Sound Science and Climate Change or What are the Denialists Smoking?

George Monbiot, in his book Heat, reveals the link between organized tobacco and organized climate change denial. I followed up his references and the documents he found make for interesting reading: memos from APCO, a PR firm, to Philip Morris on how to fake a grassroots movement (what we'd call astroturfing today). I strongly recommend reading Heat but in the meantime here are some examples, in which APCO is discussing the strategy for setting up The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC).

In proposing a European version of TASSC, the following are suggested, in a document dated March 25, 1994:

• Preempt unilateral action against industry.
  
• Associate anti-industry "scientific" studies with broader questions about government research and regulations.
  
• Link the tobacco issue with other more "politically correct" products.
  
• Have non-industry messengers provide reasons for legislators, business executives and media to view policies drawn from unreliable scientific studies with extreme caution.
  

And what were those "broader questions"? Here's a list from the same document:

• Global warming
  
• Nuclear waste disposal
  
• Diseases and pests in agricultural products for transborder trade
  
• Biotechnology
  
• Eco-labeling for EC products
  
• Food processing and packaging
  

So the agenda was this: confuse the public on the merits of science in the tobacco arena, but create a smokescreen (how appropriate) by having similar debates in other areas and – here's the critical point – ensure that the same people were involved so it would be harder to see the whole thing for what it was, a front for tobacco. Here's another snippet (document dated September 30, 1993):

APCO recommends that we steer away from launching TASSC in Washington, D.C. or the top media markets of the country. Rather, we suggest creating a series of aggressive, decentralized launches in several targeted local and regional markets across the country. This approach:

• Maximizes recruitment efforts. Stresses that TASSC is a grassroots effort that will fight unsound science on both the local and national levels.
  
• Avoids cynical reporters from major media. Less reviewing/challenging of TASSC messages; increases likelihood of pick up by media.
  
• Limits potential for counterattack. The likely opponents of TASSC tend to concentrate their efforts in the top markets while skipping the secondary markets. Our approach sends TASSC's messages initially into these more receptive markets - and enables us to build upon early successes.
  
• Allows for a national coordinating effort. Publicize, in each market, a national 800 number, the supporters of TASSC and the existence of the TASSC Public Information Bureau.
  

Now, of course, it is unlikely that the majority of people who have taken a pro-industry stance on these matters are in the pay of organized tobacco or their successor in the climate change debate, Exxon, but the planting of these seeds is all that's necessary. As uninformed members of the public pick up a perception that there's a vast groundswell of scientists who disagree with the position they see from the mainstream media, they are conned into thinking the debate is real. It's even possible that some genuine scientists were sucked in (I've noticed how most of those are retired or late-career scientists, playing on their standing, but likely to be out of touch with the latest science). Sadly, some of the mainstream media consequently pick up the spin as real, the approach of seeding it in less critical media having done the job of giving the position legs. Reporters in publications like The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and The Australian, seeing the story coming at them from many sources, mistakenly believe what they are seeing represents a genuine grassroots movement of concerned scientists. So why, now that this whole thing has been exposed, do some of these publications continue to take the inactivist position so seriously? Because no one likes to admit to being a dupe. Or maybe because no one likes to admit that they need to make major lifestyle changes to eliminate a social harm – in other words, that they are part of the problem. This is why climate change persists as a misreported issue. And why the original "junk science" myth, tobacco is not that harmful, persisted so long, in smokey editorial offices. So, what's to be done? We must recognize that in the Internet age, knowledge is not created centrally, but by networks of potentially disorganized individuals. APCO tapped into this concept in an era when the Internet was not as universal as it is today, so they needed significant funding to set up their astroturf operation. The good news is that, today, you do not need major funding to set up a genuine grassroots movement. All you need to do is to recruit friends who recruit friends, via personal networking sites like FaceBook. So, now you know what to do: take the message out there. The climate inactivist movement is an outgrowth of the tobacco denial movement, and just as bogus. Equip yourself with the facts by reading sites with real science (to which you will find pointers on this site: I do not claim to be a great primary source; for example, the RealClimate site is run by real climate scientists). This article is another take on APCO's role in creating TASSC.

