LIES, DAMNED LIES AND JOURNALISM
'How can you help being snobs, so long as this balderdash is set before you?' wondered Thackeray. 'Oh, down with the papers, those engines and propagators of Snobbishness!' The situation is much worse than Thackeray conveys here, in that it is the elite – or at least their faithful scribes - writing this balderdash for the consumption of the masses, peddling prejudices and stupidities that comfort and reassure the people and make the world safe for the rich and powerful. Hegel remarked that in the modern world reading the newspapers has replaced listening to the Sunday sermon from the pulpit. People have their truths and pieties delivered to them through the letter box. One can speculate how much would change if the newspapers were to abandon just a little bit of their interest in the lives of celebrities, end their daily veneration of the impossible lifestyles of the rich and powerful, and instead focus on the significance of the real life of real people on planet Earth.
There are exceptions. ‘Climate scientists raise spectre of mass extinction’, ‘On the brink of climate crisis’, ‘The final countdown’, ‘Undeniable truths about climate change’, ‘World Given 2017 Climate Deadline’, ‘'Door is closing' on chance to contain global warming’, ‘World's distress signal is ignored’, ‘A Deafening Warning on our Climate’.
These newspaper headings and subheadings summarise the warnings issued by scientists with respect to climate change in the last couple of years, and indeed what has been the main response to those warnings. The message has fallen on deaf ears and has been ignored.
From these headings one could surmise that the press, at least, has played its full part in raising the climate alarm. Not so. These words all come from just two newspapers, The Guardian and The Independent. Coverage in other newspapers has been sporadic at best, downright tendentious at worst. Abusive terms like and ‘eco-alarmist’ are thrown at those scientists and environmentalist who, well, try to sound the alarm on climate change. Those who have attempted to do something and act over climate change are met with the term ‘eco-zealot’.
Poets and artists like Goethe and William Blake had called industrialism right all along. The idea that a Faustian pact with the idols of industry could deliver peace, freedom and happiness was always a delusion and now the price of the bargain is being demanded. Yet, far too many people still don’t see through the delusions. Hilariously, Blake’s Jerusalem is routinely trotted out, as though somehow the early travails of industrialisation have been overcome and, through a little social democratic reformism, we have achieved the New Jerusalem. Well, that wasn’t then, and it certainly isn’t now. And, if you understand Blake, it will never be if we rely on industrial means, what Blake castigated as Urizen, the technological reason that narrows human horizons.
This doesn’t mean that newspapers as such are the home of climate change denial. The truth may be some elitist view that people are too stupid to understand ‘long words’ and ‘complex’ arguments. And such a prejudice is sufficient to rule out informed and intelligent comment concerning of climate change. Science is counter-intuitive and runs against common sense. Newspapers seek familiarity above all. They appeal to this common sense, regardless of evidence to the contrary.
It is easy to blame business for the extent of climate change denial. Business puts an inordinate amount of time and money into greenwashing, disinformation, and buying influence in politics and the media. The newspapers need the sponsors, and therefore take the dollar. Abandoning an ecologically and economically reckless and destructive capitalism is unthinkable, until the whole building finally burns down with us all inside it. We can accept that journalists are just doing their job in reproducing the conventional unwisdom. These are journalists who eke out an existence churning out lines so obvious that they write themselves. It’s amazing how far lies and misinformation can go when they feed an existing prejudice. People read what they want to read, and these journalists take what people already believe and give it them back. And the people are confirmed in their blessed ignorance.
But there are other kinds of "journalist", the ones who go much, much further than this, the ones who look at the snow and write that global warming is a myth. Peter Sissons makes a great deal of Caroline Lucas’ reaction to his ‘question’ that the weather doesn’t seem to be playing ball with the climate change scenario.
It had been pre-arranged that the leader of the Green Party, Caroline Lucas, would go into our Westminster Studio to be interviewed by me. She clearly expected, as do most environmental activists, what I call a 'free hit' - to be allowed to say her piece without challenge.
We can halt Sissons’ account here and point out that ‘environmental activists’ have been struggling for decades to even receive coverage on political shows, let alone expect a ‘free hit’. Greens have never been allowed to say their piece without challenge, when arguing about pesticides, acid rain, the ozone layer, the lot. Sissons’ cites the readership of The Guardian at the BBC as evidence of left-wing bias. I always find that those who shout most about bias tend to see the world through their own distorted political glasses. Writing in The Guardian on the 40th anniversary of the birth of The Green Party, John Vidal declares: ‘Pretty much everything that this advance guard was talking about has come true’. Sissons can call that bias all he likes, but it is an empirically verifiable claim. And here we come to the weak point of Sissons’ case against Caroline Lucas and ‘environmental activists’.
I began, good naturedly, by observing that the climate didn't seem to be playing ball at the moment, and that we were having a particularly cold winter while carbon emissions were powering ahead. Miss Lucas reacted as if I’d physically molested her. She was outraged; it was no job of the BBC - the BBC! - to ask questions like that. Didn't I realise that there could be no argument over the science?
Peter Sissons When One Door Closes 2011: 299
I have never seen the interview, so I cannot gauge Caroline Lucas’ reaction. But to draw conclusions about the climate by pointing to the weather in a particular time and place is about as asinine a piece of reasoning there is in this field. Don’t believe it? As a little boy I used to read The Modern Children’s Library of Knowledge published by Grolier. I still have it. Book Two is entitled The World We Live In. Chapters 20 to 23, from page 106 to page 124, are grouped under the heading ‘Weather and Climate’.
It’s a simple distinction that a child of six was expected to know. So let’s take this slowly. Climate – weather, climate – weather, climate is one thing, weather is another thing. Climatology is the science of the climate, meteorology is the science of the weather, climate – weather, climate – weather. It is easy to conflate the two if you are younger than five or six.
Sissons is no moron, mind. In lambasting Lucas in his autobiography, he cites evidence which purports to show that the planet is actually getting colder, not warmer.
I persisted with a few simple observations of fact, such as there appeared to have been no warming for ten years, in contradiction of all the alarmist computer models.
Peter Sissons When One Door Closes 2011: 299
He must have searched evidence for that claim out. This is very far from being a ‘few simple observations of fact’. What Sissons is citing here is the statistical trick used by deniers of climate change, taking the peak El Nino year of 1998 (when seas are warming) as the base, and comparing it with the La Nina year of 2007 (when seas are cooling), and arguing the slight dip in temperatures indicates global cooling. Actually, seven of the hottest ten temperatures in recorded history have come in the ten years after 1998. The trend remains upwards. Sissons’ claim that the world is getting colder is far from an observation of fact and reveals his own bias. To make that claim requires a deliberate search for the evidence to fit the pre-existing prejudice. And it requires a deliberate fixing of a base point. Take any other year, 1997, 1987, 1977, any year, and Sissons’ ‘simple observations of fact’ are turned into evidence of global heating. This isn’t science, it’s just playing with figures. Oh, and no scientist has ever argued that the temperature would increase monotonically in lockstep with CO2, the relationship is not so crude and direct as that. That’s just a piece of scientific illiteracy. Sissons should read up on the lock-in effect to start to get some understanding of the complexity of climate science, before he starts opining about ‘simple observations of fact’.
