I’m pleased to offer some essays and letters with links that have recently appeared in The Australian newspaper. One of them is an essay from my friend and fellow skeptic, Jo Nova, in Perth, who does a superb job with her rebuttal to an attempt to shut down debate on climate change.
Here’s a short timeline of events:
It seems to have started with this editorial piece: Climate debate no place for hotheads, by Graham Lloyd, Environment editor, The Australian, December 04, 2010
Then there were responses, a lot of them, in this summary of letters: Long may The Oz promote open debat, The Australia, December 07, 2010. plus there has been a flurry of related coverage:
Then there was this essay, by David McKnight, which brought out the ridiculous old “tobacco and big oil” arguments to use in smearing skeptics. Sceptical writers skipped inconvenient truths.
Followed by Jo Nova’s rebuttal to that essay: Newspapers should lead the country
Here’s McKnight’s essay:
Sceptical writers skipped inconvenient truths
- David McKnight From: The Australian December 11, 201
A response to The Weekend Australian’s summary of its editorial position on climate change
THE Australian is undoubtedly the most serious newspaper in Australia and its record on climate change matters because of this. More importantly, its stance matters because of the civilisational challenge that climate change presents to Australia and the world.
This was recognised by the chief executive officer of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, who warned in 2007 that climate change posed “clear catastrophic threats”. Murdoch also pledged that News Corporation would “weave this issue into our content” and “tell the story in a new way”.
I happen to agree with Murdoch’s description of the seriousness of the threat.
But there is a puzzle. In recent years The Australian campaigned in favour of objective facts in the teaching of Australian history against “political” interpretations.
By contrast, its attitude to the science of climate change has zig-zagged from a grudging acceptance of the facts to simple denial and back again.
In all modes, its stance is invariably dominated by old ideological obsessions that are tangential to this profound issue.
Last weekend in Focus, The Australian’s new environment editor, Graham Lloyd, defended his newspaper’s stance on climate change. It is healthy for a newspaper to publicly debate its stance on such an issue but Lloyd’s article was highly selective and, I believe, misleading.
Lloyd argues that there has been a “longstanding misrepresentation of this newspaper’s editorial position on climate science and its longstanding support for a global response to limit greenhouse gas emissions”.
Really? How longstanding? Editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell told Crikey last week that “for several years the paper has accepted man-made climate change as fact”. “Several years” is hardly longstanding. But Mitchell’s statement is also disingenuous because it omits vital facts.
As Lloyd showed, it is possible to find editorials in 1997 in The Australian under then editor-in-chief David Armstrong that accepted the science on climate change. But after that period, The Australian took a different direction. This is paradoxical. As the scientific evidence for climate change strengthened, the newspaper’s attitude went in the opposite direction.
At the beginning of 2006 an editorial agreed that the world was warming but claimed “no one knows . . . why it is happening” (January 14, 2006).
At the same time the newspaper described itself as “healthily sceptical about the possible causes of and solutions to global warming” (November 4, 2006). No wonder Mitchell confined himself to the phrase “several years”.
A couple of months after this, an editorial made the extraordinary suggestion that “the real debate on climate change is only now getting started”.
The editorial’s contribution to this debate was to disparage the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report and proffer the long discarded sceptical claim that there was “a link between cyclical sunspot activity and the climate here on earth”.
Shortly after its “sunspot” editorial, The Australian published a feature article (“Rebels of the Sun”, March 17, 2007) recycling this discredited theory and lamenting that the debate “has become increasingly stifling and intolerant to dissenting voices”, citing fossil industry-funded sceptics, and attacking Al Gore, whose campaign on climate change was documented in An Inconvenient Truth.
For many years The Australian has been unable to see climate issues except through a distorted ideological lens. For example, an editorial on January 14, 2006, argued that the environment movement was about “more theology than meteorology” and “[S]upport for Kyoto cloaks the green movement’s real desire: to see capitalism stop succeeding”.
