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 The study’s conclusions, as yet unpublished but seen by Left Foot Forward, were presented to a closed meeting of campaigners on Wednesday night.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”
pinroot
When I read statements like “if you don’t contol the way an issue is framed, you don’t control the debate” it becomes obvious that this isn’t about science, it’s about politics and winning at any cost and truth be damned. If it wasn’t for skeptics, we’d still believe the earth was at the center of the universe. Science is all about being skeptical and not accepting something as fact simply based on “consensus.”
Ken
RE: As cognitive linguist George Lakoff has written, if you don’t contol the way an issue is framed, you don’t control the debate.
COMMENT: The issue was “framed” using the actual words & content of the e-mails & computer code commentary. How would you suggest we “control” that????
RE: “…George Monbiot, who was also the only significant voice countering the sceptics during the whole Climategate debacle. … – Oxfam’s study shows that almost no-one bothered to back him up in defending the integrity of the science.”
COMMENT: Before knee-jerk responding, think about & THEN respond to this question: Who out there is truly prepared to come forward & defend the science??? Its my observation that the vast vast vast majority of “believers” parrot the conclusions endlessly & when pressed, shift to ad-hominum attacks to skeptics. In other words, it appears that there’s a lot squawking but few really competent with even a cursory understanding of the actual science. One example: Trenberth (spelling?) stated at some lenght about the lack of data needed to explain the roughly decade-long absense of warming. Elsewhere self-proclaimed expert bloggers were directly contradicting this expert by asserting the warming has continued unabated.
Even RealClimate is quick to pounce on the assertions that cosmic rays and clouds may be connected to solar cycles–quick to rule this out as a possibility. At the same time there’s an internatioanl team of scientists at CERN–a VERY prestigious & competent bunch–conducting the CLOUD experiment to quantify the effects/relationships. Pending thier finding to rule out this interaction, or to quantify the special conditions to which it applies, and to what extent — solar/cosmic ray/cloud interactions are a so-called “known unknown” and NOBODY can “scientifically” assert there’s no interaction or that it is inconsequential. The objective facts & data simply don’t yet exist.
Stuff like that undermines the cause being promoted.
chris
Well if Oxfam, of whom I have donated thousands of dollars over the last 4 years, is now part of a religious cult, where facts mean nothing only the ideology counts, have just lost one donor.
Thanks guys for alerting me to their scam.
Walter Manny
Steven, thanks very much for your observations and clarifications here. I am a lay reader and very much a skeptic (radiative physics, yes, relative impact and predictive value of same, unconvinced), and so I have done most of my post AR-4 reading at Real Climate, which purports to be an educational site. I note that since the UEA scandal, the moderators have allowed just about anything I care to post, which was hardly the case beforehand. Still, their refusal to link and the often knee-jerk nature of “inline responses” betrays a continuing lack of any sort of skepticism on the part of the moderators. Their fearful approach, which I believe is loosening, has been characterized among other things by their continued tolerance and even encouragement of labels such as “deniers” and “denialists”, which, whatever else you might want to say about it, does not advance their cause these days, if it ever did. I am often tempted to sink to that level by referring in kind to “credulists”, but that would be mere self-entertainment, so I stick to “proponents”. I am sure I am not the only one to have tried, with Revkin, Friedman and others, to convince them that “deniers” has no place in the legitimate debate about AGW, and I continue to hope that noxious term will fade away.
Paul Nevins
I honestly thought this was a parody story. are you sure it isn’t? Tens of billions spent promoting the AGW story and agenda is somehow losing the argument to the hypothetical but actually non existent “skeptics network”?
This is a political issue. I don’t think any actual scientist who investigates the data and the uncertainties involved is likely to think catastrophic warming is likely.
If there is some great conspiracy where skeptics are paid for their service please send my check to the linked web page. They could sure use the money.