In researching a book on global warming deniers, we often felt demoralized by the efficacy of doubt-mongering tactics and depressed that the American public had been repeatedly fooled by the same strategy and tactics. On the other hand, we felt cautiously optimistic because disputes over other issues — tobacco smoking, acid rain, second-hand smoke, and the ozone hole — ended with the scientific evidence prevailing, and with regulation that (however delayed or weakened) addressed the problem.

Global warming was the great unfinished story, but with the mainstream media and many politicians acknowledging the reality of global warming in recent years, it seemed that there was real progress. “The debate is over,” California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared in 2005. “We know the science. We see the threat posed by changes in our climate.”

Now it seems that progress has been reversed. In recent months, as the U.S. Senate prepared to consider climate and energy legislation, there has been a stepped-up effort on a broad front to belittle the overwhelming evidence of human-caused global warming. As they did with smoking and acid rain, the so-called global warming skeptics have had one overriding goal: to sow doubt in the public’s mind and head off government regulation.

….If all this sounds familiar, it should. Similar attacks were launched against the scientific evidence of the ozone hole, of second-hand smoke, and of the harms of DDT. As one tobacco executive put it in 1969, “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public.” Casting doubt about climate science is simply part of the effort to prevent regulation of fossil fuels. The point of merchandising doubt was, and remains, the prevention of government regulation.

These opponents of science are free-market fundamentalists, unwilling to accept that global warming and many other pollution-induced ills are market failures, and that government action of some kind will be needed to address it. Market fundamentalists believe that free markets are the solution to social problems and government intervention can only do harm. The reality, however, amply demonstrated by experience, is that pollution is external to the market system — there’s no cost to dumping waste into the air and water. And as Lord Nicholas Stern has recently noted, global warming is the biggest market failure of them all. But this is yet another truth that the free market fundamentalists prefer to ignore.

Meanwhile, the contrarians’ campaigns continue, and with significant success: Many Americans accept the deniers’ allegations as true, or at least are confused by them, and therefore do not know what to think or whom to trust. Science has been effectively undermined, which has eroded public support for the decisive action needed to avoid the worst effects of global warming.

Riley Dunlap has an interesting article, At 40, Environmental Movement Endures, With Less Consensus, with new Gallup poll results that’s worth reading.

April 22 marks the 40^th anniversary of the first Earth Day, an event widely considered to be the birth of the modern environmental movement. Few social movements survive 40 years, so in this sense alone, environmentalism might be considered successful. On the other hand, the movement has had limited success in policy arenas in recent years, leading to allegations of the “death of environmentalism.”  In addition, this year’s Gallup Environment poll finds historically low levels of public worry about environmental problems (particularly global warming) and support for environmental protection. Are we witnessing the end of environmentalism as a significant social movement and, in the eyes of many, a major progressive force in the United States?

Read more to find out…

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…in an op-ed piece in today’s NY Times.

Excerpts (links his):

[T]he scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

Because these and other effects of global warming are distributed globally, they are difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location. For example, January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.

Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.

The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States. Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm.

….The political paralysis that is now so painfully evident in Washington has thus far prevented action by the Senate — not only on climate and energy legislation, but also on health care reform, financial regulatory reform and a host of other pressing issues.

….Some analysts attribute the failure to an inherent flaw in the design of the chosen solution — arguing that a cap-and-trade approach is too unwieldy and difficult to put in place. Moreover, these critics add, the financial crisis that began in 2008 shook the world’s confidence in the use of any market-based solution.

But there are two big problems with this critique: First, there is no readily apparent alternative that would be any easier politically….Second, we should have no illusions about the difficulty and the time needed to convince the rest of the world to adopt a completely new approach.

Updates: There is a wide range of opinion on the IPCC these days:

• Union of Concerned Scientists weighs in on climate warming and the criticism of the IPCC.
• Roger Pielke, Jr. has been writing a lot about the IPCC recently (here, here, here)
• Joe Romm at Climate Progress

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Yesterday, Bryan Walsh ran a story, As Climate Summit Nears, Skeptics Gain Traction in Time Magazine in which the following passage appeared:

Even a small amount of doubt is enough to shatter consensus. That is why a number of researchers have suggested in the wake of the CRU e-mail hack that climate scientists be more open with their data and engage with critics in the future. “Climate McCarthyism” — as Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute have called the knee-jerk attacks by some climate-change advocates on those who deviate from the green mainstream — must stop. That may not seem fair — industry groups have played dirty for years smearing climate scientists — but researchers will need to be above reproach. “Scientists need to consider carefully skeptical arguments and either rebut them or learn from them,” wrote Judith Curry, an atmospheric scientist and climate researcher at Georgia Tech, on the blog Climate Audit.

