Rebutting Climate Denial, One Source at a Time


Some sources really are just better than others. When in doubt, follow the expertise.

 
 
Tell me if the following situation sounds familiar. You share a post calling attention to the issue of climate change. A friend or acquaintance jumps in to tell you that actually the science isn’t settled and there’s still debate about this or that. You respond by linking to one or more sources which address those talking points. They respond by linking sources of their own that say just the opposite. The exchange ends in a stalemate, as neither side is able to convince the other of the legitimacy of their chosen sources.

This “dueling sources” business tends to short-circuit popular debates over science more often than we’d like, but they needn’t end there. In fact, it usually takes minimal effort to sort out which sources to trust and which we should deem unreliable. And while it may be grandiose to expect that each party to a discussion will be objective enough to accept feedback on their own sources, we should be prepared to provide it in the event that there are receptive minds within reach.

What I want to offer here are some simple, broadly applicable methods you can use to help make heads or tails of competing information, particularly when it comes to questions of science. They will be especially useful for laypersons who lack the necessary expertise to debunk the arguments and data directly, which, let’s be honest, includes most of us. We don’t always have a resident expert on hand we can tag in to correct the record. What we can do instead is look for a few basic characteristics that can serve to either validate or impugn the reliability of a given source. Though this post hews closely to the topic of climate change, it should be readily exportable to other scientific issues where overwhelming agreement among scientists exists.

We should first recognize that when it comes to an issue as politicized as climate change, there will always be competing or contradictory sources. Americans have been sharply divided over climate change for decades now, thanks largely to fossil fuel interests funneling billions into campaigns committed to sowing doubt, denial, and uncertainty. Oil corporations like Exxon and Shell, despite knowing the relevant dangers, bankrolled thinktanks and lobby groups that continue to churn out misleading information at seemingly self-replicating rates. Suffice to say, if one wishes to stake out a particular position on climate change, they will find it trivially easy to track down sympathetic sources.

But just because anyone can furnish sources in a debate that agree with their view doesn’t mean all sources rest on equal footing. What matters is which of those sources hold up against the peer reviewed literature. Indeed, what matters most in science is the durability of an idea measured by its success in the peer review process. A theory that sounds good on paper may not survive the scrutiny of experts. For a theory to stand the test of time — as has the theory that humans are behind this current iteration of climate change — it must withstand rigorous empirical investigation by generations of experts who publish their findings in peer reviewed journals.

This means that the credibility of a given source is, or rather should be, a matter of empirical support. You should easily be able to determine whether a source is trafficking in well-sourced science from relevant experts (and if not, I’ll explain how in the next section). You should be able to take someone else’s sources and validate them against experts who practice and publish in the field, and they should be able to do the same for yours. If one person’s sources consistently cite individuals who are not experts in climate science, or rely on unpublished or speculative ideas, then neither those sources nor the person posting them ought to be considered trustworthy on the topic in question.

What often happens is that you get people with little knowledge of the science circulating articles by people who also aren’t experts in the topic, which then get taken up by an intricate web of consumers acting on confirmation bias who accept the information without any further interrogation because it supports what they already believe. This isn’t how we get to the truth.

We get to the truth by listening to what the experts have to say, and by querying the consensus of those experts, just as we would in any other context. If you want to know why you have a heart murmur, you’re probably going to lend more credence to your primary physician’s diagnosis than that of the barista at your local coffee shop. If you’re wondering why the brakes on your SUV aren’t working properly, you’re better off listening to a licensed mechanic than your coworker who has no experience working with cars.

It should be likewise for questions about climate change. Apart from going back to school and acquiring the necessary degree to understand and interpret the studies ourselves (unrealistic), we should look to what the best minds have concluded on such questions — to the people who are in the best position to render a verdict. Rarely do we possess the technical know-how to assess competing scientific claims, but we always have the option, if not the willingness, to consult those who do.

