The Inquisition of Climate Science

James Powell

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780231527842
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Modern science is under the greatest and most successful attack in recent history. An industry of denial, abetted by news media and "info-tainment" broadcasters more interested in selling controversy than presenting facts, has duped half the American public into rejecting the facts of climate science—an overwhelming body of rigorously vetted scientific evidence showing that human-caused, carbon-based emissions are linked to warming the Earth. The industry of climate science denial is succeeding: public acceptance has declined even as the scientific evidence for global warming has increased. It is vital that the public understand how anti-science ideologues, pseudo-scientists, and non-scientists have bamboozled them. We cannot afford to get global warming wrong—yet we are, thanks to deniers and their methods.

The Inquisition of Climate Science is the first book to comprehensively take on the climate science denial movement and the deniers themselves, exposing their lack of credentials, their extensive industry funding, and their failure to provide any alternative theory to explain the observed evidence of warming. In this book, readers meet the most prominent deniers while dissecting their credentials, arguments, and lack of objectivity. James Lawrence Powell shows that the deniers use a wide variety of deceptive rhetorical techniques, many stretching back to ancient Greece. Carefully researched, fully referenced, and compellingly written, his book clearly reveals that the evidence of global warming is real and that an industry of denial has deceived the American public, putting them and their grandchildren at risk.

Science and Potemkin Science

Anyone following the controversy over global warming is bound to come away with the impression of two parallel but separate universes: the scientists and the deniers. Two conferences, one held in December 2008 and the other in March 2009, reinforced that impression. The two meetings were outwardly identical, as speakers illustrated their remarks with charts and tables and took questions and comments from their audience. But there the resemblance ended, for the two sets of speakers began with different missions and ended with opposite conclusions.

The scientists who presented their research at the December 2008 meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), held in San Francisco’s Moscone Center, evidently regarded global warming as an observational fact.¹ Dr. James Hansen, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University, gave an invited lecture titled, “Climate Threat to the Planet: Implications for Energy Policy and Intergenerational Justice.” Sixteen thousand AGU members had come to the Bay City for the meeting, and Hansen’s audience filled the conference room. He had become the most authoritative and outspoken scientist on global warming, warning with increasing urgency that rising temperatures threaten the future of humanity. Twenty years earlier, Hansen had been one of the first to sound the alarm, testifying on a sweltering June day to members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that he was 99 percent certain that global warming had begun. “It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here,” Hansen cautioned.² Now, two decades later, for Hansen and his AGU colleagues, the evidence for global warming had grown from “pretty strong” to virtually certain.

Hansen’s science and his forthrightness had earned him the respect of his peers, election to the National Academy of Sciences, the AGU Award for “Scientific Freedom and Responsibility,” as well as medals from the World Wildlife Fund and the American Meteorological Association, the latter for “outstanding contributions to climate modeling, understanding climate change forcings and sensitivity, and for clear communication of climate science in the public arena.” EarthSky Communications and a panel of 600 scientist-advisers named Hansen as their “Scientist Communicator of the Year,” praising him as an “outspoken authority on climate change” who had “best communicated with the public about vital science issues or concepts during 2008.”³ In June 2010, Hansen won the Sophie Prize, set up in 1997 by Norwegian Jostein Gaarder, the author of the 1991 best-selling novel and teenagers’ guide to philosophy, Sophie’s World, for Hansen’s “key role for the development of our understanding of human-induced climate change.”

But the more awards Hansen accumulated and the more his climate forecasts turned out to be correct, the more the deniers disparaged him. They had no choice, for if Hansen is right, the deniers are wrong. One can even go to Facebook.com and sign a petition asking NASA to fire Hansen.

In his AGU talk, the NASA scientist showed a series of slides summarizing the state of climate science at the end of 2008. Some images came from his own research, but most were the work of other scientists. The overall impression was of global warming advancing more rapidly than scientists had suspected only a few years earlier. One slide was unusual for a scientific talk: a photograph of Hansen’s newest grandchild, Jake, whom he said “will live in the greenhouse world that we choose to create.”

