Propaganda: The Climate Debate Warms Up

The climate may not be heating up, but the war between pro-climate change people and the deniers certainly is.

A severe blow to the climate change movement was several recent winters and summers in the US northeast have not been scarily warm. This is an area where many people important to the debate on climate change live. Including the government of the United States of America.

Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma, who years ago called Global Warming the greatest hoax ever, recently declared "We won, you lost, now get a life!"

Now another PR disaster. An email server at the University of East Anglia in England's Climate Change Unit, has been hacked, and hundreds or thousands of scientists emails stolen. One of those emails dated 1999, contained these damaging words:

"I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

Unfortunately for the global warming people, this comes in the middle of a prolonged propaganda campaign to discredit scientists. I find it frankly appalling that any scientist would freely use the words "trick" and "hide the decline" when discussing climate data, even in private. Of course I understand that some scientists think themselves very witty and sometimes use words in ways that other people find very unfunny. I can think of several examples in the computer world, where programming geeks are very fond of telling their users that programs have "blown up" or "died" when they merely stopped operation until a forgotten jcl card could be inserted. But users are accustomed to this kind of language from computer geeks and even use it themselves.

The problem with scientists is that although they may be very clever dealing with test tubes and such, they are often lacking in personal communication skills. Most people make allowances for this. I believe Einstein has made some embarrassing statements too. That is OK when they are not involved in politics and when they are not being attacked for propaganda purposes.

Scientists are also under attack by right wing Christians over evolution. As usual, they are simply incapable of taking the threat seriously. A movie was made called "Expelled: No intelligence allowed" that dug up a lot of dirt to make scientists look bad, and it looked like they were suppressing scientific data which might have proved that God (if not Adam and Eve) existed.

The propaganda attacks on scientists use every trick, every media outlet, in a well funded, coordinated, no-holds barred attacks. But scientists still have the public's confidence because they never (almost never) lie deliberately, and they have no ulterior motive in their findings. Or hardly ever. The propaganda battle is not fought scientifically, it is fought in the media, the political arena, in fudged figures, or in public debates. Most scientists by their training and nature are incapable of the kind truth-bending needed to manipulate people's emotions. The public knows this and allow extra credit for it. The most damaging thing you could ever do to a scientist is make public their private communications, where they don't even know enough to avoid words like "trick" or "hide".

George Monbiot has written a column on this, I'm not sure his attempt at witty irony is going to fare well.

The picture is stolen from this website. Obviously it is photoshopped, as Polar bears live at the north pole, and penguins at the south pole, and this very lack of land based predators is the reason penguins don't need to fly, and so evolved into a flightless species, and why you would never find flightless birds at the north pole. And the ipods of course.