British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Enquiry, Evidence and Facts: An Interdisciplinary Conference
You can Argue with the Facts: A Political History of Climate Change
Professor Naomi Oreskes
University of California, San Diego, Department of History,
9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093 -0104, U.S.
An abstract presented to the conference
‘Enquiry, Evidence and Facts: An Interdisciplinary conference’
at the British Academy, London, on 13 December 2007
Biography
Naomi Oreskes (Ph.D., Stanford, 1990), Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego, studies the historical development of scientific knowledge, methods, and practices in the earth and environmental sciences. Her 2004 essay “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” (Science 306: 1686), led to Op-Ed pieces in the Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle, and has been widely cited, including in The New Yorker, USA Today, the Royal Society’s publication, “A guide to facts and fictions about climate change., and in the academy-award winning film, “An Inconvenient Truth.”
Her recent testimony to the United States Senate on the history of climate science may be accessed at http://epw.senate.gov/epwmultimedia/epw120606.ram.
Abstract
"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." --Galileo
“Galileo evidently was too good-natured to ask whether that single humble individual was being funded by petroleum money.” --Craig Callender
Scientists believe in facts. They generally believe that evidence is evident, and that in the long run truth wins out. Scientists also generally subscribe to a supply-side model of knowledge: supply the knowledge and it will trickle down to whomever needs to know it. Science studies scholars, however, have long ago rejected the idea of “facts of nature” waiting to be unveiled. The process of creating scientific knowledge is far more complex, they have concluded, and proof is ultimately a question of persuasion: of a scientist or group of scientists persuading the relevant colleagues in their expert communities.
On either view, for facts to travel, they must extend beyond expert communities into nearby scientific domains that share borders, and thence into still larger communities for whom those facts may be pertinent. But in this process of expansion or extension, facts may encounter forms of resistance distinct from the processes that established them in the first place. If people have reasons to resist the knowledge being presented, they can and will argue with the facts, often quite effectively. Consider the political history of climate science.
In recent years there has been considerable resistance to the conclusion that anthropogenic global warming is a serious problem. Few people know, however, that this resistance has a long history—almost as long as the scientific study of global warming itself. In 1979, the first major U.S. report to reach the American White House on the subject concluded that the globe would warm from greenhouse gas emissions—it was only a matter of time—and that warming would have serious deleterious consequences. The same year, resistance to this conclusion began to develop. In the 1980s and 1990s, resistance to the facts of climate change as accepted by the expert scientific community took three principal forms: one, arguing over the significance of the facts; two, arguing about whether the facts actually were facts; and three, providing an alternative set of facts to make the whole picture look different.
1) Arguing over the significance of facts
In July 2005, Robert May, president of the Royal Society, summarized the view of academicians around the world about the threat of climate change: “The scientific evidence forcefully points to a need for a truly international effort. Make no mistake, we have to act now. And the longer we procrastinate, the more difficult the task of tackling climate change becomes.”[1] But does the scientific evidence point to the need for international action? If so, what kind of action? A rational person might argue that yes, warming will happen, but it would be better to deal with it on a local scale. This is exactly what physicist William Nierenberg did argue in the early 1980s, when he headed a study group of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
Nierenberg did not take issue with the conclusion that increased greenhouse gas concentrations would lead to global warming; he took issue with the conclusion that this constituted a problem. The CO2 ‘problem’ (his scare quotes) was not one, because climate had always been changing and humans had repeatedly adapted. The likely effects of an enhanced greenhouse effect were not much different from past natural changes, and they were sufficiently far off in the future that technological innovation would facilitate adaptation. This adaptation could be carried out on a local level, without need for international agreements, treaties, or sanctions, and if adaptation proved impossible, then we could migrate. Humans had migrated repeatedly in the past, and no doubt we would do so again in the future, so there was nothing to worry about.
Nierenberg’s arguments were taken up by the U.S. Reagan Administration, which found them compatible with its commitment to unleashing the power of free enterprise to drive innovation and economic activity. But as environmental groups increasingly emphasized the potentially serious impacts of warming, and the scientific community came to the conclusion that warming was not far off in the future, but was already occuring, resistance took a new form. By the late 1980s, many people were starting to argue over whether the facts were, in fact, facts at all.
2) Are the facts facts?
By the mid 1990s, scientific experts—climate modelers, atmospheric chemists, and paleoclimatologists--had little doubt that warming was occurring, and that human activities were at least part of the reason why. Yet this conclusion was challenged by think-tanks and independent institutes—mostly outside the halls of science—who argued that warming was not happening, or that if it was, it was natural climate variability. Taking their argument to the streets, as it were, they wrote numerous reports and pamphlets, articles and letters to popular journals, challenging the facts as climate scientists saw them.
