A new study has revealed just how much more effective climate sceptics are at commenting on forums, posting stock arguments, and linking back to sceptic sites.
A fascinating new study commissioned by Oxfam and produced by digital mapping agency Profero has shed new insights into the way climate sceptics’ networks operate. The study’s conclusions, as yet unpublished but seen by Left Foot Forward, were presented to a closed meeting of campaigners on Wednesday night.
Profero’s study analysed online coverage of the “Climategate” debacle that broke last November, tracking its progress from fringe blogs to mainstream media outlets over the ensuing weeks and months.
Tracing the online paper trail back to its source, the researchers concluded that:
• The ‘Climategate’ story was first aired on climate denier blog The Air Vent, before wending its way onto more popular sceptic sites Climate Audit and Watts Up With That, and then featured by James Delingpole in his Daily Telegraph blog – whose followers propagated it further;
• From thereon in, the story was picked up by a wide range of media outlets, and went global –the culmination of a concerted effort to push it into the mainstream;
• The timing of the CRU email leak was calculated to have maximum impact on the Copenhagen negotiations, with the second wave of sceptic attacks after Christmas deliberately timed for when the environmental movement was at its weakest, exhausted from the UN talks; and
• The speed of information flow within the sceptic community, with its rapid publication of sceptical “research”, is far quicker than any scientist or NGO could hope to match – and handily unencumbered by peer review or sign-off processes.
This meant that because almost no-one from the climate movement responded to or rebutted the sceptics’ arguments, they ended up owning the story.
This allowed them to shift what political theorists call the “Overton Window”: the acceptable parameters within which a debate can be conducted. Suddenly after Climategate, it became acceptable for the mainstream media to question the fundamentals of climate science.
As cognitive linguist George Lakoff has written, if you don’t contol the way an issue is framed, you don’t control the debate. Climate progressives allowed this episode to be written on the sceptics’ terms. The result? A sizeable drop in the public’s belief in climate change (although the freezing winter may also have played a part in this).
Profero’s study then looked at the character of the online climate sceptic networks that permitted this information flow. It discovered that the sceptic community is extraordinarily well-networked and interwoven, with sites like Climate Audit and Climate Depot acting as hubs for a wide range of other individual pundits and bloggers. (And no, I’m not going to give these sites free publicity by linking to them.) Of the top five most linked-to climate commentators, four are climate sceptics.
The one exception was Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who was also the only significant voice countering the sceptics during the whole Climategate debacle. “I have seldom felt so alone,” he wrote early on in the scandal, with justification – Oxfam’s study shows that almost no-one bothered to back him up in defending the integrity of the science.
In many ways, the tactics revealed by Profero are not new. They were first tried and tested by American neo-cons in the 1970s long before the internet became a tool for campaigning. What is new is that the patterns of activity are now traceable, which means that the progressive response to climate scepticism can be more strategic – that is, if we listen to the findings.
Indeed, the reports’ insights should give pause for thought to progressives contemplating the strength of their own networks. Stuart Conway, the study’s co-author, declared simply that “there are no progressive networks” – just hubs of activity here and there, lacking interconnection. Whilst a number of blogs buck this trend – honourable mentions include Treehugger and, yes, Left Foot Forward – the pro-environmental community as a whole lacks brio and responsiveness.
It’s not that there we don’t have the numbers: it’s more than we’re not using our numbers effectively. NGOs, notably, were nowhere to be seen during the debate. Whilst there were some good reasons for this – NGOs feared they would be simply seen as “the usual suspects” in rebutting deniers – this clearly left a vacuum that needed filling by an activist community.
After presentation of the study, discussion moved onto filling that vacuum: how we can better combat sceptic networks and strengthen our own. The discussions ranged far and wide, and I’d love to tell you some of the creative ideas discussed, but you’ll have to watch this space…
For now, though, let me close with a challenge for progressive readers: one of the study’s more obvious conclusions was how effective climate sceptics are at commenting on forums, posting stock arguments, and linking back to sceptic sites. This is unsurprising for anyone who has ever trawled through comments left behind after any climate change article. By the time you read this, there will doubtless be sceptical comments posted beneath this blog, too.
So here’s what I’d like you to do:
• Read the comments, and if you notice any that cast doubt on the validity of climate science, post a response, be polite and use facts;
• You might like to make use of the handy checklist of arguments to counter deniers over at Skeptical Science;
• Link to some of the dirt dug up on sceptics’ funding by SourceWatch; or
• Refer to the discussions at RealClimate and Climate Safety.
