Entries associated with the tag "Denialism":

Peter Montague's "Rachel's Democracy & Health News" is a good window on the left wing of the environmental movement, and that's where I picked up on historian David Noble's "The Corporate Climate Coup" and its companion piece, Denis Rancourt's "Global Warming: Truth or Dare?", both originally housed at Rancourt's blog Activist Teacher.

They're enormously long; fortunately Rancourt's a good summarizer:

"I argue: (1) that global warming (climate change, climate chaos, etc.) will not become humankind’s greatest threat until the sun has its next hiccup in a billion years or more (in the very unlikely scenario that we are still around), (2) that global warming is presently nowhere near being the planet’s most deadly environmental scourge, and (3) that government action and political will cannot measurably or significantly ameliorate global climate in the present world....

"By far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and...the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized."

Noble elaborates:

"If the corporate climate change campaign has fuelled a fevered popular preoccupation with global warming, it has also accomplished much more. Having arisen in the midst of the world-wide global justice movement, it has restored confidence in those very faiths and forces which that movement had worked so hard to expose and challenge: globe-straddling profit-maximizing corporations end their myriad agencies and agendas; the unquestioned authority of science and the corollary belief in deliverance through technology, and the beneficence of the self-regulating market."

Rancourt and Noble do draw on some right-wing denialist material, and the underlying logic is eerily similar: since the commonly proposed solutions to climate change don't involve undoing world capitalism ASAP, then the problem must not exist. (The right-wingers reach the same conclusion from the opposite worry, that the commonly proposed solutions might indeed undo world capitalism.)

Quite aside from some factual questions -- did Al Gore really just prevent a "world-wide global justice movement" from taking power? -- Rancourt and Noble have the same problem that has bedeviled the left since the collapse (first moral, then physical) of any credible alternative to capitalism. No matter how bad the current system is, what goes in its place? One of the commenters on Rancourt's article gave a revealing answer to this question:

"If I were the benevolent dictator of planet Earth, I would remove all subsidies to the polluting industries, make towns and cities responsible for their own energy and food production, take from the rich to give to the poor equalizing wealth among all peoples, make it illegal for anyone to earn 7 times the amount the most poorly paid person makes, give Aboriginal peoples ten times the land they have now and a huge apology for the injustices done to them, only allow democratic free presses to operate, implement a 1-child per couple law, ensure all farm animals are well-treated and can roam freely, reforest the planet, reuse metals instead of mining, and so on. What a beautiful world it could be!"

Uh huh. No such utopia could exist without a centralized power that would make previous totalitarianisms look wimpy. Better the capitalist devil I know, thank you.

Some friends, both blog readers and nonreaders, have forwarded me two articles arguing -- contrary to the consensus view of hundreds of qualified climate scientists worldwide embodied in the new IPCC report -- that climate change and global warming aren't truly problems. Their arguments are unfounded and palpably dishonest to boot.

One comes from Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor writing in the Canada Free Press, a publication whose other causes include promoting hatejock Michael Savage for president. Ball remembers the 70s media scare about global cooling and quotes Lowell Ponte, who back then called global cooling "the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years." Ponte, it turns out, is a radio personality, not a scientist. There was no scientific consensus on global cooling; the best thinking at the time was that we didn't know enough about climate to make any predictions at all. This business of deliberately confusing popular scares with science-based warnings would be silly if it weren't reprehensible, since it falsely demeans the best way our species has of learning about the world and foretelling trouble ahead.

The other is J.H. Huebert's review of Richard Posner's 2004 book Catastrophe: Risk and Response in the Journal of Libertarian Studies. Huebert has some good criticisms of the book, but also is dogmatic enough that he can refer to "University of Chicago court intellectuals advocating bigger government" with a straight face. He thinks to dismiss Posner on global warming by quoting him (accurately) as saying, "I am not a scientist and have no authority to make judgments on disputed scientific questions." However, Huebert doesn't mention that Posner then remedies his deficiency -- just as any intellectually honest skeptic with limited time might do (now quoting from my review of Posner in the Reader on March 4, 2005): "He analyzed a random sample of recent articles from the 20 most influential peer-reviewed atmospheric-sciences journals. He observes that of 55 articles, only 2 expressed any doubt that human-caused global warming is real and will have adverse consequences." Huebert gives every sign of having read Posner's book, in which case he read this and chose not to mention it. Such deception is unworthy of a journal that purports to represent a noble strand of political philosophy.

Quite aside from their lack of scientific evidence or credibility, neither Ball nor Huebert is arguing in good faith. I have yet to see any material from this side that meets basic standards of argument or evidence. Having spent some time looking, here, here, and here, I have to wonder whether it's a good use of time and energy to point out the denialists' lies one at a time while they are not ashamed to continue producing them in bulk.

UPDATE: The excellent So-Called "Austin Mayor" Blog does the necessary demolition work on Mark Steyn as well. 

The Heartland Institute has been promoting Fred Singer and Dennis Avery's new book Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years, so I took a look. The book isn't just wrong -- it's systematically dishonest.

Singer and Avery keep starting to argue the science, then switch to contending that fears about global warming are exaggerated and that proposed remedies will be counterproductive. By page three they're hyperventilating: "Will people give up the scientific and technological advances that have added thirty years to life expectancies all over the globe in the last century?" (Later they call their adversaries scaremongers.)

