This page examines the science and common arguments of global warming skepticism. Common objections like ‘global warming is caused by the sun’, ‘temperature has changed naturally in the past’ or ‘other planets are warming too’ are examined to see what the science really says.
An excellent resource to bookmark.
New survey from the Center for Climate Change Communication: Extreme Weather and Climate Change in the American Mind.
Some highlights:
The campaign group formed to support Barack Obama’s political agenda has launched an initiative to shame members of Congress who deny the science behind climate change.
In an email to supporters on Thursday, Organizing for Action said it was time to call out members of Congress who deny the existence of climate change, saying they had blocked efforts to avoid its most catastrophic consequences.
The email linked to a video mocking Republicans who reject the science on climate change. “Right now, way too many lawmakers in Washington flat-out refuse to face the facts when it comes to climate change,” Jon Carson, executive director of Organizing for Action wrote in the email. “We’re never going to make real progress on this issue unless members of Congress get serious.”
The video mainly features Republican members of the House of Representatives who are notorious for denying the existence of climate change, or positing bizarre notions about its causes.
However, it also includes some national figures such as the Florida senator Marc Rubio and House speaker John Boehner, whose views on climate are not that broadly known. There are no Democrats in the video.
“The Partisans : How to Deal With Climate Change Deniers” - pretty funny.
Thursday’s report by dozens of scientists from five different federal agencies looked into why forecasters didn’t see the drought coming. The researchers concluded that it was so unusual and unpredictable that it couldn’t have been forecast.
“This is one of those events that comes along once every couple hundreds of years,” said lead author Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Climate change was not a significant part, if any, of the event.”
Via AP
Every major oil company has a climate change division. Most have active climate change plans aimed at reducing emissions, managing environmental risks, and experimenting with alternatives to reduce climate impacts. Importantly, these are voluntary efforts.They chose to manage and discuss climate risk.
Here are links to the biggest oil and gas companies’ climate pages:
See also, Skeptical Science post Big Oil and the Demise of Crude Climate Change Denial.
The question is: What - exactly - do deniers know that these companies do not? And why are these companies not listening to (or hiring) deniers?
Good question, but deniers don’t phase me (reactionary environmentalists grind my gears though!). I’ve argued on this blog that I’d rather have climate deniers state their case on the record now, for posterity. My previous post shows this as well - that climate deniers do not have any evidence, but they sure are masters of smoke and diversions.
It’s the same as getting politicians on record as racists and bigots - it will be used against them time and again. Eventually they’ll come around, you just have to be persistent, even keeled, and take the long view (often beyond your generation - the essence of sustainability, right?).
I’d also like to mention that I consider myself a steward rather than an activist. See here for what that means.
Light always leads to truth. I’m trained to convincingly argue the other side of nearly any issue - and deniers simply do not have a single, coherent argument against climate change.
But man, deniers do have very, very powerful arguments against taxation! That is, they deny climate change exists and their reasons almost always are: Big bad government shouldn’t punish energy companies by taxing carbon. After all, where would we be with out them? After all, you have to admit that reading this blog post on your computer or phone cannot happen with out the miracle of fossil fuels. After all, plastic and metals and economic development require burning fossil fuels. After all, socialism doesn’t work. After all, alternative energy is a waste of tax payer money. Most powerful is taxing carbon will raise the cost of gas and electricity - this appeals to everyone.
Do you see what just happened there? If you found yourself arguing against these points, then you’ve fallen into their trap. Don’t fall for it. Instead, paraphrase their argument so as to establish understanding of their point of view and then demand evidence for their points.
Climate change, aka the greenhouse effect, has been known since the 1800s. There is no sky with out greenhouse gasses. To deny that emitting greenhouse gasses does not thicken the sky is to say that the air around us - the atmosphere - does not exist. It is an absurdity.
In fact, every major oil company has a climate change division. Most have active climate change plans aimed at reducing emissions, managing environmental risks, and experimenting with alternatives to reduce climate impacts. Importantly, these are voluntary efforts.* The companies chose to manage and discuss climate risk.
Here are links to the biggest oil and gas companies’ climate pages:
See also, Skeptical Science post Big Oil and the Demise of Crude Climate Change Denial.
The question is: What - exactly - do deniers know that these companies do not? And why are these companies not listening to (or hiring) deniers?
There are more “sophisticated” denier arguments. “It’s snowing,” “the climate has changed before,” “that Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick graph is a hoax,” “it’s the sun,” “it’s the moon,” “the earth is cooling,” “computer models are unreliable,” etc. You can read over 150 of these here.
But none of them have data to back these arguments up (again, see here for a list of common denier arguments and why they’re all wrong [e.g., no evidence]). Most interesting is that almost all of these lead to the same conclusion: big bad government should not tax oil and gas companies (bizzare, right?).
So, to me, when I read a climate denial I mainly see that they’re concerned with taxation - a legitimate concern and a more interesting conversation.
