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.
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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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The above seems to imply that if today’s Climate Contrarians have accepted any amount of money from a free market think tank that has ever accepted (or is now accepting) tobacco money, they’re therefore just like the cancer deniers of yore, because they both share an affinity with free market ideology. Is that what you’re saying?
Apparently you ARE saying that any link to the Tobacco Industry, in any amount, means that the opinions and efforts of today’s Climate Contrarians have been as much bought and paid for as those of the “hired gun” smoking = cancer deniers of the past, because they’re both free-marketeers—and thus capable of any enormity. Is that what you’re saying?
Eh? Please explain the relevance of this sentence. How is it germane to anything I said? (Also please clarify which tobacco dispute.)
Of course its signers didn’t instantaneously coalesce out of the blue and collectively write the petition all by themselves, without prompting. Every “spontaneous” movement or fad or trend or revolt involves some prompting. It’s a matter of degree. Leeser prompting = more sponaniety.
On one hand, if a person, after reading about a petition on one of his favorite sites or blogs, clicked on a link and tediously filled in a lot of personal details, with no personal benefit likely, and a possible personal downside (from opposing a majority position with rabid mind-guards), that’s fairly spontaneous. It was uncoerced, unpressured, uncompensated, and required some effort and risk-taking.
On the other hand there’s the case where a petition is shoved under a person’s nose and he is “put on the spot” by aggressive and/or potentially retaliatory petitioners, and whose signing requires little more than a nod. For instance, the Met Office’s statement of support for the embattled climatologists at EAU was circulated on the signers’ work computer by their higher-ups, who would be aware of anybody who failed to sign. (Or rather, click the YES box (a “nod”).)
But he’s just an aggreagator, not the originator of the articles and news items he cites. Those are what get discussed. Are you implying that, because Morano is getting paid by some free-market organization (presumably), the material he cites can be dismissed as the production of funded-denialism? I think you are, based on my analysis of your earlier statement.
BTW, Morano was forced out of his position as a staffer to Inhofe because his blogging was considered inappropriate. If his funding came from the government, like say Gavin Schmidt’s, would you consider his blogging to be untainted?
OK, Frank. Or Brendan. Or Herbert. Or Monty. Or Jones. Or Mann. Or Schmidt…
You’re just talking the talk. If you walk the walk, then recant your posts defending the odious communist McKnight, who would put the rest of us in a gulag for having an opinion that diverged from the Party line.
You can’t pick and choose with people who want a totalitarian government, you have to repudiate them until and unless they publicly – and sincerely – recant. It’s like saying your neighbor is a great guy, he gives to charity, he belongs to the Rotary, he goes to church, and just because he was caught molesting little boys doesn’t mean he’s not a great guy.
You have to shun McKnight completely, in total, so long as he intends to do whatever he can to put society under his yoke.
So, Herbert Brendan Frank Montwhatever, Jones, you gonna walk your talk?
About midway between what I predicted and what you predicted.
Roger Knights: “The above seems to imply that if today’s Climate Contrarians have accepted any amount of money from a free market think tank that has ever accepted (or is now accepting) tobacco money, they’re therefore just like the cancer deniers of yore, because they both share an affinity with free market ideology. Is that what you’re saying?”
The similarity that I claimed between the two groups is “an affinity with free-market ideology”, not funding per se. Your claim was to discern a distinguishing difference between tobacco and climate sceptics by appealing to organisation and funding versus non-funding and spontaneity. To my mind, the point of similarity — an affinity with free-market ideology — outweighs your claimed difference.
“Every “spontaneous” movement or fad or trend or revolt involves some prompting. It’s a matter of degree.”
Definitely. In my view, the effort required to compile and collate the likes of the Oregon Petition belongs more under the category of “organised” than “spontaneous”.
“Are you implying that, because Morano is getting paid by some free-market organization (presumably), the material he cites can be dismissed as the production of funded-denialism?”
No. I’m saying his collation of lists is organised rather than spontaneous. The value or otherwise of his lists lies in their content.
