The featured image for this post is from Angela Wheeler at the CO2 Coalition, used with permission.
This post is a comment on Cobb, 2024, the paper is entitled “The politics of climate denialism and the secondary denialism of economics.” The paper defines climate denialism, discusses the reasons it exists, and the effect of widespread “denialism” on society. The paper was written in response to a paper I wrote with my colleague Marcel Crok, entitled “Carbon dioxide and a warming climate are not problems,” the abstract for our paper is here and the full text can be downloaded here. I am responding to Cobb’s paper primarily to correct some misinformation in it regarding our paper and Exxon’s climate research efforts. Unfortunately, the paper is paywalled and quite different from the abstract. I asked Cobb several times for a copy, via email and through ResearchGate, but he never responded to my requests, so I bought a pdf from Wiley.
The paper does not address climate science and explicitly assumes that humans cause climate change and that the changes are dangerous. The paper provides no evidence that humans cause climate changes, nor does it cite any such evidence.
Cobb defines two forms of climate denialism. His “primary denialism” is the belief that climate change is not caused by humans. He states this as “the belief that climate change is not real or not caused by human activity,” but this must be an error, since everyone knows climate changes. It is just the amount caused by humans that is debated. Then Cobb defines “secondary denialism” as one who admits humans are largely responsible for current climate change but doesn’t believe it is dangerous. In other words, people who believe we can adapt to human-caused changes. With my slight re-wording of his definition of primary denialism, these are good definitions.
Part 1
Cobb’s paper is divided into four parts, Part 1 is a discussion of the origins of climate denialism where Cobb blames it all on Exxon, following the whole Naomi Oreskes, Geoffrey Supran, Peter Frumhoff nonsense, as discussed here. However, this conspiracy theory is largely based on a very flawed “content analysis” of Exxon documents that was torn apart in court by Kimberly A. Neuendorf the inventor of content analysis. To quote her court filing (S&O is an abbreviation of Supran and Oreskes):
“S&O’s content analysis does not support the study’s conclusions because of a variety of fundamental errors in their analysis. S&O’s content analysis lacks reliability, validity, objectivity, generalizability, and replicability. These basic standards of scientific inquiry are vital for a proper content analysis, but they are not satisfied by the S&O study.” (ExxonMobil, 2018a, Attachment A)
Thus, Oreskes and Supran were totally humiliated and shown to be frauds in court. Their papers on “Exxon Knew” were blown out of the water. More on Cobb’s Exxon conspiracy theory later in this post.
Part 2
Part 2 of the paper is critical of May & Crok, 2024. May & Crok state that the world should not end the use of fossil fuels until a danger from them is identified, which Cobb interprets as “start[ing] from a conclusion and working backward.” Seems more like common sense to me. That man-made climate change is dangerous is pure speculation, as May & Crok make clear. Eliminating fossil fuels is extremely dangerous as well established by Bjorn Lomborg, Alex Epstein, and William Nordhaus. Neil Record has estimated that if we stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow six billion people would die. Vaclav Smil details how critical fossil fuels are to our wellbeing in his book How the World Really Works. Thus, Cobb is comparing a possible future danger to a sure danger that we would face by eliminating fossil fuels. To make matters worse, he does not address the key question: Is there any danger in man-made global warming?
Cobb’s second point is that how the extra heat collected in the atmosphere due to additional greenhouse gases is redistributed around the Earth by convection is not important. Further, if climate models cannot recreate this distribution properly it doesn’t matter. It does matter, so does the fact that if the greenhouse gas effect is excluded from a model, the model results move closer to observations in both the AR5 and the AR6 models in the tropical middle troposphere. Finally, as the world warms, it causes changes in atmospheric and oceanic circulation that moves heat from areas where the greenhouse effect is strong (like in the tropics) to where it is weak (like at the poles), facilitating cooling (see here). A warming planet also changes cloud cover in ways that facilitate cooling (see here). Unfortunately, the “consensus” ignores these observations.
