Just over a week ago, I wrote a quick post on a new sociological analysis of organized efforts to sow doubt about global warming. The analysis was illustrated by a flow chart of what the researchers called the “climate change denial machine.” I added an update a day later describing a chart of the “climate alarmism machine” created in response by an Australian blogger.
John Rennie, the former editor in chief of Scientific American, criticized me for engaging in “false equivalence” — a habit that I, and many others, have long criticized, particularly on science stories.
He was right. My description of the “alarmism” chart as “an overdrawn, overblown caricature of reality” was insufficiently critical.
I had issues with the sociologists’ analysis, but it was part of a serious effort at scholarship. Nearly all of the assertions by the Australian blogger in the second chart were inflammatory and untrue, with only thin threads leading to legitimate issues (one being that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as noted in a review by the Dutch environment agency, has traditionally focused its summaries on worst-case outcomes and left out potential positive effects or other factors, like population growth, that contribute to climate vulnerability).
But I disagree with Rennie and Joe Romm, who followed up on his criticism, on some broader points. [Oct. 18, 10:59 a.m. | Updated | John Rennie has filed a long response to this piece.
Here’s the prime question Rennie posed about my original post:
Was Andy implying that those on the climate activism side were an equivalent kind of propaganda machine, even though the case for the reality and gravity of climate change is much better validated by the scientific literature? It seemed unlikely, but he seemed to let his readers think so.
Setting aside the word propaganda, I will readily assert that there has been a longstanding and well-financed effort to raise public concern by downplaying substantial, persistent and legitimate uncertainty about the worst-case outcomes from greenhouse-driven warming and over-attributing the link between such warming and climate-related disasters and other events. Much of this is organized.
But it should be pointed out that there is a climate-style amplifying feedback process, in which a funding agency, a university and researchers highlight the most newsworthy aspect of a new study — even if it’s tentative — and that baton is passed to journalists eagerly sifting for “the front-page thought.” Kind of looks like a hype machine, in some ways.
For example:
The Amazon. A case in point was the Copenhagen climate summit in March, 2009. The meeting, organized by 10 universities and paid for by a variety of corporations, was, as one organizer explained, “a deliberate attempt to influence policy,” with a prime goal being to make the case that climate findings had grown more dire since the 2007 reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
That’s all fine and well. In the policy struggle everyone can have a voice, including scientists who choose to join that fray. But the prime news nuggets unveiled at the meeting often were not well grounded in the scientific literature — a case in point being an unpublished “bombshell” study of Amazon drying. The robustness of the conclusions was quickly challenged by other rain forest researchers, undercutting the very goal of the meeting.
You may recall the concerns expressed at the time by Yadvinder Malhi, an Oxford University biologist who is focused on the Amazon and climate:
If that conclusion was based on solid empirical science then so be it, but when such a story goes out on a pure model study (not yet peer-reviewed) with significant imperfections, it may do a lot of damage in the real world.
Climate and Death. The Global Humanitarian Forum report on deaths from global warming was another largely overstated and poorly founded effort.
Frog Extinction. Another case in point is the overstatement of findings of amphibian extinctions driven by global warming in a National Science Foundation press release (and many subsequent press accounts) and the resulting coverage.
There are many other examples, and the pattern has been laid out many times before, as in my 2006 article “Yelling Fire on a Hot Planet” and 2007 piece on “A New Middle Stance Emerges in Debate Over Climate” (which some critics saw as falsely equivalent, as well).
It’s important to note that there’s also sometimes a kind of “false inequivalence” in the fight over climate science and policies — an implication that the lack of action on greenhouse gases is largely the result of the unfair advantage in money and influence held by industries dealing in, or dependent on, fossil fuels.
Romm, as he’s done before, made this a central point in his new critique.
That industry has enormous influence on energy policy — through both money and lobbying heft — is well established. Indeed, I spent a lot of reporting time revealing instances when that influence was felt.
But it’s wishful thinking to assert that clearing the field would magically propel meaningful (that’s an important word here) changes in energy choices and habits.
Even if the fossil fuel industries and their allies were far less organized and powerful, they would still have the utterly easy task of maintaining today’s energy norms.
Climate campaigners, on the other hand, face the epic challenge of convincing society to rapidly replace an energy system that took more than a century to become the underpinning of modern economies and lifestyles.
Here’s an excerpt from one of my previous posts laying out how the fight over climate-related energy policy is incredibly lopsided regardless of who’s spending more money:
In reality, those defending the status quo in energy and climate policy have always only needed the slightest bit of doubt and distracting uncertainty to maintain society’s comfortable inertia on energy.
Inertia is easy. Change is momentously hard as long as humans are in their fossil-fueled comfort zone.
I will continue to disagree with Joe Romm over whether “perfect” unfiltered public information on climate change would lead to concrete and consequential steps to move away from the fuels, and habits, of convenience.
This is why I’m with Jonathan Foley, the director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, and other “ climate pragmatists.”
Get started with demonstrable steps on energy efficiency and intensified research, for example, that have wide support even among Republicans. What better way to marginalize true obstructionists at the conservative fringe?