Who are the main figureheads of the worldwide AGW-denialist movement? Their name is, alas, Legion. Certainly there are far too many, often working with covert or overt funding from the fossil fuels industry, to include any comprehensive listing here. Instead, here is a sort of dramatis personae of some of the major—or at least noisiest—players. I’ve had to omit many figures who’re quite significant in this curious little alternative reality: Tony Abbott, chris Allen, Robert Balling, Fred Barnes, Joe Bastardi, Glenn Beck, David Bellamy, chris christie, John christy, Ken Cuccinelli, Joe D’Aleo, James Delingpole, Peter Heck, Peter Hitchens, Robert Jastrow, Jonathan I. Katz, Nigel Lawson, Mark R. Levin, Rush Limbaugh, John Mackey, Pat Michaels, Andrew Montford, Marc Morano, William Nierenberg, Richard North, Joanne Nova, Ted Nugent, Sarah Palin, Benny Peiser, Roger A. Pielke Jr., Roger A. Pielke Sr., John Raese, Dana Rohrabacher, Roy Spencer, John Stossel, Graham Stringer, John Tierney, David Whitehouse, Ian Wishart . . . Many can be found in the index.
And nor is there space to deal in detail with all the points put forward by the deniers, or even by all of the major deniers . . . and, anyway, it would be a waste of time. What they produce collectively is essentially just noise, the sheer volume of which serves to bamboozle, just as the din of a raucous day in the monkey house can drive the wits out of visitors and attendants alike. Perhaps this is the deniers’ intention.
The physicist and mathematician Freeman J. Dyson is the most prestigious scientist the AGW community considers one of its own; most of his significant work dates from the 1940s and early 1950s. In fact, Dyson accepts the reality of anthropogenic global warming and agrees something needs to be done; in his view, the best treatment would be to plant a trillion genetically engineered fast-growing trees to hugely increase the vegetational removal of CO2 from the atmosphere. As Isaak Walton might have said, first genetically engineer your tree. Where Dyson differs from climate scientists is in his assessment of the severity of the problems of atmospheric CO2 and ocean acidification—he believes they’re less urgently in need of our efforts than other issues like global poverty—and in what he regards as the unjustified ostracizing by most climate scientists of the few “heretics” in their midst. It would seem Dyson should treat himself to a visit to, say, www.exxon secrets.org.
Dyson is not, as sometimes claimed, entirely unqualified in climate science. He did some early work on the subject at the Institute for Energy Analysis, Oak Ridge, during the 1970s, investigating the environmental effects of rising levels of atmospheric CO2. The team concluded that the environmental hazards could be controlled by a mixture of emissions reduction and intelligent management of land use.1 In the mid-1970s the atmospheric concentration was around 330 ppm. It is today around 390 ppm, and rising.
Richard Lindzen is an atmospheric physicist of some distinction who nevertheless brings to studies of AGW what James Hansen describes as “a theological or philosophical perspective that he doggedly adheres to.”2 His Wall Street Journal piece “Climate Science in Denial: Global Warming Alarmists Have Been Discredited, but You Wouldn’t Know It from the Rhetoric This Earth Day”3 was derided as so riddled with errors even the first six words of its subtitle are false. This was the fourth op-ed by Lindzen the WSJ had run, each decrying the 98 percent of climate scientists who’re concerned about global warming. Cynics pointed out that, if the WSJ thought the voice of the dissident 2 percent deserved four op-eds, it was about time the newspaper ran 196 or so op-eds by climate scientists.
In 1997 Lindzen conceded to journalist Ross Gelbspan that his consultancies for Australian and US coal interests and for OPEC companies were worth some $2,500 per day to him—this in addition to his academic salary.
Professor of geology at Adelaide University, Ian Plimer is the author of the AGW-denialist Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science (2009); he has to date published no peer-reviewed papers on climate science. It’s his contention that civilizations prosper in warmer times, so why fear global warming, which anyway is a natural process about which we can do nothing?
In particular, he claims, as a geologist, that “[o]ver the past 250 years, humans have added just one part of CO2 in 10,000 to the atmosphere. One volcanic cough can do this in a day.”4 This is quite simply untrue. Annual CO2 emissions through burning fossil fuels and changing land use are about one hundred times greater than volcanoes can produce even in a volcano-rich year. Plimer has often been corrected on this point, but carries on making it anyway. And the same goes for his repeated assertion that the United States Geological Survey (USGS) data don’t take into account submarine volcanic activity; the USGS quite explicitly says they do.
He also repeats some very strange conspiracy-theory notions. “The Greens opt to pressure democratically elected governments to reject a large body of science in favor of authoritarianism and promote policies which create unemployment and economic contraction,”5 he told an apparently embarrassed audience at the Paydirt Uranium Conference in Adelaide in March 2008. It is, of course, Plimer himself who rejects “a large body of science.”
In July 2009 Plimer challenged Guardian journalist George Monbiot to a public debate on “Humans Induce Climate change: Myth or Reality?” and added, “I am happy to fly to London at my expense.”6 After some thought Monbiot accepted the challenge, but on condition Plimer answer beforehand thirteen very specific questions about the content of Heaven and Earth. Plimer started wriggling . . . and wriggling . . . The debate never happened, but on December 15, 2009, the two men faced each other on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Lateline. Here’s a sample Plimer answer:
[W]hat I think is happening is governments just cannot resist the opportunity to tax us more, to set up huge bureaucracies, and this is what Copenhagen’s about. It’s not about science, it’s not about morality, it’s not about the Third World—it’s about money, and it’s about governments putting their hands in our pockets, taking out our money, and having to go through sets of sticky fingers to end up disappearing somewhere else in the world.
No, that isn’t an Onion parody; it comes from the ABC’s own transcript.7 Similarly bizarre was Plimer’s insistence that neither Monbiot nor the moderator, Tony Jones, had read Heaven and Earth when obviously both had. A typical exchange:
Jones: [L]ast week we had the World Meteorological Organisation release their annual statement which says the first decade of the 21st Century is likely to be the warmest on record, that 2009 is set to be the fifth warmest year on record. Are they credible?
Plimer: A couple of points. That is a projection; we haven’t yet finished this year.
This discussion took place on December 15.
One of the eight-strong Advisory Board at the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC; see page 95) was Frederick Seitz, also chairman of the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), an organization so rooted in the sciences that it was founded (in the early 1990s) using seed capital and office space provided by the Moonies; it now receives funding from ExxonMobil plus a bunch of rightwing organizations. Seitz served as president of the National Academy of Sciences from 1962 to 1969 and as president of Rockefeller University from 1968 to 1978. During World War II he worked on the atomic bomb project. He worked with Eugene Wigner on the Wigner–Seitz unit cell; in other words, he was a solid-state physicist rather than a climatologist.
