The Last Gasp of Climate Denial Groups

The headline in the Guardian says it all: "No longer taken seriously, we're seeing the last gasp of climate denial groups." Written by scientist and regular Guardian contributor, Dana Nuccitelli, explores the recent lecture given by "Lord" Matt Ridley, a somewhat journalist known for his misleading (to be kind) support of climate change denial lobbyists. Most specifically in this regard is the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), an anti-science climate denial policy lobbying organization in the UK.


Click on the link above to read Nuccitelli's debunking of Ridley's repetition of the usual denier talking points, all of which have been debunked over and over and over before.

In a nutshell, Ridley is wrong to claim that environmental predictions are "always exaggerated." The examples he gives weren't exaggerated (in fact, they were likely underestimated) AND they were corrected by taking appropriate policy action. We took responsibility for them and fixed them.

Ridley is also wrong to claim "model predictions have been consistently wrong." In fact, models have been remarkably accurate. If anything, they have underpredicted the rate and magnitude of man-made climate change.

Ridley is absolutely wrong to claim "the best evidence" indicates climate sensitivity is "relatively low." In fact, he's carefully, and dishonestly, cherry picked the handful of studies he likes and ignored all the majority of studies that he doesn't like.

Finally, Ridley is wrong again when he suggests that all the world's scientists for the last 100+ years are in on some grand conspiracy. Frankly, when you have to have global, multigenerational conspiracies to "explain" your position, you know you have no scientific evidence.

Again, these points are discussed in detail in Nuccitelli's excellent debunking.

Why was this talk even given?

But let's step back and explore the "last gasp" part of the title. The Ridley talk was given on the premises of the Royal Society, which is the UK's version of the National  Academy of Sciences. The obvious question is why would the Royal Society open up its conference facility to such a person as Matt Ridley, especially as he was there representing the GWPF lobbying organization? Many scientists asked this question as well, rightly concerned that the GWPF was attempting to garner some undue credibility by having the talk in such a prestigious location.

Like most scientific organizations, the Royal Society (RS) is underfunded and often rents out its conference rooms to outside groups. Once a contract is signed they can't really cancel the event without cause. Apparently the RS initially thought that since the science is unequivocal, having a "policy" oriented talk would focus on policy options for addressing the science.

Not surprisingly, that isn't what Ridley did. As usual for GWPF, he spent the majority of his lecture denying the science rather than proposing policy measures. That is par for the course for denial lobbyists, who prefer to deny the existence of reality instead of take responsibility for addressing it.

And so the "last gasp." Denial lobbyists have painted themselves into the corner of their own rhetoric. They've been denying the unequivocal science of man-made climate change for so long and with such clearly divorced-from-reality deception that they have no honest way of shifting to actual policy discussions. Given that their denial is so obviously dishonest, they have nothing left than to try stunts like this. "Ooh, what a coup. We're at the Royal Society. That will get us some credibility!"

Dana Nuccitelli's Guardian article shows the result is the opposite. Other than their ideological Facebook spammers, no one takes the denial lobbyists and their spokespeople seriously any more. The Paris climate agreement recently went into force earlier than expected because the nations of the world understand the necessity of dealing with the unequivocal science. Deniers are becoming more and more pathetic and alone in their denial.

Denial lobbying groups like GWPF, Heartland Institute, Cato Institute, George C. Marshall Institute, and all the other fossil fuel- and libertarian-funded lobbyists and their hired spokespeople have devolved into self-parody, much like, as Nuccitelli notes, the Trump-led Republican party in the United States.

A Consensus on Consensus

"Warming of the climate system is unequivocal." "Anthropogenic drivers...are extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century." 

These are the top line conclusions of the most recent IPCC Assessment Report 5, commonly known as AR5. The term "unequivocal" is defined as "leaving no doubt, unambiguous" (i.e., undeniably occurring). The term "extremely likely" is defined as "95-100% probability" of occurrence. Keep in mind that scientific conclusions are generally conservative (i.e., it's probably even worse).

