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Today is the northern hemisphere winter solstice  and we’ve already seen a year with many climatic records broken and numerous record-breaking disasters, especially with all the tornadoes and droughts and heat waves. Already the global average temperature estimates for 2011 are coming in, and it looks like it will once again break all previous records for the warmest year in history (which was previously broken by 2010, and before that by 2009). The reports we’re hearing from the media about even more rapidly melting polar ice caps and the vanishing of glaciers around the world are not reassuring.

But in the southern hemisphere, it is summer solstice today, and there the signs are even more ominous. Australia has just gone through years of one climatic disaster after another, capped by 2011 with record flooding, wildfires, drought, and even an gigantic typhoon named Yasi. As this article points out, or an article in the December 2011 issue of Discover magazine discussed, many climate scientists view Australia as a harbinger of the future. It is far more vulnerable to changes in climate than most other regions, since it is a small continent located in the southern high-pressure belt of deserts, with only limited wet areas along the coast and the tropical north. It has few mountains or other topographic features that modify climate or trap rain and snow compared to most other continents, so it can be whipsawed through climate changes much faster than other regions. As the article’s author quoted in an email he received from an Aussie friend, “Welcome to Australia, the petri dish of climate change. Stay safe.” Or as David Karoly, the leading climate researcher at the University of Melbourne, put it, “Australia is the canary in the coal mine. What is happening in Australia now is similar to what can expect in other places in the future. One of the effects of increasing greenhouse-gas levels in the atmosphere is to amplify existing climate signals. Regions that are dry get drier, and regions that are wet get wetter. If you have a place like Australia that is already extreme, those extremes just get more pronounced.”

Australia has seen more extreme climatic events in the past decades than in all of its previous recorded history. It has gone through decades-long drought, and heat waves of 115° for weeks, leading to historic wildfires in 2009 and each year since then which have wiped out millions of acres and killed 173 people. Its topsoil built over generations is blowing away, causing record dust storms reminiscent of the “Dust Bowl” years in the U.S. in the 1930s.  Its groundwater supply has nearly vanished, leading to nationwide water shortages, and severely damaging the crops that were developed when it had enough water to irrigate them. When the drought finally broke last summer, the region suffered through record flooding instead, which was even more destructive of farmlands and cities. Even the Great Barrier Reef, Australia’s great gem of biodiversity (and an important magnet for tourist dollars as well as science) is rapidly dying from bleaching caused by warmer, more acidic oceans. With the loss of the Great Barrier Reef (and many other reefs around the world), scientists predict a collapse of the food chain and mass extinction in the oceans (including important fisheries) that will dwarf any of the geologic past.

As the article’s author, Jeff Goodell, explains:

Adding to Australia’s vulnerability is its close connection with the sea. Australia is the only island continent on the planet, which means that changes caused by planet-warming pollution – warmer seas, which can drive stronger storms, and more acidic oceans, which wreak havoc on the food chain – are even more deadly here.

How bad could it get? A recent study by MIT projects that without “rapid and massive action” to cut carbon pollution, the Earth’s temperature could soar by nine degrees this century. “There are no analogies in human history for a temperature jump of that size in such a short time period,” says Tony McMichael, an epidemiologist at Australian National University. The few times in human history when temperatures fell by seven degrees, he points out, the sudden shift likely triggered a bubonic plague in Europe, caused the abrupt collapse of the Moche civilization in Peru and reduced the entire human race to as few as 1,000 breeding pairs after a volcanic eruption blocked out the sun some 73,000 years ago. “We think that because we are a technologically sophisticated society, we are less vulnerable to these kinds of dramatic shifts in climate,” McMichael says. “But in some ways, because of the interconnectedness of our world, we are more vulnerable.”

With nine degrees of warming, computer models project that Australia will look like a disaster movie. Habitats for most vertebrates will vanish. Water supply to the Murray-Darling Basin will fall by half, severely curtailing food production. Rising sea levels will wipe out large parts of major cities and cause hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage to coastal homes and roads. The Great Barrier Reef will be reduced to a pile of purple bacterial slime. Thousands of people will die from heat waves and other extreme weather events, as well as mosquito-borne infections like dengue fever. Depression and suicide will become even more common among displaced farmers and Aborigines. Dr. James Ross, medical director for Australia’s Remote Area Health Corps, calls climate change “the number-one challenge for human health in the 21st century.”

And all this doesn’t even hint at the political complexities Australia will face in a hotter world, including an influx of refugees from poorer climate-ravaged nations. (“If you want to understand Australian politics,” says Anthony Kitchener, an Australian entrepreneur, “the first thing you have to understand is our fear of yellow hordes from the north.”) Then there are the economic costs. The Queensland floods earlier this year caused $30 billion in damage and forced the government to implement a $1.8 billion “flood tax” to help pay for reconstruction. As temperatures rise, so will the price tag. “We can’t afford to spend 10 percent of our GDP building sea walls and trying to adapt to climate change,” says Ian Goodwin, a climate scientist at Macquarie University in Sydney.

The strangest irony of the whole situation is that politically, Australia is in a bind. The right wingers in Australia are very powerful, with huge financial backing from the powerful coal companies, and many of them deny the scientific evidence  of the global climate change, even as the warning signs are occurring all around them. With all its vast deserts, one would expect Australia to be at the forefront of solar energy, and moving quickly to ameliorate the climate problems that it has produced. And yet the opposite is the case: energy conservation efforts have had little traction in Australia, since coal is still cheaper. As Goodell writes:

Australia remains deeply addicted to coal, which not only provides 80 percent of its electricity but serves as its leading export. Perhaps more than any other nation on earth, Australia is trapped by the devil’s bargain of fossil fuels: In the short term, the health of the nation’s economy depends on burning coal. But in the long term, the survival of its people depends on quitting coal. Australia’s year of extreme weather has reawakened calls for a tax on carbon pollution, but it is far from clear that the initiative will pass, or, in the big picture, whether it will matter much. “What we are ultimately talking about is how climate change is destabilizing one of the most advanced nations on the planet,” says Paul Gilding, an Australian climate adviser and author of The Great Disruption. “If Australia is vulnerable, everyone is vulnerable.”

And the saddest part of this irony is that even if Australia could switch from coal to solar and reduce its own carbon footprint, it would still need to sell its coal to China and the rest of Asia. In short, there are no easy solutions.  As Goodell describes it:

“Living on the beach is pretty much the Australian dream,” he says as we pass beach town after beach town. At Narrabeen Beach, a broad sweep of sand 15 miles north of Sydney, Goodwin points out where residents have been forced to truck in sand in an expensive and hopeless effort to keep the beach – and the homes along it – from being washed away by increasingly strong storm surges. If the seas rise by at least three feet this century, as the current scientific consensus expects them to, every one of the structures along the beach will vanish. “In fact,” Goodwin says, “the way things are going, they could be gone within a decade or two.”

“Do the people who live there know that?” I ask.

“Some of them do, but they don’t care,” he says. “Or they don’t think about it. Australians have a hard time imagining the future will be any different than the present.”

Australians aren’t alone in their denial, of course. But there is a sense of fatalism here that is absent in America, a feeling borne by having lived for long years in a harsh climate, of being able to take whatever nature dishes out. It is why Australians don’t leave their houses during raging wildfires, and why they build cites in landscapes where no cities should be built. When it comes to dealing with Mother Nature’s nasty moods, Australians have a kind of outback machismo, a justifiable sense of pride for having built a nation in one of the most extreme climates on the planet. But as the catastrophes multiply, so too do the psychic costs of living with it. As a recent report by Australia’s Climate Institute concluded, “Higher rates of drug and alcohol misuse, violence, family dissolution and suicide are more likely to follow more extreme weather events.” In 2006, during the prolonged drought in the Murray-Darling Basin, the government estimated that an Australian farmer committed suicide every four days.