Note also Sissons’ gratuitous use of the word ‘alarmist’. It is used by all the climate change deniers. The claim that the facts contradict the heating trend betrays a complete scientific ignorance and further comment is not required. I have addressed it at length elsewhere. Suffice to say, Sissons offers no science here, merely a repetition of a claim made on the basis of cherry-picked data. It’s worth emphasising this point, since Sissons seems to think that he has proven some great scientific point with respect to the facts. The only ‘facts’ he has is the claim that from the high point of 1998, there has been a slight fall of temperatures, and that therefore this means cooling rather than heating. He mentions worrying Nick Clegg in an interview on this same issue, then claims that Andrew Neil ‘skilfully eviscerated the then environment secretary Hilary Benn on his show The Daily Politics.’ He may well have done. So what? Politics is the world of murk and bias, not of light and truth. If Sissons, Neil and other political journalists really want to prove a point here, they should engage with the science and the scientists. Arguments based upon cherry-picked data and a conflation of weather and climate wouldn’t stand a minute’s scrutiny. But that’s all that Sissons has.
But it was the scandal over the Climategate emails that was a real game changer, and more recently a number of other colleagues have started to tiptoe onto the territory that was for so long off-limits.
Sissons 2011: 300/1
Peter Sissons and other journalists are more than welcome to venture into the scientific terrain. But it’s research, evidence, observation, testing that counts here. Sissons thinks that the BBC coverage of climate change is biased. He believes that the ‘alarmist’ case itself is biased. Fine. We ask for evidence which contradicts the case for human made global heating. To date, we don’t have it. ‘Don’t hold your breath’, writes Sissons, with respect to an investigation into whether the BBC is biased on climate change. I won’t hold my breath waiting for climate change deniers to actually do some science of their own, let alone offer a contrary explanation to human made climate change that fits the facts and explains what we already know.
There are countless examples of this from the newspapers. Implying that climate change scientists have been caught out ‘fiddling their figures’, journalist Christopher Booker claims that the attempt to deal with climate change is landing us with ‘the biggest bill in the history of the world’. (Daily Mail November 23, 2009). That hysterical claim is easily countered by reference to current global arms expenditure standing at $1.738 trillion (2011 figures, The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute calculates). Stern calculates that 2% of GDP per annum is required to reduce the chances of temperature increases above 5°C from around 50% to about 3%. Whilst 2% of GDP per annum appears great, it should be evaluated in relation to the reduced risk it buys. A quick calculation shows that 2% of GDP changes the odds on the survival of life as we know it from a 50-50 flip of the coin to 32.3333 to 1. That is a substantial reduction of the risk of ecological devastation for the limited costs incurred.
It is hard to repeat Booker’s arguments without being accused of deliberately caricaturing them. So that Booker’s views are not misrepresented, then, he should be quoted in his own words.
‘We all know the basic thesis: that thanks to mankind burning fossil fuels, the world's temperatures are hurtling upwards, and that unless the most drastic action is taken, we can look forward to an unprecedented global catastrophe — droughts, hurricanes, killer heatwaves, melting icecaps, sea levels rising to the point where many of the world's major cities are submerged…. Yet the oddest thing which has become increasingly evident in the past year or two is the fact that almost none of these things is happening…’
The manifest absurdity of Booker’s words only need to be read to be apparent. The Guardian’s Tanya Gold treats journalists like Booker with the contempt they deserve when she writes, in a dismissive parenthetical comment, ‘Read the papers, fool. Greenland has melted.’ (This carrier bag conspiracy is a truly deadly distraction, Tanya Gold Guardian August 4 2012). The Arctic has suffered a record melt too. The very things that Booker claimed were not happening have not just happened, they have smashed the records.
Booker makes a claim which has become the stock-in-trade of the deniers, so it should be stated at length in Booker’s own words. He refers to ‘the fact that global temperatures have not been continuing to rise as the computer models insisted they should.’
Even some of the most committed scientific supporters of the global warming theory now admit the warming process has come to a halt — although they insist that in a decade or two it will re-emerge again stronger than ever.
The fact remains that the models on which the whole global warming panic was based have been proved dismally wrong, suggesting that the theory on which they were programmed may itself have been fundamentally flawed. (Christopher Booker)
Note the hyperbole, ‘proved dismally wrong’. Leaving aside the point that only mathematics deals with proof – the deniers deliberately ask for something that science cannot deliver - the addition of the adjectival ‘dismally’ is designed to colour the facts. It’s a writers trick but it is a highly disreputable practice in science.
What are the facts that Booker is pointing to? He is claiming that the ‘warming process has come to a halt’. Here, Booker’s ‘reasoning’ is just lame. Far from being ‘proved dismally wrong’, the case for global warming remains firm on the basis of the very figures that Booker is employing. I have already addressed the claim that temperatures have been falling in the past decade. Booker’s claim for global cooling is based on the exceptional El Nino year of 1998 (with a warmer surface temperature of oceans) being a little warmer than the La Nina year of 2007 (with a cooler surface temperature of oceans). Such claims confuse (whether deliberately or ignorantly, you can judge for yourself) cycles with trends, peaks with troughs and sea temperatures with land temperatures. Seven out of the ten highest temperatures recorded in history came in the years after 1998, with the result that the last decade was the hottest since records began. The trend is clearly upwards. Yet the likes of Booker employ the crudest of statistical tricks to argue that the world is getting cooler and layer on, trowel thick, misleading adjectival phrases to sway opinion on emotion rather than reason and evidence. This is not science that Booker is presenting but misinformation and manipulation. Such claims amount to a crack-brained attempt to gainsay the science. They fool no-one who understands the scientific case, only those willing to be fooled. The claims cannot withstand close inspection. Early on in their studies, first year undergraduates used to be pointed in the direction of the book How to Lie with Statistics. It was part of basic training in methods of social investigation, getting students to be careful with the way they access, assimilate, evaluate and employ evidence, facts, data. The use of exceptional base positions to give a misleading impression of trends is the most obvious trick in the book. It’s what the kids cut their teeth on.
Booker concludes that ‘It is beginning to look as though the panic over global warming, which has our politicians so in its grip, may have been no more than a colossal scare story.’ Is it? That’s not what the US National Academy, NASA, the Royal Society in the UK and countless other august scientific bodies are saying, quite the contrary. The scientists working for a body like the IEA would make short work of such a claim. Booker writes as though such scare stories could ever have a long shelf life in science. James Lovelock writes well with respect to scientific illiterates like Booker (if you think that’s a strong ad hominem attack, read what Booker says about Darwin for proof of his scientific illiteracy. I have myself criticised the moral implications of Darwinism, as does Booker, but I would never accuse Darwin, as Booker does, of making leaps of faith or being anything but careful and cautious with respect to his evidence.):
Do not make the mistake of those disgruntled humanists who will reject Gaia because it is part of a science they do not understand. There is nothing solid in their claim that science is malign or bogus. Science is wonderfully self-cleansing and bad theories have a short life.
