The climate-denial charge about a 1970s global cooling consensus

The title on this Guardian article is a little misleading, Brian Cox: scientists giving false sense of debate on climate change by Karl Mathiesen 09/03/2014. Because it's mainly about physicist Brian Cox talking about how bad climate denial is:

He [Cox] said the strategy of challenging the science of climate change was dangerous because it promoted the idea that science was political and up for debate. This weakens the position of science as a reliable basis for deciding how to respond to the world, he said.

"I always regret it when knowledge becomes controversial. It’s clearly a bad thing, for knowledge to be controversial. We can trace back through history the times when knowledge was considered to be controversial. And that’s what we are actually saying when we talk about climate change. We’re saying that there’s something inherently problematic with knowledge.

"Don’t undermine the science just because you don’t like the economics. That’s a dangerous slope, because the problem of course is you’re not undermining just that, you’re undermining the basis of rational decision-making in society."

He does have some advice for scientists talking about this, trying to work around the limitations of average science literacy among popular audiences.

On of the climate deniers' zombie talking points that keeps lurching around is that idea that them smarty-pants scientists a few years ago were saying that the world was getting colder, not warmer.

Thomas C. Peterson, William M. Connolley and John Fleck address this piece of propaganda in "The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus" Bulletin of the American Meterological Society Sept 2008.

As they report, in the 1970s when the climate science as we know it today was in its formative stage, there was an broad assumption that a a longterm cooling trend was underway (end note references omitted):

Efforts to accumulate and organize global temperature records began in the 1870s. The first analysis to show long-term warming trends was published in 1938. However, such analyses were not updated very often. Indeed, the Earth appeared to have been cooling for more than 2 decades when scientists first took note of the change in trend in the 1960s. The seminal work was done by J. Murray Mitchell, who, in 1963, presented the first up-to-date temperature reconstruction showing that a global cooling trend had begun in the 1940s. Mitchell used data from nearly 200 weather stations, collected by the World Weather Records project under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization, to calculate latitudinal average temperature. His analysis showed that global temperatures had increased fairly steadily from the 1880s, the start of his record, until about 1940, before the start of a steady multidecade cooling.

By the early 1970s, when Mitchell updated his work, the notion of a global cooling trend was widely accepted, albeit poorly understood. The first satellite records showed increasing snow and ice cover across the Northern Hemisphere from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. This trend was capped by unusually severe winters in Asia and parts of North America in 1972 and 1973 which pushed the issue into the public consciousness. The new data about global temperatures came amid growing concerns about world food supplies, triggering fears that a planetary cooling trend might threaten humanity's ability to feed itself. It was not long, however, before scientists teasing apart the details of Mitchell’s trend found that it was not necessarily a global phenomenon. Yes, globally averaged temperatures were cooling, but this was largely due to changes in the Northern Hemisphere. A closer examination of Southern Hemisphere data revealed thermometers heading in the opposite direction. [my emphasis]

Here's where some minimal scientific literacy is needed to make any kind of reasonable judgment on this.

At that time, there were indications of significant and previously unrecongized shifts in global temperatures. Those shifts could have major implications for human life and civilization, e.g., how they affect food supplies. So scientists and policy makers recognized they needed more study.

As Peterson et al also report (end note references omitted):

In 1965, when U.S. President Lyndon Johnson asked the members of his President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) to report on the potential problems of environmental pollution, climate change was not on the national agenda. The polluting effects of detergents and municipal sewage, the chronic problems associated with urban air pollution, and the risks associated with pesticides dominated public discourse about humanity’s impact on the environment. However, in a 23-page appendix, which today appears prescient, the committee’s Environmental Pollution Panel laid out the following stark scenario: emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels could rapidly reshape Earth's climate. [my emphasis]

It was a new problem in 1965, in the sense that the available instruments and actual studies were showing it to be a matter of concern.

And they explain that work was also being done at that time on historical studies of longterm climate variations in the past. An engineer and geophysicist named Milutin Milankovitch had speculated as early as 1930 "that that highly regular changes in the tilt of Earth's axis and the eccentricity of its orbit around the sun would change the distribution of sunlight hitting the Earth' surface, leading to the waxing and waning of ice ages." (Peterson et al's summary)

Further research over the following decades had shown the validity of the notion "by the late 1970s."

