 I'm going to talk about something a little different today than what you usually hear me talking about. All of you here are, of course, familiar with the denial of evolutionary science known as creationism. Many of you are familiar with NCSE's efforts to try to help teachers who are being pressed when they teach evolution. We're getting a lot of reports at NCSE of teachers who are getting the same sort of treatment from students or parents or school boards when they try to teach about climate change. We've been studying this for about a year now. Although we don't know everything there is to know about it, one thing that is clear is that there are very strong parallels between the anti-evolution movement and the anti-climate change movement. I want to talk a little bit about this, not from the standpoint of an expert yet, though I'm working on it, but I and my staff have some insights that we hope you will find useful. First of all, there's a lot of different forms of global warming denial. The main one is that it's not occurring. It's really not getting warmer. A second fallback is that, well, it's getting warmer, but humans aren't responsible. It is not anthropogenic. Final possibilities, well, it's getting warmer and people are responsible, but there's nothing we can do about it. There are various forms of denialism out there. I'm going to be talking more about one and two. The issue of mitigation is very interesting, but I only have a half hour, so I'm limited. I can't even tell you about all of the parallels that I'd like to. But I'm going to talk about the similarities and differences between evolution denial and climate change denial. At NCSE, we often talk about what we call the pillars of creationism. These are the three arguments that the creationists use, and pretty much any time you read creationist literature, one of these pillars will include that argument. The first one, of course, is that evolution is bad science. It's a theory in crisis. Scientists are giving up on it. Right. The second pillar is that evolution and religion are incompatible. You've got to choose between science and religion or evolution and religion. The third pillar is the fairness pillar. If you teach evolution, it's only fair to teach creationism or something else to balance it out. We find a somewhat similar set of ideas that encompass most of the global warming denialism, and I thank my colleague, Josh Rosenau, for this insight. Anthropogenic global warming is weak science. Scientists disagree with this. This is a big controversy over global warming. Well, actually, that's not true. Just as with evolution, the huge, huge majority of scientists accept that living things of common ancestors and that the universe has had a history and that what we see today is different from what there's been in the past. There's really not an argument going on in science about whether evolution took place. In the case of global warming, there is also a very, very strong consensus among scientists, particularly among climate scientists. The second pillar is a particularly interesting one, whereas in evolution, it's that evolution and religion are incompatible. Anthropogenic global warming is anti-capitalist. It is a similar ideological foundation for both forms of denialism, similar in the sense that the foundation for the objection is ideological. They're just different ideologies. In the case of evolution, it's a religious ideology. In the case of global warming denialism, it is a political and economic ideology. Free market capitalism, fear of big government, the idea that anthropogenic global warming is really a liberal plot to try to increase government, and nobody's going to tell me what kind of light bulbs to buy. This kind of idea that it's anti-capitalist, it's pro-big government, and so forth. There's even a third parallel, the fairness pillar, that it's unfair to impose anthropogenic global warming solutions until everybody agrees, until everybody gets on the same page, the jury is still out. I'm going to talk more about the first and second pillars just because I don't have a lot of time this morning. A major technique used by both global warming and evolution deniers was illustrated by Oreskes and Conway in their book, Merchants of Doubt, and it was also used by the tobacco companies during the decades that public health organizations attempted to demonstrate that smoking caused cancer, it was addictive, it caused heart disease, and had other negative effects. Questioning the science is a very effective strategy for casting doubt on issues that have public policy implications. This, of course, is related to the first pillar of creationism or global warming denial. You claim that science has not yet settled on the issue. A major way of doing this is to find scientists who disagree with a consensus view and hold them up as if they represent a serious threat to the views that are being held by the majority. Since the science has not settled, there's no need to take action. We don't need to have warning labels on cigarettes because scientists are still unclear about the health effects of nicotine, and similarly we don't need to take any action on global warming because the science is still not clear. You get scientists who agree with your position and you present them in petitions or in some other way you present them to the public as questioning the basic accuracy of the science in question. The tobacco