Is a conservative climate consensus possible?
If hard cases make bad law, soft science makes sensible politics even harder. The Climate Wars present legislators on both sides of the aisle with few certainties, among them that one side is prone to construe any human impact on climate as tantamount to Weather of Mass Destruction.
It does so with Hollywood’s full arsenal of special effects at it disposal, and makes its case using lines corny enough to make Captain Planet wince, yet the results seldom face scientific criticism. This stands in stark contrast with its token opposition, chosen for political reliability rather than scientific acumen, and scripted by conservative media often as scientifically impoverished as they are well funded. The result is that Republicans find themselves poorly armed and bizarrely outnumbered in the Climate Wars.
Where does this asymmetry come from? Even recusing all those with a stake in the outcome in the Climate Wars, there are still hundreds of thousands of scientists at large in America. Yet Fox and the other self-styled conservative media can find barely a dozen willing to put their scientific reputations at risk on demand. Those often seem a pretty underwhelming and unenthusiastic lot, for a reason as simple as their discourse tends to be infantile—deliberate appeal to authority instead of evidence is akin to a scientific death wish.
In science, as in politics, the truth that sets men free is seldom the one they want to hear. Be it evolution or climate science , the conservative media’s most favored talking heads frequently adduce views by turns obsolete, tendentious, bent or just plain daft.
If Conservative journalism at large perseveres in relying exclusively upon them, it risks becoming a 21st century scientific eyesore. Some already regard it as such because of websites regurgitating Yack Radio sound bites as “sound science.” This is a risky business, for while faith-based science op-eds may find their target in a demographic of Fox viewers who last saw a science text in junior high, they tend to repel adults who invest in today’s technical economy.
If Conservative journalism at large perseveres in relying exclusively upon them, it risks becoming a 21st century scientific eyesore. Some already regard it as such because of websites regurgitating Yack Radio sound bites as “sound science.” This is a risky business, for while faith-based science op-eds may find their target in a demographic of Fox viewers who last saw a science text in junior high, they tend to repel adults who invest in today’s technical economy.
Less scientific common sense is heard on the right today than in Reagan’s time. Many of the talking scientific heads on both sides seem more interested in trading truth for influence than speaking truth to power. Though presentable to the point of being, well, lawyerly, those on the right by and large lack a first-rate scientific constituency and show as little stomach for debating the facts in a serious scientific forum as Al Gore—who appeared before an audience of 12,000 earth scientists in San Francisco last year only to skedaddle the minute he finished his 1001st performance of The Speech.
Those demanding Gore debate, like Steve Milloy, should be exhorted to sally forth and mix it up at meetings that afford an open forum for controversy. But peer review cuts both ways. I must I accept Milloy’s protest that it is unfair to write he refuses to debate his scientific views, what there is of them. I’d love to see him enliven Association of Science Writers meetings and appear on NOVA in a warm Moyeresque colloquy with different climate modeler each month.
His cohort is wise to keep a low academic profile, for the burlesque of climatology on Milloy’s Orwellian “Junk Science” website would not stand an ice cube’s chance in hell of surviving scientific cross examination. Finding their polemics un-publishable in the face of peer review, some contrarians have scandalously opted to found, or co-opt, journals of their own, just as Creationists do, and for the same reason—to avoid the rigorous reality check that peer review affords.
The reluctance of the fringes in the Science Wars to come out and fight tends to polarize the apolitical scientific center. Absent intellectually serious Republicans, scientific professionals on websites like RealClimate have only Democrats with whom to discuss policy. It is hard to break this cycle because while contrarian PR flack lack serious scientific street cred , TV, environmentalists can field PBS stars galore
Most “global warming skeptics” brought to the debate on Fox are amateurs by comparison, and their lack of intellectual seriousness is woefully obvious in (un-peer reviewed) articles that read like the advertising copy they are , witness “Meltdown for Global Warming Science”.
“Bombshell papers have just hit the refereed literature that knock the stuffing out of the United Nations, and its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In two research papers in…Geophysical Research Letters…we have a quarter-century of concurrent balloon and satellite data, both screaming that the U.N.’s climate models have failed, as well as indicating its surface record is simply too hot.”
Authors Singer & Michaels were dead wrong—the satellite data they cited was seriously in error—the climatologists responsible, Spencer & Christy, agreed to its retraction in Science in 2005 and told Newsweek in 2006: “our satellite trend has been positive.”
Canada has contributed to K Street climatology as conspicuously, and controversially, as NeoCans have to White House speechwriting. The tar sand industry has fielded Dr. Robert Ball and sundry economists respond to the IPCC report with such works as “Polar bears of western Hudson Bay and climate change.” While normative science accepts citation in peer-reviewed journals as the ultimate measure of success or failure, the Natural Resources Stewardship Project has another view:
“A measure of Dr. Ball’s impact was seen recently when, after one of his pieces was featured on the Drudge Report a leading on-line news service, he received approximately 1,000 e-mails from the general public during the next 24 hours.”
There is more to science than changing your mind when the facts demand—you have to persuade your colleagues as well. Science Citations is the usual metric, but it instead reveals that , Singer, Michaels, and Ball are most often cited by themselves.
Twenty years ago, a famously bad climate model almost lead to a foreign-policy debacle—it abused the Stefan-Boltzman equations by treating this planet as a featureless bone-dry billiard ball, ignoring the kaleidoscopic play of clouds in the sky, and the sluggish thermal inertia of the oceans. Taken to scientific task in Nature, and examined as a political aberration in the Wall Street Journal it soon collapsed back into the cold war factoid cemetery—“Nuclear Winter” could not take the heat.
