Paul Krugman: Swift Boating the Planet

From the New York Times, via yet another cyber-renegade who farts on the Times' pay-per-view firewall around its opinion columnists, courtesy of BuzzFlash:

Leading the charge was Patrick Michaels, a professor at the University of Virginia who has received substantial financial support from the energy industry. In Senate testimony, and then in numerous presentations, Dr. Michaels claimed that the actual pace of global warming was falling far short of Dr. Hansen's predictions. As evidence, he presented a chart supposedly taken from a 1988 paper written by Dr. Hansen and others, which showed a curve of rising temperatures considerably steeper than the trend that has actually taken place.

In fact, the chart Dr. Michaels showed was a fraud... The original paper showed a range of possibilities, and the actual rise in temperature has fallen squarely in the middle of that range. So how did Dr. Michaels make it seem as if Dr. Hansen's prediction was wildly off? Why, he erased all the lower curves, leaving only the curve that the original paper described as being "on the high side of reality." ...

Dr. Hansen has been trying to correct the record for years. Yet the claim ... has remained in circulation, and has become a staple of climate change skeptics, from Michael Crichton to Robert Novak. There's a concise way to describe what happened to Dr. Hansen: he was Swift-boated.

Click here for the rest.

Last week when I was in Houston I got to hang out with a good friend of mine, an articulate and polite conservative, passionate about his beliefs, and a grand debater. He's also really intelligent, and reads more political stuff than I do; relative to me, he has a superior command of details and facts. Well, his "facts," anyway. Generally, in political debate, I tend to accept most of what he offers as facts, focusing instead on principles and overall themes. It's just too damned difficult to know if the numbers and whatnot that he rattles off are true or not. Besides, it's no fun to contest facts in a friendly little argument; discourse generally dissolves into "yeah it is" and "no it's not" contrarianism. Consequently, by challenging his underlying assumptions, I've managed to keep a guy who I've seen flabbergast an endless parade of liberal debaters on his toes. We love our arguments.

Unfortunately, for our most recent meeting, I found myself falling into that previously mentioned contrarianism. My conservative pal was offering "facts" that I just couldn't play with. "There is no scientific consensus that man is causing global warming," he said. Not being up to date on the latest right-wing quackery on this issue, I knew I was wading into a nasty bog when I told him that he was wrong, and had no idea what he was talking about. He referred to some study of a huge number of scientists that found that attitudes were mixed. I asked what kinds of scientists comprised the sample, to which he replied simply that it was scientists.

"Look, this is just a right-wing talking point," I said. "You can easily get together some sort of survey of scientists, say, chemists and biologists and physicists, but unless you're talking about the scientists who matter, climatologists, guys who study the atmosphere, it doesn't matter. Every two bit high school biology teacher in the Bible-Belt has his own pet theories about why evolution is flawed science, but they don't matter; they're not authorities in the field."

That got him, and he moved to a different tactic.

"It's basic chemistry: co2 and cfc's actually cool things, not warm them up."

"But it's not basic chemistry!" I retorted. "We're talking about massive climate systems that do, indeed, involve basic chemistry at their most rudimentary levels, but we're talking about the big picture here, which is wildly complex. To say it's all about basic chemistry is to insanely distort and simply the issue as to render it meaningless."

Fortunately for both of us the people in our company decided to move to a different topic, so we never resolved our disagreement. But I was left with a strong reminder of the way that conservative discussion of most issues isn't so much about winning the debate as it is about introducing flawed lines of reasoning to muddy the discourse such that...well, as Fox News likes to say, the viewer is left to decide. I don't think my buddy was trying to muddy the debate himself, he's simply reflecting what he's read, which is decidedly screwed up when you really dig into it.

There is an entire industry on the issue of global warming alone which tries to distort the debate. Check out this one group's page of crap, all assembled by a right-wing think tank on whose board Jack Abramoff served until recently: obviously, the money and power behind global warming skepticism come from lobbyists, which ought to say something in and of itself.

Krugman is absolutely right to compare the disinformation campaign about global warming to the Swift Boat Veterans' campaign to turn John Kerry from war hero to draft-dodging hippy. Except there's a lot more money on the line with global warming. How the hell can truth prevail here when so much power is in favor of lies?

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