There are several things to consider:

The scientific process is a powerful tool—in many ways, the most powerful tool we have.  All ideas should be allowed at the table and should be investigated thoroughly.  Yes, even the ideas of climate skeptics.  The notion that scientists might have attempted to short circuit the peer review process is unfortunate. This should never happen.

However—and this is an important point that has not been stated strongly enough—when a fair peer review process rejects ideas for not standing up to intense scrutiny, as determined by several sources of empirical observations and models, it’s time to move beyond the false ideas for the sake of clarity and efficiency.  Climate skeptics and warming advocates alike who lose on the battlefield of peer review need to own their loss, suck it up, and move on.  Returning to the table is fine, but do it with new ideas that better help us understand the way the world works, rather than trotting out retreads or, worse, advancing an agenda.

I tell my students that the outcome of science isn’t meant to be fair.  However, the process of science is fair.  At the starting blocks, it accepts all ideas and sifts through them one by one to see which ones stand the test of scrutiny (data and models and other lines of evidence) and which ones don’t.  The ones that don’t are discarded to the dustbin of history.   The ideas that survive get to live another day until subject to refined analysis and new data, models, and ways of thinking.  Over time, if they continue to survive, they become generally accepted ways of describing our world.  Much of what we know about climate warming, such as the  role of greenhouse gases in causing warming, fits this bill.  Of course, something may come along that could revolutionize conventional wisdom—Einstein did that to Newtonian mechanics with his theories of relativity—but until that happens, scientifically based conventional wisdom that has withstood the test of time is simply the best process we have at getting closer to the truth on climate warming science.

Problems arise when people conflate outcomes and process—equating, for instance, a bad outcome (rejected idea) to an unfair process.  This can lead to a rejection of science as a a way of knowing, and that’s unfortunate.  People don’t have the choice of rejecting the scientific method simply because they lose.  That’s the game of a poor loser.  The challenge is for them to come back with a winning idea.

It’s all too easy for climate science to become politicized.  Everyone knows this.  With regards to skeptics—contrarian for the sake of contrarianism.  With regards to warming advocates—overly dismissive of alternative viewpoints.  At that point, science crosses the threshold to ideology, which has no place in the peer review process. Fortunately, ideology seldom lasts long in a well-oiled peer-review meat grinder.

So why don’t I worry?  Because I return, over and over, to a singularly powerful idea:  In the end, a fair peer review process will lead us closer to the truth.   The furnace we call the climate warming debate is blistering.  This is why we must make sure the crucible of a fair review process is strong enough to withstand it.  And so far the peer review process most likely has been fair.   There are too many independent research groups studying climate change, involving tens of thousands of scientists worldwide, who are reaching the same basic conclusions about warming.  It’s simply impossible for a conspiracy to ever grow that big.

What we need now more than ever is for both sides of the climate debate to consider all ideas and for the losers (of a fair process) to own their loss.   Sure, it’s a high-stakes game, and nobody likes to lose.   But some will.  The question is whether the losers will continue by pushing an agenda rather than useful ideas.   History will be a harsh critic of those who do.

Climate change skepticism and denial are fueled by a perfect storm of all four problems coming together.  This is why skeptics and deniers won’t go away, and as long as they’re influential, some people will stay disengaged.

• Problem 1—Environmental literacy:  When people don’t know enough about climate change, they can be easily persuaded by contrarian arguments.  If the average person can’t explain (1) why modern warming is more influenced by greenhouse gases than natural causes and (2) how we know we are breaking out of natural ranges of climate variability (i.e., a clear sign that warming is anthropogenic), then climate deniers will always be able to peddle credible-sounding misinformation to the public (more on how to answer these correctly in a future post).
• Problem 2—Communication: As mentioned in an earlier post, media plays a role here.  Traditional media balancing of competing claims adds to the perception of uncertainty.  And when there is uncertainty, people tune out because they think the issue  is not resolved.  By keeping climate warming shrouded in as much uncertainty as possible, skeptics prevent people form forming strong opinions about it.  The media needs to do a better job distinguishing legitimate criticisms of climate science vs. dubious claims from deniers.
• Problem 3—Personal perception, values, and behavior:  We saw how sociodemographic factors and cultural identity affect whether people engage climate warming.  Half of Americans have not yet accepted the idea that warming is real, and 82% have not taken personal action.  When political parties, certain religious groups, and some conservative think tanks align themselves on the wrong side of the warming issue, there will always be a political base for denial.
• Problem 4—Political-economic context:   The enormous inertia built into techno-institutional complexes and the huge sums of power and money exchanged by politicians and the fossil fuel industry ensure that there will be constituencies at the highest levels of government who deny warming and fight mitigation.