Later, an editorial accused “deep green Luddites” of believing that “the only way to avert the coming apocalypse is to close down all the power plants, take all cars off the road and return to a pre-industrial Arcadia” (June 8, 2007). Lloyd’s article last Saturday ignored these editorials.
He failed to mention that just before the 2007 federal election an editorial characterised an environmental approach in politics as wanting to “transform the nation into a wind-powered, mung bean-eating Arcadia” (October 27, 2007). This kind of unrestrained invective suggested the newspaper itself could be accused of hysteria and alarmism, a charge it regularly threw at those who disagreed with it.
Such rhetoric meant that genuine debate on climate in the pages of The Australian was simply not possible.
The newspaper continually framed the debate as one between, on the one hand, sensible sceptics and, on the other, “deep green Luddites”. By implication, the political and business leaders of Europe, plus Gore and Tony Blair, were in the latter category.
A newspaper’s columnists have access to valuable journalistic real estate under the sponsorship of the editor. Instead, The Australian’s columnists have largely repeated the paper’s dominant editorial line.
The former economics editor, Alan Wood, over many years characterised concern about climate change as “green hysteria”. Another occasional columnist, Alan Oxley, chaired the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation study centre that sponsored a conference of fossil fuel companies and climate deniers in Canberra in April 2005.
At the conference, he said, “Leading scientists also explained how the science on which Kyoto is based was unravelling and argued that the cataclysmic threat of global warming is oversold.”
Shortly afterward Oxley argued, “There is no reasonable certainty that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide from human activity cause significant global warming.” (August 2, 2005).
When the Howard government began to acknowledge that carbon emissions were linked to dangerous climate change, another regular columnist, Christopher Pearson, said he felt “bitter disappointment” about curbs on “what will turn out to be, in all probability, a perfectly harmless gas” (November 18, 2006).
Unsurprisingly, this column, as with many others from The Australian, was recycled on denialist websites around the world.
Lloyd reported that The Australian has defended the right of climate sceptics “to have a voice”. This is curious. Does it defend the right of tobacco sceptics to have a voice? Of course not, for the simple reason that all intelligent people recognised long ago that such sceptics were fronts for the tobacco industry and that the medical science of smoking was settled.
On climate issues The Australian still gives voice to a global PR campaign largely originated by the oil and coal companies of the US. On this score genuinely sceptical journalism is missing in action. Instead, an ideological sympathy with climate sceptics has been concealed behind a fig leaf of supposed balance.
But what shines through in the attitude of the newspaper is its lack of intellectual and moral seriousness in dealing with the consequences of climate change. Climate issues are always taken as an opportunity for cheap shots about what The Australian calls “the Left” or “deep greens”. This attitude stands in stark contrast to the deep seriousness of the newspaper’s endlessly re-affirmed belief in free markets, competition and privatisation.
The Australian’s editorials and columns on climate change raise questions about its own standards of evidence.
For example, the newspaper never questioned the so-called evidence cobbled together to confirm Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.
This was deemed adequate enough to support an invasion at a terrible cost in lives.
But the overwhelming evidence on climate change accumulated over more than 25 years by the best minds in the field was dismissed for many years by The Australian and is now only grudgingly accepted. This is what alarms many of Australia’s leading climate scientists.
The challenge posed by climate change to our economy and society is profound. Most Australian political leaders who are locked into the 24-hour news cycle see it as merely another issue. For a long time the newspaper has characterised climate change as an issue with a political, not scientific basis. It bears some responsibility for the impasse we have reached as a nation.
The role of a serious national newspaper is to give leadership on such issues. It could do this by asking hard questions on the future of the coal industry and on Tony Abbott’s comment that the science is “absolute crap”.
This is especially so given that climate change poses “clear catastrophic threats”, in the words of the newspaper’s publisher in 2007. On that score, I’m with Rupert Murdoch.
David McKnight is the author of several books on politics and history. He works in the arts faculty at the University of NSW.
==========================================================
Here is Jo Nova’s red hot rebuttal:
Newspapers should lead the country
A REPLY to a critic of The Australian’s coverage of the debate about climate change.
