How (climate change) deniers work

All deniers have a small set of tools to maintain their worldview in the face of the incongruity of that worldview with reality.

Cherry picking data is a favourite. Here's Andrew Bolt proving the IPCC are a failure because a reputable sounding Professor of Climate Change has shown how little support there is for climate change, and how the IPCC are driving some evil agenda without any evidence at all. Look, there's even a link to the paper! And this is the damning proof:

Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous. That particular consensus judgement, as are many others in the IPCC reports, is reached by only a few dozen experts in the specific field of detection and attribution studies; other IPCC authors are experts in other fields.

The paper itself is an, at times, rather dense somewhat postmodernist investigation of the IPCC. It has a number of legitimate criticisms in terms of the structures of knowledge and power within the organisation, knowledge hierarchies, the geographies of expertise and so on. It does not at any time claim that climate change is faked or wrong. Here is the full paragraph Mr Bolt selects only half of:

Without a careful explanation about what it means, this drive for consensus can leave the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism. Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous. That particular consensus judgement, as are many others in the IPCC reports, is reached by only a few dozen experts in the specific field of detection and attribution studies; other IPCC authors are experts in other fields. But consensus-making can also lead to criticism for being too conservative, as Hansen (2007) has most visibly argued. Was the IPCC AR4 too conservative in reaching its consensus about future sea-level rise? Many glaciologists and oceanographers think they were (Kerr, 2007; Rahmstorf, 2010), leading to what Hansen attacks as ‘scientific reticence’. Solomon et al. (2008) offer a robust defence, stating that far from reaching a premature consensus, the AR4 report stated that in fact no consensus could be reached on the magnitude of the possible fast ice-sheet melt processes that some fear could lead to 1 or 2 metres of sea-level rise this century. Hence these processes were not included in the quantitative estimates.

So the quote relates to a specific aspect of 'knowledge hierarchies' in the IPCC. The conclusion that things might be worse than we expect is not palatable to Mr Bolt or the dozens of rightwing sites on the internet that repeat this particular quote out of context.

And here is the full conclusion of the review (EoR's emphasis):

During its 20-year history, the IPCC has been examined critically from a number of different standpoints: dissecting its 1980s origins; revealing its norms, practices and modes of self-governance; debating the role of consensus in its assessments; policing characterizations of uncertainty; and tracing the relationship of its institutional function and knowledge claims to emerging ideas of global environmental governance. But other questions about the status of climate change knowledge synthesized by the IPCC remain less widely investigated, questions which emerge from the agendas raised by the new geographers of science (e.g.
Powell, 2007; Finnegan, 2008). As Sheila Jasanoff has shown in many of her writings (e.g. Jasanoff, 2004a,b; 2010), knowledge that is claimed by its producers to have universal authority is received and interpreted very differently in different political and cultural settings. Revealing the local and situated characteristics of climate change knowledge thus becomes central for understanding both the acceptance and resistance that is shown towards the knowledge claims of the IPCC. It is a task for physical and human geographers to take seriously, and to do together.

There's probably a whole paper in how a single quote from this review is being used to bolster the deniers' claims.

Another denier tactic: lie. Repeat the lie. Even if disproved, repetition will eventually make it true. So Bolt also goes on to point out the evil clique of lying scientists whose sordid activities were exposed by Climategate. Even though it's been disproved again and again. If fact, it was always so flimsy that the deniers seemed to even psychically know what the outcome of the reviews would be before they were finalised (and more on the author of that article soon). A whitewash! Of course. Which leads to another denier tactic: the conspiracy is never disproved, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

Evidence? Review? Proof? All too troubling for the deniers. The rant is far easier (EoR's favourite denier troll was someone who replied to yet another Bolt rant against the ABC's science report Robyn Williams by demanding she be sacked immediately for her mendaciousness).

EoR does, however, find agreement with Bolt on one point:

The man is utterly shameless.

It's just which man we disagree on.