In my last post I highlighted the release of the National Climate Assessment (NCA) and stated that I would hardly have noticed it if it weren't for some of the reaction to it. It was brought to my attention that Bret Baier on Fox News hosted a panel discussion that included George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Mara Liasson. Will and Krauthammer spent their portion of the time throwing doubt and contempt on climate science, while Liasson played it mostly down the middle.
To be honest, I found myself thinking that if this is what conservative thought-leaders have to say about climate science, then climate science is in a good place. I say this because I thought Will and Krauthammer's opposition was frankly pathetic. Krauthammer appealed to the weather and short-term variations as an excuse to dismiss climate science as legitimate (he should have consulted the report's FAQ). Then, somewhat self-contradictory, he said he would support reductions in carbon emissions if other countries would sign on. Will's argument was that his house in South Carolina hasn't been hit by a hurricane, and that climate scientists are socially induced to support mainstream climate science.
Jonathan Chait at The New Yorker did a nice job of responding to the panel, pointing out that Will was adopting an argument that applies to all of science. (All Science Is Wrong, Concludes Esteemed Fox News Panel.) I don't want to re-do the work done by Chait, so I will refer you to his column. However, I do want to comment on a few specifics. But before doing so, I want to provide a little historical framework.
A fair-minded public cannot weigh scientific evidence themselves, so they look to experts. However, when there is a dispute among experts, the public naturally has trouble coming to a conclusion. Many special interests have discovered that if they can find even a few experts to take their side, it helps to level the playing field in the public arena. This kind of confusion was perfected by the tobacco industry. As scientists increasingly found that tobacco caused cancer, the tobacco industry decided that the best way to defend themselves from the threat of legislation was to cast doubt on the science. One way that they did so was to appeal to scientists who did not think there was a link between tobacco and cancer. It didn't matter how much those scientists were in the minority; their mere existence served to strengthen the tobacco industry's side of the debate. What the tobacco industry understood was that a loud spokesperson for the extreme minority appears equally legitimate to a spokesperson for the majority in the eyes of the public. We see this same model employed for many issues, whether it be vaccination and autism, evolution vs creationism in public schools, or any other number of fringe controversies involving science. In each case, a few clear thinkers stand against the establishment, like David and Goliath.
It is a matter of historical record that some of the same people who fought on the side of the tobacco industry went on to take up opposition to climate science and were the early pioneering skeptics, presumably because of their ideological opposition to government regulation. So perhaps it is not coincidental that some of the same tactics have been used: always emphasizing the limitations of the science, and elevating the waning number of credentialed skeptics who disagree with the mainstream understanding of the science. Whatever the case, when Dr. So-and-so says that global warming is happening because of humans, but Dr. Other-guy says it is not, what conclusion should the public draw?
This is why, to certain extent, there is a proxy rhetorical battle. The word 'consensus' is often invoked by supporters of mainstream climate science. It is an attempt to put the debate in context for the general public. In response, skeptics of mainstream climate science accuse the mainstream of being unscientific for agreeing TOO much and thinking the science is 'settled.' It is a rhetorical battle over expertise.
With that as background, let's come back to the Fox News panel.
BAIER: So you don't buy that 97 percent of scientists who studied the issue --
WILL: Who measured it? Where did that figure come from? They pluck these things from the ether. I do not. The New Yorker magazine, which is impeccably upset about climate change, recently spoke about the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as "the last word on climate change." Now, try that phrase, "the last word on microbiology, quantum mechanics, physics, chemistry." Since when does science come to the end? The New Yorker has discovered the end of this. Who else has?
You can see what Will has done here. First he implies that the consensus does not exist because the 97 percent number has been invented out of nothing. Actually, the number comes from
a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences where the authors did a literature search in order to quantify the size of the debate in the published literature. The authors reported:
Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that (i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field surveyed here support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.
It may be that George Will has difficulty distinguishing science from the ether [1].
Having dismissed the 97 percent number, Will then sought to re-cast the meaning of consensus. Rather than a sign of experts converging on truth, Will asserts that agreement is actually a sign of closed sclerotic minds. Krauthammer joined in:
99 percent of physicists [were] convinced that space and time were fixed until Einstein working in a patent office wrote a paper in which he showed that they are not. I'm not impressed by numbers.
Put aside the fact that the kind of revolution that Einstein started is rare, and that his work did not so much invalidate Newtonian physics as incorporate it into something larger. Do you see the dilemma here? If climate scientists disagree, then we are told that we should await further research. But if scientists come to largely agree, then we are told it is a sign of scientific weakness.
My favorite part was toward the very end, when George Will was obviously caught a little off guard by Mara Liasson.
WILL: ...Again, there is a sociology of science, there is a sociology in all of this, and engaging the politics of this, we have to understand the enormous interests now invested in climate change.
LIASSON: On both sides.
WILL: Sure.
LIASSON: The fossil fuel industry has a big interest and you say environmentalists have an interest.
WILL: It pales in comparison to the money flowing from the federal government.
The transcript doesn't capture it, but
in the video Will seemed to stammer a little before squeaking out that "sure." But he's a pro, so he recovered quickly by emphasizing the magnitude of the money from the federal government propping up climate science. Thus, according to Will, mainstream science is a product of a combination of financial dependence on the federal government and factors of socialization. For some reason it never seems to cross the minds of Will and Krauthammer that there just
might be a powerful sociology in the conservative disbelief in climate science. In fact, their appearance on Fox News bad-mouthing climate science is itself one contributor to the sociological currents of conservatives. How many people came away from that segment thinking, "Well, if George Will and Charles Krauthammer don't buy it, then I don't either?"
Back to Will, does the interest of the fossil fuel industry pale in comparison to the federal government? A quick search turned up
a GAO report showing that in 2012 the federal government spent about $2 billion on climate science, about $4 billion supporting technological research, and about $1 billion in aid to developing countries. $7 billion is a lot of money. For comparison, the
NIH budget for 2012 was almost $31 billion. What about the fossil fuel industry? I'm not a business guy, so this kind of stuff isn't really my thing. But maybe
this is an indicator: excluding divestments and tax-related sources of profit, Exxon Mobile made $8.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2012. I'm not a mathematician, but if the U.S. federal government's total spending on climate-related science in 2012 was about equal to Exxon Mobile's profits in one quarter of the same year, I'm going to go with "George Will is full of hot air" on this one.
Will and Krauthammer's analysis makes for good cable TV. Their arguments have a veneer of truth (science
is an imperfect and social activity, and we can't know exactly what the future will bring), and they articulate them with gravitas. This makes their skepticism emotionally appealing and helps the viewer to feel superior to the other side. But when you drill down into their assertions, it turns out that their wells of truth have run dry. Fans of Will and Krauthammer ought to demand better.
Notes:
1. Chait
caught someone else trying to knock down the 97 percent claim. My favorite quote is at the end:
[Anthropogenic global warming is] not a topic of serious debate among the climate science field. It’s a topic of serious debate in American politics because one of the two major parties is controlled by a movement that resorts to bizarre, paranoid explanations for facts that complicate its ideological priors.
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