A major thrust of argumentation focused on the reliability of temperature records. The claim of current warming relied on a comparison with past conditions, which in turn relied on historical temperature records. Various arguments were made suggesting that these records were unreliable, that they were skewed by their locations in urban areas (the “heat-island effect”), or that they were not sufficiently geographically distributed to give an accurate picture of global conditions. In short the argument was made that the fact of climate change was not, in fact, a fact.
When scientists tried to defend their research, they found themselves in a difficult position, because any counter-argument would necessarily support the view that there was an argument, and thus that the facts were not settled. An extreme case of this occurred when J.D. Mahlman, the well-known climate modeler, defended climate research in the pages of Science, by dividing the research results into different categories based on their degree of certainty. His first category, however, was not simply “facts,” but what he called “virtually certain facts.” His defensive position was underscored by his use of scare quotes, for his heading actually read “Virtually certain ‘facts’ ”. Even the scientists who had established the facts now felt compelled to refer to them as ‘facts’.
Another line of argumentation involved causation. While climate scientists argued that the evidence was consistent with a predominantly human cause, others, outside the research community, argued for solar variability as the dominant or even exclusive cause. This strategy rested in part on taking scientific discussions of (undisputed) solar variability out of context, and using them to suggest that solar variation was the dominant, or even sole cause of observed recent warming.
Astrophysicists Willie Soon, Sallie Baliunas, and colleagues, for example discussed evidence for solar variability in an article in New Astronomy, in which they concluded “…variable fluxes either of solar changed particles or cosmic rays modulated by the solar wind, or both, may influence the terrestrial tropospheric temperature on timescale (sic) of months to years.”[2] No doubt this was a reasonable conclusion from their data, but in the popular literature they went further, suggesting that solar variability, not increased greenhouse gases, was the primary cause of global warming. “Don’t blame man, blame the sun,” ran the headline in The Wall Street Journal when Baliunas argued that the observed warming could be linked to solar variability, as made manifest in sun spot cycles. “Introducing the sun’s impact in the models has show that human effects on temperature are much smaller than first projected,” she claimed, “and perhaps insignificant…”[3]
3) Supplying alternative facts
A third line of argumentation was provided by a group known as the “Greening Earth Society,” funded by the Western Fuels Association, a coalition of industry fuel suppliers to electrical power plants. Through market research, targeted print and radio advertising, glossy brochures, and the production of a half-hour video, this organization promoted a set of alternative facts suggesting that increased atmospheric CO2 would be beneficial to the environment. The campaign was targeted not at scientists, but at ordinary citizens, but it rested on what appeared to be a technical argument: that increased CO2 would enhance photosynthesis.
The claim rested mainly on the work of one man, Sherwood Idso, a long-time skeptic of climate models. In the early 1980s he had argued that climate models exaggerated the effects of carbon dioxide on atmospheric heat balance. In the 1990s, he Idso promoted a new argument—that CO2 would “green” the world by enhancing photosynthesis. (As a soil scientist, Idso was perhaps more credible making claims about plants than he had been about climate models, although he was no more an expert on the former than he had been on the latter.) Plant CO2 uptake would both slow atmospheric warming and enhance agricultural productivity, thus counter-acting any negative warming effect from overheating or drought.
The argument presumed that CO2 availability was a primary limitation on agricultural productivity, a presumption that was nowhere actually demonstrated, and it was supported by only modest research in peer-reviewed journals. Nevertheless it provided what appeared to be scientific support for the view that not all the effects of warming would be bad, that some effects might be very good, and that there was, at least, significant scientific debate.
Traveling without your parents?
For much of the 1990s, a significant portion of the American population did not believe that anthropogenic global warming had been demonstrated, a position at odds with the conclusions of the expert scientific community. This suggests that these various campaigns of resistance were effective in blocking the facts from traveling to the American lay public. The facts, in the eyes of the American people, were not the same as the facts as seen by climate researchers.
However, in recent years Americans have come to accept the reality of anthropogenic warming. In the summer of 2007, a Yale University-Gallup poll found that 72% of Americans are completely or mostly convinced that global warming is happening. Yet at the same time, 40% think that there remains “a lot of disagreement” among scientists about the issue. This suggests that the resistance campaigns were effective in creating a lasting impression of scientific debate and discord, and that when the facts finally did travel, they left their parents behind.
Notes
1. Stephen Pincock, "Scientists Demand Action on Climate, " Scientists 19 (July 2007): 47
2. Soon, W et al, 200, "Variations of solar coraonal hole area and terrestrial lowere tropospheric air temperature from 1979 to mid-1998: astronomical forcings of change in earth's climate? New Astronomy 4:563-579, quote in abstract on p. 563
3. Sallie Baliunas, 8/5/99, "Why So Hot? don't Blame Man, Blame the Sun," Wall Street Journal