Another speaker at the 2008 AGU meeting, Wallace Broecker of Columbia University, is also a pioneer of climate science. In 1975, Broecker published a paper in Science titled, “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?”⁴ Broecker had made many pathbreaking discoveries, becoming best known for his idea that ocean currents not only operate on the surface, but at depth as a kind of conveyor belt that transports salty, dense seawater around the globe.⁵ In the North Atlantic, winds push surface currents from the equator toward the poles, where they cool and sink, the deep water flowing in the opposite direction all the way to Antarctica. The oceanic conveyor belt helps control global climate, leading Broecker to fear that as the planet warms, melting freshwater ice might dilute the salty current and shut down the conveyor, changing the climate of the North Atlantic in unpredictable ways.

But in his AGU talk, titled “Shifting Rainfall: A Paleo Perspective,” like an honest scientific skeptic, Broecker found his own theory wanting and rejected it: “Twenty years ago my concern regarding the impacts of the ongoing CO₂ buildup were centered on the ocean’s conveyor circulation. Would the predicted increase in rainfall and runoff lead to a sudden shutdown? In the meantime, model simulations have made clear that this is highly unlikely.”⁶

In the AGU conference session titled “Global Environmental Change,” scientists presented more than 100 papers describing new research results. Not one contradicted the greenhouse theory of global warming. To say that the AGU scientists shared a consensus on global warming would be an understatement. Unanimity would be more accurate.

Never a Crisis

In March 2009, 800 “scientists, economists, legislators, policy activists, and media representatives” gathered in New York for a three-day conference sponsored by the Heartland Institute.⁷ According to the institute, “The presenters at this year’s conference are the elite in the world among climate scientists.” If that were true, then many of the speakers would be active in original climate research, publishing their results in peer-reviewed scientific journals. But almost none of the speakers met that description. Many did not even have degrees in science. Still, they included a distinguished MIT meteorologist, the last man to set foot on the Moon, and the president of the Czech Republic.

The speakers scorned global warming not only as false, but a deliberate hoax designed, as the former astronaut put it, to effect “an enormous transfer of wealth from the people to the government.”⁸ The title of the conference presaged its conclusions: “Global Warming: Was it Ever a Crisis?”

The mission of the Heartland Institute is “to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.”⁹ As I will show later, the Heartland Institute is an anti-regulation organization historically funded by Big Tobacco and Big Oil, with an avowed mission and history of promoting the interests of corporations.

Not only did the conclusions of the speakers at the two conferences differ, so did their methods. Having few if any research results of their own to report, in contrast to the AGU speakers, presenters at the Heartland Institute Conference attacked the research findings of mainstream scientists, looking for any discrepancy or inconsistency. The speakers said that global warming is natural, not man-made; that atmospheric carbon dioxide does not cause global warming; that global warming will not harm humans or coral reefs or cause extreme weather events. Computerized climate models do not work, the presenters claimed, and the alleged scientific consensus on global warming is nothing more than an “urban myth.” And that list comes from only the first morning of the conference. After the meeting, the Heartland Institute answered its own question of whether global warming had ever been a crisis with “a resounding ‘no.’”¹⁰

A Political Movement

One of the keynote speakers at the Heartland conference, Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT, does have outstanding scientific credentials, though most of his research has not dealt directly with global warming. Lindzen titled his talk: “Climate Alarm: What We Are Up Against, and What to Do.” He opened with these words: “Global warming alarm has always been a political movement,” thus preemptively denouncing those who disagree with him as motivated by politics, not science, a ubiquitous denier theme.¹¹

Speakers at the Heartland Institute Conference indulged in personal attacks, especially on Hansen and former Vice President Al Gore, whose book and film, An Inconvenient Truth, had made him their bogeyman. One might have hoped that Lindzen, a distinguished professor, member of the National Academy of Sciences, and AGU medal winner himself, would have risen with dignity above petty personal attacks, but no, he got down in the mud, accusing scientists who espoused global warming—even his own MIT colleagues—of dishonesty and worse: of selling out their scientific integrity for money. Lindzen named names:

Most of the atmospheric scientists who I respect do endorse global warming [but] the science that they do that I respect is not about global warming. Endorsing global warming just makes their lives easier. My colleague, Kerry Emanuel, received relatively little recognition until he suggested that hurricanes might become stronger in a warmer world. He then was inundated with professional recognition. Another colleague, Carl Wunsch… [has] politics [that] are clearly liberal. Wally Broecker[’s] work clearly shows that sudden climate change occurs without anthropogenic influence. However, he staunchly beats the drums for alarm and is richly rewarded for doing so.¹²

In his speech, Lindzen neither presented research results of his own nor did he explain why for twenty years he has been adamant that global warming is false. He did, however, say that “Nature is, as any reasonable person might suppose, dominated by stabilizing negative feedbacks rather than destabilizing positive feedbacks.” Negative feedbacks move the system back toward stability. Positive feedbacks amplify the output of a system—and make global warming worse. Though half a century of research, including attempts by Lindzen himself, has failed to find significant negative feedbacks, Lindzen continues to claim that they exist in sufficient strength to render global warming harmless and allow business-as-usual to continue.

A Cheap Tuxedo

Another major difference between the conferences of scientists and those of deniers lies in the aftermath. When their meetings end, scientists rush back to their labs to continue their research and follow leads picked up at the meeting. Having no labs to go to, deniers conduct a public relations stunt by issuing a “declaration,” a cleverly worded statement that dresses up their denial in fancy duds. To paraphrase Kris Krishtalka, a denier declaration is nothing more than anti-science in a cheap tuxedo.

After a 1992 meeting in Germany just prior to the Rio Earth Summit, deniers put out the Heidelberg Appeal, saying, “We are… worried… at the emergence of an irrational ideology which is opposed to scientific and industrial progress and impedes economic and social development.” Three years later came the Leipzig Declaration, which proclaimed, “There does not exist today a general scientific consensus about the importance of greenhouse warming from rising levels of carbon dioxide. On the contrary, most scientists now accept the fact that actual observations from earth satellites show no climate warming whatsoever.” Richard Lindzen signed both declarations.¹³

After its conference in March 2008, the Heartland Institute upheld the tradition by issuing a “Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change.” Among its conclusions were that

Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but rather a necessity for all life… assertions of a supposed “consensus” among climate experts are false… warmer weather is generally less harmful to life on Earth than colder… there is no convincing evidence that CO₂ emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change.… We recommend that world leaders reject the views expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as popular, but misguided works such as “An Inconvenient Truth” [and] that all taxes, regulations, and other interventions intended to reduce emissions of CO₂ be abandoned forthwith.¹⁴

As we will learn, scientists have long disproven each of the alleged statements of fact in that declaration. Moreover, since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore jointly won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, there was little chance that world leaders would reject their conclusions.

These declarations are most useful in revealing how the deniers operate. They

• Engage in publicity stunts designed to gain media attention and that promulgate disinformation.
• Repeat claims long after scientists have shown them to be false.
• Make assertions without presenting any evidence to back them up. Had a speaker at the AGU meeting said that carbon dioxide does not cause global warming, the audience would have demanded to see the evidence.
• Have no scientific findings that falsify global warming.
• Have opposed global warming for twenty years. True, back then, many scientists were also skeptical, but as the evidence mounted, they changed their minds. Deniers do not change their minds, a sure sign that they base their denial not on science, but on ideology. To paraphrase Lindzen, global warming denial has always been about politics, not science.

The 2008 statement is also useful in revealing the true motivation of organizations like the Heartland Institute: to prevent the use of “taxes, regulations, and other interventions” to reduce CO₂ emissions. The Heartland Institute may even have no particular beef with global warming; its objection is to taxes and government regulations that might crimp American corporations. This explains why the institute and likeminded groups consistently wind up on the side of corporations and opposing science.

Over the fall of ...