Guest post by Russell Cook
Lewandowsky et. al’s faulty methodology is just one of the paper’s problems; like many other ‘skeptic’ motivation analyses, its central premise is unproven and relies on a SINGLE highly questionable source.
Experts like Steve McIntyre pore over the manner in which the Lewandowsky paper’s survey was conducted. But there is another basic problem with this paper and others essentially similar to it, where a collective analysis proposes to explain why anyone would deny the settled science of global warming. Such papers operate under a false premise, namely that analysis is needed because the science is settled and skeptic scientists – who arguably are the only people qualified in this issue to offer science assessment opposition that might be valid – are corrupt.
No need to go any farther into the Lewandowsky paper than its first page to see this, where it says in the top paragraph that “More than 90% of climate scientists agree that the global climate is changing largely due to human CO2 emissions”, followed with a statement in the second paragraph that researchers “in history and sociology frequently cite the ‘manufacture of doubt’ by vested interests and political groups….”
This latter reference is in regard to the so-called ‘lies’ that skeptic scientists are said to be spreading via associations with right-wing think tanks. Immediately following each statement are citations from people who’ve made basically the same statements over many years: IPCC scientist Stephen Schneider and researchers William Freudenburg, Aaron McCright, Riley Dunlap, Chris Mooney, and Naomi Oreskes. A less evident but still troubling glimpse into this overall problem is the citation on pg 4 of Max Boykoff in regard to “the scientific consensus on climate change is often misrepresented in the media” and on pg 5 of Myanna Lahsen in support of the assertion that there is are “notions of a conspiracy among [skeptic] scientists.”
The core problem is the premise that skeptic scientists should be ignored because they are corrupt. The question is, who do these people rely on to prove this accusation? Rummage through any of the above individuals’ variety of writings and presentations, and a disturbing single source ultimately emerges:
- William R. Freudenburg, AAAS 2010 Annual Meeting, February 22, 2010, Organizer: Riley E. Dunlap, Discussants: Stephen H. Schneider, Naomi Oreskes, Speakers: Myanna Lahsen, Maxwell T. Boykoff, William R. Freudenburg,Understanding Climate-Change Skepticism: Its Sources and Strategies“(transcript here): “The Heartland Institute is one of the right-wing think-tanks that Riley [Dunlap] talked about, asking ‘can 19,000 scientists be wrong?’ Number one, that’s a very loose definition of ‘scientists’ that they use. And number two, a journalist Ross Gelbspan almost 15 years ago started saying ‘they sure can be’. What we’ve got here is a persistent and well funded campaign of denial.” (Note: At the above AAAS presentation, Naomi Oreskes said “the US coal industry launched a half million-dollar campaign … to challenge the scientific evidence regarding global warming….The number one point of this strategy was to reposition global warming as theory, not fact.”)
- Naomi Oreskes, 2007 PowerPoint Presentation “You Can Argue with the Facts: The Denial of Global Warming”, “Reposition global warming as theory not fact”, Ross Gelbspan, Boiling Point, 51-52
- Chris Mooney, “The Republican War on Science” 2007 book: “…climatologist Patrick Michaels, a recipient of substantial energy industry funding” … End note 62 “Michaels’s industry ties are documented in Gelbspan, The Heat is On”
- Chris Mooney, “Is Climate Denial Corporate Driven, or Ideological?” Desmogblog, 1/19/11: “Recently, I’ve been reading some research by Riley Dunlap, a sociologist at Oklahoma State University who collaborates frequently with Aaron McCright, another sociologist at Michigan State. Together, they’ve done penetrating work on the right wing resistance to climate change science in the US…” (Note: Joe Romm stated in 2008, “Ross Gelbspan, whose defining books Boiling Point and The Heat is On were a big part of the inspiration for starting the DeSmogBlog…”)
- Riley E. Dunlap and Aaron M. McCright, Pg 144 Chapter 10, Organized Climate Change Denial 2011 book: “The blows have been struck by a well-funded, highly complex, and relatively coordinated ‘denial machine’ (Begley 2007)” (Note, this is the Sharon Begley Newsweek article in which she quoted without citation, “….the Information Council on the Environment. ICE’s game plan called for enlisting greenhouse doubters to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” ”)
- And; Dunlap / McCright, Pg 148: ” …the fossil fuels industry pioneered the charge against climate science and policy making. (Begley 2007; Gelbspan 1997; Goodell 2007)” (Note, the latter is Jeff Goodell’s book “Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy” in which he said, “Western Fuels was one of the key backers of the Information Council on the Environment, a front group whose explicit purpose, according to Gelbspan, was to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact”)
- Jules Boykoff and Maxwell Boykoff, FAIR, November/December 2004 “Journalistic Balance as Global Warming Bias”: “In terms of the global warming story, “balance” may allow skeptics—many of them funded by carbon-based industry interests—to be frequently consulted and quoted in news reports on climate change. Ross Gelbspan … charges in his books The Heat Is On and Boiling Point that a failed application of the ethical standard of balanced reporting on issues of fact has contributed to inadequate U.S. press coverage of global warming”
- Jules Boykoff and Maxwell Boykoff, “Balance as Bias: Global Warming and the U.S. Prestige Press’ ”: …a small group of influential spokespeople and scientists emerged in the news to refute these [IPCC] findings (Gelbspan, 1998; Leggett, 2001; Schneider, 2001)” (Note, the Leggett citation is of Greenpeace’s Jeremy Leggett’s 2001 book “The carbon war: global warming and the end of the oil era” in which his acknowledgements section says, “to Ross Gelbspan for editorial assistance and for deploying his skills as an investigative journalist…” and where he says on pg 162, “Ross Gelbspan, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist… had been researching the carbon club’s dissidents for more than three years.”)
- Myanna Lahsen, “Chapter 5, The Detection and Attribution of Conspiracies: The Controversy Over Chapter 8” 1999, Pg 116: “Oil and coal companies have spent millions of dollars to hire public relations groups to orchestrate such efforts as well as aggressive media campaigns seeking to undermine public concern about global warming (Gelbspan 1995; 1997). An early example of such campaigns was the Information Council for the Environment (ICE)”
- Stephen Schneider (& Richard Wolfson), “Chapter 1, Understanding Climate Science”, 2002 PDF file, pdf’s pg 41, “A concerted effort by a handful of climate ‘contrarians’ or ‘greenhouse skeptics’—scientists who do not share the views of most climate scientists—has kept the ‘debate’ on global warming very much in public view.22” … End note 22 “Gelbspan, R., 2000: The Heat Is On”
- And; pdf’s pg 46: “The amplified influence of these “greenhouse skeptics,” and their close ties to the fossil-fuel industry, are well documented by journalist Ross Gelbspan in his book The Heat Is On.”