The question is how much resistance will these problems pose to enacting real reform?

The good news is that the broad coalition forming around energy security, green jobs, and climate warming appears to be overpowering the forces of environmental illiteracy, poor communication, anti-warming values and behaviors, entrenched political and economic interests, and deniers/skeptics—at least in terms of local, state, and federal action:

• The prospects are looking good for federal climate legislation (examples 1, 2, 3).
• Businesses are running far and fast from anti-warming groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (examples 1, 2, 3, 4).
• Some states have already developed climate action plans, and clusters of states have already enacted a GHG cap and trade system, such as RGGI.  Many folks don’t know this.  Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont are already bound to a 10% reduction by 2018.  For those who say that cap and trade can’t work, it already has.
• As of February 2009, more than 550 U.S. cities have become members of ICLEI, developing plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Here’s what will be interesting to watch in coming years:  If problems 1-5 persist, will a sizable fraction of Americans remain unwilling to change opinion or behavior?  How will this square with legislation mandating greenhouse gas reductions?

To learn more about the cottage industry of climate change denial, check out this book.

Related posts:

• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Overview
• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Problem 1: Environmental Literacy
• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Problem 2: Communication
• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Problem 3: Personal perceptions, values, and behaviors
• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Problem 4: Political-economic context

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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sepponet/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Prerequisite posts:

• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Overview
• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Problem 1: Environmental Literacy
• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Problem 2: Communication

In earlier posts, we examined climate change engagement as problems of environmental literacy and communication.  There is no doubt we can do better with both of these.  But as we will see, proponents of environmental literacy and communication make a mistake if they believe engagement is simply a matter of getting more information to people.  Science, it is believed, will speak for itself.

Unfortunately, it often doesn’t.

A political scientist recently told me that before the age of 25, people use information to shape their value system and perceptions of the world.  After 25, they start cherry picking information that simply reinforces these beliefs (hence the world of cable news).

Although this is is a rough generalization, it suggests that a person’s values development may have a shelf life.  It also reveals why issues like climate change may not resonate with people cut from certain ideological cloths—no matter how much information they encounter.

The psychology, sociology, and ethics literature has a lot to say about this problem.  For simplicity, I want to pull out four challenges I think are among the most common and important with respect to climate change…

Challenge 1: Problems that are global in nature and distant in the future are not considered urgent

Matt Nisbet’s article¹ that we looked at last time contained another Pew poll that came out earlier this year, asking Americans which issue should be Obama’s top priority:

If you look at how priorities of Americans are changing over the past two years, some pretty obvious trends show up:

• It’s the economy—people are worried about their jobs.
• At the bottom of the table, the percentage of people who think protecting the environment is a top issue has fallen from 57% to 41%.
• Climate warming is dead last, falling from 38% to 30%.

These kinds of data are not new.  Quality of environment is generally a latent concern for most people.  But when asked to rank the importance of things like climate change against other issues that are personal (economy, health care) or are easily manipulated for political gain (terrorism, deficits), environmental concerns usually lose.

Update: The new Bureau of Labor Statistics data out today are grim:

Challenge 2: Cultural identity shapes perceptions and responses to environmental issues

Earlier this year, the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication published a report¹ called Global Warming’s Six Americas 2009: An Audience Segmentation Analysis (Maibach et al. 2009).

There were a number of important outcomes of this study that have wide-ranging implications for climate change, environmentalism, and environmental studies programs.

The first interesting point is that they identified six clusters of Americans falling along a spectrum from alarmed to dismissive about climate change:

There are three larger groups here:

• Those that get climate warming—the alarmed and concerned (54%)—make up a majority of Americans.
• The cautious and disengaged (31%) are on the sidelines, either not sure about climate change or not perceiving it to be a salient issue.
• The doubtful and dismissive (18%) are the climate warming skeptics and deniers.

So what do these groups mean in terms of engagement with and commitment to climate warming?

These statistics are eye-opening:

• A full 82% of Americans have not yet engaged climate warming personally.
• Almost half (49%) have not yet been convinced that warming is happening or they are actively hostile towards it.

Who are these folks relative to what a “typical” American looks like demographically?

These data are also eye-opening.  You can read the demographic breakdowns in the figure, but a number of things stand out:

• This is why climate warming is also an issue of race, gender, class, education, and religion. All of these frames shape personal values regarding climate warming.  It means that we need to do a better job of engaging all of these constituencies.
• People of color are falling out disproportionately in the disengaged group.
• Blue-collar folks are in the cautious group on the sidelines.
• Religion is a correlate with those doubtful or dismissive of climate warming as well as those disengaged.

