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Denialist Agenda (Part 5): Who’s defending science?
Here is Part 5 of Clive Hamilton’s excellent series of articles on ABC unleashed:
The sustained assault on climate science, detailed in this series, spread from the loonier corners of the internet first into certain media outlets with an ideological axe to grind, and now into neutral news outlets too lazy or lacking in confidence to carry out some basic checking before reporting the same distortions.
There is no excuse for this as there are a number of websites with easy-to-read and up-to-date deconstructions of the lies and misrepresentations peddled by sceptics, including Deltoid in Australia and RealClimate in the United States.
But if in echoing denialist misrepresentations some journalists are naïve or too busy to check, others are willing accomplices. For several years The Australian newspaper has been the leading organ of climate denial in Australia.
The list of beat-ups is so long that blogger Tim Lambert keeps a catalogue of The Australian‘s war on science. It’s a kind of archive of journalistic misbehavior that could be used in courses on media ethics. Let’s consider a couple of them.
Franklingate
Earlier this month, The Australian decided it wanted to challenge Climate Change Minister Penny Wong’s “alarming predictions” about the effect of sea-level rise on Australia’s coasts. So to which authority did journalists Matthew Franklin and Lanai Vasek turn to repudiate decades of scientific research?
There he was, featured in a huge photograph on the front page under the headline “Wong wipeout doesn’t wash with locals”, a 53-year-old bronzed man named Lee who said he’d been swimming at Bondi for 30 years and “was adamant he had seen ‘no change’ to the coastline”. To augment his careful observations, Lee engaged in some projections too, declaring that there’s nothing suggesting sea-levels at Bondi will change in the future.
Brilliant; give him a job at Australia’s leading sea-level research outfit, the Antarctic Climate CRC in Hobart. There he could go head-to-head with Dr John Church, the world’s leading authority on sea-level rise. He chairs the World Climate Research Programme’s scientific committee on sea-level rise, was awarded the 2006 CSIRO’s Medal for Research Achievement, and in 2007 won the Eureka Prize for his work on the measurement of sea-level rise. Mere trifles compared to Lee’s common sense.
Franklin and Vasek did not ask Church or any other authority on sea-level rise what their research shows; instead, for “authority”, they quoted Bob Carter, one of Australia’s leading climate skeptics — a favourite of the Heartland Institute and a founding member of the Australian Environment Foundation, a front group set up by the Institute of Public Affairs and whose board has included Leon Ashby, now president of the Climate Sceptics Party.
The Australian‘s decision to pitch the opinion of a bloke with a tan against years of scientific research is a deliberate strategy of pandering to ignorance, of fuelling wishful thinking at the expense of science. As politics it’s clever; as journalism it’s risible.
Walkergate
Jamie Walker writes beat-ups aimed at discrediting scientific claims that the Great Barrier Reef is seriously threatened by global warming. In a story earlier this month (front page again) Walker accurately reported research by the Australian Institute of Marine Science to the effect that some reefs did not experience the expected bleaching last summer due to the influence of storms.
This became the headline “Report undercuts PM’s reef wipeout” because Walker made the ludicrous leap from the absence of bleaching for two years to a rosy future for the Reef into the indefinite future. One data point became that basis for rejecting a catalogue of research linking warming seas to coral damage.
Walker has form for bagging marine scientists. Last year a story by him headed “Scientists ‘crying wolf’ over coral” was based on the opinion of Peter Ridd, a physicist who is listed as the Science Coordinator for the Australian Environment Foundation front group.
Weissergate
For years, the opinion pages of The Australian have been turned over to every denialist who pops up anywhere around the world, with even the loopiest given free rein — Christopher Monckton, Andrey Illarionov, Ian Plimer, Bob Carter, David Evans, Jon Jenkins, Christopher Booker, David Bellamy, Brendan O’Neill, Frank Furedi and many more.
The last two, incidentally, are members of an anti-environmental Trotskyist splinter group called the Revolutionary Communist Party, showing that, for opinion editor Rebecca Weisser, it doesn’t matter whether you are left or right as long as you loathe environmentalism.