Seitz’s connection with science denial started around 1978 or 1979, when he became a permanent consultant to tobacco company R. J. Reynolds, his task being to commission research that might help counter the profits-denting scientific consensus about smoking. Over the next decade or so he was responsible for distributing some $45 million to scientific researchers who, astonishingly, could find little evidence that smoking was deleterious to health; just under $900,000 went into his own pocket.8
Another phase in Seitz’s assault on the integrity of science saw him, in 1984, cofounding the George C. Marshall Institute. Its original purpose was to wage a publicity campaign against scientific criticism of Ronald Reagan’s SDI program (“Star Wars”). The view of Seitz and his cofounders—Robert Jastrow and William Nierenberg—was that the Soviet Union’s socialism was such a threat that maximum resources should be put into defending the US from it, even if scientific facts didn’t support the proposal. Indeed, the staff of the institute traditionally show a fairly cavalier attitude toward facts, many of their data having been found dubious. Where their real skill lies, however, is in propaganda—in persuading politicians, media, and public that there’s a powerful body of opinion disagreeing with the scientific consensus.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, it might have seemed the Marshall Institute would pack up its bags—but no. Various discoveries of science—whether about the dangers of smoking or the toxicity of environmental mercury—have an impact upon politics in the sense that they suggest regulation: Rules governing drinking water, for example, are generally agreed to be a good thing. But not by the libertarians associated with the Marshall Institute. To them, governmental regulations of any kind were (and are) anathema. Just like those fringe evangelicals who believe it’s okay to lie for Jesus, the Marshall Institute people carried on propagandizing.
In 1994 the institute published Seitz’s Global Warming and Ozone Hole Controversies: A challenge to Scientific Judgment, which denied the ozone hole (see pages 216ff.) was a problem. He also became associated with the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, a maverick operation founded in 1980 by Arthur B. Robinson; Robinson started his career as a chemist but was drawn by his christian fundamentalism into science denial. In 1998, when the Oregon Institute and the Marshall Institute got together to publish Robinson’s mighty Research Review of Global Warming Evidence, the book bore a preface by Seitz. The book’s thesis is our old friend: Increased atmospheric CO2 will create a new Eden. This piece of pseudoscience was produced in a format precisely mimicking the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and sent out for free to tens of thousands of nonclimatological scientists and graduates who very often, assuming it was from the NAS, took it seriously. The media swallowed the fraud and regurgitated it wholesale for viewers on a nightly basis. Accompanying Research Review was a document called the Oregon Petition, written by Seitz. Here’s an extract:
There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.9
The George W. Bush administration used the petition as part of its excuse for withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol in 2000.
S. Fred Singer played a significant role in the development of observation satellites and was the National Weather Satellite Service’s first director. In 1993 he and Kent Jeffreys produced a paper called “The EPA and the Science of Environmental Tobacco Smoke,” which claimed the EPA was rigging the science concerning the dangers of secondhand smoking; the study was funded by the Tobacco Institute and published by a rightwing think tank, the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. Singer had a fair history in the movement to deny the harmfulness of secondhand smoking (see pages 95 and 270), much of which is detailed, alongside his career in AGW denialism, in Naomi Oreskes’s and Erik M. Conway’s Merchants of Doubt (2010). Naturally Singer was displeased by this book. In a piece for American Thinker he sought to belittle Oreskes and Conway, to justify his stance on passive smoking, and to make the curious argument that, since he’d been right all along about smoking (he had?), he was probably also right about global warming—or the lack thereof.
Oreskes’ and Conway’s science is as poor as their historical expertise. To cite just one example, their book blames lung cancer from cigarette smoking on the radioactive oxygen-15 isotope. They cannot explain, of course, how O-15 gets into cigarettes, or how it is created. They seem to be unaware that its half-life is only 122 seconds. In other words, they have no clue about the science, and apparently, they assume that the burning of tobacco creates isotopes—a remarkable discovery worthy of alchemists.10
I checked. Oreskes and Conway make no such claim. They’re referring to a scientifically impenetrable 1979 statement by Fred Seitz that “the oxygen in the air we breathe and which is essential for life plays a role in radiation-induced cancer”11 and making a guess that he might have been talking about radioactive oxygen in the air: “Oxygen, like most elements, has a radioactive version—oxygen 15—although it is not naturally occurring.”12 The source they footnote for this statement gives the half-life of O15. So:
There are, at least, no obvious spelling errors in Singer’s paragraph.
As early as 1991 Singer coaxed the dying Roger Revelle—among the most significant early figures to warn of elevated atmospheric greenhouse gas levels—and persuaded him to sign on as one of three coauthors of an article that essentially said the science involved was still dodgy. The article, “What To Do About Greenhouse Warming: Look Before You Leap,”13 appeared just as preparations were being made for the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Singer and his cronies publicized Revelle’s near-deathbed “recantation”; according to all who knew him, the elderly Revelle hadn’t really known what was going on. One of Revelle’s PhD students, Justin Lancaster, spoke out intemperately on the subject. Singer, with considerable industry resources behind him, via SEPP, sued, claiming monstrous damages; it was an ugly example of the use of the legal system and superior finances to silence criticism—or, as they say, a “triumph for solid science.” Lancaster was forced to retract, but has since withdrawn his retraction.
In Heat (2007, pp. 24–27) George Monbiot recounts his early experience with Fred Singer. He traced a set of widely disseminated bogus figures to Singer’s SEPP website, where there was loose citation of a 1989 report in Science. Monbiot diligently went through 1989’s issues of Science and found there was no such report. He published this discovery in his Guardian column and thought that was the end of the story.
However, one of his readers contacted Singer and asked for an explanation. Singer’s first response was to claim Monbiot must be “confused—or simply lying” about the figures having appeared on the SEPP site. The reader persisted: Not only had the figures appeared on the website, they were still there. Singer’s second response was that they’d been put there in error by a “former SEPP associate”—in fact, his wife—and had now been corrected. A year later, Monbiot checked the site and discovered that, no, they hadn’t. I visited the SEPP website in November 2010 and, so far as I can establish, they’ve now gone. But for how long?