Because Milankovitch's astronomical metronome was predictable over thousands of years, climate scientists could now begin talking about predicting the onset of the next ice age. And they did. Members of the Climate: Long-range Investigation, Mapping and Prediction (CLIMAP) project lived up to their project’s name with a "prediction" of sorts; in the absence of possible anthropogenic warming, "the long-term trend over the next several thousand years is toward extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." (Peterson et al, end note references omitted) [my emphasis]

Research also showed that some kinds of particulates generated by human activity had a cooling effect at the same time that fossil fuel burning tended to raise temperatures.

These studies made great strides in the 1970s. As Peterson et al report (end note references omitted):

In July 1979 in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Jule Charney, one of the pioneers of climate modeling, brought together a panel of experts under the U.S. National Research Council to sort out the state of the science. The panel's work has become iconic as a foundation for the enterprise of climate change study that followed. Such reports are a traditional approach within the United States for eliciting expert views on scientific questions of political and public policy importance. In this case, the panel concluded that the potential damage from greenhouse gases was real and should not be ignored. The potential for cooling, the threat of aerosols, or the possibility of an ice age shows up nowhere in the report. Warming from doubled CO2 of 1.5°–4.5°C was possible, the panel reported. While there were huge uncertainties, Verner Suomi, chairman of the National Research Council’s Climate Research Board, wrote in the report's foreword that he believed there was enough evidence to support action: "A wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late". Clearly, if a national report in the 1970s advocates urgent action to address global warming, then the scientific consensus of the 1970s was not global cooling.

In the sound-bite, fact-free culture of FOX News and Republican hate radio, though, this history gets boiled down to, "Aw, them scientists don't know what they're talkin' about. They used to say the earth was coolin' off, now they say it's gittin' hotter."

That way, you don't have to learn to pronounce words like "Milankovitch."

Of course, the people who grind out climate denial papers for the Koch Brothers or other fossil fuel industry sugar-daddies can come up with highfalutin language to nitpick the findings of actual climate scientists. The science denial is science denial.

To quote Brian Cox again, "Don't undermine the science just because you don't like the economics. That’s a dangerous slope, because the problem of course is you’re not undermining just that, you’re undermining the basis of rational decision-making in society."

Tags: global climate change, pseudoscience, science denial

Climate change denial

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been running a number of articles recently dealing with science denial. Steven Cohen and Alison Miller, both of the Columbia Earth Institute, write in Climate change 2011: A status report on US policy Jan/Feb 2012 about the partisan divide on climate change science:

It is impossible to deny or ignore the growing partisan divide that has profoundly influenced the US climate debate, making it more polarized even as climate science has become more definitive. Last year, a Gallup poll found that in 2010, only 30 percent of self-identified Republicans believed the effects of global warming were already beginning, a drop from almost 50 percent in 2007. The percentage of convinced Democrats, however, remained at 70 percent or higher during the same period, according to Gallup. A Pew Research Center poll in October 2010 found similar results highlighting the partisan divide, reporting a 40 percentage point difference between Republicans and Democrats believing evidence that the Earth is warming (Marshall, 2010).

The demographics within the Republican Party on climate science denial are particularly interesting:

The division remains even after factoring in education. A 2011 study found that, among Democrats and liberals, levels of education had a strong correlation with not only a belief in climate science, but with individual concern about global warming; however, that same study found the opposite effect in the case of Republicans and conservatives (Hoffman, 2011). This persistent gap suggests that climate change has become an ideological issue - much like gun control, taxes, or regulation - that defines what it means to be a Republican or Democrat (Nisbet, 2009). The US divide over climate change involves more than just an understanding of climate science. [my emphasis]

It's become a "tribal" issue, in other words, a psychological identifier.