- Stephen Schneider, “Laboratory earth: the planetary gamble we can’t afford to lose” January 1997, pg 160: “For an exposé of a number of prime “contrarians” and their supporters, see R. Gelbspan, Dec. 1995. The heat is on. Harpers 35. Gelbspan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.” (Note: Gelbspan never won a Pulitzer)
I could go on at length, and readers here are likely to find other connections I’ve missed, along with related problems which would take multiple articles to describe, such as the Boykoff situation I wrote about last June. But my point is the unmistakeable thread throughout all of this. It is eerily too easy to spot Ross Gelbspan’s associations with practically any given person who claims skeptic scientists are corrupt.
And Gelbspan, as I’ve pointed out earlier, has never proven he has any evidence to support his accusation that skeptic scientists are paid to manufacture doubt about man-caused global warming.
It certainly appears that what we have instead is around two decades of efforts by enviro-activists to manufacture doubt about the credibility of the skeptics. So, how many more attempts to smear skeptics can be thrown on this pile before the whole thing collapses?
Russell Cook’s collection of writings on this issue can be seen at “The ’96-to-present smear of skeptic scientists.” You may also follow him at Twitter via @questionAGW
[Duplicated text removed. Robt]
Is there any documentation anywhere that lists oil, gas and coal’s spending on climate related topics?
PS. Story body repeat twice
This Gelbspan character sure is hamming it up as a beefy sophisticate:
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/files/content/portraits/ross_gelbspan.jpg
Great article. The warmists just cannot understand that the majority of us realists believe the following.
1. There has been warming since 1850, but mainly due to the fact of coming out of the LIA.
2. CO2 does cause some warming up to a point.
3. A 760 ppm of CO2 will not cause CAGW as there is just as much chance of a negative feed back as there is positive.
4. That the land based temperature data has been tampered with.
5. That we receive very little funding compared to them.
One needs to understand that these warmists are always “flipping” it is they who are the ones who have the belief system of conspiracy theory NOT US.
My bet is Lewandowsky (Mr WC) really knows very little of the science of global warming and that most people posting on WUWT know a lot more than he does.
Thank god for WUWT and all the other hard working realists.
Psychoanalyzing skeptics? Much better than providing predictions that actually allow testing of the theory instead of some disaster with a moving target 50 to 100 years in the future, so no one alive can validate the theory. I became a bit of a skeptic with the “panic” of the next ice age, which was going to happen in a couple of years. I distrusted climate science when we started getting barraged with disaster scenarios in science by press release. Each disaster prediction was worse than the last and they even seemed to be coordinated. One announcement of impending doom didn’t step on another.
Oh, and the AGW types want me to believe that they can control the climate. No reason to be skeptical about that.
I fervently hope that there really is a very well-funded sceptic conspiracy out there somewhere. And that it will soon take notice of my efforts here and elsewhere and begin to hose em down with oodles of lovely green and folding.
But sadly, reality strikes and both propositions seem highly unlikely.
The article raises an interesting point though. Even if there were such a conspiracy, how would that invalidate the points that sceptics raise? It is a long time ago since Einstein was not taken seriously because he had some Jewish background. It was his science that won through. His ideas made good sense and Mother Nature obviously agreed with him because through experiment we can see that he was right.
It made as much scientific sense to say ‘Einstein must be wrong because he is Jewish’ as it does for Mann to say ‘Any criticism of my work can be ignored because it comes from people who I think are paid by a Big Oil Denier Conspiracy’. And it is extremely unscientific of ‘the community’ to let him and his cronies get away with such errant vacuous tosh.
This appears to be posted twice, Anthony.
The issue Lewandowsky faces, as with the rest of the academic dross who hang on the outside of the climate science gravy train, is that real world data show the apocalyptic predictions of Hansenkoism are wrong. These people have two choices: accept ‘the team’ got it wrong or attack those pointing out these serious scientific mistakes.
Pointman has written about this: http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2012/09/07/an-assessment-of-current-alarmist-propaganda/
‘The so-called psychological studies, I find interesting and encouraging for a number of reasons. Politically, it’s the usual stereotyping of the opposition, a way of dehumanising, and therefore writing off their influence as insignificant…..
The tone and intensity of these studies is becoming increasingly aggressive. The word denier is now appearing in published papers and the vileness of the stereotypes we’re accused of being, is getting worse…….They’re fighting a losing battle with public opinion and they know it. Their support is melting away more rapidly every day and most frighteningly, they can’t seem to find a way of stopping that, never mind slowing it down.’
To put loons like Lewandowsky out of their misery, someone needs to point out why ‘the team’ got it so wrong. It’s very simple. Read paper after paper and you see a mass scientific blindness, e.g.: http://forecast.uchicago.edu/archer.ch4.greenhouse_gases.pdf
‘The spectrum of the light leaving the earth going into space ranges between two different blackbody spectra, a warmer one of about 270 K, and a colder one from about 220 K.
……The most pronounced of these absorption bands, comes from the bending vibration of CO2. Light of this intensity that shines from the surface of the earth is absorbed by the CO2 in the atmosphere (Figure 4-4). The CO2 in the atmosphere then radiates its own light at this frequency…..
Other parts of the spectrum, most notably the broad smooth part around 1000 cycles/cm, follow a warmer blackbody spectrum. These come directly from the ground.’
So, the author assumes the Earth emits IR as if it were an isolated black body in a vacuum, totally false. He then says CO2 IR from the surface is absorbed in the lower atmosphere then re-radiated at TOA where it is much colder.
In reality very little CO2 IR can be emitted from the earth’s surface because as with all other GHGs, identical wavelength thermal radiation from the lower atmosphere turns it off, a well-established principle of radiant heat transfer. If not true, there could never be radiative equilibrium – think about it [it’s called Prevost Exchange]
This is a failure to understand that TOA attenuation of CO2-IR is self-absorption of thermal IR, nothing to do with what happens at the bottom of the atmosphere. The whole subject was constructed on a fake premise. It increases IR absorption by a factor of 5. Each failed prediction derives from this basic mistake.
Lunatics like Lewandowsky must accept they were conned by Hansen, Trenberth, Houghton etc. who failed to understand this most basic science. Engineers understand it because we measure such effects every day. This is science failure on an heroic scale.
Nothing like the smell of McCarthyism in the moring
This isn’t done out of ignorance, it’s done out of purposeful intent. It’s the only answer they have, as they can NOT debate the science itself. It’s always amazed me when people shout at the top of their lungs that skeptics are funded by big oil, with no proof, while they rake in billions in grant money.
