Selling by colour

Apr 21, 2011

CUSTOMER PERCEPTION EQUALS REALITY

By Dennis Furlan

If we don’t go green, the world dies, or so we have heard for generations. As individuals, citizens, businesses and communities, we have been told to change our lifestyles or lose the planet. A big part of that change is political and economic. A scaling down of our “footprint” is necessary, they say, for long-term sustainability. We have to make sacrifices, we are told, and those involve money and rules. It also means having trust in the people that keep telling us these things. That would be the environmental movement.
Timothy Ball, Ph.D., is one of Canada’s (and the world’s) best-known environmental sceptics. He is a man the scientific establishment loves to hate. Why? Because he doesn’t toe the environmental line. In a nutshell, he thinks the movement is a sham. According to Ball, “I believe that you have to be a person who can step back and look at the larger picture. I’m now concerned, especially in the last four or five years, of the loss in credibility of science and the loss of credibility on the environmental issue.”

However, Ball’s doubts about the environmental movement go farther back than that; farther back than the current global warming claims; farther back than David Suzuki, Al Gore or the Kyoto accord. According to Ball, “Going back to 1972, even further, and you look at the statements the environmentalists have made over the years, they’ve been selling a bill of goods to the public. Of course, where you get into the difficulty is people can’t believe that the whole world can be fooled.”

The “bill of goods” Ball refers to includes a laundry list of claims made by environmentalists over the decades that sceptics believe serves as an indictment of the movement altogether. Scare-mongering about the pesticide DDT has led to millions of people dying of malaria in Africa. An obsession with over-population led to a focus on carbon dioxide and trying to kill industrial growth. Predictions of floods and catastrophes that have never materialized.Climate model projections that have been debunked and discredited.

Conversely, Richard Littlemore is a founding editor of desmogblog.com, a website established to track and discredit sceptics like Ball. According to Littlemore, claims like the ones made above are: “Complete bullsh**. It’s unadulterated, unadorned, unreconstructed, bullsh** in every way.”

Littlemore believes that the sceptics cherry-pick various quotes, incidents, and stories, and weave a narrative without any credibility. He says about the sceptics, “These are guys who have fomented the idea of an international cabal of scientists who got together and share money among themselves. It’s silliness.”

In an effort to get to the bottom of these various claims by either side, let’s take a closer look at some of the
alleged controversies involved:

Item #1: The environmentalists can’t get their story straight.

They talked about global cooling in the 1970’s. Then they talked about global warming. Then they talked about climate change, as if the climate doesn’t change.

At the heart of this specific issue is the degree of certainty surrounding claims and predictions about climate, especially 100 years from now. According to Littlemore, the science speaks for itself. He says, “Here’s the deal. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there’s a 95 percent chance that global warming is in fact happening, that humans have caused and are causing the climate to change on Earth, and it’s getting worse at a rate unprecedented since the time of humans.” Littlemore continues, “If there was a 95 percent certainty that the plane you were going to get on would crash, you would not get on.”

MadhavKhandekar, Ph.D., is a former Environment Canada scientist and another well-known Canadian sceptic. Khandekar believes that the claims made by pro-warming people like Littlemore are alarmist and have not borne fruit. Khandekar says, “The climate models that we often talk about, and many environmentalists like to quote, have a lot of unreliability. They are not proven very well. They may have been researched well. I don’t deny that. I know a large number of climate modellers. I’ve known them personally for over 30 years, and I respect their work. I’m not saying that they’re lying or anything. But I think that they’re committed to this scare about global warming.”

Which leads to item #2: Does the pro-warming side often get it wrong?

Khandekar points to the example of the Russian heat wave in 2010 as a perfect example of a major global event that the pro-warming side was wrong about. According to Khandekar, “I just saw a paper saying that the Moscow heat wave was the result of a special blocking pattern in the mid-troposphere over Europe. That’s called a heat wave. It’s normal. It’s not global warming.” In fact, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States, global warming was not the cause of the heat wave. As Khandekar suggests, natural atmospheric phenomena were the culprits.

