The sordid whack-a-mole nature of climate change denial

It’s all about doubt when it comes to climate change, no matter what the science is telling us. The playbook is tried and true as illustrated in the 2014 film, Merchants of Doubt—if you can create enough doubt about the science and the harmful effects of tobacco, asbestos or fossil fuels, basically you’re home free. Instead of solving an obvious problem, companies in those industries can obscure and obstruct, and continue to make truckloads of money.

And it’s still happening. In a report from the Desmog Blog this month, “Study Finds The ‘Era of Climate Science Denial Is Not Over,'”  Graham Readfearn writes: “Conservative think tanks in the United States are a sort of ‘ground zero’ for the production of doubt about the links between fossil fuel burning and dangerous climate change.

“These think tanks produce reports, hold conferences, write books, go on television, produce columns and blogs and generally and liberally splatter the public discourse with talking points.

“You’ll have heard their manufactured doubt everywhere. ‘CO2 is great for the planet… fossil fuels are good… climate scientists are wrong… the world has been hotter in the past… cutting emissions will kill the economy.’ That sort of thing.”

He points to a new study published in the journal Global Environmental Change that says, “the era of climate science denial is not over.”

Dr. Travis Coan, of the University of Exeter, and Dr Constantine Boussalis, of Trinity College Dublin, analyzed 16,000 articles, reports, transcripts, letters, reviews and press releases from the websites of 19 conservative think tanks, mainly based in the U.S, who work on climate change.

In the study, Boussalis and Coan discuss how commentators had been speculating about an end of climate science denial for more than a decade. But analyzing documents from 1998 until mid-2013, Boussalis and Coan found that think tanks had in recent years been focusing less on policy and more on attacking the science.

Why change the playbook if it works so well?

Republican Bob Inglis a conservative former South Carolina congressman, lost a bid for re-election in 2010 after telling a radio host that he believed humans were contributing to climate change. “The most enduring heresy that I committed was saying the climate change is real,” he told PBS’ FRONTLINE.

Inglis saw through the thick fog machines of doubt and denial, to his cost. He closed the Merchants of Doubt, with moving and spot analysis of why it so hard to embrace the reality of climate change:

He’s a hero.

COP21 a cop-out or an opt-in?

It’s been awhile, but in the great scheme of things not that long, and my absence here lately is of no great import. Things have changed in the past few months, including an engagement, a time-consuming book project and a re-think of my assocoation with TriplePundit. It’s all great-to-good-to-exhausting, but without getting into details, the gist is that I’ll concentrate more on this blog space in the future. Maybe.

First, some venting about the climate change summit that concluded in December, COP21. Remember? It already seems like a long time ago! The results were better than expected and encouraging, but still probably too little too late. Coverage and punditry was mixed, which is better than saying the effort failed. Time will tell on that. Yes, it’s a climate accord among a slew of nations, but unenforceable.

Here’s Bill Mckibben, founder of 350.org, the global grass-roots climate campaign, writing in the New York Times: “In the hot, sodden mess that is our planet as 2015 drags to a close, the pact reached in Paris feels, in a lot of ways, like an ambitious agreement designed for about 1995, when the first conference of parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change took place in Berlin.

“Under its provisions, nations have made voluntary pledges to begin reducing their carbon emissions. These are modest — the United States, for instance, plans to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 2025 by 12 to 19 percent from their levels in 1990. As the scrupulous scorekeepers at Climate Action Tracker, a nongovernment organization, put it, that’s a ‘medium’ goal ‘at the least ambitious end of what would be a fair contribution.'”

If all parties keep their promises, and if you expect that to happen I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn you can buy, the planet will warm by an estimated 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit, or 3.5 degrees Celsius, above preindustrial levels. “That is way, way too much,” McKibben says. “We are set to pass the 1 degree Celsius mark this year, and that’s already enough to melt ice caps and push the sea level threateningly higher.”

The irony is, he continues, an agreement like this adopted at the first climate conference in 1995 “might have worked.”