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]
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.