What Do Lung Cancer and Climate Change Have in Common?

The answer is that both have powerful propaganda efforts working to deny any human caused link to them. In the case of lung cancer they deny links to smoking, in the case of climate change they deny any links to human-caused CO2 emissions. In both cases they bring out the same arguments from the same think tanks that try to find any small error to discredit researchers or even the scientific peer-review process itself.

From the Guardian:

The fact is that the critics — who are few in number but aggressive in their attacks — are deploying tactics that they have honed for more than 25 years. During their long campaign, they have greatly exaggerated scientific disagreements in order to stop action on climate change, with special interests like Exxon Mobil footing the bill.

Many books have recently documented the games played by the climate-change deniers. Merchants of Doubt, a new book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway set for release in mid-2010, will be an authoritative account of their misbehaviour. The authors show that the same group of mischief-makers, given a platform by the free-market ideologues of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, has consistently tried to confuse the public and discredit the scientists whose insights are helping to save the world from unintended environmental harm.

Today's campaigners against action on climate change are in many cases backed by the same lobbies, individuals, and organisations that sided with the tobacco industry to discredit the science linking smoking and lung cancer. Later, they fought the scientific evidence that sulphur oxides from coal-fired power plants were causing "acid rain." Then, when it was discovered that certain chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were causing the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere, the same groups launched a nasty campaign to discredit that science, too.

Later still, the group defended the tobacco giants against charges that second-hand smoke causes cancer and other diseases. And then, starting mainly in the 1980s, this same group took on the battle against climate change.

What is amazing is that, although these attacks on science have been wrong for 30 years, they still sow doubts about established facts. The truth is that there is big money backing the climate-change deniers, whether it is companies that don't want to pay the extra costs of regulation, or free-market ideologues opposed to any government controls...

But then I recalled that this line of attack — charging a scientific conspiracy to drum up "business" for science — was almost identical to that used by The Wall Street Journal and others in the past, when they fought controls on tobacco, acid rain, ozone depletion, second-hand smoke, and other dangerous pollutants. In other words, their arguments were systematic and contrived, not at all original to the circumstances.

We are witnessing a predictable process by ideologues and right-wing think tanks and publications to discredit the scientific process. Their arguments have been repeatedly disproved for 30 years — time after time — but their aggressive methods of public propaganda succeed in causing delay and confusion.

The Return of El Nino

Some possible good news for our heating bills here in the great north woods is the return of El Nino in the Pacific. This means that warmer waters on the surface of the central Pacific will continue probably into next summer, and if it continues to strengthen it could mean record heat for many areas next summer. In the shorter term a moderate El Nino this winter usually brings warmer temperatures to the northern plains, including northern Minnesota. Now before you drag your beach umbrellas down to Park Point this January remember warmer is a relative term, and we will still get our share of sub-zero and snow. But overall it should be milder than the last two La Nina influenced winters.

In other climate news - global cooling is still not happening, at least according to statisticians who looked at the temperature data blindly. In a fine example of journalism an AP reporter sent the different datasets from land and satellite to several prominent statisticians without labeling the data and asked them to describe the trends. All of them said the trend is clearly upward and that any short-term downward trend is just random noise in the overall upward progression. There is a lot of disinformation out on the internet that uses cherry-picked statistics or records, but if you look at the data honestly the rapid rise in overall world temperature is obvious. If you don't believe me, take the GISS temp graph to a stockbroker and tell him it is a stock price graph - I bet you he will tell you to buy it.

Climate Science And Honest Debate

The late spring we are having here in northern Minnesota is giving some of the local climate change skeptics more hope than ever that global warming is just some socialist plot to try and take away their pickup trucks and SUVs. Unfortunately for them local weather is not the same as global climate (as I tried to point out in this post). The skeptics are becoming more and more shrill in their arguments as the science that refutes them becomes more solid every day, and most of the arguments they make are full of holes and cherry-picked data that makes attempting to engage them in honest debate an exercise in futility. Coby Beck has gathered together a very nice page of links called "How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic" which has categorized the most commonly encountered denialist arguments.

What is interesting is that many of the same debate techniques used to deny climate change are the same as those used by those who denied a link between smoking and cancer, or used by creationists to discredit evolution. One of the things they all have in common is the attempt to put "reasonable doubt" in the mind of the public that there is scientific agreement on these subjects. Mainstream journalists follow along by framing the subject as a two-sided debate with merit on both sides. The problem with this is that the general public does not see the peer-reviewed scientific journals where actual scientific debate takes place, and they don't realize that it is a small but vocal minority creating most of the controversey.

Please click on the links provided and the links under Climate Change in my list on the left. Often Google Scholar can provide abstracts to peer-reviewed science on climate change that you can find at a university library. Reading science is not easy, but it is nessecary if you want to know the real data and not just spin driven by ideology.