- Joanne Nova The Australian December 18, 2010
DAVID McKnight’s criticism of The Australian over climate change (“Sceptical writers skipped inconvenient truths”, Inquirer, December 11) makes for a good case study of Australian universities’ intellectual collapse.
Here’s a University of NSW senior research fellow in journalism who contradicts himself, fails by his own reasoning, does little research, breaks at least three laws of logic, and rests his entire argument on an assumption for which he provides no evidence.
Most disturbingly – like a crack through the facade of Western intellectual vigour – he asserts that the role of a national newspaper is to “give leadership”.
Bask for a moment in the inanity of this declaration that newspapers “are our leaders”. Last time I looked at our ballot papers, none of the people running to lead our nation had a name such as The Sydney Morning Herald. Didn’t he notice we live in a country that chooses its leaders through elections? The role of a newspaper is to report all the substantiated arguments and filter out the poorly reasoned ones, so readers can make up their own minds.
The point of a free press is surely for the press to be free to ask the most searching questions on any topic. Yet here is an authority on journalism attacking The Australian for printing views of scientists who have degrees of doubt about global warming and/or any human component in it.
And these scientists that McKnight wants to silence are not just the odd rare heretic.
The swelling ranks of sceptical scientists is now the largest whistle-blowing cohort in science ever seen. It includes some of the brightest: two with Nobel prizes in physics, four NASA astronauts, 9000 PhDs in science, and another 20,000 science graduates to cap it off. A recent US Senate minority report contained 1000 names of eminent scientists who are sceptical, and the term professor pops up more than 500 times in that list. These, McKnight, an arts PhD, calls deniers.
Just because thousands of scientists support the sceptical view doesn’t prove they’re right, but it proves their opinions are nothing like the tobacco sceptics campaign that McKnight compares them with in a transparent attempt to smear commentators with whom he disagrees.
Ponder the irony that McKnight, the journalism lecturer, is demanding The Australian adopt the policy espoused by the dominant paradigm, the establishment, and censor the views of independent whistleblowers.
He thinks repeating government PR is journalism; the rest of us know it as propaganda.
McKnight doesn’t name any scientific paper that any sceptic denies. Instead, he seems to use a pre-emptive technique designed to stop people even discussing the evidence about the climate.
McKnight’s research starts with the assumption that a UN committee, which was funded to find a crisis, has really found one, and that it is above question. His investigation appears to amount to comparing articles in Fairfax versus Murdoch papers, as if the key to radiative transfer and cumulative atmospheric feedbacks lies in counting op-ed pieces. If he had made the most basic inquiry, McKnight might also have found out that the entire case for the man-made threat to the climate rests on just the word of 60 scientists who reviewed chapter nine of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report.
He’d also know that the people he calls deniers, far from being recipients of thousands of regular Exxon cheques, are mostly self-funded – many are retirees – and that Exxon’s paltry $US23 million for 1990-2007 was outdone by more than 3000 to one by the US government alone, which paid $US79 billion to the climate industry during 1989-2009.
So “sharp” is McKnight’s analysis that he calls the independent unfunded scientists “a global PR campaign originating from coal and oil companies”, but all while he is oblivious to the real billion-dollar PR campaign that is waged from government departments, a UN agency, financial houses such as Deutsche Bank, the renewable energy industry, the nuclear industry and multi-hundred-million-dollar corporations such as the WWF.
The job of a newspaper, he indicates, is to decide which scientist is right about atmospheric physics. Is Phil Jones from the East Anglia Climate Research Unit right, or is Richard Lindzen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorologist, right? Add that to the duties for aspiring national editors. Tough job, eh?
McKnight’s main error in his article – accepting an argument from authority – has been known in logic for 2000 years, and his entire synopsis is built around this fallacy.
Just suppose, hypothetically, that the government employed many scientists on one side of a theory and none from the other. McKnight’s method of “knowing” who is right involves counting the institutions and authorities who support the grants – I mean, the theory. If science were exploited this way, McKnight would fall victim every time, blindly supporting the establishment.