The February 12, 2001, issue of the Washington Post carried a letter from Singer claiming it had been twenty years since he’d last received any funding from the oil industry, and that had been for a piece of consultancy work. Unfortunately for his claim, ExxonMobil’s own website bore evidence (since removed, but lovingly preserved in PDF form by Ross Gelbspan) that the company had paid $10,000 to SEPP and $65,000 to the Atlas Economic Research Foundation—both owned by Singer—in the year 1998 alone.
Sherwood B. Idso and his two sons Craig D. Idso and Keith E. Idso have built up a sort of familial cottage industry based on AGW denialism, pushing their ideas through well funded groups like the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global change (CSCDGC)—which Craig founded in 1998 and of which Sherwood has been president since 2001—and the CO2 Science website, which offers a digest of material favoring denialist views.
Sherwood Idso’s 1980 paper “The Climatological Significance of a Doubling of Earth’s Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration”14 claimed a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would have little effect. He was by now associated with Arizona State University’s Office of Climatology; he and his colleagues would, over the ensuing years, receive over $1 million in grants from the fossil fuel and utility industries.15 In 1990 he and Robert Balling of Arizona State University’s School of Geographical Sciences were sponsored by the Cyprus Minerals Company for a project called “Greenhouse Cooling.” Sherwood’s 1999 paper “Real-World Constraints on Global Warming”16 was published by the ExxonMobil-funded Fraser Institute, an indication of where his scientific reputation had migrated. The paper’s conclusions—natural negative feedbacks will solve the warming problem for us—fly in the teeth of established climate science.
His books are published either by the Institute for Biospheric Research (president: Sherwood B. Idso) or by Vales Lake Publishing, a small print-on-demand press with an odd list of science-denying items. He took part in the 1991 half-hour video The Greening of Planet Earth (see page 245).
Craig Idso served from 2001 to 2002 as director of environmental science at Peabody Energy, the world’s largest coal company to remain in private hands. Since then he seems to have devoted the bulk of his energies to the CSCDGC, which has now, according to Greenpeace,17 become a Koch Industries front group. In 2009 he delivered to the Climate change Conference organized by the Heartland Institute a paper called “Climate change Reconsidered”; this proposed, inter alia, that one motivation of the IPCC scientists was their hope of being invited to all-expenses-paid conferences in “exotic locations.” More recently, he is one of the listed authors—alongside Fred Singer—of the 880-page Heartland Institute-published Climate change Reconsidered: The Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate change (NIPCC), which you can pick up from Amazon for a nifty $123.00 . . . in paperback.
Number Two Son, Keith E. Idso, is currently the CSCDGC’s vice president while also—the mind boggles—serving on the Arizona Advisory Council on Environmental Education.
The résumé of Sallie Baliunas reads almost like a parody: An astrophysicist by training, she has been a board member, chair of the Science Advisory Board and senior scientist at the Marshall Institute (ExxonMobil-funded), cohost and environment/science editor at Tech Central Station (ExxonMobil-funded), a contributing editor to World Climate Report (published by the Western Fuels Association), on the Advisory Board of the UK’s Scientific Alliance (secretive, but probably ExxonMobil-funded), an “expert” at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (ExxonMobil-funded), and an authority on global warming and the ozone layer at the National Center for Public Policy Research (ExxonMobil-funded). In 1993 and 1994 she was the Robert Wesson Endowment Fund Fellow at the Hoover Institution (ExxonMobil-funded). There seems to be a theme running through all this . . .
Baliunas’s list of publications on climate science, as given on her Marshall Institute bio page,18 seems impressive—especially for one who has no academic qualifications in the subject. On clicking the links, however, we discover a slightly different story. These supposedly scholarly papers seem not to have appeared in the standard peer-reviewed scientific journals—in other words, they’re directed not at the scientific community but at the denialist echo chamber.
The American Astronomical Society awarded Baliunas its Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in 1988, and in 1991 Discover magazine singled her out as one of the USA’s outstanding female scientists. Since then, the decline.
One of her frequent colleagues is Harvard–Smithsonian astrophysicist Willie Soon, who contends climate change is the product of variations in solar output—a contention that has been proven false (see page 254). He is associated with a whole string of fossil fuel–funded organizations, including the Marshall Institute, the American Petroleum Institute, the Fraser Institute, Tech Central Station, World Climate Report, United for Jobs, the Heartland Institute, the Cooler Heads Coalition, and the Frontiers of Freedom Institute and Foundation Center for Science and Public Policy; the latter was set up in 2002 thanks to a $100,000 grant from ExxonMobil.19 Even the Center forAstrophysics and the Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory, to both of which he and Sallie Baliunas belong, receive funding from ExxonMobil.
He was a coauthor—with Baliunas, David Legates, and Tim Ball—of the non-peer-reviewed paper “Polar Bears of Western Hudson Bay and Climate change: Are Warming Spring Air Temperatures the ‘Ultimate’ Survival Control Factor?” (2007), which was largely responsible for the meme that it’s not climate change causing polar bear populations to decline.20 In the acknowledgements section of this paper appeared the sentence: “W. Soon’s effort for the completion of this paper was partially supported by grants from the charles G. Koch charitable Foundation, American Petroleum Institute, and Exxon-Mobil Corporation.” There was, naturally, controversy.
Funding came from the American Petroleum Institute for an earlier Soon–Baliunas paper, “Lessons & Limits of Climate History: Was the 20th Century Climate Unusual?”21 (2003), an attack on the work of paleoclimatologist Michael Mann, which this time failed to make it into even the non-peer-reviewed section of a journal but was instead published by the Marshall Institute.
When the Soon–Baliunas paper “Proxy Climatic and Environmental changes of the Past 1000 Years,” partly funded by the American Petroleum Institute, appeared in the January 31, 2003, issue of the obscure journal Climate Research, there was an outcry. One of the journal’s editors, chris de Freitas, a known AGW denier, had published the piece despite all four of its peer reviewers recommending rejection. Not long after, half the journal’s editorial board departed in protest.22
The paper had zero effect on the accepted science concerning AGW, but has had a significant political impact: James Inhofe cites it frequently.
Politicians
Chairman of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee from 2003 to 2006, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) stands as one of the most spectacular AGW denialists in an age that has seen plenty of them. It is his conviction, real or assumed, that “[w]ith all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it.”23 In addition to denying climate science, Inhofe has played, through his committee chairmanship, a major role in ensuring that little or nothing gets done in the US about mercury pollution, which he says is unimportant.