There is a scientific consensus that the climate is warming. It's unequivocal. Humans are the dominant cause. These findings are undeniable.

Contrary to what deniers suggest, scientific consensus isn't some sort of hands-raised vote that goes on in some boardroom; it's the result of more than 100 years of scientific research published in peer-reviewed science journals. The nature of science is to always try to falsify assumptions, so when the data are so overwhelming that no doubt remains as to the overall conclusion, then that conclusion is seen to have reached consensus. Scientists are a skeptical bunch, so when the data demonstrate something this unequivocal it's considered a consensus. There is no denying it.

This scientific consensus has been demonstrated by several papers using a variety of metrics. And now a new paper, Consensus on consensus: A synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming (PDF), brings together the authors of seven of those earlier papers to demonstrate the scientific robustness of that consensus.

A good summary of the issue is presented by Dana Nuccitelli, a co-author of the paper, in The Guardian. This new study concludes:

1) Depending on exactly how you measure the expert consensus, it’s somewhere between 90% and 100% that agree humans are responsible for climate change, with most of our studies finding 97% consensus among publishing climate scientists.

2) The greater the climate expertise among those surveyed, the higher the consensus on human-caused global warming.

The previous papers all used different methods to assess consensus. This paper shows that despite the method used the results are all similar; the vast majority of climate scientists agree that more than 100 years of peer-reviewed science demonstrates that humans are warming the climate system. The details of the study can be found in the PDF above or online here.

Nuccitelli, and the paper itself, also delves into the work of Richard Tol, an economist associated with the UK policy lobbying firm, Global Warming Policy Foundation. While not a climate scientist, Tol has admitted that the scientific consensus is "indeed correct." This hasn't stopped him from vigorously pursuing his role with the lobbying firm to block policy action, spending substantial amounts of time trying to discredit the consensus he has already acknowledged. The current paper builds on previous critiques of Tol's work, identifies further fatal errors in his analysis, and unequivocally debunks his misrepresentations. Based on previous experience, no one should be surprised that denier attempts to deny the scientific consensus are error-filled (some so egregious it's difficult to accept they weren't intentional) and fail to stand up to scrutiny.

The scientific consensus, on the other hand, has stood up to intense scrutiny. As this new paper documents, no matter what method is used to determine consensus, the results always show something approaching unanimity. Climate change is happening and humans are the dominant cause.

Nuccitelli ends his Guardian article with the following, which seems an appropriate way to end this piece as well:

While the consensus may be an inconvenient truth for those who seek to obstruct and delay the implementation of global warming solutions, it's nevertheless an indisputable reality; one we'd be better off if people learned to accept.

The Irony of Climate Deniers Attacking Published Journal Articles

A new peer-reviewed paper was published recently in the scientific journal Theoretical and Applied Climatology. Its title is "Learning from Mistakes in Climate Research" and the objective is to survey recent "denier" papers, that is, the rare papers that reject the unequivocal scientific consensus that human activity is warming our climate system. The authors - seven climate scientists and science communicators from Norway, the Netherlands, the United States, the UK, and Australia - highlighted the errors in fact and logic common to the selected denier papers.

Not surprisingly, the denier lobbyists and their network of front groups and bloggers attacked the study. The lines of attack ignored the validity of the actual points being made and focused instead on its publishing history and the impact factor of the journal. These attacks are about as ironic as you can get given that deniers rarely even attempt to publish in actual scientific journals (preferring instead to "publish" opinion pieces in business blogs). The one journal they publish most in has an impact factor that is essentially non-existent. As the proverb goes, those who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

But it was rejected by other journals?

Deniers (on Facebook and other non-scientific venues, mainly by non-scientist ideologues and/or conspiracy theorists) are trying to denigrate the study by suggesting it was rejected by other journals. Their false conclusion is that if a paper is rejected by other journals it must somehow be wrong. That false conclusion shows an incredible ignorance of how scientific publishing works.

