Down the Global Warming Rabbit Hole

A short search in wacko-land for the truth about climate change.

One of the loosely-held challenges I’ve given myself since coming to the Center for Justice is to locate the Center’s work within the world around us. I hold it loosely because it’s an impossible assignment. If, when I’m trapped in the Community Building’s low-speed, zen-like elevator, someone wonders aloud why I haven’t given space, here, to the war in Afghanistan, the spread of swine flu, the industrialization of food, or the plight of illegal immigrants, I sort of  shrug and offer the lame explanation that I’m a pretty busy guy. I’m learning that I can usually avoid these awkward encounters by taking the stairs.

Even so, one item that just jumped out at me this week was a letter to the editor in the Spokesman-Review. As will become clear, shortly, I don’t always read the Spokesman-Review in the morning, even though it lands on our doorstep. But Tuesday morning I did, and my eyes jumped to “Nature’s in charge, not man,” a letter from Spokane’s Penny Lancaster who, among other things, is a big Nancy McLaughlin supporter. Although her letter could have used some proof-reading it was competently written, in an even tone, and didn’t resort to name calling. I like that in letters to the editor.

But I still had trouble believing my eyes. Ms. Lancaster referenced a “consensus” on global warming that, unbeknownst to “professors from area universities,” had “collapsed.”

Collapsed? Really?

This got my attention. What was Ms. Lancaster talking about? What had I missed?

For starters, it soon became clear that I had tuned in late, in the middle of a controversy. Ms. Lancaster’s provocative letter was a response to Jonathan Brunt’s article last Sunday (August 9th) “Council candidates split on global warming’s cause.” The headline didn’t quite capture his reporting, which found that only four of the twelve candidates running in the primary for council seats said they believed that human activity is a significant cause of global warming. Right. Four of twelve.

So, before we get to Ms. Lancaster, we have to back up just a tad and merge some basic facts:

(A) The Nobel Prize Winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded as recently as 2007 that:  “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” and that, “Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations.” By “very likely,” the IPCC meant that there’s only a 5% chance that the observed global warming is due to “natural climatic events.”

(B) The U.S. National Research Council’s Committee on the Science of Climate Change has endorsed the IPCC’s findings.

(C) In 2006 the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society, unequivocally stated that “global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now.”

(D) Eight of the twelve council candidates running for office in Spokane this fall don’t accept that human activity contributes to global warming.

There is a reason for the disconnect between facts A-C, and fact D. Actually, in fairness to Ms. Lancaster, Ms. McLaughlin and everyone else who disputes the prevailing scientific view on global warming, there are two reasons.

The first is that even IPCC concedes there’s a 5% chance that the panel is wrong–not about global warming per se, but about its cause. So there is room here for doubt, as there is in all scientific disputes where investigators are forced to rely on non-experimental observations and inferences.

But the main reason is that global warming and, specifically, the connection between human activities (greenhouse gas emissions) and climate change has become hyper-politicized, especially in the United States. It isn’t enough that the planet and mankind are sagging under the well-documented and deleterious effects of global warming. We also have to put up with the smog-belching sound truck of propaganda and misinformation pumped out by Fox News and other right-wing media, heavily funded by Exxon and the usual gamut of right-wing think tanks. Of course, a powerful ingredient in this stew has been the Republican Party’s war on science during the eight years of the Bush Administration.

The new dessert is the Sarah Palin cupcake with the pink icing that says, wink-wink, us plain folks know you can’t trust smart people anyway, because they’re elitist and out to exploit us. This is how you can take a five percent sliver of doubt about an inconvenient consensus and create room for office holders and aspiring office holders in far off Spokane to try to appear prudent in their skepticism. It’s folksy.

My perception is that the Bush Administration–which did so much to discourage scientific integrity–nevertheless wound up rotting from within because of its reluctance to accept the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change. Consider that among the Republican Presidential candidates last year, not one of them publicly disputed the prevailing science on global warming. At least three of them–John McCain, Mike Huckabee and Tommy Thompson–said they wanted to move aggressively to address the problem. Right, even Mike Huckabee repudiated Bush/Cheney’s indifference on global warming.

So, yes, it was a jolt to wake up Tuesday and realize that this supposed controversy had come back to life and had begun eating peoples’ brains, right here in Spokane.  How did that happen? According to Ms. Lancaster, it was science itself that had come to call.

What the heck, I decided, let’s follow this intriguing thread and see where it goes. I’m not a scientist, to be sure, but I’m the son of science teacher. Over the years, I’ve written quite a bit about science for publications including The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. I’ve served on a federal advisory committee that dealt heavily with scientific research on radiation and health and I’ve been invited on occasions to speak before scientific organizations, including the Institute of Medicine and the National Commission on Radiological Protections and Measurements.