JimB
Looks like you’ve duplicated a bunch of text.
Those who think that it would commit “the genetic (origin-tainted) fallacy.” (A logical fallacy.)
Well put. The thought crossed my mind when reading the questionnaire whether those who wrote it might themselves be believers in silly conspiracy theories. It would be an enjoyable diversion to review a “counter questionnaire” listing some favorite beliefs (lacking robust science and/or belying strong ideological bias) promulgated by the warmist/alarmist crowd.
Note also typo on next to last line in Par. 3: “…the assertion that there is are…” (one too many verb conjugations).
Kurt in Switzerland
P.S. Similar topic discussed at Revkin’s blog:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/obama-and-romney-weigh-in-on-science-questions/?comments#permid=38
Latimer Alder says:
September 11, 2012 at 4:13 am
“It is a long time ago since Einstein was not taken seriously because he had some Jewish background. It was his science that won through. His ideas made good sense and Mother Nature obviously agreed with him because through experiment we can see that he was right.”
Let’s not forget that, after all these years and all the confirmations, it still is called the Theory of Relativity. Do these “scientists” really think that CAGW is more settled than Relativity?!
Prompted by today’s date I wonder why the 9/11 conspiracy theory was not included in the survey since it is one of the most current of the grand conspiracies.
Could it be because Lewandowsky was aware of polling in 2007 which showed that 35% of USA Democrats believed Bush knew about the attack in advance and another 26 percent were not sure, leaving less than 40 percent of Democrats who believed Bush was not involved.
This same demographic contains the most fervent believers in CAGW.
Wouldn’t want to muddy up the desired result, would we?
Or perhaps Lewandowsky is a truther?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polls_about_9/11_conspiracy_theories
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings.
After reading through all the quotes I got to:
“Note: Gelbspan never won a Pulitzer”
And spat my tea on the keyboard. The Pulitzer was a running theme appeal to authority.
Googling to factcheck…
Even if some coal company paid a few hundred thousand dollars to half a dozen people a generation ago for a study, so what? If so little money pollutes an entire field of study forever, what does tens of billions of dollars per year from government agencies being spent now do to the Warmist position?
PS: The original post is shown twice.
http://www.pulitzer.org/faceted_search/results/Gelbspan
“Search: gelbspan
Your search yielded no results”
OMG thats hysterical.
Had Lewandowsky et al even pretended at conducting a scientific study / survey – the very first bias they would have removed…is themselves.
There is no objective way to study opposing views, when one allows personal subjective views to taint the survey pool.
Any serious objective study would have farmed the polling and survey questions out to an independent third party….removing oneself as far from charges of improprieties.
For a true accounting……Never hire a fox to count the hens.
I would love to see a survey of AGW proponents/believers/non-skeptics and their persistent belief in the “Big Oil” conspiracy to undermine AGW. Also, we could survey their beliefs in support for socialism, redistrubution of wealth, belief in science as consensus, deference to authority, etc. I’d really love to see if they believe the ends justifies the means, their support for post-normal-science and science v. advocacy.
” I have oil money?” – h/t Otto.
*** MODERATORS ***
the text after first “@questionAGW” is the same article repeated again.
[Fixed, thanks. ~mod]
Following the money is generally used to ascertain motivation for political actions, such as why politicians vote a certain way. There is some evidence that money is motivating and this could apply to science. However, this does NOT apply to the actual truth or falsity of a theory. It only applies to the motive of the researcher and the possibility that their research is slanted. This may alert people to the need for verification of the results and certainly more testing, but it does not tell us if climate change is really happening. Wind turbine manufacturers can pay for a study showing wind is perfect, coal can do the same and conclude wind turbines are very bad. Science settles this with assessing the data and methods in both studies and looking for errors in the research. More studies are done if needed. Science is about the data. We need to get people to understand that while there are motivations for slanting research, you don’t resolve them by announcing “Coal paid for that study so it is wrong.” You review the data and decide if the study is flawed. Accusations about motive may move you to question a study, but the accusations have no actual relation to the truth of the study. Data is independent of speaker and funding.
It may be nothing at all, or at least very little, but a few lines from Pielke Jr.’s correspondence with Lewandowsky’s colleague Hanich, found in this Andrew Bolt article, may speak volumes (they do to me) about how the ridiculous and meretricious ‘survey’ was actually conducted and manipulated:
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/lewandowsky_was_warned_his_survey_was_no_good/
Hanich:
“You have raised a very valid point. We are aware of methodological issues, one of which is dealing with repeated replies.
When we published the surveys, we had two options:
a) Use the provision offered by the hosting company to block repeated replies using IP addresses. This, however, will block legitimate use of the same computer, such as in our laboratory, where numerous participants use the same PCs. ”
I have an image of many grad and doctoral students, along with the post-docs and junior faculty, busy for days on end, repeatedly ‘taking the survey’ and brown-nosing their seniors. I wonder …..
(posted also on the Daily Lew thread)
The alarmists themselves are the biggest conspiracy theorists on the planet !
Anyone that disagrees with them is being paid by big oil even me.
This is exactly how the media fact-checkers work in America. Often the source is a blog or column. The fact-checkers don’t even seem to try to verify the fact-checks themselves, but just pass on what they read elsewhere.
The obvious connection is:
At an AAAAAAAAAAS convention, they all acted like…
End of discussion.
The good thing about these warmists is that by constant repetition of transparent lies they teach the rest of us to recognize chicanery. The bad thing is that we also learn that lying is acceptable.
I decided the whole thing was too Lewdicrous to comment on seriously, so here’s my take.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/09/11/lewd-lew-and-aggie-w-a-failed-romance/
It is not just that warmistas believe in conspiracies in the form of the “oil-funded denial machine” (when ironically there is proof of conspiracy in the Climategate emails) but that they are gullible. For example, not batting an eye about 100 feet of sea level rise when it is currently rising by mm, or claiming that ice sheets the size of the USA can “slide” into the ocean, or that shutting down all power plants is somehow a feasible option (Hansen), or that wind power does not destabilize the grid, or that we are currently experiencing massive climate disruption when the data say “no trend” or……just willing to believe anything at all that fits the doom meme.
Can someone ask Mr Lewandowsky (or whatever his name is);
Had the UN / IPCC, M. Mann, J. Hansen et all, and your own Govt. NOT started campaigning or mentioning anything about cAGW / Climate Change, would you yourself have noticed any difference in the Earths climate today?
I’m more interested in the motivations behind the manufacture of fear, than the manufacture of doubt. I think I know the answer, control.