Lovelock Gaia 2000 Pref
Bear this in mind when Booker opines that ‘the IPCC was never intended to be an impartial body, weighing the evidence for and against man-made global warming and coming up with objective conclusions. It was set up by a small group of scientists already so firmly committed to the belief in 'human-induced climate change' that they were not prepared to examine any evidence which contradicted it.’
They did. Time and time again contrary evidence was examined and found wanting. From sun activity to volcanic eruptions, the alternative explanations for global warming have been found wanting. I shall come shortly to former climate change sceptic Professor Muller, who examined all these explanations and has now produced research which explains that ‘almost all’ of the temperature increases in the last 250 years to be the result of carbon emissions caused by human activity. Muller now calls himself a ‘converted sceptic’. Booker writes of the evidence which contradicts man made global warming. He should put up or shut up. Where is this evidence that has been ignored? He doesn’t have it. It doesn’t exist. What there are are plenty of failed and falsified explanations. They are no less false now than they were when they were tested and thrown out. And Booker accuses the climate scientists of some blind belief!
As a journalist, the job of Booker and others of his ilk may well be to confirm the biases and values of their readers. But, even so, there is no excuse for laziness, the lack of research in the argument, the cherry picking and distortion of the evidence and deliberately misleading of the public (particularly when the arguments are so easily disposed of).
People may have a right to their own opinion, but not to their own facts. If Booker or any of the other deniers want to put forward a competing theory to man made global heating, then they need to do the research, the experiments, the testing, write the papers, and have them published like anyone else.
But climate change denial is so systematic that it must be more than journalists pandering to the prejudices of the readers. The completely unfounded and unsubstantiated claims that these journalists direct against the case for man made global heating represent a deliberate and systematic abuse of scientific principles as such. These characters must have a powerful reason to go to such lengths.
The claims made by these journalists make no sense with respect to climate science. They only make sense when set in the context of fossil fuel industries and oil companies and the PR companies and lobbies that represent them. Follow the money, not the science, and then it all makes sense. It is a universally acknowledged truth, backed by the empirical evidence of countless examples, that when a journalist who knows nothing about science writes about science, the result is complete rubbish.
You don’t have to look to hard to find, behind all the denigration of the science, what is really at stake here, not scientific truth but a dogged defence of the economic status quo. Booker has no science to back his claims, he has no ‘hard evidence’. Anyone who relies on a cheap statistical trick like calculating from an extreme base line is not a serious figure. His main concern is that the proposed cuts in carbon emissions ‘would plunge our world back into the Dark Ages.’
Booker argues his case at length in The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is The Obsession With 'Climate Change' Turning Out To Be The Most Costly Scientific Blunder In History? The book is thin on science – real science, that is, and not a biased focus for analysis combined with cherry-picked data - but useful in revealing the reactionary political purpose at the heart of the deniers’ thesis.
Booker states that pretty well ‘every aspect of our lives in today's industrialised society involves emitting carbon dioxide — and short of some technological revolution as yet undreamed of, the only way we could meet that target would be to close almost every part of our economy.’
Booker quotes a scientist here, Professor Lindzen: 'Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st-century's developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally average temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections contemplated a roll-back of the industrial age."
Lindzen might be a scientist, but that statement is politics, not science. The impact of a scientific hypothesis upon the human social order is of no relevance whatsoever to the truth or otherwise of the science. Plenty mental and emotional capital had been invested in the belief that God had created the Earth for man and had placed it at the centre of the universe. The idea was the basis of Christian civilisation of the Middle Ages. Do we deny the truth of Galileo’s revelation that the Earth goes round the Sun and continue to believe the obverse? For reasons of social and religious convenience?
So we can remove the economic impact from the statement as an irrelevance. We come to the scientific content. As science, Lindzen’s views are illiterate. Professor he may be, but he makes a couple of crass errors.
First, note the attempt to diminish the significance of the temperature increase of 0.7C. The number may appear small, but the impact in terms of the way it affects carbon sinks and sources, rain patterns and ocean currents, is substantial. The adverse weather the world has been experiencing is as a result of this ‘few tenths of a degree’. The governments of the world are attempting to restrain future temperature increase to 2C but are failing woefully. The point is, if 0.7C temperature increase can cause so much mayhem, imagine how much worse the impact of 2C increase or more will be.
Second, Lindzen repeats the faithful old canard about computer modelling, as though computer projections are not based on empirical evidence, as though climate scientists are not using all other methods in analysing the climate system, as though climate scientists are not gathering data on the ground.
Third, returning to the economic aspect of the question, the green industrial revolution calls for the release of the new productive forces from the exploitative grip of capitalist relations. It is only the polluting carboniferous industry that is to be rolled back. Of course, those with vested interests in the burning of fossil fuels do not like this, and so portray environmentalism as a backward looking movement seeking a return to nature. A return to what nature? Greens are looking forwards to the realisation of nature through planetary and human flourishing in one and the same process, and that entails a green industrial revolution.
We need to decouple ‘the economy’ from the capital system so that environmentalism cannot be so easily dismissed by defenders of capital as an economic vandalism. The point to be made is that economic necessity in a capitalist mode of production does not invalidate ecological necessity and certainly does not trump it – at least not if you want the survival of civilised life.
And here, at least, Booker is correct. Capitalist economics and the planet’s ecology are on a collision course and either one or the other must go. The real Inconvenient Truth is that there is no way of growing our way out of the climate crisis, a point which many environmentalists can tend to shy away from.
There are only so many Christopher Booker type articles that it is possible to wade through before one loses the will to live. It is important to realise that such articles are designed to feed people their own prejudices back, reassure the mug punters that all is well in the world and that they can carry on being as stupid and as selfish as before. People read newspapers to have their beliefs confirmed, not challenged and contradicted.
‘I might not know the truth about climate change, but I recognise trickery and slippery excuses when I see them’ states Daily Mail journalist Stephen Glover (Daily Mail, Thursday, November 26,2009).
‘If climate change really is the biggest threat facing humanity, let's have a more measured and reasoned argument in which the sceptics are not shouted down or ignored. If our way of life is to be changed, and our countryside transformed, and the Third World possibly deprived of the opportunities of economic growth, we deserve a bit more than bogus pictures of polar bears perched on lumps of ice, and Bianca Jagger informing us that the Cumbrian floods are the result of climate change.’
Well, I can agree with every point but one there. But who would disagree? Sceptics are not shouted down and ignored. Deniers are, and deserve to be, since they do not engage in the arguments, do not offer original research that respects scientific principles, are not open to persuasion by fact and evidence, and are thus beyond reason. And the case for human made global heating amounts to much more than pictures of polar bears and Bianca Jagger. Climate scientists have offered much more than this for a long time now. Whether journalists like Stephen Glover deserve this is another matter. He seems not to have seen the evidence from impeccable scientific sources.