“If ]Morano’s] funding came from the government, like say Gavin Schmidt’s, would you consider his blogging to be untainted?”
I don”t think the source of funding — or the fact of funding — necessarily taints the message. But I haven’t made any comment about whether I think Morano’s blogging is tainted by funding.
Smokey: “…then recant your posts defending the odious communist McKnight…”
As a man dedicted to the principle of free thought and speech, I reject loyalty oaths, demands for recantation, and any other pressures towards conformity. So I decline your offer.
Brendan H says:
Let’s look at the record, step by step.
Here’s what McKnight wrote, implying that today’s skeptics are hired guns, similar to those few (a dozen or two?) who outspokenly denied the link between smoking and cancer in the 50s & 60s:
The smoking = cancer denialists were a small, well-paid group of hired guns, basically. McKnight was implying that today’s climate contrarians are their equivalent. Jo Nova rebutted the implication:
You then weighed in:
I responded thus:
In other words, there is a qualitative difference between the skeptics of today and those of yore, not just a quantitative one, rebutting your point (“if their only difference lies in their number, appeal to number is a logical fallacy”). To which you said:
This was a red herring—i.e., an attempt to shift the argument to a debate about a different assertion: that today’s skeptics are politically biased.
But the original argument was about what McKnight was implying. McKnight wasn’t implying that today’s skeptics should be given no newspaper space because they are libertarians or conservatives. He was implying that they are a tiny clique of insincere or hopelessly deluded hired guns, mere industry shills or cranks, unworthy of anyone’s attention.
Jo Nova used the words “nothing like,” by which she really meant, obviously, “not ‘like’ in the ways McKnight is implying”: They are vastly more numerous, more spontaneous (not “recruited” as the smoking deniers mostly were), not nobodies, and some are Nobelists.
You’ve unjustifiably taken her words in their literal sense and diverted the discussion onto a different matter—i.e., about a previously undiscussed feature in which the two groups are alike.
What you should have said, if you wanted shift the discussion to a talk about political bias, was to do so explicitly, like this:
Incidentally, not all the influential people in the skeptical movement have a “free market ideology” or are Republicans or Conservatives. Those who don’t fall into that box include Stott in the UK, McIntyre, Corbyn, Watts (I read he was a one-time Democrat), the leading denier” in France (a big-time socialist), and no doubt dozens I’m unaware of. So that’s a weakness in implying “likeness” among skeptics.
Nor should speaking at a free-market think-tank-sponsored event, or having had books published by them, equate to having “accepted tobacco money,” as you seem to imply. (I presume you mean here “industry money,” because the industry involved here would be oil or coal, not tobacco.) If you do, then speakers at events held by environmental organizations could be tarred with having accepted “Soros’s money” (or worse, in some cases). The accusation is overblown: the money wasn’t “industry money,” it was think-tank money. Accepting it isn’t something that only a libertarian ideologue would do. I.e., it’s likely that free market think tanks occasionally pay “mainstream” speakers and authors.
Another point: Skeptical scientific research hasn’t been industry-funded for years, and not much of the research that supports the skeptical position has ever been so funded.
****************
I believe (based mostly on a vague recollection of what I read years ago) that the Oregon Petition Project was a spontaneous, unfunded (or only trivially funded) effort by one or two persons (initially, anyway). I don’t believe there was any expensive or organized advertising + PR campaign to recruit signers. I’ve rarely seen links to it posted on WUWT. Signers mostly signed because they had an internal motivation to do so. So it was/is much more toward the grass-roots end of the spectrum than the AstroTurf end.
*************
Regarding the dispute over the skeptical movements’ spontaneity, let’s “look at the record” again:
“Spontaneous” doesn’t mean unorganized or fleeting, as you imply; it means unprompted, or only lightly prompted. The organizer of the Petition Project and Morano aren’t hired guns who were recruited (prompted). They acted, unprompted, on the basis of their beliefs. So “spontaneous” is correct.
(Naturally, Morano and others who are devoting full time to their fight sometimes seek funding. But so do environmentalists, and the origin of that movement was spontaneous, despite its organization and longevity.)
