Suppose your doctor is sure
that you have a serious condition, but the causes and treatment are not fully understood
by medical science. She recommends a treatment. You go to another doctor, who
says the same thing. Many other doctors in many different countries all say the
same thing. On the internet you read about a doctor who says something very
different and proposes a much cheaper medication, whose manufacturer pays him
to praise it.
What do you do?
Republicans advise us to
listen to the internet. Not about your personal medical condition, but about
the health of our earth.
Republican politicians nearly
all say the same thing. Don’t worry about climate change. The science is
uncertain. Global warming is not happening. But if it is happening, it’s a
good thing. Whatever is happening, don’t do anything about it.
Both NASA
and NOAA reported that 2014 was the warmest year since data began being
collected in 1880. That assessment was echoed by scientific agencies in Japan,
Germany,
and England.
Recently, climate scientists
said that 2015 will most likely be even
warmer. July was the warmest month ever measured.
Are the vast majority of
climate scientists around the world right? What about those people on the
internet who say “no”? What about Republican politicians who say “no”? How can
you tell what we should do?
Numbers matter. The fact that
well over 90% of climate scientists agree that the globe is warming and that
human actions are the main cause is significant, just as you might be convinced
if nearly every doctor agreed that you had a disease and needed treatment. What
about that tiny minority, though?
That is where some
understanding of science is important. When tobacco companies were denying that
smoking was addictive and caused cancer, they paid and deployed scientists to
write articles which “proved” there was no connection. The tobacco
industry also overwhelmingly funded Republican politicians. When the Food
and Drug Administration said in the 1990s that nicotine should be regulated as
a drug, House Speaker Newt
Gingrich said that the agency had “lost its mind”.
So-called think tanks, like
the Heartland Institute, transferred money from tobacco companies and
conservative donors to scientists who wrote articles denying the link between
cancer and tobacco. The president of Heartland, Joseph Bast, wrote a piece in
1998 that is still on
their website denying that moderate smoking or second-hand smoke was bad
for you. A year ago, Bast publicly
denied writing that article.
Scientists with PhDs, writing
advertisements for private companies or political donors who pay them, do not
produce science. Real science is much more complicated: funding comes from
sources who are not committed to particular results; articles go through a
lengthy process of peer review; every claim, every footnote, every number is
checked for accuracy. The method of argument must stand up to careful scrutiny.
The science of global warming
and the “science” of denial are separate and unequal worlds. The scientists
quoted by deniers might have impressive credentials, but like the scientists who
so confidently asserted that smoking was good for you, their results are bought
and paid for. Their articles, reproduced in many forms by people with
political interests, do not stand up to scrutiny. Take one of the most often
repeated claims by warming deniers, that we have been in a cooling period since
1998, thus global warming is a hoax. The Heartland Institute has used a seemingly impressive
graphic to make this claim for years. The graphic is not a fake, but the
conclusion from it is. July 1998 was the warmest month ever at the time.
The year 1998 was the warmest ever by a significant amount. That yearly record
was not broken until 2005, but the monthly record was only broken this July. By
highlighting the peak of July 1998, Heartland and others still claimed earlier
this year “No global warming for 18 years”.
Measuring the temperature of
the earth means averaging many thousands of temperature readings. Temperatures
vary considerably by season and by region. In 2014,
parts of Illinois were much cooler than usual, while California, Arizona and
Nevada had their warmest year ever.
The variation across the
globe in July 2015 can be seen in this
map. Global warming is a long-term process that cannot be measured in any
one month. In fact, the decade after July 1998 was significantly warmer than
the decade before it, or any decade since measurement began. Averages show that
no cooling occurred.
When you take the claims of
global warming deniers, such as the so-called pause in warming, or the number
of scientists who are skeptics, or the lack of consensus of the world’s
scientists, and investigate the footnotes or check the math, you see that they
are not doing science. Their work cannot stand peer review, so it is published
on the internet, where they get maximum readership with minimal credibility.
Just like the miracle cures
of snake oil salesmen, it’s hokum, paid for by oil companies and conservative
billionaires, all to prevent government from doing anything. Like any miracle
cure, it’s seductively attractive – take this pill and you’ll lose weight, cure
cancer, prevent aging.
Swallow that at your own
risk. It’s bad for your health.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
Published in the Jacksonville
Journal-Courier, September 1, 2015
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