A climate of crushing dissent

Clayton Cramer links an eye opening story about powerful United States Senators conspiring to stifle dissent — in a manner so distasteful that a British lord, Christopher Monckton has felt compelled to defend the American tradition of free speech.
The Wall Street Journal provides some background on the remarkable letter from Senators Rockefeller and Snowe. The full text is here, and as scoldings go, it’s a real gem:

A study to be released in November by an American scientific group will expose ExxonMobil as the primary funder of no fewer than 29 climate change denial front groups in 2004 alone. Besides a shared goal, these groups often featured common staffs and board members. The study will estimate that ExxonMobil has spent more than $19 million since the late 1990s on a strategy of “information laundering,” or enabling a small number of professional skeptics working through scientific-sounding organizations to funnel their viewpoints through non-peer-reviewed websites such as Tech Central Station. The Internet has provided ExxonMobil the means to wreak its havoc on U.S. credibility, while avoiding the rigors of refereed journals. While deniers can easily post something calling into question the scientific consensus on climate change, not a single refereed article in more than a decade has sought to refute it.

Hey wait a second! I’ve expressed plenty of skepticism about Global Warming — surely enough to allow this blog to qualify as a “climate change denial front group.” So where’s my money? Why haven’t I gotten a check from ExxonMobil?
I mean, am I not a “non-peer reviewed website” too? Shouldn’t that be enough? Surely, I’m just as non-peer reviewed as Tech Central Station. Or is there something more involved than merely the crime of being non-peer reviewed? I notice that the letter also attacks the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Surely none of this involves their movie reviews of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truths (or Truths-That Might-As-Well-Have-Been-True).”
If this wasn’t so amusing, I’d wonder about the exact nature of peer review. Why, for example, is the lack of peer review so important in the case of a website like Tech Central Station, but so irrelevant in the case of Al Gore’s movie?
If I’m wrong, and if “An Inconvenient Truth” was fully peer reviewed, my apologies to all peer movie reviewers.
Otherwise, it might be worth a look at the peer review process.
What is a peer? According to the traditional definition, the only genuine peer I have identified in this post would seem to be Lord Monckton. But traditional peerage is not scientific peerage. I’d always thought scientific peers were other scientists, but the more I read about this, that doesn’t seem to be the case with what’s called “Climate Science.” Climate science is tough to define, but so far, one thing seems clear. The field is so devoted to studying the climate of the past 200 years that there’s a movement afoot to exclude geologists, because they study the big picture, and too many of them dissent from the theory of a human cause for Global Warming. The problem is, Global Warming Theory and even “Climate Science” itself are pretty much defined and predicated on the assumption of human responsible agency.
Geology is based on geologic time, and in terms of geologic time, man has only been on the planet for an instant. This inevitably creates a conflict between geologists and Climate Scientists, and a perfect example is the argument over why the earth didn’t roast when carbon dioxide levels were 18 times what they are today. Naturally, this is inconvenient for those who are determined to pin the blame on man (or on CO2 for that matter):

Skeptics say CO2 crusaders simply find the Phanerozoic data embarrassing and irreconcilable with public alarms. “People come to me and say, ‘Stop talking like this, you’re hurting the cause,’ ” said Dr. Giegengack of Penn.

Dr. Giegengack is of course a geologist.
In the Global Warming debate, are geologists considered “peers”? The whole topic of peer review is so fraught with vagueness that I have so far been unable to determine that one way or another. But I do see that geologists are generally frowned on to the point where (in Australia, at least) the idea of this geologist opining on Global Warming generated controversy. (Via Jennifer Marohasy, who has a lot more to say about the subject of peer review in general. (More here on peer review and Climate Science.)
“Peer review” of course, begs the question of what constitutes peerage. The medieval warming period used to be considered peer reviewed science, but now some of the “peers” are trying to write it out.
I’m still not sure what a peer is, but there’s always Lord Monckton:

The Royal Society says there’s a worldwide scientific consensus. It brands Apocalypse-deniers as paid lackeys of coal and oil corporations. I declare my interest: I once took the taxpayer’s shilling and advised Margaret Thatcher, FRS, on scientific scams and scares. Alas, not a red cent from Exxon.
In 1988, James Hansen, a climatologist, told the US Congress that temperature would rise 0.3C by the end of the century (it rose 0.1C), and that sea level would rise several feet (no, one inch). The UN set up a transnational bureaucracy, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The UK taxpayer unwittingly meets the entire cost of its scientific team, which, in 2001, produced the Third Assessment Report, a Bible-length document presenting apocalyptic conclusions well beyond previous reports.
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This week, I’ll show how the UN undervalued the sun’s effects on historical and contemporary climate, slashed the natural greenhouse effect, overstated the past century’s temperature increase, repealed a fundamental law of physics and tripled the man-made greenhouse effect.
Next week, I’ll demonstrate the atrocious economic, political and environmental cost of the high-tax, zero-freedom, bureaucratic centralism implicit in Stern’s report; I’ll compare the global-warming scare with previous sci-fi alarums; and I’ll show how the environmentalists’ “precautionary principle” (get the state to interfere now, just in case) is killing people.

OK, so perhaps Lord Monckton is the wrong kind of peer. His articles are opinions, and they’re not published in scientific journals.
But unless I am missing something, geologists who publish in peer-reviewed scientific journals are not considered the right kind of peers. That seems to be the case with a peer reviewed paper recently published in Environmental Geology:

The authors place the recent warming into an interesting perspective noting “the global warming observed during the latest 150 years is just a short episode in the geologic history. The current global warming is most likely a combined effect of increased solar and tectonic activities and cannot be attributed to the increased anthropogenic impact on the atmosphere. Humans may be responsible for less than 0.01°C (of approximately 0.56°C (1°F) total average atmospheric heating during the last century)”. Holy cow, can you imagine the letters and e-mails they must have received in response to that conclusion? They even show that over the last 3,000 years, the earth has cooled, or if you look just at the last 1,000 years, the earth has been cooling as well (the earth was in the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years ago).
Their conclusions with respect to potential policy will more than raise some eyebrows as well as they write “Any attempts to mitigate undesirable climatic changes using restrictive regulations are condemned to failure, because the global natural forces are at least 4-5 orders of magnitude greater than available human controls.” They show that the climatic effects of the Kyoto Protocol would be negligible, leading them to state “Thus, the Kyoto Protocol is a good example of how to achieve the minimum results with the maximum efforts (and sacrifices). Impact of available human controls will be negligible in comparison with the global forces of nature. Thus, the attempts to alter the occurring global climatic changes (and drastic measures prescribed by the Kyoto Protocol) have to be abandoned as meaningless and harmful.”
Our World Climate Reports uncover and present interesting results we find in the peer-reviewed professional scientific journals, and as we have seen over and over, there are many absolutely amazing papers published regularly in outstanding journals. The global warming crusade would denounce this paper as outrageous, but it survived rigorous peer-review, the editor elected to publish it, and like it or not, this paper is part of the serious science literature. Dismissing the paper is made more difficult given the affiliation of the authors and the prestige of the journal.
The debate on climate change is never boring, the debate is full of surprises, and anyone claiming the debate is over is simply dismissing a significant number of papers that appear regularly in the major journals.
Reference:
Khilyuk, L.F., and G. V. Chilingar. 2006. On global forces of nature driving the Earth’s climate. Are humans involved? Environmental Geology, 50, 899-910.

Again, what is a peer?
I’d hate to think that peers are only people who agree with each other, because that would tend to retard and not advance scientific skepticism (long considered a defining feature of scientific methodology). I have to ask: what if Climate Science defines its playing field as excluding those (like many geologists) who express skepticism about man’s ability to change the climate?
Does “Climate Science” exclude dissent by definition? Is it now considered “unscientific” for geologists to say that the world was once warmer or that carbon dioxide levels were once higher? If so, I have to wonder whether science itself is becoming unscientific.
Just as geologists have never been especially popular with certain religious fundamentalists who insist the earth is 10,000 years old, they don’t seem very popular with human-centric Climatologists today. One geologist who seems aware of this tension between geology and those who deem man in need of a good scolding is Pierre Jutras, (Assistant Professor of Geology at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax) — who dares opine that CO2 can be good:

…[O]n a geological time scale, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have hardly ever been so low, and ecosystems are suffering greatly because of that. The last time carbon dioxide levels were so low, near the end of the Paleozoic era (about 250 million years ago), the Earth’s biosphere went through its greatest extinction, as 90 per cent of Paleozoic species were gone by the beginning of the Mesozoic era (age of the dinosaurs).
The last time that life went through a major expansion and diversification was during the Cretaceous period (135 million to 65 million years ago), when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were more than six times those of today. Moreover, when life first started, around 3.8 billion years ago, carbon dioxide levels were hundreds of times higher than today’s. Since then, most of the original carbon dioxide content of Earth’s primitive atmosphere has been stored in carbonate rocks, coal, oil and gas.
[…]
Yet, one major concern that remains is the rate of temperature increase. Changes that are too rapid can be harmful to ecosystems, even if they head in the right direction. However, it is the tendency of humanity to look at any change as intrinsically bad. There is this ingrained biblical attitude and belief that the Earth was a static Garden of Eden before humans came to mess it up. In fact, the Earth is always changing, has always been changing, and always will be changing. It is better to adapt to changes and try to mould them to our benefit, than to hopelessly try to maintain things in a static state.

Words of reason to some can be words of treason to others.
Talk like Professor Jutras’s can lead to accusations of receiving money from Exxon!
Back to Senators Rockefeller and Snowe, and their scolding of Exxon’s CEO.

In light of the adverse impacts still resulting from your corporations activities, we must request that ExxonMobil end any further financial assistance or other support to groups or individuals whose public advocacy has contributed to the small, but unfortunately effective, climate change denial myth. Further, we believe ExxonMobil should take additional steps to improve the public debate, and consequently the reputation of the United States. We would recommend that ExxonMobil publicly acknowledge both the reality of climate change and the role of humans in causing or exacerbating it. Second, ExxonMobil should repudiate its climate change denial campaign and make public its funding history. Finally, we believe that there would be a benefit to the United States if one of the world’s largest carbon emitters headquartered here devoted at least some of the money it has invested in climate change denial pseudo-science to global remediation efforts. We believe this would be especially important in the developing world, where the disastrous effects of global climate change are likely to have their most immediate and calamitous impacts.

I don’t know about Snowe, but Rockefeller has certainly gotten his share of Big Oil money to say the least. Yet no one attacks him for that.
Is being on Big Oil’s receiving end only grounds for attack if you’re against Kyoto? If Rockefeller were on the other side, and voiced the skepticism he condemns, wouldn’t he be viciously demonized because of his Big Oil background? If having Big Oil money is a relevant consideration, then why doesn’t that relevance flow in both directions?
Accustomed as I am to political disagreements, I’ve never seen anything quite so frenzied and ad hominem as what’s going on in the Debate That’s Over. Disagreement has become so unpopular that dissenters are likened to Holocaust Deniers, and even threatened with Nuremberg-style tribunals. (By “peers,” no doubt….)
The whole thing smells funny to me. It’s as if something more is at stake than a disagreement over whether man is able to change the climate. I’ve previously speculated that the circling of the wagons might indicate a fear that if cooling might set in before Kyoto, they might not get their way, but now I’m wondering whether scientific credibility might be a larger issue than the climate change debate.
Think about it. If a huge and overwhelming “scientific consensus” turned out to be wrong, incalculable damage might be done to the credibility of all science. (The way Dreyfus had to be guilty.)
MORE: George Monbiot not only advocates Nuremberg Tribunals for deniers, he also spends a great deal of time attacking Lord Monckton. A comment to one of his recent broadside provides (I think) a classic example of the clearly religious yearnings that drive so many of these humancentric scolds:

I casally destroy what future generations will depend upon to live because they have yet to be born and it is only me, and my time and my normalcy that is important.
I am like those who, sixty years ago, did their jobs and lived their normal lives and didn’t ask questions about where their jewish neighbours had gone. I am like those who participated in slavery and other atrocities, except that the effects of my crimes will outlast all those others.
And it is OK, because today I am normal, and busy, and have other things on my mind and, if what I do is really so bad so many people wouldn’t be doing the same, would they?
But when, in the hours before I die, I think back upon my life and what it has meant, I must do one thing. I must hope and hope and pray and pray that there is nothing beyond life and beyong time and beyond myself, that there is no blance, no karma, no morality and no justice.
Because if there is, and I do what I do, knowing what I know….

So let us pray.