Posts filed under ‘climate denial’
Heartland leak reveals corporate funds behind climate denial
Heartland Institute poster.
Desmogblog said the leaked documents “expose the heart of the climate denial machine”, which “relies on huge corporate and foundation funding from US businesses”.
The leaked documents reveal most of Heartland’s big corporate backers. These include Microsoft, media giants Time Warner and Comcast, pharmaceutical giants GlaxoSmithKline and Pfzier, US steel maker Nucor, tobacco companies Altria and RJR Tobacco, a foundation controlled by the billionaire Koch brothers, the US Chamber of Commerce and the Credit Union National Association.
The Heartland documents refers to an anonymous donor “who has given as much as half the organisation’s entire budget in some past years”.
The documents show how Heartland channels this money to various pro-business causes. Heartland has made many payments to some of the world’s most prominent climate denier scientists and bloggers, including Australian scientist Bob Carter.
One document outlines how Heartland tried to promote a climate denial-based school curriculum in the US. It lamented: “Heartland has tried to make material available to teachers, but has had only limited success.
“Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective.”
To counter this, Heartland paid Dr David Wojick — who is a coal industry consultant, not a climate scientist — US$5000 a module to develop a “global warming curriculum” for children in kindergarten through to year 12.
The documents also included Heartland’s plans to ramp up its support for hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), a dangerous technique used by the shale and coal seam gas industries.
It said: “Heartland has been one of the most outspoken defenders of fracking in the US … We have not, however, yet attempted to raise funds from businesses with a financial interest in fracking.
“In 2012 we intend to correct that oversight and approach dozens of companies and trade associations that are actively seeking allies in this battle.”
Another document spells out Heartland’s “climate strategy”. It said Heartland would work to prevent climate scientists gaining access to the media.
It said: “Heartland plays an important role in climate communications … Efforts at places such as Forbes [magazine] are especially important now that they have begun to allow high profile climate scientists (such as [climate scientist Peter] Gleick) to post warmist science essays that counter our own.
“This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out.”
The institute reacted furiously to the leak. On February 15, it said eight of the nine documents were stolen and the ninth, the “climate strategy” memo, was a forgery. But it also said it could not confirm that any of the documents were authentic.
Heartland described the leak as a “criminal act” and a “fraud”. It warned: “We intend to find this person and see him or her put in prison for these crimes.”
Heartland asked “all activists, bloggers, and other journalists to immediately remove all of these documents and any quotations taken from them”. A few days later, it launched legal action to force websites to remove the documents and any related commentary.
Desmogblog refused Heartland’s demand, saying on February 19 it would leave the documents “in place — in the public interest”.
The next day the source of the leaked documents came forward — Peter Gleick. He said in a February 20 statement on the Huffington Post that he had first received the documents in the mail, from an anonymous source.
Gleick said: “I do not know the source of that original document but assumed it was sent to me because of my past exchanges with Heartland and because I was named in it.”
He said that to confirm the documents’ accuracy he “solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name”.
Gleick said: “I can explicitly confirm, as can the Heartland Institute, that the documents they emailed to me are identical to the documents that have been made public.
“I made no changes or alterations of any kind to any of the Heartland Institute documents or to the original anonymous communication.”
Desmogblog called Gleick a “whistleblower” who “deserve[d] respect for having the courage to make important truths known to the public at large”. It said: “Gleick has effectively caught Heartland squarely in the headlights, proving that the institute has dissembled and lied.”
Heartland repeated its demand that “publishers, bloggers and website hosts” take down the leaked documents. It said the “climate strategy” memo “was most likely written by Gleick”.
But Desmogblog posted a paragraph-by-paragraph evaluation of the memo on February 22, pointing out that it “uses phrases, language and, in many cases, whole sentences” that appear in the other documents.
Desmogblog concluded: “The Climate Strategy Memo is an accurate executive summary of the information contained in budget and fundraising documents that were to be put before the Board at its January meeting.
“DeSmogBlog therefore sees no basis whatsoever for Heartland’s assertion that the Climate Strategy memo is a ‘fake’ which contains ‘obvious and gross misstatements of fact’.”
Heartland’s reaction to its own leak is very different from how it reacted to the theft of 61 megabytes of papers, documents and private emails from the Climatic Research Unit based at the University of East Anglia, England, in 2009.
Dubbed by climate deniers as the “Climategate” affair, Heartland alleged that the leak exposed that “climate science [had been] hijacked and corrupted by this small group of scientists”.
Heartland still has a MegaUpload link to the climate scientists stolen documents on its website.