At first that seemed like an odd stylistic quirk, but it's actually a feature. Their implicit logic -- never stated outright for obvious reasons -- is that if activists exaggerate storm and flood fears, or slap their prefabricated solutions (solar! conservation! organic farming!) onto this problem, then there must be no problem after all. The logic is laughable, but it allows the authors to blur the distinction between sensation-mongering activists and professional climate scientists. (That's worse than being mistaken. Mistakes can be corrected through open debate; sliming the process by which we do that is far more dangerous.)

The book's explicit claim is that because there's a 1,500-year climate cycle (apparently based on solar variation), no other climate change is going on. Again, the conclusion doesn't follow, and the initial premise is dubious.

Most of the book consists of throwing mud at the findings of peer-reviewed climate science and seeing what sticks. The mud is of low quality, but since this is a blog and not a book, I'll limit myself to four examples.

Page 36: "CO2 has been a lagging indicator [in the last three ice ages and subsequent warmings], its concentrations rising about eight hundred years after the temperatures warm ... additional evidence that CO2 is not the forcing agent in recent global climate changes." Singer and Avery quote a 2003 article (PDF) published in the peer-reviewed journal Science to this effect. But they don't mention that the warming episodes in question lasted about 5,000 years! So the fact that CO2 didn't start the warming doesn't mean it had no role in the (much larger) warming that followed. It's as if they were arguing that gravity doesn't exist because someone pushed  a car that was sitting still at the top of the hill. Technical details here from a coauthor of the original paper. (For the record, honest disputants fully lay out the other side's arguments before attacking them and don't cherry-pick them to create a false impression.)

Page 132: "Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas ... have demonstrated" that there was a worldwide medieval warm period warmer than today, so there's no problem now. Again, the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise, and the premise is questionable -- in fact, it has been questioned by several climate scientists, writing in Eos (behind a paywall, summary here if you scroll down to "Myth #2"). The climate scientists had serious criticisms: Soon and Baliunas counted as "warm" any place that appeared to be wetter OR drier OR warmer than it was in the 20th century; they took evidence scattered over a 500-year period (800-1300) as signifying a global change; and they compared their results to the 20th-century average, when the relevant comparison should be to the last part of the 20th century. CAVEAT: I haven't read the article or the criticism. My point is that when Singer and Avery present Soon and Baliunas as having "demonstrated" something -- and then fail to mention, much less address, professional criticisms of their work -- they're deceiving their readers, not engaging in reasoned dialogue.

Page 39: Antarctica is cooling. Another case of cherry-picking and twisting a peer-reviewed publication, well answered by its author Peter Doran (previously blogged here).

Page 11: Satellite temperature records show little warming; surface records show more because of the urban heat island effect. Temperature records must be corrected for all kinds of biases; this particular discrepancy has been accounted for, and when it is, the result is a rising temperature record that can be explained only by climate models that include human CO2 pollution. Details here. Singer and Avery cite a 2004 paper Singer coauthored that analyzes temperatures from only 1979 to 1996 -- allowing them to avoid dealing with inconvenient warming data from the last decade.  Full-scale demolition of that paper here, if you need further evidence that Singer, Avery, and their backers -- including Chicago's own don't-think tank, the Heartland Institute -- aren't serious participants in the discussion of these issues.

BTW, over the years I haven't hesitated to call bullshit on environmentalists when appropriate, such as Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb. His persistent refusal to acknowledge that he was wrong is intellectually corrupt in much the same way Singer and Avery's book is.

Physicist Steven Weinberg is unwilling to respect all sincere faiths equally (Times Literary Supplement, via 3 Quarks Daily):

"My late friend, the distinguished Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam, tried to convince the rulers of the oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf to invest in scientific education and research, but he found that though they were enthusiastic about technology, they felt that pure science presented too great a challenge to faith. In 1981, the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt called for an end to scientific education. In the areas of science I know best, though there are talented scientists of Muslim origin working productively in the West, for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer working in a Muslim country that was worth reading. This is despite the fact that in the ninth century, when science barely existed in Europe, the greatest centre of scientific research in the world was the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.

"Alas, Islam turned against science in the twelfth century. The most influential figure was the philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, who argued in The Incoherence of the Philosophers against the very idea of laws of nature, on the ground that any such laws would put God’s hands in chains. According to al-Ghazzali, a piece of cotton placed in a flame does not darken and smoulder because of the heat, but because God wants it to darken and smoulder. After al-Ghazzali, there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries."

Think it couldn't happen here? John Quiggin of Crooked Timber pulls it together with valuable links:

"Jonathan Chait connects the dots between dishonest conservative claims about income inequality (coming in this case from Alan Reynolds) to similar arguments made about evolution and global warming. As he says, to construct an alternate reality in which income inequality is not increasing, global warming is not happening and the world is near the end of its 6000 years anyway, there’s no need to prove a case – just cast enough doubt on the facts and ideology or faith will do the rest. This is happening across the board. The Republican War on Science is so broad-based that there is now no academic discipline whose conclusions can be considered acceptable to orthodox Republicans."