On climate change scepticism...

Excerpts from the transcript of an American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium. If you find those interesting go to the transcript and audio at the Science Show

Riley Dunlap on climate change sceptics as authors:

Back in the '80s there were only a couple of years, in the '90s we miss a few years, sort of a reasonably consistent flow and we get in the 2000s, and there's just been an explosion in these books quite recently. If we do it by decade it jumps out at you more. We've jumped up to 64 books espousing some version of climate change denial since 2000. Several of these books are bestsellers. On Amazon, you find them in Borders, Barnes & Noble, Hastings, they're carried by the Conservative Book Club, they reach a large audience. Now, the key issue; how many of these books are linked to conservative think-tanks? It turns out to be 78%. What you see here originally almost all were. I'm going to give you some insight into where these come from.....

Okay, now we get some insight here. We now distinguish between natural science PhDs, a PhD in another discipline, and no PhD. What of course you can see is the lowest connection to think-tanks are down here among people without PhDs. In addition, a main source of books these days are self-published books, Author Press et cetera, Author House, I think it's called, anyone can publish a book. And another thing that's going on is a lot of these books are self-published and these are the folks who aren't affiliated with the think-tank. I found one, a retired real estate agent in British Columbia, he started writing books after he retired and he decided to do one on climate change because it's a hoax et cetera.

William Freudenburg on those anti-science websites and vested interest think tanks:

Usually at a AAAS meeting when there's any talk about the connections between science and society it's in the old framework of public understanding of science. How well is the information getting to society? There's less attention to what some sociology and philosophy of science people have written about, about how scientists are affected by society. When you get outside of the halls of the AAAS, there's plenty of attention, especially in the United States, and it's almost all bad: JunkScience.com, which was set up by someone who used to fight the so-called junk science on cigarette smoking; American Thinker...they lie; ClimateSceptic.com, ClimateSceptics.org, which looks a lot like Wikipedia, doesn't it.

Then blizzards happen and of course we conclude from this...Inhofe is out there building an igloo...that if it snows in Washington DC that proves that the global climate is getting colder. You've got some very conservative outlets that pick up the trope and repeat it that scientists are hiding evidence, and eventually it quite often gets into relatively mainstream media such as CNN. 'Is this a trick or is this the truth?' And you find a few important scientists saying that every error exaggerated the impact of change. That's a testable hypothesis.......

And you heard from Dr Dunlap that that campaign is going on today.

Some of his other research that you didn't hear about, an earlier study he did with Jacques and Freeman, found 141 books expressing scepticism about anything environmental. And in that earlier study, 92% of the books were from conservative think-tanks. And this is not by any subtle way of doing the math, either the author worked for it, they published it, or both. In essence, there would not be a so-called scepticism literature if it were not for the work of some well funded, hard working, skilled in PR, conservative think-tanks.

Stephen Schneider on the scientist as sceptic:

So we're going to talk about the issue of scepticism. I'm going to start right out now; what's the difference between scepticism and denial? There's no such thing as a good scientist who isn't a sceptic. I changed my opinion in 1970 from cooling to warming, published it first, it's one of my proudest moments in science because we found, as the evidence accumulated, that there were a number of reasons, it's all explained in chapter one of Science as a Contact Sport, and I still have to hear things from those famous climate professors, the ones that publish all the papers in the referee journals, professors Limbaugh and Will, you know, about how... 'Oh Schneider, he's just an environmentalist for all temperatures', it's a great line!....

The purpose in the advocacy world is to win for the client or the ideology. In science that is a quick ticket to not getting funded, not getting promoted and not getting your papers accepted. So you don't start with a level playing field because the two epistemologies of advocacy and science are so diametrical that it therefore is actually career counterproductive for scientists to try to act in the same behavioural way that the opponents do.