The climate wars continue raging on opinion pages.
The 2009 'incident now widely referred to as Climategate,' declared an editorial last week in Nature , not only has done 'no lasting damage to science,' but might even have 'fostered climatology and improved the way the field is perceived by the general public.' In that spirit the editors add the following:
Climategate 2 may damage the cause of the climate sceptics who eagerly promote it. Despite their obvious lack of anything approaching credible evidence, their hyperbole, accusations, claims and allegations remain the same. Beyond the echo chamber they inhabit, who is still listening?
In a related vein, Simon Kuper of the Financial Times asserts in a commentary headlined 'Squabbling while the world burns' that while it's tempting to blame and to debate climate skeptics, the real 'block' to action on human-caused climate destabilization 'is that the believers—including virtually all governments on earth—aren't sufficiently willing to act. We could do something. But shouting at sceptics is easier.'
On the other hand, a commentary presented as a cover story in National Journal reports that the controversial 'e-mail release succeeded in changing the public debate in the U.S., where GOP lawmakers continue to point to the East Anglia e-mails as evidence that climate science is not settled—and as a reason not to act on climate change.'
That commentary begins with a photo of an Earthrise over a moonscape, with this caption: 'Warning: 'Climate change is occurring … and poses significant risks to humans and the environment,' reports the National Academy of Sciences.' The article asks, 'As climate-change science moves in one direction, Republicans in Congress are moving in another. Why?'
As part of its own answer, the commentary says, 'Here's what has changed for Republican politicians: The rise of the tea party, its influence in the Republican Party, its crusade against government regulations, and the influx into electoral politics of vast sums of money from energy companies and sympathetic interest groups.'
The commentary identifies, and wonders about, Republicans who believe that human activities are destabilizing the planet's climate. At one point it notes that Indiana Republican Senator Richard Lugar 'says that the only way science can stand up for itself is by entering the fray—loudly, clearly, and simply.' Lugar has suggested something that may call to mind the Doomsday Clock with which the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists seeks to remind the world of the danger of nuclear war:
I have gone to conferences for several years and have pled for indicators . . . that would make a difference in terms of my being able to argue. . . . This may be impractical, but in Times Square, there's an indicator of how the public debt is rising. We're going to have to have, for there to be a good public discussion about this, some metric which is understandable.
As to the question of taking action, Thomas L. Friedman's 3 December New York Times op-ed begins by charging that President Obama 'has been completely missing in action on the climate debate.' An editorial at the international organization SciDev.net (Science and Development Network) worries that the 'willingness of politicians to listen to scientific evidence, although growing, remains patchy.' It adds, 'Nowhere is this more evident than in the debate on global warming, where the scientific consensus on the need for urgent action to limit carbon emissions is not reflected by political commitment to enact tough measures.'
The Boston Globe 's Derrick Z. Jackson sees insurance companies taking action. In a 30 November column he says the companies 'feel the effects financially as the pace of climate-related disasters accelerates.' He reports that Allstate CEO Tom Wilson 'said pricing premiums to account for increased extreme weather events 'is permanent.' ' Jackson suggests that with climate destabilization 'clearly increasing,' it's 'possible that higher bills from insurers will change minds in Washington more effectively than a preponderance of scientific evidence has.'
A recent issue of the Richmond Times Dispatch quoted from an attack on climatologist James Hansen by lawyer John H. Hinderaker. In a blog called Power Line, under the headline 'James Hansen and the corruption of science,' Hinderaker wrote (and the Times-Dispatch quoted):
It recently came out that James Hansen, one of the two or three most prominent global warming alarmists on whose work the IPCC reports rest, 'forgot' to report $1.6 million in outside income, as required by his government contracts. Is that significant? Well, yes: A handful of scientists, including Hansen, have gotten wealthy on climate alarmism. They have an enormous financial interest in the faux science they have done so much to perpetrate. It is more likely that the Pope would renounce Christianity than that Hansen, Michael Mann, etc., would change their minds about global warming, regardless of the evidence. (I say that because the Pope has far more intellectual integrity than the climate alarmists.)
Beyond that handful of leading alarmists, if you are involved in any way in climate science, you have a financial interest in alarmism. Even minor climate scientists get consulting contracts and are invited to present papers in exotic locales. And if you are not an alarmist, you have little or no chance of cashing in on the billions of dollars in government grants for climate research. Essentially, the closed world of climate 'science' has been bought and paid for, largely with our tax dollars. Under these circumstances, it is remarkable that so many real scientists have been willing to forgo financial advantage and blow the whistle on the alarmists' frauds.
The Wall Street Journal's editors telegraphed the message of a 2 December op-ed in their choice of headline: 'Absolute certainty is not scientific: Global warming alarmists betray their cause when they declare that it is irresponsible to question them.' The op-ed's author, Daniel B. Botkin serves as president of the Center for the Study of the Environment and is professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Oxford University Press is publishing his forthcoming Discordant Harmonies: Ecology in a Changing World.
Botkin says he feels 'nostalgic for those times when even the greatest scientific minds admitted limits to what they knew.' One of his comparisons between today's climate science and science in the past invokes the engineering research of the Wright brothers:
It is helpful to go back to the work of the Wright brothers, whose invention of a true heavier-than-air flying machine was one kind of precursor to the Mars Landers. They basically invented aeronautical science and engineering, developed methods to test their hypotheses, and carefully worked their way through a combination of theory and experimentation. The plane that flew at Kill Devil Hill, a North Carolina dune, did not come out of true believers or absolute assertions, but out of good science and technological development.
Also in the WSJ , a 5 December letter from climatologist Michael Mann answered the 28 November 'Cimategate 2.0' op-ed previously discussed in this venue. Under the headline 'Climate contrarians ignore overwhelming evidence,' Mann revisits the 'hockey stick' debate:
Our original work showed that average temperatures today are higher than they have been for at least the past 1,000 years. Since then, dozens of analyses from other scientists based on different data and methods have all affirmed and extended our original findings.
Contrarians have nonetheless painted a misleading picture of climate science as a house of cards teetering on the edge of a hockey stick. In reality, my research is just one piece in a vast puzzle scientists have painstakingly assembled over the past 200 years establishing the reality of human-caused climate change.
Does that mean that everyone should have to drive an electric car and adopt a polar bear? Of course not. Policy decisions must balance matters of economics, international diplomacy and ethics in a way that is informed, rather than prescribed, by science.
In 2006, then-Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R., N.Y.) asked the National Academy of Sciences to look into studies like the hockey stick. It affirmed our conclusions.
Mann's letter, almost the length of an op-ed, charges that 'attacks on climate science have become personal.' It criticizes Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and the American Tradition Institute—which he calls 'a group with ties to fossil-fuel interests'—for seeking access to his old email correspondence from his days at the University of Virginia. And it blasts 'fossil-fuel interests and their allies' for 'following the same attack-the-science strategy that tobacco companies adopted to delay smoking regulation.' Mann consistently characterizes the loss of email messages from the University of East Anglia as theft.
What Mann calls theft, Bret Stephens praises in a 29 November Wall Street Journal column headlined 'The great global warming fizzle: The climate religion fades in spasms of anger and twitches of boredom.' With his religion analogy, Stephens mocks climatology and climatologists:
Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen. As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term 'climate change' when thermometers don't oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other 'deniers.' And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.
Stephens ends with this: 'Religions are sustained in the long run by the consolations of their teachings and the charisma of their leaders. With global warming, we have a religion whose leaders are prone to spasms of anger and whose followers are beginning to twitch with boredom. Perhaps that's another way religions die.'
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for Science and the Media. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