Addendum

I add new links here as I discover new data sources:

• There are some good links to bolster the case in this RealClimate discussion (and the next page). Could this be a smoking gun?
• A report in New York Times on how the fossil fuels industry knew as far back as 1995 that “contrarian” theories did not seriously challenge mainstream climate science – but suppressed an internal report to that effect.
• The Union of Concerned Scientists in January 2007 reported that ExxonMobil had at that time spent $16-million on supporting anti-science lobbying groups, in a tobacco-style campaign to discredit  the science by propaganda rather than sound scientific investigation
• John Mashey has written an extensive study of the anti-science tactics of the fossil fuel industry including the lessons they learnt from tobacco
• Tobacco companies in Australia are at it again: they created a fake retailers association to protest plain wrapping in the lead-up to the 2010 federal election
• Graham Readfearn in the Guardian summarizes where the main anti-science lobbyists are today (2015)
• Union of Concerned Scientists reports internal fossil fuel memos and emails show that climate change was being factored into their plans as early as 1981 – much as organized tobacco knew of the health risks of their product decades before the issue became public, forewarning them of the need to launch a denial campaign (2015)

Finally, a really good authoritative book by Naomi Oreskes, published in 2010, details the whole denial industry right back to its roots:

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

Perpetual motion machine, anyone?

As Kermit said, it’s not easy being green.

I recently stumbled upon a bunch of excitingly clean green things, like claims you can run a car on water (a teensy bit of electricity separates out the water into hydrogen and oxygen and you burn the hydrogen) and magnetic power generators that apparently make electricity out of nothing.

Now, I have actually majored in physics, and while some people may regard violating the law of conservation of energy as a victimless crime, I have to say that if any of this stuff was remotely close to possible, everyone would be doing it.

Let’s take running a car on water. So maybe the oil companies would suppress such an invention. But the sites claiming it can be done also claim it’s really simple. So what’s to stop an insignificant poor country without oil developing this technology for their own use? Even if it’s too hard a job for a backyard tinkerer to convert their car engine, why isn’t everyone running their lawnmowers on water? Why are there no modern-day Albert Schweitzers in darkest Africa, running their clinics off water powered internal combustion engines?

Anyway this stuff has been thoroughly debunked many times so why bother? One of these things has turned up in my own back yard. There is a bunch calling themselves Lutec in Queensland, Australia who claim they can amplify electricity.

An amplifier, in the usual sense, has two inputs: the signal you want to amplify, and a power source that provides the amplification (which sets an upper bound on the output signal). Theirs is really special. The input signal amplifies itself. No kidding.

Their device involves a few steps including:

1. run mains AC through a transformer to step down the voltage
   
2. rectify to DC
   
3. run the DC through a pulsed motor which drives an AC generator
   

This is not quite all but their big claim is that if they stick a DC voltmeter and ammeter on the DC side, and AC equivalents on the AC output, the volt x amp product (watts) is significantly higher on the AC side. They are amplifying electricity.

Or so they claim.

A moment’s thought should reveal how absurd this is. If they fed the output back to the input, you would get a positive feedback loop. The output would increase indefinitely until something blew – even if you disconnected the mains input.

There are two reasonable possibilities. These people don’t understand what they are doing and are not measuring what they think they are measuring, or they are frauds.

How could they be getting the results they claim? If they are frauds, it’s easy: they could have another power source hidden somewhere – or they rigged the meters. If not, how could they be getting such a big instrument error? The trick is to understand how AC voltage and current are measured. Since AC is constantly fluctuating between a positive and equally low negative value, you need to take an average to get a voltage number that equates to DC voltage (or amperage). The standard formula for this is the root mean square (well explained on WikiPedia so I won’t repeat the explanation here).

The problem with taking the root mean square is that if you are designing a voltmeter, it would be hard to calculate the RMS voltage correctly, so my understanding is that most voltmeters fake it by assuming the AC is in the form of a sine wave, and calculate the RMS voltage as peak voltage / square root of 2. If the wave is different shape, the voltmeter will give an incorrect result. If your AC voltage is nominally 240 as in Australia, the actual peak voltage would be about 339, as illustrated in the first picture.