Six leading climate scientists released an “open letter to the Heartland Institute” on February 17.
They said: “We know what it feels like to have private information stolen and posted online via illegal hacking. It happened to climate researchers in 2009 and again in 2011. Personal emails were culled through and taken out of context before they were posted online.
“In 2009, the Heartland Institute was among the groups that spread false allegations about what these stolen emails said.
“Despite multiple independent investigations, which demonstrated that allegations against scientists were false, the Heartland Institute continued to attack scientists based on the stolen emails.
“When more stolen emails were posted online in 2011, the Heartland Institute again pointed to their release and spread false claims about scientists.
“So although we can agree that stealing documents and posting them online is not an acceptable practice, we would be remiss if we did not point out that the Heartland Institute has had no qualms about utilising and distorting emails stolen from scientists.”
Critical Decade report understates climate threat
Professor Will Steffen.
And straightaway, the Coalition began a fruitless, phoney debate about the report in the media.
Liberal senator Nick Minchin dismissed the report, saying it was meant “to further the cause of global warming alarmism”. He also said “anything Australia does [to cut emissions] will be utterly pointless and have no impact whatsoever on the global climate”.
The shadow minister for industry and science Sophie Mirabella went further. “This report will shut down Australia as a modern, industrialised economy,” she said, which would make the 70 pages of The Critical Decade quite a bit worse than the Great Depression.
Meanwhile, Coalition leader Tony Abbott said he was “very pleased” with the report because it endorsed his “direct action” plan to offset fossil fuel emissions by storing extra carbon in the soil. But the report said the opposite, warning that “atmospheric carbon cannot be sequestered into land ecosystems indefinitely”.
There is a bias in the report, but it’s not “alarmist” bias as the climate deniers pretend. The first two chapters are packed with robust, tested science. The final chapter, which suggests how Australia should respond, is a political document.
It’s not hard to work out why Coalition MPs were so quick to rubbish a report they hadn’t even read. The Coalition’s response was an example of what The Critical Decade called “attempts to intimidate climate scientists [and add] to the confusion in the public about the veracity of climate science”.
The report, which drew on research by the Australian Academy of Science, the British Royal Society, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other recent studies by the world’s leading climate scientists, left no room for doubt: “Climate change is indeed real, and is occurring at a rapid rate” and “the primary reason for this warming, at least since the middle of the 20th century, is the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere”.
The global surface temperature is rising — at about 0.17°C a decade over the past 30 years. Sea temperatures are rising fast too. The sea is also becoming more acidic as the excess carbon dioxide is dissolved in the world’s oceans.
The Arctic ice cap is in sharp decline. The “large polar ice sheets on Greenland and West Antarctica … are currently losing mass to the ocean through both melting and … by break up and calving blocks of ice.”
Glaciers and mountain ice caps worldwide are in retreat. Climate change will also pose “significant risks of sea-level related impacts in the 21st century”.
The risks of climate change have been known for decades. But the report says carbon pollution has risen sharply in the past decade. In the 1990s, emissions grew at about 1% a year. In the 2000s, they grew at 3% or more a year.
“Given the strong rise in emissions over the past decade, current emissions are about 37% larger than those in 1990,” The Climate Decade says.
The report also discusses the likely impact climate change will have in causing more extreme weather events — bushfires, floods, droughts, cyclones and rainfall.
In regards to rainfall patterns in Australia, the report acknowledged that much remains unclear: “Climate change could, in fact, lead to more extremes in general — both in drought and in rainfall.
“This daunting uncertainty not only challenges attempts at adaptation, but also enhances, not diminishes, the imperative for rapid and vigorous global mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions.”
Another section explains one of the most important facts of climate science: that small amounts of warming will cause abrupt and dangerous changes in the climate system.
The report lists some key thresholds, or tipping points, that “can be irreversible in any timeframe relevant to human affairs”.
These include the melting of Arctic ice cap, the loss of the Greenland ice sheet, the drying out of the Amazon rainforest and the thaw of Arctic soils, which would release millions of tonnes of extra greenhouse gases now stored beneath the soil.
It’s the nearness of these tipping points that makes immediate action to cut emissions so necessary, and which condemns all plans to decarbonise slowly, sometime by the middle of the century.
The report concludes “there is no room for any further delay in embarking on the transition to a low- or no-carbon economy”. It says Australia’s emissions must peak by 2020 and fall to zero by 2050 — and this to have a 75% chance of temperatures staying below 2°C above industrial levels.
But it is here that the gulf between the science and the proposed responses begin to appear.
