Trevor Cook: Blogging about global warming

This article I wrote appears in the current issue of the Walkley magazine, under the heading "Opinion Overboard".

"Although very few scientists doubt the reality of man-made climate change, and the seriousness of the threat it poses for us all, the media and the blogosphere is heavily populated with the work of global warming deniers and sceptics.

Indeed, so prominent is their work, that we could be forgiven for thinking that climate change is a matter for serious scientific debate as well as political skirmishing.

While the abuse of media balance means that deniers and sceptics get ‘equal time’, on the Internet they can fill search engines and sites with all sorts of misinformed and superficial commentary.

On his site, Turn Up The Heat George Monbiot, a professor at Oxford University, a columnist for The Guardian, confronts the prominent sceptics and challenges their positions point-by-point.

Monbiot says that while few corporations or public figures are now stupid enough to deny that climate change is happening, or that we need to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases, many are simply ‘greenwashing’ their existing practices.

One of the more recent targets for Monbiot’s campaign against greenwashing was Virgin boss Richard Branson largely because the aviation industry is one of the major contributors to the problem of greenhouse emissions.

While some companies like Virgin might see investing in alternate fuels as the way of the future and good sense in both investment and branding terms some others are clearly fighting a sold rearguard action.

In fact, Monbiot believes the continuing prominence of scepticism about global warming is due to a “very concerted effort by corporations to cast doubt on the science”. He’s not alone in making this accusation.

Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, reported in Mother Jones (May 2005), that ExxonMobil has funded a vast array of think tanks and opinion makers who are all major players in the debunking global warming movement. In fact, Mooney says that all the climate change debunkers receive funding from Exxon Mobil.

Nevertheless, Exxon denies that it is behind the most recent high-profile debunking effort - a spoof of Gore Vidal’s "Inconvenient Truth" which appeared on the popular YouTube site.

In the spoof, Gore is seen boring an army of penguins with his lecture and blaming global warming for everything, including Lindsay Lohan's thinness.

But when the Wall Street Journal tried to find the guy who posted the film "Al Gore's Penguin Army" -- listed on YouTube as a 29-year-old -- they discovered the video was posted by "Toutsmith" from a computer registered to the DCI Group, a slick Republican public relations firm, which just happens to have oil giant Exxon as a client.

Dave Gardner, an Exxon spokesman, told the media that Exxon had no role in creating the spoof. "We, like everyone else on the planet, have seen it, but did not fund it, did not approve it, and did not know what its source was".

According to the Wall Street Journal, “the anti-Gore video represents a less well-known side of YouTube. As its popularity has exploded, the public video-sharing site has drawn marketers looking to build buzz for new music releases and summer blockbusters. Now, it's being tapped by political operatives, public relations experts and ad agencies to sway opinions”.

Traffic to the penguin video, first posted in May this year, got a boost from prominently placed sponsored links that appeared on Google search engine when users typed in "Al Gore" or "Global Warming." The ads, which didn't indicate who had paid for them, were removed shortly after The Wall Street Journal contacted the DCI Group.

Apart from the potential for deception, the other problem with blogs is their democracy. All posts are equal. But in fact there is tremendous nonsense and embarrassing superficiality and over-simplification on both sides of the climate change debate.

Graham Young editor of Australia’s Online Opinion site says “most of the global warming blogs just fuel one side or the other of the debate, apart from Real Climate and Climate Audit where you get some light amongst the partisanship”.

In July this year a US congressional committee report said argued that “the discussion and evaluation of the use of PCA (a statistical technique used to measure past global temperatures) to some extent has degenerated in to the battle of competing web blogs.

The committee stated its belief that “web blogs are not an appropriate way to conduct science and thus the blogs give credence to the fact that these global warming issues have migrated from the realm of rational scientific discourse. Unfortunately, the factions involved have become highly and passionately polarised”.

The blogs it named as the major protagonists in the debate included Real Climate considered by many to be the premier climate change site.

But the Real Climate site also acknowledges the problem of sifting the good from the bad online: “it can be easy to find climate science information on the web, but that information ranges from the excellent to the atrocious - and it can often be hard to tell them apart without some prior expertise”.

To help its readers overcome this problem, Real Climate has recently started using a new ‘customised search’ service from Google Co-op.

The idea behind customisation is that the search is restricted to domains and pages that have passed some kind of quality control. RealClimate is one of the demo sites of the new technology and it has started off with a selection of sites (IPCC, goverment labs, research institutes etc) that it believes provide quality information about climate science.

Eventually, by adding qualified sites, Real Climate hopes to have a service that could be an essential resource for the interested public, journalists, and possibly even scientists, that would give a higher quality level of information than is possible now.

Some commenters on Real Climate have pointed out the obvious danger of a site selection that reflects or biases towards particular viewpoints. Nevertheless, initial reaction has been highly positive. Perhaps, indicating a depth of frustration with the junk that is infecting the blogosphere.

Google’s experiment with customized searches also represents a move away from the anarchic early days of social media to a reassertion of some new form of editorial control or guidance.