Nevertheless, I support the conditional language that Glover uses. Even if the main claim of the climate scientists is correct, that carbon emissions are the main cause of the increase of global temperatures to dangerous levels, then it is still a matter of politics how we organise our interchange with nature. It doesn’t necessarily follow, for instance, that we have to erect power stations in beauty spots all over the land and all around the coasts. There is always a debate to be had over energy economics and infrastructures and how these support a way of life we choose to lead. Science does not settle that issue, it is a question of politics, ethics and culture. And it is always possible that, one day, a scientist will discover that carbon emissions are not responsible for temperature rises or that, indeed, global temperatures are on a downward rather than an upward trend. It’s unlikely. That’s not what the research and evidence shows at the moment, quite the contrary. But possible. Hence the need for caution, political debate and the negotiation of common agreement. Science does not dictate politics nor determine ethics.
Glover is cautious enough not to dismiss the climate science as made up. That remarkable claim undermines the case of all those who make it. Glover is wrong in his main claim, however, since he cannot recognise trickery at all. It needs to be stated clearly and loudly, given the drip-drip campaign of misinformation concerning so-called Climategate, that no evidence of any trickery whatsoever was found in relation to the findings of the scientists at the University of East Anglia, no fiddled figures, no bogus research, nothing. Nothing in the emails alters anything with respect to the key scientific conclusions. Independent scientific bodies with impeccable scientific credentials have all come to the same conclusions. To continue to allege fraud and trickery is nothing less than an assault on science.
The conclusions of the East Anglia were not only found to be sound, they were actually firmed up by subsequent investigations. Any such trickery discovered derives from the way that scientists are having to deal with politically motivated attempts to access their research and waste their time.
Glover’s points seem to be on the whole reasonable. ‘The misbehaviour of one influential group in seeking to manipulate the facts obviously does not mean that all climate change believers are wrong. But in future people would be wise no longer to take on trust their most outlandish and hair-raising claims.’ But who would disagree with this? It is never wise to take ‘outlandish’ and ‘hair raising’ claims on trust.
The main thrust of Glover’s article, however, is disingenuous. He attacks the BBC.
‘The Corporation long ago stopped questioning the climate change consensus. Visit its website and you will find little, if anything, critical of the University of East Anglia. But you can watch a video clip of Bianca Jagger, borrowed from its programme The Daily Politics, informing us that climate change is the biggest threat we face, with scenes of the Cumbrian floods in the background. She suggests they were caused by man-made climate change. Bianca Jagger cannot possibly know whether or not they were, and nor does the BBC. Her views about the causes of climate change are completely worthless, and yet the BBC cheerfully broadcasts them.’
‘Completely worthless’? That dismissal begs the question as to just whose views on the causes of climate change are worthwhile. If, as Glover argues, Bianca Jagger’s views on the causes of climate change are ‘completely worthless’, then so too are those of journalists like Stephen Glover and those of everyone else who is not an expert. How many people are experts? In another part of the article Glover asserts that ‘almost none of us will ever understand climate change. Without specialised scientific knowledge, most of us can only make an educated guess as to whether it is caused by man.’ Put the two points together, and it seems that there can be no coverage of climate change in media and politics – at precisely the time it needs to be debated most and when common agreement is most required for sustainable change. Any action in politics that has a democratic deficit at its heart is doomed to failure in the long run.
Glover’s view implies that only climate scientists can have worthwhile views on climate change. So what, then, becomes of politics and ethics? Not that the likes of Glover respects the climate scientists who do have specialised scientific knowledge – his article concerns giving voice to ‘sceptics’ against those climate scientists pointing to man made climate change. How can non-experts, whose views are ‘completely worthless’, decide who is right and who is wrong on the issue? Either we have a scientific dictatorship in which the climate scientists rule or we have a genuine politics in which the relation between knowledge and opinion is settled prudentially. I support the latter position. How scientific knowledge is understood and applied is a matter for us as social, political and rational animals.
Here, I follow Aristotle to argue that our scientific understanding of the natural world should be integrated with the moral understanding of the human world. My philosophy is grounded in Aristotle's concept of eudaimonia, which is generally translated as “happiness” but which is better understood in terms of "flourishing," "fulfilment," or "well-being" through the progressive unfolding and actualisation of essential potentialities. In the Politics and in particular in the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle developed a conception of morality as a skill and a form of 'practical knowledge’. The good life for human beings is a matter of both "knowing that" and "knowing how". (Casebeer, W. D. (2003). Natural ethical facts: Evolution, connectionism, and moral cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Flanagan, O. J. (2007). The really hard problem: Meaning in a material world. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.)
There is such a thing as scientific truth and there is such a thing as moral truth, with human beings having to prudentially live that scientific and moral knowledge in order to live the good life. This is more than a pragmatism in which whatever works with broad agreement is true. There is such a thing as scientific truth and moral truth – ‘knowing that’. If climate scientists are telling us that carbon emissions are driving global heating, then we need to act on that truth, not re-negotiate it in such a way as we can carry on with our polluting existence. What climate science has to say about global heating, its causes and effects, is a clear example of "knowing that," and it involves a truth claim about which individuals may be right or wrong. Neither numbers nor negotiations nor agreements decide the truth here, only evidence. But there is such a thing as ‘knowing how’. This is the province of practical knowledge. And this is decided not by our understanding of the natural world but by how we live that knowledge in such a way as to ensure human flourishing and well-being. In this domain, no-one’s views are ‘completely worthless’. We act on scientific knowledge rather than defer to scientific authority. Politics is a world of deliberation and decision making, a dialogic world which involves the participation of all in a public realm. To defer to the authority of science proposes a didactic model which does nothing to advance practical knowledge and prudential judgement. Eco-praxis is a case of ‘knowing-how’. That’s ethos as a way of life.
The truth is that we need to move beyond words to deeds. The issue can never be resolved by the science alone, since scientific evidence can never be conclusive. The ‘debates’ go round and round in circles and eventually run to nothing more than substantial than a tedious cycle of claim and counter-claim.
Acer Negundo Trees
I come now to John Inqham in the Daily Express (2/12/2009) and an article entitled “The Big Climate Change ‘Fraud.’” The opening sentence is not encouraging: ‘Many experts claim man-made global warming is melting sea ice but Prof Plimer says climate has always changed’. Of course the climate has always changed, it always will; but that statement of the obvious doesn’t invalidate the claims made with respect to man-made global warming.
Inqham claims that the scientific consensus that mankind has caused climate change was ‘rocked’ when Ian Plimer called it a "load of hot air underpinned by fraud". Rocked? Hardly. Plimer’s claims, particularly with regard to volcanic eruptions, have been looked at and found wanting time and again. Plimer’s repetition of his tired old clichés rocks nothing and no-one, least of all the world of climate science. Plimer refers to the climate change lobby as "climate comrades" keeping the "gravy train" going. Comrades? Yes, that old sneer, ‘they are all communists and marxists.’ Such lame, tired, cliché ridden abuse reveals how barren such climate change deniers really are.