In previous posts I discussed how peer-review works (and how deniers try to abuse the process) so I won't repeat the basics here. Scientific journals reject thousands of papers every year based on factors that have nothing to do with whether the paper is good or bad. In all fields there are journals professionals in those fields consider the most prestigious, and so those professionals tend to submit their papers to the best journals first. That demand for space runs up against the obvious limitations of space each journal has to fill, so the most prestigious journals reject the vast majority of papers received solely on the basis of no room to print them. Journals may also reject papers because the topic doesn't fit the narrow scope of that particular journal.

In short, rejection in scientific journals is common, and expected.

The reason for the initial rejection of this particular paper is likely because it is an untraditional paper that doesn't fit the scope of most journals. Most climate studies collect data on temperature, sea level, ice thickness, or hundreds of other measurable factors, do statistics, and report the results. This paper is more of a survey of other papers selected because they represent the tiny percentage of papers rejecting the unequivocal science. The goal was to see if there were commonalities in their methods or logic. There are limitations of such a survey (as there are will all studies), and the authors acknowledge those limitations. The observations they make may be incomplete because the survey didn't look at all denier papers, but they are valid.

The irony here is that deniers rarely publish scientific papers, and when they try to publish they often are rejected. Those rejections may include the same factors as above, but they also include rejection based on lack of veracity of the data they present and the logic used to derive conclusions. As the "Learning from Mistakes" paper highlights, even the rare denier papers that do make it through the publication process have serious flaws that invalidate their conclusions. In fact, denier conclusions often don't even agree with the data they present in their own paper, never mind with reality.

But the journal has a low "impact factor?"

These same deniers have suggested that the journal the paper was published in has a "low impact factor." They falsely conclude from this that the journal is not to be trusted. That's silly, and inaccurate.

To begin with, the journal in which this paper was ultimately published, Theoretical and Applied Climatology, is put out by Springer Science, a renowned publishing company in business since 1842. The journal is a continuation of journals that have been published since 1949. In recent years the journal has evolved into an Open Access format, that is, the papers are available in full as PDFs for free to the public.

An "Impact Factor" is a measure of the average number of citations of recent articles, that is, how often are those articles cited by other authors in newer papers. It's a rather arbitrary metric with many criticisms, and there are other metrics that are also used. It's use is based on the assumption that papers that are cited more are somehow more important, but impact factors tend to be biased towards journals that publish review articles (people cite review articles instead of each individual study reviewed) and journals that publish cutting edge news (like Science and Nature). The more specialized the journal, the fewer opportunities there are for citing it.

The reason deniers have focused on this one metric is because they think it allows them to dismiss the paper without having to address any of its points. That, and the fact that the denier lobbyists sent word out via their blogging networks to tell everyone to focus on it.

The most recent impact factor for Theoretical and Applied Climatology in 2014 was 2.015. This falls within the range of most climate journals.

Not surprisingly, for the rare attempts by deniers to publish, their preferred journal, Energy & Environment, had an impact factor of 0.319, which ranked it 90th out of 93 journals in its category. Hardly something to brag about, especially since its editor admitted to "following her political agenda" in choosing the papers to publish (mostly from a small group of deniers). Of course, deniers' favorite platform for "publishing," that is, blogs, have zero impact factor because they aren't peer-reviewed at all. Which is why virtually everything in denier blogs is wrong.

There are more instances of denier ignorance and double standards demonstrating they don't understand most of what they parrot from their denier blogs. I've cataloged many of them on this page under Exposing Climate Denialism.

The main goal of the denier lobbyists and their blogger network (including Facebook trolls) is to deflect from the valid points being made in the journal article "Learning from Mistakes in Climate Research." Those "mistakes" made by deniers may be intentional, as the history of people like Willie Soon and Richard Lindzen suggest. They include "cherry picking," "curve-fitting," and other factual and logical errors like drawing conclusions that aren't even supported by the data they themselves present. This likely happens because they start with the conclusions they want and try to force-fit the cherry picked data to support it.

There's a word for that.

Take the time to read the article as it important to read what the denier lobbyists have tried to hide from the public. Dana Nuccitelli, one of the co-authors on the paper and a regular contributor to the Guardian, has provided a nice summary of their findings. Because the journal is open access you can download the full paper from their website and read it yourself. And here is the PDF copy.