It’s too soon to say for sure, but it may be that the deadly weather of the past few years will open people’s eyes to the risks of living on a superheated planet. In July, Prime Minister Julia Gillard introduced her proposal for a carbon tax in Australia. The plan would levy a modest price of $25 a ton on carbon for several years, then morph into a carbon-trading scheme in 2015. It’s a complicated proposal, full of loopholes and subsidies for Big Coal, but if it passes, it would be a big step in the right direction. “It’s a critical time,” Ross Garnaut, the government’s key climate adviser, told reporters. “Each year, the growth in emissions makes it less likely that we’ll be able to avoid severe damage from climate change. So the requirement to take action is urgent.”

It’s not just floods and drought and wildfires that are spurring action to cut carbon pollution. It’s also the fear of being left out of the economic benefits of clean technology. “With its deserts and sunshine, Australia should be the solar-energy capital of the world,” one California entrepreneur tells me. “Instead, they are still passing out subsidies to the coal industry.” Or as one Australian blogger put it, “Australia is currently exporting typewriters to a global economy moving quickly toward computers.”

But as the demand to take action grows, so too does the corporate and political push-back. The coal industry is a powerful force in Australia, and it is rolling out the usual tired arguments that a tax on carbon would devastate the economy and send jobs scurrying overseas. The country’s opposition leader, echoing the language of right-wing deniers in Congress, dismisses climate change as “absolute crap.” But as befits the Australian psyche, the scare tactics here are even bigger and nastier than in America. The rhetoric over global warming has grown so heated, in fact, that climate scientists at the Australian National University have been assigned security protection after several weeks of abusive e-mails and phone calls. For their work in understanding what is happening to their country, some scientists have even received death threats.

Let’s hope that the Australian “canary in the coal mine” can help us better understand and prepare for what is already happening in the U.S. and around the world.

Today Reuters reported that Canada has stated that the Kyoto Protocol is a “thing of the past” but has not yet confirmed whether it will formally pull out of the pact. Russia and Japan also said that they will not renew their commitment to the protocol unless it binds on the world’s greatest polluters.

The United States, which was the world’s largest emitter at the time of the Kyoto Protocol, refused to sign the treaty as it clearly had more to do with politics than with science. Since then, China and India have both probably surpassed US emissions, and have been producing sharply increasing emissions every year while wealthier nations have been striving to reduce CO₂.

As China and India are both in periods of extreme economic growth as they struggle to catch up to the rest of the world’s standards of living, it’s unlikely that either will bother to meet any CO₂ restrictions. There is just not enough immediate incentive to do so, and no immediate drawback in continuing to pollute their way to economic growth.

Most nations that did ratify the Kyoto Protocol have failed to meet its targets, and failed by huge margins. There is a really simple reason for this: as China and India discovered, there’s just no compelling reason to bother.

My opinion is that the only way any nation will truly change their CO₂ emitting ways (and I’m talking to you, United States, China, India, Brazil, Russia, etc.) is if we make it cheaper and more profitable to use clean energy. Not artificially so, through the use of penalties and incentives, but genuinely so. This means investment in clean energy sources, namely Generation IV nuclear technologies.

Discuss and flame.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry took his skepticism about climate change one step further on Wednesday, telling a New Hampshire business crowd that scientists have cooked up the data on global warming for the cash.

In his stump speech, Perry referenced “a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling in to their projects.”

“We’re seeing weekly, or even daily, scientists who are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what’s causing the climate to change,” Perry said. “Yes, our climates change. They’ve been changing ever since the earth was formed.”

It isn’t the first time Perry has accused climate scientists of fibbing. ThinkProgress’ Brad Johnson reported on Monday that in Perry’s book, Fed Up!, the governor calls climate science a “contrived phony mess.”

Among his fellow GOP presidential contenders, however, Perry’s views are not so extreme.

Herman Cain has called the very premise of climate change “a scam,” while former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) has referred to it as nothing more than a “trend,” accusing the left of “taking advantage” of it by creating “a beautifully concocted scheme because they know that the earth is gonna cool and warm.”

Back in 2009, meanwhile, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) argued on the House floor that the very concept of global warming is faulty because “carbon dioxide is a natural byproduct of nature!”

Rick Perry even managed to further emphasize his ignorance of science when in a recent debate that he said he admired Galileo and how he “was outvoted for a while.”  Bad analogy, Rick! If Perry actually knew any science, he would realize that Galileo was championing an unpopular scientific idea (heliocentric solar system) that was “outvoted” by the conservative power of that time, the Church and the Inquisition. Eventually, scientific truth won out, not the political delusions of the conservatives.

Only Jon Huntsman, who is hopelessly behind and unlikely to get the nomination in a party dominated by anti-science extremists, sounded sane. In an interview with ABC News in late August, he said:

“When we take a position that isn’t willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs counter to what 98 of 100 climate scientists have said, what the National Academy of Science has said about what is causing climate change and man’s contribution to it, I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science, and, therefore, in a losing position.”

But the rest of these candidates, one of whom could potentially hold the presidency for the next four years, should worry us with not only their rejection of science, but the even more alarming tactic of using ad hominem attacks and “shoot the messenger” tactics to try to discredit the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists around the world (as I discussed in my post of Aug. 24). Not only are their charges and fantasies patently absurd, but they remind us of how other demagogues, from Hitler and Stalin to Joe McCarthy, used name-calling and intimidation to threaten and suppress ideas of people who challenged their world viewpoint.

First of all, the idea that climate scientists are a global left-wing conspiracy to get rich and enforce a liberal agenda is laughable on the face of it. I know hundreds of natural scientists (geologists, biologists, chemists, and physicists in many subspecialties), and if there’s one thing they almost all share, it’s a lack of interest in politics and economics, let alone a unified socialist-communist agenda. Many got into science specifically because they weren’t interested in economics and politics, and had a gift or love for doing science instead. What they are committed to is a sincere love of the truth, and a willingness to make sacrifices of their time, money, and even comfort and personal safety to find out what is really true about nature, no matter whose agenda it might support. Only rarely do most of us think about possible political or economic implications of our research. Typically scientists try to downplay those aspects because they don’t want to attract attention or controversy! If you doubt this, just look at all the negative comments that scientists heaped on Carl Sagan or Stephen Jay Gould because they were willing to be public figures and occasionally step into the political spotlight!

As James Powell points out in his excellent new book The Inquisition of Climate Science, the very idea that a scientific community, which is built upon the foundation of peer review and challenging accepted ideas and always double-checking each other’s work (especially if you disagree), would be able to put together a giant conspiracy about the data and cover it up—AND that normally conservative organizations, from the insurance companies and big corporations like GE to the U.S. military would all be in on the conspiracy—is ridiculous in the extreme. This shows a complete lack of understanding of science and how the scientific community really works. It’s a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black, because global warming denialism is entirely a PR campaign and conspiracy  by right-wing ideologues and their energy company backers, not a movement that spontaneously arose from dissident climate scientists. There is much evidence to support this contention. For example,  Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway documented from memos that leaked to the press that in April 1998 the right-wing Marshall Institute, SEPP (Fred Seitz’s lobbying firm which promotes denialism and doubt about tobacco and environmental issues), and ExxonMobil met in secret at the American Petroleum Institute’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., and planned a $20 million campaign to get “respected scientists” to cast doubt on climate change, get major PR effort going, and lobby Congress that global warming wasn’t real and was not a threat. Then there was the famous 2002 memo from GOP pollster and spinmeister Frank Luntz to the Bush White House:

“The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science….Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other experts in the field.”