Moreover, Morano’s lists aren’t the heart of what gets discussed in the skeptical blogosphere—certainly not on WUWT, where he’s rarely cited. He just spreads the news more efficiently than would be done without him. In his absence, word would still get around, via the scores of skeptical blog-site curators who link to one another, and the commenters who post links. It’s not as though he and his ilk are agitators who have fomented the skeptical movement.
It’s the independent and mostly unfunded bloggers and their followers who are the power of the movement. They file FOIA requests, write letters to the editor and their representatives, set up websites or blogs, and post inconvenient comments on MSM sites. They not only dig up and discuss the skeptical implications of published science, they do lots of original research themselves. (E.g., McIntyre, Willis, Tisdale, Watts, Montford, Mosher/Fuller, and scores or even hundreds more.) No one is paying them to do it and they have nothing to gain thereby (barring a trivial amount some get in book royalties and speaking fees). They are far more spontaneous than the publish-or-perish emissions of PC-monitored, career-track academics.
So “largely spontaneous” is correct. You can’t wish it away by saying that Morano is organized, funded, and much cited. He’s only 8% of the phenomenon. The Oregon petition is only 2%. They are a small part of the movement; it is largely an Amateurs’ affair.
Roger Knights: “In other words, there is a qualitative difference between the skeptics of today and those of yore…”
I understand that you are making a qualitative argument. Perhaps Jo Nova is too, although that’s not at all clear from the text. What is clear is a litany of numbers.
“This was a red herring—i.e., an attempt to shift the argument to a debate about a different assertion: that today’s skeptics are politically biased.”
It’s not a red herring. The ideological/political divide in both issues is strikingly similar, despite the line-up of some personnel. How important is it, and in what way? That’s a thesis-sized question, and it’s almost Christmas.
“If you do, then speakers at events held by environmental organizations could be tarred with having accepted “Soros’s money”…”
I know that argument could be made, which is one reason I haven’t been arguing on the funding.
“It’s the independent and mostly unfunded bloggers and their followers who are the power of the movement.”
Are climate sceptic bloggers unorganised? Take a hypothetical case. A blogger hears of an claimed injustice involving a commericial operation, environmentalists, and a local authority; proceeds to publish the case far and wide and urge followers to take the case to the public and lobby the politicans.
Another blogger alerts readers to pending legislation, supplies contact details, and urges reades to lobby the politicians.
Organised or spontaneous? The line is a fine one. On this matter, the funding issue is not relevant.
Brendan H says:
“As a man dedicted to the principle of free thought and speech, I reject…” & blah, blah, etc.
This thread is getting old, and I’m moving on to above the fold. Have the last word, herbert. But it’s crystal clear that you talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
So talk away. Maybe you’ll even convince someone.
But “quantity has a quality of its own.” I.e., it’s reasonable that a few scientists could be corrupt or crazy enough to be industry shill, and it’s reasonable that an industry could secretly corrupt and pay for a few such shills, but it’s not reasonable that such a large number would yield to the temptation or that if they would, that they could be recruited, in any practical sense. That implication should be “clear from the text.”
It is a red herring, albeit a “thesis-sized question.” Googling define “red herring” brings up the following definitions (in the first hit):
The main issue, the real issue, and the issue in question—i.e., the one that Jo Nova was disputing with McKnight—had nothing to do with the political orientation of the tobacco & global warming skeptics. It had to do with whether they were industry shills or not. Your introduction of the question of their political orientation was a diversion from that issue.
That’s spontaneous, ad hoc coordination, similar to a flash-mob get-together, not organization. Organization implies structure and a hierarchy—i.e., organization implies an organization chart, even if not always written out. It also usually implies, for a large group, a permanent clerical and operational support staff, or secretariat. Etc. The gulf is a wide one.
Question: What is the “sinews of war” (and of any form of mass conflict)?