But "education" in such surveys can be misleading. Because education also correlates with higher income on the average. This could also suggest that the more affluent Republicans are more willing than working class voters in the Republican base to disregard the dangers of climate change, which wouldn't be surprising. Because money talks, and the climate science denial position is virtually all money talking:

The fossil fuel industry has caused much of the political division on climate change through aggressive action to promote skepticism among the public; the industry, typically through conservative think tanks, has funded opposing scientific opinions, economic reports, and public relations campaigns. For example, in 2005 Chris Mooney of Mother Jones found 40 ExxonMobil-funded organizations that either sought to undermine mainstream scientific findings on climate change or maintained affiliations with a small group of skeptic scientists (Mooney, 2005). Furthermore, some climate scientists may have contributed to the political divide by moving past their knowledge of climate change to predict socioeconomic impacts and propose policy solutions that go beyond the scope of climate data and models. This combination of science, policy, and advocacy can undermine non-expert confidence in climate science.

And, in typical authoritarian projection, climate science deniers argue that scientists who do study climate change are mostly corrupted by the pursuit of grant money, which they apparently supposed flows from the fount of what they call Political Correctness, by which they mean stuff they think is politically incorrect. (No wonder they get confused!)

Conservatives opposing anti-pollution regulations have always argued that they represented more gubment regulation that allegedly hurts the economy. Climate science denial is their tool for working concern over global climate change into that long-established partisan and ideological framework:

But it seems climate skeptics are concerned about the validity of climate change mostly because of its implications for regulation of business. The effort to regulate greenhouse gases would eventually entail some level of government regulation of many aspects of daily life, from the cars Americans drive to the electricity that powers their homes and businesses. Those who are wary of big government dislike this potential intrusion.

Critics of climate regulation argue that it will pose an impossible burden on businesses and stifle a weak economy through higher energy prices. At least in the Republican Party, political dialogue throughout 2011 was dominated by the message that government wastes money and takes on duties that should be left to the private sector. Emboldened by electoral gains in 2010, conservatives and Tea Partiers continue to emphasize that government is the problem and an unregulated free market is the solution.

Since more affluent/better educated Republicans tend to give more emphasis to such economic concerns than to the "values issues" like abortion and general hostility to women's rights, that's consistent with the poll findings that better educated Republican are hotter for climate science denial. (Bad pun, I know ...)

Tags: global climate change, science denial

Climate change denial and "free-market" ideology

Darrel Moellendorf writes in Conservatives, John Locke, and Climate Change Dissent 07/07/2011:

Among American conservatives, there is now a standard anti-government line that would incline them to approach regulatory policies with hostility. But that has nothing to do with climate science. You would think that one could have a free-market economic and philosophical bent and still be perfectly sane about the science of climate change. Shouldn’t we expect the majority of free-market advocates to endorse the position of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, at least at similar rates to the rest of the public? And yet Republicans have only become more skeptical regarding anthropogenic climate change in the last decade, even as the consensus among climate scientists remains overwhelming. It starts to look like an admirable—but deeply wrong—political philosophy has been twisted by a political ideology or corrupted by industry funding, or both.

Tags: global climate change, science denial

Science denial by anecdote

Science denial is doing serious harm to people. And if the Republican Know-Nothings have their way, it will get worse.

Steve Silberman discusses Why the GOP Hates the National Science Foundation Neurotribes 05/27/2011. The immediate occasion for his post is the issuance of an anti-science report:

Yesterday [05/26/2011] in Washington, amid great fanfare, the Republican senator from Oklahoma, Tom Coburn, released a 73-page report called The National Science Foundation: Under the Microscope. The report – deemed “scathing” in an “exclusive” by ABC News, and widely touted by other news organizations, particularly those owned by Rupert Murdoch — purported to expose a culture of waste, fraud, and mismanagement at the NSF.

The report provided examples ready-made for radio talk-show ridicule:

... the type of “studies” cited by the report sound dubious indeed, including research into “How to ride a bike; When did dogs became man’s best friend; If political views are genetically pre-determined; How to improve the quality of wine; Do boys like to play with trucks and girls like to play with dolls.”

Such anecdotes are popular and, for better or worse, effective ways of communicating ideas. It's common as dirt these days to hear anecdotes about this or that incident of incompetence or irrationality in laws.

Have you heard about the old lady who spilled hot coffee on herself and then sued McDonald's? You know old Joe Jones who lives down the street? He has a city car that he uses all the time for his private trips! And what about all the paperwork my business has to turn in to the gubment? And so on.