Nor are all scientists “commies”. I know of large numbers of both conservative and liberal scientists (but no outright communists or socialists), despite the claim that we’re all left-wingers. Some of the leading figures in climate research, such as Kerry Emanuel at MIT, are staunch Republicans. (Again, global warming is no left-wing ideology if it is accepted and acted upon by such conservative organizations as insurance companies, major corporations like GE, and the U.S. military). There are scientists who do have strong political opinions, but as scientists we try our best to prevent our political biases from influencing our scientific results. We’re human, of course, so occasionally research with a political agenda does get published—but then the rest of the scientific community will jump in and criticize it, so we don’t get away with our biases for long.

Finally, the idea that we do this to get rich is the most absurd charge of all, as Al Gore pointed out (and the right-wingers immediately attacked him again). Most scientists must endure a grueling 5-7 years in grad school on miserably small stipends to earn their Ph.D. Then we must live on paltry teachers’ salaries or even more tenuous “soft-money” grant funds to eke out a living. Most of the scientists in faculty posts don’t make six-figure incomes until they are near retirement, if ever. Meanwhile, people who spent much less time in grad school, like lawyers and MBAs and politicians, make the really big bucks. Once again, it’s a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black: assuming your opponent is motivated by the same things that motivate you, even though in this case it is clearly false.

In some cases, the right-wing fringe has gone to extreme lengths in their hostile attitude toward legitimate science. The FBI has reported a sharp increase in threats and hate mail and intimidation against prominent climate scientists like Michael Mann, James Hansen, and others. Australian climate scientists have also been threatened. The transition from conservative climate denialist to a dangerous anti-Semitic hate group is not difficult; one white supremacist website posted Michael Mann’s picture and those of other climate scientists and labeled it “Jew”. (In fact, most climate scientists are not Jewish, but the facts don’t matter to racists and anti-Semites). Another climate scientist told ABC News that he found a dead animal placed on his doorstep, and now he must travel with a bodyguard. As Mann said, “Human-caused climate change is a reality. There are clearly some who find that message inconvenient, and unfortunately they appear willing to turn to just about any tactics to try to suppress that message.”

Even more despicable are the right-wing politicians and pundits who actually target prominent scientists for intimidation. Jim Powell in his new book rightly compares it to the Inquisition, which threatened Galileo with torture when he espoused the heretical idea that the earth was not the center of the universe. These bullies use persecution of scientists to further their own political careers, all but inviting some of their crazy followers to gun them down.  Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma is one of the most brazen. He listed the name of 17 prominent climate scientistsand claimed that they engaged in “potentially criminal behavior” for violating the Federal False Statements Act. This is the classic tactic of McCarthy-style witch hunting, or analogous to how conservative authorities (such as the Inquisition) threatened Galileo with torture when he dared speak scientific truth to power. It has a tremendously chilling effect on science, not to mention what it does to the personal lives of hardworking scientists and their families. Of course, it is an entirely baseless charge, since the truth lies with the scientists, and it is Inhofe who is distorting reality. Nevertheless, an anti-scientific troglodyte like Inhofe is capable of wasting a lot of scientists’ time and money fighting and defending themselves against charges in court or in Congress, not to mention the fact that all these scientists are now targets of gun-toting crazy right-wingers.

But the craziest of all is Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. Even before his election in 2008, he was known to be an extreme right-winger and teabagger, and now he is abusing the powers of his office to push his extremist agenda. He is suing to release all the raw data and emails collected by Michael Mann when he worked at the University of Virginia. (Mann is now at Penn State, so Cuccinelli cannot touch him there). Cuccinelli hopes to find some sort of “smoking gun” of conspiracy along the lines of the East Anglia “Climategate” scandal. This is despite the fact, as has been proven by six independent commissions, there was nothing amiss in the emails, and no conspiracy was discovered, just careless language quoted out of context. Given the right wing’s scientific incompetence and misinterpretation of the East Anglia data, there’s no reason to think that they will have any better ability to interpret Mann’s data, should they release it. Instead, we can expect that they will find stuff that fits their preconceptions without any scientific expertise to judge the data in the first place. Cuccinelli is trying to claim that Mann had committed fraud, and should return all the research money, along with legal fees and triple damages.

This is really just a witch-hunt by an extremist politician who is using his relatively obscure position as state attorney general to further his political career. It is consistent with all the other ways he is using his office for political gain and street cred in the right-wing fringe. His crusades have ranged from the silly (trying to cover the naked breast of the crude sketch of the goddess Minerva on the Virginia state seal) to the serious. The latter include directing public universities to remove sexual orientation from their anti-discrimination policies, attacking the Environmental Protection Agency, filing a lawsuit challenging federal health care reform, and trying to reverse George Mason University’s policy about concealed weapons on campus. Polls show that the voters of Virginia are tired of his antics and want him to work on the job that most state attorney generals are paid to do: prosecuting criminals and corporations on the behalf of the state and enforcing state laws, not tilting at right-wing windmills.

Let’s hope by the time of the 2012 elections that the people will tire not only of these candidates, but their extreme anti-science agenda, with its terrible effects on scientific research and researchers. Hopefully, these demagogues will not only be voted down, but the voters will send a message that this kind of extremism (here in the defense of oil companies and other powerful corporate interests) is not to be tolerated. In the words of Army lawyer Joseph Welch, whose statements during the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings finally derailed the Red Scare of the McCarthy era:

Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

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Last week I returned from an amazing Skeptic Society cruise along Alaska’s Inside Passage. During the cruise, we held a conference with 200 other Skeptics on “Glaciers and the Science of Climate Change,” with presentations by scientific experts on glaciers and climate. On day 3, we witnessed the glaciers melting away before our very eyes. At Glacier Bay National Park, we saw tons of ice calving away from Margerie and Johns Hopkins glaciers, causing huge booms to echo across the fjord. As our resident expert Dr. Bruce Molnia of the USGS pointed out during his presentation, over 95% of the glaciers of Alaska are stagnant or shrinking, and we saw several examples of these. Molnia has been studying Alaska’s glaciers for decades, and he showed stunning images of how much they have retreated in just the past century (such as the images of the retreat of Muir Glacier below, shot in 1941  and in 2004). If you recall the images of the vanished glacier’s in An Inconvenient Truth, some of those were from Molnia’s research. We billed the trip as “See ‘em before they vanish” but in the case of most of the glaciers, it’s already too late. If my 6- and 8-year-old sons repeat this trip decades later as grown men, there will be almost no glaciers to see at all.

Naturally, the conference focused on the scientific evidence about glacier retreat and global climate change. Our moderator Michael Shermer challenged us to show us the evidence that climate change is real and anthropogenic, and our speakers did so in spades. Much of this evidence was outlined in Chapter 10 of my new book Catatastrophes!, so I will not repeat all of it here. But some of the key points that came up again and again in the conference were:

1. The community of scientists who actually do climate research has long ago reached a consensus that anthropogenic global warming is real, and their consensus is about 95–99% depending upon the study (Oreskes, 2004; Doran and Kendall Zimmerman, 2009; Anderegg, 2010). This is as much agreement as you’ll see in science, comparable to scientific consensus about evolution or quantum physics or relativity. As I pointed out in previous posts, there are cranks who challenge the ideas of relativity or quantum physics, or creationists who deny evolution, but they do not represent the overwhelming scientific  consensus.