The second picture shows a different wave form in which the peak is still 339V, but the RMS is now 200V.
So if you had a machine that was producing this sort of output, your voltmeter would be registering 20% more than it should.

You can play around with wave forms to adjust the inaccuracy even further. I chose this particular one because it wasn’t terribly hard to construct out of sines and cosines.

I’m not an expert on AC and measurement techniques but this is a plausible indication of where the problem may lie – that’s if they aren’t straight-out charlatans, with a compact battery secreted somewhere to boost the output, hidden wires back to mains, or deliberately inaccurate meters.

As I said at the start – it would be great if these things were for real. If you want to be green, you can’t be gullible, that’s for sure. Poor old Kermit.

---

For those who want to check my working, here it is. I graphed the equations using the free Grapher program that ships with Mac OS X. Yet another reason to buy a Mac. PS: I checked the details with several engineers who are more familiar with AC measurement than I, and they agreed that this is a plausible explanation. You need to shape the wave so that it’s far enough off a sine shape to fool the voltmeter, but still register the peaks.

Here's another view on Pure Energy Systems Wiki.
The Australian Skeptics' journal has published a debunking of the Lutec device in two parts (part 1; part 2).

Lutec were claiming they had a machine ready to sell at least as far back as 2002. So where is it?

And if you are keen on powering your car with water, read this contribution at the good old Mythbusters site. Let me know which parts are wrong. Science please, not conspiracy theories.

Are we doomed?

The link between smoking tobacco and cancer was first established in the 1930s, and it took about 60 years for a good fraction of the world to accept the need to limit smoking.

The climate change debate is of similar character – some of the same players are even involved. The tactics, not surprisingly, are similar. Promote the view with a combination of bought off scientists and fake grassroots (astroturf) movements that there is more debate about the science than there really is. Promote the view that there is a mafia who attack anyone who opposes the mainstream scientific position. Argue that the mainstream is "junk science" as opposed to opinions of non-specialists, who do not do any real scientific work, who somehow have it right. Position dissenters from the mainstream as Galileos.

No one would be happier than me if the link between CO₂ and climate could be convincingly debunked, because the tobacco example shows just how hard it is to change government policy, not matter how convincing the science, in the face of a determined industry lobby. For this reason, I've been taking a skeptical view of the climate change "skeptics": trying to find evidence that they may just be right. This has been pretty heavy going, because a lot of them are clearly uninformed and a lot of "skeptic" commentary is plain garbage. Some of course is valid. In an area as complex as this, there have to be errors and omissions in the accepted models. A genuine scientific skeptic will of course validly explore these problem areas and either find improvements, or overturn the whole model.

So far, in my reading of this work, I've not managed to find anything better than nitpicks. Some details of the models may not be totally accurate, not that anyone ever claimed they were. All of the models used by climate modelers of any worth are reported as representing a range of values, allowing for uncertainties – as they should.

The thing which troubles me about the self-appointed (being kind and not assuming they are not industry shills) "skeptics" is that they all insist that the range of values in IPCC projections are "alarmist", i.e., that the "skeptical" position is that things are better. I have not seen one person in the group widely touted as representing correction to the "mainstream" arguing that science could be badly wrong in the other direction. There are climate scientists in the "mainstream" who argue that some numbers could be optimistic, e.g., James Hansen at NASA argues that we don't have good data to support the view that sea level rise will be within the relatively benign range the IPCC accepts for 2100 (or more recently, 2099).

A true skeptic has to look at the whole range of possibilities for error in the modeling. So, what evidence is there that the modeling could be radically wrong in the direction of optimism?

A popular "skeptic" argument revolves around looking in the paleoclimactic record for instances of temperature-CO₂ coupling, and demonstrating that temperature change leads the trend. This is not particularly useful, because such instances do not mirror the current scenario, where gigatonnes of CO₂ are being added to the atmosphere independently of a temperature trigger. It is more useful to look for past events where a massive infusion of greenhouse gases was not triggered directly by a temperature increase, i.e., something bigger than can be explained by reduced solubility of CO₂ when the oceans warm up.