Mitchellgate
The man who oversees this travesty of reporting is editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell. Last year he was chuffed to receive the annual JN Pierce Award for Media Excellence for coverage of climate change policy from … wait for it … the Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association, the foremost lobby group for the oil and gas industries. APPEA lauded Mitchell because his paper’s
“in-depth coverage of a range of public policy issues affecting Australia’s upstream oil and gas industry has been of a consistently high standard. The reporting has been thoughtful, balanced, analytical, well researched and a big effort was made to ensure that all facets of the issue were presented.”
Astonishment robs me of words.
The Fox of print
Rupert Murdoch had a much-publicised change of heart in 2007 — thought to be stimulated by his son James — when he told his news editors that the planet should be given the benefit of the doubt and News Ltd would go carbon-neutral. There are now rumours that Murdoch has recanted and has rejoined the denialist camp.
Certainly that would be consistent with the virulent anti-science now being run by his media outlets — including the triumvirate of broadsheets based in London, New York and Sydney — led of course by Fox News. Murdoch’s son-in-law, Matthew Freud said he spoke for other family members when he last month launched a breath-taking attack on Fox News. He said he is “ashamed and sickened by [Fox boss] Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard [for] journalistic standards”.
Despite its high-brow pretentions, is not The Australian — with the same commitment to an ideological agenda, the same disregard for the separation of news and comment, and the same stable of bumptious right-wing columnists — just the Fox News of print? No wonder the paper’s last reporter with any credibility on climate change, Lenore Taylor, has finally jumped ship.
Right now on campuses across Australia, The Australian is engaged in an aggressive marketing campaign to sign up university students, offering a year’s subscription for $20. It would be comforting to believe that university students are capable of seeing through the distortions and manipulation of news that defines the national broadsheet. But that is wishful thinking and to the extent that The Australian‘s discount sale succeeds we risk seeing a generation of graduates whose understanding of climate science is grossly distorted by the newspaper’s unrelenting war on science.
For years, scientific organisations have attempted to correct The Australian‘s misrepresentation of the science. So unresponsive is the newspaper that some, including the Bureau of Meteorology, have just given up.
Science’s defenders
The trashing of the reputation of climate science spills over into the other sciences, so how has the profession been fighting back? After all, once the fury dies down it is likely to be many years before public trust in science can be rebuilt to previous levels. It would be a grave mistake for scientific organisations to imagine that this will all blow over and the world will return to normal.
One would expect that the employers and professional organisations of the scientists who are daily attacked as frauds, cheats and political zealots would be in the public domain defending them against these charges. But for the most part, they have been missing in action or engaged in skirmishes far from the main action.
The CSIRO is nowhere to be seen. Instead it has put the lid on its climate scientists, barring them from presenting their work, preferring actively to promote the commercial interests of the coal industry. The CSIRO’s new Chief Executive, Dr Megan Clark (who transferred across from a senior executive position with BHP Billiton) should be out in public defending vigorously the quality of the organisation’s climate research.
The Bureau of Meteorology, whose work has often been traduced, has tried to respond but seems to have capitulated in the face of hopeless odds.
The Australian Academy of Science includes fellows whose work has been called fraudulent and dishonest and who are the target of abuse and threats. Their treatment should be a matter of the first concern, not least because the esteem in which all science is held is under attack.
At bottom, scientists are not good at public relations, and most scientists would much rather bury themselves in their labs than face a microphone. Once this did not matter, but in the face of a sustained assault on their credibility by people who have an intimate knowledge of how to use the media to manipulate the truth, their unworldliness is causing lasting damage.
As expected, the response to this series of articles on the state of climate change denial has been strong. The dogmatic and vitriolic nature of many of the comments on this blog and others confirms that denial is only nominally about the science and really about ideology and cultural identity.
There are two or three charges against me that keep doing the rounds and for the record I want to make brief replies.
1. Using the term “denier” does not equate climate denial with Holocaust denial. The term is used in other contexts, such as HIV denial, as a descriptor for those whose minds are closed to evidence that contradicts their opinion, yet who maintain their opposition to empirical reality is based on evidence. It is not the same as scepticism.
2. I have not equated climate and Holocaust denialism. The passage quoted to “show” that I have is my description of an argument others might use to equate the two (known as consequentialism), but which I explicitly reject.
3. I have not argued that we need to “suspend democracy” to tackle climate change. I have said some people believe this, but I don’t. I have said we must reinvigorate democracy.