2. The planet’s climate is clearly changing in a way that cannot be explained by simple climate cycles or warming since the Little Ice Age or any other cause. One only need look at the unprecedented disappearance of the world’s glaciers, ice caps, and permafrost, the temperature records from multiple sources all over the world, and many other lines of evidence to show that the planet is warming faster with higher levels of carbon dioxide than any time in the past 650,000 years at minimum (based on the EPICA ice core from Antarctica), and probably since the Ice Ages began over 2.5 million years ago. The fact that the North Pole is now ice-free open water in summer for the first time in 2 million years is shocking in and of itself. Where will Santa go?

3. Many people agree that climate is changing, but are not sure that humans are to blame. If they want proof, they can examine the huge array of data directly point to humans causing global warming. We can directly measure the amount of carbon dioxide humans are producing, and it tracks exactly with the amount of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Through carbon isotope analysis, we can show that this carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is coming directly from our burning of fossil fuels, not from natural sources. We have satellites measuring the heat released from the planet and can actually see the atmosphere get warmer, and pinpoint its sources to human activities. The most crucial proof emerged only the past few years: climate models of the greenhouse effect predict that there should be warming in the stratosphere, but cooling in the troposphere, and that’s exactly what our space probes have measured. Finally, we can rule out any other culprits: solar heat has been decreasing since 1940, not increasing, and there are no measurable increases in cosmic radiation, methane, volcanic gases, or any other potential cause. Face it—it’s our problem.

4. As Oreskes and Conway demonstrated in their 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, and I expanded upon in my book Catastrophes!, the “doubt” about anthropogenic global warming was not some sort of minority opinion among real climate scientists. Instead, a number of leaked memos show that it was entirely a PR campaign cooked up by energy lobby (mostly oil and coal producers) and the right-wing and libertarian institutes (especially the Marshall Institute and Heartland Institute) to blunt the political forces that were taking anthropogenic global warming seriously. They resorted to the same tactics as other kinds of reality deniers, such as the Holocaust deniers or the creationists: citing studies out of context to mean the opposite of what was actually said (the whole “climategate” kerfuffle over their misreading of stolen emails); generating phony “lists of scientists who doubt” evolution or global warming (these lists are composed almost entirely of people with no academic credentials in climate change research or evolutionary biology, so their “dissent” is immaterial); taking small pieces of data out of context to deliberately misrepresent the actual record (for example, the claim that “climate has been cooling since 1998″ is based on a tiny downward wiggle from 1998-2001, while the overall trend is hotter, and the hottest global average temperatures on record have come from the past 3 years); pointing to small differences between labs or individual scientists that they can’t get their story straight (but as the 2007 IPCC report and the previous studies showed, the consensus is virtually unanimous among working climate scientists). Even more striking, the deniers of both evolution and climate change are largely overlapping audiences, now that it is virtually a creed among the GOP and Fox News, and creationist websites like the Discovery Institute site now feature as much climate denialism as they do evolution denialism. (Just last week Texas Gov. Rick Perry stridently topped all the other GOP presidental candidates in denying global warming, accusing scientists of cheating and exaggerating to make themselves rich. This kind of shoot-the-messenger demagoguery is laughable. Most research scientists I know made big sacrifices of many years in grad school to earn their degrees, only to receive a paltry academic’s salary which is much less than they should receive for so much education in comparison to lawyer, doctors—or politicians and oil geologists. None of the scientists I know are motivated primarily by money—they do it because they love their field of research, and want to find out what is happening with climate, not line their pockets).

All of this was grist for a lively discussion during the cruise seminars. Fortunately, we were able to point to some encouraging trends. The entire debate over global warming in the U.S. is largely a rear-guard action and irrelevant to where the political winds are blowing now. Most of the rest of the world’s nations accepts the reality. The fact that even Kyoto holdouts like China, India, and the U.S. agreed to the basic science of global warming in the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit is a big step forward. (Unfortunately, our political gridlock has also meant that other countries, especially China, are pushing hard to develop the next green technology, and leaving us behind). It is not just the liberals and environmentalists who are taking climate change seriously. Historically conservative institutions (big corporations, the insurance companies, emergency management agencies, the U.S. military, and even some oil companies) are already planning on how to deal with global warming. These organizations have no political axe to grind or party affiliation, but they must plan for a future that is clear to climate scientists and most people around the world, even if it is clouded in the U.S. by political ideology.

Some people may still try to deny scientific reality, but big businesses like oil and insurance, and conservative institutions like the military, cannot afford to be blinded or deluded by ideology. They must plan for the real world that we will be seeing in the next few decades. They do not want to be caught unprepared and harmed by global climatic change when it threatens their survival. Neither can we as a society.

But my favorite talk was Eugenie Scott’s presentation, “Deja Vu all over again: Denialism of Climate Change and Evolution.” It gave me a sense of deja vu, because apparently without knowledge of each others’ work, we have converged on a common topic. This is what philosopher William Whewell would call a “consilience” or common agreement of different lines of evidence or threads of argument. As I independently pointed out in my upcoming book written last summer about science denialism, entitled Reality Check, and in a paper I wrote which is now in press, there are tremendous parallels between the evolution-deniers (creationists), the climate change deniers, and many other types of science deniers. Even more striking, they borrow most of their tactics from the prototypical reality deniers, the Holocaust revisionists, along with the tactics of the tobacco companies in creating “doubt” through PR to obscure the real science.

Consider the following:

• This scientific consensus about this idea is accepted by 95-99% of all the scientists who work in the relevant fields;
• This scientific topic threatens the viewpoints of certain groups in the U.S., so it is strongly opposed by them and people they influence;
• Their anti-scientific viewpoint is extensively promoted by websites and publications of right-wing fundamentalist institutes such as the Discovery Institute in Seattle, and often plugged by Fox News;
• The opponents of this consensus cannot find legitimate scientists with expertise in the field who oppose the consensus of qualified scientists, so they beat the bushes for “scientists” (none of whom have relevant training or research credentials) to compose a phony “list of scientists who disagree with Topic X”;
• Deniers of the scientific consensus resort to taking quotes out of context to make legitimate scientists sound like they question the consensus;
• Deniers of the scientific consensus often look for small disagreements among scholars within the field to argue that the entire field does not support their major conclusions;
• Deniers often pick on small errors by individuals to argue that the entire field is false;
• Deniers of the scientific consensus often take small examples or side issues that do not seem to support the consensus and use these to argue that the consensus is false;
• Deniers of the scientific consensus spend most of their energies disputing the scientific evidence, rather than doing original research themselves;
• By loudly proclaiming their “alternate theories” and getting their paid PR people to question the scientific consensus in the media, they manage to get the American public confused and doubtful, so less than half of US citizens accept what 99% of legitimate scientists in this field of research consider to be true;
• By contrast, most modern industrialized nations (Canada, nearly all of Europe, China, Japan, Singapore, and many others) have no problems with the scientific consensus, and treat it as a matter of fact in both their education and in their economic and political decisions;
• Powerful politicians have used the controversy over this issue to try to force changes in the teaching of this topic in schools;

Reading through this list, most people would immediately assume that it only describes the creationists and their attempts to target the scientific consensus on evolution. Indeed, the list does describe creationists or “evolution denialists”—but it also describes the actions of the climate denialists (who deny global climate change is real and human caused) as well. In fact, the membership lists of creationists and climate-change deniers is highly overlapping, with both causes being promoted by right-wing political candidates, news media (especially Fox News), and religious/political organizations like the Discovery Institute and many others.

