Climate Denial 101

Notice anything…? ☺

As can be seen, Hansen’s team ran their climate model against three greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. Scenario C (the blue curve) was their low-end case that could be expected to prevail if the world stopped listening to people like Michaels and drastically reduced emissions, even beyond the Kyoto guidelines and other proposed restrictions. Scenario B (the green curve) was their baseline “business-as-usual” estimate that presumed current emissions and the reductions that could be realistically expected for the 90’s and beyond, given mitigation efforts that were under way. Scenario A (the red curve) was their worst-case—Michaels et al. have their way, the gloves come off, and polluting industries gleefully flood the atmosphere with exponentially increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

The agreement between the green Scenario B curve and the black observed one speaks for itself. The only significant differences correspond to aerosol cooling from the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, and the record-breaking 1998 El Nino discussed earlier, neither of which could’ve been taken specifically into account in any forecast and were transient events that have little to do with long-term climate change anyway. Hansen presented all three scenarios during his 1988 Congressional testimony to give lawmakers a sense of the range of potential outcomes. But the bulk of his data and slides concentrated on this scenario because it was deemed to be far closer to what could be realistically expected in the coming decade…

And it’s missing from Michaels’ Figure 9 slide, as is Scenario C.

That’s right folks… Michaels erased Hansen’s baseline and low-end results from his slide, and deliberately misrepresented the worst-case scenario as his baseline instead! This isn’t just spin or careless oversite… it’s outright fraud.

Short of violence, knowingly falsifying data is the most negligent offense a scientist can commit—especially when he/she has been trusted to provide expert testimony to Congressional lawmakers. If Michaels had pulled a stunt like this at a scientific symposium or in a paper submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, he would’ve been fired with malice and stripped of his titles. But since he was testifying on behalf of industry-funded Astroturf fronts outside the scientific community he was immune from academic disciplinary action.

The scientific community was understandably horrified. Michaels was widely condemned for his fraudulent behavior in the media and scientific forums (Hansen, 2005; Krugman, 2006; Lambert, 2006; 2008; etc.), but not surprisingly, the skeptic community had a ready string of excuses for him. Michaels himself bristled at being labeled a fraud and defended his actions by claiming that (get this…) in his opinion, “business-as-usual” means baseline—regardless of what the authors meant by either term.

my purpose was to demonstrate that commonly held assumptions about climate change can be violated in a very few short years.

One of those is that greenhouse gas concentrations, mainly carbon dioxide, would continue on a constant exponential growth curve. NASA scientist James Hansen had a model that did just this, published in 1988, and referred to in his June 23, 1988 Senate testimony as a ‘Business as Usual’ (BAU) scenario.

BAU generally assumes no significant legislation and no major technological changes. It’s pretty safe to say that this was what happened in the succeeding ten years.” (Michaels, 2006)

Other skeptics echoed similar rationalizations. One even went so far as to claim that Scenario A was Hansen’s real baseline because it was “arguably more prominent graphically” in his figure (McIntyre, 2008; Lambert, 2008) … again, in his opinion.

The problem with all this of course, is that it wasn’t his own work, nor that of any other skeptic that Michaels was representing in his testimony—it was Hansen’s. And the only definition of “baseline” that’s germane to his work is the one he clearly presented in his publications and 1988 Congressional testimony as his team’s most plausible case (Hansen, 2005). The scenarios they modeled are specifically spelled out, not only in the body of their published research, but in the paper’s abstract where even a minimal attempt at due diligence would’ve made them evident (Hansen et al., 1998). The responsible thing to do (not to mention, the ethical one) would’ve been to present all three transparently with a justification for why one thinks the exponentially increasing emissions case should be treated as the baseline rather than the most plausible one. Unfortunately for Michaels, it was 1998. Had he done that it would’ve been clear that the actual greenhouse gas emissions that had taken place since Hansen’s testimony were much closer to Scenario B than the one that was more favorable to his agenda, and the spectacular agreement between the green and black curves in Figure 10 would’ve stood out like a sore thumb. The Committee would’ve put two and two together and drawn the obvious, but politically inconvenient conclusion… and we certainly can’t have that, now can we? 😉

So, he did the only thing he could’ve done to serve his deep-pocketed industry benefactors… he erased everything but the worst-case scenario lest the Committee be allowed to judge for themselves.