Two degrees of warming is widely held to be a very dangerous target, well beyond the safe zone that might avoid dangerous tipping points.
As the 350.org campaign constantly reminds us, we are already well beyond the safe zone. The world’s leading scientists say we must cut the carbon pollution in the atmosphere to well below 350 parts per million, down from 392 ppm today.
NASA climate scientists James Hansen and Makiki Sato said in a January article “that goals of limiting human-made warming to 2°C and CO2 to 450 ppm are prescriptions for disaster”.
The Critical Decade calls for Australia to adopt a carbon “budget approach” to cutting emissions that could replace the normal “targets-and-timetables” approach, such as the Australian government’s pledge for 5% emissions cuts on 1990 levels for 2020.
This new approach could be a good idea. But David Spratt pointed out in a May 23 Crikey article that the report gave the wrong emissions cut figures needed to make it work.
The report said Australia could safely emit 1 trillion tonnes of CO2 from 2000 to 2050, but the real figure is closer to 250 billion tonnes, of which only 190 billion were left to use in 2009.
Spratt asked: “So what does a carbon budget approach mean for Australia? In short, we are in deep carbon deficit heading towards bankruptcy, and at the present rate of emissions, Australia would run out of its carbon budget to 2050 within 5 years …
“The Climate Commission has bravely put the science of a global carbon budget on the table. It now needs to explain the implications for Australia. It is not a 5% reduction by 2020 as the major parties advocate. It is getting to zero emissions in 10 years. That’s the science.”
Australia’s climate scientists are under huge pressure. The climate denier campaign, backed by Australia’s most powerful businesses, is designed to delay and intimidate.
The climate pretender campaign is no less of a problem. Best represented by the Labor party, the climate pretenders accept climate change is real but insist on slow, small and ineffective changes — business as usual.
This political environment tends to influence how the science of the natural environment is communicated. And this is a big reason why the report argues further delay on cutting carbon pollution is impossible, but still says government and industry have decades left to act.
Thus, Climate Commission chief Tim Flannery made a big political concession when he told journalists “we have exactly eight years and seven months to meet [the Australian government’s] target of minus 5% which is a very ambitious target”.
But the government’s plan is not ambitious. The science says it’s suicide.
Far deeper cuts and much more drastic actions are needed — much like the Scottish government’s recent pledge to power the country by 100% renewable energy by 2020.
Social change at the heart of climate dilemma
Two days before a March 23 rally against the government’s proposed carbon price took place in Canberra, Liberal MP Dennis Jensen told reporters gathered outside parliament house why he opposed the policy.
He held up a piece of charcoal and dropped it to the ground. “Does anyone know what that is? Charcoal, also known as carbon,” he said. “If you notice when I let it go, it doesn’t float into the air.”
After this attempt to rebut the science that says that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, Jensen offered another argument.
He opened a can of coke and poured it in a glass. “All of those little bubbles there, it’s the same stuff that you breathe out,” he said. “This government has managed to actually tax the air that we breathe.”
Not true, of course. The proposed carbon price would be levied on the 1000 biggest polluting companies — not on cans of soft drink or “the air that we breathe”.
Jensen’s antics are easy to poke fun at. But he and the rest of the Liberal party are carrying out a deliberate political strategy to distort the debate on climate change.
The aim is to associate any kind of action on climate change with economic hardship for ordinary people. The subtext is the idea that the climate change crisis has probably been exaggerated, and may not exist at all.
Liberal leader Tony Abbott’s decision to speak at the Canberra rally fitted neatly with this strategy. Coalition MPs Barnaby Joyce, Bronwyn Bishop, Eric Abetz and Warren Truss joined him on the platform.
Abbott attacked the carbon price proposal in front of a banner that said, “Ju-Liar Bob Brown’s Bitch”.
He later said the crowd of 3000, which included members of far-right groups such as the Citizens Electoral Council and the League of Rights, was “a representative snapshot of middle Australia”, ABC Online reported.
The rally was organised by the Consumers and Taxpayers Association (CATA), which makes no secret of its climate change denial.
Its website includes an article by amateur astronomer Gregg D Thompson, titled “CO2 The Truth”.
CATA says “there is no proof at all” that carbon dioxide “causes a greenhouse effect”. It claims the Arctic ice sheet is not shrinking (not true), glaciers are not retreating (false) and that the Earth has cooled since 2006 (the hottest years on record were 2009 and 2010).
A detailed response to CATA’s climate denier arguments is available at the Skeptical Science website.
