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A new group challenging the general consensus on climate science is getting significant air time in Australia, where uproar over a proposed carbon tax may topple the country's minority government.
Launched in February, the Galileo Movement is getting much of its lift from its influential "patron," conservative radio personality Alan Jones, one of the most popular broadcasters in Australia, who has touted the effort on his daily morning show.
The effort is the brainchild of two retirees frustrated by what they see as the orthodoxy of "settled science" on climate change. They cite as inspiration Galileo Galilei, the 17th century astronomer and father of modern science, who challenged the dogma of the Roman Catholic Church to report the Earth orbited around the sun.
The group's website lists a host of figures and references that take aim at what they describe as the "political fabrication of global warming alarm." It argues that the chief greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, is a harmless component of the atmosphere. "It's an honest document that throws down the gauntlet," said John Smeed, a retired engineer and a Galileo Movement's co-founder. "We have gotten a tremendous amount of support from people who are saying thank goodness someone stood up."
Few issues have divided Australians to such a degree. Earlier plans to curb emissions upended two political leaders, including Gillard's immediate predecessor in the Labor party. Support for the Labor government sits at record lows, according to public opinion polls.
Close examination of the Galileo Movement's arguments shows that the effort is recycling many of the same straw man arguments and distortions about the science that other groups have previously employed to scuttle a cap-and-trade bill in the U.S. Congress last year, a stricter emissions trading scheme in New Zealand three years ago and other regional and national efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Smeed and Galileo Movement co-founder Case Smit draw support from a who's-who of the global climate-denier movement. Advisors include News Ltd. blogger Andrew Bolt, University of Virginia emeritus physicist Fred Singer, George Mason University climatologist Patrick Michaels, Perth-based coal-to-liquids advocate David Archibald and public speaker Lord Christopher Monckton of the United Kingdom.
The effort employs the same accusations and distortions that climate scientists and various investigative panels have battled for years: Academics are doctoring the science, the major science bodies are corrupt, the science is anything but settled.
"It's very environmentally sound: They don't bother to create any new facts. They just recycled old ones," quipped Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City and a publisher of the website RealClimate.org.
But the attack on science can be effective. By casting doubt on the science, the need for behavior change is blunted – an approach the tobacco industry successfully employed throughout the 1980s and '90s to delay efforts to warn the public of smoking's dangers.
"Every country has its own home-grown marriage of folks who are skeptical of the science and the ideological groups who just don't want regulation," said Aaron Huertas, spokesman for the Union of Concerned Scientists.
"The playing field is a little bit uneven. To succeed all they have to do is give people an excuse, give them a little grain of doubt, and they're done."
The debate in Australia has certainly seized center stage recently. With climate policy all but dead in the United States and a global deal stalemated in the United Nations, Australia Prime Minister Julia Gillard's proposal to impose a $23 per ton tax on carbon emissions stands as the planet's most aggressive – and likely – effort to regulate greenhouse gases.
"They're playing high stakes and high risk," said Kennedy Graham, a Green Party member of parliament in New Zealand, where an emissions trading scheme was amended in 2009 with a weaker version. "I'm not sure which way it will go, but if it goes in, it will be a stronger system than New Zealand's."
The Galileo Movement's stated ambition is to stick around just long enough to "axe the tax." Gina Rinehart, the Australian ore magnate whose coal investments have lifted her atop Australia's list of wealthiest individuals, underwrote a $100,000-plus Australia speaking tour that Smeed and Smit organized last year for Monckton. But the pair are still seeking to raise the $300,000 that Smeed says the Galileo Movement needs to launch its advertising campaign.
Jackson Wells, a Sydney-based public relations firm, is handling the movement's publicity. The firm's eclectic client list ranges from tobacco and mining companies to academics, the Rotary Club International, the Church of Scientology and the sponsors of the Sydney Peace Prize.
By employing the same arguments – and the same players – that have cropped up in other political efforts to address climate change across the globe, the Galileo Movement is part of a pervasive, stubborn tradition, Graham said.
"There will always be people who will argue a case for whatever reason – merit or profit – independent of the facts of the situation," he said. "That's always been there, from the Copernican Revolution to climate change."
In that sense, said NASA's Schmidt, correcting the scientific errors is almost pointless. "The science here is being used as a proxy for a lot of different things," he said, noting that debunking the fallacies in the Galileo Movement's argument won't change the group's prevailing politics.
"But it's clear that one side on this debate is abusing the science much more than the other," he added. "That's worth pointing out."
DailyClimate.org is a nonprofit news service covering climate change.
This article originally appeared at The Daily Climate, the climate change news source published by Environmental Health Sciences, a nonprofit media company.
» Read more about the Galileo Movement and why they believe CO2 is a greenhouse gas
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11 Comments
Add CommentHmm. Lying to legislators is considered perjury in the US, and is subject to heavy fine an potential prison sentence. Perhaps this is an option for use against the denialist crowd in North America, would something similar work in Oz?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's not realistic to expect years of rhetoric to dry up and blow away. What's really needed is to get vested interests out of politics. Or more accurately to make those interests public record.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf the money trail was completely public (at present it is not), and conflict of interest laws were enacted and enforced (IE representatives were required to recuse themselves from issues involving even the appearance of impropriety on their part) it would be easier to get things done. Re-instating the OTA would be good too (A bi-partisan resource for members of the government to get information on science issues). In the mean time the biggest single fix is education. Not just about the facts, but how they were arrived at. The process, if you will. The idea here isn't to say "You are wrong and this is why". The idea is to say, "well this is why we think this. As you can see a lot of people have looked into it and come up with these ideas collectively. We used these procedures for these reasons. Other people with no vested interest in our work reviewed it (Quite the contrary in some cases, many of them wanted our work to be disproved) If you can add something to the process or have evidence against our ideas we'd love to hear it. If not, kindly consider our recommendations."