Challenge 3:  People don’t see personal harm arising from climate change within their lifetimes

The Maibach article also speaks to this challenge.  In the figure below, they ask two questions:

• How much do you think global warming will harm you personally (left panel)?
• How much do you think global warming will harm future generations (right panel)?

As you can see in the left graph, there’s a lot of brown (only a little and not at all) and gray (don’t know).  More people think they will die from cancer, a heart attack, or an auto accident than being harmed by climate warming.

However, when the audience thinks about future generations, they think that there is greater risk of harm.

This distinction may help with the climate change communication challenge in the earlier post.  In fact, if you’ve had a chance to see climate modeler James Hansen talk recently, this is one of his pitches.  He frames the impacts of warming in terms of the harm his grandchildren will experience.

Challenge 4: Some climate-impacting behaviors are easier to change than others

Dramatic reductions in carbon emissions in a short period of time are going to require significant behavioral changes in transportation, diet, and powering our lives.  Unfortunately, we are creatures of habit.  And our lifestyles are locked in based on things like how our homes, cities, and roads were designed decades ago and the kinds of transportation available to us.

As mentioned in an earlier post, a paper out this week by Tom Dietz and colleagues suggested that policy measures like cap and trade could take years to implement.  Why not take a look at how much readily available technologies in U.S. homes could potentially reduce emission in the short term?

How much of a difference could households make? According to Dietz et al., they are

• 38% of the overall US carbon emissions
• 8% of global emissions
• larger than the emissions of any single country except China

So if we could modify behaviors associated with household energy use, we might be able to bring about relatively quick and possibly large reductions.  The outlook is mixed, however, as suggested by this table:

Some main points:

• Home weatherization is behavioral low-hanging fruit.  People are willing to do these things because they both save money and are good for the environment (probably in that order).  The good news is that there are sizable reductions that can be achieved.
• Driving is the tough nut to crack.  People are simply unwilling to change driving behavior or carpool.  The bright spot here is fuel efficiency.  People are willing to drive cars with better gas mileage, so this behavior should continue to be encouraged with tax credits for hybrid and electric vehicles.

Related posts:

• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Overview
• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Problem 1: Environmental Literacy
• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Problem 2: Communication

¹References:

• Dietz, T. et al. (2009) Household actions can provide a behavioral wedge to rapidly reduce U.S. carbon emissions. PNAS 106(44):18452-18456.
• Maibach, E. et al. (2009) Global Warming’s Six Americas 2009: An Audience Segmentation Analysis. Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication
• Nisbet, M. (2009) Communicating Climate Change: Why Frames Matter for Public Engagement. Environment 51(2):12-23.

Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/ / CC BY 2.0

In the next several posts, I’m going to address the question of why it appears that people don’t seem to engage climate change.  This work is based on research for a talk I gave a few days ago.

Helping people understand and become active in dealing with climate change is challenging, but it’s also an incredibly fascinating interdisciplinary enterprise.  You’ll see that disciplines across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities are needed for this conversation.

And you’ll see some things that are counterintuitive and may surprise you.

I’m going to consider five major problems contributing to this challenge, shown in order of what I consider to be increasing difficulty to deal with:

Many have argued recently that Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s new book, SuperFreakonomics, is the most recent version of contrarianism disguised as balanced analysis of climate change.

I almost feel bad for Levitt and Dubner because rather than adding to the serious discourse of climate change as intended, SuperFreakonomics is turning out to be an instruction manual for how to call out and discredit contrarian arguments (I say almost because they are probably raking in a ton of royalties from this controversy):

(1) Eric Pooley, a columnist with Bloomberg, was one of the folks to make the initial call out the day the book hit store shelves.

(2) Next came Paul Krugman’s NY Times blog, further calling out Levitt and Dubner as contrarians with a series of hard-hitting blog posts, including this one.

(3) David Roberts at Grist then added comparisons to the longstanding climate warming skeptic, Freeman Dyson, taking some serious shots at the media (sorry Jon Stewart fans, you may not like what you hear).

(4) In one of his longest posts ever, Joe Romm at ClimateProgress (who was also one of the vocal folks initially calling out Leavitt and Dubner) picked up Roberts’ and Krugman’s analyses yesterday and examined further the two questions above, showing how and why the media often enables these folks (with more bad news for Jon Stewart fans).

(5) In a letter yesterday at RealClimate, scientist Raymond T. Pierrehumbert (one of Levitt’s colleagues at the University of Chicago) shows how easy it would have been to get the science right in SuperFreakonomics.

Related post:  SuperFreakonomics ignites a SuperStorm of criticism