In Australia, the US and Britain, the right is rushing to embrace climate denial at a time when the scientific evidence of climate change is more alarming than ever. On one level it’s an irrational response. But it’s not completely illogical.
In a March 9 Democracy Now interview, The Shock Doctrine author Naomi Klein pointed out that “climate change really is a profound threat to a great many things that right-wing ideologues believe in”.
She said: “So they’re choosing to disbelieve it, because it’s easier to deny the science than to say, ‘OK, I accept that my whole worldview is going to fall apart,’ that we have to have massive investments in public infrastructure, that we have to reverse free trade deals, that we have to have huge transfers of wealth from the North to the South. Imagine actually contending with that. It’s a lot easier to deny it.”
Klein’s point is important. The mainstream “debate” about climate is becoming less and less about the facts and science, and more and more about ideology and politics.
In this context, does the Labor/Greens carbon price plan offer a viable alternative?
To answer this, it’s vital to set apart carbon pricing in general (which could, in theory, help the transition to a zero-emissions economy) and this particular carbon pricing proposal.
Countless journalists, NGOs and politicians have referred to the proposal as a “carbon tax”. It isn’t.
It’s a carbon trading scheme that begins with a temporary fixed price for three to five years. This is similar to the former Rudd government’s proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, which was to begin with a temporary fixed price for one year.
The big problem is that carbon trading schemes haven’t worked anywhere to cut emissions sharply.
In a 2009 New York Times article, NASA climate scientist James Hansen described carbon trading as “a market-based approach that has been widely praised but does little to slow global warming or reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.
“It merely allows polluters and Wall Street traders to fleece the public out of billions of dollars.”
Yet the carbon trading plan has the support of Australia’s big environment NGOs. This underscores another big problem with the mainstream debate on climate — the real solutions to the climate crisis are still on the margins of the discussion.
As Klein said: “What I [also] see is that the green groups, a lot of the big green groups, are also in a kind of denial, because they want to pretend that this isn’t about politics and economics …
“And they’re not really wrestling with the fact that this is about economic growth. This is about an economic model that needs constant and infinite growth on a finite planet.
“So we really are talking about some deep transformations of our economy if we’re going to deal with climate change. And we need to talk about it.”
A step in this direction would be public investment in renewable energy infrastructure.
Deniers, pretenders and real climate action
Liberal leader Tony Abbott is a climate change denier. He told a recent meeting in Perth that he still doubted the science of climate change and said: “Whether carbon dioxide is quite the environmental villain that some people make it out to be is not yet proven.”
His party’s campaign against the carbon price deal struck between the Labor government, the Greens and independent MPs has one central aim: to undermine public support for strong government action to tackle climate change.
Abbott’s campaign is not crazy, even though it promotes an irrational response to the climate change threat. He is running a calculated scare campaign on behalf of Australia’s fossil fuel lobby.
The campaign avoids facts and evidence. It is designed to associate economic hardship, price rises and job losses with any kind of climate policy.
The truth is that a zero-emissions economy would be job-rich. And the “cost” of not cutting carbon pollution fast is a world of climate chaos.
There is a big danger that Abbott’s campaign will have an impact. It must be resisted.
But it’s wrong to think the climate deniers pose the only menace here.
The climate denier campaign works in tandem with the agenda of the climate pretenders — those who defend business as usual “solutions” to climate change.
Tony Abbott is Australia’s leading climate denier. Labor PM Julia Gillard is Australia’s leading climate pretender.
The danger is that the debate on climate will be narrowed to a false choice between two different kinds of inaction — one open, one concealed.
Pricing pollution cannot be the main response to climate change. Not when the climate science says we need to transform the economy rapidly.
Full details of the proposed carbon price plan are yet to be released.
But a carbon price or emissions trading scheme that shifts the cost-burden away from business and on to households would undermine public support for climate action and make it harder to win support for other, genuine climate measures.
It would give weight to the fossil fuel lobby’s hypocritical claims that climate action will always hurt ordinary people.
More compensation to the big polluters is inexcusable. Australian governments already give about $12 billion a year in subsidies to the big polluters. These subsidies should end and the money spent on zero-emissions projects.
In this context, the NSW Greens deserve high praise for their new Solar Thermal Plant initiative — a commitment to build three publicly owned and funded solar thermal power stations in western NSW.
The Socialist Alliance also calls for public investment as a key response to the climate emergency.
The federal Greens should follow the lead of the NSW branch and endorse a publicly funded rollout of renewable energy on a national scale.
Public investment in renewable energy and other carbon abatement programs is the most important and practical response to the climate emergency. We can’t allow the climate deniers, or the climate pretenders, to sideline it.