The one big difference between them is motivation. Creationists are motivated exclusively by strong fundamentalist literalist religious beliefs; most AGW (anthropogenic global warming) deniers are motivated by right-wing political and economic ideologies, which view environmentalism as a threat to unrestrained capitalism and freedom to do whatever we damn well please (including polluting and destroying our planet). As Oreskes and Conway (2010) brilliantly document, AGW denialism did not exist as a serious movement until about a decade ago, when various right-wing and libertarian think tanks (Marshall Institute, Heartland Institute, Cato Institute), heavily funded by energy companies with vested interests in denying AGW, began a concerted PR campaign to discredit the overwhelming evidence and the conclusions of 95% of the climate science community. Because there were almost no climate scientists who denied the evidence for AGW, the PR specialists recruited among scientists not trained in climate research, and compiled phony lists of “dissenting scientists” (most of whom have no advanced degree, or their degree is not in climate science). This is comparable to the way creationists compile phony lists of “scientists dissenting from evolution,” which turns out to be mostly people with degrees completely irrelevant to evolution, like engineering and physics, rather than evolutionary biology or molecular genetics or geology. The NCSE brilliantly satirized this ridiculous PR exercise by creating “Project Steve”, which showed that there are more scientists with the name “Steve” or “Stephen” or “Stephanie” (over 1100 so far, which is less than 1% of the total population of scientists) than the total number of “scientists disputing evolution.”

I could go on and on with documentation of the other similarities between evolution-deniers and AGW-deniers, but the space in this column is limited. Most of it is provided by Oreskes and Conway (2010), and spelled out in my two upcoming publications in even greater detail. The only good news I can see in this regard is that the U.S. is almost alone in its anti-scientific attitudes toward both evolution—and AGW. Almost all the other industrialized nations in western Europe and Asia have accepted it long ago, were enthusiastic signatories at the Copenhagen Conference, and are actively involved in working to reduce their carbon footprints. More revealing is the fact that numerous relatively conservative or non-ideological institutions also accept the reality of climate change. This includes the insurance companies and their re-insurers (like Swiss Re), many other major businesses, emergency management agencies at every level, and even the U.S. military (hardly a bastion of liberalism). These organizations don’t have the luxury of playing political games. They’ve read the scientific consensus and must plan for the future. If they can see the matter so clearly, why can’t we? Just like in our lack of an energy policy and dependence on foreign oil, it looks like the U.S. will be the last major country dragged into facing reality after the rest of the world  has already jumped ahead of us and prepared for it—and invested heavily in clean energy development and preparation for climate change while we wasted time in an unnecessary battle between accepted science and ideological PR.

There is one other other ray of light: Eugenie Scott announced at TAM9 that the National Center for Science Education will now be fighting not only for good evolutionary science to be taught in schools, but also climate science as well. And her announcement got a huge round of applause from the TAM9 audience, which would not have happened a few years ago when there were still a lot of AGW deniers at TAM.

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.
—Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 2003

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
—Richard Feynman

What’s real is what’s real, and, like it or not, no one can change the nature of reality. Except, of course, with mushrooms.
—Bill Maher

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to a bill that overturns the scientific finding that pollution is harming our people and our planet. However, I won’t physically rise, because I’m worried that Republicans will overturn the law of gravity, sending us floating about the room. I won’t call for the sunlight of additional hearings, for fear that Republicans might excommunicate the finding that the Earth revolves around the sun. Instead, I’ll embody Newton’s third law of motion and be an equal and opposing force against this attack on science and on laws that will reduce America’s importation of foreign oil. This bill will live in the House while simultaneously being dead in the Senate. It will be a legislative Schrodinger’s cat killed by the quantum mechanics of the legislative process! Arbitrary rejection of scientific fact will not cause us to rise from our seats today. But with this bill, pollution levels will rise. Oil imports will rise. Temperatures will rise. And with that, I yield back the balance of my time. That is, unless a rejection of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is somewhere in the chair’s amendment pile.

Meanwhile, the Republican leaders of the House Science and Technology Committee were also attacking the science of global warming. The agenda for their March 31, 2011 hearing was explicitly arranged to challenge the climate science community and cast doubt on their data about global temperature change. They openly “stacked the deck” with their chosen witnesses, which included such “expert scientific witnesses” as an economist, a lawyer, and a professor of marketing—and Richard Muller, Professor of Physics at University of California Berkeley.

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To geologists, Richard Muller is a well-known name, even though his expertise is primarily in nuclear physics. He has dabbled in a lot of geologic topics over the years with varied success. His efforts to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs by postulating another unseen star in our solar system (the “Nemesis hypothesis”) has been refuted, as were his explanations of a alleged 26-million-year cycle of extinctions by postulating periodic perturbations of comets in the Oort cloud. As I summarized in my 2003 paleontology textbook (Prothero, 2003, Bringing Fossils to Life, Chapter 6, the original data supporting the “periodic extinction” model has long been discredited, so the periodicity is not real. Thus, the mechanisms proposed to explain a non-existent extinction periodicity are now moot as well.

To the global warming deniers, Muller had been an important scientific figure with good credentials who had expressed doubt about the temperature data used to track the last few decades of global warming. Muller was influenced by Anthony Watts, a former TV weatherman (not a trained climate scientist) and blogger who has argued that the data set is mostly from large cities, where the “urban heat island” effect might bias the overall pool of worldwide temperature data. Climate scientists have pointed out that they have accounted for this possible effect already, but Watts and Muller were unconvinced. With $150,000 (25% of their funding) from the Koch brothers (the nation’s largest supporters of climate denial research), as well as the Getty Foundation (their wealth largely based on oil money) and other funding sources, Muller set out to reanalyze all the temperature data by setting up the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project. Although only 2% of the data were analyzed by last month, the Republican climate deniers in Congress called him to testify in their March 31 hearing to attack global warming science, expecting him to give them scientific data supporting their biases.

To their dismay, Muller behaved like a real scientist and not an ideologue—he followed his data and told them the truth, not what they wanted to hear. Muller pointed out that his analysis of the data set almost exactly tracked what the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Goddard Institute of Space Science (GISS), and the Hadley Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK had already published (see figure). Muller testified before the House Committee that:

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project was created to make the best possible estimate of global temperature change using as complete a record of measurements as possible and by applying novel methods for the estimation and elimination of systematic biases. We see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups. The world temperature data has sufficient integrity to be used to determine global temperature trends. Despite potential biases in the data, methods of analysis can be used to reduce bias effects well enough to enable us to measure long-term Earth temperature changes. Data integrity is adequate. Based on our initial work at Berkeley Earth, I believe that some of the most worrisome biases are less of a problem than I had previously thought.

The right-wing ideologues were sorely disappointed, and reacted viciously in the political sphere by attacking their own scientist, but Muller’s scientific integrity overcame any biases he might have harbored at the beginning. He “called ‘em as he saw ‘em” and told truth to power. Such scientific backbone is becoming increasingly rare in a political climate where every controversial scientific topic, from evolution to global climate change to stem-cell research, has become highly polarized and ideological. But it speaks well of the scientific process when a prominent skeptic like Muller does his job properly and admits that his original biases were wrong. As reported in the Los Angeles Times :

Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, which contributed some funding to the Berkeley effort, said Muller’s statement to Congress was “honorable” in recognizing that “previous temperature reconstructions basically got it right…. Willingness to revise views in the face of empirical data is the hallmark of the good scientific process.”

This is the essence of the scientific method at its best. There may be biases in our perceptions, and we may want to find data that fits our preconceptions about the world, but if science is done properly, we get a real answer, often one we did not expect or didn’t want to hear. That’s the true test of when science is giving us a reality check: when it tells us “an inconvenient truth”, something we do not like, but is inescapable if one follows the scientific method and analyzes the data honestly.

Thomas Henry Huxley said it best over 150 years ago:

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.

