2. The Scientific Consensus
Who believes what?
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Consensus means different things to different people, and much debate remains within climate science. However, what can be said is that there exists a strong consensus that humans are now playing a significant role in the climate, primarily due to the emission of greenhouse gases.
The IPCC
The IPCC’s findings form much of the basis for the consensus on climate change.
Within the IPCC, there are three working groups that cover different areas.
* Working Group I (WGI) is “The Physical Science Basis.”[1] It is our best understanding of the science behind climate change and it is what we will focus on in this presentation.
* Working Group II (WGII) is “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerabilities.”[2] It is what is believed will happen as result of further warming.
* Finally, there is Working Group III (WGIII) which is “Mitigation of Climate Change,” or solutions to the problem.[3]
The IPCC does not do original reseach. The reports are syntheses of the available scientific literature. The cutoff for consideration for new material was in 2005.
AR4 WGI
The Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) WGI has 619 coordinating lead authors, lead authors, and contributing authors. These are the people who actually worked on the report. The scientists from the US are nominated by their peers and coordinated through the State Department.
The 619 authors do not include “expert reviewers.” Essentially anyone can be an expert reviewer. For example, a single skeptic with no qualifications in climate science was responsible for half of the comments on the second draft of chapter 9, 97% of which were rejected as gibberish or unsupported assertions.[4] In total, WGI addressed over 30,000 reviewer comments.
Summary for Policymakers[5]
Each working group includes a Summary for Policymakers (SPM), written by lead authors of the report. The AR4 WGI SPM has 33 authors representing academic institutions from 16 countries, with the US contributing by far the most.
The SPMs are consensus documents and therefore conservative, the exact opposite of what the skeptics often portray. Negotiators from each UN nation must agree to the precise wording of the summary, but the politicians cannot override the scientists. The conclusions must encompass the views of the most skeptical party, which includes the governments of the United States, China, and Saudi Arabia to name a few.
The WGI SPM concludes that “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.” That is, it is a fact that the world has warmed. Significantly, “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely [i.e. greater than 90 percent probability] due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”
Consensus census
In addition to the IPCC, the world’s scientific societies have overwhelmingly endorsed the science of anthropogenic global warming.
Among them:
| Organization | Description |
|---|---|
| The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)[6] | The largest general scientific society in the world, servicing 10 million individuals. It publishes the journal Science. |
| The American Chemical Society (ACS)[7] | Founded in 1876. Currently has 160,000 members. |
| The American Geophysical Union (AGU)[8] | Established in 1919 and currently made up of 50,000 earth scientists. Their parent organization, the American Institute of Physics (AIP), also endorses their statement |
| The American Meteorological Society (AMS)[9] | Founded in 1919 and currently has more than 11,000 members. |
| The Geological Society of America (GSA)[10] | Founded in 1888 and has over 20,000 members |
| The science academies of the G8 nations (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, UK, and US) and Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa[11] |
Endorse the conclusions of the IPCC’s fourth assessment report |
Science academy signatures
These are the signatures of each science academy’s president.
Progression of skeptics
The skeptics view declarations of consensus as a means of stifling debate, but as we discussed in section 1, modern global warming theory did not spring into mainstream science over night.
Over the decades there has been a general progression from:
-
Warming isn’t happening
-
but if it is happening it’s not the result of human influence
-
but if it is the result of human influence, it isn’t enough to worry about
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but if it is worth worrying about, we should adapt to the changes instead of trying to prevent them.
Think tank roundup
The campaign to prevent or slow regulation of greenhouse gases overwhelmingly originates from think tanks dedicated to promoting free market ideals. Fellows at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the George Marshall Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute or others will put forth some combination of skeptical talking points. At the extreme, some believe that the world will become a green paradise due to the CO2 increase[12] (see section 11 for why this is dubious). They say we shouldn’t worry about extinction of species, which won’t happen, but if it does we can put the animals we care about in zoos.[13] This may sound like an absurd caricature, but it is the position of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Turning the tables (and then turning them back)
Skeptics are often accused of being in the pocket of industry, so they have proposed an argument of their own: scientists have put forth a false crisis to receive research grants. If you frame your research as it relates to climate change, you are more likely to receive funding so it’s in the scientists’ best interest to keep the global warming ball going (or so they say). Thus, it must all be a scam.
If it’s all driven by money, who has the most to lose?
On the left is the total dollars spent on climate change by the US federal government from 2001 to 2007.[14]
On the right is not ExxonMobil’s revenue, but its profit for the same time period.[15] This figure doesn’t include the other oil companies, nor does it include the profits from other fossil fuels, such as coal or natural gas.
