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climate change deniers
Climate change deniers are contrarians who challenge the evidence that human activities such as deforestation and human behaviors that result in more greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are causing changes in our planet's climate that may prove devastating and irreversible. Contrarians pose as skeptics, refusing to accept consensus conclusions in science on the ground that there is still some uncertainty. True skeptics raise specific doubts about specific claims and do not try to debunk a whole area of science by an occasional error or by the general lack of absolute certainty, which is unattainable in any area of science.
The core of the consensus view of the scientific community
has been stated by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) in its "Climate Change 2007" report. The core of the consensus view is,
among other things, that global warming is happening and that human
activities are contributing significantly to the climate change, which is
affecting such things as the intensity of hurricanes and rising sea levels.
It would be absurd, of course, to claim that the consensus of the scientific
community agrees with everything in the IPCC reports, especially since not
all the scientists who worked on those reports agree with each other on
every item.
In one important respect, it doesn't matter what the scientific consensus on climate change is, since what matters is what policies the powerful governments of the world institute, and those governments tend to ignore science. If they don't ignore the science, they find contrarians to argue that the consensus isn't absolutely certain* and therefore we're justified in continuing along our current course. Powerful governments tend to listen to scientists when the consensus science is compatible with their policies or when it is required because of catastrophes that have already occurred or are about to occur.
BBC News has posted 10 of the arguments most often made against the IPCC consensus, as well as some of the counter-arguments made by scientists who agree with the IPCC: Climate Skepticism: the Top 10. An even clearer contrast between the deniers and the consensus can be found here.
See also manufactroversy, "Keeping a cool head about global warming," and SD Newsletter 11 Jan 2010: Global warming, climate changes, science, and politics.
note: In "Keeping a cool head about global warming," I wrote:
First, let me acknowledge that scientists who produce scientific work that conflicts with the consensus of scientists on climate change are not necessarily contrarians. There is room in any complex scientific inquiry for a variety of opinions on how to interpret various sets of data.
In a newsletter, I wrote:
The climate change skeptics page is now the climate change deniers page. A link was added to Greenfyer's take on what some are calling "climategate," the hacking of a computer belonging to the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain and posting hundreds of e-mails and other documents. The deniers are so hot and venting so much carbon monoxide and methane that global warming is said to be accelerating at an unprecedented pace and the axis of the Earth has shifted two degrees. Jim Lippard provides a sober view of the affair.
As the folks at Denialism.com note, deniers employ rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of argument or legitimate debate, when in actuality there is none. Most deniers' arguments incorporate more than one of the following tactics: Conspiracy, Selectivity, False Experts, Impossible Expectations/Moving Goalposts, and Argument from Metaphor/violations of informal logic. Global warming deniers are big on conspiracy: according to them, an entire community of scientists has some ulterior motive for their climate research, such as an ideology or a desire to keep their funding. Global warming deniers are also prone to cherry-picking their data and their quotes, citing single errors or discredited papers as proof that a whole field of science is corrupt. Because many of those supporting the climate change denial campaign are corporations heavily invested in fossil fuels or are politicians who depend on those corporations for campaign funds, they are prone to put forth fake experts to raise some dust.
further reading
books and articles
Hoggan, James. 2009. Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming. Greystone.
websites
Climatologists under pressure from the editors of Nature: To these denialists, the scientists' scathing remarks about certain controversial palaeoclimate reconstructions qualify as the proverbial 'smoking gun': proof that mainstream climate researchers have systematically conspired to suppress evidence contradicting their doctrine that humans are warming the globe.
This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country's much needed climate bill....
In the end, what the UEA e-mails really show is that scientists are human beings — and that unrelenting opposition to their work can goad them to the limits of tolerance, and tempt them to act in ways that undermine scientific values.
See also: Presidential Address: Reflections On: Our Planet and Its Life, Origins, and Futures by James J. McCarthy for a brief overview of the history of climate science.
