Party of 1

Someone with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board seems to have been asleep at the switch. In Friday’s paper, in the weekly “Taste” section, there appeared a commentary that was unflattering in the extreme to the board’s positions, especially the contentious matter of climate change — a matter about which the board is only too happy to trumpet its views.

The article in question didn’t have much to do with climate change, except in passing.  The author was Robert Crease, chair of the philosophy department at SUNY-Stony Brook.  In the main, his intent was to pay homage to Martin Gardner, longtime author of the “Mathematical Games” feature that appeared in the Scientific American from 1956 to 1981.

Crease spoke to cognitive neuroscientist Al Seckel, an admirer of Gardner, who studies “why people regularly and seemingly inexorably fall victim to optical illusions, faulty logic and pseudoscience.” Seckel notes that people may discount dissonant information that fails to conform to their preconceived notions. “As an example, Mr. Seckel noted that global-warming skeptics who lack training in science yet appear to argue on a ‘technical level’ tend to be libertarians. If global warming is correct, that suggests large-scale governmental regulation is needed, contrary to the core beliefs of a libertarian. ‘It is easier for a libertarian to attack the science of global warming,’ Mr. Seckel said, ‘than to alter one’s core libertarian beliefs.’”

That’s a concise summary of the reasons for declining to take the representations of climate-change skeptics at face value. The most loudmouthed skeptics are not climatologists. They’re not meteorologists.  They’re not physicists.  They presume that they are competent to critique the work of natural scientists — because they’re ideologues….

On the whole, I tend to look at the representations of climate-change skeptics with a skeptical eye, as regular visitors to this site will have noted. For me, the skepticism smacks too much of a corporate public-relations campaign, going back two or three decades.  On the other hand, it was no less of a thinker than John Stuart Mill who reminded us of the benefits of freewheeling debate, involving even the views of those we might regard as absolutely repugnant.  In that spirit, a lengthy feature posted last week on the English-language website of German newsmagazine Der Spiegel merits close attention.  Highlights:

– The reputation of the Nobel-prizewinning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been compromised. “In mid-March, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon slammed on the brakes and appointed a watchdog for the IPCC…. There is already a consensus today that deep-seated reforms are needed at the IPCC. The selection of its authors and reviewers was not sufficiently nonpartisan, there was not enough communication among the working groups, and there were no mechanisms on how to handle errors.” In Germany, the prestigious Leibniz Association has called for the resignation of IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri.

– Reconstruction of global temperatures from historical records is extremely complicated. “At a number of weather stations, temperatures rose because houses and factories had been built around them. Elsewhere, stations were moved and, as a result, suddenly produced different readings.” Due to these and other complicating factors, the data had to be “homogenized” by means of statistical methods.  Unfortunately, British climatologist Phil Jones, one of the principals in the “Climategate” affair, admitted under pressure from climate-change skeptics that he “had deleted his notes on how he performed the homogenization. This means that it is not possible to reconstruct how the raw data turned into his temperature curve.” Pressure is building to “start from scratch” on the calculation of the global temperature curve — a process that could take years.

– The latest estimates indicate that, even in the face of ongoing warming, an increase in the incidence of “monster storms” such as Hurricane Katrina is not to be expected. “According to the models, the high latitudes will heat up more substantially than the equatorial zones (which also explains why climate change is already so visible in the Arctic regions). On balance, temperature differences on the Earth’s surface will decrease, which in turn will even reduce wind speeds — meaning the much-feared monster storms are unlikely to materialize.”

– Climate change may produce winners as well as losers. Canada, Russia, and Germany may benefit from a more temperate climate.  On the other hand, subtropical regions, including the southern United States, Australia, South Africa, and such Mediterranean countries as Spain, Italy and Greece may suffer from more frequent drought conditions.

The feature concludes with the thoughts of German climatologist Hans von Storch: “Climate change isn’t going to happen overnight. We still have enough time to react.” That’s not inconsistent with the position staked out elsewhere on this site….