We all rely on fossil fuels and energy companies have every right to earn profit, and the amount of profit is not unreasonable given their revenue. However, modern civilization is built around a stable climate, and knowing what it’s doing now and will do in the future is vital to the 6.5 billion people who depend on it for the water they drink and the food they eat. These are not trivial questions (see section 11).
A cottage industry
The US fossil fuel industry had funded many of these think tanks under the guise of fostering the free market. In recent years, industry has scaled back or eliminated financial support as the political winds have changed.
The think tanks persist in their message however, having essentially created a cottage industry for climate change skepticism. Think tank fellows publish books, make TV appearances, write newspaper editorials or host conferences as a way to present “balance.” The result is, “On the one hand we have the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and on the other we have the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.”[16] The latter is a creation of the Heartland Institute that culminated in their own “summary for policymakers,” which summarizes a report that doesn’t actually exist.
The Oregon Petition
The most common tactic that skeptics use to sow doubt is by listing individual scientists who don’t agree with the consensus. These lists have come in various forms over the years, such as the Leipzig Declaration, the Inhofe 400, or the Manhattan Declaration[17], but the most prominent example is the Oregon Petition. The petition was first circulated in 1998 and was recently resurrected and updated, gathering many new signatures. [18]
This was organized by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM) for the purpose of convincing the US government to reject Kyoto. The OISM was founded by Arthur B. Robinson and currently includes 8 “faculty members,” which includes Robinson and his two sons. Two of the “faculty members” are dead. Before global warming, the OISM focussed on nuclear war survival skills and methods to slow aging.
The petition’s cover letter was written by Frederick Seitz, who was president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) from 1962 to 1969 and co-founder of the George Marshall Institute, a think tank founded to support Reagan’s missile defense program. His cover letter still accompanies the latest version of the Oregon Petition, updated in 2007, months before his death early in 2008.
“Review of information on the subject of global warming”
Attached to the original petition was an “eight page review of information on the subject of global warming.”[19] The lead author was Arthur B. Robinson himself, who is a biochemist. The two other authors were Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon, both astrophysicists and “senior scientists” at the George Marshall Institute. Robinson’s son Zachary also contributed. This version of the paper was formatted to make it appear that it was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Given Seitz’s past presidency it may have seemed to some that the NAS was endorsing it, leading them to issue a statement denouncing the petition.[20]
The latest version of the paper drops Baliunas, and the Robinson son Zach is swapped for Noah.[21] It was published in The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JPANDS), which, aside from having nothing to do with climatology, is a forum for quack science, including the claim that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS.[22]
Persistence pays off
The original petition eventually collected 17,000 scientist signatures. According to Robert Park, who was the spokesman for the American Physical Society at the time, “Virtually every scientist in every field got it.”[23] The current version has added 14,000 signatures.
There are over 10 million people with degrees in science and engineering in the US, and more than 500,000 science or engineering PhDs.[24] That is a large pool to draw upon if you are looking for skeptics with no expertise in the topic at hand.
In contrast, the consensus statements described earlier are written by experts from those societies, or by officials elected by their membership. To believe the skeptics, these organizations are either incompetent or part of a worldwide conspiracy.
31,000 scientists
The Oregon Petitions website categorizes[25] its 31,000 scientists like this:
A third of the signers are engineers, or people with generic scientific degrees. 4000 signers were medical doctors, computer scientists and mathematicians. The most relevant category “Atmospheric, environmental, and earth” has 3700 names. They are broken down further.
Since we are talking about warming caused by an enhanced greenhouse effect, the most relevant are the atmospheric scientists. These are broken down further still:
More than half of the names are meteorologists, who tend to be TV weather people (see section 8 for the differences between weather and climate). The most relevant are the 40 climatologists, and 114 atmospheric scientists. These are the people whose profession is most relevant to the study of these issues, yet they make up about half of a percent of the names on the petition.
Scientific American survey of Oregon Petition signatories
While some fields are clearly not relevant, others are at least applicable to the study of the greenhouse effect, or the broader climate. Scientific American took a random sample of 30 of the 1400 signatories from the original petition claiming to hold a Ph.D. relevant to climate science.[26]
Of the 20 they were able to contact, only 1 was actually doing climate-related research. Scientists who are skeptical of global warming can publish their arguments in a peer reviewed journal. That is how science works. However, as we will see shortly, this is extremely rare.
A tobacco interlude
The campaign to obfuscate global warming is often compared to that surrounding tobacco. They intersect with the author of the Oregon peitition’s cover letter, Frederick Seitz. Seitz was a distinguished scientist who did important work in solid-state physics. After he was the president of the National Academy of Sciences, he went on to head Rockefeller University, and was later hired by the tobacco industry to direct their medical research programs.