Media foster climate of denial
Climate deniers love banging on about media bias. It’s a favourite theme.
They claim media outlets suppress the debate, peddle global warming hysteria and refuse to give deniers an equal hearing.
Indeed, the evidence (always a knotty issue for deniers) shows that there is a glaring bias in the way the Australian media covers climate change. But it’s a bias for climate denier propaganda, not against it.
Take the Rupert Murdoch-owned media empire: Australia’s largest. The editorial line of its flagship broadsheet, the Australian, is notorious for its climate denial.
News Limited’s other big daily newspapers and websites give a platform to columnists such as Andrew Bolt, Tim Blair, Terry McCrann and Piers Ackerman, who are prepared to rubbish the work of climate scientists.
But the Australian media bias for climate denial is not limited to the opinion columns in the Murdoch press. The bias is often just as telling in what the mainstream media choose not to report.
British climate denier Lord Christopher Monckton’s tour of Australia in early 2010 overlapped with a visit by US climate scientist James Hansen. Both were visiting Australia to promote their views on climate change.
A Media Monitors study, published by Crikey in March, found that Monckton received 455 media mentions. Hansen, one of the world’s top climate scientists, received a mere 21 media mentions.
Even the ABC mentioned Monckton about 18 times more than Hansen (161 mentions to nine).
Climate deniers have as much cause to complain about media bias as they have evidence that global warming is a big conspiracy.
But how should the media report climate change? Do they have a responsibility to report “both sides of the debate”? Do climate deniers deserve any media coverage at all? Or should the media strive to stay detached from the political issues in the name of presenting a balanced view?
These questions were debated at the George Munster Award Forum, hosted by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism in Sydney on October 22.
The forum panellists included Macquarie University climate scientist Anne Henderson-Sellers, the ABC’s national environment and science reporter Sarah Clarke, Ben Cubby, environment editor of the Fairfax-owned Sydney Morning Herald, and Monash University professor of journalism Philip Chubb.
Henderson-Sellers criticised the way climate change was reported in the mainstream media. Far too often, scientifically robust views are given equal weight to non-expert opinions that are not based on facts. “I am against this false balance, this pretence of balance”, she said.
Chubb said that giving equal coverage to deniers was not balanced reporting, but led to a bias in favour of climate deniers.
He said: “The fact is that a recent, creditable study has indicated that 97% of published, peer-reviewed climate scientists support the concept of anthropogenic [human-caused] global warming.
“If you have a media representation of that reality which accords people who do not have that expertise … equal representation in the media, you are utterly distorting the situation.
“You are creating a position [that] is biased, in the sense that it is distorted. And you are confusing the public.”
Chubb said the mainstream media’s willingness to give deniers a platform was bad journalism. In practice, it means the most important debates about the climate crisis are buried.
“I believe”, Chubb said, “that there is plenty of dissention, argument, colour and movement within the climate change debate amongst the credible climate change scientists about the extent of the problem, how disastrous the situation actually is and what needs to be done to remedy it.
“If the media is seeking conflict, there is plenty of it within the halls of climate science. It doesn’t need to go outside the halls of climate science and talk to people who are irrelevant, who don’t understand the concept of evidence, but who are prepared to shoot off their mouths nonetheless.”
Cubby responded to Chubb’s criticisms: “One thing about journalism that is different from, say, a scientific journal, is that it is also about story-telling and to some extent about entertainment as well.”
At this point, Henderson-Sellers shook her head in disagreement. Cubby continued: “Anne can shake her head at that, but it is. You’ve got to sell newspapers. You’ve got to make people watch their TV show.
“That can lead to an unacceptable level of distortion. But the opposite is that every story in the paper can be dull but worthy. And it would be incredibly boring.”
Clarke, who has reported on climate change issues for the ABC for the past eight years, defended the record of her employer: “I think Phil’s kind of having a go at the wrong targets tonight … I think [the ABC and Fairfax] are the ones who have delivered the objective, scientific [analysis] … I think Fairfax and the ABC have delivered.”
Later on in the discussion, Cubby said: “This gets to an important point [about] what journalism is for in this context. I’m getting the vibe that we should really be fighting a tide of scepticism on behalf of the climate science community.
“Now, I’m very cautious about campaigning on issues like that. I think the principles of neutrality are extremely important to have a functioning system of journalism. In some ways, those are more important than winning an argument in the public’s mind about climate change.”
