Magnified Minority

In 1998, the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine released a petition signed by 17,000 scientists arguing against the realities of climate change.

That’s a lot of scientists. Even members of the Spice Girls and characters from the TV show, M*A*S*H, signed the petit — wait, what?

The Oregon Petition, which would gain over 31,000 signatories by 2008, is a benchmark example of the “magnified minority tactic” in climate disinformation. Not only did the petition include numerous false names, including those of celebrities, only 39 of the 31,000 signers specialized in climate science.

Though it’s been quite thoroughly debunked, the petition is still used as evidence today by climate skeptics.

Why? Because this type of misinformation works alarmingly well.

In a 2017 paper, “Inoculating the Public against Misinformation about Climate Change,” psychologist Dr. Sander van der Linden and his team arrived at a dismal conclusion: Misinformation actually cancels out accurate information.

Cook explained the study’s methodology. “They ran my study where they told people about the 97% consensus,” Cook told the Weather Channel Digital, “but then when they told people about the scientific consensus, but here’s also some misinformation about consensus, the two things cancel each other out (there’s no change in belief). So what that tells us is that, even if we get our communications right and people are hearing it, all that work can be canceled out by miscommunication.”

PragerU offers a perfect example of misinformation via the magnified minority tactic in “Climate Change: What Do Scientists Say?”, a video with 6.4 million views on Facebook and YouTube, presented by Dr. Richard Lindzen.

At the video’s outset, Lindzen puts his cards, or in his case, scientific papers, on the table. He’s published more than 200 of them. The outspoken climate contrarian has an impressive academic portfolio: He taught Meteorology at MIT for 30 years.

In 1995, Ross Gelbspan reported in Harpers that Lindzen had been charging “oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services.” Lindzen denied this, telling The Weather Channel Digital, “None of my work has ever been supported by the fossil fuel industry. And never have I received anything from the oil industry. Never, ever. I have testified on behalf of a coal company, and I charged for that. But the reason I was asked to testify, was I have a very well-established public opinion on this.”

Nowadays, Lindzen writes about “climate alarmism” for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank co-founded by Charles Koch, co-owner of the largest private oil company in the U.S. Cato’s stance on global warming is skeptical at best, and the organization has received at least $125,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998. “I do very little with Cato,” Lindzen said, appearing to distance himself from the think tank where he sits as a distinguished senior fellow.

“The less the climate changes, the louder the voices of the climate alarmists get,” Lindzen articulates only 20 seconds into his PragerU video. “So, let’s clear the air and create a more accurate picture of where we really stand on the issue of global warming, or as it is now called, climate change.”

(Notice how Lindzen, like Trump, has already implicitly made the argument that the term “climate change” itself is somehow intentionally misleading.)

According to Lindzen, there are three groups of folks dealing with climate change:

“The part of the United Nations’ International (sic) Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.” Scientists who don’t see climate change “as an especially serious problem” (Lindzen places himself in this group). “The politicians, environmentalists, and media.”

Lindzen characterizes the first group as “scientists who mostly believe that recent climate change is primarily due to man’s burning of fossil fuels — oil, coal and natural gas. This releases CO2, carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere and, they believe, this might eventually dangerously heat the planet.”

Firstly, “The IPCC isn’t a group of people,” Jonathan Lynn, head of communications and media relations at the IPCC told the Weather Channel Digital. Nor is it the International Panel on Climate change as Lindzen misspeaks, but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“Formally, what we are is an organization of governments,” Lynn said. “Every single one of our reports has been endorsed — has buy-in — (emphasis mine) from every single government in the world, including the United States, and in turn the scientific community as well. There’s no academy of science that would disagree with what we say; far from it, they will often (including the National Academy of Sciences in the United States) support the findings of the IPCC, which is just simply an assessment, a reflection of what’s being published by the scientific community.”

The IPCC, Lindzen claims, believes that, “Given the complexity of climate, no confident prediction about future global mean temperature or its impact can be made.” That is untrue.

The IPCC unequivocally believes that predictions about the state of the climate can be made, and that these predictions are based on overwhelming evidence.

“If you look at the (IPCC) synthesis report of 2014 — that’s our last publication — there’s some pretty clear, strong statements in there,” Lynn said. “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal … you can’t say it more strongly than that: Warming of the climate system is unequivocal. What we’re saying is, when we look at all the scientific literature, and all the measurements that are done, there’s no doubt. Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950’s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia.”

Cook similarly pointed out, “Scientists are independent, they’re skeptical, they’re genuine scientific skeptics, so the reason why we have 97% agreement is because the evidence base is so strong, all of these human fingerprints being observed.”

Is it, as Lindzen argues, one of three camps on climate change? Perhaps. But ignoring its breadth, authority and the scientific rigor underpinning its reports is actively making it seem smaller or less consequential than it is. It also has the benefit of magnifying Lindzen’s other camps; it puts his deniers on the same footing as the realists.

This is the magnified minority at its best.

This minority is perhaps best described in real life. In 2017, Lindzen wrote a letter to President Donald Trump urging him to pull the U.S. out of the United Nations International Convention on Climate Change. In it he included the signatories of 300 “scientists.” Surely a veteran scientist of MIT should be able to find at least 300 individuals with the credentials to deny the human role in climate change, especially if that stance is one of the three major groups dealing with it. Alas, hardly any of the signatures were from climate scientists, and some were well-known industry-backed climate deniers.

In response, MIT climate researchers sent their own letter, making clear to the president that Lindzen’s was “not a view shared by us, or by the overwhelming majority of other scientists who have devoted their professional lives to careful study of climate science.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists annotated Lindzen’s letter (below), correcting for its numerous errors and miscommunication.