More journals of opinion have come in over the electronic transom, and three of them feature cover stories on climate change — a sign, I suppose, that this issue is not going away, health care, unemployment and recession notwithstanding. For what it may be worth, both National Review and the Weekly Standard feature caricatures of Al Gore on their covers.

The Nation, for its part, features a cover story by Johann Hari of the London Independent on corporate funding and influence upon big environmental organizations, most notably the Sierra Club, Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy. “The green groups defend their behavior by saying they are improving the behavior of the corporations. But … the pressure often flows the other way: the addiction to corporate cash has changed the green groups at their core.” Of the three groups upon which he concentrates, Hari finds the Sierra Club to be the least corrupt. But even they are, in his judgment, too constrained by their estimate of what legislation can be passed through a  compromised U.S. Senate.

As an alternative, Hari favors British-style “direct action,” which he argues has helped to block airport expansion and the construction of new coal-fired power plants in that country. Maybe so, but I wonder if any such campaign is capable of a transformation of the fossil-fuel-based economy at the “macro” level. The problem is that this issue invites skepticism — and the more stridency and direct action you engage in, the more skepticism you provoke.

The reason for this is reflected in this week’s “Beat the Devil” column in the Nation by Alexander Cockburn, who has become notorious as perhaps the most prominent climate-change skeptic on the left. Cockburn’s taking-off point was not climate change, but instead a February 28 column by Frank Rich on the tea-party movement and the crashing of a private plane into an Austin, Texas office building by an individual who harbored antigovernment sentiments. Cockburn found that the Rich column to reeked of an upper-middle-class stench, a class prejudice against the “petite bourgeoisie” represented by Joe Stack, perpetrator of the Austin incident. “The lower middle class is what we’re focusing on here, the people who own auto repair shops, bakeries, bicycle shops, plant stores, dry cleaners, fish stores and all the other small businesses across America…. Today’s left no longer believes in revolutionary change but despises the petite bourgeoisie out of inherited political disposition and class outlook. Ninety-five percent of all the firms in America hire fewer than ten people. There’s your petite bourgeoisie for you: not frightening, not terrifying and in fact quite indispensable.”

That sort of thinking apparently is what drives Cockburn’s reaction to the climate issue. “And the petit bourgeois are legitimately pissed off…. They’re three or four payrolls away from the edge of the cliff, and when they read about trillions in handouts for bankers, trillions in impending deficits, blueprints for green energy regs that will put them out of business, what they hear is the ocean surge pounding away at the bottom of that same cliff.” Cockburn objects to the atmospherics of a left movement dominated by “eggheads,” and, up to a point, I suppose his point is well taken. Such people are sure to dominate any “direct action” movement on climate change, and their foibles have been well-documented, along with their propensity to drive away individuals of lesser income and educational attainment. I just wonder whether this obviates further discussion of the climate issue on the merits. I suppose Cockburn’s larger point is that people like Johann Hari and James Hansen will not be able to get everything they want on climate — because a progressive movement dominated by upper-middle-class professionals is overextended on that issue and umpteen others. Its base is far short of the broad middle-class support  needed for political success in a competitive system, especially one with the characteristics of the United States.

Looking at the right-of-center journals, it looks like there is some good reporting in the National Review cover story by staff reporter Stephen Spruiell, on Al Gore’s conflicts of interest. As far as I know, an environmental activist like Johann Hari would be happy to concede the point, as far as it goes. Gore is involved with venture-capital fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which has investments in such “green-tech” firms as ethanol manufacturers Mascoma Corporation and Amyris Biotechnologies. There may be some place for biofuels, but it has been reported widely that Brazilian sugarcane and switchgrass would be a more economical source of ethanol than American corn. Ethanol is subsidized to the extent that it is, largely because the quadrennial American presidential campaigns begin in Iowa.