Chubb said he could not agree with Cubby’s defense of media neutrality: “Nobody’s asking journalists to get on the team. Nobody is asking journalists to get on any team. There is a difference between journalism and politics and a difference between journalists and politicians and there ought to be. That’s true.
“However, it’s also true that the concept of neutrality only goes so far in reporting the truth. Neutrality obscures the truth at a certain point. There is a point beyond which neutrality as a concept for journalists … ceases to be useful.
“It ceases to be useful in precisely this type of situation — where if you are being neutral you are actually biasing the representation of the argument against one side.
“Neutrality is, in this case, attacking the essence of journalism. The essence of journalism is verification and truth.”
In reality, no line in the sand can be drawn between journalism and politics. Journalists do not exist in a bubble separated from the rest of society. They make political decisions all the time. And political decisions are made for them too, whether they are aware of it or not.
Indeed, Cubby and Clarke’s defence of the liberal media’s record on climate would have been more convincing had they been more willing to admit the heavy political restrictions media corporations place on individual journalists.
But Chubb’s main point about the pitfalls of accepting “media neutrality” is a powerful one.
It recalls how US freelance journalist T.D Allman once defined “genuine objective journalism” in his 1983 obituary to exiled Australian dissident journalist Wilfred Burchett: “Genuine objective journalism not only gets the facts right, it gets the meaning of events right.
“It is compelling not only today, but it stands the test of time. It is validated not only by ‘reliable sources’, but by the unfolding of history. It is journalism that ten, twenty, fifty years after the fact still holds up a true and intelligent mirror to events.”
Media corporations discourage this kind of journalism because it is subversive by definition. But at a time when so much is at stake, subversive and objective journalism is what we really need.
Hamilton launches new climate book
Author and climate commentator Clive Hamilton spoke at the Sydney launch of his new book, Requiem for a Species, at Gleebooks on March 16. He discussed the troubling gap between the scientific certainty that dangerous climate change is already underway and the strong resistance of government’s to respond to the emergency.
In the past 12 months, climate denial has made something of a comeback. In the United States, attacks on science are reaching a fever-pitch. But Hamilton explained this is far from accidental. Climate denier institutes and think tank receive huge funding from fossil fuel corporations and other vested interests.
“The attack on climate science has been orchestrated, relentless and effective”, he told the meeting.
He spoke of how the prominent US climate denier and Republican congressperson, James Inhofe, has even released a report calling for a criminal investigation into climate scientists. “This conjures up images of McCarthyism”, Hamilton said.
He argued the theoretical leadership of the climate denier movement had a broader political agenda. They are trying to consolidate a conservative social base around “a hatred of environmentalism” and “a backlash against the [progressive] social movements of the 1960s”.
Meanwhile, the scientific evidence about global warming is becoming more frightening than ever. Hamilton referred a recent report released by climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows for the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change research.
He said the Anderson and Bows study estimated that even were global emissions to peak by 2020 and decline by 3.5% a year (emissions cuts for big polluters like Australia would need to be about 6% to 7% a year in this scenario), atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases could still reach 550-650 parts per million (ppm) — a 4°C average temperature rise.
This is far above the recognised safe-climate level of less than 350ppm. It underscores that very radical changes are needed to decarbonise our economies. It also shows that we are desperately short of time.
Hamilton ended his talk with a discussion of how people might respond psychologically to the knowledge that human civilization is in deep trouble.
He drew on the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus’s concept of “active fatalism” as an example of a psychologically healthy response to the climate crisis. “In facing the facts we must not submit to apathy”, he said.
Climate scientists victims of cyber-bullying
Australian author and climate change commentator Clive Hamilton has revealed that prominent climate scientists have been targeted by a cyber-bullying campaign by climate deniers.
In a February 22 article on the ABC Online site, The Drum, Hamilton said: “In recent months, each time they enter the public debate through a newspaper article or radio interview these scientists are immediately subjected to a torrent of aggressive, abusive and, at times, threatening emails.
“Apart from the volume and viciousness of the emails, the campaign has two features — it is mostly anonymous and it appears to be orchestrated.”
Hamilton’s article was part of a 5-part series that examined the interests behind the rise of climate denial in Australia.
His February 22 article included a small selection of the abusive emails sent to scientists, activists and journalists who have commented publicly on the science of climate change.
The University of New South Wales’s (UNSW) Ben McNeil was told: “It’s so obvious you are an activist going along with the climate change lie to protect your very lucrative employment contract.”
Professor David Karoly, from the University of Melbourne, received an email that said he was guilty of “treason and homicide” and should be “compared with Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot.”