That takes a lot of work and education, of course. One can't mend years of disillusionment with government and science over night.
The fact is, there are some very reasonable people asking very reasonable questions about climate change. Some of the very scientists who work on it have said some things that suggest they know more than we realy do. That's exactly the sort of thing that makes it seem like what we actually do know is in doubt. Politicians are even worse.
Personally, I'm a believer. I also know that unpredictable consequences are plenty dangerous enough without spinning worst case scenarios on limited data. When those who are worried go beyond what we actually know and into the land of speculation without acknowledging the shift they are inviting climate change deniers to cut them off at the neck. Limited speculation based on real world facts is one thing, throwing around worst case scenarios that are only loosely tied to facts (IE plausible, but one of countless other potential scenarios) is just as self serving as the tricks the deniers use.
P.S. In the short term, just getting voters to see they have a real vested interest in the process (Voter turn out pretty well stinks in this country) would likely push things in the right direction even with all the suspect information floating around.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt was about 6 or 7 years ago when I first came across Phil Jones' reply to Warwick Hughes (an Australian, but I don't know if he's part of the "Galileo Movement") :
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Why should I give you my data when all you want to do is find something wrong with it ?"
To which the correct answer is, of course :
BECAUSE THAT IS HOW "SCIENCE" WORKS, YOU [ self censored ] !!!
It was at that point in the "global warming debate", as it was called back then, that I went from being "mildly sceptical" to a "hardened sceptic".
Until the (C)AGW proponents can make some FALSIFIABLE predictions, as opposed to simply asserting (afterwards) that ALL extreme weather events are "compliant with the models", I will remain sceptical.
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Regarding the phrase "the global climate-denier movement", ALL of the people cited agree that :
1) "Climate" exists
2) The climate changes (always has changed; is changing; always will change)
3) CO2 is what is commonly known as a "greenhouse gas"
4) Adding CO2 to the atmosphere, ALL OTHER THINGS BEING EQUAL (which they aren't outside a laboratory), will result in the Earth's average surface temperature rising. The exact AMOUNT it would change in any given scenario is uncertain, though, due to incomplete knowledge of the feedback mechanisms.
Please can the SciAm editors explain what, EXACTLY, they believe these people are "denying" ?
There comes a point when the claims made by the 'denialists' simply become ludicrously unrealistic. There is of course incomplete knowledge. Now, if there was smoke pouring out of the windows of your house, you would have 'incomplete knowledge' about what was going on inside the house. You would still certainly be considered an idiot if you therefor concluded that it wasn't worth doing anything about. There simply comes a point when it is no longer responsible to fail to act. This is particularly true when the cost of action is so much drastically smaller and the bad consequences so much smaller when modest action is taken sooner. The truth is that while it was never going to be cheap or simple to deal with this issue it is nowhere near as difficult as some people want to insist.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnother related issue is just how horribly distorted priorities have become. The US for instance could have entirely revamped its energy infrastructure. Instead the money was squandered on pointless wars in the Middle East who's only effect was to enrich the very people who now stand in the way of progress and insist it is too expensive. This is beyond foolish.
Claims by 'realists' that there is no detected effect of our added CO2 on planetary temperature or climate are "ludicrously unrealistic" compared to the 'alarmists' claims of catastrophe and plans to massively tax the most affordable energy sources for what even they admit is zero effect ?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat's ludicrously unrealistic .
The first distortion in this unscientific screed is that CO2 is "a harmless component of the atmosphere". It's not harmless !
It is the essential foundation of all life , including watermelons .
Wow.... I've grown accustomed to my comments to be censored by RealClimate.org when I defy dogma. Never seen them censored by SCIAM before.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA new low for your editorial board.
What I had said was that REALClimate.org has a habit of censoring comments that they don't meet their political stripe.
I guess SCIAM does that now too.
Interesting.....
It's interesting to see how Galileo has been hijacked as the icon of AGW skepticism. What the skeptics are defending is the old-line view of climate as an ineluctable force of nature that puny humans cannot comprehend. They see modern rigorous climate science as mere superstition, often with implications of ideologically driven religious fervor.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisActually, of course, the roles are exactly reversed, but the Galileo Movement adherents are never going to admit that.
Eppur se muove, of words to that effect.
I infer , Dan , that you do not have a quant background . It is because of the absolutely amateurish level of establishment "climate science" that I ever got diverted into the battle against this junk . It's my observation that it is a rare "climate scientist" who even knows how to calculate the temperature of a radiantly heated colored ball .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNobody can outspend governments ; they manufacture the money . They continue to spend tens of billions trying to perpetuate this stupid fraud .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI infer , shish , that you are yet another of the quantitatively and even biologically uneducated masses incapable of evaluating this absurdity for yourself , therefore have no other option than to abdicate your own reason to the clearly non-existent but statist parroted "consensus" .
A cheap experiment that is simple and easily reproducible is published at www.galileomovement.com.au/blog - millions of young brain-washed minds can be liberated by the practice of science like this.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA most expensive experiment has just been published in 'Nature' where early results from the CERN 'Cloud' experiment confirm Svensmark's theory that the Sun and cosmic rays control the earth temperature and climate.