19/06/2019

Why Old-School Climate Denial Has Had Its Day

The Conversation - 

New South Wales, which was 100% drought-declared in August 2018, is already suffering climate impacts. Michael Cleary
The Coalition has been re-elected to government, and after six years in office it has not created any effective policies for reducing greenhouse emissions. Does that mean the Australian climate change debate is stuck in 2013? Not exactly.
While Australia still lacks effective climate change policies, the debate has definitely shifted. It’s particularly noticeable to scientists, like myself, who were very active participants in the Australian climate debate just a few years ago.
The debate has moved away from the basic science, and on to the economic and political ramifications. And if advocates for reducing greenhouse emissions don’t fully recognise this, they risk shooting themselves in the foot.
Australia’s carbon dioxide emissions are not falling. Department of Environment and Energy
The old denials
Old-school climate change denial, be it denial that warming is taking place or that humans are responsible for that warming, featured prominently in Australian politics a decade ago. In 2009 Tony Abbott, then a Liberal frontbencher jockeying for the party leadership, told ABC’s 7.30 Report:
I am, as you know, hugely unconvinced by the so-called settled science on climate change.
The theory and evidence base for human-induced climate change is vast and growing. In contrast, the counterarguments were so sloppy that there were many targets for scientists to shoot at.
Climate “sceptics” have always been very keen on cherrypicking data. They would make a big fuss about some unusually cold days, or alleged discrepancies at a handful of weather stations, while ignoring broader trends. They made claims of data manipulation that, if true, would entail a global conspiracy, despite the availability of code and data.
Incorrect predictions of imminent global cooling were made on the basis of rudimentary analyses rather than sophisticated models. Cycles were invoked, in a manner reminiscent of epicycles and stock market “chartism” – but doodling with spreadsheets cannot defeat carbon dioxide.
That was the state of climate “scepticism” a decade ago, and frankly that’s where it remains in 2019. It’s old, tired, and increasingly irrelevant as the impact of climate change becomes clearer.
Australians just cannot ignore the extended bushfire season, drought, and bleached coral reefs.zzz

Partisans
Climate “scepticism” was always underpinned by politics rather than science, and that’s clearer now than it was a decade ago.
Several Australian climate contrarians describe themselves as libertarians - falling to the right of mainstream Australian politics. David Archibald is a climate sceptic, but is now better known as candidate for the Australian Liberty Alliance, One Nation and (finally) Fraser Anning’s Conservative National Party. The climate change denying Galileo Movement’s claim to be to be non-partisan was always suspect - and now doubly so with its former project leader, Malcolm Roberts, representing One Nation in the Senate.
Given this, it isn’t surprising that relatively few Australians reject the science of climate change. Just 11% of Australians believe recent global warming is natural, and only 4% believe “there’s no such thing as climate change”.
Old-school climate change denial isn’t just unfounded, it’s also unpopular. Before last month’s federal election, Abbott bet a cafe patron in his electorate A$100 that “the climate will not change in ten years”. It reminded me of similar bets made and lost over the past decade. We don’t know whether Abbott will end up paying out on the bet – but we do know he lost his seat.

The shift
So what has changed in the years since Abbott was able to gain traction, rather than opprobrium, by disdaining climate science? The Australian still runs Ian Plimer and Maurice Newman on its opinion pages, and Sky News “after dark” often features climate cranks. But prominent politicians rarely repeat their nonsense any more. When the government spins Australia’s rising emissions, it does it by claiming that investing in natural gas helps cut emissions elsewhere, rather than by pretending CO₂ is merely “plant food”.
As a scientist, I rarely feel the need to debunk the claims of old-school climate cranks. OK, I did recently discuss the weather predictions of a “corporate astrologer” with Media Watch, but that was just bizarre rather than urgent.
Back in the real world, the debate has shifted to costs and jobs.
Modelling by the economist Brian Fisher, who concluded that climate policies would be very expensive, featured prominently in the election campaign. Federal energy minister Angus Taylor, now also responsible for reducing emissions, used the figures to attack the Labor Party, despite expert warnings that the modelling used “absurd cost assumptions”.