Other emails have threatened violence against scientists. UNSW’s Andy Pitman received the threatening message: “Fuckk off mate, stop the personal attacks. Just do your science or you will end up collateral damage in the war, GET IT.”
Climate activists have also been targeted by the cyber-bullies. Hamilton said one received an email that asked: “Did you want to offer your children to be brutally gang-raped and then horribly tortured before being reminded of their parents socialist beliefs and actions?”
Another activist was sent: “Fuck off!!! Or you will be chased down the street with burning stakes and hung from your fucking neck, until you are dead, dead, dead!”
The politics of climate denial
It might seem bizarre that although the science of human-caused climate change is more conclusive and worrying than ever, climate denial could enjoy a resurgence. But it’s happening — at least in Australia and a handful of other developed nations.
The comeback of climate denial is out of step with views on climate change in most of the world.
A BBC poll, released in December, said concern about climate change has risen sharply worldwide. Sixty-four percent said climate change was “very serious” — 20% higher than a similar 1998 poll. In Brazil and Chile, the figure was 86%. Eighty-three percent of Costa Ricans and Filipinos agreed.
But in Australia, Britain and the US, the trend appears to be running the other way.
A recent US poll by the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication found that less than 50% of adults found global warming “worrying” or “somewhat worrying”. This is 13% less than an October 2008 poll.
Fifty-seven percent of respondents said they believed global warming was happening, down from 71% in 2008. Those who felt global warming was caused by human activity dropped from 57% to 47%.
A November poll by the London Times said only 41% of Britons now believed climate change to be an established scientific fact.
An October poll by the Lowy Institute said concern about the threat of climate change was weakening in Australia too. Fifty six percent said climate change was very important, down 19 points from a poll two years earlier.
So if climate denial is finding new supporters here, why is this the case? After all, no climate denier has published a peer-reviewed article in a scientific journal in the past 15 years.
Among climate scientists there is no debate about the reality of global warming any longer. The research of many hundreds of scientists has proved that climate change is real, that greenhouse gases released by human activity cause climate change, and that climate change represents an immense danger to human civilisation as we know it.
But there are reasons why a political space for climate denial remains open. The first of these is that climate deniers have it easy.
Climate scientists are required to deal skeptically with facts and measurable data before drawing firm conclusions. Climate deniers have no such constraints. They don’t have to prove or justify anything, but merely have or throw enough mud in the hope some of it will stick. This gives deniers an advantage in public debates.
NASA climate scientist James Hansen explained something of the problem in his recent book on the science of global warming Storms of my Grandchildren.
He said climate deniers “tend to act like lawyers defending a client … presenting only arguments that favour their client.
“This is in direct contradiction to my favourite description of the scientific method, by Richard Ferryman: ‘The only way to have real success in science … is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what’s good about it and what’s bad about it equally. In science you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty’.”
Hansen continued: “The scientific method, in one sense, is a handicap in a debate before a nonscientific audience. It works great for advancing knowledge, but to the public it can seem wishy-washy and confounding.
“The difference between scientist-style and lawyer-style tends to favour the [denier] in a discussion before an audience that is not expert in the science.
“I long ago realised that the global warming ‘debate’, in the public mind, would be long-running. I also noted that [deniers] kept changing their arguments as the real-world evidence for global warming continued to strengthen, conveniently forgetting prior statements that were proven wrong.”
Australian paleoclimate scientist Andrew Glickson has referred to another typical denier tactic.
Typically, deniers “scan the field for real or imagined, major or minor errors, inferring such errors undermine major databases, theories, or even an entire branch of science”, he wrote on ABC’s Unleashed blog in July.
Glickson compared climate deniers approach to “the eternal search for errors and gaps in Darwin’s evolution theory by creationists, based on their belief in a supernatural creator.”
A recent example of this strategy was the hype about a small error in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) about the predicted timeframe for Himalayan glaciers to melt completely.
A paragraph in the IPCC report said that chances the glaciers would “disappear … by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high”. On January 20, the IPCC announced this particular prediction was wrong after leading glaciologists drew attention to the mistake.
However, it said: “Widespread mass losses from glaciers and reductions in snow cover over recent decades are projected to accelerate throughout the 21st century … This conclusion is robust, appropriate, and entirely consistent with the underlying science and the broader IPCC assessment.” The loss of meltwater from retreating glaciers could affect the water security of up to one-sixth of the world’s population.
But this hasn’t stopped deniers from seizing on this one small error to allege the whole 938-page IPCC report is fraudulent and the entire science of climate change is bogus.