Swifthack - a clearing house for articles on "climategate."
Skeptical Science - Examining the science of global warming skepticism Deniers "vigorously criticize any evidence that supports man-made global warming and yet eagerly, even blindly embrace any argument, op-ed piece, blog, or study that refutes global warming."
Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States
New Scientist: A guide for the perplexed
UN Environment Programme data centre
World Meteorological Organization
NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
US National Snow and Ice Data Center
Natural Resources Stewardship Project
Gristmill:
how to talk to a climate skeptic
The Lavoisier Group
*
news stories
New Piecing together the temperature puzzle The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year since global instrumental temperature records began 130 years ago. Worldwide, the mean temperature was 0.57°C (1.03°F) warmer than the 1951-1980 base period. And January 2000 to December 2009 came out as the warmest decade on record.
Climate scepticism 'on the rise', BBC poll shows Some 35% of Brits believe climate change is either not happening or that it's happening but is not due to human behavior. Only 26% of those polled believe climate change is happening and that it is "now established as largely man-made."
Glacier-melting debate highlights importance of satellites Data from satellites allow scientists to measure glacier extent in detail, providing authoritative evidence of trends.
Climate Change in the American Mind: Americans’ Global Warming Beliefs and Attitudes in January 2010 The researchers used an online research panel of 1,001 American adults. The completion rate was 50 percent. The sample was weighted to correspond with US Census Bureau parameters for the United States. The survey found:
Only 50 percent of Americans now say they are “somewhat” or “very worried” about global warming;
The percentage of Americans who think global warming is happening is 57 percent;
The percentage of Americans who think global warming is caused mostly by human activities is 47 percent.
2000s Warmest Decade on Record, Government Reports In 2009, global surface temperatures were 1.01 degree above average, which tied the year for the fifth warmest year on record, the National Climatic Data Center said. And that helped push the 2000-2009 decade to 0.96 degree above normal, which the agency said "shattered" the 1990s record value of 0.65 degree above normal. The warmest year on record was 2005 at 1.11 degrees above normal.
Heat Over Panel’s View of Asian Ice Projections on thawing Asian glaciers reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were not based on peer-reviewed research, but were drawn from a 2005 report on Himalayan glaciers by the World Wildlife Fund, which relied on an informal comment made by an Indian scientist to New Scientist magazine in 1999. (One panel contributor, Georg Kaser, has said there were warnings that this particular finding was wrong.)
Scientists make mistakes, but carelessness of this magnitude is unacceptable. Climate deniers will have a field day with this.
update: 24 Jan 2010. The source of the error on the melting of the Himalayan glaciers responds: UN climate change expert: there could be more errors in report “I know a lot of climate sceptics are after my blood, but I’m in no mood to oblige them,” he told The Times in an interview. “It was a collective failure by a number of people,” he said. “I need to consider what action to take, but that will take several weeks. It’s best to think with a cool head, rather than shoot from the hip.” In other news:
Rajendra Pachauri's Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion's share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers. It means that EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognise as bogus.
Global warming 'speeds' up gas emissions Higher temperatures on the surface of the earth are fuelling a further increase in emissions of methane, Edinburgh University experts found. Methane is a greenhouse gas which is more potent than carbon dioxide. The study indicated warmer temperatures in regions which were at higher latitudes increased methane - exacerbating global warming.
James Hoggan talks about global warming Hoggan is the author of Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming. "One poll conducted in October by the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Americans who believe that there's evidence global warming is happening shrank from 71 percent in 2008 to 57 percent this year. A more recent ABC-Washington Post poll found a slightly smaller, but nonetheless significant drop — from 80 to 72 percent.
"One of the more notable aspects is how the belief in human-induced climate change has become a partisan issue. The drop among Republicans and independents is more precipitous than among Democrats. The Pew poll found that 75 percent of Democrats believe in global warming, compared to 83 percent last year. But only 53 percent of independents believe, compared to 75 percent previously. And just 35 percent of Republicans believe, as opposed to 49 percent last year."