The best candidate is the Permian-Triassic extinction event (I cite WikiPedia because it's easy to read and accessible, but I have read relevant literature in academic journals as well to check; I encourage other genuine skeptics to read further). Let's call this one the PTE for brevity. PTE is the biggest extinction event since the fossil record began, and wiped out 90% of all life. it took 3-million years for coal to form in significant quantity, so severe was the die-off. What triggered it? That far in the past, exact mechanisms are hard to pin down, but it is known that massive volcanos, the Siberian Traps, spewed out millions of cubic kilometres of lava. Some of this lava landed in coal beds; much also landed in a shallow sea. Seas contain methane clathrates (also called methane hydrates), methane trapped in water molecules in relatively cold water. If the temperature increases, the methane is released. These two effects combined to have a significant greenhouse effect, and the resulting rapid temperature rises may have made the oceans become anoxic. The dominant life form in the oceans became sulfur-reducing bacteria, which exhale toxic sulfur dioxide, which poisoned life on land. How quick was the die-off? One study [Rampino et al 2000] shows that it could have taken under 8,000 years, but definitely less than 60,000 years, for most animals to die off.

How close is this scenario to what is happening today? The Siberian Traps eruptions occurred over a much longer time period, of the order of hundreds of thousands of years at least. The continental configuration was different – this was the era of the single supercontinent, Pangea, so ocean circulation would have been very different. The presence of a significant polar land mass in the south today means we have a larger buffer against warming (sea ice is much less stable than land ice). On the other hand, the atmospheric CO₂ levels were very similar to today's before being elevated over a relatively short period by a factor of 5 to 10.

So on balance, I can't say that what is happening today is cause for much optimism. The fact that we are adding CO₂ to the atmosphere so much faster cannot be good for the environment. The worst-case IPCC scenario has CO₂ levels rising by a factor of 5 on pre-industrial by 2100, scarily close to what happened at the end of the Permian – but thousands of times faster. Time is of course a critical variable in biosphere adaptation. Evolution does not work on decadal time-scales. If forced change in thousands of years was catastrophic, where are we headed now?

Then there's the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), around 55-million years ago. Methane clathrates have also been implicated in this one, as has a release of between 2000 and 5000 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere over 10,000 to 20,000 years. There is also the possibility of volcanic events causing the greenhouse gas releases. As with the PTE, the key issue is the rapid deployment of greenhouse gases, followed by global warming, then a large-scale die-off. In the case of PETM, the die-off was more restricted, with some molluscs heavily reduced (over 90%); this was the time when many older mammal forms died off, and precursors to modern life forms appeared. As with PTE, the time-scale was much longer than today's. Since PETM is much more recent, it is an easier target for study, and figures in IPCC reports. What is particularly worrying about PETM is that the rate of warming is outside the range of climate models, suggesting that contrary to the common "skeptic" position that cliamte models are alarmist, the opposite may be true.

In conclusion, from what I've found so far, there is a strong relationship between relatively rapid increases in greenhouse gases, similarly rapid climate change, and mass extinctions.

If anyone can find an example of this scale of increase in greenhouse gases (doubling or more, with a baseline similar to today's levels), over a time period short enough to cause problems with biosphere adaptation, which is not associated with a significant extinction event, let me know.

So, to answer the question in the title: are we doomed? On the evidence I've found so far, yes. Until I turn up something better, it seems we have no option but to fight the fossil fuel industry, futile though that may seem. Meanwhile, this all reminds me of one of my favourite Far Side cartoons: "The Real Reason Dinosaurs Became Extinct". A bunch of dinosaurs are seen smoking. Larson tied the two issues together nicely.

In case you can't find references on the net and have a library:

[Rampino et al 2000] Rampino, M. R., A. Prokoph, and A. Adler, 2000. Tempo of the end-Permian event: high-resolution cyclostratigraphy at the Permian-Triassic boundary. Geology, 28: 643-646.