A second reason climate denial is winning some new support is that it exploits peoples fear of change and the unknown. The science of climate change is frightening. It makes plain that unless radical changes are made in our economy and society, humanity faces an uncertain future.
People are responding differently to such an all-encompassing threat. A growing number are determined to win a safe climate for future generations and want to force governments to deal with the problem. But some have become despondent and assume runaway climate change is inevitable and cannot be stopped.
Others respond with denial — finding it easier to believe nothing is wrong at all, rather than accept modern capitalism is driving humanity to a precipice. For many, climate denial is a soothing psychological balm and reflects a desperate need to escape from a troubling reality.
A third reason for the recent rise in climate denial is that denial is now a well-funded industry in its won right.
PR consultant Jim Hoggan, author of the 2009 book Climate Cover-up, has said he has found it “infuriating … to watch my colleagues use their skills, their training and their considerable intellect to poison the international debate on climate change.”
“Few PR offences have been so obvious, so successful and so despicable as this attack on the science of climate change. It has been a triumph of disinformation — one of the boldest and most extensive PR campaigns in history, primarily financed by the energy industry and executed by some of the best PR talent in the world”, he wrote on the Desmogblog in June.
The mainstream media’s coverage of climate change must also share some of the blame. Despite the scientific consensus, “journalists continued to report updates from the best climate scientists in the world juxtaposed against the unsubstantiated raving of an industry-funded climate change denier — as if both were equally valid”, Hoggan said.
The highly publicised Australian tour of prominent British climate denier, Lord Christopher Monckton, laid bare this problem.
Monckton is not a scientist, but a former journalist, a semi-professional eccentric and a one-time advisor to the conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Yet despite his lack of qualifications his climate denial speaking tour generated a vast amount of media coverage.
Monckton lies at the most kooky end of the climate denier spectrum. Even National Party leader Barnaby Joyce, himself an uncompromising climate denier, has said Monckton’s views are on the “fringe”. Even so, federal opposition leader Tony Abbott met with Monckton to discuss climate policy on February 4.
Among Monckton’s most absurd claims are that the Copenhagen climate conference was “a sort of Nuremburg rally”, that US President Barack Obama wants to use climate change as an excuse to set up a world communist government, and that the young protesters calling for strong climate action outside the Copenhagen summit were akin to the Hitler youth.
While in Australia, he even claimed NASA sabotaged the launch of its own multi-million dollar satellite a year ago because the satellite, designed to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, would have given evidence that climate change is untrue.
Monckton has a history of making wild claims. In 1987, he wrote that AIDS victims should be locked away to stop the spread of the disease. He claims to have found the cure for diseases such as Graves’ disease, multiple sclerosis and influenza. In a letter to US senator John McCain he also falsely said he had won the Nobel Peace Prize.
A final reason for resurgence of open climate denialism in Australia is the federal ALP government’s closet climate denialism.
PM Kevin Rudd is fond of ridiculing climate denial, but his own climate policies do nothing to address the climate crisis. The proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme will cost taxpayers billions and reward the big polluters. Yet it will do nothing to sharply cut greenhouse gas emissions.
By promising to take strong action on climate change, but failing to do so, the Rudd government has opened the door for climate deniers to make ground. In the face of obvious government greenwashing, some are concluding that the threat may not be all that severe after all.
The politics of climate denial and climate greenwash share much in common — both are ways of denying reality. To win against the climate deniers also requires victory against the business-as-usual policies of the major parties, which acknowledge the science in words but betray it in practice.
Climate justice vs climate denial
Retreat of the Chacaltaya Glacier, Bolivia 1940-2005.
The government of Bolivia made a submission to a UN working group on climate change. Their message: Rich countries must pay their ecological debt.
The statement includes: “There is no viable solution to climate change that is effective without being equitable. Deep emission reductions by developed countries are a necessary condition for stabilising the Earth’s climate…. Any solution that does not ensure an equitable distribution of the Earth’s limited capacity to absorb greenhouse gases, as well as the costs of mitigating and adapting to climate change, is destined to fail.”
See the full document on Links.
Meanwhile, Australian geologist, Ian Plimer, has released a big new book Heaven and Earth which denies climate change is happening. The Australian, in particular, has presented the book as a breakthrough study.
Professor Barry Brook, Director of Climate Science at The Environment Institute, University of Adelaide, rebuts Plimer’s arguments on his site Brave New Climate.
You can also listen to Brook’s excellent interview with Craig Nelson & John Rice on Plimer’s book on Radio Adelaide’s Back Story.
Climate Change Social Change 