Having said that, I wouldn’t pretend to be conversant on the countless technical issues that form the science on global warming. There are, as Ms. Lancaster points out, a fair number of scientists who dispute the IPCC findings and I’ll bet any one of them could cherry pick studies to make me appear ignorant or stupid. Frankly, it was New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert who persuaded me that not only is man-induced global warming real, but that it is beginning to have devastating effects on the environment and human civilization.

Kolbert is not a scientist either, but the reality for a lay person on near-hopelessly complex scientific questions is that you have to decide whom to trust. In terms of affecting public understanding, journalism is more transparent than science because it forces the journalist to show his or her math in ways that ordinary people can evaluate. Although some would argue that quality journalism is a dying art, it is an art that allows for invaluable translations of science and scientific methods that scientists themselves can rarely provide. This is why, for example, geologists love John McPhee (who’s not a geologist) for his writing on their science, because McPhee, in books like “Basin and Range,” made geology interesting and accessible to the rest of the world.

It’s really important that the cause and effects of global warming be made understandable to citizens because the stakes are enormous. Would that we could bring Carl Sagan back to life to help us out with this one. Kolbert’s reporting (and the New Yorker’s well-known diligence in fact-checking) earned my trust and helped settle my mind on the issue.

But there is another useful guide, here, for the ordinary citizen that’s well within reach. People, especially those who seek public office, should know how science works and how scientific disputes are supposed to be resolved among scientists. (I don’t think this is too much to ask given how well science has served all of us, thus far, in removing scourges like, say, polio.)

The new dessert is the Sarah Palin cupcake with the pink icing that says, ‘wink-wink, us plain folks know you can’t trust smart people anyway, because they’re elitist and out to exploit us.’ This is how you can take a five percent sliver of doubt about an inconvenient consensus, and create room for office holders and aspiring office holders in far off Spokane to try to appear prudent in their skepticism. It’s folksy.

Particularly in an age when advocates can post anything they want to the internet with the push of a button, people should at least know, or know to ask, whether a new finding comes from a peer-reviewed journal or a blog post. More to the point, people should know what the scientific process looks like.

Trust me on this, it doesn’t resemble either American Gladiator or the Bill O’Reilly show. You don’t get to swerve back and forth between a discussion of the facts and arm-spinning tirades where you can call people “pinheads” or cut off their microphones. That’s not science, even though it is apparently where an increasing number of people get their news about science.

Ms. Lancaster steered Spokesman-Review readers in two directions. First, she took aim at the local science teachers that Brunt had contacted for his story and proposed that they had not read the “U.S. Senate Minority Report” that records the state of scientific dissent against the IPCC position that links human activity to climate change. It’s this report, which you can link to here, that is the basis for her assertion that the scientific consensus on the main cause of global warming “has collapsed.” The report is entitled “U.S. Senate Minority Report: More than 700 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims Scientists Continue to Debunk ‘Consensus’ in 2008 & 2009.”

A careful reader will notice that I made an embarrassing punctuation error in typing in the title of the report, because I left out the period between “Claims” and “Scientists.” But I didn’t. It’s their error, not mine, and it basically reflects the level of thought and care that went into the report, which was prepared by the Republican staff of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee under the guidance of oil-state Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma.

The report simply summarizes the science that purports to dispute the IPCC position and adds to the list of scientists who dissent from it. The report gives no credence to science that supports the IPCC position, and attempts nothing like an analysis to calibrate the differences between the opposing views. Instead, it’s simply aimed at “debunking” the “consensus” acceptance of man-made global warming.

I’ve read Senate reports before. This one is a political brick thrown at a glass window.

It reflects pretty much what you’d expect from Sen. Inhofe, the senior Republican and former chairman of the committee. Inhofe regularly garners attention by making outrageous charges against people and organizations that draw his ire. He has called global warming the “second largest hoax” ever perpetrated on the American people (second only to the separation of church and state.) He has compared the Environmental Protection Agency to the Gestapo, and has even alleged that the Weather Channel is behind the global warming hoax as a way to attract viewers. According to the Center for Responsive Politics Inhofe is second only to Texas Sen. John Cornyn in the amount of political contributions received from the oil and gas industry by U.S. Senators.

My guess is that the professors contacted for the S-R’s story actually are familiar with Inhofe and the spunky minority staff at the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee. I’m guessing they’re also familiar with the January 2009 survey conducted by Peter Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman at the University of Illinois-Chicago, in which 82% of the responding North American Earth scientists said they agreed that human activity is a “significant contributing factor” to climate change. Doran and Kendall Zimmerman, in releasing their findings, notably compared it to a 2008 Gallup poll, in which only 58% of the general public answered the same question in the affirmative.

What lives here is not just a disagreement over the science in which the vast majority of scientists accept the IPCC position. Rather, according to Ms. Lancaster, what we have is the “false science” linking man’s activities to global warming that is leading wrongly and inexorably to policies that will “lower the quality of life and reduce economic well-being for future generations.” Her letter ends: “See for yourself at www.climatephysics.com.”