Inqham gives the game away with the next line: ‘In a controversial talk just days before the start of a climate summit attended by world leaders in Copenhagen, Prof Plimer said Governments were treating the public like "fools" and using climate change to increase taxes.’ And we all know that people don’t like paying taxes, don’t we. The manipulation and management of the global public is as crude and as barefaced as that. Many people fall for it. Cheap populism that allows the rich and powerful to carry on polluting. Just before the start of every climate summit, the same figures are wheeled out to make the same claims in the same newspapers. Their message is designed for populist appeal, the Greens are really Reds and are out to raise your taxes, it’s all pseudo-science for political reasons and so on. People complain about the lack of democracy in the world, yet allow themselves to be led by the nose like this. How many more times are the individuals composing the demos going to allow the polluters to get away with this tactic? If you want democracy, then live up to your demand and claim it.
Plimer claims that carbon dioxide has had no impact on temperature and that recent warming is merely part of the natural cycle of climate stretching over billions of years. Plimer told a London audience: "Climates always change. They always have and they always will. They are driven by a number of factors that are random and cyclical." The explanatory content of that statement is precisely zero, ‘climate is as climate does’.
Plimer is exploiting the old canard of playing natural cycles against human made impacts. The question is not an either/or at all. Of course there are many factors which affect climate, including the lead in petrol. There is no denial of the importance of natural cycles amongst climate scientists. The point is that the heating in recent years is mostly due to rising greenhouse gases, and if we continue to pump out more CO2 the world is going to get a whole lot hotter.
The fact that there are natural causes for climate change is not denied and is not the issue. Plimer reaches far back into the distant past, completely missing the point at issue – what lies behind the extraordinary warming currently being experienced by the earth. The fact is that no natural cause is able to explain this warning. Unless Plimer can propose a natural explanation for the current warming that can withstand rigorous scientific testing – and his assertions concerning geology and volcanic eruptions have been found wanting – then general assertions of the existence of historical natural climate change are thoroughly inadequate and unpersuasive.
In his characterology of personality types constituting social life, the social theorist Henri Lefebvre refers to ‘the pompous idiot’. Reading Lefebvre’s comments here, the extent to which certain journalists and certain newspapers pander to existing common sense prejudices becomes plain:
This one is well anchored in the everyday; he collects its most commonplace contents and inflates them crudely. He uses triviality to discover wisdom, a philosophy, a vision of the world. For example, he extracts proverbial sayings from their ironic context, their mutual oppositions and corrections, and turns them into eternal truths. There will always be rich people and there will always be poor people. Those people don't suffer as we do. Money can't buy you happiness. There will always be wars. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. We aren't choirboys. I'd rather be a happy pig than an unhappy Socrates. There's a nip in the air, etc. . .
The pompous idiots are so stupid that they seem harmless. Because of their retarded and blinkered individualism, they are easy prey for demagogues. Through the inertia and mechanical nature of their stupidity, they go farther than others more treacherous or more intelligent than themselves in disintegrating the social and the human.
Lefebvre Critique of Everyday Life vol 2 Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday Henri Lefebvre 2008 ch 3
Or, unpersuasive in a scientific sense. The appeal of dividing natural causes of climate change and human induced causes is psychological and political. The approach exploits the fact that people are uncomfortable with the counter-intuitive character of science. Natural cycles are much easier to understand than arguments concerning carbon emissions. The trick is to appeal to the natural causes in order to increase popular denial of the human made causes.
Of course, the reasoning is based on a rather obvious logical flaw.
We can expose this by way of analogy:
Your house burns down. Fire inspectors investigate and discover that you have left a cooker on all night and this has caused the fire. You object that in the past, all the houses that have burned down in the neighbourhood have done so as a result of being struck by lightning. Or so it has been claimed. The record shows house fires in the area to be the result of natural causes, not human activity.
The reasoning is illogical and irresponsible. Anyone who would argue this to a fire inspector would rightly be considered stupid. Yet this is precisely the reasoning employed by those who think that the fact that there are natural causes of climate change precludes the fact there are human causes. The two are not mutually exclusive. When it comes to the climate system, phenomena can have more than one cause. To argue that “A causes B” is not to argue that “A is the only cause of B”.
We can take the house analogy further. Since, in the past, house fires have been the result of lightning strikes, there is no need for undue alarm at the overheating cooker in the kitchen. Houses only burn down as a result of natural causes, over which we have no control. So we can safely leave the cooker on all night, even all week, and reject all attempts to modify our behaviour as undue interference. Natural causes cannot be controlled. Mother nature is much more powerful than human beings. Climate change deniers are guilty of making all of these lazy assertions. They have a tendency to argue, or suggest, that climate scientists argue that global warming is entirely caused by human CO2 emissions and thereby deny natural causes. Roger Helmer tried to slip this claim past George Galloway on his Talk Sport radio show in 2009, and even Galloway, with zero understanding of climate science, spotted the straw man being erected immediately. No scientist is arguing this, Galloway correctly argued, which had the normally word perfect Helmer quickly retreating, hoping no-one spotted his attempt to deceive.
Plimer claims that ‘climates always change’. Yes, and rain always rains and politicians always lie. Plimer’s statement is scientifically vacuous. It isn’t science, of course. It’s politics. Plimer is appealing to the ‘retarded and blinkered individualism’ of a certain public, that section which is ‘easy prey for demagogues’. It’s all a ruse to raise taxes. People don’t like paying taxes, so the claim that the science is bogus goes down well. And the ecologically destructive economic system carries on.
Given that the science behind climate change denial is so threadbare, we need to move onto political ground and contest this issue in the open. Who are these people, what lies behind them, who backs them, what are their connections, who funds them and why.
Inqham gets the obligatory reference to ‘Climategate’ in here. Plimer’s comments ‘came days after a scandal in climate-change research emerged through the leak of emails from the world-leading research unit it the University of East Anglia. They appeared to show that scientists had been massaging data to prove that global warming was taking place and lobbying against academics who disputed this.’
The statements made in the press were always phrased the same way, ‘appeared’ to show fraud. The journalists and the papers lacked the guts to back their prejudices with the outright claim that fraud had occurred. They know fine well that they could not support that claim in a court of law. So, day after day, they gave the impression that fraud had been committed. It’s entirely for public consumption.
Of Climategate, Plimer comments: "If you have to argue your science by using fraud, your science is not valid." This is very true. It is for Plimer to show where the scientists at UEA have committed fraud. He doesn’t. There was no fraud. Indeed, subsequent investigations by independent bodies not only showed no fraud but actually reinforced the conclusions of the East Anglia scientists concerning man made global warming with further research. That conclusion to the whole affair received nothing like the same coverage in the newspapers that had been most vocal in alleging fraud. If that kind of misinformation is what certain people want to read because it fits their prejudices, they cannot complain about lack of democracy. Democracy will be achieved when the individuals composing the demos lead themselves by their own nous and not let others lead them by the nose.
Plimer’s own claims concerning emissions as a result of volcanic eruptions have been examined at length and have been shown to be inadequate. The idea that contrary evidence is abused or ignored is not true. My theory of invisible pixies leaving no trace in my magic garden is repeatedly ignored by scientists, but that’s probably for a very good reason. But Plimer’s theories have been examined. They just cannot explain what needs to be explained and so must be rejected. That’s just sound science, the most self-cleansing discipline we have. Science is not political debate in which all sides, regardless of how stupid and idiotic they are, get an airing. That’s politics. Bad theories get eliminated in science. In politics, they get elected to government.
