3 signs the climate op-ed you’re reading is full of it

Climate 101 is a Mashable series that answers provoking and salient questions about Earth’s warming climate.  

Shoddy climate opinion articles are like zombies.

They’re continually resurrected in various forms. Once risen, they mostly belabor similarly inattentive and easily refuted presentations of “facts.” They’re published in widely disseminated newspapers, and essentially tell thousands of climate scientists they’re misguided or contend that concerns about the growing consequences of human-caused global warming are overblown. (Not if you’re familiar with Antarctica’s destabilized Thwaites Glacier, for one.) 

The latest such effort, which appeared in the Washington Post opinion section on May 14, was written by a Fox News contributor and political columnist at the Post with the headline, “An Obama scientist debunks the climate doom-mongers.”  

There’s actually only one person implicated as a “doom-monger” in the opinion article — the current presidential envoy for climate, John Kerry, who’s not much of a doomist, but does aim to fulfill the Paris Agreement, the United Nations climate pact agreed upon by all the world’s nations in 2016. Of course, most climate scientists, like those who create deeply vetted climate reports for the UN, aren’t “doom-mongers.” Just the opposite: Climate scientists often refute climate doomist claims. (Precisely zero climate scientists, however, are quoted in the Post‘s opinion piece about climate science.) 

The op-ed goes on to promote deceptive ideas that make it appear the world’s climate hasn’t changed significantly (it has), and that much of the deeply-vetted science is uncertain (not exactly). The following is a brief guide to spotting and avoiding poor attempts at rebutting largely agreed upon climate science. We also delve into how best to educate yourself about climate science — a complex and evolving nexus of the oceans, atmosphere, cryosphere (ice regions), and the terrestrial world. 

1. The single-source problem

If a column or climate hot take rests on one “expert’s” attempt at subverting an entire field of geologists, oceanographers, atmospheric scientists, glaciologists, paleoclimatologists, ecologists, and beyond, treat it with a healthy dose of skepticism. 

It is at best presumptuous to think that, in the halls of science (where peer-reviewed literature is debated and critiqued), climate researchers haven’t considered (for decades) how they could be wrong or misguided. 

The recent Washington Post piece, for example, is based on “facts” from a single individual, Steven Koonin, a theoretical physicist who served as under secretary for science in the U.S. Department of Energy for two and a half years during the Obama administration. He has a new book out about climate science, called Unsettled, which claims that “core questions” about climate science remain unknown. (There is indeed uncertainty about some complex climate impacts, like how much seas will rise, but the big warming picture, along with many adverse impacts, is clear.) Koonin worked for five years as the chief scientist for BP during the time the oil giant hired an advertising agency to popularize the term “carbon footprint.” In so doing, BP successfully steered blame for the warming planet onto individuals like you, rather than a primary culprit: the companies extracting, refining, and selling ancient fossil fuels. Like, say, Koonin’s former employer.

Koonin, while clearly an accomplished researcher and intellectual, is not a climate scientist. This is evident in the cherry-picked, superficially reasonable, at times laughable “facts” attributed to him in the opinion piece (discussed below in part three of this story). 

“There’s a long history of people going outside their field and claiming expertise,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and the director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research center. (“We call it ‘Nobel disease,'” he added. Koonin hasn’t won a Nobel, but you can read more about the phenomenon here.) Hausfather spotted the recent Washington Post climate editorial and publicly expressed displeasure with it.

“There’s a long history of people going outside of their field and claiming expertise.”

A somewhat recent, stunning example is Princeton physicist William Happer, who former President Donald Trump chose to lead a (never realized) climate team on the National Security Council. Happer, also not a climate scientist, claimed in an interview that Earth is experiencing a “CO2 famine” (it is not) and concluded that “If plants could vote, they would vote for coal.” (Plant and climate experts have proved Happer’s ideas about CO2 wrong.) 

Maybe, mused Hausfather, over decades, some scientists forget how complex their field truly is, and are apt to oversimplify other experts’ deeply complex fields. Either way, a single “expert” making big claims should never be the only source cited in any piece of journalism, ever. Especially if their expertise is not in the field being discussed.

2. Misuse of “uncertainty” 

Some climate op-eds might argue that climate science is invalid or unreliable because there is inherently some uncertainty with future predictions. (Surprisingly, this Washington Post column doesn’t specifically use the word “uncertainty,” but does claim scientists don’t have enough information to “untangle” how much humans are driving global warming, versus natural warming (this isn’t true; human activities are responsible for all of modern warming.)

Of course, climate scientists don’t agree on everything. For example, there’s ongoing scientific study and debate over how much the warming Arctic is contributing to extreme weather events, like prolonged heat waves or blasts of Arctic air. This complex, dynamic process isn’t nearly settled science. There is uncertainty. Another ongoing question is how much sea levels will rise this century. A conservative estimate is oceans will rise by another one to two feet by century’s end — but potentially much more. There is, yes, uncertainty. That’s why scientists, globally, are intensively researching the problem.