I FIRST MET BJORN LOMBORG IN 2001 upon the publication of his Cambridge University Press book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, which I found to be a refreshing perspective on what had been the doom-and-gloom, end-of-the-world scenarios that I had been hearing since I was an undergraduate in the early 1970s. Back then we were told that overpopulation would lead to worldwide hunger and starvation, that there would be massive oil depletion, precious mineral exhaustion, and rainforest extinction by the 1990s. These predictions failed utterly. I felt I had been lied to for decades by the environmentalist movement that seemed to me to be little more than a political movement that raised money by raising fears.

Lomborg’s publicist thought that I might be interested in hosting him for the Skeptics Society’s public science lecture series at the California Institute of Technology that I organize and host. I was, but given the highly debatable nature of many of Lomborg’s claims I only agreed to host him if it could be a debate. Lomborg agreed at once to debate anyone, and this is where the trouble began. I could not find anyone to debate Lomborg. I contacted all of the top environmental organizations, and to a one they all refused to participate. “There is no debate,” one told me. “We don’t want to dignify that book,” said another. I even called Paul Ehrlich, the author of the wildly popular bestselling book The Population Bomb — another apocalyptic prognostication that served as something of a catalyst in the 1970s for delimiting population growth — but he turned me down flat, warning me in no uncertain language that my reputation within the scientific community would be irreparably harmed if I went through with it. So of course I did because (A) truth is more important than reputation, and (B) no one threatens me and gets away with it. My own Senior Editor, Frank Miele, who is an expert on evolutionary biology and biodiversity (and is one of the fastest and most facile researchers I’ve ever known), challenged Lomborg on several of the chapters in his book, and we had a lively and successful debate.

My experience is symptomatic of deep problems that have long plagued the environmental movement, and for a time the political pollution of the science turned me into an environmental skeptic. That alone would be meaningless, given that I have only ever written one article on the subject (my June 2006 Scientific American column explaining that I flipped from climate skeptic to believer), but I believe that the environmental extremists had a similar effect on millions of others who remain skeptical in the teeth of what now appears to be reasonably solid evidence for anthropogenic global warming.

In fact, the documentary film Cool It, based on Lomborg’s book of the same title that serves as the popular version of his more technical and scholarly first tome, opens with him stating unequivocally that global warming is real and human caused. Wait! I thought Lomborg was a climate denier? That is what his critics have accused him of being, in fact, which apparently is the charge delivered if one does not accept in full all the claims in Cool It’s erstwhile anti-avatar, Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth. Here it might be useful to distinguish the two films by breaking down the subject matter into five questions:

1. Is the earth getting warmer?
2. Is the cause of global warming human activity?
3. How much warmer is it going to get?
4. What are the consequences of a warmer climate?
5. How much should we invest in altering the climate?

Global warming is real and primarily human caused. With questions 3 and 4, however, estimates include error bars that grow wider the further out we run the models because complex systems like climate are notoriously difficult to predict. Lomborg (and myself) provisionally accept the estimate of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the mean global temperature by 2100 will increase by around 4–5 degrees Fahrenheit, and that sea levels will rise by about one foot, which Lomborg reminds us is about the same level that sea levels have risen since 1860, without any major (or for that matter minor) consequences. In other words, man-made global warming will be moderate, causing moderate changes.

Examining question 4 more closely, Lomborg computes that if global warming continues unchecked through the end of the century there will be 400,000 more heat-related deaths annually, but he then notes that there will be also be 1.8 million fewer cold-related deaths, for a net gain of 1.4 million lives. This is a typical calculation that Lomborg makes in what is essentially an economic triage for global warming — he is not saying that global warming is good or inconsequential, only that its consequences must be weighed in the balance against other problems. For example, Lomborg sites data from the World Wildlife Fund that at most we will lose 15 polar bears a year due to global warming, but what doesn’t get reported is that 49 bears are shot each year. What would be more cost-effective to save polar bear lives — spend hundreds of billions of dollars to lower CO₂ emissions and (maybe) lower the mean global temperature by a fraction of a degree, or limit hunting permits?

This leads to question 5 — the economics of global climate change — which Lomborg notes that if all countries had ratified the Kyoto Protocol and lived up to its standards (which most did not), according to the IPCC at best it would have postponed the 4.7°F average increase just five years from 2100 to 2105, at a cost of $180 billion a year! By comparison, although global warming may cause an increase of two million deaths due to hunger annually by 2100, the U.N. estimates that for $10 billion a year we could save 229 million people from hunger annually today.

Economics is about the efficient allocation of limited resources that have alternative uses. If you had, say, $50 billion a year to make the world a better place for more people, how would you spend it? Cool It traces Lomborg’s attempt to answer this question through a group of scientists, economists, and world leaders whom he gathered in 2004 in Copenhagen to reach what he calls the “Copenhagen Consensus.” These experts ranked reduction of CO₂ emissions 16th out of 17 challenges. The top four were: controlling HIV/AIDS, micronutrients for fighting malnutrition, free trade to attenuate poverty, and battling malaria. A 2006 Copenhagen Consensus of U.N. ambassadors constructed a similar list, with communicable diseases, clean drinking water, and malnutrition at the top, and climate change at the bottom. A late 2008 meeting that included five Nobel Laureates recommended that President-elect Barack Obama allocate his promised $150 billion in subsidies for new technologies and $50 billion in foreign aid be allocated for research on malnutrition, immunization, and agricultural technologies. For a cool Kyoto $180 billion you can buy a lot of condoms, vitamin tablets, and mosquito nets and rescue hundreds of millions of people from disease, starvation, and impoverishment.

Cool It is an uplifting film, filled with solutions that any green technophile would love: solar, wind, wave, and geoengineering technologies take up a lion’s share of the film. (And true climate skeptics will denounce Lomborg on this front as they do not believe that these alternatives can come close to replacing coal and oil as sources of energy.) To his credit, the unflappable Lomborg, with his boyish good looks and curiosity, includes in his own film harsh disparaging commentary by his long-time critic Stephen Schneider, the Stanford University climate scientist who passed away this past July. In a very classy touch, Cool It is dedicated to Schneider.

* * *

Note: If you are skeptical of Lomborg and his branch of environmental skepticism, read the Yale University economist William Nordhaus’ technical book A Question of Balance (Yale University Press, 2008). Nordhaus computes the costs-benefits of various recommendations for changing the climate by either 2105 or 2205, primarily focused on the cost of curbing carbon emissions. Economists like to compute future profits and losses based on investments made today, adjusting for the value of a future dollar at an average interest rate of four percent. If we spent a trillion dollars today (the equivalent of the recent bailout or the Iraq war), how much climate change would it buy us in a century at four percent interest? Nordhaus’s calculations are compared to doing nothing, where a plus value is better and a minus value worse than doing nothing. Kyoto with the U.S. is plus one and without the U.S. zero, for example, and a gradually increasing global carbon tax is a plus three. That is, a $1 trillion cost today buys us $3 trillion of benefits in a century. Al Gore’s proposals, by contrast, score a minus 21, where $1 trillion invested today in Gore’s plans would net us a loss of $21 trillion in 2105. Add to these calculations the numerous other crises we face, such as the housing calamity, the financial meltdown, the coming pressures of funding Social Security and Medicare, not to mention financing two wars, a failing public education system, and so forth, and suddenly global climate change is put into perspective.

NASA visualization of arctic surface warming trends. NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, Larry Stock, Robert Gersten

As many skeptics know by now, legendary skeptical trailblazer James Randi set off a firestorm last week with two Swift blog posts about global warming. His first post carried his strong suspicion that consensus science on climate change is incorrect, while his followup post wondered “whether we can properly assign the cause to anthropogenic influences.”