Many people still assume the costs of climate change are in the future, despite us increasingly seeing the impacts now. While scientists work to quantify the environmental damage, arguments about the costs and benefits of climate policy are the domain of economists.
Jobs associated with coal mining were a prominent theme of the election campaign, and may have been decisive in Queensland’s huge anti-Labor swing. It is obvious that burning more coal makes more CO₂, but that fact doesn’t stop people wanting jobs. The new green economy is uncharted territory for many workers with skills and experience in mining.
That said, there are economic arguments against new coalmines and new mines may not deliver the number of jobs promised. Australian power companies, unlike government backbenchers and Clive Palmer, have little enthusiasm for new coal-fired power stations. But the fact remains that these economic issues are largely outside the domain of scientists.
Debates about climate policy remain heated, despite the scientific basics being widely accepted. Concerns about economic costs and jobs must be addressed, even if those concerns are built on flawed assumptions and promises that may be not kept. We also cannot forget that climate change is already here, impacting agriculture in particular.
Science should inform and underpin arguments, but economics and politics are now the principal battlegrounds in the Australian climate debate.

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In Courtrooms, Climate Change Is No Longer Up For Debate

Undark - 

Increasingly, global warming science is going unchallenged in lawsuits seeking to curb fossil fuel use and hold companies to account.
Alexander Pohl/NurPhoto via Getty Images
In September 2017, San Francisco experienced its hottest day on record, with temperatures reaching a searing 106 degrees. Weeks later, the city joined Oakland to announce it would sue five major fossil fuel firms — BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips — for the costs of building sea walls and other infrastructure to protect residents from global warming.
“I don’t even imagine a case where there is a jury hearing a liability issue that you’d see a vigorous attack on the underlying science.”
When the case reached court the following year, federal district judge William Alsup ordered a tutorial on climate change in which he asked both sides a series of pointed questions, including what caused the planet’s ice ages and what the main sources of CO2 in the atmosphere were. In the news media, the trial was cast as a possible “Scopes” moment for climate change, a reference to the seminal 1925 Tennessee trial in which evolutionary theory was pitted against Biblical teaching.
The cities called on a number of expert witnesses, including Myles Allen, a professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford. By walking the judge through the century-long history of climate science, punctuated with rapidly ascending line graphs, the witnesses brought global warming to the court’s attention in a way that left no doubt about how credible a threat it was. The fossil-fuel companies, meanwhile, took a different tack. Chevron’s evidence during the tutorial was presented through a lawyer, who acknowledged the role of human activity in climate change but denied the company could have known the future implications of its actions and said a court wasn’t the right place to deal with the issue. Statements submitted by the other defendants were largely in line with Chevron’s presentation.
Filed alongside the case were two amicus briefs — documents produced by someone who is not a direct party in a case, but has an interest in the subject at hand — questioning aspects of climate science. They were written by well-known climate skeptics and promoted by the Heartland Institute, a libertarian organization with links to the fossil fuel industry. Alsup challenged the briefs’ validity and asked who had funded the research behind them, which turned out to include fossil fuel firms such as Peabody and ExxonMobil.
In the end, Allen said, the defense chose not to call on those climate skeptics when presenting its formal evidence in court, a sign of how much progress has been made in climate science and public understanding over the past decade. “Maybe 10 years ago they would have been called, but I think it’s recognized now that it’s become so discredited that it’s not worth putting them up,” said Allen.
Alsup ultimately dismissed the case, ruling that while the evidence of climate change is real and persuasive, the courts are not the proper place to decide issues of such global magnitude, deferring the matter to the legislative and executive branches. Even so, his overall sympathy to the science and the short shrift he gave climate-change denial show how the basic facts of anthropogenic global warming are increasingly being accepted in law. Indeed, other jurisdictions in the United States and abroad now regularly hear about the effects of global warming and the threats it poses. And campaign groups, individuals, and public authorities involved in the burgeoning field of climate litigation are testing out various legal strategies to try to force recalcitrant governments and companies to cut their emissions faster and to get compensation for damages.
“I think the real reason you don’t see the basic science challenged much in these cases is that courts are places of inquiry where the standards of reliability are reason and evidence rather than tweets, falsehoods, and the kind of manipulative discourse that you hear in the political sphere,” said Douglas Kysar, the deputy dean of Yale Law School. “In the U.S., I don’t even imagine a case where there is a jury hearing a liability issue that you’d see a vigorous attack on the underlying science.”
Oakland and San Francisco are now appealing Alsup’s decision, but the judge’s active engagement with the science was nonetheless in stark contrast to a Supreme Court case 12 years earlier, involving the Environmental Protection Agency’s responsibility for regulating greenhouse gases. When Justice Antonin Scalia was corrected for confusing the layers of the atmosphere, he blurted out in frustration: “I’m not a scientist. That’s why I don’t want to have to deal with global warming.”
That would be unlikely to fly today, and Kysar notes that expert testimony in most courtrooms is subject to rigorous admissibility standards. “The courts’ legitimacy and credibility is not based on the power of the purse, having an army, or being elected; it’s based on making pronouncements that seem to be driven by evidence, reason, and principle,” he said. “So when they’re making scientific claims about what actions are causing what effects in the world, they want to be quite sure they’ve got it right.”