He’s associated, according to exxonsecrets.org, with the Competitive Enterprise Institute (funded by ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, Cigna Corporation, Dow chemical, EBCO Corp., General Motors, IBM, and others), with the Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy (funded primarily by the National Association of Manufacturers), with the Tech Central Science Foundation (funded largely by ExxonMobil, with further contributions from AT&T, Avue Technologies, Coca-Cola, General Motors, Intel, McDonalds, Merck, Microsoft, Nasdaq, PhRMA, and Qualcomm), and with the Washington Legal Foundation (largely funded by ExxonMobil).24
Inhofe maintains that the earth has been undergoing a warming trend since the end of the so-called Little Ice Age. Since this process is purely natural, it’s pointless to try to counter it by, say, capping CO2 emissions.
His single most destructive act has been, arguably, his involvement in the legal campaign to suppress the National Climate Assessment. Commissioned by the George H. W. Bush administration, this was a survey of the likely effects of climate change on the US, region by region. Because of this regional approach, it’s deemed the report might have a more immediate impact on US readers than any number of global assessments—that your own neighborhood may become a dustbowl hits harder than hearing millions will starve in Africa—and thus it was subject to attack by US denialists from the outset. The ExxonMobil-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute led the charge in 2000, bringing a lawsuit, with Inhofe and Congresswoman Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO) as coplaintiffs, in an attempt to suppress publication. The incoming Bush Jr. administration dodged the issue by claiming the National Climate Assessment was just an advisory report, not official policy.
This meant the report could still be disseminated. The Competitive Enterprise Institute mounted a second lawsuit, now assisted by the Data Quality Act, which Emerson had smuggled into an appropriations bill and which essentially offers a license to politicians to alter any governmental science report until it says what they want it to say. In consequence of this second lawsuit, the Bush Jr. administration covered the National Climate Assessment with disclaimers and ignored it entirely when formulating its own—laughable—climate policy. That’s worth thinking about for a moment: The single most valuable tool in assessing the dangers to this country of climate change has been cast aside because of the activities of a fake think tank and two denialist politicians.
In a long article on Inhofe’s antiscience, antienvironment activities, chris Mooney records that “[s]ince 1999, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, Inhofe has received almost $300,000 in campaign donations from oil and gas interests and nearly $180,000 from electric utilities.”25
Inhofe maintains a list of “over 650” qualified scientists who dispute the consensus on global warming. Analysts have pointed out a few problems. First, some names appear twice, so “over 650” represents 604.26 Second, most are unqualified. Third . . . in 2007, meteorologist George Waldenberger wrote to Inhofe’s staffers:
Take me off your list of 400 (Prominent) Scientists that dispute Man-Made Global warming claims. I’ve never made any claims that debunk the “Consensus.”27
Guess what? This, however, is now attached to Waldenberger’s listing:
[Note: There have been questions raised regarding whether Waldenberger belongs in this report. For clarification, please see this January 13, 2008 letter to Waldenberger. (LINK)]28
When I clicked the “(LINK)” it didn’t work.
In an ABC News/Washington Post interview on July 23, 2010, Inhofe came up with a remarkable statement: “I don’t think that anyone disagrees with the fact that we actually are in a cold period that started about nine years ago.”29 While it’s easy enough to laugh at Inhofe as a caricature of the bought politician, the truth is that, because of the activities of this man, countless people are needlessly going to suffer and die—arguably, many already have. And he has made it clear in pronouncement after pronouncement that he simply does not care.
Inhofe’s counterpart in the House of Representatives is the Texan Joe Barton, popularly known as “Smokey Joe” because of his environmental record. Until 2006 Barton was chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and it was from this position that in 2005 he launched a campaign against paleoclimatologist Michael Mann and his colleagues on the Hockey Stick graph, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes—a campaign that would culminate in the infamous Wegman report (see page 251). Even before things reached that stage, Barton and his staffers had been sending out demands to see the full financial and research records of the three climatologists—a witch-hunt.
Barton’s reasons for refusing to accept AGW are the usual litany of errors and misunderstandings. Although denying that our CO2 emissions might be contributing to the problem, he accepts the planet is warming but reckons this is a good thing—for the “plant food” argument, in other words. As Professor Andrew Dessler, of the department of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, Barton’s alma mater, sadly observed, “He listens to the people who tell him what he wants to hear. He has never come to us, and I think that we would be a logical choice if he wants to hear a mainstream climate view.”30
A 2004 Center for Public Integrity report31 revealed that by then Barton had, since 1998, received more money in the form of “campaign contributions” from oil and gas companies than any other current US politician, with the solitary exception of President George W. Bush. According to a 2010 estimate, his contributions from the fossil fuel industries now top $1.5 million.32
Famously, in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy of spring 2010, Barton made a public apology to BP for the fact that the company had been expected to contribute to the cleanup expenses; even his Republican colleagues were stunned. His most puzzling scientific speculation is probably this, from early 2009:
Wind is God’s way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it’s hotter to areas where it’s cooler. That’s what wind is. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to [wind] energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up?33
Christopher Walter Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, has emerged in recent years as the standard-bearer for the AGW denialist Right, touring to debate publicly against scientists. In one such debate, with University of New South Wales computer scientist Tim Lambert (known for the blog Deltoid) in February 2010, there was no doubt that, from a scientific point of view, Lambert demolished Monckton. Yet the public perceived it rather differently. In the red corner was a rather hesitant, somewhat rumpled figure who spent a lot of time scowling at his computer screen as he accessed graphics to support fact after verified fact. In the blue corner was someone who spoke fluently without notes and appeared to have huge stores of data at his mental fingertips. It can hardly be doubted that many viewers came away convinced by Monckton’s imitation of science.
And they must, too, be impressed by his qualifications. He was, for example, Science Advisor to Margaret Thatcher . . . except that, oops, he wasn’t: He was one of her policy advisors, his special area being not science but economics. In fact, she, with a degree in chemistry, is significantly the better qualified in science: Monckton has a BA (Hons) and MA in classics and a diploma in journalism.
And he makes other odd claims. He has repeatedly stated—even in front of the US House of Representatives—that he is a member of the House of Lords, the UK’s upper parliamentary chamber. Contacted about this, the House of Lords Information Office said: “christopher Monckton is not and has never been a Member of the House of Lords.”34 Again, the UK journalist George Monbiot discovered in 2007 that Monckton’s Wikipedia page alleged the UK newspaper the Guardian had paid Monckton £50,000 as compensation for an article by Monbiot it had published about him. No such payment has ever been made. Monbiot discovered the false statement had been inserted into the Wikipedia article by Monckton himself.35 The most bizarre claim came in Monckton’s autobiographical introduction to “More in Sorrow Than in Anger: An Open Letter from The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley to Senator John McCain about Climate Science and Policy” (p. 2), which was issued under the auspices of the denialist Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI):
His contribution to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report in 2007—the correction of a table inserted by IPCC bureaucrats that had overstated tenfold the observed contribution of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets to sea-level rise—earned him the status of Nobel Peace Laureate. His Nobel prize pin, made of gold recovered from a physics experiment, was presented to him by the Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Rochester, New York, USA.36
Plenty of people on both sides of the argument have read this as a claim that Monckton is a Nobel laureate—and that was doubtless the intent. (Although the “Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Rochester” is not named in this document, Monckton has elsewhere identified him as David H. Douglass, a solid-state physicist and known climate “skeptic” at the University of Rochester.)