We can distill the foregoing to a battery of basic questions: Is the source drawing on relevant expertise? That is, has the author of the piece or founder of the website completed academic training in subjects relevant to climate science or are they citing peer reviewed research by experts who have? Can the ideas expressed be traced back to peer reviewed literature? Does the article link to studies or provide a journal reference or citation number? Does the website or group have a history of peddling unsourced or unverified claims? These are all questions that can be easily resolved with just a few minutes of careful reading and desk research.

That’s assuming, of course, you know what to look for. Thus far, the advice here has been mostly general in nature. Below I’ll walk through a real world example to illustrate how this works in practice.

Case Study

Let’s suppose the friend from earlier decides to chime in on one of your posts and proceeds to dispute whether there is a settled consensus on the causes of climate change. And let’s further suppose (since I get this one a lot) that they post a PragerU video, titled “Do 97% of Climate Scientists Really Agree?,” to make their point. This video argues, in a rather roundabout way, against the legitimacy of the commonly cited 97% consensus figure. But let’s ignore the actual arguments for now and instead apply the approach outlined earlier to see how this source stacks up.

Where do you start? I like to start with DeSmogBlog’s Climate Disinformation Database, as it contains extensive entries “on the individuals and organizations that have helped to delay and distract the public and our elected leaders from taking needed action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and fight global warming.” Basically, if they’ve made contrarian noises about the science of climate change in a public forum, they’re in this database, receipts and all. In addition to their affiliations and publications, every single quote attributed to a person or organization is sourced and referenced in chronological order. When I see a name associated with a view that sounds fishy, this is my first pit stop.

For good measure, you might take a few minutes to cross-reference DSB with Wikipedia, SourceWatch, and RationalWiki. Usually there’s overlap, although DSB will typically have a much denser bio pertaining to climate change.

Let’s look at DSB’s entry for PragerU. It doesn’t take long to realize that this isn’t an academic institution as the ‘U’ in its name might suggest, but a right-wing organization with strong Judeo-Christian origins whose raison d’être is to rail against the American left. Its founder, Dennis Prager, is a conservative radio talk show host who denies climate change and sees environmentalism as a replacement for God. He has no educational background in STEM or any credentials related whatsoever to science.

After watching a handful of their videos, it’s probably not too difficult for one to conclude that PragerU is invested in pushing a conservative ideological agenda and is not a reliable resource on information about climate change, or any other science for that matter. This is not to say that conservative sources in general cannot be reliable on matters of science, only that we’d prefer to get our information from a more neutral or scientific source and not one so obviously invested in political outcomes.

But okay, you might say, PragerU is just the thinktank. It’s Alex Epstein who’s being held up as an expert in the video, so what about him? Well, turns out he’s no more of an expert than Dennis Prager. In fact, all Epstein has done in this space is write op-eds and books championing fossil fuels. What are his credentials? He didn’t study science in college, much less climate science. He has no STEM-related degree whatsoever, nothing but a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. He hasn’t published a single peer reviewed paper in a single journal relevant to climate science. It should go without saying that these are all red flags.

Sure, okay, so Epstein’s not an expert, but is he at least citing peer reviewed research? Does he name scientists who agree with the views he’s espousing? Are there study references or journal citations that appear under the video that allow the audience to follow up on Epstein’s claims? The answer to all of these is no. PragerU neglects to mention that Epstein is not a scientist, and all they include under the video are promotional links for their own products and other offerings.

But wait — when Epstein finally gets around to refuting the 97% consensus figure toward the end of the video, he does cite an “analysis” which showed that “less than 2% of papers” say that human beings are the main cause of recent warming. A citation is provided in tiny text at the bottom of the screen. It’s quite easy to miss as it appears for only a second, but it’s there nonetheless: “David Henderson — 1.6%, Not 97%, Agree that Humans are the Main Cause of Global Warming, Library of Economics and Liberty, March 1, 2014.”