Climate scientist receives death threats An Australian born scientist at the center of the East Anglia University email affair says he has received a number of death threats.
Dr. Tom Wigley, a former director of the university's Climatic Research Unit, said "This sort of thing has been going on at a much lower level for almost 20 years and there have been other outbursts of this sort of behavior - criticism and abusive emails and things like that in the past."
The climate denial industry is out to dupe the public. And it's
working by George Monbiot
When I use the term denial industry, I'm referring to those who
are paid to say that man-made global warming isn't happening.
The great majority of people who believe this have not been
paid: they have been duped.
'Acidifying oceans' threaten food supply, UK warns Ocean chemistry is changing because water absorbs extra CO2 from the air. Some believe this could be as big an impact of rising CO2 levels as climatic change, though it is rarely discussed within the UN climate convention.
EPA: Greenhouse Gases Hazardous to Your Health - Announcement comes as big global warming conference begins in Copenhagen - This could signal a possible first step by the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act and permit President Obama to take action without obstruction by a few Republican senators who heard from someone that global warming is a hoax being perpetuated by communists who hate the free market.
UN hits back at climate sceptics amid e-mails row The UN's official panel on climate change has hit back at skeptics' claims that the case for human influence on global warming has been exaggerated.
Statisticians reject global cooling In a blind test, the Associated Press gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time. "If you look at the data and sort of cherry-pick a micro-trend within a bigger trend, that technique is particularly suspect," said John Grego, a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina.
PM warns of climate 'catastrophe' The UK faces a "catastrophe" of floods, droughts and killer heatwaves if world leaders fail to agree a deal on climate change. There is no plan B, says Gordon Brown.
What happened to global warming? (Click here for the answer, which is "nothing." the global cooling myth is the result of selective use of statistics.) "For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures....The UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, responsible for future climate predictions, says ... temperatures have never increased in a straight line, and there will always be periods of slower warming, or even temporary cooling. What is crucial, they say, is the long-term trend in global temperatures. And that, according to the Met office data, is clearly up....The Met Office ... predicts that from 2010 to 2015 at least half the years will be hotter than the current hottest year on record (1998).
Sceptics disagree. They insist it is unlikely that temperatures will reach the dizzy heights of 1998 until 2030 at the earliest. It is possible, they say, that because of ocean and solar cycles a period of global cooling is more likely."
Doctors warn on climate failure "Failure to agree [on] a new UN climate deal in December will bring a "global health catastrophe," say 18 of the world's professional medical organizations. "A low-carbon economy will mean less pollution. A low carbon diet (especially eating less meat) and more exercise will mean less cancer, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
Global warming has made Arctic summers hottest for 2,000 years "Warming as a result of increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has overwhelmed a millennia-long cycle of natural cooling in the Arctic.... "The accumulation of greenhouse gases is interrupting the natural cycle towards overall cooling," said Professor Darrell Kaufman....The Arctic began cooling around 8,000 years ago as natural variations in the Earth's orbit and angle of tilt reduced the amount of sunlight reaching high latitudes. Today, the planet is one million kilometres farther away from the sun during the northern hemisphere's summer solstice than it was in 1BC. This natural cooling effect will continue for 4,000 more years."
Fake EPA Scandal Of The Day "Earlier this year, when the EPA was putting together its finding that carbon-dioxide endangers the public health, an economist at the agency named Al Carlin drafted a short report disputing the scientific consensus on global warming and asked his bosses to consider it. The bosses heard him out, but decided, in the end, to leave climate science to actual scientists. And with good reason: As NASA's Gavin Schmidt explains, Carlin's "critique" makes a bunch of very basic errors—no surprise, given that he's not a climatologist and was mostly just parroting right-wing pseudoscience.") Even more interesting that this news about no news is the latest op-ed column from Paul Krugman about climate-change deniers in Congress, whom he accuses of betraying the planet. ("If there was a defining moment in Friday’s debate [on the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill], it was the declaration by Representative Paul Broun of Georgia that climate change is nothing but a 'hoax' that has been “perpetrated out of the scientific community. I’d call this a crazy conspiracy theory, but doing so would actually be unfair to crazy conspiracy theorists."