Below is a reprint of a tidied-up version of my online article/comment, “Notes from Skull Island,” which addresses the issues of organization and funding:
============
Notes From Skull Island:
Brian Martin, in his wonderful online booklet Strip the Experts, at http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/91strip.html wrote that if your opponents:
This line of attack on skeptics has been very successful for the warmists in the past, which is why they constantly recur to it. But the recent skeptical attack has been mostly an indignant blogger-led populist revolt against increased and unnecessary taxation and regulation (fewer barbecues, etc.) and elitist presumption.
If our side were well funded and well organized, it would have the following characteristics:
1. There’d be a slick umbrella site like HufPo under which all dissident bloggers could shelter, cutting their costs, increasing ad revenue, and simplifying and standardizing the process of surfing the deviationist blogosphere, especially for visiting journalists. The effect would be to considerably “amplify” the dissenters’ voices.
2. Failing that, there’d be enough $ for individual sites to ensure that, for instance, Climate Audit would have been able to handle to traffic-surge in the wake of Climategate, instead of being overwhelmed. (How’s that unpreparedness agree with “well organized”?)
3. There’d be a PR agency to “package” stories emerging from the blogosphere and articles in scientific journals or contrarian columnists and feed them to media sources in easy-to-read, pre-edited form. (Or at least an unincorporated online network of funded individuals performing a PR function.) This is a topic that is so complex and filled with jargon that it desperately needs such pre-chewing to get the MSM to swallow it. But what do we have? Only Climate Depot, which provides leads, but no packaging. (Update: We now (finally!) have a professional weekly summary of the news, re-posted on WUWT, but it’s only a baby step.)
BTW, another contra-factual is Climategate. There was no pre-planned media-coordination involved in the matter. There was no campaign to alert them to its importance, nor any professional packaging of the story for them. No one gave Fox a heads-up. As a result, MSM coverage of the event was nil.
4. There’d be a centralized, regularly updated, annotated, topically divided, web-wide index of useful “ammo” skeptical or skeptic-supporting articles. If I, or anyone, were cat-herder in chief, this would be one of the top items on the agenda.
5. There’d be a REPOSITORY for “quotes of the day” from blog commenters. (These get lost in the noise after a week or so otherwise.) Here’s an example, from Willis:
6. There’d be extensive book tours for every skeptical book published, to gain exposure in multiple markets via interviews in the local press, etc. Such tours could be extended for many months, well beyond any rational “payback” in book sales, if the real aim were to get media exposure – for instance by challenging local warmists to debates on the premises of the newspaper or broadcaster, etc. The funding for such a tour could easily be concealed.
7. Certain fringe or off-topic comments would be “moderated” out, because they step on people’s toes and don’t play well in Peoria. E.g., New World Order theorizing, bolshy bashing, boot-the-UN and tar-and-feather-‘em remarks, and most attribution-of-motives comments. Populist “venting” of all sorts would be toned down; instead the stress would be on sweet reasonableness and out-reaching to the average citizen and opinion-leader. Any media pro would advise that course, especially one with a big funder behind him (who wouldn’t want to be tarred by association with tin-hat opinions (if news of a link ever came out)). Such a “mainstream” tone and mindset would be the fingerprint of any top-down campaign on a scientific topic.
8. Not only would there be more stylistic similarity, but the content would be less idiosyncratic as well. There’d be evidence of a “script” or list of talking points that skeptic commenters were following, instead of the typical home-brew assemblage of arguments.
9. There’d be an astro-turfed tag-team of high-stamina commenters assigned to Win the War for Wikipedia by out-shouting and out-censoring Connolly and Co. They’d also go en masse to Amazon and give warmist books a thumbs-down and engage in comment-combats there as well. But the dissenters in that venue have been an outnumbered, disorganized rabble.
10. There’d be much more stress on arguments that would move the masses and that don’t take a degree to understand. I.e., arguments about the costliness, technical impracticality, and political unenforceability of mitigation strategies, and about the ineffectiveness of massive CO2 emission-reduction in the atmosphere even if all those obstacles were of no account.
