Climate wars continue in the New York Review of Books

APR 18, 2012

William D. Nordhaus debates skeptic authors of Wall Street Journal pieces.

Recent high-visibility climate-war skirmishing in the Wall Street Journal has moved to the New York Review of Books. William D. Nordhaus has challenged, heard back from, and then replied to three authors of the 27 January WSJ op-ed “Sixteen concerned scientists: No need to panic about global warming ,” reported on here in a 30 January posting. Much of the blunt exchange focuses on climate-related economic-outlook uncertainties, and much of it involves the rhetoric and politics of the climate wars, rather than science.

The three climate skeptics representing the original 16 are Roger W. Cohen, William Happer, and Richard Lindzen. The WSJ‘s later, related skirmishing was reported here in postings on 22 February , 14 March , and 27 March .

Nordhaus opened the new NYRB exchange with “Why the global warming skeptics are wrong ,” illustrated at the top with a photo of icebergs from a melting glacier. He calls the original WSJ op-ed “useful because it contains many of the standard criticisms in a succinct statement,” namely, “that the globe is not warming, that dissident voices are being suppressed, and that delaying policies to slow climate change for fifty years will have no serious economic or environment consequences.”

Without objection from the three responders, Nordhaus characterizes their work as addressing six questions: “Is the planet in fact warming? Are human influences an important contributor to warming? Is carbon dioxide a pollutant? Are we seeing a regime of fear for skeptical climate scientists? Are the views of mainstream climate scientists driven primarily by the desire for financial gain? Is it true that more carbon dioxide and additional warming will be beneficial?”

On each question, Nordhaus charges, “the sixteen scientists provide incorrect or misleading answers.” In a commentary with 10 footnotes, he argues that temperature data in fact do show planetary heating, he defends climate modeling, he disputes skeptics’ definition of pollutant concerning CO₂, and he offers a complex economic-outlook analysis.

He cites the skeptics’ use of the story of Trofim Lysenko’s ideology-based hijacking of biology in the Soviet Union, calling the rhetorical tactic “lurid” and “misleading in the extreme":

The idea that skeptical climate scientists are being treated like Soviet geneticists in the Stalinist period has no basis in fact. There are no political or scientific dictators in the US. No climate scientist has been expelled from the US National Academy of Sciences. No skeptics have been arrested or banished to gulags or the modern equivalents of Siberia. Indeed, the dissenting authors are at the world’s greatest universities, including Princeton, MIT, Rockefeller, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Paris.

Similarly, concerning the skeptics’ “follow the money” charges, Nordhaus writes: “In fact, the argument about the venality of the academy is largely a diversion. The big money in climate change involves firms, industries, and individuals who worry that their economic interests will be harmed by policies to slow climate change.”

The three responders’ reply commentary came bundled with a subsequent response from Nordhaus, all under the headline “In the Climate Casino: An exchange ” with a total of 25 footnotes. Like Nordhaus, the three offer technical arguments that have been seen often before, but they also offer two quotable passages corresponding to the ones quoted above.

In one of those, they begin, “In another rhetorical flourish, Professor Nordhaus’s fourth point misrepresents us as claiming that ‘skeptical climate scientists are living under a reign of terror about their professional and personal livelihoods.’” They continue:

This reductio ad absurdum is inappropriate, but we observe that individuals like climate scientist James Hansen, environmental activist Robert Kennedy Jr., and economist Paul Krugman have characterized critics of climate alarm as “traitors to the planet.” We noted the systematic dismissal of editors who publish peer-reviewed papers questioning climate alarm, as well as the legitimate fears of untenured faculty whose promotions depend on publications and grant support. We note here that editors like Donald Kennedy at the prestigious Science magazine have publically declared their opposition to the publication of papers finding results in opposition to climate dogma.”

They add that the “Climategate e-mails specifically describe these tactics, and numerous examples are given in” a publication by one of the three, Richard Lindzen. Concerning “follow the money,” they respond: “Regarding Professor Nordhaus’s fifth point that there is no evidence that money is at issue, we simply note that funding for climate science has expanded by a factor of 15 since the early 1990s, and that most of this funding would disappear with the absence of alarm. Climate alarmism has expanded into a hundred-billion-dollar industry far broader than just research.”

Nordhaus’s reply to the skeptics’ letter begins with an analogy that illustrates the general tenor of the overall exchange: “I have the sense of walking into a barroom brawl.”

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.