When Michael cr State of Fear what Johnny Carson had earlier done for Carl Sagan, technothriller writer Michael Crichton called me to discuss thengeophysics. We touched on dynamics of the ‘nuclear winter crack-up, from Carl Sagan’s refusal to debate, to the hazards of simple models of complex systems, subjects that figured in his 2003 Cal Tech speech. ‘Do Aliens Cause Global Warming?”
The decay of Crichton’s thoughtful critique of climate modeling, designed for a sophisticated Cal Tech audience, into a few scientifically depleted sound bites finds a parallel in Viscount Monckton's preference for simple equations over the daunting complexity of modeling a planet with a dynamic atmosphere and oceans. But just as Sagan was Science Editor—of a ubiquitous tabloid—Parade—Monckton is hard wired to the Daily Telegraph.
This insularity is much remarked upon in the small world of global climate modeling—its favored blog, RealClimate, having hosted this remark:
“the leftward bias in climate discussions arises not from any bias of the scientists or the science, but rather from the fact that conservatives have been absent from discussions about how to handle the issue. In general, those of a conservative bent have wasted a lot of time and energy attacking solid science that they often do not understand rather than trying to come up with solutions that won’t knock the economy off the rails. This has worked out very well for Al Gore, but it probably isn’t the best use of their talents, or the best way to guard their interests.”
Among the few skeptics on climate change who count as real players in the underlying scientific game is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a prolific and respected author of peer-reviewed papers on the atmospheric sciences, MIT’s Richard Lindzen.
Lindzen stands out like a gilded lightning rod atop a pyramid whose scientific facade is propped up by a rubbly Flintstone fill of politically appointed TV weathermen, geologists, and mining engineers righteously defending the turf (and production prospects) of coal and tar sand miners. Near the apex of respectability in this microcosm are astrophysicists who think variable star and cosmic ray research should get its fair share of the funding pie. Examining their collective bibliography suggests the core competence of most of those whose authority is invoked by publicists lies outside the realm of climate modeling.
Lindzen is no stranger to technical controversy, having over the years posed many novel and scientifically interesting objections to the common wisdom in the climate change debate, focusing on how rising amounts of atmospheric water vapor could curb the rate of man made temperature rise. But each of his serial objections has been coherently replied to in the peer-reviewed science literature. Good scientist that he is, Lindzen has accepted as valid many quantitative objections to his theoretical views, and altered his stance accordingly.
That’s how science works- the iconoclast who lauded Crichton’s State of Fear on the floor of Congress no longer defends many talking points that the yack-TV pundits still cleave to. Though scarcely part of the “consensus” that so dismays the idiotarian blogosphere, he has alienated many in it—as I hope I have—by committing the unpardonable political sin of allowing scientific facts to change his mind.
This has yet to register with the talking heads on FOX, and Limbaugh’s fans will spout his line on climate until the seas run dry, boil, or freeze over. Little wonder Marc Morano, Rush’s scientific casting director, became ringmaster of Inhofe’s public policy circus. But what about Lindzen’s impact on his colleagues views? The National Academy has over a thousand members, and Lindzen has had 20 years to persuade them that man-made warming remains too uncertain to be a serious issue. Like most respectable skeptics, he began by questioning warming’s detectable existence, and pointing out that negative feedbacks could curb it in models and reality alike.
Ask around the Academy as to how many Lindzen has won over, and you will discover that the answer is closer to none than a dozen.
The same is true on Lindzen’s home turf. Another MIT professor, with an office a minute away from Lindzen’s, shares the view that the Climate Wars have become egregiously politicized and that climate models are sorely constrained. Yet in a quarter-century of daily interaction, Lindzen has failed to persuade fellow MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel that global warming is “not a big deal.”
Emanuel is a far cry from a liberal icon. MIT is not Harvard, and like Lindzen, and many others in high-tech establishments like MIT, Emanuel harshly criticized Carl Sagan’s attempt to use a primitive climate model as a policy lever during the Cold War, calling “nuclear winter” studies “notorious for their lack of scientific integrity ” in the pages of Nature in 1986. Bear that bipartisan commitment to the integrity of science in mind as you consider “Phaetons’ Reins,” his overview of what the climate wars have come to. I recommend making the detour to read it because the atmosphere is the Earth’s most complex dynamic system, and there is no way I can do justice to the debate in so few words as I have here.
Should it evoke a certain sense of déjà vu, you can confirm it by reviewing “A War Against Fire,” a report from the front I wrote for the (then-) echt conservative quarterly The National Interest long before Gore started running for Environmental President. Its conclusion stands. If any species of principle is at once worth conserving and profoundly endangered, it is that the political neutrality of scientific institutions must first exist in order to be respected.
While the Wall Street Journal and other conservative must-reads remain willing to run words critical of media hype and politicized science on the left, all are in denial about the fact that conservatives are quitting the field in the Science Wars, abandoning intellectually serious engagement in favor of posturing on TV and preaching to the choir on op-ed pages that increasingly have no in-house science editors—or fact checkers—to whom to turn.
The results can be painfully comic, but they embody what Jefferson noted three centuries ago: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” The information explosion has merely expanded the scope of the rhetorical carnage. The disdain shown science by ill-informed conservatives and intransigent liberals slugging it out in the TV trenches less recalls Jefferson’s fears than Thucydides’ view of an earlier conflict:
“The state which separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.”
Different as Republican and Democrat world views may be, there can be no armistice in the Climate Wars until both sides acknowledge that, from the atmosphere’s point of view, there can be, at most, one kind of physics.