Debunking the Rare Published Climate Denier Paper - Monckton edition

Climate deniers rarely publish papers in scientific journals for the simple reason that they rarely do actual research. Instead, deniers prefer to write Op-Eds in business magazines and newspapers, or offer themselves as pundits on cable media, or just write on blogs. None of these is peer-reviewed, so they can say pretty much anything they want. In rare cases, however, deniers will publish in a peer-reviewed journal. When they do, the published work never stands up to scrutiny. Never.

One recent denier paper caused an uproar because it claimed to overturn decades of actual climate science research, specifically arguing that climate models "run hot," that is, that models show greater future warming than warranted. To no one's surprise, the paper has now been soundly debunked. While once again deniers' claims are found to be false, the episode provides a good illustration for people who want to assess the veracity of denier claims.

First, assess the scientific backgrounds of the authors of the study. The denier study is authored by Christopher Monckton, Willie Soon, David Legates, and William Briggs.

Monckton is not a scientist, and worse, has been repeatedly found to have lied about what scientists and their studies say. He also has been told by the British House of Lords to stop referring to himself as a member (he isn't one).

Soon is an aerospace engineer with a long history of providing denier "deliverables," i.e., publications that meet the needs of his fossil fuel funders. He has co-authored at least three papers that have misrepresented the science.

Legates is a geography professor who often co-authors papers with Willie Soon and other climate deniers.

Briggs somewhat ridiculously calls himself as "statistician to the stars." [Or perhaps, "numerologist to the stars."]

All of these authors are also affiliated with various climate denial lobbying organizations such as the Heartland Institute. None of them does original climate science research.

Second, assess the quality of the journal. As noted in an earlier post, quality standards in journals can vary. In every field there are journals that are considered to be preeminent, and other journals that are considered second tier. The better journals tend to be more stringent in their peer-review process since they normally receive many more submissions than they have room to publish. The journal for the Monckton et al. paper is a new Chinese journal called Science Bulletin, which most climate scientists had never heard of prior to the right wing promotion of the Monckton et al. paper. That doesn't necessarily mean it is a bad journal, but it does suggest that Monckton and his co-authors (and their corporate promoters) had to search around for a journal whose standards were low enough to allow publication. Deniers, again on the rare occasions that they publish in a journal at all, generally find that only obscure or lower tier journals with limited or no peer-review standards will allow them to pass the first step in the review process. This is why so many denier papers are published in the British policy journal E&E, which is specifically focused on publishing denier papers that can't pass basic peer-review.

Third, assess the quality of the paper. Aye, there's the rub (to paraphrase Hamlet). Whereas it's difficult enough for the public to adequately assess the authors and the journals, it's even more improbable that the public can assess the veracity of the science supposedly being presented.

This last point is worthy of elaboration. Deniers count on the public not being able to evaluate the science. After all, climate scientists, like other professionals, spend many years in specialized education and work experience learning how to do research and evaluate the research of others. That is why deniers so rabidly use their lobbying organizations and paid bloggers to seed the internet with their talking points, knowing that the ideologues will plagiarize and saturate the blogosphere before the paper can be debunked, which it is every single time.

Fourth, assess whether the paper has withstood scientific scrutiny. Whenever a single paper claims to overturn the state-of-the-science based on 100+ years and 100,000+ papers, it's a good bet that the single paper is wrong. Sure, single papers can sometimes catch things others missed, but to overturn that much science it will take thousands of other studies confirming that single paper before we can be assured of its veracity. So if a paper makes what appear to be outrageous claims, search to find out if scientists have debunked it already. While the rebuttal paper described in Nuccitelli's article will invariably take some time to come out, there usually is some discussion of papers on various blogs. Which gets us to the last point.