And there’s more (p. 2):
He has lectured at university physics departments on the quantification of climate sensitivity, on which he is widely recognized as an expert, and his limpid analysis of the climate-feedback factor was published on the famous climate blog of Roger Pielke, Sr.
Outside denialist circles, Monckton is not recognized as an expert on “the quantification of climate sensitivity” or any other aspect of climate science. As for Pielke’s blog, it’s famous as a rallying point for AGW denialists.
Barry Bickmore, in his online essay “Lord Monckton: 3rd Viscount of Brenchley, King of Fantasyland” (2010), concluded:
Many people listen to crackpots like Lord Monckton when it comes to climate science, because (a) they don’t trust anything that smacks of environmentalism, and (b) they don’t have the background knowledge to tell real science from pseudoscience. However, in this case Lord Monckton has done us the service of making several false claims about non-technical subjects that anyone can easily understand. At least it should be clear to anyone that Monckton should not be treated as a trusted source of information.37
In all this, one’s inescapably reminded of L. Ron Hubbard’s claim (see page 81) to be “one of America’s first nuclear physicists.”
Returning to that open letter to John McCain, we find that things get no better in its introductory paragraphs. Take this (p. 3):
If the United States, by the ignorance and carelessness of her classe politique, mesmerized by the climate bugaboo, casts away the vigorous and yet benign economic hegemony that she has exercised almost since the Founding Fathers first breathed life into her enduring Constitution, it will not be a gentle, tolerant, all-embracing, radically-democratic nation that takes up the leadership of the world.
It will be a radically-tyrannical dictatorship—perhaps the brutal gerontocracy of Communist china, or the ruthless plutocracy of supposedly ex-Communist Russia, or the crude, mediaeval theocracy of rampant Islam, or even the contemptible, fumbling, sclerotic, atheistic-humanist bureaucracy of the emerging European oligarchy that has stealthily stolen away the once paradigmatic democracy of our Mother of Parliaments from elected hands here to unelected hands elsewhere. For government of the people, by the people and for the people is still a rarity today, and it may yet perish from the earth if America, its exemplar, destroys herself in the specious name of “Saving The Planet.”
McCain presumably stopped reading about here, if he ever started. One suspects McCain was not the letter’s intended recipient—that Monckton was engaging in a damage-limitation exercise after the presidential candidate AGW denialists were most likely to support (and who was Monckton’s own clear favorite, rather than the science-oriented Barack Obama) had publicly declared that AGW was real and that doing something about it was an urgent priority.
Monckton represented the libertarian front group Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT)—funded, according to SourceWatch,38 by the Carthage Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, chevron, ExxonMobil, and the Daimlerchrysler Corporation, among others—at the event called Copenhagen Climate challenge, mounted as an alternative to the UN-sponsored international climate talks in Copenhagen in December 2009. There he famously described a Jewish environmentalist as a member of the Hitler Youth.39
Among other items on Monckton’s résumé are that he serves as chief policy advisor for the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI), whose website claims its aim is “[s]cience based policy for a better world” and which heavily promotes online articles like “Proved: There Is No Climate Crisis.”40 The SPPI was founded in 2007 by Robert Ferguson, previously executive director of the now defunct Center for Science and Public Policy (CSPP), a group under the aegis of the Frontiers of Freedom Institute. Despite this, despite the fact that the SPPI and the CSPP share the same office building, and despite there being no perceptible difference between the e-mail communiqués from the two groups, the SPPI is very firm in its claim there is no connection. Earlier still, Ferguson served successively as chief of staff to three Republican congressmen: Jack Fields, John E. Peterson, and Rick Renzi. The group’s chief science advisor is Willie Soon.
Monckton is listed by the Heartland Institute on its roster of “climate change experts”—a group of individuals whose unifying characteristic is AGW denial. The Institute is a rightwing think tank that adopts the position of being antiregulation in every sphere, no matter the human consequences. It is known to have been funded heavily by the tobacco industry (until recently a section of its website was called “The Smoker’s Lounge”), but more recently has become secretive about its donors.41
In December 2009 Monckton joined the UK Independence Party (UKIP), generally regarded as on the loony fringe of UK politics. In the general election of 2010 he was UKIP’s advisor on science policy (he’s now its deputy leader). The Guardian, as part of a series quizzing the various political parties on their science policy, published a summary of Monckton’s responses.42 Monckton told Brian Cox, concerning climate change, that the party’s policy was immediately to cancel all funding for AGW research and convene a royal commission to investigate; only thus could the “rapacious extremists” warning of the threat of climate change be thwarted. As Cox commented:
Since just about every national and international scientific institution on Earth accepts the evidence of humanity’s impact on the climate, such a commission would almost inevitably conclude in science’s favour. Ukip doesn’t explain what it would do in the event of that outcome, having already crippled scientific research into potentially one of the greatest problems facing humanity this century.
On medical matters, Monckton claimed that linking salt intake to high blood pressure was just a matter of “the medico-scientific community [whipping] up unjustifiable fears” and stated: “The placebo effect is not fully understood, and should not be dismissed in favour of ‘scientific’ proof.” This latter seems to have been a muddled defense of homeopathy.
John Abraham has produced a magnificent rebuttal of Monckton’s climate claims (see pages 74–75); also splendid is the “Monckton Myths” section of the Skeptical Science blog.43
Journalists and Others
Anthony Watts is a TV journalist, a weather presenter who studied electrical engineering and meteorology at Purdue University; there’s no record of his having graduated, however, and he’s been reticent in discussing this. After a career in local television, in 2004 he moved to radio, joining the Fox News affiliate KPAY (1290 AM) in chico, California.
He is associated with the Heartland Institute, which published his report Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable? (2009); in this he argued that the location, orientation, and even the paint of many US weather stations were responsible for those stations registering artificially high temperatures. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration analyzed his claim and found it baseless.