“They’re all wrestling with problems no single person can solve,” said Sarah Green, an environmental chemist and climate scientist at Michigan Technological University.

Yet there are fundamental ideas on which thousands of climate scientists, globally, do agree. “What climate scientists agree on is humans are causing climate change. Humans are changing the climate system and they’re doing it in a major way,” said Jessica Tierney, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona.

“What climate scientists agree on is humans are causing climate change. Humans are changing the climate system and they’re doing it in a major way.”

The current 20-year megadrought in the Southwest is a salient example of major change. It’s the worst Southwestern drought in hundreds of years, specifically because higher temperatures are drying out the land and evaporating more water from rivers and reservoirs. Climate change is exacerbating a natural event, say scientists who study drought. 

Everyone has access to the updated, current consensus about climate science, wherein climate scientists state the certainty (high to medium to low,) about certain impacts. For example, the UN reports with “high confidence” that “sea level will continue to rise well beyond 2100.” 

This consensus science is published, and offered in more digestible summaries, by institutions like the UN and the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Beyond superb climate reporting by journalists, like this one, who cover climate change and the environment, the big, deeply vetted community assessments from government agencies — involving hundreds of scientists — are reliable climate resources. The reports have power in numbers and it’s best to look at the most updated versions.

“If folks want to know what’s happening with climate scientists, read what climate scientists are saying, or look at the big community assessments,” said Hausfather. 

Here are a couple:

• UN IPCC Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5 C Summary for Policymakers: The report lays out the benefits of stabilizing Earth’s temperatures at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures.

• Fourth U.S. National Climate Assessment: A congressionally mandated federal climate report, produced by over 300 experts: “The impacts of global climate change are already being felt in the United States and are projected to intensify in the future — but the severity of future impacts will depend largely on actions taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to the changes that will occur,” the report reads. 

Here are other reliable, but perhaps more digestible, climate science sources, meant for anyone interested:

3. Deviously cherry-picked facts

Beware how facts are presented, particularly in opinion pieces. Often, they are cherry-picked, meaning a specific piece of data is presented to support a certain argument, while other pertinent numbers or important context are ignored.

“Cherry picking — it’s the number one playbook,” said Tierney.

The recent Washington Post opinion piece cherry picks repeatedly. Here are a few examples:

Cherry-pick #1: “Instead of droughts, ‘the past fifty years have been slightly wetter than average’ in the United States, according to NOAA figures.”

This is a remarkably lazy example of cherry picking. Yes, the entire U.S. averaged as a whole may be “slightly wetter than average,” which makes sense because wetter places are getting wetter, as a warmer atmosphere holds more water. This means wetter storms, and the potential for intense flooding. But the Lower 48, 3,000 miles wide, has stark regional differences. Of note, the Southwest is now warming and drying. The current drought is extreme. “It’s two decades long and probably the worst drought in at least 400 years,” Benjamin Cook, a research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who studies drought, told Mashable last month.

Cherry-pick #2: “‘The warmest temperatures in the U.S. have not risen in the past fifty years,’ Koonin writes, according to the U.S. government’s Climate Science Special Report.” 

That’s deceiving, at best. While Koonin is cherry-picking outliers in extreme temperatures, average temperatures in the U.S. are warmer than 50 years ago, and still rising. The trend is clear. According to NOAA’s temperature records, on average, “the seven warmest years in the 1880–2020 record have all occurred since 2014, while the 10 warmest years have occurred since 2005.” Koonin is referencing some of the highest maximum summer temperatures recorded in U.S. history, which occurred during extremely hot summers in the 1930s, explained Hausfather. Crucially, this was a regional warming event (making up about 2 percent of the planet’s surface) during the nation’s extremely dry “Dust Bowl” years. In sharp contrast, today, nearly the entire globe is warming. 

Cherry-pick #3: “‘The rate of global sea-level rise 70 years ago was as large as what we observe today,’ according to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”

Nope. Updated observations show sea level rise is accelerating. Crucially, accelerated melting of the planet’s vast ice sheets, particularly on Greenland and Antarctica, are driving this acceleration. “[Koonin] is clearly not up to date on the science,” said Tierney. She noted that the next big UN IPCC report (officially due in 2022) concludes, with “high confidence,” that sea levels are accelerating. Already, sea levels have risen by some eight to nine inches since the late 1800s.

(Hausfather identifies Koonin’s other cherry-picked numbers in this Twitter thread.)

TL;DR? Beware poorly reported and dubiously sourced opinions, masquerading as respectable science coverage. They’re not going away. Some of these opinion stories, like the Washington Post‘s latest, will promote the idea that humans can simply adapt to changing climes. 

Indeed, in some ways, we must adapt (see: Miami). But, as climate scientists will point out, we must also stabilize the planet’s temperature, preferably at levels that avoid the worst consequences of climate change. 

“We can’t adapt infinitely,” said Green.