Less impressive in my judgment is the cover story by Steven Hayward in the latest issue of the Weekly Standard, which doesn’t appear to contain much new — just a summary of the points made in the public-relations campaign ongoing in right-of-center media for the past 90 to 120 days, ever since the “Climategate” revelations. There is, however, one sentence in the Hayward article to which I would like to call attention: “Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Guardian that climate skeptics are akin to tobacco scientists—some of the same people, in fact, though he gave no names and offered no facts to establish such a claim.”

No names? I wonder whether he saw the piece in the December Foreign Policy by Annie Lowery, to which I have linked frequently. Lowery discussed briefly the case of the late physicist Frederick Seitz, who just before his death wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal impugning climate researchers associated with the IPCC. Lowery: “Other scientists discredited Seitz by revealing he was on the payroll of tobacco companies while arguing against the carcinogenic effects of second-hand smoke.”

Climate-skeptical polemicists want to belittle the parallel between tobacco and climate, although I don’t know how it could be much clearer: In both cases, a PR campaign was waged with corporate funding, by individuals who by all appearances were at best indifferent to the facts at hand. Hayward calls it an “ad hominem argument” and a “sign of desperation” — which at least affords an opportunity for a brief discussion of the concept of ad hominem or “argument against the man.” You can learn in an undergraduate course in logic that an ad hominem argument is not necessarily invalid. It can, of course, amount to nothing but the swinging of a rhetorical brickbat — but it can also represent a legitimate appeal to a consideration of the character, temperament and motivations of the opponent. The most revealing thing about argument can be the character of the individuals to which it appeals….

“The global warming industry, like Alexander in the famous children’s story, is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Actually, a bad three months….” So writes George Will in Sunday’s Washington Post. I’ll give him this much: the opinion-complex of which he is a part has has a good three months, with regard to the matter at hand — with a big assist from several of the climate researchers.

John Gray, whom I have cited as an influential thinker on the “About” page of this site, has written that, while global warming is a real phenomenon, not much can be done about it.  George Will could have said as much, and left it at that — but he has gone on to make assertions he is not competent to make, in a manic and brazen pursuit of unlimited corporate prerogative.

Too much has been said about this topic already.  Without commenting further about how bad global warming might or might not turn out to be, or what can or cannot be done about it, let me repeat that everything I see suggests that this will play out in much the same way as the tobacco-and-lung-cancer controversy. In the meantime, I might be willing to give George Will the time of day on this matter — were he to show some willingness to answer the criticisms offered (for instance) here, here, here, or here.

Before the first of the year I put together this post, entitled “Climate: Why Skeptics Are Viewed With Skepticism” — in large part, to draw attention to this article from the Foreign Policy website.

I’ve just stumbled upon this commentary from the website Weather Underground, which cites this very interesting book — with implications about the intersection between science and politics that go beyond the climate-change issue….

Weather and climate have been on the minds of Washingtonians in recent days, as the city attempts to dig out from under several feet of snow. As much is reflected on the editorial pages of Sunday’s Washington Post. Looking down on the national capital from his outpost in Vermont, Bill McKibben is not backing down on the climate-change question. Referring to the “Climategate” and “Glaciergate” controversies, he writes: “Looked at dispassionately, those political attacks essentially buttress the consensus around global warming. If that much money and attention can be aimed at the data and all anyone can find is a few mistakes and a collection of nasty e-mails, it’s a pretty good sign that the science is sound (though not as good a sign as the melting Arctic)…. Looked at dispassionately, the round of snowmageddons crisscrossing the mid-Atlantic carries the same message. But it’s hard to be dispassionate when you’re wondering, six hours of shoveling later, if there’s a good chiropractor in the neighborhood and what kind of dogsled you might need to reach her.”

In the same paper, Dana Milbank observes: “As a scientific proposition, claiming that heavy snow in the mid-Atlantic debunks global warming theory is about as valid as claiming that the existence of John Edwards debunks the theory of evolution.”  Still, he argues that, with the snowstorms, “greens were hoist by their own petard.”