Skeptical bloggers were swift to respond. Critics (including PZ Myers, Orac, Sean Carroll, and James Hrynyshyn) chastised Randi for speaking outside his domain expertise; for dissenting from current consensus science; and for lending his name to the disreputable “Oregon Petition Project.” Others, like Phil Plait, corrected Randi while sensibly reminding us that “anyone, everyone, is capable of making mistakes.” And, inevitably, global warming deniers seized upon the event. (One headline, at Britain’s Telegraph.co.uk, gleefully crowed “James Randi forced to recant by Warmist thugs for showing wrong kind of scepticism.”)

But, of the many posts to respond to Randi, two in particular caught my attention. SkeptiCamp pioneer Reed Esau asked,

So what happens now? That uneasy feeling you are now experiencing may be the implications of the situation setting in. … Most of us are laymen who don’t have the professional experience and analytical skills to properly evaluate the data and the methods. To pretend we do (or to reject it on a hunch) separates us from the very scientific enterprise we skeptics purport to value.

Similarly, according to Skeptical Inquirer columnist Massimo Pigliucci, “we need to pause and think carefully about the entire skeptical movement in light of episodes like this one.”

So, What Happens Now?

I’ve long argued that our patchy, lukewarm reluctance to accept mainstream climate science is skepticism’s greatest failure. I’ll return to that argument in future posts, but today I’d like to concentrate on the general question raised by Esau and Pigliucci: what is skepticism’s appropriate relationship to consensus science? What — if anything — may skeptics responsibly say on mainstream science subjects?

Organized skepticism has always talked about science. Certainly, we use science-informed arguments when critiquing paranormal claims. We use techniques from science (and from other investigatory disciplines, such as history and journalism) when digging into strange stuff. The promotion of scientific literacy is also a core part of our traditional mandate (as I argued in the essay “Where Do We Go From Here?”).

Nonetheless, it’s my opinion that there are severe limits on the kinds of scientific arguments into which skeptics may responsibly wade. If we’re serious about our science-based epistemology, we must be prepared to consistently defer to scientific consensus. As Esau puts it,

That consistency is essential, because without it people like myself will ask “So, what’s the point?” To waver from that consistency risks calling the entire enterprise into question.

Staying on Track

The simple truth is that many skeptics have limited scientific qualifications. Yes, of course, there are towering, world-class scientists in the skeptical camp. But most skeptics are not working scientists. Even skeptics who do have scientific qualifications are frequently called upon to comment outside of their area of domain expertise. (Think of astronomer Phil Plait commenting on vaccines, or neurologist Steve Novella commenting on evolution.)

At the same time, people turn to skeptical media to find out what’s really true about weird things — sometimes life and death things, as in alternative medicine. Skeptics solicit that trust. We make the implicit (and sometimes explicit) promise that we are able to provide the nuanced, objective, evidence-based facts.

That combination of stated commitment to science, limited qualifications, and weighty ethical responsibilities (as when we comment on medicine) place a very high due diligence burden upon skeptics.

So, with last week’s firestorm as a cautionary tale, I’d like to propose some rules of thumb for skeptical discussion of mainstream science:

1) Where both scientific domain expertise and expert consensus exist, skeptics are (at best) straight science journalists. We can report the consensus, communicate findings in their proper context — and that’s it.

Skeptical resources spent on mainstream science journalism are resources taken away from our core mandate (pseudoscience and the paranormal — a mandate no one else has), although science popularization is of course valuable in itself when done responsibly. (My upcoming book is a straightforward kids’ primer on evolution.) But skeptics who do delve into science reporting should consider themselves obligated to stay close to mainstream expert opinion — and, obligated to solicit fact-checking and criticism from actual scientific experts.

Unfortunately, some lay skeptics have the idea that general critical thinking skills qualify them to critique professional science even in the face of wide agreement among domain experts. I submit that this is hubris — and almost always a mistake. (It is also the exact argument that sustains anti-vaccine activism, creationism, and other fringe positions whose examples we might wish to avoid.)

Daniel Loxton with 2000 sheep (in night corral) on the BC side of the Alaska Panhandle

In my previous career as a shepherd, we had a term for a very similar (and almost inevitable) phenomenon: “Rookie Syndrome.” Raw trainee shepherds would arrive in camp, look at sheep for a couple days, and then start to argue with the experienced hands. Why they thought a cursory glance qualified them to challenge domain experts is anyone’s guess, but it happened all the time. With some basic, introductory experience (say, two or three years), they typically became embarrassed about the arrogance and naiveté of their first weeks — during which they had known too little to even realize what they did not know.

Whether it’s sheep, law, stage magic, aircraft maintenance, Shakespeare scholarship, or a scientific discipline, every field has its specialized literature, skills, and knowledge base that take years of work to acquire. In any complex field, such domain expertise is essential to form a qualified opinion. And in most such fields, Rookie Syndrome — armchair quarterbacking — is common.

2) Where scientific domain expertise exists, but not consensus, we can report that a controversy exists — but we cannot resolve it. As Bertrand Russell put it,

when the experts are…not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and… when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.

Skeptics sometimes stumble badly here: we cannot, as laypeople, responsibly wade into an area in which we are not expert and expect to settle expert controversies.

If we’re not qualified, we should not promote our opinions. If we are qualified, we should attempt to convince our fellow experts in the relevant peer-reviewed literature — not skip peer review to make popular appeals in the popular (skeptical) press.

3) Where scientific domain expertise and consensus exist, but also a denier movement or pseudoscientific fringe, skeptics can finally roll up their sleeves and get to work.

This is traditional ground for us, our bread and butter, as when we combat creationism or vaccine paranoia or AIDS denial. But note that there are two distinct components to critiquing fringe movements: knowledge of pseudoscience (our own area of domain expertise); and knowledge of the contrasting body of actual scientific literature — a literature on which we are not typically expert.

On the straight science component, we are obligated to defer to the current state of the science. On the pseudoscience component, we are often able to make a contribution in our capacity as the best available experts.

Consider the example of debating creationism. In the past, creationists typically ran rings around biologists. This was not because scientists lacked knowledge of science, but because scientists lacked specialized knowledge of nonsense. That’s where we came in. The history and rhetoric of nonsense is a specialized niche arena — our arena. Skeptics perform an essential public service when we concentrate on that.

This is our primary realm:

4) Where a paranormal or pseudoscientific topic has enthusiasts but no legitimate experts, skeptics may perform original research, advance new theories, and publish in the skeptical press.

This practically endless assortment of traditional skeptical topics (from Nessie to pyramid power to astrology to iridology to UFO crashes to psychic surgery) is where we should focus our energy. In these areas, our contribution is unique, valuable — and, I have argued, an ethical obligation. There are hundreds of topics under this vast umbrella, so it’s not like this “narrow” mandate for skepticism doesn’t offer us enough to do!

In this shadowy, fringe realm, skeptics can indeed critique working scientists. There is no mainstream of consensus science on, say, ghosts; skeptics are the relevant domain experts. And, just as we stumble when we venture outside of our expertise, so too will scientists who charge blindly into our own speciality.

And what are the most powerful, most illuminating, most enduring examples of skeptics schooling credentialed scientists and prestigious mainstream media? Exactly those demonstrations — such as the epic Project Alpha and Carlos hoaxes — brought to us by James “The Amazing” Randi.

1. Is the earth getting warmer?
2. Is the cause of global warming human activity?
3. How much warmer is it going to get?
4. What are the consequences of a warmer climate?
5. How much should we invest in altering the climate? Here are my answers.

Global warming is real and primarily human caused. With questions 3 and 4, however, estimates include error bars that grow wider the further out we run the models because complex systems like climate are notoriously difficult to predict. I provisionally accept the estimate of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the mean global temperature by 2100 will increase by 4.7 degrees Fahrenheit, and that sea levels will rise by about one foot (about the same as they have risen since 1860). Moderate warming with moderate changes.

