Climate Science Comes of Age - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 17

Contrarians have tended to retreat up the ladder of denial as the scientific evidence has become
more compelling. With the ever upwardly trending Keeling curve of CO 2 levels plain for anyone to
see, few were calling into question the rise in atmospheric CO 2 by the time I had entered climate
science in the early 1990s. But you could still find claims that there was no evidence of warming.
John Christy and Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, for example, argued in a
series of papers in the early 1990s that the satellite temperature measurements they had analyzed
demonstrated an absence of warming in the atmosphere. 14 Problems with their estimation procedures
were established by the late 1990s, however. 15 When their original findings were found to have been
almost entirely in error, they did acknowledge that Earth is warming. Spencer still contends,
nonetheless, that humans are not to blame for the increase, 16 while Christy accepts that there is a
detectable human contribution to the warming, but argues that future warming will be less than
standard climate models project. 17
Figure 2.4: The Stages of Denial
A cartoon that uses a thermometer to gauge one conception of the various stages of climate change denial. [TOLES ©2009 The
Washington Post. Reprinted with permission of UNIVERSAL UCLICK. All rights reserved.]
Contrarians in the climate change debate, oddly enough, have been known to jump several rungs
of the ladder of denial at once. For example, S. Fred Singer appeared to leap from warming is not
occurring (stage 2) all the way to it is warming but there is nothing we can do about it anyway (stage
6) with the topic Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years that he coauthored in 2006. 18
Yet one can still find some clinging to that lowest rung of the ladder, the rung I term “CO 2
denial.” In a 2007 article in the social science journal Energy and Environment , a high school