Climate Change: The benefit of the doubt

SMH.com.au


Climate change sceptics are scenting victory in the battle for public opinion, write Ben Cubby and Antony Lawes

In the Queensland village of Maleny, best known for its folk festival, organic food and flourishing cottage industry in various hemp products, Jon Woodlands is a familiar face.

The veteran environmental campaigner has joined protest camps to halt logging in rainforests and uranium mining at Jabiluka, and even been arrested for diving in front of a cement truck in an attempt to stop Woolworths building a supermarket in his home town.

But when Woodlands decided to write an article for a local newsletter outing himself as a climate change sceptic, he says the goodwill of his fellow greenies evaporated instantly.

What followed were legal threats, the severing of friendships, ostracism and abuse - as well as a fair amount of support, both public and private.

''I've had people go off the Richter scale even if you suggest there's any doubt [about climate change science],'' the former TAFE teacher says. ''It's like a religion.''

Jon Woodlands has never met John Roskam, but the two men have travelled very different paths to arrive at the same point: a firmly held belief that the science behind climate change is shaky.

From his office in Melbourne's Collins Street, 1400 kilometres from laid-back Maleny, Roskam has done more to fuel doubt about climate change than almost anyone in Australia. As executive director of the Institute of Public Affairs, a think tank that exists to promote free-market ideologies, Roskam has helped finance and give structure to Australia's often self-contradictory band of climate sceptics.

''Of all the serious sceptics in Australia, we have helped and supported just about all of them in their work one way or another,'' he says, listing some prominent figures on the local circuit. ''Ian Plimer - we launched his book - Bob Carter, Jo Nova, William Kininmonth.''

The IPA's operating budget is small but its influence in nurturing climate scepticism in the wider community is large. About a quarter of its $2 million in annual funding comes from corporations with a direct stake in the climate change debate, not including contributions from its 1000 individual members, some of whom also have a personal interest in climate change.

The money is used to pay for sceptic research and extend patronage to prominent sceptics by giving them a platform for publication and media exposure. The IPA is a key part of Australia's small labyrinth of think tanks, foundations and internet-based communities attempting to undermine public confidence in climate science.

The network was instrumental in nurturing the deluge of climate sceptic emails that helped to convince Liberal MPs to dump Malcolm Turnbull, and their influence is likely to have had an effect on the internal ALP polling that convinced it to shelve the emissions trading scheme until at least 2013.

But it is the spontaneous rejection of the mainstream view from unexpected quarters, like Jon Woodlands in Maleny, that the IPA finds especially welcome.

''I truly believe that the Australian people are waking up and it's a victory for liberal democracy,'' Roskam says.

In the battle for public opinion, Roskam is finally scenting victory. He cites a poll commissioned by his organisation since the federal government decided to postpone its ETS, which showed 26 per cent of the 1000 people surveyed thought "The variation in global temperature is just part of the natural cycle of nature," with another 38 per cent not sure what the truth is.

Other polls are less clear cut, and suggest that public support for working to solve climate change remains strong, although sceptics are represented in most communities and age groups. The Lowy Institute for International Policy has been polling changing public attitudes to climate change for several years, and allows for more nuanced responses than the IPA's Galaxy survey.

Although often cited as evidence of waning public support for climate change action, the most recent Lowy findings show that interest in the issue peaked with the election of the Rudd government and quickly declined thereafter to its current level, with about half the population wanting immediate greenhouse gas cuts, and the proportion who think nothing should be done ''until we are sure global warming is a problem'' steady for the past two years at 13 per cent.

''In a sense, the support was probably inflated a lot by the publicity around Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and the Stern report in the UK,'' says the Lowy research fellow Fergus Hanson. ''That was coupled with what people may have perceived as a lack of understanding of climate change by John Howard.''

The interesting feature of the Lowy polls is that they show little or no impact on public attitudes resulting from the sceptic coups such as the Copenhagen conference or the much-publicised tour of Australia by the English sceptic Christopher Monckton. The data gathered after Viscount Monckton's lecture series showed few statistically significant differences from 2008. This means the popularity of climate scepticism in Australia may have already reached its zenith.

Either way, the groups pushing for action to cut greenhouse gas emissions have taken a battering in the past few months. The director of the Climate Institute, John Connor, said the green movement had adopted a ''rope-a-dope'' strategy since Copenhagen - absorbing punishment, minimising damage, and trying to keep its strength in reserve for the next round.

The blows came thick and fast. First came the theft and publication of emails at East Anglia University's climatic research unit in November - a perfectly timed public relations coup for sceptics - then a vague outcome at the UN's Copenhagen climate conference, followed by the feverish hunt for errors like the so-called ''glaciergate'' in the UN's Fourth Assessment report. The fact that most of the alleged errors turned out to be mistakes themselves, Copenhagen still represented a modest milestone, and the East Anglian researchers have since been cleared of wrongdoing had little impact.

''We tried to react at the time but it was like spitting into the wind,'' Connor says. ''The various 'gates' were front-page news and then when things turned out to have no substance it was reported on page 13.''

The various science organisations and environment groups are now dusting themselves off and the first signs of the fight back have begun.

In this week's issue of the prestigious journal Science, the US National Academy of Sciences published a letter from 255 members, including 11 Nobel laureates, defending climate science. The tone is designed to put mainstream scientists back on the front foot. It attacks the ''dogma'' of climate sceptics and challenges them to come up with an ''honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence''.

The views are being echoed in Australia by climate researchers who are increasingly tired of being called ''alarmist'' when they have spent their lives being painstakingly neutral - and professionally sceptical, in the scientific sense.

They point out that, despite the ferocious public relations battle around global warming since Copenhagen, the science underpinning the theory of man-made climate change has emerged unscathed.

Some of that feeling was expressed in a carefully worded public statement released on Thursday by the Chief Scientist, Professor Penny Sackett.

She said Australia and the rest of the world were moving too slowly to curb its carbon emissions in order to avoid a 2 degree global temperature rise, considered a critical ''guardrail'' beyond which lies dangerous climate change.

''In the face of slow changes at national levels, it is all the more important that forward-looking industries, states, individual cities and towns, community groups and family groups continue to network together to reduce their carbon footprints and assess the impact of climate change on their activities,'' the Chief Scientist said.

The one age group where the polls say support for climate change action is still clearly growing is people under 30. The Australian Youth Climate Coalition, which has 50,000 nominal members and managed to get 4000 of them to attend a conference in Sydney last July, saw another surge in membership when the government shelved the ETS.

''I don't really know about the polls,'' said the organisation's co-director Amanda McKenzie, as a handful of members faced the public handing out ''climate reality'' pamphlets outside Town Hall on Thursday evening.

''It sounds pretty basic but the best barometer I use is talking to taxi drivers. When I started out a few years ago they usually used to think it was pretty strange when I said I was working on climate change, now they know what I'm talking about and they're usually positive.''