4. Most bizarrely, some have said I should not be listened to because I have proposed shooting koalas for sport. This furphy came inevitably from Andrew Bolt. In an article titled “Cashing In On Koalas”, I argued the opposite by ridiculing the free-market approach to conservation using the well-known rhetorical technique of pushing an argument to its extreme, in this case charging American tourists to hunt koalas on Kangaroo Island. For those slow on the uptake I went as far as to propose some koalas be put in cages to be shot at short range by those with poor aim, and, for the really slow-witted, I concluded by saying Wilson Tuckey had given the scheme his blessing. Andrew, it’s called satire, you dope.
5. If a vote were held for the most vituperative blogger in Australia, Andrew Bolt would win hands down. Yet he has reacted to my criticisms of him with wounded outrage and by running around whingeing to everyone who will listen. We all met his type in the schoolyard, the bully who cries as soon as someone gives him one back. It’s truly pathetic.
False Killer Whales, Truly at Risk from Pacific Longlines
Dr. Andy Read is a marine mammologist and Duke Univeristy Marine Lab professor. He’s also part of a team of experts that convened last week in Honolulu. The new Take Reduction Team (TRT) is assessing the high mortality rate of false killer whales in the Pacific longline fishery. The team’s assessment is long overdue.
Thanks to the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act, the TRT is legally mandated. Its implementation does not meant that it is too late to mitigate our affects on this population. Afterall, the Pacific longline fishery is use to being highly regulated. To its credit, it has adopted a suite of bycatch reducing technologies that have proven to minimize the take of threatened species (ie. side setting and streamers to reduce albatross take). But the recent drop in this distinct poplulation is truly shocking; from more than 500 in 1989, only 100 individuals remain. Our behavioral changes will have to be significant.
If you’re equally as shocked, read on: http://honoluluweekly.com/cover/2010/02/truth-or-consequences/
I was recently in Honolulu at the longline fishery’s main market. I snapped this photo of Sean Martin, my guide around the market. He is the owner of several longline fishing boats, president of the Hawaii Longline Association, to which the owners of all of Hawaii’s 125 longliners belong, and co-owner with Jim Cook, another past Wespac chairman, of Pacific Ocean Producers, the Pacific’s biggest fisheries-supply company.
Sean’s on the TRT as well and has a lot to lose. The longliners, Hawaii’s largest commercial fishery, bring in about $60 million a year.
“Climate Change as a major geological event”
Canadian Indie radio EcoShock have released their latest radio program, featuring an interview with Yale Professor Mike Pagani about the sensitivity of the atmosphere to climate change, and palaeoclimate scientist Dr Andrew Glikson on climate change as a major geological event. Listen below:
[audio:http://www.ecoshock.net/eshock10/ES_100226_Show_LoFi.mp3?]Evaluating the effectiveness of the protection of coral reefs
Responding effectively to the multiple threats to coral reefs around the globe requires not only good monitoring but also good reporting of the success or failure of management strategies. The Status of Coral Reefs of the World series, the 5th edition of which was published in 2008, offers the most comprehensive and rigorous reporting of coral reef status globally. Many countries also have national or regional reports on the status of the environment, including of their coral reefs.
Evaluating and reporting on the effectiveness of management strategies for coral reefs requires a clear analytical framework. Without this the communication of any results of such research for policy improvement is severely hampered.
Reef managers and others involved in reporting on the state of coral reefs may find helpful the discussion of conceptual frameworks for evaluation of policy in a new book, Does environmental law work? How to evaluate the effectiveness of an environmental legal system. While the book focuses on laws protecting the Great Barrier Reef and the review of the relevant science is not new, the discussion of conceptual frameworks for evaluation is applicable to all measures responding to threats to coral reefs.
Denialist Agenda (Part 4): Manufacturing a scientific scandal
This 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?
A cool animation of increasing atmospheric CO2!
A wicked cool animation of increasing atmospheric CO2 conc. through time. You can also see when new data sources and monitoring sites come on line and the seasonal pulse in the northern hemisphere. Neat! (if scary). Animation by sphericalcat. Hat tip to John Cook.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7jvP7BqVi4&w=560&h=340]
Denialist Agenda (Part 3): Think tanks, oil money and black ops
Here 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
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
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.”