That doesn’t prove he’s wrong but his analysis is confused at every level. He claims The Australian has zig-zagged from acceptance to denial but then later accuses The Australian’s columnists of repeating “the dominant editorial line”. But which editorial line would be dominant: the zig type or the zag? In science, evidence is the only thing that counts, not opinion. McKnight, the follower of funded opinions, has the gall to question The Australian’s standards of evidence but the only evidence he offers is a collection of opinions. McKnight paints himself as an authority on journalism yet fails to investigate his base assumption, research the targets of his scorn or understand the role of the free press: he is his own best example of why argument from authority is a fallacy.
If our journalism lecturers are feeding students with ideas of leadership roles, how decrepit is the institution where students are not even taught that the highest aim of a journalist is to ask the most penetrating questions and leave no stone unturned, so the people they serve might have the best information?
Such is the modern delusion of the activist-journo: McKnight wants to be the leader, to dictate what the public can think and to direct where public spending goes, but he doesn’t want to bother running for office or to expose his claim to open debate. He’s nothing more than a totalitarian in disguise.
Joanne Nova is a commentator and the author of The Skeptics Handbook. She is a former associate lecturer in science communication at the Australian National University.
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Thumbnail- thanks for the link- I left a comment but could not find where the actual comments section is (to read the other submitted comments on the article)
@brett – Ta. I think it takes some time for comments to get put up. And not every comment gets up. I left one there this morning. The Comments section in The Australian is not that visible on my laptop screen. Maybe I just getting getting blinder as I get older. But their comments section seems to be less visible than other online newspapers.
RS Brown @ur momisugly 10:58
You’ve put your finger on just why he’s such a scumbag. And if Powell acted as he did out of spite, then the excess morbidity and mortality from the maneuver is on his soul.
=============
jorgekafkazar says: December 17, 2010 at 11:04 pm
not, as The Australian titles it, “Newspapers should lead the country”
Freudian slip?
Jack Greer says:
December 18, 2010 at 9:42 am
This sentence alone in Joanne Nova’s rebuttal destroys entirely her objectivity, and therefore her authority:
“McKnight’s research starts with the assumption that a UN committee, which was funded to find a crisis, has really found one, and that it is above question.”
Jack, I don’t see how Jo Nova’s statement is false. What other “research” results does it look like McKnight is starting from? The UN’s ipcc was in fact formed and funded to find a potential crisis specifically involving the possible effect of Humanity’s actions upon the “climate” – my take is that the ipcc was even supposed to bias and hype its “science” in the direction of the alleged crisis to whatever degree it wanted to. The ipcc certainly did “find” a possible Man Made crisis – after all, anyone could, especially given enough “funding” and biased “science”. And the ipcc acts and speaks like its credibility and the validity of its possible crisis is “above question”, which again, imo, it is even supposed to do according to its mission.
So it looks to me like Jo Nova is simply saying that McKnight has initially assumed the validity of the essentials of the UN ipcc’s “Climate Science”, and that he is repeating them without any significant questioning.
Brendan H says:
December 18, 2010 at 12:38 pm
“DAVID McKnight’s criticism of The Australian over climate change…makes for a good case study of Australian universities’ intellectual collapse.”
“Jo Nova begins an opinion piece accusing her opponent of logical fallacies by peddling one of her own in the form of a hasty generalisation. The implication is that one sample can be generalised across the Australian university system.”
The first lesson in learning to do analsyis of another’s writings is to read all the words of the piece that you are analyzing. For example, you overlooked the phrase “good case study of.” Ms. Nova did not claim that McKnight proved the intellectual collapse of Australian universities, she claimed that his example is a “good case study of” the collapse. In other words, she claimed that she will show us intellectual collapse in McKnight. So, see, she did not commit a hasty generalization at all. This lesson is free. If you want me to analyze the remainder of your errors, there will be a charge.