••••

KRISTIN CASPER, litigation counsel for Greenpeace’s Global Climate Justice and Liability campaign, said judicial awareness of climate science will continue to grow as public awareness and acceptance increases. “I would expect almost every judiciary will have a climate case before it at some point in the next couple of years,” Casper said. One example: In 2017, an Australian judge was asked to determine whether an open-cut coal mine should be built in Gloucester, New South Wales. The Rocky Hill Coal Project had been denied permission by the state’s planning minister.
“I would expect almost every judiciary will have a climate case before it at some point in the next couple of years.”
In a masterclass of science communication, Will Steffen, emeritus professor at the Australian National University’s Climate Change Institute and a member of Australia’s Climate Council, explained how the world has already vastly overcommitted to spending its carbon budget. He gently led the court to the conclusion that any project which opens up new fossil fuel deposits is incompatible with the Paris Agreement on climate change which most countries signed in 2015. “I wanted to make sure that the chain of logic we used in a scientific approach came through very clearly,” Steffen said. In February 2019, the judge refused to approve the Rocky Hill project in a judgment that extensively referenced Steffen’s testimony.
In other countries — particularly in Europe — public acceptance of climate change science is broader and is often reflected in legal cases. When the Urgenda Foundation, a Dutch organization devoted to promoting use of renewable energy, challenged the Dutch government’s strategy to curb greenhouse-gas emissions in 2015, it deliberately chose not to put forward any climate experts as witnesses. Urgenda’s legal counsel, Dennis van Berkel, said they based their case entirely on official reports from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), of which the Netherlands is a member. “We wanted to have a discussion on the law, not the facts,” van Berkel said. “So it was very much our goal to present the facts as they were acknowledged by the state themselves.”
The Dutch government didn’t dispute that climate change is real, but it disagreed that it had to act as quickly as campaigners wanted. It had already set a target to cut emissions by 2020 but was unlikely to meet it. Urgenda responded by presenting evidence from the IPCC and UNEP showing that delays in confronting climate change would exacerbate its risks and costs. Van Berkel said politicians often argue that it’s too expensive to act on climate change. “But that argument came up short in court because there was no way to substantiate it,” he said, “because the reports all read in the other direction.”
In 2015, the judge agreed, ordering the Netherlands to cut its emissions by 25 percent by 2020 compared to 1990 levels. The Dutch government is appealing the decision in the Netherlands’ Supreme Court, where the final argument is likely to revolve around an interpretation of human rights law. But it was the first time a court had forced a government to act on climate change, and it inspired similar cases in Ireland, Switzerland, New Zealand, and Pakistan.