A study in mass psychological projection. We (unconsciously or otherwise) know we’re corrupt, so we’ll accuse anyone objecting to us of corruption.
The really disturbing aspect of this saga is not Lewandowsky’s foul deed. That’s to be expected from the warmist camp. It’s the fact that it has started to gain traction. It’s penetrated the outer ring of the main stream media and been reported in the Blaze, at Huffington Post, and on MSNBC’s website. Mann, Gleick, and Lewandowsky can spew any nonsense they want because academia and the media cloak them in credibility, truth be damned. Look at the lunacy of the “97% of all climate scientists agree” meme. It’s obvious rubbish and accepted, ironclad fact for thousands around the globe.
I was reminded of the fact yesterday while watching the twitter storm over Mitt Romney’s “my family owned slaves” comment. What, you say? A news satire site used a fake Romney quote in a humorous story and bingo! thousands of tweets go out touting it as real. The problem is that you can’t convince the ones condemning Romney that the quote is fake! How do you get around the two separate realities that have developed?
http://twitchy.com/2012/09/09/left-falls-for-fake-romney-quote-i-can-relate-to-black-people-my-ancestors-once-owned-slaves/
I think the single biggest problem is Lewandowsky assumes the Theory of Global Warming to be an absolute truth while the IPCC itself say only that it is probable – Supposedly 90% or so. So therefore so-called denial of the science can’t be a conspiracy since there is a finite probability of it being Correct. That it there is a 10% Chance that the 75/77 scientists that agreed to the consensus of Global warming are wrong. Thus it is perfectly reasonable to accept the possibility of them being simply wrong – no conspiracy to do anything required.
Personally I don’t see any conspiracy, just some racketeering and profit making on the climate change Grant Money racket. Inducements to deliver a predetermined outcome in order to deceive the investor. Classic organised crime stuff.
Why haven’t the emails from Climategate been analyzed for insight as to the myriad psychological disorders revealed there?
… More than 90% of climate scientists agree that the global climate is changing largely due to human CO2 emissions …
Funny, this. This means that 10% of climate scientists do NOT agree. So the skeptics agree with the 10%: this group, minority that it is, still has the respect of the other climate scientists, does it not? Or do the warmists believe that 10% of climate scientists also believe that NASA faked the moon landing?
Who are the nuts? The ones who disagree, or just the ones who agree with those who disagree?
There is so little thinking-through in the climate dispute. A university education does not a thinking man make, just one who knows stuff.
Most unfortunately, the Globe and Mail is providing uncritical publicity for Lewandowsky: Social Studies.
Anyone know Michael Kesterton personally–it would be good to set him straight.
AlecM says:
September 11, 2012 at 4:33 am
“In reality very little CO2 IR can be emitted from the earth’s surface because as with all other GHGs, identical wavelength thermal radiation from the lower atmosphere turns it off, a well-established principle of radiant heat transfer. If not true, there could never be radiative equilibrium – think about it [it’s called Prevost Exchange]”
See also Kirchhoff’s Law of Thermal Radiation. Recently I pointed a warmist to an old WUWT post by Tom Vonk about that. He refused to read it, saying “WUWT has never changed the science.” I told him Kirchhoff ain’t a WUWT contributor – he’s dead!
Lots of fun with these folks. They actively REFUSE to process information.
Mike Mangan says:
September 11, 2012 at 7:28 am
“The really disturbing aspect of this saga is not Lewandowsky’s foul deed. That’s to be expected from the warmist camp. It’s the fact that it has started to gain traction. It’s penetrated the outer ring of the main stream media and been reported in the Blaze, at Huffington Post, and on MSNBC’s website. ”
What’s so tragic about that? HuffPo and MSNBC are for the clinically insane anyway and make no qualms about it. Let them make asses out of themselves, it’s what they do.
“identical wavelength thermal radiation from the lower atmosphere turns it off”
Oh dear – it’s a shame when the CAGW nutters who are so convinced about the conspiracy theories being pushed on WUWT are given evidence that there really are conspiracy nutters pushing theories on WUWT,
Russell Cook,
Your strategy to expose in detail one of LEW’s false premises is an important task. Also, I think it is just one of LEW’s several premise problems.
I was happy to see your focus on premises this morning after I decided yesterday to try to do a blog that looks at argument premises in the climate science arguments.
Coincidence!
John
Spending on manipulating public opinion: There is a PR firm in Vancouver. I heard the lady in charge interviewed by the CBC one morning, asking about her receiving American funding to oppose the proposed oil pipeline to the BC coast from Alberta. She admitted they received 3.8m dollars (foreign funding as far as we are concerned) to run a campaign opposing the pipeline by ramping up local opposition and riling the natives. The spend rate averages $17,000 a week. They also have local money from various activist organisations trying to undermine or stop various things with a phalanx of compliant local sheeple in tow.
That is Canadian operatives accepting foreign money to meddle in Canada’s internal evergy affairs provided by who-knows-? in the US to harm the Canadian oil industry. The amount involved in this tiny example is 8 times the amount referred to above as the ‘oil industry’ trying to steer global warming conversations, is it not? Imagine how much is spent in the US to meddle in big projects, especially now that the drillers are coining it looking for new shale gas.
It seems there is no bottom to the pit of money available to the groups that are trying to promote natural gas as the ‘low carbon’ alternative to ‘fossil fuel’ and kill or cripple coal and oil production. Kind of a strange way to make a country energy independent. No doubt Big Solar and Big Wind are behind the scenes sopping up the subsidies as fast as they can be arranged.
Any assumption based on “Who pays you?” is flawed. Corporations support causes for their own strategic and tax reasons, which rarely connect with what the activists think they’re trying to accomplish. If BP or RJReynolds supports a foundation, it doesn’t mean that the foundation works for oil or works for tobacco.
My admittedly informal study of Rhetoric – the classical art of getting people to accept a proposition as true regardless of its actual veracity, also known as the art of selling freezers to Eskimos – has taught me many things. The primary tools of rhetoric are also known among logicians as the “Fallacies of Informal Logic”.
Often those practicing Rhetoric will resort to ad hominem attacks (casting doubt on the integrity of the opponent rather than directly confronting the issue at hand), and one I call the “Old Switcheroo” (also called “the pot calling the kettle black”) wherein the opponent is openly (and usually falsely) accused of some nefarious action while the complainant is secretly performing that same action.
Look at how much money the ‘carbon industries’ are pouring into the environmental movement in a naive attempt to buy goodwill.
Interview with Michael Mann, ABC Australia 15/03/2012
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2012/s3454652.htm
Rule #1. If you believe electricity generated by coal is cleaner than electricity generated by shale gas you are a member of a cult and need deprogramming.