Now we’re getting somewhere. The reference is not to a peer reviewed paper but a blog post on econlib.org by David Henderson. Who is he, one wonders? Yes, DSB has an entry on him, too. The late Henderson is an economist who, like Prager and Epstein, lacks any formal training in the subject of climate science. He served as chairman for the Global Warming Policy Foundation (SourceWatch link here), a lobby group that prides itself on combating climate-centric policy and contesting the underlying science, and whose average trustee age at the time of formation was 74. And the Library of Economics and Liberty, as far as I can tell, is merely a collection of libertarian blog posts. Birds of a feather, as they say.

Henderson’s blog post is so thin on the ground as to be comical. It’s not even his “analysis”; he says a commenter on one of his previous posts “sifted through” the data of one of the studies attesting to the 97% figure. He doesn’t link to the comment in question. He gives us no information whatsoever about this “Mark Bahner,” only that he came up with 64 studies, or 1.6%, that “claimed explicitly that humans are the main cause of global warming.” Henderson even admits to not checking the data for himself! He is simply passing along the conclusions of a lone commenter, who could be anyone from a paid coal lobbyist to a Russian troll. We’re given zero details about the methodologies said commenter used, or any data product that would allow others to replicate his results.

If I had to guess, this random netizen probably only counted the papers that explicitly say climate change is both real and human-caused in the summary abstract. But this is bound to be very few, since anthropogenic climate change is so broadly accepted that it’s unnecessary for the authors to state the obvious in such an overt fashion. One could make a similar “case” against any number of scientific theories, including the theory of evolution and gravitation. Biologists don’t begin each paper with an awkward declaration of their belief in common descent. Rather, most research extant seeks to iron out the details encompassed by major integrative ideas. Ironically, it’s the papers that reject or dispute the consensus that are easiest to spot, yet even there we only find an exceedingly small minority. (As it happens, Cook et al. 2013 raise these very same points.) At any rate, guessing is all we can do here because, again, Henderson offers no support for how these figures were reached. Of course, that didn’t stop him from putting said figures in a clickbait headline in the form of a bare assertion.

So that’s the “analysis” Epstein relies on in the PragerU video. Let’s briefly recap what we’re working with here. We have one non-expert (Henderson) circulating an unevidenced claim from an anonymous blog comment, which then gets picked up by an ideologically driven thinktank (PragerU) who hires a conservative ideologue lacking expertise in climate science (Epstein) to appear in a video casting doubt on the consensus of climate scientists. I doubt we could conceive of a more unreliable info-chain if we tried. Note that nowhere in this pipeline is relevant expertise present. What our few minutes of desk research should tell us, then, is that we shouldn’t trust this gaggle of usual suspects any more on questions about climate science than we would on questions concerning medicine and health.

What about the actual arguments raised in the PragerU video? Though the questionable nature of PragerU’s sourcing is reason alone to deem their content untrustworthy, I’ll go ahead and address them here strictly for purposes of completeness. Epstein’s main argument amounts to a gross non sequitur. He says that the upside of fossil fuels is that “they make modern life possible.” Undoubtedly true, but that has nothing to do with whether the 97 percent statistic regarding human-caused climate change is accurate or not. And it also singularly fails to address whether a civilizational transition to renewable and clean energy could also support modernized life. If “precision matters,” as he says, why so blatantly beg the question as he does here?

When Epstein does get around to addressing the question in the video’s title, he makes two embarrassing blunders. We’ve already covered the first one in which he cites, effectively, a blog comment rather than peer reviewed research. Second, he omits a crucial detail when discussing the Cook et al. 2013 study. The researchers broke their meta-analysis into two parts. In the first part, they used their own methodology to categorize the population of abstracts. In the second phase, they actually reached out to the authors of the papers themselves, asking them directly whether their paper endorsed the consensus on anthropogenic global warming. Both the third-party and self-rated methods returned a figure in excess of 97%.

That is, the second phase of the study served as a check on their own methodology, and ended up validating their result. Why Epstein and PragerU would omit this important detail is hardly a mystery, at least to those of us who understand how the denial machine works.