If skeptics were truly Machiavellian, or guided by political “pros” behind the scenes, they’d be hitting these popular hot buttons. They are where the warmists’ case is shakiest — and it’s always a good strategy to focus on the opponents’ weakest points and pound on them endlessly. Instead, these topics make up only 10% or so of the skeptical thrust. Most dissenters devote most of their energy to talking about weather events, dissing believers, and arguing about technical and scientific matters.
11. There’d be an extensive online collection of opposition research, such as warmist predictions waiting to be shot down by contrary events. Such opposition research is so valuable a tactic (as is now being shown) that no political or PR consultant would have failed to insist on it.
E.g., a score of warmist predictions of less snowfall would have been at hand to counter Gore’s claim that the models predicted more snowfall. Similarly, the IPCC’s Assessment Reports would have been scoured for flaws and nits long ago. Instead, it wasn’t until Glaciergate that we got on its case in any semi-organized fashion.
12. There’d be an online point-by-point rebuttal of all the “How to Talk to A Skeptic” talking points, not just scattered counterpoints to a few of them. And there’d be a Wikipedia discussing those points and more in fuller detail. Lucy Skywalker is trying to assemble these, but it’s obviously an unfunded effort.
13. The Oregon Petition Project would have been handled professionally. I.e., there’d have been no short-sighted tactics such as use of NAS-lookalike typography, no claim that the signers constituted “a meaningful representation” (let alone that the consensus was on the skeptics’ side), no claim that all the signers were scientists (when some were technologists and dentists, etc.), and no implication that the signers had all been vetted. A skilled propagandist, such as one hired by King Coal, would have avoided such a transparent over-reaching, which threw away the petition’s effectiveness by handing the opposition a chance to counterpunch effectively.
14. There’d be a place for the reposting of the “highlights” of WUWT and other skeptic sites, and also such sites would have editors who would retroactively (after a month or so) do on-site flagging and/or highlighting of outstanding posts within those threads. This would encourage posters to do better and make it easier for newcomers and journalists to effectively skim our sites and notice our better arguments and facts.
15. There’d be a reposting of “negative highlights” from warmists’ sites in which the unsavory qualities of their leading lights and hatchetmen were on display. Call it, maybe, “Quoted Without Comment” or “Get a Load of This.” It would make an impact on fence-sitters.
16. There’d be a spiffy ad campaign consisting of short spots (20 to 40 seconds) that would focus on making one quick jab at the warmists. There should be a standard format for these ads, such as a common tag-line, music, lead-in, graphics style, etc. The touch should be light, with the aim of making the spots entertaining, such as by including little bits of silly rhymes, etc. The ads should also be “different,” to get around viewers’ defenses, and to make the message “sticky.” Care should be taken to avoid overstatement, and to make qualifications where necessary, to forestall counterpunches.
17. There’d be a copy editing & peer review service to vet our side’s books prior to publication, since any flubs will be seized on by warmists to discredit the entire work, as happened to Plimer’s book. Instead, dissenting books continue to be produced in an amateurish fashion. For instance, in Steve Goreham’s just-out (and excellent) Climatism!, I found two obvious spelling errors in just an hour’s skimming. (“Forego” for “forgo” and “principle” used where “principal” was needed.)
Big Oil? Baby Oil is more like it. Ologeneous overlords? My companions and I on Skull Island laugh until we vomit.
PS: 18. We’d be conducting polls of various groups of scientists designed to offset the effect of such polls by the other side.
Roger, that’s an excellent summation of how an anti-Climatist campaign should be organized, but this thread is, as Smokey said, “below the fold” and becoming invisible to most passers-by.
I’d like to see Anthony elevate your little essay to a lead post, and see if some funding could be found to organize a team with paid staffers and a professional website to implement the program you have so neatly outlined.
Hey, it’s not too late!
/Mr Lynn
Here’s a good thread by Anthony (on March 22, 2010) rebutting a claim that our side is organized, etc.:
“The well funded, well organized, global skeptic network laid bare …” at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/22/the-well-funded-well-organized-global-skeptic-network-laid-bare-sarc/