The Express article refers to Plimer as a Professor at Adelaide and Melbourne Universities, as indeed he is. He is not a climatologist, though. His specialist area is mining geology. He is not an expert on climate at all. If one follows Stephen Glover’s reasoning, that should make Plimer’s views as ‘completely worthless’ as Bianca Jagger’s view. Plimer is allowed to castigate the people in what he calls the ‘climate-change lobby’ as ‘climate comrades’ – yes the Greens are really communists, keep away - arguing that many scientists have a vested interest in promoting climate change because it helps keep the "gravy train" going. The article doesn’t mention Plimer’s own vested interests with respect to Australia’s mining industry. These characters play many members of the public for fools. It is up to the public to prove otherwise and send the deniers packing.
I shall pass quickly by Neil Hamilton’s reference to the climate change ‘gravy train’, since the irony should be obvious to one and all. ‘Many academics on the eco-gravy train try to ignore or suppress data tending to undermine their pet theories,’ opines Hamilton (Hamilton The great global warming con). ‘Many’ academics? This claim only has substance if Hamilton can name names and the rest of us can check the truth or otherwise of the statement. Indeed, Hamilton should not only name names here, he should give us the killer science that has been suppressed or ignored and which falsifies the ‘pet theories’ of these academics. Of course, he doesn’t do any of this. He cannot do it. No doubt he could copy and paste claims made on some denialist website, as so often happens when deniers are challenged to put up the evidence. But when it comes to real science, the characters with the loudest voices fall strangely silent. They have nothing, which is why their accusations tend to be rather general. ‘Many academics’? Who? Hamilton cannot name one. His claim is vacuous. ‘Pet theories’? Which? Falsify them. Hamilton’s conclusion is hilarious.
‘The truth about CO2 is that it is not a pollutant. It's the lifeblood of the planet. It stimulates plant growth and the water given off in transpiration neutralises the greenhouse effect of the gas. Why don't we hear more of this? There is no money to be made from a non-crisis.’
The most interesting thing about this statement is that Hamilton seems to think that the statement of what is very well-known by scientists at the lowest entry level is a point of great insight. This statement is a revelation only to someone completely ignorant of science. Everyone who knows anything about ecology knows that carbon is the building block of life. It is mentioned in books on ecology, in the same manner that a mathematician may begin with the simple sum that 1 + 1 = 2. It is mentioned very clearly in books on ecology. Here is a passage from Tim Flannery’s Here on Earth, a book which demands that human beings live according to a holistic, Gaian perspective.
Carbon is the indispensible building block of life. You and I are made up of 18 per cent carbon by dry weight, and plants have a much higher percentage. Almost all of that carbon was once floating in the atmosphere, joined in a menage a trois with oxygen to form CO2. Billions of years ago, when life was a weak infant struggling to survive, there was more CO2 in the atmosphere than there is today, for living things had not yet discovered a means to use it. Back then, perhaps, life nestled as microscopic bacteria in the bosom of the deep sea, or hid in sediments around hot springs. Wherever it found a refuge, its energy budget must have been small, as most of Earth was still untouched by its power. Today, however, CO2 forms just four parts per ten thousand of the gaseous composition of Earth's atmosphere, while a by-product of photosynthesis, oxygen, forms 21 per cent. This is the ultimate measure of life's triumph..
Flannery 2010 ch 4
I could produce such quotes from books by ecologists till kingdom come. But, of course, the controversy is not about carbon as such, but about the increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere since the industrial revolution, trapping more heat in the atmosphere and slowly warming the earth. That’s why we don’t hear much of carbon as the building block of life – this fact is very well known and is uncontroversial.
The controversy lies elsewhere. In the 300 years since the industrial revolution, anthropogenic carbon emissions have increased atmospheric concentrations of CO2 by about 35 percent. And that does spell crisis. Where once carbon sources and sinks were in balance, now there is a growing carbon imbalance. Much of those carbon emissions is absorbed and re-emitted by the natural carbon cycle, from carbon sinks within vegetation, soils, the seas and by other natural processes. So long as this happens, carbon does not affect the global climate. However, the critical issue now is that these natural processes are becoming severely overloaded, with the result that overall carbon concentrations of the atmosphere are rising relentlessly, threatening to turn carbon sinks into carbon sources. Our carbon emissions are inducing significant changes in greenhouse gas concentrations, substantially greater than those associated with the onset and termination of the last ice age. (Sweet, W. (2006) Kicking the Carbon Habit: Global Warming and the Case for Renewable and Nuclear Energy, Columbia University Press.)
Hamilton should not be allowed to get away with the sneer that ecologists are on the gravy train, whipping up a crisis for their own pecuniary ends. This is a claim repeated at every opportunity, and is designed to get members of the demos joining in the chorus. The people who make this claim either don’t know where the big money is in science, or think that the rest of us don’t know. The idea that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the entire global geoscientific community ignores the fact that research funding available is simply insufficient to make so many scientists rich. Scientists have much better and easier ways of making money than climate science. The real gravy train is the $1.7 trillion the world currently spends on arms. If climate scientists wanted to make money, they would go into biotechnology, GM food, or the fossil fuel industry. Ian Plimer, the geologist who denounces climate science as a "load of hot air underpinned by fraud", is connected to the mining industry.
And ecologists need take no lessons on the positive aspects of carbon. They give the lessons. Take this from the ecologists H Girardet and M Mendonca in their book A Renewable World:
The main argument of this chapter is that carbon dioxide should be regarded not simply as a 'bad' that has to be stored in underground caverns out of harm's way, but that it can be turned into a good that can be used to enhance the wellbeing of the biosphere and humanity.
Girardet and Mendonca 2009 ch 2
Hamilton presents a trite observation on carbon as a great scientific insight and accuses ecologists of silence on the truth about carbon. He plainly needs to catch up on his basic reading. Ecologists well know that carbon as such is not the enemy but is the building block of life, that carbon can be used for the human and planetary good. And any ecologist worth his or her salt can tell you that pollution is an anthropomorphic concept. In nature, there is no pollution, as waste gets recycled. ‘The truth about CO2 is that it is not a pollutant.’ We don’t hear anything more of this because it isn’t a controversial point. There is nothing of any substance in Hamilton’s article. It is designed to feed existing prejudices and, no doubt, sap the will of those he abuses. Frankly, if Neil Hamilton talking about the environmental gravy train is the best the deniers can do, then there’s nothing for the ecologists to beat. The only science in Hamilton’s article is a claim about carbon that children at junior school should know.