Watts is best known for his very heavily trafficked blog Watts Up With That?, begun in 2006, which provides not just a megaphone for himself but a rallying ground for other AGW deniers, notably christopher Monckton. The blog played an important role in the Climategate fiasco through its dissemination of the hacked CRU e-mails. Among the claims made in its postings are that Venus (see page 237) is hot not because of the runaway greenhouse effect but because of its atmospheric pressure.44 In another post, the same author came out with the remarkable statement that “If there were no Sun (or other external energy source) atmospheric temperature would approach absolute zero. As a result there would be almost no atmospheric pressure on any planet”45 —which is true, insofar as that, at near absolute zero, the atmosphere would largely have frozen solid, but otherwise meaningless: A planet’s average atmospheric pressure is unaffected by temperature. A characterization of Watts Up With That? by science blogger Joseph Romm could hardly be more accurate:
In general, you can assume that if Watts has reprinted a piece, it is filled with anti-scientific disinformation. It’s kind of like the laws of thermodynamics. If someone tells you they have a perpetual motion machine, you don’t actually have to look at the design closely to know that, in fact, they don’t.46
It’s in the Watts Up With That?’s reader comments that one discovers true comedy gold—and outright malevolence toward science and scientists. A useful counterblast is the blog Wott’s Up With That (http://wottsupwith that.com/), run by an earth sciences-trained IT worker who for obvious reasons prefers to give his identity only as Ben. Also recommended is The Video Climate Deniers Tried to Ban—Climate Denial Crock of the Week: Anthony Watts by Peter Sinclair, which can be accessed on YouTube.47 An account of Watts’s attempts to suppress the video is “Climate Crock of the Week: What’s Up with Anthony Watts [take 2]” by Kevin Grandia.48
In his February 15, 2009, column for the Washington Post, “Dark Green Doomsayers,” conservative columnist George F. Will claimed: “Nine decades hence, our great-great-grandchildren will add the disappearance of California artichokes to the list of predicted planetary calamities that did not happen.” He produced some science: “According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979” and “according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.”
Within hours, the Arctic Climate Research Center posted a statement on its website to the effect that sea ice area has decreased considerably since 1979: “We do not know where George Will is getting his information.”49
In a follow-up column, “Climate Science in a Tornado,”50 Will dug his heels in, claiming to have accurately quoted a January 1, 2009, article in the science blog Daily Tech: “Sea Ice Ends Year at Same Level as 1979”51 by Michael Asher. He also indicated that, on January 12, the center had confirmed the information.
Unfortunately for Will, the online version of his column52 included a link to the “confirmation,” which—surprise!—is no such thing, but rather a clarification53 for readers of Asher’s Daily Tech article: Arctic sea ice levels have plummeted. So what Will hoped his readers would accept as supporting his AGW denial proved on inspection to be the opposite.
Will’s second “fact”—that the World Meteorological Organization says there’s been no global warming for a decade—likewise clashed with the reality. Its likely source was a BBC report about the cooling effect of La Niña written (somewhat sloppily, and since revised) by Roger Harrabin.54
Will’s overall thesis is that, since nothing came of the consensus in the 1970s that the threat was global cooling, this proves nothing will come of the modern consensus about global warming. There are two main problems with this argument. First, it’s illogical: Science was wrong about phlogiston; this doesn’t imply it’s wrong about Relativity. The second flaw was outlined by chris Mooney in a March 21, 2009, rebuttal of Will that the Washington Post was finally shamed into publishing, “Climate change Myths and Facts.” Essentially, it is this: “What global cooling consensus in the 1970s?”
Just last year, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published a peer-reviewed study examining media coverage at the time and the contemporary scientific literature. While some media accounts did hype a cooling scare, others suggested more reasons to be concerned about warming. As for the published science? Reviewing studies between 1965 and 1979, the authors found that “emphasis on greenhouse warming dominated the scientific literature even then.”
To this day, Will has refused to retract his assertions.
Another journalist to climb upon the denialist bandwagon is ultraconservative Patrick J. Buchanan. On March 1, 2010, Buchanan, who backs up his anti-climate-science crankery with a staunch refusal to accept evolution, combined his two denialist enthusiasms in a single column for the WorldNetDaily, “Hoax of the Century.” His argument was that evolution could be thrown out because Piltdown Man was a hoax and Nebraska Man a mistake; both stories, particularly the former, in fact offer validations of Darwinism. What’s more startling is that Buchanan seems to think this has anything to do with climate change. He dutifully recites the three minor errors in the IPCC’s massive 2007 report (has the man ever wondered what errata slips are for?), claims Antarctic ice coverage is growing rapidly, says the Climategate farrago undermined the validity of the IPCC report, and mysteriously adds:
Though America endured one of the worst winters ever, while the 2009 hurricane season was among the mildest, the warmers say this proves nothing. But when our winters were mild and the 2005 hurricane season brought four major storms to the U.S. coast, Katrina among them, the warmers said this validated their theory.
You can’t have it both ways.55
In fact, climate scientists were in general studiously careful not to claim any of the 2005 hurricanes as evidence of warming, while the snowy US winter of 2009–10 is entirely in keeping with predictions of extreme weather events and high rates of precipitation.
The journalist Alexander Cockburn, coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the political newsletter CounterPunch, is unusual in being a leftish denier of climate science, for years using his column in the Nation to propagate views on the subject that were obviously bitterly resented by many of that magazine’s readers. He upholds the crank theory of retired explosives expert Martin Hertzberg, who has described climate change as “the scientific hoax of the century” and claims global warming and cooling are a result of variations in the ellipticity of the earth’s orbit, heightened CO2 levels being a symptom, not a cause, of warming. Cockburn also believes greenhouse warming is impossible, as it would violate the second law of thermodynamics. What silly billies those scientists are to get these things wrong.
christopher Booker is a UK journalist whose writings cater to a range of denialisms, notably that mad-cow disease, asbestos, and passive smoking pose no threat to health, that evolution by natural selection is an unproven theory (he likes ID), and of course that there’s no such thing as global warming—in short, the ill informed antiscience prejudices of the daft elderly relative you try to avoid at weddings. Booker proclaims this crankery from the bully pulpit of a weekly column in the high-circulation UK newspaper the Daily Telegraph, and is author of influential antiscience books like Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming, Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth (2007; with Richard North), The Real Global Warming Disaster (2009), and Climategate to Cancún: The Real Global Warming Disaster Continues (2010; with North). He has played a major role in attempts to smear Rajendra Pachauri (see pages 252ff.).