••••

OF COURSE, judges still have to address knotty questions about who is ultimately responsible for putting emissions into the air, who should stop it from happening, and who should pay for the consequences. Answers will only come as more cases go to court, and it seems likely that plaintiffs will be helped by the accumulation of scientific evidence analyzing the extent to which climate change contributes to sea-level rise or extreme weather, and how much can be traced to particular companies.
Plaintiffs will be helped by the accumulation of scientific evidence analyzing the extent to which climate change contributes to sea-level rise or extreme weather.
But even if climate litigation doesn’t succeed, it has helped to shift the tone of public debate, as is clear with one of the most important cases currently going through the courts. In Juliana v. United States, a group of 21 young people claim inaction on climate change violates their fundamental constitutional rights to liberty, life, and property. While the Obama administration initially attempted to dismiss the case, filed by the nonprofit organization Our Children’s Trust in 2016, its lawyers didn’t dispute many of the stated facts about climate change. And even now, Kysar said, despite the current climate-change skepticism guiding the Trump White House, the department’s new political appointees can do little to change its formal response.
“If they tried to file an amended answer which went back on those stipulations,” said Kysar, “they would have looked like a laughing stock.”
The Juliana case has many procedural and institutional hurdles to overcome before it reaches trial. Earlier this month, a panel of judges heard arguments from both sides on whether the case should be allowed to proceed. But if it does, Kysar believes it will be very hard for the government to win.
“What it would have to say is that, although we stipulate to all these facts about the existential threat that we are substantially contributing to through our actions and inactions, we don’t believe that it’s the responsibility of government to preserve the basic conditions for civilized life,” he said. “What lawyer wants to make that argument?”

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A Scientist Took Climate Change Deniers To Court And Wrested An Apology From Them

