Russel Norman

Russell Brown on climate change sceptics

Published: January 3, 2008

by Russel Norman

Russell Brown has a great article over at Public Address about the state of the NZ Herald. Brown particularly takes a look at the latest offering from NZ Herald columnist Fran O’Sullivan on climate change. It seems that Fran has unfortunately relied on a bunch of bunkum evidence supplied by the US Christian Right. It’s worth quoting at length:

O’Sullivan’s column now reads like a wingnut blog, with all the bitter, conspiratorial muttering and graceless prose that implies. Case in point: her predictions for 2008. She starts with a couple of punts made more in hope than judgement: “Helen Clark is rolled,” and “New Zealand explodes in wave of civil disobedience,” over the EFA. And then there’s this:

3. Climate change science consensus breaks

More prominent scientists will dispute the extent of the man-made global warming scenario. Four hundred scientists, many of them current and former participants in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have already criticised claims by the panel and former US Vice-President Al Gore.

A minority report issued by the Senate environment and public works committee lists the scientists by name, country and academic/institutional affiliation and features their words, biographies and weblinks to their peer-reviewed studies and original source materials gathered in 2007. In New Zealand, rational scientists will still be demonised by Government and some business organisations.

This is pure wingnut talking point: Google will find pages and pages of almost identical claims on American websites. But perhaps a newspaper with pretensions to quality should try harder than that.

Let me help: the “report” comes from the office of Republican Senator James Inhofe, who is, by the standards of a developed nation, crazy. Inhofe has declared that “I don’t believe there is a single issue we deal with in government that hasn’t been dealt with in the Scriptures,” which ought to be the place of first recourse for matters ranging from foreign policy to homosexuality. He has stated that the “spiritual door” for the 9/11 attacks was opened by God because the US government was insufficiently supportive of Israel. Inhofe is also freakishly paranoid. He has repeatedly stated his belief that global warming is a “hoax”.

Nonetheless, you might have assumed that the 400 “prominent scientists” heralded in Inhofe’s report had relevant expertise, or at least they were all actually scientists (or to put it another way, that O’Sullivan has actually read the list she is recommending to her readers).

Regrettably, neither is the case. The list includes TV weathermen and economists (Update: and three TV gardeners!) as well as people who are scientists but have no relevant expertise, and notorious credential-inflaters like Timothy Ball.

The report deceives in various other ways. In support of the idea that the tide is turning, the official release cites “Paleoclimatologist Dr. Tim Patterson, professor in the department of Earth Sciences at Carleton University in Ottawa, recently converted from a believer in man-made climate change to a skeptic.” I suppose reasonable people could differ on the meaning of “recently”, but Patterson has been publicly lining up with climate sceptic groups since at least 2002.

You might also want to be careful of claims that people on the list have been part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In most cases, that means they have been expert reviewers. Which still sounds pretty flash. Until you realise that anyone can be an expert reviewer. You just have to ask for a copy of a draft report.

Okay, so — surely all these people have made some common declaration on climate change, or at least confirmed to Inhofe’s office that their view is what he says it is? Well, no. It’s a clippings list, compiled by his staff from news reports that could conceivably be taken as indicating global warming denial on the part of the subject. Inevitably, it includes people who actually regard anthropogenic climate change as a fact.

On the other hand, here’s a useful, and rather long, list of organisations that explicitly endorse the following conclusions:

1) the climate is undergoing a pronounced warming trend beyond the range of natural variability;

2) the major cause of most of the observed warming is rising levels of the greenhouse gas CO2;

3) the rise in CO2 is the result of burning fossil fuels;

4) if CO2 continues to rise over the next century, the warming will continue; and

5) a climate change of the projected magnitude over this time frame represents potential danger to human welfare and the environment.

The list includes the scientific academies of 19 countries, including the US, Britain, Japan and New Zealand, a slew of US government agencies, the World Petroleum Council, and dozens of multinational corporations. You could also add our own Meteorological Service and National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research.

None of these organisations, are, apparently, “rational”.

Of course we should question and revisit scientific conclusions. It’s what scientists do all the time. But we should also be able to smell bullshit when it is served up, and O’Sullivan doesn’t appear to have made even the most modest effort to do that. She has a long and admirable record in journalism, but columns like her last one are an embarrassment not only to herself, but to her paper.

Published in Environment & Resource Management by Russel Norman on Thu, January 3rd, 2008   

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