So let us look at Leo McKinstry’s Daily Express article ‘Now there are lies, damned lies and global warming’ (Daily Express Dec 2009). Or, ‘there are lies, damned lies and the Daily Express’. Oh, there are plenty of lies being told with respect to global warming that will certainly damn us all. As nauseating as it is to wade through the same claims over and again, it is worth keeping an inventory on these articles by climate change deniers in the press. Their function is to reinforce existing prejudices and stupidities and keep the ship of fools afloat for a little while longer. The specific claims are quickly forgotten, their job being done in building a mentality inoculated against scientific reasoning. But reading back serves to expose the nonsense that is written and to reveal the political purpose of this kind of journalism. ‘The louder the zealots shriek about our imminent doom, the more dubious their claims look. Far from being an indisputable scientific fact, climate change increasingly looks like a conspiracy organised by the political elite.’ As soon as one hears allegations of a conspiracy, it’s time to become sceptical. We currently have a global political and business elite that you wouldn’t send out for a loaf. The idea that they could involve tens of thousands of scientists in the invention of the science of global heating wouldn’t even work in Hollywood.
This article was written in 2009. We can now compare its claims to what we now know in 2012. ‘In the drive to impose the green agenda on a sceptical public, science has been disgracefully politicised, with critics silenced and crude propaganda dressed up as research.’
If climate science is propaganda dressed up as research, it should be an easy task for scientists to expose it. Stalin politicised science in the Soviet Union, and the errors were easily exposed. We hear plenty from these critics who claim to have been silenced, every time a major climate conference is due. And when they are given the opportunity to step up to the plate and give us the missing science, they offer nothing that hasn’t been heard before. The idea that environmental groups are holding the world’s governments to ransom, overriding the interests of the oil and fossil fuel lobbies, is just risible.
Leo McKinstry claims that ‘the full depths of this dishonesty were exposed last week by the leak of damning e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Change Unit, a world-renowned body that has been at the forefront of the campaign for tougher environmental action.’ Actually, the investigation of any alleged dishonesty went through the appropriate channels, with the UEA’s scientific case emerging stronger than even they had stated it.
McKinstry’s scientific research amounts to no more than repeating the claims that the likes of Christopher Booker is peddling in the newspapers: ‘there is no less ice at the poles than there was 30 years ago.’ Depends what, where, when and how you measure. No citations are ever given for these claims. We know there is a slight thickening of ice in the Antarctic, and scientists are beginning to understand why – yes, you’ve guessed it, the way that global heating has changed wind and sea patterns.
Like the other ‘sceptical’ journalists, McKinstry’s bluster is short on the science but full of political wind. He claims that politicians ‘adore the green agenda because it gives them the chance to bully people and strut around on the international stage, puffing themselves up with bogus moral concern. In the name of climate change they can impose endless new taxes and new regulations.’ As if politicians are ever short of such opportunities. Has he not heard of the wars that these same politicians are waging through all manner of lies and dodgy dossiers? As if, having spent decades seeing off the socialist threat to the capital system they are going to invent a climate science that says that the capitalist economy is wrecking the planet. The state and capital are in symbiotic relation, the state is not going to invent a scientific theory that pulls the ground from under capital.
It’s all so simple for McKinstry, as it always is for the ideologues who live in a world of black and white, us and them, good and bad. ‘Left-wing ideologues have eagerly seized on climate change because, with traditional economic socialism so discredited since the fall of the Berlin Wall, they have been desperate to find another stick with which to beat the capitalist West.’ Actually, ‘left wing ideologues’ have spent an awful long time condemning the Green agenda as a middle class politics that ignores the real cause of the ecological crisis – capital accumulation and class exploitation. But McKinstry should be put on the spot with regard to his last claim: ‘Their rhetoric is as bogus as the science they use.’ That’s a strong statement. There is a difference between those who deny scientific reason as such and those who distinguish between good and bad science. The rejection of ‘bogus science’ implies that there is such a thing as genuine science. McKinstry claims that the science of global warming is worse than ‘lies and damned lies’. He should have a pretty easy task of exposing climate science as a bogus science, then. Instead, he repeats claims that the likes of Booker and Plimer have made in the Mail and the Express. ‘As distinguished scientist Professor Ian Plimer said in London this week, so much of the talk about climate change is actually "a load of hot air underpinned by fraud". That’s not actually a scientific statement and falsifies nothing in climate science. Quoting someone who agrees with your view doesn’t make that view right. But an allegation of fraud is serious. Where is this fraud? Name names. Of course, claims like this work by insinuation.
And Plimer is a geologist, not a climate scientist, a geologist who works in the lucrative Australian mining industry. Plimer’s own claims with respect to volcanic emissions have long since been rejected for reasons of sound science. The claim has recently been checked again, just to make sure. Professor Richard Muller now describes himself as a ‘converted sceptic’ having found that ‘essentially all’ of the temperature increase in the last 50 is the result of the human emission of greenhouse gases. Muller checked the claims made for the impact of volcanic eruptions and found them ‘negligible’. The same goes for solar activity, another favourite explanation of the deniers. That’s not ignoring contrary explanations to carbon emissions, just good sound science. And that’s the difference between sceptics and deniers. A genuine sceptic is persuaded by research, facts and evidence, deniers just continue to deny. Fraud is ‘alleged’ but never shown.
And, frankly, quoting the words of deniers is the sum total of Leo McKinstry’s rebuttal of the ‘bogus science’ of climate change. There is no science at all behind any of this. He has falsified none of the science behind global warming and offered no alternative scientific explanation of his own. This is not science at all. It is pure politics in defence of an ecologically and economically destructive capitalism, labelling all critics as communists out to raise taxes and impose regulations. What these people want is a global anarchy of the rich and the powerful.
The claims of McKinstry, Booker, Plimer et al were made as recently as 2009. Just three years on it is easy to see them as the politically motivated, scientifically illiterate rants they are. For the record, the police investigation into the hacking of the emails of the University of East Anglia scientists concluded that it was a ‘sophisticated and organised’ operation. It is worth noting how many newspapers and journalists made constant reference to ‘Climategate’ in terms of scientists being caught ‘apparently’ fiddling the figures. Not one of these journalists showed any concern with the real scandal here, namely, the ‘sophisticated and organised’ hacking of scientists’ emails. The journalists are quick to assert that climate science is a politically motivated pseudo-science. Are we to believe that those behind this ‘sophisticated and organised’ hacking were motivated by a desire for scientific truth? The use that was made of the selectively quoted comments from the emails was interesting, a drip drip of climate change denial. Who benefits? Which newspapers carried the selectively released lines from the emails?
Leaving aside the scientific evidence, the political rationale of climate change deniers is risible. We have had a generation and more of a ‘populist’ politics in which electoral success has been based on promises of low taxes and the removal of the ‘dead hand’ of the state. Can the deniers who assert that climate change is just a ruse by governments to raise taxes and extend government control explain what possible electoral advantage already unpopular politicians and parties can have in espousing such vote losing policies? If crashing economies and an unravelling social fabric has not been reason enough for governments to increase taxes and regulation, then the idea that a ‘made-up’ science that few amongst the public understand would suffice is simply incredulous. Politically, the deniers’ charge is so laughable it only needs to be stated for its manifest stupidity to become apparent.