Mother Jones - 

In the fight against climate disinformation, experts like him are turning to new arenas.
Scientist Michael Mann attends the New York screening of the HBO documentary, "How To Let Go Of The World And All The Things Climate Can't Change" in New York City. Slaven Vlasic/Getty/HBO
In 2011, renowned scientist Michael E. Mann sued a Canadian think tank that published an interview suggesting his work on climate change was fraud.
Eight years later, the Winnipeg-based Frontier Centre for Public Policy—which often promotes climate change denial—apologized Friday and wiped the inflammatory interview from its website.
“(The apology) gives me faith in our legal system that truth can still win out, even in an era of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts,'” Mann said in an email to National Observer.
In the fight against climate disinformation, experts like Mann, an atmospheric scientist at Pennsylvania State University, are turning to new arenas.
Mann is best known as the lead researcher on a landmark 1998 paper on climate change. He and three colleagues reconstructed global temperatures going back about 500 years, producing a now-infamous sideways-hockey-stick-like graph of global temperatures that showed a sharp upswing beginning in the 1900s.
Mann has spent the two decades since the paper’s publication defending it and his reputation against climate change deniers—sometimes in court. He settled with the Frontier Centre on Friday, but a related case in British Columbia and a similar one in the United States are ongoing.
In a message posted to its website, the Frontier Centre apologized for publishing “untrue and disparaging” comments about Mann.
“Although the Frontier Centre for Public Policy still does not see eye to eye with Mr. Mann on the subject of global warming and climate change, we now accept that it was wrong to publish allegations by others that Mr. Mann did not comply with ethical standards…” the think tank wrote in part.
In an email to National Observer, Frontier president and CEO Peter Holle said the group is choosing to address the issue of climate change through its other activities instead of the courts.
“The organization had an opportunity to settle with Mann to avoid further expenditure of time and resources on the matter,” Holle wrote.
Though Mann said the Frontier Centre was smart to retract and apologize, he also pointed out that the case was about untrue allegations of misconduct, not the group’s stance on climate change, making it an outlier.
“Making false and malicious allegations about a scientist is illegal,” Mann said by email. “The law is the appropriate recourse, and often an effective one, as this latest episode demonstrates.”
Climate scientists should be challenging climate disinformation publicly more often, said University of Calgary climatologist Shawn Marshall, “but it is a matter of picking our battles.” Scientists aren’t marketers, Marshall added, but now find themselves in the business of convincing the public their findings are real—an especially difficult task in the polarized realm of social media.
One example played out in real-time Saturday when Milton MP and deputy Conservative party leader Lisa Raitt—who has a master’s degree in environmental biochemical toxicology—tweeted a link to a Financial Post opinion piece that falsely claimed, against scientific consensus and a report released by the federal government in April, that there’s “no solid connection between climate change and the major indicators of extreme weather.” The story was authored by an economist who does not believe in climate change.
Soon after, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe replied.
“Hi Lisa—I am a climate scientist,” tweeted Hayhoe, a Canadian working at Texas Tech University, linking to YouTube videos explaining the climate crisis. “The article you quote above is incorrect and dangerously misleading. For the sake of our shared country, please have the courage and the integrity to update your understanding.”
Hayhoe shared several more links and invited Raitt to reach out if she had questions. Raitt deleted the original tweet in short order and shared one of Hayhoe’s, saying it was “important to read this as well.”
“Well I’ve learned my lesson in tweeting anything about climate change,” Raitt posted later the same day. “I’m not the one to fight with on this because like most I believe that emissions cause climate change and we should reduce emissions.”
Hayhoe replied with a thank you: “If all our politicians were like this, we would be in a much better place!” she tweeted.
Most people who deny climate change do so because they’ve received information that lines up with their beliefs from a source they trust, Hayhoe told National Observer.
“It’s not a case of people doing this largely for nefarious reasons, for selfish reasons, for greedy reasons, for evil reasons,” she said.
In an interview with National Observer Wednesday, Raitt said the original tweet wasn’t an attempt at a climate change-denying political statement—she was sharing an article she’d read, and wasn’t aware of the author’s background. Once Hayhoe and others pointed out the clash between the article and scientific consensus, she realized she “didn’t want to be a lightning rod on this topic” and deleted it, Raitt said.
“(Hayhoe’s) tweet spoke to me, because it was clearly somebody who was giving me the benefit of the doubt that I wasn’t trying to make a political statement,” Raitt said. The two later had a conversation in private messages and made plans to meet the next time Hayhoe is in Ontario.
The science of attributing extreme weather events to climate change is an emerging one, and Raitt said she’s just learning about it now. However, she said she “fundamentally” believes in climate change and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—something she then took flack over from climate change deniers on Twitter.
“Me being caught in this crossfire between two different streams of thought on whether or not extreme weather is a result of climate change, that’s not an argument I am educated enough to have,” Raitt said. “I wasn’t going to win on either side of this.”
Earlier in his career, Marshall said, he used to engage more with online climate-change denial, something he’s since given up on. “I used to try to respond to it and give proper sources to support the truth and facts, but then they just came back with more rant and often it turned to harassment and bad language.”
Marshall also participated in two public debates with representatives of Friends of Science, a climate change-denying nonprofit, but said he worries it didn’t help—climate change deniers can confuse the facts with false information, while scientists must stick to research that might be difficult for non-scientists to fully understand.
“On the other side there’s no rules,” he said. “It’s hard to win against that.”
Instead of fighting with climate change deniers directly, Marshall said he now prefers to spend time arming his students with the information they need to combat climate myths.
“I’m feeling defeated,” Marshall said. “I feel like we have to fight this in a different way than having arguments with people who don’t want to have a discussion.”
Another climate change-related legal dispute happened in 2009, when scientist Andrew Weaver, who’s now a BC MLA and leader of the province’s Green party, sued the National Post over a series of four articles he said attacked his character. The articles also expressed skepticism about climate change.
In April 2017, a BC judge overturned a previous ruling, which was in Weaver’s favour, and ordered a new trial. Weaver’s lawyer didn’t immediately respond to a request for an update, and Weaver said in a phone interview that he couldn’t comment on the case.
A spokesperson for the Post‘s parent company, Postmedia, declined to comment as the matter is still before the courts. One of the reporters named in the suit, Kevin Libin, was promoted on Monday to become executive politics editor for the entire Postmedia chain, including local dailies like the Edmonton Journal and Ottawa Citizen.
Climate change court cases remain rare—the best way to combat garden-variety denialism is to try to understand where the person is coming from on an individual basis, Weaver told National Observer. That can allow you to make arguments that appeal to the person’s values, rather than making them feel attacked.
“I don’t think it helps to belittle,” Weaver said. “People talk all over each other. Unless you know where someone’s coming from you don’t know how to address their arguments.”
Though public figures rarely, if ever, back down on climate change denial publicly, Hayhoe said she continues to try to have those conversations for the sake of others who are reading along and might be unsure what to believe.
“Every single one of us, what we do in areas that we don’t know too much about is we look to (thought leaders) to form our opinion,” she said.
“I do them more for other people who want to know what is the truth.”

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