Ice sheet melt threat reassessed The collapse of a major polar ice sheet will not raise global sea levels as much as previous projections suggest.
Climate Change Myths and Facts by Chris Mooney "Readers and commentators must learn to share some practices with scientists -- following up on sources, taking scientific knowledge seriously rather than cherry-picking misleading bits of information, and applying critical thinking to the weighing of evidence."
The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus
Antarctica's cold awakening "90% of all the ice on the globe is locked into Antarctica. If all of it melted, the oceans would rise by 70m (230ft)...the latest research suggests wider areas are getting warmer."
Japan's boffins: Global warming isn't man-made; Climate science is 'ancient astrology', claims report In a new report from Japan's Energy Commission, three of the five researchers "disagree with the UN's IPCC view that recent warming is primarily the consequence of man-made industrial emissions of greenhouse gases."
The Scientific Case for Modern Anthropogenic Global Warming by John W. Farley
Thaw of polar regions may need new U.N. laws
Mount Shasta glaciers growing, despite warming
Vast cracks appear in Arctic ice
Methane rise points to wetlands
Antarctic glaciers surge to ocean
Increasing Acid Could Kill Most Coral by 2050 by Andrea Thompson, LiveScience
Researcher: What's bad for coral reefs also bad for lobster
Rising seas 'to beat predictions' BBC
Arctic ice melt spurs a dire new warning, AP, by Seth Borenstein
UN challenges states on warming, BBC News, by Richard Black
New Skeptical Science now an iPhone app The app lets you use an iPhone or iPod to view the entire list of skeptic arguments as well as (more importantly) what the science says on each argument. To download the app, go to http://itunes.com/apps/skepticalscience
Skepticblog: Climate Skepticism by Steven Novella, Feb 08 2010 What is most disappointing about the AGW controversy is the degree to which self-identified members of the skeptical community engage in less-than-skeptical discourse on this topic....I am still waiting to hear a legitimate scientific argument from AGW dissidents why we should reject the claim that global warming is happening and is likely anthropogenic. I am not impressed by political arguments, calling my position a religion, or weaving liberal conspiracy theories.
NASA – Last Decade Warmest on Record by Steven Novella - Neurologica In the past climate science was an innocuous discipline, and the scientists fairly anonymous. Now they have been thrust into the middle of a raging political controversy, and big decisions are hinging on their data and analysis. I get the sense (reinforced by climategate) that the climatology community has not fully adapted to this reality. There is an opportunity now to accelerate this process. There needs to be more transparency in temperature data and its analysis, not because I think there is any fraud going on, but because we need transparency in order to have public confidence in the science.
AGW by James Randi "An unfortunate fact is that scientists are just as human as the rest of us, in that they are strongly influenced by the need to be accepted, to kowtow to peer opinion, and to "belong" in the scientific community....The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- a group of thousands of scientists in 194 countries around the world, and recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize -- has issued several comprehensive reports in which they indicate that they have become convinced that "global warming" is and will be seriously destructive to life as we know it, and that Man is the chief cause of it. They say that there is a consensus of scientists who believe we are headed for disaster if we do not stop burning fossil fuels, but a growing number of prominent scientists disagree. Meanwhile, some 32,000 scientists, 9,000 of them PhDs, have signed The Petition Project statement proclaiming that Man is not necessarily the chief cause of warming, that the phenomenon may not exist at all, and that, in any case, warming would not be disastrous....I strongly suspect that The Petition Project may be valid." (See also I am not denying anything, Randi's response to the criticism of those who, rather than setting him straight, denigrated his integrity or intelligence and tried to straighten him out by demanding that he kowtow to peer pressure.)