companies use this approach very effectively. Creationists and global warming deniers do the same thing. The Discovery Institute has its list of scientists doubting Darwinism. Somewhat over 800 now. If you look around at this conference you will probably see some people wearing Project Steve shirts. That's why NCSE had Project Steve to poke fun at this idea of lists of scientists supporting or rejecting any kind of scientific idea. That's a really dumb way to put your point of view out to the public. We don't do science by signing petitions. Scientific conclusions are accepted or rejected by the scientific community based on how good the evidence is, how good the tests work to support or refute your ideas, not because you have a list of scientists that's for or against a particular position. But these sorts of things are remarkably effective for the general public. The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, run by a man named Arthur Robinson and his sons, it's actually a rather small organization, has a petition against global warming, signed by a very impressive 30,000 scientists. It's a lot of scientists. I mean, that's pretty interesting. If you examine this list of people, and there have been a number of people who have tried to do spot surveys, take every 10 examine them, write the people and so forth and so on, you find that it's drawn from a fairly random list of sciences, including medicine, engineering, veterinary medicine, agriculture, computer science, as well as some climate scientists. About a third of the signatories, about 10,000 of the signatories of this petition, are classed as general science. And anybody with a bachelor's degree or higher can sign this petition. Well, at least the Discovery Institute requires you to have an advanced degree. All of our steves are PhDs, by the way. There are also our questions about the validity of the signatures, but this petition of 30,000 scientists, doubting global warming, has been presented to Congress and it is being shopped around to the general public as something that is very important. But when you think about it, even 30,000 scientists is a tiny, tiny percentage of all the people who have received degrees in science since about the 1970s, which I got my PhD in 74, so I'd be classed as somebody who was still active in science and so forth. I could sign this petition. And one calculation is 0.3%, 3 tenths of 1% of the scientists signed this petition. So even though 30,000 people sounds like a really huge number, there are reasons to doubt whether this petition actually represents a significant challenge to the consensus view of scientists that the earth is getting warmer and CO2 is really important in this process and humans are the cause of the CO2 that is tipping the balance. This idea of getting scientists to sign up on petitions for against something is really very misleading to the general public. It really misleads the public as to how science is actually done, as I mentioned before. Lawyers have a somewhat cynical reference to expert witnesses. For every PhD, there's an equal and opposite PhD. Yet for every, that's Michael Beehy there and you might recognize the other fellow. It's actually my favorite picture of him. No, when it comes to evolution, there is not an equal and opposite PhD. It is just, you know, when these lists of scientists are presented or scientist A versus scientist B on a TV show or something, we had that great panel on media a moment ago, the public is really confused about the weight of evidence on one side or the other of an issue like global warming or evolution or even tobacco. In the case of evolution, the number of scientists over there on the evolution side is just so overwhelmingly huge compared to the number of scientists on the anti-evolution side that it's, you know, it's just not even funny. I mean, it just swamps the deniers of evolution. Similarly, the public thinks that if there are scientists that deny global warming, then the jury is still out. Yet for every PhD, there is not an equal and opposite PhD for climate change. The percentage of scientists denying global warming is a very small percentage of scientists as a whole and even a very small percentage of climate scientists who are the ones, of course, who can speak most authoritatively. A technique that is used, a strategy that is used by both global warming and evolution deniers is to question the science. For example, in this memo that was presented to the GOP congressional candidates, should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate. Such approaches are recognized by global warming denialist is extremely effective in the American public. I want to talk about a real strong parallel between climate science and creation deniers or creation challenges to evolution. And this is the idea of cherry picking the data. A classic creationist technique is to find an apparent anomaly and thereby challenge evolution. Most of the young earth creationist arguments against the age of the earth are of this type. So lava flows in Hawaii were dated to be 3 billion years old when the volcano was actually observed to erupt in 19, sorry, 1801. Therefore, radiometric dating is unreliable. Therefore, the earth is young. Therefore, evolution didn't take place. Find a little anomaly. Hold it up bravely. This challenge is evolution. Living mollusk was dated by carbon 14 and found to be 3,000 years old. There's all kinds of this