S. Seeker: I agree that shutting up dissenters is not elegant, but if they try to block measures that protect other people from… getting malaria… they certainly do not deserve equal attention.
The consensus view was that DDT was killing birds. Dissenters were silenced. DDT was banned. As a direct result over 100 million people have died of malaria.
Maybe the dissenters DID deserve “equal attention”. Maybe then the (ongoing) Malaria Holocaust could have been avoided or at least mitigated.
Is it surprising that CAGWers cite malaria prevention as a great success of post-normal politicized science? To the uninitiated perhaps. To me it is more revealing than surprising.
Brendan H says:
December 18, 2010 at 12:38 pm
“DAVID McKnight’s criticism of The Australian over climate change…makes for a good case study of Australian universities’ intellectual collapse.”
Jo Nova begins an opinion piece accusing her opponent of logical fallacies by peddling one of her own in the form of a hasty generalisation. The implication is that one sample can be generalised across the Australian university system.
“hasty generalisation”? No, right off she says very clearly that she’s offering up McKnight’s “criticism…” instead as a “case study” of something she obviously thinks has already been pretty well established as a process – the “Australian universities’ intellectual collapse”. She says McKnight’s performance provides us with a good example which demonstrates what she means by “intellectual collapse”, and then she explains to us throughout her article why it is in fact “intellectual collapse”.
1DandyTroll says: “She’s a very good writer and researcher and news media need more of her and less of them bong sucking hippies that just plaster the papers with, essentially, greenie organizations propaganda.”
You mean those bong-sucking, hashish-brownie-gobbling sensemilla seekers, DT?
Brendan H says:
December 18, 2010 at 12:38 pm
It isn’t just one , if you have been following Jo’s site.
Jo Nova isn’t trying to shut down debate either.
That McKnight was communist in 1991 just shows that he was either evil or stupid or both. He does not appear to have changed his thinking.
It isn’t just the 100 million or so killed by communism in the 20th century, it is also the hundreds of millions of lives blighted by the evil system for nothing more than the comfort of a few and the ego gratification of the “useful idiots” who helped make it happen.
You are just another anonymous troll. Tell us your real name you gutless [snip].
The newest pieces of information McKnight refers to are what were published in 2007.
That’s a once-upon-a-time story and, since 2007, especially after Climategate, the discussion on the AGW has dramatically changed I believe.
Minor point in this discussion, but to claim that Thomas Kuhn is the “grandfather” of “postmodern philosophers of science” is calumny. The paradigms of which Kuhn speaks do not “determine what various individuals believe and experience.” They are rather the product of what today we call ‘groupthink’, the herd tendency to follow the mainstream, the ‘consensus’, and—of course—the money. Mr. Goodwin has the causation arrow backward.
What happens, Kuhn observes, is that over time the consensus paradigm begins to break down as explanations of anomalous data become increasingly convoluted, and that leaves the way open for scientific genius to seize the day, though often at great personal cost.
Of course, to make a tangential point, it would be fatuous to rank the CAGW speculation with a real scientific paradigm, just because there appears to be a consensus among scientists. It is really a political ideology, whose adherents are not scientists at all, but True Believers intent upon changing society—just look at the yuppie riff-raff at Cancun.
/Mr Lynn
JPeden: “…instead as a “case study” of something she obviously thinks has already been pretty well established as a process – the “Australian universities’ intellectual collapse”.”
Fair point. My bad. Nevertheless, “Australian universities’ intellectual collapse” seems somewhat over the top.
I am surprised when I read of a person, an academic with time to research current peer reviewed literature, who has failed to notice that in this calandar year, all the arguments supporting the AGW hypothesis have been shown to be false.
But for The Australian, Mc Knight’s position is the status -quo in MSM in Australia. There is a reasonably intelligent discussion programme on ABC radio on Saturday mornings. As a wrap to the year, presenter Geraldine Doogue asked one of her guests what they would like for Christmas……and the answer ? “A price on Carbon”. I fell on the floor laughing, but this answer was accepted as perfectly normal by the panel.