In The Real Global Warming Disaster Booker cites Sir John Houghton as having said, in the latter’s book Global Warming: The Complete Briefing (1994) that “[u]nless we announce disasters, no one will listen.” Houghton has stated this neither in the book nor anywhere else: It is completely contrary to his beliefs. The “quote” appears to have been invented in November 2006 by journalist Piers Akerman in a column for the Australian Sunday Telegraph.
Jonathan Leake of the UK’s high-circulation Sunday Times seems to be an example of a journalist deceived by ExxonMobil-funded scientific AGW deniers into believing their shtick. If we go back to articles like “The Climate of Fear” (with Jonathan Milne), which appeared in the newspaper on February 19, 2006, we find a perfectly competent piece on the current state of the science. His Sunday Times piece of January 31, 2010, “UN Climate Panel Shamed by Bogus Rainforest Claim,” was something else entirely. This was the origin of the farrago soon named “Amazongate,” the lie—based on an activist pamphlet that falsely cited a letter to Nature56—that the IPCC 2007 report’s claim that up to 40 percent of the Amazon rainforest could disappear because of climate change was false.
In fact, the lead author of the Nature letter, Dan Nepstad, had e-mailed Leake two days before the article ran, saying there was nothing wrong with the IPCC’s statement of the facts.57 Leake went ahead and published anyway. Nepstad was angry enough that within four days his account was reported in Science. It’s at this point that any responsible newspaper would retract the story. Not the Sunday Times, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch and syndicates Leake’s stories to other Murdoch newspapers around the globe. Even as denialists were thinking “Amazongate” was the big story, many media reporters thought the Sunday Times’s stubbornness was the real cause célèbre. When finally a retraction appeared a full five months later (only after an official complaint58 to the Press Complaints Commission, the UK media’s policeman) the climbdown was reported in media including Newsweek, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.
Leake’s article had run a credit, “Research by Richard North.” As pointed out in the complaint to the PCC, “Richard North is a writer who steadfastly refuses to accept the mainstream scientific results relating to climate change science.”59 In other words, he writes an AGW-denialist blog while collaborating with christopher Booker on various antiscience books (see above).
Having started down the path of AGW denialism, Leake, with the encouragement of his employer, went from a walk to a run. February 14, 2010, saw a piece from him called “World May Not Be Warming, Say Scientists” that produced a roster of sources for its skepticism that made this reader laugh out loud when he saw it: John christy (see page 229), Ross McKitrick (see page 304), Anthony Watts (see page 297) and “Terry Mills, professor of applied statistics and econometrics at Loughborough University,”60 whose qualifications may be fine but are not in climate science.
One of those consistently holding the Sunday Times’s toes to the fire over what he dubbed “Leakegate” has been Tim Lambert, whose Deltoid should be required reading for anyone presuming to comment on climate-change issues.61 As he reported on March 2, 2010,62 the Sunday Times response has been to try to stitch him up.
A March 14, 2010, piece by Leake, “Ed Miliband’s Adverts Banned for Overstating Climate change,” reported that the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) had clamped down on four government public-service ads: “The ASA has ruled that the claims made in the newspaper adverts were not supported by solid science and has told the Department of Energy and Climate change (DECC) that they should not be published again.”63 All told, there were ten points at issue. The ASA rejected nine out of the ten. Two of the four ads were exonerated; the other two required editing. “Banned”?
David Rose achieved distinction at Time Out, the Guardian/Observer and Vanity Fair, and his investigative true-crime books, like A Climate of Fear (1992), have merit. However, in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 he was spectacularly wrong about Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction—he was in effect Tony Blair’s journalistic useful idiot in the same way Judith Miller at the New York Times was George W. Bush’s—and since joining the rightwing tabloids Daily Mail/Mail on Sunday, which have a strict AGW-denialist editorial policy, he has published numerous similarly misguided articles on the subject of climate change.
One was “What Happened to the ‘Warmest Year on Record’: The Truth is Global Warming has Halted,” which appeared in the Mail on Sunday on December 5, 2010, and was fairly accurately described by George Monbiot as “his longest list of errors yet.”64 With the help of a recently formed organization of climate scientists, the Climate Science Rapid Response Team, Monbiot was able to catalog the most egregious errors—including Rose’s reliance on information from the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a denialist organization whose funding is, according to SourceWatch, “mired in controversy.”65 Their claim, regurgitated by Rose, was that 2010 was not an exceptionally warm year—no warmer than, say, 1998 (the warmest year on record to that date!). Rose castigated the UK Met Office for suggesting otherwise; as we now know, the Met Office was right. Rose claimed water vapor is a much more important greenhouse gas than CO2, a hypothesis comprehensively debunked. He claimed Michael Mann had “made an extraordinary admission” that the world might have been hotter during the Medieval Warm Period, something Mann has never said. There’s more. Monbiot concluded his analysis: “The question now emerging for Rose is very simple. Just how many mistakes does he have to make before the thesis that these are innocent errors starts to collapse?”
The journalist, broadcaster, and blogger Andrew Bolt might be considered the Australian equivalent of Anthony Watts. His blog on the website of the Murdoch-owned Melbourne Herald Sun is reportedly one of the most popular in Australia; he uses it to promote rightwing ideology and antiscience, particularly AGW denial.66
His column of March 23, 2010,67 is a classic example of Bolt’s technique. Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization (CSIRO) and the nation’s Bureau of Meteorology had recently released a briefing, The State of the Climate, showing how Australia was being affected by global warming. Primed by denialist blogger Jo Nova, Bolt pounced:
So why did the CSIRO choose to show [maps of] only the rainfall changes from 1960, when the BoM’s records go back many decades earlier?
Answer: perhaps because if it showed the rainfall changes from, say, 1900, you’d see that most of Australia has got wetter over the century[.]
And then you might not panic.
In fact, the two maps show the exact opposite of what Bolt claims: Australia is indeed getting drier. Furthermore, if you look at the Bureau of Meteorology’s entire series,68 you can see this trend even more clearly. But how many of Bolt’s readers looked?
The writer Michael Crichton’s main literary contribution to AGW denialism was his grossly irresponsible 2004 thriller State of Fear, whose plot centers on a theme of environmentalists committing mass murder in order to advance their own views and suppress contrary ones. He made use of standard conspiracy-theory tropes: Scientists alter their findings to please the organizations that fund them; the Secret Masters of the World are manufacturing crises, such as the threat of imminent climate catastrophe, in order to keep us all distracted from what they’re really doing; the science on global warming is scanty; and so on. Sort of like a Syfy channel original movie. Unfortunately, it seems Crichton actually believed this stuff. Even more unfortunately, so did many of the book’s millions of readers. The Union of Concerned Scientists was so alarmed it created a special rebuttal page, “Crichton Thriller State of Fear,”69 identifying Crichton’s worst errors.
