Denying Denialism

A friend of mine, JP, started all of this when writing:

If you were to ask me 2 years ago what my key understandings were about climate change, I would have said the following:

Sea ice is rapidly shrinking (summer arctic sea ice to be gone by 2015)

Sea levels are rising and accelerating

Polar bear populations are under stress (have increased in the last 20 years)

The levels of glacial retreat around the world are unprecedented (similar retreats have been seen in the last century)

97% of scientists agree that global warming is real and an urgent problem

Any scientist who is skeptical about the claims made about climate change is a "denier" and is funded by oil/resource companies

We are seeing an increase in extreme weather events (they are actually getting less common)

Climate models are accurate in their predictions 

Every one of those things is either totally false, or a largely exaggerated claim.

This is the sixth in a series based on my response, which itself was split over a few emails.  The first was Ice Extent Challenge (in which I provided a little more context about JP) and was followed by Sea Levels Rising, Polar Bears and Climate Change, Glacial Retreat and A Worry of Climate Change Scientists.  Some of the issues may also be touched on in a series of articles on the nature of climate denialism.  Please also note the caveat.

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JP’s Claim: The statement “any scientist who is skeptical about the claims made about climate change is a ‘denier and is funded by oil/resource companies” is either totally false or largely exaggerated

Scientists who are sceptical, especially with regard to more extreme claims, are just being scientists.  Denialists, however, seem to have a particular definition of the word “sceptical”.  Scientific scepticism is about impartiality prior to investigation, even if that is a position taken rather than a position held – in other words, the methodology used cannot assume the conclusion even if the experimenter already has an idea what the outcome might be and a researcher’s should filter data through their preconceptions.  A denialist on the other hand uses a much less scientific definition of “scepticism”, more oriented towards a position of doubt so they don’t approach a topic with scientific scepticism at all – they are not impartial and they are not inclined to take the position of impartiality.

I think JP is using the latter definition rather than the former.  He’s basically falling into the trap of calling denialists “sceptical” when they are rarely anything close to it.  A survey of the noisier denialists will clearly illustrate that there is little, if any, effort to be impartial.  They will certainly, however, make a show of calling out anyone else that they view as failing to be impartial – so they do seem to understand the importance of impartiality – but their targets are normally journalists, particularly the BBC.  One scientific target that I noticed that Joanne Nova has had a bee in her bonnet about is Berkeley Earth, which she refers to as the BEST (Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures) Project – as does Anthony Watts but not Tony Heller, although he does make a pun on that acronym.

Note that Berkeley Earth, as their entry page states, “(posts all their) raw data and our analysis code online to provide an open platform for further analysis … (and all their) … Berkeley Earth papers, memos, graphics and analysis code.”  Note also that the founder of Berkeley Earth, Richard Muller, is what a denialist must surely hate most … an ex-denialist, although he calls himself “a converted skeptic”.  (Muller and his daughter appear to be champions of shale, which means coal-seam gas, which means fracking – but being an enemy of coal appears to be enough of a problem to get the denialist hordes excited.)

Joanne Nova, Anthony Watts and Tony Heller, who are the three denialists that I see raised most often, are extreme enough to appear to be parodies of themselves.  They seem to be very popular among those who are already in the denier camp, but their extreme positions are unlikely to convert someone who is not yet ready to ignore evidence.  The types that I really worry about are those who rather than claiming that it’s all a big conspiracy, that academia is lying to the populace and so on, claim instead that there’s nothing to worry about with climate change and therefore fall into the chasm between right wing think tanks and those with most informed opinion.  I found four listed as “arguing that global warming will have few negative effects” (note that this website is a denialist one – apparently with some link to Roy Spencer, but otherwise no history, no mission, no location and no easily found definition of GSM – unless you already know that it means “grand solar minimum”):

Indur M. Goklany: an electrical engineer linked to the Cato Institute and the Heartland Institute.  His main claim to fame re an anti-climate-change stance is that he wrote “Ironically, much of the hysteria over global warming is itself fueled by concerns that it may drive numerous species to extinction and increase hunger worldwide, especially in developing countries. Yet the biofuel solution would only make bad matters worse on both counts”.  From that comment he seems more anti-biofuels than anti-climate-change per se.

Craig D. Idso: a geographer linked to the Science and Public Policy Institute which is a climate change denial mouthpiece (which is only 1/3 funded by ExxonMobil) and the Heartland Institute, another climate change denial mouthpiece (which might no longer be funded by ExxonMobil, but no longer discloses its funding sources) – note that Heartland was previously involved in tobacco lobbying.

Sherwood B. Idso: a research physicist doing something with water (brother to the geographer above) linked to the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, yet another climate change denial mouthpiece (and which funded in a small way by ExxonMobil and also Peabody [coalmining]).