Error #4)   Skeptics assume regional weather events apply to climate change.

As we’ve seen, climate change is the global system response of the earth’s oceans, continental land mass, ice sheets, and atmosphere to various long-term forcings. Individual weather events such as storms or temperature records cannot be tied to it, although a clear upward (or downward) trend in their frequency and/or intensity can be. For the most part, professional climate deniers with official-sounding think-tank titles and big industry paychecks are aware of this and rely on errors of the previous sort. But in the popular press and blogosphere, a veritable legion of talking heads and wannabe climate commentators regularly show up to feed at this trough. Now to be fair, climate activists are often as guilty of this as any skeptic (how often have we heard someone from Greenpeace, or the Sierra Club blame global warming for Hurricane Katrina or a nasty heat wave in Palm Springs?). But unlike their environmental counterparts, skeptics routinely compound the error with a glaring ignorance of basic high-school science.

To wit, in a 2015 Forbes editorial one James Taylor (not the singer) tells us that,

“Yet another bitterly cold, snowy winter is destroying alarmist global warming claims, proving once again that over-the-top global warming predictions are proving no more scientifically credible than snake oil... blizzard after blizzard is burying much of the nation with record winter snow totals, with winter snowfall records beings set from Boston to Denver. Global warming activists are in full-throttle damage control, desperately claiming global warming causes record snow and cold.” (Taylor, 2015)

Sentiments like these are hardly new. As far back as 2003, conservative polemicist Ann Coulter (her chosen label BTW, not mine) echoed similar thoughts.

"[this] year, Washington, D.C., had the coldest February in a quarter-century. What are the scientific conclusions of Ms. Carlson's neighbors now? In a single day in February, New York got its fourth-deepest snowfall since 1869. Baltimore got more snow in February than in any other month in recorded history. I wish there were global warming." (Coulter, 2003)

The weather/climate confusion in both screeds speaks for itself. But the real irony here is that “global warming activists” aren’t the only ones who claim that global warming causes record snowfalls. High school chemistry teachers do as well. Had Taylor or Coulter taken one of their classes (and paid enough attention to actually pass), one of the first things they would’ve learned is the ideal gas law. According to the ideal gas law, the ratio of pressure to density in any pure gas is proportional to its temperature. Extending this law to gaseous mixtures like moist air results in what’s known as the Clausius Clapyron relationship, which tells us that dew point is also a function of temperature and pressure. Increasing the temperature and/or pressure of air increases the amount of moisture it can hold before becoming saturated (this BTW, is why relative humidity is (ahem...) relative). If a parcel of air is wet enough, and a change in pressure or temperature lowers its dew point below its ability to carry the amount of water it has, and the excess moisture must go somewhere. This is why your mirror fogs up with dew after a hot shower. It’s also why a falling barometer tends to bring rain… or, if it’s cold enough, snow.

As global average temperatures increase, so does the amount of moisture the atmosphere can carry. This translates directly into larger water bombs available to be dropped when the barometer falls, or when the excitable kid delivers an unseasonable cold snap. In other words, … [wait for it] … record snowfalls.

This isn’t “full-throttle damage control” folks… it’s high school chemistry.

The four classes of error we’ve covered are a recurring theme in virtually every argument the climate skeptic community has ever made. Having followed their writings for over 20 years, I can honestly say that I have yet to see them make a single claim that isn’t a textbook fit to one or more parts of this four-point template. Use it long enough and a pattern begins to emerge—a pattern of chronic spin, that when traced to its financiers is found to have little to do with science, and everything to do with the short-term gain of special interests. That is a problem… because the real world is beholden to the laws of physics, which care little for anyone’s profit or loss.

Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynmann was one of the scientists who served on the Rogers Commission that investigated the 1986 Challenger disaster. Speaking of the events that led up to that tragedy he said,

"For a successful technology reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

He was right. I realize that climate mitigation efforts will be costly. I understand all too well why industries and consumers who will be impacted (including me) find them alarming. But we don't have the luxury of misleading ourselves. Nature couldn’t care less about the pretty, majestically turreted sandcastles we’ve built for ourselves, or how much trouble it will be to move them to higher ground. It doesn’t care about our petty agendas and prevarications, nor our need to be appeased with easy populist answers and scapegoats. If our children and grandchildren are to inherit a livable world, we cannot afford to kid ourselves about the incoming tide.