Wall Street Journal presses to have climate change seen as an open scientific question
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0197
In a posting six years ago called “ The false objectivity of ‘balance’ ,” climatologists at the blog RealClimate declared that granting “a handful of ‘contrarian’ climate scientists . . . equal time or space in public discourse on climate change out of a sense of need for journalistic ‘balance’ is as indefensible as, say, granting the Flat Earth Society an equal say with NASA in the design of a new space satellite.”
The Wall Street Journal emphatically disagrees, as reiterated in a 21 February renewal of its effort to chase this false-balance principle out of election-year technocivic discourse—and to spread instead the notion that much about climate science remains distinctly unsettled.
The renewal takes the form of another lengthy commentary by the same 16 people from various scientific and technical fields who ignited an opinion-page debate on 27 January ( as reported earlier ). That original commentary challenged the American Physical Society and argued that there is “no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize’ the world’s economy.”
The 27 January commentary opened with an election-year assertion that science has not yet settled its understanding of the planet’s climate:
A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about “global warming.” Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.
It also closed with that assertion, again with election-year framing: “Every candidate should support rational measures to protect and improve our environment, but it makes no sense at all to back expensive programs that divert resources from real needs and are based on alarming but untenable claims of ‘incontrovertible’ evidence.”
That adjective incontrovertible, of course, comes famously from the American Physical Society’s Climate Change Statement . It was discussed in a 6 February Wall Street Journal rebuttal letter from Robert L. Byer, the APS president. The WSJ also printed a 1 February rebuttal letter from Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and 37 other climatologists.
Later, the 7 February WSJ devoted the top half of its letters page solely to voices opposing the climate consensus. Besides leveling charges of financial, intellectual, and peer-review corruption against scientists who advocate the consensus, those letters alleged the following:
• The Trenberth et al. letter comes “straight out of the Saul Alinsky playbook"—a reference to a political organizer of the 1960s often derided as un-American by presidential candidate Newt Gingrich.
• Consensus defenders’ overall argument rests on a frail web of assumptions, “and if any one of them is answered in the negative, the whole global-warming enterprise falls apart.”
• Trenberth et al. base their argument on authority rather than on science.
In the new 21 February commentary (which as of that date appears only online), the 16 consensus skeptics thank the 7 February contributors but respond only to Trenberth et al. and to APS’s Byer.
The skeptics begin with a paragraph that ends with a direct denial of the false-balance principle. Trenberth et al. had charged that the 16 mostly lacked expertise, like “dentists practicing cardiology.” The 16 turn that medical metaphor around, and in their paragraph’s last sentence assert, in effect, that science—and all of us—most certainly must treat the planet’s climate as an open scientific question:
We agree . . . that expertise is important in medical care. . . . Consider then that by eliminating fossil fuels, the recipient of medical care (all of us) is being asked to submit to what amounts to an economic heart transplant. According to most patient bills of rights, the patient has a strong say in the treatment decision. Natural questions from the patient are whether a heart transplant is really needed, and how successful the diagnostic team has been in the past.
Then the 16 offer a graph labeled “Reality vs. Alarm” that they say shows that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—a “diagnostic team"—has been mistaken in its model-based temperature projections. They dispute Trenberth et al. concerning ocean temperatures, and ask, “Why should we now believe exaggerating IPCC models that tell us of ‘missing heat’ hiding in the one place where it cannot yet be reliably measured—the deep ocean?” This takes them back to the medical metaphor and, in effect, to further disputing of the false-balance principle:
Given this dubious track record of prediction, it is entirely reasonable to ask for a second opinion. We have offered ours. With apologies for any immodesty, we all have enjoyed distinguished careers in climate science or in key science and engineering disciplines (such as physics, aeronautics, geology, biology, forecasting) on which climate science is based.
The 16 don’t actually explain how climate science could be based on aeronautics, the field of at least one of their number, the aerospace engineer Burt Rutan. They go on, however, to deny the authority of national academies of science. They write, “Apparently every generation of humanity needs to relearn that Mother Nature tells us what the science is, not authoritarian academy bureaucrats or computer models.”
They also revisit past debating about warming-trend data, the Little Ice Age, Vikings in Greenland, medieval warming, and the Holocene Climate Optimum. They assert, “The fact is that there are very powerful influences on the earth’s climate that have nothing to do with human-generated CO2.” They charge that thanks to faulty polling techniques, it’s “deceptive” to claim that “more than 97% of scientists actively publishing in the field agree that climate change is real and human caused.” This leads them back to the issue of the climate consensus as an open scientific question:
But what is being disputed is the size and nature of the human contribution to global warming. To claim, as the Trenberth letter apparently does, that disputing this constitutes “extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert” is peculiar indeed.
One might infer from the Trenberth letter that scientific facts are determined by majority vote. Some postmodern philosophers have made such claims. But scientific facts come from observations, experiments and careful analysis, not from the near-unanimous vote of some group of people.
The 16 cite two cases to show that the “continued efforts of the climate establishment to eliminate ‘extreme views’ can acquire a seriously threatening nature when efforts are directed at silencing scientific opposition.” They criticize government support for green technologies. Then they address that adjective incontrovertible in a passage asserting that the American Physical Society is actually wavering on the climate consensus as settled science:
Turning to the letter of the president of the American Physical Society (APS), Robert Byer, we read, “The statement [on climate] does not declare, as the signatories of the letter [our op-ed] suggest, that the human contribution to climate change is incontrovertible.” This seems to suggest that APS does not in fact consider the science on this key question to be settled.
Yet here is the critical paragraph from the statement that caused the resignation of Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever and many other long-time members of the APS: “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.” No reasonable person can read this and avoid the conclusion that APS is declaring the human impact “incontrovertible.” Otherwise there would be no logical link from “global warming” to the shrill call for mitigation.
At the commentary’s end, the 16 call explicitly for treating anthropogenic global warming as an open scientific question:
In spite of the obstinacy of some in APS management, APS members of good will are supporting the establishment of a politics-free, climate physics study group within the Society. If successful, it will facilitate much needed discussion, debate, and independent research in the physics of climate.
In summary, science progresses by testing predictions against real world data obtained from direct observations and rigorous experiments. The stakes in the global-warming debate are much too high to ignore this observational evidence and declare the science settled. Though there are many more scientists who are extremely well qualified and have reached the same conclusions we have, we stress again that science is not a democratic exercise and our conclusions must be based on observational evidence.
The computer-model predictions of alarming global warming have seriously exaggerated the warming by CO2 and have underestimated other causes. Since CO2 is not a pollutant but a substantial benefit to agriculture, and since its warming potential has been greatly exaggerated, it is time for the world to rethink its frenzied pursuit of decarbonization at any cost.
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.