Milbank: “For years, climate-change activists have argued by anecdote to make their case. [Al] Gore, in his famous slide shows, ties human-caused global warming to increasing hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, drought and the spread of mosquitoes, pine beetles and disease. It’s not that Gore is wrong about these things. The problem is that his storm stories have conditioned people to expect an endless worldwide heat wave, when in fact the changes so far are subtle.”

Walter Russell Mead has penned a follow-up to his earlier musings on climate change and the “Climategate” controversy on the American Interest website. The comments section following Mead’s article suggests strongly that the readership of this publication leans strongly toward climate-change skepticism and feels that Mead has been too easy on the climate researchers.

Mead: “Scientists don’t get to write the Endangered Species Act all by themselves; other interest groups (real estate developers, for example) also get a bite at the apple.  If cigarettes cause cancer, whether to discourage smoking, ban it altogether or otherwise regulate it is a political decision not a scientific one.  Once the controversy crosses this line, scientists turn from experts and authority figures into ordinary citizens and it is their voting strength and their ability to persuade non-scientists about the merits of their views and priorities, rather than the number and quality of their peer reviewed publications, that determines their weight in the political process….

“If climate scientists are even half right, they are going to have to get used to intrusive and unrelenting public scrutiny.  Their work will be second-guessed and disputed; their financial interests examined with a fine-toothed comb.  Hostile critics will go through their emails;  every jot and tittle they publish will be closely examined by lynx-eyed skeptics.  The debates over the policy implications of global warming will be waged mendaciously, tendentiously and unscrupulously — just like the debates over issues ranging from abortion to stem cell research to animal rights….

“The findings of climate science will (and should) be held to a much higher standard of accuracy and certainty than normal scientific studies.  Scientists can be wrong about the lesser spotted skink for twenty years and then change their minds; no harm, no foul except maybe to the skinks.  But if the implications of the work of climate scientists lead to serious proposals for the entire world to make dramatic shifts in its basic patterns of energy usage, it would be utterly naive and idiotic for scientists to expect that there wouldn’t be lots of people second guessing their work and checking over it in the hope of discovering mistakes.”

Walter Russell Mead has penned a follow-up to his earlier musings on climate change and the “Climategate” controversy on the American Interest website. The comments section following Mead’s article suggests strongly that the readership of this publication leans strongly toward climate-change skepticism and feels that Mead has been too easy on the climate researchers.

Mead: “Scientists don’t get to write the Endangered Species Act all by themselves; other interest groups (real estate developers, for example) also get a bite at the apple.  If cigarettes cause cancer, whether to discourage smoking, ban it altogether or otherwise regulate it is a political decision not a scientific one.  Once the controversy crosses this line, scientists turn from experts and authority figures into ordinary citizens and it is their voting strength and their ability to persuade non-scientists about the merits of their views and priorities, rather than the number and quality of their peer reviewed publications, that determines their weight in the political process….

“If climate scientists are even half right, they are going to have to get used to intrusive and unrelenting public scrutiny.  Their work will be second-guessed and disputed; their financial interests examined with a fine-toothed comb.  Hostile critics will go through their emails;  every jot and tittle they publish will be closely examined by lynx-eyed skeptics.  The debates over the policy implications of global warming will be waged mendaciously, tendentiously and unscrupulously — just like the debates over issues ranging from abortion to stem cell research to animal rights….

“The findings of climate science will (and should) be held to a much higher standard of accuracy and certainty than normal scientific studies.  Scientists can be wrong about the lesser spotted skink for twenty years and then change their minds; no harm, no foul except maybe to the skinks.  But if the implications of the work of climate scientists lead to serious proposals for the entire world to make dramatic shifts in its basic patterns of energy usage, it would be utterly naive and idiotic for scientists to expect that there wouldn’t be lots of people second guessing their work and checking over it in the hope of discovering mistakes.”

