According to An Inconvenient Truth, the Oscar-winning documentary by Davis Guggenheim and starring Al Gore, 928 peer-reviewed articles about global climate change were published in the decade spanning 1993 to 2003. Each of these articles either supported the notion of anthropogenic global warming or was neutral towards the cause of global warming. (Guggenheim, 2006)
The pen behind this count didn’t simply make these numbers up, and unlike scary articles about global cooling in the 1970s, the results of this survey were not published in the popular media but in the journal Science, in an essay by Naomi Oreskes that aims to establish “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change.”
According to Oreskes, 25% of the surveyed abstracts (identified by a keyword search based on “climate change”) “dealt with methods or paleoclimate” and took no position for or against the human causal factor. Even though such researchers might be of the opinion that our current climate change is completely natural, none of them made an attempt to argue the case — hence were “neutral” toward anthropogenic climate change. (Oreskes, 2004)
In the manufactured controversy surrounding global warming, much noise is made about the “scientific consensus,” both by proponents and by contrarians. To prevent any semantic confusion, take “proponents” to mean “agrees with the IPCC report position that global warming is primarily caused by human activity”; “contrarian” to mean “willfully ignorant of science and its methods.”
Contrarians will have you believe that there is no scientific consensus, and that in fact the body scientific is torn and stretched – perhaps to the point of breaking – over this charged debate. Certainly a Wikipedia article lists a number of “Scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming,” and uses my same criteria of proponent to establish that “mainstream” assessment. At the time of this writing, there are 25 names on their list, along with characteristic quotes taken from the popular media, where they make their opinions known. (Wikipedia, 2007)
One wonders: if there is such a shattered consensus in the scientific community, why aren’t the peer-reviewed journals ablaze with evidence of the contrarian position? Why are the opposing voices showing up in conservative think tank policy statements and opinion pieces in such prestigious scientific rags as the Wall Street Journal? Risking a fallacious obfuscation of a middle position, either the contrarians don’t know what they’re talking about or there’s a vast conspiracy to keep them quiet.
Of course, the opposing viewpoint would have you believe that it is being purposefully and maliciously marginalized by the intelligentsia and the eco-freaks in charge of international science. Isn’t that always the way? I mean, that’s why there’s no valid scientific literature concerning Intelligent Design, Geocentrism, and the luminiferous ether, right?
That’s right: the scientific consensus, according to the contrarians, is all a bunch of hand-waving, a house of cards, a small man behind a great curtain. But according to what motive? If the score is unfairly 928 to 0 (as of 2003, remember), why are the scorekeepers keeping the visiting team from making points?
The Argument From “Follow The Money”
There’s no money in the contrarian position, and scientists are guided in their research efforts based on the grants they can expect to win, therefore scientists will research, write, and publish according to that which gives the highest grants, which happens to be in support of the prescribed consensus.
There are several problems with this argument. First off, it works both ways. Just as they accuse the proponents of payola-fueled groupthink, someone is in fact paying the contrarians to make their skeptical statements – think tanks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, and the George C. Marshall Institute all fund projects that are “skeptical” of global warming, and all of them have taken money from ExxonMobil Corporation, which may have a vested interest in disingenuous anti-environmental movements. That’s just a for-instance. Ronald Bailey at Reason magazine will tell you that positions don’t follow funding, rather that funding follows positions. If I take that to heart, I can give Cato the benefit of the doubt particularly since such a small percentage of their total funding comes from corporate interests. It is clear that the George C. Marshall Institute deserves no such dispensation. A Union of Concerned Scientists whitepaper titled “Smoke, Mirrors, and Hot Air” alleges that the GMI only became a “clearinghouse for global warming contrarians” after ExxonMobil started pumping money into the organization. That would be positions following funding, and a really bad shell game. The document goes on to detail energy industry lobby dollars feeding disinformation coming from the Heartland Institute and the CEI (Union of Concerned Scientists, 2007). And while these organizations fund books and tours and popular media articles, the tally of contrarian positions in the peer-reviewed journals sits at a rotund zero.