My Utilites have spent a lot of money promoting the “green agenda”….And I thought THEY were Big Oil. I suspect the boogie man is green.
Does anyone have figures on how much the conventional energy producers are spending on green programs?
A new book
http://www.amazon.com/Science-Left-Behind-Feel-Good-Anti-Scientific/dp/1610391640/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=1LIX5K3G75CXZ&coliid=I1X6UBC8NB94CM
focuses on antiscientific beliefs common among environmentalists and “progressives.”
A proper survey relating attitudes toward science in general and attitudes concerning CAGW would include items about the nutritional virtues of organic crops, the supposed dangers of genetically modified “Frankenfood,” the alleged link between thiomersal in vaccines and autism, and the purported need to suppress nuclear power plants.
Regarding Albert Einstein
The physics (Newtonian mechanics) that Einstein partially overturned had been accepted by all scientists in the field for over 200 years. It had been confirmed both by observation and experiment many times. What Einstein did was to propose and show that Newtonian mechanics was a special, but not a general, case. Relativity was the general case and extended Newton’s “laws”. Newton’s laws only break down at very high velocities (high fractions of c) and are still used at “normal” velocities, including such things as interplanetary navigation.
Einstein was not an intellectual with advanced degrees, but a man who only had a teachers diploma in mathematics. He was even unable to obtain a teaching position but had to take a job as a clerk in the Swiss patent office. His early work was done entirely in his own time and at his own expense, without the resources of a university or other research organisation. He could validly be called the ultimate amateur scientist. His work was later to be denigrated by a politically influenced national science body, possibly a favourable situation for the world.
We now can compare his situation with the current state of “climate science” and the denigration of the “sceptics”. There are parallels in every instance.
We come to the accusations of “amateur unqualified” people not working in the field whose opinions should be ignored if the bulk of the experts disagree.
The amateurs wish to extend the science (within the scientific method), not limit it, but the experts have a fixation on one small part of the science and ignore the scientific method.
The amateurs want the science to be open with regard to data, methods and results with free and open discussion most of the professionals in the field appear to want a “closed shop”.
The amateurs appear to want the science to be treated purely scientifically but politics seems to be a major factor for many of the professionals.
I am certain that there are many points that I have missed but I have been up all night and it will soon be dawn. I apologise if this missive is somewhat rambling.
Goodnight all
Jo Nova’s site is down again. Hit too many nerves over the Lewandowsky paper?
http://joannenova.com.au/
Is this Psychology or psychosis?
tadchem says:
September 11, 2012 at 8:19 am
“Look at how much money the ‘carbon industries’ are pouring into the environmental movement in a naive attempt to buy goodwill.”
They’re not buying goodwill. They are fighting each other. Example: Duke Energy supports Cap&Trade – they don’t care because they’re a local monopolist and it will harm the competition.
NatGas industry funding Sierra Club to rail against coal.
Maybe carbon based industries funding anti nuclear protests (this is only a suspicion, but why not).
Etc etc.
The new EPA regulation prohibiting new coal plants by limiting the allowed amount of CO2 per MWh? Just a new barrier to entry for upstarts. The list is endless – in the energy market, for every loser there’s a winner.
Richard of NZ says:
September 11, 2012 at 9:15 am
“Einstein […] could validly be called the ultimate amateur scientist.”
Great observation!
steveta_uk says:
September 11, 2012 at 8:03 am
““identical wavelength thermal radiation from the lower atmosphere turns it off”
Oh dear – it’s a shame when the CAGW nutters who are so convinced about the conspiracy theories being pushed on WUWT are given evidence that there really are conspiracy nutters pushing theories on WUWT,”
“Turns it off” should better be replaced by “is [partially] neutralized [by energy flow in the opposite direction, obviously]”. Look up Prevost exchange, the term does exist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_equilibrium#Prevost.27s_definitions
He was a bit early so he didn’t know about photons etc but it looks like he got the basics right.
Bob Shapiro:
Bob, stop talking. Take your hands away from the keyboard, and leave them away.
Building on DaveA’s quote (September 11, 2012 at 8:25 am) of Michael Mann referring “to some other books that have been written on this topic that actually trace much of the attacks against climate science and climate scientists to various organisations and front groups that derive most of their funding from the fossil fuel industry”, I mentioned Mann’s references in a prior WUWT comment: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/25/dr-michael-mann-compares-inconvenient-visitors-to-his-facebook-page-to-beetle-larvae/#comment-1043394
This sort of thing goes all the way to top people at the IPCC, as I detailed in my American Thinker piece last year, IPCC vice chair Jean-Pascal van Ypersele’s saying Dr S Fred Singer was corrupt: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/08/climate_science_and_corruption.html
What I didn’t know at the time I wrote that article was the way van Ypersele was relying on Naomi Oreskes as his source for the accusation: “IPCC vice-chair: Attacks on climate science echo tobacco industry tactics” http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/oct/28/ipcc-climate-science-attacks-tobacco
It’s been a wild exercise to see how people source this accusation, and then trace it back from there, only to see it arrive at the same “Gelbspan” origin… the few exceptions being references to the more murky handling of the accusation in the ’91 – late ’95 span of time before Gelbspan took over.
AlecM says: “…Hansenkoism…”
I LIKE it!
There must be mountains of evidence of a well funded denialist machine from those fossil fuel interests. I mean, they keep repeating it so it must be out there. Now let’s see…………..
What’s this?
Oh this is getting too much for me……………
and on and on………………….
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2012/06/08/masters-of-hypocrisy-the-union-of-concerned-scientists/
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/tag/funding-issues/
Sorry the last reference is for CRU. Forgot the url
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/about/history/
Bruce C says:
September 11, 2012 at 7:14 am
Can someone ask Mr Lewandowsky (or whatever his name is);
Had the UN / IPCC, M. Mann, J. Hansen et all, and your own Govt. NOT started campaigning or mentioning anything about cAGW / Climate Change, would you yourself have noticed any difference in the Earths climate today?
—-
An excellent question to ask. You could try posting in on the Shapingthefuture blog (or whatever it’s called)
“Had the UN / IPCC, M. Mann, J. Hansen et all, and your own Govt. NOT started campaigning or mentioning anything about cAGW / Climate Change, would you yourself have noticed any difference in the Earths climate today?”
I guess this is supposed to be a trick question, because who knows much about the “Earth’s climate” without science. But if you asked instead whether people have noticed any difference in the climate where they live, quite a few could say yes. I could.