Question 4 deserves even more skepticism. In his carefully-reasoned and politically-bipartisan book Cool It (Alfred Knopf, 2008), the “skeptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg notes that if global warming continues unchecked through the end of the century there will be 400,000 more heat-related deaths annually; there will be also be 1.8 million fewer cold-related deaths, for a net gain of 1.4 million lives. This is not to say that global warming is good, only that its consequences must be weighed in the balance. For example, Lomborg sites data from the World Wildlife Fund that at most we will lose 15 polar bears a year due to global warming, but what doesn’t get reported is that 49 bears are shot each year. What would be more cost-effective to save polar bear lives — spend hundreds of billions of dollars to lower CO₂ emissions and (maybe) the mean global temperature, or limit hunting permits?

This leads to question 5 — the economics of global climate change — which I think needs a sound dose of skepticism, particularly since the collapse of our economy. Even if all countries had ratified the Kyoto Protocol and lived up to its standards (which most did not), according to the IPCC, at best it would have postponed the 4.70F average increase just five years from 2100 to 2105, at a cost of $180 billion a year! By comparison, although global warming may cause an increase of two million deaths due to hunger annually by 2100, the U.N. estimates that for $10 billion a year we could save 229 million people from hunger annually today. It’s time for economic triage.

Economics is about the efficient allocation of limited resources that have alternative uses. And after the U.S. government allocated a trillion dollars of our limited resources to shore up our flagging financial foundations, those alternative uses have never seemed so pressing. Should we (can we?) really allocate the equivalent of a Manhattan Project to lower CO₂ emissions 50 percent by 2050 and 80 percent by 2100, as the IPCC recommends in order to divert disaster? My answer is no. Why? Because the potential benefits for the costs incurred are simply not warranted.

If you had, say, $50 billion a year to make the world a better place for more people, how would you spend it? In 2004, Lomborg asked this question to a group of scientists and world leaders, including four Nobel laureates. This “Copenhagen Consensus,” as it is called, ranked reduction of CO₂ emissions 16th out of 17 challenges. The top four were: controlling HIV/AIDS, micronutrients for fighting malnutrition, free trade to attenuate poverty, and battling malaria. A 2006 Copenhagen Consensus of U.N. ambassadors constructed a similar list, with communicable diseases, clean drinking water, and malnutrition at the top, and climate change at the bottom. A late 2008 meeting that included five Nobel Laureates recommended that President-elect Barack Obama allocate his promised $150 billion in subsidies for new technologies and $50 billion in foreign aid be allocated for research on malnutrition, immunization, and agricultural technologies. For a cool Kyoto $180 billion you can buy a lot of condoms, vitamin tablets, and mosquito nets and rescue hundreds of millions of people from disease, starvation, and impoverishment.

If you are skeptical of Lomborg and his branch of environmental skepticism, read the Yale University economist William Nordhaus’ technical book A Question of Balance (Yale University Press, 2008). Nordhaus computes the costs-benefits of various recommendations for changing the climate by either 2105 or 2205, primarily focused on the cost of curbing carbon emissions. Economists like to compute future profits and losses based on investments made today, adjusting for the value of a future dollar at an average interest rate of four percent. If we spent a trillion dollars today (the equivalent of the recent bailout or the Iraq war), how much climate change would it buy us in a century at four percent interest? Nordhaus’s calculations are compared to doing nothing, where a plus value is better and a minus value worse than doing nothing. Kyoto with the U.S. is plus one and without the U.S. zero, for example, and a gradually increasing global carbon tax is a plus three. That is, a $1 trillion cost today buys us $3 trillion of benefits in a century. Al Gore’s proposals, by contrast, score a minus 21, where $1 trillion invested today in Gore’s plans would net us a loss of $21 trillion in 2105.

Add to these calculations the numerous other crises we face, such as the housing calamity, the financial meltdown, the coming collapse of social security and medicare, two wars, a failing public education system, etc.

In my opinion we need to chill out on all extremist plans that entail expenses best described as Brobdingnagian, require our intervention into developing countries best portrayed as imperialistic, or involve state controls best portrayed as fascistic. Give green technologies and free markets a chance.

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I’m tired of people yelling at each other from opposite sides of the fence. Pick a side! Pick a side! I’m right! You’re wrong!

It doesn’t matter what the issue is these days. Everyone has an opinion whether or not it is well-informed, and that opinion is chained to the concrete slab in the ground that defines an issue. And, like dogs protecting a house, the barks are loud. Intimidating.

The chances of breaking that chain or moving the concrete are slim. So, how do you stop the barking? Drown it out with barking of your own? Adding to the noise just increases the din that drowns out reason.

Do you keep walking past the house until you can’t hear the noise, until the barking stops on its own? Just being there provokes the dog’s angry response.

So, what do you choose? And, why?

This past week, I asked Twitter whether or not people thought the public’s interest in global warming had cooled. I had just read a NYT article reporting on polled data suggesting such a trend. The responses I received were quite interesting.

Now I know that Twitter is by no means a random sample of people. Most of the individuals on Twitter are tech savvy information junkies, which slants the population right off the bat. Secondly, the wording I used was meant to get peoples’ attention. Using ‘global warming’ instead of the new, less evocative term ‘climate change’ immediately catches the eye of the opinionated.

My first, entirely unscientific result was that the population within Twitter who responded to my question paralleled the poll results. People are much more concerned about the economy and job stability these days than whether or not the ice sheets might melt someday. This all seems to jive quite well with the human “hierarchy of needs” developed by a guy named Abraham Mazlow, wherein physiological needs must be met before people can attend to their psychological growth. When we were in times of economic plenty, people had more time to consider global issues like the environment and climate change, and to potentially make changes in their lives according to a certain perspective. Now, with jobs on the line, people are more self-interested, and less likely to be concerned about global issues.

However, the season could also be a factor in the waning climatological interest. Most places are too cold right now for people to be thinking about the more generalized (and less extreme) warming trend that has been measured around the globe. Also, with the economy and the US Presidential transition taking up time/space in the media for the past few months, it may just have fallen off of peoples’ radar.

The second result of my request was an onslaught of anthropogenic global warming deniers. What people believe wasn’t even part of my question. Yet, here they were telling me in no uncertain terms that human-induced climate change is a bunch of hogwash. Maybe in their own way, they were answering my question in the negative. Obviously, the issue has not cooled for some.

Working in science communications, I think it is very important to tell a correct tale, and to help people understand what is going to affect their lives. Somehow, the climate issue has been compounded beyond reporting the facts as they appear into an emotional and politically divided issue. There doesn’t seem to be a way to discuss the science anymore without triggering someone’s hot button.

The scientific debates of the climatologists have expanded into battles that include the meteorologists, the geologists, the pundits, and Joe Blow. The media hasn’t helped. There is a glut of misinformation, and misleading and politically biased content, which makes discerning the accurate reporting more difficult than it should be. Who do you turn to when the path isn’t clear? Who do you trust? It seems that most people turn to their ideological roots. They go home.

Home is comfortable and safe, making it a difficult place from which to move people. People resent the attempt to move them. Do you know many people who react well to being told that they are wrong? It’s hard to even find that quality among scientists.

So, how do we stop the reactionary defense of an ideological stance?

I suggest that we change the topic entirely.

Shall we leave the science of the climate to the scientists, and get to work on more pressing issues? This is not a new idea. It has already seen some success in redirecing peoples’ energies. Suddenly, climate change has been replaced with topics like energy independence and transfer of renewable technologies to developing nations.

By changing the climate change topic, which has an arguably pessimistic, end-of-the-world tone into a more positive, results-based discussion, the din has softened to mere clamour.

Where else can the topic be changed, and how?