Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
as do absurd accusations against others. Some of the amateurs are more than willing to engage in
some degree of mischief, whether it be taking advantage of the IPCC open review process by flooding
its authors with countless frivolous comments (each of which must be responded to, according to
IPCC rules) or exploiting the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and related laws to launch
frivolous requests for documents and private correspondence of scientists. A since deceased
Tasmanian named John Daly, with his Web site “Still Waiting for Greenhouse,” provided an early
proof-of-concept for how a single individual with nothing more than a Web site could battle
mainstream climate science by peddling contrarian views and maligning the work of dedicated
scientists.
Today, much of the trench warfare takes place on the Internet. Former mining industry consultant
Stephen McIntyre is especially well known for his broadsides against established climate science.
McIntyre frequently uses his Web site climateaudit to launch attacks against climate scientists
themselves, often leveling thinly veiled accusations of fraud and incompetence—once, for example,
titling a post about a highly respected NASA climate scientist with the rhetorical question “Is Gavin
Schmidt Honest?”
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Since then, a number of other amateur climate change denial bloggers have arrived on the scene.
Most prominent among them is Anthony Watts, a meteorologist for a Fox News AM radio affiliate in
Chico, California, and founder of the site “Watts Up with That?” which has overtaken climateaudit as
the leading climate change denial blog. Watts also started the Web site
SurfaceStations.org
, which
purported to identify poorly sited meteorological stations in the United States in an effort to
demonstrate that the instrumental record of warming temperatures is hopelessly compromised by
instrumental measurement biases. With the assistance of the Heartland Institute, Watts published a
glossy, very official-looking report about the project, showing lots of photos of ostensibly badly sited
meteorological stations, with plots of the supposedly compromised records.
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Curiously absent from that report, however, was any direct comparison showing what the
surface temperature record looks like both with and without the sites that Watts deemed unworthy.
Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) went ahead and
calculated it themselves, producing versions of the continental U.S. average temperature curve both
with and without the records in question. You can probably anticipate the result: It was difficult to
distinguish the “with” and “without” versions within the thickness of the plot curves. Eliminating the
“suspect” data made virtually no difference at all; in fact, the small bias that was found was of the
opposite sign. The “corrected” record showed slightly more warming!
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This is just one example of a
favored
modus operandi
among climate change contrarians: hyping real or imagined errors that make
no difference to any significant scientific conclusions—the scientific equivalent of a identifying a
typo in a report.
Finally, there is the front line of the climate change denial ground attack. It consists of anti-
climate-science activists and conspiracy theorists who operate largely under the radar screen but
nonetheless play an essential role in the denial agenda. Their primary tool is the “cut-and-paste,” the
repetition of contrarian talking points in arguments with friends, neighbors, relatives, and coworkers;
in letters to editors of local newspapers; in online newsgroups; in comments sections of Internet news
articles; and on blogs. Their role is not to be underestimated, as false statements repeated often
enough help create the echo chamber of climate change disinformation.
Not all “amateurs” are what they appear to be. A primary goal of the disinformation machine is