Fifth, assess the trends of the authors and organizations involved. In other words, know who can - and cannot - be trusted to provide honest information. The public needs to make an effort to be informed about who are the paid deniers and the lobbying organizations that support them. Given that these deniers have long histories of misrepresenting the science, the public can safely assume that anything and everything these people and groups produce will be false. In this case, all four denier authors are from the usual small cast of deniers who constantly offer up unsupportable opinions. All four are associated with denier lobbyists. And the methods of the paper clearly show that they concocted model inputs that are contradicted by actual data and evidence. No wonder their results are unsupportable - they ignored real data and just make stuff up.

It's critical that the public knows who are scientists and who are lobbyist spokespeople. All four authors of this particular paper more close resemble spokespeople than scientists. If they want to be scientists then they have to do actual research and produce actual scientific papers that stand up to scrutiny, just like all legitimate scientists have to do. Alas, they don't. Nothing they have produced ever stands up to even the slightest scrutiny. And it isn't just a case of being wrong, it's a case of consistently misrepresenting the science and intentionally cherry picking the information to reach a desired conclusion. Every single time.

Since the public isn't likely to start reading highly technical scientific journal articles directly, it's important to learn which sources are reliable and which are not. 

I'll have more on the methods of real scientists vs deniers in future Exposing Climate Denialism posts.

Why Climate Deniers Desperately Need "The Pause" in Warming; And Why The Pause is not a Pause

A new article by scientists Dana Nuccitelli and Michael Mann reiterates the fact that the climate system continues to warm. Their opening line begins "over the past 17 years, the Earth has warmed rapidly." This continued rapid warming is borne out by the overwhelming science during the period climate deniers often claim there to have been a stoppage in warming (and even more bizarrely, a "cooling").

The climate is warming rapidly, so how can climate deniers claim it isn't?

Nuccitelli and Mann explain it quite nicely in their article, which I urge you to read in full. To begin with, deniers always ignore all the data sets except their preferred single set of satellite data, which deniers claim shows cooling. With that in mind, Nuccitelli and Mann note:

First of all, it is wrong: the satellite data clearly show ongoing warming over the past two decades.

Secondly, the satellite data in question only estimate the temperature of the atmosphere above Earth's surface. We, and most other living things, reside on Earth's surface, and the data tell us that surface warming continues unabated.

Finally, warming of the atmosphere accounts for only about two per cent of overall global warming; more than 90 per cent goes into heating of the surface and the oceans. That heating contributes to the melting of the ice sheets, and the acceleration of global sea level rise.

Clearly the "pause" is not a pause at all. One of the best ways to see the fallacy of deniers claiming a pause is to look at the following global land-ocean temperature record:

[See larger]

As is evident to everyone, temperatures vary from year to year due to short-term influences like El Nino and La Nina events, volcanic action, aerosols, and natural variability. Just as evident to everyone is that the overall trend is one of warming. There are short periods of time where the rate of warming is slower or faster, and even a period where warming seemed to have stopped (this was a temporary condition when toxic aerosols from unregulated air pollution were masking the warming effects of CO2), but clearly the trend is warming.

In short, it's clear human activity (mostly burning of fossil fuels) is warming the climate system. The rate varies due to short-term influences, but the main driver of the warming is increased CO2 in the atmosphere. The science on this is unequivocal (i.e., clear and undeniable). In recent years, even more of the warming has been going into the oceans (where most of it goes anyway) as the lack of El Nino, the recurring La Ninas, the increased volcanic activity, and the increased aerosol emissions from rapidly growing China all have contributed to a slower rate of increase in the warming of the atmosphere. That heat is still there; it's just that more of it is in the oceans. This is temporary. El Nino's return and other indicators helped 2014 become the hottest year on record, and 2015 is already on pace to surpass that record. The evidence supports the idea that the rate of warming is actually increasing, and will likely speed up rapidly.

So why do climate deniers keep insisting that "the pause" means climate change isn't happening or has stopped?

Because they have no science to back up their denial. If you look at the history of climate denial you'll see deniers hop, skip, and jump from one false interpretation to another. They must ignore the vast majority of data, extract one factoid, and create an entire fictitious story line that is contradicted by the actual truth. That is why you see deniers argue that a single paper is the "death knell" for man-made climate change, only to have the author of any legitimate study come out to explain it does no such thing. Deniers must ignore the science and fabricate conclusions that are divorced from reality. And that's what they do every single time.

