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 The study’s conclusions, as yet unpublished but seen by Left Foot Forward, were presented to a closed meeting of campaigners on Wednesday night.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.”
201 Responses to “Combating the growing influence of climate sceptics”
AMac
“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.”
– – – – –
That’s an excellent idea. I think it would add to public insight into paleoclimate reconstructions (i.e. the “Hockey Stick”) if supporters of the AGW Consensus wuld address the issues that have been raised regarding Prof. Mann’s use of Lake Korttajarvi lakebed sediment data series — the “Tiljander proxies.”
Here are two questions that address this point, along with my own answers. Googling combinations of the obvious terms will bring up links to informative references.
Question #1. — Can the educated layperson discover an instance where a prominent validation of the Hockey Stick should be rejected, because it clearly is based on major, obvious, and uncorrected errors?
Answer #1. — Yes. The calibration and Upside-Down use of the Tiljander proxies by Prof. Michael Mann’s research group in the high-impact, peer-reviewed journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA” (“PNAS”) in 2008.
Question #2. — Are the self-correction mechanisms of science operating properly in the discipline of paleoclimatology?
Answer #2. — No. AGW Consensus scientists and advocates have rallied around Prof. Mann in public. AGW Consensus science-bloggers at “RealClimate.org”, “Stoat”, and elsewhere have endorsed the Mann group’s use of the Tiljander proxies. Climategate emails by Darrell Kaufman and Nick McKay reveal what some AGW Consensus scientists have said about this, in private.
In “Cargo Cult Science”, physicist Richard Feynman famously pointed out that the scientific process is always vulnerable — scientists are all-too-human. Is that relevant in this instance? Should the public hesitate to accept “Hockey Stick” reconstructions at face value?
Steven Mosher
On the identification of people’s beliefs.
Lucia of rank exploits believes in Global Warming and is self classified as a Luke Warmer
JeffId of Airvent believes in global warming: I haven’t directly asked him if he is a Lukewarmer,
But I’ve never seen him deny radiative physics
Steven McIntyre believes in global warming, his principle question is an accounting one: How much
and how was it calculated. I’ve never seen him deny radiative physics.
I am a Lukewarmer. That means I believe in radiative physics ( More GHGs will raise temperatures)
Part of the problem, as I diagnosed in our book, with the climate scientists is that they responded to people like Mcintyre as if they were part of the skeptic community. Their responses to me and my FOIA requests were predicated on a belief that I am part of some conspiracy or group or network of skeptics. Similarly with others such as david Holland. This belief and the strategies it engendered is what caused their behavior and that behavior is what led to the release of the files. If they had seen McIntyre and others for what they really were, individuals with particular hobby horses ( like auditing records) Then much if not all of the affair could have been avoided. Simply: if they had sent McIntyre the data, data they sent freely to other researchers, the whole affair could have been avoided. But they could not bring themselves to send it to McIntyre. They viewed him as a part of a larger network. Much the same way that now people are viewing Lucia and JeffID as part of that network.
So, just for the record: I believe in AGW. I believe in Radiative physics. I am no skeptic. I talk to skeptics. It’s called dialog. We share certain values: openness and transparency. They let me post on their blogs even though I disagree with their skepticism. In contrast, On RealClimate, a blog that presents science that I largely agree with my comments are routinely blocked.
The problem that people dont see is this. When people accuse me and Lucia and jeffId and SteveMc of being skeptics or of being part of a network, we just laugh. More importantly, whoever does this loses all credibility with us. It’s like being accused of cheating when you know you are faithful.
The announcement of the existence of the files to the blogosphere happened at Lucia’s. I did it there because
she was mentioned in the mails and she baked me brownies once.
Good brownies.
Steven Mosher
“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).”
As a former fan of Lakoff ( back in the 80’s) I have to agree with this. In fact much of the work I’ve done promoting this story has been a reframing of the stock framed responses that were peddled by the defenders of CRU and Mann.
Let me explain the dominate frames and how I reframed them
1. The mails were taken out of context.
This one was dead easy. We reframed this as ” the mails are worse in context” So, let me suggest
that you not use that frame. The way it works is simple. You say they are taken out of context. I take
a mail, put in context, and people learn more about the issue. The problem with the original frame
is that it was a DEAD metaphor. Further it didn’t frame the issue IT FRAMED THE COVERAGE. that
is it framed what “skeptics” were doing. Saying they are being taken out of context was stupid. It
gave me the idea to write the book. Thanks.