Bob Carroll comments: The fact that 32,000 scientists have not been influenced by the need to be accepted in going against the consensus demonstrates that it is very unlikely that scientists who accept AGW are kowtowing and do so out of a desire to belong. Still, it is a fact that the tendency to conform has led to many group errors in the past. It's a fact, but its relevance here is questionable. Also, there is an unfortunate series of sentences in Randi's response that seems to indicate that he thinks global warming is about heat being released into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels and forests. There are other problems with Randi's argument, but others with more energy than I have for this business have gone into great detail regarding them, so I refer the reader to Plait, Orac, Pigliucci, and Myers. I don't necessarily agree with everything these bloggers have written about Randi's essay, especially those who charge Randi with committing a variety of logical fallacies. I don't want to get into this fray, and Randi can certainly handle the flack on his own, but I would point out that there is a major difference between bringing up a fact to illustrate that something is possible and bringing up that fact to prove that something is probable or actually true. That same fact may be relevant to establishing possibility, but irrelevant to establishing actuality. Also, you don't need a Ph.D. to be a career scientist. Meanwhile, the petition Randi speaks of has been thoroughly debunked already. (See next link.)
Misleading by Petition Just What is the Consensus on Global Warming? by Gary J. Whittenberger Ph.D. eSkeptic "...through his Global Warming Petition Project, Arthur Robinson has solicited the opinions of the wrong group of people in the wrong way and drawn the wrong conclusions about any possible consensus among relevant and qualified scientists regarding the hypothesis of human-caused global warming. His petition is unqualified to deliver answers about a consensus in which the public is interested."
Lippard blog: Who are the climate skeptics? He compared the fourth-most-cited paper of the top 83 scientists of the IPCC to the fourth-most-cited paper of all of the 2008 NIPCC participants, "using Jim Prall's excellent website of citation counts for climate scientists. Of the 619 scientists of the AR4 (2007) Working Group 1 on the physical science basis of climate change, the top 83 each have more than 200 citations to their fourth-most-cited paper. There are only thirteen climate skeptics with that level of citation, most of whom received those citations for papers having nothing to do with climate science, and none of whom were involved with the 2008 NIPCC report."
Skeptimedia: Keeping a cool head about global warming ...a paper by Steven F. Hayward called "Scientists Behaving Badly; A corrupt cabal of global warming alarmists are exposed by a massive document leak" was published in The Weekly Standard, a neoconservative opinion magazine. Hayward's characterization of criminal theft as a "document leak" sets the tone, as does his characterization of the climate scientists whose e-mails were stolen as "a corrupt cabal of global warming alarmists." Hayward even speculates that the criminal theft might have been a leak by a "whistleblower from the inside."
Climate change Deniers hoax themselves … again by Greenfyres
Bob Park's comment on the theft of climate scientists' files:
CLIMATEGATE: WHAT ABOUT THE PEOPLE THAT DID THE HACKING? Last week someone broke into the e-mail files of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, and posted the results on the web for the world to see. The Wall Street Journal and Investors Business Daily are having a field-day writing about "criminal conspiracy" and "scientific blacklisting." There were a few embarrassing comments about global warming deniers in a mountain of e-mails. I would hate to see some of my private e- mails on the web. The suffix was added to invite comparisons to the infamous break-in at the Watergate Hotel by Nixon's goons, but in this story the unnamed burglars are treated as heroes. No one wrote even a line about what was probably the only criminal offense in this sordid affair: hacking into private files. There are angry demands in Congress for an investigation of the affair. So far the only effect has been to shift the focus away from bad news about rising oceans and stranded polar bears to climate scientists more interested in scoring points than advancing science. All that's left is to figure out who paid for the break- in. That book has already been written.
Last updated 03/02/10
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clever Linda phenomenon