Which begs the question, how do scientists and the honest public deal with climate denial? I'll have more on that in future posts, but the first thing that scientists can do is be careful about adopting the language of denial lobbyists. The "pause" or "hiatus" language is denial language. It was created by lobbyists to falsely throw doubt on the continued warming. As denial lobbyists intended, the denialosphere of paid, ideological, and conspiratorial bloggers quickly saturated the internet with the two misnomers. That was to be expected. But scientists started using the terms in their own blogs and conversations, thus playing into the lobbyist's intended deception.

Instead, scientists should have clearly explained that short-term influences routinely cause short-term variations and that the overall trend continued. Perhaps a more accurate term should have been used by scientists ("faux pause" was belatedly adopted by some climate scientists, but even that mimes the lobbyist-preferred misdirection). The problem here is that scientists are not always very good at communicating with the public, whereas lobbyists have ample experience in that regard since the very job of lobbyists is to manipulate public opinion and provide cover for political allies. While I can't recommend scientists become more political, I can recommend scientists spend more time reaching out to the public and communicating the science accurately.

In that regard, there is much more work that needs to be done.



Source of graphic: "Warming since 1880 yearly" by DHeyward - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Warming_since_1880_yearly.jpg#/media/File:Warming_since_1880_yearly.jpg

How to Talk to Climate Deniers

Talking to climate deniers can be a difficult experience. And yet, scientists - and the public - must talk to deniers. Well, sometimes. The first step in any interaction with climate deniers is determining whether it is worth the time. Many times it simply is not. Deniers' own willful ignorance can in itself demonstrate to anyone watching the deniers' lack of veracity. For these deniers, which includes your typical internet trolls, interaction is what they crave, no matter how ignorant, obnoxious, and often, downright dishonest, they demonstrate themselves to be. Exploiting any interaction gives these folks the self-validation their psyche demands. They can be ignored.

But sometimes climate deniers spread falsehoods that aren't so easily recognized as such by passing readers or listeners. It is to these deniers that scientist Michael Raupach suggests climate scientists need to speak, though perhaps not in direct "debate." What Raupach really means is that scientists should be correcting the record and ensuring the public gets accurate climate science, not the falsehoods so often repeated by denialist groups. In a speech to the Australian Academy of Science, Raupach "called on his colleagues not to sit on the sidelines of the political debate about global warming and other environmental issues, given the evidence they present asks society to consider fundamental changes."


Invariably, it is the conservatives (or more accurately, the extreme political wing who call themselves conservatives but who are really more of reality-deniers) who ignore the science in favor of their rehearsed talking points. So how does one convince ideologically motivated people to stop denying the science and instead take responsibility for dealing with it?

Dana Nuccitelli, writing in the Guardian, says that "facts can convince conservatives about global warming - sometimes." He notes that in new research led by Sophie Guy, "across the participants as a whole,

People who were knowledgeable about climate change believed more strongly that it is happening, that it is being caused by human activities, and that it has negative consequences than those with less knowledge."

And also,  

"conservatives of a libertarian flavor were more likely to accept that global warming is happening when they had a better understanding of the climate. This indicates that some conservatives are persuadable; that information, evidence, and facts can potentially break through their ideological filter."

And yet, certain conservatives will actually be less persuaded by more information because they convince themselves they know better than actual climate scientists. This is the basis for the concept, "Confidence of the Dumb."

Science writer Chris Mooney notes another study in which the ample us of pie charts - not bar graphs, not data tables, not line charts, but pie charts - may be the best way to convince conservatives that man-made global warming is real and that debate should be focused on which policy options provide the best strategies for dealing with the science. Mooney argues that this technique emphasizes one fo the best ways of communicating anything - "You keep it simple, and you show pretty pictures."

Climate scientists would be wise to take that advice.

[Note: Pie chart from Skeptical Science]