Patrick Michaels: a Cato guy, who used to be an environmental science research professor and who is personally funded by fossil fuel companies.  The Cato Institute doesn’t seem terribly deeply involved in climate change denial (despite a stacked council), but they are against doing anything about climate change, because it’ll be too expensive and (they claim) ineffective.

Electroverse lists more people who are claiming that climate change is primarily caused by natural processes, thirty of them – I recognised about a quarter of them as denialists (Easterbrook, Happer, Kininmonth, Marohasy, Plimer, Singer, Soon, Spencer – all listed here [of those that I didn’t immediately recognise, only four are not listed]).

I think the best thing to say here is that there is a significant, albeit small minority of scientists who contest the mainstream climate change consensus – but this makes them climate deniers (at least) rather than sceptics, since they have taken a position against the notion of climate change.  Just how small this minority is compared to the numbers that agree with the consensus is unclear, and there does seem to be a direct relationship between the likelihood of conforming with the consensus and expertise in the area.  Care should be taken when using Electoverse’s descriptions of expertise (and indeed the descriptions used by any denialist).  For example, George Taylor is listed as being a “retired director of the Oregon Climate Service at Oregon State University”, which is true enough, but misleading since that position is more about long-range meteorology than climate science.  Electroverse would have been better off referring to Taylor’s membership of the American Association of State Climatologists (although it should be noted that his state governor did disown him).

There’s no good argument that climate deniers aren’t deniers but what about the notion that all climate deniers (or “skeptics”) are paid by oil or resource companies?  By “resource companies” I am going to assume that JP meant other fossil fuel companies than oil, rather than mining companies in general or wider resource companies such as timber loggers.  I’m not going to accept the idea that if it can be shown that one or two denialists aren’t in the employ of these companies, then the claim that all of them are is false.  I think the claim is more that, in general, denialists tend to be associated with organisations that are in turn linked to fossil fuel extraction companies.  So, the key question is: do denialists, in general, have dodgy associations?

We’ve already looked at four, where there was clearly a 100% hit-rate (two in the Heartland Institute, one in the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change and the other, by his own admission, being personally funded by the oil industry.

What about the other thirty mentioned as “claiming that climate change is primarily caused by natural processes”?  I’ll look at a quarter of them, selected at random, so numbers 3, 10, 2, 15, 8, 26, 4 and 14 and using DeSmog’s Orwellian list of the usual suspects:

Tim Ball – ExxonMobil funded “Friends of Science”

William Happer – Peabody (coal mining) via the CO2 Coalition

Don Easterbrook – Heartland Institute (as a speaker)

David Legates – polar bear study funded, in part, by Koch Industries

David Douglass – Heartland Institute (as a speaker)

Nir Shaviv – Heartland Institute (as a speaker)

Ian Clark – scientist on call for the Competitive Enterprise Institute (ExxonMobil funded)

William Kininmonth – Heartland Institute (as a speaker)

Wow, again, 100% hit rate!  Perhaps I’ve been unfair, in which case the reader is more than welcome to try to find anyone on that list who has not been involved with an organisation that is linked to a fossil fuel extraction company.  At this time, I do want to stress that Heartland Institute is an organisation that was intimately involved in defending the tobacco industry when it was known that their products were both carcinogenic and addictive (Heartland Institute | Commonwealth of Pennsylvania) – and is still at it today.  The point is that the Heartland Institute has a track record of promoting profit over truth – they continue to do so with regard to fossil fuels:

Because the evidence of climate risk from fossil fuel use is tenuous at best, and the benefits from continuing to use fossil fuels are clearly evident, it would be a crime against humanity for governments to force people to drastically reduce their use of fossil fuels. To borrow a phrase from the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, life without fossil fuels is, “… poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Let’s keep drilling, mining, and utilizing affordable and reliable fossil fuel energy sources so that everyone now, and in the future, can live longer, healthier, more fulfilling lives.

The Heartland Institute does not make details of its funding public, other than to say that they got “$5.5 million in support from approximately 5,000 individual, foundation, and corporate supporters”.  However, the Institute certainly used to be funded by fossil fuel extraction companies – although even some of those have become less enamoured with it, with ExxonMobil moving away and earning a rebuke from Heartland for being too green:

ExxonMobil had become just another member of "the discredited and anti-energy global warming movement," complained Heartland's president, Tim Huelskamp, a former Republican congressman from Kansas. "They've put their profits and 'green' virtue signaling above sound science."

In short, JP is misguided at best when claiming that the statement “climate deniers tend to be associated with oil/resource companies” is either totally false or largely exaggerated.  It seems neither false nor hugely exaggerated.  I’m not suggesting that there are absolutely no deniers out there who have no links to any fossil fuel company, there is after all such a thing as a “useful idiot”.  Finally, money is not necessarily the only motivator for climate denial in town – I can think of five other categories and will be expanding on that in the next few weeks.