In response to the PragerU source, I would probably link to a Skeptical Science resource or my primer on climate change, which includes several links attesting to the overwhelming consensus of research pointing to human-caused climate change. Those links reference a number of peer reviewed meta-analyses, each relying on separate methodologies, that support the strong consensus, as well as published experts commenting on said consensus. It demonstrates that the consensus statistic was not derived from a single study (an inference the PragerU video leads you toward), but has been independently established by a range of different studies using a variety of different methodologies.

Oreskes 2004 was among the first; Doran and Zimmerman 2009 was another; Anderegg et al. 2010 another; previously mentioned Cook et al. 2013 another; Verheggen et al. 2014, Stenhouse et al. 2014, and Carlton et al. 2015 came after that. And finally, a kind of super meta-analysis was published in 2016 by a collaboration of several of the authors of the previous studies, which found that the consensus sits between 90 and 100 percent, depending on which scientific disciplines are queried.

Less robust studies include those by James Powell, former science advisor to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Powell conducts his own analyses periodically, examining all the papers accepted for publication in a given period and determining how many rejected anthropogenic climate change. His first analysis looked at the literature from 1991-2012 and found that there have been 13,950 peer-reviewed papers on global warming published in the last 21 years by 33,690 different authors from over 20 different countries. Out of that population, just 24 are papers of dissent. That’s 0.17%. (If you drill down further, you find that of those 24, even fewer flat-out reject global warming, with the balance accepting that the earth is warming but demurring that humans are the cause.)

A similar analysis examining the period from November 2012 through December 2013 was performed in 2014, in which Powell found that 9,135 out of 9,136 authors accepted anthropogenic global warming. (The lone dissenter rejected the consensus not because of contrary evidence but because of economic and monetary concerns surrounding Russian markets.) Powell makes all of his data publicly available, with full references for each study that include the paper’s title, document number, and Web of Science accession number.

In short, the oft-mentioned consensus is based on several independent analyses, each attesting to the uniquely anthropogenic causes of current climate change. For a more reliable and more comprehensive presentation of the climate consensus than the one released by PragerU, I recommend the following video hosted by the edX platform. Note the copious references provided in the subjacent text.
 

 
Let us revisit our questions from earlier. Which of these sources should we consider reliable? Is it PragerU that features people like Alex Epstein who write op-eds for a living and offers no credible or reproducible research? Or is it rather outlets like Skeptical Science and educational platforms like edX that feature scientists who actually study climate for a living? If this question sounds easy, that’s because it is. The follow up question that should be posed to anyone using PragerU-style material to defend their view is this: why are you listening to unpublished, inexpert hacks like Epstein as opposed to practicing scientists?

More knowledgeable patrons of the science can take this exercise a step further and elaborate on why a certain source’s claims cannot be reconciled to the published literature. With enough working knowledge, they can cite specific papers, quote excerpts, and adduce graphs that empirically contradict the asserted claims. But it doesn’t require formal training to evaluate sources and identify the odd man out. All it takes is a modicum of Google sleuthing and sufficient interest in offering good-faith defenses of settled science. As someone who wades into these debates on a regular basis, I am constantly surprised by how effortless it is to debunk the prevalent talking points due to the vacuous nature of the claims themselves, the degree to which those making them eschew qualified voices, and the deliberate, heavy-handed deception involved throughout.

In the era of fake news and troll farms, efficient vetting of sources has taken on a newfound urgency. Granted, not all of the folks who produce the kind of articles and videos that get disseminated around Deniersville are genuine hacks, paid and propped up by the fossil fuel industry. Some are simply misguided and confused laypersons who have succumbed to confirmation bias and antiscience propaganda. In the end, though, it shouldn’t matter. If one’s claims cannot withstand empirical scrutiny, they should be dismissed, and one’s level of trust in that source should evaporate. Expertise matters. Peer review matters. Look for these two things and it will help you immensely in discerning what’s legitimate and what isn’t.

 

Further reading and resources:

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