Yes, it is quite obvious who the real conspiracy-nuts are. The accusation of unfounded conspiracy mongering is pure projection. It is especially ironic for a paper that accuses its ideological opposition of conspiracy mongering to take a blatantly unfounded conspiracy theory as one of its premises. The funding advantage for the “consensus” over the last 15 years is on the order of $100b vs a few millions for the skeptics. For these consensoids to complain that they are being beaten by funding is preposterous.
I’d like to see the results of Lewandowski’s questionnaire separated out for the correlation between consensus views and his 9/11-truther question. It is well known that the vast majority of self-identified Democrats accept consensus climate views, and that an amazingly high number, something on the order of 50%, also give substantial credence to the claim that the Bush administration was complicit in the 9/11 attacks. Mainstream Democrat “trutherism” became such a phenomenon that there was no hiding it. Even radical leftist fruitcake Ben Smith at Politico did not even try. Here is his 2006 report on a Scripps-Howard poll:
Multiply those percentages together (Democrats who believe in consensus climate views and in 9/11-trutherism, and a strong correlation between these views is pretty much inevitable in Lewandowski’s survey, and if that is borne out then THAT is the correlation between climate-views and conspiracy theorizing that is actually newsworthy. It also fits right in with Lewandowski’s own conspiracy theorizing about skeptic funding.
So…. their point seems to be that oil money corrupts, but government money does not.
Must be the special ink.
Like most Stalinists, what these people fear most is informed dissent or, if you will, skepticism as a crucial component of scientific progress. They think they can freeze the truth as they perceive it in place. That’s why (to relate this to the post above on the paucity of tree-ring data gathering in the past quarter century) McIntyre’s Starbucks Hypothesis is so relevant. They have their truth and any attempt to continue research that might falsify it is considered subversive. Woe be to him who challenges the iron-clad consensus!! This is science?
It’s so obvious that their science is ideology-driven and that their policy goals have shaped the science.
The fact is that the theory of AGW was embraced and beloved BEFORE the science was remotely settled. The knee-jerk, hostile response to any attempt to disprove it is settled indicates that Climate Science has become politically-motivated, authoritarian science.
Call it “statist science.” That’s what it’s really all about. Giving their friends in government (“the state”) more functions and regulatory power.
Most? That wouldn’t apply to any of the big US think tanks like Heartland (under 10% I think), Cato, etc. Maybe Marshall gets a somewhat higher percentage.
Here are other conspiracy theories (besides truthism) likely accepted by more warmists than contrarians, and that would have been included in a SCIENTIFIC (impartial) survey. (I’m not saying these are wrong–I’ll leave that broad-brush insinuation for Dr. Lew to imply.) There must be half a dozen more:
JFK killed by the CIA / oilmen
UFOs
Diebold’s voting machines are rigged
Dark Alliance (CIA drug smuggling)
Conventional Western medicine is a racket / scam
Jo Nova’s site is up and running again.
No need to go any farther into the Lewandowsky paper than its first page to see this, where it says in the top paragraph that “More than 90% of climate scientists agree that the global climate is changing largely due to human CO2 emissions”, followed with a statement in the second paragraph that researchers “in history and sociology frequently cite the ‘manufacture of doubt’ by vested interests and political groups….”
=====================================================================
The “manufacture of doubt” by vested interests and political groups?
How about the “manufacture of belief” by vested interests and political groups?
On another thread regarding Lewandowsky smoking came up alot. Has the Doctor Lew said anything about Doctor Mann being defended by … er … represented by an attorney that defended “Big Tobacco”?
Why does the person bringing the lawsuit need a defense attorney?
Lewandowsky’s paper and rantings remind me of Gleick and his testimony/lecture to the senate on ‘ethics’ (no you couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried).
Gleick was accusing skeptics, ‘funded by the fossil fuel industry’, of using ‘unethical dirty tricks’ and even categorised the deceit and ‘abuse of the scientific process’, his list included – ‘mischaracterising facts’, ‘scientific misconduct’, ‘personal attacks on scientists’, ‘arguments from ideology rather than evidence’. Gleick, who had received a ‘genius’ award was then caught using deceit and unethical dirty tricks by producing a faked document and impersonating a board member of Heartland in an attempt to discredit Heartland (and other skeptics) to prove his conspiracy theory (he was soon caught because he left the equivalent of his name and address on the document). Unsurprisingly skeptics suggested his list was actually his own tactical battle plan or even that during his testimony to the senate he had read out his own curriculum vitae by mistake!
Lewandowsky, on the one hand accuses skeptics of being well organised funded and in conspiracy with the fossil fuel industry and on the other hand of being paranoid nutters who believe in conspiracy theories……
Sorry, but I can’t help but see similarities between Gleick and Lewandowsky – but then I’m just a paranoid skeptic owed billions by the fossil fuel industry. In fact with this constant ‘melting’ we keep hearing about the Wicked Witch of the West must be getting very worried as Lewandowsky must expect that soon the only thing left of the Arctic will be a pair of ruby slippers and a few ‘Munchkin Men’.
One of the most iniquitous things that CAGW scientists and activists (now one and the same) have done is to pervert the English language in their obsession with the belief that their view is absolute and unquestionable dogma.
Skepticism is fundamental to a university education, most particularly in science. By corrupting the word skeptic, academics and scientists are subverting the foundations of progress in knowledge, technology and science.
Skepticism is doubt and being able to challenge the authoritarian view. All students of science should be taught that their lecturers are fallible. Whatever it is that is being taught should be doubted, questioned and overturned if possible by creative thinking. Students should be encouraged to be skeptical and to think of skepticism as a virtue.
When students hear the likes of Mann, Lewandowsky and anyone who is adamant that CAGW is right and skepticism is wrong they should consider these words:
“Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.” Robert King Merton
“Have no respect whatsoever for authority……Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle: permit us to question — to doubt — to not be sure. I think that it is important that we do not forget this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained.
“Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers in the preceding generation … Learn from science that you must doubt the experts.
“It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress and great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress that is the the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom, to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed, and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.
True Science teaches, above all, to doubt, and to be ignorant.” Richard Feynman
The next time a student of science hears the word “consensus” they should think of Bertrand Russell who wrote:
“The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”
The current crop of Mannian scientists preaching CAGW to their students as being something which is without doubt, were understood by Tolstoy:
“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
When the likes of Lewandowsky produces such absurd work and CAGW scientists preach that the science is settled students should remember the words of Jaques Monod.
“In science, self-satisfaction is death. Personal self-satisfaction is the death of the scientist. Collective self-satisfaction is the death of the research.”
Being skeptical and doubtful is something which today’s students, our future scientists and thinkers, should be proud of. If they are labelled a skeptic for doubting authoritarianism they should take it as a compliment.