stuff in the creationist literature. Now, a few, when was it? Last month, I guess? Month before? The Northern California Conference of Science and Skepticism, Skeptical, sponsored by the Bay Area Skeptics, of which I'm a president, and the Sacramento Area Skeptics and Shane Trimmer as their president. And if he's around at these meetings, be sure to say hi to him. Skeptical was held and we were very privileged to have, as one of our speakers, Dr. Peter Glyke of the Pacific Institute. I received an email from one of my Bay Area Skeptics members who was very upset that we had invited Peter Glyke without also inviting a denialist. And he wrote, any objective review of the actual scientific data makes clear that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming proponents have not made their case that CO2 caused a meaningful portion of the mild warming, seen 1998, but has since stopped as CO2 continues to grow. CAGW, by the way, is an epithet in the denialist literature. Now, the claim that global warming has seized since a high of 1998 and that the last decade is cooler is very common in denier literature. And I suspect that my skeptic member read this literature uncritically. Unfortunately, even skeptics can be uncritical if what you are reading agrees with what you already agree with. We all have to be extremely careful about that. The hardest thing to do is to challenge things that you hold very strongly. But this is a really good example of cherry-picking the data. And I am indebted to Peter Glyke for this information. If you look at global surface temperatures from 1997 to 2010, and here's a little chart of, you probably can't see the bottom, but 97, 98, 99, 2000, et cetera, up to 2008. Indeed, if you look at the 1998 figures to 2008, there has been a decline. But why just pick 1998? Why not pick 1997? If you pick 1997, there's a slight increase in temperature between then and 2008. And if you pick 2000, there's even, I'm sorry, 1999, there's an even stronger increase in temperature between that date and 2008. Why pick 1998? But even so, why stop at 2008? If you go all the way to the end of the decade and add 2009 and 2010, then even measuring from 1998, you get an increase. This is classic cherry picking of data that we have seen in the creationist and which in my, albeit limited introduction to the global warming controversy, I'm seeing a lot of it. Let me give you another example. And again, I am indebted to Peter Glyke for this information. The National Snow and Ice Data Center records show conclusively that in April 2009, Arctic sea ice extent had indeed returned to and surpassed 1989 levels. 1989, of course, being critical on this as well. Okay, now, the melting of Arctic sea ice is a matter that climate scientists have expressed a lot of alarm over as an indicator of oceanic heating. And the heating of the ocean just totally dwarfs the heating of land. Most of the time, we look at land measurements, but the oceanic heating is very, very scary. The Heartland Institute, the producers of this statement, is a conservative organization that opposes global warming again on anti-big government grounds. Well, let's take a look at the Arctic ice area from 89 to 2009. At the bottom of this graph is a series of months, January, February, March, April, etc., you can see. And when you look at it, you know, gee, the overall curve clearly shows less ice in 09 than in 89. So what's going on here? Well, what they did was cherry pick the one place in this series where the lines overlap and where it in only in April 89 did these lines cross. Shades of pandas and people, if you know that reference. I'm looking at these little lines crossing over and it's reminding me of stuff. This is egregious cherry picking of data. Another parallel between the creationist attack on evolution and anti-global warming deniers is to go to the public rather than to the scientific literature, the scientific community to make their points. You'll find a lot of bypassing of the scientific community. You'll find arguments being made directly to the general public, op-eds, popular pieces, lots of literature being produced. One difference, one difference, I'm talking mostly about parallels, similarities between the two movements. One difference is that at least the creationists have true grassroots organizations. In the case of global warming, people who have been studying the financial supports for these various organizations find that there are a lot of fake grassroots anti-global warming groups. They're referred to as astroturf rather than grassroots because, and believe me, there's another big difference. There's a whole lot more money behind anti-global warming than there is behind creationism. But the claim is made by both camps that journals are closed to them. The climate science, the anti-global warming people are particularly adept at attacking peer review. They call it PAL review. Well this is just cronyism. That's why the pro-global warming literature gets published rather than the anti-global warming literature. Nice thing about talking to a bunch of my fellow skeptics who know something about science, know a little bit more about how it works. You know that science is a very competitive enterprise and that in one sense, if you build a better mousetrap, people will buy your mousetrap. If you come up with a way of understanding the natural world, come up with an explanation. They're called theories. If