The trouble is falling into traps - avoid responding to their points and learn how to tactfully demand evidence.
m
* If you are discussing this with an informed denier, they may counter that oil companies were forced by the U.S. federal government to create these climate divisions. Thus, 1) Demand for evidence or stfu (remember: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and the burden of proof is always upon the claimant). For example, to say that the U.S. forced, say, Petrochina into managing climate change issues would require the denier to show the agreement and/or documents. 2) Most oil companies are not publicly traded on the U.S. boards. Publicly traded companies are required to disclose any environmental risks to their share holders. They do this on a form called a 10-K. In 2010, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) *asked* corporations to *voluntarily* disclose any climate risks to their share holders. Most companies hired experts to examine their operations. The resulting reports showed that many companies are not at risk, and they say this on their 10-Ks. Oil companies did the same, and found their operations are in fact at risk. So, they voluntarily disclose this information, and they did so publicly. In fact, some companies went further and opened up R&D to help reduce emissions and expand into renewable energies like solar and wind. So, don’t get pulled into the counter-argument that companies were “forced” to acknowledge 10-K disclosure. They weren’t.
Seems more accurate since they’re experts at mocking and deficient at science.
Life as a Target
Attacks on my work aimed at undermining climate change science have turned me into a public figure. I have come to embrace that role. By Michael E. Mann | March 27, 2013
As a climate scientist, I have seen my integrity perniciously attacked. Politicians have demanded I be fired from my job because of my work demonstrating the reality and threat of human-caused climate change. I’ve been subjected to congressional investigations by congressman in the pay of the fossil fuel industry and was the target of what The Washington Post referred to as a “witch hunt” by Virginia’s reactionary Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. I have even received a number of anonymous death threats. My plight is dramatic, but unfortunately, it is not unique; climate scientists are regularly the subject of such attacks. This cynicism is part of a destructive public-relations campaign being waged by fossil fuel companies, front groups, and individuals aligned with them in an effort to discredit the science linking the burning of fossil fuels with potentially dangerous climate change.
My work first appeared on the world stage in the late 1990s with the publication of a series of articles estimating past temperature trends. Using information gathered from records in nature, like tree rings, corals, and ice cores, my two coauthors and I had pieced together variations in the Earth’s temperature over the past 1,000 years. What we found was that the recent warming, which coincides with the burning of fossil fuels during the Industrial Revolution, is an unprecedented aberration in this period of documented temperature changes, and recent work published in the journal Science suggests that the recent warming trend has no counterpart for at least the past 11,000 years, and likely longer. In a graph featured in our manuscript, the last century sticks out like the blade of an upturned hockey stick.
The graph, now known as the hockey-stick graph, has become an icon in the climate-change debate, providing potent, graphic evidence of human-caused climate change. As a result, the fossil fuel industry and those who do their bidding saw the need to discredit it in any way they could, and I have found myself at the receiving end of attacks and threats of investigations, as I describe in my recent book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars. In 2003, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) denounced my work on the Senate floor and called me to testify to his committee under hostile questioning. Two years later, House Representative Joe Barton (R-TX) attempted to subpoena all of my emails and research documents from my entire career, and the correspondence and files of both my senior coauthors, presumably looking for some way to both intimidate and discredit me. Inhofe and Barton are two of the largest recipients of fossil fuel money in the U.S. Congress. More recently, Ken Cuccinelli, the newly minted “Tea Party” Republican Attorney General of Virginia, took a page out of the same playbook, demanding all of my emails with 39 different scientists around the world from my time at the University of Virginia, claiming that he was investigating potential state fraud.
Meanwhile, I’ve also been subject to a constant onslaught of character attacks and smears on websites, in op-eds, and on right-leaning news outlets, usually by front groups or individuals tied to fossil fuel interests like ExxonMobil or the petrochemical tycoons, the Koch Brothers. As the journal Nature put it a March 2010 editorial, climate researchers are in a street fight with those who seek to discredit the accepted scientific evidence simply because it is inconvenient for some who are profiting from fossil fuel use.
But being the focus of such attacks has a silver lining: I’ve become an accidental public figure in the debate over human-caused climate change.
Rest of his post at The Scientist
Now watching: Climate Skepticism & Science’s Role in Political Science.
A panel of climate and science experts discuss the role science plays in fostering healthy skepticism of political science regarding the climate. The percentage of Americans today who say humans are the primary cause of global warming is much lower than it was in the second term of President George W. Bush.
Skeptics are winning the climate communication battle even as temperatures rise and the number and intensity of floods and droughts increase worldwide. What role does the scientist play in the communication, and what messages will reach the skeptics’ ears?