“Free rein”
A total of $45 million was spent on medical research under Seitz’s guidance.
For his part, Seitz says he was comfortable taking tobacco money, “as long as it was green. I’m not quite clear about this moralistic issue. We had absolutely free rein to decide how the money was spent.” Did the research give the tobacco industry political cover? “I’ll leave that to the philosophers and priests,” he replies.[27]
They had “free rein” with one notable exception. “They didn’t want us looking at the health effects of cigarette smoking.” In one case, a study of smoke inhalation in mice was cut short by tobacco lawyers.[28] Usually, the money went to investigate every other cause of cancer and heart disease except smoking.[29]
The public campaign
Seitz’s public mandate was quite different. One of the programs that Seitz oversaw was the Council for Tobacco Research, which had the explicit goal to provide “research into questions of tobacco use and health.”[30] In a speech introducing Seitz in his role[31], former RJR CEO Colin Stokes gives their reasons for creating the research program:
. . . our sense of integrity dictates that we respond directly to a fundamental attack on our business.
. . . if we can refute the criticisms against cigarettes, we may remove government’s excuse for imposing heavy taxes on the product.
. . . there are a large number of crucial questions that need scientific answers in the area of smoking and health.
The search for the “true causes of cancer”
Stokes launches into a litany of talking points, alleging the link between smoking and cancer and heart disease remains controversial, with “prominent medical authorities lining up on each side of the arguments” and “for every charge that has been made against cigarettes, there has emerged a strong body of scientific data or opinion in defense of the product.” He accuses the American Cancer Society and federal government of spending too much effort and money to prevent smoking, thus discouraging the discovery of “the true cause of cancer.” Does any of this sound familiar?
The road to Oregon
Seitz had said that even his father knew that cigarettes cause cancer, yet he had no trouble spending $45 million with a mandate that he was privately directed to ignore. By 1989, a tobacco industry lawyer was advising Philip Morris’ CEO that Seitz was “quite elderly and not sufficiently rational to offer advice.”[32]
In the mean time, the George Marshall Institute that he co-founded increasingly shifted its attention to global warming issues. By 1998, he was endorsing the Oregon Petition, and 9 years after that, at the age of 96, he was endorsing it again. Seitz was also skeptical of ozone depletion and the dangers of second hand smoke.
Oreskes survey
No discussion of the consensus on climate change can be complete without covering the Oreskes Survey.
Naomi Oreskes is a professor of History and Science Studies. She has a bachelor’s degree in mining geology, and her Ph.D. is in geological research and the history of science. In 2004, she analyzed 928 abstracts from articles published between 1993 and 2003 in refereed scientific journals listed in the ISI Web of Science database with the keywords “global climate change.”[33]
She found:
* 75% explicitly or implicitly endorsed the consensus position.
* 25% dealt with climate measuring methods or climate of the past, stating no position on human caused climate change
* No abstract in the survey rejected the consensus position
What it does not say (and many people on both sides get this wrong):
* That no skeptical papers exist.
* That no skeptical scientists exist.
The 929th abstract might well have included a skeptical position, but of those in the sample, they didn’t exist. This means that they are very, very rare.
Peiser survey
Benny Peiser, who is a social anthropologist, wrote a letter to Science challenging the conclusions of the Oreskes survey. His letter was rejected by the editors.[34] Peiser searched all documents including editorials and letters, and included the social sciences and arts and humanities databases. Oreskes excluded those databases and only included articles that met the standard of peer review.
He initially found 34 articles that he claimed “reject or doubt” the consensus opinion[35], but he now believes that only 1 meets the criteria. “I have publicly withdrawn this point of my critique” he writes.[36] The remaining article was published in the American Association of Petroleum Geologists journal, The AAPG Bulletin. This article was specifically excluded from Oreskes’ survey since it was a summary article and statement by the trade group and not an original peer reviewed article.
Peiser says he doesn’t doubt that the “overwhelming majority of climatologists” agree that the current warming period is mostly due to human impact, but he doesn’t believe that it is unanimous. But Oreskes didn’t say that it was unanimous.
Schulte survey
The skeptics are still attacking the Oreskes survey.
One example comes from Klaus-Martin Schulte, an endocrinologist, and uses the same erroneously classified papers from the unplublished Peiser letter to Science. [37] It was published in the journal Energy and Environment (E&E), which was also responsible for the wavy graph of CO2 measurements in the introduction. Peiser is on the editorial board of E&E and the editor is a political scientist. The paper claims to revisit and update the Oreskes study to 2007. Originally, the editor wasn’t going to accept it because, “it was a bit patchy and nothing new.”[38] Nevertheless, it was published some months later.[39]
“Less than half of all published scientists endorse global warming theory!”