2. Nothing in the science changes. I liked this frame too. This frame is handled by simply agreeing with
the frame. That’s right nothing in the mails changes the science. The mails reveal that the men who
said trust us, are not trustworthy. That doesnt put us into denial, it puts us into doubt.
The other thing that is funny is the way that standard charges can now be turned on their heads. For example, anytime someone accuses Skeptics of being part of a conspiracy, that’s a led for a blog post I can write about the climategate files. Any time anyone mentions peer review that a led. It’s more than frame stealing. It’s PWNING the vocabulary. Here is the little secret: everything people accuse the skeptics of doing, is a behavior I can find in the mails. It hit me early on: The climatescientists involved became so fearful of “skeptics” that they became the very thing they feared.
The other major mistake that my side ( I believe in AGW ) makes is that they lost a huge opportunity to own the high ground on the underlying issue behind climategate: Openness and transparency. We had a chance to Coopt
this meme in 2007 and missed it. Instead we practiced nixonian stonewalling
On Balance
Well, after reading the comments from the leftist feet and the skeptics who agree with global warming, I can say I am convinced that the warmists have made themselves untrustworthy. And that’s what matters now. The science has not changed. What has changed is public perception of the integrity of the warmists.
Steven Mosher
““there are no progressive networks” – just hubs of activity here and there, lacking interconnection.”
It’s more than interconnection. The network of Lukewarmers and Skeptics ( we are different ) who broke this
story and who promoted it have something more than “interconnections.” we have the following:
1. the ability to disagree. On the other side, lets say the alarmist side, you don’t really have the ability
to disagree with one of your own. For example, you can’t even say the following:
A. Climate science is true AND Phil Jones corrupted the FOIA process at CRU. you can’t say that.
B. Climate science is true AND Michael Mann’s hockey stick is based on suspect statistics.
Now, I can go anywhere in skeptic land and say these two things. And generally get accepted and have a
dialog. I can even convince people to listen to me about the truth of climate science. And they don’t call
me names. I only get called names by alarmists.
2. The ability to say we are wrong. In fact the more honest we are about the mistakes we make, the worse the
alarmists are in their refusal to make any such admission.
3. We link to our opponents. Invite the fight. For people ( the undecided) who are new to the fight this is
a prima facia indictor of “fairness” and “open mindedness” Think of it this way. IF you are undecided,
and open minded and if your way of coming to the truth is via dialog, which blog are you going to trust:
one that links to opponents or one that blocks alternative views. Now, if your aim is to get “consensus”
about what your message should be and you dont want any input from your opponents then pick a insular
path. You won’t convince the undecided this way. The practice of not linking to opponets is one of the classic
mistakes that the alarmists made in this internet war. To be sure they listened to people who argued that
linking to a site would “lend the site” credibility. But these people had it exactly wrong. Linking to a site does
not lend credibility to the site linked. it lends credibility and power to the person linking. So WUWT the most
powerful force in this whole war links to its opponents. Why? because the brand is so strong he can. because
he believes ( rightly or wrongly) that he will win the argument. People key in on this strength. The strength to link to your opponent. It’s especially appealing to the customer. The customer with the open mind who wants to
hear the argument. And when the other side refuses to link back, that imbalance of power is underscored. As a marketing professional I just have to call out a great strategy when I see it.
3. Volunteerism. We don’t get paid. When people accuse us being paid, we volunteer MORE.
4. Disorganized. There is no “plan of attack” It’s essentially asymetrical warfare. To the extent that the alarmist camp is organized pushing common messages it actually works to our benefit. As the mails show some on the alarmist side are trying to structure the debate and deliver talking points. They don’t do a very good job of it, and they become rather predictable. The decentralized activity on the skeptic lukewarmer side can experiement with tactics. For example, nobody dictated the Piltdown Mann meme to me. I tried it, it worked. Same with the Lukewarmer meme. Somebody tried it, it worked. Their is no “message” to carry. There are tactics made up in the trenches by people actually INVOLVED in the day to day debate. “Free the code” wasn’t dreamed up and pushed down people’s throats. It originated in a comment on a blog. spread from there because it worked.
So you want three pieces of advice: disagree with each other ( shows independence of mind) When you are wrong or someone on your side is wrong call them to account ( shows you dont know know everything) Link to your opponents ( shows a willingness to reason )
Do you notice something about the psychology of all this? Do you see how all these behaviors play well with the undecided? It’s called knowing the customer.
And on that point you would do well to study the demographics of the various sites. It would surprise you.