these leaders to evince a concern for the environment, and even to pretend to accept climate science, they can speak to the denialist minority using dog-whistling techniques to signal that they are really on their side.

This explains the decision by new Opposition leader Tony Abbott to meet Monckton when even one of the country’s most conservative columnists wrote of the dangers of associating with his extreme views. Although he had been forced to repudiate his pre-leadership claim that climate science is “absolute crap”, in meeting Monckton Abbott sent the message that his real views have not changed. Of course, he can respond to accusations of giving succour to denialism with the dog-whistler’s device of “plausible deniability” – he is happy to hear all views.

A more subtle message was sent by Abbott earlier this month when he gloated over the recent recall of the Toyota Prius; for him and others hostile to environmentalism, the tarnishing of a green icon is a reason for celebration.

Tomorrow: The Exxon-funded think tanks that feed climate denial.

Part 1: Bullying, lies and the rise of right-wing climate denial