Michael Mann, professor of Geosciences at Penn State and author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, spoke of the so-called “hockey stick” curve he and his co-authors published more than a decade ago. The curve showed that “recent warming exceeded anything that we’ve seen for at least the past 1,000 years,” Mann explained. The graph became an icon in the climate change debate. “If I’m going to be put in the limelight in the way that our detractors have tried to put me in the limelight,” Mann stated, “I’m going to try to take advantage of that, and the book was part of my effort to do that.”
According to Katharine Hayhoe, professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas Tech University and co-author of A Climate for Change, Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions, climate change is so polarized right now, “that if we, as scientists, are not getting attacked, then we’re not talking to the right people.” Comparing herself to a doctor who finds a red flag for a potential disease, she said, “We’re taking the temperature of the planet, we’re seeing some red flags and we have a responsibility to tell people about that.”
Bill Anderegg, a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University researching forests and the American West, spoke of a study his team did on climate change, which was widely accepted by scientists. According to Anderegg, the study did two things: “First, we found that there’s an incredibly high agreement behind what the IPCC had articulated as the main components of human-caused climate change. And second, that those who are publicly doubting and expressing their lack of agreement essentially were not very well qualified.” He spoke of his surprise at the immediate backlash: “Suddenly, your e-mail address is across a dozen blogs that are not very friendly.”
Hi nturlbruntt!
Thanks for your note and absolutely not! The earth is at its hottest point in over 11,000 years.
Your client believes a rumor from the 1970s, one that won’t die apparently. It was dismissed, debunked, defrocked, and deblorgged decades ago, but has resurfaced as a rather brilliant right-wing political talking point.
97% of climate scientists agree the earth is warming. This is the highest agreement in any of the sciences in all of history. Second, the vast majority of scientists in the 1970s agreed global warming was occurring, that humans are causing it by emitting greenhouse gases, and that the earth is in big, big trouble.
Back in 2005, climate scientists at Real Climate took the time to discuss the origins of the rumor, show who restarted it, and describe why it’s completely false. You an read their post, here.
In 2008, the American Meteorological Society published a special article on this myth. It’s a great read, very short. It describes the history of the myth (it also gives a glimpse at how scientists suck at PR).
Lastly, Skeptical Science ranks it as the 11th most discussed myth. They published a simplified, easy to read summary of the myth called: “What were climate scientists predicting in the 1970s?”, which shows that scientists back then were very worried about warming.
At the end of the day, your client is acting as proxy for the fossil fuel industry. This may sound crazy, but his/her’s real argument is that oil and gas should not be regulated, that they should be able to pollute without regulations. People who argue that that the world is cooling, instead of warming, are really saying that there is no need to regulate pollution or emissions.
What’s even more bizarre is that they may not even realize this.
Naomi Oreskes discusses how this happened in her book, Merchants of Doubt, which shows that oil and gas industries hired the same public relations experts that defended the tobacco industry in the 80s. Recall that the tobacco industry - and the politicians they donated to - denied that cigarettes caused cancer (seriously), and they successfully perpetuated that myth for decades.
And that, my friend, is how an industry and politicians manipulate public opinion.
Cheers!
Michael
The Anti-Science Left. A wonderful set of interviews on how the left denies science. (Warning: Chris Moody is as smug as ever, but the rest of the video is great.). They discuss Mark Lynas’s switch from anti-GMO to supporting GMOs by looking at the reams of scientific data. The great science writer Michael Shermer discusses evolution and climate change, and makes the case that despite all the doom in the news, humans and the environment are much better now than ever in history. Great conversation.
The SCDNR’s climate report was supposed to be published in 2012, but new leadership changed focused on expanding a shipping port and building a the East Coast’s largest gold mine.
The report warns of dire economic circumstances if nothing is done. One scientist even quit due to (it seems to me) political in-fighting within the Department.
Secret climate report calls for action in SC
A team of state scientists has outlined serious concerns about the damage South Carolina will suffer from climate change – threats that include invading eels, dying salt marshes, flooded homes and increased diseases in the state’s wildlife.
But few people have seen the team’s study. The findings are outlined in a report on global warming that has been kept secret by the S.C. Department of Natural Resources for more than a year because agency officials say their “priorities have changed.”
Current DNR director Alvin Taylor said the department is busy with other environmental matters, such as port expansions in Charleston and Savannah, and a massive gold mine planned for Lancaster County.
Via The State
PBS Documentary Looks at Right-Wing Promotion of Ignorance Through Textbooks.
(Sierra Voices) - Texas textbooks determine what children learn nationwide.
“I believe that dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark … somebody’s got to stand up to these experts.” (Don McElroy, former member of the Texas State Board of Education).
Well, no wonder the GOP wants to defund PBS. Where can I send them a donation??!
What is this?
(via upworthy)
I want to punch climate change in the face.
A blog about the interactions between the built environment, people, and nature.
I'm a climate change consultant specializing in climate adaptation, environmental law, and urban planning based in the U.S. In addition to traveling and hiking, I research, publish, and lecture on how cities can adapt to climate change.
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