The problem with anecdotes, though, is that unless you have a good picture of the whole story, they usually don't actually tell us much about the larger policy picture. For instance, one of Coburn's reports criticisms was directed at at program in which a "scientist put shrimp on a tiny treadmill to determine if sickness impaired the mobility of the crustaceans." Silberman writes:

Surely there is waste and mismanagement at the NSF, as there is at any large organization staffed by human beings, though even allegedly LOL-worthy studies of ailing shrimp can yield results that inform the fate of fisheries that provide food and jobs for millions of people. Many outlets in the mainstream media and the right-wing blogosphere dutifully mocked the alleged absurdities detailed in the report, complete with the inevitable photos of sick shrimp on treadmills (also furnished by Senator Coburn's office) ...

This particular know-nothing way of trashing government expenditures was given a prominent boost by an important liberal Democratic Senator, William Proxmire, who was a major critic of the Vietnam War. Rick Perlstein sketches the history in The Saga of the Golden Fleece: Why America Needs to Learn to Love Government Spending Once Again Our Future 02/03/2009:

Proxmire, who left public service in 1989 and died in 2005, may be best remembered—it's what I remember—for a monthly publicity stunt called the "Golden Fleece Award," bestowed upon what he would claim was the month's most wasteful and ridiculous pockets of government spending. The pundits fell in love with the notion's good-government pretensions, and for all I know the stunt did the nation some good paring the federal budget of waste, fraud, and abuse.

I suspect, though, the exercise was largely a silly waste of time. One of my professors in graduate school won a Golden Fleece award. Senator Proxmire awarded it for a supposed grant to fund her "mountain climbing hobby." Actually, she's one of the nation's most distinguished anthropologists. She has never climbed a mountain in her life, but used her field work among the Sherpas of Nepal to arrive at some of the most incisive theorizing extant on how societies work. Second-guessing the peer-review process of National Science Foundation grants made for nifty headlines. But it was also numbingly reactionary. According to the Wikipedia entry on Proxmire, the prizes sometimes "went to basic science projects that led to important breakthroughs."

It savored of the Reagan aide who once, defending cuts in higher education spending, said it wasn't the business of government "subsidizing intellectual curiosity." ...

The New York Times' (Richard Severo, William Proxmire, Maverick Democratic Senator From Wisconsin, Is Dead at 90 12/16/2005) obituary for Proxmire included an example of one of his Golden Fleece awards dealing with a project at ... the National Science Foundation:

But he was best known for his Golden Fleece Awards, which he announced in monthly press releases to call attention to what he believed to be frivolous government spending. An award, for instance, went to the National Science Foundation in 1975 for spending $84,000 to learn why people fall in love.

But however much Proxmire may have contributed to the trend back in the day, today's Republican Party is giving itself over to magical thinking in the service of some very worldly ideology. Except for his perhaps overly-rosy view of the New York Times, Silberman's description is right:

Today's GOP has a visceral distrust of scientists for the same reason that it has a visceral distrust of the "lamestream media" (particularly deeply reported news organizations like The New York Times), teachers, organized labor, regulatory agencies, National Public Radio, and protest movements that are have not been astroturfed for Fox News’ cameras by Koch Industries: They’re not with the program, whatever this week’s program might be — more windfalls to Big Oil, justifying torture, or floating amendments to officially brand gay people as second-class citizens. [emphasis in original]

Fanaticism ain't pretty.

Tags: science denial, tom coburn, william proxmire

Gee, you think global climate change might have something to do with this?

This PBS Newshour video is titled "Meteorologist on Severe Weather: 'We Have Never Seen a Year Like This Before'":



This report actually provides a good illustration of how science denial complicates the understanding of issues like global climate change. Both the guests on this program are very good at describing scientific considerations on whether the current round of tornados and other extreme weather events are related to global climate change. Honest and professional scientists speak in trends, patterns, indications, probablilities.

But on the climate deniers side, you have people like Rush Limbaugh saying things along the lines of "Goll-lee, it shore was cold this past winter, how can Al Gore explain that?" And, "Look, these here scientists cain't say anything definite about whut's causin' this." If you're clueless about real science and inclined to find tribal affinities with the FOXists, that sounds a lot more definite that developing patterns and indications.

Tags: global climate change, science denial