Cobb’s third point is pure projection, he is basing his argument on ideology and opinion with no scientific input and projecting that flaw on May & Crok. His only source is an unpublished article that he claims will be published in the future (Pulles, 2024). This is despite the fact that all of May & Crok’s arguments are solidly referenced with high-quality peer-reviewed sources.
Part 3
In Part 3, which is on populist politics, one sentence in the paper is interesting:
“… ideological differences in the environment are marked by conflicts over facts, not values.” Cobb, 2024
Here Cobb confuses “facts” with “the interpretation of facts,” but I see his point. The fundamental argument over whether most of climate change is man-made and dangerous is not a value issue, it is in the interpretation of existing and past climate observations.
I think that May & Crok (see here for links to the submitted paper or download it from ResearchGate) established that climate change (aka global warming, whether man-made or not) has had no global detrimental effect to date. See AR6 WGI, Table 12.12, page 1856 or figure 5 here for the evidence.
In fact the net effect today of climate change may be positive (Tol, 2018). Richard Tol shows that climate change will likely have a limited impact on the economy and human welfare in the 21st century, also see (Lomborg, 2020). Tol notes that it is likely that the initial impacts of climate change will be positive. Beyond 2100, who knows? Could someone predict the world of 2000 in 1924? We need to plan over reasonable time frames.
Cobb does not discuss the differing opinions and evidence regarding the current impact of climate change, he simply assumes that man-made climate change is dangerous and anyone who disagrees with his opinion is a “denier.”
Cobb also assumes that climate change might have a high existential risk for all of humanity but does not identify it. Such a risk from global warming is clearly impossible since the temperature over the oceans (70% of the surface) is limited by physics to 30 degrees (Sud et al, 1999). More details on the possible dangers of heat are discussed here. Global cooling, which is likely to happen sometime in the next 2,000 to 3,000 years, is another issue and may be a significant problem, but fortunately it is far in the future when humanity will be better prepared (Vinós, 2022, Ch. 14).
Part 4
The paper faces us with a choice; unsupported conjecture that man-made climate change will increase human mortality or the certainty that eliminating fossil fuels will increase human mortality and suffering.
Cobb offers an extended discussion of error. One could conclude that climate change is dangerous when it isn’t, or not a problem when it is. Both errors are possible in climate science. But since it is clear that the costs of eliminating fossil fuels are huge and catastrophic and the costs of ignoring global warming and adapting to climate changes in the future are small it seems the question about error is moot at this time (Crok & May, 2023), (Nordhaus, 2018), (Record, 2023), and (Smil, 2022).
As touched on above, if climate change ever becomes a problem, it will be far in future. Our best estimate is it will be very manageable, and possibly beneficial, until 2100 (Tol, 2018). Thus, computing the net present value of effects and causes is critical in any policy decision. Like the IPCC, Cobb seems to believe that discounting future effects and costs is misleading, and he does not believe Nordhaus’s Nobel Prize winning assessment of climate change (Nordhaus, 2018). More on Nordhaus’s Nobel prize lecture can be seen here in the discussion around figure 8. Cobb can have that opinion, but I disagree, and obviously so does the Nobel Prize Committee. Cobb implies that Nordhaus’s analysis ignores the impact on human lives, but climate change mortality is dropping rapidly due to better infrastructure suggesting that humans are currently adapting to climate change quite well (Lomborg, 2020).
