Climate Change Skeptics I Love and Loathe

Exxon, Exxon, clean it up. / You take all of your money and put it in my cup. / There's nothing you could do, to repay the sea. / There's about two million ways that you could repay me. From "Valdez," by Port O'Brien (All We Could Do Was Sing, 2008)

There are climate change skeptics that I might not love exactly, but at least respect. Some like Stephen McIntyre, who was featured in The Star December 12, uses his knowledge of mathematics to challenge studies published by scientists. The article focuses on McIntyre's issue with Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph that was presented to illustrate a rapid increase in global temperatures in recent decades compared to trends from the last thousand years. Just as importantly, according to the article, he is unpaid: "he's not funded by the oil industry or big business."

What the article doesn't mention are a couple interesting points raised in a Scientific American article called "Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense." On page two, John Rennie argues that the flaws in Mann's original study were overstated, then goes on to point out that Mann and others have since demonstrated in other studies that there is more evidence that the global warming trend has occurred in the past two centuries in which industrialization has increased the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Rennie closes the section with a reminder that even if all the historic temperature reconstructions were discredited, it still wouldn't account for "studies of climate mechanics" which support the explanation that humans are responsible for the "recent rapid rise in CO2." [Thanks to the ravenweb blog for bringing this article to my attention. See the original blog post for a solid recommendation of a children's book that combines Christmas & climate change education of all things.]

Rennie's article notwithstanding, skeptics like McIntyre serve a useful role. In any field where there is a broad consensus on an issue, a few gadflys are needed to mitigate the negative side effects of groupthink. If meaningful change on carbon emissions is going to happen, it will only come if the best evidence is presented to the general public and the weakest studies are winnowed out before they trigger a cynical response from people.

Then there are the skeptics I loathe. You probably know the type. They are the ones bankrolled by certain big businesses to sow confusion about the scientific case being made that humans are responsible for increases in CO2 in the atmosphere. What might surprise you is that some of these climate change skeptics are on a second career. Their first? Denying that smoking causes cancer. Three years ago, CBC's The Fifth Estate (Canada's 60 Minutes), ran a documentary called "The Denial Machine" that made the following case:

It shows that companies such as Exxon Mobil are working with top public relations firms and using many of the same tactics and personnel as those employed by Phillip Morris and RJ Reynolds to dispute the cigarette-cancer link in the 1990s. Exxon Mobil sought out those willing to question the science behind climate change, providing funding for some of them, their organizations and their studies.

As familiar as the tactics may seem, the documentary still proved to be an eye-opening experience for me. As far as I'm concerned, the moment a company like Exxon stoops to these tactics, it is an admission that they do agree with the scientific consensus on climate change, and their only recourse is to stall political change as long as possible to maximize profits at the expense of the common good.

The final straw for me was when the program exposed Imperial Oil's sponsorship of a conference in Ottawa that gathered Canadian and U.S. climate change skeptics, some of whom have received money from Exxon (Exxon owns 69.6% of Imperial, better known nationally as Esso). I took a hammer out that night and pulverized my Esso Speedpass and (with only one exception I recall) haven't fueled up at any of their stations since. It's one thing for an oil company to feed my own dependence on oil based transportation, it's another for them to spend profits gained from those transactions trying to convince politicians that no negative consequences arise from this codependence.

Postscript

Unless something unexpected happens, this will be my last blog post on this topic for a while. I found the process worthwhile, having revisited certain sources and being exposed to new ones that solidified my knowledge base on this issue. Along the way, I also identified some strategies that can be enacted on a domestic level to fend off feelings of helplessness that the political failure on the national level could induce. One unintended side effect of blogging on this subject was stumbling upon an advertisement for a series of PBS documentaries called Carbon Watch. I haven't viewed any of them yet, but given Frontline's solid journalistic credentials, it should prove informative. I'll give the last word to Gwynne Dyer, a respected Canadian journalist who writes a column syndicated in 45 countries, including this one on the "Aftermath of Copenhagen." I expect his analysis will carry more weight with you than mine did anyway.