“Climategate,” “Glaciergate,” and the wider ongoing controversy and discussion over climate change continue to rage on, with many major developments originating from the UK. On Tuesday, activist George Monbiot, on his blog for the Guardian, call for heads to roll at the University of East Anglia. He wants the resignation of both Phil Jones,, head of the Climate Research Unit (CRU), and Annie Ogden, head of communications at the university. “When the emails were first published in November, I called for Professor Jones’s resignation as head of the CRU. Though he has stepped down temporarily, his position is now even less tenable. The longer he leaves it, the worse this will get.” Ogden, for her part, “was warned repeatedly that the university’s handling of this issue was a catastrophe, and still the policy – of utter passivity in the face of crisis – remains unchanged.”

At least for the moment, Monbiot is sticking with IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri. “It’s worth remembering that he was appointed to run the IPCC after the Bush administration had his predecessor, Bob Watson, booted out at the behest of ExxonMobil…. Once it had extracted Watson, [the Bush administration] accepted Pachauri as his replacement. The very qualities which made him acceptable to the climate change deniers in the White House – he wasn’t a climate scientist, he had friendly relations with business – are now being used by climate change deniers as a stick with which to beat him.”

Monbiot sees little reason to back down on the wider questions. Skeptics “stoutly ignore far graver evidence of falsification and fabrication by their own side, even when there is smoking gun evidence that their champions have secretly taken money from fossil fuel companies to make false claims…. In fact, as [Guardian environment correspondent] Fred Pearce has shown, even their claims about the material in the hacked emails are almost all false.”

Pachauri, for his part, granted an interview to Amy Kazmin of the Financial Times in New Delhi yesterday (Wednesday). Pachauri suspects that he and the IPCC have become the targets of an orchestrated lobbying and public-relations campaign. “It doesn’t take a genius to arrive at the conclusion that apparently this is carefully orchestrated. These things are certainly not happening at random. The one unfortunate thing that has happened is the mistake that the IPCC made on the glaciers. We have acknowledged that; we have put that on our web site…. What they are indulging in is skulduggery of the worst kind…. I don’t want to get down to a personal level, but all you need to do is look at their backgrounds. They are people who deny the link between smoking and cancer; they are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder – I hope that they apply it to their faces every day – and people who say that the only way to deal with HIV/Aids is to screen the population on a regular basis and isolate those who are infected…. You can look at the names of the authors of these articles that have appeared in the Sunday Telegraph. These are the persons I’m referring to…. It’s only a surmise. I have no evidence. But there is enough documentary evidence to show that, for instance, in Washington DC, the number of lobbyists (trying to influence US climate change policy) has increased many fold and from what I read from the Centre for Public Integrity, 770 companies are supporting some of these lobbyists. And certainly some of them are active on the other side of the Atlantic as well.”

At the website of The American Interest, Walter Russell Mead concludes that climate-change activists — and climate researchers as well — have overplayed their hand. “The global warmists were trapped into the necessity of hyping the threat by their realization that the actual evidence they had — which, let me emphasize, all hype aside, is serious, troubling and establishes in my mind the need for intensive additional research and investigation, as well as some prudential steps that would reduce CO2 emissions by enhancing fuel use efficiency and promoting alternative energy sources — was not sufficient to get the world’s governments to do what they thought needed to be done.”

The takeaway: “American public opinion supports ‘doing something’ about global warming, but not very much; support for specific measures and sacrifices will erode rapidly as commentators from Fox News and other conservative outlets endlessly hammer away…. For better or worse, the global political system isn’t capable of producing the kind of result the global warming activists want.  It’s like asking a jellyfish to climb a flight of stairs; you can poke and prod all you want, you can cajole and you can threaten.  But you are asking for something that you just can’t get — and at the end of the day, you won’t get it.”