Conclusion
Cobb assumes that “primary denialism” was somehow invented by Exxon, which is silly. Skepticism that CO2 controls climate existed long before Exxon did their research into the topic in the late 70s and early 80s. Knut Ångström (Ångström, 1900) showed that the CO2 absorption spectrum is largely saturated in the atmosphere today and more CO2 will make very little difference, the largest impact of CO2 is seen in the first 50 PPM of CO2, after that the impact of more CO2 falls dramatically. Type “50” in the CO2 box in the University of Chicago MODTRAN calculator to see the difference. The whole “Exxon Knew” BS was disproven years ago as discussed here. In the Exxon Climate Papers post, I write:
“If [Exxon] withheld or suppressed climate research from the public or shareholders, it is not apparent in these documents. Further, if they found any definitive evidence of an impending man-made climate catastrophe, I didn’t see it. The climate researchers at ExxonMobil participated in the second, third, fourth and fifth IPCC assessment reports making major contributions in mapping the carbon cycle and in climate modeling. They calculated the potential impact of man-made CO2 in several publications.” Link.
This tired, old, and discredited story about Exxon lying or misleading people about climate change keeps popping up, but it is entirely without merit, as proven in court and in numerous publications. Cobb also blames Exxon for the fact that bipartisan support for eliminating fossil fuels “crumbled in the 1990s.” Exxon had nothing to do with that, the key issue then was when SAR (the 1996 second IPCC assessment report) came out, the politicians in the IPCC forced the scientists to change their obvious conclusion that they could not tell if humans were affecting the climate to a human effect could be discerned. This unethical intrusion on the science caused the 17th president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Frederick Seitz, to write a blistering editorial in the Wall Street Journal entitled “A Major Deception On Global Warming.” For a complete account of this shameful episode in IPCC history see pages 230-235 in my book Politics & Climate Change: A History. For additional discussion see here and here.
Cobb makes a good point here:
“The increasing prevalence of conspiracy theories about a wide range of issues has caused the public to be confused about whom to trust. Previously accepted sources of authority are losing credibility, and there is a genuine danger that this could make any type of collective decision-making difficult or impossible.” (Cobb, 2024)
In a classic case of projection, Cobb believes this applies to “deniers,” but in reality it applies to the so-called “climate consensus,” an authority that fewer and fewer people trust today. Even after Naomi Oreskes & Geoffrey Supran were humiliated in court, we still hear the “Exxon Knew” nonsense. I suppose conspiracy theories will always be with us.
I disagree with Cobb’s conclusion; I think increasing public skepticism of authority by the public is a very good thing. An informed and skeptical public is essential for any republic to survive. If the skepticism prevents uninformed and unproven collective decisions, so much the better. Much more on the Union of Concerned Scientists scam and their “conspiracy theory” about Exxon can be seen in my book (May, 2020c, pp. 128-147).
I generally dislike papers like this that assume man-made climate change is dangerous, then criticize those that disagree. I find it interesting that although the IPCC reports, especially AR5 and AR6, are quite biased and ignore evidence that goes against their narrative that humans cause climate change (Crok & May, 2023) and (InterAcademy Council, 2010), Cobb seems to think that they are not biased enough and are too neutral.
Blaming Exxon for public doubts about the dangers of man-made climate change is disingenuous. The doubts arise because even after 30 years and six major iterations of the CMIP climate models and six major report cycles, the IPCC still has not made a convincing case that man-made climate change is significant or dangerous. In fact the models moved farther from observations in AR6 than they were in AR5 as admitted in AR6 (IPCC, 2021, p. 927).
Solving the academic credibility problem that has arisen recently will be hard. Once integrity is lost, it is hard to regain. Scientists must set aside their political agendas and biases and learn to report on their work in clear well-worded prose that can be read by anyone with the interest and necessary skills. Cobb and I agree that mainstream media reporting on science is awful, we want more people getting their science news from primary sources.
Wiley has over 27 million research papers in their database, how many of these are worth the paper? I would encourage all academics and scientists to resolve to write better and more objectively. Fewer, but better and more readable papers. Write for the public, not each other. A true scientist doing meaningful work can explain it to a bright high school student.
Download the bibliography here.
Other criticisms of May & Crok, 2024 are discussed in the links below:
Phoma destructiva’s 2nd Comment on Pubpeer
Pubpeer Comment on our recent paper by the anonymous “Phoma destructive”