. . . declares skeptical Senator James Inhofe on his website.[40] Inhofe’s press contact reproduces an article summarizing the claims of the Schulte survey. The article goes on to repeat the false assertions that the WGI Summary for Policymakers is not written by scientists and that the report itself is revised to conform to the summary. The article concludes, “By contrast, the ISI Web of Science database covers 8,700 journals and publications, including every leading scientific journal in the world!”[41] Not surprisingly, you won’t find the Schulte survey in the ISI Web of Science database, because E&E is not one of those 8,700 leading journals.[42]
Consensus ≠ science
Even if they accept that a consensus exists, the skeptics will say that “Science is not done by consensus” which is true. However, policy is. You weigh the scientific evidence and then act on it.
Policymakers would be irresponsible to ignore the warnings of the scientific community with the hope that the consensus position is wrong and an increasingly insignificant minority is right. If you’ve heard the expression “prepare for the worst, but hope for the best,” what people are doing instead is hoping for the best, preparing for the best, and ignoring the rest. That is not a rational response to a potentially grave problem.
Notes
[4] (IPCC, 2007) Online here. The skeptic responsible for half of the comments on the second draft of chapter 9 was Vincent Gray. Example of one comment. “Insert after ‘Bayesian’ ‘(or super-guesswork)’” Response? “Rejected. Bayesian analyses are not guesswork.” Sixty-eight of his comments argued for the replacement of “anthropogenic” with other words, and dozens more comments argued for similar word changes.
[5] AR4 WGI Summary for Policymakers can be accessed directly here
[6] (AAAS Board of Directors, 2006) Online here
[9] (AMS Council, 2007) Online here
[10] (Peters, et al., 2006) Online here
[11] (Joint Academies, 2008) Online here
[12] The Oregon Petition (see below) is based, in part, on the belief that the additional CO2 may be good for us.
[13] (Achenbach, 2006) Online here.
[14] (Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, 2007) Online here
[15] Annual reports online here.
[16] Noted global warming (and acid rain, ozone depletion and secondhand smoke) skeptic, S. Fred Singer created the “Summary for Policymakers of the Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change” (Singer, 2008) on the occasion of the Heartland Institute’s 2008 International Conference on Climate Change. It summarizes the work of a variety of skeptics, including Zbigniew Jaworowski famous to global warming skeptics for disputing the CO2 record of the ice cores. This is notable because Singer and Dennis Avery (a Heartland Institute senior fellow) authored the recent book Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years primarily based on the ice core work of Willi Dansgaard and Hans Oeschger. Oeschger denounces Jaworowski here.
[17] Leipzig Declaration (SEPP, 1995, 2005), Inhofe 400 (Morano, 2007), Manhattan Declaration (International Climate Science Coalition & Heartland Institute, 2008)
[18] (Global Warming Petition Project, 2008) Website here
[19] (Robinson, Baliunas, Soon, & Robinson, 1998) Archived here
[20] (Council of the National Academy of Sciences, 1998) Online here
[21] (Robinson, Robinson, & Soon, 2007) Online here
[23] (Macilwain, 1998) Abstract here
[24] (Macilwain, 1998) Abstract here
[25] (Global Warming Petition Project, 2008) Online here
[26] (Scientific American, 2005) Broken link
[27] (Hertsgaard, 2006) Online here. The website TCSDaily.com (Schulz, 2006) purports to debunk the Vanity Fair article by claiming that Seitz’s work didn’t try to hide the effects of tobacco. A program whose purpose was to investigate the link, and yet conducted very little science on that link might qualify.
[28] (Kouri, 1997) Online here.
[29] (Fyock, 1979) Online here
[30] (Hobbs, 1984) Online here. CTR’s mandate is described on page 2, under the heading “Organization and policy.” See note 31 for sworn testimony on the way the research was characterized in the report.
[31] (Stokes, 1979) Online here.
[32] (Holtzman, 1989) Online here
[33] (Oreskes, 2004) Online here
[34] (Peiser, 2005) Online here
[35] (Lambert, 2005) Online here
[36] (Media Watch, 2006) Online here
[37] (Lambert, 2007) Online here
[38] (Littlemore, 2007) Online here
[39] (Schulte, 2008) Abstract here
[40] (Dempsey, 2007) Online here
[41] (Asher, 2007) Online here
[42] (Thomson Reuters) Online here