Category: Climate science

The Climate Show #24: John Mashey digs into organised denial

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It’s been a long summer (not a hot one) for the The Climate Show, but Glenn, Gareth and John are back with a good show for the new year. Feature interview — and it’s a cracker — is with Californian computer scientist John Mashey, who has been digging deep into the networks of organised denial, tracking the flows of money and malpractice from plagiarism to zombie chairmen. Plus John Cook introduces his Debunking Handbook, a look at Arctic ice and its impact on European weather and a report calling for “dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilisation”.

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The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars

It was clearly never Michael Mann’s wish to be embroiled in the public controversy that has been manufactured by the denial industry around his and his co-authors’ work. He’s a scientist first and foremost, the nine-year-old who wanted to know what it meant to go faster than the speed of light, the high school student whose idea of a fun Friday night was hanging out with his computer buddies writing programmes to solve challenging problems, the Ph.D candidate looking for a big-picture problem to which he could apply his maths and physics interests, the post-doctoral researcher wanting to pursue curiosity-driven science. “When we first published our hockey stick work in the late 1990s,” he explains, “I was of the belief that the role of a scientist was, simply put, to do science.”

In support of that belief he eschewed the notion of taking any position regarding climate change policy. But merely doing the science, resulting in the hockey stick graph which showed a rapid and unprecedented global warming in recent time by comparison with the proxy temperature records of the last thousand years, meant that he was catapulted willy-nilly into public attention. And not just attention, but attack and vilification by the denial campaign. The title of his book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines is no overstatement. He has battle scars.  However it’s not a conflict he is prepared to retire from.  He no longer thinks he should avoid communicating the societal implications of climate science. Quite the opposite. He points out that scientists who study climate science and its potential impacts understand better than anyone the nature of the climate change threat. It would be irresponsible in the extreme for scientists to leave the field to industry-funded climate change deniers to confuse and mislead the public and dissuade policy makers from taking appropriate action.

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The Benefits of Soil Carbon

The UN Environment Programme’s just released Year Book 2012 includes a report The Benefits of Soil Carbon which looks at the vital role played by soil carbon in regulating climate, water supplies and biodiversity, and maintaining the ecosystem services that we depend on. The report is 15 pages long and well presented for general reading. I thought it well worth drawing attention to. I’ll point to a few of the report’s highlights here, in particular those that relate to climate change.

First, it offers a reminder of how important a carbon storehouse the soil is.  The top metre of the world’s soils stores more than three times the amount of carbon held in the atmosphere (approximately 2200 billion tonnes of carbon, two-thirds of it in the form of organic matter). This sequestration gives soils an essential role in climate regulation. However, soils are vulnerable to carbon losses through degradation. They also release greenhouse gases to the atmosphere as a result of accelerated decomposition due to land use change or unsustainable land management practices. Continue reading “The Benefits of Soil Carbon”

The unfettered rage of dismal denial

I knew that climate scientists were on the receiving end of some nasty emails, but it was still a shock to read James Hansen’s recent communication, in the course of which he gives a sample of the emails that he’d had in just the one week. They’re a dismal example of the unfettered rage which marks at least some sectors of the denialist world. Imagine receiving this sort of thing in your mail not just on the odd occasion but regularly:

  • You rework your temperature data sets every time Mother nature proves you wrong, in an effort to force Her to agree with your ill conceived ideas about energy and nature. You, in fact, are the one committing crimes against humanity by lying, conniving, and concealing the truth about climate change on our world.
  • What a pile of nonsense, Hansen. You take money and junkets hand over fist from people who pay you to mouth off trash like that. You aren’t exactly “forthcoming” about the “sources and amounts” of your graft – I mean, “gifts.” You ought to be ashamed of yourself,
  • You sir are a walking crime against humanity and you know exactly why. You lie constantly about man-made global warming.
  • You are not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination. You are a global warming shill and a con-artist.
  •  Are you some kind of lunatic??

And those are just my extracts from his selection from a week’s haul.

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The catechism of climate crank cliché

“A cliché,” according to the late Brian O’Nolan, “is a phrase that has become fossilised, its component words deprived of their intrinsic light and meaning by incessant usage. Thus it appears that clichés reflect somewhat the frequency of the same situations in life. If this be so, a sociological commentary could be compiled from these items of mortified language.”

O’Nolan is perhaps better known as Flann O’Brien, the author of such staggering works of comic genius as The Third Policeman and At Swim-Two-Birds, but for many years he contributed a column to the Irish Times under the pen name Myles na Gopaleen. One of the highlights of that column was the occasional appearance of extracts from Myles na Gopaleen’s Catechism of Cliché.

I was reminded of that catechism when I stumbled upon the “core principles” of the International Climate Science Coalition, a list of the doctrines the ICSC expects its members and supporters to believe and promote. Like Myles’ least favourite constructions, they are certainly fossilised and deprived of any intrinsic meaning but have the added attraction of being for the most part untrue.

A catechism, as the more literate (or Catholic) reader will know, is:

…a summary or exposition of doctrine, traditionally used in Christian religious teaching from New Testament times to the present. Catechisms are doctrinal manuals often in the form of questions followed by answers to be memorized, a format that has been used in non-religious or secular contexts as well. [Wikipedia]

Amongst the doctrinal manuals available for today’s climate sceptic there are the popular scriptures by Plimer and Wishart, the undergraduate philippics of Carter and Allegro, and the industrial grade biblical length blockbuster produced by Fred Singer and his Not the IPCC project. So much to choose from, such a lot to read. How is the would-be denier to thread their way through such a maze of doctrinal complexity, uncertainty and contradiction? Let us help them by preparing a climate crank catechism in the style of Myles…

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