As for the science, the simple fact is that there is overwhelming evidence in support of human-made climate change. Evidence to the contrary is thin on the ground. Pundits glibly point to the snow in winter or highlight the Met Office’s failure to predict the weather, and cast doubt over the climate science and the competence of the climate scientists. Richard Littlejohn puts the word ‘experts’ in inverted commas, to suggest that they are making it up. So the challenge is simply this, what explanation based on fact and evidence can the journalists offer on the rise in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere? The world’s most eminent scientists argue that the explanation for the disturbing trends in our climate system lies in our burning of fossil fuels. And they back that explanation with scientific research, fact and evidence, tested and peer reviewed. Few people understand climate science, so, ultimately, this is a judgement call. People must decide for themselves who is likely to be right here — laymen journalists with no scientific background or the world's most eminent scientists? But in exercising judgement it is wise to ask for scientific fact, evidence and explanation. This is public, transparent, testable. The climate scientists have a wealth of scientific research behind them. Before forming any judgements, the public should examine what the climate change deniers have.
It is telling that what little science these journalists and newspapers peddle is second hand and shop worn, at best involving claims that have long since been tested and found wanting. In the main, the discussion focuses on motivations, interests, politics, things that people easily understand. The approach allows the complex issues of science to be fitted to pre-existing political patterns, with all parties reinforcing their own prejudices.
In Politics and the English Language, George Orwell gave a definition of the politics of opinion that I have not seen bettered.
Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase - some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse - into the dustbin where it belongs.
But it is worth keeping these newspaper articles for the record. And reading the likes of Booker, McKinstry, Hitchens, Littlejohn et al, it is clear that one is not dealing with serious science, only pure political wind. But it’s an ill wind at that, blowing no-one any good. We shouldn’t be surprised. In politics, victory goes to those who have the loudest voices and tell the biggest lies. Of course, such people fear and hate science. It’s a threat to their position. If the claim is that contrary evidence is being suppressed, the challenge can be issued immediately – put up the evidence or shut up. Sun activity and volcanic eruptions have been looked at. They do not fit the evidence. They fall far short of explaining what needs to be explained. As things stand, the case for man made global warming fits the known facts more comfortably and with the least amount of assumptions. This is the more parsimonious hypothesis, and the burden of proof is with those who claim contrary evidence and explanation. Put simply, the opportunity remains for those pointing to the activity of the sun and volcanic eruptions to provide scientific evidence to confirm their theories. They have yet to do so. Time and again, testing turns negative. All the while MMGW remains the more parsimonious model consistent with all the data and making the least assumptions.
Plimer said Governments were treating the public like "fools" and using climate change to increase taxes.’ Reading these newspapers and it becomes clear that these journalists are treating people as fools. Think back to Lefebvre’s category of ‘pompous idiot’, the person who collects the commonplace and inflates it crudely. The climate has always changed, it’s a natural thing …. It’s just difficult to tell who the pompous idiots are, the journalists or the public they dupe, a public which it seems is all too willing to be duped. ‘Through the inertia and mechanical nature of their stupidity, they go farther than others more treacherous or more intelligent than themselves in disintegrating the social and the human.’ (Lefebvre 2008 ch 3).
The very scientists who have done most to warn people about the dangers to the social, the ecological and the human have been castigated as peddlers of a pseudo-science. And more than a few people have been willing to consume this nonsense.
So let us repeat the terms used by certain journalists to denigrate climate science and climate scientists: ‘trickery’, ‘fraud’, ‘lies’, ‘damned lies’, ‘propaganda’, ‘bogus science’.
This brings us to the case of Simon Lewis, an expert on tropical forests at Leeds University. Lewis made a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission over an "inaccurate, misleading and distorted" newspaper report published by the Sunday Times about a supposed mistake made by the UN's panel on global warming.
The Sunday Times piece was headlined "UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim". No such claim was made by the UN climate panel. The Sunday Times article should shame journalism, but we have learned that journalism knows no shame.
Lewis exposed the inaccuracy of the Sunday Times story, in that it gave the impression that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made a false claim in its 2007 report that reduced rainfall could wipe out up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest. The Sunday Times story was widely followed up across the world, fuelling claims that the IPCC was flawed and its conclusions unreliable.
The claim was inaccurate and Lewis demanded that the story should be corrected. After repeated attempts to raise his concerns had failed, Lewis finally made the PCC complaint. Lewis sent a letter to the newspaper. It was neither acknowledged nor printed. A comment he posted on the newspaper’s website was deleted. There are lies, damned lies and journalism. And downright tommyrot on climate science has been given free reign in certain newspapers for a long, long time.
Lewis said: "There is currently a war of disinformation about climate change-related science, and my complaint can hopefully let journalists in the frontline of this war know that there are potential repercussions if they publish misleading stories. The public deserve careful and accurate science reporting."
I’m afraid a lot of the public deserve what they pay for. Too many people want to read what they pay to read in the newspapers of their own choice. They are having their own prejudices rationalised and confirmed by being given back to them in print. But Lewis’ point is reasonable. The public deserve careful and accurate reporting on all issues, otherwise we are simply in the world of reading to confirm our own prejudices. However, the tendency is for journalists to pander to those who want to be reassured, to have their beliefs confirmed. Since that’s where the greater numbers are, that’s where the biggest newspaper circulation is. People don’t want to be discomforted by information which contradicts their beliefs. The newspapers print letters from characters dismissing climate scientists as ‘cranks’ and asserting that MMGW was ‘increasingly discredited’. Is it? Where? Who by? Has the black swan been found? Journalists simply articulate the inchoate prejudices of the men and women of common sense, each confirming the other in their mutual stupidity.
For all of his undemocratic bluntness here, John Ruskin spoke well on the phoney populism contained in the view that everyone has a right to their own opinion. Ruskin challenged the view that everyone should have their opinions represented, whether in the press or in parliament. ‘The concession might be desirable ... if only it were quite certain you had got any opinions to represent. But have you? . . Your voices are not worth a rat's squeak . . till you have some ideas to utter with them." (Ruskin Portrait of a Prophet).
In a single year, the UK alone produces newspapers sufficient to wrap around the Earth 270 times. The irony isn’t lost on those aware of the gravity of the climate crisis. Much of what these journalists write in these newspapers in denial of the climate crisis and in defence of the economic system driving this crisis is indeed strangling and suffocating the life out of the planet. Even worse, most of these newspapers are bought by people because they want to read the prejudices, hatreds and stupidities that are dished up for them. The job of journalists is to sell newspapers and they do this by giving people their own prejudices back, if in more articulate form, thus confirming the public in their blessed ignorance.
How many carbon absorbing trees are lost every year in order to produce the papers in which journalists systematically deny the reality of climate change? It doesn’t seem a fair exchange.
In his book The Disinherited Mind, Erich Heller makes a reference to the death-dealing lies of the press. The black ink of journalism is the same colour as the Black Death, only twice as deadly. Never has this been truer than with respect to climate change. The acres of rubbish poured out in the press will cost millions of people and other life forms their health, well-being and ultimately their lives themselves. Personally, I’d prefer to have the trees back. If the world is to end, then we should plant a tree. Martin Luther never spoke a truer word.