As an aside, Crichton was responsible for enunciating a classic example of muddled thinking about science: “There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”70
Two AGW contrarians frequently cited as representing the true, scientific face of anticonsensus thought are the Canadian former minerals prospector and mining consultant Steve McIntyre, who runs the denialist blog Climate Audit, and his frequent collaborator Ross McKitrick, a Canadian economist. McIntyre is associated with the Heartland Institute and the Marshall Institute; McKitrick is associated with those as well as with the Fraser Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the John Deutsch Institute, Friends of Science, the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, and the Global Warming Policy Foundation. According to a long piece about them in the blog Deep Climate,71
McIntyre and McKitrick have published exactly one . . . peer-reviewed article in a scientific journal.72 (Besides [this], Ross McKitrick’s misleading list of so-called “peer-reviewed science journal articles” also includes two pieces in the contrarian social science journal Energy and Environment, a comment letter to PNAS and a pair of replies to comments on [that solitary peer-reviewed] article!)
It seems McIntyre, with time on his hands, began sometime in 2003 to reanalyze the data Michael Mann et al. had used to produce the famous Hockey Stick graph, and to post about his results on a denialist website. He then hooked up with McKitrick, who was already deeply involved in fossil-fuel-funded AGW contrarianism; McKitrick helped him ready his results for publication as a scientific paper; the rest is history. Somewhere along the line they also began a liaison with PR man Tom Harris, whose APCO Worldwide has been profoundly involved in tobacco denialism (see pages 94ff. and 270ff.) as well as AGW denialism.
What seems extraordinary about M&M (as they like to call themselves) is that there’s so little to say about them. McIntyre produced a paper in 2005 that generated a very brief conversation in scientific circles and a huge kerfuffle outside those circles, and that’s about it. Yet M&M are cited favorably, as if qualified climate scientists, in books like Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines (2008) by Richard A. Muller.
The Danish economist Bjørn Lomborg’s reputation as a leading AGW skeptic rests on his two bestsellers The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001) and, tightening the focus a bit, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (2007). In the former he conducted a purportedly rigorous re-examination of the claims of many of the foremost environmental advocacy groups and came to the conclusion that things really aren’t that bad—to the contrary, in most areas of the environment there are actually signs of modest improvement. An adjunct that especially appealed to US Republicans was Lomborg’s attack on Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006); alas, almost all of Lomborg’s complaints have been refuted, and the remaining few are trivial.
In some specific instances Lomborg’s assertions are undoubtedly correct—for example, London’s Thames and New York’s Hudson are both paradigms of cleanliness by comparison with their polluted filth of just a few decades ago. Yet this is to ignore that the reason the fish have returned to these rivers is that concerted campaigns have been conducted, and a lot of public money spent, to clean them up. They’re just two of untold ecosystems around the world, some immeasurably larger. While many individual ecosystems have been reclaimed thanks to similar special efforts, these represent just, ahem, a drop in the ocean.
There’s another sense in which Lomborg’s arguments are justified. He’s correct in saying some environmental groups exaggerate their claims, distort evidence, and—ironically!—treat science cavalierly. What he doesn’t stress is that most don’t.
Scientific American was concerned enough about the accusations in The Skeptical Environmentalist that it commissioned not one but four reviews of the book. All four reviewers—none of them lightweights—were little pleased by what they read. Later, one of them, Thomas Lovejoy, wrote: “I remember my frustration at inadequate citations, so much so that I characterized them in the review as a ‘mirage in the desert.’” Lovejoy made this remark in his Foreword to Howard Friel’s 2010 book The Lomborg Deception (p. vii), which performed the same exercise, although on an even larger scale, that John Abraham in the same year performed on claims by christopher Monckton. Friel tracked down and read for himself the sources Lomborg had offered as support, and very often discovered the “sources” didn’t say what Lomborg claimed they did.
In 2002 various environmental scientists complained about The Skeptical Environmentalist to the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD), a part of Denmark’s Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation (MSTI) that other governments might think to emulate. In early 2003 the DCSD ruled the book scientifically dishonest but said Lomborg himself should not necessarily be considered so since, essentially, as an economist rather than a scientist, he didn’t know what he was talking about. Lomborg appealed over the DCSD’s head to the MSTI, which ruled in his favor, referring the case back to the DCSD for a second examination. In March 2004 the DCSD announced it wasn’t going to bother with such a re-examination, because there was no reason to think it would change its opinion. As one might guess, this has been hailed in AGW-denialist circles as a triumph.
In 2010 the movie Cool It appeared, based on Lomborg’s 2007 book and directed by Ondi Timoner. It was given a gushy, gullible review in the New York Times by Jeannette Catsoulis,73 full of praise for Lomborg’s supposed wisdom in taking a midway position between climate scientists and AGW deniers—rather like taking a halfway position between a cardiac surgeon and your plumber when planning a bypass operation. It’s depressing she didn’t bother to check the valuable Lomborg-Errors website, one of whose stated raisons d’être is “because in the handling of errors, Lomborg does not act like most persons would do. A normal person would apologize or be ashamed if concrete, factual errors or misunderstandings were pointed out—and would correct the errors at the first opportunity given. Lomborg does not do that.”74 Nor was she apparently worried about Lomborg’s latest book, Smart Solutions to Climate change (2010), in which he seemed abruptly to change his tune, now describing climate change (p. 2) as “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today . . . a challenge humanity must confront.” (Cynical minds have suggested it was the publication of Friel’s The Lomborg Deception that prompted this sudden recantation.) Unfortunately, Lomborg is less interested in such boring means of dealing with global warming as reducing CO2 emissions or developing clean energy sources—although he does put such measures forward as part of his eight-point plan—than in grandiose schemes of geoengineering, such as whitening clouds so they reflect more of the sun’s radiation back into space.
Lomborg is not alone in believing geoengineering offers salvation; Bill Gates has poured many millions into related research. It seemed cruelly ironic, though, that mere moments after Lomborg had nailed his colors to the geoengineering mast, a study appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences declaring that, not only was geoengineering incapable of doing the job of restricting sea-level rises, it was also an extraordinarily dangerous approach.75 The authors found that various measures, such as carbon storage and the spraying of the upper atmosphere with reflective aerosols, might bring short-term relief, but that none of them would make the basic problem go away: There’s already too much CO2 in the atmosphere and we’re constantly adding more.