As a testament to kind of alarmism that the sceptics claim surrounds the environmental movement, an environmentalist at the time of the Russian heat wave was quick to capitalize on the catastrophe and draw conclusions from it. According to an August 2, 2010, article published by Time magazine, the following comment was made by Moscow Greenpeace director Vladimir Chuprovconcering previous Russian doubts about climate change: “If you look at what is happening with this heat wave, it’s horrible. It’s clearly enough to shake people out of their delusions about global warming.”

Item #3: Is ice increasing or decreasing on Antarctica?

One of the more prominent arguments raised by the sceptics is recent evidence suggesting that, although environmentalists constantly cite melting ice in the Arctic, ice is actually accumulating on the largest chunk of ice on the planet: Antarctica. According to an April 30, 2009, article posted on the website ecoworld.com, prominent climatologist Roger Pielke Sr. of the University of Colorado said about the world’s southernmost land mass: “The sea ice around the continent is far above average. Also, note the colder-than-average sea surface temperatures around Antarctica … The expansion of the sea ice coverage implies a cooling.”

Littlemore is quick to address these sceptical claims about ice on Antarctica. He says, “Isabella Velicogna has done all the decisive work on Antarctica by using data from GRACE satellites. They are basically two satellites that orbit the Earth and take constant measures that determine exactly what the mass of things is on the ground. And what Velicogna’s research has proven over the last five or six years is that the net mass of Antarctica is losing ice at an unprecedented rate.”

Item #4: How credible are the sceptics?

This is a question Littlemore loves to answer. Predictably, he has very little regard for the credentials that sceptics like Khandekar and Ball bring to the table. In fact, according to Littlemore, Ball doesn’t even have a scientific degree in climatology. He makes the claim that many sceptic critics make of Ball, which is: “Well, he’s got a Ph.D. in historical geography… so he didn’t study science in school, he’s never done any physics, he’s never done any atmospheric physics. He mentions climatology in the title of his Ph.D., but it’s not climatology…. He’s an historical geographer.”

Coverings followed up on this specific claim and asked Ball what his response was. Ball sent a wordless e-mail that simply included a transcript from Queen Mary College at the University of London in England. It credits Ball with a Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Science in the field of study of Climatology.

Item #5: Is the political fix in?

A major criticism of the sceptics made by people like Littlemore is they are not currently in the field of climatology and they don’t publish peer-reviewed studies. Sceptics like Ball and Khandekar respond that they’re prevented from doing so; that the political fix is in, so to speak. According to Khandekar, “I don’t like to get too involved in the political flavour of things, but I do think it is ideological and political. I know many of these people. They no longer even want to speak with me. I ask them to sit down and have tea with me. I no longer get any response.”

Evidence of this “political flavour” was on display in the wake of the Copenhagen environmental summit that took place in 2009. No substantial global deal on climate change was reached. Yet where was the criticism from the environmentalists? Instead, they remained silent and refused to upset their political masters. In fact, Littlemore himself bemoans this development when he says, “But the people who care about the environment have been trained to kiss butt among governments and policy makers.”

This raises the question, if the situation is as bad as the environmentalists say, why not chastise the politicians who won’t do anything? Which leads to:

Item #6:
What can actually be done?

This in many ways is the crux of the matter, since so much is being asked of us in dealing with the alleged environmental problems facing us. In other words, if it’s really that bad, we have to make economic sacrifices. There’s no way of getting around that fact. Indeed, money and markets tend to be the focus of much of the ongoing discussion. Allegations of money come from all sides. Sceptics are funded by big oil. Environmentalists are in cahoots with big government forces and alternative energy firms. On and on it goes.

However, what might be telling are comments made by Australian climate commissioner Tim Flannery and published in a March 25, 2011, article on the website of the Herald Sun of Australia. According to Flannery, “If we cut emissions today, global temperatures are not likely to drop for about a thousand years… If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow the average temperature of the planet is not going to drop in several hundred years, perhaps as much as a thousand years…”

The point of this current examination is not to play a game of “gotcha.” People on all sides take stances that should be scrutinized, from declaring carbon dioxide a pollutant and predicting floods that haven’t occurred, to claiming that global warming isn’t occurring, but, if it is, the planet can take it. The sceptics are guilty of the last contradiction. There are countless more issues on the table, too.

We, as people that make our living in contact with the public, have to understand that our customers may be on either side of a very strong controversy, and confronting them with one perspective of “green” or another always runs risks.