I believe that there is at work a concerted effort to depict sceptics of the CAGW thesis as conspiracy theorists. Does that me a conspiracy theorist?
Dirk and AlecM
“switching off radiation”
If two identical bodies are side by side radiating at each other, how do they decide who radiates ?
FUD tactics?
mfo says:
September 11, 2012 at 2:59 pm
One of the most iniquitous things that CAGW scientists and activists (now one and the same) have done is to pervert the English language in their obsession with the belief that their view is absolute and unquestionable dogma.
Skepticism is fundamental to a university education, most particularly in science. By corrupting the word skeptic, academics and scientists are subverting the foundations of progress in knowledge, technology and science.
========
I was thinking exactly the same thing due to the misuse of terms in the Lewandowsky paper.
Lewandowsky clearly doesn’t understand the meaning of terms like Alarmist, Affirmer, Warmer, Luke Warmer, Skeptic, Realist, and Denier. It would make a difference if all sides of the climate debate could at least agree on the appropriate meaning for the terms.
The funniest thing for me was that just after reading the title of the Lewan-dowsky paper, I found a link to an essay by Lewin about corruption at IPCC Madrid ’95 on a Finnish website and noticed that it was being promoted side-by-side with a story titled “NASA Moon Hoax.”
http://nwo.11syyskuu.net/
I had heard of all the ‘Merchant of Doubt’ scepticisms assocations with AGW scepticism — before and after Oreskes — but never the Moon Hoax…until now! Perhaps it is that the other Lewan is prophetic…he has spotted a trend…nuclear winter, passive smoking, CFCs, the moon???…hmmm…why not…maybe I will take a look at that other article after all….
reposition global warming as theory, not fact…….
—
OW! That made my head hurt. Well these post-honesty scientists need look up the definition of a theory.
all lewandowsky et al’s efforts are coming to nought:
10 Sept: Guardian: Fiona Harvey: Global carbon trading system has ‘essentially collapsed’
Joan MacNaughton, a former top UK civil servant and vice chair of the high level panel, told the Guardian: “The carbon market is profoundly weak, and the CDM has essentially collapsed. It’s extremely worrying that governments are not taking this seriously.”
The panel said that governments needed to reassure investors, who have poured tens of billions into the market, by pledging a continuation of the system, and propping up the market by toughening their targets on cutting emissions, and perhaps buying carbon credits themselves…
To make matters worse, the current phase of the Kyoto protocol ends this year, and of the world’s major economies only the EU has pledged to continue it…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/sep/10/global-carbon-trading-system
IdeaCarbon: Advisory Board
Lord Nicholas Stern
Advisor to IDEAglobal Group, parent company of IDEAcarbon
Ms Christiana Figueres
Ms Figueres joined IDEAcarbon as Vice Chairman of the Carbon Ratings Agency’s (CRA) Ratings Committe in February 2009. Since July 2010, Ms Christiana Figueres has served as the new Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and as such had to relinquish her role with the CRA…
Mr Neil Eckert
Mr Eckhert joined the IDEAcarbon Advisory Board in June 2011. Mr Neil Eckert was Chief Executive of Climate Exchange Plc, an AIM listed company, which owned the European Climate Exchange (ECX) and the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) until sale to ICE in July 2010. Mr Eckhert is Chairman of Trading Emissions plc, an AIM listed company, which is one of the world’s leading funds investing in emission reduction permits…
http://www.ideacarbon.com/about-us/advisory-board/index.htm
kim2ooo says:
September 11, 2012 at 6:15 am
Had Lewandowsky et al even pretended at conducting a scientific study / survey – the very first bias they would have removed…is themselves.
There is no objective way to study opposing views, when one allows personal subjective views to taint the survey pool.
Any serious objective study would have farmed the polling and survey questions out to an independent third party….removing oneself as far from charges of improprieties.
——
Agree but no polling company of any repute would write the questions correctly, as per Dr. Lewie.
Actually, it works in the opposite direction. I give money to the fossil fuel industry!
They provide power and I buy it, an arrangement in which they make (horrors, foulness) 8 cents on the dollar.
Let’s be honest, that is what the climate scientists really object to.
ghl: two radiating bodies of equal temperature in thermal equilibrium with no other energy transfer mode have a de facto emissivity and absorptivity of zero. You can prove this experimentally. Put two pyrgeometers or other pyrometers back to back horizontally in zero temperature gradient. The net signal is zero because they each measure the temperature radiation field in their viewing angle. This is because the radiation coming from the other direction is blocked by the shield behind the detector.
Now take one of the pyrometers away. The net signal jumps to the temperature measurement, an artefact of the measurement process, What this proves is that the radiation from one radiating body is exactly cancelled out by that from the other so each has zero emissivity/absorptivity. How is this so?
Each body has an intermediate state of matter** in contact with kinetic energy and the Aether, as it used to be called, and translates energy from one to the other and vice versa. There are four rate equations and in thermal equilibrium the same number of photons arrive and leave per unit time and the same number of kinetic energy packets arrive and leave per unit time. Emissivity/absorptivity is purely statistical.
The EM communication between the two bodies is real time at the speed of light. Reduce the temperature of one body and at the hotter body more kinetic energy packets arrive at the intermediate state than leave so there is net energy transfer from the hotter to the cooler body. In the case of one body being solid, that energy is shared between convection, conduction, evaporation and radiation so the de facto emissivity/absorptivity of the Earth’s surface is [2009 Trenberth ‘Energy Budget’ neglecting the imaginary ‘back radiation’, a temperature measurement] is 63 W/m^2/160 W/m^2 = 0.39.
Climate science has completely ignored this in its childish belief that the Earth radiates as if it were an isolated black body in a vacuum. This aspect of radiation physics is poorly taught with students being handed the S-B equation and Kirchhoff’s Law [only only applying at thermal equilibrium]. Because climate science also gets the thermalisation wrong [it can only occur at heterogeneities, mainly clouds], the latter means that at TOA, DOWN emissivity = zero, increasing as height falls. In all cases only net radiative flux does thermodynamic work.
**The intermediate state in the atmosphere is the GHGs which translate kinetic to EM energy and vice versa. Because the EM-kinetic energy translation is very slow, another process takes over, the onward transmission of that energy at near the speed of light by thermally emitted photons, hence the low atmospheric warming is at clouds. This bit of atmospheric physics was completely missed by Houghton who baldly states on p 11, 3rd Ed that the lower atmosphere [in local Thermodynamic Equilibrium] radiates as if it were a black body – totally wrong. This arrogant religious extremist has cause an immense amount of damage to science and society.
steve_ta: I notice you never debate science! This aspect of radiative physics has been picked up by me, Claes Johnson and Doug Cotton. it’s what I was taught as a process engineer at Imperial College and I have measured coupled convection and radiation in big process plant.