Oh, and remember to check out James Delingpole’s column at the Telegraph. If any of it makes you angry, you might like to let him know. Did I say be polite? Scratch that.
UPDATE 23/3:
Profero, the digital mapping agency behind the Oxfam report have posted a message on their website. They say:
“We’re really excited that people are taking an interest in what we do and hats off to LeftFootForward for getting the scoop on this piece of work but we’d like to clarify what’s being discussed (most of the conversations focus upon a visual representation of some of the key conversations in the form of a landscape map) as it should be understood in the context of an entire report (120 pages or so) which hasn’t been made public.
“The report as a whole applies our own bespoke models and frameworks to both quantitative and qualitative data in order to bring to the surface complex dynamics and issues which would otherwise pass un-noticed if an automated technological monitoring solution had been used in isolation.”
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201 Responses to “Combating the growing influence of climate sceptics”
RupertRead
https://www.leftfootforward.org/2010/03/combating-the-growing-influence-of-climate-sceptics An important piece.
Josh
Sounds like the global cooling deniers are getting desperate. Dear old Willy, it must be a bitch for evidence based blogging when the evidence dosen’t support your discredited, Stalinist, Maoist, Trotskyite, Leninist, Fascist theory. What a shame
Richard Blogger
@Leo The BBC and the Guardian are news sources, they have to report news. It is true that they have columnists who give opinions (OpEds in American-speak) like Monbiot, but it is clear that they are opinions not reporting. Similarly Delingpole is an OpEd columnist and not a reporter.
So in this debate one must remove the columnists (where someone says “this is my opinion” regardless of how expert they are – in Monbiot’s case – or knuckle headed they are – in Delingpole’s case) and look at the reporting.
Reporting means looking for credible sources and checking them, and getting more than one source. It means throwing away “beliefs” and presenting facts. It also means getting both sides of the argument and letting the readers/viewers/listeners decide. That’s good journalism.
Unfortunately we are in a situation when this rarely happens. Churnalism, as Nick Davies popularised (though it’s not a term he created) is a lazy, but cheap, form of journalism that has taken over the media. It is journalism by press release.
These days it is how loud you can shout that matters, not whether you are right. And in the climate debate the people with the loudhailers are the deniers.
Are blogs “news” or “journalism”? Well there is a lot of debate amongst journalisms about this, and no one has yet to come up with a satisfactory answer. Will’s “call to action” to address the deniers claims on their sites is nothing new. Before the internet anyone could print up a flyer with a cheap duplicator machine and put their point of view across. The internet just does the same thing but on a wider scale. Do I think there is any point? No. The denier sites are the places where die-hard deniers go to smugly congratulate themselves on being ignorant. You cannot change their minds. Far better to address comments on the main-stream sites, the main newspapers sites, the main TV sites where people are more open-minded. In those places Will’s advice is very pertinent, presenting the facts in a polite way makes people more willing to listen. The loud hailer bearers then come across for what they are: ignorant and bullying.
Climate Zombie arguments
@Josh – “Sounds like the global cooling deniers are getting desperate”
Sorry Josh, but global cooling was a theory that died in the 1970s: http://tinyurl.com/3yzczf
Sounds to me like it’s the climate sceptics who are the desperate ones – digging up dead arguments and trying to breathe life into them again…
Luboš Motl
Well, I am offended that The Reference Frame, my blog, isn’t in the graph – the authors haven’t really gotten to the core yet. 😉 More seriously, it’s completely crazy for the IPCC to appear in the middle, and connected to Pielke Jr only. Is that a joke?
The traders with fear are so obsessed with the form – the question how to brainwash others and “frame” the issue in the most professional Goebbelsian way – that they completely miss the question whether they’re actually right about anything, and whether most people can really be fooled all the time about anything.
While the human stupidity is almost infinite, it’s also true that most people don’t reach these infinite limits. Most people have actually understood that something is really unhealthy about the community (and its method) that produces the bombshell propositions of the kind that humans are threatening the climate.
If there’s somewhat sane in the AGW movement, she should ask the question what she should fix about herself, before she asks how her complete lack of scientific integrity, ability, and will to think about the climate rationally should be optimally imposed upon others.