Echo chamber of outrage: Ars attends a climate skeptics’ summit

“I accept that the planet has warmed,” said conservative columnist Mark Steyn from the podium. “And I rejoice that it is warm.”

Steyn was one of many speakers at the libertarian Heartland Institute's 10th “International Conference on Climate Change,” a major event for climate science contrarians. The two-day conference, held in mid-June at the classy Washington Court Hotel just a few blocks from the US Capitol, had all the trappings of an academic conference, but you wouldn’t mistake it for a Geological Society of America meeting. Tables set up outside the hotel’s main ballroom hosted conservative advocacy groups and think tanks like CFACT, the Ayn Rand Institute, and the Heritage Foundation (which attracted visitors with a life-size cardboard cut-out of Ronald Reagan). The audience contained some meteorologists but seemed mostly composed of retired couples with an interest in politics, along with a handful of state legislators.

The goal was to gather speakers—who, organizers frequently reminded the audience, were some of the most famous and well-respected experts in the world—who could arm attendees with the information they needed to take the Good Fight back out to the streets. A small number of the talks presented research into climate science, but most were arguments against climate policy based on economic impacts. In other words, imagine the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal plus a podium.

As for the speakers, they viewed themselves as voices of reason speaking truth to power—all of them trying desperately to keep the Western world from slipping over the precipice to certain economic ruin. And to hear them tell it, Heartland and its allies were winning the battle against the "climate alarmists." The public remains divided on the issue of climate change, with some recent polling placing it low on the priority list of concerns. Attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through legislation have been stymied. International negotiations have been arduous.

I went to Heartland’s conference expecting a series of detailed critiques of climate studies, much like the sort of posts that populate contrarian blogs after a new paper makes headlines. What I experienced instead was significantly less wonky—a cathartic echo chamber of outrage.

Red meat

Serious scientific argument was thin on the ground. For instance, in a breakfast keynote on the second day, Mark Steyn simply made fun of well-known Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann for 30 minutes. (Steyn has written that Mann's research was fraudulent, resulting in a defamation lawsuit from Mann. Steyn is also the editor of a forthcoming book called A Disgrace to the Profession—you can guess who it’s about.)

Steyn wasn’t subtle, reiterating his accusation that Mann’s famous “hockey stick” tree ring temperature reconstruction was “fraudulent in every sense,” which resulted in hearty applause from the audience. Steyn also worked in references to the supposedly scandalous “Climategate” e-mails from 2007, describing University of East Anglia researchers corresponding with Michael Mann as “four schlubs who sound like Mann’s battered wives.”

During the audience Q&A that followed, Steyn found another target in former Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Chair Rajendra Pachauri, who resigned earlier this year after sexual harassment accusations. Steyn referred to Pachauri as “Rajendra Pants-downee,” commenting that the former railway engineer’s “choo-choo jumped the tracks.” The jokes got huge laughs.

This is, it probably goes without saying, not the kind of thing you hear at an academic conference. Nearly every presentation referenced both Obama and Al Gore so frequently that a drinking game would have resulted in serious liver damage. References to studies published in peer-reviewed journals, on the other hand, were almost completely absent. Clever insults ruled the day; belly laughs were far more common than the curious "hmms" that usually dot the audience of a research talk.

Back to the future

The conference speakers did refer to science in passing—usually through sardonic quips about “alarmist” or "falsified" science—but their references gave me the feeling of being stuck in a time warp. There was an obsession with Al Gore and his 2007 film, An Inconvenient Truth, particularly the imagery of desperate polar bears. (“There is a problem with polar bears right now,” said Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe while receiving an award for political leadership. “It’s overpopulation.”)

Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” temperature reconstruction, first published in 1998, also remained a common punch line. Attendees seemed blissfully unaware of the pile of subsequent studies that have yielded the same result. To them, the hockey stick remains the emblem of debunked, fraudulent climate science—their enemy’s shattered sword.

The bugbear of land temperature records distorted by the urban heat island effect, too, is still being slain. The idea here is that as cities grew up around weather stations, all that concrete heats up in the midday sun, pushing thermometer readings higher and artificially creating the appearance of a warming trend. This does happen, as does the opposite. Speakers claimed repeatedly that researchers ignore this effect.

Though this sounds good, it's not true. (And the fact that there are no urban heat islands on the ocean, which covers most of the Earth’s surface, appears to be under-appreciated.) For instance, the Berkeley Earth project, led by then-climate skeptic Richard Muller, was a privately funded effort purporting to address such warming biases in the temperature record. The project's record turned out to look just like all the others, and the team behind it concluded that the impact of the urban heat island effect was “indistinguishable from zero." That work was promptly discounted by groups like Heartland. When contrarian blogger Anthony Watts was asked during the conference about the Berkeley Earth project, he dismissed it by saying that the project hadn’t excluded “what I consider all of the bad data.”