Now that sounds like a fun trip. Let’s go there and find out more about this “false science” and what it means for us.

Trust me on this, scientific debate doesn’t resemble either American Gladiator or the Bill O’Reilly show. You don’t get to swerve back and forth between a discussion of the facts and arm-spinning tirades where you can call people “pinheads” or cut off their microphones. That’s not science, even though it is apparently where an increasing number of people get their news about science.

Click. What we’re greeted with is not the staid, on-line masthead of a scientific organization, but the contorted face of an angry infant next to the pink headline: “I can’t believe you believe in Global Warming.”

Right, it’s as though you got out of the cab in front of the National Academy of Sciences and walked through the marbled archway to be greeted by Vince McMahon of World Wrestling Entertainment.

Great.

Not to be too academic about it, but in the Doran/Kendall Zimmerman survey, 90 percent of the responding Earth Scientists accepted that global warming is occurring. But try explaining this to a snarling child.

So what’s next? Maybe a quote from a Greek philosopher about the importance of dispassionate science.

Nope. It’s a short blast at the IPCC followed by a bold, fire-engine red screed:

“In light of the many scientists who have firmly declared that global warming is a scam, hoax, pseudo religion and that human CO2 cannot affect our climate, all politicians who continue to support the global warming agenda are either irrational, insane or simply flaming liberal idiots.”

Very good. We’ve just been head-butted to the floor and smacked with a folding chair.

What next? Gee, science is fun, isn’t it?

Reading on, I learn this is the website of Edwin X Berry, of Bigfork, Montana, who reports that he is a PhD Atmospheric Physicist and AMS Consulting Meteorologist.

Exploring a little, I find he’s actually written a letter to Spokane (oh, a local angle) in which he warns our city leaders that by signing on to the United Nation’s Climate Protection Campaign, “we are partying on the train to Auschwitz” because the IPCC claims are “lies and frauds.” If the people of Spokane are suckered into the fraud, he writes, efforts on our part to reduce carbon emissions will just be a part of “feely-goody sustainability proposals” that “are evil steps leading America to self-imposed destruction.”

Well, you get the point. Speaking only for myself, this is a pile of disgusting filth.

I accept that there is a small possibility–based on the IPCC caveat–that measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions will some day be shown to have no effect on global climate change. In which case, we will have done something misguided out of a sense of prudence and caution. If that’s our mistake, so be it. Though it would be expensive, it would likely pay off in the long run if what we wind up with is a shift to green energy use that would, in so many other ways, benefit our health and environment.

How can that be compared to the evil of Hitler’s genocide, of “partying on the train to Auschwitz?” I’m sure Mr. X Berry has a ready reply. But I’m not interested. He can smoke on it in Bigfork, for all I care.

My point would be this: you don’t have to be an expert on the science of global warming, or other important controversies involving science, to wade in and make decisions for yourself. To be sure, just because someone (like Mr. Berry) is obnoxious and abrasive doesn’t make him or her wrong on the science. But it is fair to judge scientific critics by the manner in which they contest conclusions they believe are wrong. Are they really interested in the science, or just stuffing the science into their world view?

Generally speaking, a scientist who argues that a finding is wrong because of technical or calculation error is more credible than one who is eager to offer you his or her crackling opinion that the global warming “hoax” is driven by Al Gore’s urge to make a lot of money off his book. You’re entitled to notice that. You’re entitled to use it in your decisions about whom to believe.

Thank you Ms. Lancaster for suggesting the tour. And, gee, thank you, Mr. Berry, for using such polished rhetoric in your carefully reasoned scientific arguments about why Spokane is on the tracks to Auschwitz.  But, all the same, I think I’ll keep company with the IPCC and with Elizabeth Kolbert, who patiently walked the planet to look at the evidence, and wrote to me and other readers like I had a brain instead of just flammable gas between my ears.

In researching this piece, I came across a 2006 interview at Grist with Kolbert who, for her 2005 reporting on climate change, won the 2006 National Magazine Award for Public Interest, the 2005 American Association for the Advancement of Science Journalism Award, and the 2006 National Academies Communication Award. It’s worth reading, especially where she discusses how “very painful” it is for her, as a mother, to wrestle with the implications of what she found in terms of how it will affect her childrens’ future.

At the time, she told interviewer David Roberts that the climate-contrarian industry was “in deep, deep trouble because even companies like Exxon “don’t want the money trail to be traced to some of these wackos anymore.”

Well, three years later and there’s not much evidence that the “wackos” are in retreat. What Sarah Palin and others on the right have found is that populism and publicly organized distrust of science and other forms of intellectual culture seems to be a winner politically, at least on the right. If something about reality strikes you as unpleasant (or, more likely, unprofitable) just reject it, make something up, and, like Sen. Inhofe, accuse those who oppose you of having heinous motives. As the son of science teacher, it’s pretty clear we have to solve that problem, before we can even get to problems like global warming.

—Tim Connor