This is the first post in what will be a regular feature at One Blue Marble.
The “climate scientists” who deny climate change are — with one or two exceptions — not actually climate scientists. They work at “institutes” that are funded by big oil, and they are unable to publish their “findings” in respected peer-reviewed scientific journals. They are out solely for number one. The Friends of Science (FoS) and Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) are prime examples. (The Union of Concerned Scientists has an excellent PDF available).
Groups like the FoS and the SPPI are working an angle that is best be described as throw-enough-shit-against-the-wall-and-surely-some-will-stick science. But the term junk science will work just as well. They don’t bother with people who have an understanding of how science works; they just work on our colleagues and friends who may not have the time to study the issue in depth. Anything is fair game, and honesty matters not a whit.
They can lie faster than climate scientists can correct the misinformation.
In many ways, professional inactivists are quite clever. Even the scientists and environmental writers who face off against them have give them their due. Often what they do is take a grain a truth, and wrap it up neatly with a pretty falsehood that seems to makes sense to non-scientists — even when its verifiably wrong. The professional inactivists have a variety of old conjuror’s tricks that rely on misdirection to fool people, so they cherry pick facts, throw in a red herring when appropriate, or play up results that fly in the face of old-fashioned commonsense (even if it’s nevertheless true). After awhile, it gets very, very confusing. People believe elaborate lies. And even when you explain it to them, they still believe the lies.
That’s exactly what has happened with Dr. James Hansen; good people actually believe that he’s falsified information to help Al Gore sell An Inconvenient Truth. It’s so ridiculous, and no one who understands science — or knows Hansen personally — believes a word of it. But he’s not the only scientist to be villified. In Canada, Dr. David Suzuki is deemed by many to be a socialist antichrist who is trying to destroy the fabric of society. Throughout the world, hundreds of serious, respected academics have had their reputations dragged through the mud because they are trying to keep the planet from sizzling.
And so here at One Blue Marble, we’ve decided to regularly tackle common myths to help non-scientists learn the truth about climate change so they can be loaded for bear when those pesky inactvists come calling. But we’d be amiss if we didn’t acknowledge a very real problem: by repeating the myths here, we are giving these lies a veneer of credibility when we shouldn’t even be talking about such tripe. The truth is this: Whenever anyone dismisses climate change as a socialist plot — or junk science — we should be laughing them out of the room, and lumping them in with members of the Flat Earth Society or people who think the moon landing was faked.
Climate Change Myth #1: Global warming stopped in 1998. The world has actually been cooling for the last decade.
Fact: See how clever the deniers are? Truth to tell, 1998, with a very strong El Nino event, was the second warmest on year on record. So if you compare, say, 1998 and 2002, you will find that 1998 was warmer.
But that doesn’t mean the world is cooling, and that’s not the comparison you should be making. If you compare 2002 with any year in the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s, you’ll find that find that 2002 was much, much, much warmer. And if you plot the yearly temperature deviation from the mean for the last 130 years, you’ll get a graph that looks like this one, pulled from NOAA.
See, here’s the thing. It doesn’t make sense mathematically to compare one year to any other year. But It does make sense to compare decades. In truth, nine of the warmest 10 years on record have occurred in the last decade, and the last decade has been the warmest our planet has seen in more than 100,000 years.
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What Climate Myths do you want to see debunked? Let us know!
Our resources page has many handy links to Grist and New Scientist on how to talk to a skeptic.
Good post Richard. Keep fighting the good fight.
This is one that strikes close to home (pun intended). I’ve never been completely satisfied with the debunking of some hurricane talk: specifically that there were supposedly more hurricanes the first half the century, vs the last 50 years (I want to say it was a U of Colorado study of hurricane history from the mid-1800s thru the present, but I’m not sure). I’ve read statistical analyses which discuss intensity and changes in the technology to gather data, but I’ve found it hard to put it simply and convincingly… besides just saying: “You’re wrong. That’s only one, superficial interpretation of one set of data.” I want to say the same data set showed an increased number of the strongest hurricanes (cat 5) over the last 60 years or so, but I’m a terrible debater and this stuff never comes to mind when I need it most.
Maybe this would be a good idea for a new iPhone app? Climate debating for dummies.
My programmer is trying to persuade me to move to .net from PHP. I have always disliked the idea because of the costs. But he’s tryiong none the less. I’ve been using Movable-type on various websites for about a year and am concerned about switching to another platform. I have heard fantastic things about blogengine.net. Is there a way I can import all my wordpress content into it? Any kind of help would be really appreciated!