you come up with an explanation that helps explain the natural world, people will accept it if it works. There's a real practicality to the endeavor of science that gives the lie to this idea that there is, in the case of evolution, an atheist scientific establishment keeping creationist articles from being published, or in the case of global warming, a politically liberal scientific establishment which is keeping their views from being published. A tax on the integrity of scientists is a very serious issue and it is quite clear in both the creationist literature as well as the denialist literature. Many of you know Ben Stein's expelled movie, which is a classic example of this. Evolution is presented as the source of the Holocaust, of eugenics, of lots of bad things, and also that evolutionists, that's an epithet, that evolutionists as an establishment are conspiring to keep the stalwarts intelligent design scientists from holding jobs and sharing their groundbreaking ideas. Good example of a tax on the integrity of scientists involves Don Johansson who discovered the Australopithecus afarensis fossil Lucy, many of you are familiar with that. Supposedly Johansson let slip in a question period of a lecture that he gave in Missouri many, many years ago that Lucy's knee was found a mile away in different strata from the Lucy bones. Now if this is true then claims that Lucy is a biped and therefore human-like, and you know she's got a really ape-like skull, so really the bipedalism is a big deal with whether Lucy is on the human trajectory. If that's so, if Lucy's knee isn't even associated with Lucy, this is a great scandal, and it shows that Johansson was lying about Lucy being a forerunner of humans. Well actually Johansson was referring to a different knee, which is also an Australopithecus afarensis knee, but not a Lucy knee. It doesn't belong to this particular specimen. It's not the first time creationists get the facts wrong, believe me. Johansson has never claimed that the 1973 knee is a knee associated with the Lucy fossils. It is a different afarensis specimen. Now it's not the first time as I say that the creationists get the facts wrong, nor that they question the integrity of scientists, but much more serious attacks are being made against climate scientists. Perhaps the best example of this is from the fuss over the leaked University of East Anglia emails called Climate Gate. Scientists in these emails were talking to one another informally over a period of several years. This was a lot of email that was hacked. Using the typical shorthand that people use in email, not realizing that their emails would be read line by line by opponents, and that things would and could be taken out of context. Now I want to call your attention to the fact that a half a dozen agencies, including the United Nations, has examined these emails and concluded that there were no fraudulent acts, no violations of ethics that went on. Now perhaps the most serious accusation, the most serious accusation was directed against University of East Anglia scientist Phil Jones, who was accused of hiding data showing a decline in temperature rather than the expected increase. An example of this is UC Berkeley physicist Rich Muller's accusation. A quote came out of the emails, these leaked emails, that said let's use Mike's trick to hide the decline. That's the words, let's use Mike's trick to hide the decline. Now others have contended that because the work of Jones at all is included in the IPCC documents, the IPCC documents are therefore called into question, global warming is a lie. Actually there was no collusion, but the reputation of competent scientists have been unjustly smeared. It's worth taking a little bit of time to go into this because it illustrates how deniers get their facts wrong, make erroneous influences from those facts, and like creationists specialize in taking things out of context. Let's look at the full quote from the emails. I've just completed Mike's nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years, i.e. from 1981 onwards, and nobody types well an email, from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. Well it's kind of hard to figure out what this actually means taken out of context. So let's put it in context. What was this email discussing? Well this email was discussing, it wasn't about the IPCC or even about climate change per se. It was about Jones's preparation of the cover illustration for a non-academic magazine being prepared for the general public, the World Meteorological Organization. Now one tends to simplify for such publications and the cover isn't going to be carrying all of the information. One thing that you should realize in looking at this chart is that temperature measurements exist only from about 1850 to the present. That's the only data for which we actually have real thermometer kinds of information. The rest of the data, the other lines on this chart, are considered proxy data that are derived from tree rings, corals, ice cores, lake sediments and so forth. They're indirect measurements. Okay, what is Mike's nature trick? This is a trick that Michael Mann used in an article in 1999 published in Nature on Northern Hemisphere temperatures. Mike's trick is to use estimated proxy data for periods where there's no direct measurements, you see the blue lines there, but to add them, see the red arrow there? Add in the actual temperature