The only US university that teaches this properly appears to be MIT which hosted Hoyt C. Hottell. He is my inspiration because his experimental data underpin IR radiative physics.
The facts are here: http://notrickszone.com/2012/08/07/epic-warmist-fail-modtran-doubling-co2-will-do-nothing-to-increase-long-wave-radiation-from-sky/
The dry air data are identical to Hottell’s: above ~200 ppmV, CO2 is in IR self-absorption mode. What surprised me though was the effect of water vapour whose side-bands absorb CO2 IR so there is no effect of CO2 change.
The question then is why is the ‘CO2 depression’ seen at TOA? The answer is very simple. TOA CO2 band IR emission is from the dry upper atmosphere. This single observation disproves Hansenkoism. There can be no CO2-AGW. As for the GHE, that is of course the rise in temperature of the Earth as it is forced to transfer heat from fewer intermediate sites.
This apparently means a fixed GHE set by the first ~1000 ppmV water vapour, when it enters IR self-absorption. However, there’s a surprising sting in the tail that also explains the ‘faint sun paradox’. I’m leaving that to later to prolong arrogant, ill-educated warmist agony..
AR5 will be based on a new fraud – the ‘abyssal heat’ which has no physical basis.
steveta_uk: i notice you never debate science. is this because you don’t know any, is it because you weren’t taught proper physics or is it because you have decided dogma is more important than objectivity?
I write this because I am genuinely perturbed at the traction that the 6 mistakes in physics of the ‘consensus’ has gained when 3 of those mistakes are so elementary as to be cringe-making. Worst of course is ‘back radiation’, taught in meteorology and climate science when it does not exist – I have explained why above, it’s an instrumental artefact.
Anyway, I’ll sign off by pointing out that the story i have revealed so far is partial. There is a final bit of amazing science which will amaze Tallbloke who has given me space on his blog as I have thought about this problem. I’ll leave it to later so I can prolong the agony of the arrogant, dogmatic warmists who tried to shut me up with crude tactics like Lewandowsky has tried.
There seems to be a concerted effort by some CAGW alarmists to identify sceptics as conspiracy theorists. That’s the only conspiracy I do believe in.
There seems to be a concerted effort by CAGW alarmists to identify sceptics as conspiracy theorists. That’s the only one I do believe in.
Interesting points here. I notice that Einstein gets a look in as the pre-eminent “citizen scientist”. I love his aphorism (paraphrased from memory): “If I am right the Germans will say I am German and the French will say I’m a Jew. If I’m wrong the French will say I’m German and the Germans will say I am a Jew.” Lewandowsky, take note.
Hilarious, really, that the Mann and his cohorts pose as valiant defenders against an overwhelming wave of contrarian propaganda given the massive preponderance of uncritical coverage in the MSM of each new terrifying and potentially catastrophic tale of doom spewed out by their confederates on a weekly basis.
Apart from the self-evident methodological failures of the Lewandowsky paper and the underlying “given” that we’re shills of some massive secret black op. funded by big oil, I totally resent the other “given” — that being unconvinced by the output from the climate science industry is a pathological condition.
Piling on: Still looking no further than the 1st page of the Lewandowsky paper, we see him cite “Stocking & Holstein, 2009”, a pair of names I’d never heard of before. In just a few lousy minutes of internet searching for the word combination “ross gelbspan holly stocking”, I turned up a book chapter by Ms Stocking (pdf file http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/17040_Chapter_4.pdf ), where she says in the book’s page 78 ” … the fossil fuel industry did the same with the science of global climate change (Gelbspan, 1997), leading—at least for a time—to news stories that gave no more weight to the consensus reports of thousands of scientists around the world than to the contrarian views of a minority of scientists (Boykoff & Boykoff, 2004).”
And remember from the link about ‘the Boykoff situation’ in my guest post above, I showed how the Boykoffs and Gelbspan were engaged in circular citations of each other to prove skeptics received ‘too much equal balance’ in the media. Meanwhile, the ‘too much equal balance’ talking point is mentioned by Stephen Schneider, as seen in this 1992 report by Gelbspan: http://i40.tinypic.com/2retaj7.jpg just above the quote from then-Senator Al Gore.
This is like shooting fish in a barrel…..
Piling on, pt II: Ok, the reference in my comment above was not the specific citation Lewandowsky mentions in his paper. Took me longer to find it, that’s all, and here it is (though what he cites is a later version, behind a subscription wall: http://pus.sagepub.com/content/18/1/23.abstract )
“Manufacturing doubt: Journalists’ roles and the construction of ignorance in a scientific controversy, S. Holly Stocking, Lisa W. Holstein. Presented to the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Journalism Studies Interest Group, Dresden, Germany, June 19-23, 2006″
And what does it say just one paragraph into its first full page? ” … Perhaps the most prominent recent example is the fossil fuel industry’s successful efforts to manufacture doubt about global warming despite broad scientific consensus (Mooney, 2005; Corbett, 2004; Zehr, 2000; Gelbspan, 1997; Beder, 1997; Trumbo, 1996)…” http://citation.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/9/1/5/3/pages91537/p91537-3.php
I’ll dig into the Corbett/Zehr/Trumbo citations at some later date, but I can say this about the “Beder, 1997” one. It’s spelled out in the footnotes as the “Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism” book on pg 37 ( http://citation.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/9/1/5/3/pages91537/p91537-27.php ), and Ms Beder describes her own book here http://www.uow.edu.au/~sharonb/agents.html . The key bit is in paragraph 3, which says, “The Information Council on the Environment, which is a coal industry front group, was formed to ‘reposition global warming as theory (not fact).’ It has a large advertising budget and in a media strategy obtained by Ozone Action … ” Her end note is for “Ozone Action, Ties that Blind: Industry Influence on Public Policy and Our Environment, Washington D.C., 1997”
And what does one find in the “Ties that Blind” papers? Why, this gem right here in an old archive file page ( http://web.archive.org/web/19980626161732/http://www.ozone.org/page18.html ) near the middle: “According to documents obtained by Ozone Action and by Ross Gelbspan, several ICE strategies were laid out including: the repositioning of global warming as theory, not fact;”
All paths lead to Gelbspan. Q.E.D.
Gelbspan seems to have a signature phrase/meme that he repeats in all his redundant calumnies: “the repositioning of global warming as theory, not fact”.
Of course, (A)GW can only dream of the exalted status of “theory”, as it is in fact loose speculation only.