We have a long way to go.
Sense Seeker says:
December 18, 2010 at 2:48 am
Your reasoned and well mannered response is (I think) welcome here. However, it appears to me that you only cast uncertainty into what is an uncertainty argument. Therefore raising the level of uncertainty. I don’t argue that climate change isn’t happening. I argue that the present climate change is not unprecedented and that observed changes fall into the realm of predictive uncertainty.
Brendan H says:
December 18, 2010 at 5:43 pm
As an American I cannot, of course, speak to the claim that “Australian Universities'” have suffered an “intellectual collapse”, but if they follow the norm of western universities in both Europe and America – I consider that to be a fair claim. Thus worthy of a rebuttal.
There is a reasonably intelligent discussion program on ABC radio on Saturday mornings.
hahahahahaha
I am amazed by all the thoughtfull, well researched, and intellingent comments on this thread by both sides of the debate. Once again, Wow, a great job by everyone. Most of you make me feel a little bit uneducated, but anyway here is my comment.
JoNova RULES
McNight SUCKS
I think that sums it up.
Brendan H says:
December 18, 2010 at 5:43 pm
Nevertheless, “Australian universities’ intellectual collapse” seems somewhat over the top.
Suffice it to say that I’ve seen enough of it in the U.S. to be on “red alert”. Dogma replaces education….or else!
Mike Borgelt says:
December 18, 2010 at 3:21 pm
“Tell us your real name you gutless bastard.”
You may well ask that question of Jo Nova, or whatever her name is.
[Reply: Joanne Nova is given as her name. Tell us about your screen name.]
That’s odd.
The McNight article is about editorial bias at The Australian newspaper.
So Nova has a big rant about things that are not even in the article she is criticizing. Plus a lot of assertions with no clear basis.
For example M gave advice to restrict the quarrelsome ones from having a say. Nova made that up.
For example M made no claims about the sponsorship in general of climate skeptics. Nova made that up.
Maybe she read into the article what she wanted to read and was not paying attention to what was actually written.
Seems that being an Associate Lecturer in science communication has not been a good career for her.
AusieDan says:
December 18, 2010 at 5:48 pm
I am surprised when I read of a person, an academic with time to research current peer reviewed literature, who has failed to notice that in this calandar year, all the arguments supporting the AGW hypothesis have been shown to be false.
—————-
Let me guess. You get your info from your favorite blogs and not from the scientific literature.
Why don’t you spend more of your time learning about the physics of atmospheres by buying an under-graduate text book on Amazon. After you have worked through all the exercises come back and then prove how wise you are.
Joanne Nova nails it with this comment:
Such is the modern delusion of the activist-journo: McKnight wants to be the leader, to dictate what the public can think and to direct where public spending goes, but he doesn’t want to bother running for office or to expose his claim to open debate. He’s nothing more than a totalitarian in disguise.
Brava!
“Does it defend the right of tobacco sceptics to have a voice?”
Recently I saw in the media the little known fact that smoking actually lowers health care costs for societies. I wish I have made note of it.
One of these days the public will come to understand this. It will save China’s bacon, if they can just keep people smoking, as they have no one to care for their elderly. According to a Dutch study on obesity, smokers live about eight fewer years than non-smoking, non-obese individuals, and cost significantly less in total lifetime health care.
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050029
“Until age 56 y, annual health expenditure was highest for obese people. At older ages, smokers incurred higher costs. Because of differences in life expectancy, however, lifetime health expenditure was highest among healthy-living people and lowest for smokers. Obese individuals held an intermediate position.”
Read it yourselves.
I’m not at all sure this even takes into account the extra eight years of pension payments and other benefits paid to those non-smoking, non-obese individuals.
I’ve been told that the research on second hand smoke is also flawed and twisted for the sake of public opinion. Shrug, all I can do is be skeptical.
I’d like to see a study on the cost of all these MRIs for minor sports injuries for all the rabid triathletes and marathon running thirty somethings.