measurements from the 1800s on. This trick is to increase the accuracy of data reporting. It doesn't sound terribly nefarious. Mike's nature trick, as in tricks of the trade, is also a separate issue from hide the decline. Okay, what does hide the decline mean? What is he talking about? Is he talking about hiding a decline in temperature therefore the earth is not getting warmer, therefore global warming is a fraud, therefore we should reject the IPCC? Well, not exactly. Jones is reporting on Keith Brifas, that's the Keith from 1961 for Keith's. Keith Brifas did data on dendrochronology, the use of tree ring information to estimate temperature. Now, if you look at the tree ring data in this slide, generally speaking, tree ring data track temperature reliably from about 1850 on, but not perfectly. So when you compare the actual thermometer measurements and the tree ring data, they track pretty well up until about 1960. For some northern boreal forests, not all parts of the world and not even all forests, but for some boreal forest, there's an anomalous difference in the measured temperature and the tree ring temperatures from about 1960 on. Hence, Jones for the purpose, again, what's the context for the purpose of this general reader magazine was correcting the anomalous proxy data by substituting the real temperature measurements, Mike's nature trick. Now, this was again for a popular magazine cover. This was not for the IPCC. If you look at these data reported in the IPCC, they are reported fully. The actual data are presented there. The discussion of this anomalous tree ring data is presented fully. There's no effort to hide the decline. They hide the decline by substituting real data for a magazine illustration. Okay. And in any event, the decline is not relevant to the IPCC conclusions. It's a decline in the quality of the data. You can decide for yourself if this warrants criminal investigation, as has been raised against Michael Mann by the Virginia Attorney General. I want to talk just for a moment about the future. If you look at denialism ecosystems, if you will, if you look at what's going on in the evolution denial biz and what's going on in the global warming controversy, the particular niche of scientific analysis, if you want to know what are the actual science arguments involving evolution, you can go to pandasthumb.org or you can go to realclimate.org. There are places you can go for this. If you want rebuttals, you can go to talkorigins.org or you can go to skeptical science. There are some good places for both of these ecosystems, shall we say. If, because these are policy issues, you need to have legal or lobbying kinds of activities going on, well, the ACLU and Americans United for separation of church and state, people for the American ways, civil liberties organizations have been great about defending evolution and many environmental groups have been suing on behalf of policy issues having to do with global warming. If you want good solid information for teachers about how to teach evolution better, a wonderful place to go is the University of California Museum of paleontology understanding evolution site. Similarly, there are many good sites for teachers to provide them with information of how to teach global warming and climate change information, some of these being federal agencies like NOAA and NASA and so forth. If you want to defend teachers who are faced with challenges from students or, God forbid, administrators or school boards who are making really bad decisions, well, that's what we do. We fill this evolution defending of teachers, niche. We have been doing it for a long time. We've learned a lot. We learn something every day. We're not perfect, but we're reasonably good at this. There really is no similar organization occupying global warming. We've decided this is something that we need to do. Right now, thank you for that vote of confidence. It means a lot to us. As we speak, which is in November of 2011, sorry, July, I'm not really that far ahead, in July of 2011 for people watching this on DVDs in the future. You know when the date is, they might not. NCSE currently is recruiting for a climate scientist to add to our team to give us the scientific depth that we need in this field. We're all a bunch of mostly biologists and geologists and we need a climate scientist. We hope to have that person on board within a month or so and we hope to start learning more about the global warming and climate change debate. We are at ncse.com. Glenn Branch is the deputy director. If you get our Friday electronic newsletter, Glenn writes it. It's a superb communication about what's going on in the creation and evolution controversy. Robert Lund is our communications director. Peter Hess is our faith outreach director. Josh got in here at the wrong time. Josh and Josh Rosnow and Steve Newton are our flare-ups wranglers. They're the people who spend the bulk of their time dealing with the questions and problems that come up. Eric Mickle is our education director. I'm delighted to be here today. I'm delighted to tell you about these new ideas. It's been fun for me to put this together because this is all kind of new stuff for my brain as well. And I really appreciate that little spontaneous round of applause for our adding global climate change to our portfolio. It's going to be tough. Thank you so much. Eugene Scott, ladies and gentlemen. Yes, indeed. Congratulations.